In the last article, we have reviewed three excellent First Person Shooters (FPS) – OpenArena, Sauerbraten and Nexuiz – which offer you a good mix of solid graphics, fast-paced action and cross-platform compatibility, while being simple to use and configure, free, stable, and low on hardware demands. OpenArena and Sauerbraten allow you to test your fingertip skills against a range of monsters in both the single and multiplayer mode, whereas Nexuiz is geared toward online, multiplayer gaming only. Regardless which one you choose, you are in for some great fun, killing nefarious fiends from another dimension.
With its rock-bottom prices, CompUSA could be positioned to be the king of cheap Linux-based PC sales, if they take this to the next level, which would be to preload the OS on its bargain PC refurbs and get some value-added SystemMAX OEM whiteboxes out there with Linux pre-installed. CompUSA.com-branded $400 or less Quad Core PCs sans-monitor with 4GB RAM and 500GB hard disks running on Ubuntu? I can see it.
On the other hand, “I think the more important news for Linux is that Wikipedia uses Linux!” yagu said. “While most people don’t really care, it’s something worth bragging about occasionally.”
Most people assume “Microsoft runs the world,” yagu added, but many “would be surprised (and maybe even amazed) if they knew how much of their world is run on Unix. It’s worth noting that for really hard, really big and really important uses, Linux is well-represented.”
For Ubuntu, meanwhile, “this is a great accomplishment, as it’s emerged as a favorite distribution,” he said. “Ubuntu demonstrates Linux can be easy to use and functional.”
The NLG is a PCMCIA card with an embedded Linux operating system. It slots into a notebook and provides a range of features to help IT departments remotely secure, monitor, manage and locate mobile computers over 3G and protect the data if the device is lost or stolen.
I have an older Dell Inspiron 6000 that I recently decided to go true-blue dual boot with Ubuntu v8.04 and Windows XP Professional SP3.
[...]
Ubuntu happily churns along with the older processor and 1GB of RAM, so unless I have some major hardware failure with the Inspiron I’ll just go right on using it dual-boot style.
And when (yes, when – not if) the time comes that XP gets so old that it’s unusable in modern computing, I can just format the drive and run Ubuntu full time on it.
So I have been wondering for some time “Is KDE 4 ready for me to use full-time?”. That coupled with me being totally institutionalised by my KDE 3.5 desktop has meant that I just haven’t made the switch. The truth is, KDE 4.1 rocks pretty damn hard. My mission at Linux Expo Live this week is to try a convert as many people as I can into KDE 4.1 users. The approach is not to convince people the KDE 4 is ready for them. It’s subtler than that; it is to convince them that they are ready for KDE 4.
Here is where things hit a snag. Jeff has registered the label’s songs under the Creative Commons License, which is only available to see while the site is on-line. The host insists it requires the US Copyright Office forms from back in the daze where things were done by monks chained to desks.
If that wasn’t enough, Jeff has also had his main storage drive crash on him and lost most of the material he had, which means all his website material is gone. He’s addressing the fans to send him whatever artwork and songs they have so he can rebuild from scratch.
As unemployment looks set to soar in the months ahead, quangocrat and soon to be outgoing head of Ofcom Lord David Currie appears to have discovered a cunning plan to find jobs for tens of thousands. The time for regulating the internet is nigh – and Ofcom could be the body to do it.
Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance.
Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society.
Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the Day
Digital Tipping Point: home audio video buff Marc Merlin 09 (2005)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
There was a good deal of responses and angry reactions to this development amongst Indian bloggers who are able to understand what Microsoft and the likes of it are attempting to do. Here is some more new information about it. [via Digital Majority]
So it was interesting to read a report that the biggest ands scariest one of them all, Intellectual Ventures, founded by the redoubtable Nathan Myhrvold, had come to India. Intellectual Ventures, according to the Wall Street Journal, has more than 20,000 patents and patent applications “related to everything from lasers to computer chips”. Myhrvold was the chief strategist and chief technology officer of Microsoft before he sent up Intellectual Ventures, an idea that he owes to Bill Gates. Microsoft had a huge patent liability problem with a seemingly endless line of people suing the company for infringement of their patents. It was then that Myhrvold came up with the idea of accumulating patents under one roof to manage them better. His rationale: it is more efficient for companies to deal with him than thousands of patent holders. The transaction costs alone make it worthwhile for companies to pay Intellectual Ventures its steep fees.
[...]
Intellectual Ventures debut here [in India] coincides with the news that CSIR is considering a move to transfer its patent lode to an independent holding company that will manage it professionally. The patents would be monetised in various ways, licensing being one option.
Indians have already taken it to the streets (photograph below) after persistent attempts by American companies to monopolise knowledge along with their close Indian allies [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11].
On Tuesday, the USPTO awarded Microsoft a patent for the Automatic Censorship of Audio Data for Broadcast, an invention that addresses ‘producing censored speech that has been altered so that undesired words or phrases are either unintelligible or inaudible.’
Richard Stallman recently referred to EPO “corruption” which had led to street protests (pictured above), claiming that the system had been deliberately broken by those who seek only to maximalise profits. Corruption is just probably inherent in the patent system if the following new comment is correct.
Some judges of the CAFC are even patent attorneys. It is sure that those “specialized” judges have a serious biais in favour of patents. Some critics says that they even lowered the barriers of novelty, making easier to get patents.
This is also what a spanish expert said recently about the introduction of specialized patent courts in Spain.
So those patent judges have a bias towards the patentee, against the interests of the defendant.
Just like with the RIAA (alluded to in this post), there is appointment of judges that essentially constitute a puppet state. They serve their own interests, as well as — potentially — the interests of those who surround (or fund) them.
Historical Excavation of Knowledge
Software patents are no ‘fun’. They can truly waste one’s precious time, potentially years. To quote a tidbit from a recent confrontation:
“I would much rather spend my time and money and energy finding ways to make the Internet safer and better than bickering over patents.”
–Dean Drako, Barracuda’s CEO
Here is a situation where digging up a 14-year-old newspaper column was necessary to trash a patent which was never supposed to be granted in the first place.
14-year-old newspaper column becomes prior art in patent litigation
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GraniteGeek of the Nashua Telegraph illustrates how a newspaper article can become prior art in a patent litigation. It also illustrates (as does the Ciba-Geigy v. Alza case) that enablement standards for prior art can be looser than for patent applications.
How much money and labour was unnecessarily wasted here? Is this the best production model? This is innovation?? This is research and development???
Nice catch by Andrew Dugdell: it’s about 10 years ago that Scott Devine, Edouard Bugnion and Mendel Rosenblum filed patent #6397242, “Virtualization system including a virtual machine monitor for a Computer with segmented Architecture”.
Now that Microsoft has an 'insider' as VMware's chief, it’s unlikely that there will be retaliation in court. The company was sort of hijacked away from its founding fathers
The French EU Presidency will close by December 31, 2008, and if no deal is struck until that day, most probably there will be no Community Patent for a long time to come. According to McCreevy, the stumbling blocks are the linguistic and translation requirements, and the setting and distribution of annual fees to maintain the patent. In his speech he stresses that significant progress has been made since April 2007, and then comes to his belief in technical solutions.
Benjamin Henrion, one of the activists from FFII, writes the following comment in response to what seems like a lawyers-dominated system, which decides ‘on behalf’ of software developers.
Dear Mr Horns, As I said to a pro-swpat guy at the recent patent conference organised by the French Presidency, I am still waiting for your clarifications or proposals for drawing a line from the patent community. FFII has proposed that the contribution to the knowledge has to be in the physical field (forces of nature), I heard patent guys laughing about it, but I am still waiting for their critics on paper because laughing is not convincing anybody.
What is the logic behind possessing mathematics anyway? Or cheaply-transferable knowledge if not freely-transferable information? We saw some good reception of the talks from Eben Moglen (over the weekend at least), so here is another insightful one, for which we have produced an Ogg Theora version.
There are always those who strive to mix sand and water. They are determined to make it stick. Such is the nature of O’Reilly-type literature, which produces textbooks on intellectual monopolies and Free software (yes, actually combining these two almost-contradictory notions). Here is the latest review of this book where there’s a reference only to “open source”.
The topic of Intellectual Property and Open Source does have a wide ranging audience for itself. With the seeming explosion of software engineering applications driven by web and e-commerce, this maybe a good book for grasping the finer legal details. The primary focus of the legal terms in this book are with respect to the U.S. Legal framework and sometime with European variants.
And talking of business method patents, it struck me last night that one consequence of the current turmoil in the financial markets is that we will see far fewer of them in the future, whatever happens with Bilski. After all, financial institutions have been among the major players in the business method patent field as they seek to protect innovative investing strategies, risk models and the like. However, there are not as many of these institutions as there were a few months ago, while those that are left are much less likely to be looking for new and exciting ways to make money. Instead, they will be going back to basics. If this is the case, patenting is going to be the last thing on their minds.
The motion against software patents is still going strong and there are some new “Stop Software Patents” videos that are voluntarily produced by concerned YouTube users. Here are just a few among the many new additions:
A few days ago we wrote about Azure Networks, which is a classic patent troll. Here is some more information that reminds us of the fact that they file the lawsuits in he most typical of venues: Texas. They probably hope for a quick settlement, i.e. money for nothing (but extortion).
Azure Networks LLC vs. Nokia Inc.
Plaintiff Azure is a Texas limited liability company with its principal place of business in Longview.
Azure claims it owns the rights to U.S. Patent No. 6,981,158 entitled “Methods and Apparatus for Tracing Packets” issued on Dec. 27, 2005.
Also, Azure claims it is the owner by assignment of U.S. Patent No. 7,302,704 entitled “Excising Compromised Routers From an Ad-Hoc Network” issued on Nov. 27, 2007.
Companies being sued for patent infringement just got a get-out-of-the-Eastern-District-of-Texas-rocket-docket-for-free card, thanks to an en banc ruling from the 5th Circuit.
In a split 10-7 decision, the panel on Friday issued a writ of mandamus ordering Eastern District Judge John Ward to transfer a product liability case against Volkswagen to Dallas, where the car crash in the underlying case took place.
The majority wrote that “the district court clearly abused its discretion and reached a patently erroneous result,” when it denied Volkswagen’s efforts to have the case moved. The car company argued that the proper venue should be the district where the crash took place.
Although the case — a family suing over design defects in the Volkswagen Golf after a fatal accident on a Dallas freeway — has nothing to do with patent law, the circuit’s decision will have big implications for the flood of patent infringement lawsuits regularly filed in what has come to be known as the country’s most plaintiff-friendly venue.
All in all, a lot is still happening. This whole debate is about removal of patent hurdles and legal obstacles. Keeping a close eye on software patents news is important these days, even to those who do not give a damn about legal stuff. Paying attention to the big picture is the only way to resolve this puzzle. If it gets political, so be it.█
“Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won’t leave you alone.”
This is why Novell should never have entered into such an agreement in the first place. Doing so acknowledges Microsoft’s patent claims in the eyes of Redmond. Now, they’ll try and hold this garbage over our heads. Software patents, and even patents themselves these days, are a joke. People are patenting stuff that was preexisting and developed elsewhere and even hardware patents have come to a point where a concept is patentable, even though no working model was ever produced. This is stifling competition and hurting the consumers.
Remember that Novell is merely a “mixed source” company, based on its own insistence [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. █
“[W]e believe in Free Software and doing the right thing (a practice you appear to have given up on). Maybe it is time the term ‘open source’ also did the decent thing and died out with you.”
It has been a while since we last mentioned Dennis Byron, who appears to be having disinformation tantrums against Free software every now and then. Groklaw has already responded to his latest libelous attack, so we won’t link to it directly and won’t comment further.
Linux was created by IBM, HP (HPQ) and other former IT systems monopolists that realized that Microsoft was taking their systems monopoly away from them. IBM, HP, Digital Equipment (now part of HP), etc. had banded together for this purpose in the early 1980s while Linus Torvalds, the nominal creator of Linux and who now works for one of the groups IBM, HP, etc. put together for its trust-like purposes, was still in short pants. Ten years later, the consortium chose a small piece of software code, “forked” by Linus from some other code while he was in college, to complement the still ongoing technical development effort by IBM, HP, etc. to come up with “one Unix.” What is today called Linux is the result of that one-Unix effort.
Isn’t that hilarious? To be fair, those Wall Street dudes are likely under a lot of stress nowadays. If he needs a job, maybe he should write a column with “Paul Murphy”, who also comes up with his own histories on the birth of Linux. I see a match. Or he could write for ADTI, methinks. They tried to allege that Linus forked Minix, but it’s a lie. Anyway, Linus already confessed. The father of Linux is the Tooth Fairy.
“A couple of years ago this guy called Ken Brown wrote a book saying that Linus stole Linux from me… It later came out that Microsoft had paid him to do this…”
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