• One-click online shopping (U.S. Patent No. 5,960,411.)
• Online shopping carts (U.S. Patent No. 5,715,314.)
• The hyperlink (U.S. Patent No. 4,873,662.)
• Video streaming (U.S. Patent No. 5,132,992.)
• Internationalizing domain names (U.S. Patent No. 6,182,148.)
• Pop-up windows (U.S. Patent No. 6,389,458.)
• Targeted banner ads (U.S. Patent No. 6,026,368.)
• Paying with a credit card online (U.S. Patent No. 6,289,319.)
• Framed browsing; (U.S. Patent Nos. 5,933,841 & 6,442,574.)
• Affiliate linking (U.S. Patent No. 6,029,141.)

Yay for the EFF!

The Public Patent Foundation is looking for geeks to help them do some patent busting work. PubPat recently challenged the Microsoft FAT patent by filing a formal complaint to the USPTO.

Let’s see what happens :).

Boy, I can’t wait to try this out :D.

20:26:13 up 2 days,  1:42,  1 user,  load average: 0.70, 0.77, 0.73

.

C’mon, join the torrent! My ISP’s gonna hate me…I’ve uploaded 3.0GB in this session and downloaded 1.8 GB. I’m annoyed, sorry.

— [HALT]
OK, I got that overwith. I’ve been hacking on the GTK+ source (I already hate it) today trying to figure out how the save/open dialogs work. I want to make GTK/Gnome apps use the same dialogs that KDE ones do. The new GTK file chooser is even worse that the old one, if you ask me. Also, the GTK file chooser code is a total mess–I’m used to the OO KDE which is really clean. You need to call a million functions to get a dialog:

	/* Filters */
	filter = gtk_file_filter_new ();
	gtk_file_filter_set_name (filter, _("All Files"));
	gtk_file_filter_add_pattern (filter, "*");
	gtk_file_chooser_add_filter (GTK_FILE_CHOOSER (filesel), filter);

	/* Make this filter the default */
	gtk_file_chooser_set_filter (GTK_FILE_CHOOSER (filesel), filter);

Ack.
/Ducks from angry Gnome overlords

— [HALT GEEK]
OK, got that over with. Went to the theatre production of Beauty and the Beast by the local funky household acting company (AAA–Actors of Alexander Avenue)…totally awesome! Thanks everybody (even none of you read this :P).

— [REENTER GEEK MODE]
I donno what to do about Icewater. I’ve halted work on my package manager system…do we really need another package management system–even if it is the answer to dependency hell (err…uh…sure, right)? Methinks not. The coolest thing I’ve seen is Autopackage. It’s trying to be a cross-distro package managment system (like InstallShield, except without the overhead of the self-contained installer, and it has deps resolution). Also, it trys to make the executables relocateable, which is really super. What’s the downside of it? It’s still alpha/beta, and isn’t really designed to create a distro with. That’s what RPM is for. Autopackage is what every Linux (/Ducks) program on the planet should provide binaries in. It’s awesome, but I donno… I’m thinking of building Icewater with RPM, then providing the Autopackage support code and going on a Autopackage rampage, createing packages for every app on Freshmeat. Also, since this would probably require a little source-code modification (to make the apps relocateable), the task would huge :*. I donno what to do :(.

I’m currently clocking the first ISO at 1 day 4 hours, uploading at 45 kB/s, downloading at 12 kB/s, outch, I only have 6% of it :|. Join in and keep your client running after you’ve downloaded.

Thanks, Slackware team!

Here’s the quote about redistributing (removed all the legalease):

3.1 General Distribution Requirements.
(a) If you choose to redistribute Sample Code, Redistributable Code, or SMC (collectively, the "Redistributables") as described in Section 2, you agree:
* to distribute the Redistributables only in object code form

[no source code]

* that the Redistributables only operate in conjunction with Microsoft Windows platforms

[Don’t try and create something, then compile it again with Mono]

* to display your own valid copyright notice which shall be sufficient to protect Microsoft’s copyright in the Software

[No public domain software]

* to indemnify, hold harmless, and defend Microsoft from and against any claims or lawsuits, including attorney’s fees, that arise or result from the use or distribution of the Licensee Software

[My emphasis. If your code blows up, then you will defend Microsoft against any charges…what about a bug in the .NET code?]

3.2 Additional Distribution Requirements for Certain Redistributable Code.
* Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine (MSDE). If you redistribute MSDE you agree to comply with the following additional requirements: (a) [cut] (b) Licensee Software shall not substantially duplicate the capabilities of Microsoft Access or, in the reasonable opinion of Microsoft, compete with same;

[Don’t try and write a replacement to Access if youre using MSDE.]

* unless Licensee Software requires your customers to license Microsoft Access in order to operate, you shall not reproduce or use MSDE for commercial distribution in conjunction with a general purpose word processing, spreadsheet or database management software product, except for the exclusive use of importing data to the various formats supported by Microsoft Access.

About the Benchmarks:

3.4 Benchmark Testing. You may not disclose the results of any benchmark test of the .NET Framework component of the Software to any third party without Microsofts prior written approval.

[If they don’t like the results, you can’t publish them…sounds familiar, eh?]

/Ducks

Does anyone know if the commercial version of VB.NET/.NET SDK is the same?
If anyone is interested, you can read both license agreements here (eula.txt is a little messed up, had a bunch of NULL bytes added to it. I removed most of them with KHexEdit, but there’s probably a few I missed): http://www.wildgardenseed.com/Taj/eula

Will this be like their firewall? (For those who don’t have Win XP, their "firewall" allows everything by default…). Glad it’s been removed from my computer.

A later attempt in December 2002 received a faint response, which was too weak to decode. Pioneer 10’s final signal (after two previous failures) was received on January 22, 2003. As of February 25, 2003, NASA came to the conclusion that the craft’s radioisotope power source was no longer functioning well enough for further contact with Earth. NASA’s (DSN) did not detect a signal during the last contact attempt February 7, 2003. The previous three contacts, including the January 22 signal, were very faint with no telemetry received. The last time a Pioneer 10 contact returned telemetry data was April 27, 2002. NASA has no additional contact attempts planned for Pioneer 10.

Shucks. But Voyager 1 is still transmitting data. It was launched in 1977. It should keep sending back data until the 2020’s thanks to its power generators (two Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators). They provided 470 Watts of 30-volt DC power at launch. They were powered by Plutonium 238, which decays to half-life in 80 years. Currently Voyager 1 is producing 315 watts of electricity.

All of Voyager 2 has had almost all of its instruments was powered down, Voyager 1 was going to be powered down in 2000, but was left on so further information could be gathered.

Both probes are connected via 3.7-meter high-gain antenna at 16-bit/sec uplink and 160 bit/s downlink normally, with a 1.4 kbit/s for playback of high-rate plasma wave data.

Both are still returning mounds of information. Check out this page from the JPL: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/

The markups just don’t make sense:
Scanner: Lindows - Yes, Mandrake - No, Fedora - No
Sorry, that’s wrong! Mandrake supported my (very weird) scanner out of the box.

Plays MP3 Files: Lindows - Yes, Mandrake - Yes, Fedora - Yes
Fedora does not support playing MP3s out of the box. Oops.

Popup Blocker: Lindows - Yes, Mandrake - No, Fedora - No
Huh? Mandy and Fedora both distribute Firefox or Mozilla.

Not only that, but Lindows has every box ticked or the highest number of starts (all)…

bash$ whois linuxshootout.com
[...]
Registrant:
Lindows Inc. (IIDFMZVYOD)
   9333 Genesee Suite 300
   San Diego, CA 92121
   US
[...]

Hmm…

State officials say there is no need for recounts, or an audit trail, with the touchscreen system because it was designed to prevent people from voting in the same race more than once — an overvote — and provide multiple alerts to voters to warn them when they are skipping a race — an undervote.

Read all about it here:
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040612/ap_on_el_pr/florida_voting_machines_1

Glad Oregon still uses DRE…

* Online shopping carts (U.S. Patent No. 5,715,314.)
* The hyperlink (U.S. Patent No. 4,873,662.)
* Video streaming (U.S. Patent No. 5,132,992.)
* Internationalizing domain names (U.S. Patent No. 6,182,148.)
* Pop-up windows (U.S. Patent No. 6,389,458.) (damn, they should enforce that patent!)
* Paying with a credit card online (U.S. Patent No. 6,289,319.)
* Framed browsing; (U.S. Patent Nos. 5,933,841 & 6,442,574.)

The webpage is: http://www.eff.org/patent/
There’s also a contest about other patents: http://www.eff.org/patent/contest/

I submitted the patent on spam filtering. Maybe I should of also submitted the double-click patent, but I don’t want to overwhelm them!

With more than 30,000 restaurants around the globe and more than 1,200 in Germany alone, McDonald’s is the undisputed market leader in the fast food sector. For its activities, McDonald’s makes use of state-of-the-art technology and mature concepts that support business workflows in the best way possible.

So, they’re going to move to SuSE (^H^H^H^HSUSE) Linux. I don’t know if that’s a great idea or not. I just installed SUSE 9.1 via FTP on a standard box (300MHz, 128MB RAM, 12GB)…slow as a dog and it overwrote my BIOS. Opening up the software installation dialog took 10 minutes, and Open Office wasn’t installed by default. They distributed KMail as their email client. WAT?!?! KMail is one of the most broken, brain-dead parts of KDE (and yes I use it because Evolution has so many funky dependencies). Oh well…maybe I’ll try it again.

The Broadcast Treaty is a proposal from a WIPO Subcommittee that’s supposedly about stopping ’signal theft.’ But along the way, this proposal has turned into a huge, convoluted hairball that threatens to make the PC illegal, trash the public domain, break copyleft and put a Broadcast Flag on the Internet. The treaty negotiation process is unbelievably convoluted and hard-to-follow, and they’ve just wrapped up the latest round in Geneva.

The EFF has a (editized) transcript here: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/001599.php#001599
Get it while it’s legal!

If all that’s true, that’s scarrrrry. Guess it’s time to become an outlaw :P.

—-
EDIT :: Just RTFA. Here’s the part about "banning computers"

from Article 16, Alternative V:
2. In particular, effective legal remedies shall be provided against those who:
…
(iii) participate in the manufacture, importation, sale, or any other act that makes available a device or system capable of decrypting or helping to decrypt an encrypted program-carrying signal.

Yes, every computer is capable of decrypting a broadcast signal. Just sloppy writing. Scarry thing is, this isn’t writing…it’s legislation–sloppy legislation.

About breaking public domain:

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has just released a draft of a treaty that would give broadcasters new power over material that they broadcast, even if that material in the public domain.

http://www.public-domain.org/?q=node/view/31
In this case, "broadcasters" would be anybody who would provide it to a large number of people. ISPs, magazines, etc.

Read this page!! http://www.public-domain.org/node/view/30