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Don Watkins (Admin)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, November 03, 2003 - 11:07 am: | 
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Found this today:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/ieupdate/
It looks like no big deal until you get into the details. The referenced patent is in regards to automatically loading stuff.
Thus if you go to a site with say, five flash movies, there will be five prompts to open them. No more auto loading for flash, activex or java.
Anywho the company has made an intersting statement in reaction to the W3C setting up a panel to "study" what changes the patent will have; Microsoft should cave in and pay millions in blackmail to the owner of a patent that should have never been issued in the first place.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1304252,00.asp
Good work if you can get it but then you get interviewed in eweek and look like a complete jerk. |
Karl_db (Karl_Db)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, November 04, 2003 - 05:12 am: |
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HeeHee…had to read a lot of links to try and get up to speed on this one. Whew!
I don’t know about the development rights issue and unless there was something in the code that gave a clue (as with sloppy code theft) how a jury could determine that. I imagine with “intellectual rights” stuff, there’s probably hundreds of people working on similar ideas all the time.
Do you remember if there ever was a WebRouser? I noticed at Dan’s Web Tips for alternative browsers, he says:
Quote:Back in 1995, Eolas announced WebRouser, a browser that was to support embedded applets. If it was ever released, I don't know where it can be found now.
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Don Watkins (Admin)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, November 04, 2003 - 05:29 am: |
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It's a real problem, the patent office is giving out patent's like candy for stuff that shouldn't be allowed to have a patent and letting the courts decide it later on. I've provided "prior art" material for all sorts of patent dispute cases stuff lately; playing music on a PC, taking contributions on-line, weird stuff. So far it's just been loons trying to cash in.
I was looking at browsers pretty carefully before, during and after that time and trying everything and no, while I recall Cello and other small efforts WebRouser never appeared on my radar. |
Karl_db (Karl_Db)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, November 04, 2003 - 05:36 am: |
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BTW: Somewhere in the interview this guy said originally they offered their innovation as free for non-commercial use, but required a license for commercial use.
Any idea how much they were asking at the time (mid/late 90's) for commercial use? Somehow I doubt if they were asking a half-billion dollars. |
Karl_db (Karl_Db)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, November 08, 2003 - 06:27 am: |
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A couple of other thoughts I've wondered about..
How it will impact non-IE browsers like Opera or Mozilla based?
Quite a number of "security" articles/experts have recommended something along this line anyway.
Sorry, can't remember any specific links to any right now. I just remember reading about ActiveX in IE vs none in Opera/Mozilla. And some security articles that said stuff is too automated as is and if less automatic there would be less viruses/spyware/trojans/etc being installed on the average PC users computers.
(For the record...I like automatic.) |
Don Watkins (Admin)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, November 08, 2003 - 06:41 am: |
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Karl - It depends on if the company tries to enforce their patent against the other browsers and/or allows them to have a license for free. My guess is that they would be inclinded to do that but I don't know if they can and not bias their case against MS.
It's easy enough to turn off scripting, in fact IE in Windows 2003 comes that way out of the box, but I think the larger problem is stuff like flash. Last I heard Macromedia was pretty freaked that users would have to click to open a flash banner. My guess is that it would effectively shut them down as a medium. |
Karl_db (Karl_Db)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, November 08, 2003 - 07:09 am: |
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Hmmm. OK..I don't understand all the legal stuff.
Isn't it probable that MS (or third party utility) will just come up with a new or modified option for browsers to checkmark that would permit the automatic showing of all ActiveX, Macromedia, javascript stuff?? |
Don Watkins (Admin)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, November 08, 2003 - 07:14 am: |
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I don't think so, I think that patent covers opening any element like that in a browser. That's why it's such a whacky patent IMO.
It's sort of like the Amazon one click e-commerce patent. Something that should never have been granted (again IMO). |
Edward K. Hauersperger (Edh66)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, November 08, 2003 - 07:25 am: |
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Quote:Do you remember if there ever was a WebRouser?
I thought I had posted THIS but see that I haven't. Some of the replies were interesting (to me). |
Karl_db (Karl_Db)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, November 08, 2003 - 01:15 pm: |
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Following some links in your link was interesting also. A post from somebody about Spyglass lead to this site which is rather interesting. |
Edward K. Hauersperger (Edh66)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, November 08, 2003 - 07:58 pm: |
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And here I thought Vice-President Gore invented the WWW. |
Karl_db (Karl_Db)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, November 08, 2003 - 09:11 pm: |
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Or, maybe the WWW invented Gore??  |
Randy Davis (Randy)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, November 09, 2003 - 06:45 am: |
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I remember when PC shell was the "thing" instead of windows. If you knew about surfing the net you did it with a text browser, can't remember the name, maybe Lynx. I was in a road design group then. The VAX was more interesting than the net to us. We played games during non-work hours that we copied off "pccommon", Jane of the Jungle, Alabama Smith, and Duke Nukem. About 4 of us went in and bought Empire. It was loaded on all the PCs in the design office. Only the handful that enjoyed PCs knew how to do all this stuff. We used to write batch files to tweak things so they would be easy for everyone to use. I typed and printed letters from a drafting program. The files were sent to our secretary's printer. She didn't care since she didn't have to type them. Two guys figured out how to save tons of drafting work in preformating survey data that was downloaded from the VAX and then used line color to format the print file that went to our plotter from the drafting program. It was a fun time...
sorry to fall slap off the topic and out the window.  |
Edward K. Hauersperger (Edh66)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, November 09, 2003 - 06:54 am: |
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Randy - I guess you didn't notice that "Don't Under Any Circumstances Change The Topic Of A Thread" was a Cardinal Rule around here. |
Karl_db (Karl_Db)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, November 09, 2003 - 08:01 am: |
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That's right Ed. Give him the dickens for not following the rules like the rest of us do!!
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Don Watkins (Admin)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, November 09, 2003 - 08:04 am: |
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All, the Vax. Remember it well, it was probably the sweetest big machine around at the time. Weird how quickly things change. |
Karl_db (Karl_Db)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, November 09, 2003 - 06:06 pm: |
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Looks pretty cool to me also Just the VAX |
Randy Davis (Randy)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, November 09, 2003 - 09:53 pm: |
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Karl & Ed, I thought the rule was "Under no circumstances change the topic unless it's funny.
Don, the boses didn't care or know what we did on it. As long as we kicked out the reports designs etc that were needed they were happy. In my opinion porn and viruses screwed up a good thing. They would have left us alone for the most part. Creativity is near dead on the computer front at work. If you can't do it in MS Office it must not be possible. They even locked our desktops so that we all have the same picture on it. :-P |
Karl_db (Karl_Db)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, November 12, 2003 - 10:03 pm: |
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Guess they have decided to review the patent. |
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