Tuesday, October 12, 2004


PayPal users still stranded as site glitch continues. A coding error during routine upgrade maintenance at online payment Web site PayPal.com has created havoc for users, who have had only intermittent access to their accounts since Friday. [Computerworld News]
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The Zen of CSS Design. [Dave Shea's mezzoblue] This will be a great book.  I only wish more designers would pay attention to using CSS for design and layout.
4:59:18 PM    comment []  trackback []  

Microsoft Issues 10 Fixes on Busy Patch Day. A "cumulative security update" plugs eight holes in the Internet Explorer browser, while other patches address "critical" vulnerabilities in the Windows shell, in SMTP and elsewhere. [eWEEK Technology News]
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webmin-bb webmin-bb.05.wbm released (Webmin for bigbrother). Total project downloads to date: 2654 Project description: webmin module for bigbrother [Download] [Release Notes] By jc-ryu@users.sourceforge.net (John Curtis). [SourceForge.net: Project File Releases (Site-wide)]
1:34:31 PM    comment []  trackback []  

Redesign Cripples Paypal Service. Problems implementing a site redesign have hampered operations of the Paypal service, halting some payment processing for eBay auctions and web merchants. [Netcraft]

Oops.  You'd like to think that site design and backend performance are two disctinctly seperate issues.  Alas, that is not the case.  I have had occasion to make changes to CSS that prevented a site from functioning, although it looked pretty.  Just yesterday, I added a simple rewrite rule to Apache that broke the layout and prevented forms from functioning properly on the CALI website.  I feel their pain.


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11:24:40 AM    comment []  trackback []  
Novell Announces New Patent Policy

I just received the following email from Novell regarding a change in their patent policy:

 

Novell's
NEW PATENT POLICY

12 Oct 2004

Dear Valued Customer:

Today Novell expands its commitment to you by putting its extensive patent portfolio squarely behind its customers, and we thought you'd like to know about it. Our motivations are simple: protect customer choice and preserve marketplace innovation.

Novell has just issued a statement announcing our preparedness, if necessary, to use our own patent portfolio - which covers technologies with significant value and widespread deployment in the IT sector today - to defend against patent attacks on open source products we deliver. Both the press release and policy statement are available at http://www.novell.com/company/policies/patent/

This initiative is aimed at any vendor that tries to mislead customers using intellectual property rights as a reason to avoid pursuit of an open source offering. To our knowledge, no vendor has actually filed a patent suit against an open source product. Instead, some appear to be simply trying to sow doubts in the minds of customers to avoid competing on technical merits, security, quality of service and value. Novell believes that open source software poses no greater risk of patent infringement than does closed source software.

I believe our Chairman, Jack Messman, said it best when he stated, “Our approach is to protect customer choice, not threaten it, and support the innovation inherent in the open source model. With this policy, we're saying we'll use our patents to actively protect Novell's open source technologies against any third party asserting patent claims against our offerings. We will use our patents for the original purpose patents were established – to encourage innovation – not to shut down options for customers. We hope our leadership in this arena will lead other patent holders to take a similar stance.”

I greatly appreciate the trust and confidence you have placed in Novell.

Sincerely,

Ronald W. Hovsepian
President, Novell North America

This represents a sort of indemnification: Novell will defend, using its patents, claims of infringement made against open source software it sells, supports, or markets.  Considering the fact it owns and is actively marketing Suse, this seems to indicate that Novell will defend OSS in the Suse distro, which is a pretty wide cross section of what's out there today.


Beta: Radio comments moderation and other improvements. We've released a new set of features and improvements to beta for testing before a general release. Included is a new feature with Radio comments moderation and improvements to upstreaming and comment/TrackBack counters. [UserLand Product News]
11:15:15 AM    comment []  trackback []  

Stellarium Astronomy Software [LawLUG] does high res renderings of the night sky.
11:14:24 AM    comment []  trackback []  

ryansiob 2.0-3 released (Ryan's In/Out Board). Total project downloads to date: 6 Project description: Ryan's In/Out Board is a perl driven, intranet based, in/out board for small-medium size organisations that needs staff to be aware of other staff whereabouts. [Download] [Release Notes] By crimperman@users.sourceforge.net (Crimperman). [SourceForge.net: Project File Releases (Site-wide)]
10:16:54 AM    comment []  trackback []  

Jake Ludington: Podcasting with Windows Media Player. [Scripting News]
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