Monthly Archives: June 2004

MT3.0 licensing update

Yesterday, [SixApart announced]:http://www.sixapart.com/log/2004/06/announcing_pric.shtml a new pricing structure for MT3.0. It seems reasonable now. I fit under the free license, and I have the flexibility to add two more disjoint, non-overlapping blogs. If I want more, I can get unlimited blogs, and I’d be able to add four more authors for $70. $70 isn’t that cheap, but if I really had to have more than three blogs, and my friends/family didn’t want to install their own copies, I can see it in the realm of possibility.

$100 for a no-limit personal license. Nice to see that there’s a cap. $100 for a license that lets you do anything isn’t all that bad. And with inflation increasing, pretty soon a hundred bucks won’t be that much money anymore. hah.

They lost a whole lot of points with their initial pricing plan, but this one wins them a whole lot of customer service points. It’s nice that at least one software vendor is listening.

Concert riders

At [The Smoking Gun: Backstage Pass]:http://www.thesmokinggun.com/backstagetour/index.html there’s an archive of “concert riders” which basically attach to the contract between a performer and the concert venue. It’s really quite amusing. Most of them seem to have basic stuff, making sure artists rake in as much as possible, and strictly denying the concert organizers from profiting from the artist’s brand.

Some interesting bits from Britney Spears’s contract rider include: specs for furnishments of the dressing room, and a fine charged in case the dressing room’s phone number is leaked. Don’t forge the specs on the catered tuna salad, and the required bucket of KFC for the band. 😀

Favorite Website Awards

From [K10K]:http://k10k.net :
[Favourite Website Awards (FWA)]:http://www.favouritewebsiteawards.com — It’s got links to a bunch of cool websites. Most importantly, it’s got a category for “recreation and games”, which has a bunch of nifty little stupid flash toys.

Check out [Simwork]:http://ezupa.com/simwork/

I’d better close that tab before it sucks away too much time. 🙂

Microsoft Patents Doubleclick

[Article]:http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99995072
[Text of the patent]:http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,727,830.WKU.&OS=PN/6,727,830&RS=PN/6,727,830

Excerpt:

> Microsoft has successfully patented using short, long or double clicks to launch different applications on “limited resource computing devices” – presumably PDAs and mobile phones. The US patent was granted on 27 April.

It’s just another example of how broken the US patent system has become. You gotta ask: does this patent really protect innovation?

There’s another side: I read another article where someone was arguing that if he had his own cool innovation, his best course of action would be to keep it secret. He could patent it, but then everyone would know, and a big company would just use it, and it would be too expensive for him to fight it.

Litigation is expensive. Since it’s expensive, it tilts things in favor of richer, larger companies. Patent everything you can, even the obvious stuff you didn’t invent, and it’s too expensive for anything but a richer company to fight. depressing….