This could be quite serious for a lot of companies: SQL Server developers face huge royalty bills.

The judgment concerns a contract dispute between Timeline Inc. and Microsoft, over three patents relating to datamarts. In Microsoft’s interpretration of its licence with Timeline, published in a press release in July 1999, “all users of Microsoft SQL Server 7, Office 2000 and other Microsoft products that utilize this type of technology are unencumbered by Timeline’s patents.”
Timeline disagreed. The Washington Court of Appeal judgement plumped for the company. The company reckons that some SQL Server developers could face bills in the millions of dollars. The “damages they face may be material to Timeline’s future financial results,” Charles Osenbaugh, Timeline’s president and CEO.

News.com also has the story.

In a ruling that could force royalty fees on some developers working with Microsoft’s SQL Server 7 data-management software, a Washington state judge said Microsoft could not sublicense another company’s patents to SQL Server customers.

Story from slashdot

slashdot had this article today. Discussing a feature on mindjack by Nicholas Carroll, entitled Spinning the Web – The Realities of Online Reputation Management. It’s a very interesting article discussing the birth of online reputations, from email and Usenet postings, to the birth of online shops and e-commerce. It talks about the essential difference between selling face to face (or over the telephone) and having to get your pitch across in words on the web. Worth a read.
One of the slashdotters, Ryo Chijiiwa, posted a link to his own story, Reputation Economy and the Internet, in which he discusses how reputation acts as a substitute for monetary worth, and also how the system compares to market economies. Again, well worth a read.

Wow, Google bought Prya Labs the company behind Blogger last week. It seems to have been announced (leaked?) on siliconvalley.com by columnist Dan Gillmor. Evan Williams, co-founder of Pyra Labs confirmed it in his blog (of course).
Dan also posted his story the following day in the Mercury News. Slashdot also covered the story on Sunday, and the Guardian Unlimited has the story today.
Google also gets blog*spot. There is already some speculation as to what Google will do with the purchase, and whether it is a bad or a good thing. I think I can trust Google to ‘Do The Right Thing’ with this. I don’t think we will see a mass of ex blogger.com users migrating back any time soon, but hopefully some cash and technology input from the new owners will give the service the boost it needs.
Strangely I’ve seen no official press announcements at Google’s press Center nor blogger.com, and Dan’s column says that the deal took place on Thursday last week.

Update: 18/02/2003 12:45 The BBC has caught up with a nice piece by Giles Turnbull.

Bloomin’ NTL load-balancing Proxy server has gone down again! Sometime after 11:40 I’m guessing (from the fact that I got a comment on my blog from someone who I know is using the same proxy.
I can make things work if I directly proxy to one of the individual machines, but doing it transparently fails.
See an earlier story for links to a list of the individual machines.
After last weeks PR fiasco, you’d think they would buck up!

Update: For those looking for a proxy. I have set up an experimental proxy here

Instead of inviting bids from other net groups to run the net’s core addressing system the US Department of Commerce has simply extended Icann’s hold for a further three years.

I’m sure there has been some sneaky underhand stuff going on to get this. I remember when they changed the voting rules for the organisation’s leadership to effectively quieten dissenting voices on the board.

Story from BBC News.

A story from yesterday at silicon.com entitled Telewest learns from NTL’s broadband brouhaha, tells of NTL rival Telewest learning from NTL’s PR gaff.

“We’ve no plans at this stage to bring in any download limits,” a Telewest spokesman said, adding that it certainly wasn’t something that could be ruled out in the future. “If we were ever to consider such a move, we would try to learn from the customer feedback surrounding NTL, and look at other options.”…
“We certainly won’t just sneak it out on a Friday afternoon,” joked a Telewest insider.

The article also quotes analyst firm Jupiter Research:

According to analyst firm Jupiter Research, such data limits will be the rule, not the exception, by the end of 2003. Jupiter said this week that peer-to-peer file-swapping is already putting a heavy burden on broadband networks, so many ISPs will decide to implement some form of bandwidth restriction.

The Inquirer has a couple more stories on this NTL Broadband Limits issue: The first is a story entitled NTL wakes up to broadband PR catastrophe:

One of the problems is that NTL advertised an unlimited service, and customers were up in arms about this. Hussain now defines this as having a “trade name”