On 1/31/2012 8:08 PM, Doug Winterburn wrote:

On 01/31/2012 06:57 PM, Swingman wrote:
On 1/31/2012 6:37 PM, Larry W wrote:
Something to keep in mind when discussing ideas that do not conflict
with
the Gass patents: It has been common for some years now for the Patent
Office to approve patents no matter how ridiculously obvious, over
reaching,
plainly derivative, etc. If someone comes up with a different idea, even
if it DOES conflict with one of Gass's patents, the patent office is
likely
to approve it anyway. I suppose if that happens Gass and the newcomer
can
duke it out in court. As usual, the lawyers will win, though in this
case,
Gass, the lawyer, would also be one of the litigants. It would be worth
seeing for that aspect alone IMHO!

You said a mouthful ... I can't believe the software patents that are
being awarded these days, they defy reason, logic, and any sense of
_shame_ whatsoever.

I was co-founder of the very first web based, third party DNS provider
on the Internet in the early nineties. _If_ we could have patented our
method back then, and we tried, my shop would currently be 5,000 sf
instead of 300sf.

I use these guys: http://www.opendns.com/

Free for home use and do a great job. Configfor DNS in your router and
Bob's your uncle.


Everything to do with third party DNS that came after 1995 was based on
our our previous work, including Network Solutions getting into the
business and giving it away for free, which was the beginning of the end
for our small company. This was in the wild west days of the internet,
before venture capital and sillycon valley was fully into the game, and
their was almost no way to protect your intellectual property from being
blatantly copied.

By 2000 the internet had changed drastically, and before the dotcom
bubble burst, things were becoming increasingly ad based for revenue
stream, instead of subscription based ... and we, basically having been
copied to death, chose not to go in that direction.

We'd already shut down by the time Ulevitch stated up his venture
capital financed, ad based, DNS service, in 2006 .

Ten years is a lifetime on the Internet. The below, compliments of
webarchive.org and the "Wayback Machine":

Ten years before OpenDNS was started, in 1996:

http://web.archive.org/web/199612230...ww.dnswiz.com/

(the links are still clickable after 16 years, as the pages are cached)

(I designed and wrote every single word of that entire web site, which
was pretty sophisticated and got fairly large, both in UI, and under the
hood, for the times ... even if I do say so myself. )

And their DynDNS for dynamic ip addresses ... we were the first with
that, and pioneered the concept 6 years before OpenDNS copied it with
their API in 2007:

http://web.archive.org/web/200102232...iz.com/client/

It was online about 1998, but apparently those pages were never crawled
until 2001.

--
www.eWoodShop.com
Last update: 4/15/2010
KarlCaillouet@ (the obvious)
http://gplus.to/eWoodShop