The Internet turns 40

The Internet as we know it is 40 years old today. The very first RFC, RFC 1 - Host Software, was published on April 7, 1969.

Cloud computing

Cloud computing isn't anything new. WorldNet from "Valentina: Soul in Sapphire" in 1984. "The Adolescence of P-1" in 1977. The idea of a world-wide computer network where programs can run on any processor on the grid isn't new. The hard part, of course, is making it happen. Machine code's specific to a particular processor. You can't run x86 code on a PowerPC CPU without some hairy emulation happening. Ditto for running Windows software on a Linux system, or vice-versa. So the first big technical challenge is making it possible for code to migrate from machine to machine without getting caught in CPU and OS compatibility issues. Things like Java's bytecode solved that, though. From a technical standpoint, there's nothing stopping code from being shifted around between machines as long as the author didn't choose to build hardware-specific executables.

The non-technical problems are bigger, though. The first is obvious: when running on the cloud or the grid or whatever you call it, your programs and data reside on someone else's system. How do you protect your data from being exposed to people who shouldn't see it? How do you force the hardware's owner, someone you may not have a direct contract with, to protect it from theft or damage? How do you insure you can get your data and programs back in the event you want to go elsewhere? They're all intertwined, you know. Amazon, for instance, solves the problems of data exposure and protection by keeping your data only on their systems, where you've got a contract with them. But at the same time, you don't entirely control the data formats. Your data resides on their systems, not yours, and in their formats, not yours. Unless you built special facilities into your software to send you copies of your data, if you decide to move from Amazon to Google you may find Amazon either won't export your data for you or won't export it in a format Google can import. And you may find your programs, written for Amazon's systems and APIs, won't compile for Google's without major rewriting.

The whole idea is a wonderful one, but you need to think about the logistics and remember that there are no silver bullets. There's no magic here. The obvious problems still exist, and still have to be dealt with, and they won't go away just because they're inconvenient to deal with.

Trademark ownership

An interesting decision about trademark ownership. What's interesting about it is that the judge ruled that trademark use trumped a registered trademark. A lot of companies have been treating trademarks as if registration, however recent, trumped all common use no matter how long-term and well-established. The judge here threw that reasoning out, ruling that the Dallas Cowboys, even though they didn't have a formal registration on the phrase "America's Team", nonetheless owned it by virtue of long use of the phrase and it's association with the team. This overturned the relatively recent registration of that phrase as a trademark by another company.

This is good news for people who've been using names and phrases associated with their products. When someone else comes along, registers that name or phrase as a trademark and tries to usurp your usage on the grounds that a registered trademark trumps an unregistered one, you can point to this decision and say "The courts say otherwise.".