I was being a little broad and overarching for the discussion I'll admit that. I am not completely in the dark about the case, for instance.
"Hitz said the cross-licensing talks were halted in April after Sun claimed that NetApp's use of WAFL infringed on Sun patents."
"Hitz said that during its negotiations, Sun did not specify which NetApp products infringed on its patents. However, he noted that Sun did say that most of those patents were gained through its $4.1 billion acquisition of Storage Technology Corp. in 2005."
Yes SUN should quantify what patents NetApp infringed on, however we still don't know who owns WAFL patents.
So here lies the problem, because the patent system is so broken who owns the patent rights to WAFL? How do we know that someone else out there in garage 20 years ago filed a patent for the same idea? Which leads to the deeper question, should anyone have the right to patent an Idea instead of a method?
Heh, I realized belatedly that I had bitten hook, line, and sinker too. I know the low UID thing is cliched, but the ones that are low and still around generally are fairly reasonable people. Once I looked a little deeper I realized that I was being reeled in and about to be someone's dinner, luckily I was small fry so you threw me back in the pond.
Thank you for the insight, but really did NetApp write the code for ZFS? No? That's what I thought, the key difference is that it is an idea, not a product that they patented and it's very broad reaching at that. That's where the problem arises in software, there are very many different ways to attain the same goals. If they had patented an idea for say the actual appliance and software together as a product/method that's different and they should be protected, they should not however be protected when someone can take an idea they had and make a better product than them as that's called competition and advancing the state of the art. Do you think that it would have been good if someone patented the clickable button? What about a scroll bar? Maybe someone should have patented GUI. Would computing technology have reached the state it's in had these things been patented when they were dreamed up?
I understand what you mean by that post, however this really isn't one of the cases of SUN being the bad guy. It's someone thinking up an idea, patenting it, doing nothing with it, then suing when they think that someone has infringed on their patent. It's utter foolishness and does not contribute to the betterment of technology. All people like these idiots do is make lawyers rich and keep the little guy with a great idea and no money for a patent or the time to make sure someone hasn't already patented his/her idea terrified of going anywhere with it. Cases like this can only be fought by huge corps such as SUN and that to me is a very sad state of affairs indeed. The problems with the patent and copyright system really underscore the reason why the U.S. is controlled by the megacorp, only a megacorp can defend themselves from the slavering legions. As of this very moment if I were to have some novel idea come into my head for a software system the only recourse I would have is to sell it to a huge corp because no matter how great it was or how much people loved it if someone had patented that idea and chose to sue me for it I do not have the means to fight it.
Well, you're kinda nitpicking at the title too. Really everyone is going to see Hard Drive as one of those nifty spinning disks in the computer, which most of the tech mentioned in the article is not so for that vast majority of people this will be an accurate title. Literal(I thik that I spelled that wrong, but heh I don't really care all that much again you know what I mean) translation and real language meaning/usage are two very different things in the American language.
Anyway this is some pretty cool stuff that they have in here. I'm really interested to see if one technology is going to dominate as rotating media have for so long now or if it's going to be a combination of several different techs. Hell it could be something that nobody has even really thought about which is the danger of speculating about the future, you really don't know. That therefore leads to the logical conclusion "?" which you'll notice at the end of the article title.
I will say this, don't use a commodity RAID controller for something like that. They're pretty good for home use, but I would really recommend you spend a little and get a real RAID card. Unless you do a lot of tape backups if that RAID unbinds you'll so many flavors of screwed Baskin Robbins will sue you for trademark infringement.
Biting Troll nom nom nom. Right because exploring more than a focused group of alternate energy souces is absolute foolishness. You do realize of course that the sun is always out in space and will be for a long time to come. Such gizmos as these benefit from increased solar cell efficiency so they're interdependent and if there's a big enough constellation of them we can provide power to any place in the world that needs it.
Being able to beam power for disaster relief is just aweful, imagine actually being able to provide instant power to an earthquake epicenter and have vital infrastructure such as water purification and medical industry back online as fast as the dust settles..... complete and utter foolishness. Let's add up some other interesting benefits, no nuclear waste, no carbon emissions, doesn't kill birds (hippies are strange), doesn't add as much industrial waste as batteries, etc etc so on and so forth. So it's expensive in the short term, but it's not as expensive as say all the money going into fusion and it will work with current tech as well as get better with new tech. Especially with some of the cool new things coming out like the microsats that could provide repair and upgrades to these things.
Oh let's not forget that there is a whole lot of space out there for something like this and we can pretty much make the solar collectors as large as we want so it scales for the future very well.
One final thing is that it can provide power to U.S. troops anywhere they need to be, they can be effectively cut off from the logistics train and still have the power to continue. As an ex-soldier I cannot tell you how many flavors of awesome and win that would have been both times I was deployed to the desert.
The human mind never ceases to amaze me, when people punch the monkey I lose a little faith, when people like that man in the video do what they do I gain a lot of it back. The existing tech is very amazing already, maybe the haptics that I was talking about combined with this existing technology would lower the barrier to entry a little bit, especially for someone who was blinded later in life. Another interesting thing about the haptics when combined with this is that I think children would find it much more fun if it was made to be fun for them. I love what that video showed, it really does blow my mind what we as humans can do and I think using a haptic response system similar to the Wiimote could really enhance what's already in place by providing more sensory depth. Really thank you, I need to get in school and start cracking on my idea instead of lazing around at my already awesome job =P
Thank you for the info, no I'm not a website designer nor have I ever used a screen reader. I still think that the something similar to the Wiimote has merit though. It would be great if say you defined the boundaries of the screen with a strong rumble, each type of information on the screen be it hyperlink, picture, video stream, audio stream, plain text had a special auditory cue for the remote as well as a lighter rumble that would tell you whether or not you're actually pointing at the link. A person could move the Wiimote over the screen and have an audible tag go off when you hit a hyperlink, one button could tell you what the text of the link was another the page it links to, the same for a block of text, a picture, music, a video stream. Another interesting possiblity is text entry for say shopping, there could be a special cue for when it moves over an entry block and the same use of a button could tell what information is needed in the block. I would love to see something that uses tactile and audio feedback such as the Wiimote on a computer and judging by Nintendo's success with it I even think that it's very possible right now. I'm not saying that it has to be a Wiimote, but the technology behind it is very sound and useful as a haptic system for more than just videogames. There is a whole area that it opens up that hasn't even begun to be explored yet.
With regards to the internet I agree with you. There is no denying that the internet is a largely visual system, and to say it's not is delusion. With regards to corps, well they have to make their brick and mortar facilities available to the handicapped and that's right, but how do you really honestly make a website available to someone who is blind? Software that reads to words on the screen would be woefully inaccurate since it doesn't really lend itself to telling you where those words are on the screen when you have to follow links and in the case of most websites there are a lot of words present. Now an interesting solution is actually already in place, the Wii. If there were an interface like say the Wiimote for a computer where the pointer would provide feedback to the user such as the edge of the screen, when you touch a hyperlink it rumbles a little, and can provide auditory cues then I think that's great. The one thing with that though is it would have to be standardized so any device would work with any webpage, for the most part it's safe to say that how things are presented on the web are standardized and the responsibility would fall not on the web designer, but on the person to buy the right equipment for use on the internet. That's how I think the issue with this should play out, not with some corp (ye gods I'm defending them) getting sued because a visual system cannot be used by the blind. Let's use a car analogy (yay!), that's like suing the asphalt company because they didn't put brail in the road so a blind person can drive on it.
Now let's move on to the personal level, where does this stop? Is everyone going to be responsible for making their websites available to the blind? What about all the people out there that make them for their family and friend but if you happen by them you can view them too? Are they accountable for that? For another analogy let's say this would be akin to making sure your house has a ramp so any ramdom stranger that happens to be in a wheel chair can get in.
Thank you for that, even though I work with a bunch of really smart people not a one of them can carry on a conversation deeper than what's put out by hollywood these days. They have no idea what a thought experiment is, don't understand what a moral dilemma is or why movies such as Apocolype Now and Bladerunner are great movies. It really saddens me and makes me lose faith in my fellow countrymen.
I agree, leave my shell alone. I love having the power that a shell gives you and most users are going to see that option and not touch it. To them shell = scary nerd thing and will avoid it at all costs, now that doesn't mean that tools shouldn't be in place so that an average person should able to do most things they need to do w/o touching the shell. The corollary to that is the shell is very powerful when wielded by the right hands and frankly I find linux problems much easier to fix for my family than windows problems because of the shell. All I have to do usually is ssh in, fix it and hop back out usually while they're still using the computer.
Yeah, my naivete is amazing considering that I have worked in those circles. You'll also noticed I never said anything about it actually happening, just that was how I think things should be. It's also known as an opinion and it's neither right nor wrong nor even naive.
Honestly though, how many people think like that? Most people are not going to be aware of an organization's ability to de-obfuscate an image and will not take the appropriate steps to hide their identity. The only thing I worry about in this post is the lack of peer review in source code, I believe that if the government is going to use software that may have a negative impact on a person's life (not saying this guy is innocent, just in general) then the source needs to be freely available for peer review so that the margin for error can be out in the open and the quality of the code verified.
Ahhh, I looooooooove my O-scope at work. I've used those to clean up so many digital signals that instead of looked like saw teeth. Best peice of diagnosis hardware ever.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. I have a pretty good job as a geek and I'm the go to guy for my circle of friends/family. I'll help any of them with their issue and I usually don't take money unless they really force it on me, what I do take though are maybe some fresh fruits/veggies from their garden, a return favor or some help around the house, maybe they watch my kids so my wife and I can have some time for us (very important in a marriage btw, even if it isn't romantic time), or they donate some time/material to people who need the help. That's really all that I ask for, I don't want money, I don't need my ego stroked (I already know that I'm pretty good =P) and I most certainly realize that doing something like that for them means that they're very willing to return the favor later on down the road.
If I had mod points I would make you insightful. I have less problems with my mother's computer now that she has Ubuntu and I didn't have to walk her through the install. When there is a problem all I have to do is ssh in and fix, I do this while she's still using it.
that this really is not news to the crowd that hangs out here on/. We promote good security so much because we already know what the above mentioned article states. It is nice to have some numbers, although I'm always skeptical of "facts" on the interwebz.
I use the hell out of that. My wife and I love it, we give away stuff all the time and we also get a bunch of good things too. Really a great program, I encourage everybody to give it a shot.
You can bolt or chain it to the wall as long as you fill in the holes before you move out. Just make sure that the anchors whatever flavor they may be are sunk into wall studs or they're trivial to rip out.
Slashdot Mirror
Could you repost the links? Either something went horribly wrong with your HTML or my browser is on the fritz(very possible).
I was being a little broad and overarching for the discussion I'll admit that. I am not completely in the dark about the case, for instance. "Hitz said the cross-licensing talks were halted in April after Sun claimed that NetApp's use of WAFL infringed on Sun patents." "Hitz said that during its negotiations, Sun did not specify which NetApp products infringed on its patents. However, he noted that Sun did say that most of those patents were gained through its $4.1 billion acquisition of Storage Technology Corp. in 2005." Yes SUN should quantify what patents NetApp infringed on, however we still don't know who owns WAFL patents. So here lies the problem, because the patent system is so broken who owns the patent rights to WAFL? How do we know that someone else out there in garage 20 years ago filed a patent for the same idea? Which leads to the deeper question, should anyone have the right to patent an Idea instead of a method?
Heh, I realized belatedly that I had bitten hook, line, and sinker too. I know the low UID thing is cliched, but the ones that are low and still around generally are fairly reasonable people. Once I looked a little deeper I realized that I was being reeled in and about to be someone's dinner, luckily I was small fry so you threw me back in the pond.
Thank you for the insight, but really did NetApp write the code for ZFS? No? That's what I thought, the key difference is that it is an idea, not a product that they patented and it's very broad reaching at that. That's where the problem arises in software, there are very many different ways to attain the same goals. If they had patented an idea for say the actual appliance and software together as a product/method that's different and they should be protected, they should not however be protected when someone can take an idea they had and make a better product than them as that's called competition and advancing the state of the art. Do you think that it would have been good if someone patented the clickable button? What about a scroll bar? Maybe someone should have patented GUI. Would computing technology have reached the state it's in had these things been patented when they were dreamed up?
I understand what you mean by that post, however this really isn't one of the cases of SUN being the bad guy. It's someone thinking up an idea, patenting it, doing nothing with it, then suing when they think that someone has infringed on their patent. It's utter foolishness and does not contribute to the betterment of technology. All people like these idiots do is make lawyers rich and keep the little guy with a great idea and no money for a patent or the time to make sure someone hasn't already patented his/her idea terrified of going anywhere with it. Cases like this can only be fought by huge corps such as SUN and that to me is a very sad state of affairs indeed. The problems with the patent and copyright system really underscore the reason why the U.S. is controlled by the megacorp, only a megacorp can defend themselves from the slavering legions. As of this very moment if I were to have some novel idea come into my head for a software system the only recourse I would have is to sell it to a huge corp because no matter how great it was or how much people loved it if someone had patented that idea and chose to sue me for it I do not have the means to fight it.
Well, you're kinda nitpicking at the title too. Really everyone is going to see Hard Drive as one of those nifty spinning disks in the computer, which most of the tech mentioned in the article is not so for that vast majority of people this will be an accurate title. Literal(I thik that I spelled that wrong, but heh I don't really care all that much again you know what I mean) translation and real language meaning/usage are two very different things in the American language.
Anyway this is some pretty cool stuff that they have in here. I'm really interested to see if one technology is going to dominate as rotating media have for so long now or if it's going to be a combination of several different techs. Hell it could be something that nobody has even really thought about which is the danger of speculating about the future, you really don't know. That therefore leads to the logical conclusion "?" which you'll notice at the end of the article title.
I will say this, don't use a commodity RAID controller for something like that. They're pretty good for home use, but I would really recommend you spend a little and get a real RAID card. Unless you do a lot of tape backups if that RAID unbinds you'll so many flavors of screwed Baskin Robbins will sue you for trademark infringement.
Biting Troll nom nom nom. Right because exploring more than a focused group of alternate energy souces is absolute foolishness. You do realize of course that the sun is always out in space and will be for a long time to come. Such gizmos as these benefit from increased solar cell efficiency so they're interdependent and if there's a big enough constellation of them we can provide power to any place in the world that needs it.
Being able to beam power for disaster relief is just aweful, imagine actually being able to provide instant power to an earthquake epicenter and have vital infrastructure such as water purification and medical industry back online as fast as the dust settles..... complete and utter foolishness. Let's add up some other interesting benefits, no nuclear waste, no carbon emissions, doesn't kill birds (hippies are strange), doesn't add as much industrial waste as batteries, etc etc so on and so forth. So it's expensive in the short term, but it's not as expensive as say all the money going into fusion and it will work with current tech as well as get better with new tech. Especially with some of the cool new things coming out like the microsats that could provide repair and upgrades to these things.
Oh let's not forget that there is a whole lot of space out there for something like this and we can pretty much make the solar collectors as large as we want so it scales for the future very well.
One final thing is that it can provide power to U.S. troops anywhere they need to be, they can be effectively cut off from the logistics train and still have the power to continue. As an ex-soldier I cannot tell you how many flavors of awesome and win that would have been both times I was deployed to the desert.
The human mind never ceases to amaze me, when people punch the monkey I lose a little faith, when people like that man in the video do what they do I gain a lot of it back. The existing tech is very amazing already, maybe the haptics that I was talking about combined with this existing technology would lower the barrier to entry a little bit, especially for someone who was blinded later in life. Another interesting thing about the haptics when combined with this is that I think children would find it much more fun if it was made to be fun for them. I love what that video showed, it really does blow my mind what we as humans can do and I think using a haptic response system similar to the Wiimote could really enhance what's already in place by providing more sensory depth. Really thank you, I need to get in school and start cracking on my idea instead of lazing around at my already awesome job =P
Thank you for the info, no I'm not a website designer nor have I ever used a screen reader. I still think that the something similar to the Wiimote has merit though. It would be great if say you defined the boundaries of the screen with a strong rumble, each type of information on the screen be it hyperlink, picture, video stream, audio stream, plain text had a special auditory cue for the remote as well as a lighter rumble that would tell you whether or not you're actually pointing at the link. A person could move the Wiimote over the screen and have an audible tag go off when you hit a hyperlink, one button could tell you what the text of the link was another the page it links to, the same for a block of text, a picture, music, a video stream. Another interesting possiblity is text entry for say shopping, there could be a special cue for when it moves over an entry block and the same use of a button could tell what information is needed in the block. I would love to see something that uses tactile and audio feedback such as the Wiimote on a computer and judging by Nintendo's success with it I even think that it's very possible right now. I'm not saying that it has to be a Wiimote, but the technology behind it is very sound and useful as a haptic system for more than just videogames. There is a whole area that it opens up that hasn't even begun to be explored yet.
With regards to the internet I agree with you. There is no denying that the internet is a largely visual system, and to say it's not is delusion. With regards to corps, well they have to make their brick and mortar facilities available to the handicapped and that's right, but how do you really honestly make a website available to someone who is blind? Software that reads to words on the screen would be woefully inaccurate since it doesn't really lend itself to telling you where those words are on the screen when you have to follow links and in the case of most websites there are a lot of words present. Now an interesting solution is actually already in place, the Wii. If there were an interface like say the Wiimote for a computer where the pointer would provide feedback to the user such as the edge of the screen, when you touch a hyperlink it rumbles a little, and can provide auditory cues then I think that's great. The one thing with that though is it would have to be standardized so any device would work with any webpage, for the most part it's safe to say that how things are presented on the web are standardized and the responsibility would fall not on the web designer, but on the person to buy the right equipment for use on the internet. That's how I think the issue with this should play out, not with some corp (ye gods I'm defending them) getting sued because a visual system cannot be used by the blind. Let's use a car analogy (yay!), that's like suing the asphalt company because they didn't put brail in the road so a blind person can drive on it.
Now let's move on to the personal level, where does this stop? Is everyone going to be responsible for making their websites available to the blind? What about all the people out there that make them for their family and friend but if you happen by them you can view them too? Are they accountable for that? For another analogy let's say this would be akin to making sure your house has a ramp so any ramdom stranger that happens to be in a wheel chair can get in.
Thank you for that, even though I work with a bunch of really smart people not a one of them can carry on a conversation deeper than what's put out by hollywood these days. They have no idea what a thought experiment is, don't understand what a moral dilemma is or why movies such as Apocolype Now and Bladerunner are great movies. It really saddens me and makes me lose faith in my fellow countrymen.
So what you're saying is that tinfoil will protect me right?
I agree, leave my shell alone. I love having the power that a shell gives you and most users are going to see that option and not touch it. To them shell = scary nerd thing and will avoid it at all costs, now that doesn't mean that tools shouldn't be in place so that an average person should able to do most things they need to do w/o touching the shell. The corollary to that is the shell is very powerful when wielded by the right hands and frankly I find linux problems much easier to fix for my family than windows problems because of the shell. All I have to do usually is ssh in, fix it and hop back out usually while they're still using the computer.
Will, just wanted to say that speech you gave at PAX was powerful and moving. I wish that you could give it to a group of Politicians.
Yeah, my naivete is amazing considering that I have worked in those circles. You'll also noticed I never said anything about it actually happening, just that was how I think things should be. It's also known as an opinion and it's neither right nor wrong nor even naive.
Honestly though, how many people think like that? Most people are not going to be aware of an organization's ability to de-obfuscate an image and will not take the appropriate steps to hide their identity. The only thing I worry about in this post is the lack of peer review in source code, I believe that if the government is going to use software that may have a negative impact on a person's life (not saying this guy is innocent, just in general) then the source needs to be freely available for peer review so that the margin for error can be out in the open and the quality of the code verified.
Ahhh, I looooooooove my O-scope at work. I've used those to clean up so many digital signals that instead of looked like saw teeth. Best peice of diagnosis hardware ever.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. I have a pretty good job as a geek and I'm the go to guy for my circle of friends/family. I'll help any of them with their issue and I usually don't take money unless they really force it on me, what I do take though are maybe some fresh fruits/veggies from their garden, a return favor or some help around the house, maybe they watch my kids so my wife and I can have some time for us (very important in a marriage btw, even if it isn't romantic time), or they donate some time/material to people who need the help. That's really all that I ask for, I don't want money, I don't need my ego stroked (I already know that I'm pretty good =P) and I most certainly realize that doing something like that for them means that they're very willing to return the favor later on down the road.
You just rewired my brain.....ouch.
If I had mod points I would make you insightful. I have less problems with my mother's computer now that she has Ubuntu and I didn't have to walk her through the install. When there is a problem all I have to do is ssh in and fix, I do this while she's still using it.
that this really is not news to the crowd that hangs out here on /. We promote good security so much because we already know what the above mentioned article states. It is nice to have some numbers, although I'm always skeptical of "facts" on the interwebz.
I use the hell out of that. My wife and I love it, we give away stuff all the time and we also get a bunch of good things too. Really a great program, I encourage everybody to give it a shot.
That's a really good idea, that makes it very cumbersome to move around unless you have the keys to remove said locks.
You can bolt or chain it to the wall as long as you fill in the holes before you move out. Just make sure that the anchors whatever flavor they may be are sunk into wall studs or they're trivial to rip out.