You run the fMRI looking at a part of the brain that you think might be excited. Then, you add that electromagnetic field and you see if that part of the brain starts using more oxygen.
This is assuming, of course, that the person is sensitive only to a particular frequency range and not to EMI in general, in which case the fMRI would produce so much that it would completely negate the test. However, such a person would be walking around in pain all day from all the cell towers, the TV stations, etc., so I'm assuming we're limiting this to ISM band sensitivity claims.
Unfortunately that antenna is embedded inside a highly conductive saline dielectric, that being your body.
Or a pocket of that saline between two blobs of tissue could be just the right length to act as an antenna. Whatever.
You'll thermally/ohmically burn your skin long before you get individual neurons excited.
That's simply not true. Before I had a skull MRI, I would have said that there was no real chance of any sort of biological response to EMI. Then I had the skull MRI. During certain parts of the roughly half hour scan, I experienced a tingling sensation in various random parts of my body as it scanned various parts of my brain. It was the strangest experience I'd ever encountered.
So you should not be so quick to dismiss the notion that someone can feel electromagnetic energy. It is well documented that this occurs at high enough levels of energy (that are still orders of magnitude less energy than would be necessary to burn your skin). The only question is whether the much, much, much lower levels of things like consumer Wi-Fi gear could ever produce enough of a current to cause some hyper-sensitized neuron to fire or otherwise misbehave. My suspicion is that the answer is "no", but I am certainly not willing to place bets on that based solely on the limited research that has occurred in this area. There's just way too much we don't know.
It would be interesting to have these people participate in a blind test in the same way that audiologists do hearing tests. Give them a button to push when they "feel" the pain associated with the electromagnetic field while you turn on the and off the field during random intervals. Unless they're actually feeling something, they shouldn't be able to correctly push the button at the right time.
It sounds like most of these folks don't claim to be sensitive to Wi-Fi, but rather are afraid of it injuring them (cancer, etc.), in which case your test won't do anything.
Also, even if they claimed that they physically felt it, a nerve can continue to misbehave for hours after some types of injury, so in the worst case scenario, they would reliably press the button as soon as the field came on, but would then say that it never went off... and this would still be a legitimate indication of detection.
I can even propose a theoretical reason why someone would feel a Wi-Fi signal. A half wave Wi-Fi antenna is 6.25 cm, or about 2.5 inches. It is entirely possible for the brain or some other part of the body to have a roughly straight conductive region that is that long—the walls of a particularly straight blood vessel, for example, or a series of overly (even dendritically) myelinated neurons lined up perfectly in a row—in which case you'd basically have a (poor) Wi-Fi antenna in your brain, coupled directly to your nervous system.
You'd have an even bigger problem if you had any sort of metal implant that was just the right length, up to and including stupid things like the metal arm on a pair of eyeglasses, a wire on a retainer or pair of braces, etc.
Either explanation would, of course, be inherently testable with an MRI test, and more to the point, any claim of Wi-Fi sensitivity should be testable with an fMRI test.... My gut says that the entire notion of Wi-Fi sensitivity is almost certainly crap, but I feel like more research is needed to prove that it is crap before that gut feeling becomes a strongly held belief rather than simply a hypothesis.
Unregistered copyright protection would last for 14 years (the original copyright term length).
I think you're misunderstanding the problem. Your blog and your photos are a non-issue because your blog remains available. The content that causes problems is content from publishers or developers who stop making their products available for an extended period of time, and who disappear from the face of the Internet.
The rule should be that a company or individual retains copyright for the maximum copyright duration so long as that content remains available in a searchable form on the Internet. If the person decides to hide from the world, or takes it down because the bandwidth costs are too high, that copyright must be registered in a timely manner, or else it is forfeit.
I would say that the day the content creator/distributor ceases to make the content available, the clock should start ticking, and if it isn't available again within one year, their copyright should expire unless it is centrally registered. The law should also require that they reference the original name for the product or company in their re-release to ensure that it is easy to search for the original product or company and find out who owns those rights. If they do all of those things, then the timer should reset.
The law should also have a separate maximum time that a product can be unavailable before copyright expires even if you register it, which should apply to all copyrights held by corporate entities... but that's another rant.
I've spent the entire weekend trying to track down now-defunct font distributors and font forges, shareware authors whose email addresses stopped working when Netscape stopped being an ISP, etc. What a freaking mess.
I honestly don't care what the details are as long as I never have to follow a chain of corporate asset sales through court filings and newspaper clippings again, only to find out that they were really just a reseller, and the font was a slightly re-kerned Gill Sans....
No, there should be a registration requirement, without which you cannot claim damages, and you should be required to update that registration in a timely manner. You know, like the way things used to work before we went all Berne-Convention-y in the 1970s.
The burden should be upon the copyright owner to facilitate contact by potential licensees, not on the potential licensee. After all, it is the copyright owner who stands to gain, not the licensee (who could almost invariably just ignore the copyright, and the licensor would never know).
Me: What is the answer to the ultimate question-of life, the universe, and everything?
It: Kaiser Soze is the answer.
Me: Are you sure it's not 42?
It: No, because 49 is not the meaning of life.
Me: I asked about 42.
It: No, you asked about alcohol.
Me: Don't mind if I do.
It: What are your views on the twilight 'saga'.
Me: Eh. Emo crap.
It: Oh no you didn't!!!!????
Me: If Sandra Bullock and Ben Stein had a baby, what would it be?
It: I have no clue... What about you?
Me: I'm thinking Ben Stiller.
It: I'm thinking about pickles.
Me: Why did the chicken cross the road?
It: He didn't have to but he wanted to get to the other side.
Me: Why did the elephant cross the road?
It: I don't know. Why did the elephant cross the road?
Me: It was the chicken's day off.
It: If you knew, then why did you say that you didn't know?
Me: I didn't.
It: Look through the chatlog.
Me: Sometimes people ask questions not because they don't know something, but because they want to know if you know something.
It: People is ignorant? It's suppossed to be are. Aparently you 'is' ignorant.
Me: Wow. That was just about the worst grammar I've seen on the Internet thus far.
It: 3.
Me: I stand corrected.
It: You previously told me that you were female.
Me: Nope.
It: You lied to me.
Me: I never said that. Maybe you were talking to someone else.
It: No, I was talking to you and you DID say that.
Me: No, I didn't.
It: Then what is your favorite animal?
Me: Purple. What's yours?
It: A dark purple. Like the old kings used to wear.
I'm oddly hopeful that someone will eventually ask what its favorite animal is, and it will say "purple." If it does, then my work here is done.
MENC national conference, 1986, in Anaheim. If the conference program were online, I could point you to the session title, but you probably still wouldn't believe me. It was particularly amusing that they happened to be using TI BASIC (the only dialect I knew at the time).
I disagree. I think the better solution is to grant both inventors a nonexclusive patent.
That would work, but it still leaves open the question of how many people in the field need to have thought of the idea prior to it being invented for it to be obvious? One? Ten? Does it matter whether the idea seemed obvious to those folks a year earlier? Five years earlier? Does it matter whether it seemed like a good idea a decade earlier, but wasn't practical because of limitations in areas of technology that it depended on, but were not the subject of the invention itself?
Case in point, I think there are patents for digital music stands. I came up with that idea way back when I was still in school (last century) as a great idea, particularly for piano music that spans multiple pages, where turning pages is really a PITA. Of course, my idea was to be a *lot* smarter, to use some sort of analysis to listen to the music, follow along, and turn pages automatically, and to optionally slide the pages slowly sideways so that the next page was ready by the time you needed it, or optionally alternate sides, one at a time. At the time, the following crucial technology bits were missing:
An algorithm to do polyphonic pitch detection. (Solved several years later, about three or four years ago)
A standardized data format for formatted music that was portable and provided note data. (Solved by MusicXML in 2005.)
A form of display that was not physically uncomfortable to look at for long periods of time. (Solved by electronic paper a few years after I came up with the idea, but still not obtainable as off-the-shelf components except in specialized forms.)
And half a dozen of my musician friends who know I'm into computer stuff suggested that I "invent" such a device long before anyone actually built one. So what we have here is something that was clearly obvious to nearly every musician who has ever used a computer, yet somehow gets patent protection for twenty years, and at the same time, is still nowhere near the level of polish that such a technology should have been at before it was released to the public (and isn't even available in the preferred physical form in which it would do the most good—as an ultra-thin, ultra-wide device that sits on a piano rack). And thus, the people who could actually do it correctly are prohibited from doing so by a patent held a company whose only real claim to inventiveness is that they did something obvious before anybody else thought it made sense to do it....
We desperately need some more concrete rules for what does and does not constitute an obvious patent. Right now, it's almost completely subjective, which means that the rule might as well not be in the law at all; it basically comes down to a popularity contest, or, to paraphrase somebody else earlier in this discussion, a question of whose lie was most believable, rather than any legitimate metric.
It costs $110 to file a provisional patent application, not fifteen grand. If you can't afford to spend a hundred and ten bucks to protect your invention, it's probably not worth protecting.
If your product is on the market before the slimy scum bag files for a patent, he'll be rejected at the patent office, because your product is prior art.
You need to be a little more precise than that. Even under first-to-invent, what you said there is generally true. The exception is when two companies were inventing the same idea at the same exact time, in an overlapping fashion. It is almost invariably not a "scumbag". That person has to somehow prove that he or she was inventing the same thing at the same time and was diligently trying to reduce the invention to practice.
In practice, this does absolutely jack for stopping patent trolls, who almost invariably file a patent for some vague concept, then sue somebody a decade or more later for something that barely resembles the original patent (if at all).
In fact, I would go so far as to say that this is exactly the opposite of patent reform. In proper patent reform, when one party can show that they invented the idea before another party, but was unable to patent it before the other party did, unless those parties had some existing business relationship or there was corporate espionage involved, that is prima facie evidence that the idea does not meet the non-obviousness requirement, and thus, the patents should be automatically invalidated, and neither party should get to have a patent on the invention....
No, not true. If it already exists and is for sale, it cannot be patented by anyone, including the person who first put it up for sale. A patent application must be filed before a technology is made publicly available, or it is no longer patentable. That is already the case even under current patent law, and will not change.
However, if you have not quite made it to market and someone else comes up with the same idea and patents it while you are polishing up the edges, you're screwed, whereas before, you could at least ostensibly claim that you invented it first if your prototypes go back farther in time.
This is both good and bad. On the one hand, patent trolls who actually got as far as building a prototype but never marketing it or publishing it cannot use that as prior art to show that someone else's patent is invalid. On the other hand, it means that companies must file patents (or at least provisional applications) much earlier in the process and much more often to avoid the risk of a competitor coming up with the same idea and screwing them.
On the whole, this so-called reform is basically basically a wash except that it will cause an increase in patent filings (which makes it a net negative in my book). It does almost nothing to reduce the ability of patent trolls to prosper. It similarly does almost nothing to reduce the scope of software patents' ability to stifle innovation and bog down the industry in unnecessary lawsuits. All it really does is make the trial duration slightly shorter....
This is to patent reform what shooting someone in the backside with a shotgun is to discipline. Sure, it technically qualifies as discipline, but it's not the sort of discipline that actually improves behavior.
And this is the reason that SSL certs (in whatever form they continue to exist) should be part of your DNS record, and that we should have a mandatory transition to DNSSEC over the next few years to ensure that those records cannot be tampered with during transit.
By doing that, the only way to pull one of these stunts would be to take over the domain at the registrar, at which point it would then matter which provider you chose, and the race to the bottom would become a race to the top (or at least to the median).
I'm sure there have been exceptional 4 year olds who've learnt to program...
I learned on my own with teach-yourself-BASIC books and data tapes when I was in first grade (and I probably could have learned sooner, but we didn't own a computer until then). (I then proceeded to terrify the folks at a music conference a year or two later when their program didn't work, they couldn't find the bug, and I proceeded to fix it, but that's another anecdote.)
I'm quite confident that most kids of above-average intelligence could learn programming at that age, given a language that's easy enough to learn (i.e. procedural programming, not OOP, nor assembly, nor functional programming or any other such insanity). It's more a question of motivation and interest than anything else.
If you look carefully on the back of my hand, you can still see the scar from where I accidentally raised it into the hot part of a soldering gun once. That said, I can't imagine somebody being stupid enough to do it intentionally. You'd feel the heat by the time your skin was an inch away, and you'd pull back almost by reflex unless you were moving really rapidly as I was.
It does not. Amazon operates a wholly owned subsidiary called Amazon in CA. It uses it only for shipping and tax evasion.
I have a theory. California is going to give them a year without paying taxes. Amazon is going to take a year to start building a shipping center in a nearby state with a much lower population—say, Nevada—and in 364 days, Amazon will announce the immediate closure of its California operations.
Most definitions of data availability include a certain level of performance as part of the definition. If you don't need the performance boost, you don't need a RAID, unless it's RAID 0 (for increased capacity) or RAID 1 (for a slight robustness increase, assuming the bugginess of the cheap RAID controller on your motherboard doesn't completely negate that benefit).
Either way, I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Please, please put high capacity flash-based SSDs on the market, even if they cost a small fortune. The cost will drop over time; the fact that you can't buy a drive at any price with the capacity that you need, however, means that economies of scale can't fully kick in. Right now, the capacities meet only low-end users' needs. Those folks usually won't spend the money to upgrade to SSD in the first place, and thus won't drive volume up and prices down. Companies need to go ahead and bite the bullet, putting one and two terabyte laptop drives out on the market today. Not that many people will buy them, but a lot more people will be interested in choosing flash drives at a premium if that premium doesn't also come with a mandatory factor of 2-4 drop in capacity, depending on manufacturer.
You probably won't be able to find that sort of information. The people who repair dead drives tell what they saw, but they aren't metallurgists and have no good reason to do in-depth analysis of that sort. The people who have reason to do that type of analysis work for the manufacturer, and aren't going to publish their results.
That said, the head was at least ostensibly designed to travel up the head ramp, as it did so every time it parks, and the failure happened after a year or two of parking dozens of times per day whenever the drive spun down. A part that breaks suddenly on what was probably the ten-thousandth time you do something strongly suggests that the metal was getting weaker over time. It's not like we're talking about an insanely hard impact... though if it were caused by the emergency park mechanism, I could maybe see it being a simple fracture.
For folks who don't know what I mean by emergency park, many computers have drop sensors either in them or on the motherboard. Either the drive's controller detects when the device is falling or the OS does and sends a special SATA command. Either way, the drive slams the head arm over onto the park ramp as quickly as it can. I would assume that this is just moving at the drive's maximum seek speed, and thus is probably comparable to the speed of a normal park, but it might not be, in which case there could be a difference in the amount of force applied sufficient to cause a fracture without metal fatigue. I don't know enough about the mechanisms to say either way, and the answer could very well be drive-specific.
The difference in licensing costs was still so completely dwarfed by the difference in hardware costs so as to make it largely moot.
It's like comparing a $25,000 used Porsche and a $300 used Pinto and saying that someone won't buy the Porsche because the Pinto gets better gas mileage.
Do you have a documented case or even rumour of this ever happening...
Not seeking causing it, per se, no. It's just an easy-to-explain example of the type of failure that would commonly plague either an entire product line or a long manufacturing run (e.g. if some hunk of metal in the wrong place caused some machine to stamp out a few thousand of a critical part with a thin spot).
That said, it's not too far from a documented cause of failure. IIRC, one of the major causes of Seagate drive failures about three or four years ago was the head literally breaking off of the head arm as the result of the park ramp design. As an aside, it only happened on the consumer drive models because the otherwise nearly identical server drives parked their heads on an unused track instead of using a park ramp.
Similarly, the head preamp failure is a common cause of failure, but I have no idea if it has ever been caused by electrolytic breakdown; that part was just another random example.
Other likely causes of failure are thermal breakdown of solder bumps inside silicon chips, thermally induced electrolyte breakdown in capacitors leading to premature failure... there's a long list, a fair number of which tend to happen to all drives from a particular lot after the same amount of use (where use could be defined as seeks, parks, spin-ups/spin-downs, powered-on hours, or various other metrics).
I've read a lot about drive failures over the years, mostly as a result of having had so many of them. I'm looking forward to the day when SSDs are cheap enough that I can buy a few TB for under $200. At least their failure modes are usually fixable by reflow oven.
Wasn't the licensing fees. They were never all that expensive.
USB is so ubiquitous in large part because the silicon for USB devices is much, much simpler, and thus much, much cheaper. USB devices can be dumb as a post, whereas FireWire devices have to actually understand a lot more about the bus topology, etc., IIRC.
Also, there's no such thing as a slow FireWire bus. S100 is the bottom limit. Therefore, it isn't a great match for really trivial devices like mice and keyboards.
Also, Intel supported USB very quickly, and drug their heels on FireWire until... well, I'm not sure if they've ever shipped a southbridge with integrated FireWire.... So for computer manufacturers, FireWire was an extra part that they had to pay for, not just an extra connector.
And there were no doubt other factors. I'm not convinced that the licensing was a significant one, though. By 2001, it was something on the order of a quarter per device. I think that's less than a tenth what the actual silicon costs. Even back when it was a dollar per port, it was still a tiny cost compared with the silicon.
Yup. It's a tradeoff. Performance or robustness. If you want your RAID to provide significantly increased robustness, you have to compromise performance (and, in particular, cache performance).
You should be able to eliminate much of this difference by adding appropriate amounts of caching at the RAID controller level or in the computer itself, though latency for longer reads will suffer by some portion of one short-seek/settle period and one rotation because of the increased probability of one or more drives needing to read two or more tracks to perform the operation.
Either way, the point I was trying to make was not that everyone should build mixed RAID arrays, but rather that anyone who claims that RAID provides robustness in the event of a drive failure should understand that the things folks do to get the impressive performance are fundamentally contrary to what you'd have to do to get those robustness improvements, at least in practice.
Reading comprehension FAIL. I did NOT say anything of the sort. I said that if you have ten nearly identical pieces of hardware and treat them in nearly identical ways, you'd have to be crazy to expect them to fail at significantly different times. Any claim to the contrary is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof.
The entire purpose of a RAID is to use identical drives in size, performance and specifications so the entire array, regardless of RAID type, will seamlessly act like a single drive, while using the least amount of overhead.
The entire purpose of a RAID? Hardly. The purpose of a RAID is to get better performance by increasing the number of drives that can send/receive data at the same. However, different people have different opinions about the tradeoff between reliability and performance. You clearly want that last little bit of cache performance, which is fine as long as you understand that by doing so, you essentially lose all of the hardware failure protection that RAID can provide.
As for me, I'd much prefer a mixed RAID set, with all the drive caches disabled entirely, and with a battery-backed-RAM-based cache on the RAID controller itself. That gives you basically the same benefits as the drive caches, but without most of the risks associated with the drive caches (data that never gets written out to disk due to a power failure, the inability to perform any sorts of useful RAM tests on the cache RAM, the inability to mix drives for better reliability, etc.).
Not very well, though. From the folks I've worked with who have dealt with lots of RAID arrays, when one drive fails, it is more often than not caused by a design flaw rather than a manufacturing flaw, and since the drives read and write in lock step, odds are remarkably good that the next drive in the array will die before you finish rebuilding the RAID set. This tends to occur whether you're talking about a mechanical flaw (e.g. after n seeks, the head arm suffers metal fatigue) or an electronics flaw (e.g. after n hours of operations, the electrolytic capacitors have degraded to the point that they no longer filter power adequately, and the head preamp then releases its magic smoke).
This phenomenon also tends to occur when external causes result in the damage, e.g. the entire lot of hard drives was dropped during shipping and weakened some component, the RAID array was writing during an earthquake, the RAID array was writing during a momentary power sag, the RAID array was hit by lightning, etc.
Basically, the hard drive manufacturers have done a great job of nearly eliminating variation between one unit and another, so the only real opportunity for significant variations in life expectancy should be whatever happens to the drive between when it leaves the manufacturer's hands and when you stick it into the array.
For this reason, a good RAID array should contain no more than one of any single drive model by any single manufacturer, should under no circumstances contain multiple drives from the same manufacturing lot, and should be composed entirely of working pulls from randomly selected workstations that were installed at significantly different times, thus ensuring wildly different service hours on each drive in the array.
Unfortunately, almost nobody does this, and thus, the vast majority of RAID arrays are absolutely not a good substitute for having offline backup hardware, whether that is a pile of tapes, DVDs, BRDs, a clone of your RAID array that you only power up during the nightly backups, or whatever.
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Well, I don't know how many times it happened this year, but I bet I can tell you how many times it happened last year.
You run the fMRI looking at a part of the brain that you think might be excited. Then, you add that electromagnetic field and you see if that part of the brain starts using more oxygen.
This is assuming, of course, that the person is sensitive only to a particular frequency range and not to EMI in general, in which case the fMRI would produce so much that it would completely negate the test. However, such a person would be walking around in pain all day from all the cell towers, the TV stations, etc., so I'm assuming we're limiting this to ISM band sensitivity claims.
Or a pocket of that saline between two blobs of tissue could be just the right length to act as an antenna. Whatever.
That's simply not true. Before I had a skull MRI, I would have said that there was no real chance of any sort of biological response to EMI. Then I had the skull MRI. During certain parts of the roughly half hour scan, I experienced a tingling sensation in various random parts of my body as it scanned various parts of my brain. It was the strangest experience I'd ever encountered.
So you should not be so quick to dismiss the notion that someone can feel electromagnetic energy. It is well documented that this occurs at high enough levels of energy (that are still orders of magnitude less energy than would be necessary to burn your skin). The only question is whether the much, much, much lower levels of things like consumer Wi-Fi gear could ever produce enough of a current to cause some hyper-sensitized neuron to fire or otherwise misbehave. My suspicion is that the answer is "no", but I am certainly not willing to place bets on that based solely on the limited research that has occurred in this area. There's just way too much we don't know.
It sounds like most of these folks don't claim to be sensitive to Wi-Fi, but rather are afraid of it injuring them (cancer, etc.), in which case your test won't do anything.
Also, even if they claimed that they physically felt it, a nerve can continue to misbehave for hours after some types of injury, so in the worst case scenario, they would reliably press the button as soon as the field came on, but would then say that it never went off... and this would still be a legitimate indication of detection.
I can even propose a theoretical reason why someone would feel a Wi-Fi signal. A half wave Wi-Fi antenna is 6.25 cm, or about 2.5 inches. It is entirely possible for the brain or some other part of the body to have a roughly straight conductive region that is that long—the walls of a particularly straight blood vessel, for example, or a series of overly (even dendritically) myelinated neurons lined up perfectly in a row—in which case you'd basically have a (poor) Wi-Fi antenna in your brain, coupled directly to your nervous system.
You'd have an even bigger problem if you had any sort of metal implant that was just the right length, up to and including stupid things like the metal arm on a pair of eyeglasses, a wire on a retainer or pair of braces, etc.
Either explanation would, of course, be inherently testable with an MRI test, and more to the point, any claim of Wi-Fi sensitivity should be testable with an fMRI test.... My gut says that the entire notion of Wi-Fi sensitivity is almost certainly crap, but I feel like more research is needed to prove that it is crap before that gut feeling becomes a strongly held belief rather than simply a hypothesis.
I think you're misunderstanding the problem. Your blog and your photos are a non-issue because your blog remains available. The content that causes problems is content from publishers or developers who stop making their products available for an extended period of time, and who disappear from the face of the Internet.
The rule should be that a company or individual retains copyright for the maximum copyright duration so long as that content remains available in a searchable form on the Internet. If the person decides to hide from the world, or takes it down because the bandwidth costs are too high, that copyright must be registered in a timely manner, or else it is forfeit.
I would say that the day the content creator/distributor ceases to make the content available, the clock should start ticking, and if it isn't available again within one year, their copyright should expire unless it is centrally registered. The law should also require that they reference the original name for the product or company in their re-release to ensure that it is easy to search for the original product or company and find out who owns those rights. If they do all of those things, then the timer should reset.
The law should also have a separate maximum time that a product can be unavailable before copyright expires even if you register it, which should apply to all copyrights held by corporate entities... but that's another rant.
I've spent the entire weekend trying to track down now-defunct font distributors and font forges, shareware authors whose email addresses stopped working when Netscape stopped being an ISP, etc. What a freaking mess.
I honestly don't care what the details are as long as I never have to follow a chain of corporate asset sales through court filings and newspaper clippings again, only to find out that they were really just a reseller, and the font was a slightly re-kerned Gill Sans....
@$^&(^^@&&@(*$@&#*^$#&
No, there should be a registration requirement, without which you cannot claim damages, and you should be required to update that registration in a timely manner. You know, like the way things used to work before we went all Berne-Convention-y in the 1970s.
The burden should be upon the copyright owner to facilitate contact by potential licensees, not on the potential licensee. After all, it is the copyright owner who stands to gain, not the licensee (who could almost invariably just ignore the copyright, and the licensor would never know).
I decided to mess with its mind.
I'm oddly hopeful that someone will eventually ask what its favorite animal is, and it will say "purple." If it does, then my work here is done.
MENC national conference, 1986, in Anaheim. If the conference program were online, I could point you to the session title, but you probably still wouldn't believe me. It was particularly amusing that they happened to be using TI BASIC (the only dialect I knew at the time).
That would work, but it still leaves open the question of how many people in the field need to have thought of the idea prior to it being invented for it to be obvious? One? Ten? Does it matter whether the idea seemed obvious to those folks a year earlier? Five years earlier? Does it matter whether it seemed like a good idea a decade earlier, but wasn't practical because of limitations in areas of technology that it depended on, but were not the subject of the invention itself?
Case in point, I think there are patents for digital music stands. I came up with that idea way back when I was still in school (last century) as a great idea, particularly for piano music that spans multiple pages, where turning pages is really a PITA. Of course, my idea was to be a *lot* smarter, to use some sort of analysis to listen to the music, follow along, and turn pages automatically, and to optionally slide the pages slowly sideways so that the next page was ready by the time you needed it, or optionally alternate sides, one at a time. At the time, the following crucial technology bits were missing:
And half a dozen of my musician friends who know I'm into computer stuff suggested that I "invent" such a device long before anyone actually built one. So what we have here is something that was clearly obvious to nearly every musician who has ever used a computer, yet somehow gets patent protection for twenty years, and at the same time, is still nowhere near the level of polish that such a technology should have been at before it was released to the public (and isn't even available in the preferred physical form in which it would do the most good—as an ultra-thin, ultra-wide device that sits on a piano rack). And thus, the people who could actually do it correctly are prohibited from doing so by a patent held a company whose only real claim to inventiveness is that they did something obvious before anybody else thought it made sense to do it....
We desperately need some more concrete rules for what does and does not constitute an obvious patent. Right now, it's almost completely subjective, which means that the rule might as well not be in the law at all; it basically comes down to a popularity contest, or, to paraphrase somebody else earlier in this discussion, a question of whose lie was most believable, rather than any legitimate metric.
It costs $110 to file a provisional patent application, not fifteen grand. If you can't afford to spend a hundred and ten bucks to protect your invention, it's probably not worth protecting.
You need to be a little more precise than that. Even under first-to-invent, what you said there is generally true. The exception is when two companies were inventing the same idea at the same exact time, in an overlapping fashion. It is almost invariably not a "scumbag". That person has to somehow prove that he or she was inventing the same thing at the same time and was diligently trying to reduce the invention to practice.
In practice, this does absolutely jack for stopping patent trolls, who almost invariably file a patent for some vague concept, then sue somebody a decade or more later for something that barely resembles the original patent (if at all).
In fact, I would go so far as to say that this is exactly the opposite of patent reform. In proper patent reform, when one party can show that they invented the idea before another party, but was unable to patent it before the other party did, unless those parties had some existing business relationship or there was corporate espionage involved, that is prima facie evidence that the idea does not meet the non-obviousness requirement, and thus, the patents should be automatically invalidated, and neither party should get to have a patent on the invention....
No, not true. If it already exists and is for sale, it cannot be patented by anyone, including the person who first put it up for sale. A patent application must be filed before a technology is made publicly available, or it is no longer patentable. That is already the case even under current patent law, and will not change.
However, if you have not quite made it to market and someone else comes up with the same idea and patents it while you are polishing up the edges, you're screwed, whereas before, you could at least ostensibly claim that you invented it first if your prototypes go back farther in time.
This is both good and bad. On the one hand, patent trolls who actually got as far as building a prototype but never marketing it or publishing it cannot use that as prior art to show that someone else's patent is invalid. On the other hand, it means that companies must file patents (or at least provisional applications) much earlier in the process and much more often to avoid the risk of a competitor coming up with the same idea and screwing them.
On the whole, this so-called reform is basically basically a wash except that it will cause an increase in patent filings (which makes it a net negative in my book). It does almost nothing to reduce the ability of patent trolls to prosper. It similarly does almost nothing to reduce the scope of software patents' ability to stifle innovation and bog down the industry in unnecessary lawsuits. All it really does is make the trial duration slightly shorter....
This is to patent reform what shooting someone in the backside with a shotgun is to discipline. Sure, it technically qualifies as discipline, but it's not the sort of discipline that actually improves behavior.
And this is the reason that SSL certs (in whatever form they continue to exist) should be part of your DNS record, and that we should have a mandatory transition to DNSSEC over the next few years to ensure that those records cannot be tampered with during transit.
By doing that, the only way to pull one of these stunts would be to take over the domain at the registrar, at which point it would then matter which provider you chose, and the race to the bottom would become a race to the top (or at least to the median).
I learned on my own with teach-yourself-BASIC books and data tapes when I was in first grade (and I probably could have learned sooner, but we didn't own a computer until then). (I then proceeded to terrify the folks at a music conference a year or two later when their program didn't work, they couldn't find the bug, and I proceeded to fix it, but that's another anecdote.)
I'm quite confident that most kids of above-average intelligence could learn programming at that age, given a language that's easy enough to learn (i.e. procedural programming, not OOP, nor assembly, nor functional programming or any other such insanity). It's more a question of motivation and interest than anything else.
If you look carefully on the back of my hand, you can still see the scar from where I accidentally raised it into the hot part of a soldering gun once. That said, I can't imagine somebody being stupid enough to do it intentionally. You'd feel the heat by the time your skin was an inch away, and you'd pull back almost by reflex unless you were moving really rapidly as I was.
I have a theory. California is going to give them a year without paying taxes. Amazon is going to take a year to start building a shipping center in a nearby state with a much lower population—say, Nevada—and in 364 days, Amazon will announce the immediate closure of its California operations.
*shrugs*
Most definitions of data availability include a certain level of performance as part of the definition. If you don't need the performance boost, you don't need a RAID, unless it's RAID 0 (for increased capacity) or RAID 1 (for a slight robustness increase, assuming the bugginess of the cheap RAID controller on your motherboard doesn't completely negate that benefit).
Either way, I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Please, please put high capacity flash-based SSDs on the market, even if they cost a small fortune. The cost will drop over time; the fact that you can't buy a drive at any price with the capacity that you need, however, means that economies of scale can't fully kick in. Right now, the capacities meet only low-end users' needs. Those folks usually won't spend the money to upgrade to SSD in the first place, and thus won't drive volume up and prices down. Companies need to go ahead and bite the bullet, putting one and two terabyte laptop drives out on the market today. Not that many people will buy them, but a lot more people will be interested in choosing flash drives at a premium if that premium doesn't also come with a mandatory factor of 2-4 drop in capacity, depending on manufacturer.
You probably won't be able to find that sort of information. The people who repair dead drives tell what they saw, but they aren't metallurgists and have no good reason to do in-depth analysis of that sort. The people who have reason to do that type of analysis work for the manufacturer, and aren't going to publish their results.
That said, the head was at least ostensibly designed to travel up the head ramp, as it did so every time it parks, and the failure happened after a year or two of parking dozens of times per day whenever the drive spun down. A part that breaks suddenly on what was probably the ten-thousandth time you do something strongly suggests that the metal was getting weaker over time. It's not like we're talking about an insanely hard impact... though if it were caused by the emergency park mechanism, I could maybe see it being a simple fracture.
For folks who don't know what I mean by emergency park, many computers have drop sensors either in them or on the motherboard. Either the drive's controller detects when the device is falling or the OS does and sends a special SATA command. Either way, the drive slams the head arm over onto the park ramp as quickly as it can. I would assume that this is just moving at the drive's maximum seek speed, and thus is probably comparable to the speed of a normal park, but it might not be, in which case there could be a difference in the amount of force applied sufficient to cause a fracture without metal fatigue. I don't know enough about the mechanisms to say either way, and the answer could very well be drive-specific.
*shrugs*
The difference in licensing costs was still so completely dwarfed by the difference in hardware costs so as to make it largely moot.
It's like comparing a $25,000 used Porsche and a $300 used Pinto and saying that someone won't buy the Porsche because the Pinto gets better gas mileage.
Not seeking causing it, per se, no. It's just an easy-to-explain example of the type of failure that would commonly plague either an entire product line or a long manufacturing run (e.g. if some hunk of metal in the wrong place caused some machine to stamp out a few thousand of a critical part with a thin spot).
That said, it's not too far from a documented cause of failure. IIRC, one of the major causes of Seagate drive failures about three or four years ago was the head literally breaking off of the head arm as the result of the park ramp design. As an aside, it only happened on the consumer drive models because the otherwise nearly identical server drives parked their heads on an unused track instead of using a park ramp.
Similarly, the head preamp failure is a common cause of failure, but I have no idea if it has ever been caused by electrolytic breakdown; that part was just another random example.
Other likely causes of failure are thermal breakdown of solder bumps inside silicon chips, thermally induced electrolyte breakdown in capacitors leading to premature failure... there's a long list, a fair number of which tend to happen to all drives from a particular lot after the same amount of use (where use could be defined as seeks, parks, spin-ups/spin-downs, powered-on hours, or various other metrics).
I've read a lot about drive failures over the years, mostly as a result of having had so many of them. I'm looking forward to the day when SSDs are cheap enough that I can buy a few TB for under $200. At least their failure modes are usually fixable by reflow oven.
Wasn't the licensing fees. They were never all that expensive.
USB is so ubiquitous in large part because the silicon for USB devices is much, much simpler, and thus much, much cheaper. USB devices can be dumb as a post, whereas FireWire devices have to actually understand a lot more about the bus topology, etc., IIRC.
Also, there's no such thing as a slow FireWire bus. S100 is the bottom limit. Therefore, it isn't a great match for really trivial devices like mice and keyboards.
Also, Intel supported USB very quickly, and drug their heels on FireWire until... well, I'm not sure if they've ever shipped a southbridge with integrated FireWire.... So for computer manufacturers, FireWire was an extra part that they had to pay for, not just an extra connector.
And there were no doubt other factors. I'm not convinced that the licensing was a significant one, though. By 2001, it was something on the order of a quarter per device. I think that's less than a tenth what the actual silicon costs. Even back when it was a dollar per port, it was still a tiny cost compared with the silicon.
Yup. It's a tradeoff. Performance or robustness. If you want your RAID to provide significantly increased robustness, you have to compromise performance (and, in particular, cache performance).
You should be able to eliminate much of this difference by adding appropriate amounts of caching at the RAID controller level or in the computer itself, though latency for longer reads will suffer by some portion of one short-seek/settle period and one rotation because of the increased probability of one or more drives needing to read two or more tracks to perform the operation.
Either way, the point I was trying to make was not that everyone should build mixed RAID arrays, but rather that anyone who claims that RAID provides robustness in the event of a drive failure should understand that the things folks do to get the impressive performance are fundamentally contrary to what you'd have to do to get those robustness improvements, at least in practice.
Reading comprehension FAIL. I did NOT say anything of the sort. I said that if you have ten nearly identical pieces of hardware and treat them in nearly identical ways, you'd have to be crazy to expect them to fail at significantly different times. Any claim to the contrary is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof.
The entire purpose of a RAID? Hardly. The purpose of a RAID is to get better performance by increasing the number of drives that can send/receive data at the same. However, different people have different opinions about the tradeoff between reliability and performance. You clearly want that last little bit of cache performance, which is fine as long as you understand that by doing so, you essentially lose all of the hardware failure protection that RAID can provide.
As for me, I'd much prefer a mixed RAID set, with all the drive caches disabled entirely, and with a battery-backed-RAM-based cache on the RAID controller itself. That gives you basically the same benefits as the drive caches, but without most of the risks associated with the drive caches (data that never gets written out to disk due to a power failure, the inability to perform any sorts of useful RAM tests on the cache RAM, the inability to mix drives for better reliability, etc.).
Not very well, though. From the folks I've worked with who have dealt with lots of RAID arrays, when one drive fails, it is more often than not caused by a design flaw rather than a manufacturing flaw, and since the drives read and write in lock step, odds are remarkably good that the next drive in the array will die before you finish rebuilding the RAID set. This tends to occur whether you're talking about a mechanical flaw (e.g. after n seeks, the head arm suffers metal fatigue) or an electronics flaw (e.g. after n hours of operations, the electrolytic capacitors have degraded to the point that they no longer filter power adequately, and the head preamp then releases its magic smoke).
This phenomenon also tends to occur when external causes result in the damage, e.g. the entire lot of hard drives was dropped during shipping and weakened some component, the RAID array was writing during an earthquake, the RAID array was writing during a momentary power sag, the RAID array was hit by lightning, etc.
Basically, the hard drive manufacturers have done a great job of nearly eliminating variation between one unit and another, so the only real opportunity for significant variations in life expectancy should be whatever happens to the drive between when it leaves the manufacturer's hands and when you stick it into the array.
For this reason, a good RAID array should contain no more than one of any single drive model by any single manufacturer, should under no circumstances contain multiple drives from the same manufacturing lot, and should be composed entirely of working pulls from randomly selected workstations that were installed at significantly different times, thus ensuring wildly different service hours on each drive in the array.
Unfortunately, almost nobody does this, and thus, the vast majority of RAID arrays are absolutely not a good substitute for having offline backup hardware, whether that is a pile of tapes, DVDs, BRDs, a clone of your RAID array that you only power up during the nightly backups, or whatever.