I suggest you leave the government out of it completely. It simply will not work.
The rest of your idea actually has a lot of merit. Let's say the patent office grants a patent on any shit it is given (not particularly different from now). If the patent is later overturned the person or company which has applied for the patent is fined triple the other party costs as well as a fine. Same for the reverse. The unsuccessful challenger is fined triple the defending side costs. The fine is unnecessary, the costs alone will make this work.
From there on if you think your patent is good enough you take out legal insurance and fight it out. If not you surrender it outright. Similarly, people will stop patent trolling as it will become an extremely expensive exercise.
Granted, the lawyers and insurance companies will have a feeding frenzy, but they are having it anyway, so this should be an improvement on the current situation.
You do not have to have absolute monopoly on something to be subject to a "monopoly abuse" complaint or special requirements for business conduct. It is sufficient to have SMP (significant market power) in the market in question. Same for using one market to penetrate another one. The definition of SMP varies from country to country and from market to market and may start from as low as 25% market share. IMO Netflix clearly has SMP in the video rental market. Similarly Microsoft has SMP in the DRM market. So they should both be looking for a session with the relevant regulator.
Virtualisation in the datacenter is not a solution for performance. It is a solution to IT and developer incompetence at least in the Unix case (in the Microsoft case it is more of MSFT incompetence).
All it does is to give you means of running more than one software package on the same machine without dealing with dependencies and installation vagaries. In the past incompetent IT departments threw a server at every application. Now they throw a VM at every application. It is most pronounced in shops that have come from running Windows, mainframe and old unix shops tend to suffer less from such insanity.
Running more than one application on a server instead of partitioning it forces you to have well defined packaging and to have all of your own software and own config packaged into native OS packages with a list of correct dependencies. You need that so you can track dependencies and have the package management refuse clashes early. If you add on top some decent monitoring of performance so you can do capacity management VM-ing becomes unnecessary in most cases at least on Unixes. This also provides the added benefit that the entire development process and installation can be tracked for security issues with extreme ease. Unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer sysamdins and even fewer developers capable of doing that. Most developer shops no longer sysadmin support in development and people responsible for packaging. As a result they are completely incapable of providing you with a set of native packages. At best they throw a huge tarball at you which you have to try to accomodate yourself. End of the day you surrender and put it in a VM because noone has any idea how and on what it depends internally (similarly noone has an idea what security issues lurk inside).
Now virtualisation in development and on the desktop - being able to scrap a machine at a whim and roll it back to a defined state is a completely different matter. That is something people should use more and more.
Or go to the dentist. Most dental painkillers are cocaine derivatives.
Hmm...
The joy of having a tooth pulled without a painkiller as a result of visiting rehab. Actually on a second thought some twats whose names start with P and finishing aris deserve that one once in a while.
That is not interesting. There are cheaper ways of doing it.
Now rigging in a bomb that will kill only a specific passport holder +/- collateral damage is a temptation that many people out there will find hard to resist.
1. U235 is the isotope that can undergo fission with low energy neutrons. It is the lighter isotope. At the same time the heavier is not harmless and we have no use for it (except as conventional weapon material).
2. You centrifuge Uranium Hexafluoride not Uranium vapour. Nasty substance. Corrosive, toxic, etc but at the same time fairly volatile. You do not need to heat it that hard to centrifuge. It is the limited supply of centrifuges that makes the process expensive. The centrifuge is the key to delivering nuclear dreams to maniacs, so it tends to be designed and produced under high secrecy conditions and there is no "open" market for them. As a result they cost tens if not hundred times what they would cost otherwise (just compare the costs with biotech lab centrifuges which can push higher Gs for longer MTBF). On the other hand, all cases of maniacs or failed states with nukes out there originate from a single incident where a Pakistani engineer stole a centrifuge design from one of the companies authorised to build them.
3. Reprocessing is well studied and really works. The problem with it is that it generates yet another disposal problem. Most reprocessing techniques use ion exchange chromatography as several of the key stages. This generates a considerable amount of highly radioactive liquid waste. While solid waste is something for which we have tolerable short term storage solutions, liquid waste scares engineers shitless. There is a reason for this. We do not have any useable storage solution for it.
I am saying that the documentation most likely does not fit the implementation. It is a classic result when only one implementation of a format exists. The bugs in the format become a feature of the format.
So while a documentation most certainly exist I can bet a case of beer that there is no way in hell to produce a working implementation without looking at the existing code or even reverse engineering it.
Further to this, even in cases where docs exists noone has even bothered to analyse the formats from a security perspective. WMF is a classic example. A format that allows you to execute stuff as a part of the definition and noone noticed this for many years until the shit hit the fan. I bet that there are gems like that in many of the other "prehistoric" format specs.
1. I bet that some of the code is not Microsoft's. They have bought it and I would not be so sure about the right to modify it in the first place. In any case we are back to rewriting code which noone understands any more. 2. You can sandbox in a sandbox-friendly language (not the case here it is all C++ or C at that age) or if your code is written in a manner where sandboxing works. Classic example - using exemptions on out-of-memory or invalid pointers to allocate memory. I know a chap who writes everything like this and he used to work for MSFT at just about that time. Wanna sandbox that? Especially in a multithreaded environment? I doubt it. On top of that I can bet that the internals of the code in question reinvent the wheel left right and center and reimplement functions that are nowdays part of the foundation classes. As a result the size of the piece of code which you have to sandbox suddenly grows on an order of magnitude. And so on. As I said, I for once can sympathise with a MSFT decision. I have no sympathy to the fact that they do not admit to the underlying reason which is using formats that are not open, well defined and standardised (nothing to do with security), but that is a different story.
Depends on the case. Most high-end quiet cases like Antec Symphony will not fit an EATX board. You have to go for a proper EATX case. Considering that the MatLab box tends to sit under the desk of its primary user it has to be quiet so putting it into any noisy monster is not really an option.
1. Either that or have a good sysadmin. Based on what you are describing I would clearly blame that on the sysadmin not having a clue.
2. I have maintained matlab working in a Debian environment for 6 years in my previous job (along with plenty of other stuff) and never ever seen what you are describing. In fact the system started as linuxthreads (2.4) and moved to NPTL later (2.6).
3. As far as open source and so on, MatLab is extremely well behaved for something that is closed source has such a nasty licensing mechanism. It is written correctly to be used and distributed in a network according to the old school sysadmin cookbook (using centralised NFS shares). If you use it this way and not the default installation you are least likely to see any problems.
didn't allow too much of embedded scripting anyway.
It is not about scripting. It is about buffer overruns in the parser. Want to audit 15 years old code and bring it to the current state of the art standard for stack and especially heap overflow? I don't.
I would concur. Tyan Opteron motherboards are probably the best choice for this. The only annoyance is that most of them are EATX and fit only in high end huge cases.
The other thing to do is to abandon Windows. Matlab behaves considerably better on Linux or Solaris than on Windows (especially on big data sets). Most Matlab users I know have long stopped trying to run it on Microsoft platforms. They are simply not fit for purpose. AFAIK Vista is no exemption. So if you really make a living off matlab you should move your other windows stuff onto a cheap and cheerfull small PC and switch the matlab monster to a "proper" OS. That is the way I have maintained it for my matlab users in the past and they have been happy with the arrangement.
I don't understand why companies _need_ to support drm'ed media.
Answer is Apple. The marketing droids have looked at the iTunes/AppleStore and decided that its complete featureset is an essential combination to have in any music device. What they are missing is that it is the iTunes superb ability to manage music collections which is the reason for Apple dominance, not the complete feature set and the iTunes store. Less than 0.1% of the music on iPods is from the iTunes Store. Unfortunately as quite often when Marketing, Internet and Reality meet, it is the Reality which suffers most.
Instead of pushing to have good GUI front-ends capable to compete with Apple all wannabie marketing and product development teams are pushing to have all items on a ticklist to be able to compete with the full iTunes/Store featureset. In the meantime apple is quietly chuckling while increasing its dominance.
IIRC a mobile phone in the GSM spec has a theoretical maximum power of 5W. They usually operate in the milliwatt range. A BaseStation maxes 20W. Less for the 1800 Band. The cells usually operate at much lower power in urban areas so you can have more of them. On top of that you have the classic inverse square law for power. So realistically there is no way in hell you can get 1.4W per kg of weight unless you sit on several BTS-es powered to the max. In reality you get much much less.
It is not just Slashdot - the Register and various other IT press outfits in the UK have covered it quite extensively including the pros and cons of running Windows on the thing and even one attempt to load MacOS on it.
Frankly, it is a geek toy. I would have bought one, if I did not have a personal notebook, a company notebook, 3 working computers doing different things around the house and enough parts to assemble 7 more in my loft (obtained for free or nearly free from dot-bomb and post-dot-bomb craters). I am not the average geek though. I can say "NO" to myself when it comes to gadgets. Most geeks cannot and as a result it is definitely on their Christmas shopping list (for that amount of money it is not surprising).
It should bundle the damn flashsupport library by default with the Linux install. It is something like 400-500 lines of code which they should have written instead of wanking off and releasing something that basically does not work. All linux distros nowdays have a working sound system. Shipping something that takes absolute control of the sound outside this framework is just plain bogus. They should accept it as a bug and bundle the library with their bugware (it uses the interfaces they have formally published for flash extension and gives flash full Audio support as well as video4linux support)
Now, we all know that Adobe are wankers, but the fact that neither Debian, nor Ubuntu have the damn library in the default install does not make matters any better.
Flash 9 lockups are a sign that your audio is not set up correctly. Basically, flash in its default state goes for the default ALSA device and if it is already locked by the OS you are pretty much stuffed. Depending on your setup it is either a browser or even X lockup or a coredump.
The only solution is to have libflashsupport installed and set to default to ESD or PULSE and either esd or pulseaudio configured.
From there on flash 9 works flawlessly.
Oh, and you owe me a beer.
Aaa... The so called ~NHS logic. Treat 10 times more people regardless of the fact that the result is nil, but do not use the treatment that may actually save one of the 10 because it is expensive.
They do it for everything.
They consider it OK to treat Eczema by splating children with a bucket of hydrocortisone twice a day and drowning them in Claritine despite the fact that the result is nil and the treatment drags on for decades. After all it is cheaper per-day and per-dose than Pimercrolimus or Advantan. They miss a crucial difference - the latter can actually put eczema under control and reduce it to a point where treatment is unnecessary most of the time.
Same for allergies - there is practically no way in hell to get them to approve gammaglobulinisation therapy.
Same for vaccines - they use "all animals are equal, but some are more equal than the others
approach and vaccinate themselves against chickenpox and leave children who are in high risk groups like astma and eczema sufferers to fend for themselves (and die from secondary infections). After all, vaccination is expensive, isn't it.
Same for cancer. Treat 10 people without any one of them getting improved survival rates as long as "it improves their quality of life", but do not use treatment that will actually give one of out 10 a chance to survive because it is expensive. Do not pay for herceptine because it is expensive, use cheap stuff regardless of the fact that as a result UK has cancer survival rates of a 3rd world country (worse than the whole of the EU).
And so on.
Sorry. NHS treatment selection logic is flawed by design. It is based on fake happy commie concepts of fairness which are misplaced here. The main goal of medicine is to try to cure the patient. If you have the choice of using a medication that has a chance of curing even one more patient and medication that will cure even one less the "cost" option is simply no longer part of the equation. It is there only if the treatments are equivalent.
I suspect that what I saw was off-the-shelf commercial software, not one off. I just do not believe someone doing a one off for a small restaurant in a small resort in a middle of nowhere in western Europe.
So all that takes to use this for prior art purposes is to find who is the software vendor and see when and where it advertised its system. I bet it was advertised on the Internet which will make it useable for prior art proof in a US case.
I have seen the ordering system in a Spanish restaurant in the middle of nowhere (Los Gigantes - a small resort on the west coast of Tenerife) do that in 2005. So there is plenty of prior art.
IIRC, all orders were taken on small wireless palmtops (probably some variety of ruggedized palm with custom software). The order was transmitted to the kitchen straight away and the waiter could service the next table and so on instead of running like mad between the table rows and the kitchen (as customary). When an order was ready for collection the palmtop rang. As a result 3 waiters managed to deal with a restaurant which had at least 45 tables, probably more.
Dunno who did the software for them, but a few years back it would have been an impressive feat of engineering. With all the limitations of PalmOS and such doing this would have required a lot of effort.
Doing the same as a web based app for something like the iPhone is a piece of cake. Depending on the complexity of the interface into the ordering system it can take from a couple of hours to at most a couple of weeks.
What is more interesting is where does this put T-Mobile partnership with Starbucks. It could have done that using any of their handhelds like the sidekick ages ago and it has suitable GSM/GPRS interface as well. Bet they are slapping themselves on the forehead at the moment.
Yes and no. NNTP stands for network news transfer protocol. It has to be news. If it is not, the server very happily wipes it out. Most servers do not keep anything for more than a couple of days. After that it is gone for good (or for bad as some libel cases in the UK have proved).
Yep. And if stuff like that did not make you pause the fact that you gave an example which was simultaneously invented by at least two people should.
Radio was invented nearly simultaneously by Marconi and Popov in 1895 and surprise surprise it was all based on a work by German (Hertz) from a few years before that. Similarly, while Marconi invented very little (most inventions were done by Hertz, Popov and Ducretes) he gets the credit because he successfully drove it through the patent system.
Slashdot Mirror
I suggest you leave the government out of it completely. It simply will not work.
The rest of your idea actually has a lot of merit. Let's say the patent office grants a patent on any shit it is given (not particularly different from now). If the patent is later overturned the person or company which has applied for the patent is fined triple the other party costs as well as a fine. Same for the reverse. The unsuccessful challenger is fined triple the defending side costs. The fine is unnecessary, the costs alone will make this work.
From there on if you think your patent is good enough you take out legal insurance and fight it out. If not you surrender it outright. Similarly, people will stop patent trolling as it will become an extremely expensive exercise.
Granted, the lawyers and insurance companies will have a feeding frenzy, but they are having it anyway, so this should be an improvement on the current situation.
You do not have to have absolute monopoly on something to be subject to a "monopoly abuse" complaint or special requirements for business conduct. It is sufficient to have SMP (significant market power) in the market in question. Same for using one market to penetrate another one. The definition of SMP varies from country to country and from market to market and may start from as low as 25% market share. IMO Netflix clearly has SMP in the video rental market. Similarly Microsoft has SMP in the DRM market. So they should both be looking for a session with the relevant regulator.
This should not be called DRM.
This should be called illegal restraint of trade and monopoly abuse.
It should be also dealt with accordingly.
Virtualisation in the datacenter is not a solution for performance. It is a solution to IT and developer incompetence at least in the Unix case (in the Microsoft case it is more of MSFT incompetence).
All it does is to give you means of running more than one software package on the same machine without dealing with dependencies and installation vagaries. In the past incompetent IT departments threw a server at every application. Now they throw a VM at every application. It is most pronounced in shops that have come from running Windows, mainframe and old unix shops tend to suffer less from such insanity.
Running more than one application on a server instead of partitioning it forces you to have well defined packaging and to have all of your own software and own config packaged into native OS packages with a list of correct dependencies. You need that so you can track dependencies and have the package management refuse clashes early. If you add on top some decent monitoring of performance so you can do capacity management VM-ing becomes unnecessary in most cases at least on Unixes. This also provides the added benefit that the entire development process and installation can be tracked for security issues with extreme ease. Unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer sysamdins and even fewer developers capable of doing that. Most developer shops no longer sysadmin support in development and people responsible for packaging. As a result they are completely incapable of providing you with a set of native packages. At best they throw a huge tarball at you which you have to try to accomodate yourself. End of the day you surrender and put it in a VM because noone has any idea how and on what it depends internally (similarly noone has an idea what security issues lurk inside).
Now virtualisation in development and on the desktop - being able to scrap a machine at a whim and roll it back to a defined state is a completely different matter. That is something people should use more and more.
Or go to the dentist. Most dental painkillers are cocaine derivatives. Hmm... The joy of having a tooth pulled without a painkiller as a result of visiting rehab. Actually on a second thought some twats whose names start with P and finishing aris deserve that one once in a while.
That is not interesting. There are cheaper ways of doing it.
Now rigging in a bomb that will kill only a specific passport holder +/- collateral damage is a temptation that many people out there will find hard to resist.
Err...
1. U235 is the isotope that can undergo fission with low energy neutrons. It is the lighter isotope. At the same time the heavier is not harmless and we have no use for it (except as conventional weapon material).
2. You centrifuge Uranium Hexafluoride not Uranium vapour. Nasty substance. Corrosive, toxic, etc but at the same time fairly volatile. You do not need to heat it that hard to centrifuge. It is the limited supply of centrifuges that makes the process expensive. The centrifuge is the key to delivering nuclear dreams to maniacs, so it tends to be designed and produced under high secrecy conditions and there is no "open" market for them. As a result they cost tens if not hundred times what they would cost otherwise (just compare the costs with biotech lab centrifuges which can push higher Gs for longer MTBF). On the other hand, all cases of maniacs or failed states with nukes out there originate from a single incident where a Pakistani engineer stole a centrifuge design from one of the companies authorised to build them.
3. Reprocessing is well studied and really works. The problem with it is that it generates yet another disposal problem. Most reprocessing techniques use ion exchange chromatography as several of the key stages. This generates a considerable amount of highly radioactive liquid waste. While solid waste is something for which we have tolerable short term storage solutions, liquid waste scares engineers shitless. There is a reason for this. We do not have any useable storage solution for it.
With a bog standard VCR - you do not. With some of the higher end PVRs or with a media center box you can use the IR blaster to tell it to.
I am saying that the documentation most likely does not fit the implementation. It is a classic result when only one implementation of a format exists. The bugs in the format become a feature of the format.
So while a documentation most certainly exist I can bet a case of beer that there is no way in hell to produce a working implementation without looking at the existing code or even reverse engineering it.
Further to this, even in cases where docs exists noone has even bothered to analyse the formats from a security perspective. WMF is a classic example. A format that allows you to execute stuff as a part of the definition and noone noticed this for many years until the shit hit the fan. I bet that there are gems like that in many of the other "prehistoric" format specs.
This is not really applicable here:
1. I bet that some of the code is not Microsoft's. They have bought it and I would not be so sure about the right to modify it in the first place. In any case we are back to rewriting code which noone understands any more.
2. You can sandbox in a sandbox-friendly language (not the case here it is all C++ or C at that age) or if your code is written in a manner where sandboxing works. Classic example - using exemptions on out-of-memory or invalid pointers to allocate memory. I know a chap who writes everything like this and he used to work for MSFT at just about that time. Wanna sandbox that? Especially in a multithreaded environment? I doubt it. On top of that I can bet that the internals of the code in question reinvent the wheel left right and center and reimplement functions that are nowdays part of the foundation classes. As a result the size of the piece of code which you have to sandbox suddenly grows on an order of magnitude. And so on.
As I said, I for once can sympathise with a MSFT decision. I have no sympathy to the fact that they do not admit to the underlying reason which is using formats that are not open, well defined and standardised (nothing to do with security), but that is a different story.
Depends on the case. Most high-end quiet cases like Antec Symphony will not fit an EATX board. You have to go for a proper EATX case. Considering that the MatLab box tends to sit under the desk of its primary user it has to be quiet so putting it into any noisy monster is not really an option.
1. Either that or have a good sysadmin. Based on what you are describing I would clearly blame that on the sysadmin not having a clue.
2. I have maintained matlab working in a Debian environment for 6 years in my previous job (along with plenty of other stuff) and never ever seen what you are describing. In fact the system started as linuxthreads (2.4) and moved to NPTL later (2.6).
3. As far as open source and so on, MatLab is extremely well behaved for something that is closed source has such a nasty licensing mechanism. It is written correctly to be used and distributed in a network according to the old school sysadmin cookbook (using centralised NFS shares). If you use it this way and not the default installation you are least likely to see any problems.
It is not about scripting. It is about buffer overruns in the parser. Want to audit 15 years old code and bring it to the current state of the art standard for stack and especially heap overflow? I don't.
One time when I cannot really blame them
I would concur. Tyan Opteron motherboards are probably the best choice for this. The only annoyance is that most of them are EATX and fit only in high end huge cases.
The other thing to do is to abandon Windows. Matlab behaves considerably better on Linux or Solaris than on Windows (especially on big data sets). Most Matlab users I know have long stopped trying to run it on Microsoft platforms. They are simply not fit for purpose. AFAIK Vista is no exemption. So if you really make a living off matlab you should move your other windows stuff onto a cheap and cheerfull small PC and switch the matlab monster to a "proper" OS. That is the way I have maintained it for my matlab users in the past and they have been happy with the arrangement.
Answer is Apple. The marketing droids have looked at the iTunes/AppleStore and decided that its complete featureset is an essential combination to have in any music device. What they are missing is that it is the iTunes superb ability to manage music collections which is the reason for Apple dominance, not the complete feature set and the iTunes store. Less than 0.1% of the music on iPods is from the iTunes Store. Unfortunately as quite often when Marketing, Internet and Reality meet, it is the Reality which suffers most.
Instead of pushing to have good GUI front-ends capable to compete with Apple all wannabie marketing and product development teams are pushing to have all items on a ticklist to be able to compete with the full iTunes/Store featureset. In the meantime apple is quietly chuckling while increasing its dominance.
IIRC a mobile phone in the GSM spec has a theoretical maximum power of 5W. They usually operate in the milliwatt range. A BaseStation maxes 20W. Less for the 1800 Band. The cells usually operate at much lower power in urban areas so you can have more of them. On top of that you have the classic inverse square law for power. So realistically there is no way in hell you can get 1.4W per kg of weight unless you sit on several BTS-es powered to the max. In reality you get much much less.
It is not just Slashdot - the Register and various other IT press outfits in the UK have covered it quite extensively including the pros and cons of running Windows on the thing and even one attempt to load MacOS on it.
Frankly, it is a geek toy. I would have bought one, if I did not have a personal notebook, a company notebook, 3 working computers doing different things around the house and enough parts to assemble 7 more in my loft (obtained for free or nearly free from dot-bomb and post-dot-bomb craters). I am not the average geek though. I can say "NO" to myself when it comes to gadgets. Most geeks cannot and as a result it is definitely on their Christmas shopping list (for that amount of money it is not surprising).
It is not Ubuntu's fault as such. It is Adobe.
It should bundle the damn flashsupport library by default with the Linux install. It is something like 400-500 lines of code which they should have written instead of wanking off and releasing something that basically does not work. All linux distros nowdays have a working sound system. Shipping something that takes absolute control of the sound outside this framework is just plain bogus. They should accept it as a bug and bundle the library with their bugware (it uses the interfaces they have formally published for flash extension and gives flash full Audio support as well as video4linux support)
Now, we all know that Adobe are wankers, but the fact that neither Debian, nor Ubuntu have the damn library in the default install does not make matters any better.
Flash 9 lockups are a sign that your audio is not set up correctly. Basically, flash in its default state goes for the default ALSA device and if it is already locked by the OS you are pretty much stuffed. Depending on your setup it is either a browser or even X lockup or a coredump. The only solution is to have libflashsupport installed and set to default to ESD or PULSE and either esd or pulseaudio configured. From there on flash 9 works flawlessly. Oh, and you owe me a beer.
They do it for everything.
They consider it OK to treat Eczema by splating children with a bucket of hydrocortisone twice a day and drowning them in Claritine despite the fact that the result is nil and the treatment drags on for decades. After all it is cheaper per-day and per-dose than Pimercrolimus or Advantan. They miss a crucial difference - the latter can actually put eczema under control and reduce it to a point where treatment is unnecessary most of the time.
Same for allergies - there is practically no way in hell to get them to approve gammaglobulinisation therapy.
Same for vaccines - they use "all animals are equal, but some are more equal than the others
approach and vaccinate themselves against chickenpox and leave children who are in high risk groups like astma and eczema sufferers to fend for themselves (and die from secondary infections). After all, vaccination is expensive, isn't it.Same for cancer. Treat 10 people without any one of them getting improved survival rates as long as "it improves their quality of life", but do not use treatment that will actually give one of out 10 a chance to survive because it is expensive. Do not pay for herceptine because it is expensive, use cheap stuff regardless of the fact that as a result UK has cancer survival rates of a 3rd world country (worse than the whole of the EU).
And so on.
Sorry. NHS treatment selection logic is flawed by design. It is based on fake happy commie concepts of fairness which are misplaced here. The main goal of medicine is to try to cure the patient. If you have the choice of using a medication that has a chance of curing even one more patient and medication that will cure even one less the "cost" option is simply no longer part of the equation. It is there only if the treatments are equivalent.
I suspect that what I saw was off-the-shelf commercial software, not one off. I just do not believe someone doing a one off for a small restaurant in a small resort in a middle of nowhere in western Europe.
So all that takes to use this for prior art purposes is to find who is the software vendor and see when and where it advertised its system. I bet it was advertised on the Internet which will make it useable for prior art proof in a US case.
I have seen the ordering system in a Spanish restaurant in the middle of nowhere (Los Gigantes - a small resort on the west coast of Tenerife) do that in 2005. So there is plenty of prior art.
IIRC, all orders were taken on small wireless palmtops (probably some variety of ruggedized palm with custom software). The order was transmitted to the kitchen straight away and the waiter could service the next table and so on instead of running like mad between the table rows and the kitchen (as customary). When an order was ready for collection the palmtop rang. As a result 3 waiters managed to deal with a restaurant which had at least 45 tables, probably more.
Dunno who did the software for them, but a few years back it would have been an impressive feat of engineering. With all the limitations of PalmOS and such doing this would have required a lot of effort.
Doing the same as a web based app for something like the iPhone is a piece of cake. Depending on the complexity of the interface into the ordering system it can take from a couple of hours to at most a couple of weeks.
What is more interesting is where does this put T-Mobile partnership with Starbucks. It could have done that using any of their handhelds like the sidekick ages ago and it has suitable GSM/GPRS interface as well. Bet they are slapping themselves on the forehead at the moment.
Yes and no. NNTP stands for network news transfer protocol. It has to be news. If it is not, the server very happily wipes it out. Most servers do not keep anything for more than a couple of days. After that it is gone for good (or for bad as some libel cases in the UK have proved).
Err... You forgot. The Antigua complaint is the first in the queue. EU is closely following.
Yep. And if stuff like that did not make you pause the fact that you gave an example which was simultaneously invented by at least two people should.
Radio was invented nearly simultaneously by Marconi and Popov in 1895 and surprise surprise it was all based on a work by German (Hertz) from a few years before that. Similarly, while Marconi invented very little (most inventions were done by Hertz, Popov and Ducretes) he gets the credit because he successfully drove it through the patent system.
Yet another history repeating... http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/theressomethingaboutmary/historyrepeating.htm