I remember playing with these in the early 80s. I think I had a 150 in one, and then they came out with the 160 and 500, but it has been so long I don't remember for sure. There were no ICs, just bunches of resistors, capacitors, etc., all with wire jumpers that were held in place by springs. Seems like there were all kinds of circuits you could build, from water and light sensors, to a radio.
I don't know if they are "worth it" as far as parts are concerned, but if a kid is wanting to play with and learn about basic electricity and electronics, it can be a good toy. In my case, my father worked on electronics and I grew up calculating resistor values by color and reading schematics.
Kits like these might be a good way to gauge the interest of a young person in electronics. If they really enjoy the kit, then it's probably going to be worthwhile to invest in more serious projects, books, and so on.
It used to be you could buy all kinds of chips and components from radio shack to build your own stuff. Over time a lot of those have fallen by the wayside. It's still possible to get some of them, but not like it used to be. Instead, I find Fry's Electronics to have all kinds of kits and things to build, like Radio Shack used it.
I bought my wife a Sony Clie PDA the weekend they were released (the flip up, rotating screen one) and the compusa two year warranty. About 15 months later, the battery wouldn't hold a charge, and the device lost all its data a couple of times as a result. Took it in, since that model had been replaced, we got a store credit for the original purchase price, she immediately bought the new model of the same clie (nx70? I don't remember anymore). This time it was about a year or so again, and the device started locking up for no reason (no extra software installed). She took it in again, under warranty, and this time switched to an ipaq 4355. She still has the ipaq (3+ years now) and it's been great for her.
I bought a computer from them ($299 july 4th special) with extended warranty. It had a drive failure before the first year, and I took it in. That was a frustrating experience, because they had to wait for parts since it was under the factory warranty. When the drive failed again outside of the factory warranty, they pulled a drive off the shelf at the store and had my computer back the same day I dropped it off.
They still have some scary overpriced items, but I recently went in there and purchased a 5.25 hd mounting kit for $9.99, 18 or 24" ata133 ide cable for $6,99, 36" for $9.99, and so on.
I whole heartedly agree; the people selling merchandise typically don't know what they are selling. But I disagree about their extended warranties. Their extended warranty (after the factory expires for computers) is one of the best things about the store. Now, I've heard the PDA warranty has changed: you no longer get store credit and I think you have to mail the device off or something, so that's a negative. For other things that can be handled in the store though, they seemed OK.
1. POP on both home and laptop machines. Configure your primary machine (home?) to leave mail on the server for X days. [I believe most clients support this, but I couldn't tell you for sure; I haven't used POP for a couple of years now.] Make sure X is large enough that you will get mail on the laptop or desktop, whichever is used least. Configure your secondary machine to leave mail on the server. This will allow both machines to get mail at the same time, has only one machine deleting mail, and should do what you want. My parents are configured similar to this and it works well for them. So far I haven't noticed any problems in the server logs if both login to the POP server at the same time.
2. I use IMAP for myself. In this case, I host my own on my server, and it does not get turned off. I have IMAP access from any IMAP client as well as a web mail client. My pda phone even uses IMAP to get messages. Any changes I make from my phone, IMAP client at work or home, or web mail all show up on the other clients thanks to the shared IMAP folder. [If you are going to store thousands and thousands of messages, make sure you use a high-performing IMAP server.]
3. Use a mail client that uses a maildir and not an mbox or other db type of storage file. Then, you can use rsync back and forth between your primary and secondary machines. Indexes (for sorting) might need to be updated after each sync however. I would say this would probably be the least efficient and most prone to problems.
4. Send all your mail to gmail, access it from them with POP (see #1), except don't delete anything using the POP clients. Periodically log into your gmail account and either archive or delete everything that is read.
Kylix had lots of problems. I was one of the many excited when it was offered and became available -- that is until I downloaded and installed it. The out-of-date library requirements (almost from time of release) for installation, the unstable environment that was not responsive or would crash from time-to-time, the wine requirement. Couple that with an extremely expensive price tag.
Borland/Inprise got greedy, plain and simple. They tried to charge a premium price for products on Linux. Had they done any amount of "real" research they would have understand that was not going to fly. I'm not saying there wasn't a market for non-free tools -- I think they could have made some great inroads had the priced and marketed Kylix properly. I remember being highly surprised at the high price of the "enterprise" version. Of course, they also charged a hefty premium for Delphi enterprise as well. I don't recall if Delphi and Kylix were the same price, it seems as though Kylix was noticeably more.
Couple Borland's history of quality software, and an expectation of excellence from their loyal customers, with the quality of Kylix, the looming disaster was obvious. I tried Kylix 1 and Kylix 3. I don't know anything about 2. Kylix 1 always felt like it was more of an alpha or beta release when I used it, not a finished released product. You are not going to win any friends charging a premium price for something like that.
The sad thing is, I have a gut feeling (pure opinion, not backed by hard facts) that the back end of Kylix was probably pretty decent. It was as though they were spending so much time getting the back end compiler part working perfectly that they ran out of time for the IDE and had to take shortcuts to get it out. Kylix may have been a technical marvel on one-hand, but the part that people actually saw and used on a day-to-day basis left a bad impression. Especially for the price.
Instead of learning their lesson and adapting to the market, they blame the Linux market for being unwilling to buy non-free tools or make other excuses. When, in reality, had the product they offered lived up to the expected quality of Borland's products, and been sold at a reasonable price, my guess is they would have been much more successful.
MySQL Cluster may be just what you are looking for. Just keep your database schema very simple since there are some gotchas with the cluster back end.
In the end, your real-time call database may need to be mysql cluster for speed and call processing, but other database functions can probably be farmed off to an inno back end or another database entirely (pgsql, sql server, etc.).
Hibernate = writes memory to disk and turns off hardware. Turning on hardware involves a complete power on cycle, and then restoration of memory from disk. Battery is not used.
Sleep = [Laptop] Turn off everything, except keep just enough going to keep the contents in RAM. Battery power is being used. Eventually, if you don't plug it in, the battery will drain. On models that do not write memory to disk, it will be seen as a crash/hard power off when this happens.
Some (non-laptop) systems have in the past used special partitions for sleep mode, where the contents of memory are saved and then the entire system is basically shut off. Frequently, just hitting space bar on these systems will restore everything to operational state. Unlike power save where the system is still on and moving the mouse or hitting space brings the system back almost instantly, restoring state from sleep frequently takes a few seconds as the memory is restored from disk.
Dialgoic, before being purchased by Intel, used to have a program of trying to acquire or patent computer telephony applications in such a way that no one could put a crimp on Computer Telephony based patents in general. [I believe this started after someone patented something involving computer telephone and went after Dialogic's customers who were creating and providing computer telephony solutions. In order to protect their market, Dialogic became involved. If anyone can confirm or deny this history, I'd appreciate getting an authoritative answer one way or the other.] I wonder if this patent is the natural extension of that program, but under Intel's ownership of Dialogic. Is Intel trying to use this pastent against someone yet? If this is from the Dialogic program under Intel's ownership, it might be defensive.
The nice thing is that there were computer telephony applications that provided these types of interfaces and services connecting a computer with the telco switches to deliver services a lot earlier than 1999 (or even 1998).
I haven't read things in detail, but it seems the magic words so far were "digital signals," "telephone interface," the computer serving as the telephone handset, and something about connecting with a switch for these services. If that's really what the claims lay out, then I point you to Visual Voice - a VB toolkit for writing computer telephony applications on windows 3.1 with visual basic 3 and 4. If memory serves, that would be around 1995, before Windows 95 was released. I believe you could use Dialogic T1 cards (satisfying the digital signal claim) and I think there was a sample app that had a telephone interface. What I don't remember is if you could use the microphone and sound card to provide the other end of an interactive phone call; I know you could use them for playback and recording of audio files through the phone, but I don't remember if it supported them live/interactively.
If not, I am pretty sure there were other tools/options in the 16-bit windows environment that did this. Some modems used the sound card to provide telephone/speakerphone use. That was single line and analog, but the extension to a digital signal is fairly obvious; I wonder if ISDN modems offered this feature - that would be digital.
And then there's Quicknet - a company I worked for from 1997 to 2000, their Phone Jack hardware and MicroTelco services were created well before this patent (1999 for sure, 1998 also pretty sure) and would seem to provide the same services.
All-in-all, while it's definitely a lot harder to prove obviousness, if there isn't direct prior art to negate this patent, I think there are enough pieces of the patent in prior implementations of phone services that this patent might be invalidated as being obvious. Of course, that assumes the person making such a ruling actually applies the "obviousness" based on people in the field, and not people in general.
Billboard on busy highway during rush hour, $5,000 Television ad during Superbowl, $1,200,000 Getting your logo on Google for free, Priceless
So, what's next and how much will be spent to get "free" advertising on Google? Or, when will GOogle get wise and start charging for AdSpace or EarthAds?
One of the "features" of NeXT computers was an optical disk that could hold, I believe, 250 megabytes. You could store your desktop, etc. (basically your home directory) on that disk, taking it with you as you went from machine to machine.
What was that? Late 80s, early 90s? Of course, with Apple owning NeXTstep and morphing into OS X, it's no surprise they'd eventually roll out a similar feature. I am surprised by the patent. And, it begs the question, can this feature from NeXT be used as prior art against such a patent from Apple, even though Apple now owns NeXT? Would this be a self-defeating patent?
Is this welcome by Freescale as an attempt to go private? Or, is this an attempt to forcibly take over the company by a different group of managers or (as a previous post questioned) corporate raiders?
Going private isn't necessarily bad. That can have some advantages for the company. Especially if this is voluntary and would essentially leave day-to-day operations and management unchanged (assuming the groups are succesful). Board of directors might change dramatically, and some top positions may change, but that could be it.
On the other hand, if this is a forced leveraged buy out to either take the company private by different leadership or by corporate raiders seeking to divide and profit, major changes could be in store for Freescale if this is succesful.
Claim it's damaging your ears and killing your ability to hear sounds in the higher frequency range. If it's on after 10PM (or whatever the local disturbing the peace violations occur), call the cops and report that high pitch noise is disrupting your peace. Have all the neighbors also call. If it's more than one household, they'll do something. When the responding officers don't do anything, get their names and badge numbers (but, as we learned earlier, don't videotape them unless you want to be a martyr) and then call and complain that they responding officers failed to stop the disturbance in the neighborhood and ask for supervisors.
I believe something in vmware tools allows for snapshots to be made while the virtual machine is active, in the background. Otherwise, I believe snapshotting only works while the machine is paused or it pauses the machine, I don't remember which.
Now that you ask, I need to double check. It was my understanding that the vmware-tools did more than just provide a VMware optimized video driver, I thought it also provided optimizations for disk and possibly network as well. I could be wrong about that though.
Linux virtual machines can have vmware-tools installed without a GUI on the guest OS. Don't know about DOS.
Assuming the hardware and RAM is beefy enough to support it, consider the rather drastic approach of virtualization for this problem.
Using Linux as the host OS. Set it up so you can remotely SSH in to "fix" things when something breaks. Then use something like VMware to create a Windows virtual PC. Keep a copy of the finished image (or create a snapshot if you are using VMware tools).
Follow the advice of the person that gave the suggestion to use Ghost -- use a second drive for documents, email, etc. When she breaks something, all you have to do is shut down the Windows virtual machine, restore the snapshot, and restore it.
You could even go as far as creating an icon on a special linux user login -- "Fix my PC" -- and have it to it automatically.
Of course, you'll be sacrificing some of RAM and a chunk of CPU performance due to virtualization.
The best companies are the ones where the founders realize early when to get the right people into those jobs. Just make sure you two split 50-50 the stock. And, make sure to use a lawyer to set everything up (incorpating, division of stock, etc.).
I doubt it's a myth. I bet they know exactly what they are doing. It's just all a bunch of smoke and mirrors.
They know they are fighting a losing battle with the "digital copies" that won't be affected by closing the analog hole. However, they also know that they have a captive audience of people that have already purchased their product. These people, at some point, WANT the purchased product.
Media shifting has (or at least was, don't know if recent case law has overruled or changed it) been legal as fair use. That means it is (or was) legal to copy a CD to casette if you legally purchased the CD and wanted to listen to it in your car cassette deck.
The media companies don't like this. They want you to have to pay them a second time for the different media. They could not (or at least I don't think they have) stop the fair-use media shifting directly. Now, however, using the guise of piracy, they are taking steps to stop people from being able to do their own media shifting. The end result will be, at least what the media industry hopes will be, a large customer base of people that they know will spend money, since they have once already, on their product that will be more inclined to spend money again for different media.
Think about it like this. If an older album sold 10,000,000 copies on cassette, and the same album then sold 1,000,000 copies on CD, the media industry will look at trends like that and see an automatic 10% revenue source for minimal work. Now, suppose a CD sells 10,000,000 copies, and the next audio format comes out. If they can make it imposible to copy that CD to the new media format, then it is likely that they'll be able to capture another 10%. 10% doesn't sound like much, but if they sell 1,000,000 copies of a song, and they are pocketing 1 or 2 dollars, that's 1 to 2 million dollars extra, times the number of titles they can repeat this process with.
In the end, I think they know exactly what they are doing.
Trustix is based on an older RedHat. They forked and made their own product. Trustix, to me, is what RHEL _SHOULD_ be. It's a SERVER distro, and that focus shows. Over the years, it has evolved into its own distro, and is even more obvious with the 3.0 release.
A minimal install +SSH is ~100 meg. MEGs. Nothing extra, unless you want it installed.
I don't know if there is a relationship or not, but when the company was known as Norton (for Peter Norton), they had good products. When they transitioned to Symantec they seemed to make whatever they touched worse.
Norton's utilities were great, tiny, fast little tools that did what you wanted in a predictable way. A must have in the DOS days, and even early Window days. As Symantec the tools seemed to get more and more bloated. Then some of the tools had to be bought separately, costing more money. They took over PC Anywhere at some point, and made the tool so large that it was all but impossible to load into some DOS based systems (with plenty of RAM) and still be able to run the rest of the system properly. They took over WinFax and took out some of the best features and seemed to make it more prone to failures.
It's a pattern of theirs. And a great disappointment. And why I, also, no longer buy or use anything from them. First thing I do on new equipment that has their software is uninstall it. Same thing I tell others.
The first patent appears to have been filed in 1995, and reexamined and confirmed in 2001 with no updates. The second patent appears to have been filed in 1996, and reexamined and confirmed in 2002 with a few more claims added.
Short of an in depth review of both patents, there are three areas where I think Google will be able to defend. First, the patents are clearly for a dedicated device plugged into the calling station. The device is self-contained, and does all the decision making, ultimately dialing the routing codes for the desired carrier. The patent is for the use of a telephone calling station. And, the patent is for devices that use the telephone network.
While a computer can be argued to equal the "device" in the patent -- how the computer is used for Google Talk does not match how the device makes its decision for routing calls. And, a sound card with headset does not a calling station make. The computer would have to be considered both the device and the calling station for these to hold up. Finally, the internet would have to be considered "the" telephone network.
The language in these patents are targetted specifically, and narrowly, to the application of their end-point call routing device. It will be interesting to see if anything comes from these, or if Google will settle quietly.
Ignoring the sheer size of Google and their ability to pay for lawyers to defend themselves rathar than settle, the patents themselves are not ideally suited for the attack against Google talk.
There are two patents. The first is 5,425,085 and is clearly for a "device" contained "in a housing" that people plug in their phone and it automatically chooses the cheapest rates to route the calls. Think of this as something that would automatically prefix your calls with a 10-10 code for least cost routing at your house.
The second is 5,519,769 appears to be for a method of updating the routing database of the device in the previous patent. It is also directed towards a device connected to the calling station.
The key to these patents and why standard carrier based least cost routing do not apply, is that the routing decisions appear to be made at the end points and not by the carrier switches themselves.
Now, if you make "device" to mean your computer, and make the "calling station" also mean your computer; make telephone network mean the internet; and, squint your eyes just so - then these could be seen to be relevant to Google Talk.
How can it NOT be their service when they admit the fault is something provided by one of THEIR vendors? Presumably, they are using what the vendor provided to offer their services.
I'm not sure I like that. Assuming each shared office has a minimal number of people squeezed in (say 2 or 3), that the office is actually big enough to comfortablly house up to 3 people, and that all in the room are working on the same project -- then yes, I suppose this could work. Yet, there are still times when individual time with no distractions will yield the most productive and effective results. How does Google address that?
Back in 1991 I worked for a wireless company that tried using data containers for quickly deployed cellular switch and cell sites. The idea would be to prebuild these at a central location and then drop them at areas where they needed to go up.
The idea was good, except for a couple of problems.
These shipping containers are nothing but a giant metal box. Grounding can become an issue, so can accidnentally having the box be one of of the poles for a DC based power system. If you are near an active AM tower, the box becomes a giant antenna and it's virtually impossible to filter out the AM signal internally.
Last, and certainly not least, these shipping containers are vulnerable to rust and other problems due to exposure to the elements. That can take several years (5 or so) if the box is in perfect shape at the start, but if they are using used boxes then it can take less than 2 years for rust holes to be a problem.
Plus, physical security isn't all that good unless the walls are beefed up.
I'm hoping these are not "standard" shipping containers, just something that looks like them.
This grand experiment with shipping containers for cellular applications was an attempt to make it cheaper to deploy equipment to new locations. And, shipping containers (especially used) were a _LOT_ cheaper than fibrebond or other prefab buildings for that purpose. Of course, the fibrebond building had a lifespan a lot longer than 2 to 5 years. So, you get what you pay for.
It sounds like you are wanting to refactor the code, or port it to another platform. If you are missing some of the code, then you'll have to reverse engineer that portion of it.
As for how to approach it - I think it depends on the size of your team, and what goals you set for the effort. Are you just wanting to learn? Or do you want to improve performance? Or make it work on another platform? What are the goals for this project?
Once you know those details, they might give you an idea where to begin.
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I remember playing with these in the early 80s. I think I had a 150 in one, and then they came out with the 160 and 500, but it has been so long I don't remember for sure. There were no ICs, just bunches of resistors, capacitors, etc., all with wire jumpers that were held in place by springs. Seems like there were all kinds of circuits you could build, from water and light sensors, to a radio.
I don't know if they are "worth it" as far as parts are concerned, but if a kid is wanting to play with and learn about basic electricity and electronics, it can be a good toy. In my case, my father worked on electronics and I grew up calculating resistor values by color and reading schematics.
Kits like these might be a good way to gauge the interest of a young person in electronics. If they really enjoy the kit, then it's probably going to be worthwhile to invest in more serious projects, books, and so on.
It used to be you could buy all kinds of chips and components from radio shack to build your own stuff. Over time a lot of those have fallen by the wayside. It's still possible to get some of them, but not like it used to be. Instead, I find Fry's Electronics to have all kinds of kits and things to build, like Radio Shack used it.
I bought my wife a Sony Clie PDA the weekend they were released (the flip up, rotating screen one) and the compusa two year warranty. About 15 months later, the battery wouldn't hold a charge, and the device lost all its data a couple of times as a result. Took it in, since that model had been replaced, we got a store credit for the original purchase price, she immediately bought the new model of the same clie (nx70? I don't remember anymore). This time it was about a year or so again, and the device started locking up for no reason (no extra software installed). She took it in again, under warranty, and this time switched to an ipaq 4355. She still has the ipaq (3+ years now) and it's been great for her.
I bought a computer from them ($299 july 4th special) with extended warranty. It had a drive failure before the first year, and I took it in. That was a frustrating experience, because they had to wait for parts since it was under the factory warranty. When the drive failed again outside of the factory warranty, they pulled a drive off the shelf at the store and had my computer back the same day I dropped it off.
They still have some scary overpriced items, but I recently went in there and purchased a 5.25 hd mounting kit for $9.99, 18 or 24" ata133 ide cable for $6,99, 36" for $9.99, and so on.
I whole heartedly agree; the people selling merchandise typically don't know what they are selling. But I disagree about their extended warranties. Their extended warranty (after the factory expires for computers) is one of the best things about the store. Now, I've heard the PDA warranty has changed: you no longer get store credit and I think you have to mail the device off or something, so that's a negative. For other things that can be handled in the store though, they seemed OK.
1. POP on both home and laptop machines. Configure your primary machine (home?) to leave mail on the server for X days. [I believe most clients support this, but I couldn't tell you for sure; I haven't used POP for a couple of years now.] Make sure X is large enough that you will get mail on the laptop or desktop, whichever is used least. Configure your secondary machine to leave mail on the server. This will allow both machines to get mail at the same time, has only one machine deleting mail, and should do what you want. My parents are configured similar to this and it works well for them. So far I haven't noticed any problems in the server logs if both login to the POP server at the same time.
2. I use IMAP for myself. In this case, I host my own on my server, and it does not get turned off. I have IMAP access from any IMAP client as well as a web mail client. My pda phone even uses IMAP to get messages. Any changes I make from my phone, IMAP client at work or home, or web mail all show up on the other clients thanks to the shared IMAP folder. [If you are going to store thousands and thousands of messages, make sure you use a high-performing IMAP server.]
3. Use a mail client that uses a maildir and not an mbox or other db type of storage file. Then, you can use rsync back and forth between your primary and secondary machines. Indexes (for sorting) might need to be updated after each sync however. I would say this would probably be the least efficient and most prone to problems.
4. Send all your mail to gmail, access it from them with POP (see #1), except don't delete anything using the POP clients. Periodically log into your gmail account and either archive or delete everything that is read.
Kylix had lots of problems. I was one of the many excited when it was offered and became available -- that is until I downloaded and installed it. The out-of-date library requirements (almost from time of release) for installation, the unstable environment that was not responsive or would crash from time-to-time, the wine requirement. Couple that with an extremely expensive price tag.
Borland/Inprise got greedy, plain and simple. They tried to charge a premium price for products on Linux. Had they done any amount of "real" research they would have understand that was not going to fly. I'm not saying there wasn't a market for non-free tools -- I think they could have made some great inroads had the priced and marketed Kylix properly. I remember being highly surprised at the high price of the "enterprise" version. Of course, they also charged a hefty premium for Delphi enterprise as well. I don't recall if Delphi and Kylix were the same price, it seems as though Kylix was noticeably more.
Couple Borland's history of quality software, and an expectation of excellence from their loyal customers, with the quality of Kylix, the looming disaster was obvious. I tried Kylix 1 and Kylix 3. I don't know anything about 2. Kylix 1 always felt like it was more of an alpha or beta release when I used it, not a finished released product. You are not going to win any friends charging a premium price for something like that.
The sad thing is, I have a gut feeling (pure opinion, not backed by hard facts) that the back end of Kylix was probably pretty decent. It was as though they were spending so much time getting the back end compiler part working perfectly that they ran out of time for the IDE and had to take shortcuts to get it out. Kylix may have been a technical marvel on one-hand, but the part that people actually saw and used on a day-to-day basis left a bad impression. Especially for the price.
Instead of learning their lesson and adapting to the market, they blame the Linux market for being unwilling to buy non-free tools or make other excuses. When, in reality, had the product they offered lived up to the expected quality of Borland's products, and been sold at a reasonable price, my guess is they would have been much more successful.
MySQL Cluster may be just what you are looking for. Just keep your database schema very simple since there are some gotchas with the cluster back end.
In the end, your real-time call database may need to be mysql cluster for speed and call processing, but other database functions can probably be farmed off to an inno back end or another database entirely (pgsql, sql server, etc.).
So, what are these new rules? And, just who do they apply to? Publicly traded companies? All companies w/more than 50 employees? Everybody?
More details would be appreciated
Hibernate = writes memory to disk and turns off hardware. Turning on hardware involves a complete power on cycle, and then restoration of memory from disk. Battery is not used.
Sleep = [Laptop] Turn off everything, except keep just enough going to keep the contents in RAM. Battery power is being used. Eventually, if you don't plug it in, the battery will drain. On models that do not write memory to disk, it will be seen as a crash/hard power off when this happens.
Some (non-laptop) systems have in the past used special partitions for sleep mode, where the contents of memory are saved and then the entire system is basically shut off. Frequently, just hitting space bar on these systems will restore everything to operational state. Unlike power save where the system is still on and moving the mouse or hitting space brings the system back almost instantly, restoring state from sleep frequently takes a few seconds as the memory is restored from disk.
Dialgoic, before being purchased by Intel, used to have a program of trying to acquire or patent computer telephony applications in such a way that no one could put a crimp on Computer Telephony based patents in general. [I believe this started after someone patented something involving computer telephone and went after Dialogic's customers who were creating and providing computer telephony solutions. In order to protect their market, Dialogic became involved. If anyone can confirm or deny this history, I'd appreciate getting an authoritative answer one way or the other.] I wonder if this patent is the natural extension of that program, but under Intel's ownership of Dialogic. Is Intel trying to use this pastent against someone yet? If this is from the Dialogic program under Intel's ownership, it might be defensive.
The nice thing is that there were computer telephony applications that provided these types of interfaces and services connecting a computer with the telco switches to deliver services a lot earlier than 1999 (or even 1998).
I haven't read things in detail, but it seems the magic words so far were "digital signals," "telephone interface," the computer serving as the telephone handset, and something about connecting with a switch for these services. If that's really what the claims lay out, then I point you to Visual Voice - a VB toolkit for writing computer telephony applications on windows 3.1 with visual basic 3 and 4. If memory serves, that would be around 1995, before Windows 95 was released. I believe you could use Dialogic T1 cards (satisfying the digital signal claim) and I think there was a sample app that had a telephone interface. What I don't remember is if you could use the microphone and sound card to provide the other end of an interactive phone call; I know you could use them for playback and recording of audio files through the phone, but I don't remember if it supported them live/interactively.
If not, I am pretty sure there were other tools/options in the 16-bit windows environment that did this. Some modems used the sound card to provide telephone/speakerphone use. That was single line and analog, but the extension to a digital signal is fairly obvious; I wonder if ISDN modems offered this feature - that would be digital.
And then there's Quicknet - a company I worked for from 1997 to 2000, their Phone Jack hardware and MicroTelco services were created well before this patent (1999 for sure, 1998 also pretty sure) and would seem to provide the same services.
All-in-all, while it's definitely a lot harder to prove obviousness, if there isn't direct prior art to negate this patent, I think there are enough pieces of the patent in prior implementations of phone services that this patent might be invalidated as being obvious. Of course, that assumes the person making such a ruling actually applies the "obviousness" based on people in the field, and not people in general.
Billboard on busy highway during rush hour, $5,000
Television ad during Superbowl, $1,200,000
Getting your logo on Google for free, Priceless
So, what's next and how much will be spent to get "free" advertising on Google?
Or, when will GOogle get wise and start charging for AdSpace or EarthAds?
One of the "features" of NeXT computers was an optical disk that could hold, I believe, 250 megabytes. You could store your desktop, etc. (basically your home directory) on that disk, taking it with you as you went from machine to machine.
What was that? Late 80s, early 90s? Of course, with Apple owning NeXTstep and morphing into OS X, it's no surprise they'd eventually roll out a similar feature. I am surprised by the patent. And, it begs the question, can this feature from NeXT be used as prior art against such a patent from Apple, even though Apple now owns NeXT? Would this be a self-defeating patent?
See also CNN Money article.
Is this welcome by Freescale as an attempt to go private? Or, is this an attempt to forcibly take over the company by a different group of managers or (as a previous post questioned) corporate raiders?
Going private isn't necessarily bad. That can have some advantages for the company. Especially if this is voluntary and would essentially leave day-to-day operations and management unchanged (assuming the groups are succesful). Board of directors might change dramatically, and some top positions may change, but that could be it.
On the other hand, if this is a forced leveraged buy out to either take the company private by different leadership or by corporate raiders seeking to divide and profit, major changes could be in store for Freescale if this is succesful.
Anyone know if this is voluntary or not?
Claim it's damaging your ears and killing your ability to hear sounds in the higher frequency range. If it's on after 10PM (or whatever the local disturbing the peace violations occur), call the cops and report that high pitch noise is disrupting your peace. Have all the neighbors also call. If it's more than one household, they'll do something. When the responding officers don't do anything, get their names and badge numbers (but, as we learned earlier, don't videotape them unless you want to be a martyr) and then call and complain that they responding officers failed to stop the disturbance in the neighborhood and ask for supervisors.
I believe something in vmware tools allows for snapshots to be made while the virtual machine is active, in the background. Otherwise, I believe snapshotting only works while the machine is paused or it pauses the machine, I don't remember which.
Now that you ask, I need to double check. It was my understanding that the vmware-tools did more than just provide a VMware optimized video driver, I thought it also provided optimizations for disk and possibly network as well. I could be wrong about that though.
Linux virtual machines can have vmware-tools installed without a GUI on the guest OS. Don't know about DOS.
Assuming the hardware and RAM is beefy enough to support it, consider the rather drastic approach of virtualization for this problem.
Using Linux as the host OS. Set it up so you can remotely SSH in to "fix" things when something breaks. Then use something like VMware to create a Windows virtual PC. Keep a copy of the finished image (or create a snapshot if you are using VMware tools).
Follow the advice of the person that gave the suggestion to use Ghost -- use a second drive for documents, email, etc. When she breaks something, all you have to do is shut down the Windows virtual machine, restore the snapshot, and restore it.
You could even go as far as creating an icon on a special linux user login -- "Fix my PC" -- and have it to it automatically.
Of course, you'll be sacrificing some of RAM and a chunk of CPU performance due to virtualization.
The best companies are the ones where the founders realize early when to get the right people into those jobs. Just make sure you two split 50-50 the stock. And, make sure to use a lawyer to set everything up (incorpating, division of stock, etc.).
You could be COO/CTO, he could be CEO/CFO.
Have fun!
I doubt it's a myth. I bet they know exactly what they are doing. It's just all a bunch of smoke and mirrors.
They know they are fighting a losing battle with the "digital copies" that won't be affected by closing the analog hole. However, they also know that they have a captive audience of people that have already purchased their product. These people, at some point, WANT the purchased product.
Media shifting has (or at least was, don't know if recent case law has overruled or changed it) been legal as fair use. That means it is (or was) legal to copy a CD to casette if you legally purchased the CD and wanted to listen to it in your car cassette deck.
The media companies don't like this. They want you to have to pay them a second time for the different media. They could not (or at least I don't think they have) stop the fair-use media shifting directly. Now, however, using the guise of piracy, they are taking steps to stop people from being able to do their own media shifting. The end result will be, at least what the media industry hopes will be, a large customer base of people that they know will spend money, since they have once already, on their product that will be more inclined to spend money again for different media.
Think about it like this. If an older album sold 10,000,000 copies on cassette, and the same album then sold 1,000,000 copies on CD, the media industry will look at trends like that and see an automatic 10% revenue source for minimal work. Now, suppose a CD sells 10,000,000 copies, and the next audio format comes out. If they can make it imposible to copy that CD to the new media format, then it is likely that they'll be able to capture another 10%. 10% doesn't sound like much, but if they sell 1,000,000 copies of a song, and they are pocketing 1 or 2 dollars, that's 1 to 2 million dollars extra, times the number of titles they can repeat this process with.
In the end, I think they know exactly what they are doing.
Trustix is based on an older RedHat. They forked and made their own product. Trustix, to me, is what RHEL _SHOULD_ be. It's a SERVER distro, and that focus shows. Over the years, it has evolved into its own distro, and is even more obvious with the 3.0 release.
A minimal install +SSH is ~100 meg. MEGs. Nothing extra, unless you want it installed.
In short, they did what you were advocating.
I don't know if there is a relationship or not, but when the company was known as Norton (for Peter Norton), they had good products. When they transitioned to Symantec they seemed to make whatever they touched worse.
Norton's utilities were great, tiny, fast little tools that did what you wanted in a predictable way. A must have in the DOS days, and even early Window days. As Symantec the tools seemed to get more and more bloated. Then some of the tools had to be bought separately, costing more money. They took over PC Anywhere at some point, and made the tool so large that it was all but impossible to load into some DOS based systems (with plenty of RAM) and still be able to run the rest of the system properly. They took over WinFax and took out some of the best features and seemed to make it more prone to failures.
It's a pattern of theirs. And a great disappointment. And why I, also, no longer buy or use anything from them. First thing I do on new equipment that has their software is uninstall it. Same thing I tell others.
Typical /. disclaimer: IANAL.
The first patent appears to have been filed in 1995, and reexamined and confirmed in 2001 with no updates. The second patent appears to have been filed in 1996, and reexamined and confirmed in 2002 with a few more claims added.
Short of an in depth review of both patents, there are three areas where I think Google will be able to defend. First, the patents are clearly for a dedicated device plugged into the calling station. The device is self-contained, and does all the decision making, ultimately dialing the routing codes for the desired carrier. The patent is for the use of a telephone calling station. And, the patent is for devices that use the telephone network.
While a computer can be argued to equal the "device" in the patent -- how the computer is used for Google Talk does not match how the device makes its decision for routing calls. And, a sound card with headset does not a calling station make. The computer would have to be considered both the device and the calling station for these to hold up. Finally, the internet would have to be considered "the" telephone network.
The language in these patents are targetted specifically, and narrowly, to the application of their end-point call routing device. It will be interesting to see if anything comes from these, or if Google will settle quietly.
Here's hoping Google fights.
Ignoring the sheer size of Google and their ability to pay for lawyers to defend themselves rathar than settle, the patents themselves are not ideally suited for the attack against Google talk.
There are two patents. The first is 5,425,085 and is clearly for a "device" contained "in a housing" that people plug in their phone and it automatically chooses the cheapest rates to route the calls. Think of this as something that would automatically prefix your calls with a 10-10 code for least cost routing at your house.
The second is 5,519,769 appears to be for a method of updating the routing database of the device in the previous patent. It is also directed towards a device connected to the calling station.
The key to these patents and why standard carrier based least cost routing do not apply, is that the routing decisions appear to be made at the end points and not by the carrier switches themselves.
Now, if you make "device" to mean your computer, and make the "calling station" also mean your computer; make telephone network mean the internet; and, squint your eyes just so - then these could be seen to be relevant to Google Talk.
How can it NOT be their service when they admit the fault is something provided by one of THEIR vendors? Presumably, they are using what the vendor provided to offer their services.
Don't forget, put them all in the same room.
I'm not sure I like that. Assuming each shared office has a minimal number of people squeezed in (say 2 or 3), that the office is actually big enough to comfortablly house up to 3 people, and that all in the room are working on the same project -- then yes, I suppose this could work. Yet, there are still times when individual time with no distractions will yield the most productive and effective results. How does Google address that?
Back in 1991 I worked for a wireless company that tried using data containers for quickly deployed cellular switch and cell sites. The idea would be to prebuild these at a central location and then drop them at areas where they needed to go up.
The idea was good, except for a couple of problems.
These shipping containers are nothing but a giant metal box. Grounding can become an issue, so can accidnentally having the box be one of of the poles for a DC based power system. If you are near an active AM tower, the box becomes a giant antenna and it's virtually impossible to filter out the AM signal internally.
Last, and certainly not least, these shipping containers are vulnerable to rust and other problems due to exposure to the elements. That can take several years (5 or so) if the box is in perfect shape at the start, but if they are using used boxes then it can take less than 2 years for rust holes to be a problem.
Plus, physical security isn't all that good unless the walls are beefed up.
I'm hoping these are not "standard" shipping containers, just something that looks like them.
This grand experiment with shipping containers for cellular applications was an attempt to make it cheaper to deploy equipment to new locations. And, shipping containers (especially used) were a _LOT_ cheaper than fibrebond or other prefab buildings for that purpose. Of course, the fibrebond building had a lifespan a lot longer than 2 to 5 years. So, you get what you pay for.
It sounds like you are wanting to refactor the code, or port it to another platform. If you are missing some of the code, then you'll have to reverse engineer that portion of it.
As for how to approach it - I think it depends on the size of your team, and what goals you set for the effort. Are you just wanting to learn? Or do you want to improve performance? Or make it work on another platform? What are the goals for this project?
Once you know those details, they might give you an idea where to begin.
OK, so i'm replying to myself.
"released"
"released" should have been "stable"