Someone should read the actual patents occasionally. Granted, it's a bit hard to see why this would be patented, but everyone above has missed the point.
Start with a simple example.
You have 10 Wii consoles and 10 Wii controllers in your West coast warehouse.
You have 10 Wii controllers in your East cost warehouse.
Normally, you would fill an order for a controller for a West coast customer from the West coast warehouse.
But, if you know that customers always buy the extra Wii controller with the Wii console, you realize that filling an order for a controller from the nearest warehouse will cause you to have to make 2 shipments later when someone orders the last console and the controllers are already depleted in the warehouse where the console is.
Now, they also add a bunch of warehouse workload calculations into the mix, so there is a bit of fancy bookkeeping here.
Stupid subject for a patent.
Why use NAS when what you need is a backup?
on
Best Home Network NAS
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You jumped from realizing that you need a backup to NAS. NAS might use RAID for hardware protection, but you can still wipe it out with a mistake or a virus. My favorite approach is to buy a cheap USB-HDD enclosure and back up the internal drive on the PC (which needs to be powered on whenever you use the PC anyway) to the USB. Then, switch off the USB drive's power and it is safe.
Once in a while, yank the drive out of the enclosure and drop it in your safe deposit box and put a new drive in.
Advantages: 1) Easy approach to off-site storage 2) Protected from errors and viruses 3) Doesn't cost much 4) Doesn't waste power 5) Can restore on other systems
Disadvantages: 1) Not a very impressive geek toy 2) Not particularly fast
This shares the same problem as all the others. What you want if you are trying to save power is a system that uses the sun as much as it can and fills in the gaps with power from the AC supply. This uses solar only if the main power is cut. Thanks for nothing.
If anyone from APC or Belkin is reading this... what I want is a reasonably-priced UPS that takes AC power and DC power in and connects to 2 banks of (user-provided) batteries. One bank is for interruptions, the other is to store enough power that the output can run from DC for periods of time before automatically returning to bypass while the batteries catch up.
Then, I can run my loads from a UPS that can consume all of the solar I generate without forgetting to fall-back to commercial power when needed.
You file a (simple) provisional patent application. That starts the clock for you to patent it and sets the date right in the patent office so nobody else should be able to. Then, before a year is up, you can file a utility patent application or you can abandon it. Costs around $150.
There are all sorts of principles in science that are called "theories." Some of them, like gravity, have mountains of evidence that reinforce the tendency of every reasonable scientific mind to believe that they are valid.
Evolution is pretty far up there on the scale of pretty solid theories. The problem with officials who are either so overwhelmed with their own religious dogma or so obtuse that they cannot understand this is that they make policy decisions based on ignorance of scientific evidence for antibiotic resistance, global warming, epidemiology, etc... and substitute their own "equally valid" belief that the rapture is imminent so none of this matters.
We've been unable to make our presence known by radio until less than 100 years ago.
We can get humans to the moon, but not to the next planet.
The universe is vast even compared to our oceans and we lose people in our oceans all the time. Why would we think a space probe would be noticed by someone?
Now, our technology will improve and some of the above statements may change rapidly. But, the chances of our using some of those technologies to destroy ourselves seem to be accelerating as well. Perhaps the missing part of the model is that other civilizations always blow themselves up within a few hundred years of their first communication attempts or steps off their planets.
I spoke to DigiView a few weeks ago about the problems with their $500 doo-dad and they still don't care. The only way to drive it is to run a windows app with real or simulated mouse clicks to trigger and export data. If more than one are in a system, they have no way to know which is which. I told them that their lack of automation capability would lead either me or someone else to design a replacement. It looks like someone has.
If this works the way it looks like it will, that'll be a well deserved scoop. It's what happens when a company refuses to listen to its customers.
RTFA. They realize that they would have passengers yapping loudly through entire flights oblivious to their neighbors who are getting ready to chuck them overboard? They rightly do not want their people in the middle of that.
For those of us old enough to remember writing VxD's in C in Windows 3.1, the only 32-bit flat compiler available was Watcom, which suited us just fine as it was far superior to the uSoft compilers if its day. When Win32 came out (mandatory in Win95), Microsoft wanted that market and had their own barely operable 32-bit compiler. They required "Dynamically loadable" VxDs for all 32-bit apps. The new Microsoft linker (required to build VxDs from already-compiled object files) accepted the same COFF object files as the old linker as well as the new proprietary object file format produced by Microsoft's compiler.
"Somehow," the new linker had all sorts of bugs in its handling of COFF but handled the proprietary format just fine. EVERYONE writing windows drivers had to switch. Don't forget that writing drivers usually requires a lot of compiler pragmas that have to be redone to port from one compiler to another.
Now, perhaps this was a mistake rather than an abuse...
1. Up to that date, even Microsoft had been using the Watcom compiler. (You don't really think they wrote all their drivers in assembly) 2. The choice to make the old VxD format inoperable in the new systems was totally elective and synchronized to their theft of the compiler market. In fact, for a few product releases, we actually had a Watcom-based driver with 90% of the code and a "proxy" built with the Microsoft compiler just to trick the system into allowing it to work.
This is one of many many stories where Microsoft has used their dominance to bully their way into a business, notwithstanding the competitors who were cleaning their clocks on a previously level playing field. They did this to the detriment of their customers for sure as well as to the people that had built a legitimate business with a superior product.
I had a professor in 1985 at the Univerity of Illinois who had built and published papers on an electric vehicle with regenerative braking. There is a nice report somewhere from the fire department on that one (NiCd-fire). At that point, the concept of gas-turbine/battery hybrids were already well under discussion.
There have certainly been some interesting innovations that make modern hybrids possible since then, primarily the interesting motor/generator/transmission gadgets, but the fundamentals that are critical to all hybrids go back way further.
IANAL, but I have analyzed a s**tload of patents and infringment claims in my work. The first rule is that, if each independent claim (claim not referencing another claim) contains an element that is not met by the alleged infringer, then there is no infringment. Bacuse of all the prior art, these patents could only get claims that are so narrowly described that they are very unlikely to be infringed.
When you read the claims, every independent claim in the first patent covers devices that have an enclosure and a phone jack. Unless Google makes a device with an enclosure and a phone jack, we don't even have to read any further to know they are off the hook.
In the second patent, every independent claim covers a mechanism to maintain and update databases in all the individual call routing devices that call into a central rates database for updates. Once again, I doubt google has every client calling into a central server for updates. More likely, each client contacts their service online at the time they want to place a call and google can use whatever cost model they want to decide how to route each call.
Fortunately, Google is not a comapny that is likely to pay these guys to just go away. I think they will make a lot of noise until it is clear that they cannot win and then just go away.
I have always had this ability (in several of the largest companies in the US) but I have always started the conversation with an acknowledgment that the sysadmins are ultimately responsible for the network. Then, we focus on what functions I may need to do, how I avoid causing a problem beyond my own work, and how we can establish a regimen where I report what I have touched and where they are able to monitor to ensure that I have do only that.
This has never been a problem. Then again, they already know, prior to that, that they would be in bigger trouble if I were not trustworthy. I offer them more controls than they would have insisted on and this gets me more latitude than they normally would have offerred.
This is part of a trend in consumer protection laws that is pretty effective. Instead of just providing a mechanism to allow governments agencies to enforce consumer protection laws, they give indivdual consumers the right to persue the offenders. This means that an offender cannot rely on the apathy of a government agency to permit them to flout the law. This works pretty well with telemarketing violations and deceptive advertising. Unfortunately, CAN-SPAM did the opposite so it is close to worthless.
That said, this would work better as a national law that permits state courts to be used for action.
Amazingly enough, the purpose of your visit impacts what you need to bring quite a bit. I doubt they need random people turning up. There are certainly plenty of people whose regular jobs have disappeared for a while. Figure out why you are going, then confirm that it really needed, then pack accordingly fro a combination of your mission's needs and FULL self-sufficiency.
Many companies contribute software to OSS software while simultaneously patenting their own work in other areas. Most of the "good guys" maintain these portfolios exclusively to force other patent-holders into cross-license agreements to avoid being instantly put out of business when a (bad guy) competitor pops up with a patent. Driving these companies away from OSS is not a good idea.
Penalizing companies that engage in abusive behavior is worth considering. Limiting your friends to only those who have no strength at all is a bad idea.
The CAN-SPAM legislation gave ISPs (including Hotmail) the right to go after spammers. The damages are intended to deter spammers and to give the ISPs an incentive to take out the spammers without spending taxpayer money to do it.
In this case, it looks like this is exactly what happened. As much as I personally dislike Microsoft, the system is working as planned on this one. The fact that they are reinvesting the proceeds into more enforcement efforts is encouraging.
As for the rest of us.... whoever runs your mailserver has the right to go after him as well so long as they gather sufficient evidence.
Make sure you have a good address. If there's any doubt, call the customer or look up the address in an on-line or CD directory.
So, when will we stop issuing patents for using a computer to do EXACTLY the same thing that was previously done without it?
Now, if we'll let Jeff patent using a computer for exactly what was done without it, the 1995 publication of doing exaclty the same thing in the electronic world should act as prior art. From rfc1801
22.4 Bad Addresses
If there is a bad address, it is desirable to do a directory search
to find alternatives. This is a helpful user service and may be
supported. This function is invoked after address checking has
failed, and where this is no user supplied alternate recipient. This
function would be an MTA-chosen alternative to administratively
assigned alternate recipient.
The phone system trusts the sender to send accurate caller-id. Anybody with a good digital connection to a phone company can spoof caller-id to their heart's content.
Verifying the VoIP user only works if it becomes mandatory to accurately certify the identity of the caller across the telephone network. Since the phone companies don't do this with each other today, they should start by getting their own house in order first.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of nuclear states with very bad economies. If you only need a few nukes, buying them probably wins out in the build versus buy debate.
Most of the posters here have missed the whole point
EVERYONE, including the project lead, pulls source from CVS, creates patches, uploads them to Bugzilla, has them reviewed by another (trusted) team member, and then approved by the person responsible for a branch. At that point, someone with CVS access is permitted to commit them to CVS.
If you do not have CVS commit access yourself, you follow the exact same procedure as someone who does right up to the point of doing the commit itself. After having done a few of these, you just have to have someone in the project vouch for you AND SIGN AN AGREEMENT and you can get CVS commit access.
The government doesn't generally have programmers familier with exactly how they really work. So, they outsource to big software companies. Instead of rapidly creating a prototype and trying it out and making sure they are on the right track, they create a massive project and find out way too late that they did not ask for exactly what they needed.
Businesses trying to outsource their business application development also learn this the hard way. If your programmers are not intimately familier with how you operate, it doesn't matter how smart they are. Also, if you are trying to create a new way of operating, try experiments first.
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Someone should read the actual patents occasionally. Granted, it's a bit hard to see why this would be patented, but everyone above has missed the point.
Start with a simple example.
You have 10 Wii consoles and 10 Wii controllers in your West coast warehouse.
You have 10 Wii controllers in your East cost warehouse.
Normally, you would fill an order for a controller for a West coast customer from the West coast warehouse.
But, if you know that customers always buy the extra Wii controller with the Wii console, you realize that filling an order for a controller from the nearest warehouse will cause you to have to make 2 shipments later when someone orders the last console and the controllers are already depleted in the warehouse where the console is.
Now, they also add a bunch of warehouse workload calculations into the mix, so there is a bit of fancy bookkeeping here.
Stupid subject for a patent.
You jumped from realizing that you need a backup to NAS. NAS might use RAID for hardware protection, but you can still wipe it out with a mistake or a virus. My favorite approach is to buy a cheap USB-HDD enclosure and back up the internal drive on the PC (which needs to be powered on whenever you use the PC anyway) to the USB. Then, switch off the USB drive's power and it is safe.
Once in a while, yank the drive out of the enclosure and drop it in your safe deposit box and put a new drive in.
Advantages:
1) Easy approach to off-site storage
2) Protected from errors and viruses
3) Doesn't cost much
4) Doesn't waste power
5) Can restore on other systems
Disadvantages:
1) Not a very impressive geek toy
2) Not particularly fast
This shares the same problem as all the others. What you want if you are trying to save power is a system that uses the sun as much as it can and fills in the gaps with power from the AC supply. This uses solar only if the main power is cut. Thanks for nothing.
If anyone from APC or Belkin is reading this... what I want is a reasonably-priced UPS that takes AC power and DC power in and connects to 2 banks of (user-provided) batteries. One bank is for interruptions, the other is to store enough power that the output can run from DC for periods of time before automatically returning to bypass while the batteries catch up.
Then, I can run my loads from a UPS that can consume all of the solar I generate without forgetting to fall-back to commercial power when needed.
You file a (simple) provisional patent application. That starts the clock for you to patent it and sets the date right in the patent office so nobody else should be able to. Then, before a year is up, you can file a utility patent application or you can abandon it. Costs around $150.
There are all sorts of principles in science that are called "theories." Some of them, like gravity, have mountains of evidence that reinforce the tendency of every reasonable scientific mind to believe that they are valid.
Evolution is pretty far up there on the scale of pretty solid theories. The problem with officials who are either so overwhelmed with their own religious dogma or so obtuse that they cannot understand this is that they make policy decisions based on ignorance of scientific evidence for antibiotic resistance, global warming, epidemiology, etc... and substitute their own "equally valid" belief that the rapture is imminent so none of this matters.
Great... it's copyrighted and provides no license.
We've been unable to make our presence known by radio until less than 100 years ago.
We can get humans to the moon, but not to the next planet.
The universe is vast even compared to our oceans and we lose people in our oceans all the time. Why would we think a space probe would be noticed by someone?
Now, our technology will improve and some of the above statements may change rapidly. But, the chances of our using some of those technologies to destroy ourselves seem to be accelerating as well. Perhaps the missing part of the model is that other civilizations always blow themselves up within a few hundred years of their first communication attempts or steps off their planets.
We probably will.
The district suggests they buy a discounted version restricted to educational use. Tough luck if the home PC is for the whole family.
I spoke to DigiView a few weeks ago about the problems with their $500 doo-dad and they still don't care. The only way to drive it is to run a windows app with real or simulated mouse clicks to trigger and export data. If more than one are in a system, they have no way to know which is which. I told them that their lack of automation capability would lead either me or someone else to design a replacement. It looks like someone has.
If this works the way it looks like it will, that'll be a well deserved scoop. It's what happens when a company refuses to listen to its customers.
RTFA. They realize that they would have passengers yapping loudly through entire flights oblivious to their neighbors who are getting ready to chuck them overboard? They rightly do not want their people in the middle of that.
For those of us old enough to remember writing VxD's in C in Windows 3.1, the only 32-bit flat compiler available was Watcom, which suited us just fine as it was far superior to the uSoft compilers if its day. When Win32 came out (mandatory in Win95), Microsoft wanted that market and had their own barely operable 32-bit compiler. They required "Dynamically loadable" VxDs for all 32-bit apps. The new Microsoft linker (required to build VxDs from already-compiled object files) accepted the same COFF object files as the old linker as well as the new proprietary object file format produced by Microsoft's compiler.
"Somehow," the new linker had all sorts of bugs in its handling of COFF but handled the proprietary format just fine. EVERYONE writing windows drivers had to switch. Don't forget that writing drivers usually requires a lot of compiler pragmas that have to be redone to port from one compiler to another.
Now, perhaps this was a mistake rather than an abuse...
1. Up to that date, even Microsoft had been using the Watcom compiler. (You don't really think they wrote all their drivers in assembly)
2. The choice to make the old VxD format inoperable in the new systems was totally elective and synchronized to their theft of the compiler market. In fact, for a few product releases, we actually had a Watcom-based driver with 90% of the code and a "proxy" built with the Microsoft compiler just to trick the system into allowing it to work.
This is one of many many stories where Microsoft has used their dominance to bully their way into a business, notwithstanding the competitors who were cleaning their clocks on a previously level playing field. They did this to the detriment of their customers for sure as well as to the people that had built a legitimate business with a superior product.
Gee... an array of these has enough information to construct a 3-d image much like a hologram.
There have certainly been some interesting innovations that make modern hybrids possible since then, primarily the interesting motor/generator/transmission gadgets, but the fundamentals that are critical to all hybrids go back way further.
IANAL, but I have analyzed a s**tload of patents and infringment claims in my work. The first rule is that, if each independent claim (claim not referencing another claim) contains an element that is not met by the alleged infringer, then there is no infringment. Bacuse of all the prior art, these patents could only get claims that are so narrowly described that they are very unlikely to be infringed.
When you read the claims, every independent claim in the first patent covers devices that have an enclosure and a phone jack. Unless Google makes a device with an enclosure and a phone jack, we don't even have to read any further to know they are off the hook.
In the second patent, every independent claim covers a mechanism to maintain and update databases in all the individual call routing devices that call into a central rates database for updates. Once again, I doubt google has every client calling into a central server for updates. More likely, each client contacts their service online at the time they want to place a call and google can use whatever cost model they want to decide how to route each call.
Fortunately, Google is not a comapny that is likely to pay these guys to just go away. I think they will make a lot of noise until it is clear that they cannot win and then just go away.
I have always had this ability (in several of the largest companies in the US) but I have always started the conversation with an acknowledgment that the sysadmins are ultimately responsible for the network. Then, we focus on what functions I may need to do, how I avoid causing a problem beyond my own work, and how we can establish a regimen where I report what I have touched and where they are able to monitor to ensure that I have do only that.
This has never been a problem. Then again, they already know, prior to that, that they would be in bigger trouble if I were not trustworthy. I offer them more controls than they would have insisted on and this gets me more latitude than they normally would have offerred.
This is great. Tens of thousands of executives are getting an education on how broken the patent system is.
This is part of a trend in consumer protection laws that is pretty effective. Instead of just providing a mechanism to allow governments agencies to enforce consumer protection laws, they give indivdual consumers the right to persue the offenders. This means that an offender cannot rely on the apathy of a government agency to permit them to flout the law. This works pretty well with telemarketing violations and deceptive advertising. Unfortunately, CAN-SPAM did the opposite so it is close to worthless.
That said, this would work better as a national law that permits state courts to be used for action.
Amazingly enough, the purpose of your visit impacts what you need to bring quite a bit. I doubt they need random people turning up. There are certainly plenty of people whose regular jobs have disappeared for a while. Figure out why you are going, then confirm that it really needed, then pack accordingly fro a combination of your mission's needs and FULL self-sufficiency.
Many companies contribute software to OSS software while simultaneously patenting their own work in other areas. Most of the "good guys" maintain these portfolios exclusively to force other patent-holders into cross-license agreements to avoid being instantly put out of business when a (bad guy) competitor pops up with a patent. Driving these companies away from OSS is not a good idea.
Penalizing companies that engage in abusive behavior is worth considering. Limiting your friends to only those who have no strength at all is a bad idea.
The CAN-SPAM legislation gave ISPs (including Hotmail) the right to go after spammers. The damages are intended to deter spammers and to give the ISPs an incentive to take out the spammers without spending taxpayer money to do it.
In this case, it looks like this is exactly what happened. As much as I personally dislike Microsoft, the system is working as planned on this one. The fact that they are reinvesting the proceeds into more enforcement efforts is encouraging.
As for the rest of us.... whoever runs your mailserver has the right to go after him as well so long as they gather sufficient evidence.
So, when will we stop issuing patents for using a computer to do EXACTLY the same thing that was previously done without it?
Now, if we'll let Jeff patent using a computer for exactly what was done without it, the 1995 publication of doing exaclty the same thing in the electronic world should act as prior art. From rfc1801
VERY innovative JeffThe phone system trusts the sender to send accurate caller-id. Anybody with a good digital connection to a phone company can spoof caller-id to their heart's content.
Verifying the VoIP user only works if it becomes mandatory to accurately certify the identity of the caller across the telephone network. Since the phone companies don't do this with each other today, they should start by getting their own house in order first.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of nuclear states with very bad economies. If you only need a few nukes, buying them probably wins out in the build versus buy debate.
EVERYONE, including the project lead, pulls source from CVS, creates patches, uploads them to Bugzilla, has them reviewed by another (trusted) team member, and then approved by the person responsible for a branch. At that point, someone with CVS access is permitted to commit them to CVS.
If you do not have CVS commit access yourself, you follow the exact same procedure as someone who does right up to the point of doing the commit itself. After having done a few of these, you just have to have someone in the project vouch for you AND SIGN AN AGREEMENT and you can get CVS commit access.
This is not a barrier at all.
Businesses trying to outsource their business application development also learn this the hard way. If your programmers are not intimately familier with how you operate, it doesn't matter how smart they are. Also, if you are trying to create a new way of operating, try experiments first.