Don't register a new account with them. By such, they can arguable say you agree to their terms.
Do send them a registered return receipt letter stating in polite terms that you don't like their new terms, and want them to remove your pages from their site. Refference your pages, and your prior user account id in the letter so there is no ambiguity about what account you are refering to. If they are smart, they will reply back saying that they have don't have reliable info confirming you are really you and the owner of the account, or they delete the pages. If they do reply as such, then you return a new reply requesting reenabling your account explicitly stating you don't agree to their new terms so you may remove your Intelectual Property from their site. If they don't grant you this access, then sue their pants off. You now should have done enough to establish that they have gone beyond the right originally granted to them by you, and they have refused to remidy the situation.
As always, consult a lawyer to find out your rights and obligations, but don't wait. Waiting to do this can be construed as tacit agreement to their new policy.
On a side note. When a company changes contracts like credit card agrements they are required to notify all parites involved. I see no reason why they shouldn't be required to do the same.
You only get the right to reproduce a peice of artwork if and only if the artist sold you that right.
This deals with copyright issues. The artist owns the copyright to the piece, and this is considered a separit entity than the piece it's self.
For a classic example, look at a book. You buy an original copy of a manuscript. All you have is the original copy. Now if you buy the publishing right to that manuscript, then you get the right to sell and make copies of that manuscript.
Yahoo is claiming publishing rights to the Intelectual Property (IP) that you publish on their system, and claiming the right to make derivitive works and publish them also. This is not a situation I can abide by for my IP. I can not abide by their rules. This is why I own my own web server withmy own rules governing it's use.
They explicitly state they don't have the obligation to modify content, but then they also claim the right to modify content then publish that modified content. If they ever modify content, then that modified content can be construed to be "blessed" by them. They now have legal obligations reguarding that content. By exerting editorial action on that content and publishing it, they have assumed responsibility for it. IMHO: If they want to change a page, about all they can do is delete it. If they modify a page and publish it, then they have exercised editorial control over the page. As such they now claim the resulting page is OK by them. As far as I'm concerned they have now given their blessing to all content left on that page. What a big trap if they ever try to exercise editorial control. It may even be big enough to leak over to those pages thay haven't changed.
As a side note: By changing I'm refering to pages that have been changed by direct human intevention. Not pages that have been automatically machine modified to add the ad popup.
I would like to copy over my entire CD collection to MP3s so I can more easily access it for playing. I'm wondering what solutions there are for Linux. I've been playing with cdparanoia, but it seams to only run at 1x read speed, when my slowest CDROM is a 4x and my fastest is 16x. How can I do the CDDA data extraction at a more reasonable rate? Is there an option I missed?
I can easily write the perl scripts to drive the ripper myself, but I need the base tools working at a reasonable rate to be efficient at the ripping. I can't afford to be sitting at the computer all day feeding disks. My free time is much to scarce.
Personally I think Linux scales much better than NT. Look at the $$$. One Super NT system with special $100,000 Quad processor System, OS, and IIS software versus 10 $3000 garden variety Linux boxes with 2 Linux boxes to distribute the load between the ten web servers. I've now got three times the load carrying capacity, fault tollerance and one third the price.
Before you say that fault tollerance isn't important: downtime costs big $$$. In a simple office environment. If you have 2000 $25,000 a year people working off of one file server and it goes down for 30 minutes durring a day. Assuming half of them were using the system at the time, you have 1000 people now unproductive for atleast thirty minutes. That's $6,250 in simple lost productivity for wages alown for that one incident. Add in lost updates to files that hadn't been saved before the server crashed, Office overhead costs, etc. You will quickly find that the real costs are over twice as much. It's unfortunatly very hard to quantify them so usually they don't get looked at, and if they do, the numbers are very unprecise. Unfortunatly the losses are still there even if they aren't totalled up. The interesting thing is the numbers above are for one incident only. If the system goes down once a month, that's a minimum of $75,000, and easily as high as $150,000 a year.
In a $100,000 a day E-Commerce site, if you lose the system for thirty minutes, that's $2,083 assuming an evenly distributed load over the day. Unfortunatly systems go down at peak times, so you'll be looking at a much higher loss of $$$. Easily as high as 5 times as much. To lose 10% of your business in one day hurts. Sure some of the people will come back at a latter time, but some will go elsewhere. You may even lose customers forever if it happens to often, or they may endup finding a better supplier.
Multiple NICs all working at the same time is actually quite necessasary to have working fast and seamlessly. Look at a router / firewall box. Also look at the situation of multiple local networks served by one application / file server. The latter is the one where we need the SMP to work seamlessly for multiple NICs.
Copper fabric will corrode over time. This will make the size of the holes efectively larger as the individual wires won't be connected at each cross anymore. This is a problem with all woven wire shielding methods, even ones made of Stainless Steel wire. The other problem is you need to ground both ends of every wire or those wires you don't properly ground will become capacitive radiators.
The way around this is to instead use perferated or expanded metal sheets. Perferated metal sheets are ones that have many holes stamped into them. Expanded metal sheets are done by slicing many short parallel slits into a metal sheet, then streaching the sheet to expand the holes. It can then be optionally rolled flat again. Either way it weighs less than a solid sheet, but still supplies EMI/RFI blocking if made of the right materials.
In the article they gave and estimated retail prive of $800, but you will have to wait till the 1st quorter of 2000 for availability.
This unit will be good for personal TV/etc, but for a HUD for general work, it unfortunatly blocks seeing past it. As far as I've been able to determin, for doing computer assisted work it's necessasary that one be able to see past the display to the real world. This usually means a display that is either see through, or only uses a portion of the field of view of one eye.
Resolution is also something that needs to improve. The display needs to have atleast 100dpi at viewing distance for the eye to not notice much. This means a 1024x768 display really only can be shown at 32.5cm diagonal at 1 meter or 65cm diagonal at 2 meters.
With a good fast CD-ROM drive, loading CDs can be quite quick. Using only a 16x drive I get respectable load times of a few minutes. I use a script for loading a CD, then creating and enabling it's mount point. When it's done, it beeps me so I can start the next one. I originally wrote the script when I had a 4x drive.
Using/dev/loop is a waste of cpu cycles. When you load the CDs onto the HD, just put each into it's own directory tree, then export the base of each directory tree via NFS/samba/etc. I've used 'cp -a' on the ones I've loaded and it's worked fine. Now admittadly I'm only exporting to other Linux and UNIX boxes.
Now if there is some reason the CD needs to be exported in it's original form, then use/dev/loop. If you need to, look in the kernel docs for where to modify parameters to increase the numbers of/dev/loop devices available. Use "dd if={cdrom drive device} of={file to dump data to} bs=16k". Then mount that file via/dev/loop. Look in the docs for CD-ROM burning for how to mount a CD image on disk. They mention how to for testing images before burning to CD.
For drive choice, go with SCSI. Pick up an Aadaptec 2940 U2W controler (plug plug, got to support the company a relative works for) and an 18G Seagate or IBM drive (quality counts). For faster serving, use multiple smaller drives in raid 0 striped fashion. Sure this is less secure against hardware failure (plain raid 0 striping gives no data integrity assurance), but it's not like you don't have backup of what's on the drives. A drive dies, reconfigure without it, and reload the CDs. When the replacement drive arives, reconfigure with it and reload the CDs. Now if you're at the point where you have 5+ drives, look at going raid 5 for the ease of rebuilding when a drive fails.
The Atanosoff-Berry Computer had the first use of rotating drum memory, bit serial computation, parallel computation. It was also the first computing device to be all electronic in it's core. Instead of using relays, like devices before it, it used vacume tubes. Vacume tubes were natoriously inaccurate when trying to work with analog voltages, but they were perfect at being able to quickly and reliably switch between on/off states.
Where did the recreation end up. I know the only part left from the original was (maby still is) in the lobby of the Physics building at Iowa State university.
It also comes with this other very usefull feature. Every so often the Microsoft VCR 2000 will stop the tape and display this blue screen, reminding the kids that they have better things to do. It's there to keep the kids from watching to much TV. It's been programmed to happen so often that that the kids will get so frustrated with the VCR they will go and play outside instead of spending hours apon hours watching movies.
The smartmedia interface uses fewer IO lines, and the case is designed for compactness. It's designed as an addressed sequential storage/retreival system with a relatively simple software interface.
The CompactFlash interface is roughly equivalent to a PCMCIA mechanically, and is 98% compatible eletrically. CompactFlash is designed to be ATA drive compatible, and as such is software driver compatible with drives in the PCMCIA cartridges, but much more complex than SmartMedia. To interface a Compact Flash card to a laptop with PCMCIA interface only requires a simple mechanical converter to connect the pins from one to the other in the right order.
Does the system us a salt value with the MD5 passwords? If not, why not? If they don't, one would be able to make a dictionary of encrypted passwords and do bulk checks against it. I did a check against the man pages on OpenBSD and didn't find any mention of using a salt with MD5, while other types mentioned using a salt value. I still haven't looked at the source. Someone should do that. I don't have the source easily readable at this point. This could be a hole.
The analogy is a very good one. I live in a secured appartment complex with locks on all the exterior doors, plus locks on the doors to each apartment. A simular situation is in effect with my computer. Each account can be considered a door, and passwords can be considered locks. I have passwords(locks) on all accounts(doors) that need login privilages, and dissabled all other accounts(doors). If somebody breaks into my computer they are treaspassing, just as they would be if they broke into my appartment.
A service like named or httpd can be considered to be like a bank lobby. If you stay within the bank lobby doing only normal transactions, then you're welcome. On the other hand, if you force your way back behind the counter to the employees only section and start rummaging through the files, then your are trespassing.
Somebody needs to write a transition document to help people convert from IIS to Apache. The file naming can easily be delt with by find / perl scripting. Potential gotchas could also be pointed out via the scripts, simple ones corrected, while major ones flagged. I unfortunatly can't do this as I've never used IIS. It would need to be a group of people who want to make the IIS to Apache switch colaborating to make the trasition manual and scripts.
I recommend using a temp file. This is because a single spec of dust can cause you to make a coaster. Write the CD, then read it back, checking it's contents. If it's not correct, try try again...
WARNING A tape or harddisk in a fireproof container will still be destroied in a fire. Most fireproof containers are designed to save paper from burning by a combination of steaming away water and thermal insulation. As such, the internal tempeture of the container will easily get over 210 degrees F. Most tapes and harddisks will be destroied at that point.
I'd have to say that it's entirely possible. The actual computational speed of one "dictionary" checking node dosen't need to be all that fast. They just need to have millions of them. If you organized the system to have parts that do specific tasks, like message reconstruction, message dispatch, message ananlysis. It becomes no problem to construct a highly scaleable system that can process millions of bytes of text a second. Sure it's specialized hardware, but it can be built from commonly available chips with little or no problem.
As an example, a checking node could be made with a few simple components. CPU, Boot ROM, DRAM memory bank, Ethernet NIC, a few indicator LEDs, power connecter, NIC connecter and PCB. That would easily fit on a PCB 6"x6" and be rack mountable, or better yet, fit as manny as possible on one PCB that is as large as you can make reasonable, say 18"x18" for 9 per board. Crank out these boards by the thousands. Don't worry if your older boards are obsoleated by newer tech, just redesign around the newer tech, and make another batch of a few tens of thousands.
Now lets go to specialized hardware. Lets make a chip that checks a stream of bytes against a list of words. Lets make it so it can check 1024 words up to 32 bytes long. Well within fab techniques 15 years ago. Place it in an 8 pin surface mount package package for size. On powerup it waits till it's addressed to load a block of words. Then it waits for the message byte streams. When it matches a word it sends out an interupt, and the message is flagged for latter analysis. Being dedicated logic, they likely could process data well in excess of 1 MByte a second. 3600 of these chips could be placed on an 18"x18" PCB with driver and control logic. This gives us 3686400 check words per PCB. More than enough for all languages and future expansions. On each board is a processor that receives messages to be checked, then passes them by the checking hardware, noting which ones get flagged for a match. Now scale this to thousands of boards. At 25 boards per card cage, 4 card cages per rack case. That's only 10 refrigerator sized cases to check 1GByte a second against 3686400 words, Now reconfigure the hardware a bit to make it 100x more parallel in the checking, and we have 100GBytes per second against 36864 words. Now make this a room sized endevor, and you can easily get well into the terabytes a second scanning rate. The really scarry thing is this is with tech available in the late 80s. It should be easily able to be scaled by a couple of orders of magnitude by now.
It's all a matter of getting the right hardware in the right volume.
Sounds like a simple extension of.cgi scripts to have the.cgi run on a different machine that the one the original web request came in to.
All you should need for blasting this pattent out of the water is to find a system where info requests came in, and were distributed out to requst processing servers. This is just a natural extension of that style of system. Highly likely that one or more of the large transaction processing systems did that as far back as the early to mid eighties, possibly even alot earlier.
Really, though, is there any point to continuing to make screens smaller after they need a magnification system larger than they are?
Yes, if you look at research on glasses integrated displaies, you will find that they almost universally are looking for super small displaies. One of the documents I was reading mentioned that if they could get a 5x5mm packaged LCD screen, they could integrate it into the boom of the glasses and use a relatively simple folded optical path to make it viewable. The lack of super small displaies has caused a couple of companies to go to alternate methods including scanned lasers and vibrating mirrors.
Slashdot Mirror
You are...
Do send them a registered return receipt letter stating in polite terms that you don't like their new terms, and want them to remove your pages from their site. Refference your pages, and your prior user account id in the letter so there is no ambiguity about what account you are refering to. If they are smart, they will reply back saying that they have don't have reliable info confirming you are really you and the owner of the account, or they delete the pages. If they do reply as such, then you return a new reply requesting reenabling your account explicitly stating you don't agree to their new terms so you may remove your Intelectual Property from their site. If they don't grant you this access, then sue their pants off. You now should have done enough to establish that they have gone beyond the right originally granted to them by you, and they have refused to remidy the situation.
As always, consult a lawyer to find out your rights and obligations, but don't wait. Waiting to do this can be construed as tacit agreement to their new policy.
On a side note. When a company changes contracts like credit card agrements they are required to notify all parites involved. I see no reason why they shouldn't be required to do the same.
Interesting case here.
You only get the right to reproduce a peice of artwork if and only if the artist sold you that right.
This deals with copyright issues. The artist owns the copyright to the piece, and this is considered a separit entity than the piece it's self.
For a classic example, look at a book. You buy an original copy of a manuscript. All you have is the original copy. Now if you buy the publishing right to that manuscript, then you get the right to sell and make copies of that manuscript.
Yahoo is claiming publishing rights to the Intelectual Property (IP) that you publish on their system, and claiming the right to make derivitive works and publish them also. This is not a situation I can abide by for my IP. I can not abide by their rules. This is why I own my own web server withmy own rules governing it's use.
Maybe.
They explicitly state they don't have the obligation to modify content, but then they also claim the right to modify content then publish that modified content. If they ever modify content, then that modified content can be construed to be "blessed" by them. They now have legal obligations reguarding that content. By exerting editorial action on that content and publishing it, they have assumed responsibility for it. IMHO: If they want to change a page, about all they can do is delete it. If they modify a page and publish it, then they have exercised editorial control over the page. As such they now claim the resulting page is OK by them. As far as I'm concerned they have now given their blessing to all content left on that page. What a big trap if they ever try to exercise editorial control. It may even be big enough to leak over to those pages thay haven't changed.
As a side note: By changing I'm refering to pages that have been changed by direct human intevention. Not pages that have been automatically machine modified to add the ad popup.
UNDER Linux, not Windows or some other OS.
I would like to copy over my entire CD collection to MP3s so I can more easily access it for playing. I'm wondering what solutions there are for Linux. I've been playing with cdparanoia, but it seams to only run at 1x read speed, when my slowest CDROM is a 4x and my fastest is 16x. How can I do the CDDA data extraction at a more reasonable rate? Is there an option I missed?
I can easily write the perl scripts to drive the ripper myself, but I need the base tools working at a reasonable rate to be efficient at the ripping. I can't afford to be sitting at the computer all day feeding disks. My free time is much to scarce.
Personally I think Linux scales much better than NT. Look at the $$$. One Super NT system with special $100,000 Quad processor System, OS, and IIS software versus 10 $3000 garden variety Linux boxes with 2 Linux boxes to distribute the load between the ten web servers. I've now got three times the load carrying capacity, fault tollerance and one third the price.
Before you say that fault tollerance isn't important: downtime costs big $$$. In a simple office environment. If you have 2000 $25,000 a year people working off of one file server and it goes down for 30 minutes durring a day. Assuming half of them were using the system at the time, you have 1000 people now unproductive for atleast thirty minutes. That's $6,250 in simple lost productivity for wages alown for that one incident. Add in lost updates to files that hadn't been saved before the server crashed, Office overhead costs, etc. You will quickly find that the real costs are over twice as much. It's unfortunatly very hard to quantify them so usually they don't get looked at, and if they do, the numbers are very unprecise. Unfortunatly the losses are still there even if they aren't totalled up. The interesting thing is the numbers above are for one incident only. If the system goes down once a month, that's a minimum of $75,000, and easily as high as $150,000 a year.
In a $100,000 a day E-Commerce site, if you lose the system for thirty minutes, that's $2,083 assuming an evenly distributed load over the day. Unfortunatly systems go down at peak times, so you'll be looking at a much higher loss of $$$. Easily as high as 5 times as much. To lose 10% of your business in one day hurts. Sure some of the people will come back at a latter time, but some will go elsewhere. You may even lose customers forever if it happens to often, or they may endup finding a better supplier.
Multiple NICs all working at the same time is actually quite necessasary to have working fast and seamlessly. Look at a router / firewall box. Also look at the situation of multiple local networks served by one application / file server. The latter is the one where we need the SMP to work seamlessly for multiple NICs.
Copper fabric will corrode over time. This will make the size of the holes efectively larger as the individual wires won't be connected at each cross anymore. This is a problem with all woven wire shielding methods, even ones made of Stainless Steel wire. The other problem is you need to ground both ends of every wire or those wires you don't properly ground will become capacitive radiators.
The way around this is to instead use perferated or expanded metal sheets. Perferated metal sheets are ones that have many holes stamped into them. Expanded metal sheets are done by slicing many short parallel slits into a metal sheet, then streaching the sheet to expand the holes. It can then be optionally rolled flat again. Either way it weighs less than a solid sheet, but still supplies EMI/RFI blocking if made of the right materials.
It should be St. Vidicon of the Cathode...
Unfortunatly I'm drawing a blank as the the series of books that's from, or what the real anme of the character was.
In the article they gave and estimated retail prive of $800, but you will have to wait till the 1st quorter of 2000 for availability.
This unit will be good for personal TV/etc, but for a HUD for general work, it unfortunatly blocks seeing past it. As far as I've been able to determin, for doing computer assisted work it's necessasary that one be able to see past the display to the real world. This usually means a display that is either see through, or only uses a portion of the field of view of one eye.
Resolution is also something that needs to improve. The display needs to have atleast 100dpi at viewing distance for the eye to not notice much. This means a 1024x768 display really only can be shown at 32.5cm diagonal at 1 meter or 65cm diagonal at 2 meters.
What do you mean Penguins don't fly, they fly perfectly well. Under water that is.
With a good fast CD-ROM drive, loading CDs can be quite quick. Using only a 16x drive I get respectable load times of a few minutes. I use a script for loading a CD, then creating and enabling it's mount point. When it's done, it beeps me so I can start the next one. I originally wrote the script when I had a 4x drive.
But, but, but, I've got a hole stack of them. All right, thier 10Megers. I might even have enough to load a CD. :)
Somday I'll get around to it and take the time to make clocks out of them.
Using /dev/loop is a waste of cpu cycles. When you load the CDs onto the HD, just put each into it's own directory tree, then export the base of each directory tree via NFS/samba/etc. I've used 'cp -a' on the ones I've loaded and it's worked fine. Now admittadly I'm only exporting to other Linux and UNIX boxes.
Now if there is some reason the CD needs to be exported in it's original form, then use /dev/loop. If you need to, look in the kernel docs for where to modify parameters to increase the numbers of /dev/loop devices available. Use "dd if={cdrom drive device} of={file to dump data to} bs=16k". Then mount that file via /dev/loop. Look in the docs for CD-ROM burning for how to mount a CD image on disk. They mention how to for testing images before burning to CD.
For drive choice, go with SCSI. Pick up an Aadaptec 2940 U2W controler (plug plug, got to support the company a relative works for) and an 18G Seagate or IBM drive (quality counts). For faster serving, use multiple smaller drives in raid 0 striped fashion. Sure this is less secure against hardware failure (plain raid 0 striping gives no data integrity assurance), but it's not like you don't have backup of what's on the drives. A drive dies, reconfigure without it, and reload the CDs. When the replacement drive arives, reconfigure with it and reload the CDs. Now if you're at the point where you have 5+ drives, look at going raid 5 for the ease of rebuilding when a drive fails.
Where did the recreation end up. I know the only part left from the original was (maby still is) in the lobby of the Physics building at Iowa State university.
It also comes with this other very usefull feature. Every so often the Microsoft VCR 2000 will stop the tape and display this blue screen, reminding the kids that they have better things to do. It's there to keep the kids from watching to much TV. It's been programmed to happen so often that that the kids will get so frustrated with the VCR they will go and play outside instead of spending hours apon hours watching movies.
Roughly.
The smartmedia interface uses fewer IO lines, and the case is designed for compactness. It's designed as an addressed sequential storage/retreival system with a relatively simple software interface.
The CompactFlash interface is roughly equivalent to a PCMCIA mechanically, and is 98% compatible eletrically. CompactFlash is designed to be ATA drive compatible, and as such is software driver compatible with drives in the PCMCIA cartridges, but much more complex than SmartMedia. To interface a Compact Flash card to a laptop with PCMCIA interface only requires a simple mechanical converter to connect the pins from one to the other in the right order.
Does the system us a salt value with the MD5 passwords? If not, why not? If they don't, one would be able to make a dictionary of encrypted passwords and do bulk checks against it. I did a check against the man pages on OpenBSD and didn't find any mention of using a salt with MD5, while other types mentioned using a salt value. I still haven't looked at the source. Someone should do that. I don't have the source easily readable at this point. This could be a hole.
The analogy is a very good one. I live in a secured appartment complex with locks on all the exterior doors, plus locks on the doors to each apartment. A simular situation is in effect with my computer. Each account can be considered a door, and passwords can be considered locks. I have passwords(locks) on all accounts(doors) that need login privilages, and dissabled all other accounts(doors). If somebody breaks into my computer they are treaspassing, just as they would be if they broke into my appartment.
A service like named or httpd can be considered to be like a bank lobby. If you stay within the bank lobby doing only normal transactions, then you're welcome. On the other hand, if you force your way back behind the counter to the employees only section and start rummaging through the files, then your are trespassing.
Somebody needs to write a transition document to help people convert from IIS to Apache. The file naming can easily be delt with by find / perl scripting. Potential gotchas could also be pointed out via the scripts, simple ones corrected, while major ones flagged. I unfortunatly can't do this as I've never used IIS. It would need to be a group of people who want to make the IIS to Apache switch colaborating to make the trasition manual and scripts.
I recommend using a temp file. This is because a single spec of dust can cause you to make a coaster. Write the CD, then read it back, checking it's contents. If it's not correct, try try again...
WARNING A tape or harddisk in a fireproof container will still be destroied in a fire. Most fireproof containers are designed to save paper from burning by a combination of steaming away water and thermal insulation. As such, the internal tempeture of the container will easily get over 210 degrees F. Most tapes and harddisks will be destroied at that point.
As someone who knows chips...
I'd have to say that it's entirely possible. The actual computational speed of one "dictionary" checking node dosen't need to be all that fast. They just need to have millions of them. If you organized the system to have parts that do specific tasks, like message reconstruction, message dispatch, message ananlysis. It becomes no problem to construct a highly scaleable system that can process millions of bytes of text a second. Sure it's specialized hardware, but it can be built from commonly available chips with little or no problem.
As an example, a checking node could be made with a few simple components. CPU, Boot ROM, DRAM memory bank, Ethernet NIC, a few indicator LEDs, power connecter, NIC connecter and PCB. That would easily fit on a PCB 6"x6" and be rack mountable, or better yet, fit as manny as possible on one PCB that is as large as you can make reasonable, say 18"x18" for 9 per board. Crank out these boards by the thousands. Don't worry if your older boards are obsoleated by newer tech, just redesign around the newer tech, and make another batch of a few tens of thousands.
Now lets go to specialized hardware. Lets make a chip that checks a stream of bytes against a list of words. Lets make it so it can check 1024 words up to 32 bytes long. Well within fab techniques 15 years ago. Place it in an 8 pin surface mount package package for size. On powerup it waits till it's addressed to load a block of words. Then it waits for the message byte streams. When it matches a word it sends out an interupt, and the message is flagged for latter analysis. Being dedicated logic, they likely could process data well in excess of 1 MByte a second. 3600 of these chips could be placed on an 18"x18" PCB with driver and control logic. This gives us 3686400 check words per PCB. More than enough for all languages and future expansions. On each board is a processor that receives messages to be checked, then passes them by the checking hardware, noting which ones get flagged for a match. Now scale this to thousands of boards. At 25 boards per card cage, 4 card cages per rack case. That's only 10 refrigerator sized cases to check 1GByte a second against 3686400 words, Now reconfigure the hardware a bit to make it 100x more parallel in the checking, and we have 100GBytes per second against 36864 words. Now make this a room sized endevor, and you can easily get well into the terabytes a second scanning rate. The really scarry thing is this is with tech available in the late 80s. It should be easily able to be scaled by a couple of orders of magnitude by now.
It's all a matter of getting the right hardware in the right volume.
Sounds like a simple extension of .cgi scripts to have the .cgi run on a different machine that the one the original web request came in to.
All you should need for blasting this pattent out of the water is to find a system where info requests came in, and were distributed out to requst processing servers. This is just a natural extension of that style of system. Highly likely that one or more of the large transaction processing systems did that as far back as the early to mid eighties, possibly even alot earlier.
Really, though, is there any point to continuing to make screens smaller after they need a magnification system larger than they are?
Yes, if you look at research on glasses integrated displaies, you will find that they almost universally are looking for super small displaies. One of the documents I was reading mentioned that if they could get a 5x5mm packaged LCD screen, they could integrate it into the boom of the glasses and use a relatively simple folded optical path to make it viewable. The lack of super small displaies has caused a couple of companies to go to alternate methods including scanned lasers and vibrating mirrors.