A summary judgment could get overturned on appeal, the case could be remanded back for trial, then trial judgment or verdict could be questioned on appeal, there could be more remands and appeals after that....... just in case you thought 7 years to summary judgment is slow.....:-(
Whether any of this happens depends on how the patentee and its lawyers view the reasons given for summary judgment, and either carry on or drop it.
It looks as if Rusty Russell was allowed a good amount of time to give the Linux Australia position. The transcript of all the witnesses is a very long one. From my scan of it, he clearly used the opportunity well to make clear how potentially oppressive the results would be if Australia accepts the bilateral agreement with US. The agreement would not only put a DMCA-like law into effect in Australia: aspects of the result in Australia might be even harsher than in the US. Also, the agreement would seemingly bring a position where Australia would be exposed to trade sanctions if the Australian legislature ever had second thoughts in future and decided to relax aspects of the law resulting from the bilateral agreement.
Parent should be modded down for misinformation: this is plain wrong, HIV is a RNA virus with DNA in its reproduction pathway. Of the different hepatitis viruses, some are based on DNA (with RNA in their reproduction pathway -- hep.B) and some others are based on RNA. I hope the parent poster does a whole lot more revision before his exams:) In any case, DNA/RNA is not the main issue, virus types are more individual than that, and there are variants of DNA and RNA virus lifecycles that lead to complications of designing possible therapy and safety of therapy (sigh). One of the authors himself was quoted as saying he doesn't know if the new virus will do harm or not.
A substantial body of opinion dates the major destruction of the Alexandrian library/museum to the late 4th century AD, i.e. a time when Christians were in charge and very concerned to discourage pagan things, which included the learning of the ancients........
It is also worth remembering that much of what did survive out of the destruction of classical learning was eventually preserved and re-transmitted to a deeply ignorant and religiously hidebound Europe several hundred years later through the hands of the relatively liberal and learned muslim arabs...
The USPTO only has one type of patent. The "I want a monopoly on this" patent. There should be defensive patents, patents issued saying "we figured out how to do this on our own, we don't want to stop other people form figuring out the same thing we just don't want to be prevented from using our inventions."
These already are available (in the US, anyway). They are called "Statutory Invention Registrations".
But they are not much used, probably because they don't create proprietary rights, only the right to prevent later inventors patenting a similar thing (not the same thing, be warned, as preventing risk of infringement of other rights).
Why only pirated installations in south east asia?
What the mention of China and SE Asia said to me, to spell it out, was this reminder: that however tight and hard the legislative screw is turned in US and Europe, and however hard punitive enforcement is set up there, those measures will not address the problem because that still leaves plenty of infected machines elsewhere, in countries that such legal measures don't reach, to screw the internet with virus traffic and worms.
It's also not about how much it is worth to the user to pay: Making patches universally available would rationally be seen by MS as an initiative to retain/(re)build market reputation and maintain market share.
Microsoft's USP 6,727,830 is for using the length of time an application button is pressed, in various broadly-specified ways. It was issued April 27, 2004, and filed July 12, 2002, as a continuation of an earlier application filed Jan 5, 1999. So the timeframe for unconditional prior art status of printed publications and uses in USA appears to be the timeframe ending on Jan 4 1998.
My HP41 programmable calculator, in use since 1981, was and is a "limited-resource computing device" with (physical) buttons associated with applications (functions). For every button and application there was a period during which the application's name would be displayed for a predetermined period if the button is pressed and held down, and activated if the button was released during that period, but if the button was held down longer, the display would go to 'null' and the application would not be activated on release. (It was a valuable HP41 feature to enable the user to check and get a reminder of what a button would do, without committing to the operation.)
It seems to be only on the last point -- what happens after delayed release -- that the Microsoft patent claims appear to differ in detail from the HP41.
But the actions specified vaguely in the MS claims do not appear to be matters of principle, let alone invention, they are just choices about which alternative action should happen after delayed release.
I hope this patent would be found invalid at least for obviousness if challenged. But like so many others, MS may calculate on benefiting from the doubt in the meantime, and from the effort and expense of mounting a challenge.
Well, besides the pressure for NDAs from commercial sponsors, Barth Netterfield in the interview mentioned some completely research-based pressures. He mentioned how some researchers feel themselves to be in competition with other researchers. This can give rise to fears such as losing publication/discovery credit, and losing priority of publication, e.g. because somebody else gets in first using tools/information acquired from their scientific competitor if there is no restraint. (This is of course in addition to the losses that business sponsors fear they may suffer -- which include fear that a competitor may get the tools/information and build products and patent rights on top of them if there is no restraint in its competitive use.)
NDAs often present headaches to all concerned, and often there is difficulty in getting them written to express properly what either side wants, plus the difficulties getting both sides to agree. Careless drafting often means they are too broad or (less often perhaps) too narrow.
But the reasons why they are needed boil down to one thing in principle: that nowadays there are many things that the outside world could do with research results, that the makers of those results feel could harm their academic or commercial interests. Therefore they want some degree of controls placed on what the outside world does, the degrees and types of control vary with the situation. Perhaps in long-gone days there may have been near-consensus about scientific etiquette, and maybe that controlled some of these matters. But it seems that etiquette alone may have failed to give satisfaction often enough, and/or the world may have got more complex and overtly aggressive enough, that many people now want what should happen spelled out in writing.
-wb-
Re:Hmm... [role of optical measurements]
on
The Venus Transit 2004
·
· Score: 2, Informative
...accurate and public measurement of an extraterrestrial distance.
I doubt that the public project related to the 2004 transit is intended to obtain more accurate measurements than already exist, for the distances and timings associated with Venus.
For all of the inner planets, even the best professional optical telescope measurements are already so much less accurate than modern non-optical measurements, such as radar-ranging and spacecraft measurements, that optical data (except for the outer planets) did not contribute at all to the final data-sets that went to make up the current best professional ephemerides. This JPL report, about the latest-but-one of the professional solar-system ephemerides, DE403, says that "all of the optical observations for the Sun, Mercury, Venus and Mars were omitted from the least-squares adjustments leading to DE403. Newer and more accurate data-types... determine these orbits far more accurately (by one or two orders of magnitude) than do the optical data." The report for the current latest general ephemeris on public release DE405, here, says much the same.
The project for measuring the timing of the June Venus transit looks like mainly an exercise in public awareness and education. Maybe there is also an aim of historical reconstruction, for doing something like re-assessing the performance of the old astronomers who measured previous transits, in an age when optical telescopes still did provide the only serious measurements available.
He believes that people with 10 years experience in C++ have nothing significant to offer over people with 2 years experience.
In almost any field of skill, you get some people who eventually push out the limits -- they almost never stop learning and advancing -- and there are others who hardly advance beyond the basic skill level, if they achieve that.
Your boss may be jaded by the experience of hiring people from the second group, but you might need to remind him that the first group exists too.
It's the difference between people who really have 12 years of experience, and those who have had practically the same initial two years, but six times over.
Your boss may challenge you to show indicators of continuing development and acquisition of mature skill, but that would be a different question.
Why is it that we have this never ending need for more powerlines and more electricity rather than looking for alternatives with any real conviction?
What would the alternatives be? Household generated power?
It's quite hard to know what would make a real difference without turning the clock right back.
I live in a house that was built about 80 years ago, and saw remains of the original electric power circuits, rated at 20 amp overall -- clearly little more load was expected then than a few light-bulbs and maybe an occasionally-used electric fire or two. People had coal fires and cooked with gas or solid-fuel, no central heating, let-alone air-conditioning, and wore warm clothes when they needed it.
Now there more houses and far more electric appliances, and stories tell of nationwide power surges when the television ads come on and '00,000s switch on their electric kettles to make coffee. For all that, it's not clear without hard figures that domestic consumption is even the main key to economy, compared with heavy industry.
Well, I just have to say I think it's a bit cruel and insensitive to have this kind of a joke at RMS's expense, as if to make out that he's some kind of a pedant.
Maybe it just shows how very young the young can be:) Far better, though, to try and communicate across the generation gap...
-wb- (feeling humor-impaired after what must surely be the biggest spate of April-1 non-jokes ever)
Even eating organic rice will not save you, since small amounts of rice seeds will surely drift on the winds and contaminate all crops. Do we really want to risk our young daughters eating abnormal quantities of lactoferrin and risking a higher rate of gigantomastia and breast cancer?
Just a couple of questions of the kind that often get overlooked..
Since when was rice eaten raw? Since when did cooked (i.e., denatured) proteins retain the hormonal/enzyme activities of the native protein?
There's a whole lot of wild imagination going into the stories of these so-called risks.
I can't believe that out of 4 million patents, only 151 of them were been invalidated since 1988. Scary
That's not what the story meant (but it was ambiguously worded). The report related only to patents invalidated by the Patent Office's re-examination process. That is a relatively new procedure. Many patent challenges are made in court, and those were not being counted. One of the factors dissuading would-be challengers from using the relatively new PTO patent re-examination process is that it has been perceived as not close enough to fairly balanced, and too likely to uphold the patent. Many challengers have preferred for that reason to reserve their patent challenges for federal court.
I'm one of the not-very-skilled, but I found gentoo relatively easy to install from their pre-compiled CD. It's good enough that I don't absolutely need the biggies compiled from scratch. So I don't see that the argument about long compile-times need be so determinative.
Above all, I found documentation items from gentoo specially helpful, because they were written by someone with the skill of remembering and including _all_ of the needed steps -- and this isn't true of all documentation in linux-land. (OT -- another very very good documentation IMO is the GRUB manual.)
So let's hear it for user-helpful gentoo folk and their well-documented distro.
I'll give you an opportunity to go into more detail about those "extreem inbalances".
I'll bite: just to explain the problem with connecting batteries in parallel:
The 9v batteries in parallel have the same nominal voltage, but almost inevitably will slightly differ in actual voltage. The difference voltage tends to drive current around the circuit composed of the two batteries in parallel. There is only very low impedance in that circuit if the batteries are reasonably new and full of charge.
As a result, the idle circulating currents can build up to high values and cause heat dissipation problems, perhaps damaging the batteries and severely limiting the useful life of the arrangement.
Since the whole point is to get longer life, that looks a bit self-defeating.
A simple solution is to include a series diode with each battery. The loss of about 0.5v overall will not be appreciable because of the wide iPod voltage tolerance.
If there is any truth in the gossip about 'not going too well' -- or even if there isn't -- there is something that the community could take part in, to help make a success of the pioneering aspects of the Munich transition. I don't know if there is already a 'Munich linux-transition wishlist website'. But such a thing could be a medium for discussion and problem-solving about teething problems, between the intrepid Munich IT people and the rest of the community. And its content could eventually help generate a blueprint for other transitions yet to come.
Given that the story is based on efforts to make a useful vaccine against a _known_ virus already out there, talk of creating 'superflu' is just... superfluity.
Let's just get this straight: according to the article, the initial data were of low precision, they implied a very large uncertainty in the asteroid's trajectory. (In the event, it wasn't even a near-miss -- it was millions of km off, several times the moon's distance.)
The large uncertainty meant that at any one moment before the conceivable (but very unlikely) arrival of the body at or anywhere near the earth, there was a very large area of uncertainty, in which the asteroid's actual point of arrival would be one tiny and uncertain spot, and the possible trajectories leading to earth would be represented by another tiny blob (tiny relative to the whole area of uncertainty), most probably located very far away from the spot containing the real asteroid.
Calculations on real computers often represent an area of uncertainty like this by a nominal position that is very roughly at the centre of the area of uncertainty, accompanied by a measure of the size of the area of uncertainty.
The fact that one can physically read from the printed result and see that nominal position separately from its accompanying measure of uncertainty, because of the way the figures are presented on screen or paper, that does not give the nominal position any reality.
It happened that the nominal position first calculated in the case of AL00667 would have been (if of zero error) a trajectory heading for earth. But it wasn't of zero error, nor even close.
The whole scare looks like an artifact of the way in which uncertain results involving a continuum are presented using discrete digits.
I'd suggest that Mandrake people could not be forced (at law) to go back to older versions than what they already use, if they don't want to conform with the new licence and its extra notification conditions.
If anybody has already used and relied on the latest version (or latest -rc) and its associated licence conditions _before_ the recent statement of licence change, it seems likely there would legally be an estoppel to prevent the XFree86 people succeeding if they try to retrospectively enforce a tightening-up of licence terms -- though I guess they can use new terms freely for their own future releases. [btw, of course this is legal debate not legal advice - CYOLA]
It looks, regrettably, like the kind of action that could make a fork viable and even necessary.
We are not paid to give an informative unbaised opinion. The BBC however are,we (brits) pay them to give us the facts, the truth.
Hope springs eternal. No chance there of money back for failure to deliver the goods. The Gilligan/Kelly/WMD affair is a sign (not the first) that it's pretty hopeless to expect the truth from them. They brush aside complaints.
Do you have any resources that help turn the knoppix install into a real install?
I had Knoppix and used both of the methods that were recommended (there was a newer one that was supposedly better that I tried, when it didn't work I tried the older method).
Well, in case this helps: I've had no trouble in using the 'knx-hdinstall' script (located in/usr/local/bin after booting from live CD) to install linux on a few machines now, i.e. from a Knoppix live-CD to a hd partition.
The result of doing this, after answering the install questions appropriately, is a Debian testing/unstable setup, in which the root user has a password, and the 'knoppix' user also has a password -- none of the 'no-login' features of the live CD setup.
(I did first tweak the script a little, but that was only because -- for unconnected reasons -- I wanted to locate the debian setup on a pre-prepared partition, _without_ allowing the script do its own reformatting. Normally the script will abort if instructed not to reformat the chosen partition).
What I had to do to get the machine bootable, besides using the knx-hdinstall script, was to make a boot floppy when offered the chance to do that while using knx-hdinstall, and then after installation, to reboot from that floppy, and finally, to run lilo from the floppy-booted linux os after inspecting and editing/etc/lilo.conf to make sure the correct partitions were mentioned. That last step relates mainly to the dual-boot setup that I wanted to end up with, and not so much to the knoppix installation itself.
If you could understand it, it wouldn't be a technical manual, it would be documentation.
After making allowances for the language translation needed, or for those that have read other stuff from Chaucer, it doesn't look too bad to understand at all.:)
I like it that this has been put on the web and even made it to/. -- even if not clear how this is news exactly!:-P
(Btw, someone skipped on proofreading the web transcription. A significant line or so went missing even in the very first paragraph... they left out the bit where Chaucer reminds littel Lowys that he gave him one that he made earlier, and it's suitable for use at their own particular 'horizon' (latitude), Ox[en]ford, where the wording starts in again. So the web version may be a bit harder to understand than it needed to be.:) )
I thought they were not supposed to be obvious to anyone skilled in the field. This is so damned obvious that anyone in or out of the field can see it.
What the hell happened to common sense?
(1) True, but the obviousness argument doesn't exist in a vacuum. To make an obviousness argument you still need to start with some related (but non-identical, clearly) prior art. Then you need to show that the differences between the current claim and the art are so (generally known for themselves, common workshop variants, or whatever) that the current claims as a whole would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the field.
USPTO, you have pissed us off too many times. Prepare to be slashdotted.
This sure does look to me like yet another patent without any apparent ingenuity at all.
But before getting ignored by the USPTO,/.ers might like to note first, that the filing date of the application leading to this wretched patent was Nov 23, 1999, so anything done in 2000 can't be relied on as prior art.
Second, the subject of the patent appears to be the coordinated allocation of email addresses and matching web addresses, such as an email address of willrobinson@physicians.org, along with a web address of http://willrobinson.physicians.org.
While I would personally agree that this is a case of 'Eureka - not!', that won't cut any ice at the USPTO. In reality, evidence of relevant prior art would be needed to take this out.
The prior art would include (a) anything that was used in the US or published in print before 23 Nov 1998, (b) anything used in the US or published in print in the period 11/23/98-11/22/99 -- except insofar as the 'inventors' don't prove that they 'invented' it first, and (c) anything 'invented' in the US before the named inventors did it, whenever that was.
Slashdot Mirror
The party's not necessarily over yet.
....... just in case you thought 7 years to summary judgment is slow ..... :-(
A summary judgment could get overturned on appeal, the case could be remanded back for trial, then trial judgment or verdict could be questioned on appeal, there could be more remands and appeals after that
Whether any of this happens depends on how the patentee and its lawyers view the reasons given for summary judgment, and either carry on or drop it.
-wb-
It looks as if Rusty Russell was allowed a good amount of time to give the Linux Australia position. The transcript of all the witnesses is a very long one. From my scan of it, he clearly used the opportunity well to make clear how potentially oppressive the results would be if Australia accepts the bilateral agreement with US. The agreement would not only put a DMCA-like law into effect in Australia: aspects of the result in Australia might be even harsher than in the US. Also, the agreement would seemingly bring a position where Australia would be exposed to trade sanctions if the Australian legislature ever had second thoughts in future and decided to relax aspects of the law resulting from the bilateral agreement.
-wb-
First off Hepatitis is an single strain RNA virus
:) In any case, DNA/RNA is not the main issue, virus types are more individual than that, and there are variants of DNA and RNA virus lifecycles that lead to complications of designing possible therapy and safety of therapy (sigh). One of the authors himself was quoted as saying he doesn't know if the new virus will do harm or not.
HIV is a double stranded DNA virus
Parent should be modded down for misinformation: this is plain wrong, HIV is a RNA virus with DNA in its reproduction pathway. Of the different hepatitis viruses, some are based on DNA (with RNA in their reproduction pathway -- hep.B) and some others are based on RNA. I hope the parent poster does a whole lot more revision before his exams
-wb-
A substantial body of opinion dates the major destruction of the Alexandrian library/museum to the late 4th century AD, i.e. a time when Christians were in charge and very concerned to discourage pagan things, which included the learning of the ancients ........
...
It is also worth remembering that much of what did survive out of the destruction of classical learning was eventually preserved and re-transmitted to a deeply ignorant and religiously hidebound Europe several hundred years later through the hands of the relatively liberal and learned muslim arabs
-wb-
The USPTO only has one type of patent. The "I want a monopoly on this" patent. There should be defensive patents, patents issued saying "we figured out how to do this on our own, we don't want to stop other people form figuring out the same thing we just don't want to be prevented from using our inventions."
These already are available (in the US, anyway). They are called "Statutory Invention Registrations".
But they are not much used, probably because they don't create proprietary rights, only the right to prevent later inventors patenting a similar thing (not the same thing, be warned, as preventing risk of infringement of other rights).
Here is a starting point for further info: USPTO details for 35 USC 157
-wb-
Why only pirated installations in south east asia?
What the mention of China and SE Asia said to me, to spell it out, was this reminder: that however tight and hard the legislative screw is turned in US and Europe, and however hard punitive enforcement is set up there, those measures will not address the problem because that still leaves plenty of infected machines elsewhere, in countries that such legal measures don't reach, to screw the internet with virus traffic and worms.
It's also not about how much it is worth to the user to pay: Making patches universally available would rationally be seen by MS as an initiative to retain/(re)build market reputation and maintain market share.
-wb-
Microsoft's USP 6,727,830 is for using the length of time an application button is pressed, in various broadly-specified ways. It was issued April 27, 2004, and filed July 12, 2002, as a continuation of an earlier application filed Jan 5, 1999. So the timeframe for unconditional prior art status of printed publications and uses in USA appears to be the timeframe ending on Jan 4 1998.
My HP41 programmable calculator, in use since 1981, was and is a "limited-resource computing device" with (physical) buttons associated with applications (functions). For every button and application there was a period during which the application's name would be displayed for a predetermined period if the button is pressed and held down, and activated if the button was released during that period, but if the button was held down longer, the display would go to 'null' and the application would not be activated on release. (It was a valuable HP41 feature to enable the user to check and get a reminder of what a button would do, without committing to the operation.)
It seems to be only on the last point -- what happens after delayed release -- that the Microsoft patent claims appear to differ
in detail from the HP41.
But the actions specified vaguely in the MS claims do not appear to be matters of principle, let alone invention, they are just choices about which alternative action should happen after delayed release.
I hope this patent would be found invalid at least for obviousness if challenged. But like so many others, MS may calculate on benefiting from the doubt in the meantime, and from the effort and expense of mounting a challenge.
-wb-
What if they don't get an NDA, what do they lose?
Well, besides the pressure for NDAs from commercial sponsors, Barth Netterfield in the interview mentioned some completely research-based pressures. He mentioned how some researchers feel themselves to be in competition with other researchers. This can give rise to fears such as losing publication/discovery credit, and losing priority of publication, e.g. because somebody else gets in first using tools/information acquired from their scientific competitor if there is no restraint. (This is of course in addition to the losses that business sponsors fear they may suffer -- which include fear that a competitor may get the tools/information and build products and patent rights on top of them if there is no restraint in its competitive use.)
NDAs often present headaches to all concerned, and often there is difficulty in getting them written to express properly what either side wants, plus the difficulties getting both sides to agree. Careless drafting often means they are too broad or (less often perhaps) too narrow.
But the reasons why they are needed boil down to one thing in principle: that nowadays there are many things that the outside world could do with research results, that the makers of those results feel could harm their academic or commercial interests. Therefore they want some degree of controls placed on what the outside world does, the degrees and types of control vary with the situation. Perhaps in long-gone days there may have been near-consensus about scientific etiquette, and maybe that controlled some of these matters. But it seems that etiquette alone may have failed to give satisfaction often enough, and/or the world may have got more complex and overtly aggressive enough, that many people now want what should happen spelled out in writing.
-wb-
...accurate and public measurement of an extraterrestrial distance.
... determine these orbits far more accurately (by one or two orders of magnitude) than do the optical data." The report for the current latest general ephemeris on public release DE405, here, says much the same.
I doubt that the public project related to the 2004 transit is intended to obtain more accurate measurements than already exist, for the distances and timings associated with Venus.
For all of the inner planets, even the best professional optical telescope measurements are already so much less accurate than modern non-optical measurements, such as radar-ranging and spacecraft measurements, that optical data (except for the outer planets) did not contribute at all to the final data-sets that went to make up the current best professional ephemerides. This JPL report, about the latest-but-one of the professional solar-system ephemerides, DE403, says that "all of the optical observations for the Sun, Mercury, Venus and Mars were omitted from the least-squares adjustments leading to DE403. Newer and more accurate data-types
The project for measuring the timing of the June Venus transit looks like mainly an exercise in public awareness and education. Maybe there is also an aim of historical reconstruction, for doing something like re-assessing the performance of the old astronomers who measured previous transits, in an age when optical telescopes still did provide the only serious measurements available.
-wb-
He believes that people with 10 years experience in C++ have nothing significant to offer over people with 2 years experience.
In almost any field of skill, you get some people who eventually push out the limits -- they almost never stop learning and advancing -- and there are others who hardly advance beyond the basic skill level, if they achieve that.
Your boss may be jaded by the experience of hiring people from the second group, but you might need to remind him that the first group exists too.
It's the difference between people who really have 12 years of experience, and those who have had practically the same initial two years, but six times over.
Your boss may challenge you to show indicators of continuing development and acquisition of mature skill, but that would be a different question.
-wb-
Why is it that we have this never ending need for more powerlines and more electricity rather than looking for alternatives with any real conviction?
What would the alternatives be? Household generated power?
It's quite hard to know what would make a real difference without turning the clock right back.
I live in a house that was built about 80 years ago, and saw remains of the original electric power circuits, rated at 20 amp overall -- clearly little more load was expected then than a few light-bulbs and maybe an occasionally-used electric fire or two. People had coal fires and cooked with gas or solid-fuel, no central heating, let-alone air-conditioning, and wore warm clothes when they needed it.
Now there more houses and far more electric appliances, and stories tell of nationwide power surges when the television ads come on and '00,000s switch on their electric kettles to make coffee. For all that, it's not clear without hard figures that domestic consumption is even the main key to economy, compared with heavy industry.
-wb-
Well, I just have to say I think it's a bit cruel and insensitive to have this kind of a joke at RMS's expense, as if to make out that he's some kind of a pedant.
:) Far better, though, to try and communicate across the generation gap ...
Maybe it just shows how very young the young can be
-wb- (feeling humor-impaired after what must surely be the biggest spate of April-1 non-jokes ever)
Even eating organic rice will not save you, since small amounts of rice seeds will surely drift on the winds and contaminate all crops. Do we really want to risk our young daughters eating abnormal quantities of lactoferrin and risking a higher rate of gigantomastia and breast cancer?
..
Just a couple of questions of the kind that often get overlooked
Since when was rice eaten raw?
Since when did cooked (i.e., denatured) proteins retain the hormonal/enzyme activities of the native protein?
There's a whole lot of wild imagination going into the stories of these so-called risks.
-wb-
I can't believe that out of 4 million patents, only 151 of them were been invalidated since 1988. Scary
That's not what the story meant (but it was ambiguously worded). The report related only to patents invalidated by the Patent Office's re-examination process. That is a relatively new procedure. Many patent challenges are made in court, and those were not being counted. One of the factors dissuading would-be challengers from using the relatively new PTO patent re-examination process is that it has been perceived as not close enough to fairly balanced, and too likely to uphold the patent. Many challengers have preferred for that reason to reserve their patent challenges for federal court.
-wb-
I'm one of the not-very-skilled, but I found gentoo relatively easy to install from their pre-compiled CD. It's good enough that I don't absolutely need the biggies compiled from scratch. So I don't see that the argument about long compile-times need be so determinative.
Above all, I found documentation items from gentoo specially helpful, because they were written by someone with the skill of remembering and including _all_ of the needed steps -- and this isn't true of all documentation in linux-land. (OT -- another very very good documentation IMO is the GRUB manual.)
So let's hear it for user-helpful gentoo folk and their well-documented distro.
-wb-
I'll give you an opportunity to go into more detail about those "extreem inbalances".
I'll bite: just to explain the problem with connecting batteries in parallel:
The 9v batteries in parallel have the same nominal voltage, but almost inevitably will slightly differ in actual voltage. The difference voltage tends to drive current around the circuit composed of the two batteries in parallel. There is only very low impedance in that circuit if the batteries are reasonably new and full of charge.
As a result, the idle circulating currents can build up to high values and cause heat dissipation problems, perhaps damaging the batteries and severely limiting the useful life of the arrangement.
Since the whole point is to get longer life, that looks a bit self-defeating.
A simple solution is to include a series diode with each battery. The loss of about 0.5v overall will not be appreciable because of the wide iPod voltage tolerance.
-wb-
Leaving aside the gloating and the refutations:
If there is any truth in the gossip about 'not going too well' -- or even if there isn't -- there is something that the community could take part in, to help make a success of the pioneering aspects of the Munich transition. I don't know if there is already a 'Munich linux-transition wishlist website'. But such a thing could be a medium for discussion and problem-solving about teething problems, between the intrepid Munich IT people and the rest of the community. And its content could eventually help generate a blueprint for other transitions yet to come.
-wb-
Given that the story is based on efforts to make a useful vaccine against a _known_ virus already out there, talk of creating 'superflu' is just ... superfluity.
-wb-
Let's just get this straight: according to the article, the initial data were of low precision, they implied a very large uncertainty in the asteroid's trajectory. (In the event, it wasn't even a near-miss -- it was millions of km off, several times the moon's distance.)
The large uncertainty meant that at any one moment before the conceivable (but very unlikely) arrival of the body at or anywhere near the earth, there was a very large area of uncertainty, in which the asteroid's actual point of arrival would be one tiny and uncertain spot, and the possible trajectories leading to earth would be represented by another tiny blob (tiny relative to the whole area of uncertainty), most probably located very far away from the spot containing the real asteroid.
Calculations on real computers often represent an area of uncertainty like this by a nominal position that is very roughly at the centre of the area of uncertainty, accompanied by a measure of the size of the area of uncertainty.
The fact that one can physically read from the printed result and see that nominal position separately from its accompanying measure of uncertainty, because of the way the figures are presented on screen or paper, that does not give the nominal position any reality.
It happened that the nominal position first calculated in the case of AL00667 would have been (if of zero error) a trajectory heading for earth. But it wasn't of zero error, nor even close.
The whole scare looks like an artifact of the way in which uncertain results involving a continuum are presented using discrete digits.
-wb-
I'd suggest that Mandrake people could not be forced (at law) to go back to older versions than what they already use, if they don't want to conform with the new licence and its extra notification conditions.
If anybody has already used and relied on the latest version (or latest -rc) and its associated licence conditions _before_ the recent statement of licence change, it seems likely there would legally be an estoppel to prevent the XFree86 people succeeding if they try to retrospectively enforce a tightening-up of licence terms -- though I guess they can use new terms freely for their own future releases. [btw, of course this is legal debate not legal advice - CYOLA]
It looks, regrettably, like the kind of action that could make a fork viable and even necessary.
-wb-
We are not paid to give an informative unbaised opinion. The BBC however are,we (brits) pay them to give us the facts, the truth.
Hope springs eternal. No chance there of money back for failure to deliver the goods. The Gilligan/Kelly/WMD affair is a sign (not the first) that it's pretty hopeless to expect the truth from them. They brush aside complaints.
-wb-
Do you have any resources that help turn the knoppix install into a real install?
/usr/local/bin after booting from live CD) to install linux on a few machines now, i.e. from a Knoppix live-CD to a hd partition.
/etc/lilo.conf to make sure the correct partitions were mentioned. That last step relates mainly to the dual-boot setup that I wanted to end up with, and not so much to the knoppix installation itself.
I had Knoppix and used both of the methods that were recommended (there was a newer one that was supposedly better that I tried, when it didn't work I tried the older method).
Well, in case this helps: I've had no trouble in using the 'knx-hdinstall' script (located in
The result of doing this, after answering the install questions appropriately, is a Debian testing/unstable setup, in which the root user has a password, and the 'knoppix' user also has a password -- none of the 'no-login' features of the live CD setup.
(I did first tweak the script a little, but that was only because -- for unconnected reasons -- I wanted to locate the debian setup on a pre-prepared partition, _without_ allowing the script do its own reformatting. Normally the script will abort if instructed not to reformat the chosen partition).
What I had to do to get the machine bootable, besides using the knx-hdinstall script, was to make a boot floppy when offered the chance to do that while using knx-hdinstall, and then after installation, to reboot from that floppy, and finally, to run lilo from the floppy-booted linux os after inspecting and editing
Best of luck if you try it again.
-wb-
If you could understand it, it wouldn't be a technical manual, it would be documentation.
:)
/. -- even if not clear how this is news exactly! :-P
... they left out the bit where Chaucer reminds littel Lowys that he gave him one that he made earlier, and it's suitable for use at their own particular 'horizon' (latitude), Ox[en]ford, where the wording starts in again. So the web version may be a bit harder to understand than it needed to be. :) )
After making allowances for the language translation needed, or for those that have read other stuff from Chaucer, it doesn't look too bad to understand at all.
I like it that this has been put on the web and even made it to
(Btw, someone skipped on proofreading the web transcription. A significant line or so went missing even in the very first paragraph
-wb-
I thought they were not supposed to be obvious to anyone skilled in the field. This is so damned obvious that anyone in or out of the field can see it.
:-(
What the hell happened to common sense?
(1) True, but the obviousness argument doesn't exist in a vacuum. To make an obviousness argument you still need to start with some related (but non-identical, clearly) prior art. Then you need to show that the differences between the current claim and the art are so (generally known for themselves, common workshop variants, or whatever) that the current claims as a whole would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the field.
(2) What can I say?
-wb-
USPTO, you have pissed us off too many times.
/.ers might like to note first, that the filing date of the application leading to this wretched patent was Nov 23, 1999, so anything done in 2000 can't be relied on as prior art.
Prepare to be slashdotted.
This sure does look to me like yet another patent without any apparent ingenuity at all.
But before getting ignored by the USPTO,
Second, the subject of the patent appears to be the coordinated allocation of email addresses and matching web addresses, such as an email address of willrobinson@physicians.org, along with a web address of http://willrobinson.physicians.org.
While I would personally agree that this is a case of 'Eureka - not!', that won't cut any ice at the USPTO. In reality, evidence of relevant prior art would be needed to take this out.
The prior art would include (a) anything that was used in the US or published in print before 23 Nov 1998, (b) anything used in the US or published in print in the period 11/23/98-11/22/99 -- except insofar as the 'inventors' don't prove that they 'invented' it first, and (c) anything 'invented' in the US before the named inventors did it, whenever that was.
-wb-