Your disks might be too slow, but OUM-based MLC flash drives are so fast most current SSDs would look like 80's tech.
MLC flash has a life cycle of only around 10,000 writes, though, which for swap is way too small to be useful. Your lifespan on that SSD is likely to be only a couple of years, or even less for demanding applications, and the pricing on them is still high enough that DRAM isn't actually that much more expensive (I see about $4/GB for SSDs compared to about $16/GB for DRAM), at which point more RAM is probably the better way to go.
. if you dont use ionice or something equivalent, io intensive ops will starve other applications, because the scheduler wont know that it's a low priority job.
CPU schedulers have had a heuristic since just about the dawn of time that states that processes using a lot of CPU should be automatically deprioritized in favour of those who use it sporadically. Why not use a similar heuristic for I/O schedulers?
Any "sane" filesystem will simply unlink that entry in the directory or table.
The only reason to be physically overwriting the entire space occupied by the 1GB file is some "super secret secure" filesystem used by people scared of having their porn browsing habits discovered by the FBI.
The problem isn't overwriting the data, it's adding the space previously used by the file to the free space bitmap/list. For a 1GB file on an FS with 1k blocks (not uncommon), you're going to be deallocating about a million blocks. Now, unless your system is fragmented horrendously, a lot of those are going to be hits to the same bitmap block (or similar), but you're still looking at writing about 5,000 or so blocks, probably scattered over several cylinders of your disk (=> more than one seek), so on a typical hard disk the process is going to take tens or hundreds of milliseconds at best. If badly fragmented, this could easily take over a second.
Did you have the ability to redeem your winnings, say for more metered time online? Then it's not prior art. Read the claims. They specify that the credits cannot be redeemed.
They only specify that they can't be redeemed "for legal currency". As doing so would be illegal in most states of the US, I would imagine few BBS operators would have been willing to do this. Winning more metered time would count as a "virtual currency [that] is not redeemable for legal currency" and therefore matches the claims, and is prior art.
Invalidating or avoiding it will require reading the claims, not the name or the abstract.
You're right.
What is claimed is:
1. A method, comprising:
receiving, at a server, a purchase order for virtual currency from a player, wherein the purchase order was made with legal currency, and wherein the virtual currency is usable within the context of a computer-implemented game;
crediting an account of the player with virtual currency, wherein the virtual currency is not redeemable for legal currency;
receiving a second purchase order for a virtual object within the context of the computer-implemented game from the player, wherein the second purchase order was made with virtual currency; and
debiting the account of the player based on the second purchase order.
Basically claims any form of virtual currency. Online casinos have been doing this just about forever.
2. The method of claim 1 wherein the computer-implemented game is a gambling game.
Restricts to gambling games. Online casinos have been doing this just about forever.
3. The method of claim 2 wherein the virtual currency comprises a plurality of virtual playing chips.
Appears to be essentially meaningless. WTF is a chip in a virtual currency context?
The claims carry on like this. 4 and 5 basically elaborate on things that all gambling systems must do. 6 is any virtual currency that can't be redeemed for real currency. 7 and 8 are the same as 4 and 5 only built on 6 rather than 1. 9 is selling in-game items for non-redeamable virtual currency; I expect Linden Labs will have a few things to say about that one, among others. 10 covers basically any imaginable implementation of 9. 11 is giving a gift of virtual currency, but only if the two players have a "friends" relationship set up. May be novel; I haven't seen it in any of the games I've played before, but hardly earth-shattering. 12-15 are the same as the first few claims but phrased from a "computer with a loaded program" perspective rather than a business-process perspective. 16 is basically the same as 11, only not restricted to currency, and requiring a client-server implementation. 17-20 are trivial, obvious variants of 16.
The rest of the application is also pretty bizarre. Take a look at figure 2. Basically, they've included a diagram of the organization of a typical computer, complete with northbridge and southbridge. Presumably because they think this will make the application look more technical than, "hey, gambling chips on a computer!!!1!"
Apparently with the next update you'll be able to install Android apps. I haven't looked at the Android API, but I would assume it includes everything you'd need to download a video via bittorrent and play it.
Why would those viewers be lost? Wouldn't those viewers have used a VCR 10 years ago? Or a TiVo?
Yes. But the networks count them as lost. The ratings provided by Nielsen et al only count live viewers. Why? Because the people who aren't watching live are less likely to see the commercials, and that's all they really care about.
Sorry, no. We were already on 32-bit 80386 machines back then [in 1986].
Barely. Sure, the 386 processor was available, but the first PC to use it didn't launch until nearly the end of the year (earliest review a brief search finds was in the Nov '86 issue of Byte). And with a $6,000+ price tag, most people were still buying 286s (about $3-5,000) or 8086-based machines (more like $1-2,000). Even as late as 1989, when I bought my first PC, 8086-based machines were much more common than 386s, and even if you were only slightly budget-minded you generally got a 286 rather than a 386.
I'm actually worried that this might be counter-productive. It's going to persuade the let's-wait-before-implementing-IPv6 people to wait a bit longer. Possibly more than it'll save. It'll be reported by the press with a "what were they panicking about?" tone, leading people who don't understand the issues to think of this as a storm-in-a-teacup that'll pass over without them doing anything, just like Y2K did.
So a simple example, but a big issue, is that of high end routers. They don't do routing in software, it isn't like they have a general purpose CPU that handles all the routing. They have one, but it is limited in power and is just for control. The routing itself is handled by ASICs. That is for speed reasons, only way to get data around that fast. Like all ASICs they do only what they were designed for. Ok well that means you have have a bigass router that can't handle IPv6. Sure technically you can upgrade the software and turn it on, but that hits the CPU. If anything more than a small amount of flows starts happening, the router crashes. You have to get a new router, that can do IPv6. Fine and well, but that costs a lot of money. These can be 7-8 figure devices. You don't just run out and buy all new ones all the time.
Well, that's true enough, but there have been reasonably accurate estimates of the date on which we'll run out of IPv4 addresses for over 5 years now, and prior to that most estimates were on the earlier rather than later side, so if the people buying these routers had performed rudimentary due diligence they should have either:
1. seen that IPv6 compatibility will be necessary within the device's lifespan and acquired one that can do this -- for instance, most of Cisco's models have had the capability for nearly ten years now -- or, 2. been aware that they were installing devices with a limited lifespan and budgeted for their replacement some time around now.
There are also software issues. Not everything handles IPv6 well. A major stalling point is Windows XP. It can have IPv6 added to it, but it doesn't support it by default.
I'm not convinced it would need to. I'd guess something like 99.9% of Windows XP installations are behind NAT routers; these routers could be reconfigured or replaced with ones that use an IPv4-over-IPv6 tunnel to handle this traffic.
But if it was something along those lines, the tasing could be perfectly legal.
Probably not, no. Assuming US law, the situations in which a taser can be legally used by a police officer are somewhat vague, as there have not been many court cases featuring them outside of the context of prison crowd control. See, for instance, this summary prepared for the Mountain View police department, and which recommends that in absence of any more specific laws, it would be advisable to assume the legal situation of using a taser is similar to that of using potentially lethal force, i.e. it should only be used if it is necessary to apprehend a suspect who is likely to pose a serious risk of harm to the public or if the suspect presents a credible threat to the life of the officer.
It's hard to see how a handcuffed man inside a police car with multiple police officers present can be considered either.
in Canada, maybe there isn't really freedom of speech.
For the record, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (part of Canada's constitution) states:
2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms: [...] (b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
Citizens need the right to record any public police action, and any police action in which the individual citizen is involved. This needs to be a law now.
The public needs a clear law allowing for the recording of police actions and allowing for the recording to be owned by the citizen and protected from seizure by police officers.
No country whose laws I've looked at in any detail has any law that prevents filming police actions, except in unusual circumstances (e.g. undercover police whose lives may be threatened by revealing images of them is a common one). All of them have laws that prevent the police from arbitrarily seizing material you have acquired perfectly legally and which are not related to an actual offence. Therefore, no law change seems to be required.
What needs to happen is that police should be disciplined for overstating the reach of the law, and people should stand up for their rights more.
The very large IPv6 address space supports a total of 2^128 (about 3.4×103^8) addresses--or approximately 5×10^28 (roughly 2^95) addresses for each of the roughly 6.8 billion (6.8×10^9) people alive in 2010.[13] In another perspective, this is the same number of IP addresses per person as the number of atoms in a metric ton of carbon.
Apples are better than oranges; they're whiter.
IPv6 doesn't provide 2^128 independently routable addresses. The design of the system is such that routing decisions may only be made on the first 64 bits of address, the remaining 64 bits being reserved for local network addressing. This means there are only 2^64 allocatable addresses (as all allocations have to be at least/64 allocations). Now, admittedly, that's still about 10^9 allocations per person, but it's nothing like the number of allocations suggested by the paragraph you quote.
Not sure why you think this is a troll. I, too, have recently had a massive malware infection through a Java applet. I did manage to sort it out via an antivirus program, but it took over 3 days for it to clean all 375,000 infected files from my system. It would have been faster to reinstall.
And people have to go to bookshops, look in a category, read the titles on spines, and inspect. In contrast, 25% of book sales now (roughly) are ebooks.
Last figures I heard were under 10%. The market's growing, but not that fast I don't think.
Guess what? Most publishers don't do much of anything to promote you. That's why Wayne Dyer had to load up a bunch of books in his car and drive around to radio stations getting talking opportunities back in the day,
Sure. Most authors go on promotional tours, and it really does help. It's better advertising than anything a publisher can do for you. But never understimate the one thing that a publisher can do which you can't: put your book in their catalogue, which for a big-name publisher means virtually automatic shelf space in most local bookshops. People are happier to buy your books (even online) if they've seen your name there, and there's little you can do to achieve that if you don't have a mainstream publisher.
95 years is for copyright on works created by corporations, or for works created prior to 1978.
I'm assuming his book has corporate copyright, as it has 4 authors. The alternative is that different parts of the books have copyright that will expire at different dates, which sounds unlikely.
I notice he talks about controlling the book forever, so he would also like a copyright term of infinity?
He probably subscribes to the belief that any time after he dies might as well be forever. His book's copyright term is 95 years; he's unlikely to live that long.
Konrath (the author of TFA) has been posting about this for a while, too. I guess the submitter has only just encountered him, but this is nothing new for him. He's well-known in publishing circles as an advocate of ebook self-publishing. He may not have been the first to talk about it, but he's probably the name that comes to mind for most in the industry when the idea is discussed.
Now you can become famous on YouTube and next thing you know be vaulted to levels unseen by many mainstream bands who were on the radio with one song.
Yeah. And you could win the lottery, too.
(Seriously: how many people post videos of themselves performing on youtube? How many become megastars because of it? I can think of maybe 3 examples...)
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Your disks might be too slow, but OUM-based MLC flash drives are so fast most current SSDs would look like 80's tech.
MLC flash has a life cycle of only around 10,000 writes, though, which for swap is way too small to be useful. Your lifespan on that SSD is likely to be only a couple of years, or even less for demanding applications, and the pricing on them is still high enough that DRAM isn't actually that much more expensive (I see about $4/GB for SSDs compared to about $16/GB for DRAM), at which point more RAM is probably the better way to go.
. if you dont use ionice or something equivalent, io intensive ops will starve other applications, because the scheduler wont know that it's a low priority job.
CPU schedulers have had a heuristic since just about the dawn of time that states that processes using a lot of CPU should be automatically deprioritized in favour of those who use it sporadically. Why not use a similar heuristic for I/O schedulers?
Depends on the paranoia of the user. FTFY.
Any "sane" filesystem will simply unlink that entry in the directory or table.
The only reason to be physically overwriting the entire space occupied by the 1GB file is some "super secret secure" filesystem used by people scared of having their porn browsing habits discovered by the FBI.
The problem isn't overwriting the data, it's adding the space previously used by the file to the free space bitmap/list. For a 1GB file on an FS with 1k blocks (not uncommon), you're going to be deallocating about a million blocks. Now, unless your system is fragmented horrendously, a lot of those are going to be hits to the same bitmap block (or similar), but you're still looking at writing about 5,000 or so blocks, probably scattered over several cylinders of your disk (=> more than one seek), so on a typical hard disk the process is going to take tens or hundreds of milliseconds at best. If badly fragmented, this could easily take over a second.
ALL currencies are virtual
The application defines "virtual" as meaning "usable within the context of a computer-implemented game".
Not quite sure how running an offshore online casino counts as "wasting your money". I hear it can be quite lucrative.
Did you have the ability to redeem your winnings, say for more metered time online? Then it's not prior art. Read the claims. They specify that the credits cannot be redeemed.
They only specify that they can't be redeemed "for legal currency". As doing so would be illegal in most states of the US, I would imagine few BBS operators would have been willing to do this. Winning more metered time would count as a "virtual currency [that] is not redeemable for legal currency" and therefore matches the claims, and is prior art.
Invalidating or avoiding it will require reading the claims, not the name or the abstract.
You're right.
Basically claims any form of virtual currency. Online casinos have been doing this just about forever.
Restricts to gambling games. Online casinos have been doing this just about forever.
Appears to be essentially meaningless. WTF is a chip in a virtual currency context?
The claims carry on like this. 4 and 5 basically elaborate on things that all gambling systems must do. 6 is any virtual currency that can't be redeemed for real currency. 7 and 8 are the same as 4 and 5 only built on 6 rather than 1. 9 is selling in-game items for non-redeamable virtual currency; I expect Linden Labs will have a few things to say about that one, among others. 10 covers basically any imaginable implementation of 9. 11 is giving a gift of virtual currency, but only if the two players have a "friends" relationship set up. May be novel; I haven't seen it in any of the games I've played before, but hardly earth-shattering. 12-15 are the same as the first few claims but phrased from a "computer with a loaded program" perspective rather than a business-process perspective. 16 is basically the same as 11, only not restricted to currency, and requiring a client-server implementation. 17-20 are trivial, obvious variants of 16.
The rest of the application is also pretty bizarre. Take a look at figure 2. Basically, they've included a diagram of the organization of a typical computer, complete with northbridge and southbridge. Presumably because they think this will make the application look more technical than, "hey, gambling chips on a computer!!!1!"
Uh, no it doesn't...
No, actually it does. Really. If somebody else later disables it, that's not Google's fault, really, is it?
Apparently with the next update you'll be able to install Android apps. I haven't looked at the Android API, but I would assume it includes everything you'd need to download a video via bittorrent and play it.
Why would those viewers be lost? Wouldn't those viewers have used a VCR 10 years ago? Or a TiVo?
Yes. But the networks count them as lost. The ratings provided by Nielsen et al only count live viewers. Why? Because the people who aren't watching live are less likely to see the commercials, and that's all they really care about.
Sorry, no. We were already on 32-bit 80386 machines back then [in 1986].
Barely. Sure, the 386 processor was available, but the first PC to use it didn't launch until nearly the end of the year (earliest review a brief search finds was in the Nov '86 issue of Byte). And with a $6,000+ price tag, most people were still buying 286s (about $3-5,000) or 8086-based machines (more like $1-2,000). Even as late as 1989, when I bought my first PC, 8086-based machines were much more common than 386s, and even if you were only slightly budget-minded you generally got a 286 rather than a 386.
I'm actually worried that this might be counter-productive. It's going to persuade the let's-wait-before-implementing-IPv6 people to wait a bit longer. Possibly more than it'll save. It'll be reported by the press with a "what were they panicking about?" tone, leading people who don't understand the issues to think of this as a storm-in-a-teacup that'll pass over without them doing anything, just like Y2K did.
So a simple example, but a big issue, is that of high end routers. They don't do routing in software, it isn't like they have a general purpose CPU that handles all the routing. They have one, but it is limited in power and is just for control. The routing itself is handled by ASICs. That is for speed reasons, only way to get data around that fast. Like all ASICs they do only what they were designed for. Ok well that means you have have a bigass router that can't handle IPv6. Sure technically you can upgrade the software and turn it on, but that hits the CPU. If anything more than a small amount of flows starts happening, the router crashes. You have to get a new router, that can do IPv6. Fine and well, but that costs a lot of money. These can be 7-8 figure devices. You don't just run out and buy all new ones all the time.
Well, that's true enough, but there have been reasonably accurate estimates of the date on which we'll run out of IPv4 addresses for over 5 years now, and prior to that most estimates were on the earlier rather than later side, so if the people buying these routers had performed rudimentary due diligence they should have either:
1. seen that IPv6 compatibility will be necessary within the device's lifespan and acquired one that can do this -- for instance, most of Cisco's models have had the capability for nearly ten years now -- or,
2. been aware that they were installing devices with a limited lifespan and budgeted for their replacement some time around now.
There are also software issues. Not everything handles IPv6 well. A major stalling point is Windows XP. It can have IPv6 added to it, but it doesn't support it by default.
I'm not convinced it would need to. I'd guess something like 99.9% of Windows XP installations are behind NAT routers; these routers could be reconfigured or replaced with ones that use an IPv4-over-IPv6 tunnel to handle this traffic.
But if it was something along those lines, the tasing could be perfectly legal.
Probably not, no. Assuming US law, the situations in which a taser can be legally used by a police officer are somewhat vague, as there have not been many court cases featuring them outside of the context of prison crowd control. See, for instance, this summary prepared for the Mountain View police department, and which recommends that in absence of any more specific laws, it would be advisable to assume the legal situation of using a taser is similar to that of using potentially lethal force, i.e. it should only be used if it is necessary to apprehend a suspect who is likely to pose a serious risk of harm to the public or if the suspect presents a credible threat to the life of the officer.
It's hard to see how a handcuffed man inside a police car with multiple police officers present can be considered either.
in Canada, maybe there isn't really freedom of speech.
For the record, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (part of Canada's constitution) states:
Citizens need the right to record any public police action, and any police action in which the individual citizen is involved.
This needs to be a law now.
The public needs a clear law allowing for the recording of police actions and allowing for the recording to be owned by the citizen and protected from seizure by police officers.
No country whose laws I've looked at in any detail has any law that prevents filming police actions, except in unusual circumstances (e.g. undercover police whose lives may be threatened by revealing images of them is a common one). All of them have laws that prevent the police from arbitrarily seizing material you have acquired perfectly legally and which are not related to an actual offence. Therefore, no law change seems to be required.
What needs to happen is that police should be disciplined for overstating the reach of the law, and people should stand up for their rights more.
Apples are better than oranges; they're whiter.
IPv6 doesn't provide 2^128 independently routable addresses. The design of the system is such that routing decisions may only be made on the first 64 bits of address, the remaining 64 bits being reserved for local network addressing. This means there are only 2^64 allocatable addresses (as all allocations have to be at least /64 allocations). Now, admittedly, that's still about 10^9 allocations per person, but it's nothing like the number of allocations suggested by the paragraph you quote.
Just wait until you hear the news that Larry Ellison is buying Linus Torvalds.
"Linux, I am your father."
"NOOOOOO!!!!!"
Not sure why you think this is a troll. I, too, have recently had a massive malware infection through a Java applet. I did manage to sort it out via an antivirus program, but it took over 3 days for it to clean all 375,000 infected files from my system. It would have been faster to reinstall.
And people have to go to bookshops, look in a category, read the titles on spines, and inspect. In contrast, 25% of book sales now (roughly) are ebooks.
Last figures I heard were under 10%. The market's growing, but not that fast I don't think.
Guess what? Most publishers don't do much of anything to promote you. That's why Wayne Dyer had to load up a bunch of books in his car and drive around to radio stations getting talking opportunities back in the day,
Sure. Most authors go on promotional tours, and it really does help. It's better advertising than anything a publisher can do for you. But never understimate the one thing that a publisher can do which you can't: put your book in their catalogue, which for a big-name publisher means virtually automatic shelf space in most local bookshops. People are happier to buy your books (even online) if they've seen your name there, and there's little you can do to achieve that if you don't have a mainstream publisher.
95 years is for copyright on works created by corporations, or for works created prior to 1978.
I'm assuming his book has corporate copyright, as it has 4 authors. The alternative is that different parts of the books have copyright that will expire at different dates, which sounds unlikely.
I notice he talks about controlling the book forever, so he would also like a copyright term of infinity?
He probably subscribes to the belief that any time after he dies might as well be forever. His book's copyright term is 95 years; he's unlikely to live that long.
Konrath (the author of TFA) has been posting about this for a while, too. I guess the submitter has only just encountered him, but this is nothing new for him. He's well-known in publishing circles as an advocate of ebook self-publishing. He may not have been the first to talk about it, but he's probably the name that comes to mind for most in the industry when the idea is discussed.
Now you can become famous on YouTube and next thing you know be vaulted to levels unseen by many mainstream bands who were on the radio with one song.
Yeah. And you could win the lottery, too.
(Seriously: how many people post videos of themselves performing on youtube? How many become megastars because of it? I can think of maybe 3 examples...)