Sometimes all a patent holder dose is read PC Magazine, then translate an article or product review into legalese and file the result at the Patent Office.
Under the American system there is no penalty for filing a patent today on something as obvious and commonplace as 120 Volt AC Electricity. The only possible penalties you could suffer are 1. to have the Application rejected (see *) or 2. To have the patent thrown out when you attempt to defend it in court. The former is no punishment since it just puts you back where you started. The Latter only hurts if you overspend on lawyers. Clever Patent sharks make the legal team part owners.
* -: Many decades ago Albert Einstein worked in the Patent Office. Since he left the average IQ in that office has been declining by around 50% per year compounded. Which means that the current average is so close to zero, that employing a few heads of Cabbage would improve matters.
To make matters worse, those Patent officers are grossly overworked as the number of staff members has not kept pace with the increase in Applications. Even the US Embassy here in Kingston had enough sense to get more interviewers when the number of applicants increased.
Actually what's wrong with taco's post is the icon.
This article should have had the "foot". Except that it was not that funny:(
PS: In a side note, this journalist (Paul McNamara) is probably just training to become a stock market annalist. A profession dominated by guys who make a living by "Predicting the past" with moderate accuracy.
The corporate vale is very thick. Odd as it seams, all SCO's management would need to do to get shafted royally is pay personal expenses directly from the company accounts and skip the AGM.
1. Usually the diagnosis is done over the phone where someone with a good memory of an actual failure will know how to convince phone support that he has the same symptoms again. I.e. "My hard drive is making a funny clicking sound. The BIOS doesn't even detect that the drive is in the machine."
2. Often the field techs are the least competent engineers available. I once had a guy on my teem replace several major components (Motherboard, Power board, 1 of 2 PSUs, 2 of 6 DIMMs) on THE WRONG SERVER. Understand what this means. He was repairing a machine that was not failed while the failed machine was sitting right next to it, And we used to screen and train our guys.
Where I come from (Jamaica) that's simple theft. If I bought a new part and payed you to replace it the old part is still mine.
I may choose to have you dispose of it or to sell it to you as reusable scrap. The choice is mine however. And again the reason is simple and has nothing to do with personal data.
If you have a loose IDE cable and I tell you "The drive is dead" then sell you a replacement and keep the old drive, I can then sell that old drive. My profit would be 100% of the sale price.
Screwing over the customer so you can sell his stuff? Most jurisdictions discourage that:)
This only applies to Servers. Desktop and Laptop users are screwed. Looks like your best bet is to degauze the old drive with a big magnet before the technician arrives if you are paranoid.
Right there on the "customize your system" page for many (if not all) Dell Machines is the option to keep your defective disks after they have been replaced.
It costs a little extra and coming from the field support arena I know why.
Whenever you replace a part under warranty they take the old one. Not because they have use for it but to make sure you don't. Imagine an unscrupulous person who would call in "My drive is broken" then when the tech replaces the drive, he just turns around and sells the old one (which was fine anyway).
The same logically applies to other components and Dell only makes this special exemption for Hard drives because that's where the data is stored.
The monopoly Power Company in Jamaica has very low capacity now with no spare capacity at all. (I.e. Every time a plant goes down so dose a portion of the grid).
That Power company (JPS) was sold to a Japanese Company (Mirobeny[SP?]) a few months ago.
This puts the odds of Jamaica getting one of these early at around 2:1
On a more serius note. The laws of nature were written by God. After writing them he set about building a Universe to the specifications allowed by those laws.
Either that or he built a universe, made it work and these laws are just documenting how his code functions.
Cell tower density is far from proportional to either land area or population.
Jamaica is very hilly and towers have to be positioned to get your signal around those obstructions without too much overlap.
Our larger and newer (6 years) cellphone provider has over 1,000 towers with coverage of around 98% of the population and around 92% of the land mass.
They are forever expanding the network but have now hit the point of diminishing returns. Some homes may never be served by the GSM network but they are looking at alternatives (sorry. not allowed to spill more)
Full Disclosure: I work for that cell provider now.
In some cases (like that monstrosity) there are no license savings because the application vendor quit, but was kind enough to hand us the source code on their way out of the business.
Here in Jamaica one celphone company spnt a year advertising it's performance during huricane Ivan. What's worse is that the other major competitor had everything. Batterys, Generators etc... The mistake thy made was in the size fuel tanks at each site. They figured a couple days suply would be enogh.
With the number of Cellsites they have , this ment a small army roaming the country with botles of gasoline to keap the network at least partialy running.
And here are you yanks panicking over government esentialy saying to cell companies "Excersize some common sence or we will kick your bots"
At least your story only involved one major blunder (no backups).
There is really nothing wrong with riding an old computer into the ground. Just make sure you plan an escape path. I.e. Test your software and configuration on new hardware. If you have multiple ancient boxes in your data centre and the testing is a routine matter then keeping just a few spares around to swap out whichever old box keels over is a cost saving measure.
Why? Because if the software and workload has not changed all you are shopping for is reliability. The punyest Rack mountable Dell with redundant hardware (PSU and HDD at least) will outrun any X86 server you bought 10 years ago and possibly for less than the cost of spare parts.
I should know we. We just replaced an old monstrosity with 4 CPUs and dedicated external storage with a bare bones PE1950 and internal 250 GB SATA RAID1.
Not because the new box was faster or more reliable. But simply to save on electricity.
Actually you are more likely to loose porn and other personal data without any available backups. Corporate data tends to be on some kind of backup schedule.
As for personal data disasters. There was a Dell Laptop model (can't remember which one) that has a short screw directly over the hard drives circuit board. I put in a slightly longer screw by mistake and killed the drive.
It took us 2 days to find the exact model on E-Bay then 2 minutes to swap the circuit boards. After which the data was transferd to an external drive. Then a brand new replacement drive was installed for regular use.
That Blunder cost around $150 and 5 days of downtime on a laptop but I (and all the other geeks in the office) learned a lot about being meticulous.
"Language is not just a medium of comunication. It is a medium of thoght."
Translation -: If you don't have the words for a concept you cannot fully grasp it. This is why some slave-masters made literacy a capital offence.
Now last time I checked, all the history books refer to "women's suffrage" and the "suffragettes". There are certain general items that I would expect everyone at university to grasp.
I.e. Basic arithmetic, Language, Geography (It's one thing to misplace Uzbekistan or even Jamaica (my home) but we have people in collage who can't find India.) and History. Not all of History of course. But at least a rough outline of those areas which are still having an obvious impact on the world today.
Wrong premise. An election campaign is different from vote buying. It's more like candidate selling. I.e. convince the voter to spend his currency (vote) on your product (candidate).
There is of course another possibility. According to this clip. A significant number of collage students will give up the vote for no charge at all.
I have to stop here and put on my male-chauvinist-pig's armour and wait for the feminist onslaught.
The moon wasn't an option since the ship couldn't even break orbit.
There were people there? I never read that before. Darned. Now that towing charge doesn't bother me so much anymore. I mean it doesn't bother our hypothetical pilot anymore. sorry.
I'm just a little shaken by the loss of life. And to think we... I mean that pilot caused it.
How many people died? how big a village? Were there any survivors?
The Tunguska region is one of the largest uninhabited land areas on earth. One of the few places were an explosion could level 2000 square kilometres of forest while killing no people and very few advanced animals.
In other words the perfect place for a being with thought processes similar to ours to drop a dysfunctional engine core (or something similar) before it explodes.
Now what became of that pilot, his ship and possibly his crew? Chances are they made a safe landing in another remote area and were latter picked up by the alien equivalent of "American Automobile Association". The towing charge from within our atmosphere to the nearest repair shop might have ruined their whole day though:).
That scenario would explain the complete lack of debris. Depending on it's construction the jettisoned portion of the engine would all be vaporised in a massive "nuclear like" explosion.
Slashdot Mirror
That's probably because:
1. You did it in front of them (and a few cameras)
2. You did it in such a way that the "gas" stuck to your face for a week.
3. You violently resisted their efforts to stop you.
Lucky for you, the videos have been censured by youtube for being too obscene, although there are several "reaction shots" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xos1v5A2p94
Sometimes all a patent holder dose is read PC Magazine, then translate an article or product review into legalese and file the result at the Patent Office.
Under the American system there is no penalty for filing a patent today on something as obvious and commonplace as 120 Volt AC Electricity. The only possible penalties you could suffer are 1. to have the Application rejected (see *) or 2. To have the patent thrown out when you attempt to defend it in court. The former is no punishment since it just puts you back where you started. The Latter only hurts if you overspend on lawyers. Clever Patent sharks make the legal team part owners.
* -: Many decades ago Albert Einstein worked in the Patent Office. Since he left the average IQ in that office has been declining by around 50% per year compounded. Which means that the current average is so close to zero, that employing a few heads of Cabbage would improve matters.
To make matters worse, those Patent officers are grossly overworked as the number of staff members has not kept pace with the increase in Applications. Even the US Embassy here in Kingston had enough sense to get more interviewers when the number of applicants increased.
Actually what's wrong with taco's post is the icon.
:(
This article should have had the "foot". Except that it was not that funny
PS: In a side note, this journalist (Paul McNamara) is probably just training to become a stock market annalist. A profession dominated by guys who make a living by "Predicting the past" with moderate accuracy.
Sad but true.
The corporate vale is very thick. Odd as it seams, all SCO's management would need to do to get shafted royally is pay personal expenses directly from the company accounts and skip the AGM.
They haven't been forthcoming either.
Can I borrow your crystal ball?
And both versions speak in general terms. I want to know the numbers.
I.e. How much DATA is saved for an all digital, big budget feature like Superman Returns (the example from TFA).
Is it Gigabytes, terabytes or Petabytes? That basic starting point would help me know if the $208K per year figure even begins to make seance.
Wow. Interesting. I never knew that.
1. Usually the diagnosis is done over the phone where someone with a good memory of an actual failure will know how to convince phone support that he has the same symptoms again. I.e. "My hard drive is making a funny clicking sound. The BIOS doesn't even detect that the drive is in the machine."
2. Often the field techs are the least competent engineers available. I once had a guy on my teem replace several major components (Motherboard, Power board, 1 of 2 PSUs, 2 of 6 DIMMs) on THE WRONG SERVER. Understand what this means. He was repairing a machine that was not failed while the failed machine was sitting right next to it, And we used to screen and train our guys.
Ohh...
:)
Where I come from (Jamaica) that's simple theft. If I bought a new part and payed you to replace it the old part is still mine.
I may choose to have you dispose of it or to sell it to you as reusable scrap. The choice is mine however. And again the reason is simple and has nothing to do with personal data.
If you have a loose IDE cable and I tell you "The drive is dead" then sell you a replacement and keep the old drive, I can then sell that old drive. My profit would be 100% of the sale price.
Screwing over the customer so you can sell his stuff? Most jurisdictions discourage that
Sorry. Just checked.
This only applies to Servers. Desktop and Laptop users are screwed. Looks like your best bet is to degauze the old drive with a big magnet before the technician arrives if you are paranoid.
Right there on the "customize your system" page for many (if not all) Dell Machines is the option to keep your defective disks after they have been replaced.
It costs a little extra and coming from the field support arena I know why.
Whenever you replace a part under warranty they take the old one. Not because they have use for it but to make sure you don't. Imagine an unscrupulous person who would call in "My drive is broken" then when the tech replaces the drive, he just turns around and sells the old one (which was fine anyway).
The same logically applies to other components and Dell only makes this special exemption for Hard drives because that's where the data is stored.
This is so cool.
The monopoly Power Company in Jamaica has very low capacity now with no spare capacity at all. (I.e. Every time a plant goes down so dose a portion of the grid).
That Power company (JPS) was sold to a Japanese Company (Mirobeny[SP?]) a few months ago.
This puts the odds of Jamaica getting one of these early at around 2:1
Yeah too bad.
On a more serius note. The laws of nature were written by God. After writing them he set about building a Universe to the specifications allowed by those laws.
Either that or he built a universe, made it work and these laws are just documenting how his code functions.
Cell tower density is far from proportional to either land area or population.
Jamaica is very hilly and towers have to be positioned to get your signal around those obstructions without too much overlap.
Our larger and newer (6 years) cellphone provider has over 1,000 towers with coverage of around 98% of the population and around 92% of the land mass.
They are forever expanding the network but have now hit the point of diminishing returns. Some homes may never be served by the GSM network but they are looking at alternatives (sorry. not allowed to spill more)
Full Disclosure: I work for that cell provider now.
True words. Sometimes it is cheaper.
In some cases (like that monstrosity) there are no license savings because the application vendor quit, but was kind enough to hand us the source code on their way out of the business.
I find this whole discusion hilarius.
Here in Jamaica one celphone company spnt a year advertising it's performance during huricane Ivan. What's worse is that the other major competitor had everything. Batterys, Generators etc... The mistake thy made was in the size fuel tanks at each site. They figured a couple days suply would be enogh.
With the number of Cellsites they have , this ment a small army roaming the country with botles of gasoline to keap the network at least partialy running.
And here are you yanks panicking over government esentialy saying to cell companies "Excersize some common sence or we will kick your bots"
At least your story only involved one major blunder (no backups).
There is really nothing wrong with riding an old computer into the ground. Just make sure you plan an escape path. I.e. Test your software and configuration on new hardware. If you have multiple ancient boxes in your data centre and the testing is a routine matter then keeping just a few spares around to swap out whichever old box keels over is a cost saving measure.
Why? Because if the software and workload has not changed all you are shopping for is reliability. The punyest Rack mountable Dell with redundant hardware (PSU and HDD at least) will outrun any X86 server you bought 10 years ago and possibly for less than the cost of spare parts.
I should know we. We just replaced an old monstrosity with 4 CPUs and dedicated external storage with a bare bones PE1950 and internal 250 GB SATA RAID1.
Not because the new box was faster or more reliable. But simply to save on electricity.
Actually you are more likely to loose porn and other personal data without any available backups. Corporate data tends to be on some kind of backup schedule.
As for personal data disasters. There was a Dell Laptop model (can't remember which one) that has a short screw directly over the hard drives circuit board. I put in a slightly longer screw by mistake and killed the drive.
It took us 2 days to find the exact model on E-Bay then 2 minutes to swap the circuit boards. After which the data was transferd to an external drive. Then a brand new replacement drive was installed for regular use.
That Blunder cost around $150 and 5 days of downtime on a laptop but I (and all the other geeks in the office) learned a lot about being meticulous.
Now THAT is a good idea.
I just ran off and registered "kevinforge.com" for this express purpose. Yes. Forge is NOT my real name but you guys already know that right ???
Sorry. Jamaica grows the most theraputic stuff. To say nothing of the marketing program
"Language is not just a medium of comunication. It is a medium of thoght."
Translation -: If you don't have the words for a concept you cannot fully grasp it. This is why some slave-masters made literacy a capital offence.
Now last time I checked, all the history books refer to "women's suffrage" and the "suffragettes". There are certain general items that I would expect everyone at university to grasp.
I.e. Basic arithmetic, Language, Geography (It's one thing to misplace Uzbekistan or even Jamaica (my home) but we have people in collage who can't find India.) and History. Not all of History of course. But at least a rough outline of those areas which are still having an obvious impact on the world today.
Wow. Sometimes I wish I was allowed to mod responses to my own comment.
+5 Funny
Wrong premise. An election campaign is different from vote buying. It's more like candidate selling. I.e. convince the voter to spend his currency (vote) on your product (candidate).
There is of course another possibility. According to this clip. A significant number of collage students will give up the vote for no charge at all.
I have to stop here and put on my male-chauvinist-pig's armour and wait for the feminist onslaught.
The moon wasn't an option since the ship couldn't even break orbit.
There were people there? I never read that before. Darned. Now that towing charge doesn't bother me so much anymore. I mean it doesn't bother our hypothetical pilot anymore. sorry.
I'm just a little shaken by the loss of life. And to think we... I mean that pilot caused it.
How many people died? how big a village? Were there any survivors?
What's all this talk of an asteroid?
:).
The Tunguska region is one of the largest uninhabited land areas on earth. One of the few places were an explosion could level 2000 square kilometres of forest while killing no people and very few advanced animals.
In other words the perfect place for a being with thought processes similar to ours to drop a dysfunctional engine core (or something similar) before it explodes.
Now what became of that pilot, his ship and possibly his crew? Chances are they made a safe landing in another remote area and were latter picked up by the alien equivalent of "American Automobile Association". The towing charge from within our atmosphere to the nearest repair shop might have ruined their whole day though
That scenario would explain the complete lack of debris. Depending on it's construction the jettisoned portion of the engine would all be vaporised in a massive "nuclear like" explosion.