RCN has provided "triple-play" voice, data, and cable tv service in a handful of big US cities since, what, 1997?
Whether this is prior art certainly depends on the claims actually in the patent and the details of RCN's implementation, but I know they were around well before 2000.
Interesting how the some of the most popular photos from these missions are pictures of other man-made objects. Think of the ratings if there were actual people there! Nasa could fund their mission on the ad revenue...
Put lockable casters on your desks, conference tables, bookcases. (Hopefully your chairs have wheels already.)
Subdivide the central core into 4 sectors with a tall fixed partition wall, so there's a core wall that spaces needing a solid wall (e.g. a conference room whiteboard) can abut. Put power and network jacks in this wall. Run a grid of 3/8" tension cables a few inches below the ceiling across the space on 12" centers (i.e. create a repeating 12"x12" grid of wires near the ceiling.) Space power and network drops regularly in the floor (or, if underfloor jacks are too expensive, in the ceiling.)
Allow teams and individuals to configure workspaces within that space by hanging various-height fabric curtains (weighted to the floor) from that grid with long j-hooks.
Just an idea I thought was neat - I'm sure there are problems with it, but cube walls are a bitch to move around and don't permit organic shapes or long, straight divisions with no perpendicular support. You could have individuals in C-shaped pods within an open area, or circular common workspaces with desks on the circumference, or any other configuration - and individual teams don't need someone from facilities to show up with tools to move things around, just a grasping pole to reach the j-hook (and maybe a ladder if you put your drops in the ceiling rather than the floor.)
I don't know definitively about the airline booking system but even back then, a lot of stuff was starting to happen. I had a friend who used to access his banking details, make transfers etc on an Atari 800 with a 1200/75 modem (who remembers those?) and PRESTEL graphic back around 1985. Equally, firms that did have online systems for their own staff's use often were somewhat lazy about protecting them from the outside world so I can well believe an airline booking system *aimed at travel agents* would be accessible to someone who'd worked out a valid id/password combo.
Exactly. I'm suggesting that this aspect of WarGames is actually a reasonable portrayal of what existed with respect to dial-up information services in 1983 - well, except for the global thermonuclear war part. Cutting-edge stuff to most people in 1983, but not total fiction a la swoopy visualizations that characterize most Hollywood depictions of computers (and remember that swoopy visualizations of computer systems and networks had already been done by 1983 - see 1982's Tron.)
Now, the huge "Crystal Palace" set built for WarGames *was* total fiction (and was one of the most expensive movie sets ever built at the time.) Take issue with that, if one must take issue with WarGames. (OTOH, word is that the Pentagon was so smitten with that vision of NORAD that they redesigned the command center to make it look more like the fictional version. By the time the base was idled last year, the similarities were striking. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:NORADCommandCen ter.jpg
Clearly written by a boy who wasn't tall enough to reach the ticket counter when Jurassic Park was in theaters, to say nothing of Wargames.
Yeah, most of those movies are truly terrible (and how did they miss "The Net"?), but the 10-year-old girl in Jurassic Park (who's been of legal drinking age for almost 3 years!) was shown using a real app called FSN that was indeed contemporary with the SGI gear of 1993 - a far cry from the Macromedia Director abominations of Mission: Impossible, for sure.
And listing WarGames - blasphemy! OK, it's ridiculous that Matthew Broderick would leave the speech synthesizer on (unless he was blind), but we (er, some people) really did use wardialers back then (well, just called them dialers before WarGames...), and man that IMSAI rig was sweet, if a little dated by 1983. Considering that typewriters still vastly outnumbered PC's at the time, the Internet had just switched over to TCP/IP, and the notion of booking an airline reservation with a home computer (fraudulently or not) was gee-whiz stuff, I'm willing to cut this movie much slack.
Gonzales added that he agrees with a letter sent to Congress in June by 49 state attorneys general, requesting federal legislation to require ISPs to hold onto customer data longer.
Who was the lone holdout state attorney general who didn't sign on to this executive branch power grab? I'd like to consider moving to that state.
Exqueeze me, but why are we still spending gigabucks on the Shuttle and ISS programs? The ISS, notwithstanding the fact that it's still under construction, is rapidly approaching the end of its design life. We won't even talk about the gruesome hack that is the modern shuttle program.
More pointless than war in Iraq, and more deadly if you're an American. (Something like 7% of astronauts have died on the job, a significantly higher death rate than the US military.)
IIRC, the magnetic coercivity of modern hard disk media is sufficiently high that the only sure method of data destruction is physical destruction of the platters.
Sledgehammer in the parking lot on the platters (removed from the drive, if possible) should do nicely for any application short of national security secrets - just be sure to wear safety goggles.
Now, what happens if you've lost all of your property in a fire, but still had an off-site digital backup of your legally purchased music somewhere? Does the loss of the original property invalidate the legality of the backups?
(I am not a lawyer, etc.)
There's no express right to make a backup of an audio recording, but leaving that aside, what's the point of a backup except to prolong access to the recording beyond the life of the original media? From the legal perspective, it's silly to even make a backup if one loses the right to use it in the event the original media is destroyed.
Now, the question of theft of the original media is slightly more interesting. A thief obtains no legal title to stolen goods, so if ones original media were stolen, one might retain constructive possession of the originals. That constructive possession would, if we assume the backups were themselves legal, permit the continued use of the backup media.
I wonder whether there's any precedent as to what would happen if the originals were later destroyed by the thief - would the use right terminate? If we assume that destruction of the originals in a house fire would terminate the right to use the backups, then I imagine no use right would be retained if the would-be thief hadn't stolen them but destroyed them and left the pieces in the possession of the owner. Wacky.
If you want mission-critical reliability, you should be running hardware that is mission-critical reliable. Hint: that ain't Intel.
This is 100% backwards. Redundant Array of Inexpensive Computers is the new model - design for failure with many cheap redundant servers. There are very few applications remaining where this is not a more cost effective (or just plain effective) approach than expensive "mission-critical" hardware.
By this logic, Australia, whose citizens are also required to vote and fined if they don't, should also have a highly corrupt government.
I see you're familiar with the Australian government!
-Isaac
Re:And this is indeed a serious problem with EBay.
on
How to Win on Ebay: Snipe
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
What I'd like is:
3. To enter my bid early but schedule it to be actually placed 2 seconds before the auction ends.
This is a sealed first-price auction, basically. Everyone submits secret bids, with the highest bid winning. I suspect eBay doesn't offer this model because it's not exciting for compulsive buyers. The sense of urgency created by the live competition and time constraint of a modified-English auction like eBay's are probably seen as crucial elements to attracting and retaining regular buyers.
-Isaac
Re:And this is indeed a serious problem with EBay.
on
How to Win on Ebay: Snipe
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Proxy bidding is supposed to allow easy auctions with fairness. The problem is the sniping phenomenon. And there is an easy fix: A bid will extend the auction by ~10 minutes if received in the last 10 minutes. Voila, no more sniping.
eBay has certainly considered and rejected this idea. If this were an auction type offered on eBay, every rational seller would choose it.
The reason it's not offered is that eBay is more dependent on bidders than sellers at the end of the day. Yes, sellers pay the fees to eBay, but sellers are less mobile than buyers - if a seller is not going to use eBay, what will they use? No other auction site has traffic within an order of magnitude of eBay. Most sellers' only other rational option is a local fixed-price sale through, e.g. craigslist - not an acceptible option to many sellers. Thus, how the sellers feel about sniping is immaterial to eBay - they're the only game in town and the sellers will come anyway.
OTOH, buyers care less about where they buy things than sellers do about how they sell them. Change the rules on eBay at this point and they will alienate their base of idiots^Wbuyers - the traffic that keeps eBay the only game in town. They already have a major fraud problem that's driving sales of some especially fraud-prone categories like computers and electronics to sites focusing on local cash deals like craigslist. The last thing they want is to change anything else that might alienate buyers.
(Yes, some buyers hate sniping, but most buyers hate bidding wars even more. Anything that helps sellers raise their average sale price hurts buyers, and since the buyers are what bring in the sellers...)
They aren't talking about still cameras, they are talking about cameras that take several frames a second. But now that you mention it, are there any movie cameras that use SLR technology?
Yes. The kind used for shooting actual movies - i.e. most 16 and 35mm film motion picture cameras use a rotating mirrored shutter to alternately direct light to the viewfinder or the film plane.
Baseball is played and enjoyed by billions (OK, maybe one billion) people around the world and couldn't manage to retain its slot in the Summer Games. Why should any videogame be in there?
(Well, OK, maybe Starcraft. It's at least as popular as curling, and like curling is dominated by countries other than the USA.)
Definitely false. Having worked in tech up and down the East and West coasts, I've found that Silcon Valley is the epicenter of hard-core, unattractive nerddom. The nerdy-geek/well-rounded-geek ratio appears to be inversely proportional to distance from San Jose.
Think touch-screen here, not camera. Regular touch screens typically register only a single point at a time. There are alternatives that use frustrated total internal reflection, but currently these require rear projection - not feasible for a tablet. See http://mrl.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/ if you haven't already.
Incorporating sensing elements within the display will permit sensing multiple simultaneous points of contact of arbitrary size/shape in a tablet form-factor. Neat!
Apple's been patenting lots of touch-interface concepts recently, too. Vide.
This patent is probably more about touch-screens than screen as scanner (that'd be a neat trick too, but probably would require too much resolution) or camera (would require a different but perfectly calibrated refractive element at each sensor - probably impractical).
Yes, we all know about how later versions of NEXTSTEP (then OpenStep) ran on SPARC, but how many people remember Apple's "Macintosh Application Environment"?
This was a complete Mac emulation environment that ran on Solaris/SPARC and HP-UX in the mid '90s. It only ever emulated a 68LC040, so by the time it was discontinued in 1998, nobody cared. It is an interesting nexus, though, between Apple and Sun (and HP, where Woz first met Jobs).
Slashdot Mirror
RCN has provided "triple-play" voice, data, and cable tv service in a handful of big US cities since, what, 1997?
Whether this is prior art certainly depends on the claims actually in the patent and the details of RCN's implementation, but I know they were around well before 2000.
-Isaac
Interesting how the some of the most popular photos from these missions are pictures of other man-made objects. Think of the ratings if there were actual people there! Nasa could fund their mission on the ad revenue...
-Isaac
Put lockable casters on your desks, conference tables, bookcases. (Hopefully your chairs have wheels already.)
Subdivide the central core into 4 sectors with a tall fixed partition wall, so there's a core wall that spaces needing a solid wall (e.g. a conference room whiteboard) can abut. Put power and network jacks in this wall. Run a grid of 3/8" tension cables a few inches below the ceiling across the space on 12" centers (i.e. create a repeating 12"x12" grid of wires near the ceiling.) Space power and network drops regularly in the floor (or, if underfloor jacks are too expensive, in the ceiling.)
Allow teams and individuals to configure workspaces within that space by hanging various-height fabric curtains (weighted to the floor) from that grid with long j-hooks.
Just an idea I thought was neat - I'm sure there are problems with it, but cube walls are a bitch to move around and don't permit organic shapes or long, straight divisions with no perpendicular support. You could have individuals in C-shaped pods within an open area, or circular common workspaces with desks on the circumference, or any other configuration - and individual teams don't need someone from facilities to show up with tools to move things around, just a grasping pole to reach the j-hook (and maybe a ladder if you put your drops in the ceiling rather than the floor.)
-Isaac
Dude, no it didn't, dude.
NCP, Dude.
Dude.
Exactly. I'm suggesting that this aspect of WarGames is actually a reasonable portrayal of what existed with respect to dial-up information services in 1983 - well, except for the global thermonuclear war part. Cutting-edge stuff to most people in 1983, but not total fiction a la swoopy visualizations that characterize most Hollywood depictions of computers (and remember that swoopy visualizations of computer systems and networks had already been done by 1983 - see 1982's Tron.)
Now, the huge "Crystal Palace" set built for WarGames *was* total fiction (and was one of the most expensive movie sets ever built at the time.) Take issue with that, if one must take issue with WarGames. (OTOH, word is that the Pentagon was so smitten with that vision of NORAD that they redesigned the command center to make it look more like the fictional version. By the time the base was idled last year, the similarities were striking. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:NORADCommandCe
-Isaac
Clearly written by a boy who wasn't tall enough to reach the ticket counter when Jurassic Park was in theaters, to say nothing of Wargames.
Yeah, most of those movies are truly terrible (and how did they miss "The Net"?), but the 10-year-old girl in Jurassic Park (who's been of legal drinking age for almost 3 years!) was shown using a real app called FSN that was indeed contemporary with the SGI gear of 1993 - a far cry from the Macromedia Director abominations of Mission: Impossible, for sure.
And listing WarGames - blasphemy! OK, it's ridiculous that Matthew Broderick would leave the speech synthesizer on (unless he was blind), but we (er, some people) really did use wardialers back then (well, just called them dialers before WarGames...), and man that IMSAI rig was sweet, if a little dated by 1983. Considering that typewriters still vastly outnumbered PC's at the time, the Internet had just switched over to TCP/IP, and the notion of booking an airline reservation with a home computer (fraudulently or not) was gee-whiz stuff, I'm willing to cut this movie much slack.
-Isaac
Who was the lone holdout state attorney general who didn't sign on to this executive branch power grab? I'd like to consider moving to that state.
-Isaac
Exqueeze me, but why are we still spending gigabucks on the Shuttle and ISS programs? The ISS, notwithstanding the fact that it's still under construction, is rapidly approaching the end of its design life. We won't even talk about the gruesome hack that is the modern shuttle program.
More pointless than war in Iraq, and more deadly if you're an American. (Something like 7% of astronauts have died on the job, a significantly higher death rate than the US military.)
-Isaac
IIRC, the magnetic coercivity of modern hard disk media is sufficiently high that the only sure method of data destruction is physical destruction of the platters.
Sledgehammer in the parking lot on the platters (removed from the drive, if possible) should do nicely for any application short of national security secrets - just be sure to wear safety goggles.
-Isaac
(I am not a lawyer, etc.) There's no express right to make a backup of an audio recording, but leaving that aside, what's the point of a backup except to prolong access to the recording beyond the life of the original media? From the legal perspective, it's silly to even make a backup if one loses the right to use it in the event the original media is destroyed.
Now, the question of theft of the original media is slightly more interesting. A thief obtains no legal title to stolen goods, so if ones original media were stolen, one might retain constructive possession of the originals. That constructive possession would, if we assume the backups were themselves legal, permit the continued use of the backup media.
I wonder whether there's any precedent as to what would happen if the originals were later destroyed by the thief - would the use right terminate? If we assume that destruction of the originals in a house fire would terminate the right to use the backups, then I imagine no use right would be retained if the would-be thief hadn't stolen them but destroyed them and left the pieces in the possession of the owner. Wacky.
-Isaac
Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport. 'Nuff said.
Air travel is a series of tubes.
-Isaac
This uses air-breathing jet engines. It's a jet pack.
-Isaac
This is 100% backwards. Redundant Array of Inexpensive Computers is the new model - design for failure with many cheap redundant servers. There are very few applications remaining where this is not a more cost effective (or just plain effective) approach than expensive "mission-critical" hardware.
-Isaac
I see you're familiar with the Australian government!
-Isaac
This is a sealed first-price auction, basically. Everyone submits secret bids, with the highest bid winning. I suspect eBay doesn't offer this model because it's not exciting for compulsive buyers. The sense of urgency created by the live competition and time constraint of a modified-English auction like eBay's are probably seen as crucial elements to attracting and retaining regular buyers.
-Isaac
eBay has certainly considered and rejected this idea. If this were an auction type offered on eBay, every rational seller would choose it.
The reason it's not offered is that eBay is more dependent on bidders than sellers at the end of the day. Yes, sellers pay the fees to eBay, but sellers are less mobile than buyers - if a seller is not going to use eBay, what will they use? No other auction site has traffic within an order of magnitude of eBay. Most sellers' only other rational option is a local fixed-price sale through, e.g. craigslist - not an acceptible option to many sellers. Thus, how the sellers feel about sniping is immaterial to eBay - they're the only game in town and the sellers will come anyway.
OTOH, buyers care less about where they buy things than sellers do about how they sell them. Change the rules on eBay at this point and they will alienate their base of idiots^Wbuyers - the traffic that keeps eBay the only game in town. They already have a major fraud problem that's driving sales of some especially fraud-prone categories like computers and electronics to sites focusing on local cash deals like craigslist. The last thing they want is to change anything else that might alienate buyers.
(Yes, some buyers hate sniping, but most buyers hate bidding wars even more. Anything that helps sellers raise their average sale price hurts buyers, and since the buyers are what bring in the sellers...)
-Isaac
Yes. The kind used for shooting actual movies - i.e. most 16 and 35mm film motion picture cameras use a rotating mirrored shutter to alternately direct light to the viewfinder or the film plane.
-Isaac
Washington state has legal gambling in casinos and cardrooms. It's about protecting that revenue, mostly.
-Isaac
Baseball is played and enjoyed by billions (OK, maybe one billion) people around the world and couldn't manage to retain its slot in the Summer Games. Why should any videogame be in there?
(Well, OK, maybe Starcraft. It's at least as popular as curling, and like curling is dominated by countries other than the USA.)
-Isaac
Definitely false. Having worked in tech up and down the East and West coasts, I've found that Silcon Valley is the epicenter of hard-core, unattractive nerddom. The nerdy-geek/well-rounded-geek ratio appears to be inversely proportional to distance from San Jose.
-Isaac
Incorporating sensing elements within the display will permit sensing multiple simultaneous points of contact of arbitrary size/shape in a tablet form-factor. Neat!
Apple's been patenting lots of touch-interface concepts recently, too. Vide.
This patent is probably more about touch-screens than screen as scanner (that'd be a neat trick too, but probably would require too much resolution) or camera (would require a different but perfectly calibrated refractive element at each sensor - probably impractical).
-Isaac
Another WSJ editorial seeking to introduce more FUD around climate change. Yawn.
Wake me up when the WSJ actually ackowledges climate change. Or the utility of a middle class.
-Isaac
They did. Palm OS used the AMX kernel from Kadak.
-Isaac
Your IQ is 2 standard deviations above the norm and you complain that there's nothing educational on public TV?
Use that noodle, man!
-Isaac
Yes, we all know about how later versions of NEXTSTEP (then OpenStep) ran on SPARC, but how many people remember Apple's "Macintosh Application Environment"?
f lash.950314.13593.html9 6/swol-12-mae.html
This was a complete Mac emulation environment that ran on Solaris/SPARC and HP-UX in the mid '90s. It only ever emulated a 68LC040, so by the time it was discontinued in 1998, nobody cared. It is an interesting nexus, though, between Apple and Sun (and HP, where Woz first met Jobs).
http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/1995-03/sun
http://sunsite.uakom.sk/sunworldonline/swol-12-19
-Isaac