At my first job out of college, a large company in Houston, I used to regularly leave through the emergency exit and walk down to the parking level where I was parked. It set an alarm off, but it quit when you closed the door behind you.
The building had full time security in the lobby. After hours, we were supposed to sign in and out with them.
One day I walked into the senior vice president's office and saw him going through the sign in/out log.
After that, I made sure I signed out at the lobby even if I did have to walk up three of four flights of stairs to get to where I was parked.
Some time later, I was really late one morning arriving at the office (about 11 am) and found a message from the senior vice president that was marked as being left at about 8:00 am. When I went to his office, I apologized for being late and he responded by telling me not to worry about it since I was usually there so late at night.
It sometimes used to take a month or more to get a telephone connected in an apartment. That was especially true in college towns at the start of the fall semester.
And one time we needed a dialup line for a PDP-11/70. It took several months before I found someone at the telephone company who could tell me what they required before they could hook up the line -- the ringer equivalence for the telephone modem.
How much is natural and how much is caused by man remains to be seen.
In any event, it makes enormous sense to determine whether or not we can and should change it before we make and enforce enormous numbers of new laws with nothing more than hope that they will change it.
My main opposition to the Republicans on this is that they vigorously oppose any research designed to try to determine whether or not there is a problem.
There really isn't any doubt that the Earth has warmed up over the last 25 years. There is also no doubt that some of the basic parameters of our climatological system have changed.
We need to find out how much of the global warming that we have seen is due to our activities. It might be 10%. It might be 90%. We just don't know. It might even be 100% natural.
We need to determine how far the warming will go. At what point will it slow down or even reverse itself? It really doesn't matter at all whether or not we are the cause.
We need to find out whether or not we can slow it down or even stop it as well as how to do that.
Finally, we need to determine, based on the other factors, whether or not we should even try to slow it down or stop it. The benefits of global warming, up to a reasonable point, may outweigh the downside.
when Paul Allen-the-billionaire wanted some fast food late at night and -- not having a car -- WALKED through the drive-through as part of a long line of cars.
I did that once myself. I didn't want to drive across the street from my office to the Taco Bell late one night so I just walked. It turned out that only the drive-through was open. So I took my turn between the cars standing in line. It took about half an hour before I got to the front of the line. I felt a bit idiotic standing there.
I never saw or heard of anyone else doing that until now.
I also used to regularly go through the drive-up line in the bank on my bicycle. But that didn't feel quite as wierd as standing in line at Taco Bell.
OK, mod me down as offtopic if necessary, but I'm getting really tired of seeing homophobia splattered all over my screen every time I visit the Slashdot home page.
I figured they were talking about one country recognizing marriages from other countries as being valid.
It would be pretty bad if countries would not recognize marriages as valid if they were performed in other countries. If that was the case and you and your wife wanted to go abroad, you would have to be remarried in every country you entered.
I suspect that WinFS is probably a problem just by itself.
Ask yourself which is more likely to become corrupted: a file system or a database?
About 12 or 13 years ago, I toyed with the idea of a creating a database out of a file system. After much thought, especially about the possibilities for corruption, I decided that it was better to keep them separate.
If they do issue WinFS, you'd better make sure you do regular backups.
I think about WinFS a lot like I think about the Windows Registry -- they make sense at first, but in the long run, they just turn into a bigger pain in the ass then what they are replacing.
last time I checked, the shelf life of a tape is not much more than 18 months.
Huh? 18 months? You must be rewriting to the same tape daily. Or more often. The barrier that you are running into is the maximum number of read/write passes rather than any limitation on how long the tape will hold data.
What you need really depends on how long you need to keep the data. If you want to store data on something that you can set aside and reload years later, tape is the way to go.
Ideally, you should use both. Use disk drives for your first level of backup for short-term and short-mid-term backup needs. For mid-term backup to long-term archival, use tape drives.
The problem with disk drives is that you not only have potential media errors, but you have all the electronics included on the drive. That results in far more single points of failure.
With a tape drive, if the unit fails, you replace it and you can still read your backup media.
Of course, you need a good quality tape drive. With cheap tape drives, you just about need to have two so you can use the second to see if the tape written by the first is actually readable.
That's why I took notes in classes even when the prof handed out his own lecture notes.
The act of writing down the highlights of what was discussed definitely helps imprint it in your mind.
For that lawyer's case, I've always figured he got a lot more out of his recordings when transcribing them so he could sell them to the other students. And then listening to the lectures again while he drove certainly wouldn't hurt.
If I had owned a laptop, I would have been tempted to use it to record what was said in class while I used paper and pencil to take notes.
I used to know a lawyer who as a law student modified a briefcase so he could conceal a tape recorder to tape his law school classes in the early 70's. From the tapes, he would the lectures to paper and then sell copies of the transcribed lectures to other students. While he was at work making deliveries, he would listen to the tapes instead of the radio as he drove.
Actually, once China becomes the technological leaders of the world, they will patent all their systems and declare war on us.
We will lose that war because we won't be able to buy the most up to date weapons systems from them and we would violate their patents if we pirated their technology.
The real question is how much of that technology that will be unavailable to us will be owned by multinational companies that were founded here but moved elsewhere partly because of our crazy patent laws.
First, hard drives are a very poor choice for backups. In addition to media failure, you also have serious problems with failure of the electronic hardware. There are just too many single points of failure. Tape is far superior.
Second, unless you have an extraordinary fire-proof safe, off site if far superior. Fire-proof safes are really only fire resistant -- it is merely a question of how long it takes for the internal contents to get warm enough to destroy the contents.
In most user communities you see divisions that ignore the entire enterprise and base their knowledgeable input on what will most help them, but maybe dosen't work in the enterprise, or adversely affects other divisions.
You sure have that right.
I know of one company where the president purchased a CRM solution with no input from anyone. The CRM solution did little of what they wanted and ran only on Windoze machines when nearly everyone who needed it, including the President, ran OSX, not Windoze. Needless to say, it never got used.
it would be shot down SO fast by the courts that it would make their heads spin
Or they could arrest people, hold them in jail for a while, charge them, and then before the courts can make a decision, drop charges and let them go with stern warnings.
That way, the courts don't get a chance to shut them down since they have to have a real dispute, but the administration can use it to silence opponents.
If I understand it correctly, Congress is considering changing it from first to patent to first to file. So they are either changing the very definition of inventor in a way that is clearly nonsensical, that is, that the first person to file for a patent is the inventor even if someone else had already done it months earlier. The only fair and honest approach is to either grant patent protection to multiple inventors or to grant patent protection only to the very first inventor.
What happens if someone invents something and doesn't patent it? After a period of time, he can no longer file for a patent. But if someone else comes along and independently invents the same thing, can they not still apply for a patent for the same invention? Unless the original inventor published the details of the invention in some venue that qualifies as "prior art", the patent would likely be issued to the second inventor and the first inventor could then be held liable for infringing that patent.
Also, the wording of the Constitution makes it clear that an invention has only one inventor. So why not argue that any invention that was made independently by two or more different people does not qualify as an invention since it has more than one inventor? That is, as someone else suggested, why does that not imply that it is obvious and thus not eligible to be patented?
It is possible that awarding the patent to all inventors of the object may serve better to advance science than just to whichever inventor happened to file first. Currently, if a company knows or thinks that someone else is working on something new, they may feel that the other company has too much of a lead and so not make their own effort thinking that they will get nothing for their hard work. But if the more advanced company doesn't solve the problem or they are actually working on something else, then the invention may not be discovered until considerably later. But by awarding the patent to all inventors, a company would be more likely to work on the same problem and the potential to advance the science would necessarily be higher because they would have be able to use of their invention even if someone else beat them to it by a few days.
Awarding the patent only to a single inventor when there are one or more others who developed the same thing independently at about the same time and by allowing only that single inventor to enjoy the rights to that invention seems to be nothing but arbitrary.
The factual record is that there was more economic growth in 100 years than there was in the previous 1000. Patents were a key component of that.
For the vast majority of inventions, I really doubt that patents made any difference at all.
How many inventors would quit inventing if the patent system was substantially cut back? How many companies would shut down their R&D departments?
I think that there would probably be cutbacks in the few industries where the cost of the R&D is so high that the only way to recoup the investment is by granting the inventors control of the invention for a number of years. For the rest, I doubt that the rate of invention would change much at all.
I wonder what it would be like if everyone who invented the same device could receive their own patents as long as their applications were filed before any were published.
One obvious effect would be that you could license it from whichever inventor with whome you could come to the best agreement.
I certainly can't see any logical reason why anyone who invented something independently of another should be deprived of the fruits of their own effort.
Slashdot Mirror
At my first job out of college, a large company in Houston, I used to regularly leave through the emergency exit and walk down to the parking level where I was parked. It set an alarm off, but it quit when you closed the door behind you.
The building had full time security in the lobby. After hours, we were supposed to sign in and out with them.
One day I walked into the senior vice president's office and saw him going through the sign in/out log.
After that, I made sure I signed out at the lobby even if I did have to walk up three of four flights of stairs to get to where I was parked.
Some time later, I was really late one morning arriving at the office (about 11 am) and found a message from the senior vice president that was marked as being left at about 8:00 am. When I went to his office, I apologized for being late and he responded by telling me not to worry about it since I was usually there so late at night.
It sometimes used to take a month or more to get a telephone connected in an apartment. That was especially true in college towns at the start of the fall semester.
And one time we needed a dialup line for a PDP-11/70. It took several months before I found someone at the telephone company who could tell me what they required before they could hook up the line -- the ringer equivalence for the telephone modem.
How much is natural and how much is caused by man remains to be seen.
In any event, it makes enormous sense to determine whether or not we can and should change it before we make and enforce enormous numbers of new laws with nothing more than hope that they will change it.
My main opposition to the Republicans on this is that they vigorously oppose any research designed to try to determine whether or not there is a problem.
There really isn't any doubt that the Earth has warmed up over the last 25 years. There is also no doubt that some of the basic parameters of our climatological system have changed.
We need to find out how much of the global warming that we have seen is due to our activities. It might be 10%. It might be 90%. We just don't know. It might even be 100% natural.
We need to determine how far the warming will go. At what point will it slow down or even reverse itself? It really doesn't matter at all whether or not we are the cause.
We need to find out whether or not we can slow it down or even stop it as well as how to do that.
Finally, we need to determine, based on the other factors, whether or not we should even try to slow it down or stop it. The benefits of global warming, up to a reasonable point, may outweigh the downside.
I'd be tempted just to change the address and notify the legitimate users.
Then point GPS.dix.dk at DLink's network.
I got a kick out of this:
I did that once myself. I didn't want to drive across the street from my office to the Taco Bell late one night so I just walked. It turned out that only the drive-through was open. So I took my turn between the cars standing in line. It took about half an hour before I got to the front of the line. I felt a bit idiotic standing there.
I never saw or heard of anyone else doing that until now.
I also used to regularly go through the drive-up line in the bank on my bicycle. But that didn't feel quite as wierd as standing in line at Taco Bell.
How about all the homophobia-phobia?
What we really need for April Fools Day is for everyone to have unlimited moderation for any April Fools topics.
And no minimum or maximum on the ratings of any post.
I figured they were talking about one country recognizing marriages from other countries as being valid.
It would be pretty bad if countries would not recognize marriages as valid if they were performed in other countries. If that was the case and you and your wife wanted to go abroad, you would have to be remarried in every country you entered.
Since they only allow telnet and ftp and no outbound connections, I don't guess there is any way to use X windows, is there?
Doesn't IBM have a similar program for some of their machines?
There have been plenty of transactional file systems, but not all that many database file systems.
And Oracle databases can run into serious errors on occasion.
I suspect that WinFS is probably a problem just by itself.
Ask yourself which is more likely to become corrupted: a file system or a database?
About 12 or 13 years ago, I toyed with the idea of a creating a database out of a file system. After much thought, especially about the possibilities for corruption, I decided that it was better to keep them separate.
If they do issue WinFS, you'd better make sure you do regular backups.
I think about WinFS a lot like I think about the Windows Registry -- they make sense at first, but in the long run, they just turn into a bigger pain in the ass then what they are replacing.
Huh? 18 months? You must be rewriting to the same tape daily. Or more often. The barrier that you are running into is the maximum number of read/write passes rather than any limitation on how long the tape will hold data.
What you need really depends on how long you need to keep the data. If you want to store data on something that you can set aside and reload years later, tape is the way to go.
Ideally, you should use both. Use disk drives for your first level of backup for short-term and short-mid-term backup needs. For mid-term backup to long-term archival, use tape drives.
The problem with disk drives is that you not only have potential media errors, but you have all the electronics included on the drive. That results in far more single points of failure.
With a tape drive, if the unit fails, you replace it and you can still read your backup media.
Of course, you need a good quality tape drive. With cheap tape drives, you just about need to have two so you can use the second to see if the tape written by the first is actually readable.
That's why I took notes in classes even when the prof handed out his own lecture notes.
The act of writing down the highlights of what was discussed definitely helps imprint it in your mind.
For that lawyer's case, I've always figured he got a lot more out of his recordings when transcribing them so he could sell them to the other students. And then listening to the lectures again while he drove certainly wouldn't hurt.
If I had owned a laptop, I would have been tempted to use it to record what was said in class while I used paper and pencil to take notes.
I used to know a lawyer who as a law student modified a briefcase so he could conceal a tape recorder to tape his law school classes in the early 70's. From the tapes, he would the lectures to paper and then sell copies of the transcribed lectures to other students. While he was at work making deliveries, he would listen to the tapes instead of the radio as he drove.
Actually, once China becomes the technological leaders of the world, they will patent all their systems and declare war on us.
We will lose that war because we won't be able to buy the most up to date weapons systems from them and we would violate their patents if we pirated their technology.
The real question is how much of that technology that will be unavailable to us will be owned by multinational companies that were founded here but moved elsewhere partly because of our crazy patent laws.
Remember what a little publicity did for Sony and their rootkit.
Maybe the customer should remind the vendor of that.
First, hard drives are a very poor choice for backups. In addition to media failure, you also have serious problems with failure of the electronic hardware. There are just too many single points of failure. Tape is far superior.
Second, unless you have an extraordinary fire-proof safe, off site if far superior. Fire-proof safes are really only fire resistant -- it is merely a question of how long it takes for the internal contents to get warm enough to destroy the contents.
You sure have that right.
I know of one company where the president purchased a CRM solution with no input from anyone. The CRM solution did little of what they wanted and ran only on Windoze machines when nearly everyone who needed it, including the President, ran OSX, not Windoze. Needless to say, it never got used.
Or they could arrest people, hold them in jail for a while, charge them, and then before the courts can make a decision, drop charges and let them go with stern warnings.
That way, the courts don't get a chance to shut them down since they have to have a real dispute, but the administration can use it to silence opponents.
If I understand it correctly, Congress is considering changing it from first to patent to first to file. So they are either changing the very definition of inventor in a way that is clearly nonsensical, that is, that the first person to file for a patent is the inventor even if someone else had already done it months earlier. The only fair and honest approach is to either grant patent protection to multiple inventors or to grant patent protection only to the very first inventor.
What happens if someone invents something and doesn't patent it? After a period of time, he can no longer file for a patent. But if someone else comes along and independently invents the same thing, can they not still apply for a patent for the same invention? Unless the original inventor published the details of the invention in some venue that qualifies as "prior art", the patent would likely be issued to the second inventor and the first inventor could then be held liable for infringing that patent.
Also, the wording of the Constitution makes it clear that an invention has only one inventor. So why not argue that any invention that was made independently by two or more different people does not qualify as an invention since it has more than one inventor? That is, as someone else suggested, why does that not imply that it is obvious and thus not eligible to be patented?
It is possible that awarding the patent to all inventors of the object may serve better to advance science than just to whichever inventor happened to file first. Currently, if a company knows or thinks that someone else is working on something new, they may feel that the other company has too much of a lead and so not make their own effort thinking that they will get nothing for their hard work. But if the more advanced company doesn't solve the problem or they are actually working on something else, then the invention may not be discovered until considerably later. But by awarding the patent to all inventors, a company would be more likely to work on the same problem and the potential to advance the science would necessarily be higher because they would have be able to use of their invention even if someone else beat them to it by a few days.
Awarding the patent only to a single inventor when there are one or more others who developed the same thing independently at about the same time and by allowing only that single inventor to enjoy the rights to that invention seems to be nothing but arbitrary.
For the vast majority of inventions, I really doubt that patents made any difference at all.
How many inventors would quit inventing if the patent system was substantially cut back? How many companies would shut down their R&D departments?
I think that there would probably be cutbacks in the few industries where the cost of the R&D is so high that the only way to recoup the investment is by granting the inventors control of the invention for a number of years. For the rest, I doubt that the rate of invention would change much at all.
I wonder what it would be like if everyone who invented the same device could receive their own patents as long as their applications were filed before any were published.
One obvious effect would be that you could license it from whichever inventor with whome you could come to the best agreement.
I certainly can't see any logical reason why anyone who invented something independently of another should be deprived of the fruits of their own effort.
What would be cool would be a home dug out of the side of a canyon.
Have a winding passage through the rock between every room.
Instead of wallpaper or monotonous single color walls, have a painted mural in every room from floor to ceiling.
Maybe a small underground stream flowing through the living room.