Which ATLAS T2 do you work for? I'm at Nebraska, a CMS T2...
Most T2 sites won't get anything from CERN (although, I think there is technically a T1 site at CERN, meaning it's possible to see some movement there). However, one break from the original MONARC model is that all T2 sites can recieve data from any T1. This means that T1 -> T2 trans-atlantic traffic is going to be increased for CMS.
The two experiments don't use any common technology / techniques (beyond "the grid", in the broadest sense) for fault-tolerance. The probability of two radically different designs having a false positive for, say, SUSY, is supposed to be low. Plus, if one CMS collaborator claims to find the Higgs, you bet 1800 ATLAS collaborators will be trying to prove him wrong (and vice-versa).
Yeah -- after I wrote that, I asked someone, and was told the engineering run was "not likely" in November now.
Oh well. More time to buy cheaper disks.:)
I do work with one of the LCG projects, so let me share some of my personal opinions with you (all this info is mostly available on the web, if you can find it. We keep no secrets.).
I don't think CERN has HTTP/FTP servers right on a OC Internet backbone, or the server structure (think magnitudes greater than Google's) to drive the data.
Oh yes we do. You are right though - buying network bandwidth is a lot more straightforward than building an disk / server infrastructure to handle all the data. It's difficult, but being accomplished.
I think total - transatlantic fiber plus the European equivalent of Internet2 - bandwidth to CERN will amount to 100 Gbps - about 10 OC-192s. Universities buy into private global fiber networks, which are independent of the public internet.
We then use gridFTP as a transport, which is basically PKI-protected FTP which transfers in N many parallel TCP streams. Then, we use a protocol called SRM to control the gridFTP transfers and (well, the CMS experiment) uses a higher-level application called PhEDEx to control worldwide data movement. Right now, PhEDEx directs about 8-10 Gbps worldwide, and we aren't "doing anything" big.
GridFTP is a fairly effective protocol. I can get near-line speed - 2Gbps from a channel bonded RAID device. Locally, we've been buying large RAIDs - 30TB a box, building up to 200TB this fall. Some sites take a more "clustered" approach - they put a few 500-750 GB drives in each of the cluster's worker nodes, and build up to 200TB that way. Costs are lower, but you have to keep 2 copies of each file in the cluster, plus have the headache of swapping out drives. Of course, I like our method better. In addition, larger, T1 sites have a few petabytes in tape silos.
Funding agencies don't just throw money into projects for years at a time, then wait for results. Two years ago, we did a test at 25% of the turn-on "complexity" (in terms of jobs run and data movement). Last year, we increased that to 50% complexity. Toward the end of this summer, we will have a challenge called CSA07 which should be between 75-100% complexity. Finally, turn-on should be around November this year.
This is a multi-billion dollar project which has been under development for 10-15 years. We've been doing lots and lots of careful planning.
You were aware that it wasn't the magnet which blew up, but rather the supporting structure that "kicked" when the magnet quenched?
Last I heard, they'll be able to add to the structures in-place. FNAL will have to spend some money, but things will be fixed without delaying the project.
And you were aware that FNAL's work passed multiple independent review committees and CERN signed off on it? It just turned out that the same oversight was made by all.
In the end, a little egg-on-face for the US, but not a huge deal.
That's 4Gbps AVERAGE, meaning it's much below the peak rate. That's also the raw data stream, not accounting for site X in the US wanting to read reconstructed data from site Y in Europe.
LHC-related experiments will eventually have 70 Gbps of private fibers across the atlantic (Most NY -> Geneva, but at least 10Gbps NY -> Amsterdam), and at least 10 Gbps across the Pacific.
Our peak is designed to be 200TB / week (2.6Gbps averaged over a whole week). That's one site out of 30 Tier 2 sites and 7 Tier 1 sites (each Tier 1 should be about 4-times as big as a Tier 2).
Of course, the network backbone work has been progressing for years. It's to the point where Abilene, the current I2 network, rarely is at 50% capacity.
The network part is easy; it's a function of buying the right equipment and hiring smart people. The extremely hard part is putting disk servers in place that can handle the load. When we went from OC-12 (622 Mbps) to OC-192 (~10Gbps), we had RAIDs crash because we wrote at 2Gbps on some servers for days at a time. Try building up such a system without the budget to buy high-end Fiber Channel equipment too!
And yes, I am on a development team that works to provide data transfer services for the CMS experiment.
Hm. That's funny; the figure I've been hearing is gas costs the average family an extra $1000 a year. That's about $80 a month.
$80 a month will break a lot of middle class families, or at least make life a lot more uncomfortable. Remember how we've been hearing about record levels of consumer spending, record levels of consumer debt, and a savings rate of about 0% among working families?
At some point, the American consumer breaks. When that happens, the whole world's economy will feel it.
(That said, I take the bus every day to work. My wife and I save at least $100 a month doing that. That's a couple of iPods a year!)
an HDMI or DVI signal is a real-time, one-way stream of pixels that doesn't stop, doesn't error-check, and doesn't repair its mistakes--it just runs and runs, regardless of what's happening at the other end of the signal chain.
This is where I stopped paying attention. Doesn't error check? He makes it sound like they just put the bits on the wire. It's at least encoded relatively well. That's even available from the wikipedia article; the video signal on HDMI is encoded with TDMS. From TDMS's wikipedia article:
The transmitter incorporates an advanced coding algorithm which has reduced electromagnetic interference over copper cables and enables robust clock recovery at the receiver to achieve high skew tolerance for driving longer cable lengths as well as shorter low cost cables.
Further, why the hell would the cable to my TV not carry a one-way stream of pixels, regardless of what's happening at the other end? This isn't lossless TCP networking. You don't want to send an ACK packet for every couple pixels you get. What are you going to do? Retransmit the pixels a couple of milliseconds later? Brilliant!
I'm sure there are plenty of mistakes that were made when designing HDMI. However, there's low adoption rate because there's a small number of HDTVs, the consumers aren't educated, and the cables are extremely costly. I think that might be the problem more than the fact that HDMI is made of twisted-pair cables.
Sorry for mistakes in the summary of the statue business - it wasn't the point of my comment. Thanks for the correction, I claim no special knowledge of Estonia other than what I remembered from BBC articles a month or two ago.
The point still is that there are rumors that the Russian government is stirring up trouble in Estonia and other Baltic states. There's no hard proof, but this and the statue incident make things look awful suspicious. Is it past the conspiracy theory-type stuff yet? Maybe not.
Sorry, I left that one kind of ambiguous. The point is that a lot of Estonians believe that Russians are stirring up problems.
Russians have been moving a lot of statues to statue gardens, especially some of the old baddies (Stalin era folk). The Estonians were doing the same thing with a lot of old Soviet statues.
The statue in question wasn't of anyone "bad" per se - it was just a soldier. The question is, does the statue represent a war memorial or a memorial of Soviet domination of Estonia? To an ethnic Russian, it might represent a war memorial; to an ethnic Estonian, it might represent the "bad old days" of Soviet domination.
So, while the Estonian government thought they were moving statues as usual (just as Russia has done for many statues), others interpretted as moving a war memorial.
One must be careful to recognize the the great contribution from the Russian *people* during the World Wars without glorifying some elements of the leadership.
Of course, the question is whether people were really offended, or just acting up because they were being paid. Either way, almost no one in the US saw this news. The only thing you see in newspapers here are the daily body count in Iraq.
According to rumor, Russia has been up to a lot of subterfuge in Estonia lately.
It didn't make US news, of course, but Estonia just had some of the first riots in their capital, Talin. Lately, the Estonian government has been removing Soviet war memorials because, well, they partly respresented the Soviets ruling their country. Just like the Russians have been doing in Moscow, they remove them all and have a single statue garden (they are historical, after all).
However, when they removed one statue of a Soviet soldier in a cemetary, thousands of Russians living in Estonia started protesting. Now, maybe the Russian population just liked that particular statue, but there were rumors that Russian agents were stirring up trouble just to stir up trouble.
Russia's been flexing its muscles across Eastern Europe again. They've been punishing "bad" countries which disobey them. First the riots (which were suspected to be caused by Moscow), now cyber attacks. Neither are outright military moves, but they sure as hell get the message across.
Combined with the recent crackdown on free media and opposition in Russia, it sounds like life might get interesting in 5 years. It seems that, with America's short attention span focused on Iraq, Russia has been putting the pieces in place to recapture former glory.
Do you think that after 50 years that Boris the Soviet simply retired to the countryside? Or has he just been waiting patient for the right opportunity?
Maybe I just haven't had enough coffee this morning to make the conspiracy theories go away.
I appreciate the fact that most posters and the article writer seem to blame the difference on the fact that TVs are so much easier to use than computers.
Those people obviously aren't looking far enough into the future.
I see a world with a mess of cords behind each and every TV; one where HDMI gets half-adapted as the "one true solution" for each component, before 3 new incompatible versions of the cord come out.
I see a world of MS Media Center. A world where it takes a day or two to set up your TV. A world which requires firmware updates to DVRs, firmware updates to DVD players, firmware updates to BluRay / HD-DVD players, HDCP updates to TVs -- without which none of the above components will work. Dare I even say that the first non-computer electronics virus will come within the next 2 years?
I see a world of TV remotes with full-sized keyboards so you can buy Pay-Per-View movies directly from the internet, and view them the next day when they download. I see a world where the bootup time for your setup is measured in minutes, not seconds.
Perhaps, some day in the future, after work we will go home to watch some TV to relax. Then we will all go outside in order to relax from watching TV.
Surely anyone who logs onto their bank site from a wireless connection in a coffee shop is just asking to get owned?
Sure, but are they aware of this fact? I'd say about 75% of the people (random number) don't know the dangers in logging in on a wireless network.
For anecdotal evidence, yesturday I was sitting in a hotel with two public iMac terminals. A lady sat down and right off the bat asked her husband how to "turn the Apple off", by which I think she meant "how do I switch to windows".
People like that have *no clue* how dangerous the internet is, nor do they care. They trust their bank to be safe and secure.
My thoughts exactly - turns out that the section of the law governing what you do inside the United States is different from the one considered in this ruling.
Note that MS still is liable for damages done within the US. They think this ruling would allow them to appeal the Eolas case and have to pay less money.
So basically, the Court held that software patents are unenforceable under US patent law as long as you don't load the software on any device inside the US.
That sets of big flashing lights in my head. If I violate Company X's patents by writing some open-source software package, can I be held liable for patent infringement? After all, I'm just distributing the "blueprints", the end-users are the ones who are violating the patent by loading it on a computer.
Of course, you can't license such a piece of software under the GPL because it would restrict redistribution. It still makes it an interesting argument that might weaken the reach of patents.
No. They claim nothing about piracy or IP in general. This has to do with patent lawsuits, not pirates or copyright.
They are claiming that they are not exporting patented parts outside of the US for foreign assembly.
The software doesn't violate the patent until the foreign manufacturers load it on a computer. Hence, MS is not exporting a patented part, so they don't violate that particular law.
It's as if I patented a widget made of steel. Can I sue the steel manufacturer for exporting the metal to China where you make the widget in violation of the patent? No. Could I sue a US widget maker for violating my patent, even if they only sell it in China? Yes.
It's a good example of "laws written for one context, used for another context". Doesn't change the piracy picture a bit.
Swing and a miss! The summary isn't even close to accurate.
The case was this: AT&T and Microsoft had a patent dispute. Microsoft accepted the fact that it violated the patent in the US. Question: Does Microsoft owe AT&T damages for patent violations in the US *and* for products shipped outside the US? Or, must AT&T sue MS in those countries also? According to a 1984 law, if you manufacture patented parts for assembly outside the US, you violate the patents in the US.
The court found: Shipping the master copy of Windows source code outside the US to be mastered abroad doesn't count as patent infringement.
Why? You can't patent an algorithm! Notice that in software patents, you must reference a combination of a "method and a device", or some such language. You have to include something physical in the patent. You can't patent "voice recognition software", you must patent "voice recognition software running on a computer". From the AP article:
"Ginsburg said that neither Windows software nor a computer standing alone without Windows installed infringes AT&T's patent."
Only if MS was shipping both a computer *and* the software, were they shipping a patented part. So, AT&T's damages must be limited to domestic damages. In order to recover damages occurred in, say, France, AT&T must sue MS in France. US law doesn't cover MS's non-US activity, in this case. Kind of makes sense to me.
As others have pointed out, the submitter stupidly mixed up copyrights and patents; pirates are usually sued for violating copyrights. I suppose if I'm a software pirate, and I get sued for patent infringement (for some really stupid reason), the damages awarded to the company would be limited to domestic damages I've done. Of course, they would get more money out of me more quickly if they limited themselves to the copyrights.
So, take home message: If you sell software worldwide, any patent violations you get sued for in the US will most likely have their damages limited to the actions inside the US. For damages from selling abroad, the company which is suing you must file their lawsuit abroad.
The server market is important, but when I buy my shiny new server, power consumption isn't my first consideration, nor is that the only thing AMD offers.
That's nice - but when we look at purchasing $250k - $500k of servers, power consumption as an important factor.
Back in the days when dual-cores were just beginning, this indeed was HUGE. Do you want 30% more Irwindales which would require 100 tons of cooling, or the AMD dual-cores which require 30 tons of cooling? The same is going to happen at the dual-core/quad-core boundary.
As CPUs are cheaper and cheaper and A/C systems remain a constant cost, the people who spend large amounts of money are going to look more and more at power costs. They're probably aiming at business customers who don't buy *a* server, but buy a *hundred* servers.
I know for a fact that in Arizona selling an M rated game to a minor is illegal and actually punishable by some law
I know for a fact this is not true. For a writeup of this, see: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070223-8915 .html
Video game restrictions, unless if it has something to do with pornography, are voluntary, just like movie restrictions are. Now, mind you, you have to look hard to find someone willing to violate these restrictions, which is why many people mistake this for a law.
Repeat after me: I2 is an experimental US backbone with a catchy name.
Universities realized that they would never have the funding to be able to afford high speed lines (today, multiple 10Gbps) which can reach the generic "outside world".
So, they worked together to get a better deal from Qwest than commercial entities could get. Then, they just didn't peer their network with anyone else in order to keep costs down.
90% of the traffic on I2 is plain ol' TCP - mostly moving lots of research data and P2P downloads between universities.
While there is some funding of basic protocols research funded by I2, nothing has been really big.
So again: I2 is just a way for universities with lots of money to move data back and forth without having to go over commodity links. The I2 organization directly funds a small amount of protocols research (of course, it also does *enable* other funding agencies to fund high-speed networking research).
The project will never release an "Internet 2.0" that we will all upgrade to.
I guess I should cover my ass and point out that none of that post is priveleged information; beyond my meandering speculations, you can read the press release yourself:
The goal at CERN and Fermilab is now to redesign and repair the inner triplet magnets and, if necessary, the DFBX without affecting the LHC start-up schedule. Teams at CERN and Fermilab have identified potential repairs that could be carried out expeditiously without removing undamaged triplet magnets from the tunnel.. All three of the pressure-tested triplet magnets at Point 5, plus the associated DFBX, will be removed from the tunnel for inspection and, if necessary, repair.
CERN will manage the redesign and repair effort and has scheduled a review for April 24-25 to validate the selected method. Fermilab will take part in the review.
Repair of the triplet magnets would begin after validation by the reviewers. The immediate goal is to have a repaired triplet in another sector of the accelerator ready to participate in a pressure test scheduled for June 1.
Primary sources are always better than some guy commenting.
I work on the LHC (although not a particle physicist, I talk to ones every day).
If you had to explain it at an 8th grade level (as newspapers aim for these days), you'd say "bad math". If you are on a nerd site like Slashdot, I'd hope we wouldn't need to make that simplification. The story is a dupe. It is still the same as before - the assymmetrical load was not put into the requirements for the magnets and overlooked during four internal and *external* reviews. CERN had all the right data, and they overlooked that specific test too.
There is a committee reviewing the case, and their findings will be released April 24 (tentatively). FNAL's goal is to have this not delay turn-on at all, although it'll cost some amount of money to fix. They hope the repairs can be made in-ground. The absolute worst-case would be if they have to take the magnets up to the surface to fix them; that will certainly cause a time delay.
Right now, they suspect it's an additional cost, but not a delay for the November turn-on. That picture could get worse, but we won't know until around May.
Lots of the world's top particle physicists have been on this project for many years; any country capable of doign "other" research is certainly already heavily involved with the LHC. The only possible project which will benefit from the delay is the Tevatron at FNAL, but we're probably 18 months from running the LCG at Tevatron levels (it will take *at least* a year to begin to get all the bugs worked out and tunings done to a multi-billion dollar system).
One delay will be noise compared to the amount of effort needed to prove the existence of the Higgs.
You mean like how Apple prevailed in its L&F lawsuits against Microsoft that dragged on for years? Oh wait, Apple didn't prevail, and eventually the two companies called a truce (with some money changing hands in the process).
That's the difference between open source and a big company.
Companies can easily operate while dragging on lawsuits for years. I'd suspect that all but the biggest open source projects would fold quickly.
I know if my hobby project got a big lawsuit from MS, I'd have no choice but to fold my cards -- unless EFF stepped in.
Slashdot Mirror
Which ATLAS T2 do you work for? I'm at Nebraska, a CMS T2...
Most T2 sites won't get anything from CERN (although, I think there is technically a T1 site at CERN, meaning it's possible to see some movement there). However, one break from the original MONARC model is that all T2 sites can recieve data from any T1. This means that T1 -> T2 trans-atlantic traffic is going to be increased for CMS.
The two experiments don't use any common technology / techniques (beyond "the grid", in the broadest sense) for fault-tolerance. The probability of two radically different designs having a false positive for, say, SUSY, is supposed to be low. Plus, if one CMS collaborator claims to find the Higgs, you bet 1800 ATLAS collaborators will be trying to prove him wrong (and vice-versa).
Healthy competition keeps everyone honest.
Yeah -- after I wrote that, I asked someone, and was told the engineering run was "not likely" in November now. Oh well. More time to buy cheaper disks. :)
I think total - transatlantic fiber plus the European equivalent of Internet2 - bandwidth to CERN will amount to 100 Gbps - about 10 OC-192s. Universities buy into private global fiber networks, which are independent of the public internet.
We then use gridFTP as a transport, which is basically PKI-protected FTP which transfers in N many parallel TCP streams. Then, we use a protocol called SRM to control the gridFTP transfers and (well, the CMS experiment) uses a higher-level application called PhEDEx to control worldwide data movement. Right now, PhEDEx directs about 8-10 Gbps worldwide, and we aren't "doing anything" big.
GridFTP is a fairly effective protocol. I can get near-line speed - 2Gbps from a channel bonded RAID device. Locally, we've been buying large RAIDs - 30TB a box, building up to 200TB this fall. Some sites take a more "clustered" approach - they put a few 500-750 GB drives in each of the cluster's worker nodes, and build up to 200TB that way. Costs are lower, but you have to keep 2 copies of each file in the cluster, plus have the headache of swapping out drives. Of course, I like our method better. In addition, larger, T1 sites have a few petabytes in tape silos.
Funding agencies don't just throw money into projects for years at a time, then wait for results. Two years ago, we did a test at 25% of the turn-on "complexity" (in terms of jobs run and data movement). Last year, we increased that to 50% complexity. Toward the end of this summer, we will have a challenge called CSA07 which should be between 75-100% complexity. Finally, turn-on should be around November this year.
This is a multi-billion dollar project which has been under development for 10-15 years. We've been doing lots and lots of careful planning.
You were aware that it wasn't the magnet which blew up, but rather the supporting structure that "kicked" when the magnet quenched?
Last I heard, they'll be able to add to the structures in-place. FNAL will have to spend some money, but things will be fixed without delaying the project.
And you were aware that FNAL's work passed multiple independent review committees and CERN signed off on it? It just turned out that the same oversight was made by all.
In the end, a little egg-on-face for the US, but not a huge deal.
That's 4Gbps AVERAGE, meaning it's much below the peak rate. That's also the raw data stream, not accounting for site X in the US wanting to read reconstructed data from site Y in Europe.
LHC-related experiments will eventually have 70 Gbps of private fibers across the atlantic (Most NY -> Geneva, but at least 10Gbps NY -> Amsterdam), and at least 10 Gbps across the Pacific.
For what it's worth, here's the current transfer rates for one LHC experiment You'll notice that there's one site, Nebraska (my site), which averages 3.2 Gbps over the last day. That's a Tier 2 site - meaning it won't even recieve the raw data, just reconstructed data.
Our peak is designed to be 200TB / week (2.6Gbps averaged over a whole week). That's one site out of 30 Tier 2 sites and 7 Tier 1 sites (each Tier 1 should be about 4-times as big as a Tier 2).
Of course, the network backbone work has been progressing for years. It's to the point where Abilene, the current I2 network, rarely is at 50% capacity.
The network part is easy; it's a function of buying the right equipment and hiring smart people. The extremely hard part is putting disk servers in place that can handle the load. When we went from OC-12 (622 Mbps) to OC-192 (~10Gbps), we had RAIDs crash because we wrote at 2Gbps on some servers for days at a time. Try building up such a system without the budget to buy high-end Fiber Channel equipment too!
And yes, I am on a development team that works to provide data transfer services for the CMS experiment.
Silly me.
Hm. That's funny; the figure I've been hearing is gas costs the average family an extra $1000 a year. That's about $80 a month.
$80 a month will break a lot of middle class families, or at least make life a lot more uncomfortable. Remember how we've been hearing about record levels of consumer spending, record levels of consumer debt, and a savings rate of about 0% among working families?
At some point, the American consumer breaks. When that happens, the whole world's economy will feel it.
(That said, I take the bus every day to work. My wife and I save at least $100 a month doing that. That's a couple of iPods a year!)
I'm sure there are plenty of mistakes that were made when designing HDMI. However, there's low adoption rate because there's a small number of HDTVs, the consumers aren't educated, and the cables are extremely costly. I think that might be the problem more than the fact that HDMI is made of twisted-pair cables.
Sorry for mistakes in the summary of the statue business - it wasn't the point of my comment. Thanks for the correction, I claim no special knowledge of Estonia other than what I remembered from BBC articles a month or two ago.
The point still is that there are rumors that the Russian government is stirring up trouble in Estonia and other Baltic states. There's no hard proof, but this and the statue incident make things look awful suspicious. Is it past the conspiracy theory-type stuff yet? Maybe not.
Is it close to being plausible? Sure
Sorry, I left that one kind of ambiguous. The point is that a lot of Estonians believe that Russians are stirring up problems.
Russians have been moving a lot of statues to statue gardens, especially some of the old baddies (Stalin era folk). The Estonians were doing the same thing with a lot of old Soviet statues.
The statue in question wasn't of anyone "bad" per se - it was just a soldier. The question is, does the statue represent a war memorial or a memorial of Soviet domination of Estonia? To an ethnic Russian, it might represent a war memorial; to an ethnic Estonian, it might represent the "bad old days" of Soviet domination.
So, while the Estonian government thought they were moving statues as usual (just as Russia has done for many statues), others interpretted as moving a war memorial.
One must be careful to recognize the the great contribution from the Russian *people* during the World Wars without glorifying some elements of the leadership.
Of course, the question is whether people were really offended, or just acting up because they were being paid. Either way, almost no one in the US saw this news. The only thing you see in newspapers here are the daily body count in Iraq.
According to rumor, Russia has been up to a lot of subterfuge in Estonia lately.
It didn't make US news, of course, but Estonia just had some of the first riots in their capital, Talin. Lately, the Estonian government has been removing Soviet war memorials because, well, they partly respresented the Soviets ruling their country. Just like the Russians have been doing in Moscow, they remove them all and have a single statue garden (they are historical, after all).
However, when they removed one statue of a Soviet soldier in a cemetary, thousands of Russians living in Estonia started protesting. Now, maybe the Russian population just liked that particular statue, but there were rumors that Russian agents were stirring up trouble just to stir up trouble.
Russia's been flexing its muscles across Eastern Europe again. They've been punishing "bad" countries which disobey them. First the riots (which were suspected to be caused by Moscow), now cyber attacks. Neither are outright military moves, but they sure as hell get the message across.
Combined with the recent crackdown on free media and opposition in Russia, it sounds like life might get interesting in 5 years. It seems that, with America's short attention span focused on Iraq, Russia has been putting the pieces in place to recapture former glory.
Do you think that after 50 years that Boris the Soviet simply retired to the countryside? Or has he just been waiting patient for the right opportunity?
Maybe I just haven't had enough coffee this morning to make the conspiracy theories go away.
I appreciate the fact that most posters and the article writer seem to blame the difference on the fact that TVs are so much easier to use than computers.
Those people obviously aren't looking far enough into the future.
I see a world with a mess of cords behind each and every TV; one where HDMI gets half-adapted as the "one true solution" for each component, before 3 new incompatible versions of the cord come out.
I see a world of MS Media Center. A world where it takes a day or two to set up your TV. A world which requires firmware updates to DVRs, firmware updates to DVD players, firmware updates to BluRay / HD-DVD players, HDCP updates to TVs -- without which none of the above components will work. Dare I even say that the first non-computer electronics virus will come within the next 2 years?
I see a world of TV remotes with full-sized keyboards so you can buy Pay-Per-View movies directly from the internet, and view them the next day when they download. I see a world where the bootup time for your setup is measured in minutes, not seconds.
Perhaps, some day in the future, after work we will go home to watch some TV to relax. Then we will all go outside in order to relax from watching TV.
Sure, but are they aware of this fact? I'd say about 75% of the people (random number) don't know the dangers in logging in on a wireless network.
For anecdotal evidence, yesturday I was sitting in a hotel with two public iMac terminals. A lady sat down and right off the bat asked her husband how to "turn the Apple off", by which I think she meant "how do I switch to windows".
People like that have *no clue* how dangerous the internet is, nor do they care. They trust their bank to be safe and secure.
My thoughts exactly - turns out that the section of the law governing what you do inside the United States is different from the one considered in this ruling.
Note that MS still is liable for damages done within the US. They think this ruling would allow them to appeal the Eolas case and have to pay less money.
Of course, you can't license such a piece of software under the GPL because it would restrict redistribution. It still makes it an interesting argument that might weaken the reach of patents.
No. They claim nothing about piracy or IP in general. This has to do with patent lawsuits, not pirates or copyright.
They are claiming that they are not exporting patented parts outside of the US for foreign assembly.
The software doesn't violate the patent until the foreign manufacturers load it on a computer. Hence, MS is not exporting a patented part, so they don't violate that particular law.
It's as if I patented a widget made of steel. Can I sue the steel manufacturer for exporting the metal to China where you make the widget in violation of the patent? No. Could I sue a US widget maker for violating my patent, even if they only sell it in China? Yes.
It's a good example of "laws written for one context, used for another context". Doesn't change the piracy picture a bit.
Swing and a miss! The summary isn't even close to accurate.
The case was this: AT&T and Microsoft had a patent dispute. Microsoft accepted the fact that it violated the patent in the US. Question: Does Microsoft owe AT&T damages for patent violations in the US *and* for products shipped outside the US? Or, must AT&T sue MS in those countries also? According to a 1984 law, if you manufacture patented parts for assembly outside the US, you violate the patents in the US.
The court found: Shipping the master copy of Windows source code outside the US to be mastered abroad doesn't count as patent infringement.
Why? You can't patent an algorithm! Notice that in software patents, you must reference a combination of a "method and a device", or some such language. You have to include something physical in the patent. You can't patent "voice recognition software", you must patent "voice recognition software running on a computer". From the AP article:
"Ginsburg said that neither Windows software nor a computer standing alone without Windows installed infringes AT&T's patent."
Only if MS was shipping both a computer *and* the software, were they shipping a patented part. So, AT&T's damages must be limited to domestic damages. In order to recover damages occurred in, say, France, AT&T must sue MS in France. US law doesn't cover MS's non-US activity, in this case. Kind of makes sense to me.
As others have pointed out, the submitter stupidly mixed up copyrights and patents; pirates are usually sued for violating copyrights. I suppose if I'm a software pirate, and I get sued for patent infringement (for some really stupid reason), the damages awarded to the company would be limited to domestic damages I've done. Of course, they would get more money out of me more quickly if they limited themselves to the copyrights.
So, take home message: If you sell software worldwide, any patent violations you get sued for in the US will most likely have their damages limited to the actions inside the US. For damages from selling abroad, the company which is suing you must file their lawsuit abroad.
How is the VA's system to work with? As far as I know, it's a huge success story compared to the British and KP failures.
That's nice - but when we look at purchasing $250k - $500k of servers, power consumption as an important factor.
Back in the days when dual-cores were just beginning, this indeed was HUGE. Do you want 30% more Irwindales which would require 100 tons of cooling, or the AMD dual-cores which require 30 tons of cooling? The same is going to happen at the dual-core/quad-core boundary.
As CPUs are cheaper and cheaper and A/C systems remain a constant cost, the people who spend large amounts of money are going to look more and more at power costs. They're probably aiming at business customers who don't buy *a* server, but buy a *hundred* servers.
I know for a fact this is not true. For a writeup of this, see:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070223-891
Video game restrictions, unless if it has something to do with pornography, are voluntary, just like movie restrictions are. Now, mind you, you have to look hard to find someone willing to violate these restrictions, which is why many people mistake this for a law.
Not in the US. I know this is not the same for several European countries.
Gah, I hate I2 sometimes for that reason.
Repeat after me: I2 is an experimental US backbone with a catchy name.
Universities realized that they would never have the funding to be able to afford high speed lines (today, multiple 10Gbps) which can reach the generic "outside world".
So, they worked together to get a better deal from Qwest than commercial entities could get. Then, they just didn't peer their network with anyone else in order to keep costs down.
90% of the traffic on I2 is plain ol' TCP - mostly moving lots of research data and P2P downloads between universities.
While there is some funding of basic protocols research funded by I2, nothing has been really big.
So again: I2 is just a way for universities with lots of money to move data back and forth without having to go over commodity links. The I2 organization directly funds a small amount of protocols research (of course, it also does *enable* other funding agencies to fund high-speed networking research).
The project will never release an "Internet 2.0" that we will all upgrade to.
I guess I should cover my ass and point out that none of that post is priveleged information; beyond my meandering speculations, you can read the press release yourself:
The goal at CERN and Fermilab is now to redesign and repair the inner triplet magnets and, if necessary, the DFBX without affecting the LHC start-up schedule. Teams at CERN and Fermilab have identified potential repairs that could be carried out expeditiously without removing undamaged triplet magnets from the tunnel.. All three of the pressure-tested triplet magnets at Point 5, plus the associated DFBX, will be removed from the tunnel for inspection and, if necessary, repair. CERN will manage the redesign and repair effort and has scheduled a review for April 24-25 to validate the selected method. Fermilab will take part in the review. Repair of the triplet magnets would begin after validation by the reviewers. The immediate goal is to have a repaired triplet in another sector of the accelerator ready to participate in a pressure test scheduled for June 1.
Primary sources are always better than some guy commenting.
I work on the LHC (although not a particle physicist, I talk to ones every day).
If you had to explain it at an 8th grade level (as newspapers aim for these days), you'd say "bad math". If you are on a nerd site like Slashdot, I'd hope we wouldn't need to make that simplification. The story is a dupe. It is still the same as before - the assymmetrical load was not put into the requirements for the magnets and overlooked during four internal and *external* reviews. CERN had all the right data, and they overlooked that specific test too.
There is a committee reviewing the case, and their findings will be released April 24 (tentatively). FNAL's goal is to have this not delay turn-on at all, although it'll cost some amount of money to fix. They hope the repairs can be made in-ground. The absolute worst-case would be if they have to take the magnets up to the surface to fix them; that will certainly cause a time delay.
Right now, they suspect it's an additional cost, but not a delay for the November turn-on. That picture could get worse, but we won't know until around May.
Lots of the world's top particle physicists have been on this project for many years; any country capable of doign "other" research is certainly already heavily involved with the LHC. The only possible project which will benefit from the delay is the Tevatron at FNAL, but we're probably 18 months from running the LCG at Tevatron levels (it will take *at least* a year to begin to get all the bugs worked out and tunings done to a multi-billion dollar system).
One delay will be noise compared to the amount of effort needed to prove the existence of the Higgs.
Companies can easily operate while dragging on lawsuits for years. I'd suspect that all but the biggest open source projects would fold quickly.
I know if my hobby project got a big lawsuit from MS, I'd have no choice but to fold my cards -- unless EFF stepped in.