1998? I had a GPS for several years by then, and my buddies had LORAN even before that. How could anyone patent the notion of "display[ing] information specific to the location the device is in," after consumer devices have been doing it for years, and military/commercial devices doing it for decades?
I'm on my second LiveScribe pen (Pulse this time, lost the Echo) and my wife just one for herself. I use it ten hours a week at work in various meetings. So much more pleasant than a laptop (and I am not bashful about taking a laptop to a meeting when it's useful), more expressive, audio recording indexed to each word you write. Couple that with Evernote, and you're in business.
The only downside is that ink and audio is all you've got until you dock. It would be KILLER if you could dock to an iPad or Android on the go.
...officials at the Institute for Medical and Biological Problems praised the experiment as a success and promised to conduct a 500-day simulation experiment later this year...
Nice trick. Maybe they rented 100 capsules for a week...
We're using DVDs to back up 5 2TB NAS servers of video files. Our
hardware is a 4-burner Flexwriter, similar to this one: http://www.amtren.com/products/sa4.shtml
The drivers come from Padus. We don't use their GUI much (DiskJuggler
and ImageJuggler)...instead we primarily build jobs and submit them from a
another machine via a perl script and their command-line tool, pfcnet. The
level of automation we needed for this project simply required scripting.
I haven't looked into their DJ.net product...it may have good potential.
If you like stats, we have the capacity of burning about 400 DVD's per day, but
rarely hit it. The input spindle holds 200 disks. We don't often make
it through the night without a failure that halts the burning. Don't get me wrong...the machine
is a workhorse, but it should not be considered a lights-out unit. After
we got our system built and pretty well tuned, we could pretty reliably back up
one NAS (1200 files, 2 TB) in about two weeks. This includes a fair amount
of idle time, especially on the weekends.
Also note that we're burning one file per disk, 60% are 1GB and 35% are
2GB. Project specs indicate that we only want one video (file) per
disk. These files will never change (many are encoded videos 30 years old!), and must be accessible both by set-top DVD players as video and as ready-to-edit.mpg files on a computer. Fortunately, most modern set-tops will play.mpg files from a non-vide DVD, so we don't have to author these disks.
So far, we've burned about 5000 disks holding about 6TB of data. Disk
failure rate is running around 5%. The Padus drivers do a good job of
reburning failed disks, but with this many disks and the automation behind it,
some still fall through the cracks. As such, we're printing a barcode on
each disk, and all disks will be scanned at least twice so we can catch the
missing ones.
Our biggest bottleneck initially was network speed. Over 100 Mbit ethernet, we
could not keep four burners busy at 4x. We attempted to upgrade the
machine to gigabit, but design limitations forced us to choose between fast
network or a fast hard drive, and we decided the hard drive was more
critical. Part of this was due to a high failure rate burning at 4x, and
anecdotal advice that 2x disks have better shelf life than 4x.
After backing down to 2x burn, 100Mbit is adequate to keep the burners
working full-time. The bottleneck now seems to be CPU utilization while
burning and network transfers are both occurring.
All of the machines (other than the NAS's) are Windows boxes.
We recieved good support from our vendor (Amtren) and outstanding support from Padus. Both worked closely with us to resolve several software and hardware issues. Both admitted that we were pushing the system harder than any of their other clients and were eager to see us succeed. Extra special kudos go to Fred P. at Padus!:-D
...
In a related project, we will be producing video DVD's on demand.
Customers can choose one or more episodes. Those files are authored into a
DVD, complete with an onscreen menu with titles, semi-custom graphics, a custom printed label on the disk and a mailable jacket sleeve. This process is up and running now, with no hands-on intervention,
but hasn't been launched yet. I've written a perl module that facilitates
this, weaving the Padus software in with dvdauthor and ImageMagick to provide an
end-to-end solution.
...
That's all the trivia I can think of. I'm happy to discuss the project
with anyone who's interested.
Slashdot Mirror
"Suddenly???"
1998? I had a GPS for several years by then, and my buddies had LORAN even before that. How could anyone patent the notion of "display[ing] information specific to the location the device is in," after consumer devices have been doing it for years, and military/commercial devices doing it for decades?
I'm on my second LiveScribe pen (Pulse this time, lost the Echo) and my wife just one for herself. I use it ten hours a week at work in various meetings. So much more pleasant than a laptop (and I am not bashful about taking a laptop to a meeting when it's useful), more expressive, audio recording indexed to each word you write. Couple that with Evernote, and you're in business.
The only downside is that ink and audio is all you've got until you dock. It would be KILLER if you could dock to an iPad or Android on the go.
...officials at the Institute for Medical and Biological Problems praised the experiment as a success and promised to conduct a 500-day simulation experiment later this year...
Nice trick. Maybe they rented 100 capsules for a week...
We're using DVDs to back up 5 2TB NAS servers of video files. Our hardware is a 4-burner Flexwriter, similar to this one: http://www.amtren.com/products/sa4.shtml
The drivers come from Padus. We don't use their GUI much (DiskJuggler and ImageJuggler)...instead we primarily build jobs and submit them from a another machine via a perl script and their command-line tool, pfcnet. The level of automation we needed for this project simply required scripting. I haven't looked into their DJ.net product...it may have good potential.
If you like stats, we have the capacity of burning about 400 DVD's per day, but rarely hit it. The input spindle holds 200 disks. We don't often make it through the night without a failure that halts the burning. Don't get me wrong...the machine is a workhorse, but it should not be considered a lights-out unit. After we got our system built and pretty well tuned, we could pretty reliably back up one NAS (1200 files, 2 TB) in about two weeks. This includes a fair amount of idle time, especially on the weekends.
Also note that we're burning one file per disk, 60% are 1GB and 35% are 2GB. Project specs indicate that we only want one video (file) per disk. These files will never change (many are encoded videos 30 years old!), and must be accessible both by set-top DVD players as video and as ready-to-edit .mpg files on a computer. Fortunately, most modern set-tops will play .mpg files from a non-vide DVD, so we don't have to author these disks.
So far, we've burned about 5000 disks holding about 6TB of data. Disk failure rate is running around 5%. The Padus drivers do a good job of reburning failed disks, but with this many disks and the automation behind it, some still fall through the cracks. As such, we're printing a barcode on each disk, and all disks will be scanned at least twice so we can catch the missing ones.
Our biggest bottleneck initially was network speed. Over 100 Mbit ethernet, we could not keep four burners busy at 4x. We attempted to upgrade the machine to gigabit, but design limitations forced us to choose between fast network or a fast hard drive, and we decided the hard drive was more critical. Part of this was due to a high failure rate burning at 4x, and anecdotal advice that 2x disks have better shelf life than 4x.
After backing down to 2x burn, 100Mbit is adequate to keep the burners working full-time. The bottleneck now seems to be CPU utilization while burning and network transfers are both occurring.
All of the machines (other than the NAS's) are Windows boxes.
We recieved good support from our vendor (Amtren) and outstanding support from Padus. Both worked closely with us to resolve several software and hardware issues. Both admitted that we were pushing the system harder than any of their other clients and were eager to see us succeed. Extra special kudos go to Fred P. at Padus! :-D
...
In a related project, we will be producing video DVD's on demand. Customers can choose one or more episodes. Those files are authored into a DVD, complete with an onscreen menu with titles, semi-custom graphics, a custom printed label on the disk and a mailable jacket sleeve. This process is up and running now, with no hands-on intervention, but hasn't been launched yet. I've written a perl module that facilitates this, weaving the Padus software in with dvdauthor and ImageMagick to provide an end-to-end solution.
...
That's all the trivia I can think of. I'm happy to discuss the project with anyone who's interested.
-dave