I think the patent office has gotten lazy about the whole "not obvious to one skilled in the art" thing.
If the improved algorithm makes use of some fundamental genius stroke of brilliance that is totally oddball and amazing and makes everyone go, "wow, that's awesome, I would never have thought of that!" then it deserves a patent.
If the improved algorithm is just incremental improvements that any signals engineer could do then it should not be patentable.
As I mentioned earlier, I've been working for a decade doing often-interesting and challenging work, and almost none of it should be (in my opinion) patentable because it's all too obvious.
There are many, many things that we need computers to do that are not particularly original. Writing drivers for a new network card, figuring out how to manage your IP addresses and fail over if things break, extending some function to allow for new capabilities, adding new syscalls to the operating system, etc. These are all things that need to get done, but there is nothing particularly original about them.
I've been a professional software developer for over a decade, often doing quite interesting and challenging work. But I wouldn't consider any of it patentable because it is all essentially straightforward to one "skilled in the art".
One last point..."obvious" does not mean "trivial". It can take a long time to bring up an OS on new hardware, but it's all straightforward stuff.
You say the patent system is doing what it's supposed to.
My impression was that the patent system was supposed to give a strong, limited-time monopoly to inventors--in return for exposing the implementation details rather than keeping it a trade secret.
Do you think software patents do this?
My impression is that software patents (if allowed at all) should include complete source code for the implementation. Also, I see quite a few software patents of the form "do *this* in software" where *this* is a high-level description of what is happening. That seems to me excessively broad....it seems like it should need to be "do *this* by following these specific algorithmic steps". If someone else does *this* some other way then the patent has not been infringed.
The NTP algorithm tries to characterize each time source and use the predicted network latency to arrive at the "true" time. If the NTP server response latency is delayed randomly due to running in a VM then it gives results that are not as accurate.
If you're trying to correlate logs down to the microsecond on multiple machines this can be a problem.
NTP server is all about consistency. If it's running in a VM and can be delayed at the whim of the host, do you think it's going to be a very good source of time?
As others have said, the coast is probably a bad place for a data center. Somewhere geologically stable, with reliable power and a good backplane connection would be best.
I work from home, so my cell phone is an ancient Blackberry curve with the lowest possible voice plan and no data plan.
Sure, I could theoretically work from anywhere with my laptop, but then I'd have to leave my big monitors, more comfortable keyboard, and faster-than-LTE internet connection--so why would I bother?
In Saskatchewan the competitors are Shaw and Sasktel. Shaw's caps start at 125GB/month but there is effectively no penalty for exceeding it, while Sasktel doesn't have any caps.
Testing and configuring can be done in an automated way using the marvellous capabilities of computing devices.
I can buy a home theater receiver for $350 that will automatically EQ my room and apply fancy filtering. There's no way it costs thousands to do the same in a hearing aid.
According to Ted Ts'o's latest update (https://plus.google.com/117091380454742934025/posts) this actually involved a combination of "umount -l" and shutting down while the filesystem was still mounted, and the user also had "nobarrier" set on the filesystem as well as "journal_async_commit".
So it sure looks like the user was playing fast and loose...this is not something that's going to hit your average person.
I currently work on a product that uses fuse on top of xfs on top of LVM on top of RAID1. There are good solid reasons for the existence of each of those layers.
No filesystem is the best for all uses, and when ZFS tries to do everything it means that it doesn't play nice with the rest of the stack.
Last time I looked I was unable to find a way to upload an app that I wrote to my mom's iPhone without a developer license (or jailbreaking the phone, which wasn't an option since it was a work phone).
In it's web browser...try to scroll on a non-scrollable webpage, and the whole screen shifts up somewhat then snaps back into place when you lift your finger.
Remote X is a pig once ping times increase due to the number of round trips required. VNC is far superior in that situation especially when it can be notified of changes efficiently.
If "retina display" is used as a scientific rather than marketing term then it shouldn't be copyrightable by Apple. Any display of equivalent angular density should be freely called a "retina display".
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I think the patent office has gotten lazy about the whole "not obvious to one skilled in the art" thing.
If the improved algorithm makes use of some fundamental genius stroke of brilliance that is totally oddball and amazing and makes everyone go, "wow, that's awesome, I would never have thought of that!" then it deserves a patent.
If the improved algorithm is just incremental improvements that any signals engineer could do then it should not be patentable.
As I mentioned earlier, I've been working for a decade doing often-interesting and challenging work, and almost none of it should be (in my opinion) patentable because it's all too obvious.
and I get paid well do it.
There are many, many things that we need computers to do that are not particularly original. Writing drivers for a new network card, figuring out how to manage your IP addresses and fail over if things break, extending some function to allow for new capabilities, adding new syscalls to the operating system, etc. These are all things that need to get done, but there is nothing particularly original about them.
I've been a professional software developer for over a decade, often doing quite interesting and challenging work. But I wouldn't consider any of it patentable because it is all essentially straightforward to one "skilled in the art".
One last point..."obvious" does not mean "trivial". It can take a long time to bring up an OS on new hardware, but it's all straightforward stuff.
You say the patent system is doing what it's supposed to.
My impression was that the patent system was supposed to give a strong, limited-time monopoly to inventors--in return for exposing the implementation details rather than keeping it a trade secret.
Do you think software patents do this?
My impression is that software patents (if allowed at all) should include complete source code for the implementation. Also, I see quite a few software patents of the form "do *this* in software" where *this* is a high-level description of what is happening. That seems to me excessively broad....it seems like it should need to be "do *this* by following these specific algorithmic steps". If someone else does *this* some other way then the patent has not been infringed.
The NTP algorithm tries to characterize each time source and use the predicted network latency to arrive at the "true" time. If the NTP server response latency is delayed randomly due to running in a VM then it gives results that are not as accurate.
If you're trying to correlate logs down to the microsecond on multiple machines this can be a problem.
You want consistently fast behaviour from your time servers. Don't mess with virtualizing them.
NTP server is all about consistency. If it's running in a VM and can be delayed at the whim of the host, do you think it's going to be a very good source of time?
As others have said, the coast is probably a bad place for a data center. Somewhere geologically stable, with reliable power and a good backplane connection would be best.
It was in africa, on a backcountry "road", and it came up to the base of the windshield. The vehicle had a snorkel for exactly this purpose.
Alternately, what about driving back-country? Sure, an electric sedan probably wouldn't be used for this, but a hybrid SUV might.
As soon as you introduce physical keys you have moving parts that can get gummed up, are hard to sterilize, and wear out.
1920x1200, $369 regular price (but it goes on sale periodically)
Even a light aircraft has a relatively heavy dense engine right at the front, and a typical one can go 180mph.
Crash that into your house and I bet you'd see some damage.
I work from home, so my cell phone is an ancient Blackberry curve with the lowest possible voice plan and no data plan.
Sure, I could theoretically work from anywhere with my laptop, but then I'd have to leave my big monitors, more comfortable keyboard, and faster-than-LTE internet connection--so why would I bother?
You can get a Wacom Cintiq 24HD touch for $2600.
Yes, it's only 24" and 1920x1200, so you could argue if it counts as "large".
In Saskatchewan the competitors are Shaw and Sasktel. Shaw's caps start at 125GB/month but there is effectively no penalty for exceeding it, while Sasktel doesn't have any caps.
Fixed monthly cost for maintaining the lines, then much smaller per-GB cost for bandwidth.
http://www.earplugstore.com/woodland-whisper-itc-ac.html
Of course the better ones are more expensive:
http://www.earplugstore.com/pro-ears-pro-fit-hunting-hearing-aid.html
Testing and configuring can be done in an automated way using the marvellous capabilities of computing devices.
I can buy a home theater receiver for $350 that will automatically EQ my room and apply fancy filtering. There's no way it costs thousands to do the same in a hearing aid.
I could see it making a lot of sense for certain workloads.
According to Ted Ts'o's latest update (https://plus.google.com/117091380454742934025/posts) this actually involved a combination of "umount -l" and shutting down while the filesystem was still mounted, and the user also had "nobarrier" set on the filesystem as well as "journal_async_commit".
So it sure looks like the user was playing fast and loose...this is not something that's going to hit your average person.
I currently work on a product that uses fuse on top of xfs on top of LVM on top of RAID1. There are good solid reasons for the existence of each of those layers.
No filesystem is the best for all uses, and when ZFS tries to do everything it means that it doesn't play nice with the rest of the stack.
Last time I looked I was unable to find a way to upload an app that I wrote to my mom's iPhone without a developer license (or jailbreaking the phone, which wasn't an option since it was a work phone).
In it's web browser...try to scroll on a non-scrollable webpage, and the whole screen shifts up somewhat then snaps back into place when you lift your finger.
Remote X is a pig once ping times increase due to the number of round trips required. VNC is far superior in that situation especially when it can be notified of changes efficiently.
If "retina display" is used as a scientific rather than marketing term then it shouldn't be copyrightable by Apple. Any display of equivalent angular density should be freely called a "retina display".