* Posts by Chris C

671 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Oct 2007

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IBM patents making money from patents

Chris C

Reporter is wrong... It's not about licensing

While the reporter is trying to make a sensational story, his understanding of the patent is wrong. In order to learn what a patent is about, you have to do more than read the description. Technically, the description is meaningless. It's the claims that are important.

And the claims of this patent are not about patent licensing. IBM is not trying to patent patent licensing. What it *IS* about is creating a pool of IP that can be used by multiple licensees. Now, while this may sound like your typical patent licensing, it's not. First, this pool encompasses patents, copyrights, and trade secrets. Second, when one of the licensees needs to use the selected IP, it is then legally transferred to them and thus unavailable for anybody else to use until they transfer it back.

So no, it's not about patent licensing. It's about temporarily transferring your IP to another company so they can use it as a bargaining chip. Mind you, I still think it's a ridiculous notion that such a thing can be patented. But at least read the claims and get the story right.

American football power nabs phone numbers for 13,000 StubHubers

Chris C

My two cents

1. I have never gone to see the Patriots play their game. And now, with this behavior, they have assured themselves that I never will.

2. You forgot to mention what they'll most likely use this information for -- spamming these people.

3. The court had no right to force StubHub to release the information of the people who did not break the law, and who could not have been thought by a reasonable person to have broken the law. Sadly, this is the U.S. and I'm not surprised in the least. Ashamed, but not surprised.

4. Ticket prices have gotten ridiculously out of hand even without scalpers. Why? So the teams (from the owners down to the players) can get ridiculous amounts of money while the people paying hard-earned money to see the game will never see as much money in ten lifetimes as these guys do in one year (OK, that's more true for baseball, but the basic premise still stands). And before anyone points it out, yes, I realize that broadcast rights, advertising, etc contribute to that as well.

5. In the event that scalpers routinely purchase all the tickets, making it so that people cannot afford the tickets, the tickets will remain unsold. As such, the tickets will lose (or not attain the desired) market value. As a result, the scalpers will either stop or will sell the tickets for less. This is how the free market operates. The ticket agency is perfectly capable of doing this as well, but they choose not to. In this case, they're jealous because the scalpers are making money instead of the ticket agency getting the extra.

6. I must disagree with Jeremy about the contract issue. If I was to purchase a ticket to any sports event, I am not entering a contract. I have not signed anything, therefor there is no contract. A policy that states "you agree that by purchasing this ticket, you are restricted from doing x, y, and z" is (in my eyes) the same as a click-through EULA. To my knowledge, no such license or policy has been tried in the courts, so no one can say which way it would go. My feeling is that unless I have signed something, I have not formally agreed to it.

7. And finally, $2 was worth a lot more 83 years years ago than today. Heck, it was worth a lot more 10 years ago. Even as short as 50 years ago, products were 10 to 20 times cheaper than they are now. The point is, the value has changed drastically, so the law should be updated to reflect that. In closing, I find it ironic that I can go into any store, purchase as many items as I want (including limited edition items which have a limited quantity), and then resell them for a profit, but I cannot do the same with tickets.

Avoiding x86 cuts iSCSI cost and watts

Chris C

re: Aaron

Actually, if you read the AC's post, and then you read the document he linked to, it is clear that he does NOT understand the difference between measuring in bits and bytes.

"a 133mhz 64bit pci-x bus limits you to about 1GB/Sec good for gigabit but not 10. So a 10GB card is pointless on this system as the bus becomes your limiting factor."

That shows that he understands the bus to be measured in gigabytes per second, but he then goes on to say that 1 gigabyte per second is good for one gigabit per second but not for 10 gigabits per second. Saying a 1GB/sec bus limit isn't good for a 10GbE card is like saying 4GB of RAM isn't good because about 0.5GB will be inaccessible in a 32-bit OS (so say the motherboard manufacturers). Just because you don't reach the theoretical maximum doesn't mean that coming darn close "isn't good".

I didn't write that comment to "prove how knowledgeable [I] might be in a particular field". I wrote that comment because there is a huge difference between Gb and GB, and I've seen many people make that mistake because they don't understand there is a difference. Asking that people are careful to use the proper notation does not make me a nerd, nor does it give anyone a bad rep. Not using proper notation can lead to serious and expensive disasters (just ask NASA about that one). It's bad enough that inattention to detail breeds ignorance, as can be seen in countless New Egg reviews such as this one: "Very disappointed that I paid for a 750GB and only got a 699GB hard drive." Let's not breed further ignorance by misusing the notations for bits and bytes.

Chris C
Stop

Bits and bytes are NOT interchangeable!

re: Not a windows issue

"I had a lengthy argument on this point before when some of our admins bought a 10GB card and werent getting the throughput they were expecting."

I hope you didn't use the same argument you used here. If you did, then the admins probably walked away saying to each other "What an idiot!" I can almost guarantee you that your admins did not buy a 10GB card. I can also almost guarantee that the reason they didn't achieve anywhere near the max throughput is because of other factors unrelated to the bus (such as the speed of the medium they were reading from [hard drive]).

This is where people reading a tech journal need to sit back and use their grey matter -- bandwidth is measured in two ways -- xbps and xB/sec. The first, such as a 10GbE card (10Gbps) is BITS -- a 10 Gigabit per second network card. The second, such as the PCI-X bus (1GB/sec) is BYTES -- a 64-bit 133MHz PCI-X bus has a peak transfer rate of 1 GigaByte per second.

So, while you are technically correct that even the 64-bit 133MHz PCI-X bus would not be able to fully utilize 10GbE, it WOULD be able to utilitize 8Gbps (eight gigabits per second). In order to fully utilize a 10GBE card (notice the capital "B", meaning 10 gigabytes per second Ethernet), you would need a PCIe x16 card using encoded data (80 Gbps).

Bits and bytes are NOT interchangeable!

Chris C

Math and cost

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A basic 2TB system costs less than £7000, while a version with 3TB of SAS or 12TB of SATA would be around £11,000, Shepherd said. "SAS is still about three times the cost per MB of SATA, although the gap gets lower as you go up in capacity," he noted.

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Is that the new kind of math? 3TB of SAS vs 12TB of SATA, and yet he claims that SAS is still "about three times" the cost per MB of SATA. According to my math, 12TB divided by 3TB is four times the cost, not three. Then again, looking at New Egg, the cost difference is way more than that. 1TB SATA drive is around 330 USD ($0.32/MB), 147GB SAS drive is around $425 ($2.89/MB), which works out to be about 9 times the cost of the SATA drive (per MB).

So, £11,000 / 22,000 USD for 12TB of SATA? A 1TB drive costs around $330, so that's $3,960 for the storage itself. So that's $18,040 for the RAID adapters, trays, and server hardware? Can we say ripoff?

Removable hard disks make a come-backup

Chris C

Missing the point

From my personal experience:

TAPE -- PRO: easy to maintain, easy to configure backup software; CON: Prone to failure in dirty/dusty environment, typically shorter recommended life than disk-based storage

EXTERNAL USB -- PRO: relatively inexpensive (when compared to tape's total cost); CON: drive lettering issue, difficult to configure backup software, Windows refusing to "let go", USB overhead

MOBILE RACKS -- PRO: inexpensive; CON: drive lettering issue, difficult to configure backup software, Windows refusing to "let go", poorly-designed racks can cause integrity problems

Remember, this is about corporate backups, not home backups. This is about using a set of drives as you would a set of tapes, so all drives must use the same drive letter (or you'll have to configure your backup software with a different configuration/backup set for each drive). View this as a zip drive with a really large capacity.

The drive lettering issue isn't a deal-breaker. But if you forget about it when using new cartridges/drives, or if Windows randomly "forgets" about the device and detects it as new, then it's a real problem and you missed last night's backup.

Backup software has gotten better with backup-to-disk folders and backing up to removable media, but anyone using older software will have trouble configuring the software to back up to a set of removable drives. Backup Exec 8, for example, makes it a real pain in the ass.

And the biggest issue I have found with any type of removable drives (USB or hot-swap mobile rack) is Windows refusing to "let go". Windows claims that files are open and it's not safe to unplug the drive. Even when Process Explorer shows no files open on the drive, Windows will still not let go. So you have two choices -- 1) unplug the drive anyway and risk data corruption, or 2) shut down your server so that you can remove last night's backup. Neither one of these are really options for any business.

I like the concept of backing up to hard drives. But in my experience, the hassle isn't worth it unless tape fails (such as if the server is in a dirty/dusty environment). As for the people complaining about the cost of the system, have you ever looked at a decent tape drive? A Quantum DLT-S4 800GB/1.6TB drive will cost you about 3,300 USD, with the tapes costing about 85 USD each. So no, compared to tape (which this is designed to compete with), it's not expensive at all.

The recommended replacement cycle for daily-usage tapes (meaning five tapes per week, each tape used once per week) is only one or two years. So it's certainly more than the "couple of months" mentioned in the article, but not as long as alluded to above.

The Quantum GoVault seems to be very much the same concept, but those are only available in capacities up to 160GB, which is not reasonable for any mid- or large-sized company (and really not even reasonable for many small businesses, either).

As for these cartridges/drives being physically larger in your pocket than a tape, I don't doubt that. But I don't think they'll be THAT much larger than an LTO or DLT tape. Those things really make you long for the small size of a DDS tape.

Chris C

re: You can do the same thing for under $30

"Or even better pop all those drives into a RAID 6 array and do your backups over a network."

Yes, because every company wants their backup to be on another system located in the same office. That'd be great for disaster recovery.

Citizen Kane Oscar goes under the hammer

Chris C

re: The hell you say...

I don't see "Debbie Does Dallas" or "Deep Throat" in your list. Speaking of which, is it just me, or does "How Green Was My Valley" sound suspiciously like the name of a porn flick?

International manhunt tracks pedophile suspect to Thailand

Chris C

Why...

There's one thing I don't understand. I think we can all agree that child pornography and child abuse is bad, and that anyone who takes part in it should be removed from society. So why on earth would Interpol and/or the various law enforcement agencies NOT want the public's help in finding these people? The FBI has various lists of wanted people, including a list of (albeit only six) "Televised Sexual Predators", right on their home page. So in cases where it's cut-and-dry (such as this case, where the "suspect" is in over 200 photographs), why not ask for the public's help?

Before anyone jumps on my back about how photographs can be doctored, if you have a large enough sample (say, 200), you can tell if they're authentic or doctored. There's no such thing as a perfectly doctored photo.

California court tilts towards mandating web accessibility

Chris C

Such flawed (lack of) logic

miiki, in your attempt to put me down, you made two assumptions:

1) That I am not disabled.

2) That if I became disabled, I would automatically demand additional rights and public and governmental assistance.

I'm not so sure about point one. I am somewhat dyslexic, and I do have severe memory problems (in that I can't remember things, or if I do, not for very long).

You are completely off-base on point two, however. I have always been of the mindset that I will take care of myself. I do not demand, or even ask for, help from others. If I became disabled in the traditional sense of the word (blind, deaf, physically disabled, etc), I still wouldn't demand help from anybody. I would never demand anybody change their ways to accommodate me. I would simply accept that there would be certain things I would no longer be able to do. That's what "disabled" means.

As for Maisie: "To make a point - disability is created by barriers." You are absolutely correct. But, and you might have to step outside your comfort zone to do this, take a step back and think what exactly those barriers are. You're focusing on what YOU view as a barrier instead of seeing the ACTUAL barrier. Why can't a blind person see a website, what's their barrier? Oh, yes, that's right -- IT'S THAT THEY'RE BLIND. Websites like target.com aren't discriminating against anyone; they aren't saying "you can't shop here". They're simply not taking additional steps to cater to you.

Chris C
Flame

Stupid laws from stupid people

Don't get me wrong, I sympathize with disabled people, I really do. But why is it that everything needs to be created for the lowest common denominator (no offense intended)? It may be hard to believe, but websites and physical stores already treat everybody equally. What laws like this want is special, preferential treatment for groups which consider themselves disabled (groups which, by and large, take offense to the word "disabled", but have no problem accepting, strike that, demanding public assistance and government aid because of their disability). A blind person has access to the website in exactly the same way I do. They may not be able to see the website, but the access is equal. Just because they may not be able to see/read the site doesn't mean that it is not equal access.

NEWSFLASH -- People are not created equal. It's about time that the government and the laws they write realize that. Discrimination is bad no matter what form it takes. But lack of something does not equal discrimination. If I don't have a handicap ramp leading into my office, am I discriminating against anyone? According to the law I am. There is a difference, a huge difference, between discrimination and not giving special accommodation to certain people.

NEWSFLASH 2 -- There is a reason these people are called disabled. While I sympathize with them, they have to realize that there are certain things they simply cannot do.

Perhaps blind people should sue Playboy next because (I'm assuming) their pictures don't have detailed captions ("Alternate text" in HTML-speak)?

Note: I'm from the U.S. Perhaps the disabled in the U.K. and elsewhere are better behaved than those i have seen here.

Digital downloads get pop-tastic applause

Chris C

Sick of hearing about Radiohead

Why is it that since Radiohead decided to offer their music direct to their fans, that's the only band you guys mention? They're not pioneers here. Harvey Danger did this two years ago (September 2005). They likely weren't the first, either.

Future of computing safe, thanks to Excel patch

Chris C

re: How the bug...

And two of the first three comments are by Softies. Nothing like blindly reciting what Microsoft has said. The only problem with that is that their explanation doesn't hold water. If you have functions such as ROUND() that use the buggy version of the number, then it's not just a display issue. As for the joelonsoftware.com link, that explained nothing about the bug's origin. It did a good job of explaining floating point calculation to the unwashed masses, but it didn't explain the cause of the bug at all. In fact, it was a very BAD article because it said the bug wasn't serious. I'd bet good money that accountants and engineers (if there are any that actually use Excel) consider it VERY serious.

Quantum sues Riverbed over de-dupe patent

Chris C

Huh?

How in the hell does anyone get a patent on de-duplication nowadays? Isn't that the cornerstone of every compression technique ever invented? Oh wait, this is the U.S. Nevermind.

Ohio docks official one week's holiday for data breach

Chris C

Cost?

"The loss of the tape, which contained social security numbers and other sensitive information, is expected to cost the state about $3m."

Wow, that's one expensive tape! Was it custom-made?

Assuming full disclosure is required for those people affected, here is a VERY generous estimate. Cost of tape: $100 (estimate). Cost of time to look up individuals' information, create a mail merge, create a generic "Oops! We lost your info, sorry." letter, and merge to create letters to send to the people: $500 (5 hours * $100/hr). Cost in labor to print those letters: $21,700 (10ppm [217 hours] * $100/hr). Cost of paper and ink to print those letters: $9,100 (7 cents * 130,000 letters). Cost in labor to stuff and seal envelopes: $36,112 (10 seconds per envelope * 130,000 letters * $100/hr). Cost to mail letters: $53,300 (41 cents * 130,000 letters). OK, so totaled up, that's $120,812.

Can someone point to where the other $2,879,188 comes from? Or are they using the usual government format of "Well, it cost us $x to redesign the system properly and implement it the way it should have been." in coming up with that estimate? It was a lost tape. It's not like someone hacked into the system (where I can possibly understand large costs of having to inspect the system in minute detail to make sure it's safe again).

This emergency alert has been cancelled by Hotmail

Chris C

Who's the idiot?

Regarding the first three comments, I believe it's you who are the idiots. This article isn't about someone sending messages out FROM Hotmail. This article is about a company not being able to send messages TO Hotmail addresses. Huge difference.

Though I must say, I liked the ignorance of the first comment. You say you agree with MS and this policy because it reduces your spam. And then you say that no one should use Hotmail, that they should use an ISP for email. But following that logic, ISPs should use that same policy, which would mean problems for users no matter who hosts their email.

Princess Fiorina goes on the box with Fox

Chris C

Let's not forget SHE WAS FIRED

You make it sound like Carly is this great businesswoman who simply couldn't keep her peeps at HP tight-lipped. The fact is, her time at HP showed her to be anything but. Let's not forget that she was fired because she nearly drove the business into the ground. We won't pretend that she had it easy since HP was in a relatively poor state when she got there. But she acquired and then killed Compaq (the only reason the name "Compaq" means anything anymore is because the name "HP" carries even more stigma), she authorized illegal investigations into her board members and beyond (and let's not pretend that she didn't understand what was being done), and she basically let the company go to hell. Forgive me if I don't take her business advice.

Manhunt 2 banned by UK censor - again

Chris C

Censorship

Anyone who pulls this crap of "It shouldn't be made available because *I* don't like it" (such as Anonymous Coward and BoldMan) is someone I can do without. Please realize that you are not me, and I am not you. Like many people here, I have played violent video games my entire life (I'm now 30), starting when I was probably about 8 years old with the NES. And yet, I have never become violent in Real Life. One of my favorite things to do when playing Soldier of Fortune is to take the knife and slice the enemies to bits, cutting them up into little pieces. But that's Fantasy. Seeing the same thing in Real Life turns my stomach. Why should everyone be punished because some people cannot disconnect Real Life from Fantasy? And for those who say violent games serve no purpose, I wholeheartedly disagree. I can unleash my anger in violent games, channeling that anger into entertainment rather than letting it keep festering inside me. It's the digital equivalent of a punching bag.

However, keeping in line with those people's logic, I think all religious paraphernalia (books, video, audio, jewelry, assorted propaganda, etc) should be outlawed because I don't agree with it. So take off that crucifix and burn that bible, because it's offensive to me. And since religion has been proven to drive people to murder, I think I'm on more solid ground than people yapping about video games.

Do you want a high-score with that?

Chris C

re: yah creepy

"I am not sure what that says about their company when their mascot makes people uneasy."

Well, to me, it could easily be seen as an attempt by the company to keep people's thoughts occupied with the creepy mascot instead of thinking about what they're eating.

Canadian prof develops drunk-driving sim

Chris C

Bad idea

This, in and of itself, isn't a bad idea; I actually think it's a good idea. Unfortunately, there are bound to be some idiots who think the experience is "kewl and trippy" and purposely act out that experience for real. And then when they cause damage and possibly kill someone, the game maker will be blamed, no matter how many people have avoided drink/drunk driving because of the game. At least that's the way it would go down here in the U.S.

Sprint Nextel and Verizon jury trials have Vonage on the brink

Chris C

Cisco, et al. are safe

I'm not a lawyer, nor do I know much about telecoms and VOIP. But I can say with near certainty that the equipment manufacturers (Cisco, et al) are safe from the telecoms companies. Mind you, I'm not saying they are not liable. I'm saying that the telecoms companies won't go after them. Simply put, the telecoms companies WANT competitors to use these technologies and grow big so that they can be sued out of existence with the telecoms companies getting nice big fat checks.

As an aside, I question how a percentage-based royalty is ever appropriate. All that means is that Vonage will have to pay higher royalties if they raise their prices, even though nothing will have changed.

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