Comment Meh (Score 4, Informative) 195
3M has had a thermal sheet which has outperformed paste for more than 10 years already.
How is this news?
Comment Eh? What is new? (Score 1) 263
I though disinformation is SOP with Governments... Or maybe it is just a British govt trait.
Comment Re:It will pass in some form (Score 3, Interesting) 253
If its passing is inevitable, I want it as hobbled and useless as possible.
The other option is to have it so overreaching that it becomes impossible to do anything without infringing.
Then the courts will have no choice but to ignore it completely.
Comment Hmm... (Score 2) 74
My personal opinion: I don't like their implementation.
I would prefer to see a version which uses a long "tape" which is covered in a thin film and the data recorded using different coloured dots from whiteboard markers.
Just my 2.
Comment Re:won't help against patent trolls (Score 1) 98
Like most such schemes (and this is not the first), this won't help against patent trolls, as they don't use patents, and are thus immune to the threat of countersuits. A patent troll is sort of the equivalent of what the SCO Group has become: a company which makes nothing, and whose entire purpose is litigation.
Well... it just needs IBM to join because they have a business methods patent on being a patent troll.
Comment Seems justified... (Score 3, Interesting) 136
From TFA:
... would not use sites that already had unused BT equipment
...
Seems reasonable to refuse on those grounds alone.
Comment Nice idea... Won't happen. (Score 4, Insightful) 205
FWIW, this is my personal opinion:
It would never happen. Today's purpose of patents is different from when the concept was created. The use today is to prevent a small or single owner nimble upstart from usurping the business of an incumbent elephant and potentially gutting the cash cow of it's shareholders.
The aforementioned incumbents would fight tooth and nail, with large campaign contributions and gifts, to prevent such a law from ever passing.
Comment Really? (Score 3, Interesting) 192
I had thought that IBM had a problem with attrition among their mainframe programmers: More of them dying though natural causes than entering the field.
Comment Re:Female British Voice (Score 1) 516
There is something undeniably very sexy about the female British voice.
I am British and I would disagree with your statement.
Comment An observation... (Score 1, Insightful) 467
If you need to "run" code, either in your head or on a computer, in order to see what it's going to do, you're probably not really programming and you're definitely not an engineer.
Comment Re:Release Date for PC (Score 5, Funny) 344
We have a cocaine fountain in the lobby? Why does no one tell me of these things?
Comment RoHS? (Score 2) 108
As an added bonus, they can not adhere to RoHS when building their disposable gliders and pollute their enemies with PCBs, lead, cadmium, mercury and lots of other lovely chemicals...
Comment Pointless (Score 3, Insightful) 311
The pointless application of technology just for the simple sake of technology seems a waste.
Now, a subject course where students have to buy and learn to program a $25 computer, no more expensive than a typical textbook, that would be a worthwhile application of technology in schools.
*sighs*
Submission + - Oracle RAC on RHEL6 and CentOS 6 (dell.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Oracle seems to be dragging its feet in certifying the Enterprise Linux 6 line (RHEL, CentOS, and similar) for use with its flagship database products even though Red Hat sent their certification information to Oracle months ago.
It would appear that some people aren't standing by idle awaiting a statement or official documentation, an Engineer from Dell has put together a nice piece on making Oracle RAC 11gR2 work with RHEL 6. Have a read over here.
It would appear that some people aren't standing by idle awaiting a statement or official documentation, an Engineer from Dell has put together a nice piece on making Oracle RAC 11gR2 work with RHEL 6. Have a read over here.
Submission + - California State Senator Proposes Open-Source Text (ca.gov)
bcrowell writes: Although former Governor Schwarzenegger's free digital textbook initiative for K-12 education was a failure,
state senator Darrell Steinberg has a
new idea for the state-subsidized
publication of college textbooks (details in the PDF links at the bottom). Newspaper editorials
seem positive.[1],
[2].
It will be interesting to see if this works any better at the college level than it did for K-12, where textbook selection has traditionally been very bureaucratic. This is also different from Schwarzenegger's FDTI because Steinberg proposes spending state money to help create the books. The K-12 version suffered from legal uncertainty about the Williams case, which requires equal access to books for all students — many of whom might not have computers at home. At the symposium where the results of the FDTI's first round were announced, it became apparent that the only businesses interested in participating actively were not the publishers but computer manufacturers like Dell and Apple, who wanted to sell lots of hardware to schools.
It will be interesting to see if this works any better at the college level than it did for K-12, where textbook selection has traditionally been very bureaucratic. This is also different from Schwarzenegger's FDTI because Steinberg proposes spending state money to help create the books. The K-12 version suffered from legal uncertainty about the Williams case, which requires equal access to books for all students — many of whom might not have computers at home. At the symposium where the results of the FDTI's first round were announced, it became apparent that the only businesses interested in participating actively were not the publishers but computer manufacturers like Dell and Apple, who wanted to sell lots of hardware to schools.
