95882
submission
daria42 writes:
Steve Ballmer has reissued Microsoft's patent threat against Linux, warning open-source vendors that they must respect his company's intellectual property. In a no-nonsense presentation to New York financial analysts last week, Microsoft's chief executive said the company's partnership with Novell, which it signed in November 2006, "demonstrated clearly the value of intellectual property, even in the open-source world."
94508
submission
oski4410 writes:
The Google engineers just published a paper on Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population. Based on a study of 100,000 disk drives over 5 years they find some interesting stuff. To quote from the abstract:
"Our analysis identifies several parameters from the drive's
self monitoring facility (SMART) that correlate highly with
failures. Despite this high correlation, we conclude that models
based on SMART parameters alone are unlikely to be useful
for predicting individual drive failures. Surprisingly, we found
that temperature and activity levels were much less correlated
with drive failures than previously reported."