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Patents

CSIRO Sues US Carriers Over Wi-Fi Patent 308

Posted by kdawson from the milking-it dept.
An anonymous reader notes that CSIRO has sued Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile in — wait for it — East Texas District Court. "Australia's peak science body stands to reap more than $1 billion from its lucrative Wi-Fi patent after already netting about $250 million from the world's biggest technology companies, an intellectual property lawyer says. The CSIRO has spent years battling 14 technology giants including Dell, HP, Microsoft, Intel, Nintendo, and Toshiba for royalties and made a major breakthrough in April last year when the companies opted to avoid a jury hearing and settle for an estimated $250 million. Now, the organization is bringing the fight to the top three US mobile carriers in a new suit targeting Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and T-Mobile. It argues they have been selling devices that infringe its patents."
IBM

The Muppets' 1967 IBM Sales Films 63

Posted by kdawson from the skinny-black-tie dept.
harrymcc writes "Forty-three years ago, before most people had ever heard of the Muppets, IBM contracted with Jim Henson for a series of short films that it used to educate and entertain its sales staff. These little-known movies — some of which feature cutting-edge office automation equipment such as very early word-processing systems — remain fresh, funny, and surprisingly irreverent. And one of them features the first appearance of the Cookie Monster, who got his big break on Sesame Street a couple of years later."

Submission + - Computer troubleshooting and falsification (windowsitpro.com)

Submitted by blarkon
blarkon writes: Ever wasted time troubleshooting an IT problem because you’d jumped to the wrong conclusion and compounded the error by looking for evidence to support your intuition? Orin Thomas suggests that we should try to disprove troubleshooting conclusions we’ve arrived at through intuition. Looking for disproof rather than proof as a way of testing an idea was first proposed in the 1930’s by philosopher Karl Popper.
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - BBC Journalist Breaks 'Unbreakable' Phone At CES

Submitted by andylim
andylim writes: A lesson for anyone claiming their product is unbreakable. Bob Plaschke, Sonim's CEO, told the BBC: "You can drop it from at least 10 storeys, you can go under water 20ft for a half hour... you can hammer a nail with it. It is basically unbreakable." Seconds later a BBC journalist smashed the screen against the side of a fish tank.
Earth

How Earth Avoided a Fiery Premature Death 114

Posted by kdawson from the flood-next-time dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Space.com has a piece about changing theories of planet migration. The classic picture suggests that planets like Earth should have plummeted into the sun while they were still planetesimals, asteroid-sized building blocks that eventually collide to form full-fledged planets. 'Well, this contradicts basic observational evidence, like We. Are. Here,' says astronomer Moredecai-Mark Mac Low. Researchers investigating this discrepancy came up with a new model that explains how planets can migrate as they're forming and still avoid a fiery premature death. One problem with the classic view of planet formation and migration is that it assumes that the temperature of the protoplanetary disk around a star is constant across its whole span. It turns out that portions of the disk are opaque and so cannot cool quickly by radiating heat out to space. So in the new model, temperature differences in the space around the sun, 4.6 billion years ago, caused Earth to migrate outward as much as gravity was trying to pull it inward, and so the fledgling world found equilibrium in its current, habitable, orbit. 'We are trying to understand how planets interact with the gas disks from which they form as the disk evolves over its lifetime,' adds Mac Low. 'We show that the planetoids from which the Earth formed can survive their immersion in the gas disk without falling into the Sun.'"
Medicine

Pneumatic Tube Communication In Hospitals 350

Posted by kdawson from the foot-long-packets dept.
blee37 sends along a writeup from the School of Medicine at Stanford University on their pneumatic tube delivery system, used for sending atoms not bits. Such systems are in use in hospitals nationwide; the 19th-century technology is enhancd by recent refinements in pneumatic braking. "Every day, 7,000 times a day, Stanford Hospital staff turn to pneumatic tubes, cutting-edge technology in the 19th century, for a transport network that the Internet and all the latest Silicon Valley wizardry can't match: A tubular system to transport a lab sample across the medical center in the blink of an eye."
Graphics

Australian Defence Force Builds $1.7m Linux-Based Flight Simulator 232

Posted by timothy from the send-some-love-to-flightgear dept.
scrubl writes "The Australian Defence Force (ADF) has revealed its latest flight simulator runs on SUSE Linux-based clusters of Opteron servers and uses an open source graphics platform. The Defence Science and Technology Organisation's (DSTO) Air Operations Simulation Centre in Melbourne creates virtual worlds that allow pilots to experience real-world combat situations without leaving the ground. The visuals software was written in OpenGL, using commercial and open source scene graph engines and making 'heavy use of OpenGL Shader Language programs.'"

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