Comment No issue here (Score 2) 129
Every update I redisable all the nvidia services, startup tasks, and shell extensions, breaking nothing of value.
Submission + - US Chip maker Marvell faces over $1billion patent fines (bbc.co.uk)
Dupple writes: US chipmaker Marvell Technology faces having to pay one of the biggest ever. patent damage awards.
A jury in Pittsburgh found the firm guilty of infringing two hard disk innovations owned by local university Carnegie Mellon.
Despite Marvel claiming that the CMU patents weren't valid because they hadn't invented anything new, citing that a Seagate patent. 14 months earlier described everything the CMU patents claimed, the jury found that Marvell's chips infringed claim 4 of Patent No. 6,201,839 and claim 2 of Patent No. 6,438,180. "method and apparatus for correlation-sensitive adaptive sequence detection" and "soft and hard sequence detection in ISI memory channels."
It said Marvell should pay $1.17bn (£723m) in compensation — however that sum could be multiplied up to three times by the judge because the jury had also said the act had been "wilful".
Marvell's shares fell more than 10%.
The maximum penalty would be close to the $3.96bn value of the company, based on its market capitalisation.
Marvell makes a range of chips which includes processors which power devices including Blackberry smartphones, Sony Google TV internet video boxes and LED lighting controllers, as well as hard disks.
A jury in Pittsburgh found the firm guilty of infringing two hard disk innovations owned by local university Carnegie Mellon.
Despite Marvel claiming that the CMU patents weren't valid because they hadn't invented anything new, citing that a Seagate patent. 14 months earlier described everything the CMU patents claimed, the jury found that Marvell's chips infringed claim 4 of Patent No. 6,201,839 and claim 2 of Patent No. 6,438,180. "method and apparatus for correlation-sensitive adaptive sequence detection" and "soft and hard sequence detection in ISI memory channels."
It said Marvell should pay $1.17bn (£723m) in compensation — however that sum could be multiplied up to three times by the judge because the jury had also said the act had been "wilful".
Marvell's shares fell more than 10%.
The maximum penalty would be close to the $3.96bn value of the company, based on its market capitalisation.
Marvell makes a range of chips which includes processors which power devices including Blackberry smartphones, Sony Google TV internet video boxes and LED lighting controllers, as well as hard disks.
Swedish Regulators Ban Word "Bank" In Domain Names For Non-Banks 175
It seems that Swedish regulators have decided to extend the requirement of not calling yourself a bank to the registration of domain names. Now anyone that tries to register a .SE domain name with the word "bank" in it will need to prove they are a legitimate bank. Hopefully there are no blood banks or anyone with the last name of "Banks" that might want a .SE domain. Here is a Google translation of the demand issued by the authorities to the .SE registry.
Fear of Porn URL Exposure Discourages Firefox 3 Upgrade 673
Barence writes "Mozilla's Security team has disclosed a very interesting piece of research which suggests people refused to upgrade to Firefox 3 because they were afraid the browser would expose their porn collection. Mozilla's research found that the number one reason for not upgrading was the new location bar, and the fact that it delved into people's bookmark collections to suggest sites as they typed. 'When we expanded the capabilities of the location bar to search against all history and bookmarks in Firefox 3, a lot of people contacted us to say that they had certain bookmarks they didn't really want to have displayed,' Firefox's principal designer, Alex Faaborg, tactfully explains. 'In some cases users had intentionally hidden these bookmarks in deep hierarchies of folders, somewhat similar to how one might hide a physical object.'"
The Speed Gamers Raise Over $26,000 For Charity 65
Levonn Lawrence writes "Moving into day four of seven, The Speed Gamers (TSG) continue to play a Final Fantasy marathon for an unusual reason: charity. The guys at TSG are playing through every main Final Fantasy game, from one to twelve, over a period of seven days in hopes or raising $50,000 for ACT Today (Autism Care and Treatment). The marathon is streamed live for people to watch. ACT is a charity helping to financially support families effected by Autism. The marathon started 6pm CST, Friday, July 17th, 2009 and is going until Friday, July 24th 2009. So far they've raised over $26,000 (not a typo) and they're only 89 hours in."
Comment Re:Am I missing something? (Score 2, Informative) 251
For one, it creates lots of temporary files for every file it scans, trying to extract them like an archive whether they really are or not. That's why it scans so slowly, and will thrash your hard drive even if you're scanning files elsewhere, like over the network.
Comment Why XFS was never an option (Score 1) 830
Ext3's commit interval was one of its best features.
Sure, it doesn't have to make guarantees when the app doesn't explicitly sync, but losing data 1% of the time in an outage is better than losing data 99% of those in those cases.
Whenever I saw people complaining of losses in XFS that wouldn't have happened in ext3, the "doesn't have to guarantee unless synced" thing was brought up as an excuse.
Comment Screen resolution (Score 3, Informative) 42
Since most reviews including this one assume that it's enough to just give the screen size in inches, as though readers are too clueless to care, I'll save you some searching. It's 1366x768.
How To Handle Corporate Blackmail? 675
An anonymous reader writes "I have been in a software engineering position at a large company for approximately seven years. Recently, for a variety of reasons, I accepted a new job working for a local software company. I have given my employer three weeks' notice, instead of the standard two, as a courtesy.
In return, it has been implied that, in spite my record of above-average performance appraisals and promotions, I will be marked as leaving the company 'on bad terms' if I refuse to extend my departure date further. With only three weeks remaining, I am hesitant to rock the boat by contacting our HR department, but this concerns me and seems like an extremely unethical practice. I live in an 'at-will' employment state, so I know that they have no legal recourse to keep me. I am concerned about the references they could give in the future; having spent a large majority of my career at this company, I will be dependent on them for references to verify my career experience.
Has anyone ever run into this kind of situation before?"
Comment Time flies (Score 1) 430
I still have a big bag full of buttons and other freebies from the 1996 Comdex.
Comment People who ruin it for everyone (Score 1) 1246
I highly disapprove of strip searching students (at least a female cop did it this time). But then you have kids like her lying and stashing things where the sun don't shine, who can only be caught by strip search.
Expel her.
Human-Animal Hybrids Fail 554
SailorSpork writes "Fans of furries and anime-style cat girls will be disappointed by the news that attempts to create human animal hybrids have failed. Experiments by British scientists to create embryonic stem cells by putting human DNA into cow or rabbit eggs had raised ethical concerns, but the question of how we would treat sub-humans will have to wait until we actually figure out how to make them."
Microsoft 'Vista Capable' Settlement Cost Could Be Over $8 Billion 313
bk- writes with news that documents from the "Vista Capable" class-action lawsuit against Microsoft indicate the software giant could be on the hook for as much as $8.52 billion in upgrade costs.
"[University of Washington economist Keith] Leffler came up with his total upgrade costs by calculating how much it would cost to upgrade each of the 19.4 million PCs with 1 GB of memory and graphics cards or onboard chipsets able to run Aero, according to Keizer. Leffler put the maximum cost of upgrading the desktops at $155, while positing that the notebooks' integrated graphics would be more tricky to replace and would cost between $245 and $590 per unit. The total price tag for Microsoft would thus range from $3.92 billion to $8.52 billion and in some cases would include complete replacements of notebooks that could not be feasibly upgraded, Leffler testified. Microsoft in its response argued that giving litigants 'a free upgrade to Premium-ready PCs would provide a windfall to millions.'"
Comment vs alternatives (Score 1) 115
I've known for months that they've been doing this, just because I've been getting email notices stating it.
I prefer the ads to silent or removed videos or suspended accounts.
Oregon Governor Proposes Vehicle Mileage Tax 713
tiedyejeremy writes "As covered by the Crosscut Blog, the Governor of Oregon, Ted Kulongoski, is proposing a change in the funding of the Oregonian transportation system that drops gasoline taxes and, by way of GPS tracking, taxes the number of miles driven, to the tune of 1.2 cents per mile. The reason for the proposed change is that lower fuel consumption via fuel efficiency will leave the system underfunded. The concerns involve government tracking of the movements of vehicles within the state, though this has been denied by ODOT official, James Whitty. I'm wondering how this affects people using the Interstate System and private roads, and if the outputs can or will be used by law enforcement to check alibis."
