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Patents

Rackspace Goes On Rampage Against Patent Trolls 132

Posted by timothy
from the there-should-be-blood dept.
girlmad writes "Rackspace has come out fighting against one of the U.S.'s most notorious patent trolls, Parallel Iron. The cloud services firm said it's totally fed up with trolls of all kinds, which have caused a 500 percent rise in its legal bills. Rackspace was last week named among 12 firms accused of infringing Parallel Iron's Hadoop Distributed File System patents. Rackspace is now counter-suing the troll, as the firm said it has a deal in place with Parallel Iron after signing a previous patent settlement with them."
Network

You Can Navigate Between Any Two Websites In 19 Clicks Or Fewer 185

Posted by Soulskill
from the too-close-for-comfort dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A study done by a Hungarian physicist found that of the billions of websites and over a trillion objects on the web, any given two are separated by no more than 19 clicks. 'Distributed across the entire web, though, are a minority of pages—search engines, indexes and aggregators—that are very highly connected and can be used to move from area of the web to another. These nodes serve as the "Kevin Bacons" of the web, allowing users to navigate from most areas to most others in less than 19 clicks. Barabási credits this "small world" of the web to human nature—the fact that we tend to group into communities, whether in real life or the virtual world. The pages of the web aren't linked randomly, he says: They're organized in an interconnected hierarchy of organizational themes, including region, country and subject area. Interestingly, this means that no matter how large the web grows, the same interconnectedness will rule.'"
Displays

Touchscreen Laptops, Whether You Like Them Or Not 398

Posted by Soulskill
from the give-the-people-what-they-may-or-may-not-want dept.
An anonymous reader writes "With CES all wrapped up, an article at CNET discusses a definite trend in the laptops on display from various manufacturers this year: touchscreens. Intel and Microsoft are leading the way, and attempting to grab the industry's reins as well: '... just to make sure the touch message was crystal clear, Intel issued an edict to PC partners during its CES keynote: all next-generation ultrabooks based on its "Haswell" chip must be touch.' With tablets and detachable/convertible computers coming into the mainstream, it seems the manufacturers have something to gain by condensing their production options. The article says, 'What does that mean to consumers? Your next laptop will likely be touch, whether you like it or not.'"

Comment: Re:no more donuts for Gabe... (Score 2) 768

by BlueLightning (#41812807) Attached to: Valve: Linux Better Than Windows 8 for Gaming

The main problem with Kylix was that instead of providing a compatibility layer for existing Delphi VCL codebases (which would have been tricky, I'll admit, given how much of the Windows API was ingrained in the VCL, but not impossible) they created a brand new compatibility layer (CLX) that didn't even support all of the VCL's functionality. Result? For those commercial Delphi customers who might have been interested in porting their code to Linux, it was just too much work to port all of their code *and* that of all of the third party add-ons they were using.

Comment: Re:OMG this will NEVER happen (Score 1) 315

by BlueLightning (#41634105) Attached to: DRM Could Come To 3D Printers

Perhaps a more realistic scenario is 3D printing individual replacement car parts. Some fairly small but currently quite expensive car parts could conceivably be 3D printed in the future - so car and car parts manufacturers will probably be keen to "protect" their existing market for replacement parts once 3D printing becomes more accessible and practical.

On the other hand, they have been mostly unsuccessful in preventing "counterfeit" parts already.

Science

Anti-WiFi Wallpaper Available Next Year 167

Posted by Unknown Lamer
from the orbital-mind-control-lasers dept.
hypnosec writes with good news for folks who want to live in a Faraday cage. From the article: "A new type of wallpaper, which has been developed by scientists from the Institut Polytechnique Grenoble INP and the Centre Technique du Papier, will go on sale in 2013 after a Finnish firm Ahlstrom acquired the license. What looks like a bog-standard wallpaper roll actually contains silver particles that allows it to filter out up to three different frequencies simultaneously. It is not the first time that such a technology has surfaced. Back in 2004, BAE Systems was tasked by Ofcom to come up with a similar solution based on what was then called a stealth wallpaper. It used copper instead of silver and blocked Wi-Fi signals while letting GSM, 4G and emergency calls through. Back then, though, a square meter cost £500, whereas the Wi-Fi wallpaper devised by the French researchers should be priced reasonably, with costs matching those of a 'classic,' mid-range wallpaper according to M. Lemaître-Auger, from Grenoble INP."

"The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception a neccessity." - Oscar Wilde

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