Comment: Re:Luminox (Score 1) 466
With today's presumably safer and mostly robotic production processes, one would think that watch producers would be allowed to use radium again?
Last I checked repair wasn't robotized.
Comment: Re:Look at a T-1 with a SLA...I did. (Score 2) 345
keep shopping, iirc speakeasy (now megapath) has T1s for ~250 a month
Comment: Re:5 Seconds (Score 1) 478
It looks like the lawyer is arguing it saved them a day or two and that since google is making $3 million a day on android that that is $6 million google wouldn't have had if they didn't steal rangeCheck. The judge then points out that as you say... it saved 5 seconds.
Comment: Re:Summary so awful, it just hurts. (Score 1) 134
Router buffers, and full routing buffers is a bad thing, they're talking about buffering your packets, not buffering the contents of your disk. Here, I found you a good article to read about bufferbloat http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2209336
Comment: Re:What about the libraries? (Score 1) 239
Then the libraries that aren't android specific are based on the Apache harmony project so affidavits from Google engineers would be quite useless there.
I touched on the libraries in my original post as well.
Comment: Re:Clean room is irrelevant (Score 1) 239
As I understand tje JAVA lic, and perhaps I'm mistaken, but it seems pretty clear that Sun lic the programming language for free but retained the lic and copyright on the implementation of the language itself.
I'm not sure how this would be relevant. Last I checked neither android nor the android SDK implement a java compiler at all. They rely on the JDK for compiling. They do static binary translation from JVM byte code to Dalvik byte code.
Comment: Re:"Clean Room" implementation (Score 5, Insightful) 239
There are some fairly large differences between Dalvik (the vm in android) and the JVM from sun/oracle/whoever. Namely the Dalvik instruction set is register based whereas java is stack based. You can easily have any engineer look at the code for the Dalvik vm itself and see there is quite a difference. Then the libraries that aren't android specific are based on the Apache harmony project so affidavits from Google engineers would be quite useless there. Now the question to me wouldn't be in Android itself but is the Android SDK truly clean room. There's a static re-compiler to recompile JVM bytecode to Dalvik bytecode. My guess is the SDK is clean room itself but Schmidt being honest about android being clean room isn't so unlikely but it is quite possible this is doublespeak and the SDK itself (hey it's not "Android") could very well be based on Sun IP. The relevant stuff I've seen in this court case hasn't related to so much lifted code as it was patents which is quite difficult to avoid infringing just by not seeing code.
Comment: Re:I can't record on my Android phone but... (Score 1) 94
Not all do. I use total recall call recorder on my galaxy s2 just fine without speakerphone.
Comment: Re:New "team" network driver (Score 1) 314
Something about a fight with Tanenbaum over microkernels vs monolithic kernels.
Changing the Texture of Plastics On Demand 48
Posted
by
timothy
from the what-would-you-do-with-this? dept.
from the what-would-you-do-with-this? dept.
cylonlover writes "Imagine a pair of rubber gloves whose surface texture could be altered on demand to provide more grip for climbing. Or maybe gloves with "fingerprints" that can be changed in the blink of an eye. They are just a couple of the many potential applications envisioned by researchers at Duke University for a process they have developed that allows the texture of plastics to be changed at will. By applying specific voltages, the researchers have been able to dynamically switch polymer surfaces among various patterns ranging from dots, segments, lines to circles."