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Patents

Submission + - Magic Folding Cube 1

Submitted by Pepebuho
Pepebuho writes: I love Magic Folding Cubes
(If you are not sure what they are, look them up here... http://www.math.nmsu.edu/~breakingaway/Lessons/MFC/MFC.html)
In fact, I built one for myself and they are fun.

Looking up whether I could make a small hobby/craft out of this, I found out that they seem to be patented.
http://www.google.com/patents?id=VXIJAAAAEBAJ&zoom=4&rview=1&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q=&f=false

On the other hand I believe there is a clear precedent that would make this patent invalid. There was
a prior invention, the Yoshimoto Cube http://www1.ttcn.ne.jp/a-nishi/y_cube/z_y_cube.html that shows the same kind
of moves that the magic cube have.

So far, my options are
1. Go naive, make several and expect not to be caught. It is possible, but I'd rather stay legal
2. Pay the royalties, although I could not find a website or anywhere to know where to go and negotiate those except sending a snail mail that most likely will be tossed out as spam.
3. Mount a challenge to the patent (expensive I think).
4. ??????

I know I should go to patent lawyer, but I would like to hear of people's opinion about this before commiting more time, and re$sources to this.

Thanks

Submission + - Immortal molecule undergoes evolution: early life? (cosmosmagazine.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Can life arise from nothing but a chaotic assortment of basic molecules? The answer is a lot closer following a series of ingenious experiments that have shown evolution at work in non-living molecules.

Submission + - Does DIY Enterprise SAN Exist?

Submitted by Anonymous Cow Nerd
Anonymous Cow Nerd writes: All of my research indicates that, when it comes to storage area networks, you should just fork out the big bucks to the experts. Before I drop $100,000 of my employer's money, I wanted to ask if any slashdotters have succeeded in the elusive enterprise-capable DIY SAN. My notable goal is simply iSCSI storage for virtual servers and I am willing to go it alone in terms of 'official' hardware compatibility since our existing $45k (3TB) SAN is already on the list. Has OpenSolaris and ZFS matured into this yet? Do any of the commercial software SAN solutions fit the bill? I'm willing to pay for proper hardware but I'd like to ensure that I put the decimal at the correct magnitude. I'd use AoE but there are no adapters for my blade environment. Thin provisioning, IOPS, high availability and asynchronous replication — oh my!

Submission + - Buzz vs Slashdot 1

Submitted by gwait
gwait writes: On managing the quality and feeding of forum postings.

I posted these thoughts on a Buzz comment thread today:

I've always thought Slashdot were along a decent path to manage this sort of problem, but then stopped 1/3 of the way — their numeric tagging system has only 6 integer steps, giving a signal to noise ratio of about 16 db, that could easily be made larger.
As a result the difference between "top rated" comments and the middle of the pack is way to small to allow for "really interesting" comments to rise to the top of the pack.

Also, the Slashdot scheme doesn't have enough dimensions — there are only a handful:
Funny, Flamebait, Troll, Interesting etc.
There could be a lot more — their defence is they want to keep the comment moderation simple, but I suspect one could add a lot more dimensions and manage a reasonable interface.

The third problem in Slashdot (relevant to managing Buzz) is that only moderators can flag comments. If Slashdot opened it up to all signed in users, then the tiny 6 level range of moderation levels would become even more overwhelmed. If the moderation levels were a full 32 bit number, then this would not be an issue, (there would be other issues for certain!)

Thoughts?
Debian

Submission + - The most popular open source operating systems (rhyous.com)

Submitted by rhyous
rhyous writes: So on the main DistroWatch.com page, there is a report that will give you the average hits per day (hpd) that an open source distro’s web site gets. At the bottom there is a link to full popularity page of just these reports:
http://distrowatch.com/stats.php?section=popularity

So at first glance, you see Ubuntu is the best and Fedora is second and so on. I wanted to take the statistics a bit further. I wanted to know what main base distribution was the most used. What I mean by base distro is this: Ubuntu is #1. But Ubuntu is not a base distribution, instead it is based on Debian. Mint is #3 and is also based on Debian. Debian itself is #6 and it is a base distribution. Fedora is a base distribution.

QlikView can connect to this web page and consume this data. It was also able to loop through and click go to the link for each distribution where it was able to pull the “Based on” results. I did a few little tweaks to clean it up.

So I used QlikView to match each Distribution to its base distribution and built my report. I gathered the cumulative hits per day (hpd) of each base distro by summing the hpd from itself and its child distros. The results are staggering.
IBM

Submission + - Joe Stack's IBM Connection

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: On Thursday, Joe stack intentionally crashed a plane into an Austin office building. Villains abound in the suicidal pilot's final rant, but Salon's Andrew Leonard notes a 1986 tax code change targeting contract software engineers is enemy No. 1. One might dismiss Stack's rant as paranoia, but the NY Times also blamed Section 1706 of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 for 'creating taxpayer woes, particularly for tens of thousands of computer programmers,' adding that the law helped insure a scarcity of programmers. The law, which targeted independent technical contractors to the tune of $60 million, was introduced by Stack nemesis Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan to make up a deficit caused by tax concessions granted to IBM for its overseas operations.
Wikipedia

Submission + - Jimmy Wales' Theory of Failure

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The Tampa Tribune reports that Jimmy Wales recently spoke at the TEDx conference in Tampa about the three big failures he had before he started Wikipedia and what he learned from them. In 1996 Wales started an Internet service to connect downtown lunchers with area restaurants. "The result was failure," says Wales. "In 1996, restaurant owners looked at me like I was from Mars." Next Wales started a search engine company called 3Apes. In three months, it was taken over by Chinese hackers and the project failed. Third was an online encyclopedia called Newpedia, a free encyclopedia created by paid experts. Wales spent $250,000 for writers to make 12 articles and it failed. Finally Wales had a "really dumb idea," a free encyclopedia written by anyone who wanted to contribute. That became Wikipedia, which is now one of the top 10 most-popular Web sites in the world. This leads to Wales' theories of failure: Fail faster — If a project is doomed, shut it down quickly; Don't tie your ego to any one project — If it stumbles, you'll be unable to move forward; Real entrepreneurs fail; Fail a lot but enjoy yourself along the way; If you handle these things well, "you will succeed.""
Google

Submission + - Google Phasing Out Gears for HTML5 (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Kelson
Kelson writes: Have you noticed that there haven't been many updates to Gears in a while? That's because Google has decided to focus instead on similar capabilities in the emerging HTML5 standard: local storage, database, workers and location cover similar functionality, but natively in the web browser. Of course, since Gears and HTML APIs aren't exactly the same, it's not a simple drop-in replacement, so they'll continue supporting the current version of Gears in Firefox and Internet Explorer. I guess this means the long-anticipated Gears support for 64-bit Firefox on Linux and Opera are moot.
Transportation

Toyota Pedal Issue Highlights Move To Electronics 913

Posted by timothy from the drive-by-wire dept.
cyclocommuter writes with an excerpt from a brief WSJ story on increasing electronic control of car components: "The gas pedal system used Toyota Motor Co.'s recall crisis was born from a movement in the auto industry to rely more on electronics to carry out a vehicle's most critical functions. The intricacy of such systems, which replace hoses and hydraulic fluid with computer chips and electrical sensors, has been a focus as Toyota struggled to find the cause for sudden acceleration of vehicles that led the company to halt sales of eight models this week."

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