Suppose we didn’t know too much about bridge design, but were convinced that (a) the current design methods were too slow and unmodular to be useful, and (b) not knowing anything about structure other than what we could observe of
What are patents for
Mr. R.J. Hall designed a new product known as a “Towel Tote” that is basically an absorbent scarf with pockets on the ends. [See one here]. After filing his design patent application, Hall e-mailed with Mr. Farley Nachemin at Bed Bath &
Obama’s big data team
Those applications used a huge chunk of Amazon’s Eastern data center. “We had thousands of nodes,” said VanDenPlas. “We pushed 180TB of traffic with billions and billions of requests. We had 60% of all of Amazon’s medium [instances] in US
Big Data and politics
For the general public, there was no way to know that the idea for the Parker contest had come from a data-mining discovery about some supporters: affection for contests, small dinners and celebrity. But from the beginning, campaign manager Jim
Free Software Patents: Alan Cox
1. A method, comprising: storing, by one or more processors, confidential data in a confidential section of virtual memory, wherein storing the confidential data in the confidential section of virtual memory comprises: mapping the confidential section of virtual memory to
Samsung’s trial brief in the Apple patent lawsuit
http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1257891/Samsung_unredacted_trial_brief.pdf Contrary to the image it has cultivated in the popular press, Apple has admitted in internal documents that its strength is not in developing new technologies first, but in successfully commercializing them. When Apple was developing its campaign to promote
TimeKeeper Server
Free software and newspapers
Folks who decry the idea of subscriber fees argue that paywalls won’t work, and that those who advocate for them, don’t understand the Internet. The opposite is true. These folks don’t understand the first thing about actual journalism. It costs
Timestamp based reconciliation
Timestamp based reconciliation: This case differs from the previous one only in the reconciliation mechanism. In case of divergent versions, Dynamo performs simple timestamp based reconciliation logic of “last write wins”; i.e., the object with the largest physical timestamp value is chosen as the correct
Murdoch strikes against copyrights
The witnesses allege a software company NDS, owned by News Corp, cracked the smart card codes of rival company ONdigital. ONdigital, owned by the ITV companies Granada and Carlton, eventually went under amid a welter of counterfeiting by pirates, leaving