Posts by Richard

Microsoft loses $200m in Texas Hold 'em up patent suit

@Daniel Hazelton

Or, unbelievably as it might seem, some journalists didn't bother to check their facts? Try US Patent #5787449. And, as far as I can tell from the patent-speak, they appear to have patented the idea of an XML dialect.

Ethernet — a networking protocol name for the ages

@Jeremy Foot

"If memory serves CSMA-CD was under severe strain with the 100Mb standards and was done away with for 1Gb."

I would have said under severe strain with 1GB (but it was in the standard for political reasons) and abolished officially with 10GB. There were tighter restrictions on the number of repeaters you could chain at 100MB/s but that was close to being a moot point.

[Citation needed] "They replaced it with a 'token passing algorithm'."

They replaced it by ceasing to support shared media LANs and requiring full duplex operation 'anyone can talk when they like'. Whether you call it Ethernet without CSMA/CD or Token Ring without the token is an 'angels dancing on the head of a pin' question. I think you'ld have to be looking through (if not rose coloured) then big blue coloured spectacles if you think token ring really had the last laugh.

Sunspots make the world hot and wet

Solar cycle

"From what I've read, but don't have any links to prove it, the sun is at its peak intensity"

That's not surprising because it's almost bang on a minimum.

http://www.sec.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/

Sun's handling of Java security update prompts concerns

Would you rather...well yes I would

"So... they fix the bug in Version 5 but to keep a loud mouth like this guy happy they should delay the v5 update until v6 is fixed as well?"

It's taken them nearly six months to fix version 5. The marginal risk that black hats might find the bug independently in another week is much less than that of reverse engineering the v5 patch.

If the bug was in the wild, and they had to get patches out asap that would be different.