Posts by At Random

UK court rules in Intel's favor in R2 Semi power patent case

There is not necessarily a difference in the final outcome

The UK and German findings are not necessarilty inconsistent because of the different legal processes.

In the UK jusrisdictions, if you are sued for patent infringement, in your response you will most likely do two things:

a: defend the suit (i.e., argue that you do not infringe); and

b: counterclaim for invalidity (i.e., argue that irrespective of a:, the patent is no good so that it does not matter that it seems you infringe it).

These are both lumped in together in the UK in one action: Intel lost on a: but won on b:, so Intel came out the winner.

In Germany, you cannot mix a: and b:. They are two separate legal processes, which gives rise to a race condition. If the invalidity action has not concluded before any infringement action is concluded, then infringement can potentially still be found in a: (and injunctions and damages awarded) before the patent is subseqently found to be invalid in b:.

Working from a countryside plot nestled in a not-spot? Consultation opens on new rural mobile planning laws for bigger masts, wider coverage

Re: Did we have this problem with telegraph poles?

We are used to having long, thin, energy-carrying things burried around here. Have a look at:

https://www.gasnetworks.ie/corporate/company/our-network/projects/projects-of-common-intere/cluden-to-brighouse-bay/

It caused a bit of disruption, but not that much. (I live 2km from one of the end-points and was disrupted more than most, but it still was not a big deal.)

We don't need pylons or telegraph poles, but for a couple of quid a year on a mobile 'phone tarriff.

Re: Did we have this problem with telegraph poles?

Yes, and it is still happening for power:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-56688162

The shame is that power pylons are entirely avoidable. Distribution cables can be buried. It is just that the energy companies do not want to spend the money to do the right thing.

The other, much bigger, elephant we have around here (D&G) is wind turbines covering our hillsides.

This'll make you feel old: Uni compsci favourite Pascal hits the big five-oh this year

Never mind the '90s...

In 1985/6/7 I made a good living writing accounting and data management applications in Pascal on Burroughts B20 BTOS (aka Convergent CTOS).

Of course, Wirth's original Pascal is useless, but with the right extensions, it is nice to use. The B20 version was modular and did things like variable-length strings. I enjoyed the BTOS/Pascal environment much more than any other '80s programming environment. When I moved on to Unix/Emacs/C, I was appalled on many levels! When I did some work in Delphi a decade later, I felt right at home!

Burroughs Pascal was the main language for BTOS applications, but they also supported COBOL. The COBOL guy would come in from time-to-time to debug something or other; he was always easy to spot because he had a jacket and tie (whereas we were all in T-shirts). He did not talk much. One day, I expressed an interest in COBOL. He tried to explain PIC clauses to me, and I almost lost the will to live!

Asus Transformer Book T100: Xbox One? PS4? Nah, get a cute convertible for Christmas

Re: Surely, you're joking Mr Asus?

On my OpenSUSE 13.1 workhorse that has everything and more installed:

eurgain@fuchsia:~> df -h

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/sdb1 20G 12G 7.4G 61% /

On the machine I am typing this, with Mint 16 loaded with lots of C and Python development tools, full LibreOffice, Gimp, VueScan, DropBox, Emacs ...: plus lots of other stuff I don't really need:

eurgain@irma ~ $ df -h

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/sda5 13G 9.5G 2.6G 79% /

So, 32G sounds like plenty to me, so long as your data is somewhere else. A sensible person could install Mint and easily have 24G free, no problem, with a fully functional machine.

Also on this machine:

/dev/sda2 88G 60G 28G 69% /mnt/windows

This is a far less usable install of Win7 for emergencies. It is kept up-to-date, has a few applications (including MS Word 2010) and a few others installed, but it is really rather minimal. Goodness only knows what occupies these 60G!

So, IMO, 32G is a fine size for a very workable full-featured Linux installation! Just keep the files you need locally, and the rest remotely.

If someone can post about their successful installation of a mainstream Linux distro, then this machine will probably be on my immediate shopping list!

OpenSUSE 13.1: Oh look, a Linux with YOU in mind (and 64-bit ARMs)

Although I flirt with others, it is always SuSE that I come back to

After using RedHat as a plaything in the late 1990s, I bought (yes, bought, on CD, in a box) SuSE 6.3. There have been a few bumpy patches along the way, and I will install and try just about every distro going, but for me it has always been SuSE/SUSE that gets the work done and looks better than most, and I have been using S[uU]SE more or less continuously now for 15 years.

Being a fickle sort, I presently have a dual-boot machine as my main workstation with Mint 16RC and SUSE 13.1. They use the same /home partition, and do not interfere with one another at all. If I want a change, or a package that has not made it into one of the SUSE repos, then Mint is there waiting, but SUSE is running most of the time.

I can certainly see the advantages of being in the Debian environment, because of the sheer number of packages ready for installation. I really cannot see the attraction of desktop Ubuntu, with its bad joke UI and outrageous lack of privacy. Mint is just fine, but a bit dull to my mind. (I actually run Ubuntu LTS as a server without GUI, but that is another unhappy story altogether, that I am stuck with for now.)

Lots of people knock YaST. I think that they are people who have not used it. I does the routine things, like user management, partitioning, and installing software as well as many other tools on other distros, although even for simple tasks, it presents them in a much more unified control centre that can launch the YaST components than any other distro I am aware of. Where it excels is in the way it handles much more tricky stuff such as configuration of daemons and bootloaders, setting up network services such as NFS and Samba imports and exports, and editing /etc/sysconfig. OK, it does not do anything that vi cannot, but it can do so many things much more quickly and easily than vi, with much less chance of going wrong. Saving time and effort is something that should be really valued, and YaST should, IMO, be given a lot of credit for doing this.

People also still think that KDE is the beta test that was 4.0. It certainly is not! It is probably one of the sanest desktops out there, especially for converts from Windows or MacOS. It is now rock steady and fast (regularly beating Unity hands down in performance benchmarks). I have not had KDE crash or seize up in years. Get your head around Akonadi, and you might get to like it, especially if you have many email accounts. Otherwise, just use Thunderbird.

This is a distro that deserves more credit than it ever receives!