Posts by david 136 38 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Aug 2015
The first of the patents was filed in 2000.
DHTs don't seem to have appeared in the wild until 2001 or so, in Gnutella, Limewire, Azureus, Bittorrent etc, and the applicability to file system block maps has some novelty.
If I were Amazon, I'd be annoyed at the patentability too, but the timeline doesn't look great for them.
"the most exciting kind of non-volatile memory – a bold attempt to bypass a whole pile of legacy bottlenecks and move non-volatile storage right onto the CPU memory bus – flopped. It was killed by legacy software designs."
No, that wasn't what killed Optane.
What killed it was the shrinking gap between the performance that it offered vs. SSD in improving form factors like M.2 NVME.
There was software being written to exploiit optane, and it would have worked great -- but the number of applications that desperately need it was small compared to the ones that were perfectly happy with mmapped nvme ssd. Intel saw that trend and decided they couldn't afford to keep that ship operating. Now, there's plenty of things that could use mmapped files that don't, but that's another story.
It's sad, because it was interesting, but it wasn't really the legacy designs. It was the lack of clear advantage with other things getting faster.
The Tesla report seems subject to the spin effect of the now-reported "autopilot turns itself off seconds before a collision" information.
If the Autopilot had done that, and it get's reported as a "non autopilot" collision, that's going to significantly skew Tesla's reported numbers.
We'd have to have data that was based on "autopilot engaged for N seconds before the crash". The NHTSA data seems to be using 30 seconds. We don't know what the Tesla report is based on.
To be fair, the wheel of reincarnation revolves, and old ideas come around again in new forms, with different twists. The balance between this and that changes too.
In general, though, it's better to wait for generic to show up with Moore's law improvements than it is to try to do special hardware, unless the hardware is likely to produce > 10-20x improvements in something critical.
One reason for the rules is to eliminate the possibility of corruption by parking officials. If given the discretion to waive fines, then that discretion is likely to be abused. "Fixing" parking tickets has a long history of being a mode of petty corruption.
Adopting a more flexible approach requires auditing of waived tickets.
Bulldog clips have short jaws, used to avoid short circuits on nearby things. Typically sed in large size for jump start/car charging cables.
Alligators have long jaws, for fine things with some risk of shorting nearby. Good for punch down terminal blocks or relay racks.
You forgot
* FAX to self
* Copy to microfiche, then print
* Copy 4000 times
* Send to monastery for transcription by copyist monks.
* Translate to ancient language for transmission in the oral tradition
* Rely on a stone in a museum to translate back to English
(Order of steps may be varied)
Can you point to any data suggesting appeals succeed often? My understanding is that overrulings are very rare. The first data I could find does not seem to support your view, see page 33 of http://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/2016-Court-Statistics-Report.pdf
where just 4% of all appeals are upheld.
Nuclear is only the future if it is affordable compared to alternatives, and Hinkley Point isn't giving any indications of being cheap.
Making fission cheaper may involve taking some risks, mitigation of which is a big part of the current cost structure.
What we really need are economical storage mechanisms that can be used to capture excess renewably generated power.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
