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Comment: Throw it in the trash and go about your business. (Score 1) 347

by nrozema (#42779283) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What To Do About Patent Trolls Seeking Wi-fi License Fees?

Given the content of the patent, near-term expiration, and the fact that you were specifically targeted as a small business unlikely to have significant resources, the entire business model of this "law firm" revolves around extorting "license fees" from scared small businesses like yours. If you voluntarily agree to pay them, they win. If you tell them to buzz off, they move on to find the next sucker.

What _doesn't_ fit in to their business model is taking even one person to court. The cost of a single suit would negate the free money "licensing fees" from potentially hundreds of suckers who just went ahead and wrote a check out of fear.

Comment: Re:Not a problem for much longer (Score 1) 383

by nrozema (#42758371) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Name Conflicts In Automatically Generated Email Addresses?

"Hey, lets move to Microsoft's Live.EDU" and then the problem is somebody else's."

Google and Microsoft only create accounts with the names you feed them from your own identity management system - so this is a relevant policy/programming question regardless of who runs the server.

Comment: Re:Obama effect (Score 1) 514

by nrozema (#42687813) Attached to: California's Surreal Retroactive Tax On Tech Startup Investors

There is a little lever on the side that makes it what it is. That little lever switches the piece from semi-automatic to full automatic. That is the one determining characteristic of an "assault weapon".

According to who?

I see this particular bit of rhetoric bandied about quite a bit recently but find zero supporting evidence for the claim that the defining characteristic of an "assault weapon" is the capability for fully-automatic fire. Neither the technical or colloquial definitions I've come across seem to suggest this. It is most certainly not the case when referring to legal definitions.

Comment: Subscription goal has been met (Score 5, Interesting) 308

by nrozema (#42447267) Attached to: A Subscription-Based Movie Theater

This is my local theater.

Last night they announced that they hit the 3,000 subscriber mark they were shooting for and will make a go at opening.

I wish them the best, though I think there are still some very big questions to be answered about the viability of the business model. Will the studios go along with it? Will subscriptions _remain_ high enough after the buzz fades away to be a viable business? I hope so, but only time will tell. The local economy is almost entirely tourism based, and their model effectively shuts out tourists who I think will be reluctant to shell out $16 for a day pass - so long-term local support is essential.

Comment: Re:Tiny hard disk, limited RAM (Score 1) 513

by nrozema (#41534119) Attached to: Why Ultrabooks Are Falling Well Short of Intel's Targets

One explanation I heard for the typical RAM limitation is that the Intel Ultrabook spec requires the machine to wake up from hibernation in a specified period of time - and it's short enough that even fast SSDs have trouble loading much more than 4GB of data back into memory within the allotted time - So most manufacturers are limiting their systems to 4GB to keep the free marketing and awareness that comes with being an "Intel Ultrabook (tm)".

Comment: Sacramento freeway came to a crawl (Score 4, Interesting) 111

by nrozema (#41416579) Attached to: Space Shuttle Endeavor Lands In Los Angeles After Final Flight

I just happened to be on US 50 in the Sacramento area when it flew overhead. Traffic slowed to a crawl to get a peek, some people just stopped. Very cool that these things can cause that type of reaction - even as they're being mothballed.

Unfortunately the spectacle caused more than a few fender benders.


+ - Larry Ellison Buys His Own Hawaiian Island 1

Submitted by nrozema
nrozema writes "Oracle co-founder and billionaire Larry Ellison is buying the Hawaiian island of Lana'i, the six-largest island in the U.S. archipelago. Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie confirmed in a written statement that the current landowner filed a transfer application with the state's Public Utilities commission Wednesday to sell its 98 percent share of the 141-square-mile island to Ellison."

Comment: OpenSolaris is dead, but ZFS lives on (Score 1) 306

by nrozema (#38591930) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Free/Open Deduplication Software?

The future of ZFS and the product that was OpenSolaris has really started to take shape over the last few months and there is a lot of good work going on around it. Illumos has set up a proper foundation that will be shepherding the development of their OS and ZFS fork. They've got some good commercial backing (Nexenta, Joyent, and others), and many of the original ZFS engineers from Sun are actively involved in the development. A lot of work is going on right now in terms of revamping the versioning scheme to ensure some level of feature interoperability between "open" ZFS and "Oracle" ZFS (assuming Oracle chooses not to play ball in the long run).

If you're looking for an inbetween solution, Nexenta is at an interesting place in the market. They are an order of magnitude cheaper than the tier 1 providers, but you're not completely on your own if you still have interest in some sort of commercial support contract. For the record I'm not affiliated with them in any way other than being a satisfied customer.

I'll also echo the previous comments about ZFS dedup and RAM - you need enough memory for the entire dedup table to fit in RAM (or a fast L2ARC SSD) or performance will tank. There is a formula buried in the documentation somewhere for determining requirements based on the size of your pool.
