B&N Pummels Microsoft Patent Claims With Prior Art

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It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
To call upon a neighbour and to say: —
“We invaded you last night–we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away.”

And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you’ve only to pay ’em the Dane-geld
And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!

It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say: —
“Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.

It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say: —

“We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that pays it is lost!”

–Rudyard Kipling

Click Here

Above Kipling quote came from a comment posted here.

Messaging apps, VoIP already eating into carrier revenues, study finds

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The study, which was carried out on behalf of Mavenir by mobileSQUARED, found that a third of operators believe operator traffic from messaging, voice and video calling will decline between 11% and 20% over the next 5-10 years. Another 20% of operators expect even steeper declines in the 31% to 40% range.

via Messaging apps, VoIP already eating into carrier revenues, study finds.

IP Phone Systems | Zultys MX250

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The MX250 IP PBX is a feature-rich enterprise-class business IP telephony system that supports high quality VoIP and Unified Communications services for up to 250 users on a single appliance and can be seamlessly expanded through an MXgroup network to support up to 10,000 users and 128 offices across an enterprise-wide Unified Communications system. The award-winning MX250 IP PBX is based on SIP Open Standards. In addition to Zultys’ enterprise-class IP phones, it can easily support legacy phones and a wide range of SIP-based third party devices to help companies more easily deploy the IP telephony system they need.

Via IP PBX – PBX System – IP Phone Systems | Zultys MX250.

Click Here for the MX250 Data Sheet

Force iptables to log messages to a different log file

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Iptables is used to set up, maintain, and inspect the tables of IP packet filter rules in the Linux kernel. Several different tables may be defined. Each table contains a number of built-in chains and may also contain user defined chains.

By default, Iptables log message to a /var/log/messages file. However you can change this location. I will show you how to create a new logfile called /var/log/iptables.log. Changing or using a new file allows you to create better statistics and/or allows you to analyze the attacks

Via Force iptables to log messages to a different log file.

Speex: a free codec for free speech

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Speex is an Open Source/Free Software patent-free audio compression format designed for speech. The Speex Project aims to lower the barrier of entry for voice applications by providing a free alternative to expensive proprietary speech codecs. Moreover, Speex is well-adapted to Internet applications and provides useful features that are not present in most other codecs. Finally, Speex is part of the GNU Project and is available under the revised BSD license.

via Speex: a free codec for free speech.

Used for Siri.

Patently Absurd – Forbes.com

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An awkward silence ensued. The blue suits did not even confer among themselves. They just sat there, stonelike. Finally, the chief suit responded. “OK,” he said, “maybe you don’t infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?”

After a modest bit of negotiation, Sun cut IBM a check, and the blue suits went to the next company on their hit list.

via Patently Absurd – Forbes.com.

Incredible.  Article from 2002.

Symmetric multiprocessing

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Symmetric multiprocessing – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

In computing, symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) involves a multiprocessor computer hardware architecture where two or more identical processors are connected to a single shared main memory and are controlled by a single OS instance. Most common multiprocessor systems today use an SMP architecture. In the case of multi-core processors, the SMP architecture applies to the cores, treating them as separate processors. Processors may be interconnected using buses, crossbar switches or on-chip mesh networks. The bottleneck in the scalability of SMP using buses or crossbar switches is the bandwidth and power consumption of the interconnect among the various processors, the memory, and the disk arrays. Mesh architectures avoid these bottlenecks, and provide nearly linear scalability to much higher processor counts at the sacrifice of programmability: