The death of Google’s patents. And maybe software patents too?
I'm actually very surprised this hasn't been picked up on any of the major tech sites. Here's the first sentence from the article:
"The Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc."
Wow! This would seem to be a complete reversal of the PTO's position (patenting world+dog is ok). If true, it could certainly be beneficial for Free and Open Source software, but more importantly, it could restore some much needed creativity and competition to the tech world that now goes to filing, defending, and getting sued over patents.
Full article is here.
QOS series part 1: Introduction to Quality of Service
With all the recent hubub about ISP traffic management, I figured I'd start an article series on QOS: what it is, how it works, and where it is implemented in a network. After all, my day job is networking so I may as well share some knowledge.
Since the Internet first went commericial in the mid-90s, network traffic has grown significantly (that's a bit of an understatement really). These days there is talk of an impending "exaflood" of network traffic - an increase of network bandwidth of epic proportions so high that all Internet traffic becomes jammed. This is little more than a theory at this point; an earlier prediction in the 1990s of a "petaflood" never actually materialized thanks to the dizzying pace of speed increases in computing power both in generic PCs and networking equipment and the phenomenal increases in network bandwidth (in the early 1990s most of the Internet was connected by 45Mbps DS3s; nowadays there are multiple 10Gbps connections between most ISPs).
The most obvious way to manage a network is to implement quality of service. QOS is called both "managed fairness" and "managed unfairness" because it attempts to provide better service for some things while providing worse service for others.
Part 1 of my QOS series lays down the foundation of QOS. Subsequent parts will discuss technologies in more detail.
Read on dear readers and learn the fundimentals of quality of service!
Moved to new hardware
So over the past few days, I've moved my websites to new hardware. I got a used Sun Enterprise 420r and decided it was time. Pretty nice box: 4 UltraSPARC II processors at 450Mhz each, 1 Gig of RAM, and 72 GB of drive space. Of course it's running my favorite server operating system - FreeBSD. I considered and even tried to install Solaris 10 but it was being a PITA so I threw my hands up and just downloaded the FreeBSD ISO instead. In the process, I've learned how to move a site and minimize the impact of doing so (not that I have a heavily trafficed site anyways). For the curious, my old hardware was a PIII 800 with 512 MB RAM and 160 GB of drive space. If the day ever comes that I need more space I can always pop in another drive. I don't see that happening soon though.