b.cognosco

The other day I saw an item (can't find it now) about a judge ordering the CEOs of Intel and Intergraph to show up at the mediation hearings. If the CEOs were forced to sit through all this and waste their own time (instead of shareholder's money) I bet there'd be fewer frivolous patents and far fewer frivolous infringement suits. There has to be some way to get the lawyers out of this.

RIM granted handheld email patent - clobbers Handspring. (SOURCE:Radio News Aggie)-Sad. RIM needs to innovate NOT litigate!
Patents were originally designed to protect small inventors, but as with copyright law, the system has been abused to create private monopolies. Now RIM seems to be determined to compete not with its engineering or marketing skills, but with its lawyers. [The Register] via [ Source: Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

It's Too Much For A Single Week!

8:15:34 PM

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First Jenny Levine at TSL returns, then liveTopics actually gets released. I'm retiring. My life is complete.

liveTopics finally released.
Kind of a double celebration:

Today, and with great relief, I formally announce the release of liveTopics (v1.0.3) which is now available for download.

You can read more about it at my company's website which I am also launching today.
It's been hard work putting together even the little currently on the website, but I hope to improve it significantly in the days and weeks ahead. Any feedback would be very welcome. [ Source: Curiouser and curiouser!]

"#prefs.txt not found" error

12:25:25 PM

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This is getting tiresome. There is obviously something wacky going on with the way Radio is reading the category files, but I don't have any idea if it's a buggered table in weblogData.root or something else entirely.

I'm not alone.

IBM Hard Drive Failures

12:20:31 PM

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Stop buying IBM drives. That's what Brett MorganZilla suggests via e-mail. I'm afraid he's right. This is now the third IBM drive to go tits-up on me in a year. What's worse, IBM can't even find the purchase records for the drives to send me an RMA. They want me to fax them the drive label and purchase receipt.

But see, I bought the drives -- all three -- from IBMDirect Online. I did that for the sole purpose of making it easier to deal with warranty issues. Turns out, it's harder because IBM apparently doesn't consider IBM a channel, and therefore doesn't record its own sales.

Stupid.

I haven't had really good luck with WD drives, either. I guess I'm left with using the Maxtor drives I can get at OfficeDepot and Staples.

Have we gotten to the point that we just throw them away when they go bad because it's less hassle and $$$ than trying to get a warranty?