Music Buildings Blog

Attendance is down at this year's Interop business tech conference. I've heard about companies issuing travel bans on employees and vendors pulling out at the last minute due to budget constraints.

Nevertheless, the networking industry is making the best out of it. Some of the early highlights for ...

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Seagate has come a long way in the data storage business, from its 5MB ST506 hard drive in 1979 to its latest 1TB Barracuda introduced last year. And today the company announced that it is the first manufacturer to ship 1 billion hard drives.

If you can't visualize that ...

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Filed under: Pop-Pourri

PopEater Music Blog: Carrie Underwood can't give up cheese. [Ecorazzi]Fergie's little girl isn't so little these days. [TMZ]Jessica Simpson gushes over Tony Romo. [Just Jared] Usher praises Chris Brown. [I'm Not Obsessed] Bad reviews don't bother Christina Aguilera.... Read more

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The most difficult issue in many patent cases is claim construction, that is, the court's interpretation and articulation of what exactly the claims of the patent mean. Interpreting patent claims is hard work. It usually involves consideration of technical jargon that, especially when significant time has passed since the patent was filed, may be obsolete or just plain awkward. As a result, courts don't always get claim construction right the first time. Indeed, a substantial percentage--depending on whom you ask, the anecdotal figure is around 50 percent--of trial court claim constructions are successfully challenged on appeal.

The high reversal rate for claim construction is especially problematic because most claim construction decisions cannot be immediately appealed. Interpreting the claims is only the first step in the infringement analysis. After they're interpreted, that construction has to be applied to the accused product or process. Most often that's something the jury is supposed to decide, which means you may have to go through a long and costly trial before a judgment is entered. That judgment--either that the patent claims are infringed or they are not--is what the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (the "Federal Circuit") ultimately reviews.

However, if the claim construction was wrong in the first place, the jury's verdict on infringement is usually wrong, too. That means a second trial will likely be necessary, which results in more work for the courts, more time lost in litigation, and more money spent on lawyers. The rub, argue critics, is that much of this additional expense and inefficiency could be avoided if claim construction opinions could be appealed prior to a final judgment on infringement.

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SAP announced that its on demand enterprise suite Business ByDesign roll out is moving slower than previously expected.

The company said that it would take 12 to 18 months longer than the original target of 2010 to reach $1 billion in revenue and touch 10,000 customers in the mid-market ...

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A village in England will host a robot hide-and-seek exercise next month, when 11 teams drawn from private companies and universities compete to sniff out snipers, roadside bombs, and other hidden dangers while relaying real-time images to a command post.

The MOD Grand Challenge, as it's called, is billed as the U.K. Ministry of Defense's counterpart to the U.S. DARPA Challenges, except it's military robots that compete against one another instead of robotic cars.

The purpose is to boost development of small robot teams capable of scouting out and alerting troops to potentially dangerous surprises on the urban battlefield. The robots must autonomously negotiate complex, unfamiliar terrain and urban clutter to locate the threats. Points are earned based on the number of threats uncovered in one hour. Points are lost if a team resorts to remote control to maneuver its bots at any stage.

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I've got a question for you: How are you doing? Sure, of course you're fine. Here's a follow up: How do you know you're doing fine? Tougher question, huh?

What's that, you have a question for me? Why am I asking these inane questions?

Because, when people ask us how we're doing, we respond automatically. I'm fine, we're fine, everything's fine. After all, if we engaged everyone in a rant about the gory truth, nothing would ever get done.

But it doesn't stop there. We don't even engage ourselves in a dialogue about the gory truth, and for much the same reason. We're too busy "living."

The truth is that seemingly simple questions can actually be pretty loaded, so loaded that we'd sometimes rather not know the answer. We have all these sayings about leaving well enough alone. Why upset the apple cart? Why open a can of worms? Don't fix it if it isn't broken. ... Comments (No responses yet)

Time Warner is splitting off its cable services division, the company said Wednesday.

Time Warner currently owns around 84 percent of Time Warner Cable. The media giant, which has been struggling of late, has been rumored to be discussing merging the AOL division with Yahoo.

"A complete structural separation of ...

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We've got Google Earth and Google Sky. Next up will be a map of the world below sea level--Google Ocean.

The company has assembled an advisory group of oceanography experts, and in December invited researchers from institutions around the world to the Mountain View, Calif., Googleplex. There, they discussed ...

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Filed under: Pop, Video of the Day

PopEater Music Blog: Artist: RihannaSong: 'Take a Bow'Why You Should Watch: She may have slowed things down in this gentle kiss-off, but the Bajan beauty means business when it comes to cheating fellas. Next Video... Read more

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