For the last five years, memory technology developer Rambus has been locked in litigation with chip vendors Infineon, Samsung, Micron, and Hynix - and the Federal Trade Commission, which brought an action against Rambus. All of these suits involved their joint involvement in standard setting activities in JEDEC. The four chip vendors accused Rambus of setting a "submarine patent" trap for them in the JEDEC process, while Rambus accused them of a price fixing conspiracy.
For a number of years, Rambus won most, although not all of the legal battles, including in its initial round against the FTC. But a month ago, the Commissioners of the FTC unanimously overturned the ruling in favor of Rambus earlier handed down by an FTC Administrative Law Judge, and held Rambus liable. You can read more about that ruling, and the background of the various Rambus suits here.
The echoes of the FTC decision are still reverberating. First, it helped Foundry Networks, which recently brought a "son of Rambus" suit against French telecommunications giant Alcatel. Since the FTC verdict, multiple class action lawsuits have been filed against Rambus on behalf of purchasers of SDRAM chips, seeking recovery of the premium added to the price of those chips in order to pay the royalties Rambus demanded to license the undisclosed patent.
Now, Broadcom has announced that it may cite the FTC verdict to revive an antitrust suit against its rival, Qualcom, according to Bloomberg News. That action was dismissed a few days ago.
You have been warned
Entire text of a sign on a Lake District mountain road
Safe backcountry driving is one part experience and three parts caution and good sense. If you exercise the latter, there's no reason to get into trouble while acquiring the former. In this installment I'll provide some rules to keep in mind to keep you out of trouble, as well as offer some practical driving tips for driving in the southwest. While I'm hardly an expert or professional driver, I have driven several thousand miles of unpaved backcountry roads over the past ten years, and pass along what I've observed in that time for you to test on your own.
The first thing to keep in mind is that once you leave a paved road, you should assume that you're on your own. Cell phones will rarely work, and the more isolated your destination, the less likely it is that anyone is going to happen by to help if you're stuck, broken down, or out of gas. As a result, it's up to you to avoid any of those things happening, and it's also up to you to make the type of preparations that will get you out of a fix if you end up in one anyway.
As you'd expect, paved roads don't often reach the places that are most off the beaten track. Getting to the backcountry therefore means using the right tool for the job, which will often be a four-wheel drive vehicle. This next set of blog entries is for those of you that have no experience with four-wheel driving on really lousy roads, but have a hankering to give it a try. I'll start with some advice on choosing the right chariot for your adventure.
Not so very long ago, that would have been very simple, in the sense that you'd know exactly what to look for. That's because there were only two choices: Jeeps (as in the registered trademark vehicle, not in the generic way the term is sometimes used) and pickup trucks. The former were built to go anywhere, with no compromises for comfort, and the latter were built to do heavy, high clearance work. Finding a place that rented a Jeep might not be easy, but at least everyone knew what you were talking about.
Today, however, there are many different types of cars that do some, most, or all of the same jobs. That's good, because the old Jeeps weren't built to carry much gear, and you don't always need a vehicle that can leap mountains in a single bound. But it's bad in that the choices become more complicated, and it's therefore easier to end up with the wrong tool for the job.
We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there. I may never in my life get to Alaska,...but I am grateful that it is there. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope
Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
This morning I decided to forego my usual breakfast banquet of a stale donut with coffee and head into town for a more substantial repast, an uplink to the Internet, and a chance to ask a question or two about things I'd seen.
On my way into town I heard part of a BBC broadcast focused on the perennial efforts of the current administration in Washington to open up the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration and production. The panel comprised the expected mix: a Sierra Club representative, an advocate of drilling, and a third party presumed to occupy the middle ground.
There wasn't anything particularly new about the interchange, which was civil, although vigorous on both sides. What struck me, as always, was the impassioned view of the industry advocate that we must begin exploitation in Alaska now because conservation efforts require too much time to take effect — an argument I have heard for so long that such efforts could easily have taken hold many times over ever since first this rationale was raised.
I was also struck by the fact that no one mentioned the amount of time it would take to explore, extract, and build transshipment facilities (pipelines? A port terminal with the capacity to store hundreds of millions of gallons of crude until ships can collect it during ice-out in summer?) Could actually bringing Alaskan Wildlife Refuge oil into the Lower Forty Eight conceivably take less than a decade?
When I was younger, backpacking seemed like the obvious way to go about seeing what was worth seeing in the out of doors. Back east, where I grew up, as a generality backpacking was a requirement as well, if you wanted to thin the ranks of the hordes of co-eco-religionists seeking the same Appalachian, Adirondack or White Mountain High. But beyond this sort of practicality, there has long seemed to be a sort of macho charisma that attaches to backpacking, a sense that there is something inherently righteous about disappearing into the bush with naught to sustain you but what you lug in under your own steam.
As I've grown older, though, I've realized that lugging fifty pounds of food and equipment (or more) on my back may sometimes be a necessary evil to reach certain objectives, but it is hardly to be considered an end in itself by any sane person. As a result, car camping has held increasing appeal to me, and my last backpacking excursion is now four years in the past. At the same time, my time spent hiking has increased rather than diminished. Better yet, my enjoyment has increased significantly, as has the variety of what I have seen while trekking about in a state of only lightly encumbered bliss.
Is car camping some sort of modern, comfort driven cop out? Not withstanding the cachet that backpacking still enjoys, I don't think so. After all, the west was hardly opened by pioneers with ultralight backpacks and high tech tents, but by settlers perfectly happy to sit in Conestoga wagons and let the oxen do the walking, and by prospectors with their donkeys and their mules to tote their gear. Similarly, the way to move your stock up into high meadows in the early summer and back in the fall was on horseback (and in some places, still is), with a packhorse for gear. In short, until recently no self-respecting westerner would dream of walking if s/he could ride — so why should we, even if packhorses have now become a less available option?
Although a dozen miles at most separate the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument from the Kaibab National Forest to the south, the two environments are as different as can be imagined (my posts on the Kaibab can be found here , here and here). Several thousand feet lower and far dryer, the Escalante is a void of shattered rock, high mesas, endless canyons, and seemingly infinite aridity, but for the thunderstorms that hover motionless in the afternoons of summer over one part of the landscape or another for hours at a time. More often than not, these showy storms simply tease with thunder, lightning and a quick shower or a spattering of raindrops, but sometimes they unleash a deluge that leads (as yesterday) to flash floods.
This difference in climate makes accessing the Escalante a far different proposition for a visitor than the Kaibab. While the Kaibab Plateau supports an active lumbering and "wildlife management" economy for those that live around it, and therefore has hundreds of miles of well maintained dirt roads, the Escalante has no trees to harvest, and only marginal ranching opportunities through much of its range. Unlike almost all government land in the West (other than National Parks), there are large areas of the Escalante where there is no evidence (think hard what that might be) of any cattle at all.
As a result, no paved roads cross the sixty mile wide Monument, and huge areas of the Escalante have no dirt roads, or miracle of miracles, even jeep or ATV tracks at all. As I sit here typing today, I'm parked on a rock ledge next to one of the few rough dirt roads for many miles around, overlooking a dry canyon to the south, and overlooked in turn by a massive, unvegetated mesa to the north. The "road" I traveled for the last two hours simply follows the dry floor of a narrow wash for most of its length. I can know almost to a certainty that I will see neither another car nor a soul (bovine or human) for as long as I choose to stay somewhere along this road's length — or the next. For that matter, I am likely the only person within 10 to 25 miles in any direction. Only a single old ATV track is visible.
The law and simple justice require that people with disabilities have equal access to public sector information technology
- Louis Gutierrez, CIO, ITD
I now have a copy of the letter that Massachusetts CIO Louis Gutierrez has sent to representatives of the community of people with disabilities, and there are a number of details that I was very pleased to see. My biggest question has now been answered: the Information Technology Division (ITD) has delayed its planned date for full ODF implementation by all Executive Agency users by only six months, to June of 2007. Early adopter implementations of plugin software (including at the Massachusetts Office on Disability) will begin in January of next year.
These dates are still dependent on the activities of a number of third parties, but are presumably based upon best available information at this time. These dependencies include:
…the adoption by the OASIS standard setting organization of ODF Version 1.1 (which will address minor accessibility issues related to the format itself), the timely delivery of completed translators by one or more of the multiple vendors that are currently developing this technology, and the validated accessibility of the translators themselves. In order to meet our implementation timetable, the Commonwealth requires delivery of a translator suitable for use by early adopters by November of this year. At each stage of this implementation, accessibility will be our first priority.
Well, I know that you're not supposed to check your email while on vacation, but among other things, I had learned last week that the Mass ITD would be issuing its mid-year statement on accessibility about now, and wanted to check in to see what it said. What I didn't expect was to find that someone at ZDNet had run a fantasy piece like this, which not only inaccurately reports that the ITD has been mandating open source implementations of ODF, but for some reason decides that I'm to blame for any delay in implementing ODF. I suppose I should be complimented if I can change the course of history with my virtual pen, but for better or worse, that's simply not the case.
Based on my own sources, here is what is right and wrong about what's been reported so far:
Right: Massachusetts CIO Louis Gutierrez met with representatives of the community of the disabled last Friday to brief them on a letter that will be sent to community leaders today. It promises to use plugins in order to save documents in ODF form in order to alleviate accessibility concerns. The ITD has also now signed a long-awaited Memorandum of Understanding with the Massachusetts Office on Disability and the state's Department of Health and Human Service The ITD also signed a commitment with the Massachusetts Office on Disability and the state's Department of Health and Human Service to design, procure, certify and develop training for software that is accessible to people with disabilities, as well as to establish a unit devoted to accessible technology, expanding on its launch in May of an accessibility lab to a similar purpose.
I've learned that it's also true that use of ODF compliant applications will not be mandatory on January 1 by employees of the Executive Agencies.
The following blog entry was submitted to the Arizona Daily Sun by the
National Forest Service with my permission. It ran about ten days later.
Yesterday, I described the impact of the Warm Fire in summary terms. If you read that post, you'll find a description that sounds rather worse than what I saw on the ground when I visited the scene. In order to see what the reality behind the statistics might be, I drove and walked many miles through the burn area, and was surprised at how varied and hopeful the landscape appeared. Areas of total destruction bordered others of modest, or even no impact, and in many areas the scene changed from one state to the other rapidly and repeatedly.
The principal reasons, I expect, are because the terrain is very varied (rolling, and often steep), and because some areas affected had previously been burned. For example, a slope fifty feet high might be utterly destroyed where the wind swept flames and burning embers uphill, and yet green grass and trees would have survived right up to the break of the slope on top. In other situations, groves of aspen bore witness to the fires of not long ago. In contrast, the Yellowstone National Park burn areas seemed vastly and uniformly devastated when I visited them several years after their destruction.
On the Kaibab, the result has been the creation of what is called a "mosaic" landscape: a desirable, natural state that comprises many patches of different types of growth simultaneously existing at various stages of maturity. How that state is achieved once fire offers the opportunity makes for an interesting story, and the tale of the aspen features prominently in that process.
In much of the west, forests exist in three states: burned, recovering from being burned, and waiting to be burned. Until recently, the time between burns in northern Arizona was two to ten years. But as logging became both feasible as well as profitable, fire suppression became an article of faith in the management of national forests. Only in the last few years has that policy been reversed, with the recognition that naturally occurring fires are a necessary and important part of maintaining forest health. The difficult question necessarily arises, however, of how to make the transition safely back to a state of nature.
The Warm Fire on the Kaibab plateau provides an interesting example of how this transition is being addressed in practice.
On June 8 of this year, a lightning strike ignited a fire in the interior of Kaibab National Forest, near Warm Springs Canyon (hence the name, the "Warm Fire"). Consistent with the new policy of the National Forest Service, it was decided to manage rather than extinguish the blaze, and to therefore classify it as a "wildland fire use fire, managed for resource benefits" (this and other details are taken from a National Forest Service report available at the National Forest visitor centers). What this means principally is that conditions were deemed appropriate to allow a naturally occurring fire to clear out the "fuel load" (i.e., dead logs, branches, needles and so on) that had accumulated through the decades during which the preceding fire suppression policy was in force.