USPTO Power Outage Damages Equipment and Shuts Down IT Systems (uspto.gov) 62
An anonymous reader sends word that many online systems at the United States Patent and Trademark Office are down due to damaged equipment after a power outage. A statement from the USPTO reads in part: "A major power outage at USPTO headquarters occurred last night resulting in damaged equipment that required the subsequent shutdown of many of our online and IT systems. This includes our filing, searching, and payment systems, as well as the systems our examiners across the country use. We are working diligently to assess the operational impact on all our systems and to determine how soon they can be safely brought back into service in the coming days. We understand how critical these systems are for our customers, and our teams will continue to work around the clock to restore them as quickly as possible, though the impacts may be felt through the Christmas holiday. We know many people have questions regarding filing and payment deadlines. We are reviewing this topic and will provide an update when we have further information."
Rubber Stamps (Score:5, Funny)
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That is correct. Then just let lawyers decide which ones are enforceable once they are challenged. I laugh every time I hear someone brag about their patent portfolio before it's been properly vetted by those blood suckers.
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That is exactly what isn't working right now, because the powers out. It has been in use so long, nobody knows how to wield the rubber stamp anymore.
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No, it is very hard to get a BAD patent.
Actually it's pretty easy to get a bad patent too. Used to work for a company that filed for thousands of patents a year. Some were so embarrassingly bad that the, uh, "inventors" used to draw lots to see who'd be able to put their name last so they wouldn't be listed as the primary inventor.
Patents that propose to change the shape of the gears in a cotton gin and claim a new patent SHOULD be rejected.
This is the USPTO you're talking about here, obviousness or the existence of an earlier patent don't rule out patentability. One of my former employers' patents, just from knowledge of the narrow field I worked in, wa
Shouldn't this have failed over? (Score:2)
What's a colo?
Re:Shouldn't this have failed over? (Score:5, Funny)
They thought about failover, but weren't sure it wouldn't infringe on a patent so they skipped it.
The first three letters of USPTO are UPS... (Score:2)
(not in that order tho ;)
UPSs save lives. If you insist on not backing up your data, not having your equipment on a UPS, and not following standard authentication and encryption standards recommended by industry, have the decency to resign and go home and fall on your blade.
In my house even my AMOLED TV is on a UPS. Power spikes happen all the time. A $100 UPS will prevent a $200 visit to replace a $100 part in a TV power supply. How is that a bad idea?
*shees*
E
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Re:The first three letters of USPTO are UPS... (Score:4, Informative)
For one thing, you have to replace the UPS battery every year.
3 - 5 years. I some network closet UPS's with 7 year old batteries that are still showing around 60% of original reserve capacity so we haven't bothered replacing them since they'll still last longer than our main server room batteries do in a power outage.
UPS battery changes are cheaper than replacing hardware that failed because it's not on a UPS.
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Even older APC SmartUPS can give a false reading if they've never been fully cycled. Yes, they do a periodic self-test (you can hear the relay clicking when being performed), but not a full discharge and recharge cycle. With batteries that old, you'll be lucky if you get 2 to 5 minutes of runtime out of them at nominal load. In fact, for SmartUPS, they must be recalibrated with a new battery. Typically this used to involve putting a 25% or 33% load until the battery completely drains in order to learn the new runtime metric. We used to use a few halogen lights to provide the test load :)
We do rundown tests every 6 months where the UPS runs itself on battery for some period of time (15 minutes) and checks the battery state? The UPS's are way oversized for the loads we run on them (2 SU3000's per closet, each closet has between 6 - 12 switches, and we've dramatically cut back on PoE power since most people switched from desk phones to cell phones), and even if we only had 5 minutes of runtime that would be more than enough, the UPS's are mostly there to let the network ride out short power g
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We do rundown tests every 6 months where the UPS runs itself on battery for some period of time (15 minutes) and checks the battery state?
Why abuse batteries like this? What did they do to you?
When not being boiled by crappy chargers they are discharged to low SOC at unnecessarily high rate for no useful reason (~$10 BOM hit for useful dummy load obviously out of the question). To pour salt on the wound same crappy chargers spend days trickling current back into batteries because UPS manufacturers don't care.
People wonder why they have to pay to replace batteries so often when they appear to just sit there idle 99.99% of the time.
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United Parcel Service. That's a trademarked name, so we can't use it.
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I always thought it stood for ÜPS, as in "oops", because that's what seems to happen a lot with the packages they send me.
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A UPS can fail catastrophically, particularly if someone is performing some electrical work upstream and didn't disconnect the UPS from main power.
Upstream electrical work shouldn't affect the UPS, worst case it will trip the UPS over to battery power. Unless by "work" you mean connecting a 120VAC circuit to 480V.
Even downstream work shouldn't cause any failure, that's what circuit breakers are for.
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A $100 UPS will prevent a $200 visit to replace a $100 part in a TV power supply. How is that a bad idea?
How? $600 worth of replacement UPS batteries over the life of a $500 TV that will actually be more like obsolete in two years anyway?
Never had a UPS on a TV. Have never had a TV fail due to any of our many power flickers, sags, spikes, or outages. Sure, it'll happen eventually. In the meantime, I'm many hundreds of dollars ahead of the game (thousands, probably, looking at the period of time I'm talking about) and also not paying for the extra electricity it takes to keep those UPSes awake and happy.
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A $100 UPS will prevent a $200 visit to replace a $100 part in a TV power supply. How is that a bad idea?
How? $600 worth of replacement UPS batteries over the life of a $500 TV that will actually be more like obsolete in two years anyway?
Never had a UPS on a TV. Have never had a TV fail due to any of our many power flickers, sags, spikes, or outages. Sure, it'll happen eventually. In the meantime, I'm many hundreds of dollars ahead of the game (thousands, probably, looking at the period of time I'm talking about) and also not paying for the extra electricity it takes to keep those UPSes awake and happy.
My $1000 3 year old TV is on a $75 UPS. Even if I have to replace the UPS every 5 years, I still consider it money well spent. If nothing else, it prevents short power glitches from interrupting my TV show.
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If you have glitches often enough for it to be a problem, then it's money well spent.
That being said, I get the idea that people are forgetting that surge suppressors are a thing, and cheaper than UPS units. Hell, I have a whole-house one that I installed on my main breaker box.
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a $500 TV that will actually be more like obsolete in two years
Jeezus, consumer much?
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Data centers have had power switching fails (Score:2)
Data centers have had power switching fails some times it just cuts all power other times fires and with a fire when the firemen say cut all power they mean do it now.
Time to abolish patents (Score:2)
Perhaps it's a side topic, but in my opinion patents do more harm than good. Big expensive labs that do nothing but invent are a rarity now. Most discoveries happen in the course of making something specific and would happen anyhow. Patents just hamper the little tinkerers and make lawyers rich.
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It's half related.
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But a patent is just a pretty piece of paper until you try to enforce it. Only then will the courts actually look at the merit of the patent and declare it enforceable or invalid.
The main reason for granting patents is to persuade inventors to publish their ideas so knowledge will s
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I know that, but it's not working as intended. There's no evidence companies heavily use patent searches to make something or make something better. They mostly use them to avoid getting sued. The court battles and the practice of holding products and product ideas "hostage" is too large a counter cost.
Overall, t
No DR then (Score:2)
Seems odd theres not BC/DR here
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BC/DR does not mean no outages. It doesn't even mean no extended outages. It simply means that there is a plan on how to eventually recover. The acceptable length of time to recovery entirely depends on the impact of the outage. If every second of downtime means lost money, having a hot backup datacenter in a different location makes sense. If, like in this case, a few days of downtime make no real difference (it can take years to go through the patent process, what is another few days going to matter)
Hitec UPS? (Score:2)
Way back when, they were putting in Hitec UPSs, a diesel-rotary flywheel system for backup power. About 7-10 years ago, 365 Main In San Francisco had an outage with these units after a few consecutive short outages. I know Hitec updated the firmware on the system to change timings, but I wonder if these units were ever "patched."
Oh well... Nothing of value lost and all that.
Longer patent turnaround? (Score:2)
Customers (Score:2)
I'm a little disturbed by their use of the term "customers". It's a bad sign that they consider patent applicants to be customers. It implies that it's their job to grant patents--denying a patent would not be serving their customers.
Yeah, I know, this isn't new. It's been their attitude for years, but I hate having our noses rubbed in it.
Customers doesn't quite have that meaning (Score:2)
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"The customer is always right"
That term mostly was used to try to prevent employees from getting into arguments with customers over trivial matters. If the customer was a Yankees fan, don't start busting him because you are a Red Sox fan, or if they come ranting about politics just politely agree with his politics and get back to business. However the customer goes to you for a service or product. If it is a product you can choose to trade it for currency or not. for a service, they pay for the work in
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USPTO power outage damages equipment .. (Score:2)
USPTO delivers an early christmas present (Score:2)
It would be a very merry Christmas for all if patents end up expiring due to non payment of maintenance fees.
USPTO IT please stay home and celebrate Christmas then celebrate the new year away from USPTO systems for the whole of 2016. Nobody will mind a brief 1 year outage... honest.
I'm calling bullshit (Score:2)
Laywer emails me this morning... (Score:2)
"I'd better send him my final rev. of the application due tomorrow within a few hours" after I got to work. I had expected to have until the end of the day. The night before I had almost given up in despair, that the thing could ever be made so that his way of saying what I tried to tell him was invented could ever make sense. And that he covered the important shit, instead of the irrelevant stuff.
By some miracle I was able to send it off within a couple hours.
My first and hopefully last experience wit