Myth of pinch-to-zoom: Apple doesn't own it

The myth of pinch-to-zoom: how a confused media gave Apple something it doesn't own | The Verge

yeah, media and is't Apple dedication. And worse, people starting to believe everything they read ...

BBC News: Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth

BBC News - Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth on shaking up system software

Neat to see how more and more big sites report on Ubuntu. This didn't happen a few years ago. More and more start to notice Ubuntu, great trend ..

experience working with patents

My experience working with patents - Where is Ploum?

interesting and a good read on patents ... such a sad sad state of this system :/

Google bids For Motorola

Google Goes Soup-To-Nuts On Android With Bid For Motorola | TechCrunch

wow! thats big news. That could really turn troubled android around into the right tracks. Also I'm sure they have some advanced dev tools for android that could be added to the SDK now. Very very cool indeed

The patent system isn’t broken - we are

The patent system isn’t broken — we are | This is my next...

very interesting (and long) read on patents. Letting patents only be valid for 3-5 years would be nice. But doesn't it (from time to time at least) take longer for a patent to be granted than that? I think I heard of patents where it took 7 years? In my opinion thats a bigger problem as times move fast. If a system can be used for 7 years and suddenly you got to pay license fees, thats bad, very bad. Also I think within 7 years its likely that someone else comes up with the same thing. Anyway, right now its a bad situation no matter which way you turn it. It needs to change, hopefully soon ...

Update: more on that:
ignore the code: It's Broken.

More on Software Patents

ignore the code: More on Software Patents

good well known points there .. nothing more to say.

Intellectual property: Patents against prosperity

Intellectual property: Patents against prosperity | The Economist

A glimpse of hope. There seem to be people in America that realize the problem. At least on the Patent side.

Start-ups hindered by software patents

Start-ups hindered by software patents | StormDriver

the software patent system is such a sad sad thing :/

"Microsoft Has Become A Joke"

Drunk On Licensing Fees And Patents, Microsoft Has Become A Joke

A bit hard on MS but still a lot seems to be true. The business model just is outdated nowadays. But I guess it will still take years for MS to understand how wrong they are. With all the failed opportunities they had in the last 10 years or so. And those few success stories that where only possible by pushing hard with lots of cash. I'm not sure if when MS realizes how wrong they are that it's not already too late. Similar to Nokia, they realized that years too late as well.

James Gosling on stuff

The Basement Coders CrashPlan Give Away!

Some interesting bits:

"Because lawyers just like to make revenue. And I'm sure they were looking at the license fees they were getting from Microsoft. Microsoft .NET just smears over a huge pile of Sun patents. When they did the .NET design, they basically cut and pasted from the Java spec. The way that they did CLR, you know they swizzled the way the instruction set went but the way this thing really operated, they exercised essentially no creativity when coming up with .NET. They've done some things since then that have been kind of good but as part of the various court cases we ended up with this rather odd patent deal with them that involved them paying us fairly tasty amounts of money. And I'm sure that the lawyers looked at the Microsoft numbers and said, yeah I want that from Google"

"I mean this is one of the reasons that hardware manufacturers often don't open source their drivers. Because if they open source their drivers, then other hardware manufacturers will look at that and go, oh, well your hardware must stomp on this patent device. ... I've had more than on hardware manufacturer tell me that."

"It turns out there's a small issue with the way the sine and cosine hardware is implemented in the spec on the intel platform. And we actually work around it in software. For the ranges from plus or minus five, we are close to intel speeds. You get the larger values, where the intel thing rips. So lots of folks who use math on the Java platform because we do it accurately. We put a lot of effort into it. The fact that we actually cared about that, and lots of people depend on it, but its' not the kind of thing that Joe Hacker is going to do."

"But one of the terms at the time, 15 years ago, was that every software vendor had decided that the only platform they could support was Windows NT. So all the people who were writing software for Sun Systems 15 years ago was telling us they couldn't do it anymore. (50:00) Even though you guys have a better platform, they've got better volume. But IBM was getting the same message. Everybody was getting the message in the software community that they were shutting down development on everything except NT. And for a company like Sun at the time the equation was basically, if we don't do Java, if we don't give software developers a way to develop software for our platform without shutting themselves out from NT then they're just going to abandon us and we're dead."

"One of the sad things about android was they really didn't pay attention to security issues as much as they should have. Google is kind of a funny company because a lot of them have this peace love and happiness version of evil. And by being overly peach love and happiness, and believing the whole world is peace love and happiness, they end up doing evil, because they really didn't spend enough time thinking about, there are actually nasty people out there. Google puts a lot of effort into security in things like Chrome."

cool stuff :)

Why Microsoft is Being Nicer to Open Source

Why Microsoft is Being Nicer to Open Source | ITworld

Microsoft Open Source Strategy is Upside Down. | Martin Iturbide

Shlomil's blog: Why you probably don't want to get Mono/Moonlight

a few very interesting links on MS, strategy. Playing good with developers (as they aren't lawyers) and still being able to sue any time they want.

Why software patents are a joke, literally

Why software patents are a joke, literally | ZDNet

Headius: My Thoughts on Oracle v Google

.. as usual software patents suck ..

Oracle vs. Google, OpenSolaris

I'm asking myself what Oracle thinks is in it for them. I really don't think that even if they win this the end result will be a positive one for them. To my understanding the primary customers of Oracles software are developers and they are pissing of a lot of them right now. They are generating a lot of FUD on their own products.

There are a lot of people blogging about that, and it generally doesn't look like its going anywhere good for Oracle. Even if Google is the "bad" one here it's still a lot of bad PR for Oracle. Bad PR that directly hits Oracles Customers.

I guess it will take years for that lawsuit to settle ...

Movies are Threatened by the MPEG-LA

Why Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the MPEG-LA

good read, interesting stuff.

Software Patents broke the system

Patent Absurdity — How software patents broke the system

they have a good video on software patents and how they are used.

Patents

ignore the code: Patents

and again, Patents suck hard .. -.-