The failing US patent system is getting ever more mainstream - The New York Times is running a long and details piece on the failings of the system, especially in relation to the technology industry most of us hold so dearly. Most of the stuff in there isn't new to us - but there's two things in the article I want to highlight.
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Member since:2011-01-28
I had aspirations to write & sell my own DVD editing & authoring software back around 2000. I had purchased several entry level commercial video packages, but there was an obvious gap in features. I saw it as an opportunity to write my own software and market it. I started prototyping and playing with my own ideas, which was fun, but at some point I'd need to license numerous multimedia patents in order to be compatible with the files & media at the time. I don't remember the specifics, but authoring licenses were typically a magnitude more expensive than playback licenses. I specifically wanted to support surround sound, but I was horrified when I discovered that dolby's DVD surround sound patents alone would cost several times more than I wanted to ask for my video authoring software. Apparently most commercial licensees could pay a couple million for a flat license, but this was obviously out of my range.
I learned that the reason entry level software packages were lacking features had nothing to do with the difficulty of incorporating them, but that the patent licensing fees made it impossible to incorporate them at those price points.
I also learned since then that researching patents (trying to do things the "right way") could lead to triple damages if you are sued in court and found to infringe, so I've never looked up patents since to see whether something I've written infringes or not. Luckily patents are poorly enforced, and most software shops fly under the radar; we're just not worth suing over until we're worth a few million anyways.
Member since:2005-07-06
~Linux, OSS video editing packages - which pretty much ignore all those MPEG licensing issues - are still severely lacking... (not only when it comes to features)
...perhaps "aspirations" or "prototyping and playing with my own ideas, which was fun" doesn't quite cut it here, perhaps this category of software is among the harder to do - for that matter, most of commercial video tools (coming from small and big players) are also meh. Good there is quite nice, and very modestly priced, Sony Vegas Movie Studio.
"The first killer app was VisiCalc. This early spreadsheet turned the Apple II from a hobbyist toy to a business computer. VisiCalc came with room for improvement, though. In addition, a new architecture and operating system, the Intel-based IBM PC and MS-DOS, also needed a spreadsheet to be taken seriously. That spreadsheet, released in early 1983, would be Lotus 1-2-3, and it would change the world. It became the PC's killer app, and the world would never be the same. On May 14, IBM quietly announced the end of the road for 1-2-3, along with Lotus Organizer and the Lotus SmartSuite office suite. Lotus 1-2-3's day is done." Impressive 30 year run."There's a disconnect between how Apple CEO Tim Cook sees his company's tax strategies and how some members of the US Senate view it. That became clearer than ever today after Cook and two other Apple executives testified before Congress, explaining why they're holding most of their international income in Irish subsidiaries like Apple Operations International, which declare no tax residency anywhere in the world. AOI hasn't filed a tax return anywhere in the world for the last five years, yet it earned $30 billion in income from 2009 to 2012, according to a Senate report released yesterday." Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's just. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and many more - these companies might not be breaking any laws, but it's obvious to anyone that what they are doing is scummy.
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Member since:
2006-05-20
My company designed, built, and sold a machine, in the field of automated material handling. Our competitor had machines in the same plant where our machine ended up. They looked at our machine and felt that it infringed one of their patents. They were quite wrong; they completely misunderstood how our machine worked. Their patent was over two side-by-side belts moving at different speeds so that product conveyed on the belt would rotate to compensate for the angle the entire machine was rotated at. They saw that our machine had two belts and jumped to conclusions. In fact, our belts could not be driven at different speeds; they were both on the same drive shaft with no clutches or gears or any other way to separate them. Their lawyers sent us a letter. Our lawyer sent a letter back that said, "No, you misunderstood how our machine works." End of story.
You know what it cost to have our lawyer write that letter? Ten thousand US dollars. And we have a lawyer who is relatively inexpensive for his quality and level of expertise.
By the way, should it really be patentable to have two side-by-side belts run at different speeds to cause rotation? Isn't that essentially how tank treads work, even though that's upside down from a conveyor application?