Interview: Skyhook CEO Ted Morgan on the Google Lawsuit

Original OSNews Interviews 10 Comments
We've covered the lawsuit between Skyhook and Google in quite some detail already, but today we have something very interesting that sheds a lot of new light on the case: an interview with Skyhook's CEO and founder, Ted Morgan, about the lawsuit. While Morgan obviously couldn't talk about everything, he explains a few things and gives some new information, as well. Read on for Skyhook's side of the story.
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The Computers that Power Man’s Conquest of the Stars

Geek stuff 23 Comments
"Watch a Nasa shuttle burning a path into space or a video of Saturn's rings taken by the Cassini satellite and it's hard not to marvel at man's technological prowess. But the surprising truth is that space exploration is built on IT which lags many years behind that found in today's consumer gadgets and corporate PCs. To this day, Nasa still uses elements of technology that powered the moon landings of the 1960s and 1970s, while the International Space Station - the manned station circling the Earth 250 miles above our heads - relies on processors dating back more than two decades."
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Sony Beaten Into Pulp by Jailbreak Community

  Submitted by sawboss Games 42 Comments
The PlayStation 3. For a long time, it was a rather well-protected machine, and it wasn't until early this year that George Hotz finally managed to crack the thing wide open. In essence, it was now possible to jailbreak the PlayStation 3 like you would jailbreak your iPhone, but of course, Sony wasn't pleased. With the recent firmware update, v3.50, Sony went from surgical precision to the battle axe - they blocked all non-Sony USB devices controllers (and a lot of PS2 > PS3 controller adapters) from working.
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Android’s Google Apps Agreement: Google’s Leverage Over OEMs

Google 48 Comments
A few days ago I dove into the lawsuit filed by Skyhook against Google, and came to the conclusion that Skyhook's case - while an entirely plausible sequence of events considering Google is a big company and hence prone to abuse - simply wasn't a very good one. Google's CEO Eric Schmidt has given a rather generic-looking statement on the matter, but however generic it may be, there's a hint in there.
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HP Slate vs. Samsung Galaxy Tab (or Why HP Bought Palm)

Wireless 47 Comments
So, we have the iPad out and about for a while now, doing its thing, most likely selling well. Of course, others want a piece of that pie as well, so we see tablets pop up all over the place, most of which are either ultra-low budget junk or vapourware (how that's Adam coming along, Notion Ink?). Earlier this year, Steve Ballmer proudly held up HP's Windows 7-powered Slate - but then, HP bought Palm, canned the Slate, promised a webOS tablet, and then resurrected the Slate as an enterprise product. Now we have a video of the Windows 7-powered Slate. Let's compare it to Samsung's detailed overview of its Galaxy Tab, and see ever so clearly why HP canned the darn thing in the first place.
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HomeGroup: a Practical Guide to Domestic Bliss with Windows 7

  Submitted by poundsmack Windows 14 Comments
"I'm sure it's just a coincidence, but Windows 7 shipped around the same time I got married, and it includes a fascinating new technology called HomeGroup. Its goal is really simple: get all your home computers sharing documents, media, and printers with each other, in a way that is both secure and straightforward. But Microsoft also has a deeper aim here: they're trying to finally kill off the decrepit NetBIOS technology that's at the heart of most Windows sharing problems. So let's have a look at HomeGroup and the technologies involved that make it work. And just to keep things interesting, we'll compare HomeGroup with what Mac OS X offers."
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Evercookie: Virtually Irrevocable Persistent Cookies

  Submitted by sawboss Internet 27 Comments
"Evercookie is a javascript API available that produces extremely persistent cookies in a browser. Its goal is to identify a client even after they've removed standard cookies, Flash cookies (Local Shared Objects or LSOs), and others. Evercookie accomplishes this by storing the cookie data in several types of storage mechanisms that are available on the local browser. Additionally, if evercookie has found the user has removed any of the types of cookies in question, it recreates them using each mechanism available."
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How VLC on the iPad Illustrates iOS’ Major Weakness

Apple 125 Comments
As I was casually browsing around today, I came across this blog post. It's about the recently released VLC media player for the iPad, which you can use to play just about any video under the sun on your iPad. The blog post is a complaint about a bit of help text that's not properly rendered inside the application - annoying, but no dealbreaker. Until I actually read the text - this is how you're supposed to get content on your iPad?
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Qt 4.7.0 Released

  Submitted by diegocg Qt 91 Comments
After many months of designing, coding, reviewing, testing and documenting, Qt 4.7.0 is finally ready for the big time. Although it's a little more than nine months since Qt's last feature release (4.6.0 on December 1, 2009), the seeds of some of the new stuff in 4.7 were sown much earlier. Indeed, many of the ideas behind the biggest new feature in Qt 4.7.0, Qt Quick, were born more than two years ago, not long after Qt 4.4 was released
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New Implementation Direct3D 11 COM API for Gallium

  Submitted by Michael 3D 66 Comments
"Luca Barbieri made a rather significant commit today that adds a state tracker dubbed 'd3d1x', which implements the Direct3D 10/11 COM API in Gallium3D. Luca says this is just the initial version, but it's already working and can run a few DirectX 10/11 texturing demos on Linux at the moment. This is not a matter of simply translating the Direct3D calls and converting them to OpenGL like how Wine currently handles it, but is natively implemented within Gallium3D and TGSI to speak directly to the underlying graphics driver and hardware. Thanks to Gallium3D's architecture, this Direct3D support essentially becomes 'free' to all Linux drivers with little to no work required."
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Xerox PARC Turns 40: Marking Four Decades of Tech Innovations

In the News 4 Comments
"For 40 years, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (commonly called Xerox PARC, now just PARC) has been a place of technological creativity and bold ideas. The inventions it has spawned, from Ethernet networking to laser printing and the graphical user interface, have led to myriad technologies that allow us to use computers in ways that we take for granted today. When it opened on July 1, 1970, PARC was set up as a division of Xerox Corp. The idea was to invest in PARC as a springboard for developing new technologies and fresh concepts that would lead to future products."
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Benjamin Franklin, the First IP Pirate?

In the News 21 Comments
"What would Benjamin Franklin have thought about P2P file sharing? We'll never know, but a new book portrays him as a skeptic of intellectual property and an advocate for the common ownership of inventions and ideas." What a surprise. A person with brains favouring loose IP laws. Anyone with two braincells to rub together understands that a free flow of information and knowledge is beneficial to human development.
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