Monthly Archive:: December 2011

"The Supreme Court on Wednesday heard oral arguments in a case that raises a fundamental question: whether a physician can infringe a patent merely by using scientific research to inform her treatment decisions. Unfortunately, this issue was barely mentioned in Wednesday's arguments. A number of influential organizations had filed briefs warning of the dire consequences of allowing medical patents, but their arguments were largely ignored in the courtroom. Instead, everyone seemed to agree that medical patents were legal in general, and focused on the narrow question of whether the specific patent in the case was overly broad." One day, American policy makers are going to wake up and realise they've made their country irrelevant. The amount of stupidity American policy makers exhibit never ceases to amaze me.

In a recent site update, CNET Download.com listings have begun redirecting product download links for popular freeware and opensource applications to their own "downloader and installer" utility which bundles a number of adware components alongside the requested application and changes the users' homepage and default search engine to Microsoft Bing. Freeware authors are sending CNet cease and desist orders demanding virgin download links, something affected open source developers may or may not be able to do due to FOSS license terms.

"In Mozilla's recently released 2010 annual report, the foundation indicates that 86% and 84% of royalty revenue came from one contract in 2009 and 2010, respectively. Mozilla separately confirms that Google is its largest contract." Evan Niu at Motley Fool then estimates that of Mozilla's last year royalty revenue of $121.1 million, $101.7 million came from Google. The article speculates that Google might eventually kill Firefox by withdrawing its financial support.

Patch up warmly this winter if you're running Java. That's the advice from .NET shop Microsoft, which reckons Oracle's platform is the single biggest target for hackers. Java proved the single most popular target in the 12-month period to the end of June, according to Microsoft's latest Security Intelligence Report has found here Running Java as a Web-browser Plugin is much more dangerous than Flash, and should disable the Java Applet Plugin.

And yet another ruling. In April this year, Apple sued Samsung over several design patents and a single software patent regarding various Galaxy smartphones and tablets. Late last night, US District Judge Lucy Koh denied Apple's request for a preliminary injunction against Samsung. The actual ruling, though, is a mixed bag - Samsung is found infringing (but it's a "close question") on Apple's design and software patents (no real patents in play here, folks), but Apple has failed completely in providing any form of proof that Samsung is causing irreparable harm to Apple.

Windows 8 will have both the new Metro-style applications and user interface and the traditional Windows 7 desktop for legacy applications, which kind of runs like an application. Since legacy applications have to be recompiled to run on ARM anyway, it's always been a bit unclear if the ARM version of Windows 8 would include the legacy desktop at all - even Microsoft itself confirmed it wasn't sure yet. Microsoft bloggers Mary-Jo Foley and Paul Thurrot have fresh rumours that Microsoft has now made the decision to remove the legacy desktop from the ARM version.