Monthly Archive:: February 2013

And there we are - the Surface Pro reviews are in. Reading through them all, there's clearly a common theme, and it's not particularly positive. We're a few months in now, so I think we can finally call it: Windows 8 and Surface are the wrong way to go.

"The case against patents can be summarized briefly: there is no empirical evidence that they serve to increase innovation and productivity, unless productivity is identified with the number of patents awarded - which, as evidence shows, has no correlation with measured productivity. Both theory and evidence suggest that while patents can have a partial equilibrium effect of improving incentives to invent, the general equilibrium effect on innovation can be negative. A properly designed patent system might serve to increase innovation at a certain time and place. Unfortunately, the political economy of government-operated patent systems indicates that such systems are susceptible to pressures that cause the ill effects of patents to grow over time. Our preferred policy solution is to abolish patents entirely and to find other legislative instruments, less open to lobbying and rent seeking, to foster innovation when there is clear evidence that laissez-faire undersupplies it. However, if that policy change seems too large to swallow, we discuss in the conclusion a set of partial reforms that could be implemented." Written by economics professors Michelle Boldrin and David K. Levine, published in the winter issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Via John Siracusa.

"People are, unsurprisingly, upset that Microsoft have imposed UEFI Secure Boot on the x86 market. A situation in which one company gets to determine which software will boot on systems by default is obviously open to abuse. What's more surprising is that many of the people who are upset about this are completely fine with encouraging people to buy Chromebooks. Out of the box, Chromebooks are even more locked down than Windows 8 machines." Good point.

"At the GNOME Developer Experience Hackfest in Brussels, the GNOME developer community has tackled the problem of specifying a canonical development language for writing applications for the GNOME desktop. According to a blog post by Collabora engineer and GNOME developer Travis Reitter, members of the GNOME team are often asked what tools should be used when writing an application for the desktop environment and, up until now, there has been no definitive answer. The team has now apparently decided to standardise on JavaScript for user-facing applications while still recommending C as the language to write system libraries in." Discuss.

"On January 31st, 1997, Final Fantasy VII was released to the Japanese public. This single game both revolutionized and raised the bar of Japanese style console role playing games. It success was so staggering, it placed Squaresoft firmly on top the the the genre, displacing the Dragon Quest series created by the rival Enix company. The story of how this game came to be has a story more expansive than the game itself. It starts, as most stories do, with it's prequel." An insanely detailed - although missing certain parts, here and there - look at Final Fantasy VII's engine. As in, 211 pages detailed. You might want to grab a coffee.

"Whonix is a project to build an operating system that will offer the maximum privacy and anonymity possible straight out of the box. Its creator, 'Adrelanos', says the aim is to make it as hard as possible for privacy-conscious users to make missteps when it comes to remaining anonymous. 'It also provides loads of documentation and possibilities for interested users to make it even more secure,' he says." We've already covered Whonix before.

The title is pretty much self-explanatory - oh UEFI. "You can read more of what is known at H-Online, but the short summary is this: Samsung's UEFI implementation appears to be faulty. It was most likely tested with Windows only and found to work, but thorough testing with other operating systems doesn't appear to have been a priority - or perhaps a consideration at all. At present, the bug appears to affect Samsung 530U3C, 300E5C, NP700Z5C, NP700Z7C, and NP900X4C series laptops; if you have one of those laptops, we recommend you exercise extreme caution if you have a need to boot into a Linux environment."

Many people think that all Androids are equal and it's a race to the bottom where the cheapest vendor wins. This could not be farther from the truth. For me, it all began half-a-year ago, when I bought the Samsung Galaxy S III and was absolutely stunned by it, then exploring and comparing it with other Androids. Now that Google has fired a shot across the bow with its low pricing for the unlocked Nexus 4, where does that leave Samsung and its flagship handset?