Monthly Archive:: May 2013

"We're almost exactly a year on from our first hands-on with the Nokia 808 PureView, hailed by me, somewhat tongue in cheek, as Nokia's custom design for me, from my own personal checklist. Insane camera, Xenon flash, replaceable battery, FM transmitter, large OLED screen, deafening speaker, and so on. All present and correct. One year on and, thanks to a brace of updates and third party additions, I find myself just as in love with the 808 now as when I first popped my microSIM card in." I'm back to my HTC 8X by now, since the Nokia E7's battery was terrible - 4-6 hours of mild use, tops, even with a brand new, official Nokia battery. My 8X gives me three days on the same usage pattern.

"Do intellectual property rights on existing technologies hinder subsequent innovation? Using newly-collected data on the sequencing of the human genome by the public Human Genome Project and the private firm Celera, this paper estimates the impact of Celera's gene-level IP on subsequent scientific research and product development. Genes initially sequenced by Celera were held with IP for up to two years, but moved into the public domain once re-sequenced by the public effort. Across a range of empirical specifications, I find evidence that Celera's IP led to reductions in subsequent scientific research and product development on the order of 20 to 30 percent. Taken together, these results suggest that Celera's short-term IP had persistent negative effects on subsequent innovation relative to a counterfactual of Celera genes having always been in the public domain." Research by Heidi L. Williams, of the Department of Economics at MIT. Forget what companies and their advocates (i.e., politicians) say, and trust science.

Exactly twenty years ago, a document was published that played a huge role in establishing the web as we know it today. Twenty years later, and this simple and straightforward document is proof of an irrefutable fact: while closed technologies can change markets, open technologies can change the world.

"In the past few weeks, I've managed to find a bit more free time to work on Haiku. As per usual, the lion's share of this time was spent on improving our integrated debugger. As such, I thought I'd give a brief overview of what's been added, and how it can be useful."

"The Q1 2013 numbers from IDC, a technology and telecommunications research firm who keeps track of this sort of thing, show that Android tablets now lead the market with a 56.5-percent share. The 27,800,000 units shipped in the quarter is a 247-percent improvement from this time last year, when just 8,000,000 units were shipped. It's important to note that this increase doesn't come at the expense of Apple, who shipped 65.3-percent more tablets in Q1 2013 than they did in Q1 2012 - it shows the market is growing, and the lions share of new purchases are Android." While Android's market share growth scares me, it's good that it's not really harming the competition. Also, maybe this will be the carrot for developers to improve Android tablet applications.

OpenBSD 5.3 has been released. It's got improvements all over the place, and includes OpenSMTPD 53, the first version considered stable enough for production use. Y'all know where the downloads are.