Patent Wars

I've been reading the ridiculous patent wars that are currently being fought in courts of law around the world about how Android phones are infringing patents..... but if you look at these patents

PCT/GB98/03016   <--- for instance

They relate to the vaguest description of an idea, and in some cases like the one above, they talk about devices that have long since gone to landfill.... the one above was filed in 1998 and U.S. Patent No. 6,956,564 on "portable computers" (not previously asserted; Apple acquired this one from British Telecom in 2008) are suing HTC over some vague use of a touch screen as described in the patent and touch screens didn't even exist in 1998 not for hand portable computers as it's called in the patent anyway !!!

No make no mistake about this, this is about the inexorable march of  Linux/Android into places where previously only bespoke software sat, such as the Apple iPhone and only now is Apple beginning to wake up  that their market share is soon going to disappear especially in their stronghold America..... the iPhone is selling stronger in the States than anywhere else but Android is catching up, just like it's overtaken Apple in Europe it will do the same in the States.

So this is why Apple are buying up stale 1998 patents off British Telecom, probably because their legal eagles can see some mileage in them, after all stalling sales of Android phones anywhere in the world means lost profits for the patent losers and increased profits for Apple.... But personally I see no honour in wheeling out a stale old patent which was originally filed for the likes of  Psion Series 5, and the HP320LX

 As you can see neither of these dinosaurs have anything in common with a modern Android phone,  and I fail to see how they can apply a patent for a device manufactured in 1998 by a COMPLETELY different company which has been simply purchased by another company on the off chance that it might be useful in fighting off a product which is better purely because of design and how that can be enforced in a court of law is beyond me...... The problem is though Linux/Android has SO many developers to push out a change takes only a few days and in some cases just a few hours, so they are behaving a bit like King Canute commanding the tide to halt

(although that isn't a very good example because King Canute didn't try to stop the tide to show how powerful he was as a king "Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws." In other words that other human construct...... God.....or as I like to call it "the fall back when nothing else fits" )

 Anyway I digress, it's all delaying tactics the design cycle of Android is accelerating, Apple on the other hand doesn't have the resources to develop as quickly as Android.... hence the litigiousness we are seeing now..... or in plain speak "blind panic" .... Steve Jobs has gone !!!! what are we going to do now ???? Sue them !!! every last one of them !!!! damn it !!!!

Laughable......Muah ha ha ha ha ha ha 

It's been a while

I simply haven't had time to update my blog of late what with this and that happening....We've moved AGAIN !!! We are still in Laugharne, but we had the chance of a nice house with a huge garden and we jumped on it from a great height..... I've already hacked the garden to death to get some light into it because it had a lot of overhanging trees and we also have an Apple tree.... but gardening has ceased now because of winter but come spring I'll be back in there hacking away again..... we even have a small stream that runs right through the bottom of the garden.... it even has brown trout in it !!! :) 

Anyway.... Hasn't the world been busy ???? Gaddafi brown bread and quite a few of his family.... well lets face it....it really wasn't going to end well, was it ? and now the UK and the US are turning their attention to Iran and their nuclear ambitions or is that their oil ? I always get those two commodities mixed up.... Then of course we have all the nut jobs who think the world is going to end as predicted in the Mayan calendar.....if it wasn't bad enough that Christians are under the delusion that there will be a second coming and a destruction of earth.....blah .....blah .....blah, and then of course we have the extremist Muslims who are blowing themselves up for their share of virgins ..... they must surely be running out of them by now ? .... I am sooooooooo glad I'm an atheist, I suppose I used to be as bad because I used to believe in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.... but I grew up and saw sense..... 

Then of course we have more sensible things going on like the sigma 2 discovery of the Higgs Boson particle at CERN or the GOD particle as it's been dubbed or basically the reason why everything has mass in the universe.... people don't seem to realise the significance of this discovery... but all will become clear.... Like I said I'm sooooooooo glad I'm an atheist....

Anyway after that quick catch up with world events... onto more serious things like Freya's progress at school.... The school have started something called Read/Write/Ink (I think that's how it's said) basically it's a new way of teaching kids to read & write and it's results are astounding.... In Freya at least, from what I can tell they use phonetics as SSSSS snake and IIIIII insect ... but it's working she has only just turned 4 years old and she is reading her first words like PIN, CAT, SIT, SAD etc it's almost like a light has been switched on in her head and it's amazing to witness :)

Andrea and I went to her nativity play yesterday at her school... historically I wasn't going to pick holes in the story and decided I was just going to take it on face value.... because I simply don't do religion in any shape or form, I find the whole subject quite distasteful in this day and age... but I have to admit Freya as an angel (human construct though it is) was pretty damn cute... 

I'm going to let Freya decide for herself regards religion, just because I find it so ridiculous doesn't mean she will... although I'm aware that my views on it may well form her views on it, but I can't do anything about that....I'm not going to sugar coat any difficult questions she might ask....... in much the same way a "Christian" family can't stop their beliefs rubbing off on their children.... live and let live just don't force your views on me and I won't figuratively rip your head off with logic....

Anyway here we are nearly at WinterSolsticemas .... because that's what it really is.......

I will probably catch you the other side of the festivities 

RIP Steve Jobs, 1955 - 2011

I was fairly lucky in that I came into computing just in its infancy with the IBM 5150 and a few years later the Apple Macintosh hit the streets...that is when Apple hit mainstream businesses, there were a few before that namely the Lisa and the Apple IIe, but the Macintosh is the one that stirred the imagination. 

Now although I'm not what you would call an avid fan of Apple Inc and their closed proprietary business model, I have to admire the man Steve Jobs, love him or loathe him, his single vision to simplify computers by removing them from the hands of geeks (like me) in darkened rooms and transforming them into everyday objects such as the iPod, iPhone and iPad, which to so many have become must have gadgets.... Back in the 1980's computers were mainly hideous things bolted together with self tapping screws, cumbersome and heavy and by today's standards incredibly slow...

Then along came the stylish Mac, first of all it had 128Kb of ram, but above all it gave the impression of something entirely different to the offering from IBM, it had a mouse !! now that wasn't a new thing the Unix world and X windows had used a mouse for some time, but Apple were the first to bring it mainstream, the monitor was infinitely higher resolution which was paper white with black characters, just like written pages... IBM on the other hand had green screen, low resolution monitors... on looks alone the Mac won hands down.... However in its early days it was seen as a toy, as most mainstream businesses used IBM and DOS (Disk Operating System) or the unimaginative A:> .... yes we were still using floppy disks in those early days, the first hard disks were quite a long way away, and the first ones that came out were hideously expensive.

 I remember marvelling at the first hard disk when it had 5MB of storage it was enormous and heavy like a house brick, but WOW it had 5MB of storage on it !!!

a hard drive that size now could hold 9 or 10 Terabytes....

Apple did things differently their floppy disk drives had no eject button and they only had one drive, eventually hard disk started appearing in Macintosh's but Apple always were very expensive to buy in some cases twice the price of the equivalent IBM, so to many it was a luxury they could ill afford... they did however practically take over in the printing and graphics side of the industry, it took IBM compatible computers many years to compete with Apple on graphics and image manipulation, by that time Apple was so entrenched within that industry they could never be toppled.....He was also responsible for the first laser printer hitting the market the Apple Laserwriter... 

However not all went well for Apple, Steve Jobs was fired in the 1980's because sales of Mac's bottomed out and slowly Apple lost momentum and market share... to the point where Microsoft had to bail them out with an injection of cash... but it was an entirely selfish act on Microsoft's part because if Apple went under Microsoft would come under the scrutiny of the monopolies commission and could/would be broken up as a result of Apple's demise... 

Steve went on to found NeXT and he "dabbled" in a few other companies such as Pixar and he gained stocks in Disney, eventually Apple bought NeXT so that it could implement its technology into Apple products and a few months later Steve Jobs was back at the helm of his first company.... the rest is history and what followed can only be described as a slew of iconic must have devices which captured an entire generation, such as the iPod, iPhone, iPad.... but without Steve's involvement and his vision in the early years Apple would not have become what it is today....

So I'm glad I was around to witness the very first Apple computers and see the humble beginnings they came from, I repaired Apple IIe's and Lisa's and Macintosh's... I even reverse engineered their "Fat Mac upgrade" which at the time cost over £4000 to upgrade via Apple to 512KB of memory, which they were none too impressed about but could nothing about because their customers were willing to void their warranty to get it for £1000.... 

One thing I will never forget is how badly a humble looking Macintosh could send you flying across the room if you dared to ignore the EHT discharge warnings and accidentally touched the anode cap from the monitor in that tightly packed Macintosh case......even after you had discharged it you kept on discharging it because it seemed to get high voltage from nowhere.... many a time I was caught out with that....

I used to have a letter signed by Steve Jobs sent to the company I worked for at the time to "cease and desist" from upgrading Macintosh's I should have kept it......he was litigious even then....

But it's a sad day, the world has lost a great man, who's drive and ambition probably won't be seen again for a long time, and so young too, he had a lot more to give......