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Comment: Re:OLPC served its purpose (Score 1) 106

by steveha (#46470691) Attached to: Is One Laptop Per Child Winding Down?







Comment: Re:for the record (Score 1) 390

by steveha (#46470651) Attached to: Apple Demands $40 Per Samsung Phone For 5 Software Patents

I disagree with your analogy in which you compare stealing a car with patent grabbing.

Um, no. I said that stealing a car with the keys inside is still stealing; despite the fact that the car owner "enabled" the theft by being careless with the keys.

In the same way, being a jerk with patents is being a jerk, despite the fact that the USPTO "enables" patent jerks by granting patents that should not be granted.

Even if Apple were to have freed every one of their smartphone inventions, there would still be lawyers arguing that those inventions are not comprehensive, that their client has patents that fall between the gaps.

Your language loads the question here. You presuppose that Apple "invented" everything that they patented; I think some of it has prior art, some of it is obvious (like the patent on dialing a number by touching the number on the touchscreen), and some of it is probably genuinely new and interesting but by now I'm predisposed to assume Apple is a jerk.

And as for your main point, you are simply mistaken. If Apple had not patented anything, but just made a public demo of the iPhone, nobody would be able to file a patent after that and use the patent to hammer Apple. Apple's iPhone would now be prior art. If you disagree, please post some sort of reference to any example that would disprove this idea.

I work at an IP company, and it has been hammered into me not to disclose anything that might be patentable, because once the idea has been publicly disclosed, it becomes not patentable. I'm not a lawyer of course.

the analogy here is a defense system vs having weapons of your own.

I understand the possible use of patents as a defense. For example, Google: I am not aware of any case where Google tried to shut down a competitor using patents. This despite the fact that they own many patents.

However, Apple has been trying to use patents to prevent Samsung from selling phones. I have a problem with that.

you can't blame one company for doing it in a world in which everyone has the bomb.

Um, the whole point of my comment is that I do blame one company for doing this. I blame Apple, I blame Microsoft, I blame any company that is getting egregiously bad patents and enforcing them.

Comment: Re:OLPC served its purpose (Score 3, Interesting) 106

by steveha (#46469187) Attached to: Is One Laptop Per Child Winding Down?

I agree.








Comment: Re:for the record (Score 4, Insightful) 390

by steveha (#46460571) Attached to: Apple Demands $40 Per Samsung Phone For 5 Software Patents

Apple is not the problem. The patent system is.

Can't we agree that both are?

If you leave your car with the keys in the ignition, then it is partially your fault when someone climbs in and drives away. However, the person who stole the car is also to blame. It's not a valid defense to say "He left his keys in the car so it wasn't stealing."

If all Apple wanted was to make sure nobody else got patents on all this UI stuff, they simply could have fully published the details of how their phone worked, and nobody filing after that would be able to claim to have invented it. And I'm not a lawyer but I think Steve Jobs's public "one more thing" demos would have sufficed to make all those UI features unpatentable by anyone else.

But that wasn't enough for Apple. "Patented!" crowed Steve Jobs. Apple patented everything they thought they could get away with, including totally obvious stuff like squishing your fingers together to make things get smaller on the screen, and spreading your fingers wide to make things get bigger on the screen. Come on, that is totally obvious and there even was prior art on it. So we return to where we started: the USPTO is a problem because it let Apple patent obvious stuff, but Apple is part of the problem for trying to patent obvious stuff. (Fortunately the "pinch-to-zoom" patent was in fact invalidated, due to Samsung winning in court against Apple!)

Samsung is going to go scorched earth on this new lawsuit. Millions for defense and not one cent for tribute. And Samsung has the millions. I hope Samsung wins big and invalidates all of Apple's patents.

(And then, as long as I'm dreaming, Samsung can go invalidate Microsoft's mobile patents next.)

Comment: http://www.foldscope.com/ (Score 4, Informative) 80

by steveha (#46451311) Attached to: Stanford Bioengineer Develops a 50-cent Paper Microscope

They have a website devoted to this:


And the news on the web site is that they will give away 10,000 of these to people who volunteer to test them. If you think you could do a good job of testing, maybe you should sign up.


To me, the most impressive part is that he claims they have very accurate focusing. I believe he said "micron" focusing. I'm not sure how that works, but the paper is cut to a very accurate shape (the video showed some sort of computer-controlled cutter, it might even have been a laser cutter). By moving a tab I guess the paper can be made to flex predictably to focus the lens?

Comment: Not really big news (Score 2) 42

by steveha (#46425807) Attached to: New Tool Makes Android Malware Easier To Create

The biggest part of this story is that it is now easier to make a trojanized version of a legit app. But it has been possible from day one.

Android apps are written in Java, and Java bytecodes can be decompiled into something remarkably similar to the original source code. Then the source code can be edited and complied back to an app. Hey presto, you have a hacked up version of the app.


But -- and this is important -- the person using this attack has no way to sign the malware with the same signing key as the upstream source of the original, legit app. This means that it is much harder to trick someone into running the malware.

So, if you get an app from the Google Play store, and later someone tries to overwrite your app with a new build that is malware-infected, Android will refuse to install the new app, because the signing key isn't identical.


So, if a user gets an email with an attached "free" version of an app that normally costs money, and that user has not previously installed the legit version of the app, and that user sideloads the malware version, then that user will have malware on his/her Android device.

So, as usual, it's easy to protect yourself: get apps from the Google Play store, and don't sideload apps unless you are certain they are clean.

For that matter, if you are browsing the Google Play store and you see an app that has only been up for a day, and claims to be a miraculously free version of a payware app... just say no.

Comment: Career advice from Yoda (Score 4, Insightful) 451

by steveha (#46421589) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How Do I Change Tech Careers At 30?

If once you start down the Microsoft path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will...

Seriously, Microsoft is in decline, and already has a bunch of people trained up in it. You should consider learning mobile development for Android, iOS, or both. If you want to learn server-side stuff I would learn the open stack: Linux, MySQL and/or Postgres, maybe Hadoop.

Comment: Re:We're number one! (Score 4, Insightful) 193

by steveha (#46404397) Attached to: F-Secure: Android Accounted For 97% of All Mobile Malware In 2013




The "walled garden" does have advantages.





Comment: Re:"Interactive" (Score 1) 767

by steveha (#46392577) Attached to: The Next Keurig Will Make Your Coffee With a Dash of "DRM"

I'm guessing that the chip in the pod tailors the brewing cycle for the coffee (or tea) in the pod for the best possible quality.

That's not enough to make people embrace the lock-in, I don't think. To anyone who is already okay with these single-serving machines, that won't make a difference.

So, they have their choice: stop making the old machines to try to force everyone to upgrade, or have people not care about the upgrade.

P.S. Nespresso machines read a bar code on the pod, which customizes the brewing. So custom brewing isn't even a new idea in single-serving coffee makers.

Comment: What do the humans actually do on a ship? (Score 4, Insightful) 216

by steveha (#46354611) Attached to: Rolls Royce Developing Drone Cargo Ships

The article is mainly about using telepresence and computers to pilot a ship. But other than piloting, what else do humans do, and how automatable is it?

For example, how often do people have to repair ships while under way? During a storm, do people ever have to run around fixing chains that are working loose, or fix a leaking seal and set up pumps to pump out a flooded compartment?

I don't know the answers to the above questions, by the way. I don't know much about cargo ships.

Even if we still need humans for some tasks on a cargo ship, perhaps not too far in the future, we might have telepresence robots that can do the tasks.

Comment: Mobile app wisdom (Score 4, Insightful) 333

by steveha (#46338369) Attached to: How Mobile Apps Are Reinventing the Worst of the Software Industry

There's an old saying: To gain knowledge, add something every day; to gain wisdom, get rid of something every day. I'm not sure exactly how that is supposed to work (where does the wisdom come from?), but clearly you can choke your life if you accumulate too much stuff.

And that's really true for mobile apps, which can choke your phone. Two years ago my wife's phone (Android 2.x) became unusable, and I discovered that she had installed five or six dozen free apps, and many of them had installed service daemons. (Why do workout tracking apps, cookbook apps, or lightweight games need daemons?) She made an effort to purge down to just the apps she needs.

Even if you assume that the phone can handle all the apps, they still add chaff for you to sort when you are looking for the app you actually want to run.

P.S. Jeff Atwood's rant was good, but he missed one of my pet peeves: I will click on a news story link in a blog or Slashdot or something, and the linked site will pop up a banner: Hey! Don't you want to install and use our mobile app? Why no, web site I have never heard of before, I really don't want to download and install your app. I just want to read the one story, and at the moment I'm reconsidering even that.

Comment: Re:Faster is not necessarily better: Quality matte (Score 1) 101

by steveha (#46327255) Attached to: FFmpeg's VP9 Decoder Faster Than Google's

I'm not a video expert, but I did write an H.261 codec once.

I don't think it's practical in a VP9 decoder to save time by cutting quality. The Huffman decoding stuff all needs to be bit-exact. The DCT is pretty standard; you would just get a fast implementation of DCT and use that.

I suppose you could sleaze the mixing and filtering steps but the results would probably be so horrible that nobody would want to see it... part of how video decoding works is to refer back to previously-decoded images. The way "motion compensation" works is to say "this block is like this other block over here, but moved over by x pixels horizontally and y pixels vertically and with a few pixels updated". This means that if you sleaze the decode, it can have an effect on later frames.

(H.261 could only do motion compensation that referenced the previous frame. VP9 has 8 different reference buffers and any one frame can encode references to up to three of them! And they'd all better contain properly decoded images.)

So, my guess is that they just did a great job of tuning their code and the quality is good.

Also, the spec says that VP9 was deliberately designed to enable parallel decoding; maybe the FFMPEG implementation takes advantage of that. See section 3.2.1, "Frame-Level Parallelism".


Comment: Re:The strangest place? (Score 3, Informative) 322

by steveha (#46221037) Attached to: What Are the Weirdest Places You've Spotted Linux?





The MATE desktop has the smooth polish of man person-years of work and the input of usability studies, and it's IMHO the best choice for non-geek users.

Comment: Epic-scale photovoltaic (Score 5, Interesting) 253

by steveha (#46158689) Attached to: India To Build World's Largest Solar Plant

According to TFA, this will be a huge photovoltaic plant. But as I understand it, solar thermal is more efficient, and for a large centralized project like that, I would have expected solar thermal.


Does anyone know why they are going photovoltaic for this project?

Photovoltaic certainly does have some pluses: it's simple, no moving parts. But for a project of this capacity I should think they would go for the most efficient solution.

Plus a thermal solution with molton salt would provide a nontrivial amount of storage, for power after dark.

So, what am I missing? Does India have lots of factories making photovoltaic cells or something?

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