Celebrity Patents!

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This comes by way of Engadget. In short, an interesting story about a bunch of patents filed by celebrities. Some of them are interesting, but not that surprising (e.g. Eddie Van Halen creating a support for a guitar). Others, though, leave me scratching my head. Like these:

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

Hmmm…. interesting…. oops, might have just violated a patent…

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Well, not quite. Being a bit tongue in cheek. But continuing on a theme of interesting patents, a story in Boing Boing referring to Flickr filing a patent for “interestingness” and how some feel they shouldn’t be able to:

I read the Flickr patent this morning and FWIW I don’t think Flickr should be able to get a broad patent on “interestingness”. There’s a very large number of papers in the image processing and collaborative filtering areas that all define various notions of relevance, interestingness, salience, or novelty. A specific innovative technique might be patentable, but not the general idea of computing how interesting an image or media object is to a person or set of people.

Of course, to flickr’s credit, I’m not sure whether flickr’s patent is so broad to be too broad. It does, after all, go through and enumerate certain steps in its method that don’t necesarily need to be steps in other methods of determining “interestingness”, so I don’t think it really goes so far as to patent the general idea of computing or figuring out how interesting a media object is. If it were,  well, you might be in violation right now. That is, if you find this entry interesting. Or at least more or less interesting that some other entry…

Vista – A Love Hate Thing

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A somewhat older story in The Enquirer (yes, I’m still catching up) about how, for the author, Microsoft Vista is not an option. The jist: Vista kneecaps its users with DRM, activation, etc. etc. etc.:

What it all comes down to is Microsoft is turning the screw on me too hard. I can’t legitimately use its software without becoming a criminal or spending tens of thousands of dollars. If it gives me a truckload of free copies, I will still be spending the majority of my time on the phone with people in Bangalore typing in licence keys to stay legal.

There’s also another, much longer article (more like a study) on how the content protection in Vista is a bad thing, to wit:

Executive Summary

Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called “premium content”, typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it’s not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server). This document analyses the cost involved in Vista’s content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry.

Executive Executive Summary

The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history [Note A].

The first article, from The Inq, well, yes, perhaps true, but it wouldn’t bother me all that much nor would I imagine most other users. Meh. The second, however, is a bit more disturbing. After reading through the headaches it introduces, it really makes me question whether PCs will ever make it to the living room in any meaningful way. On the other hand, it might not necessarily be Vista this kills altogether, but the market for the type of content its trying to protect with these measures.

I’ve actually tried the Vista RTM and do quite like it, though haven’t yet experienced the nightmares that both the above folks describe. So I got a feeling that notwithstanding the above, many others will feel the same, will buy it, and will live with the content limitations. And it won’t be the huge disaster that the two folks above foresee it being. Though of course, it would be interesting to see what happens if they are right…

Microsoft v. Apple, Round ??

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Another recent story/editoril in The Inquirer egging on Apple to divorce the way cool OSX and license it separately from the somewhat maybe less cool hardware (at least in the eyes of the Inq). And who else to better promote OSX than Dell. Anyway, a snippet:

Apple could position the move as “Dell is so cool, we had to do a deal with them.” Underlying that is “Let’s face facts, with the exception of a pretty case, and a couple of hardware features, we’re an Intel box all the same.” (I know I’m going to get foaming rabid Mac owners that say the bits under the hood of their machines are especially selected by Zen Master Craftsmen and assembled by virgins in a far off land with blessed incense burning on a 24×7 basis, but it just ain’t so).

What has Apple got to lose? Zero.

I certainly would be interested in seeing Apple do this. On the other hand, I don’t know if it would come at “zero” cost. As their user base increases, so do the variations of hardware that people will want to use, and the drivers, and the third party software and, before you know it, you’re starting to make compromises here and there to let everything work. Then as more users come on board it starts becoming more of a target for hackers, who then start working feverishly to craft attacks, trojans and viruses, then leading your users to suggest that your platform is inherently security-deficient, requiring further investment in updates, patches, etc. Then of course you get on MS’ radar, who also produces a rather important office productivity app for OSX and may not take too kindly to Apple trying once again to eat its lunch.

I don’t know. I just don’t see it happening. OSX is nice and all, but to my simple mind, there is, and has been, a viable alternative to Microsoft operating systems for quite some time – replete with easy installation, cool features, nice interfaces, good security, and even relatively broad hardware compability – its called Linux and its free. And unlike the old Slackware days, Ubuntu (along with several other variations), is pretty easy to install and configure. But even with all this, where’s Linux on the desktop? Yes, its certainly being used, but has it made more than a few percentage points dent on MS market share? No. Why? Inertia. Windows has the biggest installed base, therefore the biggest possible customer base, so developer develop for Windows and put less effort into others (with of course some exceptions). Therefore more apps for Windows. And users don’t pick an OS because they like it – they pick it because of the apps they can run on it. So they continue to buy Windows. Not because its that much better than Linux, or OSX, but because they have MS Office, Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop, Premiere, SAS, Mathematica, Cubase, AutoCAD, etc. etc. etc. all at their disposal. Sure, there are some nice apps for Linux and of course OSX – but certainly nowhere near the depth or breadth of Windows apps.

Given this, why the heck would Apple bother trying where Linux (which has a nicer price point) hasn’t (yet) succeeded? I guess we’ll see. It would be neat to see how far they get. But I ain’t holding my breath.

Pretexting, Canadian Style

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From one of my very smart colleagues at the firm – a recent Canadian case involving “pretexting” like activity a la HP.

The short story: A company hires an investigator to see what some former employees are up to, since they’ve started a competing business. Based on what they find out, they sue the employees. In discovery (in rough terms, the process through which each party gets to look at the information that the other side has supporting their case), the employees find out that the investigator has obtained their phone records and also has recorded them on video at their business premises, in both cases without their consent and without a court order.

Sound somewhat familiar?

So the employees countersue the company and the investigator. It turns our that the company wasn’t aware of the methods used by the investigator and so is left off the hook, but the action against the investigators is given the green light.

Whether or not the claim of the employees will succeed remains to be seen. In the meantime, folks thinking of using investigators, for whatever purpose, would be wise to give serious consideration to the nature of information that they want to collect.

Rapleaf

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Interesting article on Techcrunch about a company called Rapleaf. The nub:

Rapleaf will allow anyone to leave feedback for anyone they’ve transacted with. Others can use this feedback to help them determine if they are doing business with someone who’d likely to engage in fraud. Rapleaf is eBay feedback for the rest of the web, and the offline world.

Very interesting idea. Of course, there have been various solutions that people have tried to address the curse (and perhaps sometimes blessing) that, on the internet, no one knows if you’re a dog. I always thought encryption and the whole public key infrastructure thing would go somewhere, you know, with PGP and all being used, then of course the various bodies around the world setting up certification authorities, and then related legislation, etc. etc. That could have solved a lot of problems, including, amongst others, spam. And of course fraud. Surprisingly enough it never got off the ground all that well and in its stead we find reputational markers such as this.

Interesting how the internet has enabled the scaling of these sorts of reputational mechanisms. Where it was once a couple of neighbours chatting about the best butcher, its now millions of folks spread across dozens of countries having their opinions on thousands (or more) vendors. Talk about network effects.

Killer E-mails

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Just one more before my “lunch” ends…. still trying to catch up. Anyway, a recent article highlights a real low point in spam. This is even worse than the Nigerian scams (which actually resulted in several real-word deaths). Anyway, the jist of it is as follows:

The emails claim that the recipient has been stalked by a hired assassin for 10 days, but that the hitman is prepared to drop the contract if he is paid a total of $80,000. Upon receiving an initial advance payment of $20,000 the hitman claims that he will produce taped evidence of the contract to kill the reader of the email.

Frightening. Even it is spam. Of course, this is nothing more than old-fashioned extortion, gone high tech. That being said, for me, it seems to have crossed a line that most cyber-criminals had not yet crossed until know – actually threatening physical harm to get paid.


Of Search Engines and Competition (Part II)

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Read a very interesting article on the weekend on how Yahoo! blew it. No, they’re not really a search engine, or rather weren’t really a search engine, but thought I’d mention it given my previous musings on search engines. The article, I think, demonstrates pretty clearly how quickly things can change in the online world, and how the balance of economic power can very quickly change so that the one puny underdog can become the king of the junkyard, so to speak. Not that Yahoo! is exactly the picture of abject failure. But, relative to Google, they certainly have some catching up to do. And if Google isn’t very, very, very careful, they may very well be in the same position a few years from now – struggling to catch up with the brash young upstart that has come up with the Next Big Thing…

The Exciting World of Licensing Metrics

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OK, off the policy/opinion track for a moment, and on to more technical stuff. Most of you will probably consider this topic rather dry, but it is something that lots of folks in the tech industry do think about (and should think about).

Just to quickly summarize, the article speaks briefly to the various types of metrics that can be used to price software, and the complexities that have arisen given things such as multi-CPU computers, multi-core CPUs, virtualization technology and clustering technology. Anyway, the article is a bit of a sales piece as it concludes that the answer to all the complexity is, of course, how the author’s company is doing it:

Subscription pricing models have become increasingly popular in the past few years. Open source software companies typically charge for support on an annual basis, rather than for one-time software licenses. But those contracts are still often based on the number of processors involved, leaving CIOs in the same bind. For our part, we at Sun want to simplify pricing and planning even more: Subscriptions for software are still actually subscriptions for support, as Sun’s software is now free and open-source. But pricing is based on the number of employees a company has. To simplify how to determine what that number is, we base it on what the company reports annually to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Nothing super new but worth a bit of a read, particularly if you’re a software developer thinking about pricing models.

My $0.02: This works fine for established, cashflow positive businesses, but of course smaller shops very often look at big upfront initial license payments as a type of financing – moving to a subscription model does of course impact this. Yes, I know, sort of stating the obvious. Then again, that does bring up the interesting question of capitalizing subscription/maintenance payments… But that’s a topic for another day…
The Software Licensing Debate, Round 2 – Weigh In – weighin – CIO