Posts

In my previous post, I complained about patent trolls – obscure companies using their patent portfolios to attack developers who have no practical way to determine whether or not they’re violating somebody’s patent when they write software. But big, innovative companies who file for patents and use those patents offensively are just as bad, if not worse. Philip Elmer-DeWitt takes a look at one of the patents that Apple has accused Android handset-maker HTC of violating. In this case, the patent is easy to understand and is associated with a popular and well-known feature of iOS. The patent in question is for the feature that enables iOS to detect data like phone numbers or addresses in text that is being displayed and turn them into links that allow the user to perform the appropriate action – dialing the number on the phone or launching the Maps application with a map of the address. ...

Craig Hockenberry warns of the number one threat to small, independent development shops – patent and copyright trolls: The scary part is that these infringements can happen with any part of our products or websites: things that you’d never imagine being a violation of someone else’s intellectual property. It feels like coding in a mine field. From our experience, it’s entirely possible that all the revenue for a product can be eaten up by legal fees. After years of pouring your heart and soul into that product, it’s devastating. It makes you question why the hell you’re in the business: when you can’t pay salaries from product sales, there’s no point in building it in the first place. ...

This week is MetaFilter’s twelfth anniversary. To commemorate the event, Matt Haughey purchased the first domain ever linked to from MeFi and posted a stories of how members of community originally found the site and what it has meant to them. Matt, recently featured on the cover of his local alternative newsweekly, was a member of the original blogging community. There are a few blogs still kicking that were born in 1999 (mine was technically born in 1998), and Matt was a member of that group. He was cleverer and more generous than most of us, though. Rather than creating a space to post his own thoughts, he built a site where anyone could post links and comment on them. ...

At work, we’re switching things to encrypt a lot of information in our databases for security reasons. The project has been time consuming and painful, and in the end, our database is far less usable from a developer’s standpoint than it was before. Soon the days when I can quickly diagnose issues on the production system with a few well-placed SELECT statements will be a thing of the past. As far as the implementation goes, I’ll tell Hibernate users who want to implement an encryption system that there’s only one way to go – UserTypes. Don’t bother with anything else. ...

Marco Arment breaks it down: In many ways, we’re better off now: publishing online is far easier, less time-consuming, and more accessible than it has ever been, which has brought content, voices, and consumers online that wouldn’t have been otherwise. But all of these proprietary networks that want to own and hold in your content are reversing much of the web’s progress in some other areas, such as the durability and quality of online identity. ...

In an interview with Chuck Klosterman on the subject of crime, baseball analyst Bill James talks about how a person becomes a murderer: It is not as if we walk through one doorway and decide that murder is acceptable. You have to walk through many doorways. The first doorway leads to a party, where people are doing drugs and having fun. The second doorway leads to more partying. It’s a long, long series of doorways, until you end up in a room where a terrible thing happens. So the question is, “How many doorways away are you?” It’s not a question about a person’s capacity to commit a murder. It’s a question of how many doorways we keep between ourselves and that situation. ...

I am a huge fan of Ruby on Rails, but I was not terribly surprised to read that as Twitter’s code base has grown, they’ve found it more amenable to move to JVM-based languages for reasons having mostly to do with encapsulation. InfoQ interviews Twitter engineer Evan Weaver about how the company’s stack is evolving as they get bigger. On one hand, they’re moving more services to the JVM for performance reasons. When they extract components from their main code base to optimize them, they generally migrate them to the JVM: ...

Last week I just happened to read a piece of media criticism by James Fallows that was published in The Atlantic in February, 1996. It didn’t surprise me to see that very, very little has changed. Here’s Fallows, writing about 1995: In January of last year there was a chance to see how well the lesson had sunk in. In the days just before and after Bill Clinton delivered his State of the Union address to the new Republican-controlled Congress, he answered questions in a wide variety of forums in order to explain his plans. ...

Last month’s National Geographic has a feature on Boston-based photographer Abelardo Morell, who sets up a room-size camera obscura and then photographs the results, which are astounding. The National Geographic article has a few examples of his work, and his official site has many more.

I don’t really know what conditions are like in the factories where Apple’s products are assembled in China. On one hand, you have Apple’s supplier responsibility page. On the other hand, you have suicides at Foxconn factories where Apple products are assembled. Today I noticed some manufacturing estimates for the iPhone 5. Apple is rumored to have placed an order for 15 million iPhone 5s from Pegatron, a manufacturer with factories in China. Apple sold 18.65 million iPhones last quarter. I can’t help but wonder how much better working conditions would be if Apple spent $5 more per iPhone on labor costs. Apple has at least $60 billion in cash and had profits of around $6 billion last quarter. Spending $5 more per iPhone would cost them less than $100 million per quarter. ...