The court case between Apple and Samsung just got more interesting. Apple are always touting their innovation and Samsung has just pointed out in court that the iPhone would not exist had it not been for Samsung Technology. I have covered the non Apple innovations that the iPhone takes for granted before, but it’s nice to see others have noticed too.

I badly want to see Apple lose this case big time, and I want to see Microsoft’s license agreement with Samsung come to light in this case too. I also want to see Microsoft lose their case against Motorola. I want all of this for the same reasons. Apple and Microsoft want to use Patents to hold back competition so people have to accept less impressive technology for more money just so these two companies can profit more. Samsung was developing phone technology before either of the others and shouldn’t have to pay now just because they didn’t think it made any sense to patent crazy and simplistic ideas and designs. (Samsung could have patented music playing phones had they wanted too.) My message to Microsoft and Apple is a simple one, compete on your products merits and stop gaming the court system to get ahead.

I’ve recently been reading the Oracle verses Google court case at Groklaw and I must say I am surprised at one thing. Apache Harmony (an Open Source Java SE.) has been around for a very long time, Sun has known for many years exactly what was in Harmony and who put it there and why (by their own admission) and Apache has been hassling Sun to certify Harmony as Java compliant without having to pay for a TCL. (Apache give it away for free so non free terms are difficult for them). Because Apache were not able to get a free TCL to certify Harmony was fully Java compatible, they never stipulated that it was. That doesn’t mean it’s illegal because the Java language is free, it just means that without the certification they couldn’t claim it was Java compatible, or use trademarks owned by Sun.

Not only did Sun never go after Apache Harmony (which contains ALL the API’s that Oracle is suing Google for), the then CEO of Sun (Jonathan Schwartz) is actually on record as saying Harmony was fine to be released as it was. Since Sun also knew that Harmony was under an Apache license (which is the same license that Google used for that part of Android), How can this not be viewed as anything but an implied license?

It goes further than that even. The same CEO is on record as saying he approved of Android and they welcomed the Java language being brought to a lot more people. In fact he will be testifying at trial that Android had his full approval a the time.

If the boss of the company who actually made Java (as opposed to Oracle who just bought Sun after all was already said and done) said on more than one occasion that Harmony was fine and legal as is, and that Android is welcome and they’d like to help however they can, again, how can this not be seen as an implied license?

Sun tried to make a popular mobile OS and failed, Oracle looked at it themselves and realized that they didn’t know enough to pull it off. Someone at that point appears to have decided “stuff it, this is too hard, lets just take a slice of Google’s pie.”

Simple facts (as I understand them),
Sun had no issue with Apache harmony with all the API’s in question under an Apache license and said so publicly and on the record.
Google uses those same Apache harmony API’s in Android under the same Apache license.
Sun (prior to Oracle buying them) also publicly endorsed Android on more then one occasion.
Oracle came and bought Sun after all of this happened and started looking for ways to monetize their investment. (In fact I believe ex Sun employees have said that Oracle were already looking for dirt on Google prior to the Sun sale even completing.)
Oracle are now claiming that Harmony is infringing and that Google is too as a result.

Is it even legal for a company that buys another company to retrospectively contradict their previous CEO’s public announcements when they don’t agree with them? I’d love to hear some explanation of how that is possible.

While Franki and I seem to be having a contest to see who can post least frequent on here, my daughters are trying to go in the other direction. They want to win a trip to Greece given away by a tour agency — all they need are votes.

You can vote for them here: http://getonthecontikibus.com/the-short-bus-4. It could be their trip of their lifetime — so far — if enough of you can help them. So what do you say? Takes two seconds to vote.

In a post over at BlogWranglers (my site that advertises my expertise in moving blogs to wordpress from hubspot and other cms/blogging platforms) I note that Facebook took a step backwards — just like Thunderbird — in my opinion.

I’ve never really liked Facebook all that much anyway — great to find someone, but horrible to carry on any meaningful conversation.

As explained in my post over there, you no longer had “Send Message” available except apparently when your friends are off-line. I use it all the time even when someone is available for chat because it is threaded, has some “history” where you can look back at what was said and is less interruptive in many cases than having a chat might be — you just want to send a message and get a response, not engage in dialog.

The recent fuss about Google sniffing open WiFi networks while driving around taking images for street view is really not as big a deal as fear mongering politicians like Stephen Conroy would have you believe. Here are some points worth considering.

1. Open wireless networks are exactly that.. they are open to anyone that wants to connect to them. In Australia at least, if you don’t secure your wireless network, it’s not illegal for others to connect to it and you only have yourself to blame.
2. Connecting to a wireless network is not instant, it takes about 3 to 5 seconds to connect, be assigned an IP address and a route and start sniffing. Now picture your wireless router with a circle of at most 80 meters around it. Now picture a car driving past at 40km an hour….. by the time they were fully connected and able to catch packets, they’d be leaving range of your wireless network anyway so the amount of data that would be captured would be fairly tiny (like maybe 2 to 5kb). What that means, is that it wouldn’t even be a full email or file or anything remotely useful, and it wouldn’t be tied to you personally anyway. Google scientists are not reading your emails or browsing though your hard disks so relax people.
3. From what I’ve read, Google collected only roughly 600 gig from the entire world, most of that would be SSID names and assigned IP’s, so as I said in point 2, the amount of data we are talking about here, per wireless network is truly tiny.
As a test. I drove down the street past a couple of open wireless networks at 30kph and each time by the time my phone connected, I was already leaving wireless range.

As far as I am concerned, if you have not secured your wireless yourself, or paid someone to, then you shouldn’t have any expectation of wireless privacy at all. If you feel violated, you have only yourself to blame as people who secured their network have nothing to worry about with this.

After my recent post about the X10 taking too long, it finally came out and I bought one almost instantly.

It hasn’t been out for a fortnight yet and it’s already downloaded a firmware update that fixes the few issues I had with the phone. To be honest I got excited and thought I was getting 2.1 Android while it was updating. Was quite disappointing to discover I was still running 1.6 at the end. Still, it is good news that they are following up with usability updates.

Fantastic phone I have to say. If you are looking for an Android phone, they don’t come better than this yet. Once I know all of its little issues I’ll add more, but I’ve been stoked with it so far.

Update: Interestingly, the GPS has been really slow to start up since the update, i do not know if it is related or not.

Recently, Sony released the latest update for the PS3’s firmware. It’s been a while so I was excited to see what new features we’d have that would improve its useability. In particular I was hoping for an improved web browsing experiance because currently the system is quite cumbersome to use.

What did I get new from this update? In short, nothing that I can find. It’s all about Sony this one. They made me download a couple of hundred MB of update simply so they could remove the option to install Linux from my PS3. Since that was a point of advertising when I bought it, I feel that they have breached their contract of sale with me by not providing what they advertised.

Other than removing that option, there was nothing I could see about 3d related updates or UI improvements anywhere else. If you are going to remove something from users that you previously sold to them Sony, you should at least make an effort to give something back. Improved useability in browsing using the bluetooth remote would be nice. Or being able to navigate the menu’s using a bluetooth keyboards arrow keys would be likewise helpful. How about some tie in between the new Xperia X10 and the PS3? There are so many things that you could have done to soften this blow that I am left wondering if you people will ever learn that the reason for your lost sales in TV’s and other lines is because you just don’t seem to listen to or think about the user experiance and impressions of your own customers. The PS3 is definately superior in value to the Xbox 360, the included Blueray drive, included wireless, superior CPU power, wireless 6 axis motion controller and bigger hard disks make it fantastic value for the price they now are. The reason you are not in front is simply bad PR and marketing of which this is just another example.

Releasing an update that is basically a downgrade in functionality is bad PR Sony. I don’t think you can’t afford more bad PR at this point.

Update: I just notice that the playstation site says this about the update:

This system software update includes all features contained in previous versions.

This is obviously not correct as they have removed the default system and other OS options. It’s a small thing but I’m feeling rather petty about it right now.