The Zeitgeist

Here we go again… yet another Patent Troll is going after someone — in this case Apple — for something that so obvious and in fact generic, you’d have to have to be from some other planet not to see that it’s not patentable.

At issue is something known as the “783″ patent, US Patent #7,321,783, which is for something called a “Mobile Entertainment and Communications.”

This patent looks impressive when you open it up from the link above, lots of claims, lots of nice functional block diagrams showing cameras, microprocessors, etc. The thing is, it describes devices that have been around for years. Camera phones, laptops, and more. The text of the patent offers absolutely nothing in terms of uniqueness, innovation or invention. Nothing. It’s all just a scam to squeeze money out of companies who have actually innovated. Here they’re going after Apple and the iPhone, Motorola and RIM (makers of the Blackberry). Why are they not going after Nokia and Ericsson? What about all the world’s laptop makers? They’ve been selling devices that do all these things much, much longer than Apple has…

It’s long past the time that we stamp out litigious patent trolls. There needs to be a in effect a Patent Death Penalty for this kind of crap. It wastes the time of the courts, it makes a mockery of the real hard work done by inventors who really do spend years working to create truly new and novel things — and it really and truly does stifle innovation by making people with ideas look over their shoulders and worry if their years of hard work will be brought down by a clever scam artist and their unethical patent attorneys who know how to game the system on their behalf.

The Penalties when people game(*) the patent system should be draconian:

1. The “inventors” should personally pay the litigation costs for all litigants affected by their bogus “patent.”
2. The “inventors” should be banned for life from filing any further patents or trademarks.
3. The Patent Attorneys assisting in the writing of the “patent(s)” and who filed the “patent(s)” should be fined $1,000,000 per false claim in the bogus “patent” and they should be disbarred in every state in which they have a law license.

This may seem like an outlandishly harsh punishment, but given the poisonous effects that these patent trolls and their (usually) bogus patents take on the ability to innovate, it barely scratches the surface in terms of undoing the damage that is done by each and every bogus patent.

It will just take 1 or 2 instances of this “Patent Death Penalty” before inventors will do their homework, and Patent Attorneys will give their clients solid advise about what is and isn’t patentable… especially if their law licenses are on the line.

*
…and by “game” I mean knowingly abusing the patent system by filing patents that are not valid and they have reason to know based on the existence of prior art or obviousness should not be granted, let alone even filed (as in the case of this patent — since every electronic mobile device such as a cell phone and laptop or PDA fits the basic description embodied in this patent).

I know how to program in a bunch of languages… some really, really old, like Algol-68, PL/1, Pascal, Modula-2 and MC680×0 Assembly Language. Some as mainstream as you can get, like C, Objective-C, Java, Perl and PHP. I’m a Unix guy so I also know several “shell” languages found in things like the C-Shell (and “tcsh”) and the Bourne/BASH shells. I even mess with these new fangled languages that all the kool kidz are using like Python and the darling of Web2.0 startups: Ruby on Rails.

For several years a groundswell has been building around Ruby (a language that feels like a semi-hybrid of Perl and Smalltalk + a smattering of various shells) and a series of libraries collectively known as Rails which as a toolset allows for some pretty rapid development of database-backed Web applications. The whole she’bang is often commonly referred to as Ruby-on-Rails — “RoR” or often just “Rails.”

Rails has been hailed as sort of a messiah of languages, if you believe its supplicants (and their VCs ), it’s all singing, all dancing and the greatest language EVAR. Lots of very popular Web2.0 apps have been written in it including: Campfire, BaseCamp and the incredibly popular Twitter.

Of course if you’ve been writing software long enough, you’ll have experienced a lot of “greatest language EVARs” … and a lot of “greatest” methodologies and “greatest” OSes and on and on. Well, there have been a whole lots of blow ups in the Rails community of late… The blog Juixe gives a good rundown on a set of explosions rocking the core of the Rails community. An even more dramatic rant has been developing from Zed Shaw who is the developer of Mongrel which is a web server and HTTP library optimized for and written in Ruby itself, and a core element of many apps developed and deployed with Rails. Zed’s rant is quite hyperbolic (and more profanity laced/infused/laden that I can describe — you have been warned) but it’s indicative of the depth of the turmoil in the ranks of the Rails elite.

What makes this so interesting is how it shows that no area of human activity, even something as traditionally insular as programming is immune from manias and bubbles. Probably the best analysis ever done on this phenomenon was written in 1841 by Charles MacKay in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (here as an ebook from the Gutenberg Project). MacKay was the first to attempt to dissect popular manias that cause people to create speculative bubbles. (Just to be clear, I’m differentiating Rails as a mania affecting programmers in a particular community apart from the general Dot Com bubble that burst in 2000, or what some think is a “Web2.0″ bubble that may [or may not] be in progress now).

From a technical perspective what I find interesting isn’t that Rails is blowing up, but rather that it took so long for common sense to start filtering back into the Rails debate. For about 2 years rails has been seen as almost a Holy Grail: Make no mistake, Ruby+Rails is quite a nice language and framework for fast prototyping and proof of concept development; it’s got a lot of things going for it, and given enough time and experience it may yet take its place as a tried and true language …however the fact that it’s being pressed into service in so many high profile situations, many of which demand ever increasing levels of scalability and performance would be a serious stressor for any relatively young and dynamic programming environment (and, if you read some of these rants and critiques, its exactly that lack of scalability that threatens to kill Rails’ viability).

Sadly, the Internet doesn’t wait for things to mature, and bubbles are very unforgiving things.

[Update: I totally missed Ms. Stacie Somers of San Diego County, another gold-digger wanna be... Macalope covers it nicely...]

It’s interesting how Apple has become everyone’s favorite whipping boy lately. The latest salvo in the “If I sue Apple maybe I’ll get rich” war has been fired by a Florida resident named “Frederick Black” who claims that Floridians have been “victimized” by Apple because their iPods can’t play WMA-protected songs.

First off, there are plenty of MP3 players on the market. Apple’s happens to play unprotected MP3 and AAC files. Microsoft’s play their own format (oddly, the Zune players themselves are incompatible with WMA and use some other DRM scheme I believe, but Mr. Black isn’t suing Microsoft I notice).

There are plenty of online music stores out there besides iTunes… Let’s see… there’s Microsoft’s, there’s Amazon’s, there’s WalMart’s, and that’s not even counting the online stores run by several of the music labels themselves. All of them sell either unprotected MP3’s which will work on anyone’s MP3 player, or WMA-protected tracks which will only work on Microsoft players (except as noted before on the Zune). Mr Black can purchase tunes from any non-protected site, or get a physical CD and copy the tracks onto his iPod that way.

Given the large number of payers and music services as well as the buy-a-CD option, I am not sure how Mr. Black and his fellow Floridians are being mistreated by Apple…

Apple actually has the most liberal policy of any of the device manufacturers and/or online stores. You can free an iTunes track from it’s AAC copy-protection by burning it to a CD and then re-importing it, you can also pay a little more for completely un-protected tracks. Just try that on the Microsoft store. Let me know how that works out for you, ok? Oh, and Apple let’s you sync your music to an unlimited number of iPods, too. And with a WMA protected device/music? Uh… not so much.

Apple also doesn’t mess around with your music collection applying DRM to your existing music. If you have any Microsoft player, including the new Zune, Microsoft applies its DRM system to your music that was NOT purchased from them or an affiliated online store. Once they do that your music collection is effectively frozen and can never be moved onto a new device. Unless, of course, you go re-import all your CDs, etc.

“Mr. Black” and all the get-rich-quick crowd need to step back and see that they’ve got it pretty good with their iPods. I’ll go out on a limb and bet that most of what Apple is doing with regard to DRM is more than likely a side-effect of their agreements with the labels and the RIAA — the folks who are suing grandmothers and teenagers and are now trying to tell consumers that they have no right to rip their own music collections and listen to them whenever they want to and/or on devices of their own choosing…

In fact, I’ll go even further… I’ll say that at the moment the only thing standing between the Rest of Us and a world where every single piece of information is DRMed, lock-boxed and pay-for-played is Apple.

Randall Munroe’s exceptionally wonderful strip about “Romance, Sarcasm, Math and Language”…

Lately, in preparation for any number of projects on my plate now and into 2008, I have been trying to brush up on my data visualization skillz’ and so I’ve been turning to a few books that seem to be the core of the interactive visualization movement that been dominating ‘web2.0′. (You can see what I’ve been reading lately in the left side bar of this blog). My latest read is Visualizing Data by Ben Fry which was just released last week by O’Reilly Media.

Fry is the co-creator of the “Processing” platform, an Open Source, Domain Specific Language (DSL) that he and Casey Reas created to showcase various computer graphics constructs including data visualization techniques. Fry’s new book is really a great read in that is very cleanly laid out and its exposition is logical and flows very nicely even if you are reading it as someone without a deep programming/IT background.

One of the biggest problems with writing a practical book on the art and craft of constructing data visualizations is always trying to find a way that your read can actually do the things you are talking about.

Until “Processing” became available just setting up a graphics platform on which one could experiment was a daunting challenge (and I say this as a programmer with almost 30 years of pretty deep experience); the books that preceded Visualizing Data set the stage by presenting their Processing framework and presented great info on how programmers can explore and learn a lot about practical computer graphics, but didn’t give a lot of guidance on the craft of how to transform “data” into “information” that can make your point through rich visual presentations.

With Processing, which will run on OS X, Linux and even Windows, you can experiment with really advanced concepts without having to spend weeks compilinge software or knowing anything about the guts of graphics drivers. As a language it’s Java-like, but is stripped down to the bare essentials needed for drawing, simple I/O and controlling drawn-objects.

When looking though his and other people’s (like Neoformix by Jeff Clark) visualizations it strikes me, that just like a good UI in general, the more elegant the final presentation of a data visualization, the more intensive the work required to create it; and most of the time that work is not about the graphics itself …it’s all about the data.

I’m about 1/3 through Visualizing Data and I am really impressed with Fry’s ability to demystify the steps needed to take a pile of data and parse it into useful information. He presents good, clear recipes for deciphering what’s important in your data and how to display it so it has both impact, and can be interacted with by your users.

I’d highly recommend Visualizing Data even if you don’t have to create the kinds of visualizations fry describes and demostrates, but even if you’re someone who might need to just betting understand what’s important in data you have to work with.

According to MacRumors, Apple has seeded Java6 for OS X 10.5 (Leopard).    So, it looks like the rumors of Java’s death under OS X were … uhm .. exaggerated.  

Seeing how my forty-<mumble>-th birthday is just 14 days away and I am pondering the ennui  of my middle-age, my thoughts drifted to someone whom I haven’t seen in, well, more than 1/2 my life now… my best friend growing up, a really sweet guy named Andrew Mahon.  He’s 2-weeks older than me; we used to be inseparable as kids  …and today is his 45th birthday.  I hope he’s doing well and having a great life;  I think we’re probably both in the IT/Internet business - (there’s a very well known Andrew Mahon who is/was at Groove Networks which may in fact be him…) … I hope that maybe one day we’ll get to re-connect… 

Happy Birthday Andrew, where ever you are!

Tags: Andrew Mahon

Quite a big deal has been made of AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson’s diarrhea of the mouth this past week where he more or less pre-announced a 3G iPhone coming in 2008 from Apple.  Cringely esitmates that this may well cost Apple over $1 billion in holiday sales, and that this was a calculated effort on the part of the AT&T CEO to send a message to Apple and Jobs about who is really in charge of their alliance.  That may well be true…

 I have a slightly different take… CEO’s who shoot from the hip like this usually do so because they think either their cojones are bigger than anyone else’s, or they think they are smarter than their firm’s contract lawyers. Or both.   I mean let’s get real for a second… we’re talking about Apple here… does anyone think for even a microsecond that there wasn’t a executive level NDA in place barring AT&T from disclosing anything about un-announced Apple products?  Then there is that “exclusive 5-year deal” — there are lots and lots of clauses in contracts as big as the one Apple cut with AT&T that gave them that “exclusive 5-year deal.”  In order to get a 5-year deal there are probably several dozen or more clauses in the contract pertaining to “misappropriation of trade secrets” and/or “unauthorized disclosure” and/or”material breach” and/or “revocation” and/or “bad faith” and/or “material damages to Apple’s business”  …any or ALL of which will allow Apple to pursue other deals with other wireless carriers and most likely force AT&T to make up the lost revenue out of its own coffers…How much you wanna bet that AT&T’s lawyers (to say nothing of the AT&T’s of directors) are taking motor-mouth Stephenson out to the woodshed this weekend for a thorough  beating..?   

Stephenson’s ego may have cost Apple some level of sales — we won’t know until after the holiday season wraps up — on the other hand,  Stephenson may have just given every other US carrier a good bit of Holiday cheer with the news that iPhones will be in their stockings this year…  I’m betting that Jobs, being one of the smarter business people on the planet (having been royally screwed over in the by people with egos as large as Bill Gates) learned that people with egos like Stephenson (a Gates-wannabe)  just don’t know when to shut the f#%k up.  

I think Jobs was counting on it — he got the big bang and all the buzz he wanted, and if AT&T did the right thing - fine; they’d have their 5-year deal - but he knew it couldn’t last: AT&T would somehow find itself in material breach of it’s 5-year deal and Apple would walk away being able to get the iPhone in the hands of every carrier… and rake in billions more from a public that’s dying to get iPhones.

3G iPhone in 2008?  Sure.  That was always a no brainer… 3G iPhones from lots of carriers?  Almost a certainty now, thanks to Randall Stephenson’s ego.   

Tags: iPhone Apple AT&T Steven P Jobs Randall Stephenson

I’ve spent a lot of my life working at financial services companies, almost all of it at so-called “money center banks” like JPMorgan and Citigroup, as well as at brokerages like BearStearns, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned about the money business is that Wall St. is about money, not sentimentality.   In other words, if the option is to make a new deal to salvage value in an underperforming deal, a deal gets made.  No one wants to lose money. (Pretty obvious, huh?)   

This is why this whole sub-prime mortgage melt-down is a crisis that never had to happen.   What this is really about is, in my now outsider opinion, is a failure to communicate.  These “sub-prime” loans refer to loans made to people with less than optimal credit scores.

If your FICO score is low, the only way a bank for mortgage company is going to lend you money is to be able to secure a higher return for you — this usually means for a fixed-rate mortgage an over all higher rate (say 1- to 1.5-points above what someone with a “perfect” FICO score would be offered) or for an Adjustable Rate Mortgage (”ARM”) a higher ballon or reset rate (the rate the mortgage floats at after the initial “low” interest rate expires). Traditional mortgages are pretty obvious, they’re straight-forward amortization loans.  And, as typical with a mortgage, you wind up paying 100-170% of the amount borrowed to the lender over the life of the loan; and why lots of people add 1 or 2 additional full-payments per year as “additional principal” payments in order or pay down the end of the loan and bring their overall payments down.

If we look at the attraction of ARM loans to lenders, CDO (Collateralized Debt Obligation) holder, and other pools of money that have been used to underwrite these sub-prime loans is that their rate of return is, on paper, astronomical.  If a $500,000 30-year mortgage at 6.5%, the total interest paid to the lender is $637,722. 

The same $500,000 at an intro rate of 1.25% and then jumping to 7.5% after the first year, then after some variable number of years at a that fixed rate will change, sometimes monthly, up or down depending upon the prevailing long-term bank rates, usually with some cap on the annual rate of change (i.e. the rate can only go up a max of x.y % per year, but can drop down as low as the lowest prevailing rate).  What this means is that the lender stand to make 400-500% returns over the life of the mortgage.

Of course, in the real world, people who could not afford large mortgages in the first place got sucked in by the intro “teaser” rate and got slammed.  However it didn’t have to be this way.  The only reason there is a  ”credit crunch” is because either the banks, or the shareholders in these loan pools got greedy to the point where they forgot the most important of all of the Wall Street adages:

Bulls Make Money  

  
Bears Make Money

Pigs. Get. Slaughtered

 Of all the large mortgage lenders in the US, only County-Wide seems to have understood what the right solution was:  Renegotiate the loans down to traditional, yet still profitable fixed-rate mortgages.   It really appears the Merrill, Citi, BearStearns (who lead of this mess with a hedge-fund collapse earlier this year) and all the others were either unable, or unwilling to understand that making a 100-170% profit on a traditional loan was better for them, and their shareholder than making 0.0000% profit on defaulted loans.

In a nutshell, these lenders had a choice to make:  Perfectly respectable profit, or a total loss of both their potential interest AND their principal.

Oh, and as an added bonus, they are causing potentially hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people to be forced out of their homes, and inflict long-term damage to an already shaky US economy. Oh, one more insult to add to the self-inflicted injury?  CEO’s like Merrill’s O’Neal, and Citigroup’s Prince walked away with severance packages in the hundreds of millions of dollars, in addition to the millions in salary and bonuses they had already collected from their firms.
If these guys were such great-deal makers, they surely could have found a way to re-cast these loans into safer fixed-rate mortgages.

In a fantasy-world where “accountability” exists these guys would have to pay back every cent they were paid in salary and performance bonuses, return their exit packages, and spend the rest of their lives in jail for the damage they’ve done.   This makes Enron look like small by comparison.  

Tags: Wall St

[update: Of course,  the author of this excellent bit of analysis is Eric BURKE ..not "Burns" {/me blushes; looks at ground, fidgets nervously} Oy-vey. Major briano on my part ... must have been channeling an old friend of mine who is, in fact, named Eric Burns. My Apologies to this Eric!! ]

Apple’s java-dev mailing list, and almost every major Java blog on the planet is simply buzzing with the news that Apple didn’t ship Java 6 with Mac OS X 10.5. People are screaming to the heavens about how Apple’s abandoned Java, and how the world is coming to an end: zuul and the key-master have hooked up, the Stay-Puft® Marshmallow Man is stalking the Upper West Side of Manhattan, dogs and cats living together^*… People are “threatening” to dump their Macs in the street, the Ubuntu Linux contingent is singing siren-songs to grief-stricken Mac-using Java developers.. it’s almost apocalyptic.Good grief! Everyone needs to CALM DOWN over this! A little perspective please… did you all know that with EVERY SINGLE Mac OS X release Apple has released a major Java update within a couple of weeks of the OS release?See for yourself, Eric Burke explains it with stunning simplicity:

Eric Burke’s Definitive OS X Java Timeline

Why not give Apple a few weeks and see what happens?

^*Yes, yes… lots of Ghostbusters references. If you have to ask, you’re too young to be reading this post, and too young to be surfing the Internet without parental supervision.

Tags: Apple, Java, Leopard, OS X