The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is confirming Amazon.com’s controversial 1-Click patent following a re-examination that lasted more than four years.

link: Amazon.com’s 1-Click patent confirmed following re-exam

In 2003, after I unveiled a prototype Linux desktop called Project Looking Glass*, Steve called my office to let me know the graphical effects were “stepping all over Apple’s IP.” (IP = Intellectual Property = patents, trademarks and copyrights.) If we moved forward to commercialize it, “I’ll just sue you.”

What’s more interesting is that it appears the Apple is just the only one that is honest about it. Apple says, we will sue you, we will win, so stop. Maybe it is arrogant and uncalled for, but they shoot straight — old west style. Microsoft on the other hand seems to be more into the art of the shakedown.

Bill skipped the small talk, and went straight to the point, “Microsoft owns the office productivity market, and our patents read all over OpenOffice.” OpenOffice is a free office productivity suite found on tens of millions of desktops worldwide. It’s a tremendous brand ambassador for its owner – it also limits the appeal of Microsoft Office to businesses and those…

The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program, a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium, reached Montreal on Saturday to complete a top-secret U.S. operation.

link: CBC News – World – Uranium shipped to Montreal from Iraq in top secret mission

Looks like QT is trying to answer the uncertainty that JavaFX has created for Swing programmers. Specifically, JavaFX is out there and has been named the air apparent to swing. However, JavaFX does not have a full component suite yet (table…cmon guys). So, with people knowing they will need to switch, but having some uncertainty about that switch, folks are a little lost. QT, looks like they are trying to position themselves as a good traditional gui toolkit that can be a refuge for swing programmers that don’t want to move to JavaFX.

Fun and Games

On closer inspection, our measurements told us that pages were primarily slow because of network and render time. Our generation time definitely had (and still has) significant room to improve but it wouldn’t provide the same bang for the buck. So we devoted most of our engineering effort towards two goals: drastically cutting down the bytes of cookies, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript required by a Facebook page while also developing new frameworks and methodologies that would allow the browser to show content to the user as quickly as possible.

link: Facebook | Making Facebook 2x Faster

Some quick, back of napkin calculations suggest that they have reduced their overall bandwidth used for page transfer by 37%. If this is the case, using their published 200 million logins per day and 60 million status updates, they have reduced their bandwidth cost by over a half a million dollars. In other words, they actually get a return on that investment in year 1. Easy to justify that project. It makes you wonder why they waited so long.

Here are my back of napkin calcs:

I have been a believer to a certain degree. Though I was never certain enough to back efforts that would have significant impacts on the global economy. Last year, some material, from Lord Monckton, made me start questioning whether the political influence on the debate had tilted it from real science to political posturing. Today, more evidence was released of the latter. Granted, the source of the article may be considered biased. However, the report that it quotes is from the Chief Meteorologist at the Weather Channel. Frankly, there are only a few guys with better credentials.

The global warming scandal keeps getting worse. Revelations over the few weeks show that many important assertions in the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were based on misquotes and false claims from environmental groups, not on published academic research as it was originally presented. This is on…

It’s been a while since I looked at it in any depth. However, this time I took the time to look at the trends. Using a simple linear interpolation, it looks as if Java will reach VB’s current level of irrelevance in about 11 years.

Now, VB is not irrelevant, it is still widely used for a large number of purposes. However, it is widely considered to be a dated or legacy language. If you accept that, and oracle does not radically alter the trend, Java will be in the same place in about 2020.

What is more interesting, is that there is not a clear heir apparent. There are several dynamic languages (including php — is that a language or a toolkit?), that have a positive slope. However, none seem to be approaching a breakout that would offset the losses that Java, C, and C++ are having. (I wonder if that represents a diversification among languages or a flaw in the survey.) Anyway, I think it is interesting to look at the trends from a career perspective. It appears that we are in store for a language trend change in…