Apple-Samsung Jury May Have Leaned on Engineer, Patent Holder

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Jurors who zipped through more than 600 questions in three days to arrive at their verdict in the intellectual-property battle between Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) had as their leader an engineer with a patent to his name.

via Apple-Samsung Jury May Have Leaned on Engineer, Patent Holder – Bloomberg.

A nice summation of lots of links from all around the blogoshere can be found on Groklaw here.  Here’s a small tidbit from that summation:

Professor Michael Risch points out an even worse inconsistency:

How did the Galaxy Tab escape design patent infringement? This was the only device to be preliminarily enjoined (on appeal no less), and yet it was the one of the few devices to be spared the sledgehammer. And, by the way, it looks an awful lot like an iPad. Yet the Epic 4G, a phone I own (uh oh, Apple’s coming after me) — which has a slide out keyboard, a curved top and bottom, 4 buttons on the bottom, the word Samsung printed across the top, buttons in different places (and I know this because I look in all the wrong places on my wife’s iTouch), a differently shaped speaker, a differently placed camera, etc. — that device infringes the iPhone design patents….

Relatedly, the ability to get a design patent on a user interface implies that design patent law is broken. This, to me, is the Supreme Court issue in this case. We can dicker about the “facts” of point 2, but whether you can stop all people from having square icons in rows of 4 with a dock is something that I thought we settled in Lotus v. Borland 15 years ago. I commend Apple for finding a way around basic UI law, but this type of ruling cannot stand.

A Quantum Computer Finds Factors

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A quantum computer, on the other hand, promises to factor a number of any size in one operation and, if one can be built, the future of the PKI looks bleak and we would have to find encryption methods that were safe against a quantum attack.

via A Quantum Computer Finds Factors.

Of course, factoring 15 isn’t something that is going to threaten the PKI and cryptography in general, but factoring  larger numbers is just a matter of increasing the number of qubits and this approach does seem to be a scalable solid state approach.

Can Android Revolutionize Spacecraft Design?

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At first glance, the idea may sound a bit silly. Why would NASA trust the operation of a satellite to a Nexus One? Surely NASA could design their own platform to power these spacecraft?

They could, but the question is, why should they? The PhoneSat program is part of the larger Small Spacecraft Technology Program, which aims to leverage the incredible advances made in consumer technology to create cheaper spacecraft. Ames engineer Chris Boshuizen explains that NASA should embrace the latest consumer technology, rather than constantly reinventing the wheel

via Can Android Revolutionize Spacecraft Design?.

OSU’s New Microbial Fuel Cell Can Generate 10-50 Times More Power From Wastewater

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A team of engineers from Oregon State University has developed a breakthrough microbial fuel cell that is capable of generating 10 to 50 times more electricity from waste than other MFCs. The team hopes that their innovation will enable waste treatment plants to not only power themselves, but also sell excess electricity back to the grid.

via OSU’s New Microbial Fuel Cell Can Generate 10-50 Times More Power From Wastewater | Inhabitat – Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building.

Building Web Services the REST Way

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Representational State Transfer is intended to evoke an image of how a well-designed Web application behaves: a network of web pages (a virtual state-machine), where the user progresses through an application by selecting links (state transitions), resulting in the next page (representing the next state of the application) being transferred to the user and rendered for their use

via.  Building Web Services the REST Way

Google Compute Engine rocks the cloud

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Google took its sweet time entering this corner of the cloud. While Amazon, Rackspace, and others started off with pay-as-you-go Linux boxes and other “infrastructure” services, Google began with the Google App Engine, a nice stack of Python that held your hand and did much of the work for you. Now Google is heading in the more general direction and renting raw machines too. The standard distro is Ubuntu 12.04, but CentOS instances are also available. And you can store away your own custom image once you configure it.

via Review: Google Compute Engine rocks the cloud | Cloud Computing – InfoWorld.

Is 5.3 cents per GCEU a good deal? It depends upon what you want to do with your machine. Rackspace prices its machines by the amount of RAM you get. It has stopped selling the anemic 256MB RAM VMs, but rents its 512MB boxes at only 2.2 cents per hour or $16.06 per month. If you want a machine with 4GB from Rackspace, it will cost you 24 cents each hour, about $175 per month.

And one more tidbit that needs emphasizing however this entire article is loaded with the ins and outs of renting servers in the cloud.

Keep in mind that the file system that comes with your cloud computer — be it on Amazon, Rackspace, or Google — is not backed up in any way unless you code some backup routines yourself. You can run MySQL on your cloud box, but the database won’t survive the failure of your machine, so you better find a way to keep a copy somewhere else too.

Very interesting.  Here is more about pricing.

Servers Ultimate

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Run a DLNA, DNS, DDNS, Email, FTP, Proxy, SMS, Time, Web and/or WebDAV server!

Run your own free DLNA, DNS, Dynamic DNS, Email, FTP(S), Proxy, SMS Gateway, Time, HTTP(S) and/or (secure) WebDAV server (yes, 10 different servers)! From one all-including app: Servers Ultimate. You can even run multiple instances of the same server type at the same time for most! We can’t list all the features because of the limited amount of text, so below you can find a summary of most of the features.

via Servers Ultimate – Android Apps on Google Play.

AT&T, have you no shame?

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The distinctions being drawn seem bizarre and arbitrary to many customers who argue that data is data—I paid for it and should control what I use it on, not AT&T. It’s even stranger because AT&T isn’t targeting “video chat” apps with its restriction; it is only targeting FaceTime.What is going on here?

via AT&T, have you no shame? | Ars Technica.

So what’s the solution? Competition plays a key role. While we would prefer a slightly stronger standard for wireless net neutrality, customers generally do have more choice when it comes to wireless carriers than they do in the wired world. Switching isn’t easy, especially in the US world of contract and early termination fees, so the mere existence of competition doesn’t always work magic, but those who want to use FaceTime do at least have the choice of moving to a company like Sprint.

Low-Power Slab Server Pairs ARM with Linux

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While Baserock Linux was first developed around the X86-64 platform, its developers planned the leap to the ARM platform. Each Slab CPU node consists of a Marvell quad-core 1.33-GHz Armada XP ARM chip, 2 GB of ECC RAM, a Cogent Computer Systems CSB1726 SoM, and a 30 GB solid-state drive. The nodes are connected to the high-speed network fabric, which includes two links per compute node driving 5 Gbits/s of bonded bandwidth to each CPU, with wire-speed switching and routing at up to 119 million packets per second.

via Low-Power Slab Server Pairs ARM with Linux.