2012 March 08 archive at Robert Pogson

Archive for March 8th, 2012

Change Happens at Google Chrome Browser

Published by Robert Pogson March 8th, 2012 in technology. 0 Comments

“404. That’s an error.

The requested URL
/linux/direct/google-chrome-beta_current_amd64.deb was not found on this server. That’s all we know.“

Not sure what that means, but I cannot upgrade my beta-version of Google’s Chrome Browser (18…)… The beta is gone for 386 as well. The beta download arrives for that other OS… and rpmish distros. I guess it’s about Debian. It may be about a recent “pwnium” contest for vulnerabilities.

There’s no problem downloading google-chrome-stable-current_amd64.deb (17…). A problem I was having with the beta-version with inserting links in my blog has now vanished, which is good.

UPDATE Today, 2012-3-9, the 64bit beta .deb is back…

- Robert Pogson

Hype About iPads

Published by Robert Pogson March 8th, 2012 in technology. 9 Comments

In the frenzy to post about iPad, I thought it would be useful to report that on Amazon.com’s most popular list, the top 3 are

Kindle Fire,
ASUS Transformer, and
Samsung Galaxy Tab.

You have to get to fourth spot and a price cut to see iPad2. Chuckle. There are reasons for that. The world does not owe Apple a living. Apple has to compete on price/performance to maintain prominence in IT. Apple has the price but not the price/performance that people seek. In 2011, iPad did very well, but in Q4 2011, dropped to around 50% share from the good old days of 2010 when they were around 80% of the units shipped in the tablet market.

- Robert Pogson

Oracle’s Case Against Google Sinks Lower

Published by Robert Pogson March 8th, 2012 in technology. 0 Comments

Some notes on the hearing yesterday in the case:
“Judge: Where in the Cockburn report is the defense of the Patval study?

Oracle: It’s not in the report. It’s in the depositions.

Judge: But by Rule 26, all the relevant information has to be in the report itself [Something about the depositions not being court-admissable evidence].

Oracle: It would be an insurmountable obstacle to comprehensively defend the methodology in the report itself.

Judge: It is critical that the statistics of the patent value calculation be correct. “You’re not convincing me”. [That's a direct quote.]“

Ouch! Judge Alsup seems to be on his game. Neither the lawyers nor the judge could get the maths right on the potential damages in the case. Rather than $billions, they seem to be headed towards a few tens of millions, provided no more patents are thrown out and Google is found to violate copyright. Google is arguing that Java APIs are not copyright protectable and Oracle is holding that they are. Damages, if any could be very small in any case compared to the worth of the two companies.

Oracle started by trumpeting $6billion in damages. How the mighty art fallen. The USPTO has thrown out most of their patent claims and the copyright situation seems very weak to me. Android includes no Java APIs at all, but Dalvik. The SDK may include Java APIs but it is distributed to rather a small number of programmers, not hundreds of millions of consumers.

- Robert Pogson