Patent Stupidity

Monday March 10, 2008 • 2 Comments 

From this post on the excellent Culture of Ownership blog, which in this case pulls its info from Ars about how patents are now being granted on certain elements of play in video games.

The example that they give is that Sega was recently granted a patent on the idea of "driving a car around a city with an arrow pointing towards the next destination".  Excuse me?  I’m pretty sure that it’d be easy to show prior art on this one, which would invalidate the patent.

And with very broad language being used for the patent application, it’ll be pretty easy for a patent holder to claim violation on something that’s only vaguely related to the issued patent.  How stupid could it get?  Think of a patent issued for the gameplay of a first-person-shooter.  Or if EA were issued patents on the gameplay of the NHL or NFL franchises.   From that point on, it’d be impossible for anyone to come out with a competing, potentially better game.

Uh, wait.  Don’t give the NFL any ideas.

I’m not even a gamer anymore, and I think this is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard.  And if you think that it’ll only happen once, I wouldn’t be surprised if sometime in the near future you hear of a patent being issued to a new gaming company for something that’s been around in gaming for five or ten years.  Count on it.

And then the same type of patent will be applied to a method of doing something in another type of application.  Imagine, for example if Adobe were granted a patent for the method of creating a PDF by printing it to a specialized print driver.  Where would that leave any of the many third party PDF generating applications, which pretty much all do it the same way?  S.O.L., that’s where.

Hopefully this isn’t an idea that’s going to get a lot bigger. 



Do These Lists Even Mean Anything?

Sunday March 9, 2008 • 1 Comment 

The UK’s Guardian has released it’s list of the 50 Most Powerful Blogs, and while I haven’t read enough of the top 50 to take exception with some of their choices, what’s more refreshing is that it doesn’t assume that all bloggers are white, American, male geeks.   In fact, in the whole list, there’s really only about three that I would really consider ‘tech’ blogs - Boing Boing (#2), TechCrunch (#3), and Engadget (#16).  The rest seem to be a balance of political, celebrity and personal blogs, with the odd sports blog thrown in.

I’m a little surprised that Digg wasn’t included, but it’s possible that it doesn’t meet the Guardian’s criteria to be defined as a blog.  What I find to be an even bigger surprise is that a number of the political blogs focus specifically on the upcoming U.S. election - what are they going to be doing after the election in November?  Start planning for 2012?

Anyway, after perusing this list, I thought I’d detail a few that I’d probably pick up.  I’m already subscribed to Boing Boing and Engadget, and wouldn’t go near TechCrunch, so what you’ll get here are non-geek blogs:

  • Kottke.org - an old time blog that goes back to the late nineties.  It’s one that I’ve always heard of, but never took the time to follow.
  • icanhascheezburger.com - As wildly popular as the lolcats have been, I never really checked into it to see what the appeal was.  I’ve since changed my mind, because there’s some pretty funny stuff on there. 
  • CopyBlogger - okay, maybe this qualifies as more of a geek blog, but it doesn’t really cover the tech world so much as how to write about it, or anything else for that matter.  A blog about writing online.  Subscribed.  Because I can use the help ;)

Oh, and the title of this post?  In the long run, I think the best reason for having lists such as these is to help introduce you to sites that you might not have heard of otherwise.  So, yeah, they do serve a purpose.



Jeff Healey 1966 - 2008

Monday March 3, 2008 • 1 Comment 

Hearing that Jeff Healey had died of cancer yesterday on this morning’s news caught me completely off guard. First of all, I didn’t realize that he was only 41. He seemed a whole lot older than that.

But when I thought about it, the Jeff Healey Band was the first concert that my wife and I ever went to, back when we started dating in the 80’s. He was opening for Tom Cochrane and Rod Stewart at BC Place. I was there to see the JHB, and my wife was there to see Rod Stewart, so it worked out for both of us.

If you’ve never seen Jeff Healey play the guitar, it’s almost in the manner that you’d play a steel guitar. He played sitting down, with the instrument on his lap, and his fingers didn’t wrap around the neck, but he played with his fingers on top. It’s very unique to watch, especially when he’d jump up from the chair during a solo and found his way back to the chair despite being blind.

In the last few years he moved away from the world of rock, something that he was never really comfortable with, and moved back into his first love, jazz. Unfortunately I only got the one chance to see him live, and the last Jeff Healey CD I bought was 1992’s Feel This. But the type of music that he played back in the late eighties on the See the Light album showed a completely different type of music that I’d never been exposed to before, and for that I’m grateful.

I’ll keep listening to the older stuff and start picking up the newer music that Jeff Healey put out, and just remember what that music meant to me, and how it changed the type of music I listen to.

Thanks, Jeff. Rest in Peace.