Practical Technology

for practical people.

September 30, 2011
by sjvn01
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World’s most profitable Android company? Microsoft!?

Measuring a profit can be a complicated thing my accounting friends tell me. For example, Google, which controls Android, is certainly making money from it, but how much? But, what if you’re making $444 million from Android and you actually didn’t have to spend any money on research and development or programming? You’d be doing great wouldn’t you? Well, welcome to Microsoft’s business plan for Android.

According to a Goldman Sachs‘ tech analyst note, as reported by Business Insider, that’s exactly how Microsoft is cashing in on Android. Goldman Sachs estimates that Microsoft will pick up $444-million in revenue from its Android patent deals for fiscal year 2012. For those of you playing at home, that’s $3-$6 per Android device. Yes, that may well be more than Microsoft makes from its own troubled mobile operating systems.

That’s nice work if you can get it. We still don’t know exactly how much Microsoft is getting from its cross-licensing patent deals with Samsung and other Android manufacturers. We don’t even know what patents Microsoft is being paid for.

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September 29, 2011
by sjvn01
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Amazon’s Kindle Fire Silk browser has serious security concerns

OK, here’s the good stuff about the new Silk Web browser, which Amazon will be embedding in its new Amazon Kindle Fire tablets: From all reports it makes Web-browsing amazing fast on relatively low-end hardware. The bad news? It does it by watching all, and I mean all, of your Web activity through Amazon’s cloud-based Amazon Web Services.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Amazon states that, “All of the browser subsystems are present on your Kindle Fire as well as on the AWS cloud computing platform. Each time you load a web page, Silk makes a dynamic decision about which of these subsystems will run locally and which will execute remotely. In short, Amazon Silk extends the boundaries of the browser, coupling the capabilities and interactivity of your local device with the massive computing power, memory, and network connectivity of our cloud.”

And to think I was worried because Facebook was tracking you on the Web whenever you were on a site with a Facebook like button on it! That, while sneaky and underhanded, was nothing. When you’ll be using your Kindle Fire’s Silk Web browser everything you do on the Web will be made part of your permanent record.

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September 28, 2011
by sjvn01
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The Amazon Kindle Fire is no iPad Killer

This? This is what all the excitement about? Don’t get me wrong. The just unveiled Amazon Kindle Fire is a fine low-end Android Linux-based e-reader/tablet, but it’s not a major Android tablet and it’s certainly no iPad killer.

While waiting to get my hands on one-come on Amazon, you’ve shipped enough books to my place to know my address by heart-I already know enough to know what the Kindle Fire is and isn’t. First, it’s not a full-powered tablet. If you want a full-sized tablet with Android under the hood I recommend you give the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 a try.

It is, however a nice media consumer device. When I look at the Kindle Fire, I don’t see so much a tablet as the next generation of the e-reader. Instead of just e-books, the Kindle Fire will let you watch movies, off Amazon Prime’s newly enlarged video library, listen to music, and get just enough of the Web, with its new Silk Web browser, that you can use it for some basic Web browsing.

Put it all together, and I see Amazon’s next generation competitor for Barnes & Nobles Nook Color much more so than I do a full-powered tablet. Of course, with a price-tag of $199, it could be very popular.

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September 28, 2011
by sjvn01
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Microsoft’s Samsung Android Patent Troll Win

Microsoft has just announced its biggest ever Android-related patent deal with Samsung. In this contract, Microsoft will get a royalty payment on every Android smartphone and tablet that Samsung sells. And, what exactly is Samsung paying for and how much are they actually paying? We don’t know.

Horacio Gutierrez, vice president of Intellectual Property and Licensing at Microsoft, smiling all the way to the bank, said in a statement that “We are always looking for new opportunities to work collaboratively within the industry, and Samsung was a natural fit, particularly because of its leadership in the rapidly changing world of digital media technologies. That’s another way of saying that Microsoft has managed to scare yet another company into paying them off for some unknown and untested patents.

On Twitter, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, triumphantly tweeted, “Today’s agreement demonstrates we now have a clear path forward for resolving the industry’s mobile patent issues” and “While we haven’t yet reached the beginning of the end of mobile patent issues, perhaps we have now reached the end of the beginning.” So, yeah, if you’re idea of a clear path ahead is to pay off Microsoft, and other major companies like Apple, than we indeed have a way forward.

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September 27, 2011
by sjvn01
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Google+ shows explosive growth

Ever notice how some people are a little, ah, delusional? For example, some folks were telling me recently how Google’s social network Google+ usage was going down and the site really wasn’t that popular. Seriously. Clearly these people have been under a rock, or perhaps too besotted with Facebook, to notice that since Google+ opened its doors to everyone, its growth has been nothing short of explosive. Indeed, Google+ made it to 50-million users faster than any other social network.

According to Paul Allen, founder of Ancestry.com, a leading genealogy site and Google+ unofficial statistician, “Google+ likely crossed the 50 million user mark. And since being opened to the general public (over age 18) last week, Google+ has been growing by at least 4% per day, meaning that around 2 million new users have been signing up each day.”

To be exact, it took Google+ 88 days to hit 50-million users. MySpace—remember them?–took 1,046 days. Facebook, with 1,096 days, took even longer.

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September 26, 2011
by sjvn01
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Linus Torvalds’s Lessons on Software Development Management

If anyone knows the joys and sorrows of managing software development projects, it would be Linus Torvalds, creator of the world’s most popular open-source software program: the Linux operating system. For more than 20 years, Torvalds has been directing thousands of developers to improve the open source OS. He and I sat down to talk about effective techniques in running large-scale distributed programming teams – and the things that don’t work, too.

Torvalds says there are two things that people very commonly get completely wrong, both at an individual developer level and at companies.

“The first thing is thinking that you can throw things out there and ask people to help,” when it comes to open-source software development, he says. “That’s not how it works. You make it public, and then you assume that you’ll have to do all the work, and ask people to come up with suggestions of what you should do, not what they should do. Maybe they’ll start helping eventually, but you should start off with the assumption that you’re going to be the one maintaining it and ready to do all the work.”

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