Linked List: August 19, 2011

Friday, 19 August 2011

Google Requests Reexamination of Lodsys Patents 

Groklaw:

We have had a chance to review the reexamination requests, and after that review we believe Lodsys is in for a rough time. We have seen reexam requests before, but when we saw these, the above quote came to mind. Lodsys, you shouldn’t have brought a knife to a gunfight.

It’d be sweet if Google could get Lodsys’s patents wiped from the board. Nice to see Google joining this fight, too.

The Talk Show, Episode 55 

Dan’s off on paternity leave, so Ryan Irelan did the show with me this week. Big topics: Google’s acquisition of Motorola, HP getting out of the PC and WebOS hardware businesses, and the general idea of getting traction in the market. Brought to you by Shopify and Rackspace.

Walmart and the Lucky Duckies 

Scott Neuman, reporting for NPR:

In a sign of just how much the economy is hurting its traditional customer base, Walmart finds itself going head-to-head with Target for middle-income customers just as its lower-income clientele is being lured away by an even cheaper option — the dollar store.

“If you go to the dollar stores, they’ve done a much better job of offering food to the consumers,” Sozzi said, adding that a lot of people who used to shop at Walmart “don’t have the money” to shop there anymore.

But those lucky duckies who can’t afford to shop at Walmart don’t pay any federal income tax. Unfair.

Apple Deprecates Developer Access to Unique Device Identifiers 

Erick Schonfeld, AOL/TechCrunch:

In a recent update to the documentation for iOS 5 (which is only available to registered Apple developers, but a copy was forwarded to me), Apple notes that it will be phasing out access to the unique device identifier, or UDID, on iOS devices such as iPhones and iPads.

This is a big deal, especially for any mobile ad networks, game networks or any app which relies on the UDID to identify users. Many apps and mobile ad networks, for instance, uses the UDID or a hashed version to keep track of who their users are and what actions they have taken.

My guess: Apple is doing this so they can further promote iOS as a secure and privacy-protecting platform. What are the odds that Google would ever block Android developers from accessing unique device IDs? This is going to result in some work for developers far afield from ad and game networks, too, though.

More Balm for Steve Jobs’s Temper 

The Financial Times:

Apple’s sales in greater China have for the first time overtaken those of Lenovo, the world’s third-biggest personal computer maker by shipment volume, results from the two companies confirm.

(Thanks to DF reader Rahul Krishnakumar.)

Rose-Colored Glasses 

Marco Arment on WebOS:

This is a high-stakes game. Apple is kicking everyone’s asses so much in the “tablet market” that it’s really not accurate to call it that. Competitors need to be great on day one to stand a chance.

Maybe This Will Help Improve Steve Jobs’s Bad Temper 

Lenovo CEO Liu Chuanzhi, one year ago:

“We are lucky that Steve Jobs has such a bad temper and doesn’t care about China. If Apple were to spend the same effort on the Chinese consumer as we do, we would be in trouble.”

Joanna Stern, today, reviewing the iPad-alike Lenovo IdeaPad K1:

The IdeaPad K1 has been in development in one form or another for a year and a half, yet it still isn’t ready. And even if it had hit the market a year ago, it wouldn’t have been good enough (at least in its current form) to go head-to-head with the original iPad. The K1′s hardware is chunky and cheap-feeling, its screen is washed out, and the software is unstable to the point of being unusable at times.

How to Use UTF-8 Throughout Your Web Stack 

This would have saved me a lot of MySQL text-encoding aggravation the last time I moved DF to a new server.

Footnotify Extension for Chrome and Safari 

Great work by Hans Petter Eikemo. Recommended.

Best Buy Giving Away Galaxy Tab 10.1s With Samsung 3D TV Purchases Next Week 

Maybe they should include free haircuts too.

HP Had WebOS Running on iPad Hardware? 

Matt Brian, The Next Web, reporting that HP’s WebOS software team was stymied by slow hardware:

The hardware reportedly stopped the team from innovating beyond certain points because it was slow and imposed constraints, which was highlighted when webOS was loaded on to Apple’s iPad device and found to run the platform significantly faster than the device for which it was originally developed.

With a focus on web technologies, webOS could be deployed in the iPad’s Mobile Safari browser as a web-app; this produced similar results, with it running many times faster in the browser than it did on the TouchPad.

I’m deeply skeptical of this without seeing it in action. I don’t doubt that the iPad is better hardware, but if it’s that easy to get WebOS bootstrapped on iPad hardware, why haven’t indie hacker jailbreak types gotten, say, Android running on an iPad, too? And I simply can’t believe that WebOS or any subset thereof running within MobileSafari would be faster than running natively on the TouchPad. I don’t believe it. Show me.

The Differences Between Android and iPhone Users at Hunch 

Confirms most of the stereotypes you already believed. Android users tend to be less educated, earn lower incomes, are more likely to be politically conservative, and be followers instead of leaders.

Update: Shamefully, iPhone users are 50 percent more likely to text while driving. Stop that.

Breaking Down the Lucky Duckies 

One more on taxes and politics. Every time I post about tax rates, every time, I get dozens of spittle-covered angry emails about the supposed fact that half of Americans — the lower half, income-wise — “pay no taxes”. It’s a total crock. It’s true that 46 percent of Americans pay no federal income taxes, but these are people with low incomes, and they pay all sorts of other taxes: sales tax, state tax, local tax, payroll tax, etc.

What They’re ‘Protecting’ Us From 

Anil Dash points out that the world’s most successful CEO is a staunch liberal:

So, who is this man? He’s the anchor baby of an activist Arab muslim who came to the U.S. on a student visa and had a child out of wedlock. He’s a non-Christian, arugula-eating, drug-using follower of unabashedly old-fashioned liberal teachings from the hippies and folk music stars of the 60s. And he believes in science, in things that science can demonstrate like climate change and Pi having a value more specific than “3”, and in extending responsible benefits to his employees while encouraging his company to lead by being environmentally responsible.

Every single person who’d attack Steve Jobs on any of these grounds is, demonstrably, worse at business than Jobs. They’re unqualified to assert that liberal values are bad for business, when the demonstrable, factual, obvious evidence contradicts those assertions.

Historical Top Marginal Income Tax Rates in the U.S. 

Eisenhower must have been a commie.

Mike Arrington’s Taxes Are Too High 

Speaking of Warren Buffett’s call for higher taxes on the mega-rich (to wit: those earning over one million dollars per year) and the knee-jerk response that it constitutes “class warfare”, here’s Mike Arrington’s response:

What I really didn’t understand until recently though is why so many rich Americans seem to loathe their richness as much as everyone else does. Many in Silicon Valley want to tax the rich into the middle class and let government spend and spend and spend. The super rich tech elite flock to Obama, joining in the call to screw the rich as loudly as all the rest.

What a crock of shit. The calls for raising taxes on the wealthy — or for simply allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire — are about restoring tax rates to those of the Clinton administration. Bill Clinton oversaw the best economy in recent U.S. history. Every income group did well, including the wealthy, and the U.S. budget was balanced. One can dispute the causes and effects of the 1990s U.S. economy. Republicans like to argue today that the economy did well under Clinton despite the higher tax rates on the wealthy. But here are three facts: (1) tax rates on the wealthy were higher then than now; (2) the economy thrived then and has suffered ever since; (3) Clinton left office with a balanced federal budget.

No marginal income tax increase, no matter how extreme, would “tax the rich into the middle class”. Marginal tax rates apply only to the last dollar. So even if the U.S. instituted an Eisenhower-era 91-percent income tax on income over $1 million, those earning over that amount would only pay that rate on income after the first million earned. If you want to argue that tax rates on the super-wealthy are already high enough, fine. But don’t argue that Buffett’s proposal, or a restoration of Clinton-era tax rates, amounts to “soaking the rich” or “screwing the rich” or “taxing the rich into the middle class”. It’s sophistry.

It’s easy to understand why the rich tech elite support Democrats on economic issues. They’re smart enough to wish we could return to an economy like we had under Bill Clinton.

World of Class Warfare: Warren Buffett vs. Wealthy Conservatives 

Jon Stewart and The Daily Show nail it again. Love the Fox News guy who accuses Warren Buffett of being a “socialist”.