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It is being widely reported on the blogosphere that the US government has “okayed” jailbreaking of iPhones and expressly made it legal. In the interest of getting to the truth, I located the three year announcement on the Library of Congress website that seems to cover these exceptions for the DMCA . It is worth reading and interpret it as you will. The sections on software do not appear to inherently allow jailbreaking except within a narrow set of conditions for use – however it could be that other reports are based on information found from another source.

I had to respond to a very, very short MacGems article on MacWorld covering Blender 3D and awarding it a 4.5 out of 5. I think having a free piece of software around is a good thing, because it keeps 3D vendors producing meaningful updates to their software. But Blender itself is a victim of its own enthusiastic user base.  Professional 3D software is never easy to use to someone new to the field, and while Blender has improved significantly since its last major release – it is not easy to use. In addition, like many open source projects, you run into feature niggles that can be terribly difficult to resolve. For example, I tried to import a small handful of 3DS format models into Blender – ones that imported flawlessly into several commercial 3D products.  The results looked like a bad Star Trek transporter accident.

Free is never completely free. If a software product is missing a feature you need, or some feature is broken, the work around time you spend has an opportunity cost associated with it. If I have to just through several software packages to convert my models to work with Blender, or if I have to recreate my models in Blender, the cost of Blender just went up by the cost of my time.

I found just enough time yesterday to get across town to visit OSCON, the O’Reilly run Open Source Convention which returns this year to Portland, Oregon. One of the most impressive things I saw there was the HP Aries IDE, the free, online application builder for WebOS – the reincarnation of Palm OS. Read the rest of this entry »

Paradigma Software shipped Valentina 4.7, including updates to the core columnar database, Valentina Reports and server specific improvements. There were a few really annoying issues put to rest with this release, and more improvements to SQL Explain functions. For Mac OS X developers though, this also brought 64 bit versions of Valentina for Cocoa, Valentina C++ for Mac OS X and Valentina PHP (Client and Standalone) on Mac OS X. Not to be ignored, Valentina PHP Client is also available in a 64  bit version for Linux.

At its core, Valentina DB is a columnar database, but you can treat it much like a traditional relational database.  With its columnar roots, you’ll find your database operations, especially complex queries against databases with records numbering hundreds of thousands or more, far faster than a relational database – with some operations, it may be only twice as fast. With others, its hundreds or thousands of times faster. This is especially meaningful if you are pulling large data sets for analysis with your custom applications. Valentina DB is a long time favorite with financial service application providers.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the First Sale Doctrine does not apply to goods copyrighted for sale abroad that are gray marketed back into the United States. The trick is in interpretation of origin of manufacture, IE  “lawfully made under this title” translates into “legally made and sold in the United States.” While it is legal to resell imported goods, the first sale doctrine only applies if they were originally made and sold in the United States.  There is no doubt in my mind that the Supreme Court will have to review it since this is a wide reaching reinterpretation of “lawfully made under this title.” Read the rest of this entry »

Recently visiting my daughter’s high school and their newly remodeled media focused building, I came to the realization that Apple has completely given up on teaching programming to kids. This will come to many as a complete surprise since Apple has a reputation for being the best solution for the K-12 market. Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Times shines a light on Dell and its practice of knowingly selling defective computers between 2003-2005, according to unsealed court documents. It makes you wonder how the public interest was served by concealing this information revealed in court. I had a Dell laptop that had epic failures during this time – two hard drive replacements, graphics card and screen replacement – and still had performance issues that would occur inexplicably and made using several types of software impossible. Despite that Dell sent repair people twice to repair the laptop, they refused to do a complete replacement of an obviously defective system.

Dell pioneered the direct sales model when the norm was to purchase single units through retail or catalogs. The upside was that they could pass the savings on to customers because they could cut out the channel. People tend to forget that the channel does provide some value other than just speedy delivery and the option to spend more on in-store advertising – retailers and distributors hate returns more than customers do. Dell claims that its direct model gives it the ability to react sooner to quality issues, but it also removes channel Darwinism from the picture.

Some at TechDirt, a site I usually have no basis for agreement has a very interesting article on the Golan case and an appeals court that seems to have ruled that congress can, as they see fit, put public domain works back under private copyright if there is some governmental interest in doing so.

Despite that I have some very contrary views to Apple on handling their SDK licensing, I still like many Apple products.  For example, I think the Mac Mini is about the best value desktop computer available.  It packs a huge amount of value into a nice looking and, more importantly, very small case. I noticed something very odd this morning though when following a link from Macintouch to Apple.com to check out the specs of the just announced update to the Mac Mini – accessing the Apple.com website from my Windows based, non Safari browser was extremely slow. Could this be intentional? Read the rest of this entry »

I have strong feelings towards Javascript. It is an efficient and terrible way to deliver Trojans through unsecure browsers but it also can be used for amazing things, including this realtime raytracing example in Javascript.