That will give you (a) an idea of what journals publish on that subject and hence what researchers in that area read, (b) examples of published articles in that field to use as a stylistic template and (c) some idea of which academics are active in the area

If he hasn't done this already then there is an extremely high probability that his work is not new, and is therefore already known, proven, accepted and won't be worthy of publication. Furthermore he will have a hell of a lot of work to do to generate the comparisons and measurements required to write something meaningful about the subject.

Even if his work is new, it may not get published if the subject is not fashionable unless his work is a huge breakthrough. Some papers do get published that purely review the state of the art, but they are rare and cover many methods in detail.

Whilst I applaud the OP's enthusiasm; from his description it sounds like he has found a small improvement and it's unlikely he will get it published. Give it a go but don't get your hopes up.

1. Copyright law protects both copying of the source and the binaries, and software licenses and/or EULAs can legally limit things like reverse engineering, specific types of usage, etc.

Copyright law does not protect an invention. If I come up with something totally revolutionary someone else can possibly make another implementation of it. All of my hard work, research and effort has been bypassed. What's my incentive to make something magical ?

Or, on the other hand, if I invent something totally mind blowing but no one else can work out how to do it. Can you guarantee that all the details will be fully disclosed in a limited period of time ?

2. Those protections might be sufficient even if a large company (e.g., Microsoft) decided to appropriate the tech. An obvious appropriation may require legal action,

Tell me more about all these individuals successfully suing large companies who have stolen their IP.

3. The source to successful proprietary programs has been released on a number of occasions. 4DOS, Doom/Quake, and DR-DOS are three potentially interesting examples.

What has this got to do with software patents ? 99.99% of proprietary software is never made open source. There is a lot of software that is more then 20 years old for which you cannot get access to the core algorithms. These outliers don't prove anything.

1. He can get a monopoly on not just his specific implementation of an idea, but ON ALL POSSIBLE IMPLEMENTIONS of that idea. This prevents even those approaches to solving the problem which are technically quite dissimilar from being independently invented and used.

No, he gets a patent on that invention. If your algorithm uses his invention then you have got to get a licence. If your algorithm is "technically quite dissimilar" either you are using the invention or not, it's quite simple. The patent document can be used to seek new and completely different ways of solving the problem at any time after it has been published, without waiting 20 years.

2. He can make the patent application without disclosing source code, and without disclosing enough meaningful technical information for someone else to actually reimplement the idea.

This is not specific to software patents. Your problem is with the patent system itself. The majority of examiners are highly qualified and check whether or not the patent disclosure is sufficient for someone else to recreate the invention. If the disclosure is insufficient then the examiner is bad and the patent can be challenged.

3. The patent will effectively last forever in an information technology context

Again, this is not software specific. Most patents are for technology, therefore any amount of time is "forever". The patent has to last long enough to make it worthwhile to the inventor. You've got to give him a chance to recoup his investment, develop a product, license it out, etc.

What about the little guy inventor who comes up with an incredible and magical piece of software that no one would never have thought of in a million years ?

Without software patents:
1. He has to hide it and obfuscate it so that no one can copy his idea.
2. He can't protect it so if anyone works it out they can copy it.
3. If he successfully hides it, no one ever gets to know how he did it.

With software patents:
1. He can get a government enforced monopoly.
2. Everyone learns how his idea works, from standardised documentation, spurring on further innovations.
3. After 20 years anyone can copy it and use it, no charge.

Facebook's UI is absolutely dire: this on the web. I assume that the mobile applications are written by people who try to make them usable.

Over time every application that I use has got better. Facebook is the only UI I have seen get more difficult to use, uglier, more complicated. It's not like they are adding seriously different functionality to previous versions like, for example, The GIMP. The concept remains exactly the same: allow users to selectively share and interact with personal information.

How is it, every time they add more privacy options, more of my personal information that was restricted access gets exposed to more people ? If I still have an account this time next year I will probably only have my name and one photograph on there...

> I'm guessing that he didn't use the same names in his design partly because that would be inviting a patent infringement lawsuit. It would be trivial to convince a judge (let alone a jury) to bring down the legal hammer because the two specs use the same terminology.

It wouldn't happen, you can't patent terminology. You might be able to copyright names, if they are specific enough.

MPEG is commonly thought of as "patent encumbered" but the patents only refer to some specific components. These components are not necessary for implementing a codec but if you do use these valuable methods then you get better results. Think of it like the patents that apply to glyph hinting for TrueType fonts: We still have lib FreeType and use TTF in Linux.

From the article:

When Xiph started out in the early ninties, MPEG was hardly dominant.

When MPEG-1 started it closely followed H.261. H.261 was very well written. Back in 1994 when Xiph started, MPEG-1 had already been going 6 years.

Ogg is full of strange fields and difficult to read structures. The author of the criticism is right to question it, especially when Ogg used similar fields but changed the names. There was never any need to change terminologies. H.261 and MPEG-1 were well written standards but not freely available and included patented technologies. The "not freely available" means that you have to buy it, not that it's secret.

If Xiph wanted to produce a free standard for video coding they could easily have adopted the same terminologies and similar structures, defining their own versions of them and recommending unpatented technologies. Instead they chose their weird terminology and rushed to come out with something different without spending the time to work out how difficult it would be for users to implement and what quality it would give. H.261 and MPEG were backed up by masses of research by companies and universities of which much was freely available in journals and conference proceedings.

The idea that "MPEG was hardly dominant" is the thought of someone who either didn't do his homework at the time or a revisionist. VCD (created 1993) was massively popular in the second half of the nineties, or doesn't that count ?

From the summary:

it's far better written than the attack.

I wish it had been. If you want to refute a rant, pick some illustrative points and clearly answer them. Don't pick apart the text, all of it, sentence by sentence. Fancy colouring and highlighting don't make it better written.

Oh, so you think he left it lying around ? A valuable device that was "found" and "returned" to a gadgets blog after a bidding war ? Right. Highly likely.

I think in most countries you do not legally own stuff you "find", at least until the owner has had a chance to claim it. Gizmodo can rationalise it all they like, they paid money to hold on to something that wasn't theirs and then offer it back to someone who they are confident actually owns it. The original guy sold something he didn't own.

Another issue, if the guy was told to take it out and field test it then it's no problem, **** happens, it could have been stolen or dropped or something. As long as he tried to be careful about it. If on the other hand it was a top secret prototype that he took out without permission then he probably deserves to be canned. Gizmodo outing the guy is pretty low and uncalled for.

I think it's obvious.

1. The record companies make the content cost more (to compensate for "lost" sales) and more difficult to use (DRM)
2. People listen to less music
3. People buy less music
4. "Sales are down - must be due to piracy"
5. Goto 1.

If you think I am exaggerating, look back to what happened when CDs launched

I haven't clearly explained myself. Both Total Recall and Blade Runner are based on PKD short stories, as you know. You used this term "PKD movie" but such a thing doesn't exist.

What I meant was that Blade Runner attempted to follow the story of Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep with only slight modifications to existing characters and storyline, most noticeably Luba Luft the opera singer became Zhora the stripper and J.R. Isidore the chickenhead became J.F. Sebastian the genetic designer. The screenwriters then proceeded to cut out huge chunks of context that would have had the viewer questioning whether the androids were more humans than the actual humans - a very important aspect of the story. The concept of empathy as the characteristic that most clearly defines humanity was erased, as was humans trying to connect to it through Mercerism or owning an animal. Despite Rutger Hauer's excellent monologue at the end there is nothing to compensate for these deficiencies, you are just left wondering about the weird questions in the VK test and the bizarre need for synthetic animals.

In the case of We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, a very short and funny story bears little resemblance to the movie.

There were a lot more mistakes than the few I highlighted. The biggest mistake was cutting out all the material to do with humans feeling empathy for one another, for animals and for androids because that is a major constituent of the story and calls into question why humans are different to androids. Details such as the weird questions in the VK test, the synthetic snake and owl don't make sense without it.

> The book is long and dense with subject matter. There's only so much you can cram into 117 minutes.

It's quite a short book (210 pages) and not dense: it's no "Dune". Would it have taken a lot of time to have Deckard visit a pet store ? Or to have J.F. Sebastian fuse with an empathy box ?

> But are you serious about Total Recall? That represents pretty much everything I don't want to see in a PKD movie.

Total Recall was not a "PKD movie", Total Recall doesn't pretend to be the same story as the PKD novel; Blade Runner does.

> Even Firefox, one of the best cross-platform programs on OS X, has many problems that would unlikely exist if it had been written specifically for OS X

Exactly, if you take the Gruber/Jobs point of view then Firefox would not be available for Mac.

> but I think it makes sense for Apple to do it

You would deny an app the chance to exist because it isn't aesthetically pleasing enough for you ? Because apps on a mobile platform must look more beautiful ?

Why can't the user decide ? Is it that difficult to remove confusing or unusable apps ?

> ... took major liberties with the plot but was still a pretty good flick that remained true to the spirit of the story.

I know my karma will be minus infinite after saying this, but here goes: Blade Runner was an enjoyable but awful movie made from a bad screenplay written about a fantastic novel.

BR has umpteen mistakes in it, from the number of escaped androids right at the start to the photo analysing machine that totally ignores Deckard's instructions. For example, "I don't get it, what do they risk coming back to Earth for, that's unusual" - why the hell are there Blade Runner units if it's "unusual" ?

It's a badly made movie. Everything to do with empathy for living beings and questioning what it means to be human is reduced to a fake snake, a drunken look at some photos on a piano and Roy's monologue.

If the screenplay writers had understood the novel they would have realised that owning an animal was a lot more than a status symbol. Likewise they would have realised the importance of the mood organ, the empathy box/Mercerism and the way that the "chickenheads" were treated. Instead of that we got one lousy unicorn sequence.

> Impostor was pretty accurate, although somewhat lackluster.

I think Impostor was the most accurate PKD film made yet. Minority Report and Total Recall have been the best movies based on PKD stories; Paycheck and Next were not too bad, just not great. A Scanner Darkly was a great novel but ruined as a movie.

> And what about when the OS changes? Will your non-native apps need to be updated?

When the OS changes then native apps are just as likely to need updating as non-native apps.

However, I am talking about this from the perspective of using something like QT (because that's what Gruber talked about in TFA), I'm not talking about Flash.

> As for the whole OK or Cancel thing, that just shows that you're one of these lazy programmers.

My point was that it's not that difficult to get it right. Having Cancel/OK instead of OK/Cancel is trivial and shouldn't be taken as a reason to blanket swipe 3rd party programming tools and libraries.

The Mac Kindle app doesn't look good. So what ? I can show you native apps that don't look good too.

> the developer is developing for something they aren't even familiar with, and Apple doesn't want those issues.

IMO it's quite arrogant to say that only native apps will ever give a high quality experience and that your multiplatform app is not allowed to have a consistent user experience because it must be customised to individual platforms. That's like websites that have banners saying "This page must be viewed at 1024x768 in Netscape Navigator 2.0+"

> Well, "OK" and "Cancel" are discouraged because they can be confusing to the user:
> "Would you like to cancel your download?"
> OK Cancel.

I would discourage anyone from creating a dialog like this. This is not a problem caused by 3rd party programming tools but rather an ambiguously worded dialog.

If you absolutely need to ask this kind of question it would be less ambiguous to have

"Would you like cancel your download ?"
"Continue Download" "Cancel Download"

I have used OK/Cancel on dialogs for changing parameters, it may be a less optimal solution. However, in this case I think users pay more attention to this kind of dialog than to all the other dialogs that they perceive need to be batted away like whack-a-mole.

The Gruber blog highlights the Mac Kindle app built with the QT toolkit as an example of problems of cross platform libraries causing bad user experiences. He seems quite rankled by the OK button being not quite the right size and text ever so slightly clipped. This would appear to be the fault of a lazy programmer rather than "evil QT".

I don't remember having looked closely at the OSX style guidelines but my few QT applications have the approved order of "OK" and "Cancel" and all of my elements are properly aligned and not clipped. I would hazard a guess that the native design tools do not make it impossible to make a badly designed or non-conformant GUI.

I think Jobs has erred in highlighting 3rd party programming tools as the source of problems based on Gruber's pedanticism. The only great apps that are native have been written by the big companies that can afford to spend the extra effort on a single platform.

We all know that in the future Adobe will give in, Flash will be "enhanced" especially for Apple products and it will immediately become absolutely vital for web browsing according to the Job's reality distortion field.