Jimmy Digital :: Technology Blog
-
Stop Software Patents
I just signed a petition on whitehouse.gov to direct the Patent Office to stop issuing software patents. I think it is fairly obvious by now that software patents cause more harm than good. The purpose of a patent is to protect an innovator, but not to serve as a barrier to innovation. They should protect the little guy from large corporations stealing and profiting from his/her intellectual property, but most software patents now are owned by large corporations and are used to force other large corporations into cross-licensing agreements or to prevent competition altogether. The corporations patent anything they can get their hands on; buttons, colors, placement of objects on screen, application behavior. I am surprised they don’t patent the machine code to go with it.
So why do it? Some do it for defensive reasons to make sure they don’t get sued by patent trolls, which are entities that look for opportunities to sue for patent infringements. But others clearly do it with the intent to profit on their patent portfolio and that I think is clearly wrong. Oracle is suing Google over using a few lines of Java in Android. Don’t tell me that Oracle is not looking to make a quick buck on this and don’t tell me that this is good for innovation. Then there is Nokia vs Apple, Apple vs Amazon, Microsoft vs i4i, SAP vs Oracle, Microsoft vs Linux, etc, etc, etc. The patent infringement cases are skyrocketing and the costs associated with them do as well.
So how does that impact you or me? Well, the costs of doing business in a patent environment will radically restructure the industry. Many small companies will fold under the costs of licensing, avoiding patent infringement, and pursuing patents defensively. The individual software entrepreneur and inventor may all but disappear. There will be fewer publishers and fewer products, and the price of software will rise to reflect the costs. So clearly the software patents are not serving the purpose they were intended to serve.
What should be done? Now that is a difficult question. The opponents of software patents will quickly tell you they should be abolished, but they don’t frequently propose an alternative for them. And there should be an alternative because one still has to have the means to protect one’s intellectual property. I think part of the answer is to patent the algorithm, but not the implementation of this algorithm. Another part is to broaden the definition of what is obvious and what is not so something like sending a job to a printer cannot be patented. There may be more, but whatever the case is the system as it functions today is broken and I think anyone involved in the software industry should sign the petition.
-
Review of Jux.com
As an amateur photographer I am always up for experimenting with my pictures. This includes finding creative ways to share them with other people. Like so many of my peers I use SmugMug, Picasa, Flikr, and many others, and they work great for the most part. They provide great features, make it easy to upload and share pictures, and provide a really good way to keep everything organized. Using these sites is a lot like driving a Toyota. They are reliable, you know exactly what you are going to get out of them, and they just seem like a safe choice because everyone else is using them. But at some point, as you do with your Toyota, you get tired of “bland” and start craving something cool; something that stands out and makes people notice.
This is exactly what happened to me as I looked for more creative ways to share my pictures with the rest of the world. First, I considered opening my own WordPress blog and using one of the cool photo-specific templates for it I found somewhere on the internet. That worked great for a little while, but underneath it all it was still a blogging platform that pretended to be a photo gallery. It was different, but not different enough. So I decided to keep looking. I wanted a dedicated photo sharring solution that was clean, simple, and was super artsy and creative (I didn’t quite know what that would look like, but I knew I wanted it). After doing a couple of searches on twitter I stumbled on jux.com and I decided to give it a shot. Now after a few weeks of using it I can officially say that for me this will probably be the find of the year.
Jux.com is a photo blogging service where you blog with full screen images and video. This is a great idea and it makes you wonder why no one thought of it earlier. Everything looks so much better on a big screen and feels less cluttered and less confined. Being a photographer I primarily post large images and I have had a wonderful experience so far. Despite taking up the full screen everything loads fast and looks crisp. I can blog with simple pictures or I can create slide shows, block quotes, countdowns, and article posts. Each image can be annotated and I have a lot of control over how these annotations are displayed on screen. I can pick fonts and font sizes, styles, colors, and position. The images themselves can either be uploaded directly or linked to from some other location on the internet. There are a couple of interesting styles that can be applied to the images prior to posting them.
The summary view of your posts is also very interesting. Here you can’t get away without displaying thumbnails, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do gigantic thumbnails. This is exactly what Jux.com does. The thumbnails are quire large and are creatively arranged, taking up most of the screen real estate and creating a gallery view. I like it because again this layout puts the emphasis on my content and reduces the clutter around it. I can also see how many views each post has so I can see what is popular.
Now so far my review has been overwhelmingly positive (yes when I like something I really like it), but there are some features that Jux.com does not yet have that I think can make it even better. First, I would like to be able to comment on other people’s posts and I would like them to be able to comment on mine. I would also like better Twitter and Facebook integration so when I blog via Jux I can get an auto-generated tweet or a Facebook message telling my friends to check it out. Being able to upload a collection of images (something like a scrap book or a picture album) in a single post would be nice. Being able to upload a watermark or a branding and automatically apply it to posts would be even better.
Overall I think Jux.com is well on its way to being a success story. I will definitely keep using it. Check out my Jux at sirotaphoto.jux.com
