Category: non GIS

Apple’s pinch-to-zoom patent, rejected in the USA

Posted by Diego Alberto Arias Prado – Thursday 2012-12-20

A new slap in the face of Apple, the company that some years ago introduced itself as “… shameless about stealing great ideas“. The US Patent Office has rejected its pinch-to-zoom technology patent claims:

Via MercuryNews.com:

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has taken a second look at Apple’s (AAPL) pinch-to-zoom technology and this time found it wanting.

In a letter sent to Apple’s lawyers on Wednesday, the office said it has completed a re-examination of the iPhone maker’s patent on its zooming technology and has rejected all of Apple’s claims. Citing older patents and published documents, the patent office found that Apple’s claimed innovations were “unpatentable.”

link: http://goo.gl/gzycT

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A quiz about Apple, the shameless company

Posted by Diego Alberto Arias Prado – Saturday 2012-08-25

I have a question, for you, smart readers of this humble blog. Maybe one of you can help me.

On August 24th, 2012 a jury in a federal court in California, United States of America, ruled that the South Korean company Samsung violated some of Apple Inc.’s patents. Among the violated patents, some of them are as absurd like a rectangle with round corners.

However, in 1994 Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, claimed that «… we have been always shameless about stealing great ideas.»

So the question is: how can you claim that stealing is great and years later sue a competitor for doing the same you «shameless» did?

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Adding a Fibre Channel disk to a Debian Linux server

Posted by Diego Alberto Arias Prado – Sunday 2012-04-29

Given the deep economic crisis Spain is living, budgets are shrinking and in particular, reusing old computers has become mandatory for many people working in organizations that rely on information technologies.

Giving old computers a new life might come with some curious problems. At work we decided to reuse a HP Proliant server which was bought circa year 2005. It has a four cores Itanium processor, which make it suitable for a task like serving web pages dinamically generated. The problem is its small storage capacity by today’s standards: just two hard disks of 36 GB each one.

Fortunately, the server has two HP QLogic ISP2312 Fibre Channel adapters. Thus storage shortage can be solved without buying additional hard disks (supossing they are avaialable for sale); instead, the needed storage is added via Fibre Channel (FC).

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A short note about setting Apache Tomcat 7 environment variables under Debian 6.

Posted by Diego Alberto Arias Prado – Sunday 2012-04-22

In this post we will see a way of setting Apache Tomcat, version 7, environment variables when running under Debian 6.

Let’s suposse that Apache Tomcat – Tomcat for short – has been installed in the directory TOMCAT_DIR and that we want to set the used Java virtual machine and the amount of used RAM memory.

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Anonymous, you are very wrong

Posted by Diego Alberto Arias Prado – Sunday 2012-01-22

After Megaupload.com shutdown, Anonymous countered with DDoS attacks against websites such the USA’s Department of Justice or the MPAA.

Anonymous, you are very wrong. Do you know who really is Megaupload’s founder, Kim Schmitz (alias Kim ‘Dotcom’)?

Kim Schmitz, Megaupload's CEO

Kim Schmitz
picture taken from elmundo.es

According to the Wikipedia:

In 1998, Schmitz was sentenced to a probationary sentence of two years for computer fraud and handling stolen goods. According to a report by News & Record, he had traded stolen calling card numbers he bought from hackers in the United States.

[...]

In 2001, Schmitz purchased $375,000 worth of shares of the nearly bankrupt company LetsBuyIt.com and subsequently announced his intention to invest EUR 50 million in the company. Unknown to others, Schmitz did not have the funds available to invest, although the announcement caused the share value of LetsBuyIt.com to jump by nearly 300%. Schmitz quickly sold the shares and profited $1.5 million as a result.

Schmitz had also arranged and obtained an unsecured loan of EUR 280,000 from Monkey AG, a company for which Schmitz had served as Chairman of the Board. The funds were to be paid to Kimvestor AG. As a result, both Monkey and Kimvestor went bankrupt. Schmitz expressed remorse, stating that he had been “dazzled” and had not recognized that he would be unable to repay the loans.

In January 2002, Schmitz was arrested in Bangkok, Thailand, deported to Germany, and sentenced to a probationary sentence of one year and eight months, and a EUR 100,000 fine, the largest insider-trading case in Germany at the time. Schmitz also pleaded guilty to embezzlement in November 2003 and received a two-year probation sentence.

Wikipedia: Kim Dotcom

The (now) defunct Megaupload.com has nothing to see with the Wikipedia or freedom speech in general. By supporting Megaupload.com you are actually disservicing the cause. I did not join last Wednesday blackout to support Kim Schmitz or other crooks who make tons of money by using other’s work.

I do hate the MPAA, the Spanish Sociedad General de Autores y Editores and the like. But what Kim Schmitz does is not the way to follow.