Not content with making fools of themselves, the folks over at Oracle are having another poke about Android being copyright theft of their Java. They’ve filed with the US Federal Circuit Appeals Court in an attempt to overturn their loss when Judge William H. Alsup of the US District Court ruled that Google was not infringing upon Oracle’s copyright of Java, mainly on the basis that APIs are not covered under copyright.

More specifically, copyright does not protect “names, titles, short phrases or expressions”, including, “catchwords, catchphrases, mottoes, slogans, or short advertising expressions.” Those are covered under trademark law, not copyright law, and it’s a whole different ballgame.

Also not protected by copyright law are, “listing of ingredients, as in recipes, labels, or formulas.” Which in software terms is the same thing as APIs.

So on these grounds, copyright does not cover APIs.

Hence Google hasn’t infringed Oracle’s copyrights by using the Java APIs in Android.

So ruled Judge Alsup.

The court of law set its standards for modern interpretation of aged laws not designed with software engineering in mind.  And frankly, pretty much everyone but Oracle agrees with this, gets it, and is perfectly content with it that way.

But losing once wasn’t enough for Oracle. They’re adamant that their misinterpretations of law are correct and so they’re appealing that decision.  Which, in theory, they have the right to do.

Of course having potentially billions of dollars at stake might have something to do with their pig-headedness.

But I’m starting to think it’s more of a mental deficiency, to be honest.  Here’s how Oracle’s appeal begins:

Ann Droid wants to publish a bestseller. So she sits down with an advance copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – the fifth book – and proceeds to transcribe. She verbatim copies all the chapter titles – from Chapter 1 (“Dudley Demented”) to Chapter 38 (“The Second War Begins”). She copies verbatim the topic sentences of each paragraph, starting from the first (highly descriptive) one and continuing, in order, to the last, simple one (“Harry nodded.”). She then paraphrases the rest of each paragraph. She rushes the competing version to press before the original under the title: Ann Droid’s Harry Potter 5.0. The knockoff flies off the shelves.

J.K. Rowling sues for copyright infringement. Ann’s defenses: “But I wrote most of the words from scratch. Besides, this was fair use, because I copied only the portions necessary to tap into the Harry Potter fan base.”

Obviously, the defenses would fail.

Defendant Google Inc. has copied a blockbuster literary work just as surely, and as improperly, as Ann Droid – and has offered the same defenses.

Clearly, the state of mind over at Oracle must be questioned if this is their idea of how to write a lawsuit.

The ironic thing is that Oracle’s cute little story of little miss Ann Droid in no way re-examines how APIs should be protected under copyright. It appears that Oracle seems to think that they’ve somehow made a point here, but it only goes to show just how much they’ve actually missed the point, in my opinion. Because essentially their little story of Ann Droid is exactly what anyone working with APIs would and has had to do, by definition. You could no more sue Libre Office for reverse-engineering Word document reading, or Foxit for PDF viewing, or Linux’s Samba and Wine for writing Windows API names and recipes for that matter.

Oracle’s whole short story of Ann Droid centers on writing a book, not on APIs.  And seems focused on confusing the laws of copyright, of trademark, and potentially even of patent depending on how you try to interpret what they’re saying and how it could possibly relate to software.

And, in fact, anti-competitive lawsuits have been filed against Microsoft for not documenting their Windows APIs more clearly. (Sometimes if at all.)  To intentionally block competitors from using APIs is not kosher.

So how Oracle can somehow think that they’re special and that their APIs are copyrightable is beyond anyone’s ability to comprehend.

But writing a short story about Ann Droid writing a Harry Potter knock-off is a whole new level of WTF?!  It’s childish.  It’s apples to oranges.  It’s ignorant.

Again, Oracle doesn’t seem to comprehend where one law ends and the next begins. They seem to think that trademark law and patent law are all a part of copyright law now, as if the three weren’t completely different things.

But then maybe it’s not gross incompetence / ignorance after all, so much as just desperation.  Surely they must know that without a shadow of a doubt they’d lose hands down in a patent law battle, and likewise in a trademark battle. Copyright is the only battleground left that they can even remotely try to claim, and that’s still the longest of long-shots as that is also a clear and obvious lose for them. But with potentially billions of dollars at stake, I guess Oracle figures that it’s worth the chance to play the part of complete and utter fools … just in case they somehow magically conjure up a courtroom equally as foolish. Which, let’s face it, just ain’t gonna happen, even if they try to invoke the magic of Harry Potter.

Frankly, I hope the appellate court slaps them down hard. These ridiculous antics of Oracle are demeaning to the whole judicial system and to software developers alike. But then with so much Java egg on their face already when it comes to security and patches lately, maybe Oracle figures that they’re already chock-full-o’-idiocy, so why not got that extra mile and become the laughing stock of everyone?

I can honestly see a future where no one uses Java anymore not because of security concerns, but because they simple no longer want to have anything to do with Oracle.

For those of you who actually care, and few are those indeed, Intel just announced yet another blow to Itanium customers.

Of course, if you are an Itanium customer, then you probably aren’t in the least bit surprised.

Itanium has pretty much always been a rocky road for Intel. The whole shebang of Itanium started out with some lackluster performance and some highly questionable future purpose.  Itanium was either to be the golden child of computing, or a whole lot of smoke blown up your skirt.  And especially once AMD reminded people that they do servers too, the road of Itanium looked awfully rocky. Since then updates to the Itanium line have often been delayed (sometimes horrendously so) and have rarely met Intel’s own original expectations, let alone any customers’.

Still, for Really Big Iron … what else can you do? Itanium customers have little choice but to hold on for the ride and hope for the best, if they can’t be bothered to think a little smaller.

Well, turns out that Intel’s recent Kittson update is no different.

First on the chopping block? Gone is the long-rumored miraculous Xeon-Itanium uber-socket. Yep. That rumor/feature has been churning practically since Itanium first reared its ugly head into the beyond-x86 world. But people really thought it would actually finally happen with Tukwila. It didn’t. Then Poulson. It didn’t. Then Kittson. Now Intel says that’s a big NEGATORY as well.

Sorry!

(For those wanting to sound like IT experts, guess what you have a very high chance of predicting not happening for the next iteration of Itanium also…  And the one after that…  And the one after that…)

But it’s not all bad, right? Okay, so Kittson loses the socket panacea, but we all expected that anyway because honestly, what numbskull would want the world’s most outrageous socket for a cute “little” (by Itanium standards) Xeon anyway?  At least Kittson will still be fabbed with Intel’s shiny energy-saving 22nm Tri-Gate process, right?

Umm … no.

That’s gone too.

And, as a result, it remains to even be postulated what extra speed, cache, or even core changes whatsoever can be expected to be found in Kittson now.

For all practical purposes, Kittson is looking to just be … err … well … just another Poulson.

For those of you wondering just why Intel has let so much slip from Itanium’s grasp this time around … well … it’s pretty obvious, really.  If you’re wondering, you must have had your head in the sand or something.

Intel has seen the future (or the present, really) and the future is ARM eating up Intel’s server dominance. The future isn’t BIG Iron. It’s small iron. Cars are doing it. Now computer processors are too. Efficiency is the new black.  Smaller is, well, not necessarily better, but an emerging market at the very least, if not the buzzword of the day.  Green is where the green is. There’s money to be made in them there ARM chips. The only reason Intel hasn’t keeled over dead from a mass exodus to ARM in the server market is because ARM just hasn’t offered 64-bits … yet. 32-bits isn’t enough anymore, and quasi-there forty-somethings are half-asterisked solutions at best. But that’s all a-changin’. The answer my friend is blowing in the wind. On the horizon is true 64-bitness. It’s no longer a question of if, but when.

To fight that, Intel is pushing hard to reduce the energy consumption of their x86 chips. Not just because then they’ll (they hope) gain back all of that phone and tablet processor market that they already lost, but also because the other barn, the one that hasn’t had all the cows wander out after the door was left open, is at the eleventh hour of opening as well: the microserver.

And to be fair, there is something to be said for the increased agility of a lot of small chips … for certain uses.

Some not exactly stunning attempts have been made to push ARM into servers. (Personally, I rather liked the Lego-block cased Raspberry Pi “supercomputer”.) Intel still has a chance to not lose the microserver battle by bringing both Atom and their usual x86 offerings into ARM-level power consumption.

And that, of course, means that their shiny new 22nm Tri-Gate fab and related resources have to be applied to the battles that they can still win, not to Itanium, which, let’s face it, has pretty much been a lost cause since its very inception.

Intel announced this intention already. And to their credit, Atom just may even bite back a chunk out of ARM in phones and tablets yet if Intel really does push their SoC Atoms onto their most energy-efficient process to give the world a true ARM alternative.  Especially when it can also run Windows.  The real Windows.  Not that RT malarkey.

So it should come as no surprise then.

But it’s not always so easy to put two and two together. Or perhaps denial isn’t just a river in Egypt. Yes folks, because Intel is concentrating on low-power Atoms, Cores, and Xeons to save their server bacon from an ARM farm, it will leave Itanium’s process upgrade to be performed in another cycle.

But then, as Itanium customers, you really should be used to disappointment by now.

So what to do while you wait? Why not try to visualize whirled peas?

And if you’re HP? Heh heh. Sorry, Charlie! Only the best-tasting server iron gets to be Intel-Kist. Didn’t you hear? Efficient and agile is in. Big and bulky is out. Green is the new black. Sorry if that’s going to make you see red. Such is the way Ye Olde Cookie crumbleth after all. That writing has been on the wall for so long that even vagrants are strumming tunes to it on the street corners.

But then, as an Itanium customer, you really should already know that too.

Honestly, I’m kind of surprised that Itanium has even lasted this long.  It’s a product in search of a market.  It’s an ideal without a need.

But still, you’d have to be pretty daft to have continued to expect it to have any kind of decent future at t his point. It’s been living on borrowed time for longer than time has been able to be borrowed. You just might want to kind of sort of possibly think of potentially transitioning over to a different platform sometime. Maybe.

Eventually.

Just a thought.

Does Apple expect to somehow magically turn up evidence that they did not collude with book publishers to fix the prices of electronic books? With Macmillan joining in with everyone else now (except Apple) and settling with the US Department of Justice in the electronic-book price-fixing lawsuit, that means every single paper publisher has settled. No one has claimed guilt or innocence in their settlements, and now that they’ve settled, they never will be found innocent or guilty in a trial.

Except for Apple, it seems.

The one and only party to continue to plead themselves innocent and fight on.

It’s hard to believe that this lawsuit has drug on since April of 2012 when the case and evidence is pretty straight forward. A part of the terms of Apple’s contract with book publishers to make their e-books available through Apple was quite clear and simple: The ebooks could not be sold elsewhere for less. Prices had to be identical (or more) to Apple.

If that isn’t the very definition of “price fixing” then I clearly don’t know what is!

You can’t really say that all of the other publishing houses agree on that, as by settling they completely avoid having to admit any culpability and with that magic escape hatch from the trial can neither be found guilty … nor innocent, I would point out. However, it now can be said that not a single publishing house thought that the court case was one worth risking being found guilty during.  Not a single publishing house thought that the lawsuit was worth fighting.

Except for Apple.

The lone warrior.

Adamant in their innocence.

And it’s beginning to look like as the only one actually new to book publishing, Apple is perhaps the only one of the lot of alleged colluders  to not fully understand the laws involved?

Now that Apple finds themselves all alone it should be interesting to see how long their continue to tilt at windmills before caving in and settling. Because we all know, Apple can’t possibly let this lawsuit actually come to completion, not when the very contract that they wrote up is all of the evidence that anyone needs to decide on a verdict of guilty.

On the plus side, now that no one is swallowing Apple’s bitter pill anymore, expect the last of the e-book prices to return to sane levels again.  Except, of course, for those from Apple, who wouldn’t know competitive pricing even if it bit a chunk out of their logo.

Now here’s another one while I’m blogging on gripes: spam.  No, not the allegedly edible luncheon meat of deniable dubious decent.  I mean the propensity of jerks to flood the world with meaningless marketing and malign malware messages.  You might have noticed that very rarely do I ever respond to comments anymore.  You might have even noticed that there seem to be fewer comments left than there used to be.  The reason?  Spam!

I apologize if you leave a legitimate comment on InsanIT.net and it gets eaten by my spam filter, but I literally get hundreds of spam comments a day.  Do you have any idea how much time it would take me to sort out the real comments from that morass of malign messaging?  I’d have to hire a staff just to filter the spam!  Instead I rely upon good old software and a big Delete button.  Sorry.  They’re ruining it for everyone.  If you’re lucky and your real comment gets through, congrats.  And if not, sorry, but it’s the best I can do with the limited time and resources I can devote to my blog.  It’s not like anyone pays me to do this.  Even my advertisements don’t actually as much as the hosting costs.  I know I could turn the hounds loose and make InsanIT.net a money-making website, but I fear quality, honesty, and integrity would take too much of a hit were I to do so.  So it remains as it is.

Of course it doesn’t greatly affect me personally, because I just hit the delete button and the indigestible mess just magically goes away.  But it affects you, and for that I apologize and admit as much culpability as I sanely can in this insane unwinnable war of worthless words.

On a related side-note:  I seriously would not object to a law making the hacking of spammers and hackers legal.  That say, if, you could document damages done, you were legally protected to act in internet self-defense.  I would not object to such legislation in the slightest, at all.  Not even a little bit.

When I upgraded my graphics card from a GeForce GTX 470 to a GeForce GTX 690 I was thrilled.  I’d designed my computer around making upgrades like that later.  I didn’t have the budget to build the “perfect” machine when I built it, but it was at least a solid platform to improve from.  So the long-overdue graphics upgrade was on my list of things to do from the beginning.

In fact, the old GeForce GTX 470 was even relegated to being a dedicated PhysX (physics) card.

And you’d think that throwing in a monster of a new video card, a dual-processor card at that, would make my silent PC unbearably loud.  After all, the GeForce GTX 690 is hardly designed for silence.  But in fact, quite the opposite has been true.  With ridiculous SLI performance available, even bumping up the quality settings in all of my games, the GeForce GTX 690 is so under-utilized that it hardly ever has to kick the fan speed up to cope with the heat.  Whereas the tiny GeForce GTX 470 had to wind up like a freaking jet engine for some video games.

So the nVidia GeForce GTX 690, I love!

But ever since I upgraded to version 310.90 of nVidia’s display drivers, I’ve had a problem.  Every single time that I turn on my computer, I have to start my computer twice!  From a cold boot the drivers always fail and Windows throws me into a low-resolution driverless mode.  It’s easy to identify as my logon screen is at an extremely low resolution.  Fortunately I can just hit restart from there.  Thereafter, so long as my computer is rebooting, second boot, every boot until I actually turn it off and cold boot again, the drivers detect the card correctly and all is fine.

It never happened with the older versions of the drivers that I had.  It always detected the card correctly the first time, every time.

Only once I “upgraded” to nVidia GeForce display driver 310.90 did this problem occur.

I’ve noticed another bug as well, that may or may not be related.  It detects my monitor on the wrong port.  In the “NVIDIA Control Panel” software on the “Configure Multi-GPU, Surround, PhysX” configuration screen is shown a representation of my two cards.  It even breaks down the GeForce GTX 690 into cards A and B, along side the GeForce GTX 470, for the three cards it technically is.  And each card shows which monitors back-end ports have which monitors plugged into them.  It correctly identifies which the DVI-I, DVI-D, HDMI, etc. ports are available on which cards.  But it always gets it wrong on which one my monitor is plugged into.  Not just the wrong port, but the wrong card.  I plug it into card A and it shows it as being on card B.  I move it to the one and only DVI port on card B to match its idiocy and it then shows it on card A.  (And not even the right port type on card A.)  It just totally flubs the port my monitor is plugged into.

Now maybe that bug is in no way related.  Or maybe that bug is the reason that I have to reboot my PC.  Don’t know.  Don’t really care.  The point is, starting your computer up twice each and every time gets really darned annoying!  You think people complain about the long boot time of Windows 7 on a hard drive now, try making them double that!  And it’s not automated either.  You have to boot it up and then manually restart it yourself!  You can’t just walk away and wait.

Now, you might ask, why don’t I just uninstall the bad driver and roll back to a prior version?  Oh, right, because the prior version of the drivers had a gaping security hole!  Seriously nVidia?  My choice is to either boot twice each and every time I start up my PC from cold, or to have a well-known security vulnerability on my PC allowing network attacks to escalate their privileges to super-user level access?  That’s a pretty crappy choice there, nVidia!  Get your freaking act together already!