Yesterday, Orientation ’12 began and the class of 2016 and their proud parents could be seen all around campus. I made a brief visit to the “Welcome Wagon”. LTS staff were busy helping the students by excluding their PDAs from Cisco NAC. I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of these devices that I saw. I also saw one student proudly declaring that she took care of the exclusion “first thing”. It would be interesting to study how the student behavior during the start of their College years translate to their ongoing academic work 🙂 Are those who filled out the checklist first, chose the Writing courses and first year seminars early the ones that are also submitting their assignments early? OK, just kidding and be assured that we are not tracking such data. I have two data points (our two boys) and I can tell you that there was absolutely no correlation between the initial enthusiasm and afterwards.

Olympics is over and the presidential elections are in full swing. As always, there are way too many things on the web to follow. I have restricted mine to a select few. I have many who I follow on twitter whose posts provide me a great list of filtered information. I have added Google Politics & Elections to one of my  Circles in Google Plus. I also follow Real Clear Politics and Five Thirty Eight by Nate Silver. I should say that Five Thirty Eight has become a bit more guarded and less exciting after it moved to NY Times. In 2008 it was a bit more exciting. Actually, in 2008, everything was exciting, especially around this time. Our older son decided to work for the Obama campaign and started in late August.

I am sure that last Friday’s verdict in favor of Apple and against Samsung would have been far more in the front pages, if it is not for the Republican National Convention and Hurricane Isaac. Frankly I was very surprised by the verdict on many counts. As has been discussed numerous times, many experts blame the patent law for this mess. For eg. Apple having a patent on rectangular phone is beyond ridicule. Would you buy a phone that is not rectangular? Does this mean that only Apple can make mobile phones or as a monopoly on rectangular phones, Apple can dictate what the license fee that the other manufacturers have to pay to Apple (and therefore pass it on to us the customers)? This article provides a balanced view of the possible long term outcomes. Intellectual property & patents is a hot topic beyond this and the confusing laws in the US and lack of international standards makes it extremely hard to operate.

I am a big fan of Apple and a user of Android operating system running on a Samsung Galaxy Skyrocket because I feel that it is my obligation to understand the various successful and emerging technologies. Based on what I have read about Steve Jobs’ remarks on going thermonuclear on Google for the grand theft, I see where this is coming from. As has been vetted many times over, Apple OS ideas germinated from a visit to Xerox PARC (which was sort of compensated for it). Apple’s current OS is UNIX, an open source operating system and though Apple licensed it (for pittance), here have been court battles over it. It is very clear that copying is rampant all around – be it in clothing, electronics, cars etc. Everyone does it with just a  slight twist to avoid  lawsuits. I guess this is where Samsung and the Droid OS may have failed! They probably should have made a rectangular phone with a slight protrusion at the top. Instead of pinch and zoom, they probably should have done three finger zoom.

Of course, all of this is driven by money. I am sure that the lawsuit will be appealed, more money wasted or that they will settle for big bucks and life will go on. But, this, amongst many others, illustrates the need for intellectual property laws to be clearer, while being fair to everyone concerned, recognize that the technologies are changing fast and access to content in unprecedented. And above all, we need these to be applicable all around the globe. Good Luck getting this done!

This is why I am a big fan of open source software, open access publishing and creative commons licensing. These collectively address the issue of affordable & fair access. These methods, combined with appropriate business models can result in desirable and well supported solutions at a reasonable price.

Our current model does not recognize and reward the innovators and content creators adequately. The bureaucrats and other middle persons tend to come in the way of the transaction between the content creator and the consumer, thereby bloating the price and introducing gimmicks such as bundling. Apple led the way through iTunes and now through iBooks to help the content creators create and sell their content directly to those who want to pay a reasonable price for it.  Linux and VMWare are two amongst many others (PGP, SSH etc.) other cases where open source software is still available to those who want to use them, but a supported version provides the comfort that many seek at a reasonable price. This is the reason why I like the Droid OS for mobile devices because it is open source, yet, others can monetize it by licensing it and implementing it as a supported platform.

Whether it is Apple or Google or Microsoft, I sure hope they all learn the lessons of AT&T and monopoly. Yes, these are publicly traded companies whose goal it is to generate revenue. But there are plenty of ways to do it without having to court over silly things like “I own the rectangular phone design” (Apple) or “No one else shall do internet search but us”  (Google) or, or… I am thinking hard about what would Microsoft say 🙂

Before it is late, I want to file for a patent for my idea of a middle finger gesture on the gesture based devices when things don’t work to your satisfaction or a thumbs down for those who are polite. I just checked and see that someone in a little town in South India called Papanasam stole my idea from one of my tweets and filed for patent! That gesture will be perfect if I run into them when I visit India this december.