Obama and Patents in the Apple-Samsung iPhone War

Christopher Carani, a partner at McAndrews, Held & Malloy, discusses President Barack Obama overturning an order barring shipments of some older iPhone models into the U.S. He speaks with Cory Johnson on Bloomberg Television's "Bloomberg West."

Two types of patents: stand essential patents, and non-standard essential patents.

Problems arise because if devices are to be interoperable, some type of patent is always going to be involved for the success of the device.

Federal Court Approves Warrantless Tracking of Cell Phones, XKeyscore Explained

Federal court approves warrantless tracking of cell phones. Brian Duggan, technologist for Open Technology Institute, weighs in on the new ruling and XKeyscore.

On Tuesday, the Fifth Court Circuit of Appeals ruled that law enforcement does not need a warrant to obtain your cell phone location information. Cell phone towers are able to track a mobile user's device and prior to this ruling, the information was only accessible with a warrant through the telecommunication companies.  The 2-1 decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is the third federal appeals court to decide the privacy issue. The 5th Circuit covers Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.

Google "Street View" Camera Trekker to Climb Mount Fuji

CNN's Diana Magnay and crew join Google team to map the climb to Mount Fuji.

A trekker will carry a 15-camera, 18 kg device that constantly takes photos to create a virtual tour of climbing Mount Fuji.

Mount Fuji is an active stratovolcano that last erupted in 1707–08, and is located on Honshu Island. Mount Fuji is the highest mountain in Japan at 3,776.24 m (12,389 ft).

Mount Fuji is one of Japan's "Three Holy Mountains"  along with Mount Tate and Mount Haku. Mount Fuji is considered a Special Place of Scenic Beauty, a Historic Site, and was added to the World Heritage List as a Cultural Site on June 22nd, 2013.

Two Networks Are Considering Pulling Their Broadcasts Off the Air Because of Aereo Antenna Farms

Besides Dish Network's ad-skipping Hopper DVR, there is a new threat to over-the-air television. Aereo. Aereo is a technology company based in New York City that allows subscribers to view live and time-shifted streams of over-the-air television on Internet-connected devices.

TV networks so far have been unable to get an injunction on the service.

Since October 2012, Aereo can be installed on Mac & PC using a compatible browser, and iOS devices including the iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch or Apple TV (2nd & 3rd Gen) via AirPlay.
A Roku video player can be used when one of the Apple mobile devices is also present.

As of April 2013, Aereo is only available in New York. The company has announced that it is coming soon to Chicago.

And now there is a threat to Aereo. It's called Filmon.com, which is already available in Chicago. Filmon.com includes CBS, NBC, ABC, CW and Fox.

Both services use antenna farms. Aereo is able to provide this service by leasing to each user an individual remote antenna. Thousands of them are stored in a data center in Brooklyn where it also houses its data servers.

FilmOn is an Internet based television provider owned by FilmOn.TV Networks Inc. FilmOn.TV Networks was founded by Alki David in 2006. FilmOn and Alki David have been involved in several legal issues over programming including the carriage of major U.S. broadcast channels, such as CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox. The legal issues resulted in requiring FilmOn to drop these channels in 2011, only to return in 2012 after appeals were lodged in Federal Court and FIlmOn launched its FilmOn Air X antenna farm.

News Corp President Chase Carey has mentioned the possibility that the media company could convert its Fox broadcast network "to a pay channel" to prevent its content being "stolen" by Aereo, he said, "is pirating our broadcast signal."

Another over the air network channel is also considering shutting down their over the air system and going "all cable."

See also ...

aereo.com

filmon.com

Activity Monitor: What Is Free, Wired, Active, Inactive, and Used Memory in RAM

Understanding Memory Use with Activity Monitor (from MacMost.com).

You can use Activity Monitor to see how your Mac is using memory. But what do free, active, inactive and wired mean? How about page ins and page outs? Plus, learn to use them to figure out if you need more memory.

"Free memory" is the amount of memory you have available in system memory or RAM.

"Wired memory" is the hardware memory that your computer needs to use at a minimum to operate.

"Active memory" is the amount of memory that is being used in RAM right now.

"Inactive memory" is an amount of memory that might have just been used

"Used memory" is the total of all used memory -- Wired, Active, and Inactive

"Free memory" plus "Used memory" equals the size of your installed RAM memory.

If you see a lot of "Page outs", that means that your RAM is overloaded and you computer needs to use a lot of Virtual Memory -- swapping memory on the hard drive.

"Page ins" is memory being used in RAM. Page outs -- memory from outside the System Memory or RAM memory.

"Swap used" is how much virtual memory is being used.

VM size is the disk space available in your hard drive. The amount can be used to swap memory as needed to run and application or process.

New Samsung Galaxy Makes Buz That Makes Apple Appear to Be Following

Samsung introduced its new smartphone, the Galaxy S-4 at New York's Radio City Music Hall on Thursday. The phone is seen as a contender to potentially become the top-selling smartphone.

Biggest news is Air Gesture -- touchless control of the screen.

Larger, sharper screen -- a 5-inch (130 mm) Pentile RG–BG Full HD Super AMOLED screen with 441 pixels per inch.

Front and Rear cameras can work simultaneously. The rear camera is a  a 13-megapixel back camera.


The Galaxy S4 uses Google's Android mobile operating system with its custom TouchWiz "Nature UX" graphical user interface (GUI).  The Galaxy S4version sold in the United States will contain a 1.9 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 APQ8064T processor.

First, it will be interesting to see how many complaints of accidental commands arising from use of this phone.  Imagine your fingers accidentally dialing someone at midnight when your putting your phone in the charger. Hmmm ... Apple iPhone 4s and now the Samsung Galaxy S4. It's a palindrome, sort of.

Official website ...

samsung.com/global/microsite/galaxys4

Chromebook Pixel High-End Laptop for Heavy Internet Users, but Not Photoshop Users

Google has unveiled a new touchscreen laptop computer. The Chromebook Pixel unveiled Thursday includes a nearly 13-inch display screen that responds to the touch or swipe of a finger.

Google introduced the Pixel on Thursday, a new version of its Chromebook laptops that store everything online without desktop software. A Wi-Fi model ($1,300) will ship next week, and a LTE cellular network version ($1450) is scheduled to ship in April.

Chromebooks initially hit the market at $250.

Google designed and manufactured the expensive version with a touch screen.

Insert a camera’s memory card, and photos upload to Google Plus. User can share photos with a click. Using Quickoffice, a start-up Google acquired last year, users can open, edit and send Word or Excel files created on the Chromebook.

Incentives
Google is offering one terabyte of Google Drive storage for three years with the Pixel.

Storage
32 GB solid state or 64 GB with the LTE model

Screen
12.85"
2560 x 1700 (239 ppi)
3:2 (1:5:1) aspect ratio
400 nit brightness
178° viewing angle
Multi-touch
Gorilla Glass (trademark for an alkali-aluminosilicate sheet glass manufactured by U.S. glassmaker Corning. Engineered for a combination of thinness, lightness, and damage-resistance)

Webcam, 720p HD, integrated
Touchpad, clickable, etched glass

3.5 mm combo headphone/mic jack
3 built-in microphones
Integrated DSP for noise cancellation
stereo speakers

Two USB 2.0 ports

Mini DisplayPort

SD/MMC card reader


802.11a/b/g/n
Dual-band (2.4 GHz / 5 GHz)
2×2 MIMO

Bluetooth 3.0

Battery, 59 Wh (5 hours active use)

1 TB Cloud storage for three years

100 MB/month free Verizon data transfer in LTE model with LTE modem

See also ...
Google search chromebook pixel

Can Apple TV Be Connected to Regular Monitor with HDMI Instead of HDTV Television?

A user can use an HDMI cable to directly connect an Apple TV to any monitor with an HDMI port. As of July 2012, OS X Mountain Lion permits wireless mirroring of a Mac, iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch to any Apple TV. The monitor must be HDCP ready to support the connection. HDCP or High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection is a form of digital copy protection developed by Intel Corporation designed to prevent copying of digital audio and video content as data travels across connections. Connections used include DisplayPort (DP), Digital Visual Interface (DVI), and High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI), as well as less popular, or now defunct, protocols like Gigabit Video Interface (GVIF), and Unified Display Interface (UDI).

 HDCP is commonly incorrectly called  High-Definition Copyright Protection.

New Facebook Graph Search Tool Is in Beta; Focuses on People, Photos (by Location or Topic), Places and Interests

Facebook has announced that it is unveiling and tool to find content and data on Facebook, known as Graph Search, but it is only in beta, and requires that users sign up for a waiting list. Graph search is immediately available to a limited number of Facebook users — in the “thousands, and will gradually extended to the rest.

Graph Search will appear as a bigger search bar at the top of each page. When a user starts typing to search for something, Graph Search will make suggestions of searches users area looking to perform. Once a user selects the search it will return results on a page that a user can further customize and filter (for things like specific timeframes).

Facebook programmers have been working on the new search feature for about a year. The first version  of Graph Search focuses on four main areas: people, photos (by location or topic), places and interests. The new search feature will facilitate searches of LinkedIn for jobs, Yelp for restaurants, Match for dates. Facebook has been collecting data on users, and is betting that friends will prefer recommendations from friends on restaurants, services and products, more than advice from a media food critic or a stranger on a message board. Initially the data mining that will be used come from users' pictures, likes, and check-ins, but not their status updates. Instagram photos will not initially be part of the Graph Search database.

For data outside of Facebook, Microsoft's Bing search engine will be resourced to help find information on the Internet.

Graph Search also potentially undermines the privacy protections in Facebook’s advertising model by indirectly reaching target population segments, which the American Civil Liberties Union believes can allow advertisers to easily identify Facebook users whose publicly-available data fits a specific profile.

Top 5 Windows 7 Tips from Dylan Combs: Speed Up Aero Peek, Run Command Prompt from Any Folder and More

Top 5 Tips For Windows 7 Optimization. Get the most out of your operating system with these and more tips.