Archive for September, 2008
Patents: Oh, now this is disgusting
According to The Register, at IFA 2008, in Berlin, some good patent trolling took place. IFA stands for ‘Internationale Funkausstellung’ and is Europe’s largest consumer electronics fair. 69 companies were raided, which beats Cebit’s 51.
“Yes” you point out, “but it’s patent holders’ prerogative and, in fact, obligation, to enforce their patents.”
You are absolutely right but this is not what this is about. We are talking, here, about Italy-based Sisvel, which is one of those outfits that does not actually produce anything but maintains what they refer to as a patrimony. They mean, of course, that their business model consists of buying obscure patents and suing the hell out of everybody. More Sisvel fun here but feel free to Google them for yourself.
Now, what’s really aggravating is how these raids happen on suspicion of wrongdoing. If you are one of the raidees, your only option is to fight it in court, which isn’t really going to help with your current “boothless” situation. Cf. latter link.
Oh, and Sisvel have their own booth at IFA. And I thought that I had an evil neighbour.
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Google Chrome: an index of what developers need to know (good and bad)
For quite some time, some of us have heard a very persistent rumor about the new Google browser. Well, here it is. And by that I mean: now. Well, tomorrow. And when you see some of the technological pieces it incorporates, it is definitely months ahead of the other guys (Javascript, you are so sexy!)
You can find the official announcement here.
Philipp Lenssen, at Blogoscoped, does a good job of listing the visually appealing goodies offered by Chrome. He even scanned and posted the comic book he got in the mail.
Here is, for your convenience, a list of what’s exciting for developers (oh yeah, it’s open source!):
Each tab runs its own process. Why, in this day and age, should a modern application that will remain open for days or weeks, stick with a memory model close to that of dinosaurs like VxWorks?
It’s WebKit + the V8 JavaScript VM. With a JIT compiler and all the optimizations offered by a VM, we should start seeing JavaScript performance close to that of native languages. Unfortunately, the DOM is not mentioned. Ideally, all DOM manipulation should be also compiled (with the possibility of inlining, etc)…we will know more as soon as we run some tests.
V8 uses aggressive garbage collection. OK I was a bit dishonest in the previous bullet point. This is a bit less exciting than some might think. Yes, there is a cost with conservative collection, since the gc needs to go through the execution stack and identify pointers heuristically and it is impossible to keep track of actual space allocation. Oh, and no generational collection…so, wait, it’s great that we don’t do that, right?
Well, I do not think that it’s the cat’s meow the Google guys are claiming it to be. Precise pointer housekeeping means that your program may incur quite a dramatic overhead, which of course depends on your program’s structure. For instance, one of the advantages of garbage collection is to reduce the need for synchronization in multithreaded programs. Precise housekeeping, however, requires the re-introduction of safe points, which force the compiler to synchronize bits of code where it is safe to reclaim memory. This would explain why some existing benchmarks show the new JavaScript VMs as not performing so well when simply running dumb loops as opposed to performing lots of local allocations.
Tabs run in their own sandbox. That’s certainly a proven security model and it makes it very hard to meddle with another tab’s content. Note that plugins are exempt, however. I wonder if frames are sandboxed,because if they are this is going to break a great deal of pages, just like AIR does.
Google Gears comes standard. Well, it’s no surprise. But it certainly makes me wonder if I want to change the browser requirements for the professional applications I am working on. After all, it’s been proven that Gears can really help desktop-like applications scale more easily.
OK, that’s what I have for now.
Oh, just a last, non-technical comment: I hope that regular users do not read this page and take its content literally. It makes it look like scammers “send users to a nearly exact copy of their bank’s website” and shows a somewhat different URL. People need to be made aware that they could actually be sent to the VERY SAME link as their bank’s and still fall prey to a scammer, since it is possible to fake that link’s destination through DNS poisoning.
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