DevTopics » Software

New iPhone Application Tracks H1N1 Swine Flu Outbreaks

timm — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 13:08:52 +0000

There is a new free iPhone application available called “Outbreaks Near Me” that tracks and reports local outbreaks of infectious disease.

Researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston and the MIT Media Lab developed the application. The app combines the iPhone’s GPS with outbreak tracking data from HealthMap.org, a website that mines the Internet for information on outbreaks.

"If people know what’s happening around them, they might be more likely to take basic precautions," such as washing their hands and getting vaccinated, said HealthMap co-founder John S. Brownstein, an assistant professor at the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program.

Users can also submit their own outbreak reports and photos right from their own phones.

Other Flu Software
Stay informed with the Flu Report

Flu Software

timm — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:57:34 +0000

Influenza, commonly referred to as the flu, is an infectious disease caused by a virus that affects birds and mammals. The most common symptoms of the flu are chills, fever, sore throat, muscle pains, severe headache, coughing, weakness and general discomfort. In more serious cases, the flu can lead to pneumonia, which can be fatal, particularly for the young and the elderly.

There’s a lot of hype and concern now about the new H1N1 swine flu and the possibility for a global pandemic. It appears the swine flu is currently no worse than the regular flu, but health officials worry that the swine flu will reemerge with the autumn flu season even stronger than today.

If there’s a problem in the world, we can always count on one or more innovative computer scientists trying to solve the problem with software. Here’s a collection of software for analyzing and treating the flu:

Swine Flu Tracker for iPhone

Swine Flu Tracker tells you all you need to know about the new H1N1 swine flu, including the symptoms and facts about the disease. The app includes CDC alerts and can plot flu cases on a map so you can avoid infected areas of town and neighbors’ houses.

The iPhone app is still awaiting approval from Apple.

Swine Diagnosis

Swine Diagnosis for Palm handhelds helps pinpoint pig diseases in the field. It filters swine diseases according to age and clinical signs. A window shows pig vital signs.

Tap the age group of the affected pig, then tap on a series of clinical signs that you have observed, and a list of probable diseases will appear. Tap on a disease, and a brief description will be shown. A handy glossary is included.

Pandemic Flu Survival Guide

Don’t be caught unprepared in a flu pandemic. Know how to protect yourself and others when the disease strikes with the Pandemic Flu Survival Guide for mobile platforms.

Stephenson Strategies, a leading Homeland Security consulting firm, has compiled the most vital information drawn from more than 100 pages of the latest, authoritative information from respected sources, including the World Health Organization (WHO), the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the US PandemicFlu.gov website, and the UK Health Protection Agency, supplemented by material from other sources.

FluSurge 2.0

FluSurge is a spreadsheet-based model which provides hospital administrators and public health officials estimates of the surge in demand for hospital-based services during the next influenza pandemic. FluSurge estimates the number of hospitalizations and deaths of an influenza pandemic (whose length and virulence are determined by the user) and compares the number of persons hospitalized, the number of persons requiring ICU care, and the number of persons requiring ventilator support during a pandemic with existing hospital capacity.

FluAid 2.0

FluAid is a test version of software created by programmers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It is designed to assist state and local planners in preparing for the next influenza pandemic by providing estimates of potential impact specific to their locality. FluAid provides a range of estimates of flu impact in terms of deaths, hospitalizations, and outpatients visits due to pandemic influenza. The software cannot describe when or how people will become ill, nor how a pandemic may spread through a society over time.

QuickFlu

The QuickFlu JAVA applet allows health officials to calculate the average number of secondary flu infections created by an index case. The program provides a quick visualization that quantifies the consequences of anti-viral drugs on the spread of the disease.

After starting the tool, you will see a visualization of what will happen in a fully unprotected population if an influenza infection is introduced. Starting with a randomly chosen index case, it is shown how this person is infected, becomes infectious, and how many people are infected by this person. Move the sliders to change the contagiousness of the cases in the different stages and short-term effects of anti-viral drugs.

InfluSim

InfluSim allows health officials to predict the course of an influenza epidemic in a fully susceptible population (pandemic influenza). The following interventions are considered: treatment of cases, partial isolation of cases, and change of contact behavior in the population through behavioral changes such as cancelling events or closing schools. The program calculates for each day of the outbreak the number of infected individuals, the influenza-related number of work days lost, the number of outpatient visits, hospitalizations and drug doses prescribed, as well as the attached costs. The simulation is based on a deterministic model which is described by an interacting set of more than 1000 differential equations.

CompLearn Open Source

CompLearn is a free open-source software application that uses mathematical compression techniques to spot obscure patterns in a wide variety of data sources, from languages and music to biology. One of the authors of CompLearn, Rudi Cilibrasi, has applied this tool to a data set of 30 different H5N1 avian flu strains and was able to build a tree graph of the relationships between the different versions of the disease. His goal was to track which strains were going where, and when new strains pop up, match them to the nearest previously known strain in the hope that this can shed light on the epidemiology of the new virus.

Swine Flu Computer Virus

It’s ironic that the real swine flu virus can be a cover for a virtual computer virus. Phishers and spammers are exploiting fears about the swine flu outbreak to sell pharmaceutical products or steal sensitive information. The email scams have a subject line related to the swine flu and typically contain either a link to a phishing Web site or an attachment that contains malicious code.

One scam features a malicious Adobe PDF document titled “Swine influenza frequently asked questions.pdf”. The malicious PDF file is actually the “Bloodhound.Exploit.6” virus which installs virus code on the victim’s computer. Another scam involves a spam email with the subject line “Suspected Mexican flu toll hits 81.” Recipients are directed to a malicious website. (Story at CNET)

Veratect Analysis Software

Veratect is on the cutting edge when it comes to searching the Web for signs of pandemics. The company had a hunch two weeks ago — a week before the CDC and WHO — that something was up with the swine flu outbreak in Mexico. Veratect combines computer algorithms with human analysts to monitor online and offline sources for hints of disease outbreaks and civil unrest worldwide. Its software tracks and ranks events for severity and posts them on its website for paying clients who require early warnings.

The swine flu is a case in point. Veratect had posted a report to its clients on April 6 when there were an unusual number of respiratory illnesses in Veracruz, Mexico, the epicenter of the recent outbreak. Veratect also sent an email to the Centers of Disease Control on April 16 pointing to an outbreak of atypical pneumonia in Oaxaca state when officials issued an alert.

>> More Flu Info <<

100 Million Lines of Code in Your Car

timm — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 16:19:14 +0000

100 million lines of code in your car,
100 million lines of code,
If one of the lines develops a bug…

An article by IEEE indicates that a premium-class automobile “contains close to 100 million lines of software code.” The software executes on 70-100 microprocessor-based electronic control units (ECUs) networked throughout the body of your car. Even low-end cars have 30-50 ECUs embedded in the body, doors, dash, roof, trunk, seats, etc. Software controls just about everything from your brakes to the volume of your radio.

“Automobiles are no longer a battery, a distributor or alternator, and a carburetor; they are hugely modern in their complexity,” says Thomas Little, an electrical engineering professor at Boston University who is developing intelligent transportation systems. “The goals to save energy, reduce [emissions], and improve safety have driven the specialization and adoption of electronics in particular.”

And like its PC counterpart, software in automobiles continues to grow in size and complexity. For example, BMW has announced that its 2009 models will be equipped with BMW Assist system, which can notify emergency personnel not only where an accident occurred, but also the likelihood of passengers being severely injured.

The first production automotive microcomputer ECU was a single-function controller used for electronic spark timing in the 1977 General Motors Oldsmobile Toronado. In 1978, GM introduced the Cadillac Trip Computer, a modified Motorola 6802 microprocessor chip that displayed fuel, trip, and engine information. GM also used the chip to test how well a microprocessor could control critical system functions such as port fuel injection, electronic spark timing, and cruise control.

Read the IEEE article.

This story reminds me of an old joke…

If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive — but would run on only five percent of the roads.
The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single “This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation” warning light.
The airbag system would ask “Are you sure?” before deploying.
Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
You’d have to press the “Start” button to turn the engine off.

Apple Removes $1000 Do-Nothing Application from iPhone Store

timm — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 15:00:15 +0000

Apple pulled the plug on a controversial application sold in its new iTunes App Store. Last Thursday, Apple removed the $999.99 “I Am Rich” application created by developer Armin Heinrich. Apparently eight idiots with nothing better to do with their money had purchased the “glorified screensaver” before it was removed from sale.

The “I am Rich” application displays a glowing red gem on the iPhone screen for the sole purpose of proving that the iPhone’s owner is either rich or stupid or probably both. That’s literally all it does. Here is the product’s official description: “The red icon on your iPhone or iPod Touch always reminds you (and others when you show it to them) that you were able to afford this. It’s a work of art with no hidden function at all.”

German software developer Heinrich told the L.A. Times, “I have no idea why they did it and am not aware of any violation of the rules to sell software on the App Store.” He has yet to hear from Apple why it removed his application.

One possible reason is that one of the customers had complained very publicly on the Web: “I saw this app with a few friends and we jokingly clicked ‘buy’ thinking it was a joke, to see what would happen. . . . THIS IS NO JOKE. . . . DO NOT BUY THIS APP AND APPLE PLEASE REMOVE THIS FROM THE APP STORE.” Six people from the United States, one from France, and one from Germany purchased the application.

For anyone looking to buy the “I Am Rich” application, I can save you some money. Just send me a check for $500, and I will send you an “I Am Rich and Stupid” certificate in the mail.

Beerware Software License

timm — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:05:56 +0000

Beerware is software that is released under a very liberal license. The Beerware license provides the end user with the right to use a software program and its source code for any purpose. Should the user ever meet the program’s author, the user is encouraged to buy the author a beer.

The term was invented by John Bristor in 1987. Many variations have been implemented, including the short and sweet Beerware license by Poul-Henning Kamp:

/*
 * ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 * "THE BEER-WARE LICENSE" (Revision 42):
 *  wrote this file. As long as you retain this notice you
 * can do whatever you want with this stuff. If we meet some day, and you think
 * this stuff is worth it, you can buy me a beer in return Poul-Henning Kamp
 * ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 */

Source: Wikipedia

Protect Your Software with Patents, Copyrights and Trademarks

timm — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 15:47:34 +0000

You’ve spent thousands of hours developing a new software program. Now how do you ensure that your competitors don’t copy your program and steal your market? The sad truth is you can’t, as Apple discovered when Microsoft “borrowed” its graphical user interface to build Windows and corner the PC operating system market. But there are steps you can take to give you an edge over your competition and make it more difficult for others to copy or steal your work. You can protect your software with patents, copyrights and trademarks.

Patents

A patent grants an inventor the right to exclude others from making, using, importing or selling an invention in the United States. The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) issues patents, which are valid for 20 years from the date when the patent was filed, subject to payment of maintenance fees. U.S. patents are valid only within the United States, U.S. territories and possessions.

How Patents Protect Software

Patents can prevent a competitor from making or selling software that utilizes technology covered by your patent. Software companies often use patents to block competitors or extract licensing or royalty fees.

Computer software has only recently become patentable. Currently you can patent computer software, data structures and business methods in the United States. The invention must be sufficiently different from what has been used or described before such that it is “nonobvious to a person having ordinary skill in the area of technology related to the invention.”

How to Obtain a Patent

You must file for a patent within one year of the date your invention was used or sold publicly in this country. You are strongly encouraged to hire a qualified patent attorney to prepare and file your patent. Patents typically cost between $5,000-$10,000 to obtain and several thousand dollars more to maintain. It usually takes several months to prepare a patent, then 1-2 years for the patent office to review and approve the patent.

To obtain a patent:

Perform preliminary patentability search. Because of the significant expense in securing a patent, it’s wise to ensure your invention is novel and there is no “prior art.” This will cost between $500-$1,000. You can do this yourself or hire an attorney. A good place to start is the USPTO Patent Database.
Prepare the patent application. This includes an abstract, detailed description, claims and supporting drawings. This is a difficult task and typically should be performed by an experienced patent attorney. You can save some money by initially preparing the documents yourself, but you should have a patent attorney review your application thoroughly before filing. Cost will range from $2,000-$7,000 or more, depending on the complexity of the patent.
File the patent with the USPTO. This can be done online or via express mail. Filing fee is $355.
Amend the patent as needed. After you file the patent application, you enter the “prosecution phase” during which the USPTO may ask for changes or additional information. It’s not unusual for the USPTO to require 2-3 amendments costing $500-$2,000 each.
Issue the final patent. After the prosecution phase, the USPTO will issue a Notice of Allowance. At this point, you must submit formal patent drawings to replace your original informal drawings, finalize the application, and pay a $685 issue fee.
After your patent is granted, you must pay maintenance fees 3.5, 7.5, and 11.5 years after the grant date. These fees range from $465 to $3,910 depending on patent age and company size.

For More Information

Copyrights

A copyright grants the owner the exclusive right to reproduce the copyrighted work, prepare derivative works, distribute copies of the copyrighted work, and display the copyrighted work publicly. Copyrights apply to “original works of authorship” including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works, both published and unpublished. The Copyright Office of the Library of Congress issues copyrights, which are typically valid for the life of the owner plus 70 years.

How Copyrights Protect Software

Copyrights can prevent a competitor from replicating your software program, documentation and code. This includes the structure, sequence, organization and “look and feel” of a program. However, copyrights protect only the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. Copyrights do not protect program logic, algorithms, systems, methods, concepts, or output layouts.

How to Obtain a Copyright

Your software, code and documentation is automatically copyrighted the moment you publish it. However, there are advantages to formally registering a copyright:

Establishes a public record of the copyright,
Establishes prima facie evidence of the copyright (if filed within 5 years of publication),
Allows you to sue for copyright infringement,
Allows you to recover statutory damages and attorney fees in court (only if you register the copyright within 3 months of publication; otherwise, you can only recover actual damages), and
Enables the U.S. Customs Service to prevent importation of infringing copies.

To obtain a copyright:

Complete copyright application Form TX.
Include the filing fee (typically $45) and one copy of the material to be copyrighted.
Send to: Library of Congress, Copyright Office, 101 Independence Avenue SE, Washington, DC 20559-6000.

For More Information

Trademarks

A trademark grants the owner the exclusive use of a word, name or symbol (mark) to describe a product and distinguish it from other products. A service mark is a trademark for services. The USPTO issues trademarks, which are valid potentially forever, provided the owner continues to use the trademark and comply with renewal requirements. However, if the owner stops using the trademark for three years or more, this is considered “abandonment” and may result in losing the trademark.

How Trademarks Protect Software

Trademarks can protect the name of a software company, its products and taglines, and prevent competitors from using similar names. Trademarks protect software brands, but not the software or code itself.

How to Obtain a Trademark

You can claim a trademark simply by adding “TM” to a name. But obtaining a federally registered trademark has several advantages:

Serves as public notice of your mark ownership and enables you to use the ® symbol,
Provides a legal presumption of your ownership nationwide, and
Grants you the exclusive right to use the mark.

Obtaining a trademark is fairly easy:

Choose one or more marks to register. These names should uniquely describe your company or product(s) and not be confusing with other registered trademarks.
Search the trademark database to ensure that nobody is currently using your mark. You can also hire a lawyer to perform a more thorough search including unregistered trademarks, but this is often unnecessary unless your mark is close to an existing trademark or in some dispute.
File your trademark application online and pay by credit card or electronic funds transfer. You can also file by regular mail. Fees range from $75 to $310 or more, depending on company size and other factors.

For More Information

Software Piracy Mixed Bag

timm — Fri, 16 May 2008 15:57:00 +0000

Although PC software piracy declined in many countries in 2007, piracy increased in fast-growing PC markets, resulting in an overall rise of piracy from 35% to 38%, and dollar losses that increased by $8 billion to nearly $48 billion. The annual study was conducted by IDC and released by the Business Software Alliance (BSA).

“We are making much-needed progress in the battle against PC software piracy, and that’s good news for governments, end users, businesses, and the industry,” said BSA President and CEO Robert Holleyman. “The battleground is now shifting, however, to emerging markets where many of our collective challenges remain.”

Software piracy has a negative effect on more than just the software industry. It also harms local resellers and services firms, lowers government tax revenues, and increases the risk of cyber crime and security problems. A recent IDC study found that reducing software piracy by ten percentage points over four years would deliver billions in economic growth and generate hundreds of thousands of new jobs.

The Numbers

The three lowest-piracy countries were the United States (20%), Luxembourg (21%), and New Zealand (22%). The three highest-piracy countries were Armenia (93%), Bangladesh (92%), and Azerbaijan (92%). Piracy rates dropped slightly in many low-piracy markets which have had stagnant rates for years, including the United States (-1%) and United Kingdom (-1%).

Russia showed the best improvement with a one-year drop of seven points to 73%, and a five-year drop of 14 points. Russia’s piracy rate is still high but decreasing quickly as a result of legalization programs, government engagement and enforcement, user education, and an improved economy.

Piracy Factors

According to the BSA, the following market factors increase piracy rates:

Fast growth in the consumer and small business sectors, which are the hardest sectors to lower piracy
Expanded Internet and broadband access, especially in emerging markets, makes it easier to pirate and share software

The following market factors decrease piracy rates:

Increasing globalization, especially in emerging markets
Anti-piracy technologies such as digital rights management (DRM)
New software distribution models such as software-as-a-service (SAAS)

Blueprint to Reduce Piracy

The BSA has developed a five-point “blueprint” to reduce software piracy:

Increase public education and awareness of the value of intellectual property and the risks of using unlicensed software.
Update national copyright laws to implement World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) obligations in order to enable better and more effective enforcement against digital and online piracy.
Create strong enforcement mechanisms as required by the World Trade Organization (WTO) Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPS), including tough anti-piracy laws.
Dedicate significant government resources to the problem, including national IP enforcement units, cross-border cooperation, and training for local officers and judiciary officials.
Lead by example by implementing software management policies and requiring the public sector to use only legitimate software.

Top 10 Software Innovators of All Time

timm — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:19:19 +0000

To be a “most important” innovation, an innovation has to be an idea that is very widely used and is critically important where it applies. – David A. Wheeler

It’s not easy choosing the best innovators in an industry defined by innovation. The nature of software is such that the technologies, systems and products completely refresh every decade or so. The triumphant invention of just 10 years ago is now considered “legacy” or even obsolete. So making a lasting impression in the software business is a tough task indeed.

Following is my list of the top 10 software innovators of all time. Inclusion on this list doesn’t mean the person came up with every idea or wrote every byte of code. Rather, these are the people whose leadership, ideas, designs and products propelled the software industry forward by leaps and bounds. Their innovations affect us greatly even today.

10. Dan Bricklin – VisiCalc

Dan Bricklin was co-creator of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet software available for personal computers. He received the Grace Hopper Award in 1981 for VisiCalc. He also founded Trellix, a website software company now owned by Web.com, and is founder and president of Software Garden.

VisiCalc was the first serious, mainstream business program for the IBM personal computer. It signaled the coming shift from large mainframes to small PCs, proving these personal computers could indeed be used for business. Many of the first IBM PCs were purchased just to run VisiCalc. Eventually Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Excel squashed VisiCalc, and unfortunately Bricklin never profited greatly from his invention.

9. Larry Ellison – Oracle

Larry Ellison founded Oracle in 1977 with $2000 of his own money. Oracle published the first commercially-available relational database and essentially launched the database market. Today, Oracle is the world’s leading supplier of database software and the second largest independent software company with nearly $10 billion in annual revenue. Oracle recently acquired PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems and Hyperion.

Ellison is living proof that business sense is an innate gift, not something to be gleaned from academic textbooks. A college dropout, Ellison is now a multi-billionaire renowned for his business sense, drive and ambition.

8. Shawn Fanning – Napster

In 1998, Shawn Fanning created Napster, the first massively popular peer-to-peer file sharing system. Fanning appeared on the cover of Wired magazine and quickly rose to fame. Napster peaked in 2001 with 26 million users worldwide. However, Napster also became the target of several music industry lawsuits, which ultimately killed the service. Since 2002, Roxio has owned the Napster name, which it used to rebrand its PressPlay music service.

Napster forever changed the entertainment business. By providing an enormous selection of free music to download, it enabled people to obtain just the music hits, effectively demoting the album. Napster also made it easy for music enthusiasts to download songs that were otherwise difficult to obtain, such as older music, unreleased recordings, and concert bootlegs. The music industry is still struggling to recover from the impact of Napster and peer-to-peer file sharing.

7. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen – YouTube

Chad Hurley and Steve Chen founded YouTube, a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. Google purchased YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion in Google stock. In January 2008, nearly 79 million users watched over 3 billion videos on YouTube. Currently YouTube hosts about 83.4 million unique videos and 3.75 million user channels. YouTube consumes more Internet bandwidth today than was used by the entire Internet in 2000.

YouTube has become a global hub of self-expression. It was one of the main factors for Time magazine’s declaration of “you” as the “Person of the Year” in 2006. It allows you to “wrest power from the few and help one another for nothing.” This will “not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.” You are no longer just receiving the news produced by media, but you are creating your own news and becoming the hero in your own movies.

6. Linus Torvalds – Linux

Linus Torvalds is a Finnish software engineer who initiated development of the Linux kernel. At the time, the GNU Project had created many of the components necessary for a free software operating system but lacked a solid kernel. The result is Linux, the world’s most popular operating system that’s not Windows.

Torvalds wrote about 2% of the Linux kernel himself, which is significant, given there are thousands of contributors to the open source operating system. Today Torvalds is the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel. Torvalds owns the “Linux” trademark and manages the non-profit organization Linux International.

5. Marc Andreessen – Netscape

Marc Andreessen was the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape Communications. AOL acquired Netscape in 1999 for $4.2 billion and made Andreessen its Chief Technology Officer. Andreessen was also the co-founder and chairman of software company Opsware (originally Loudcloud) when it was acquired by Hewlett-Packard. Currently he is co-founder of Ning, a company that provides a platform for social-networking websites.

Andreessen was 23 years old when he built the browser that launched the World Wide Web. The Netscape $2 billion IPO in 1995 propelled Andreessen into the spotlight and on the cover of Time magazine. Andreessen became the “poster-boy wunderkind of the Internet bubble generation: young, twenty-something, high-tech, ambitious, and worth millions (or billions) of dollars practically overnight.” (wiki)

4. Larry Page and Sergey Brin – Google

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Ph.D. students at Stanford, invented Google in 1996 as a research project. The Google website launched in 1997, and by the end of 1998 it had indexed about 60 million web pages. In 2000, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords and launched the pay-per-click model, until then a rarity in advertising. Google launched its IPO in 2004, raising $1.67 billion and giving it a market capitalization of $23 billion, making Page and Brin instant billionaires.

Today Google has a market cap of $180 billion and owns 70% of web searches. Google performs nearly 6 billion web searches each month. Google has also become a verb in popular lexicon. If there’s anything you need to know, you “Google it.”

3. Steve Jobs – Apple, Pixar

Steve Jobs is the CEO, chairman and co-founder of Apple Inc., and is the founder and former CEO of Pixar Animation Studios. In fiscal 2007, Apple had worldwide sales of $24 billion. Apple’s iPod and iTunes dominate the portable and online music markets with nearly 80% market share. The Apple Macintosh owns 8% of the personal computer market and provides an effective counter-weight to the dominance of Microsoft Windows. Pixar led the surge of software-animated feature films, including Toy Story and Finding Nemo, resulting in eight academy awards. The Walt Disney Company purchased Pixar from Jobs in 2006 for $7.4 billion.

Jobs “contributed greatly to the myths of the quirky, individualistic Silicon Valley entrepreneur, emphasizing the importance of design while understanding the crucial role aesthetics play in public appeal. His work driving forward the development of products that are both functional and elegant has earned him a devoted following.” (wiki)

2. Tim Berners-Lee – World Wide Web

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is an English developer who invented the World Wide Web in March 1989. Berners-Lee published the first website on August 6, 1991. The site provided an explanation about what the World Wide Web was, how to use a web browser, and how to set up a web server. Berners-Lee made his idea freely available, with no patent or royalties due. In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The W3C declared their standards must be based on royalty-free technology so they can be easily adopted by anyone.

Berners-Lee once said: “I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and — ta-da! — the World Wide Web.” The World Wide Web is one of the most important communication inventions in history, providing a standard platform for global communications and commerce. Today there are over 100 million websites and 45 billion web pages.

1. Bill Gates – Microsoft

Bill Gates is co-founder and chairman of Microsoft, the world’s largest software company with 79,000 employees in 102 countries and $51 billion in annual sales. More than 90% of personal computers use the Microsoft Windows operating system, and nearly 50% of web servers run Microsoft software. Microsoft also dabbles in cable TV, Internet portals, computer hardware, and gaming with the XBox. Microsoft is currently in process to acquire Yahoo.

Gates, the world’s third richest man, is leaving Microsoft in July to become a full-time philanthropist. His Gates Foundation is the largest in the world with an endowment of $38 billion.

Say what you will about Microsoft, but kudos to the man whose company delivered a world-dominant computing platform, offering software entrepreneurs a market 600 million strong and expected to hit a billion by 2010. When there is that much attention and opportunity focused in one place, we will continue to see incredible advances in software and hardware that fuel Moore’s Law and drive our information society.

So who would appear on your list of Top 10 Software Innovators? Please comment below.

Brief History of Software Patents

timm — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:56:29 +0000

A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a government to an inventor for a fixed period of time in exchange for disclosure of an invention. The patent enables the inventor to exclude others from making, using, selling or importing the invention. (wiki)

History of Patents

Evidence suggests the ancient Greeks were the first society to grant special rights to inventors. Italy awarded the first patent in 1421 and passed the first patent law in 1474.

In America, the early colonies granted a few inventors “monopolies” to produce and sell their inventions starting in 1646. James Madison helped create “The Patent and Copyright Clause” of the US Constitution in 1788:

The Congress shall have power . . . to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writing and discoveries.

The U.S. Patent Commission was created in 1790 and run by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. It granted the first patent on July 30, 1790 to Samuel Hopkins of Philadelphia for a method of producing potash, an essential ingredient used in making soap, glass and gunpowder. (wiki)

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) was established in 1903 as one of 15 executive departments of the U.S. government. It is headed by the Secretary of Commerce, who is appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. (source)

1970s and Before: No Software Patents

The USPTO originally refused to grant patents for computer software. In the 1970s, the USPTO would deny a patent if the invention “utilized a calculation made by a computer” (source). The rationale was that patents could be granted only for “processes, machines, articles of manufacture, and compositions of matter” and not for “scientific truths or mathematical expressions of it.” The USPTO viewed software as mathematical algorithms–not processes or machines–and hence granted no software patents.

1980s: Software Patentable as Part of Process/Machine

In 1981, the U.S. Supreme Court forced the USPTO to change its position on software patents. Ruling on the case of Diamond v. Diehr, the Supreme Court determined that the execution of a process controlled by software was patentable. In that case, the invention was a method for heating rubber so that it could be “cured.” The novel part of the invention was a computer program that determined the optimum heating times. So even though the only novel feature was software, since it was included in an otherwise patentable invention, the entire invention was ruled patentable. (source)

After 1981, there was great confusion among the USPTO and inventors trying to determine whether each invention was solely a mathematical algorithm or in fact a patentable invention that contained algorithms. What patent attorneys quickly discovered was that software could indeed be patented as long as it was combined with another patentable process or machine, even if the software was the only thing new or novel about the invention.

1990s: Software Patentable

In the early ’90s, the Federal Circuit (one step below the Supreme Court) attempted to clarify this issue and ruled that the invention as a whole should be examined. If the invention is solely a mathematical algorithm (such as converting decimal to binary numbers), then the invention is not patentable. However, if the invention uses algorithms that manipulate concrete, real-world values (such as analyzing seismic measurements to predict earthquakes), then the invention is a process describing those real-world concepts and hence is patentable.

In 1998, the Federal Circuit issued its State Street Bank & Trust v. Signature Financial Group decision, which further clarified the patentability of computer software in the United States. In this case, Signature Financial had obtained a patent on a “Hub and Spoke” method of running mutual funds. State Street Bank asked the court to declare this invention unpatentable as a mere mathematical algorithm or business method. The Federal Circuit rejected the arguments and upheld the patent by explicitly stating that business methods can form patentable subject matter. (source)

Today: Anything Goes

After the State Street decision, there is little doubt that computer software, data structures and business methods are patentable in the United States. As a result, the number of software patents has exploded with over 325,000 registered software patents and more than 40,000 new software patents approved in 2006 alone.

101 More Great Computer Quotes

timm — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 13:33:34 +0000

In response to my original article, “101 Great Computer Programming Quotes,” José M. Aguilar doubled the fun with “101 More Great Computer Quotes,” which was translated, edited and republished here by Timm Martin (and Google Translator) with permission from Mr. Aguilar.

Computing

“I do not fear computers. I fear lack of them.”
– Isaac Asimov
“A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.”
– Emo Philips
“Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.”
– Edsger W. Dijkstra
“The computer was born to solve problems that did not exist before.”
– Bill Gates
“Software is like entropy: It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics; i.e., it always increases.”
– Norman Augustine
“Software is a gas; it expands to fill its container.”
– Nathan Myhrvold
“All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you can’t get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a hammer.”
– IBM Manual, 1925
“Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.”
– Alan Bennett
“Physics is the universe’s operating system.”
– Steven R Garman
“It’s hardware that makes a machine fast. It’s software that makes a fast machine slow.”
– Craig Bruce

Knowledge

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”
– Albert Einstein
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
– Stephen Hawking
“The more you know, the more you realize you know nothing.”
– Socrates
“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.”
– Benjamin Franklin
“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.”
– Confucius
“If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
“Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.”
– Mitchell Kapor

Users

“If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.”
– Linus Torvalds
“From a programmer’s point of view, the user is a peripheral that types when you issue a read request.”
– P. Williams
“Where is the ‘any’ key?”
– Homer Simpson, in response to the message, “Press any key”
“Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind.”
– Donald Knuth
“There is only one problem with common sense; it’s not very common.”
– Milt Bryce
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
– Bill Gates
“Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.”
– Donald E. Knuth

Internet

“The Internet? We are not interested in it.”
– Bill Gates, 1993
“The best way to get accurate information on Usenet is to post something wrong and wait for corrections.”
– Matthew Austern

Professionals

“The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That’s where we come in; we’re computer professionals. We cause accidents.”
– Nathaniel Borenstein
“Pessimists, we’re told, look at a glass containing 50% air and 50% water and see it as half empty. Optimists, in contrast, see it as half full. Engineers, of course, understand the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.”
– Bob Lewis
“In a room full of top software designers, if two agree on the same thing, that’s a majority.”
– Bill Curtis
“It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.”
– Nathaniel S. Borenstein
“Mostly, when you see programmers, they aren’t doing anything. One of the attractive things about programmers is that you cannot tell whether or not they are working simply by looking at them. Very often they’re sitting there seemingly drinking coffee and gossiping, or just staring into space. What the programmer is trying to do is get a handle on all the individual and unrelated ideas that are scampering around in his head.”
– Charles M. Strauss
“If you think you are worth what you know, you are very wrong. Your knowledge today does not have much value beyond a couple of years. Your value is what you can learn and how easily you can adapt to the changes this profession brings so often.”
– Jose M. Aguilar

Programming

“Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.”
– Abelson and Sussman
“Commenting your code is like cleaning your bathroom — you never want to do it, but it really does create a more pleasant experience for you and your guests.”
– Ryan Campbell
“We have to stop optimizing for programmers and start optimizing for users.”
– Jeff Atwood
“Low-level programming is good for the programmer’s soul.”
– John Carmack
“It’s OK to figure out murder mysteries, but you shouldn’t need to figure out code. You should be able to read it.”
– Steve McConnell
“If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as ‘lines produced’ but as ‘lines spent.’”
– Edsger Dijkstra
“Programming can be fun, so can cryptography; however they should not be combined.”
– Kreitzberg and Shneiderman
“Before software should be reusable, it should be usable.”
– Ralph Johnson
“If you automate a mess, you get an automated mess.”
– Rod Michael
“Looking at code you wrote more than two weeks ago is like looking at code you are seeing for the first time.”
– Dan Hurvitz
“It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.”
– Alan Perlis
“Less than 10% of the code has to do with the ostensible purpose of the system; the rest deals with input-output, data validation, data structure maintenance, and other housekeeping.”
– Mary Shaw
“If you have a procedure with ten parameters, you probably missed some.”
– Alan Perlis
“How rare it is that maintaining someone else’s code is akin to entering a beautifully designed building, which you admire as you walk around and plan how to add a wing or do some redecorating. More often, maintaining someone else’s code is like being thrown headlong into a big pile of slimy, smelly garbage.”
– Bill Venners
“Code generation, like drinking alcohol, is good in moderation.”
– Alex Lowe

Development

“Simplicity, carried to the extreme, becomes elegance.”
– Jon Franklin
“A program is never less than 90% complete, and never more than 95% complete.”
– Terry Baker
“When you are stuck in a traffic jam with a Porsche, all you do is burn more gas in idle. Scalability is about building wider roads, not about building faster cars.”
– Steve Swartz
“Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design — designing too early what a program should do.”
– Paul Graham
“Programming without an overall architecture or design in mind is like exploring a cave with only a flashlight: You don’t know where you’ve been, you don’t know where you’re going, and you don’t know quite where you are.”
– Danny Thorpe
“The best way to predict the future is to implement it.”
– David Heinemeier Hansson
“We need above all to know about changes; no one wants or needs to be reminded 16 hours a day that his shoes are on.”
– David Hubel
“On two occasions I have been asked, ‘If you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”
– Charles Babbage
“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
– Albert Einstein
“Today, most software exists, not to solve a problem, but to interface with other software.”
– IO Angell
“Good specifications will always improve programmer productivity far better than any programming tool or technique.”
– Milt Bryce
“The difference between theory and practice is that in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.”
– Richard Moore

Quality

“Don’t document the problem, fix it.”
– Atli Björgvin Oddsson
“As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications.”
– Dave Parnas
“If the code and the comments do not match, possibly both are incorrect.”
– Norm Schryer
“I think it’s a new feature. Don’t tell anyone it was an accident.”
– Larry Wall
“If you don’t handle [exceptions], we shut your application down. That dramatically increases the reliability of the system.”
– Anders Hejlsberg
“When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code.”
– Richard Pattis
“In a software project team of 10, there are probably 3 people who produce enough defects to make them net negative producers.”
– Gordon Schulmeyer
“I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.”
– Alan Perlis
“Program testing can be a very effective way to show the presence of bugs, but is hopelessly inadequate for showing their absence.”
– Edsger Dijkstra

Programming Languages

“Manually managing blocks of memory in C is like juggling bars of soap in a prison shower: It’s all fun and games until you forget about one of them.”
– anonymous Usenet user
“There’s no obfuscated Perl contest because it’s pointless.”
– Jeff Polk
“Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.”
– Alan Kay
“There are only two things wrong with C++: The initial concept and the implementation.”
– Bertrand Meyer
“It was a joke, okay? If we thought it would actually be used, we wouldn’t have written it!”
– Mark Andreesen, speaking of the HTML tag BLINK
“Web Services are like teenage sex. Everyone is talking about doing it, and those who are actually doing it are doing it badly.”
– Michelle Bustamante
“Perl: The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.”
– Keith Bostic
“I didn’t work hard to make Ruby perfect for everyone, because you feel differently from me. No language can be perfect for everyone. I tried to make Ruby perfect for me, but maybe it’s not perfect for you. The perfect language for Guido van Rossum is probably Python.”
– Yukihiro Matsumoto, aka “Matz”, creator of Ruby
“XML is not a language in the sense of a programming language any more than sketches on a napkin are a language.”
– Charles Simonyi
“BASIC is to computer programming as QWERTY is to typing.”
– Seymour Papert
“It has been discovered that C++ provides a remarkable facility for concealing the trivial details of a program — such as where its bugs are.”
– David Keppel
“UNIX is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity.”
– Dennis Ritchie
“Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I’ll use regular expressions.’ Now they have two problems.”
– Jamie Zawinski

Security

“I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.”
– Stephen Hawking
“The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards.”
– Gene Spafford
“Being able to break security doesn’t make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.”
– Eric Raymond
“Companies spend millions of dollars on firewalls, encryption and secure access devices, and it’s money wasted, because none of these measures address the weakest link in the security chain.”
– Kevin Mitnick
“If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don’t understand the problems and you don’t understand the technology.”
– Bruce Schneier
“Hoaxes use weaknesses in human behavior to ensure they are replicated and distributed. In other words, hoaxes prey on the Human Operating System.”
– Stewart Kirkpatrick
“Passwords are like underwear: you don’t let people see it, you should change it very often, and you shouldn’t share it with strangers.”
– Chris Pirillo

Companies

“I am not out to destroy Microsoft, that would be a completely unintended side effect.”
– Linus Torvalds
“Yes, we have a dress code. You have to dress.”
– Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems
“In an information economy, the most valuable company assets drive themselves home every night. If they are not treated well, they do not return the next morning.”
– Peter Chang
“It’s better to wait for a productive programmer to become available than it is to wait for the first available programmer to become productive.”
– Steve McConnell
“I’m not one of those who think Bill Gates is the devil. I simply suspect that if Microsoft ever met up with the devil, it wouldn’t need an interpreter.”
– Nicholas Petreley

Predictions

“Two years from now, spam will be solved.”
– Bill Gates, 2004
“The problem of viruses is temporary and will be solved in two years.”
– John McAfee, 1988
“Computer viruses are an urban legend.”
– Peter Norton, 1988
“In 2031, lawyers will be commonly a part of most development teams.”
– Grady Booch
“I don’t know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran.”
– CA Hoare, 1982
“In the future, computers may weigh no more than 1.5 tonnes.”
– Popular mechanics, 1949
“I see little commercial potential for the Internet for at least ten years.”
– Bill Gates, 1994
“Before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia.”
– Arthur Summerfield, 1959, United States Post