While the press has been trumpeting the pending demise of the Blackberry Messaging Service in the US thanks to greedy patent lawyers clutching a dead man’s patents, a simple blog post that claims to hold the secret to the Blackberry’s survival has gone little-noticed. If true, it would appear that someone involved in the case has violated their non-disclosure agreement, and yet may work to quell the fears of Crackberry addicts everywhere.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, if you thought NTP/Blackberry mess was stupid and ridiculous, there appears to be more stupidity coming down the patent bureaucracy pipeline. Someone else is hoping that the The US Patent and Trademark Office will let another ridiculously abusive patent slip through the cracks. The company this time? Cingular. And what did they patent?

This: 🙂

Specifically:

The method and system described in the patent allows a user of a mobile phone (or other device) to select a displayable icon, such as an emoticon, that indicates the mood or emotion of the user or conveys other information independent of text. In some embodiments, the selected displayable icon is inserted into a text message or screen, such as an instant message, chat screen, or user text field.

So in other words, something like: 🙁

It’s important to note that a Patent has not been issued yet (though the application number is rumored to be US 2006/0015812 A1). I sincerely hope the USPTO doesn’t bungle this one up. There’s plenty of prior art.

Hey patent people! 🙄

Let’s pretend for a second that you are a big car afficionado, and the vehicle of your dreams is, say, a 1969 Shelby Mustang. And yet, your station in life causes you to be bestowed with a far less illustruous chariot… say for instance, a 1989 Plymouth Reliant (because, what with its estimated value of $425, if you can’t afford THAT car, well… start walkin’). Not the end of the world, but, if you get challenged to a street race, well, don’t expect the Reliant’s rated 89 HP to give you much of a boost.

Sure, if you can’t modify the car’s performance, you can try changing its appearance a bit. After all, nothing says faster faster burn u up with my l33t car OMG LOLZ! than every neon light, spoiler wing and ricer mod possible attached to your car. But some cars just don’t look great with gigantic aluminimum spoilers attached to their rears, or ground effects (though people HAVE tried to rice up Plymouth Reliants anyway, believe it or not).

So what’s left? Imitation performance sounds perhaps? Would a street racer really be intimidated by your old K-car clunker if it happened to sound unmistakeably like a turbocharged Pontiac GTO?

The creators of the upcoming VroomBox seem to think so:

VroomBox utilizes a powerful microprocessor to digitally recreate the sound of 15 different cars and fantasy vehicles, and play them through speakers under the car. It even includes special effects such as screeching tires and turbo blow-off valves that trigger automatically. And you can download more cars and effects from the web. Sounds and effects are controlled from a small faceplate with a backlit display that fits neatly on or under the dash.

Great. So even if your car is so old and tired that there’s no way you can burn up your tires on the road, this thing will sure make it sound liek you did. Yeah, that’s realistic.

The bad news: the VroomBozx is evidently still in development (as in still vaporware), though it’s promised that an actual production model will be available in early 2006.

So, years after Amy Fisher blows the face off the wife of her lover, they all decide to kiss and make up, and go on television. It’s amazing how money will just make everything a-okay, isn’t it?

NEW YORK (AP) _ More than a decade after 16-year-old Amy Fisher had a sexual relationship with a much-older car mechanic and shot his wife in the head, the onetime “Long Island Lolita” and Joey and Mary Jo Buttafuoco have agreed to appear together in a televised reunion.

All three have signed on for the appearance, which has yet to be sold to a network, television producer David Krieff told the New York Post for Monday editions.

Translation: They’re all hard up for cash, they want to cash in on something that happened 15 years ago, and none of the networks are whorish enough to come knocking and buying….yet. These people truly have no shame.

Adobe Labs is uncovering the wraps on its latest workflow piece: Project Lightroom. Releasing the program as a public beta through June 2006, the program is first available as a Mac version, with a Windows Beta release soon to follow. What does Lightroom do?

Adobe® Lightroom™ Beta is the efficient new way for professional photographers to import, select, develop, and showcase large volumes of digital images. So you can spend less time sorting and refining photographs, and more time actually shooting them. Its clean, elegant interface literally steps out of the way and lets you quickly view and work with the images you shot today, as well as the thousands of images that you will shoot over the course of your career. Because no two photographers work alike, Adobe Lightroom adapts to your workflow, not the other way around.

In a nutshell, this appears to be a far more powerful, professional and soon-to-be less secular version of Apple’s Aperture software. I feel though that both packages are aiming for the high-end, hard core digital photography afficionados, while most of the tools provided by each package will probably go over the heads of the average end user. For basic needs, Picasa might even do the job.