Displaying items by tag: API

Remember the days when browsing the internet was simple, all you had to worry about was clearing your cookies and browser history and you were fine. Ok, so it was never truly that simple, but you get my point. Now as internet surfers become more concerned about tracking and companies find new ways to follow you even more, things have gotten a bit crazy. Microsoft’s Edge wants to remember everything you do as does Chrome and Safari. This is presented as giving you a more complete and speedy internet experience, in reality it just creates a trove of data about you that can be used for good or bad.

The Google-Oracle fight has been going on for a long time now and has had a few ups and downs in the course of the case. The original premise of the case is that Google was able to speed up development through the reuse of nine (9) lines of code that Oracle claims are protected by copyright. One judge agreed that this was absurd, but his decision was thrown out on appeal. Now, the Department of Justice is throwing their two cents into the mix at the request of the Supreme Court. Their commentary is quite interesting…

If you have been on the internet at all the last few days you have probably seen all of the articles about how great DirectX 12 is and why it will be a game changer. To be fair the next version of DirectX is looking like it is a massive refinement of the API and one that should bring about some nice benefits to the gamer… the PC gamer. For years many game developers have not made full use of the features and options in the DirectX (DX) API simply because of the extra CPU, GPU and other types of power needed to push these enhancements around the board.

Although the concept of Virtual Reality (VR) is nothing new, there has always been something of a roadblock for this technology. That roadblock is money, if you do not have the money for the hardware and the programing APIs you are not going to develop for it. This is pretty much the fate of any technology that is stuck in the hands of a few large companies. Just look at 3D, we do not see 3D as more prevalent in gaming and movies because of cost.

In development it has always been a given that if you can code for a specific build of materials or specific hardware platform you can usually get more out of the application you are developing. Nowhere was this more evident than when RISC CPUS were on the market. At the time that DEC Alpha was king we saw a 667MHz CPU slamming 1GHz processors from both AMD and Intel. The reason for this was that the software was specifically coded to take advantage of that platform.

Microsoft will later this month finally announce some more details about the new release of the DirectX APIs. According to the official announcement, presentation of DirectX 12 is scheduled for 20th March at a conference of the Game Developers Conference (GDC).

Facebook has bought San Francisco startup, SportStream. SportStream created a service that is able analyze the content related to a sport or sports that appears on social networks.

Time for the Google news (much like many of our combined reports of Apple’s doings). This time we have a couple of things to talk about. The first is the penultimate decision in the Google Vs Oracle case, followed by a complaint by the RIAA about how little Google is doing to flight piracy and rounding things out with a complaint against Microsoft and Nokia in the EU for patent trolling. Sounds like a lot of fun so let’s get started.

Although we have reported on many patent trials and covered quite a few legal messes (Samsung and Apple come to mind). There are not really that many that we have felt very strongly about one way or the other. We have our opinions about all of them, but in the end most suits are about money and leverage so even the losers will end up getting concessions. However, the Oracle Vs. Google patent/copyright case was one that had us more than a little interested.

So the Jury in the Oracle V Google trial has reached a partial verdict. The headlines for this are all over the place ranging from Google found guilty to Google trial moves to the next step. As usual the truth is somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. In fact Google was found to have infringed on Copyright for the Java API, but not for Java Documentation. The Jury reached no conclusion on Google’s fair use claims or the claim that APIs cannot be copyrighted.