Monthly Archive:: October 2014

In September 2011, the two companies entered a seven-year cross-licensing agreement for mobile-related patents. The payments for the first year were made without fuss. In August 2013, Samsung told Microsoft that it had assessed the value of the royalties owed for the second year as over $1 billion. Payment of this fee was due in October, but Microsoft says that no payment was received until late November 2013. Redmond's complaint says that Samsung owes more than $6.9 million in interest fees for the late payment (per the terms of the original licensing agreement).

What changed between August and October? In September 2013, Microsoft announced that it was buying Nokia's Devices division. The software giant asserts that Samsung is both claiming that Nokia's devices are not covered by the cross-licensing deal - and hence violating Samsung's own patents - and that the Nokia purchase voids the licensing agreement in its entirety.

The #GamerGate hashtag is inextricably linked to campaigns of harassment and its proponents have been demonstrably manipulated by a small number of people who want to hurt others for fun. Until now it has had no major successes, but by giving in to its demands and pulling its advertising from Gamasutra, Intel has legitimized a movement that has shown itself to be anti-feminist, violently protectionist, and totally unwilling to share what it sees as its divine right to video games.

In short, while Apple's hardware continues to impress me, their software has gone downhill at a rapid pace. iPhoto is an unusable mess with the volume of photos I now have. Aperture has been discontinued and is badly lagging behind in terms of both performance and features. iTunes takes forever to launch, and is bloated mess of way too many features and functions. iCloud is still a mess that I wouldn't dream of storing my important data in. iOS 7 crashed so often that I became intimately familiar with the Apple logo that appeared every time it did. iOS 8 fixed the crashing, but introduced thousands of little paper cut like bugs. I used to install updates from Apple the second they came out, now I wait a few days to see if they are actually any good.

Microsoft dev here, the internal rumours are that early testing revealed just how many third party products that had code of the form

if(version.StartsWith("Windows 9"))
{ /* 95 and 98 */
} else {

and that this was the pragmatic solution to avoid that.