Development by Davis: “Infographic: How patents hinder innovation” plus 5 more

Infographic: How patents hinder innovation
Examining comments: A podcast with Peter DePasquale
AMD and Nuvixa Bring New, Immersive Dimension to Telepresence
Android Apps Break the 50MB Barrier
AMD Amends Wafer Supply Agreement with GLOBALFOUNDRIES
Portal + Super Mario mashup Mari0 released

Infographic: How patents hinder innovation

Posted: 06 Mar 2012 06:00 AM PST

Patents may have been created to help encourage innovation, but instead they regularly hinder it. The US Patent Office, overwhelmed and underfunded, issues questionable patents every day. "Patent trolls" buy too many of these patents and then misuse the patent system to shake down companies big and small. Others still use patents to limit competition and impede access to new knowledge, tools, or other innovations.

Read more...

Examining comments: A podcast with Peter DePasquale

Posted: 06 May 2012 05:00 AM PDT

The SIGCSE community (ACM Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education) is fairly large and quite diverse. Computing educators from all across the world and all levels (K-16+) gather to discuss tools, techniques, and research that might inform our work as techers of computing.

At the intersection of tools and research lies the Comment Mentor (COMTOR) project, which is led by Peter DePasquale, an Associate Professor of Computer Science at The College of New Jersey. The COMTOR project combines Peter's passions at the intersection of computer science education research and the development of robust, distributed applications in the cloud.

Read more...

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

AMD and Nuvixa Bring New, Immersive Dimension to Telepresence

Posted: 06 Mar 2012 12:00 AM PST

AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced it has invested in Nuvixa, Inc., a developer of gesture-based video communication and presentation solutions, through AMD Ventures (formerly the AMD Fusion Fund program). Leveragi...

Android Apps Break the 50MB Barrier

Posted: 05 Mar 2012 07:09 PM PST

Android applications have historically been limited to a maximum size of 50MB. This works for most apps, and smaller is usually better — every megabyte you add makes it harder for your users to download and get started. However, some types of apps, like high-quality 3D interactive games, require more local resources.

So today, we're expanding the Android app size limit to 4GB.

The size of your APK file will still be limited to 50MB to ensure secure on-device storage, but you can now attach expansion files to your APK.

Each app can have two expansion files, each one up to 2GB, in whatever format you choose.
Android Market will host the files to save you the hassle and cost of file serving.
Users will see the total size of your app and all of the downloads before they install/purchase.

On most newer devices, when users download your app from Android Market, the expansion files will be downloaded automatically, and the refund period won't start until the expansion files are downloaded. On older devices, your app will download the expansion files the first time it runs, via a downloader library which we've provided below.

While you can use the two expansion files any way you wish, we recommend that one serve as the initial download and be rarely if ever updated; the second can be smaller and serve as a "patch carrier," getting versioned with each major release.

Helpful Resources

In order to make expansion file downloading as easy as possible for developers, we're providing sample code and libraries in the Android SDK Manager.

In the Google Market Licensing package, an updated License Verification Library (LVL). This minor update mostly adds the ability to obtain expansion file details from the licensing server.
From the Google Market APK Expansion package, the downloader service example. The library makes it relatively simple to implement a downloader service in your application that follows many of our best practices, including resuming downloads and displaying a progress notification.

Because many developers may not be used to working with one or two large files for all of their secondary content, the example code also includes support for using a Zip file as the secondary file. The Zip example implements a reasonable patching strategy that allows for the main expansion file to "patch" the APK and the patch file to "patch" both the APK and the main expansion file by searching for asset files in all three places, in the order patch->main->APK.

Expansion File Basics

Expansion files have a specific naming convention and are located in a specific place for each app. As expansion files are uploaded to the publisher site, they are assigned a version code based upon the version of the APK that they are associated with. The naming convention and location are as follows:

Location: <shared-storage>/Android/obb/<package-name>/
Filename: [main|patch].<expansion-version>.<package-name>.obb
Example: /sdcard/Android/obb/com.example.myapp/main.5.com.example.myapp.obb

Expansion files are stored in shared storage. Unlike APK files, they can be read by any application.

Downloading and Using the Expansion Files

When the primary activity for the app is created, it should check to make sure the expansion files are available. The downloader library provides helper functions (for example the "Helpers" class in the code below) to make this easy.

boolean expansionFilesDelivered() {     // get filename where main == true and version == 3     String fileName = Helpers.getExpansionAPKFileName(this, true, 3);     // does the file exist with FILE_SIZE?     if (!Helpers.doesFileExist(this, fileName, FILE_SIZE, false)) {         return false;     }     return true; }

If the file does not exist, fire up the downloader service with DownloaderClientMarshaller.startDownloadServiceIfRequired(). The downloader will perform an LVL check against the server. This check will deliver the names of the files, file sizes, and the file URLs.

Once that check has been completed, it will begin downloading the files. You don't have to use our download solution, but you might want to because we:

Include a notification UI that provides progress and estimated completion time in layouts customized for ICS and pre-ICS devices
Resume large files safely
Handle redirection with appropriate limits
Run in the background as a service
Pause and resume downloads when WiFi is not available

Enjoy! We can't wait to see what kinds of things developers do with this! For more information about how to use expansion files with your app, read the APK Expansion Files developer guide.

[This post wasn't actually written by anyone, but bashed out by a posse of engineering and product-management people. Heavy bashers included Dan Galpin, Ilya Firman, Andy Stadler, Michael Siliski, and Ellie Powers.]

AMD Amends Wafer Supply Agreement with GLOBALFOUNDRIES

Posted: 04 Mar 2012 12:00 AM PST

AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that it entered into an amendment to its Wafer Supply Agreement (WSA) with GLOBALFOUNDRIES Inc. In this amendment, AMD and GLOBALFOUNDRIES agreed to a negotiated wafer price mechanism for 2012. AMD also agreed to transfer its remaining ownership interest in GLOBALFOUNDRIES to GLOBALFOUNDRIES and, as a result, AM...

Portal + Super Mario mashup Mari0 released

Posted: 05 Mar 2012 09:00 AM PST

What happens when you bring together the joy of the past with the joy of the... well, more recent past? Mari0, a mashup of Portal and the original Super Mario Brothers.

Mario gets a portal gun and the game mechanics from Portal with four-player co-op in a scratch recreation of the Super Mario worlds. And if that's not enough, you can download extra mappacks and the level editor.

It's open source, free-as-in-beer, and available for Linux (as well as Windows and Mac).