News.Com and Reuters are reporting that the Delaware Supreme Court has finally ruled in the Qualcomm v. TI suit. Here is the backstory…
In early 2000, TI and Qualcomm entered an agreeement whereby TI could license the Qualcomm CDMA patents. As a result, TI became one of the largest manufacturers of CDMA chipsets. In July 2003, Qualcomm sued TI for breech of contract. Many people (including some analysts at Deutsche Bank) felt that this suit was an effort to freeze TI out of the chipset market. In response to the lawsuit, TI senior vice president Joseph Hubach noted the intention of TI to “level the playing field” for CDMA technology.
Well, after nearly two years, the suit has finally been resolved. Today, the Delaware Supreme Court handed Qualcomm the bitter news that TI had not violated its agreement. Does this mean that the CDMA marketplace is open? Hardly. But it does mean that TI executives and shareholders have been vindicated. With this victory, TI will have the latitude to agressively market its competitive CDMA chipsets. Who knows. Maybe CDMA technology will become more cost effective. Then again, maybe not. Right now, I’m cautiously optimistic. And I’m also waiting to hear the response from Qualcomm.
-CyclingRoo-
Note: I am employed by one of the largest CDMA carriers in North America. Nevertheless, these comments represent the opinion of Lorin Olsen and in no way represent the views of my employer.

Yesterday, I finally got Greasemonkey to work on the Firefox Deer Park Alpha. And today, it comes in handy. Stefan Magdalinski (whitelabel.org) and Matthew Gertner (Allpeers) have just posted a very cool Greasemonkey script called WikiProxy. The script was designed to fix Stefan’s BBC browsing experience. Specifically, he was tired of not seeing any links on BBC pages he browsed. So he wrote a script that would take all the proper nouns and check to see if there was a Wikipedia entry for those nouns. If matches are found, the page is re-writen to link to the Wikipedia entry. Now this is really cool.
Of course, the script will read/re-write all pages to check for Wikipedia links. Hence, I’m not inclined to run this all the time for all sites. But it is a very cool concept. It’s not quite an AJAX implementation. But it wouldn’t be hard to make the background calls to Wikipedia in an asynchronous manner. Hmmm. Maybe I feel a project coming on… [6/11: Matt tells me it is AJAX. So, I guess the science project is off. Rats!]
-CyclingRoo-

As noted before, the Deer Park Alpha version of Firefox has some really cool features worth considering. But I haven’t been able to utilize Greasemonkey – until now.

I decided to spend some time digging around Technrati to see if there was a resolution to my Deer Park / Greasemonkey challenges. Bingo. I ran across John Mora’s blog and his post outlining the Greasemonkey resolution. His post highlights the problem as being resolved by code in the Greasemonkey CVS. Fair enough. So I got the code from CVS and installed it into my Deer Park browser. Voila, problem solved!

Thanks, John. Book Burro is now working again – as are all my other scripts. W00t!

-CyclingRoo-

As noted before, the Deer Park Alpha version of Firefox has some really cool features worth considering. But I haven’t been able to utilize Greasemonkey – until now.
I decided to spend some time digging around Technrati to see if there was a resolution to my Deer Park / Greasemonkey challenges. Bingo. I ran across John Mora’s blog and his post outlining the Greasemonkey resolution. His post highlights the problem as being resolved by code in the Greasemonkey CVS. Fair enough. So I got the code from CVS and installed it into my Deer Park browser. Voila, problem solved!
Thanks, John. Book Burro is now working again – as are all my other scripts. W00t!
-CyclingRoo-

The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) has been a standard for many years. But since LDAP had its genesis in the old X.400 and X.500 days, LDAP has always been a protocol that invited corporate (rather than community) involvement. Consequently, the most visible LDAP implementations were commercial offerings from infrastructure providers. Commercial providers included: Microsoft (Active Directory), Siemens (DirX), IBM (Notes), Banyan (Vines), Zoomit (Via), and Netscape (Enterprise Directory Server). Some of these products are gone. Many remain.
But the days of commercial LDAP are numbered, I hope. Last year, Red Hat acquired the Netscape directory source code from AOL. It was widely rumored that the product would be released under an open source license. Well, that time has come. Red Hat has released the product under a GPL (with exceptions for certain sub-components). The new product is known as the Fedora Directory Server. While I expect many new implementations to arise, I am personally looking for some great certificate systems to folllow.
All in all, it is amazing to see the march of technology commodization reaching higher and higher levels of the OSI stack!
-CyclingRoo-

Apple has been a swell sweetheart for IBM. Over the past few years, Apple has been using the IBM POWER architecture (and the PowerPC chip) in the heart of its desktops and servers. This was not always the case. When Apple first began, Steve and Woz used the MOS 6502 chip. [Note: this was not a Motorola chipset, although it was designed by former Motorola engineers.] When the Macintosh appeared on the scene, Apple moved to Motorola as its chip foundry and the 68000 as its chip. And the Power architecture is a direct descendant of the Motorola 68000 product family.
So IBM has been supplying chips for Apple for a very long time. But now, Apple may be changing its foundry once again. Everyone (including Ziff Davis) is now reporting that Apple will abandon the IBM PowerPC in favor of Intel chips. While IBM will supply chips throughout 2005, that relationship will end when new Apple systems are released in 2006.
Is this “a good thing” or is it something else? I’m voting for this being a “very good thing.” First competition is always good. And I love to see competition in the desktop. So come 2006, we can buy an Intel based desktop and we can (hopefully) choose whether we want Windows, Linux or Mac OSX. Wow. Maybe we’ll see some real pressure on the desktop OS. While Linux is cool (and I’ve been using it as a desktop for seven years), bringing the kitch of Apple to the household desktop (and the living room digital entertainment experience) will really force Microsoft to do some new and daring things. This could be a lot of fun – and a real spark in functionality for the general user! 🙂
-CyclingRoo-
=====
Update 6/6/05 12:30 CDT
=====
Boy, the net is running on overdrive on this story. BroadbandReports is positively humming. One of the best summary articles is Daniel Drew Turner’s article at eWeek. Not everyone is buying this as a legtimate story. Boy, if this isn’t real, Apple really is the master of spin!
=====
Update 6/6/05 1:30 CDT
=====
It’s confirmed. Here’s the Apple announcement.

Can anybody resist the sweet smell of chocolate chip cookies baking in the kitchen? I know that I can’t. And that smell is unmistakable – as well as compelling.
Well, our friends at Microsoft are baking some interesting cookies for Office 12. Specifically, Microsoft has announced that Office 12 document (Excel spreadsheets, Word documents and PowerPoint presentations) will be stored in XML format. W00t!
This _could_ mark the beginning of the the end of proprietary file formats. Of course, it might also mean that Microsoft will simply store Office 12 docs in some blob (or encrypted object) embedded within an XML document.
Right now, it’s hard to tell what will be open and what will be proprietary. Information Week (and everyone else) is reporting (via Dan Leach, a Microsoft spokesmodel) that Open XML formats will be royalty-free. But I am going to play it safe and wait for the file formats and schemas to be released. And it may well be that the formats will be licensed as “royalty-free” but copyright-encumbered. In this way, Microsoft could preclude people from using (or extending) the file formats themselves.
Again, I’m going to wait and see.
But in the meantime, I want Robert Scoble to know that Microsoft’s announcement is “a very good thing.” And I want Robert Scoble to report that Microsoft would score a bigger win if the formats were not only royalty-free but license-free and open for modification and extension. [Please excuse the obvious ‘link-whoring’ effort to sieze Robert’s attention.]
If Microsoft wants their Office suite to live on, they should fully open the file formats themselves. Yes, they might take a hit from the wannabees that will release products that exploit the open formats. But they would also extend the life of the product line by re-invigoring competition. More importantly, Microsoft might be able to cherry-pick the best features from competing and emerging products. In a way, a license-free file format would allow Microsoft to utilize other people/organizations to “test the market” for them. Other people could determine just what customers really want in the next generation of office products. Then Microsoft can “embrace and extend” their current products to include the _best_ new features.
And between now and then, there will be a lot more cool things coming from Redmond. I wonder how Microsoft is going to integrate RSS into the complete desktop experience? While I want to see a “full-on” assault with RSS capabilities being folded into everything (Office, browser, collaboration suites, etc), I fear that Microsoft may try and embed RSS into the Office suite alone. I want to see XML and RSS everywhere. And Microsoft can make this happen. Don’t limit the “open vision” to the Office products alone!
Again, I am going to wait and see. But I’m also going to hope and pray. After all, Jiminy Cricket noted that “When you wish upon a star your dreams come true.” Most people remember that line. But a later line is even more prescient. “If your heart is in your dreams, no request is too extreme.” Well Jiminy, I am requesting a completely open file format for all to use.
-CyclingRoo-