DevTopics

Apparently America hasn’t cornered the market on stupid patents and trademarks.  A Russian businessman has obtained a Russian trademark for the emoticon 😉 which is used to convey a wink in text messages and e-mail.

Oleg Teterin, president of the mobile ad company Superfone, said he doesn’t plan to sue individual users.  “I want to highlight that this is only directed at corporations, companies that are trying to make a profit without the permission of the trademark holder,” Teterin said.  He plans to send legal warnings to companies that use the symbol without his permission.  “Legal use will be possible after buying an annual license from us,” Teterin continued.  “It won’t cost that much — tens of thousands of dollars.”  He also said similar emoticons 🙂 or 😉 or 🙂 resemble his trademarked symbol and therefore fall under his ownership.

“Imagine the next wise-guy who trademarks the 33 letters of the Russian alphabet and then says anyone who uses the Russian alphabet has to send him money.  It’s absurd,” said Alexander Manis, director of a broadband Internet and mobile company.

Scott Fahlman, a Carnegie Mellon professor, believes the trademark is invalid due to prior art.  Fahlman claims he was the first to use three keystrokes — a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis — as a horizontal “smiley face” in a computer message 25 years ago.

Read more at FoxNews

8 Curiosities That You May Not Know About Emoticons 😉

In Ray Kurzweil’s amazing 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, Kurzweil predicts that computing power will continue along the exponential track of Moore’s Law, such that by the year 2030, a $1,000 personal computer will be 1,000 times more powerful than the human brain.  At that point, computers will be capable of learning and creating new knowledge entirely on their own with no human assistance.  By scanning the compendium of knowledge on the Internet, some computers will “know” literally every single piece of public information generated by human beings (every scientific discovery, every book and movie, every law and theorem).

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This article was written by José M. Aguilar in Spanish on his excellent blog Variable Not Found, and was translated, edited and republished here by Timm Martin (and Google Translator) with permission from Mr. Aguilar.

I’ve been using emoticons often since I discovered them back in the day when Fidonet dominated the world of digital communications.  And in spite of their everyday use, I haven’t given them much attention.  However, when I searched for some information about emoticons, I found some curiosities that I think are worth knowing.

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This article was written by José M. Aguilar in Spanish on his excellent blog Variable Not Found, and was translated, edited and republished here by Timm Martin (and Google Translator) with permission from Mr. Aguilar.  This is Part 2 of the article (click here for Part 1).

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It’s holiday time, and what better way to reward your favorite programmer geek than with a T-shirt?  Following are some of my favorite programmer T-shirts:

Java Programmers Change Lightbulb

Front: How many Java programmers does it take to change a light bulb?

Back: You’re still thinking procedurally.  A properly designed light bulb object would inherit a change method from a generic light bulb class, so all you’d have to do is send a light bulb change message.

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At midnight on February 17, 2009, all televisions in the United States will switch from analog to 100% digital.  If you are still receiving your signal over the air, you will have to convert your analog signal to digital.  This public service announcement (spoof) will guide you through the simple process.

Your PC is lying to you.  John Hodgman, also known as “PC” in Apple’s catchy “Hello, I’m a Mac” commercials, has published a new book, “More Information Than You Require.”  It’s an almanac of facts ranging from the historical to the trivial, except most of the facts are actually absurd fabrications.

For example, consider this helpful folk remedy:

“If you have lost a finger, numb the pain with a poultice of goose grease and pine needles.  Leave the poultice on the finger stump until it becomes sticky.  Now find another finger.  Stick it on there and seek no further treatment.”

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This is scary, folks.  If you use Microsoft Visual Studio to create web services, you could be subject to lawsuits for patent infringement.  Yes, simply using a software program puts your company and livelihood at legal risk, yet another sign of how terribly flawed is the U.S. software patent system.

Fortunately, Microsoft is coming to save the day.  Microsoft filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in San Francisco last week to defend users of its Visual Studio development tools.  The lawsuit seeks to invalidate several patents that WebXchange is using to sue three large companies: Allstate Insurance, Dell computer and FedEx.

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1.  Make a list of the top 10 ways to amuse a programmer.
10.  Use binary.

Inspired by nymphs.org

This is part 6 in a series of articles on obscure programming languages.

Many .NET fans will recognize F# as anything but obscure.  F# (pronounced “F-Sharp”) is a succinct, expressive, efficient, type-inferred, functional and object-oriented programming language for the .NET platform.  Although F# is a research language, it can also serve as a quality environment for large-scale symbolic programming commonly used to implement verification, analysis, optimization and transformation applications. 

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