Posts

Posted on

From Ars Technica: Apple v. Samsung judge ends Galaxy Tab ban, Apple may have to pay $2.6M

The judge in the landmark Apple v. Samsung patent case today ended a three-month-old sales ban on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, giving Samsung a small victory after its crushing $1 billion loss to Apple.

One of the bright spots for Samsung in last month’s verdict was the jury ruling that the Galaxy Tab 10.1 did not infringe a design patent. The tablet did infringe other Apple patents, but not the one that was the basis of a sales ban on the Tab issued on June 26 by US District Court Judge Lucy Koh. Samsung attempted to get the ban overturned after the jury ruling, but it had also previously appealed the June 26 injunction to a higher court. As a result, Koh was unable to overturn the injunction immediately since she no longer had jurisdiction. Jurisdiction was returned to Koh Friday with a US Federal Circuit Court of Appeals ruling allowing her to decide the issue, and she promptly granted Samsung’s motion to dissolve the sales ban today (PDF).

Koh dismissed an argument from Apple that the court should wait until post-trial motions are resolved before deciding whether to end the sales ban. “The public has no interest in enjoining a non-infringing product, and thus any market disruption caused by dissolution would be insignificant compared to Samsung’s interest in restoring its product to market,” Koh wrote today. In addition to granting Samsung’s motion to dissolve the injunction, she retained the $2.6 million bond Apple posted as a condition of obtaining the preliminary injunction.

from Ars Technica

Posted on

From Ars Technica: California universities to produce 50 open-source textbooks

California Governor Jerry Brown gave his pen a workout yesterday. In addition to signing legislation prohibiting social network snooping by employers and colleges, he also signed off on a proposal for the state to fund 50 open source digital textbooks. He signed two bills, one to create the textbooks and the other to establish a California Digital Open Source Library to host them, at a meeting with students in Sacramento.

According to a legislative summary, the textbook bill would “require the California Open Education Resources Council to determine a list of 50 lower division courses in the public postsecondary segments for which high-quality, affordable, digital open source textbooks and related materials would be developed or acquired.” The council is to solicit bids to produce these textbooks in 2013. The bill makes clear that the council has the option to use “existing high-quality digital open source textbooks and related materials” if those materials fit the requirements.

The law specifies that the textbooks must be placed under a Creative Commons license, allowing professors at universities outside of California to use the textbooks in their own classrooms. The textbooks must be encoded in XML, or “other appropriate successor format,” to facilitate re-use of the materials.

from Ars Technica

Posted on

From Ars Technica: $99 Raspberry Pi-sized “supercomputer” touted in Kickstarter project

Raspberry Pi-sized board called Parallella puts supercomputing power into a $99 package.

Chipmaker Adapteva wants to make parallel computing available to everyone, but there’s a good chance you’ve never even heard the company’s name. Founded in 2008, Adapteva focuses on building low-power RISC chips, which it sells to board manufacturers, and is trying to license its intellectual property to mobile processor vendors for use in smartphones.

“We’re way down the food chain,” Adapteva CEO and founder Andreas Olofsson told Ars. But Adapteva wants to bring its technology directly to the people who would actually use it, with a Kickstarter project to raise at least $750,000, and a stretch goal of $3 million.

Adapteva calls it “Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone,” a 16-core board hitting 13GHz and 26 gigaflops performance, costing $99 each. If the $3 million goal is hit, Adapteva will make a $199 64-core board hitting 45GHz and 90 gigaflops. (Adapteva seems to be counting GHz on a cumulative basis, adding up all the cores.) Both include a dual-core ARM A9-based system-on-chip, with the 16- and 64-core RISC chips acting as coprocessors to speed up tasks. The Adapteva architecture hits performance of 70 gigaflops per watt, and 25GHz per watt, the company says.

from Ars Technica

Posted on

From Wired Top Stories: Apple Mapocalypse Sends iOS 6 Users Into a Tizzy, Riverbank

Following the official launch of iOS 6 Wednesday, disgruntled users across the globe flocked to share their collective displeasure with Apple’s new Maps app. The seemingly premature launch of this error prone app seems an unusual move for Apple, as relying on a quality maps service has become such an integral part of our smartphone experience.

from Wired Top Stories