Stuart Jarvis

No, this is nothing deep It’s just that one of the many things I found intriguing about Akademy was learning the different ways that people refer to our apps and technologies – and those of other organisations. Generally, I think I’ll copy the pronunciation of people working on relevant app, so in case you are as clueless as I was (am?) here’s my cheatsheet:

• Krita. I had picked up “critter” as the pronunciation here and used it when introducing Lukas’s talk. However, he used “Kree-ta”, I think, so I guess that’s right
• Akonadi. Seems to be “ack-on-aah-dee”. I had always imagined the last bit rhymed with “die”
• Nepomuk. The “nep” but rhymes with “sep” in September, “o” rhymes with the “o” in FOSS and the last bit seems to vary between an “uck” and “ook” sound

There are a few that have some interesting splits:

• GNOME. This one fascinates me for its difference between native and non-native English speakers. In English of course we have gnomes pronounced without sounding the “g” and most native English speakers seem to say GNOME the same way with a silent “G”. Most people who don’t have English as a first language seem to sound out the “G” as “guh-nome”
• GNU. For me, this has always had the “G” sound included: “guh-noo”, but I also met some people who say “noo”, which confused me at first. It is easy to do
• openSUSE. This still splits people between the (original and best?) “open-soo-suh”, “open-soose” (which rhymes with “loose”) and “open-soo-zee”. At least everyone seems to agree on how to say “open”.
• Plasma. Even this has some subtle variations between a soft and harder (more like “z”) sound for the “s” and which syllable carries the stress

There are a few too that no one seems to know how to say:

• KRandRTray. Is it “kay-ah-and-ah-tray”? Is it “krand-ah-tray”? Or is it just that handy thing that does monitor stuff?
• Kopete. Maybe one of the developers knows? I heard “koh-pet”, “koh-peet”, “koh-pet-a” and maybe a few others too

And another that came up due to some other event that was on at the same time as Akademy:

• Uruguay. I know I say it wrong, I’m British after all and we do funny things with our “u”s, pretending we can use them like the “y” in “year”.

Tags: offtopic

This started as a comment on Ade’s blog post about Hugin, but I don’t think comments should be bigger than the original blog post, so I’ve moved it here instead

Ade makes some interesting points about the GPL, particularly the opportunity to exclude certain jurisdictions where the use of the software would infringe a patent. He also raises the question of whether distribution of source code – as opposed to binaries – can be counted as infringement and reflects on the trend to explicitly claim for a medium containing code that would cause the invention to be ‘realised’ on a computer.

Background

If you’d like an elegant and (generally) very well argued primer and history of what can be patented in UK law see this judgement (from 2006, things have changed a bit since then). The judge in that case, Peter Prescott, was actually only standing in and therefore wasn’t really expected to take a fresh look at it as he did and go against patent office practice that had been making software patents a bit easier to obtain in the UK up until that point.

He’s something of a personal hero of mine

Why I’m writing about this

I guess the first thing to say is that I’m no patent lawyer, this is not legal advice and my knowledge is limited to UK and (a little) to EU patent law. The knowledge I have was gained through working as a patent examiner (one of the people who decides whether or not a patent is granted on an idea) from 2004-2007 at the UK Intellectual Property Office. During the last year of my time there I was in the department working on ‘unpatentable’ inventions: software patents, business methods and the like.

This area of patent law moves quite fast in varied, contradictory and nonsensical directions and I really have not been paying attention to it since I left almost three years ago.

Who can infringe? (Why claim the software medium?)

Within UK law, at least, there is the idea of primary and secondary infringement. The primary infringer is someone who does something directly reading on to the claims of a patent. So if the patent claims only the method of doing something and your software performs that method when run then the primary infringement would occur only when the method is actually performed (i.e. when the program is run). In that scenario, if you were selling the software then only your customer would be a primary infringer when they used the software. However, as a supplier of the means to infringe, you could be open to a claim of secondary infringement. The original logic of this was – I believe – to allow the owner of a patent to sue, say, the British importer of an infringing device rather than having to pursue a foreign manufacturer abroad.

However, pursuing a case for primary infringement is easier and so, as Ade noted, many patent applications will also include a claim along the lines of:

A storage medium containing code that, when run on a computer, performs the method of claim x

This would allow them to go after anyone supplying the program on a disc as a primary infringer.

There was, briefly (I think it got overturned) a court judgement in the UK that ruled that any claim to a program on some kind of medium was a software patent as such (well, obviously…) and not permissible under UK law. I had great fun in my last few months as a patent examiner rejecting loads of applications simply by saying:

Claim x is a claim to a computer program on a storage medium. The invention is therefore clearly a computer program as such and cannot be patented.

Applicants and their patent attorneys didn’t much like that.

So does source code infringe?

I doubt it. There may be an argument for secondary infringement, but that gets in to all kinds of difficulties as there are various defences such as the research defence (pure academic research and the publication of methods arising from it are immune from patent infringement) or freedom of speech (anyone remember the haikus containing the deCSS code?).

Also few people make money from distributing source code, so where’s the point in suing them? It’s easier to sue the end user who directly infringes (and doable if they’re a big company: SCO tried it with Daimler, albeit in a copyright rather than patent case) or someone distributing the binaries on a commercial basis (if the patent owner remembered to claim for software discs too).

Disclaimer: as far as I’m aware, the above has never been tested and a lot of it might not apply outside the UK anyway.

Why does this matter to KDE?

Most of the software patents that came to me originated in the US and were fairly easy to dismiss under UK law. However, there was a patent application that came to me before I worked in the unpatentable section that could have had a direct impact on Amarok.

I don’t remember the details of the patent in question (and probably couldn’t reveal them anyway as I don’t want to mess with the Official Secrets Act). However, it was for a hardware audio player and one of the features it claimed had, I knew, been in Amarok for a little under a year, but before the filing date of the patent. It was my opinion that Amarok would have infringed had the patent application been granted. It took me a couple of days to find the disclosure of the feature in the Amarok infrastructure (trawling wiki page histories and forum posts), twice as long as the target time allotted for processing that particular patent – and I had to hit that target to get promoted.

The point is that the Amarok wiki and forums are not somewhere we routinely searched for prior art and had that patent application been passed to someone else who didn’t know (or care) that the feature was already in Amarok then the prior art probably would not have been found. I would not have been criticised for not finding it and it was against my interests (other than as a user of Amarok) to spend the time doing so.

The problem is more than software patents

As illustrated by the Amarok case, it’s not only software patents that can be dangerous. The ‘invention’ there was obvious – to you or me – but it probably wouldn’t have been patently obvious, by which I mean the the level of invention required for getting a patent is low.

There is also a problem not only with a lack of time to do things properly, but also a lack of technical knowledge. I examined applications concerning JIT compilation, despite having no knowledge of programming. I examined applications for magnetic hard drive read heads without having the faintest idea of what would be obvious to someone in the industry, or really even really which features were important.

I always had the impression, since we saw the results of prior art searches from other offices, that the European Patent Office were far more thorough than we were. They certainly had more time per patent application and found things in places we would never have looked. We tried not to look at what the US Patent Office was up to.

I’ll finish off by quoting Peter Prescott in that judgment I linked to at the start:

Despite the prohibition on granting patents for computer programs … it is said that the EPO [European Patent Office] has granted more than 40,000 of them… From the point of view of the applicants … if there is any chance of getting such a patent it may be said to be a rational business choice to try it. If not, their competitors might … patents that are wrongly granted can be very expensive to challenge, and perhaps beyond the means or inclination of small and medium enterprises. An accumulation of patents of that sort … may be a serious barrier to entry.

The only safeguard against that wrong – and it is a wrong – is the vigilance of the Patent Office. When I was a Patent Office examiner … we sometimes granted patents that we shouldn’t, but did it anyway because we thought the Patents Appeal Tribunal would not support us.

Tags: amarok, background, Free Culture, offtopic, patents, suckage

This is possibly a little offtopic for many KDE peeps, but relevant to the stuff I do with KDE. It may be relevant to you if you write articles, announcements, press releases – or even blogs

I spent the last couple of days attending a “results-based writing” course hosted by my university. The main aim was to learn some things about writing concisely for scientific papers and finding a good structure for my thesis, but the lessons are applicable to all many kinds of writing. Writing a thesis takes a lot of endurance and strong writing ability, as you have to keep the reader interested and informed for thousands upon thousands of words encompassing complex topics and formed scientific opinion. While many online education sources do indeed offer some great tips on compiling a good thesis paper, it is best to take a look into face to face courses as well as you can ask questions of the teacher and other students and involve yourself verbally as it plays out.

The training I attended was provided by Cognitrix and was excellent. These are key points that I took away from the course:

• Know your audience
• Identify the concepts and how they link
• Don’t try and hide uncertainty with vague language
• See the opposite point of view
• Cut the waffle
• If you can’t say a sentence in one go then it is too long

They maight seem obvious, but many scientific papers fail on a lot of them. More detail on each follows below.

Know your audience

What jargon can you include? What explanation is necessary? On the Dot I insert hyperlinks to applications, jargon or concepts that I think might not be widely known, but mostly base that on what I understand.

Identify the concepts and how they link

We took a science paper, wrote its concepts out on paper and drew arrows to link them. Those with the most outgoing links are probably good starting points; those with mostly incoming links conclusions. Some items were not linked at all (these were mostly irrelevant and could be removed). Others had few links coming in and needed more background.

Don’t try and hide uncertainty with vague language

I know I’ve tried this in the past when I haven’t quite understood something. Not on the Dot, because there are far too many knowledgeable people reading and I’d get found out If you can’t explain something well then you probably don’t understand it properly yourself.

Try and imagine the opposite point of view

Particularly useful for science. Scrutinize statements like “it is obvious” to see whether they are true. Do you need to provide justification?

Cut the waffle

Some of us (I am guilty) can be a bit verbose. Being brutal with every word, we cut a sentence from 50 to 19 words with no loss of information.

If you can’t say a sentence in one go then it is too long

If you can’t remember at the end of a sentence how it started then the information is hard to take in. A good test is whether you can say the sentence aloud without pausing for breath.

Summary

Applying some of the above, I just cut the length of this post by 21%. I’m going to be trying to apply these lessons not just in my dayjob but also in my work with KDE. So you should read a bit less from me

Tags: background, communicating, Dot, offtopic, promotion, Science

Dear lazyweb…

My operating system hard disk has failed (again – kinda, poking it from a live CD shows that the filesystem isn’t recognised, though I can mount it if I explicitly state it is ext4 and a fair bit of the data is still there). It’s a vintage 70GB Seagate, the SMART diagnostics are not good, it has got corrupted before and I didn’t really trust it anyway – data is on another disk.

So, it’s time for a new disk.

The question is whether to buy another spinning disk or go for solid state? Does anyone have experience of an SSD and have a view on advantages/disadvantages (I’ve Googled a bit already). I’d be going for a cheap MLC SSD at probably 30-60GB (Intel or OCZ) which is plenty for the OS and .kde etc – i.e. stuff with little files and lots of seeks, most of my data would stay on the other magnetic disk. Alternatively I’ll get the smallest magnetic disk I can find. The SSD option is likely 50-100% more expensive.

I also need to decide what distro to put on the new disk. The old system was Fedora 12 and I’m pretty happy with that, but I always have a bit of a look around when I’m doing a new install. I have a laptop on F12 too and my work PC runs F11, while a geriatric Shuttle PC acting as a media centre runs Arch.

I’m looking for a distro that:

• Packages the latest KDE SC (and does it well)
• Installs only free software by default, including drivers
• Has good repos for multimedia stuff, if not included – 3rd party is fine
• Isn’t obsessed with re-inventing the wheel (use NM, one of the major package managers/PackageKit – or have a good reason for not doing so)

Bonus points for working well with upstreams and contributing to KDE. Good (free) Radeon drivers are also a plus. I’ve recently played with Kubuntu and Mandriva in VirtualBox and not been convinced they’d be better, but maybe I missed something?

Any thoughts?

Tags: help needed, offtopic

(Apologies to Planet KDE readers – this may well be irrelevant to you. But since most of my posts are KDE related and will remain so I haven’t seen any point in setting up a separate feed for the planet)

You may have heard about the cracking of the email system at a leading UK University and subsequent posting of excerpts on various climate science conspiracy theory websites as “proof” of a conspiracy among climate researchers to keep the alleged truth about climate (which is of course it’s all fine actually, there is no man-made climate change) a secret. I haven’t been that interested in it really, but finally got around to having a look.

I won’t go over everything in detail here, as there is already a nice concise rebuttal, but there are a few comments I can make as someone working in climate related science at an unrelated institute (my own comments, not in any way endorsed by my employers). For the record, I’m concerned with finding out about past (natural) climate events, not predicting the future.

A few things have been pulled out of the emails. One is the contempt that some of the scientists express for some of the better known climate conspiracy theorists. Really, this is not surprising. Have you ever had anyone publicly trash the quality of your work and accuse you of lying for personal gain without backing it up with any facts whatsoever? Would you perhaps say some unflattering things about them in private correspondence? A lot of the allegations that have been made are libelous, but have not been pursued because (a) scientists generally aren’t that much in to lawyers and (b) it would only give publicity to the malicious idiots making the comments in the first place.

The other thing is the alleged “tricks” referenced in some of the emails. The main one refers to the famous “hockey stick” plot of rising temperatures, in which an email referred to using a “trick” to prevent the divergence of data for recent years. Real Climate make some general comments about the use of “trick” which does, generally in science mean some clever way of dealing with an issue. I know I’ve said about some of my data, in an email, that “the trick is to average it over 1mm, then you can see the trend” (without the trick you have a mass of noise). The trick relating to the hockey stick graph is to use instrument data – you know, the stuff you actually measure to give you temperature readings. That graph makes use of instrument data, where we have it and scientifically inferred temperatures for older times for which we don’t have instrument data. The problem with the plot is that the inferred temperatures for recent years diverge from the instrument record, so obviously the method used there for inferring old temperatures is not perfect (this is widely acknowledged). You’ll note that the plot has big error bars on the old data.

Well, I could go on – but what’s the point? The climate issue seems to attract huge numbers of people who have great certainty that the body of scientific evidence is wrong or, actually, fabricated without reading any of it or producing their own research. But then, as the Daily Mail so eloquently put it (while simultaneously comparing scientists with the Nazis) we do have this unfortunate habit of “relying solely on empirical facts” – of course we should instead rely on enlightened conjecture. Damn those facts.

The thing with climate science is that it is hugely uncertain. It is unfortunate that politicians need to have things put to them in definite and certain terms – climate scientists as a whole have had to come to some slightly premature agreements about the danger that faces us, just to make people listen before it is (probably) too late. We know that gases such as carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere have a warming effect (it’s fairly basic physics and is to do with the radiation the earth emits which is particularly well absorbed and re-emitted by these gases) and we can even quantify that.

The uncertainties come in what happens next.

More greenhouse gas leads to warming which leads to ice melt which makes the planet’s surface darker which means that more of the sun’s energy is absorbed rather than being reflected which leads to more warming. However, more warming leads (in some places) to more plant growth which reduces carbon dioxide, although the plants themselves may absorb more of the sun’s heat. In other areas it leads to increased desertification which reflects more of the sun’s energy and cools us. It may lead to more clouds, which also reflect the sun’s energy. But then high temperatures cause more forest fires that release carbon dioxide. But the soot from burning also blocks heat from the sun. There are plenty more effects and counter effects like those. Then there are the oceans which have a huge role in regulating temperature everywhere, but which we understand ridiculously badly…

What we have at the moment is a hugely complex system we call earth that we don’t really understand at all but which, for a tiny part of its history, has been quite hospitable to us as a species. We’re changing it in ways that it hasn’t been changed for a long time. There have of course been past major climatic events as the conspiracy theorists love to point out – probably driven by natural events such as volcanic activity – but another inconvenient truth the conspiracy theorists tend not to mention is that these past warming events have generally been associated with mass species extinctions. We’re not sure how well the earth will be able to counteract the stuff we’ve been doing. Current best estimates suggest that we are quite capable of causing our own destruction in quite a big way, although you’ll see if you actually read the IPCC reports that they put a large margin of error on those estimates – even to the extent that we might all be more or less ok. It all depends on whether you think a 1 in 3 chance of not killing a few million people (perhaps more) counts as good odds. Even if you do, getting odds that far in our favour still require us to take some pretty serious action.

Skepticism is great – in the sense of requiring evidence before believing anything it is the very foundation of science. However, blind faith in far fetched conspiracy theories and a complete rejection of rational argument… well, it does get a little irritating.

Ok, rant over. Next post will be back to KDE, I promise

Tags: offtopic, rant, Science