Patent crazy

There’s a flurry of news on the technology patent front in the last day or two. First,


Creative is accusing Apple of an iPod patent breach, saying that the iPod’s user interface violates a patent that Creative has.

Then comes the news that Nintendo has patented the Sanity system for games.

THEN there’s news that even
ringtones can be patented!

Things have gone absolutely nuts.

Via The Financial Times, Slashdot, and Engadget

Google – A villian??

Now, I like Google as much as the next person. They’ve come out with some great stuff (like Google Earth), put out two new betas this week (Google Desktop & Google Talk), and generally being a darn good search engine.

You’d think that would make a lot of people happy (and, well… it does), but there are apparently quite a few people in Silicon Valley that
don’t particularly like the way people at Google have been acting lately.

According to the article, one of the reasons for that is that they’re hiring so many talented people, and it’s causing the salaries out there to go up. Another reason is that it’s harder to get funding for startups.

Some of this might just be kvetching by people that can’t get people to sign on to the companies they’ve started, and don’t want to pay the going rate for the folks out there. I guess only time will really tell.

Me? I’m still using the tools Google provides, because they’re working well for me. And that’s really the bottom line.