Developer Week in Review: Start your lawyers!

If the lawsuit fits, the Kinect SDK for Windows arrives, and IPv6 day fails to excite.

Summer is here, so it’s time to hit the beach and soak up some sun. You know, sun? That bright yellow ball that blinds you whenever you go out for Doritos and Mountain Dew in the middle of a 48-hour hackathon? I’m told it’s actually quite pleasant to be around, once you get acclimated to it. Still, probably better to stay inside, avoid the evil day star, and see what’s been happening in the World of Geek this week.

Get your lawsuits

Samsung and AppleIn the latest chapter of “As the Smartphone Turns,” Samsung has accused Apple of fathering an illegitimate child with it when Samsung had amnesia, gotten as a result of being hit on the head by an old Motorola bag-phone while trying to save RIM from ending up destitute on the street.

Not really, but the realities of Samsung v. Apple are almost as bizarre. This week, a US district judge told Samsung that, no, you don’t get to see previews of the iPad 3 and iPhone 5. This comes as Samsung continues to be Apple’s largest supplier of semiconductor technologies. There must be some awesome screens set up to let Apple shovel money into Samsung’s bank account while at the same time suing them.

Also in “Intellectual Property Gone Wild” news this week, Oracle is evidently asking for (cue Carl Sagan voice) billiuns and billiuns of dollars as penalties in their Java suit against Google, which means that Google might actually need to clean out the petty cash drawer and make a trip to the bank. And Apple has paid off Nokia to settle a long-running patent suit between the two companies. And BitTorrent came under attack this week when they were sued for violating a “submarine” patent on file distribution granted in 2007. Litigation, the growth sector of the American economy!

In related news, I got a notice this week that my own trademark application will be approved in three months if no one objects. Watch out world, I’m gonna have some IP soon, and I’m not afraid to use it!

Please remember to stretch before logging into your PC

Folks have been hacking the Kinect for a while now, hooking it up to all sorts of esoteric devices that aren’t XBoxen (and just what is the group noun for an XBox? A Lanparty of XBoxes?). Now Microsoft has decided to make Kinect hacks officially supported, at least if you run Windows. With the release of the Kinect SDK for Windows, developers can finally make desktop users flail around awkwardly, just like their gaming counterparts.

With the release of the SDK, Windows hackers will gain access to a powerful vision recognition system, and it will be interesting to see what the first third-party Windows applications to come out will look like. Somehow, I suspect it’ll have something to do with porn …

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Where were you when the IPv6 turned on?

The one-day IPv6 lovefest earlier this month didn’t seem to break anything significant, but on the other hand, it didn’t seem to do much to promote the adoption of IPv6 either. Unless you happen to be one of the 12 people on the planet whose ISP allocates and routes IPv6, the only way to know that anything had happened at all was if you had an IPv6 tunnel set up with a broker such as Electric Hurricane.

With the IPv4 space “officially” exhausted, you’d expect there would be more urgency about this issue, but business seems to be proceeding according to the normal human emergency protocol (that’s the one where you ignore a problem until it becomes a crisis, then run around like a chicken with it’s head cut off). In the meanwhile, there are still quite a few active class A subnets lying around, each with 16 million addresses (here’s a list). One must wonder how long it will be before pressure starts to be applied on entities such as HP (which owns two!) to start freeing them up for the good of the net.

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