Patent war II

Earlier we reported on different types of patent law suits between Microsoft and Motorola.
Here's a global overview of lawsuits in the mobile world from Design Language News, a fine site specializing in visualizing data.

Light field camera

The eye and conventional camera's capture the colour and intensity of light. They need to focus to get a sharp image for a certain distance.

Light field camera's also capture the direction of the light rays.
This allows you to reprocess and refocus the light information afterwards.
Storing this extra information takes up about 200 times the space of a classical picture. So the camera's have to sacrifice resolution to keep picture storage size within limits.
Lytro will bring a consumer light field camera to the market next year.  An 8GB version costs $400 and stores 350 pictures.

You can refocus some pictures in a demo at their site.

EDAM: Easy Development And Maintenance

Design patterns make code more flexible and easier to evolve and test.
Design patterns make code more complex and harder to write.
Strike the right balance between easy work now (development) and later (maintenance).