C’mon Apple, at least get your math right. The Mac mini does look like a winner though. I predict geeks (like me) who are sick of fixing their relatives’ virus and spyware infested Windows boxes will cause this thing to fly off the shelves.

I had a meeting with a patent attorney today. One of those frankly more distasteful aspects of the job - not the meeting itself, since the attorney is a perfectly nice guy, just the entire patenting thing. But I really don’t want to get into a discussion on software patents, so to get the point some interesting factoids I learned today: there are less than five thousand patent examiners in the U.S., and the average time spent examining a patent is twenty hours. This surprised me, since my gut reaction was ten minutes. I guess I kind of figured that a lot of silly patents get filed, even with the filing fees being what they are. Also, patent examiners must be way more specialised than I would guess, since the backlog for computer network security related patents is around three years, whereas other computer related patents seem to be taking around one year or so to process. If you do the math, this means the maximum throughput of the patent office is maybe around half a million patents a year. And that as was pointed out to me is perhaps a somewhat dubious way of quantifying the rate of human progress, at least in the US.

It’s rather coincidental this meeting occurred today, given recent news related to patents. In particular, IBM “released” 500 patents to open source (today’s press release). Before one gets all excited about this simply because the words “open source” are involved, one might check and find out that IBM owns more than 40000 patents, so this is a very small part of their overall portfolio. And if you look at the specific patents being released it’s clear a lot of this seems to have something to do with a processor. What is IBM about to release? Think PS3 hardware. Then think about getting gcc to support this right off the bat. So really in the end it just looks like.. well, business as usual in this silly industry of ours.

A different sort of book review: my copy of Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook showed up today. Folks, this isn’t your grandma’s copy of The Joy of Cooking. The words “fuck the Health Department” are featured prominently in at least one recipe. I throughly enjoyed his other books (which weren’t cookbooks, but were about food), and it’s written in the same sort of style, and yet the recipes actually look quite doable - at least as far as authentic French bistro food goes - there does seem to be an emphasis on developing a cozy relationship with a butcher. Fortunately, you can always just go to Chinatown instead - and Bourdain even recommends this! Cool! Since I’m not one to blanch at things like tripe or pig’s feet or lamb’s tongue, I’m already dying to try some of them. Highly recommended and I’ve only done skimming half of the volume so far. Now where do I get veal bones in Seattle?