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Apple Sued For Using Tabs In OS X Tiger
rizzo320 writes "AppleInsider is reporting that an Illinois-based company and its Nevada partner have filed a lawsuit against Apple Inc., alleging that Mac OS X 10.4 'Tiger' infringes an interface patent relating to the OS's nearly universal use of tabs. The suit was filed in the patent troll's and forum shopper's favorite venue: Marshall, TX. The patent in question is 5072412, which was originally issued to Xerox in 1987, but is now owned or licensed to IP Innovation LLC and its parent Technology Licensing Corporation. 'Category dividers triggered by Spotlight searches, as well as page tabs in the Safari web browser, bear the closest similarity to the now 20-year-old description' of the patent, according to the article. IP Innovation is requesting damages in excess of $20 million and an injunction against future sales and distribution of Mac OS X 10.4. Software patent reform can't come soon enough!"
balls itch.
Hey, I'm trying to see how many people who have low ID numbers are still using Slashdot. I know there must be a bunch of people with ID numbers lower than mine.
...
Although I admit that it is stupid, I still wish that I had signed up for my ID sooner so that I could have an even lower one. When CmdrTaco announced on Slashdot that accounts were available (before that everyone just typed whatever nickname they wanted to in with their posting - remember that?!?) I didn't bother to sign up until there was a topic I actually wanted to post about a few days later. If only I had signed up as soon as I saw the announcement I know I'd be under 100!!!
Anyway, here's some stuff:
- I started reading Slashdot back in '97 (or was it '98? Not sure. It was when it was really new and far and away the best place to get geeky news, especially about Linux). I don't remember how I first heard of it.
- I remember when it was called "Slashdot: News for Nerds on the Stuff That Matters". I always thought that the dropping of the "on the" clause signalled a corresponding drop of the geek-relevency of the articles.
- When Slashdot subscriptions were announced in (when was it? 2000? 2001?) I sent in $100. My original subscription STILL HASN'T RUN OUT!!! Although I have used up almost 9000 out of the 10000 ad-free page views I bought.
- I think I have scanned (not necessarily read) every headline on Slashdot since 1998, except for a period of two or three months last year when I got fed up with the lameness of the newer Slashdot admins, and decided to stop reading it regularly. But I came back because, well, I really like Slashdot despite the Zonks of the world. I have checked Slashdot two or three times a day at least daily since 1998, and for those occasions where I was away from a computer for weeks at a time (on vacations and stuff), I would go back and look at every back story that I missed in that time. It would take me hours or days after a long trip to "catch up" on Slashdot
- Whatever happend to that JonKatz dude or whatever his name was? He was the cause of my first usage of the slashdot preferences settings - to ban him from my view of Slashdot
- Also, whatever happened to those really cool "Ask Joe Shmoe" stories or whatever they were called where all of the Slashdot community would come up with questions for a guest celebrity? I know they still do them every once in a while but back when there was one per week they were really cool.
- To show off my Slashdot-Geek factor: I got married in 1999. My wife, unbeknownst to me at the time, was preparing a little "time capsule" to represent our lives together as a gift on our wedding day. It sounds really cheesy I know but it really was an awesome and beautiful thing. She made it out of doll furniture and other custom miniaturized little bits and pieces, and it was a scene representing all of the things that we had in our lives, under a little half-dome of glass. There were little representations of our pets, my motorcycle, the magazines that I subscribed to at the time, her cooking paraphenalia, etc. Anyway, there was also a little laptop in there for me, and she got one of my co-workers to write her instructions on how to take a "screenshot" (using xwd I think) of my Linux system, and while I wasn't looking one day, she snapped my browser when it was on Slashdot, printed it out, and shrunk it down to like 2 cm by 1.5 cm. And so I have this little laptop in our time capsule that is showing a Slashdot page from sometime in 1999. That's how much of a Slash-geek I am - my wife knew back then that Slashdot was such a big thing for me that it was worth immortalizing in our wedding time capsule!
- I have been a huge fan of Slashdot over the years (obviously) but get really tired of the increasing tendency of the articles to simply be controversial topics to drum up the post count. The number of "Random idiot study group says Windows is more secure than Linux" type trolling is getting wors