Novell took a deep dive on my credibility list too, but they are in a position to be more knowledgeable than most on the issue of Microsoft's patent claims. To hear Microsoft tell it, Novell has been told what patents are at issue. See the quote under Microsoft's second story in the Groklaw article.
You are right. Linus couldn't possibly be a little bit more informed than the rest of us about the fundamentals of Linux. I'm sure Bill Gate's comments about the internals of windows would be meaningless patter as well.
"We disagree with the recent statements made by Microsoft on the topic of Linux and patents. Importantly, our agreement with Microsoft is in no way an acknowledgment that Linux infringes upon any Microsoft intellectual property. When we entered the patent cooperation agreement with Microsoft, Novell did not agree or admit that Linux or any other Novell offering violates Microsoft patents."
Doesn't look like it was "mission critical". It looks more like one of several Comcast experiments in this kind of technology for which Washington was the testbed. The competition appears to have done better in the experiments.
I figured out the random integer, but I haven't figured out how to enter it. Sounds like you are trying to do something interesting, though. By the way, if your host is Microsoft (or runs Microsoft servers), you might want to consider using a different host. Dirty tricks... happen.
You are quite wrong. There is a considerable literature on this. Juries almost always take their responsibility seriously.
There is also, and this may have been the real issue for the case in question, a mild bias in juries (which judges usually try to counter in the instructions) to give a little bit of extra weight to the governments case. That's unfortunate, but very human.
Interesting point, but its a little worse than you think. I count some 2500 patents in which Microsoft is the assignee and the term "user interface" appears somewhere in the patent.
The good news:
IBM has at least 6300 patents with the words user interface in them.
Xerox, which really got the ball rolling on user interface patents, has 2000 plus patents that refer to user interfaces.
The somewhat wierd news: Apple has only
600 or so patents with the words user interface in them.
Of course all of these players together account for less than a sixth of all the patents (currently over 70,000 that include the words "user interface".
I was going for both. Sometimes insightful works better when packaged in a little humor.
Your example should not result in a new patent, so long as the original patent is written well. A tape drive is an electronic storage technology. A disc drive is another. I can detail the invention using a tape drive, but the tape drive should always be regarded as an example of an electronic storage technology and my claims should always be encompassing enough to cover any other electronic (or other) storage technologies that might be substituted at the same location in the invention.
I have some awareness of this, I have five patents, including some fairly widely cited ones.
Obviousness, as a general criterion in patenting, covers this kind of substitution. Both Amazon and the bartender are merchants. A storage technology is used for both the bartenders tab (the bartenders memory or, more commonly, paper records) and Amazon (a relational database, although they will have written this aspect of the claim more generally).
I picked the example for its humor, but but there are lots of other examples, including examples of patents that make specific claims about how one might do the one click that make no claims about the obvious implication that a billing will be made against an existing account. One great example is speed-dial, a common feature of telephones that has collected several thousand related patents. None that I can see do anything but try to improve on the functionality of speed dialing. None that I can see attempt to extend the primary use of speed dial (making a phone call by pressing just one or two buttons) to an obvious implication of the invention, that the same act would add the resulting phone call to your telephone bill. Amazon's one click patent does.
Amazon's patent for one click met the criteria for obviousness before the Supreme Court changed the definition. The only way it stands a chance now is if Congress changes patent law in a manner that removes obviousness as a barrier to patents. Amazon may be able to patent a specific method of a making a purchase with one click (much as some early speed dial patents do, with reference to specific registers on a chip), but that method cannot reasonably extended into its obvious implication (billing) and can almost certainly be worked around (one of the reasons there several thousand speed dial patents).
One-click has been around as long as bartenders have been extending credit to known customers, but I suppose you can't see prior art rising when its obscured by a head of foam.
The Insight was always a limited production testbed. The entire Honda hybrid lineup is built on the technology it demonstrated, and with its task accomplished, Honda has moved on to other limited production vehicles. Those of us lucky enough to have them get the best mileage of any car on the road. Those of you who don't have one are, how to say this, out of luck.
That's amazingly good. My average, over 104,000, is 61.8 mpg. I'm not complaining at all, as my easily fall inside the range that I could expect under the "old" EPA rating system.
I suspect that the new EPA estimates will more correctly project the mileage of regular cars and somewhat underestimate the mileage of hybrids.
I've owned a hybrid (a Honda Insight) for six years now. I've averaged about 62 MPG over the life of the car (about 104,000 miles now).
An intelligent car that can communicate with the road 60 seconds ahead would undoubtedly improve that number, as stop signs and red lights are probably the biggest drains on overall fuel economy. You gain some coming to a stop, but you always lose more getting back up to speed. The best mileage scenario, in my hybrid, at least, is continuous motion. I've averaged over 80 miles per gallon for hundreds of miles in the flats of North Carolina and the midwest when stops were few and could be anticipated well in advance.
Just having the detailed mile per gallon information in front of me as I drive (instantaneous, trip, overall, etc) is a big help in driving up mileage, as that boosts the drivers intelligence about the mileage implications of different driving behaviors.
Clearly this is not a question of intelligence and hybrid being alternatives. The combination would be best, and all cars should show detailed mileage information to drivers, if only so they can educate themselves about how to drive more efficiently.
All he said was I've actually tried the alternatives and the author has overstated things by a lot.
Only on Slashdot is entirely reasonable argument modded as flaimbait by those who would defend Microsoft no matter how unreasonable the defense.
Its interesting. The post that I am replying to was, when it was posted, the first to comment on DRM as a possible problem. It was carefully written based on a read of the problem posted and some backchecking into old articles on Vista security and DRM. It immediately picked up enough "interesting" points to give it a +5, and still has at least five such votes, but it has subsequently picked up three "redundant" identifiers (even though it was the first post to lay this out) and, it would appear, four "troll" designations. The net is that it now ranks "0".
What possible justification is there for putting a "troll" designation on a post that gives a grounded analysis of the problem? What possible justification is there for putting a "redundant" modifier on the first post that lays out the logic?
If I was paranoid, I'd say that MicroSoft has targeted the message to make it "go away". That shouldn't be possible, of course.
Actually, if you read carefully, its not even clear that Apple's player is involved (although that seems likely). There is a cascade of actions here that end in bluescreen under some conditions but not others. The bluescreen happens if you open the.MOV from disk, but not if you stream it from the net or another machine. The Toshiba machine is described as an example, so this may be happening on some other platforms.
Clearly, any attempt to debug a problem with the data provided is open to being wrong, but the clues provided suggest that (1) its not the.MOV file, (2) its not the software, (3) its not the codec (at least not as it normally runs), and (4) its not the drivers (with the same caviat). All three conclusions can be reached on the basis of the simple fact that content runs when it is streamed.
So what does that leave, especially given that the.MOV is known to run both streamed and stored on other systems. To be that leaves Vista itself, whose DRM Security code is already highly suspect. I would refer you to http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/25/203 4238. The material referred to in that discussion explains it all.
I suggest you go back a few months and read this and the report (by noted security expert Peter Gutmann) on the problems that are inherent to Vista's DRM protection: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/25/203 4238.
If you read that article and think about it you will quickly discover dozens of ways in which either Vista's DRM or the hardware protections that manufacturers are supposed to intall in response it it could be the problem here. The most important thing is that the DRM. or busted DRM, or expectation of DRM where there is none, could be anywhere in the system. It doesn't have to be directly associated with the specific.MOV file. Worse, because the "security" puts requirements on drivers to change behavior, code that functions normally when there is on DRM "issue" may not function when there is.
You should do a little research before you yell FUD.
There are several levels of Windows that I never ran on any of my systems, most often because I had an extremely reliable alternative, OS/2.
I didn't install XP on anything until after SP2, but only then because somebody was paying me to write code that had to run on the platform. XP has been OK, but has not been an improvement on Win2K by any useful measure. In the meantime, I've shifted most of my work on to Linux and MacIntosh. Both are an improvement on Microsoft's offerings, in my assessment, and Open Office gives me a stable office environment that runs on all three platforms. Among the three, Windows XP remains the least reliable, requiring a reboot every week or so.
Vista looks all flashy and glitsy, but at the end of the day I need an operating system that works (e.g. gets out of the way so I can get my work done). Based on everything I've seen, Vista is the most intrusive version of Windows yet, and I now routinely recommend my friends and customers over to other platforms: Linux if they can handle it; MacIntosh if ease of use is primary. It pains me to make these recommendations. I have significant code that has been in the system since the late 1980's.
I can, moveover, imagine somebody paying me to develop something on Vista, but I'll do my best to avoid it.
What you are seeing lies at the bullseye of the primary reason why I don't intend to ever install Vista. I don't know that the problem stems from this, but this problem has digital rights management (DRM) written all over it. Windows devices are supposed to degrade (by Microsoft specification that Toshiba has surely designed to) when they detect allegedly (by some measure) "illegal" content (e.g. content that should be DRM protected and isn't). Who knows what difficult interactions are built into the "decision" (made by the operating system and enforced in hardware) to give you a blue screen when you play your locally stored MOV files in Quicktime, but the problem is almost certainly in Vista's DRM code rather than Quicktime.
The best solution, I would guess, is to replace your Vista installation with something that isn't designed to fail. XP is a reasonable solution if you can get it. Ubuntu Linux is probably the next best option.
If you do replace Vista, be sure to go back to Toshiba and ask for a refund on the operating system.
This has been discussed on Slashdot before. It may be worthwhile to find and read older related articles.
I just checked with my registrar, and while the major goatse addresses (com, org, net, and biz) are all taken, there are open goatse variants, including goatse.us.com and goatse.eu.com. Get 'em while they're hot.
Well, there are nutso people in the world with more money than brains...
but no, I looked for the pattern because the numbers were so stupid. The pattern simply confirmed the obvious.
Jokers appear to have hijacked the bidding
on
Goatse.cx Is For Sale
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Last I looked the bidding was up over $40 million. Worse, the pattern of the bids suggested that the bidders who are bidding can't possibly be serious. Bidder 20 was a head at 30m, then bid 40m without a counter bid. Bidder 19 had previously done something similar.
CLR may be an important target, but I've read through the patent filing and would tend to agree with others here that the real issue is the separation of form, content, and function that is described, in the first paragraph, as the core of the "invention". CLR plays a role in that, but only a partial role. Its not just compiling arbitrary languages into an intermediate format, which is admittedly one of the characteristics of.net, but the pairing with XML and other elements that allow content and form (both of which tend to be expressed with variants of XML to be fully separated from function (which is the core of what you compile into CLR).
Even if CLR is the only issue, there is a huge amount of prior art on this. UCSD P-System did the exact same compilation of arbitrary languages into intermediate form such that it could be run on arbitrary processors in the 1970's. The Java Virtual Machine provided another widely used CLR-like in the mid-1990's. There have been plenty of others along the way.
But CLR is not the only issue, and there is plenty of prior art on it too. Various efforts to separate content from form and function occurred throughout the 1980's as user interface programming became important. I'm most familiar with the work I was associated with, so I'll document that here, but I'm sure I wasn't alone on this path. Bricklin had at least some of it in his roughly 1982 prototype development system and many of the claims in the patent might be asserted to have been implemented in early versions of SmallTalk.
As for work I was associated with, a colleague of mine at IBM Research, Richard Redpath, created an early system for separating interface content from code in about 1986. We used it initially to trivially translate a program into about 25 languages, but we applied it fairly generally and I think he may have received a patent for the work. My third generation user interface generator (about 1987) extended that separation form (specified with an XML-like language), function (compiled to a intermediate p-machine), and content (also specified in an XML-like language) in roughly 1987. We initially built a prototype SGML word processor with it. Another team in IBM Research, led by Stephen Boies, took that concept and developed it much further than I did, producing an IBM product that was widely used for building Kiosks. I would imagine they wrote relevant patents as well.
I used that platform in 1996 to implement a collaborative web surfing application that that displayed arbitrary content encoded in HTML in a user interface specified in XML within a system written in REXX and Java that was compiled to a Java Virtual Machine that displayed in a variety of browsers (Netscape, IE, Opera, etc) on a variety of platforms (Windows, OS/2, UNIX, and so on). We wrote a number of patents on that project, but there was so much prior art on separation of form, function, and content that we would never have dreamed of filing a patent on that aspect of the system. I'm sure I am hardly alone in having done such things at least three years before this patent was filed.
It is hard to believe that this patent is worth the money it will cost Vertical to litigate MicroSoft on it. It's hard to believe that they spent the money to force this through the patent process after three rejections. They can't possibly win.
Just to be clear. The Palms are all better than those Windows CE monstrosities (can you say bloatware squared). Linux is the right move. Too bad they didn't make it a year or two ago. Nokia has clearly demonstrated that Linux can power a superior pocket computer. I've loved my Palm's (and still have one running), but the larger screen and true multitasking of the Nokia N800 clearly make it the better machine right now.
Slashdot Mirror
Novell took a deep dive on my credibility list too, but they are in a position to be more knowledgeable than most on the issue of Microsoft's patent claims. To hear Microsoft tell it, Novell has been told what patents are at issue. See the quote under Microsoft's second story in the Groklaw article.
Of course he is. He is simply saying it authoritatively. That counts for something.
You are right. Linus couldn't possibly be a little bit more informed than the rest of us about the fundamentals of Linux. I'm sure Bill Gate's comments about the internals of windows would be meaningless patter as well.
From the Novell press release, issued yesterday:
The commentary on Groklaw is interesting as well
Doesn't look like it was "mission critical". It looks more like one of several Comcast experiments in this kind of technology for which Washington was the testbed. The competition appears to have done better in the experiments.
I figured out the random integer, but I haven't figured out how to enter it. Sounds like you are trying to do something interesting, though. By the way, if your host is Microsoft (or runs Microsoft servers), you might want to consider using a different host. Dirty tricks ... happen.
You are quite wrong. There is a considerable literature on this. Juries almost always take their responsibility seriously.
There is also, and this may have been the real issue for the case in question, a mild bias in juries (which judges usually try to counter in the instructions) to give a little bit of extra weight to the governments case. That's unfortunate, but very human.
Interesting point, but its a little worse than you think. I count some 2500 patents in which Microsoft is the assignee and the term "user interface" appears somewhere in the patent.
The good news:
The somewhat wierd news: Apple has only 600 or so patents with the words user interface in them. Of course all of these players together account for less than a sixth of all the patents (currently over 70,000 that include the words "user interface".
I was going for both. Sometimes insightful works better when packaged in a little humor.
Your example should not result in a new patent, so long as the original patent is written well. A tape drive is an electronic storage technology. A disc drive is another. I can detail the invention using a tape drive, but the tape drive should always be regarded as an example of an electronic storage technology and my claims should always be encompassing enough to cover any other electronic (or other) storage technologies that might be substituted at the same location in the invention.
I have some awareness of this, I have five patents, including some fairly widely cited ones.
Obviousness, as a general criterion in patenting, covers this kind of substitution. Both Amazon and the bartender are merchants. A storage technology is used for both the bartenders tab (the bartenders memory or, more commonly, paper records) and Amazon (a relational database, although they will have written this aspect of the claim more generally).
I picked the example for its humor, but but there are lots of other examples, including examples of patents that make specific claims about how one might do the one click that make no claims about the obvious implication that a billing will be made against an existing account. One great example is speed-dial, a common feature of telephones that has collected several thousand related patents. None that I can see do anything but try to improve on the functionality of speed dialing. None that I can see attempt to extend the primary use of speed dial (making a phone call by pressing just one or two buttons) to an obvious implication of the invention, that the same act would add the resulting phone call to your telephone bill. Amazon's one click patent does.
Amazon's patent for one click met the criteria for obviousness before the Supreme Court changed the definition. The only way it stands a chance now is if Congress changes patent law in a manner that removes obviousness as a barrier to patents. Amazon may be able to patent a specific method of a making a purchase with one click (much as some early speed dial patents do, with reference to specific registers on a chip), but that method cannot reasonably extended into its obvious implication (billing) and can almost certainly be worked around (one of the reasons there several thousand speed dial patents).
One-click has been around as long as bartenders have been extending credit to known customers, but I suppose you can't see prior art rising when its obscured by a head of foam.
The Insight was always a limited production testbed. The entire Honda hybrid lineup is built on the technology it demonstrated, and with its task accomplished, Honda has moved on to other limited production vehicles. Those of us lucky enough to have them get the best mileage of any car on the road. Those of you who don't have one are, how to say this, out of luck.
That's amazingly good. My average, over 104,000, is 61.8 mpg. I'm not complaining at all, as my easily fall inside the range that I could expect under the "old" EPA rating system. I suspect that the new EPA estimates will more correctly project the mileage of regular cars and somewhat underestimate the mileage of hybrids.
I've owned a hybrid (a Honda Insight) for six years now. I've averaged about 62 MPG over the life of the car (about 104,000 miles now).
An intelligent car that can communicate with the road 60 seconds ahead would undoubtedly improve that number, as stop signs and red lights are probably the biggest drains on overall fuel economy. You gain some coming to a stop, but you always lose more getting back up to speed. The best mileage scenario, in my hybrid, at least, is continuous motion. I've averaged over 80 miles per gallon for hundreds of miles in the flats of North Carolina and the midwest when stops were few and could be anticipated well in advance.
Just having the detailed mile per gallon information in front of me as I drive (instantaneous, trip, overall, etc) is a big help in driving up mileage, as that boosts the drivers intelligence about the mileage implications of different driving behaviors.
Clearly this is not a question of intelligence and hybrid being alternatives. The combination would be best, and all cars should show detailed mileage information to drivers, if only so they can educate themselves about how to drive more efficiently.
All he said was I've actually tried the alternatives and the author has overstated things by a lot. Only on Slashdot is entirely reasonable argument modded as flaimbait by those who would defend Microsoft no matter how unreasonable the defense.
Its interesting. The post that I am replying to was, when it was posted, the first to comment on DRM as a possible problem. It was carefully written based on a read of the problem posted and some backchecking into old articles on Vista security and DRM. It immediately picked up enough "interesting" points to give it a +5, and still has at least five such votes, but it has subsequently picked up three "redundant" identifiers (even though it was the first post to lay this out) and, it would appear, four "troll" designations. The net is that it now ranks "0".
What possible justification is there for putting a "troll" designation on a post that gives a grounded analysis of the problem? What possible justification is there for putting a "redundant" modifier on the first post that lays out the logic?
If I was paranoid, I'd say that MicroSoft has targeted the message to make it "go away". That shouldn't be possible, of course.
Actually, if you read carefully, its not even clear that Apple's player is involved (although that seems likely). There is a cascade of actions here that end in bluescreen under some conditions but not others. The bluescreen happens if you open the .MOV from disk, but not if you stream it from the net or another machine. The Toshiba machine is described as an example, so this may be happening on some other platforms.
.MOV file, (2) its not the software, (3) its not the codec (at least not as it normally runs), and (4) its not the drivers (with the same caviat). All three conclusions can be reached on the basis of the simple fact that content runs when it is streamed.
.MOV is known to run both streamed and stored on other systems. To be that leaves Vista itself, whose DRM Security code is already highly suspect. I would refer you to http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/25/203 4238. The material referred to in that discussion explains it all.
Clearly, any attempt to debug a problem with the data provided is open to being wrong, but the clues provided suggest that (1) its not the
So what does that leave, especially given that the
I suggest you go back a few months and read this and the report (by noted security expert Peter Gutmann) on the problems that are inherent to Vista's DRM protection: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/25/203 4238.
.MOV file. Worse, because the "security" puts requirements on drivers to change behavior, code that functions normally when there is on DRM "issue" may not function when there is.
If you read that article and think about it you will quickly discover dozens of ways in which either Vista's DRM or the hardware protections that manufacturers are supposed to intall in response it it could be the problem here. The most important thing is that the DRM. or busted DRM, or expectation of DRM where there is none, could be anywhere in the system. It doesn't have to be directly associated with the specific
You should do a little research before you yell FUD.
There are several levels of Windows that I never ran on any of my systems, most often because I had an extremely reliable alternative, OS/2.
I didn't install XP on anything until after SP2, but only then because somebody was paying me to write code that had to run on the platform. XP has been OK, but has not been an improvement on Win2K by any useful measure. In the meantime, I've shifted most of my work on to Linux and MacIntosh. Both are an improvement on Microsoft's offerings, in my assessment, and Open Office gives me a stable office environment that runs on all three platforms. Among the three, Windows XP remains the least reliable, requiring a reboot every week or so.
Vista looks all flashy and glitsy, but at the end of the day I need an operating system that works (e.g. gets out of the way so I can get my work done). Based on everything I've seen, Vista is the most intrusive version of Windows yet, and I now routinely recommend my friends and customers over to other platforms: Linux if they can handle it; MacIntosh if ease of use is primary. It pains me to make these recommendations. I have significant code that has been in the system since the late 1980's.
I can, moveover, imagine somebody paying me to develop something on Vista, but I'll do my best to avoid it.
What you are seeing lies at the bullseye of the primary reason why I don't intend to ever install Vista. I don't know that the problem stems from this, but this problem has digital rights management (DRM) written all over it. Windows devices are supposed to degrade (by Microsoft specification that Toshiba has surely designed to) when they detect allegedly (by some measure) "illegal" content (e.g. content that should be DRM protected and isn't). Who knows what difficult interactions are built into the "decision" (made by the operating system and enforced in hardware) to give you a blue screen when you play your locally stored MOV files in Quicktime, but the problem is almost certainly in Vista's DRM code rather than Quicktime.
The best solution, I would guess, is to replace your Vista installation with something that isn't designed to fail. XP is a reasonable solution if you can get it. Ubuntu Linux is probably the next best option.
If you do replace Vista, be sure to go back to Toshiba and ask for a refund on the operating system.
This has been discussed on Slashdot before. It may be worthwhile to find and read older related articles.
I just checked with my registrar, and while the major goatse addresses (com, org, net, and biz) are all taken, there are open goatse variants, including goatse.us.com and goatse.eu.com. Get 'em while they're hot.
Well, there are nutso people in the world with more money than brains ...
but no, I looked for the pattern because the numbers were so stupid. The pattern simply confirmed the obvious.
Last I looked the bidding was up over $40 million. Worse, the pattern of the bids suggested that the bidders who are bidding can't possibly be serious. Bidder 20 was a head at 30m, then bid 40m without a counter bid. Bidder 19 had previously done something similar.
So many jokes, so little time:
Dell offers new rootkit for Second Life: virtual trees.
Dell branches out into Second Life Phony Industry with Trunk service.
Dell leafs computer business to enter lucrative virtual nursery business.
CLR may be an important target, but I've read through the patent filing and would tend to agree with others here that the real issue is the separation of form, content, and function that is described, in the first paragraph, as the core of the "invention". CLR plays a role in that, but only a partial role. Its not just compiling arbitrary languages into an intermediate format, which is admittedly one of the characteristics of .net, but the pairing with XML and other elements that allow content and form (both of which tend to be expressed with variants of XML to be fully separated from function (which is the core of what you compile into CLR).
Even if CLR is the only issue, there is a huge amount of prior art on this. UCSD P-System did the exact same compilation of arbitrary languages into intermediate form such that it could be run on arbitrary processors in the 1970's. The Java Virtual Machine provided another widely used CLR-like in the mid-1990's. There have been plenty of others along the way.
But CLR is not the only issue, and there is plenty of prior art on it too. Various efforts to separate content from form and function occurred throughout the 1980's as user interface programming became important. I'm most familiar with the work I was associated with, so I'll document that here, but I'm sure I wasn't alone on this path. Bricklin had at least some of it in his roughly 1982 prototype development system and many of the claims in the patent might be asserted to have been implemented in early versions of SmallTalk.
As for work I was associated with, a colleague of mine at IBM Research, Richard Redpath, created an early system for separating interface content from code in about 1986. We used it initially to trivially translate a program into about 25 languages, but we applied it fairly generally and I think he may have received a patent for the work. My third generation user interface generator (about 1987) extended that separation form (specified with an XML-like language), function (compiled to a intermediate p-machine), and content (also specified in an XML-like language) in roughly 1987. We initially built a prototype SGML word processor with it. Another team in IBM Research, led by Stephen Boies, took that concept and developed it much further than I did, producing an IBM product that was widely used for building Kiosks. I would imagine they wrote relevant patents as well.
I used that platform in 1996 to implement a collaborative web surfing application that that displayed arbitrary content encoded in HTML in a user interface specified in XML within a system written in REXX and Java that was compiled to a Java Virtual Machine that displayed in a variety of browsers (Netscape, IE, Opera, etc) on a variety of platforms (Windows, OS/2, UNIX, and so on). We wrote a number of patents on that project, but there was so much prior art on separation of form, function, and content that we would never have dreamed of filing a patent on that aspect of the system. I'm sure I am hardly alone in having done such things at least three years before this patent was filed.
It is hard to believe that this patent is worth the money it will cost Vertical to litigate MicroSoft on it. It's hard to believe that they spent the money to force this through the patent process after three rejections. They can't possibly win.
Just to be clear. The Palms are all better than those Windows CE monstrosities (can you say bloatware squared). Linux is the right move. Too bad they didn't make it a year or two ago. Nokia has clearly demonstrated that Linux can power a superior pocket computer. I've loved my Palm's (and still have one running), but the larger screen and true multitasking of the Nokia N800 clearly make it the better machine right now.