O’Reilly Network: PTO Director Orders Re-Exam for ‘906 Patent. “In what could be good news for the Web, the Director of the US Patent and Trademark Office has ordered a re-examination of the ‘906 patent, which was the subject of a patent infringement lawsuit this summer brought by Eolas against Microsoft.” Linked from Tomalak’s Realm
Good news, I think. A patent restriction could be really damaging for many browser manufacturers, and the claim appears to be dubious.
It’s the first Wednesday of the month, and that means more security bulletins from Microsoft. This month’s come in two emails titled “Microsoft Windows Security Bulletin Summary for November 2003” and “Microsoft Office Security Bulletin Summary for November 2003” and consist of
All result in “Remote Code Execution” which certainly sounds like a bad thing to me.
You’ll find copies of the bulletins at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/winnov03.asp and http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/offnov03.asp.
It’s the 46th week of the year.
News.Com: Internet Explorer to stomp pop-ups. “Darin Linnman, a Microsoft spokesman, said that the company plans to add the pop-up blocking feature to an updated version of Explorer with Service Pack 2 when it’s released in the first half of next year.” Link from Tomalak’s Realm
Now there’s innovation! I wonder if they’ll use the Mozilla model or the Opera model, the two browsers I use instead of IE.
Wired has an article on Wallop, Microsoft Research’s experiments in blogging. Link via Scripting News.
Not surprisingly, with AOL coming out with blogging software and Google buying Pyra Labs, Microsoft is checking it out. Dan Gillmor’s eJournal blogs: “My colleague, Michael Bazeley, points me to Wallop, a project of the Online Lab at Microsoft Research’s Social Computing Group…. ” in Microsoft Experiments with Blogging and Social Software.
Mary Jo Foley of Microsoft Watch noted the site here
Swapped around a hub and a switch in the home office today, and one of the W2K servers refused to connect to the network. Flickering lights on the switch, solid link lights on the NIC, both LinkSys. Cold shutdown and examination revealed the card was older than the version of the driver; reverting to the older, proper driver brought on the Full Microsoft Experience: machine locked up, lost it’s entire driver database, refused to load, refused to recognize hardware, melted down. Okay, not the full eXPerience: I didn’t blue screen. But near enough. A few hours later and the original, incorrect driver is in place, and I’m backing up the few items on the machine not duplicated elsewhere prior to meling it down for slag. Or Mandrake, SuSE, something. Grrrr. I hate hardware.
CNET News.com – Front Door leads off with a story that Novell to acquire SuSE Linux. “The longtime Microsoft foe signs an agreement to acquire SuSE Linux for $210 million in cash, while IBM will take a $50 million investment in Novell.” I’m sceptical that this will be a good move for any of them. Novell does not have a history of successes. SuSE was popular in Europe, with a reputation as a top distribution, but also a positive attribute of *NOT* being an “American distribution,” despite the fact that contributions come from all over the world.
Yesterday, RedHat sent out notices that ‘free’ RedHat would be no more, with a renamed (and possibly incompatible?) Fedora taking over the “enthusiast” market and a “Red Hat Enterprise Linux” raising the price point for a supported, business-grade Linux.
To me, it sounds like the #1 and #2 leading distributions have shot themselves in their respective feet. This is the kind of behavior that a marketing company like Microsoft can take advantage of. Let’s hope in the coming weeks that spin and damage control minimize the FUD sure to develop from these moves.
“In a Nutshell: All About Longhorn” John Carroll submits a special report summarizing Microsoft’s recent Professional Developer Conference, which seemed to focus on “Longhorn,” Microsoft’s next major client operating system, supposedly due in 2003. It sounds like a completely rewritten OS, with legacy Win32 APIs as well as all new .NET interfaces. On the bright side, Microsoft is finally replacing all the groady old interfaces that drove us crazy. On the downside, what will the compatibility issue be like? Shades of the Win32s mess revisited. Let’s hope they’ve learned from that. Linked from OSNews
“Replace and defend. Reading the Longhorn SDK docs is a disorienting experience. Everything’s familiar but different. Consider these three examples: …” From Jon’s Radio
Jon cites Joe Hewitt’s blog where Joe says:
“This means that Microsoft may be attempting to simultaneously obsolete HTML, CSS, DOM, XUL, SVG, SMIL, Flash, PDF.”
Why is Microsoft confusing innovation with obliteration? Read my blog subtitle: Interoperable, competition, working well with others. This is a time for evolution and not revolution. Microsoft’s arrogance is astounding.
Web Group Backs Microsoft in Patent Suit. “A leading Internet standards-setting organization took the unusual step of urging the director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office to invalidate a software patent.” By Steve Lohr. [New York Times: Business]
I’m concerned that Microsoft’s decision not to pursue appeals potentially very damaging to the industry and Microsoft’s customers.