Mad Mike Magee’s Musings

SOFTWARE FIRM Microsoft got a writ from Fullview on the 29th of April, alleging its Round Table video conferencing software breached a number of patents.

Fullview alleges that patent number 6,700,711 called Panoramic Viewing System with a Composite Field of View is breached by Round Table.  The patent was issued to Vishjit Singh Nalwa and Fullview said that he holds 14 US patents on his omni directional camera viewing system.

Part of the patent describes the ability to panoramically scan 360 degrees. Fullview is seeking injunctions on Round Table and damages from the Vole. ♣

THE VOLE AND THE GANNETT along with the Monster are being sued by Pitchware in a California district court.

Pitchware said in its “e-filing” on the 7^th of April that Monster Worldwide, Career Builder, Gannett, the McClatchy Company, Microsoft and Career Marketplace have used its patent in their products.

The patent number 7,043,454 is interestingly entitled “method and apparatus for a cryptographically assisted commercial network system designed to facilitate idea submission, purchase and licensing and innovation transfer.”

Have a dekko at the patent. It is apparently a “method and apparatus for effectuating bilateral commerce in ideas”.

What the heck can this mean? ♥

SOFTWARE FIRM Microsoft is obviously keen to get Indian users going on Vista.

According to DQ Channels,  it cut the cost of Vista Home Basic to Rs 4,000 ($99), Vista Home Premium to Rs 5,300 ($131) and Vista Ultimate to Rs 11,500 ($284).

This, said a man from the Vole, is to do with a transformation in the way people buy software. So it is nothing to do with the fact that Microsoft needs to push Vista at any price, practically. These Indian price cuts range between 13 per cent and 39 per cent. ♦

PATENTS breached by Microsoft are worth a cool $2 billion in damages, a witness claimed yesterday in fresh Alcatel-Lucent litigation.

According to Bloomberg, the Vole needs to divvy up $1.99 billion for breaching patents used by the Windows Media Player, Vista and the Xbox 360.

Dell, meanwhile, should reach into its purse and pay Alcatel-Lucent a mere $465.6 million.
An expert witness reckoned that the amounts are justified because the patents allegedly breached are based on millions of systems shipped.

The case continueth. ♣

THE SUPREME COURT told Microsoft that it wouldn’t squish an antitrust case that Novell brought against it in 2004.

Novell claims that the Vole destroyed its Wordperfect and Quattro Pro programs because they didn’t have to run on Windows.Microsoft claimed that because Novell wasn’t in the OS business, it can’t have come to harm.

The irony being that Novell was in the OS business for quite a while, but certainly not in 2004.

The case continues. ♣

DON CLARK at the Wall Street Journal (sub required) seems to have got a press release about parallel computing earlier than anyone else today.

He writes that His Voleness and La Intella will announce a major investment to promote programming for multicore chips.

This will be led by boffins at Berkeley and there’s probably going to be a lot more money put in than the cash prizes of $250 AMD said it was offering a week or two back.

Intel - like AMD - is really hoist by its own petard. After running out of places to go in the megahurts wars, attention was turned to multicore chips, and no doubt we’ll probably see Intel “Atom” MIDs soon with multiple cores. But the big big problem is how to write software that will take advantage of these hardware capabilities.

And it’s not a new big big problem. Software boffins have struggled with the concept for years and years. The Journal quotes William Dally, a Stanford professor, as saying that while the chip makers are hurtling pell mell towards multicores, no one has a clue on how to program for them.

That no doubt includes Microsoft, which couldn’t even be bothered to program for Intel’s marketing scheme called HT - that’s hyperthreading, not hypertension - in the glory [surely gory, Ed.]  days of Chipzilla’s Pentium 4.♣