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David vs. Goliath (2/12/98)
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Add another lawsuit to the pile that's making Microsoft's twelve gazillion lawyers richer by the second. This time, though, it's not a government agency suing the Redmond software company, as in the Department of Justice's current litigation; nor is a big computer tech company like Sun hauling their butts to court for something like contract violation in corrupting Java. It's not even a class-action suit representing millions of frustrated Windows 95 users. In this particular case, it's just one guy suing for patent infringement.
According to Wired News, a man named Martin Gardiner Reiffin claims to hold a U.S. patent for the software technique known as multithreading, which allows more than one set of instructions in a single application to run at the same time. For instance, in Mac OS 8, you can have six copy processes running at once and still empty the trash and launch Netscape; that's because the OS 8 Finder is multithreaded. Gardiner claims that since he owns the patent for the technique, Microsoft owes him royalties for every product they ship that uses it-- which, of course, if paid, would probably transfer a hefty chunk of Bill Gates' billions over to Gardiner's Swiss bank account. Microsoft's lawyers will probably argue that the patent never should have been granted to Gardiner and that it is therefore not valid.
Given that Apple (and just about every other software vendor out there) uses multithreading in their products, why is Gardiner only suing Microsoft for royalties? "Because they have 90 percent of the market," he says. Hmmm, guess there is a benefit to having only 2.6% market share after all...
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SceneLink (445)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 2/12/98 episode: February 12, 1998: Scandal! The latest OS pretender on Macintosh turf proves to be nothing but an imposter. Meanwhile, Microsoft's lawyers work to swat a fly buzzing around and asking for a billion dollars, and rumors of Allegro's imminent castration are greatly exaggerated...
Other scenes from that episode: 444: Whoopee, Another Hoax (2/12/98) Wouldn't you know it? A scant two days after we tell you about the InfiniteOS project, our buddy John Farr at AppleLinks writes to tell us that InfiniteOS is no less vaporous than COS. Let's make that clearer: On an existence scale of 1 to 10, InfiniteOS rates a 0... 446: Allegro in Full Force (2/12/98) Yesterday we mentioned the disparity between the "Allegro Lite" descriptions posted by Mac OS Rumors and MacWEEK. MacWEEK claims that Allegro Lite is a feature-reduced version of the next Mac OS revision, which has some functions removed in order to meet the summer ship date...
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