Microsoft Declines Comment on Motion Controller
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Company is mum on plans for releasing an Xbox 360  motion controller.
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Microsoft Corp. said on Monday it had  decided not to appeal a December ruling by a European Union  court ordering it to immediately implement EU antitrust  sanctions imposed last March.
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Software giant Microsoft Corp. will for the first time be forced by antitrust regulators to change how it designs and sells its widely used Windows operating system, after a European Union judge Wednesday rejected the company's bid to postpone sanctions against it.- washingtonpost.com
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Tycho:  When I started reading articles about Senator Brownback's bill - the one that would require that the ESRB play through games in their entirety - I expected to agree with it in principle, but take issue with its execution.  The shrill phase of the site, where I would don armor and ride under the aegis of the true gamer no matter how mild the incentive, now rests in the reliquary with Xbox Controller Jokes and Jabs At User Friendly.  I had chosen a singularly poor moment to become reasonable.  Upon further examination, the Senator's plan (which I think may be rightly called a machination) is the sort of thing one might forge in the fires of Mount Doom.
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Microsoft can't dust off its blue ribbons anymore.
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(InfoWorld) - Citing a mistaken filing, Microsoft has abandoned a patent application for technology in its Visual Studio software development platform that originated outside the company, a Microsoft representative said on Tuesday. The application involved Microsoft's implementation of the BlueJ developer environment, which the company calls "Object Test Bench," said the representative, who attributed the company's response to an InfoWorld press inquiry on the subject to Jason Matusow, Microsoft's senior directory of IP and interoperability. "Microsoft mistakenly filed for a patent on a technology included in components of Visual Studio 2005 that was based upon an academic project to help individuals grasp introductory concepts of software programming through pictorial representation of code," the representative said. The company had been notified by Michael KÃ¶lling, the creator of BlueJ, that the patent application covered technology substantially similar to his project. BlueJ is an IDE for teaching object-oriented programming and Java to beginners, according to KÃ¶lling's blog. "Microsoft agrees with Professor KÃ¶lling, and in keeping with the companyâs standards for quality patent filings, [it is] expressly abandoning the patent application with the USPTO (United States Patent & Trademark Office) through normal procedures," the company said. KÃ¶lling could not be reached for comment on Tuesday. But in his blog, he raised the question of whether Microsoft's patent application would be denied because it was based on "prior art," which is technology that already existed. "While I am sure we would have had a good case to file for prior art, and while it is likely that this would have stopped the application, I really have better things to do with my time," he wrote. In a blog entry last Friday, KÃ¶lling had expressed fears that the patent application could destroy BlueJ.
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Dirty uncle not welcome Leader of the Ubuntu tribe Mark Shuttleworth has no plans to invite dirty uncle Microsoft over for patent protection talks.â¦
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Microsoft has responded to intermittent Xbox LIVE issues that started shortly after Christmas.
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A U.S. District Court Judge in California has denied three motions by Microsoft to invalidate patents related to AutoPlay in a lawsuit brought by TV Interactive Data (TVI). Judge Jeffrey White rulred that Microsoft did not offer sufficient evidence of prior art and the case will go to trial. TVI filed suit in 2002 claiming that Microsoft's AutoPlay technology -- found in all versions of Windows -- infringes on TVI patents. Microsoft has been swamped by patent cases, and continues to battle Eolas in a dispute over Internet Explorer.
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Security rival says Microsoft is withholding spyware APIs for the Windows update, but the software giant denies it.
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Blog: The software maker says that the force-feedback technology company is not living up to terms of a 2003 legal settlement
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While Gates closes up on Â£ for $ pricing Two controversial aspects of Microsoft's Vista were conspicuous by their absence at yesterday's launch event - neither digital rights management nor the way Microsoft will shut down or reduce the functionality of software it considers to be an illegal copy were mentioned.â¦
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Microsoft Corp., the world&#39;s largest software maker, asked a European Union court to suspend an order by antitrust regulators forcing it to disclose information on the inner workings of its Windows product to competitors.
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Did Immersion -- the patent holder for tactile feedback devices used in game controllers -- settle its lawsuit against Sony for building "rumble" into its PlayStation 2 joysticks without a license? BetaNews reported in March the sides did settle, but now Immersion may be trying to characterize the pact with Sony as a licensing agreement instead.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft declined to comment Friday on post-Vista plans by releasing a comment -- a move bloggers attributed to buzz about a list of most-asked-for features to Vista's successor. The list was yanked from a Microsoft forum earlier this week. The company's statement, attributed to Kevin Kutz, director of the Windows client team, was among the shortest on record from the company. "The launch of Windows Vista was an incredibly exciting moment for our customers and partners around the world, and the company is focused on the value Windows Vista will bring to people today," Kutz said. "We are not giving official guidance to the public yet about the next version of Windows, other than that we're working on it. When we are ready, we will provide updates." Bloggers dedicated to tracking every Microsoft twitch said the comment on not commenting was prompted by speculation about user-requested features for the next edition of Windows. That list had been solicited from an invite-only group of Windows beta testers in a program dubbed "Early Feedback Program" that started in December 2006. It included such requests as integrated antivirus scanning, plain-English error messages, and several improvements to Internet Explorer that are fixtures in rival Firefox, such as session restore. On Tuesday, Windows beta tester Jamie Grant posted a list of the feature requests -- which blogger Long Zheng characterized as a bit like Dell's user-generated, user-ranked IdeaStorm -- on Microsoft's own enthusiast Channel9 site. The thread, however, was quickly locked by Channel9 administrators; Grant later deleted the post and list. But by then Channel9 users had seen the 70-some items, and bloggers like ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley began spreading the word. Some, like Zheng, didn't take the censorship well. "One would think, or at the least I would think, a list of product suggestions thought of by the people, written by the people, moderated by the people, and ranked by the people is a product of the people," said Zheng in an entry to his "istartedsomething" blog. "Under some unexplainable spell, some Microsoft employees insist this become company secrets, thus, protected by non-disclosure. I beg them to reevaluate what's at stake." Even Robert McLaws, a blogger who is usually supportive of Microsoft, took the company to task, albeit gently. After translating the Microsoft statement as, "Hey, we just spent five years working on this thing, we don't know what we're doing next. Why don't you guys go spend some time talking about that while we go figure it out, mmmk?" McLaws advised Microsoft that "instead of getting annoyed because we need something to do, you guys need to chalk it up as an unwanted side effect of taking five years to get your last product out the door." Microsoft's statement isn't a change from its official position, which has all along been to emphasize Windows Vista and downplay any future releases. For a time, that mum's-the-word approach went so far as to hedge whether a Service Pack would be created for Vista. Although executives soon relented and at least acknowledged a Vista SP1 would be forthcoming, they continue to push Vista. This week, in fact, as rumors spread that the beta of SP1 might pop up as early as Monday, COO Kevin Turner urged partners to focus on Vista and other 2007 products. "I see one thing in FY [fiscal year] '08; I see money," said Turner. "I see monetization. I can smell it and hear it, see it, OK, because this is the year that we're going to monetize that innovation."
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Tycho:  I don't know whose fault it is exactly, mine or theirs, but I won't be installing Vista anytime soon.  I would like some crazy shit to happen when I minimize something don't get me wrong.  I want my windows to go Waja-wajow(!) is possible.  But if there's a great reason to "trade horses midstream" or whatever the going metaphor is I haven't discovered it.
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SAN FRANCISCO - A California judge has denied three motions for summary judgement in a patent infringement case filed by TV Interactive Data Corp. (TVI) against Microsoft Corp., meaning the case will proceed to trial.