Victorious, VirnetX sues Microsoft, again

Good, I hope they get acouple billion out of them....

It's interesting that so many patent applications can be examined, and patents awarded; then they can be re-examined and patents rescinded.

Though I know nothing of this action, I was consulting during Microsoft's brilliant growth, by methods that left even IBM with its mouth open.

In the 1980s, Microsoft would approach a 'Mom & Pop' company selling an augment (like a defragmenting program) for MS-DOG. "We just love your little augment to our 'operating system'. Give us the source code, and we'll make sure it runs even faster on our next version - and, it won't die, as WordPerfect will." Indeed that was true. The next version contained the little augment, it ran faster, and the 'Mom & Pop' company closed.

Microsoft now appears to have a gackle of patent attorneys better than our government's. Microsoft's earlier methods leave me wondering whether the patents reviewed as 'invalid' are invalid because the ideas were not original, or invalid for some other reason.

When you think of all the different stolen softwares that go into a windows release, it is amazing that Vista was so reliable...downright incredible that Win7 is even more reliable.

Remember, when windows crashes, it isn't microsoft's fault...they didn't write it!

Well, I think that might be going a little far. Given that the size of a GNU/Linux is roughly 2 GB, and the size of the equivalent Windows 7 is 20 GB, Microsoft appears to have taken lots of room for its own code.

One example would be their streaming AVI container with DRM. You know, the 18-year old format without shape or ability to vary the bit-rate sampling -- the one that plays all those streaming movies from NetFlix that's I've bought for two years but can't play because I'm being penealized for not buying a newer Microsoft operating system.

Another might be Microsoft Network's firewall -- though this could be FreeBSD's, I suppose: the one that prevented me from getting a digital signature for an attorney because thawte.com, a subsidiary of VeriSign, was blacklisted on MSN.

Wait ... I do know of one. Win3.1's process scheduler! When hundreds of papers had been published refining Unix's scheduler, Microsoft's gave half the clock ticks to a DOG program, dividing the rest among the 3.1 user applications. They had to have written that.

In the early 90s, there were some nice applications that originated with Microsoft. However, after OS/2 Warp died, I switched to GNU/Linux & MacOSX. So, I confess ignorance; but those 18 GB must contain something.

Though I understood Microsoft, which will be the only operating system if *ix is eliminated for being insideous, cannot build hardware, it seems to control many hardware companies: those that prevent their hardware from ever working with Linux.

Before buying a USB flash drive, to boot a repair operating system from, I checked the speeds and read all the technical specs on SanDisk's web site. Upon receiving it, I found a read-only partition had eaten the MBR, and the USB had been secretly modified from the standard to prevent my removing it with anything but a Microsoft operating system (later MacOSX was added). It was interesting the 'U3' partition would have installed, without permission, adware on a MS computer identical to the adware servers that I thought MS had removed from Vista and the MS web browser. Nevertheless, I used an already compromised Mac to remove it; but that left it far too slow to use.

So, I wish to amend my previous post. Microsoft has been writing some very, very creative software. :-) (This is my last post on this news article about MS taking over other's patents.)