Submission + - Odd Units of Measurement
CowboyRobot writes: "ACM's Queue has a column by the inimitable Stan Kelly-Bootle, where he explains the curse of metrics and the dangers of their bastard offspring, units as well as some of the more absurd units of measurements.
My favorite line: milliHelen: The amount of beauty that can launch one ship."
Enforced Ads Coming to Flash Video Players 397
Dominare writes "The BBC is reporting that Adobe is releasing new player software which will allow websites that use their Flash video player (such as YouTube) to force viewers to watch ads before the video they selected will play. 'But the big seller for Adobe is the ability to include in Flash movies so-called digital rights management (DRM) — allowing copyright holders to require the viewing of adverts, or restrict copying. "Adobe has created the first way for media companies to release video content, secure in the knowledge that advertising goes with it," James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research said.' This seems to have been timed to coincide with Microsoft's release of their own competitor, Silverlight, to Adobe's dominance of online video."
Feed Review: SpamSieve 2.6 (macworld.com)
Submission + - Microsoft Copies BlueJ, Patents It
PRC Banker writes: One of BlueJ's developers, Michael Kolling, has posted a message on his website, Michael Kolling, saying Microsoft copied BlueJ and are attempting to patent it. "After blatantly copying BlueJ (without reference or attribution), Microsoft have now filed for patent for the functionality they knowingly copied from us." He even quoted a Microsoft developer "*My* [Dr Fernandez's] interpretation of the above statement is basically that our academic customers wanted this because of the success of this BlueJ feature." Something in Microsoft just doesn't tie up. BlueJ is an educational IDE for teaching object-oriented programming and Java to beginners, a cross-platform academic project started in 1998.
Submission + - Microsoft steal BlueJ idea and patent it
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft is attempting to patent "Object Test Bench", a graphical object-oriented teaching tool. The problem is that BlueJ created it in 1994 and it's been in active and healthy use since, as a free project created by academics. Microsoft openly acknowledges this. Whichever way the BlueJ team turn, they now face a legal battle against huge corporation. Headstrong Slashdotters might be screaming "SUE!! PRIOR ART!!" but BlueJ is an academic project and legal battles require lots of cash. It's not helped by the fact BlueJ is based outside of the US.
