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Patents

Touchpad Patent Holder Tsera Sues Just About Everyone 168

eldavojohn writes "Okay, well, maybe not everyone but more than twenty companies (including Apple, Qualcomm, Motorola and Microsoft) are being sued for a generic patent that reads: 'Apparatus and methods for controlling a portable electronic device, such as an MP3 player; portable radio, voice recorder, or portable CD player are disclosed. A touchpad is mounted on the housing of the device, and a user enters commands by tracing patterns with his finger on a surface of the touchpad. No immediate visual feedback is provided as a command pattern is traced, and the user does not need to view the device to enter commands.' Sounds like their may be a few companies using that technology. The suit was filed on July 15th in the favoritest place ever to file patent claim lawsuits: Texas Eastern District Court. It's a pretty classic patent troll; they've been holding this patent since 2003 and they just noticed now that everyone and his dog are using touchpads to control portable electronic devices."
Data Storage

SATA 3.0 Release Paves the Way To 6Gb/sec Devices 248

An anonymous reader writes "The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) has just released the new Serial ATA Revision 3.0 specification. With the new 3.0 specification, the path has been paved to enable future devices to transfer up to 6Gb/sec as well as provide enhancements to support multimedia applications. Like other SATA specifications, the 3.0 specification is backward compatible with earlier SATA products and devices. This makes it easy for motherboard manufactures to go ahead and upgrade to the new specification without having to worry about its customers' legacy SATA devices. This should make adoption of the new specification fast, like previous adoptions of SATA 2.0 (or 3Gb/sec) technology."

Comment Re:Good God... (Score 1) 40

Actually, this would be their second. Steel Battalion: Line of Contact was released a couple of years back to critical acclaim - at first. Then the connection errors arose en-masse, thanks to a broken server browser which did a poor job at reading a player's "connection quality" and refused to let most people who splurged the $200 required to get into the game in the first place even join any matches. Of course, all Capcom did was blame the player base and their ISPs and utterly refused to fix the problem; a patch was only released following months upon months of complaints (prior to which there was barely even any acknowledgement of a problem) - and even this failed to do anything to really fix the game, after which most players had already given up on it and moved on. Let's not even get started at their flawed beta program, which prioritized only players who had bought the original game directly through the Capcom website (most of whom had barely gotten past the game's fourth level, and then shelved it) while they disregarded their active forum and community base as potential beta candidates.

But I'm not jaded. Honest!

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