Re: [Sheflug] Microsoft Profits Plunge

[(Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 12-Aug-09 21:03:53, Richard Ibbotson wrote:
> On Wednesday 12 Aug 2009 21:55:53 Bob Mottram wrote:
>> 2009/8/12 Richard Ibbotson <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>> > Oh... looks like there's another twist in the plot so far.......
>> >
>> > http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8197990.stm
> 
> http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090812144154814
> 
> Some Groklaw stuff which might or might not give some more details 
> about this.
> 
> -- 
> Richard

The patent which bit Microsoft -- US Patent  5,787,449  July 28, 1998
can be read from the US Patent Office at

  http://tinyurl.com/nbvnmf

(the real URL has 172 characters). Once you get past the legalistic
patentese in the "Abstract" and "Claims", you get to an interesting
and informative section "Description". See in particular the
"BACKGROUND TO THE INVENTION". This gives a very nice description
of how markup developed, and I was particularly pleased to see their
description of how troff (now on all our Linux machines as groff)
does its work. It goes on to outline how RTF & SGML work, and so on.
Quite instructive, I found!

I've then moved on to try to understand how their proposal is intended
to work, and how it differs essentially from embedded markup. This
is heavier going ...

Best wishes to all,
Ted.


--------------------------------------------------------------------
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861
Date: 12-Aug-09                                       Time: 23:12:06
------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

_______________________________________________
Sheffield Linux User's Group
http://sheflug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/sheflug_sheflug.org.uk
FAQ at: http://www.sheflug.org.uk/mailfaq.html

GNU - The Choice of a Complete Generation