Kent's Tech stuff

Sorry about the delay from the last post. So here's what's going on.

The Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen filed a lawsuit against Apple, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, eBay, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, and Staples! Allen is also the founder of a company called Interval, and he says that all these major search engines and e-commerce companies are infringing upon fundamental web technologies developed by Interval in the 90's. The curious thing is that Microsoft wasn't included in the lawsuit. After all they do provide the search technology for Yahoo (which WAS on the list). Allen also refused to comment on if licensing issues had been discussed with the above companies prior to filing the lawsuit.

These are the specific patents cited in the lawsuit:

• No. 6,263,507, "Browser for Use in Navigating a Body of Information, With Particular Application to Browsing Information Represented By Audiovisual Data."

• No. 6,034,652, "Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device."

• No. 6,788,314, "Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device."

• No. 6,757,682, "Alerting Users to Items of Current Interest."

In the mean time, one of NASA's spacecrafts has spotted a multi-planet solar system. They named the system Kepler-9 after the Kepler spacecraft that found it. Little fact; the Kepler spacecraft is armed with a 95 megapixel camera. 95! Reportedly there are two Saturn-class planets and one planet around the size of Earth in the Kepler 9 system. They were able to detect the planets by measuring the dimming of starlight as planets passed in front of their sun. Within the next couple of years we should be able to say whether planets like our Earth are common or rare. As of now, there scientists have found around 300,000 systems capable of having planets like our solar system. Get ready for the aliens people!

Now for some gaming news. Lenovo, yes, LENOVO has announced their own game console. Apparently it will be a competitor for Microsoft's Kinect. Levovo's new console is called eBox. Yes, a very uncreative ripoff, I know. It will launch in China by the end of the year. Lets see if Lenovo can actually make a console to match Microsoft's Xbox and much anticipated Kinect.

Thanks for reading! I will be posting again shortly.

-Kent