The Supreme Court of the United States has refused to hear Microsoft’s appeal of an antitrust suit being brought against Microsoft by Novell, which alleges the Redmond software giant used its monopoly in the computer operating systems market to "target and destroy" its WordPerfect and Quattro Pro productivity applications.
The private lawsuit dates back to 2004, but the issues in the suit date all the way back to the mid-1990s when Novell acquired the word processor WordPerfect and spreadsheet applications Quattro Pro and decided to compete with Microsoft Office in the productivity applications market. The effort was essentially a disaster, and Novell sold the applications to Corel in 1996. When Novell bought WordPerfect and Quattro Pro, it claimed the applications had a combined value of over $1 billion. The company sold the applications to Corel for $170 million.
Novell alleges Microsoft held back "critical technical information" about Windows internals from Novell, while at the same time making that information available to its own Microsoft Office development teams. As a result, Novel claims Office had an unfair advantage over competitors like Novell, and Microsoft abused its monopoly position in the operating systems market to constrain trade and competition in the applications market. Novell is basing part of its case on facts established by the federal government’s successful antitrust case against Microsoft.
Not surprisingly, Microsoft maintains WordPerfect and Quattro Pro failed to catch on simply because customers didn’t like them very much.
In October of 2007, the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court ruling that Novell’s antitrust suit against Microsoft could go forward. Microsoft appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, hoping they would quash the case. For several years, Microsoft has expressed official bewilderment that Novell would be suing them over a business it owned only briefly and sold over a decade ago.
In 2004, Microsoft paid Novell $536 million to settle litigation related to Novell’s NetWare operating system; at the same time, Novell dropped out of the antitrust case being brought against Microsoft by the European Commission.
In 1950, Alan Turing asked whether machines can think. Rather than argue over definitions, he turned the question into a party game, where an interrogator trades typed messages with hidden players and tries to work out who is who. Since then, chatbots have gotten so good that they have already fooled humans in modern versions of the test.
So, four researchers from Paris Cité University asked the obvious follow-up question in a new study published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports: can AI at least catch its own kind?
Mozilla is giving Firefox’s Smart Window two new tricks. If you haven’t tried it yet, Smart Window is an optional AI mode in Firefox with a built-in chat that helps you get things done while you browse. With this update, it can fill out online forms using details from your tabs and keep an eye on websites for you.
Tired of typing the same details into every form?
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.