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Friday, February 13, 2004

Microsoft Locks Up XML Patent - Microsoft has been granted United States patent 6,687,897 for "XML script automation."
The patent, awarded by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on February 3, appears to deal with basic XML functionality. Specifically, it describes a method for unpacking multiple scripts contained within a single XML file.
According to the application filed by Microsoft, the patent involves "systems, methods and data structures for encompassing scripts written in one or more scripting languages in a single file."
"The scripts of a computer system are organized into a single file using Extensible Language Markup (XML)," Microsoft's patent document continues. [Internetnews.com]

9:26:54 AM

No Rumor: Windows Source Code Loose on the 'Net. Reports online late on Thursday said that the source code for Windows 2000 and Windows NT4 had been posted to an Internet download site. Microsoft said the company is investigating the rumor and later confirmed the leak. [eWEEK Technology News]
9:17:57 AM

Novell's Chris Stone Will Not Speak at Harvard Feb. 23 - Moglen Will. I received the following from Harvard's Journal of Law & Technology's Editor: "Due to concerns regarding litigation filed by SCO after our invitation for Mr. Stone to speak was issued, Novell's General Counsel has informed us that Novell Vice Chairman Chris Stone will be unable to come speak to JOLT on Feb 23rd."Instead, the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology is pleased to welcome our third speaker of the year: Eben Moglen, Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia Law School in New York. Professor Moglen is General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation, and a leading spokesperson for open source and free software." [GrokLaw]
9:15:32 AM

PHP 5.0 Beta 4 released!. PHP 5.0 Beta 4 has been released. This fourth beta of PHP 5 is also scheduled to be the last one (barring unexpected surprises, that did occur with beta 3). This beta incorporates dozens of bug fixes since Beta 3, rewritten exceptions support, improved interfaces support, new experimental SOAP support, as well as lots of other improvements, some of which are documented in the ChangeLog. Some of the key features of PHP 5 include: PHP 5 features the Zend Engine 2. XML support has been completely redone in PHP 5, all extensions are now focused around the excellent libxml2 library (http://www.xmlsoft.org/). SQLite has been bundled with PHP. For more information on SQLite, please visit their website. A new SimpleXML extension for easily accessing and manipulating XML as PHP objects. It can also interface with the DOM extension and vice-versa. Streams have been greatly improved, including the ability to access low-level socket operations on streams. [PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor]
9:13:28 AM