October 2003 - Posts
Well, what do you know, I'm not the only one of the opinion that this patent is invalid on the basis of prior art...
Story Here
Hmm, it occurs to me that I haven't posted much speech related stuff for the past two weeks -- school's been hectic lately.
Well, not too much new right now, though I am having lunch with one of the researchers at Bosch to update them on what's been going on recently and where we're headed with future
Ariadne (dialogue system) related work.
So this is totally awesome. My friends Jim Bai and Craig Austin at CMU just made this fabulous pumpkin!
Jim is our wonderful student consultant this year at Carnegie Mellon for Microsoft (hired off of my referral :) ), and Craig is one of his suitemates. Let's give them a round of applause!
And don't forget that awesome Longhorn "T"!
So says a fortune cookie from my dinner tonight. I hope Someone Really Special remembers mine. I swear, I feel like I had a whole slew of lessons this week on trust and loyalty in relationships. Sometimes, you have to bend over backwards to let them get their way, and sometimes you have to stand your ground to direct them back onto the right path. And sometimes you have to lose it all to remember what you had.
It's just so incredibly heart breaking seeing someone you care for go forth onto a self-destructive path, then you save them, and then know that you have to terminate the relationship for your own good. Always listen to your close friends, always be good to your close friends, even when they are not good to you or to themselves. Never violate your principles, and always believe in yourself. Lesson for the evening.
And to that SRS if you're out there, take care of yourself. Never underestimate the power of friendship.
Try this:
search for “Natural Language Understanding” at Google,
get advertisement to “Work for Google”
Link
Very cute, and very smart to do :)
Don, I just want to say thank you -- that was a very informative and very cool article! It felt like a trip down memory lane. Me not being a Microsoft employee (ah, the joys of being at a University), I'm free to say what I want about the Eolas case... and might I suggest you give Mr. Michael Wallent a bit of help here if you haven't done so already -- especially as the case goes to the appeals court. Since you were one of the inventors of COM... and that led to OLE... and you all see where I'm going with this.
Michael Wallent rocks too, I met him here @ CMU last year -- I wish him the best of luck with all of these legal issues so he can go back and deal with what's really important -- getting Longhorn out and fantastic.
For anyone who is curious and unfamiliar with the Eolas patent, here it is:
Eolas patent
Do not comment on this posting if you are an MS employee.
Look closely at this ad:
Yay! Okay, as a Bay area resident for 18 months during my years in college, I can't begin to express my joy at this result, if it is true! I remember the rolling blackouts of 2001 when I was working at IBM -- it sure was a funny scene seeing thousands of computer geeks at Sun, IBM, and Apple on De Anza Blvd. in Cupertino evacuating the buildings and seemingly seeing daylight for the first time. Regardless, those blackouts cost California tons of productive hours... prior to that California had water problems, and California spends the most on education, yet has an abysmal public education system for K-12.
As someone who left their heart out west, it brings a tear to my eye to finally see Davis leave!
So I just read about Microsoft's changes to Internet Explorer to deal with the Eolas patent, and I must say, all this change does, in my opinion, is create nuisance to content developers and users, and while it may circumvent the patent (whether it does or doesn't I am withholding my opinion on), it doesn't prevent the fact that the ActiveX control or plugin still will load after a bit of Javascript.
Sometimes patent law frustrates me. Embedding object A into object B has been going on for over 10 years, and at this point, is what I'd consider something “trivial and common knowledge.” Then, a patent like this rears it's head after the technology has been around for a very long time, with the sheer intent of extracting money. I just don't like this type of behavior by companies. I know people often question Microsoft's business practices, but if there is no prior art to Eolas' patent, why weren't they knocking on Microsoft's door at the time of OLE hatching 10+ years ago?
Don Box, if you read this feed, what year did OLE start hatching? 1987-88?
Looks like some friends of mine at Cornell are working on something really cool -- a project called Herbivore.
In a nutshell, it's a Peer to Peer system that ensures privacy. Nifty.
Read more about it at
www.herbivore.info
And look at their whitepaper here.
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