Digenis.org

According to the US Patent and Trademark Office website, Microsoft is attempting to patent the selection and conjugation of verbs by a computer program. Other sources reporting this news weren’t sure what Microsoft had up their sleeve, but I dug around the patent filing, pulled some URLS out of the xeroxed diagrams, and figured out that it’s just a feature they’re trying out on their Encarta Encyclopedia Homework Help site.

It’s nothing impressive really… In fact, it’s quite ridiculous; just think of it as a HTML version of 501 Spanish Verbs. Would textbook verb conjugation tables count as prior art? And what about similar online programs like verbix.com?

Hopefully Microsoft’s patent application will be denied. It kind of reminds me of the old Onion article where Microsoft tries to patent ones and zeroes.

Moscow metro map with GSM operator coverage

Are there any non-English based programming languages? Why, yes there are.

The McCafe on Old Arbat is now offering some smoking-fast free wifi. Okay, I’m completely rescinding my praise of this wifi at McCafe; I’ve been here a few times this week as we don’t have our network set up in the new apartment and it has been consistently cutting out every five minutes or so… Erghh…

And the plural of MacBook Pro is…

PCWorld has put together a list of the 25 worst tech products. I’m sad to admit that I’ve owned/used 5 of them: AOL, Realplayer, Windows ME, Internet Explorer 6, and an Iomega Zip drive. In full agreement that each of them bites. How many have you used?

Here’s one way to bypass region-encoding DVD restrictions on a Mac.

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