lukeofman

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10206988-56.html - "Microsoft, TomTom settle patent dispute". I am going to have to disagree with you on this one. Some of the patents that MS was beating their war drum over are silly and ignore that the only reason TomTom uses some of these features is to support MS windows users.

I frankly hope they have to payout a half a billion dollars like they did with Eolas so they realize that no software patents is likely cheaper than paying out and paying for lawyers.

Well lets assume for a second that it is instead a service that got compromised... unless you use a bad service that saves your password, they are using auth tokens which may not necessarily stop working just because you change your password.

When I see companies advertising poor real-world ways of engineering, it just makes me think of the documents I make on my projects showing code made by some engineers and how a solution could have been made in half the code (or less), more clearly, more abstracted, more efficient, and fewer bugs.

Do these people use dumb interview questions like asking people to list c language trigraphs? Sure, someone that knows it might be a good programmer, but they might also write obfuscated piles of crap that cause bugs since they over complicate problems.

Generally the largest problem when MS buys a company or does interesting research is the transition into MS products. The various politics in the company force the the interesting tech to make compromises to utilize existing MS products. Often these compromises clearly make the tech less interesting from an outsider's prospective. The same thing happens at most(all?) large tech companies including Google.

This is a great idea along the lines of another thing I've wanted: OCR for math formulas when scanning documents or drawings (some really good computer science documents are out of print or are unavailable in a digital, searchable form).