Microsoft has been ordered by a judge to stop selling Microsoft Word and ordered to pay $290-million in damages after losing a patent infringement lawsuit. Christine Persaud in MarketNews:

Patent No. 5,787,449 refers to custom XML, and a particular “Method and System for Manipulating the Architecture and the Content of a Document Separately from Each Other.” i4i LP, which invented this technology, filed suit against Microsoft in March 2007, stating that the software giant was infringing on its technology by utilizing it in certain Word products, and argued that this infringement was “willful”.

What happens now?

In addition to the monetary recuperation, there is now a permanent injunction against Microsoft for custom XML in Word 2003 and 2007. The company is now prevented from selling, offering to sell, and/or importing in or into the U.S. any infringing and future Word products that have the capability of opening a .XML, .DOCX, or .DOCM file containing custom XML, and from using any infringing and future Word products to open an XML file containing custom XML.

What happens next?

Microsoft will appeal this very serious black eye. The verdict and pronouncement came from Judge Leonard Davis, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, long known as a court of harbor in patent litigation for David and Goliath battles. Good for David, not for Goliath. Juries there seem to relish decisions favoring David at the expense of Goliath, and more verdicts are overturned on appeal than other locales. Microsoft’s Kevin Kutz:

We are disappointed by the court’s ruling. We believe the evidence clearly demonstrated that we do not infringe and that the i4i patent is invalid. We will appeal the verdict.

Duh. The real question is, “How fast can Microsoft move?” The judge issued a permanent injunction which goes into effect in 60 days, which gives Microsoft time to mount an appeal. Links to PDFs of the complaint, judgement, and injunction are available here.

The first serious competitor to Apple’s iPhone hit the streets of New York today. At most a few dozen people queued up in line to be the first to buy Motorola’s Droid on Verizon. Marguerite Reardon on CNET:

From New York to San Francisco, most stores around the country had few if any lines when doors opened Friday morning. There was a handful of people waiting outside at the Verizon Wireless store on West 34th Street here in Manhattan. And about 20 people waited in line outside a store here on Sixth Avenue, as well as at one in Clifton, N.J., Verizon officials said.

David Pogue on CNBC when asked which he would choose, the iPhone or the Droid:

It’s tough.

Agreed. From what I’ve seen of the Droid it’s a worthy competitor running on a better network than AT&T. Will the Droid have the success of the iPhone? It’s unlikely, given the iPhone App Store and a two year head start. However, I predict that Android will demolish Windows Mobile, seriously hurt RIM’s BlackBerry dominance, slow iPhone’s growth, damage Nokia and Symbian, and further fragment the so-called smart phone or app phone market. Apple’s share will be substantial but no one will dominate in the future.

Who uses Twitter? A Harvard study of 300,000 Twitter users found that 10-percent of the users account for 90-percent of the tweets. The “median number of lifetime tweets per user is just one.”

Unlike other social networking sites like Facebook.com, men are almost twice as likely to follow other men on Twitter than they were to follow women, according to the study. Women were also more likely to follow men than they were to follow other female users.

Looks like Twitter has become much ado over not much. It’s interesting; a curiosity, trendy, and a fad, not a social phenomenon (except for the 10-percent of users who make up 90-percent of all Twitter’s tweets).

Is your Mac and OS X safer to use than a PC running Windows Vista? Or, is Vista more secure than OS X? Semantics aside, Rich Mogull highlights The truth about Apple, Mac security, and responsibility.

Macs are plagued with as many (and sometimes more) vulnerabilities as other operating systems. These are the doors attackers use to exploit our systems, and Macs are far from invulnerable. But the truth is that in the real world, Macs suffer from far fewer compromises. This is the difference between security and safety. A highly secure home in a bad neighborhood is still more likely to be robbed than a less secure home in a safer area. Mac market share is probably an important reason here, as is the history of the platform, the focus of the bad guys, and a host of other factors.

Sigh. How about discussing how much more difficult it is to compromise a Mac vs. a Windows PC? Or, how much more difficult it is to move malware from one Mac to another?

If Macs start being compromised on a wide scale, or security concerns otherwise start affecting buying decisions, no amount of Apple advertising will be able to cover it up. Market forces will engage, and Apple will either provide a more secure platform, or we’ll all move on to something else. The more we pressure Apple for security, and not just relative safety, the less likely we are to experience future real-world security compromises.

Rubbish. Windows has not been a more secure platform and users did not, en masse, move on to something else (Mac growth notwithstanding).

Our Mac security future is in our hands, not the government’s, attackers’, or even Apple’s.

More rubbish.

Skitch? Social networking for graphic media hounds? Skitch is a clever and attractive floating utility which marries screen capture and web sharing tools.

Skitch + Skitch.com is an amazingly fun and super useful duo. Everyday we all share images, ideas and have fun with friends online—this should be easy… right?

Clever floating pad makes getting, manipulating, sending, and sharing screen clips easy, yes. But why?