InSourced - Microsoft gets under your skin - patently! News Site

Sub Reality

Look, Ma, no Hands! Microsoft's line of thinking in using various frequencies with nano powered connections between devices that use the natural salinity of the skin to provide the network.

This would allow the interation, over the skin, of data. A sort of exterior pseudo nano-bot technology. The patent may prevent anyone trying this in Linux.

How long before we can scan images with our hands, or hook into the internet with our ears? By focusing on paradigm shifts of this nature, social engineering becomes possible. Microsoft may, for example, create a health grid, providing medical diagnosis by connecting your skin device to a network.

Various medical tests could be designed and simple treatments prescribed or a Doctor alerted. It should be a fairly simple matter to measure temperature, heatbeat and blood pressure and thus detect abnormalities in the general population.

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Open Source Licences

Intellectual Property and Open Source can work together. An Open Source development can be adopted and marketed by an organisation and royalties paid to the originator of the Open Source module that is being put to use in that way. Open Source software is best written "unbranded" and then adopted by third parties who place their marketing identification and support services around the Open Source Project. What appears missing is the licencing and returns to the originator of the Intellectual Property. Companies have traditionally funded software projects. Companies thusly own a bunch of "Intellectual Properties" that can return income to the company for marketing these products.

Switching Version

In
PCWorld.com - Free Agent: Hard-Core Fedora Mathew Newton describes the very easy upgrade between one version of Linux and another. It is a good guide for the average Linux user on how easy it is to use an operating system that is built in a modular fashion. With Linux, your applications can reside on a mountable (think network mountable) module. Combine this with a wireless network and you have the extendable worker, who comes into your premises and suddenly sharing their development libraries with your company. Bolt on true open source licencing and charging for such use, and we will transform the meaning of work, originality and software distrubution. Songs you download or parts of your own software library of plug in objects that are used cause royalties back to creators. The entire orb like respository could extend into any type of digital content creation. This may be a dream, but the bits are all there.

And using Linux, they tend to work. As they often do, using Windows, until they don't.