Microsoft is as bad as Carlos Mencia!

Microsoft haters have a common saying, "if you can’t make it, steal it". Seems to fit Carlos Mencia’s comedy routines pretty well (do a Google search for "carlos mencia steal").

Die-hard computer enthusiasts will be quick to claim that MS ‘stole’ the GUI operating system interface from Apple, who got it from Xerox, and that Microsoft ‘borrowed heavily’ from MAC OSX to create Vista.

It seems that Microsoft, with its deep pockets, is at it again:

First, one blogger says it appears that Microsoft has tried to patent a process that works just like ‘sudo’ (an application which lets a non-superuser temporarily gain superuser privilege to run a single command) in Unix/Linux back in 2000. Except that ‘sudo’ has been around since 1985! (blog post, patent application). Quotes from the blogger:

And when did this Microsoft patent happen? It was filed in 2000. Well gee, that doesn’t make sense. How’d they get the patent? It certainly falls under the category of "obvious" if there’s prior art such as sudo.

What makes this whole thing funny, though, is something I saw a couple days ago. Head over to Builder-AU and listen to Peter Watson from Microsoft. He says,

User Account Control is a great idea and strategically a direction that sort of all operating systems and all technology should be heading down

Excuse me? Does he really believe this is all Microsoft’s great new idea?

In the end, this seems like a patent that Microsoft will hold up and say "we have a patent and Linux is violating it!" They won’t ever sue on it though (just leave the threat hanging to scare away potential users), because then they could have the patent revoked. It’s better for them to just wave it around.

Second offense: we can’t compete with Google or Yahoo (we’re always in third place) so let’s try (again) to buy Yahoo for $50 Billion. Read it at Forbes.com

Good grief, what are you people thinking over there in Redmond?!