A federal jury in Texas has ordered Apple to pay $532.9 million for infringing on patents held by Smartflash LLC, in software and games delivered through iTunes, reports Bloomberg. The plaintiff claimed that Apple infringed three patents related to “data storage and managing access through payment systems” and cited their use in apps like Game Circus LLC’s Coin Dozer and 4 Pics 1 Movie. Game companies who used the same technologies settled out of court with Smartflash earlier. Apple said that it saw no reason to pay royalties on the price of a phone when the dispute was over a…
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This is going to sound crazy, but I actually managed to increase my productivity significantly by changing a single obscure setting on my Mac. There’s a setting buried inside System Preferences under Date & Time on OS X that makes your computer audibly read out the time every hour (or more frequently). Turn this on and you’ll start getting an almost-human voice barking the time at you from your computer on a regular basis (you can do this on Windows too, but it’s a little more complicated to get set up). Even though that sounds stupid and like something you might not…
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Today, in an email to Outlook.com customers, Microsoft announced that it will be discontinuing support for Facebook Chat and Google Chat on the service. The company blames the Google Chat removal on Google changing its chat protocol but doesn’t mention why it’s removing Facebook support. Going forward, the only chat service available in Outlook.com will now be Skype. One of Outlook’s big drawcards was integrating all these separate chat services into one stream, so it’s disappointing Microsoft wasn’t able to keep it going.