rtobyr - Slashdot User

Submission + - Nuance Loses Patent Trial Over OCR Tech

Submitted by rtobyr on Tuesday August 27, 2013 @10:12AM

rtobyr writes: The Recorder is reporting that Nuance and partner Mofo have lost a suit over patent infringement of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) against Russian competitor ABBYY Software House.
Nuance had accused ABBYY Software House of infringing three of its patents and mirroring its packaging. Both companies market software that uses optical character recognition technology, or OCR, to convert scanned images of text so they can be searched and edited digitally. Represented by a team of lawyers from Morrison & Foerster and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Nuance argued that ABBYY's FineReader was little more than a copy of its signature product OmniPage. The Burlington, Mass.-based company also sued Lexmark International Inc. for its use of ABBYY's products and sought more than $100 million in total damages from the two companies. Nuance did not prevail on any claims in Nuance Communications v. ABBYY Software House, 08-0912. MoFo partner Michael Jacobs, who is co-lead counsel for Nuance with fellow MoFo partner James Bennett, declined to comment.

Submission + - Why aren't schools connected?

Submitted by

rtobyr

on Monday April 02, 2012 @01:00PM

rtobyr writes: "We use the Internet--E-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and blogs to communicate with colleagues, friends, and family. When I was in Iraq with the Marine Corps, we used e-mail (secured with encryption and stuff, but e-mail nonetheless) to communicate the commanding officer's order that a combat mission should be carried out. My third grade daughter produces her own YouTube videos, and can create public servers for her games with virtual private network (VPN) technology.

Yet here I am trusting a third grade girl to deliver memos to me about her educational requirements in an age in which I can't remember the last time I used paper.

Teachers could have distribution lists of the parents. The kids' homework is printed. Therefore, it must have started as a computer file (I hope they're not still using mimeograph machines). Teachers could e-mail a summary of what's going on, and attach the homework files along with other notices about field trips or conferences that parents should be aware of.

Teachers could have an easy way to post all these files to the Internet on blogs. With RSS, parents could subscribe to receive everything that teachers put online. If teachers want to add to the blog their own personal comments about how the school year is going, then all the parents would see that also, and perhaps have the opportunity to comment on the blog.

It seems to me that with the right processes, the cost and additional workload would be insignificant. For example, instead of developing a syllabus in MS Word, use Wordpress. Have schools simply not paid attention to the past decade of technology, or is there a reason that these things aren't in place?"

Submission + - How Can I Contribute to Open Source? 2

Submitted by

rtobyr

on Tuesday December 22, 2009 @01:22PM

rtobyr writes: "I work for a state government agency. That means we can't donate money, because it's a "gift of public funds." I had the idea to put up a web page stating that we "use the following free software to save tax dollars" as a way to help spread the word about Open Source software, but management calls this "endorsement." A mirror server is a no-go as well. I'm certainly not a talented enough programmer to help with development. I've donated $10 here and there out of my own pocket, but I'm hoping you Slashdotters have some creative ideas about how my organization could give something back to the teams that create free software we benefit so much from."

Submission + - Webmail at Work

Submitted by

rtobyr

on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @04:57PM

rtobyr writes: "I don't allow users at my organization to use any third party e-mail. When users complain, I point out that we can't control the security policies of outside systems. End users tend to think that big business will of course have good security; so I ran a test of the "Big Four:" Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL/AIM Mail, and GMail. Yahoo Mail was the only webmail provider to allow delivery of a VBS script. GMail was the only provider to block a zipped VBS script. End users also tend to think that a big business would never pull security features out from under their customers. We Slashdotters know that AOL and Microsoft have both compromised the security of their customers. I don't know of any security related bad press for Yahoo or Google. Three of my Big Four either allow VBS attachments or have a poor security track records. So my Ask Slashdot question is this: If you are a network administrator, do you limit your users' ability to use third party e-mail, and if so, do you allow for GMail or other providers that you've deemed to have secure systems and repuations?"

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