Microsoft prohibited from selling MS Word due to patent infringement!

A CNET news today reported about Judge Leonard Davis of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas has issued a permanent injunction that "prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML.

In March 2007, the Toronto based plantiff, i4i sued Microsoft alleging that Microsoft voilated its 1998 patent (No. 5,787,449) for a document system that eliminated the need for manually embedded formatting codes.

In May 2009, a federal jury in Tyler, Texas, ruled that the custom XML tagging features of MS Word 2003 and MS Word 2007 infringed on i4i's patent and ordered Microsoft to pay $200 million in the case.

In Tuesday's ruling, Microsoft was also ordered to pay an additional $40 million for willful infringement, as well as $37 million in prejudgment interest. The order requires Microsoft to comply with the injunction within 60 days and forbids Microsoft from testing, demonstrating, or marketing Word products containing the contested XML feature.

I'm sure this will not be the end of the story. Let's see how Microsoft react on this.

Source: CNET News - Judge orders Microsoft to stop selling Word by Steven Musil.

How to set destination using Panoramio photo in Garmin GPS

Do you know that you can interestingly set your destination in Garmin GPS by selecting a photo of the location you want to go? The feature is called Garmin Photo Navigation.



You need to download the Panoramio photos from the Photo Navigation section in the Garmin Connect website at http://connect.garmin.com/photos.

I'll show you how to do that, step-by-step.

Ensure that your Garmin GPS device is connected to your computer with a USB cable, and that you have already installed Garmin Communicator Plugin Software in your computer.

Get your browser to go to the Garmin Connect Photo Navigation website.

You need to sign in your Garmin customer account if you haven't done so.

Look for Panoramio photos in your desired location by searching with the "Find photos" search. For example, key-in "Penang" to find photos around Penang.

You can zoom-in the Google Map to your convenient size. There might be more than one page of photos which you can switch between the pages with the "Photos" pagination bar on top of the Google Map.

Select the photos by click on them one by one. Click on the [+] button of the enlarged (selected) photos to put them in your selection list.

When you have done, click the "Send to Device" button to download the Panoramio photos to your GPS device.

Remember to also contribute some photos taken by you to Panoramio.com website.

The photos will be stored in the /Garmin/JPEG folder of your Garmin GPS device.

Now, switch your attention to your Garmin GPS device and go to "Where to? > Favorites > Panoramio Photos".

Select a photo and click the "Map" or "Go!" button. Have fun!

How to capture screenshots of Garmin Nuvi GPS

One of my reader asked about how I captured the screenshots of my Garmin Nuvi GPS. In fact, it is a built-in feature.

To enable screenshot capturing, go to Tools > Settings > Display > Screen Shot and change the setting from the default "Disabled" to "Enabled". You will then see a camera icon appear on the top right corner of the screen. Tap on it anytime and the screenshot of the current screen will be captured in a *.BMP graphics file stored in the /Garmin/scrn folder of your GPS navigator.

Just connect your GPS to your computer using a USB cable, and your GPS internal memory will be mounted as a remote drive for you to access its content. You can then copy over the screenshot files stored in the /Garmin/scrn folder.