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20071129 Thursday November 29, 2007
Not Everything Comes Back Into Sytle Humor

They say that fashion is cyclical and everything comes back into style.

They were wrong.

 King Collar

Very wrong. 

Thanks to Gordon for the tip.  Give him a job.


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November 29, 2007 10:41 AM PST Permalink | | del.icio.us technorati slashdot digg reddit facebook stumbleupon

OLPC: How's This For Prior Art? Computers

Perhaps you've heard that the One Laptop Per Child group is being sued by a "Nigerian entrepreneur" because he claims they stole a keyboard design he invented.

What, is the 419 scam business slowing down?

Here's what he claims:

 

[The plaintiff] said his company spent seven years developing the Konyin Nigeria Multilingual Keyboard, which can easily reproduce the unusual punctuation marks used in dozens of Nigerian languages and dialects.

For example, many words require accent marks placed over letters. This is usually done by adding special software to the keyboard, as well as an extra "AltGR" key rarely found on US keyboards. A user who wants to type an accented letter E hits the AltGR key and some other key.

 

Is he saying he invented the AltGraph key?  This key rarely found on US keyboards...

Except for every Sun Microsystems keyboard!!

Here is the Nigerian layout of the OLPC laptop:

Nigerian keyboard layout

 

And here is (part) of a Sun Type 5 keyboard (Photo courtesy Wikimedia.com):

Sun Keyboard

 

So, if he really is claiming adding two shift keys is his invention, I submit this as evidence that he's full of it.

More evidence that he's full of it?  Here's a link to what the "stolen" keyboard looks like.  Compare it to the OLPC keyboard and you'll see that's they're not even similar.

Here's another take on the story.
 


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November 29, 2007 02:17 AM PST Permalink | Comments [2] | del.icio.us technorati slashdot digg reddit facebook stumbleupon

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