Microsoft said on Tuesday it will tweak its Word application to remove a feature judged to be a breach of patent ensuring that it will be able to continue selling one of its most widely used programmes.

The world’s largest software company made the announcement shortly after a US court of appeals upheld a $290 million jury verdict against it for infringing a patent held by a small Canadian software firm, i4i, which was pleased with the court’s decision to protect the property rights of small inventors.

The disputed patent feature relates to the use of XML, or extensible markup language, used for manipulating text, in the 2007 versions of Word.

If you haven’t paid attention to the new privacy settings and mindlessly clicked on with the default one’s then you might end up sharing a lot more than you intended to!

FB recently announced that in order to encourage members to share more information , it has upgraded its privacy settings, making several categories of information of its users visible by default to everyone, unless you actively manage the settings people can see your family,relationships,education,work and not to mention posts( orkut analogy : they’ll be able to see your profile and your scraps!), regardless of what the previous settings were ( hmmm…ok if you don’t do anything wrong on the net but if your parents are on FB too then change your settings!)

Encouragement apart, I think the revised settings is a very clever move to get search engines index more information from the site , in order to counter growing competition from micro blogging sites like Twitter.

Apple Inc chief executive Steve jobs was paid his customary $1 annual salary in 2009, but Apple’s strength through a rough economic climate returned the value of his personal holdings in the company pre-meltdown levels.

Jobs does not get a bonus or reimbursement for perks (given he holds the largest shares in the company), according to a regulatory filing. Apple said it reimbursed it Jobs  $4000 for company travel on his $90 million Gulfstream V jet, which received as a bonus in 1999,which is far less than the $871,000 Apple reimbursed jobs in 2008. The CEO took six months leave, during which he received a liver transplant.

Jobs, 54, hold 5.5 million shares of Apple’s stock. He has not sold any shares since he rejoined in 1997, nor has he been awarded any new equity since 2003. Jobs is also the largest share holder in the Walt Disney Co. His 7.4% stake is currently worth about $4.5 billion.