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The stupid Amazon patent. Umm... go to technocrat.net, d00d. I'm waiting for no-click shopping. Make them press "Enter". :)

if you read the patent, it also covers buying something "by making a sound".

I liked the show. It's one of the better small time radio shows out there. I say go for the full 30 minutes, or 32 mb to be specific!! C'mon think aboout it, my rio has 32mb of memory, get the pic?

Actually, while it is true that part of the claims of the patent involve user profiles, claims 1, 6 and 11 refer to 'a single user action', and it appears that all other claims are what are called dependent claims on one of those three. So two clicks is arugably okay for B&N. Or two keystrokes--but not one. (See the reference below.)

Never trust a news organization to correctly detail the specifics of a patent. The specifics tend to involve a lot of weasel-wording and are easy to get wrong even for the well-informed.

Check it out yourself here.

So, how many of you actually looked at the patent before denouncing it and making lame "I patented this" jokes?

See the actual patent for details, and note that it was filed over 3.5 years ago...

This also apparently deals with controlling the manufacturing itself instead of, say, faxing a list of songs you want in what order and having some poor schmo burn it for you. The packaging is included within the process -- it looks like it's meant to be completely automated *and* distributed (think: multiple manufacturing sites).

While searching for the patent in question (which someone else found here) I ran across this silly patent. What this fellow (from Intel) seems to be patenting is the remote triggering of a batch application. In other words: computer A sends a message over the network to computer B. Computer B executes a batch task in response. Computer B sends "I'm finished" response back to computer A. This seems to be angled as a way for a central computer(server) to use spare cycles on a client computer as directed by the server. I certainly wouldn't want some server to have the ability to start processes on my computer like that. Scary. Actually, the patent sums this up nicely (you'll want to sit down for this):

Service providers, such as American Online.TM. ("AOL") and Compuserve increasingly must buy more powerful computers to service the additional members and the new content that is constantly being updated. These service providers could save on computer costs if some of the computational requirements of their system could be serviced by remote personal computers owned by private individuals and other independent entities who subscribe to the Internet provider services.



--GnrcMan--

A quick search on "National Security" shows 280 patents either funded by or directly assigned to the NSA.

This link lets you read the patent for yourself. It was filed April 15, 1997.

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It is much much worse than a claim on use of shared memory. The real killer broad claim is #2, which is an attempt to claim ALL pre-compiled user-specific template pages.

Use of shared memory (#4), server-farms (#5), and cacheing (#6) are additional claims over and beyond the basic claim #2. Claim 2 applies whether these other claims are implemented or not.

The nitty-gritty of claim #1 is just a fallback position, which protects Yahoo's detailed process in the event that Yahoo's other claims are ruled too abstract. Claim #1 does not apply unless you specifically generate lists of relevant sports teams and weather reports from user postcodes. The real horror is claim #2.

Claim 2

2. Using a page server, a method of providing real-time responses to user requests for customized pages, the method comprising the steps of:

obtaining user preferences, wherein a user's user preferences indicate items of interest to that user;

obtaining real-time information from information sources;

storing the real-time information in a storage device;

combining the user preferences for the user and a template to form a template program specific to the user;

receiving, from a user and at the server, a user request for a customized page customized according to the user preferences;

executing the template program specific to the user using the real-time information stored in the storage device as input to the template program to generate the customized page; and

providing the user with the customized page, wherein the steps of executing and providing are performed in real-time response to receipt of the user request in the step of receiving and wherein the customized page includes at least one item of real-time information selected from the storage device.

Claim 4

4. The method of claim 2, wherein the step of storing the real-time information in a storage device is a step of storing the real-time information in a memory having a capacity to simultaneously contain all of the real-time information that could be required for execution of the template program.

The term "template program" would appear to cover any per-user pre-generated page which includes ASP or PHP or Javascript to fill in the blanks. Bespoke formats in which the user template contains just field names instead of script fragments might also be considered "programs", executable by the web-server plus appropriate module.

Very, very nasty.

Go to the Patent Office Search and type in the patent number [5,983,227 (keep the commas)]. And ten miles of script will get the patent. -d

I agree with you that the abstracts don't do these things justice; far too often they just spark people to make dumb posts about how they should patent X or Y, because they don't understand that the real part is the claims.

the full patent is here

Interesting concept, but i have reservations about the idea of continuing the promotion a disposeable mentality. Of course, if they have anywhere near the popularity of disposeable cameras (remember those silly things, why would someone buy a camera to throw away?) she'll make a lot of money.

also, view the full patent text here

return 0;
//(BLiP)

WOW !!!

I think there are ten (10!) years since somebody pointed out to me that there was a method to store dates so they could be sorted by time without any problem.

That is jan 12th 1999 would be written 19990112. If you name your logfiles Daemon.19991015 etc. They will be automaticly sorted by date when you do 'ls -l'. It came with the story that it was called "the Japanese Method of storing dates".

And now (1998) somebody has patented this practice ????


If this isn't a damn good reason for other countries NEVER to accept software patents, then nothing is.
--
Why pay for drugs when you can get Linux for free ?

Check out the other Y2K related patents (search for Y2K at US Patent & Trade Office's web site) and then look at the other referenced patents... (I count at least 14) It seems as though every common thing related to dates has been patented... What's next... patenting things like object oriented programming and data models??? -Kevin

Here is the full text from the USPTO server.

It really is as simple as it sounds. Quite unbelievable.

I was this over on HNN a while back, related to Echelon and a patent the NSA has for "document retrieval" which would, according to the information on their site, ignore the type of stuff people were sending for "Jam Echelon Day".

Basically, it can figure out what a document is about in spite of things such as keywords being planted in the document (ala the Jam Echelon plan), and is not dependant on the language of the document. It works by relating the document to a database of other document fragments, they say.

The NSA's website has some information about it, and this is the patent itself.

If this stuff exists and works, then Jam Echelon was a waste of time on the technical side - but I think the main point was to raise awareness, and that it has done.

The point isn't how long it took them to work out the bugs in security or time spent making the click button gif or any other inconsequential crap. The patent is for storing user info in a cookie and retrieving info from a database. That is what they are saying took 1000s of hours to come up with.... that is disgusting and an insult to anyone who has ever coded for the web. Boycott Amazon now...end all software patents.

Bad Command Or File Name

Wonder if the patent office will be sued over the patent.The shopping cart is at the top of the page.

It is as bad as it seems.

Patent number 5,960,411-- you can read the entire patent document from this link.

Claim 1 (of 26):

1. A method of placing an order for an item comprising: under control of a client system, displaying information identifying the item; and in response to only a single action being performed, sending a request to order the item along with an identifier of a purchaser of the item to a server system; under control of a single-action ordering component of the server system, receiving the request; retrieving additional information previously stored for the purchaser identified by the identifier in the received request; and generating an order to purchase the requested item for the purchaser identified by the identifier in the received request using the retrieved additional information; and fulfilling the generated order to complete purchase of the item whereby the item is ordered without using a shopping cart ordering model.

Whew! Talk about a run-on sentence. Good thing legalese != English.

It'll be interesting to see how this works out. Normally in these kind of cases, it's a Big Boy going after someone without the resources to defend themselves. Barnes and Noble certainly has the wherewithall to bring this to court if their lawyers think they have a chance. However, I suspect that they'll just roll over and pay royalties to Amazon.

Very sad.

Eschelon doesn't use a keyword search, instead it works like this. Eschelon does not use a dictionary search, but instead searches based on a very elegant but simple method which utilizes the frequency of occurances of unique strings of characters. Also check out this link to the NSA on their searching technology.

Jam Eschelon day is a really good idea, but using keywords is the wrong way to go about it. Instead, a story generator which generates subversive letters would be better.

(Thanks to Hacker News Network for the links.)

"They" are NOT using keyword matching! What they are using is a very sophisticated pattern matching that can scan for topics in texts.

This is of course only speculation...

But check out these sites that suggest that it is true:
Information Sorting and Retrieval by Language or Topic (NSA link)
Method of retrieving documents that concern the same topic (US Patent and trademark office)

Best regards,

If you want to do big database stuff, you should look at who does it well. The US Patent Database runs on DB2, which is the largest public database in the world. (I think the numbers were 15 Terrabytes Compressed Data last time I read up on it)

Free 60 trial downloads can be snatched up at this fun address.

My main feeling that this is a better option over something like MySQL is that if you are really shuffling arround that much data, you need a really robust transaction control engine. Last time I worked with MySQL, it was fast, but lacked real transaction control. This may have been added by now, as I haven't checked of late.

OK, these are just a few other bits of interest I picked out of the patent:

In a preferred embodiment of the invention, the morph host is a very long instruction word (VLIW) processor which is designed with a plurality of processing channels.

I'm not going to go into huge detail about VLIW machines (particularly since I don't know all that much about them :-). Suffice it to say that traditional VLIW CPUs fetch multiple instructions at once, and rely on the compiler to ensure that there are no dependencies between instructions in a fetch group (if the compiler can't find x number of independents, it will pad the holes with non-operations, or NOPs). Looking at Transmeta's patent, it appears that rather than a compiler doing this checking, their code-translation software will be doing it on the fly. RISC/CISC machines, on the other hand, typically do this checking in hardware. But Transmeta's reasoning seems to be that doing it in hardware adds complexity, hence lower clock rates, and also doesn't make multiple instruction sets very feasible.

Regarding the instruction translation and subsequent caching I mentioned in my previous post, a quote from the patent illuminates the matter a little more:

The code morphing software of the microprocessor...includes a translator portion which decodes the instructions of the target application, converts those target instructions to the primitive host instructions capable of execution by the morph host, optimizes the operations required by the target instructions, reorders and schedules the primitive instructions into VLIW instructions (a translation) for the morph host, and executes the host VLIW instructions.

When the particular target instruction sequence is next encountered in running the application, the host translation will then be found in the translation buffer and immediately executed without the necessity of translating, optimizing, reordering, or rescheduling. Using the advanced techniques described below, it has been estimated that the translation for a target instruction (once completely translated) will be found in the translation buffer all but once for each one million or so executions of the translation. Consequently, after a first translation, all of the steps required for translation such as decoding, fetching primitive instructions, optimizing the primitive instructions, rescheduling into a host translation, and storing in the translation buffer may be eliminated from the processing required. Since the processor for which the target instructions were written must decode, fetch, reorder, and reschedule each instruction each time the instruction is executed, this drastically reduces the work required for executing the target instructions and increases the speed of the microprocessor of the present invention.

Transmeta seems to have an excellent idea here. They're caching optimized translations of the incoming instructions, so rather than have to translate and optimize over and over each time you see that bit of code, you do it once and then just grab it from the cache. Due to the spatial and temporal locality of programs (ie the fact that your accesses to instructions are not random, but are localized in loops, etc), this cache ("translation buffer") will only fail to have a translation present once every million instructions. So you're doing *one* translation every million cycles, rather than a million translations like current processors would have to do. Interestingly enough, a scheme like this was brought up as a discussion item in my Superscalar Processor Design class a couple of weeks ago, though my professor used the example of an specialized Alpha decoding/translating x86 and caching the results. One might even write the translations back out to disk as an attachment to the original executable, so that the next time you run the program that's fewer translations you have to do, and eventually you'll have a fully translated version on your hard disk for optimal speed. I guess we'll just have to wait to see if Transmeta does something similar.

One embodiment of the enhanced hardware includes sixty-four working registers in the integer unit and thirty-two working registers in the floating point unit. The embodiment also includes an enhanced set of target registers which include all of the frequently changed registers of the target processor necessary to provide the state of that processor; these include condition control registers and other registers necessary for control of the simulated system.

It seems this new chip is going to have a lot of registers. As Cartman would say, sweeeeeet!

The patent also provides some sample C code, the corresponding x86 assembly, and some sample optimizations the Transmeta system may perform. It's a little more than half way down the page, if you want to look, just scroll until you see code :-)

This reminds me, the SABRE group happens to own a patent that covers all uses on the web of the feature that allows a user to enter a zipcode and get a list of the locations nearest to that zipcode. See US Patent 5,893,093. This is not related to what you are talking about, but it worries me.

In any case, NCR is a huge company with a legacy name. It shouldn't be surprising that NCR has patents that have bearing on Netscape. They obviously don't "just make cash registers".

It is really amazing what some of these patents claim to have invented!

Inventions which are:

• Not useful (such as perpetual motion machines); or
• Offensive to public morality

Who says perpetual motion machines wouldn't be useful? I think they meant "inventions which violate thermodynamic laws."

Also, I'm not sure about their standards of what's offensive. Most /. readers might consider many software patents (such as the infamous XOR patent) to be offensive. In Alabama, they might consider this audio dildo to be more offensive... combine that with a perpetual motion machine and you've got something really unpatentable!

JMC

Inventions which are:

• Not useful (such as perpetual motion machines); or
• Offensive to public morality

Who says perpetual motion machines wouldn't be useful? I think they meant "inventions which violate thermodynamic laws."

Also, I'm not sure about their standards of what's offensive. Most /. readers might consider many software patents (such as the infamous XOR patent) to be offensive. In Alabama, they might consider this audio dildo to be more offensive... combine that with a perpetual motion machine and you've got something really unpatentable!

JMC

But I agree, there's lots of prior art for claim 1. Here's another solid one: the Psion 3a palmtop was released in 1993, and has everything claimed in claim 1. Including "a keypad for effecting control of said apparatus" (what will these people think of next!).

Hmm.. Actually, claim 1 says compressed. Prior art for this, pre 1995?

I know that US patent law differs from every other country's (it's AFAIK the only country to use date-of-invention rather than date-of-filing, which causes a lot of trouble), but I'd be disappointed if most of the claims 2-17 didn't fail on the grounds of obviousness, even if prior art didn't exist. (And, for instance, claim 16 is predated by the NICAM system in Europe - I don't know if digital interleaved audio is used on TV in the USA)

A digital replacement for an analog audio tape recorder can record audio programming digitally in a faster than real time format and can play back audio programming, where such programming has been digitized and stored in data files using a variety of compression/decompression algorithms. Audio programming is stored digitally on a non-volatile medium, such as a hard drive, or in a flash EPROM, or other solid state non-volatile memory. The device includes a hard drive, a modem for connection to a data base via an on-line service, a keyboard, a display, and an audio system. The device uniquely combines the remote data access capability resident in a personal computer with a set of tailored, streamlined control functions to simplify, automate, and render seamless the process of selecting audio program material; ordering the program material from a service; receiving acknowledgment of the order and receiving the program material via automatic download for storage in a hard drive; playback of the program material when and where the user desires, with fully streamlined control functions; and control of the user interface functionality on the keyboard through a setup mode of operation.

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seems rather broad, wouldn't a laptop with a MOD Player fall under this, even though it's not a specialty device. Unfortunatly this seems to exactly describe most new MP3 players (Empress, etc.) I believe just having a patent doesn't entitle you to royalties (INAL) Legal or not, it really sucks that something like this is patentable. There is also a longer press release at: http://www.audiohighway.com /news/press/index_press.html

Brandon

If that fails, search for "Fullerton; Larry" as the assignee/inventor name at http://164.195.100.11/netahtml/sear ch-bool.html.

If that fails, search for "Fullerton; Larry" as the assignee/inventor name at http://164.195.100.11/netahtml/sear ch-bool.html.

If anyone is curious, here are the patents filed by "Larry Fullerton":
US Patent Office Search Results