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The thing is, you have to have trust in version control to be prepared to use it. You are putting your business in its hands, so it had better not break or introduce errors on purpose. Trust depends upon your reputation. Reputation matters.

Would you put your trust in the safety of your product in the hands of a company to whom the continued life of your product represented part of a competitive threat to their platform?

http://www.burst.com/new/newsevents/Burst.com%20Ap ple%20Answer%20and%20Counterclaim.pdf

They have a patent on buffering and streaming data faster than it can be played since 1990.
1. You couldn't stream that fast on most networks back then!!
2. Did they invent buffering? that's been around since the 70's at least maybe longer I'm not good with dates.
3. They list no protocol, method, innovation, file format or even a suggestion on how their supposed compression should be done.
So now they want money fom apple for itunes because it plays music while your downloading other media?
Who's next linux users. What about Real Media, they were streaming and buffering when wmp was a wave player.

I'd love to be an expert witness for apple, need someone with some fancy letters behind their name, I'm your man!!
This patent stuff has really reached a new low. It's gonna be awhile until the judges understand technology enough to throw these patents out on their face. I could patent the idea of downloading more than one file at a time and make a killing suing, who was it that thought of adding the resume feature to ftp clients?

What their incredible solutions is: redundant server setup with a separate distributor server that "tells" the client software which of the servers is least loaded, and buffering of video

But load balancing and buffering is new, right?

I mean, look for yourself and go and download one of their excellent products, and just pay for it already:

http://burst.com/new/promo/main.htm

1) vanilla load balancing
2) automatically resuming a download
3) playing a download while the entire file is saved to disk (regardless of how much is actually viewed?)
4) caching downloads (and/or partial downloads) on disk instead of asking the server again

I can't bring myself to actually read the patents since my Patentlawyerese-to-English translator is broken but they have a list of them here (pdf).

So some speculator pooled together the [cough]bullshit[/cough] IP of several defunct startups and hopes to sue everybody.

Burst.com claimed to have a revolutionary way of delivering streaming content. Lossless. Faster than realtime.

Well, golly. You can deliver content losslessly and faster than real time via HTTP and FTP, too. Only Burst.com did this with a magical, proprietary protocol that required a magical, proprietary server that they would be happy to sell to you. The secret of the "secret sauce" that Burst.com CEO Richard Lang mentions in the feature is that there is no secret sauce. ...

If you have a really fast conneciton and there are no bottlenecks along the way, it lets you see/hear media almost instantly. It works by putting a huge buffer at the client, and then filling that buffer as fast as possible so that buffering time is minimized.

QuickTime's "Fast Start" provided much of this functionality with QuickTime 3's progressive streaming (1998), and QuickTime 6 added the final missing piece (random access) with its Instant-On feature earlier this year. RealNetworks uses a similar method to optimize the viewing experience in RealSystem 9.

Burst has 10 U.S. patents, according to their own page here. It's hard to tell which ones are really at issue (I haven't seen a list of the ones Apple is trying to have invalidated) but it almost certainly includes 5,262,875 which in my reading is the most general one.

This is their main claim:

We claim:

1. An audio/video file server for decompressing and distributing selected audio/video program information stored in a compressed digital format within the file server to one or more external playback stations for real-time viewing by users at those playback stations, the audio/video file server comprising:

storage means for storing compressed digital audio/video program information;

transceiver means, connected to the storage means, for receiving compressed digital audio/video program information from an external source over a time period that is less than a real time period required to view the audio/video program information to thereby update the compressed digital audio/video program information stored in the storage means;

a plurality of playback units, each associated with an external playback line and an external playback station and each including decompression means, for receiving selected compressed digital audio/video program information stored in the storage means, for decompressing the selected compressed digital audio/video program information received from the storage means, and for playing the decompressed selected audio/video program information in real time over the associated playback line to the associated playback station;

network interface means, connected to the storage means, transceiver means, playback units, and plurality of playback stations, for receiving playback requests from the plurality of playback stations; and

processing means, connected to the storage means, transceiver means, playback units, and network interface means, the processing means being responsive to the network interface means, following receipt of a playback request, for controlling the associated playback unit to play the decompressed selected audio/video program information in real time.

To me, that's pre

Burst is not one of those companies that collects patents for the purpose of suing alleged infringers.

Burst themselves had the foresight to develop their technology a number of years ago and patent their ideas. Check out their website and you will see that the "faster than realtime" technology that Burst developed is the only patents that they own.

Time for you to do a bit of 'research' yourself dimwit.

From wikipedia entry on QT: "Apple released QuickTime 4.0 for Mac OS on June 8, 1999...It added the second version of the Sorenson video codec, and support for streaming."

Burst demonstrated their streaming/buffering technology in 1997 (the U2 concert streamed via internet). Burst was clearly there first with their caching technology. You can see the timeline at the burst.com site: http://www.burst.com/new/about/timeline.htm

boiled- baked- fried?

http://www.burst.com/new/products/main.htm

My god, a two click search, and by your own admission for holding patents with NO intent of producing. (If they had a product we would all be hating on Apple) your entire well reasoned and well written argument falls apart.

And visit the website:

http://burst.com/new/products/main.htm

Burst.com doesn't just hold the patents, they are selling products which use them.

Interesting

Hardly, unfortunately. It's the same thing they did with Burst with whom they just settled for a paltry $60M. This is becoming modus operandi for Microsoft.

It will be interesting to see if Microsoft destroyed evidence in this case as well.

Burst.com (BRST.PK) was last known to have two employees. Burst.com Profile..
What product it had was sold without support. Customer Support The net proceeds from the settlement will be used to retire debt, promote licensing and enforcement of it's patent portfolio, and reward the penny stockholders who gambled on the litigation. $60 Million Non-Exclusive License Sets Stage For Aggressive Patent Enforcement.

The "three strikes" rule is from criminal law. Moral outrage has its place, but in civil litigation it often gets in the way of a settlement that is in the best interest of both sides.

Burst.com (BRST.PK) was last known to have two employees. Burst.com Profile..
What product it had was sold without support. Customer Support The net proceeds from the settlement will be used to retire debt, promote licensing and enforcement of it's patent portfolio, and reward the penny stockholders who gambled on the litigation. $60 Million Non-Exclusive License Sets Stage For Aggressive Patent Enforcement.

The "three strikes" rule is from criminal law. Moral outrage has its place, but in civil litigation it often gets in the way of a settlement that is in the best interest of both sides.

Yahoo's last financial profile for Burst.com (2002) had the company with two employees, and nine month revenues of $150,000 set against losses of $628,000. Profile: Burst.com

Burst.com has since raised enough capital to carry it through to trial. Message from the Chairman You could argue that buying stock in the company is simply buying a ticket in the lawsuit lottery. Burst.com has one product and a patent portfolio, neither of which seem to be setting the world on fire. burst.com Sales

To consider the lawsuit as a threat to Microsoft strikes me as just plain loopy. A bit of trivia: Richard Lang's last success was as the co-founder of Go-Video and co-inventor of the Go-Video dual deck VCR. Burst.com MS Q&A

Yahoo's last financial profile for Burst.com (2002) had the company with two employees, and nine month revenues of $150,000 set against losses of $628,000. Profile: Burst.com

Burst.com has since raised enough capital to carry it through to trial. Message from the Chairman You could argue that buying stock in the company is simply buying a ticket in the lawsuit lottery. Burst.com has one product and a patent portfolio, neither of which seem to be setting the world on fire. burst.com Sales

To consider the lawsuit as a threat to Microsoft strikes me as just plain loopy. A bit of trivia: Richard Lang's last success was as the co-founder of Go-Video and co-inventor of the Go-Video dual deck VCR. Burst.com MS Q&A

Yahoo's last financial profile for Burst.com (2002) had the company with two employees, and nine month revenues of $150,000 set against losses of $628,000. Profile: Burst.com

Burst.com has since raised enough capital to carry it through to trial. Message from the Chairman You could argue that buying stock in the company is simply buying a ticket in the lawsuit lottery. Burst.com has one product and a patent portfolio, neither of which seem to be setting the world on fire. burst.com Sales

To consider the lawsuit as a threat to Microsoft strikes me as just plain loopy. A bit of trivia: Richard Lang's last success was as the co-founder of Go-Video and co-inventor of the Go-Video dual deck VCR. Burst.com MS Q&A

For being a monopoly......

For creating 3rd rate, no, 5th rate shite they palm off as software.

For overcharging for said shite.

For stealing blantanly others work (1 case in point of many)Znet Burst
Burst faq

For duping the general public into thinking THEY are the benchmark.

For actively assisting SCO in their quest against OSS.

For doing untold harm to the software industry in general.

... to control the future media distribution standard, and impose a 'Microsoft tax' similar to that they have on PCs today. Its importance to them cannot be overestimated, and they will fight tooth and nail to maintain its position. Robert X Cringely has a very interesting article on Microsoft's media strategy in his ongoing coverage of Burst.com's patent-infingement suit against MS/WMA.

The Faster-Than-Real-Time(TM) process delivers video in large advance bursts, saving it in a configurable local buffer, isolating the viewing experience from network noise and freeing up bandwidth to serve more users. burst.com has a comprehensive intellectual property portfolio including 9 U.S. patents and 34 international patents covering bursting, video delivery scheduling, rapid casting, multi-casting, video-on-demand, a range of set-top box applications, as well as many others.