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Apple Patents 'Chameleon' Computer Case
Dave B writes "The Register
has been fishing at the patent office again and found that Apple has a new patent for "a computing device [which] includes a housing having an illuminable portion. The computing device also includes a light device disposed inside the housing. The light device is configured to illuminate the illuminable portion".
While this gives us the exciting prospect of an iMac that is all five fruit flavors at once surely the original iMac with its glowing power button, or indeed a-thousand-and-one other electronic gizmos represent prior art?" Update a couple of users noticed this Slashdot Story from 2002 which looks familiar.
A "glowing power button" does not a "housing having an illuminable portion" make. That is a status indicator. A button, a light serving a unique and specific purpose is not prior art.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
The funny thing is that this actually IS news. But only because it is Apple. I for one am dying to see what the new iMac will look like. Even people who never plan to buy an Apple product are, at the very least, interested. However, if DELL had filed this patented then no one would really care. That says something about the importance of good design in the computer industry.
patents protect a specific implementation. you can't patent the idea of putting a light in a box, you patent how you do it.
What about a case that changes colour with system load - "oops, the server has gone a funny lava-red color - we'd better leave the room!"
Dave
You mean, changeable colors on your case, like a Wurlitzer Jukebox from 1934?
Plus I'm sure there are some case modders out there who have red, green and blue (and UV!) lights in their case controlled by software.
Apple is a design leader, and there's a portion of the PC hardware industry that watches Apple designs and makes knock-offs on the PC side.
The question with patents is always: if this patent were not granted, would companies still have the incentive to innovate in this area with the same intensity? To the extent that this patent is original and non-obvious, I think the answer here is that the patent is justified. Apple has proven that they can innovate in this area, and they should be rewarded for this.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
Guess one can never get enough of "waah! but what if someone had patented sex!" kind of fallacies on /. Was starting to get withdrawal syndromes after through a whole weekend without reading one ;)
But OK, let's play that game. Let's talk about paintings:
1. They'd more likely have to patent a device or method to make those paintings. So someone might have got a patent on something new like flinging colours at the canvas, but then someone else might just as well get the same result (or close enough) by using the old methods (using a brush). For which plenty of prior art existed.
(Just as this patent doesn't prevent you from having a lit case by other means than what Apple patented. You can still have your old cathodes or LED fans.)
2. For that matter, it might have stimulated someone to try more new stuff. So we might have 3-4 times more styles in the same period. Which is the whole purpose of patents: to stimulate researching _and_ publishing your research.
(And you could say the same about the situation at hand. We've had _years_ of noone even trying something more original than yet another LED fan or cathode behind acrylic window. By now every kiddie has one of those. So if it takes patents to get out of that loop and have a more original case, seems to me like a benefit of patents.)
3. Patents are not for ever. Copyrights amd trademarks do get extended. Patents expire no matter what.
I.e., if you talk about a 100 years interval, you may notice how the 20 years covered by a patent is only a fifth of it. I.e., combined with the previous point, we'd probably have a helluva lot more art choices after 100 years.
4. Patents encourage publishing your results, as opposed to keeping everything super-secret. Art is a bad example there. But there are a ton of technological processes that one could have kept secret. Or which _are_ being kept secret. Patents encourage companies to share this information with the rest of the world instead.
5. Patents get licensed all the time. I'm sure that if someone absolutely needed to do something impressionistic before the patent expired, they could have negotiated a license.
(And in this case, if IBM or MS absolutely needed to do their own lit cases, I'm sure they can persuade Apple.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Patent issues aside, I like the sound of this feature. Xserves are already pretty nice for 'admin by eye', but this sort of design takes that to a new level.
I've got new mail. How do I know? The Mac's pulsating yellow. Device 3 on that RAID's getting sick - it's turned a nasty shade of puce. We need to tweak our load-balancing: that server's green, but that one's red.
Shit. They've all gone red. Start blocking links from slashdot.
Well, "a device that makes you loads of money" is a pretty obvious idea too, the actual implementation is the kicker. And if case modders had done it, they would have boasted about it, and there would be dozens of imitations.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Yeah, because the iMac has always had the best hardware available in it.
Did I mention that many of the statistical people that monitor such things have said it (the iMac) is the best selling computer of all time? Perhaps style matters more than how many billion times per second it can process a NOP while you are reading Slashdot.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
The idea of a mood ring isn't too far off from the actual implementation. Heat sensitive liquid crystals would react to your body heat and change color (and sometimes pattern in some rings). They'd say various colors equated to different moods e.g. green = normal body temp = calm, yellow = hot = stressed, red = very hot = horny.
There are many ways color could be put to use.
In a computer lab situation, all students are taking a quiz. The color reflects the student's "questions per second" rate of progress through the quiz. Blue = Quick Pace, Green = Average Pace, Red = Slow Pace. (or any sort of gradients between these). Blue might be indicative of a really sharp student or one who's cheating. Red might indicate a dumb student or one held up by technical problem.
Again in a school lab, but where the students are given free research time to roam the web. The case may show green for sites on an approved "white list", some form of amber on an off-site list based on a computed content rating, a red color for black listed sites or ones with highly offensive content rating.
A boot up progress bar? As the machine starts up the colors fill the neutral body color from grey to blue from bottom to top and the whole case seems like it's being filled with water as it indicates where it is in the boot process. (Aqua?)
A mode (initiated from the server) that would turn all the machines cases to indicate 802.11 signal strength for a period of 10 seconds. Allowing you to adjust the base station's antenna or position to give good signal strength to everyone in the room.
An accessibility feature for deaf users (or an option for computers in mute) to strobe to the would-be sound strength being generated by the computer with color indicative of volume. While you won't be able to make out the content of what's being said, you could distinguish between a system beep when played over the sound of your game of risk. All without interfering with the real screen's content area.
Any other thoughts?
OK, here you go: ABXZone
He doesn't explain how he did it but there's various pictures and a screenshot at the end of the thread of the software integrated into MBM.
That's quite a stretch of the imagination . . .
but a car is not a computing device - it's primary function is driving
Regardless, the description beyond that isn't even remotely close.
Headlamps and illuminated dashboards != LED-lit computer housing