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Did Microsoft Invent The iPod?
nate.oo writes "If you think Apple Computer's Steve Jobs invented the technology behind the Apple iPod, don't bet your 60GB, 15,000-song model on it. According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, patent applications that cover much of the technology associated with the iPod were submitted by Microsoft."
Of course Microsoft invented the iPod....just like they 'invented' the GUI (Apple), Active Directory (Novell), and the TCP-IP stack (BSD).
You would be a fool and a communist to insinuate otherwise (apologies to Bill Hicks).
From TFA:Hey, if you can't beat 'em, litigate 'em to death, I guess...and people bitch and moan when I use the abbreviation M$...
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Somehow seems appropriate. It's too bad the Patent Office doesn't see things the same way with these applications...
Throw the bums out!
Isn't this pretty ancient? There was an article on ./ last week about an Apple patent being refused. In the end, the MP3 player was invented by Compaq anyway - yet another ./ article from a couple weeks before.
:)
This is worse than cable TV
And at the end of the day, that's all that matters.
nate.oo "writes" stuff that was just a rip of the top of the TechWeb article. Cute.
Contents of the article aside, such an assumption would be wrong, Steve Jobs didn't invent the iPod - Jeff Robin did.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.
- George Orwell
They also invented the Google start page! I'm too lazy to add a link. To understand joke, see Slashback from 1-2 days ago.
Patenting != inventing.
Hell, Microsoft's just trying to get whatever loose patent they can get so they can selectively use it to pressure their competitors.
You can always tell if Microsoft is sweating because of you if they take out a patent on something you've built as soon as you issue the first press release.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
You know, if I listen closely I can hear the laughter of thousands upon thousands of Korean engineers, and I'm in Seattle.
Why would they file a patent for it, but then allow Apple to develop, create, and market the device?
Or am I misreading this? Did they file a patent for something that vaguely described a system of some sort used in the iPod? That wouldn't really surprise me, seeing how they've recently tried to patent a method for highlighting numerical data with a box.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
I don't mean to troll here, but is any of this really that significant? It seems to me that all the 'who-did-it-first' business is all just loose speculation..
Homer: You can't like... own a potato... it's one of God's creatures.
Best regards, A.C.
According to a citation on "Platt's home page, he and other colleagues at Microsoft developed a paper in the 2001-2002 timeframe discussing AutoDJ, "a system for automatically generating music playlists based on one or more seed songs selected by a user."
Yeah, but does it run Linux?
The article mentions that Microsoft submitted a patent on a "portable, pocked-sized multimedia asset player" - i.e. a completely open-ended and substanceless junk patent. Or maybe the patent did have some merit, but who knows, since the article doesn't give more details. The one detail it does mention is in regards to a playlist feature that the iPod doesn't have.
On the brighter side, the not so subtle combination of Microsoft, Apple, vague patents and the iPod should make for a orgiastic troll feeding frenzy in the comments. And Techweb got some more traffic and hopefully some ad revenue. Hooray.
Did Al Gore invent the Internet?
We all know the US patent office doesn't know their ass from a hole in the ground... I work for a company who has been issued many software patents during the last several years and I'm ashamed to admit most of them were for things that should be obvious to most software developers, yet the USPO has no problem with issuing a "patent" for them. We are driven to submit more and more applications for patents, whether we believe in them or not, so the company has legal grounds against other companies doing the same thing when the time comes. If you are in a country who has yet to adopt software patents, a piece of advice: DON'T LET YOUR GOVERNMENT DO THIS TO YOU, and if the US government pushes your government to adopt our system, tell them to shove it!
... run their database on MS software? If so, why does Microsoft bother applying for patents? They could just get in through a back door and insert retroactive patents on anything they like.
(Yeah, my tinfoil hat just fell off.)
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
Yes, MS probably invented the portable MP3 device. This is not to say that the iPod was created by MS (it clearly was not) but a generic MP3 player that this patent refers to may have been developed by MS prior to Apple.
It is pretty common to have tech companies develop things way ahead of others and yet fail to succeed. It is also quite common to see companies improve upon others' prior works. Ideally, such progress won't result in lawsuits but unfortunately capitalism will necessarily lead to everything being resolved through some pricing mechanism (which are basically what corporate lawsuits are about--this is also why I think lawyers and everyone associated with the process get paid a lot, relative to the people who invented the idea).
It is quite common nowadays to have start-up tech companies simply patent something and not deploy it to the field or attempt to sell it. Once upon a time, it was thought that inventing something meant that you needed to develop a product and sell it. Nowadays it is becoming more profitable to not develop an end-product and instead sit on some intellectual property and then live off the royalties you earn by suing whoever runs afoul of the patent. There have been quite a few good examples of this shift in trend (eg. cases involving RIM, Rambus, etc).
I think the trend I'm talking about will become the norm within 20 years. I don't think it'll play as much of a role in the computer industry (since the industry is well developed with large companies have more power) but I anticipate that it will be the norm in developing industries like biotech, nanotech, and stuff like that. Biotech companies will simply develop some intellectual property and sit on it (without developing any drugs or anything). It'll end up being more profitable for investors to do that...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
From the article:
So far, Microsoft hasn't been able to dent the Apple iPod dominance...
Exactly which devices would be doing the denting, or is this a reference to the music players that Microsoft has released in an alternate universe?
~Someday, I hope to be an aspiring author.
if you think Apple Computer's Steve Jobs invented the technology behind the Apple iPod, don't bet your 60GB, 15,000-song model on it.
Ok, who thinks Jobs invented the ipod. Where did he even say that? He may run the company, but he is hardly an engineer.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
According to apple, the ipod was on store shelves before even M$ sumbitted the patent application.
I remember too. My friend bought the absolute first gen ipod.. a klunky 5 gig job... back in late 2001.
TFA can stick this FUD where it belongs, thank you very much.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
From wikipedia...
Of course, the argument stems from whether the time of invention is when the idea is conceived, when the product is designed, when the first working prototype is built, or when the public can buy the final product. I'll steer clear of that argument.
Unless Microsoft somehow patented the idea of a well designed stylish mp3 player their patent is so laughably easy to dismiss with prior art it stands as just another example of how lazy, inept & stupidty-riddled the US Patent Office is.
Wood Shavings!
- Godai
Maybe we will see a patent show up that is vaguely worded again and basically makes Microsoft the only ones allowed to make a video game console.
since they are now patenting all kinds of things people have been using for years...which I thought you weren't allowed to do.
i think /. is slowly becoming less of 'stuff that matters' and more of a popularity contestant.
'i know! let's publish articles that bash microsoft and make apple look like a victim/saint...it can't fail!'
'yes! by jove, you got it!'
EVERYONE who isn't busy following paris hilton is busy getting patents for anything they can. I remember, as a college senior, doing my senior design project, one week we were made to look thru the US Patent Office website and find possible 'patent infringements' for our design (just as an exercise in real world product cycle development) - and we prob found about a hundred patents that "loosely" resemble every known product from a Tivo to a toaster....
every article now seems to be completely anti-microsoft and pro-apple. and if it has nothing to do with them, then the comments will always bring M$ into the fray.
Really, can you HONESTLY say that /. and the internet and the computer me and you and everyone else is able to afford now was NOT a direct or indirect result of Microsoft and its products?
(I already know I'm going to be considered a troll or given a 1 rating, but it needs to be said)
If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.
Winamp + 486 Is actually less powerful than an iPod. and I've been playing sounds on a computer for ages. Man I wonder what Mr. Nakamura (apologies if I spell it wrong) thinks of the idea of M$ thinking they are first with portable sound. Of course years before the iPod was released a product named the Diamond RIO was fighting for it's life against companies like M$ (under the guise of the BSA) for it's portable MP3 players. (bought mine in 98 or 99)
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
I've read a lot of articles that have to do with software patents here on Slashdot. It seems like a majority of the people are against software patents. I'd like to get better informed about this issue. What are some good resources that I can use? I'd like to know why they are so bad. If they are as bad as people claim them to be, what can I do to help change the situation?
They were focussed on the end-user experience (TM) and were looking to integrate their distribution channels by consolidating their partners. They were constantly innovating, to provide a richer set of functionality. Sigh. Why do I have to explain these things to such mighty techies...
Microsoft invented the iPod.
Saddam had WMDs he was going to give to Bin Laden.
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Rock On
I'd absolutely bet my cheap one button standard mouse that Amazon didn't invent the mouseclick though.
The iPod is just a small computer with a catchy name and good marketing. How could anyone claim to have "invented" it?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I can't believe that no one's mentioned this yet, but a simple google search reveals that the first hit points to this article which already talked about the patents and that Platt's application was rejected twice and user comments mentioned that Platt worked for MS.
Apple patents, Microsoft patents, IBM patents, Sun patents. They all claim they are only doing it for good, but then they all go around suing people.
And the patents themselves are pretty iffy. If you only allow Microsoft's narrow claims, than Apple probably doesn't infringe and could trivially work around them. If you allow Microsoft's broadest claims, then they just patented finding other songs you like based on a bunch of examples--a trivial and obvious idea implemented by many people.
Patents really only serve two purposes: they make money for lawyers, and they create barriers to entry for small, new companies. That's why all the big players love them so much. It's also why we really have to do something about them if we care about our high-tech economy, because innovation comes from the little startups.
Haven't we read this shit before?
Sorry if I miss the point here, but it seems to me the Diamond Rio came out WAY before the Ipod. If the patent is really referring to a "pocket-sized, portable MP3 player", shoulldn't Rio be credited for prior art?
Not only have they violated Microsoft's patents, but by copying from anyone at all they have violated /.'s patent on duplication of a pre-existing entity.
English is easier said than done.
Insightful-as-fuck.
There were portable MP3 players on the market years before the iPod.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The more I hear about Edison, the less inspiring he appears to be. Wasn't he the one that electrocuted animals to disprove the theories of Nikola Tesla?
This is true. wikipedia info including a video of the actual killing.
Also read about the AC vs DC battle. Edison even tried to coin his competitor's name as a verb meaning "electrocution". Quite the sicko.
I read the MS paper on AutoDJ. It is crap. Here's how it works: editors magically decide some finite set of descriptive qualities and rate each of your songs on each of those qualities. If editors rate your least favorite song "highly snazzy" and your most favorite song also "highly snazzy", AutoDJ will guess that whenever you select three "highly snazzy" songs in a row to seed the playlist, your least favorite song will be a good match based on the "highly snazzy" factor. Maybe other songs fit better on other descriptors besides "snazzy", but those scores are no more reliable at predicting your impression than "snazzy."
Moreover, the underlying assumption is that when you select a few songs your selection represents a state which the playlist should make a best effort to approximate. Even if it worked ideally, the generated playlists would always represent a musical rut.
I have a theory that iTunes Party Shuffle uses computed Eigenvalues of your iTunes library to compare the end of one track to the beginnings of other tracks and find a good match so that songs flow together. THAT is smart. It sometimes gets into a rut, but that is because I need to round out my collection, and the rut is always more interesting than getting stuck in one mode. AutoDJ is half-baked.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
"If you think Apple Computer's Steve Jobs invented the technology behind the Apple iPod"
He didn't. A team of engineers at another company did and sold the finished product to Apple. He just took the credit.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
you're an idiot. a freakin tool.
He is an incredible engineer. go do some god damn research before posting
The lightbulb is likely an essential device to modern living. (if someone disagress then more power to you :) It remains to be seen if the PDA and MP3 player follow suit. I believe the phone has already hit that point. And on the matter of points my point is anywhere from a 120 to 150 years ago the lightbulb was invented by numerous different people in various forms. I had always thought Diamond invented the MP3 player with the Rio,wiki says it was Eiger labs. However the minute MP3's became common everybody conceptualized the portable MP3 player, who patented it should really be a moot point. Damn I hate the USPTO sometime, I didn't want to say that, but god what a mess it's becoming.
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
Microsoft patents everything that crosses their path. Is it just me, or is this a patent for the binder?
I think that line in the original post should read:
+------+ +--------+
don't bet your | 60GB |, | 15,000 |-song model on it.
+------+ +--------+
________________________________________________
suwain_2
"The documents describe a "portable, pocked-sized multimedia asset player" that can manipulate MP3 music files."
yes, it would be very nice if the iPod could manipulate MP3s, not just play them. Or at least fast forward/rewind within a song/track, now that would be very nice for longer songs, think those BBC Beethoven tracks, and ebooks when it suddenly gets lound on the train/bus/where ever and you miss something. I'm yet to see a portable device that can do that, but I've only used the iPod mini Zaurus5500 media player and the generic 128mb mp3 player I got for $10.
F7 doesn't work, ignore spelling and grammar
...to see MS make money by not making the product, not selling it, but still making a profit from it because of those cents-to-bucks per item sold. The issue looks oh so familiar from MS's day one.
Of course if they waited with it so as to ket the ipods gain great enough share until they'll sue, that behavior could be rightly enough questioned I guess.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
What the hell are you talking about?
A matrix can have an eigenvalue.
A unary mathematical operation can have an eigenvalue, in a sense.
What matrix or mathematical operation involving your playlist is iTunes finding the eigenvalue(s) of? This is a pretty fundamental question in your whole scheme.
"If you think Microsoft's Bill Gates invented the technology behind the Personal Computer, don't bet your Altair on it. According common knowledge, much of the technology associated with the personal computer and interfaces we all use today were stolen by Steve Jobs, from Xerox PARC."
=D
Patent applications that cover much of EVERYTHING have been submitted by Microsoft. It's what they do. Submit patents, and make bad versions of good ideas. Call me when there's news.
Who cares...
M$ didn't invent windows...
Microsoft owns a nice chunk of Apple stock.
So its win-win for them.
That being said. Apple is were all Mircosoft's good ideas go.
I've had the misfortune of working on a few technology projects for background music companies. This so called "Auto DJ" idea is really nothing new as it was considered something of a holy grail in the background music industry to develop a database of music "attributes" thereby enabling a system that could tailor music programming to various clients. (Lots of similar ideas with the client picking a few songs they like and the system works from there. Or the background music player has an "I like this" button and the programming evolves based on the button presses.) We are talking mid 90s for this project - prior to the filing of this patent.
The title says "Did Microsoft Invent The iPod ?"
The summary says "If you think Apple Computer's Steve Jobs invented the technology behind the Apple iPod [..]"
Well which is it?
Clearly M$ didn't invent the iPod, otherwise they'd have their logo on the iPod because they'd have hired the man who actually did invent it for the exact reason Apple hired him.
This is yet another example of lack of proper editing by the editors, picking the most noticable title instead of something worth reading content. Sometimes I doubt their capability as editors.
In the mean time, I point you to the comments that debunk this nonsense.
Honestly, this is why the few times I have given out software I wrote for free (usually, I write applications for a specific client) I just do it anonymously.
Did Microsoft Invent The iPod?
No. And here's proof. With each new release the iPod:
That's not Microsoft.
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
They patented a "portable, pocked-sized multimedia asset player"...
Oh boy will they feel stupid when I patent an "portable, pocked-sized multimedia asset player via a computer network"!
bash$
I don't care much about such stories these days. While they may show how the current patent system is outdated and abused, these stories tell nothing about how to improve it.
What we need is more discussion about reforming the patent systems and then REALLY CARRYING OUT THE REFORMS.
The patent wasn't for an mp3 player at all. It only covers the menu system used in an mp3 player. It is just another vague patent that doesn't mean shit.
They want to be the bosses of audio-DRM (well, all DRM) and thus they created the Plays For Sure initiative http://www.playsforsure.com/. This group, led by Microsoft, works to try to stop the dominance of the iPod. This would benefit MS by allowing them to own (or even be a significant player in) the audio DRM market and would benefit the makes of the music players by allowing them to sell more hardware.
So, the devices doing the denting are the ones on that page. That is, those backed by Microsoft.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
from the register...
check and mate.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Microsoft appears to have patented the generic MP3 menu on a portable MP3 player AFTER Apple did a public demo of the iPod.
However the iPod was not the first MP3 player.
Preveous units used flash memory or CD for MP3 storage.
The Flash units suffered in size. The CD units had portability problems.
Try iPod dancing with a flash or CD rom unit, The flash unit runs out of music quickly the CD unit skips a lot becouse of your movement.
However I don't remember of any hard disk MP3 players before the iPod.
The patent appears to target the iPod. Apple made a big deal of it's menuing system and ability to sort mp3s. So Microsoft runs out and patents it.
What Microsoft probably didn't quite get is that Apple can keep quiet. By the time Apple is hyping something it's a few months away unlike Microsoft who starts the hype before the first line of code hits the keyboard.
I don't actually exist.
have a theory that iTunes Party Shuffle uses computed Eigenvalues of your iTunes library to compare the end of one track to the beginnings of other tracks and find a good match so that songs flow together.
Does your theory involve actually knowing what eigenvalues are, or are you just making shit up?
At best I'm guessing you're trying to imply some sort of principal component analysis across properties of the tracks, which involves finding eigenvalues (and eigenvectors) of the covariance matrix. That doesn't really make sense though because most of the properties are categorical (artist, genre, title, album) so PCA is hardly going to be meaningful, let alone help songs "flow together".
Other alternatives include trying to do some level of correlation across the Fourier transform of the actual music (end of one track correlating with beginning of next), but aside from failing to account for volume and beat information, it also fails to have anything whatsoever to do with eigenvalues.
Finally you could take Fourier transforms, statistics on mean and variance of volume, beats per minute etc., and the user rating of the track, as one huge multidimensional space, throw it through PCA and select the closest track in the re(multidimensional)scaled space, which would actually give some semblance of "flow" and even use eigenvalues somewhere in the whole process... but that's an awfully large amount of heavy lifting to do compared to just picking a track at random which can do a surprisingly good job.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
this is the main "other" reason, and is quite plausable...
if you patent it, others cant then unethically sue you for *their* undeserved patent.
let me see if I get this: it's ok to say Microsoft "ripped off" something or that Apple "ripped off" the GUI from xerox, but software patents are bad because they disallow the sharing of ideas?
/.) sound like a second grader "Mommy, Johnny copied the man in my painting!"
If Apple and MS "ripped off" Xerox (and each other) then didn't Miguel and all those KDE devs rip them off too?
Grow up, already. Comments like this make you (and anyone else who makes them - including the eds at
Ok, who thinks Jobs invented the ipod. Where did he even say that? He may run the company, but he is hardly an engineer.
Jobs never claimed he invented the iPod, but his name does appear on some recent Apple patents and he seems to have written the script for the Apple "Here's to the Crazy Ones..." Think Different tv commercial.
Back when Woz worked at HP, Steve Jobs was employee #40 at Atari. He bullshitted his way into the job, but he did manage to work as a technician for quite some time. He was credited for requesting small features and refinements in several 1975-era Atari games. Jobs was just as much of a perfectionist (and asshole) back than as he is now.
A year or so later he ended up conning Woz into designing Breakout for Atari and kept far more than his "50%" share. By this time development of the Apple I was underway (or at least being hashed out in Woz's head).
it seems to me that all these comments anymore are just a popularity contest disguised as informative or interesting commentaries. including the comment i'm writing right now.
is everything just a competition to be innovative and worthwhile? what's the point of that, besides a justification of self worth?
Man, how much more loaded a post title could this get? Patents dont mean anything about inventing.
p le-loses-ipod-patent-because-of-microsoft/
read what the Apple spokesperson had to say about that. Chronology with evidence does hold up for something, I'd hope. Its not who applies first, but who can prove they thought of it first.
http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/news/comments/ap
Move along. nothing to see here. Put it back in the oven.
Lycestra
People tend to forget about Creative's offerings. I don't know if the Zen line came out before the iPod, but the Nomad Jukebox was definitely out years before the iPod. It might not have had the same form-factor, but it was as portable as a CD player and obviously didn't suffer the same problems as a CD.
"The physics involved" haven't changed, only what was practical has changed. LOW VOLTAGE DC requires large conductors to avoid high losses and there was no efficient way of converting it from one level to another a century ago. AC has the huge advantage in being easily transformed via.. er, transformers.
That's no longer exclusively true. And power loss is directly proportional to resistance but proportional to the square of the current, so doubling the voltage in a circuit cuts those losses much larger than half.
Meanwhile, low frequency AC transmission has all sorts of losses over long hauls due to reactive coupling to earth and to the atmosphere, and these losses vary even depending on the weather.
Rectifiers and inverters can be made very efficient these days, and long haul powerlines increasingly may carry 750KVDC or more on them... that's direct current, not alternating.
The higher voltage DC transport is more efficient, you see... but now we have the technology to exploit it.
Who is going to post the story about how Microsoft opted not to sue Apple for royalties, even though it was totally in its legal right to? I wonder if there's a single person on this website who would bother... I won't hold my breath.
Why would they file a patent for it, but then allow Apple to develop, create, and market the device?
So they wouldn't have to, of course.
What takes more work, having to develop, design, find component suppliers, subcontract assembly or build plants to to do it yourself, then package, and market the device, get everyone to buy it and become king of the market?
Or let someone else do it then swoop in with a bunch of lawyers and say "we'll be taking our profits now."
Is that a rhetorical question? Is this?
Surely an American name would be more like "Sitting Bull" or somesuch?
You speak with forked tongue, sir. Jeff is a British name, short for either (German) Geoffrey or (British variant) Jefford. Geoffrey was originally a German tribal word for "peace". My grandfather, major of Kidderminster, Worcestershire UK, was called Jefford, although I can't imagine anyone calling him Jeff.
Most non-Anglophone/non-Scandinavian cultures can't even pronounce the "J" sound used with "Jeff". For instance, the European household cleaning liquid "Jif" had to be rebranded "Cif" so that other nationals could pronounce it. I sincerely doubt that the native American languages had the "J" consonant, it is fairly exclusive to Britain, Germany and Scandinavia.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
gets shot by the guy who doesn't.
that is right. it is i who invented the ipod.
This application by Moodlogic was filed a few days earlier, and seems to cover much of the same ground as the Microsoft patent...
Wish someone was clever enough to point out that three independent applications for the same invention in the space of a few months (and those are only the ones showing up), would indicate that the basic idea was obvious...
Regards,
-Jeremy
Mercedes has been developing the automotive airbag system since, at least, the sixties. Many well respected engineers have said, during all this time, that airbag systems were impractical, dangerous, or that they jut couldn't work at all. In spite of that Mercedes went on with developing the system and today they hold many patents. Did they "develop the market" for them? No, Congress did that.
I don't know who "invented" MP3 players. They were around a LONG time before the ipod and before itunes, yet somehow because they happen to make the most popular mp3 player on the market this somehow entitles them to all the patents? Or makes them immune from fair enforcement of those patents?
This is nonsense. "Creating the market" is the reward for marketing innovation and that reward brings with it its own financial benefits - but innovative marketing has nothing at all to do with technical innovation.
I wouldn't even include Germany in the list of countries that use J as in Jeff. Their "j" sounds a lot more like "y" as in "young".
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
You know, this is really getting sad. I know that everyone loves taking pot shots at MS, but I think it especially ironic given the missing context of this story. The only reason anyone even knows about this story, is because when Apple tried to patent some really obvious aspects of an MP3 player, they were told that they couldn't have the patent because Microsoft had beat them to it! Microsoft hasn't sued anyone, or in any way tried to enforce their patents on any company. This is just being floated around because Apple is pissed that someone beat them to patenting work done back before there was even a market for MP3 players, by companies that are long out of business.
That's like saying, well, just trust us to stand in your house with a gas can and a lighter after we got out prison for arson. We'll be good, we promise.
This is my sig.
It's YOU who are spinning things. The exact quote is:/ president.2000/transcript.gore/
"I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
It was uttered by Al on 3/9/99, in a CNN interview. The transcript is at http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/03/09
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
And your point is?
immune from fair enforcement of those patents?
I don't recall suggesting anyone be immune to the fair enforcement of anything. The question I raised is whether it is fair that software patents be awarded in the first place since they do not supply the benefits claimed by their supporters, and since they make possible a whole range of new tactics for unfair competition.
innovative marketing has nothing at all to do with technical innovation.
Yes, and what has Microsoft technically innovated here? Nothing.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
extra points for circumventing lameness filter
"The idea that a company spends lots of money to develop algorithms, and that those algorithms should be protected is a good one."
I don't think this is true. There is an ideal way to protect algorithms and thats via trade secrets. Thats why NVIDIA, for example, supply binary only drivers for Linux, even though they also use patents, for real protection trade secrets are used.
Since there is an easy cheaper and more effective way to protect a good algorithm (trade secrets), those patents must be junk - if they were any good they would be kept secret!
"The nature of the economies that support industries resting on intellectual properties must shift, perhaps acknowledging that intellectual property should not be a luxury, but a commonplace product in most everyone's lives."
I think they have to reexamine the use of patents in a global economy. When patents were on macro sized *physical* things, a patent in the USA could protect the USA market from copies from abroad (where the patent doesn't cover). They could stop the physical goods at the port! That's not true of software you can ship across the internet, or of business process ideas where you ship the *result* of the process not the process itself!
Imagine a patent on a new telesales equipments in the USA, its worthless because telesales is largely outsourced to India. If you made telesales more expensive (by charging for the patent) in the USA, more telesales work would be exported to India! The exact opposite of what you want!
I sincerely doubt that the native American languages had the "J" consonant, it is fairly exclusive to Britain, Germany and Scandinavia.
;)
Given that exactly the same sound also appears in, e.g., Chinese and Japanese, I sincerely suspect you know less about linguistics than you think you do.
[i]Did Microsoft Invent The iPod?[/i]
No.
You've got to admit that when Microsoft puts on their best effort, the results are mediocre. And when they put in their typical effort, we get Windows ME. And when they put in their worst efforts we get in things like the WMA music format or Microsoft Bob, or Longhorn.
So its natural that people make fun of their for their programming skills.
P.S. Only asshats use the term "whatnot".
The quote is (I'm typing as I listen):
"...during my service in the United States (uh) Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet..."
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Read the Forbes story (they know a thing or two about patents) or the story in The Register. This is not true. It's a pleasing fantasy, for some reason. "This Just In: GM bought patents to car that runs on water, killed inventor!' The patent that Apple lost (round one -- they'll refile) has to do with a round contoller wheel. The patent that MS has, which has already been rejected twice, is a way to make a playlist automatically. Not a "playlist" folder, not a "smart playlist," but an "automatic playlist." The iPod doesn't use this patent, and it has other patents on various parts of the iPod. Now, the talk about whether patents do any good, or if the patent office is properly run, this is very debatable public policy. The fact that this "story" is popping up all over the place just means that this particular fiction is telling people something they want/don't want to believe.
I feel compelled to correct this misconception
And I feel compelled to point out that Al Gore is a pompous asshole and he deserves it. I'm not a Bush fan, but thank God we didn't have to listen to "lockbox" as President for 4+ years.
He was misquoted deliberately
And I'm sure Al would have done the same to any political opponent who would have said something similarly stupid. Quit defending him; your time is better spent elsewhere.
Guys, if you check out the facts for this crazy story, then this is what you will find:
1. Apple applied for some iPod related patents. They don't need these patents to build the iPod, they just want these patents to prevent others from copying parts of the iPod.
2. The patent examiner found that one of the claims in Apple's patent application is covered by a Microsoft patent. Therefore Apple can't get its patent.
3. The Microsoft patent has nothing to do whatsoever with the iPod. Only one claim in their patent is the same as one claim in a patent that Apple tries to get. All that Apple needs to do is remove that claim, reapply, get the patent.
4. There is no reason to assume that the iPod itself relies on this one specific claims and therefore would be covered by the Microsoft patent. In any case, the iPod was built _before_ Microsoft made its invention, so even if it was covered by the patent, Microsoft would have some problem. (Patent examiner: So where is the prior art? Apple: We built and sold one million of them. Is that enough prior art? )
5. There is a patent exchange agreement between Microsoft and Apple that was still running when Microsoft got their patent.
doesnt microsoft patent everything.... even if they dont make it... look at the patent for the microsoft tv junk... it is esentaialy TIVO but did microsoft invent that too just because they have a patent for it... or the rio players were before the ipod... and microsoft didnt make them...
(yes i know i suck at spelling fell free to correct my grammar and/or spellin i dont care, im still not going to change
P.S. Steve Jobs invented nothing. CEO's don't invent, the nameless engineers at Apple invent. 'nate.oo' is a jerk for continuing this awful CEO worship cult of the '90s. I wish Orwell wrote that above passage as Big Brother inventing helicopters.
Fight Frist Psoting!
Browse Slashdot with 'Newest First'!
microsoft is seen to have invented the toaster
I thought Al Gore invented Napster, then sold the mp3 format he invented to Apple, which took the format technology to create the first beta iPods... and now Al Gore is creating the next step, which is an "Internet" TV channel, which is really a TV channel, but somehow controlled by the Internet masses as the ultimate expression of podcast meets v-bloging meets CNN.
Wanna know the scary part, the last part, which is also the true part, is the least likely scenario most people will actually believe.
I8-D
http://hci.stanford.edu/bds/2p-star.html
http://fp3.antelecom.net/gcifu/applemuseum/lis a2.html
Never linked on here before
Finally you could take Fourier transforms, statistics on mean and variance of volume, beats per minute etc., and the user rating of the track, as one huge multidimensional space, throw it through PCA and select the closest track in the re(multidimensional)scaled space, which would actually give some semblance of "flow" and even use eigenvalues somewhere in the whole process... but that's an awfully large amount of heavy lifting to do compared to just picking a track at random which can do a surprisingly good job.
Further, since most iPods contain a self-selected set of music and not a large but random compilation of tunes from iTunes, one would expect them to "flow" since they would all match the listener's taste and prefered style. Picking randomly from a playlist of songs the listener likes is likely to produce a set of songs that seem to flow - since the number of different groups and styles is likely to vary in a small band.
Of course, someone may have very varied taste in music - but their songs would still flow - to them - beacuse they probably like to have very different songs played while listening.
To me, self - selection is key - thay's why Amazon's book recommendation is less likely to interest you than if you randomly pull a book from your collection to read (and the one you read will probably be similar to the last one you read as well as the follow-on).
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
In summary, this headline should probably be modded -1, Troll... What other purpose is there to stating on a well-known anti-Microsoft site that Microsoft patented something before Apple did it, in a tone suggesting superiority?
Everything is there for dominance. The hardware is cheaper and works great. Music publishers, such as the new Napster, have lined up with seemingly cheaper deals. They even have all you can eat plans. Vendors have been enticed to give away hardware and music to "influential" demographic target groups. And of course, there's the desktop monopoly which can be exploited to screw the competition's software and which comes with Windoze Media Player. It should be like Office or IE all over again.
The problem is that Microsoft sucks. The music goes away, from your computer and your device if you quit paying your subscription. You can't copy the files, and the first brush with the full power of DRM is truly shocking to users. "It's like someone else is in my computer," is how a fellow student described it to my yesterday. The reputation of Windows Media Player and Windows itself could not be lower and both have earned it with continued advertising assaults both intended and exploit driven. The result is something that's painful to use and liable to lose all of your music at any moment. The same cheap hardware works very nicely with Free software. I use my cheap little usbfs Walmart mp3 player with KDE software and it's an awesome, network aware solution that blows both DRM schemes out of the water.
Microsoft's failure to make entertainment systems that work is a tremendous opportunity. Everyone wants their computer to play music and movies without hassle and no one is ready to have textbooks and reference materials come the Microsoft way. Apple is using this screw up to crack the desktop monopoly. Ipod is the most popular music player even on Microsoft's campus, ha ha ha. You can bet that more than a few of them have bought Apple computers too. The free software community can also greatly benefit. If you know someone who's about to buy a $500 mini mac or $200 mp3 player, give them a Mepis CD and show them how they can use their current hardware and music collection without surrendering control of their digital future to anyone.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Gore stating "I took the initiative in creating the Internet." is a pretty straight forward lie. Not at all out of context.
r e_internet_inventor.mp3
http://www.geocities.com/omnipyre/multimedia/algo
All of Gore's "misstatements" seen in the context of his history, makes it clear he was a compulsive liar.
http://www.hench.net/2002/z070202a.htm
I think this is a more detailed one;
_ apple_patent/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08/10/microsoft
Although the posted one is so vague, it might be talking about something else.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Well did'nt bill gates steal windows from Steve Jobs? I truly believe Bill Gates is the richest thief in America.
They just claim to have invented everything. Spoons, toasters, web commerce, you name it, they have filed or have tried to file a patent for it, blatantly months, years, or decades after the same idea has already been brought to market and would take a non-braindead patent clerk 2 minutes to find prior art on.
Just look at all the slashdot articles. We see one about every 2 weeks for MS trying (succceeding?) to patent things there's blindingly obvious prior art for. Nothing new here. Tomorrow they'll try to patent the computer case, using about 850 words to describe "a metal box you put a computer in" in such complex verbage that the patent clerk will think "I have no idea what he's talking about and have never heard ANYTHING like that before so it MUST be original". *STAMP* ("Approved")
Not that it counts for much, but I will at least say they don't spend all their time chasing down "patent infringers" for their thousands of silly patents. I think they do it more for defense than offense, unlike some we've seen here recently.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Too bad i had built a portable music player back in the early 80s.
Totally solid state.. Totally useless due to the memory tech at the time. ( so it was scrapped )
Too bad i cant prove it.. Doh !
The moral to this story: Owning a patent does not mean you were the actual inventor. it only means you are the one that got to the patent office first.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Xerox PARC guys
There were women working at PARC too. Adele Goldberg was one of them.
Wait, does this mean Apple didn't invent putting numbers on a box?
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/1997/Aug9 7/MSMACpr.mspx
So even if MS's patents are valid it won't lead to a lawsuit.
You don't make money off your source code through patents. You make money off of that through copyright.
That's all there is to it. Software Patents deserve to be blown away on the wind. The only thing that is keeping them in place is the huge bureaucracy that has been built to support them. In essence, the people who work creating software patent applications do not want to lose their job, so they perpetuate a sick and fraudulent system.
Apple invented the hard drive-based portable MP3 jukebox?
Um, I had an Archos Jukebox long before the first iPod came out (and got lots of weird stares from people trying to explain to them what it was). And the Personal Jukebox came out even before the Archos did.
Apple didn't invent the hard drive-based portable MP3 jukebox -- they perfected it. May not seem like a big difference, but let's not write the people who did the actual inventing out of the history books...
Read my blog.
Tesla, on the other hand, had the opposite problem: he'd theorize and never bother to test his theories. So a lot of Tesla's work is half-baked (or less). Much of his work can't be reproduced, meaning either (a) he was so amazingly, stunningly smart that the combined work of tens of thousands of other extemely smart people can't figure it out even after decades, or (b) he was completely wrong.
The world needs experimenters and theorists. They keep each other honest.
a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.
This sounds lika a reference to the Edison quote of "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% transpiration."
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
I wish Microsoft good luck in their endeavor.
And that's without sarcasm.
Now troll me.
Mozilla stole tabs from NetCaptor. So what? Right?
M$ Says, "All you Ipods belong to us!"
Apple responds we give up..
Or, the patent could have nothing to do with what a bunch of /.ers and mindless newspaper and web hacks think it's about,
"The Real Deal On Microsoft's Playlist Patent"
existed before the iPod. The iPod is like a Windows CE 1.0 type PDA with a built in MP3/Audio Player and other features.
By the way, I think that there were MP3 players before the iPod. I recall that I had a cell phone that played MP3 files before Apple released the iPod. IIRC I used to have a Windows CE 1.0 HPC that had some audio player that could play MP3, MIDI, and other audio files, but the file size had to be small, because the secondary storage was battery backed up RAM.
If you think about it, the features that Apple wants to put into future iPods to play movies, and other media files, the Microsoft PocketPC already has. Imagine the iPod 2 or iPod 3 has bluetooth and wireless Internet abilities and a web browser, and PocketPCs have had those abilities for years now.
Besides everyone knows that Microsoft basically controls Apple, because if Apple does not do what Microsoft wants, Microsoft won't release a new version of MS-Office for the Macintosh. Steve Jobs wanted an iPod, Microsoft had the technology and patents, I think they made some sort of deal there. Also did anyone forget the money that Microsoft invested in Apple years ago? I think Microsoft wants to see that stock pay off.
Apple will continue to profit off the iPod and iTunes, until Microsoft decides to enter the market with their new version of PocketPC and MSMedia services to buy audio and video and multimedia files off of the Internet.
Ironically didn't Apple have patents on the Newton, and Palm have patents on the Palm Pilot, before there was a Windows CE? WTF? Was Microsoft the first one to file a patent for hand held media players that use hard drives or something? Or is it that Microsoft based Windows CE and PocketPC patents on Windows patents?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
So I doubt MS will go after Apple (by way of a SW example, remember all the aspects of the Apple GUI MS copied, and the derivatives of that it patented, and Apple also patented, who actually had the kernal of the idea is debatable).
Someone too young to know about the "Look and Feel" lawsuit that Apple had against Microsoft, which was eventually settled out of court?
"Will slashdot ever drag itself into the year 2005 and provide the ability to edit posts?"
/.
That would make it a wiki. Not
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
That page has the most self-serving rewriting pack of lies I have ever seen.
My entire CS course pre-dates the micro-computer and every language, from Fortran to Lisp predates Microsoft founders by YEARS!
What a bunch of lying bunch of sons of bitches.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
you talk of FFT or maybe the selection is just random..
.. i dunno .. DO SOME TEXT PROCESSING TO MATCH LIKE GENRE'S OR ARTISTS NAME OR...
what is so bloody difficult about imaging they
C'mon people, why be all complex when it's just a little processing on a purely text-level. ID3's. Really!
And of course, don't forget that BPM is a viewable attribute - if calculating the Sound Check level were to do a very quick BPM guess too, then that might be the only other attribute you needed to match against missing ID3 info (sometimes) and all of that is done on the host
Easy!
I thought Al Gore invented the iPod.
Firecock would be better, but that's still not testicular.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
That was, infact, one of the founding moments of the 'mutually assured distruction' hardware agreement moving to software. Of course, if a massive fundamental patent was breached, I'm not sure the agreement would stand, but for the day-to-day patent infingements the agreement holds up well.
Diamond Multimedia was the first to market such a device in the late 90s.
Actually, it was a Korean company, Saehan, that released the world's first hardware mp3 player. The Saehan MPMan was released a few months before the first Rio, in June 1998. It was marketed in the US as the Eiger Labs MPMan.
Da Blog
I think what we see here is an attempt by M$ to throw a little sand, or even a wrench, into the gears of a competitor. It is also indicative as to how the will use sw patents if Europe falls for US-style sw patents. The only thing holding them back is that going all out with patents right now would wake Europeans up to the problem and make them less complacent.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Apple did not invent the iPod either, it just came up with a catchy name for an MP3 that had a hard drive. MP3 players were on the market at least 6 years ago, manufactured by Sony, Hitachi, Matsushita, and various other companies. Sonly was even using flash memory in its more compact models (earphones that were the MP3 player itself) before the iPod came along. Apple just polished it up, and got the record labels on board as a way to sell hardware.
Other MP3 players are actually a little more advanced that the iPod, but what the iPod has that they don't is cool design and superior marketing.
but it took a company like apple computer to put the idea into ordinary people's minds that they needed one.
but how? I've owned many gadgets including ipods, pre-ipod mp3s, pdas, etc....for my money the ipod is clearly the least hassle to use with the best quality, even if you don't buy iTunes. Ok maybe you disagree and you maybe right. It could be that I've been seduced into the Apple podset! But. Just like Picasso once said, "I don't borrow ideas, I steal them,(make them my own)". This is exactly what Apple does better than anyone, every day, all day long. They take an invention and turn it into another APPLE billboard. That's an Apple. Apple. Apple. Apple.
Microsoft's new corporate motto.
Perhaps you are too young or were out of touch at the time, but Al Gore perhaps IS the most important figure in the internet.
Back in the late eighties Gore was going around talking about the importance of the "information superhighway". He was a politician-geek, and saw the potential. At the time ARPANet was nothing more than a network backbone between research universities and defense contractors.
He sponsored bills, gave speeches, and promoted the concept. This was when Java was just a drink, years before the web was invented, and before anyone save a few DARPA geeks even knew what email was.
If you are too young, it maybe impossible to imagine that time. Yet, in the late 80s, the internet wasn't even a twinkle in the CS eye, and if you remember it even took Microsoft off guard. But Gore had the vision, and he was proselytizing the dream. He was a key internet rainmaker, getting the money to make the internet happen.
Geeks, don't like to hear this, but the technology makers are perhaps not as important as the money people. Without the money, technology doesn't get to market and languishes.
Oi! We have now had TWO completely wrong-assed stories about this same event in slashdot. #1 was some bumf about "Apple failing to get patents to the iPod" because of some vaguely related patent by some Microsoft spod. Now that's turned into Microsoft invented the iPod?
Render unto us a grand holy rotating break, Taco. At least read your own damn articles before accepting a new one. Or at least apply some damn common sense when you get funky spin like these.
If you count the clickable trackball it has five.
:)
http://www.apple.com/mightymouse/specs.html
Not trying to be a pedant or anything
I've had a five button Kensington optical mouse for a while, and I've always been able to use it for exactly the things Apple describes the extra buttons on their new mouse is for (like expose and dashbaord). No special drivers or anything (n-button mice have been supported forever in OS X).
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
Aw hell -- right after I submitted this I noticed the side buttons don't work independently. Ass. It is only 4. Damn you Apple!
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
You may want to check out the date that the patent was submitted. It turns out the Ipod was released before the patent was in.
Anybody remember Apple buying the 3D graphics company Raycer? They had patents on using 3D graphics chips to treat various window contents as textures on surfaces. This is the basis of Quartz Extreme compositing. I wonder if they will be giving Microsoft trouble over using Direct 3D to render Aero Glass effects?
Bill Gates and Microsoft will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes. We have not been looking kindly upon their actions...
Grandmaster of the Revolutionary Order of the Forty-Two Fish
Ahem. No, no... the 'i' and the 'o' are lowercase. I think you meant iPod.
noone is that stupid. stop trying to pretend.
....just like they 'invented' the GUI (Apple)
Before you start spinning the wheel in the rumor mill, do your homework on the evolution of the GUI. You'll see that neither MS or Apple have the right to claim to have developed it from scratch.
The technology came out of Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). Microsoft and Apple managed to hire talent from PARC, thereby inheriting the GUI knowledge from those individuals.
Trivial Omnipotence
There are also a number Eastern, Middle Eastern, (and I believe African) languages which include the "j" sound.
Actually, you're right but I somewhat barely do know what eigenvalues are. I saw Eigenradio (which uses eigenvalues for PCA, according to the diagram) a while ago, which is what got me thinking. What I thought was cool about eigenvalues is what you think sucks about them for this purpose. Also I think you're talking about computing eigenvalues on the song files' metadata. I mean computing eigenvalues and doing PCA on the raw audio data for the actual music contained in the files. The cool thing about this is that the covariance you get is freely independant of any arbitrary categorization in the files' artist or genre tags.
I thought about your suggestion about using FFTs too, but I came down to the suspicion that a lot of the heavy lifting is to support all of the assumptions about what makes a song flow well with another one: like frequency distribution or the other things you listed like variance of volume (which audio people call compression, and beats per minute. Also you do a lot of heavy lifting to gather statistics on the whole song, whereas only the beginning and end are significant to a good segue. Also you do a lot of heavy lifting to always compare against the complete set of statistical metadata for your songs when all you need is to take the favorite match from a limited set of randomly selected possible next tracks.
Of course, if I'm wrong about iTunes, but right about generating a better playlist through statistical matching, we may have totally blown the patent here :)
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
Buried in this claim is the implication that any song in a selective subset of songs collected by anyone has a uniform ability to flow into any other song in the subset. A random selection is as good as any statistically matched selection if and only if the preceding statement is true. I'm not claiming to have/know such a magic bullet, but you'll have a harder time supporting your assertion that it is not possible.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
Of course, someone may have very varied taste in music - but their songs would still flow - to them - beacuse they probably like to have very different songs played while listening.
Buried in this claim is the implication that any song in a selective subset of songs collected by anyone has a uniform ability to flow into any other song in the subset. A random selection is as good as any statistically matched selection if and only if the preceding statement is true. I'm not claiming to have/know such a magic bullet, but you'll have a harder time supporting your assertion that it is not possible.
Actually, I'm asserting just the opposite - since a song collection is a selected, not random, set of music, a random selection from that set of songs is as likely to flow as some set selected by a mathematical formula.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.