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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."
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
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!!
I feel compelled to correct this misconception as a public service every time I see it.
Gore never claimed to have invented the internet. He said he backed funding (repeatedly and against republican opposition) for the Arpanet which became the internet.
He was misquoted deliberately (and repeatedly) by a group of right wing press until the lie became main stream. So now you can find many reasonable moderate people who believe he originally made the claim.
Yes, Edison electrocuted many animals, but it wasn't to disprove Tesla's theories. Rather, it was to 'demonstrate' that AC electricity (Tesla's system), was more lethal than Edison's preferred DC. Edison put on elaborate shows in which he electrocuted horses, dogs, elephants, and just about any other animal he could get his hands on (he was also known for paying children 25 cents for each stray dog they could bring him). Edison claimed that while AC electricity was obviously lethal, DC was not (which is patently false).
Interesting that Edison's name is synonomous with electricity even today, although the electricity we use in our homes is Tesla's alternating current.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Actually they didn't "take" it. It was in exchange for Apple stock. Xerox made out very well.
I read the msnbc.com article on this. The gist of it I believe was that Microsoft filed the patent after the iPod came out, and Apple was slow to file for the patent. Apparently prior art means nothing to the patent office.
Microsoft had seen the windowing idea at Xerox PARC. The idea came from there.
Nice attempt at historical revisionism, but no. Try looking here or here for a quick history lesson.
only a small part of the Windows TCP/IP stack was taken from BSD.
I'm confused...are you arguing with me or corroborating my statements? Come back when you've made up your mind.
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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
"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.
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
Correct: it does not.
I presume from what you say that you believe the only possible motive for doing that is if you are planning to shoot the next person who enters the room. Here are some alternative explanations:
- You are planning to commit suicide, but have not yet plucked up the courage.
- You have received anonymous death threats, and want to be able to defend yourself.
- You are planning to discharge it into the air from your balcony to signal the start of a revolution.
- You have serious psychological problems that lead you to believe you are going to assassinate the president today. (As you live in Sweden, it's unlikely you'll have the opportunity.)
- You are fifteen, drunk, and did it because your friend dared you to.
Hmm, I seem to see an awful lot of possible interpretations, and only one of them involves murder.Now, note in particular the "self defense" one. This one is actually analogous to the situation Microsoft is in! Microsoft is regularly threatened, or even attacked, with software patents. Given that they therefore have a clear, obvious, and verifiable motive to patent things, why are so many people determined to believe in conspiracies instead?
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.
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.
Microsoft did attempt to license the doubious "IP" of the FAT file system.
According to them, if you want to use long file names on flash media, you have to licence their IP. For $.25 a unit, up to $250,000 per licencee.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, the patent seems to be invalid.
Although this first attempt at patent extortion seems to have failed, I expect we will see Microsoft try again soon.
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.