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."

Comments

Credit where credit's due

[Dubpal]

"If you think Apple Computer's Steve Jobs invented the technology behind the Apple iPod..."

Contents of the article aside, such an assumption would be wrong, Steve Jobs didn't invent the iPod - Jeff Robin did.

Apple had it on shelves before the MS patent

[plasmacutter]

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.

Re:That's like saying

[Barlo_Mung_42]

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 So now you can find many reasonable moderate people who believe he originally made the claim.

Re:Invention..

[TripMaster Monkey]

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.

Re:Did M$ invent the iPod?

[smhill]

Actually they didn't "take" it. It was in exchange for Apple stock. Xerox made out very well.

Re:AutoDJ is half baked, unrelated to iPod or iTun

[Coryoth]

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.