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Multi-Channel Communication Patent Up For Sale
OTDR alerts us to the latest software patent stupidity in the news as patent number 6,418,462, "methods allowing clients to perform tasks through a sideband communication channel, in addition to the main communication channel between a client and server," snubs its nose at AJAX, ftp, and decades of prior art and goes on sale next month in San Fransisco. "Singled out are AJAX mashups including Google Maps and Gmail, and Microsoft 'Live'... Also in the frame are Amazon's S3 and EC2 and clusters from Microsoft, VMware, and Oracle. eBay's Skype, Napster, and Microsoft's Groove are also listed as potentially infringing on the patent in P2P."
Hopefully some patent troll will spend mega bucks on it, then spend even more bucks on expensive lawsuits against the likes of Google, Microsoft, etc., and finally end up going the way of SCO when they get buried under the weight of prior art. The sooner one of these "IP Portfolio" companies gets well and truly burnt, the better.
Plus, as a a bonus, Slashdot gets to root for Microsoft in court for a change. Watching some of the anti-Microsoft zealots around here trying to post on *that* should be entertaining, to say the least!
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Doesn't it destroy the purpose of a "patent" if you can sell the rights to it to someone completely uninvolved with its creation?
Rights shouldn't be a commodity!
Communism, its a party!
Is this really the patent?
My reading is that it doesn't really claim what TFA is claiming it does.
This patent seems to be patenting a process where many unrelated clients connect to a supposedly lightweight server and distributes workloads among those clients via a sideband channel. That's not my understanding of how Ajax works.
It seems to me that it suffers from the same issues that many distributed computing platforms suffer from which is that you get free CPU at the expense of a great deal of bandwidth so it's only useful for a very limited sets of workloads. In this case I can't really imagine what you'd use it for.
This is a trivial patent to wipe out. If anyone pays even a penny for this AND pursues a lawsuit, I think that I will dig up the old business plans and even the code for this and kill it. Idiots and greed are such a bad combination.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Forget SETI at home look at PVM. First release 1989 !!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Virtual_Machine
Description here
http://www.netlib.org/pvm3/book/node17.html
Main channel is to pvmd. "backchannel" is the process to process communication.
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The PVM system is composed of two parts. The first part is a daemon , called pvmd3 and sometimes abbreviated pvmd , that resides on all the computers making up the virtual machine. (An example of a daemon program is the mail program that runs in the background and handles all the incoming and outgoing electronic mail on a computer.) Pvmd3 is designed so any user with a valid login can install this daemon on a machine. When a user wishes to run a PVM application, he first creates a virtual machine by starting up PVM. (Chapter 3 details how this is done.) The PVM application can then be started from a Unix prompt on any of the hosts. Multiple users can configure overlapping virtual machines, and each user can execute several PVM applications simultaneously.
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The general paradigm for application programming with PVM is as follows. A user writes one or more sequential programs in C, C++, or Fortran 77 that contain embedded calls to the PVM library. Each program corresponds to a task making up the application. These programs are compiled for each architecture in the host pool, and the resulting object files are placed at a location accessible from machines in the host pool. To execute an application, a user typically starts one copy of one task (usually the ``master'' or ``initiating'' task) by hand from a machine within the host pool. This process subsequently starts other PVM tasks, eventually resulting in a collection of active tasks that then compute locally and exchange messages with each other to solve the problem. Note that while the above is a typical scenario, as many tasks as appropriate may be started manually. As mentioned earlier, tasks interact through explicit message passing, identifying each other with a system-assigned, opaque TID.
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I'm waiting for a Beowulf Cluster to come flying out freom the bowels of the earth to smite them with sword and axe.
The other question is, could the server serve the request, distribute the problem, and retrieve the results from the client in less work then it would actually take the server to solve the problem itself? If you're going to hand off a problem to the person surfing the website, they'd have to probably solve the problem within 1 or 2 seconds, or you risk them going to a different page and not returning the results. Most distributed computing tasks require jobs longer than a couple seconds.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Those big squarish light swtitches that take up almost the whole plate, along with their electrical outlet counterparts, and anything else in that form factor are patented by Leviton under the name "Decora". All the other styles are probably also patented. Since there's patents on STYLES of power switches it's going to be difficult to make a blanket patent.
I invented something a little while back when I was 13 or so. I was listening to a radio show about some astronomical event as I was going to sleep. They were talking about some photos, and they said we should go to their website and look at them. Well as I was 13, and it was after bed time on a school night I didn't have access to the internet so I just had to try to imagine what it looked like from their descriptions. Suddenly it dawned on me, what if you embedded a small screen in the radio? That way the radio station could send images over another frequency, you could even use the feed from the radio show's webcam when there wasn't any images to show. After about a minute of thinking about how useful this device would be I realized I'd just invented the television, again...
I'm pretty sure I've re-invented other stuff, I just can't remember what at the moment.