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Apple Sued Over OS X Quick Boot
An anonymous reader writes "With a patent originally owned by LG in tow, a Florida based company called Operating Systems Solutions LLC recently filed suit against Apple claiming that OS X's use of quick booting infringes the aforementioned patent."
The company in question is a bit suspicious — having formed very recently — and so others are speculating it was created for a proxy battle against Apple by LG.
They should try this case in Germany.
These patent lawsuits are getting out of hand.
Everyone is suing everyone else, minimal innovation is happening and when it does it's from some upstart who gets buried the moment it makes a press release.
There have been many implementations of this any many variations since at least the early 90's. I don't know when the patent was lodged but I think Apple themselves may have prior art on this.
Patents and patent trolls should become illegal in our current economic environment.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
AFAIK LG and Samsung also both sell LCD panels to Apple...
It's not only a mess, it's a really weird one.
Sorry, you're too late for that.
And forgive me for possibly stating the obvious---
If LG were to sue Apple directly, Apple might throw a hissy and stop buying LG's panels.
So to prevent that, LG creates a shell/shill to bring the suit, on the presumption that Apple won't see right through it and continue to buy panels as if nothing was wrong.
Anybody else buying that?
How is something everyone who has ever used a computer for the past 30+ years thought of on their own patentable?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Someone to wave their hand and say ....
"these are not the patents you are looking for"
da da da dum indeed.
"They that sow the wind, shall reap the whirlwind."
I'm sure before nearly every nation on earth was dragged into World War 1 that they thought it was a good idea to get into a 'little fight.' At least times will be interesting again...
WTF?
Seriously, will someone please patent the process of patent trolling on behalf of something like the FSF?
There's got to be some way to phrase a patent to encapsulate it, or would it fail due to prior art?
No, I think that if random /. posters are coming up with that 5 minutes after reading the summary, LG wouldn't be stupid enough to think that no one at Apple - who has a vested interest in these things - would ever come to that conclusion. I mean, seriously. That doesn't take any insight.
It's seems unlikely that LG is the puppeteer. As - AFAIK - they're not involved in any of the Apple/Android/mobile patent wars with Apple, it would be pretty stupid for them to instigate a fight. After all, they sold off a parent that this new company claims has significant value. If that's the case, why would LG sell it? Why not pursue Apple themselves? The only reason would seem to be legal insulation from the lawsuit if they think the claim is tenuous and they're just trying to ruffle Apple's feathers. But if they're not involved in the patent fight, why would they provoke Apple and risk their current business with Apple?
In short: no, it seems too transparent and too stupid (stupid at least with the information I'm aware of; maybe an Apple suit against LG is imminent or something).
I vote based on politicians' actions, unless contrary to my preconceptions. Often wrong, never uncertain. #iamthe99%
I think that Apple, and others, have been using truncated boot processes for a decade or so. I can't see this one going anywhere.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
whats even better is they dont know removing autoexec.bat will speed booting up
whoever wins sucks
Does that mean ASUS had to/has to licence this patent for Bootbooster too? Caching the results from the last boot seems a sensible idea when some modern BIOSes take an age to finish...
It could be Apple and LG already have a contract that would prohibit LG from filing suit directly.
Form a shell company with little to no assets and use them to fight the morons with little to no patent claim.
"...The company in question is a bit suspicious — having formed very recently..."
Formed recently you say? Gee, with a name like Operating Systems Solutions, what ever gave anyone that idea?
Probably takes the cake for the most unoriginal company name ever...makes you wonder if someone lost a bet in the marketing department, or perhaps that name was pulled out of someones ass after a late-night binger...
My 1981 Apple IIe and my 1985 512K Mac booth boot in about a second. The 512K Mac needs a bit longer to read the floppy drive. But the GUI is up before that.
If only modern systems could boot that fast.
What was LG (Lucky Goldstar) doing in the early 80's with fast boot? Nothing.
BTW, C64, TR-80, etc... all booted fast since the OS/BASIC was in ROM.
Yea, but that's nothing compared to deleting system32!
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
'nuf said?
That's just Slashdot's general stance. Has nothing to do with patents or anything specific. Nerds just hate winners.
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Having read the patent (RE40,092 in case anyone is interested), it's claims are so broad and complete that any implementation of any kind of acceleration of the booting process would violate it. In fact, they're so complete, that any hibernate mode would also likely violate them, which suggests that it shouldn't be hard to find prior art since hibernate modes substantially predate this patent. I suspect that Apple will use prior art to get the patent invalidated, but it's tough to say for sure.
The real problem with this patent, though, is the standard one for software patents: it's just a set of general ideas about what you could do to make booting faster (store configuration data, check configuration data, write some or all pages of memory to disk, read some or all pages of memory from disk) with nothing that could actually be described as a specific invention or process. As such, the patent (as is almost always the case with software patents) is so broad that it's ridiculous. They've basically been granted a patent on any feasible idea for speeding up the boot process.
"Quick boot" was a ridiculous piece of marketing in the first place.
Anyone who uses a computer regularly and has two brain cells to rub together, has been using sleep/resume for about 10 years now.
I've run systems for several months at a stretch without ever rebooting them. It takes ~3 seconds to wake one up. Problem solved, patent free.
The faster we hit rock bottom, the better.
They have been researching digital cameras since the 1970s and have like 1000 patents relating to digital cameras.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Sasson
They literally the invented digital still camera and got a patent for it in 1978
Their patents have been tested in court. However Kodak seems to have no problems licensing its patents. Kodak
doesnt pursue frivolous or overly broad claims. Kodak actually invented most of the digital camera technology existing today
and licenses it to everybody.
Apple tried to claim a patent claim against kodak and got bitchslapped in May.
http://www.toledoblade.com/Courts/2011/05/16/Apple-loses-round-in-digital-camera-patent-dispute-with-Eastman-Kodak.html
Nokia sued them because they really wanted to cross license Apple's multi-touch patents and had refused to give Apple the same licensing terms they give everyone else
So invalidating software patents would have been great for Nokia. They'd have had free access to Apple's bullshit 'pinching means zooming in' patent (filed years after that gesture was publicly demoed), and Apple would still have had to pay or a license to the various technologies that the world's mobile phone network infrastructure is built on.
Apple would have been more than happy to pay the same licensing fees that everyone else pays
And then sue Nokia for violating patents on things that should never have been allowed to be patented.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Now all of you technology giants must pay up and desist your manufacture of electronics and use ... i duno water or something to create your boolean logic.
For my next patent: Boolean logic.
can't we just do away with patents altogether?
I mean, patents were invented in an epoch were information traveled with pigeons. Nowadays information gets instantaneous world wide publicity. Patents where designed to be a protection mechanism for makers, not the industry. Today makers can just broadcast their new invention and monetize on it directly or with the way they wish what need is there for Patents in this space?
-- no sig today
Apple must get rid of autoexec.bat soon!!
Good old autoexec.bat. I remember back in the days when I first got into Linux most of the comparisons for home users back then were between Linux and DOS, not Linux and Windows. One BBS poster came in ridiculing the Linux users for our stupidity because everything a computer loaded HAS to come from autoexec.bat and so you need DOS to even run Linux, so clearly DOS was superior.
Sorry, the reference just brought that old mix up to mind. Carry on.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Just to clarify, you mean years after the concept was publicly performed by others, whereby Apple stole it and then patented some else's concept (which long persisted in scifi and movies). Their pinch/zoom patent, in addition to being extremely obvious, was stolen from others. The fact Apple applied for such a stolen/obvious concept in addition to the fact it was granted, in of itself, shows how fucked in the head Apple is, not to mention how fucked up the patent system is.
Provide evidence that it was, in fact, "stolen" before you make shit up.
Have you never watched scifi? Its well documented fact these gestures existed before Apple stole them as their own. Period.
Hell, I even remember all the Apple fanboyz pretending it was something new and novel when Apple rolled it out and myself and several others looked at each other thinking WTF - we've seen this in movies for many years.
Seriously, are you so detached from reality and so tethered to Apple's nipple you honestly have no clue these gestures long existed before Apple stole them and claimed them as their own?
So a movie now counts as "prior art" now? Are you so idiotic as to think that you can just make the gestures, that you don't actually have to do any engineering to get them to work?
Yes, it was new and novel, because it was the first time it actually fucking worked in real life.
Have you never watched scifi? Its well documented fact these gestures existed before Apple stole them as their own. Period.
Damn! There goes my warp drive patent!
Moron.
My MacBook Pro mid-2010, take AGES to boot.
I would submit that you either have a hardware problem with your MBP, or maybe you are doing something like forcing it to mount a bunch of network shares that are not always available on bootup.
Even my old G5 tower running 10.4 boots to the desktop in under 30 seconds.
It can't possibly be valid. OS X Lion does not boot up quickly on my computer.
It's fascinating that every single person that has claimed this has posted as AC.
Quit lying.
I think you mean Unix (Linux kernel came out in '91 IIRC), but I remember those days, too. Workstations came in various Unix/BSD flavors, home boxes ran DOS, and Macs were overpriced Speak-and-Spells. I remember getting a 20 meg HDD and marveling over "how can I ever fill this thing up?".
In my ill-spent youth, another computer geek and I would go to the Radio Shack at the mall and edit the autoexec.bats on the demo machines. We would add
/autotest
format c:
What can I say? I was a bit of an ass when I was a kid. :(
"We live as though the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be." - Joss Whedon via Angel
No, I mean Linux. This was circa '93 - '94. Windows 95 wasn't quite out yet and back in those days a lot of the hobbiest crowd tended to still do a lot of work in DOS rather than suffer through Windows 3.1.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
comes around. I'm finding it hard to find sympathy for companies that do things like this, no matter who it is.
Oh yeah, the only person I knew who actually used 3.1 was a friend's dad who wanted to play "Dungeon Master". My mom had a Mac Plus when I was in the sixth grade and up, and I had gotten turned off by GUIs by the downright condescending nature of it all. I mean, Mac error messages were FROWNY FACES for Cthulhu's sake! And no sensible BSD back-end to pipe errors to a log, no control, no terminal, etc. I was not impressed. Even as a kid I expected more out of an OS.
"We live as though the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be." - Joss Whedon via Angel