Open up itunes and click on the "browse" button (it looks like an eye)......then drag the sliders across and down so that the playlist browser looks like a part of the track browser, and the display elements look like they are laid out in a grid as they are in the Contois mock-up.......it is exactly the same as the picture in question.
Now open up Windows 2.1, maximize the File Manager window, minimize all the other windows, change the color scheem to black and white, and move the trashcan icon down to the lower right. Now despite the fact that Windows 2.1 used a paned interface rather than overlapping windows, and a separate menu bar per top level window, you can make it look like a Macintosh.
Apple did not prevail in their argument then, and Contois shouldn't prevail in his argument now.
The iTunes interface seems to be almost a ditto copy of their interface,
Only if you deliberately distort the iTunes layout in a non-obvious way.
Apple used a similar distortion of the Windows interface to try and show that Microsoft had duplicated the Macintosh user interface. Their argument did not prevail and while it may seem amusing for them to be hoist on their own petard the real losers would not be Apple, it would be their customers.
OK, I just finished reading the entirety of the page you cite, and if you don't have a response for the final section you shouldn't be attempting to use a paraphrase of one of the quotes as a response. Here's the text:
The real point is surely that a patent for a device invented by someone with a basic knowledge of physics is used to protect the *invention* not the *knowledge*. They are not used to prevent anyone else inventing another device using the same basic knowledge of physics.
Even if it is perfectly just for the RSA (or any other) patent "taken as a whole" to be used to protect "not merely a disembodied mathematical concept but rather a specific machine"; that *doesn''t* mean it is neccessarily just to use the patent to protect that "disembodied mathematical concept" when it is used in some other "specific machine". But software patents *are* used to try to stop people employing the same algorithms in other inventions. So, despite the ingenuous ruling of the court they *are* being used to try to control "disembodied mathematical concepts" - in other words ideas.
I have no idea if Watt had a patent on the steam governor. But I bet he didn't try to take one out on Boyle's Law. -- An exchange on the RSA PKC Patent
Again, I argue software is not a specialized field.
The specific feature of software that makes it different from manufacture is that there is no "manufacturing step" in software. The result of this is that all the effort involved in creating a software product goes into design, and so a software developer, in the course of writing any significant program, implements thousands of potentially patentable inventions without even being aware that they're "inventions". The only disclosure or prior art is embodied in similar works. And even if a patent search was possible for corporate developers (it's not, these companies depend on their own patent arsenal to use cross-licensing as a "get out of jail free" card), open source software developers simply can't afford the necessary fees and time.
And as this suit demonstrates, cross-licensing doesn't work if the person bringing the suit is not engaged in software development themselves.
Contois site (emusicgear.com) is a retail music storefront.
He was involved with a product called the "IBM Music Feature Card"... he worked for Yamaha and his father worked for IBM, and it was based on a Yamaha synthesizer chipset.
There's precisely one reference I could find online to a program that might be related to this patent:
Where did Vermont skiers have their most memorable breakfast in years while enjoying "live" music? Chances are it was in Stowe, VT, at the Dutch Pancake Café at Grey Fox Inn, home to the popular Yamaha Silent Disklavier® MPX100 piano.
"It was a pleasure to work with Grey Fox Inn and bring the latest music technology to their clientele," said Dave Contois of Contois Music in Essex Junction, VT. "We developed 'Piano Player,' a Windows program that allows users to import their PianoSoft(TM) or standard MIDI files and play them from the personal computer," he explained. "Grey Fox Inn runs the program on the same computer that they take reservations on-it was a perfect fit."
"From the kids' reaction of 'the ghost' playing the piano, to adults commenting on the computer technology and quality of the music and sound of the Disklavier and the mood that it has set throughout the restaurant-all have been a real asset to our business," commented Michael Diender co-ownsr of the Dutch Pancake Café and Grey Fox Inn. -- Accent Online
It's possibly that by "we" he means "Yamaha": Yamaha Piano Suite contains "Piano Player- Supervised piano practice with brilliantly effective audio/ visual feedback."
Doesn't most of what Linux cred HP have come from their acquisition of "the lab formerly known as DECWRL" via their acquisition of Compaq, and the projects Jon "Maddog" Hall started there?
Actually, Microsoft bribed some hotel staff at a big convention hotel to put the announcement about Windows on the beds of all the attendees.
Apple, of course, said not a word about Macintosh until the 1984 Superbowl. They *did* have the Lisa out by then (I first saw one in 1982 or early 1983). Both Microsoft and Apple had licenses from Xerox, based on the Star Office System (which I first saw at NCC 1982) as well as whatever Microsoft licensed from Apple.
Linux/OS does not need to support every bit of crappy hardware.
Funny, when I talk to real Linux fans about the difference between Linux and FreeBSD, the fact that Linux supports more bits of... shall we say "second tier"... hardware is one of the advantages they bring up. I'll have to remember that one next time.
but they did not wait for Windows to actually get popular and entrenched. they went right after it.
Apple announced Windows in 1983, and licensed some of the user interface elements from Apple's Lisa for it (the Mac, of course, didn't come out until some months later). The lawsuit wasn't filed until 1988, on Windows 2.1, and it REALLY took a stretch to make Windows 2.1 look like Mac OS... Microsoft had deliberately changed the user interface, avoided overlapping windows, and restricted file icons to the inside of the File Manager, so they didn't infringe on Apple's Xerox-inspired desktop design.
Apple minimized all the programs other than the file manager to make the file manager window cover the whole screen so it looked like the desktop and the MDI subwindows looked like the Mac's Finder windows. This also put the file manager menus at the top of the screen instead of the top of the file manager window. They then took a picture of the Apple desktop with some icons moved to sit at the bottom so they looked like Microsoft's minimized program icons. Finally, they changed Windows to black and white to make it look like the Mac's monochrome display.
The resulting images looked similar, but they didn't represent the normal was users used either environment.
Can someone tell me a real,legal use for bittorrent?
Providing access to slashdotted articles and downloads.
It's also often the only practical way to download popular shareware without playing the "wait for a download server and don't you dare leave the computer because you'll only have five minutes to start your download" game.
Is it? I don't know enough about how the patent system works to say... what parts of the patent should I look at to tell if it's a design patent or some other kind of patent?
That both designs display using a Miller column browser (with different content!) and can show an image won't be sufficient.
So that's what it's called. This user interface predates the Macintosh, in fact it predates the Xerox Star office system that inspired the Macintosh. It comes from the Smalltalkclassbrowser.
If you can't come up with an alternative way to design a UI that lists genre, artist, album and song you are either incredibly unimaginative or the worlds worst designer.
It's clear that you've never used iTunes, because iTunes doesn't normally look like that.
He deliberately moved the vertical slider in iTunes 1/3 of the way over, and the horizontal slider half the way down. This make it look like the playlist browser, the track browser, and the cover art were laid out the same way as his. In fact the cover art and playlist browser are a narrow vertical column, with the currently displayed playlist next to them, and the track browser is normally only displayed at the very top of the Library playlist. The normal view of iTunes is more like this.
This is ironically the same kind of trickery that Apple used against Microsoft, rearranging the Windows 3.0 user interface to make it look like Mac OS for the photographs they provided as evidence. This kind of trickery failed to prevail then, and hopefully it will fail this time.
Let's see, you get a 67 Mhz ARM and a 33 MHz ARM and 4M RAM and a couple of low resolution displays for $150. This doesn't seem particularly inexpensive to me, not when you can get a 206 MHz StrongARM or 300-400 MHz XScale, along with 32-64M RAM and a high resolution touch-screen for less than that with a remaindered Pocket PC. And there's already a variety of Linux-on-Pocket-PC-hardware projects to choose from.
No, this one is purely a matter of the hack value... the DS hardware is no bargain.
When looking at the whole picture, all these things are truly unimportant in the world of Linux and open-source. Modems? GIF? FAT? MP3? We don't need any of them.
Um, dude, I disposed of MP3 and GIF right after I brought them up. They're minor because they're (a) outside the kernel, and (b) not required for hardware configuration or system installation.
You want to have to pay for a binary-only kernel module so you can access a flash drive under Linux? Or to access system configuration on some laptops? And that's just their "stalking horse"...
You think you've won the war. You haven't. You've won some border skirmishes, but they're just cannoning-up right now: the real war hasn't even started.
could please someone tell me what has happened to Linux in the US since then?
Microsoft has spread FUD with a thick trowel about the dangers of using open source software because you're not indemnified against patent claims, and have won the occasional victory as a result.
Microsoft has earned royalties on flash memory cards using their patent on the FAT file system.
There's the Unisys GIF patent, and the Sorensen MP3 patent, but they're kind of peripheral to Linux itself. The Microsoft FAT patent is the first one that could be a real problem, since FAT's everywhere. Right now they're establishing precedent, it's going to take a while before they can move.
Remember the Hayes patent modem wars? This kind of restriction CAN be made to stick.
HP produced CDE, under than name HP-VUE, which became the standard Unix desktop.
I know about CDE. CDE is the biggest disaster to hit the UNIX world since SCO Open Server. It's an appallingly bad design, and completely failed to provide a usable desktop environment.
You're defining desktop as "something you put on a desk". I'm talking about a computer that you run desktop software on, that provides a Xerox-star-like working environment. So...
Now lets discuss our definition of success.
My definition of success includes actually fulfilling the requirements that providing a desktop environment created. CDE was a complete failure there: not only was the file browser completely inadequate, but the window manager and that horrid tacky dock thing was a worse tool than the vanilla menu-oriented Motif window manager it replaced. The first thing I did on our CDE-infected servers was to come up with a hook that let our users keep on using their preferred window manager, because with the introduction of CDE they lost the option of just starting their own WM from.xsession or.xinitrc.
Don't talk to me about CDE. I know CDE. CDE makes Windows 2.0 look good.
The majority of the UNIX-based "desktops" are similarly screwed up. NeXT was one of the few exceptions.
SUN were the largest player in the high-end market through out the 1990s, despite having distinctly inferior processor technology towards the end of the period.
Sparc was always a trailing edge processor, right from the start. The "register window" design made context switches appallingly expensive, but didn't provide the compiler with enough scratch registers so it suffered from almost as much register pressure as the 386. To combat the context switch problem they put multiple register contexts on chip, which helped a lot under low loads but you could always see the knee in the performance curve as soon as you got more ready processes than yuo had register contexts.
Sun has entry level workstations starting at about $1,400
The cheapest Sun workstations that ever ran NeWS were a good deal more than that. Once they abandoned NeWS they gave up any attempt to be anything more than a "me too" user interface. IBM's desktop wasn't AIX, ever, it was OS/2.
Is that SGI, HP, Sun, IBM, or Apple you are talking about?
HP doesn't have a desktop environment worth talking about. Sun had the potential of one, but threw it away. IBM's just got a crippled version of the OS/2 shell. SGI? Pretty graphics but the user interface was no better than the other UNIX desktop attempts... about the only thing they had that was even interesting was the cute file system visualiser in Jurassic Park. None of them have had desktop sales in even Amiga-class volume.
The pretty graphics do slow it down. But without them, under Rhapsody and NeXTstep, the same basic API was more usable and faster than Mac OS or Windows on sub-100-MHz pre-RISC pre-Pentium hardware.
it's also designed around a one-button mouse
You're thinking of OS 9. OS X is 2-button native with legacy 1-button support for political reasons.
Self-proclaimed gurus have been wrong about other stuff too. I wish Apple had been able to shed more of OS 9 than they did.
GNOME and KDE should have been emulating a known, successful standard:...... NeXTstep. There was even a GNUstep that got quite far along before the Gnome/KDE people decided that Windows was the model to follow.
kde and gnome are even doing work to try and get their vfs layers merged and my hope is that eventually it gets moved to some kind of general filesystem layer so that linux will have everything as a url instead of just everything as a file.
I hope not. Not on a general desktop OS for ordinary users to use. Being able to treat http://evil.invalid/exploit.sh as a local file is, well, just asking for the fuckup fairy to come calling.
Slashdot Mirror
Open up itunes and click on the "browse" button (it looks like an eye)... ...then drag the sliders across and down so that the playlist browser looks like a part of the track browser, and the display elements look like they are laid out in a grid as they are in the Contois mock-up.... ...it is exactly the same as the picture in question.
Now open up Windows 2.1, maximize the File Manager window, minimize all the other windows, change the color scheem to black and white, and move the trashcan icon down to the lower right. Now despite the fact that Windows 2.1 used a paned interface rather than overlapping windows, and a separate menu bar per top level window, you can make it look like a Macintosh.
Apple did not prevail in their argument then, and Contois shouldn't prevail in his argument now.
The iTunes interface seems to be almost a ditto copy of their interface,
Only if you deliberately distort the iTunes layout in a non-obvious way.
Apple used a similar distortion of the Windows interface to try and show that Microsoft had duplicated the Macintosh user interface. Their argument did not prevail and while it may seem amusing for them to be hoist on their own petard the real losers would not be Apple, it would be their customers.
I eagerly await your response to this argument.
Again, I argue software is not a specialized field.
The specific feature of software that makes it different from manufacture is that there is no "manufacturing step" in software. The result of this is that all the effort involved in creating a software product goes into design, and so a software developer, in the course of writing any significant program, implements thousands of potentially patentable inventions without even being aware that they're "inventions". The only disclosure or prior art is embodied in similar works. And even if a patent search was possible for corporate developers (it's not, these companies depend on their own patent arsenal to use cross-licensing as a "get out of jail free" card), open source software developers simply can't afford the necessary fees and time.
And as this suit demonstrates, cross-licensing doesn't work if the person bringing the suit is not engaged in software development themselves.
He was involved with a product called the "IBM Music Feature Card"... he worked for Yamaha and his father worked for IBM, and it was based on a Yamaha synthesizer chipset.
There's precisely one reference I could find online to a program that might be related to this patent:
It's possibly that by "we" he means "Yamaha": Yamaha Piano Suite contains "Piano Player- Supervised piano practice with brilliantly effective audio/ visual feedback."
Doesn't most of what Linux cred HP have come from their acquisition of "the lab formerly known as DECWRL" via their acquisition of Compaq, and the projects Jon "Maddog" Hall started there?
Actually, Microsoft bribed some hotel staff at a big convention hotel to put the announcement about Windows on the beds of all the attendees.
Apple, of course, said not a word about Macintosh until the 1984 Superbowl. They *did* have the Lisa out by then (I first saw one in 1982 or early 1983). Both Microsoft and Apple had licenses from Xerox, based on the Star Office System (which I first saw at NCC 1982) as well as whatever Microsoft licensed from Apple.
Linux/OS does not need to support every bit of crappy hardware.
Funny, when I talk to real Linux fans about the difference between Linux and FreeBSD, the fact that Linux supports more bits of... shall we say "second tier"... hardware is one of the advantages they bring up. I'll have to remember that one next time.
but they did not wait for Windows to actually get popular and entrenched. they went right after it.
Apple announced Windows in 1983, and licensed some of the user interface elements from Apple's Lisa for it (the Mac, of course, didn't come out until some months later). The lawsuit wasn't filed until 1988, on Windows 2.1, and it REALLY took a stretch to make Windows 2.1 look like Mac OS... Microsoft had deliberately changed the user interface, avoided overlapping windows, and restricted file icons to the inside of the File Manager, so they didn't infringe on Apple's Xerox-inspired desktop design.
Apple minimized all the programs other than the file manager to make the file manager window cover the whole screen so it looked like the desktop and the MDI subwindows looked like the Mac's Finder windows. This also put the file manager menus at the top of the screen instead of the top of the file manager window. They then took a picture of the Apple desktop with some icons moved to sit at the bottom so they looked like Microsoft's minimized program icons. Finally, they changed Windows to black and white to make it look like the Mac's monochrome display.
The resulting images looked similar, but they didn't represent the normal was users used either environment.
Can someone tell me a real,legal use for bittorrent?
Providing access to slashdotted articles and downloads.
It's also often the only practical way to download popular shareware without playing the "wait for a download server and don't you dare leave the computer because you'll only have five minutes to start your download" game.
It is a design patent.
Is it? I don't know enough about how the patent system works to say... what parts of the patent should I look at to tell if it's a design patent or some other kind of patent?
organize music by Genere, then artist, and finally album
Except his design organizes it by Category, Composer, and Artist.
That both designs display using a Miller column browser (with different content!) and can show an image won't be sufficient.
So that's what it's called. This user interface predates the Macintosh, in fact it predates the Xerox Star office system that inspired the Macintosh. It comes from the Smalltalk class browser.
If you can't come up with an alternative way to design a UI that lists genre, artist, album and song you are either incredibly unimaginative or the worlds worst designer.
How about this one?
Not to mention that they pulled this very game on Microsoft over Windows 3.0.
I still would rather see Apple prevail, I don't want iTunes to end up broken-by-lawsuit the way Graffiti on the Palm was.
It's clear that you've never used iTunes, because iTunes doesn't normally look like that.
He deliberately moved the vertical slider in iTunes 1/3 of the way over, and the horizontal slider half the way down. This make it look like the playlist browser, the track browser, and the cover art were laid out the same way as his. In fact the cover art and playlist browser are a narrow vertical column, with the currently displayed playlist next to them, and the track browser is normally only displayed at the very top of the Library playlist. The normal view of iTunes is more like this.
This is ironically the same kind of trickery that Apple used against Microsoft, rearranging the Windows 3.0 user interface to make it look like Mac OS for the photographs they provided as evidence. This kind of trickery failed to prevail then, and hopefully it will fail this time.
Let's see, you get a 67 Mhz ARM and a 33 MHz ARM and 4M RAM and a couple of low resolution displays for $150. This doesn't seem particularly inexpensive to me, not when you can get a 206 MHz StrongARM or 300-400 MHz XScale, along with 32-64M RAM and a high resolution touch-screen for less than that with a remaindered Pocket PC. And there's already a variety of Linux-on-Pocket-PC-hardware projects to choose from.
No, this one is purely a matter of the hack value... the DS hardware is no bargain.
When looking at the whole picture, all these things are truly unimportant in the world of Linux and open-source. Modems? GIF? FAT? MP3? We don't need any of them.
Um, dude, I disposed of MP3 and GIF right after I brought them up. They're minor because they're (a) outside the kernel, and (b) not required for hardware configuration or system installation.
You want to have to pay for a binary-only kernel module so you can access a flash drive under Linux? Or to access system configuration on some laptops? And that's just their "stalking horse"...
You think you've won the war. You haven't. You've won some border skirmishes, but they're just cannoning-up right now: the real war hasn't even started.
could please someone tell me what has happened to Linux in the US since then?
Microsoft has spread FUD with a thick trowel about the dangers of using open source software because you're not indemnified against patent claims, and have won the occasional victory as a result.
Microsoft has earned royalties on flash memory cards using their patent on the FAT file system.
There's the Unisys GIF patent, and the Sorensen MP3 patent, but they're kind of peripheral to Linux itself. The Microsoft FAT patent is the first one that could be a real problem, since FAT's everywhere. Right now they're establishing precedent, it's going to take a while before they can move.
Remember the Hayes patent modem wars? This kind of restriction CAN be made to stick.
HP produced CDE, under than name HP-VUE, which became the standard Unix desktop.
.xsession or .xinitrc.
I know about CDE. CDE is the biggest disaster to hit the UNIX world since SCO Open Server. It's an appallingly bad design, and completely failed to provide a usable desktop environment.
You're defining desktop as "something you put on a desk". I'm talking about a computer that you run desktop software on, that provides a Xerox-star-like working environment. So...
Now lets discuss our definition of success.
My definition of success includes actually fulfilling the requirements that providing a desktop environment created. CDE was a complete failure there: not only was the file browser completely inadequate, but the window manager and that horrid tacky dock thing was a worse tool than the vanilla menu-oriented Motif window manager it replaced. The first thing I did on our CDE-infected servers was to come up with a hook that let our users keep on using their preferred window manager, because with the introduction of CDE they lost the option of just starting their own WM from
Don't talk to me about CDE. I know CDE. CDE makes Windows 2.0 look good.
The majority of the UNIX-based "desktops" are similarly screwed up. NeXT was one of the few exceptions.
SUN were the largest player in the high-end market through out the 1990s, despite having distinctly inferior processor technology towards the end of the period.
Sparc was always a trailing edge processor, right from the start. The "register window" design made context switches appallingly expensive, but didn't provide the compiler with enough scratch registers so it suffered from almost as much register pressure as the 386. To combat the context switch problem they put multiple register contexts on chip, which helped a lot under low loads but you could always see the knee in the performance curve as soon as you got more ready processes than yuo had register contexts.
Sun has entry level workstations starting at about $1,400
The cheapest Sun workstations that ever ran NeWS were a good deal more than that. Once they abandoned NeWS they gave up any attempt to be anything more than a "me too" user interface. IBM's desktop wasn't AIX, ever, it was OS/2.
Is that SGI, HP, Sun, IBM, or Apple you are talking about?
HP doesn't have a desktop environment worth talking about. Sun had the potential of one, but threw it away. IBM's just got a crippled version of the OS/2 shell. SGI? Pretty graphics but the user interface was no better than the other UNIX desktop attempts... about the only thing they had that was even interesting was the cute file system visualiser in Jurassic Park. None of them have had desktop sales in even Amiga-class volume.
OS X is a pretty but clunky piece of crap
The pretty graphics do slow it down. But without them, under Rhapsody and NeXTstep, the same basic API was more usable and faster than Mac OS or Windows on sub-100-MHz pre-RISC pre-Pentium hardware.
it's also designed around a one-button mouse
You're thinking of OS 9. OS X is 2-button native with legacy 1-button support for political reasons.
Many usability gurus hailed Mac OS 9.
... ... NeXTstep. There was even a GNUstep that got quite far along before the Gnome/KDE people decided that Windows was the model to follow.
Self-proclaimed gurus have been wrong about other stuff too. I wish Apple had been able to shed more of OS 9 than they did.
GNOME and KDE should have been emulating a known, successful standard:
kde and gnome are even doing work to try and get their vfs layers merged and my hope is that eventually it gets moved to some kind of general filesystem layer so that linux will have everything as a url instead of just everything as a file.
I hope not. Not on a general desktop OS for ordinary users to use. Being able to treat http://evil.invalid/exploit.sh as a local file is, well, just asking for the fuckup fairy to come calling.