Read on to the examples, as I was reading the first example case I thought "aha! this renders it completely irrelevant", but as you reach the final example (software related) it starts to look more robust.
The reason there is so much preamble in the patents is it's ancestry. The original patent was quite clever, but each successive generation gets a little more vague and a little closer to being "and you could do something like this with a typewriter too!"
Proponents of the patent system would point out here that this is a distinction between "Patent" and "Copyright", but I think this particular patent demonstrates a clouding of the distinction, to the point where this patent, as applied to computer software, is essentially speculative. The document uses a fragment of terminology to create a false air of specificity: e,g it uses the term "a memory", which sounds technical but reviewing the context indicates it could mean anything from a post it note to a networked file system that uses Bitmap images to encode data using BMP images of either a boy for 0 or a girl for 1. The "inventor" clearly did not persue any actual research or development in any of these fields.
If you extract just the software specific portions of the patent, and discount it's ancestry, it could actually cover things like tweakable web portals, Hulu's "is this ad relevant to you", ad widgets in wordpress, adsense... All kinds of technologies that were developed from scratch without reference to the patents this patent uncreatively extends:(
The "upgrade buttons" are running into it at a very, very shallow level; if the upgrade button is just a button for a hyperlink, it does not interact with this patent. If their upgrade button submits feedback on their use of the application or anything like that, then there may be enough gray area for it to actually go to court =/
J (or maybe his J looks almost like his T), Q and Z.
There are a few instances of characters that could be either a U or a V, but could also be one of his oddly shaped N characters.
First impression from both pages is of a missouri-dialected "Feersum Enjin". And later on, in the middle of the first page, I noticed ""NTE GDDMN SENCURE RCBRNE""...
I guess the point is they're hoping people/not/ tainted with handwriting analysis reports and victim backgrounds might come up with; but I immediately find myself wanting to know things like: was he a truck driver, are these scribbled notes (suggesting a short hand) or pontificated (suggesting an encryption). Sports fan? (did he write up the plays to a game?) Or a PC gamer? (is it a cheat sheet for a game, directions for a mud/adventure)
Lastly, most folks seem to be assuming left-to-right... If it was right-to-left, ES could easily be "espacio".
I'll avoid metered internet access for as long as I can, but that said, after all the cons, there are at least two potential pros:
End-users finally get a leg to stand on when spammers argue "it's just an inconvenience", as there is somewhat of a precedence that having your wallet depleted falls beyond the definition of "inconvenient".
It's also an incentive not to let your PC sit there joining the spam/botnet chorus with a virus on your machine.
For most given Google employees, Android, Chrome, Google Apps... These are beasts they have poured themselves into to make the computing world a better world...
Kinda like a whole lot of other minions based out of Seattle;)
There's no debating that there was an explosion - the main fuel tank exploded, whether with or without combusion is not relevant - the fuel rapidly.
The orbiter, however, had detached sufficiently before the explosion that if you put the two at rest on the ground, the tank explosion would probably have buffeted the shuttle but done little significant damage to it.
Unfortunately, the vehicle was right in the middle of maneuvers designed to prevent it being destroyed by the *normal* conditions it was passing thru.
At the point in its flight at which the as-yet undamaged challenger separated from its launch vehicle, the velocity, air pressure and etc are outside the vehicle's specifications. It needs that big main tank there to protect it. What happened to the challenger orbiter is the result of travelling at X miles per hour in attitude [X,Y,Z][r,p,y] at an altitude of X miles without the main fuel tank to protect it: it begins to break up.
Engineering types get testy about our seeing it all just as one big bang because what happened to the orbiter itself is a mind-blowing tale of engineering success in extreme conditions: the orbiter itself failed with magnificent grace, broke apart largely according to plan, allowed the crew compartment to separate in-tact. I mean - wrap your head around that -- I find that mind boggling and staggering, and yet almost entirely ignored/overlooked in the light of the big boom.
If it had had ejector seats for the crew, and the crew had been in pressurized suites, chances are it might even have been survivable.
I'm not an engineer, so at the end of the day, I probably say "challenger exploded" myself. But I think its sometimes worth noting that there was more to it than that?
Has it just been slow news this year that these kind of likely-to-be-redacted-in-a-few-days threads are making the front page so frequently lately?
Developing high-end PC games generally incorporates the risks of having to develop your own custom tool chain along with the costs of having to target what is effectively a whole suite of disparate platforms: Intel/AMD, nVidia/ATI/Intel, 1024x768 thru tripple head, random quantities of RAM and disk performance. And every time a fancy new tech comes along, each PC game developer winds up having to develop their own custom tools for them until their mainline dev tools catch up. And users are going to want to turn tech on and off to suite their specific unique snowflake of a PC. Now you have to make sure your colliders work with/without shadows, bump mapping, cuda, etc, etc... And your eye-candy has to try and still look good in 1024 different video/effects combinations to claim your market price.
I half suspect it won't be too long before we start seeing "home" and "premium" style flavors of the same games.
And all of that tool-chain development is often only good for the specific product/franchise, with its specific creativity demands.
It's both a good and a bad thing. The bad part is that unless the developer can source willing to make a high-risk, high-stake investment, then the underlying game might be insufficient to attract players: The most epic eye-candy will ultimately only cover so much absence of actual game. The same gamers that want their overclocked, watercooled, i9 12 core 6Ghz CPU with tripple sli geforce 600 series cards to set fire to the watercooling when they play the game, ultimately want a game that is at least as appealing gameplay-wise as Wolfenstein.
Conversely, the stable platform that consoles offer presents game-developers with a much better opportunity to access existing, well rounded tool chains and middleware; spend less time on training and ancillary development and support, and focus on content and gameplay creation.
It's also a hell of a lot easier to prototype and demo your game - which is ultimately the most important part of both developing and pitching your product. When you're creating a bleeding-edge PC game, you have to jump in at the deep end, which means getting a real sense of what the product may look like is going to be a large-downpayment affair.
This divide has been here since the first computer games, since the days of the "home computer" vs the "PC" and etc.
It's not going to go away. PCs are to gaming what speed-record cars with rocket engines are to driving: The investment, risk, hazard and degree of technical competence and inconvenience are well beyond the true "massive" market, but allows for brief glimpses of magnificent engineering and advancement that will ultimately trickle down to the mundane sports SUV that the broader consumer market will ultimately benefit from.
3rd stipulation (well, actually, it's the first step in their 'invention') is "Player enters unique identifier into the IO/device" which is then forwarded to the central controller.
Blizzard, in particular, use a decentralized authentication service (battle.net) and the player is never actually aware of their own unique identifier.
It should be thwarted on "obvious" - since it's not patenting the components but the use of them. It's not inventing the centralized controller, the tournament database or the unique identifier, or the mechanism of association. It's patenting the process of association...
There are, however, several flaws in the patent:
- It stipulates entry fee processing, - It stipulates the points at which entry fee processing and prize dissemination are executed,
but most importantly of all:
- It stipulates that "Player enters his unique identifier into the I/O device".
The story is a deliberate untruth designed to draw attention to a minor UI issue with some phones: it is possible for the list being displayed to refresh as you are tapping, resulting in the wrong person being selected to call, message, or do anything else to.
Which would explain why the issue only had a handful of people reporting it and a resultingly low priority...
And I haven't experienced the issue since my phone's last system update several months ago.
I had a Logitech Mouse which had a ridiculous amount of blue Led lighting. I can understand a small LED to help you re-find the mouse when gaming in the dark and reaching for a soda... I started to figure this mouse was missing a cover or something, the LED would literally dazzle me when I took my hand off the mouse, until I saw the same mouse in a store. One of the staff had turned it upside down so it wouldn't blind him every time he walked past.
Puts zimmerframe to one side, and checks false teeth are in-place
Many moons ago, I ran an Amiga based BBS. The Amiga equivalent of a Blue Screen was the Guru Meditation, one of the signs of which was that the red power-LED would flash.
Somehow, the machine only ever crashed at night, when I was asleep (temperature?). And somehow, I would be awake within moments.
There was no sound, just a red light becoming a flashing red light.
Ever since, I've been slightly phobic of alarm clocks with red displays. And I absolutely hate all but the smallest, dimmest of power LED lights. My mouse has wads of putty covering the stupidly bright LEDs that are supposed to make it cool. Putting LEDs on a mouse so you can find it in the dark when your hand isn't on it is one thing, but making them so bright they shine thru and around your hand is another.
Several years back I had a PC case open near my bed. Inside the IDE connector had blindingly bright red LEDs for activity. I'd set the machine to download a slackware install to one drive and then install it on another. As it happens, the download drive's LED was broken.
The moment the machine finished downloading and the primary drive's LED went on, I woke up. I was actually awake a full minute before the machine beeped to indicate it was rebooting.
And I'm probably a contestant for "worlds heaviest sleeper", so long as there are no red, flashing lights near the contest;)
IceCat (www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla) exists because "they distribute and recommend non-free software as plug-ins and addons".
Actually, I like to think of IceCat as the software version of Locutus. Oh, it's the least GNU-piece of GNU software so far, it still looks, smells and tastes like Firefox/for now/... But how long before the GNU nano-bloats^H^H^H^H^Hots activate and begin replacing the Javascript engine with an Emacs API?
No, you're not getting it right. "TimeWarp" refers to TiVo's ability to let you pause/rewind either the show being recorded or live tv. In effect, both are being recorded, but TiVO devised - and described in some depth in the full patent - a way to interact with both recording streams.
Say the live TV show pans out to be rubbish and you now want to watch the show you were recording? With a VCR you can either watch it live as it records, or you have to stop the recording to rewind.
With a TiVo (et al), you can switch to the recorded channel and jump to anywhere in what has been recorded: You can watch the intro, then skip forward past the opening commercials up to any point in the recording stream.
Couldn't do that with a VCR, and the TiVo spec covers a very specific way to implement doing it on a low-cost system.
Read the patent itself and not just the abstract, and frankly it strikes me as a case of the patent system actually working, for a change. The patent system is broken and needs fixing, but this isn't a case in point.
The "blurb", as people are referring to it, is just the abstract from the patent. Scroll down and view the 23-page PDF describing in fairly exacting detail how their specific methodology works.
And for those saying "I could do it on my VCR": no, you couldn't pause live TV on your VCR while recording a show on a different channel.
The patent actually covers how TiVo splits up the separate components of the incoming sources (Video, Audio, CC, etc), and buffers them up without having to decode the MPEG stream of the video - which means potentially storing partial screen frames, but doing so in a fashion that doesn't require a lot of CPU to subsequently reassemble in a frame-based random access order, allowing you to press a rewind button or a skip-back button on either the live tv or the show being recorded.
Lets be honest here - any well-bedded down installation of any main stream operating system results in a machine that takes a painful amount of time to start up.
First, the computer has to detect all of its hardware. Then the operating boot loader loads up, detects its hardware environment and begins loading drivers. And finally the operating system must detect its hardware environment and configure itself for use, load in all the cruft that has somehow wound up in the startup sequence before finally asking who you are. With your credentials provided, the operating system loads the shell which... must detect its hardware and software and configuration environment and finally provide you access to the operating system.
Y A W N.
The hardware and software technologies that make laptops more than a small niche market seem to struggle to make their firm stamp on the desktop scene. Most modern PC hardware and software has some sort of "standby" concept but either it doesn't exactly power down or some device in the system counteracts it (I've come across no less than 9 big-vendor, high-price NIC cards that will generate a wakeup event on media disconnect - such as the one caused by the device going to sleep/powering down, even when the device is configured to allow standby mode).
A few weeks ago I accidentally put my Windows XP gaming box into standby while getting up to go to the store. I was amazed to find it still in standby when I returned. Unlike previous instances of standby it didn't wake on a keyboard input, the machine is actually powered down, not consuming any power and I had to press the power button to boot it back up. I assumed it had come out of standby itself and crashed and powered off. It spent more time going thru the POST than it did booting back into Windows. Try and imagine my shock along with my frustration that I would have to fetch another soda and more screenwipes.
But I was an instant convert. It takes 1/30th of the time to put this box into standby compared to the time it takes to shutdown and it takes 1/70th of the time to get from off state to responding operating system from a post-shutdown power on. In short, when I get to my computer to use it, I hit the power switch, pull up my chair, sit down, crack open my sode, turn on the LCD monitor and by the time its powered up, I can make use of my mouse cursor.
Think about all the time your PC spends checking for new hardware - every reboot, every power on, and all the PnP support for USB devices and etc. I'll admit its handy, but I'd bet 80%+ of PCs don't change hardware configuration - servers all around the world, back-room spreadsheet crunchers that grandpas and dads use to calculate their taxes once a year... And all those rental/lease office workstations that run for 2 years with a single static configuration but still spend 3-5 minutes every day setting themselves up almost as if for the first time.
And I'm not just talking about operating systems, I'm talking about the whole experience - bios, bootstrap, OS and desktop.
Infact, in most offices the "off"ers are generally using the excuse to do 10 minutes less work a day.
For the rest of us, nothing sucks worse than turning your PC off and then something calling you back to your desk and you have to wait while it powers up. Now you're on unpaid overtime waiting for your computer to start up... that's YOUR time your crappy operating system and software are biting into, and that's not OK.
So we leave our PC on. Maybe we turn off the monitors (more likely if they are LCDs) - but anything that's going to eat YOUR time, anything that's going to emphasise the minute you ran late this morning when your boss comes in and you can't bring up an editor or a spreadsheet... is not in our personal best interest. Because the computer is still loading acrobat or the creative mixer.
I know - 10 minutes is pretty trivial when its the fate of the planet we're talking about; but its t
Anyone who fails to call for legislation than attacks Microsoft rather than attacks what makes Microsoft it is difficult not to view as an admirer of the throne - like Netscape.
The theory is that, in growing into a lumbering saurian, a corporation becomes succeptable to more agile competitors who can innovate in smaller more aggresive ways, but Microsoft has proven it can simply undermine - or buy - any such competition. C.f. Scoble's bemoaning of Microsoft's failure to buy YouTube.
But where the theoertical corporation must compete to meet this challenge, Microsoft can simply spend. They can exert pressure on their competitors to become partners and thus innovate on their behalf.
Microsoft has to be Bell'd. Windows could be a remarkable operating system if it was being developed by an Operating System developer. Vista is what a developer produces when the least of their concerns if their operating system, which is an unfortunate thing for an operating system.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that Mr Luecke is a Sheikh, but I also don't think you can see this from space:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=&aq=3&sll=30.084394,-97.128067&sspn=0.064316,0.126171&ie=UTF8&ll=30.086771,-97.140684&spn=0.052358,0.066347&t=h&z=14
Sony's SOE games (the MMOs, such as EverQuest) have been down for 2 weeks. They brought them back online earlier today.
Read on to the examples, as I was reading the first example case I thought "aha! this renders it completely irrelevant", but as you reach the final example (software related) it starts to look more robust.
The reason there is so much preamble in the patents is it's ancestry. The original patent was quite clever, but each successive generation gets a little more vague and a little closer to being "and you could do something like this with a typewriter too!"
Proponents of the patent system would point out here that this is a distinction between "Patent" and "Copyright", but I think this particular patent demonstrates a clouding of the distinction, to the point where this patent, as applied to computer software, is essentially speculative. The document uses a fragment of terminology to create a false air of specificity: e,g it uses the term "a memory", which sounds technical but reviewing the context indicates it could mean anything from a post it note to a networked file system that uses Bitmap images to encode data using BMP images of either a boy for 0 or a girl for 1. The "inventor" clearly did not persue any actual research or development in any of these fields.
If you extract just the software specific portions of the patent, and discount it's ancestry, it could actually cover things like tweakable web portals, Hulu's "is this ad relevant to you", ad widgets in wordpress, adsense ... All kinds of technologies that were developed from scratch without reference to the patents this patent uncreatively extends :(
... slams into this patent.
The "upgrade buttons" are running into it at a very, very shallow level; if the upgrade button is just a button for a hyperlink, it does not interact with this patent. If their upgrade button submits feedback on their use of the application or anything like that, then there may be enough gray area for it to actually go to court =/
Anyone else notice the missing letters?
J (or maybe his J looks almost like his T), Q and Z.
There are a few instances of characters that could be either a U or a V, but could also be one of his oddly shaped N characters.
First impression from both pages is of a missouri-dialected "Feersum Enjin". And later on, in the middle of the first page, I noticed ""NTE GDDMN SENCURE RCBRNE""...
I guess the point is they're hoping people /not/ tainted with handwriting analysis reports and victim backgrounds might come up with; but I immediately find myself wanting to know things like: was he a truck driver, are these scribbled notes (suggesting a short hand) or pontificated (suggesting an encryption). Sports fan? (did he write up the plays to a game?) Or a PC gamer? (is it a cheat sheet for a game, directions for a mud/adventure)
Lastly, most folks seem to be assuming left-to-right ... If it was right-to-left, ES could easily be "espacio".
I'll avoid metered internet access for as long as I can, but that said, after all the cons, there are at least two potential pros:
End-users finally get a leg to stand on when spammers argue "it's just an inconvenience", as there is somewhat of a precedence that having your wallet depleted falls beyond the definition of "inconvenient".
It's also an incentive not to let your PC sit there joining the spam/botnet chorus with a virus on your machine.
"That's NOT why we...".
For most given Google employees, Android, Chrome, Google Apps... These are beasts they have poured themselves into to make the computing world a better world...
Kinda like a whole lot of other minions based out of Seattle ;)
There's no debating that there was an explosion - the main fuel tank exploded, whether with or without combusion is not relevant - the fuel rapidly.
The orbiter, however, had detached sufficiently before the explosion that if you put the two at rest on the ground, the tank explosion would probably have buffeted the shuttle but done little significant damage to it.
Unfortunately, the vehicle was right in the middle of maneuvers designed to prevent it being destroyed by the *normal* conditions it was passing thru.
At the point in its flight at which the as-yet undamaged challenger separated from its launch vehicle, the velocity, air pressure and etc are outside the vehicle's specifications. It needs that big main tank there to protect it. What happened to the challenger orbiter is the result of travelling at X miles per hour in attitude [X,Y,Z][r,p,y] at an altitude of X miles without the main fuel tank to protect it: it begins to break up.
Engineering types get testy about our seeing it all just as one big bang because what happened to the orbiter itself is a mind-blowing tale of engineering success in extreme conditions: the orbiter itself failed with magnificent grace, broke apart largely according to plan, allowed the crew compartment to separate in-tact. I mean - wrap your head around that -- I find that mind boggling and staggering, and yet almost entirely ignored/overlooked in the light of the big boom.
If it had had ejector seats for the crew, and the crew had been in pressurized suites, chances are it might even have been survivable.
I'm not an engineer, so at the end of the day, I probably say "challenger exploded" myself. But I think its sometimes worth noting that there was more to it than that?
Has it just been slow news this year that these kind of likely-to-be-redacted-in-a-few-days threads are making the front page so frequently lately?
Developing high-end PC games generally incorporates the risks of having to develop your own custom tool chain along with the costs of having to target what is effectively a whole suite of disparate platforms: Intel/AMD, nVidia/ATI/Intel, 1024x768 thru tripple head, random quantities of RAM and disk performance. And every time a fancy new tech comes along, each PC game developer winds up having to develop their own custom tools for them until their mainline dev tools catch up. And users are going to want to turn tech on and off to suite their specific unique snowflake of a PC. Now you have to make sure your colliders work with/without shadows, bump mapping, cuda, etc, etc... And your eye-candy has to try and still look good in 1024 different video/effects combinations to claim your market price.
I half suspect it won't be too long before we start seeing "home" and "premium" style flavors of the same games.
And all of that tool-chain development is often only good for the specific product/franchise, with its specific creativity demands.
It's both a good and a bad thing. The bad part is that unless the developer can source willing to make a high-risk, high-stake investment, then the underlying game might be insufficient to attract players: The most epic eye-candy will ultimately only cover so much absence of actual game. The same gamers that want their overclocked, watercooled, i9 12 core 6Ghz CPU with tripple sli geforce 600 series cards to set fire to the watercooling when they play the game, ultimately want a game that is at least as appealing gameplay-wise as Wolfenstein.
Conversely, the stable platform that consoles offer presents game-developers with a much better opportunity to access existing, well rounded tool chains and middleware; spend less time on training and ancillary development and support, and focus on content and gameplay creation.
It's also a hell of a lot easier to prototype and demo your game - which is ultimately the most important part of both developing and pitching your product. When you're creating a bleeding-edge PC game, you have to jump in at the deep end, which means getting a real sense of what the product may look like is going to be a large-downpayment affair.
This divide has been here since the first computer games, since the days of the "home computer" vs the "PC" and etc.
It's not going to go away. PCs are to gaming what speed-record cars with rocket engines are to driving: The investment, risk, hazard and degree of technical competence and inconvenience are well beyond the true "massive" market, but allows for brief glimpses of magnificent engineering and advancement that will ultimately trickle down to the mundane sports SUV that the broader consumer market will ultimately benefit from.
Just wondering :)
... and maybe it'll be the year that soda vendors wise up to not putting 3 table spoons of salt in their thirst-quenching beverages.
Blizzard uses BitTorrent to distribute their client and patches. Does Blizzard count as a person?
Anyone have any stats on how often Linux ISOs are downloaded via BitTorrent?
100 is such an oddly round number. A combination of IP blocking software and a badly configured uTorrent client, maybe?
3rd stipulation (well, actually, it's the first step in their 'invention') is "Player enters unique identifier into the IO/device" which is then forwarded to the central controller.
Blizzard, in particular, use a decentralized authentication service (battle.net) and the player is never actually aware of their own unique identifier.
Sadly, the patent is derived from earlier incarnations... http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=i8YEAAAAEBAJ&dq=5779549
It should be thwarted on "obvious" - since it's not patenting the components but the use of them. It's not inventing the centralized controller, the tournament database or the unique identifier, or the mechanism of association. It's patenting the process of association...
There are, however, several flaws in the patent:
- It stipulates entry fee processing,
- It stipulates the points at which entry fee processing and prize dissemination are executed,
but most importantly of all:
- It stipulates that "Player enters his unique identifier into the I/O device".
BOOM - Gotcha.
Buh-bye patent.
The story is a deliberate untruth designed to draw attention to a minor UI issue with some phones: it is possible for the list being displayed to refresh as you are tapping, resulting in the wrong person being selected to call, message, or do anything else to.
Which would explain why the issue only had a handful of people reporting it and a resultingly low priority...
And I haven't experienced the issue since my phone's last system update several months ago.
Surely, unless you are being pedantic in reference to the alarm performing it's function in the morning, they are one and the same worries?
I had a Logitech Mouse which had a ridiculous amount of blue Led lighting. I can understand a small LED to help you re-find the mouse when gaming in the dark and reaching for a soda... I started to figure this mouse was missing a cover or something, the LED would literally dazzle me when I took my hand off the mouse, until I saw the same mouse in a store. One of the staff had turned it upside down so it wouldn't blind him every time he walked past.
Eventual solution? A little wad of putty.
Puts zimmerframe to one side, and checks false teeth are in-place
Many moons ago, I ran an Amiga based BBS. The Amiga equivalent of a Blue Screen was the Guru Meditation, one of the signs of which was that the red power-LED would flash.
Somehow, the machine only ever crashed at night, when I was asleep (temperature?). And somehow, I would be awake within moments.
There was no sound, just a red light becoming a flashing red light.
Ever since, I've been slightly phobic of alarm clocks with red displays. And I absolutely hate all but the smallest, dimmest of power LED lights. My mouse has wads of putty covering the stupidly bright LEDs that are supposed to make it cool. Putting LEDs on a mouse so you can find it in the dark when your hand isn't on it is one thing, but making them so bright they shine thru and around your hand is another.
Several years back I had a PC case open near my bed. Inside the IDE connector had blindingly bright red LEDs for activity. I'd set the machine to download a slackware install to one drive and then install it on another. As it happens, the download drive's LED was broken.
The moment the machine finished downloading and the primary drive's LED went on, I woke up. I was actually awake a full minute before the machine beeped to indicate it was rebooting.
And I'm probably a contestant for "worlds heaviest sleeper", so long as there are no red, flashing lights near the contest ;)
IceCat (www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla) exists because "they distribute and recommend non-free software as plug-ins and addons".
Actually, I like to think of IceCat as the software version of Locutus. Oh, it's the least GNU-piece of GNU software so far, it still looks, smells and tastes like Firefox /for now/... But how long before the GNU nano-bloats^H^H^H^H^Hots activate and begin replacing the Javascript engine with an Emacs API?
No, you're not getting it right. "TimeWarp" refers to TiVo's ability to let you pause/rewind either the show being recorded or live tv. In effect, both are being recorded, but TiVO devised - and described in some depth in the full patent - a way to interact with both recording streams.
Say the live TV show pans out to be rubbish and you now want to watch the show you were recording? With a VCR you can either watch it live as it records, or you have to stop the recording to rewind.
With a TiVo (et al), you can switch to the recorded channel and jump to anywhere in what has been recorded: You can watch the intro, then skip forward past the opening commercials up to any point in the recording stream.
Couldn't do that with a VCR, and the TiVo spec covers a very specific way to implement doing it on a low-cost system.
Read the patent itself and not just the abstract, and frankly it strikes me as a case of the patent system actually working, for a change. The patent system is broken and needs fixing, but this isn't a case in point.
The "blurb", as people are referring to it, is just the abstract from the patent. Scroll down and view the 23-page PDF describing in fairly exacting detail how their specific methodology works.
And for those saying "I could do it on my VCR": no, you couldn't pause live TV on your VCR while recording a show on a different channel.
The patent actually covers how TiVo splits up the separate components of the incoming sources (Video, Audio, CC, etc), and buffers them up without having to decode the MPEG stream of the video - which means potentially storing partial screen frames, but doing so in a fashion that doesn't require a lot of CPU to subsequently reassemble in a frame-based random access order, allowing you to press a rewind button or a skip-back button on either the live tv or the show being recorded.
Lets be honest here - any well-bedded down installation of any main stream operating system results in a machine that takes a painful amount of time to start up.
... must detect its hardware and software and configuration environment and finally provide you access to the operating system.
... that's YOUR time your crappy operating system and software are biting into, and that's not OK.
... is not in our personal best interest. Because the computer is still loading acrobat or the creative mixer.
First, the computer has to detect all of its hardware. Then the operating boot loader loads up, detects its hardware environment and begins loading drivers. And finally the operating system must detect its hardware environment and configure itself for use, load in all the cruft that has somehow wound up in the startup sequence before finally asking who you are. With your credentials provided, the operating system loads the shell which
Y A W N.
The hardware and software technologies that make laptops more than a small niche market seem to struggle to make their firm stamp on the desktop scene. Most modern PC hardware and software has some sort of "standby" concept but either it doesn't exactly power down or some device in the system counteracts it (I've come across no less than 9 big-vendor, high-price NIC cards that will generate a wakeup event on media disconnect - such as the one caused by the device going to sleep/powering down, even when the device is configured to allow standby mode).
A few weeks ago I accidentally put my Windows XP gaming box into standby while getting up to go to the store. I was amazed to find it still in standby when I returned. Unlike previous instances of standby it didn't wake on a keyboard input, the machine is actually powered down, not consuming any power and I had to press the power button to boot it back up. I assumed it had come out of standby itself and crashed and powered off. It spent more time going thru the POST than it did booting back into Windows. Try and imagine my shock along with my frustration that I would have to fetch another soda and more screenwipes.
But I was an instant convert. It takes 1/30th of the time to put this box into standby compared to the time it takes to shutdown and it takes 1/70th of the time to get from off state to responding operating system from a post-shutdown power on. In short, when I get to my computer to use it, I hit the power switch, pull up my chair, sit down, crack open my sode, turn on the LCD monitor and by the time its powered up, I can make use of my mouse cursor.
Think about all the time your PC spends checking for new hardware - every reboot, every power on, and all the PnP support for USB devices and etc. I'll admit its handy, but I'd bet 80%+ of PCs don't change hardware configuration - servers all around the world, back-room spreadsheet crunchers that grandpas and dads use to calculate their taxes once a year... And all those rental/lease office workstations that run for 2 years with a single static configuration but still spend 3-5 minutes every day setting themselves up almost as if for the first time.
And I'm not just talking about operating systems, I'm talking about the whole experience - bios, bootstrap, OS and desktop.
Infact, in most offices the "off"ers are generally using the excuse to do 10 minutes less work a day.
For the rest of us, nothing sucks worse than turning your PC off and then something calling you back to your desk and you have to wait while it powers up. Now you're on unpaid overtime waiting for your computer to start up
So we leave our PC on. Maybe we turn off the monitors (more likely if they are LCDs) - but anything that's going to eat YOUR time, anything that's going to emphasise the minute you ran late this morning when your boss comes in and you can't bring up an editor or a spreadsheet
I know - 10 minutes is pretty trivial when its the fate of the planet we're talking about; but its t
Anyone who fails to call for legislation than attacks Microsoft rather than attacks what makes Microsoft it is difficult not to view as an admirer of the throne - like Netscape.
The theory is that, in growing into a lumbering saurian, a corporation becomes succeptable to more agile competitors who can innovate in smaller more aggresive ways, but Microsoft has proven it can simply undermine - or buy - any such competition. C.f. Scoble's bemoaning of Microsoft's failure to buy YouTube.
But where the theoertical corporation must compete to meet this challenge, Microsoft can simply spend. They can exert pressure on their competitors to become partners and thus innovate on their behalf.
Microsoft has to be Bell'd. Windows could be a remarkable operating system if it was being developed by an Operating System developer. Vista is what a developer produces when the least of their concerns if their operating system, which is an unfortunate thing for an operating system.
Mac's closed architecture wards off upgrade-hungry gamers. Linux as a gaming platform? Uhm. Yeah - it's right up there with the Altair.
By crook more than by hook, Windows is the defacto gaming platform that Mac and Linux.
An evil that we can only hope Vista will help undo. Can the OS community do for gaming what Thunderbird did for email?