In fact it doesn't mention music anywhere in the claims..... it doesn't even mention CDs..... this patent covers any ordering of data of any kind onto media of any kind.
It even covers books and paper.
This could be waved as a very big stick
Prior art? you betcha.... how about the batch queue for your local printer for a start:-)
read my "Let me add...." followup above (I was originally responding to the original/. article which didn't include a link to the actual patent) in my follow up I beleive I make the point that there is enough prior art (from the late 80s prior to the patent's '94 date) to successfully argue that the GraphOn patent is obvious to anyone familiar with other work (ie Timbuctu and X) in the field (in 1994).
I don't beleive that companies do as much research about prior art as they should - I think that for many companies the prevaling attitude is along the lines of "first we'll get the patent then we'll deal from a point of power" - and I don't beleive that the patent office has the resources or expertise to research prior art (esp. prior art that hasn't already been patented and isn't in the patent office's files) and to keep the companies honest.
I mentioned this above..... but rather than this how about simply allowing the judge to award legal costs (including the cost of the defense's lawyers!) to someone who is sued with one of these patents and prevails with a reasonably provable prior art defence
This would give people who are being sued more incentive to not knuckle under and pay when litigation is going to cost too much even to win, or when you are a little open source company with no such resources.
It would also make companies actually have an incentive to actively research prior art before filing such a suit (or such a patent) - there's little incentive at the moment to do so because just holding such a patent however bogus is a barrier to entry to competitors.
Finally it might grow an industry of lawyers (shudder) who work these sorts of cases and become adept at defending prior-art suits on contingency..... now that would really deter them:-)
As the AC who replied to me pointed out it is a patent that implements GUI emulation at the API call level. In fact the whole thing (other than the X/NT references) basicly describes Faralon's Timbuctu product from the late 80s. I'm also pretty certain I remember someone doing a Mac->X version of this at the API level.
The fun part in the claims is " 3. The method of claim 2 wherein the remote graphical user interface is a graphical user interface known as X. " - that's right they've claimed something based on its name.... not its functionality - call it something else and it doesn't apply..... I for example use a graphical system called "XFree86"..... I don't think anyone uses a thing just called "X" - I'm sure lawyers would argue for a loser interpretation of this clause.
Of other interest is Claim 9 where they make a claim over anyone working with an "operating system including X-Windows" - yup if you happen to have X in some form on your disk you may be covered
Whats more important is that to anyone aware of Faralon's work and to the way that X works (ie to someone 'current in their field') this is an obvious thing to do and therefore not novel or patentable
It seems that to get a bogus patent nullified you have to go to court......
I'd like to see
a division of the patent office that does post-facto reviews of patents as follow ups from public comment (so we can all email someone and have it actually have some effect) - maybe just a place where you can mail prior-art examples to
the ability for judges to require legal costs to be paid by someone who has such a bogus patent and then sues someone when obvious prior art is available - esp. if the defendant points it out at the very beginning of precedings - this might discourage people knuckling under just to save the legal bills (esp. important for us low paid open source people)
Faralon was doing this for macs 10 years ago (not over X but the moral equivalent).
Sundry PC emulators running on Suns have been doing this too over X - for at least 5 years. These bozos don't have a leg to stand on - other than having hoodwinked the patent examiner about the state of the art
(OK - to be fair, they could have been incredibly ignorant of the state of the art when they filed their patent)
because if we want Linux to invade the desktop it needs to be able to play in the family-with-one-computer space.
As it is I'm stuck with buying the kids an extra computer
We also need support in GUIs - kind of like Apple's launcher - a way for parents to set up kid environments so that they can't break out and trash the parent's world. In Linux this is particularly easy because the normal user protection mechanisms for a logged in kid can be used to keep them from damaging stuff by accident.
Some suggestions for kid-friendly GUI features:
XDM support for logging in by clicking an icon (or picture of the kid) without a password (remember little kids can't ready yet!)
simple visual shells (like Apple's launcher) basicly a bunch of icons on a window where adults can install games for kids
do something about netscape - kids love the web.... but if it keeps locking up they're going to keep turning off the computer to fix it....
"are your routers wire-tapable?".... if no one asks this very simple question then they will assume that customers don't care. On the hand if EVERYONE asks this question they will compete to not be wire-tapable.
Of course even then you can trust them.... safety is in big numbers...
As the ISPs get bigger and bigger and the consumer choices start to vanish companies that make routers will find themselves going after fewer and fewer larger contracts. If just one big ISP (say Microsoft for example under Federal pressure for some reason) decides to knuckle under and only buy routers that can be tapped then you'd better make sure you have one ready to sell - it could be 20% of your yearly income.
I agree that there are real Y2K problems (and other end-of-epoch problems like 2038) - my point was that the Y2K panic has gotten way out hand - to the point where it's causing more impact that any real bugs are likely to
However we should be putting our efforts into places where the effects of potential bugs are large compared with the costs of stopping them - for example life-critical systems (hospital stuff, air traffic control etc), places where companies might lose large amounts of money or get sued (banks) etc etc
Y2K-like bugs have been with us since there have been computers - at least 10 years ago I read a news article about a little old lady of 105 who got a note from her local elementary school suggesting that now was the time to enroll....
ITS at work made us all upgrade our suns to make the 'y2k compliant' - I lost 2 days work.... if we'd left it worst case the machine concievably might have crashed on Jan1 - a day when I will be on vacation, and then beenrebooted..... afterwards my delete key didn't work (I guess it wasn't y2k compliant:-) [really needed a new xmodmap]
I can't help feel that for the bulk of us the cost of becoming 'y2k compliant' exceeds the possible damage caused by not being --- probably by several orders of magnitude!
some early soft-DVD systems were cracked not by breaking the algorithm, but by simply getting Windows to pass back the bitstream from inside directx after it had been decrypted - exactly as described above
Even if Windows had disabled this - there's nothing to stop an enterprising pirate (avast me 'earties!) from disassembling Winxx and binary hacking in their own hooks to get the data. The only real 'safe' implementation is going to be a card where the encrypted bitstream goes in one end and analog RGB comes out the other... the trouble is that these don't fit so well with GUIs which expect to be in charge of the screen real-estate.
The fact that you have to dump the result of your decompression into a frame buffer where anyone can read it should be an obvious weakness to just about anyone - geez I could just about make a script 'forward a frame, take a screen dump, forward a frame,...' if everything's scriptable you don't even need to do any programming
I'm sure this has probably already happened, I even bet the DVD lawyers are aware of pirates who are ripping DVDs this way - what probably scares the pants off of them is the information being available to a much wider audience than a couple of boat loads of pirates
In my opinion Derek would be found liable by the court as this statute stands. Derek is a scapegoat - the DVD consortium have not gone after others who have worked on cracking CSS because they reside in coutries that do not have such a law on the books. Unfortunately, the UK parliament passed this law (no doubt after considerable lobbying by industry groups) and Derek is a UK resident so they went after him.
EVEN if the DVD Consortium was on shaky legal grounds, the cost in time and money of fighting a copyright infringement case is astronomical and I think most people in Derek's position would have done the same thing.
I agree - and I think that this also points to how we get around this.... bend, don't break.... there are lot more of us than them (the lawyers) what should happen now is that someone else should pick up the torch, move the sources under CVS elsewhere and continue work on linux DVD.... don't make a big deal about it.... but also realise that eventually the lawyers will come after you, when they do you raise a stick, then bow out gracefully and pass the torch...
Locking the door after the horse has bolted is always a bad idea.... it just makes the other users of the stable angry.
Leaving the key under the mat is also a bad idea
Letting amateurs implement crypto doesn't work so well either
But the worst mistake is to alienate a whole bunch of smart people who understand locks by selling them horses but not letting them ride them
In the future if you are basing a business on the use of large secret numbers you had better use really big ones.... and maybe not leave them around where people can find them
Ahem.... cross-bars are NOT more scaleable than buses.... their complexity goes up with the square of the number requesters while buses go up linearly.
However given that - an on-chip cross bar for a chip with a small number of requestors and LOTS of layers of metal for routing may be a better solution than trying to build something with an on-chip tri-state bus (we silicon guys try to avoid on-chip tri-state things if we possibly can)
They have been working up to this for a couple of years now and I beleive the big push will be in the coming year. This is more aimed at building ISA-less systems with all the legacy devices gone. This means no ISA interrupt controller, FD controller, KBD controller, serial, parallel etc etc, no VGA compatable frame buffer
PCI/AGP and USB are the big winners here and I expect will be the main stream for the next few years. Low end machines will probably do without PCI slots (but will have a PCI bus between the chips on the motherboard).
and as a result no more IRQs, or IO ports or.... hooray!
Just boxes on your desktop hooked together with USB or firewire.... that hot plug.... usb/firewire disks, cameras, (firewire) video cards, net connections, sound cards (usb/firewire speakers really), kbds, joysticks,..... a brave new world - I can't wait 'till ISA is dead!
Last time I checked firewire's pretty close in speed to a backplane bus anyway - for a low end box why not get rid of all that empty space, slots etc - if you do that and only have external connections then you can build smaller form factor cases, get away from standard sized MBs. With no holes for cards you can do cheaper FCC (meaning cheaper MBs and cases). etc etc
With the push to much cheaper PCs this sort of thing is going to happen - even if it saves $10 on the production price to someone who's making 1M boxes/year that's $10M.
It was originally done on PDP7s and quickly ported to 11s
My first experience was V6 on an '11 and my first port was of V6 to the vax (no not a port you've ever heard of)
68k (and 32k etc) ports came out when chips with MMUs or chips for which MMUs could be made became available (I probably did 15-20 68k ports plus a couple of others in the mid-80s). x86 based ports came later - for the 286 initially which was an abysmal Unix target - Intel learned a lot by the time they brought out the 386 and sadly around the same time Motorola floundered.
That Compaq's customer base is much wider than most other 'PC' companies and many of them have long standing, decades long, experience with Unix..... Unix was developed on Compaq (aka DEC) computers....
We're all going to go out and buy one right? The market for eavesdropping equipment that does this sort of thing is so small that there are no economies of scale.... the prices will not come down because the cost of the hardware is probably miniscule compared with the R&D.
Slashdot Mirror
It even covers books and paper.
This could be waved as a very big stick
Prior art? you betcha .... how about the batch queue for your local printer for a start :-)
http://www.patents.ibm.com/detai ls?pn=US05930768__
I don't beleive that companies do as much research about prior art as they should - I think that for many companies the prevaling attitude is along the lines of "first we'll get the patent then we'll deal from a point of power" - and I don't beleive that the patent office has the resources or expertise to research prior art (esp. prior art that hasn't already been patented and isn't in the patent office's files) and to keep the companies honest.
This would give people who are being sued more incentive to not knuckle under and pay when litigation is going to cost too much even to win, or when you are a little open source company with no such resources.
It would also make companies actually have an incentive to actively research prior art before filing such a suit (or such a patent) - there's little incentive at the moment to do so because just holding such a patent however bogus is a barrier to entry to competitors.
Finally it might grow an industry of lawyers (shudder) who work these sorts of cases and become adept at defending prior-art suits on contingency ..... now that would really deter them :-)
The fun part in the claims is " 3. The method of claim 2 wherein the remote graphical user interface is a graphical user interface known as X. " - that's right they've claimed something based on its name .... not its functionality - call it something else and it doesn't apply ..... I for example use a graphical system called "XFree86" ..... I don't think anyone uses a thing just called "X" - I'm sure lawyers would argue for a loser interpretation of this clause.
Of other interest is Claim 9 where they make a claim over anyone working with an "operating system including X-Windows" - yup if you happen to have X in some form on your disk you may be covered
Whats more important is that to anyone aware of Faralon's work and to the way that X works (ie to someone 'current in their field') this is an obvious thing to do and therefore not novel or patentable
I'd like to see
Sundry PC emulators running on Suns have been doing this too over X - for at least 5 years. These bozos don't have a leg to stand on - other than having hoodwinked the patent examiner about the state of the art
(OK - to be fair, they could have been incredibly ignorant of the state of the art when they filed their patent)
ooooh ...... isn't there a hockey team called the penguins .....
As it is I'm stuck with buying the kids an extra computer
We also need support in GUIs - kind of like Apple's launcher - a way for parents to set up kid environments so that they can't break out and trash the parent's world. In Linux this is particularly easy because the normal user protection mechanisms for a logged in kid can be used to keep them from damaging stuff by accident.
Some suggestions for kid-friendly GUI features:
yup the days of lots of different sound cards may be on their way out .... look for one standard Intel sound DSP integrated into their core logic ....
Of course even then you can trust them .... safety is in big numbers ...
So support you local Mom&Pop ISP!
Official operating system of 25% of the world's population ..... suck on that Billy boy :-)
However we should be putting our efforts into places where the effects of potential bugs are large compared with the costs of stopping them - for example life-critical systems (hospital stuff, air traffic control etc), places where companies might lose large amounts of money or get sued (banks) etc etc
Y2K-like bugs have been with us since there have been computers - at least 10 years ago I read a news article about a little old lady of 105 who got a note from her local elementary school suggesting that now was the time to enroll ....
I can't help feel that for the bulk of us the cost of becoming 'y2k compliant' exceeds the possible damage caused by not being --- probably by several orders of magnitude!
Even if Windows had disabled this - there's nothing to stop an enterprising pirate (avast me 'earties!) from disassembling Winxx and binary hacking in their own hooks to get the data. The only real 'safe' implementation is going to be a card where the encrypted bitstream goes in one end and analog RGB comes out the other ... the trouble is that these don't fit so well with GUIs which expect to be in charge of the screen real-estate.
The fact that you have to dump the result of your decompression into a frame buffer where anyone can read it should be an obvious weakness to just about anyone - geez I could just about make a script 'forward a frame, take a screen dump, forward a frame, ...' if everything's scriptable you don't even need to do any programming
I'm sure this has probably already happened, I even bet the DVD lawyers are aware of pirates who are ripping DVDs this way - what probably scares the pants off of them is the information being available to a much wider audience than a couple of boat loads of pirates
ncf
EVEN if the DVD Consortium was on shaky legal grounds, the cost in time and money of fighting a copyright infringement case is astronomical and I think most people in Derek's position would have done the same thing.
I agree - and I think that this also points to how we get around this .... bend, don't break .... there are lot more of us than them (the lawyers) what should happen now is that someone else should pick up the torch, move the sources under CVS elsewhere and continue work on linux DVD .... don't make a big deal about it .... but also realise that eventually the lawyers will come after you, when they do you raise a stick, then bow out gracefully and pass the torch ...
Leaving the key under the mat is also a bad idea
Letting amateurs implement crypto doesn't work so well either
But the worst mistake is to alienate a whole bunch of smart people who understand locks by selling them horses but not letting them ride them
In the future if you are basing a business on the use of large secret numbers you had better use really big ones .... and maybe not leave them around where people can find them
However given that - an on-chip cross bar for a chip with a small number of requestors and LOTS of layers of metal for routing may be a better solution than trying to build something with an on-chip tri-state bus (we silicon guys try to avoid on-chip tri-state things if we possibly can)
PCI/AGP and USB are the big winners here and I expect will be the main stream for the next few years. Low end machines will probably do without PCI slots (but will have a PCI bus between the chips on the motherboard).
Just boxes on your desktop hooked together with USB or firewire .... that hot plug .... usb/firewire disks, cameras, (firewire) video cards, net connections, sound cards (usb/firewire speakers really), kbds, joysticks, ..... a brave new world - I can't wait 'till ISA is dead!
Last time I checked firewire's pretty close in speed to a backplane bus anyway - for a low end box why not get rid of all that empty space, slots etc - if you do that and only have external connections then you can build smaller form factor cases, get away from standard sized MBs. With no holes for cards you can do cheaper FCC (meaning cheaper MBs and cases). etc etc
With the push to much cheaper PCs this sort of thing is going to happen - even if it saves $10 on the production price to someone who's making 1M boxes/year that's $10M.
My first experience was V6 on an '11 and my first port was of V6 to the vax (no not a port you've ever heard of)
68k (and 32k etc) ports came out when chips with MMUs or chips for which MMUs could be made became available (I probably did 15-20 68k ports plus a couple of others in the mid-80s). x86 based ports came later - for the 286 initially which was an abysmal Unix target - Intel learned a lot by the time they brought out the 386 and sadly around the same time Motorola floundered.
That Compaq's customer base is much wider than most other 'PC' companies and many of them have long standing, decades long, experience with Unix ..... Unix was developed on Compaq (aka DEC) computers ....
We're all going to go out and buy one right? The market for eavesdropping equipment that does this sort of thing is so small that there are no economies of scale .... the prices will not come down because the cost of the hardware is probably miniscule compared with the R&D.