Since when? My last three linux installs have all used RAM first, and not filled up any swap space until it was needed. There are plenty of reasons for an OS to NOT write to a swap. The most important reason being SPEED. Of course, by writing a lot to the swap a system can guarantee faster "hibernation" states and offer some degree of protection from power failure or system crashes.
I am looking at KDE System Guard on a SuSE 9 (amd64) installation. It current is using almost 1 GB of memory and 4 K of swap. Go figure, the OS is writing to the memory that is available. This system has 2 GB of RAM. My other SuSE 9 installation (for x86) is using 296 MB of RAM and 0 MB of pagefile.
Back to the speed statement. You would be right to be skeptical of the Desktop being any faster. In reality, if you have something that needs memory a lot it will slow down the system. The slowest part of a computer system is probably going to be the HDD. Most home systems only have 7200 RPM drives, and older systems with PATA are also at a disadvantage. Now, if you are running an OS on a laptop, you really do not want to be writing to an HDD since you could have as slow as 4200 RPM or 5400 RPM, though 7200 RPM drives are becoming more available for a premium.
This is true. I had this same problem while I was home X-Mas. I just installed FireFox. Of course, I am hoping to transition my mom to Linux, so the best way to do this is for me to get her on Open Source apps now (like FF, OOo, and Gaim), so the transition will be a lot smoother when the time comes to rid her machine of XP.
Three things:
1. Some phones come with processors in the 400 MHz and up range. (The Greenphone the GP references runs at 312 MHz, btw.)
2. I would imagine if built for an ARM processor, which a lot of these phones are, the RISC processors would actually run KDE a bit faster then your old 400 MHz processor.
3. On PDAs running Linux, we have Opie and GPE. Why do we need KDE?
As something on the side, what kind of 400 MHz processor are you using? Despite what Intel used to like us to believe, the processor speed is not everything.
Actually, I would argue that it is not the laws faults. At least not the way it is written. As written, 35 USC 103 explains obviousness in relatively good terms. Obviousness did not become an issue until relatively recently. I will not fault SCOTUS in Graham v. Deere, because the requirements they set forth were not very restrictive. The issue came later when the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) including the requirement that the joining of the two items must be taught in the prior art.
This is an extremely rare thing and actually makes the requirement hard to fulfill. It actually limited the Graham Factor, "one of ordinary skill in the art," practically eliminating it. I do not think the CAFC truly thought this out before making a decision, because if you already the idea to combine the two technologies (and mention as much in your patent specification) then you would almost certainly have claimed it, which would make it a 35 USC 102 violation, something that is really easier to defend for a Patent Examiner.
I believe we are still waiting to see the end result of KSR v. Teleflex before SCOTUS. If SCOTUS rules with KSR and essentially says the CAFC over-stepped their bounds, then you could be looking at the mass invalidation of thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of patents. You mention the standard is hurting Microsoft and Sony, but it actually is helping another industry with as much if not more money. The pharamaceuticals and bio-tech companies love the standard as it is because it helps them get a lot of patents on new drugs passed. I believe if you review the documents from KSR v. Teleflex, you will find support for KSR's writ from a group that included Microsoft, while the big pharma's filed in opposition (supporting Teleflex).
Perhaps the IBM/SCO case could close earlier than planned? Perhaps we can finally be rid of this specter once and for all? My understanding is the lawyers were paid in advance. Since filing bankruptcy is hardly the end for a company, I do not know that it would necessarily finish off SCO or the IBM case. Actually, someone could come in and purchase SCO with the intentions of keeping the lawsuit alive.
It won't happen for a few reasons. 1) Microsoft doesn't hold a trademark on "Live!", sort of makes it hard to sue for that, 2) The trademark they have is for "XBox Live", 3) The people with the closes trademark ("Live!") is actually Creative Labs.
I have to agree with another child post. Let me give you some non-violent and important examples of the DoD's research.
1. The Internet. You are using it now. It was originally created by ARPA, now DARPA, which is part of the DoD. You can thank the need for a interconnected, wired (and unwired) network for computer systems the military was using for the "Birth of the Internet."
2. GPS. Another advance that came from a military need.
3. Computers. Not entirely DoD based, but ENIAC was built for calculating artillery firing tables for the US Army, which falls under what is now the DoD.
Those are just three I can think of pretty readily without having to go digging for information. Do they do other research into weapons? Yes. Is it all to make things more deadly? Not necessarily. It is really to make them more effective and efficient. A lot of these researches are done in an attempt to save soldiers' lives and to prevent civilian casualties. A lot of their medical research is along the same vein. If not for some dumb laws (created by the US government), I wouldn't be surprised if the DoD was dumping tons of money into stem-cell research too. Trust me, it isn't all bad.
I'm a luddite I admit, but what makes IM so great?
Instant gratification? Even e-mail is not as instantaneous as IMs are. Far less spam. Granted IM is getting spammed, but not at the rate that e-mail is.
There's no way to archive the messages is there? GAIM
Is there a way to catalog the information into a searchable index?
See my previous answer. If you log, you can search those logs using GAIM. Not real hard. Tons of other programs offer this option as well.
How can you "forward" an im to another person or group of people? Can you thread the information into a cohesive timeline?
Logs have timestamps. Marvelous little thing that tells you the date and time a message was sent. Forwarding messages might be possible. Worst case you copy and paste. Most chat systems also offer chat room options. AOL IM offers you the ability to create a room and invite the people you want to it. This can be accomplished and logged with the above.
I definitely have uses for irc (which is kinda like im I guess) but if it were my sole means of electronic communication I wouldn't get anything done. What am I missing?
Obviously a lot. IM is coming into increasing usage. We have a Jabber server at work for all internal communications, it is used more than the e-mail system or the phones are. I actually have to get up from my desk once a day just to make sure that people are really in this place. I do not know how big it will be with inter-office communications, especially considering a lot of companies headed by older execs still don't use e-mail well. (Trust me, plenty of offices are still sending TONS of paper memos.)
No, one actually used my front lawn the other day
Environmentalist Reponse: "If people were not encroaching on the natural habits that have belonged to these creatures for millenia, then the bear would not be shitting on your front lawn and would instead be shitting in the woods."
My Response: "Hey, at least you got free fertilizer!"
nope, and neither was Jesus, so get over it.
Catholic Response: "The Pope is the head of the Catholic Church, a ordained Catholic Priest, and former Cardinal of the Catholic Church. A church that was founded as one of the earliest, if not the first, Christian church based on the teachings of Jesus Christ."
My Response: "The Pope is Catholic, he wears a funny hat and leads the Catholic Church, that is enough for me. As for Jesus, he was a Jew and quite possibly a Buddhist. Look at the teachings of Jesus and compare them to Buddha. Trust me, he didn't lose 20 yrs of his life, he had to be somewhere during that great missing span of life that isn't talked about in the bible.
yes, the one clear answer is you are thinking in your own small little world, it is the generalization and abiguities to your thinking that lead to the flaws on your conclusions.
Yes, my little world is one full of cynicism and humor. One in which you obviously have never been. They were damn jokes, and thankfully the moderators had more common sense then you did.
Nothing in this world is certain, and until that is understood and accepted, peace will never occur.
That statement is so untrue. There are many things in this world that are certain. I am certain that we will all die, despite how much we try to delay the inevitable. This notion that this has to be understood and accepted for peace to occur is as absurd as people saying I cannot develop a moral base without a religious context. Understanding and acceptance of others beliefs is important, but the idea that it is a necessity for peace is just stupid. There are plenty of places where people live in relative peace without having any understanding or acceptance of others. Just because you do not understand or do not accept a group of people does not mean you have to be violent to that group of people, and just because you are not violent and not hateful towards a group of people does not mean you understand or accept them. (Damn, I am bordering on a logical fallacy there.)
Let's look at the application, notebooks. There are quite a few pros for solid-state drives here: 1) HDDs are loud, 2) HDDs are hot (especially as you increase RPM), 3) HDDs are sensitive to motion, 4) HDDs require more power, 5) HDDs are marginally heavier (I mean the things are pretty small already). So the advantages here are pretty obvious, quieter, cooler, longer battery life, and marginally lighter notebooks.
Now, it is only fair we look at the downside, which is this overplayed write issue. Let us assume 10,000,000 writes (this is very generous, so I include 1,000,000 as well), since they will surely be using the best they can get, and this is pretty close to the high end that you will hear people discuss. You rarely re-write a vast majority of the software on your PC. Many programs are installed and never updated, and those that are updated are not done that often. If we assume, for the sake of sanity and argument, that the Windows system folder will only be written during Windows updates and that there would be one update per day that would be equal to something in the range of 27,000 days before you reached 10 million writes (only 2,700 if we say 1,000,000 writes). Most of your media files will be re-written even less.
So let us look at two things that can be written fairly often. First, you have a page file. The solution, load up your system with 1 to 2 GB of RAM and set the Windows page memory settings to the minimum. Of course, if Windows behaved properly, it wouldn't even write to the page file until AFTER the RAM was full (or damn near full). Second, user documents. Let's us assume your program performs auto-saves of your documents on a 5 minute cycle. So, the file is written one time every five minutes, 12 times an hour, 288 times a day (if you type for 24 hours of course), 105120 times a year (wow, I recommend some sleep and bathroom breaks), which ultimately results in 95 years (wow, congratulations on long life) of the file. Granted if we go with one million that is 9.5 years of continuous typing, but then you probably don't have much of a life if you are doing that.
This re-write claim is the most over-stated problem. Most places tell you the average life of today's HDD (for home use) is between 3 to 5 years, of course that is why they also tend to only warranty you for that long. Also, using my numbers, how many 9.5 year old drives are you using at home? Seriously, this problem is not that big of a deal; if it was going to be a huge problem, I am sure they would have though about that. (Note: This doesn't even get into the technology they use to spread the writes out to avoid wear.)
14 years vs. longer than our lifetime (there is stuff from my year of birth, 1982, that will not make public domain until long after my death). Hmmmm, let me think on that. Also, the design patents cover a lot of things that copyright and trademark were never meant to cover.
Disclaimer: I am an ex-patent examiner, so I have a decent understanding of patent law.
Without seeing the record, I cannot speak on your specific case, but the definition of obviousness is defined by law and has actually been modified through court rulings. There actually is a current case KSR v. Teleflex that could possibly return the definition of obviousness to the "old definition". This definition would invalidate a great many existing patents and could create a huge problem for either the USPTO, the courts, or both.
The original definition of obviousness required you to determine if "a person of ordinary skill in the art" could combine the two (or more) prior art sources. The CAFC (Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit) later changed this definition during another case in the year 2000. The case (Winner Int'l Royalty Corp. v. Wang) established the necessity for the prior art to provide a teaching that would suggest the combination. Say I had a backlit calculator keypad patent and a keyboard patent, with the patent application being examined a backlit keyboard. If the two patents of prior art do not suggest the use of a backlight in a keyboard, then there is no case for obviousness. (NOTE: Some claims of the calculator could be written broad enough to cover the keyboard, making the need for obviousness invalid.) This requirement has proven very restrictive on examiners and is a large reason why some many BS patents get passed nowadays.
I will note, if your advisor did not use a patent attorney or agent, he made a big mistake. This is not an easy venture for anyone to take on without a good understanding of the patent law. I know this patent seems dumb, but there is a good chance it holds more water then we would like to admit. I do hope that it gets invalidated though; there are a lot of patents out there that do not deserve to be.
Re-read the claims. There are a few words in the first claim that I can easily read away from the Lightgun. I have posted enough here, so I will stop my karma bonus for now.
I am tired of posting replies, so I will simply make one big huge post so hopefully everyone will read it.
1. N64 is not prior art. Nor is anything else not seen until after Sep. 5, 1995. This patent was filed in 1997 as a continuation of another application filed on the date I provided. If you want prior art, please pre-date 1995. (Note: N64 was first shown in Nov. 1995.)
2. The use of this device as a "mouse" is irrelevant. The patent claims are broad enough they can be construed to cover a gaming console. I have to given them some credit for that claim wording, it made me shake my head.
3. No matter how many people "came up" with the idea, it does not matter. The patent definition of obviousness is not the human definition. It might seem obvious to place a button in such a location, but did anyone file a patent or design such an item before them? If not, then was it really that obvious for someone to do it?
4. They really are not trolls. They have been making these products and making amicable licensing agreements with other companies. I still think this patent might be bogus, but I would not know without doing a full patent search.
So to recap, prior art must be before 1995, read the claims and ignore most everything else, and they are not really trolls, but this patent is probably pretty weak, especially if you consider it took almost 10 yrs to issue and there are a good number of reference arts provided.
Um, the patent was filed in 1997 with priority to 1995. Therefore you can erase, Wii, Xbox360, Xbox, Dreamcast, and N64, as established in prior postings.
Now, the NES zapper might be close, but I have to more closely read the claims then my cursory glance. The same for your flightsticks. I will admit there has to be some very close art for it to take almost 10 yrs to get these claims patented.
Hmm. "reduced sales and/or lost profit", eh? Their patented device is for use with a PC during slideshow presentations. I don't see how the hell a videogame console controller would ever have any impact on that at all. Well, unless Nintendo licenses out *shudder* Powerpoint to run on the Wii.
The lost profit easily comes from the loss of royalty fees. Also, note that there has been software written for Mac that allows control using the Wii remote. So they could actually attempt to use this against Nintendo, even if it wasn't the intended purpose of the device.
Sorry folks, I don't think your precious IR mouse product is about to be supplanted by the wiimote any time soon. These are 2 different products used for entirely different purposes, in 2 entirely different markets. A homebrew hack that doesn't quite cover the required functionality isn't a threat to your business.
Unfortunately, patent law doesn't care. The claims for their invention seem to cover just about any electronic system and could be construed to cover this other market. Their similar patent issued in the late 1990s has already been licensed to other companies, including TV makers, so this idea that the two markets do not cross is not really applicable in the patent world. They managed to get a patent whose claims seem to cover this, and in the end, that is all that really matters. Doesn't mean I like this patent. The 10yrs to issue makes me wonder how much prior art is really close to invalidating this patent.
From my quick research, they really are not Trolls, using the regular definition. They did not sit on a patent for years and pop up with it blindly. They actually do sell products on their website, and have been signing licensing agreements for their patents with large electronics companies since the 1990s. These are not the typical moves of a patent troll. NTP is a patent troll. They had an invention, which they could not sell. RIM makes a product that uses a similar technology and becomes successful. Well after they are successful, NTP comes in and sues. That behavior is much more trollish then this case.
Do I think this patent is lame? Quite possibly. There has to be something very close to prior art for it to take almost 10 years to get issued.
you are reading the specification way too much. Everything a patent is exists in the claims. The claims do a very nice job of avoiding making it sound like the system is overtly PC based. It refers to an "electrically responsive system", which is a nice broad term to cover a variety of systems. Remember, patent lawyers get paid a lot more than we do, and they are the masters of broad terminology, while avoiding the vagueness that will get a patent tossed.
Too bad this has priority to Sep. 5, 1995. Patents are fun aren't they? The issue date really means shit; look at the filing date and then check for a priority. In this case, we need to go back 11 yrs.
I can kinda see how the record companies can win a suit against the p2p providers, saying that their software enabled all these people to violate copyright law
You are kidding, right? There are plenty of legal uses for p2p software, including the sharing of non-copyrighted materials. Some places started using bittorrent to spread software and take the load off of their servers. A lot of linux distributions did this. There are actually materials that are in the public domain that people can download through these services as well. Was the primary use of Kazaa to share illegal software? Maybe; however, I think either their arguments were flawed or the judge was stupid, because any punishment of Kazaa was a slap in the face of the Betamax decision that allowed us to keep are VCRs and provided the way for CD-RW and DVD-RW drives.
if it didn't this will die because there is a huge amount of precident in prohibiting companies from being sued when their products were used in the commission of crimes (hello, gun manufacturers).
Really? Because people still sue video game companies claiming that the violent game was the reason someone went nuts and shot up his office or school. Those cases and violent game laws are what keep Jack Thompson in business. We live in a society today that hates to take responsibility for its own actions. Everyone always seems to believe someone else is to blame, and until the courts stop this sort of non-sense from ever seeing the light of day, they will continue to be a problem.
Actually, I have seen -0 a few different times. In the computer world, there are cases we decided to define the sign of a number with the lead bit = 1. This resulted in b00000000 = +0 and b10000000 = -0. We also have 11111111 = -0 when using one's complement. Of course there are others ways to represent signed numbers that solve the two zero problem (see two's complement). (Reference)
Slashdot Mirror
Since when? My last three linux installs have all used RAM first, and not filled up any swap space until it was needed. There are plenty of reasons for an OS to NOT write to a swap. The most important reason being SPEED. Of course, by writing a lot to the swap a system can guarantee faster "hibernation" states and offer some degree of protection from power failure or system crashes.
I am looking at KDE System Guard on a SuSE 9 (amd64) installation. It current is using almost 1 GB of memory and 4 K of swap. Go figure, the OS is writing to the memory that is available. This system has 2 GB of RAM. My other SuSE 9 installation (for x86) is using 296 MB of RAM and 0 MB of pagefile.
Back to the speed statement. You would be right to be skeptical of the Desktop being any faster. In reality, if you have something that needs memory a lot it will slow down the system. The slowest part of a computer system is probably going to be the HDD. Most home systems only have 7200 RPM drives, and older systems with PATA are also at a disadvantage. Now, if you are running an OS on a laptop, you really do not want to be writing to an HDD since you could have as slow as 4200 RPM or 5400 RPM, though 7200 RPM drives are becoming more available for a premium.
So..."They've gone to plaid"?
This is true. I had this same problem while I was home X-Mas. I just installed FireFox. Of course, I am hoping to transition my mom to Linux, so the best way to do this is for me to get her on Open Source apps now (like FF, OOo, and Gaim), so the transition will be a lot smoother when the time comes to rid her machine of XP.
No, the brief spoken word rap from "Where No Fan has Gone Before" is the best!
Three things:
1. Some phones come with processors in the 400 MHz and up range. (The Greenphone the GP references runs at 312 MHz, btw.)
2. I would imagine if built for an ARM processor, which a lot of these phones are, the RISC processors would actually run KDE a bit faster then your old 400 MHz processor.
3. On PDAs running Linux, we have Opie and GPE. Why do we need KDE?
As something on the side, what kind of 400 MHz processor are you using? Despite what Intel used to like us to believe, the processor speed is not everything.
Actually, I would argue that it is not the laws faults. At least not the way it is written. As written, 35 USC 103 explains obviousness in relatively good terms. Obviousness did not become an issue until relatively recently. I will not fault SCOTUS in Graham v. Deere, because the requirements they set forth were not very restrictive. The issue came later when the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) including the requirement that the joining of the two items must be taught in the prior art.
This is an extremely rare thing and actually makes the requirement hard to fulfill. It actually limited the Graham Factor, "one of ordinary skill in the art," practically eliminating it. I do not think the CAFC truly thought this out before making a decision, because if you already the idea to combine the two technologies (and mention as much in your patent specification) then you would almost certainly have claimed it, which would make it a 35 USC 102 violation, something that is really easier to defend for a Patent Examiner.
I believe we are still waiting to see the end result of KSR v. Teleflex before SCOTUS. If SCOTUS rules with KSR and essentially says the CAFC over-stepped their bounds, then you could be looking at the mass invalidation of thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of patents. You mention the standard is hurting Microsoft and Sony, but it actually is helping another industry with as much if not more money. The pharamaceuticals and bio-tech companies love the standard as it is because it helps them get a lot of patents on new drugs passed. I believe if you review the documents from KSR v. Teleflex, you will find support for KSR's writ from a group that included Microsoft, while the big pharma's filed in opposition (supporting Teleflex).
It won't happen for a few reasons. 1) Microsoft doesn't hold a trademark on "Live!", sort of makes it hard to sue for that, 2) The trademark they have is for "XBox Live", 3) The people with the closes trademark ("Live!") is actually Creative Labs.
I have to agree with another child post. Let me give you some non-violent and important examples of the DoD's research.
1. The Internet. You are using it now. It was originally created by ARPA, now DARPA, which is part of the DoD. You can thank the need for a interconnected, wired (and unwired) network for computer systems the military was using for the "Birth of the Internet."
2. GPS. Another advance that came from a military need.
3. Computers. Not entirely DoD based, but ENIAC was built for calculating artillery firing tables for the US Army, which falls under what is now the DoD.
Those are just three I can think of pretty readily without having to go digging for information. Do they do other research into weapons? Yes. Is it all to make things more deadly? Not necessarily. It is really to make them more effective and efficient. A lot of these researches are done in an attempt to save soldiers' lives and to prevent civilian casualties. A lot of their medical research is along the same vein. If not for some dumb laws (created by the US government), I wouldn't be surprised if the DoD was dumping tons of money into stem-cell research too. Trust me, it isn't all bad.
I'm a luddite I admit, but what makes IM so great?
Instant gratification? Even e-mail is not as instantaneous as IMs are. Far less spam. Granted IM is getting spammed, but not at the rate that e-mail is.
There's no way to archive the messages is there?
GAIM
Is there a way to catalog the information into a searchable index?
See my previous answer. If you log, you can search those logs using GAIM. Not real hard. Tons of other programs offer this option as well.
How can you "forward" an im to another person or group of people? Can you thread the information into a cohesive timeline?
Logs have timestamps. Marvelous little thing that tells you the date and time a message was sent. Forwarding messages might be possible. Worst case you copy and paste. Most chat systems also offer chat room options. AOL IM offers you the ability to create a room and invite the people you want to it. This can be accomplished and logged with the above.
I definitely have uses for irc (which is kinda like im I guess) but if it were my sole means of electronic communication I wouldn't get anything done. What am I missing?
Obviously a lot. IM is coming into increasing usage. We have a Jabber server at work for all internal communications, it is used more than the e-mail system or the phones are. I actually have to get up from my desk once a day just to make sure that people are really in this place. I do not know how big it will be with inter-office communications, especially considering a lot of companies headed by older execs still don't use e-mail well. (Trust me, plenty of offices are still sending TONS of paper memos.)
Now, I will have some fun of my own...
No, one actually used my front lawn the other day
Environmentalist Reponse: "If people were not encroaching on the natural habits that have belonged to these creatures for millenia, then the bear would not be shitting on your front lawn and would instead be shitting in the woods."
My Response: "Hey, at least you got free fertilizer!"
nope, and neither was Jesus, so get over it.
Catholic Response: "The Pope is the head of the Catholic Church, a ordained Catholic Priest, and former Cardinal of the Catholic Church. A church that was founded as one of the earliest, if not the first, Christian church based on the teachings of Jesus Christ."
My Response: "The Pope is Catholic, he wears a funny hat and leads the Catholic Church, that is enough for me. As for Jesus, he was a Jew and quite possibly a Buddhist. Look at the teachings of Jesus and compare them to Buddha. Trust me, he didn't lose 20 yrs of his life, he had to be somewhere during that great missing span of life that isn't talked about in the bible.
yes, the one clear answer is you are thinking in your own small little world, it is the generalization and abiguities to your thinking that lead to the flaws on your conclusions.
Yes, my little world is one full of cynicism and humor. One in which you obviously have never been. They were damn jokes, and thankfully the moderators had more common sense then you did.
Nothing in this world is certain, and until that is understood and accepted, peace will never occur.
That statement is so untrue. There are many things in this world that are certain. I am certain that we will all die, despite how much we try to delay the inevitable. This notion that this has to be understood and accepted for peace to occur is as absurd as people saying I cannot develop a moral base without a religious context. Understanding and acceptance of others beliefs is important, but the idea that it is a necessity for peace is just stupid. There are plenty of places where people live in relative peace without having any understanding or acceptance of others. Just because you do not understand or do not accept a group of people does not mean you have to be violent to that group of people, and just because you are not violent and not hateful towards a group of people does not mean you understand or accept them. (Damn, I am bordering on a logical fallacy there.)
Or is this lawyer just a greedy bastard?
Does a bear shit in the woods? Is the pope catholic? These are all questions with one pretty clear answer...
Let's look at the application, notebooks. There are quite a few pros for solid-state drives here: 1) HDDs are loud, 2) HDDs are hot (especially as you increase RPM), 3) HDDs are sensitive to motion, 4) HDDs require more power, 5) HDDs are marginally heavier (I mean the things are pretty small already). So the advantages here are pretty obvious, quieter, cooler, longer battery life, and marginally lighter notebooks.
Now, it is only fair we look at the downside, which is this overplayed write issue. Let us assume 10,000,000 writes (this is very generous, so I include 1,000,000 as well), since they will surely be using the best they can get, and this is pretty close to the high end that you will hear people discuss. You rarely re-write a vast majority of the software on your PC. Many programs are installed and never updated, and those that are updated are not done that often. If we assume, for the sake of sanity and argument, that the Windows system folder will only be written during Windows updates and that there would be one update per day that would be equal to something in the range of 27,000 days before you reached 10 million writes (only 2,700 if we say 1,000,000 writes). Most of your media files will be re-written even less.
So let us look at two things that can be written fairly often. First, you have a page file. The solution, load up your system with 1 to 2 GB of RAM and set the Windows page memory settings to the minimum. Of course, if Windows behaved properly, it wouldn't even write to the page file until AFTER the RAM was full (or damn near full). Second, user documents. Let's us assume your program performs auto-saves of your documents on a 5 minute cycle. So, the file is written one time every five minutes, 12 times an hour, 288 times a day (if you type for 24 hours of course), 105120 times a year (wow, I recommend some sleep and bathroom breaks), which ultimately results in 95 years (wow, congratulations on long life) of the file. Granted if we go with one million that is 9.5 years of continuous typing, but then you probably don't have much of a life if you are doing that.
This re-write claim is the most over-stated problem. Most places tell you the average life of today's HDD (for home use) is between 3 to 5 years, of course that is why they also tend to only warranty you for that long. Also, using my numbers, how many 9.5 year old drives are you using at home? Seriously, this problem is not that big of a deal; if it was going to be a huge problem, I am sure they would have though about that. (Note: This doesn't even get into the technology they use to spread the writes out to avoid wear.)
14 years vs. longer than our lifetime (there is stuff from my year of birth, 1982, that will not make public domain until long after my death). Hmmmm, let me think on that. Also, the design patents cover a lot of things that copyright and trademark were never meant to cover.
Disclaimer: I am an ex-patent examiner, so I have a decent understanding of patent law.
Without seeing the record, I cannot speak on your specific case, but the definition of obviousness is defined by law and has actually been modified through court rulings. There actually is a current case KSR v. Teleflex that could possibly return the definition of obviousness to the "old definition". This definition would invalidate a great many existing patents and could create a huge problem for either the USPTO, the courts, or both.
The original definition of obviousness required you to determine if "a person of ordinary skill in the art" could combine the two (or more) prior art sources. The CAFC (Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit) later changed this definition during another case in the year 2000. The case (Winner Int'l Royalty Corp. v. Wang) established the necessity for the prior art to provide a teaching that would suggest the combination. Say I had a backlit calculator keypad patent and a keyboard patent, with the patent application being examined a backlit keyboard. If the two patents of prior art do not suggest the use of a backlight in a keyboard, then there is no case for obviousness. (NOTE: Some claims of the calculator could be written broad enough to cover the keyboard, making the need for obviousness invalid.) This requirement has proven very restrictive on examiners and is a large reason why some many BS patents get passed nowadays.
I will note, if your advisor did not use a patent attorney or agent, he made a big mistake. This is not an easy venture for anyone to take on without a good understanding of the patent law. I know this patent seems dumb, but there is a good chance it holds more water then we would like to admit. I do hope that it gets invalidated though; there are a lot of patents out there that do not deserve to be.
Re-read the claims. There are a few words in the first claim that I can easily read away from the Lightgun. I have posted enough here, so I will stop my karma bonus for now.
I am tired of posting replies, so I will simply make one big huge post so hopefully everyone will read it.
1. N64 is not prior art. Nor is anything else not seen until after Sep. 5, 1995. This patent was filed in 1997 as a continuation of another application filed on the date I provided. If you want prior art, please pre-date 1995. (Note: N64 was first shown in Nov. 1995.)
2. The use of this device as a "mouse" is irrelevant. The patent claims are broad enough they can be construed to cover a gaming console. I have to given them some credit for that claim wording, it made me shake my head.
3. No matter how many people "came up" with the idea, it does not matter. The patent definition of obviousness is not the human definition. It might seem obvious to place a button in such a location, but did anyone file a patent or design such an item before them? If not, then was it really that obvious for someone to do it?
4. They really are not trolls. They have been making these products and making amicable licensing agreements with other companies. I still think this patent might be bogus, but I would not know without doing a full patent search.
So to recap, prior art must be before 1995, read the claims and ignore most everything else, and they are not really trolls, but this patent is probably pretty weak, especially if you consider it took almost 10 yrs to issue and there are a good number of reference arts provided.
Um, the patent was filed in 1997 with priority to 1995. Therefore you can erase, Wii, Xbox360, Xbox, Dreamcast, and N64, as established in prior postings.
Now, the NES zapper might be close, but I have to more closely read the claims then my cursory glance. The same for your flightsticks. I will admit there has to be some very close art for it to take almost 10 yrs to get these claims patented.
Hmm. "reduced sales and/or lost profit", eh? Their patented device is for use with a PC during slideshow presentations. I don't see how the hell a videogame console controller would ever have any impact on that at all. Well, unless Nintendo licenses out *shudder* Powerpoint to run on the Wii.
The lost profit easily comes from the loss of royalty fees. Also, note that there has been software written for Mac that allows control using the Wii remote. So they could actually attempt to use this against Nintendo, even if it wasn't the intended purpose of the device.
Sorry folks, I don't think your precious IR mouse product is about to be supplanted by the wiimote any time soon. These are 2 different products used for entirely different purposes, in 2 entirely different markets. A homebrew hack that doesn't quite cover the required functionality isn't a threat to your business.
Unfortunately, patent law doesn't care. The claims for their invention seem to cover just about any electronic system and could be construed to cover this other market. Their similar patent issued in the late 1990s has already been licensed to other companies, including TV makers, so this idea that the two markets do not cross is not really applicable in the patent world. They managed to get a patent whose claims seem to cover this, and in the end, that is all that really matters. Doesn't mean I like this patent. The 10yrs to issue makes me wonder how much prior art is really close to invalidating this patent.
Do I think that they are patent Trolls? Probably.
From my quick research, they really are not Trolls, using the regular definition. They did not sit on a patent for years and pop up with it blindly. They actually do sell products on their website, and have been signing licensing agreements for their patents with large electronics companies since the 1990s. These are not the typical moves of a patent troll. NTP is a patent troll. They had an invention, which they could not sell. RIM makes a product that uses a similar technology and becomes successful. Well after they are successful, NTP comes in and sues. That behavior is much more trollish then this case.
Do I think this patent is lame? Quite possibly. There has to be something very close to prior art for it to take almost 10 years to get issued.
you are reading the specification way too much. Everything a patent is exists in the claims. The claims do a very nice job of avoiding making it sound like the system is overtly PC based. It refers to an "electrically responsive system", which is a nice broad term to cover a variety of systems. Remember, patent lawyers get paid a lot more than we do, and they are the masters of broad terminology, while avoiding the vagueness that will get a patent tossed.
As I said before, prior art must be before Sep. 5, 1995. N64 wasn't out until 1996. Of course, there might be a Nintendo patent that pre-dates this.
Too bad this has priority to Sep. 5, 1995. Patents are fun aren't they? The issue date really means shit; look at the filing date and then check for a priority. In this case, we need to go back 11 yrs.
I can kinda see how the record companies can win a suit against the p2p providers, saying that their software enabled all these people to violate copyright law
You are kidding, right? There are plenty of legal uses for p2p software, including the sharing of non-copyrighted materials. Some places started using bittorrent to spread software and take the load off of their servers. A lot of linux distributions did this. There are actually materials that are in the public domain that people can download through these services as well. Was the primary use of Kazaa to share illegal software? Maybe; however, I think either their arguments were flawed or the judge was stupid, because any punishment of Kazaa was a slap in the face of the Betamax decision that allowed us to keep are VCRs and provided the way for CD-RW and DVD-RW drives.
if it didn't this will die because there is a huge amount of precident in prohibiting companies from being sued when their products were used in the commission of crimes (hello, gun manufacturers).
Really? Because people still sue video game companies claiming that the violent game was the reason someone went nuts and shot up his office or school. Those cases and violent game laws are what keep Jack Thompson in business. We live in a society today that hates to take responsibility for its own actions. Everyone always seems to believe someone else is to blame, and until the courts stop this sort of non-sense from ever seeing the light of day, they will continue to be a problem.
Actually, I have seen -0 a few different times. In the computer world, there are cases we decided to define the sign of a number with the lead bit = 1. This resulted in b00000000 = +0 and b10000000 = -0. We also have 11111111 = -0 when using one's complement. Of course there are others ways to represent signed numbers that solve the two zero problem (see two's complement). (Reference)