This is the patent mentioned in the linked article, I'm not sure what you mean by 'the original patent' - are you talking about Creative's patent? If so then the two aren't linked at all.
Anyway this patent is just about the user interface for a music player and it's pretty specific - you have to display "at least two individual data fields selected from music categories, composers, artists, and songs", then let people select, update the list etc. This is exactly what the ipod does.
Personally I think it's fairly obvious, it's just not as obvious as people are saying, and it doesn't cover any of the examples I saw people giving of prior art.
There was no mention of the terms. Ebay/paypal have already got a service called payloadz which would let you sell MP3s (even off your myspace page) for 15% commission or less (compared to iTunes' ~50% r something). Maybe this will be similar because they are partnering with paypal?
Anyway, all this is good - it's removing the crap between the artists and listeners, and that's good for the small guys.
Of course, it's still all about promotion, but every little helps.
Loads of +5 informative comments saying how bad the patent is and claiming prior art based on TFA's incorrect descriptions of what the patent is about.
Meanwhile people who took a look at the patent languish on +1 or lower (including myself obviously, or why else would I be posing this?).
C'mon guys, the answer is obvious - line your bin with tinfoil. Instant faraday trash cage, no more local government spying on where you get your take-out pizzas from etc etc
Won't work - they tip the garbage into the garbage truck and scan it there.
if you're going to make tinfoil comments, you really need to work on your paranoia a bit.
A menu selection process to allow the user to select music to be played - its a music player! File>Open is a damned menu! Please for a second picture a music player that doesn't allow the user to select the music to be played via a menu. mpg123 is all that comes to mind.
The ability of the software to transfer music tracks to a portable music player - wait any OS can do this - its copying files for crissakes. Again trivially File>Save As... heck your browser could then be a piece of software that can transfer tracks to a portable music player. Throw in the right plugin and it can open music files and save them to a portable music player.
You can't conclude stuff like that from reading the article. You have to look at the patent. I'll be the first one to say that there are a lot of dumb patents around, but dismissing all patents out of hand doesn't seem right either.
I guess I'm biased having 'got' a number of patents (although they are all assigned to my ex-employers, so of no use to me). Most of them were hardware, but a couple were software and I like to think they are not obvious. Certainly my employers spent quite a bit of money to get me and my coworkers to come up with those ideas.
Anyway back to the patent - here's the first claim:
1. A computer user interface menu selection process for allowing the user to select music to be played on a music device controlled by a computer, comprising the steps of:
a) simultaneously displaying on a display device, at least two individual data fields selected from music categories, composers, artists, and songs;
b) selecting at least one item from at least one of the data fields;
c) in response to step b), redisplaying all data fields not having an item selected therefrom with data related only to the at least one item selected in step b), and simultaneously maintaining all items originally displayed in the data fields with at lest one item selected therefrom;
d) selecting an item in the songs data field in response to step c), and
e) playing the selected song item from step d) on the computer responsive music device.
None of the things you suggested are covered by that - it has to do all of those things to be covered. But yeah, it's still pertty dumb, just not totally dumb.
I'd say the fastest way would be to get a teacher, although I came to music late and never felt comfortable with that (although I did try it).
If you're not going to get a teacher then get a mic and some recording software (there's loads of free stuff out there - audacity for example). It really hard to hear what you're doing wrong while you're doing it.
On the tuner front, I'd go with a hardware one - the best ones IMO are the clip on ones that sense vibration. I have an Intellitouch one but there are other models now.
One way for the artist is to create music for people that actually put a value on it and don't want the artist to starve. Physical barriers are not the only things that stop people taking things without paying.
There are plenty of examples of this right now, for instance in the UK Warp Records (one of the bigger UK indie lables with an anual turn over around the $10million mark) have nearly their whole catalog in their online store as DRM free MP3 files (high quality VBR using LAME alt-preset standard). There are also other examples in this list.
Personally, I'm going to have my album downloadable as DRM-free MP3s - it will also be on iTunes for people that find that more convenient (?!) but it'll be more expensive (to make up for apple's cut) and obvious will have iTune's DRM there.
Thanks for the comments - yeah, my voice ain't so great, I try hard though;)
Meanwhile for anyone interested I finally fixed the effect on the front page - turns out the front page's URL was in www.burbleland.com, but the rest of the wordpress site was set to just burbleland.com... so the javascript and the stylesheet were in different domains, so the js couldn't get at the style information it needed to run.
I guess you are entitled to your opinion - most people seem to think it looks kinda cool. I tried to make the main music links obvious - they are not mangled at all. I still might tone it down a little, but then again the music is kind of wierd, so the website should be too I think... hmm or maybe I'll just do the headlines.
What version of firefox was the scrolling slow in? I'm running 1.5 on an old 700MHz P3 and it seems find?
Ha ha, thanks for letting me know and my apologies - the site is still in development - I mostly test it in firefox and occasionally in IE - yesterday I made a change that made nothing show in IE and forgot to test it (not related to the text effect). I've fixed that now.
I have no idea why it isn't working in firefox for you - what platform/version are you using?
There's also an intermitant bug in the cookie turn on/off handling which I'm trying to track down.
I still think (my incompetence aside) my initial point was still valid though.
Re:Webpage design
on
Steal This Film
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
What's with the javascript to generate the text then? Surely they could have done it with regular
HTML so that people with no js would still be ok?
On my site I've tried to create 'an atmosphere' with text effects and yeah. it also makes it pretty hard to read.
But! I use regular HTML and with js to apply the effect - if you have js off you just get regular text. I also let you turn the effect off if you don't like it.
They could have done something better with those cutouts: Stuck a copies of "The HP Way" under their arms, painted tears on their cheeks and propped them up on Page Mill Road outside HP's HQ. Well that's what I would have done.
you send a html link to 100 people and at least one of them will click on it because
- he was bored and had to something/anything
- his mouse happned to be near the link and he just cliked
- out of sheer curiosity
Slashdot Mirror
This is the patent mentioned in the linked article, I'm not sure what you mean by 'the original patent' - are you talking about Creative's patent? If so then the two aren't linked at all.
Anyway this patent is just about the user interface for a music player and it's pretty specific - you have to display "at least two individual data fields selected from music categories, composers, artists, and songs", then let people select, update the list etc. This is exactly what the ipod does.
Personally I think it's fairly obvious, it's just not as obvious as people are saying, and it doesn't cover any of the examples I saw people giving of prior art.
There was no mention of the terms. Ebay/paypal have already got a service called payloadz which would let you sell MP3s (even off your myspace page) for 15% commission or less (compared to iTunes' ~50% r something). Maybe this will be similar because they are partnering with paypal?
Anyway, all this is good - it's removing the crap between the artists and listeners, and that's good for the small guys.
Of course, it's still all about promotion, but every little helps.
Loads of +5 informative comments saying how bad the patent is and claiming prior art based on TFA's incorrect descriptions of what the patent is about.
Meanwhile people who took a look at the patent languish on +1 or lower (including myself obviously, or why else would I be posing this?).
It's a funny old place.
C'mon guys, the answer is obvious - line your bin with tinfoil. Instant faraday trash cage, no more local government spying on where you get your take-out pizzas from etc etc
Won't work - they tip the garbage into the garbage truck and scan it there.
if you're going to make tinfoil comments, you really need to work on your paranoia a bit.
You can't conclude stuff like that from reading the article. You have to look at the patent. I'll be the first one to say that there are a lot of dumb patents around, but dismissing all patents out of hand doesn't seem right either.
I guess I'm biased having 'got' a number of patents (although they are all assigned to my ex-employers, so of no use to me). Most of them were hardware, but a couple were software and I like to think they are not obvious. Certainly my employers spent quite a bit of money to get me and my coworkers to come up with those ideas.
Anyway back to the patent - here's the first claim:None of the things you suggested are covered by that - it has to do all of those things to be covered. But yeah, it's still pertty dumb, just not totally dumb.
I think spam goes in either a different pipe or a truck, I'm not 100% sure of how it works though
I'm 80% sure of how it works, how sure are you? Between us we're probably completely certain.
I'd say the fastest way would be to get a teacher, although I came to music late and never felt comfortable with that (although I did try it).
If you're not going to get a teacher then get a mic and some recording software (there's loads of free stuff out there - audacity for example). It really hard to hear what you're doing wrong while you're doing it.
On the tuner front, I'd go with a hardware one - the best ones IMO are the clip on ones that sense vibration. I have an Intellitouch one but there are other models now.
Other than that, practice and have fun!
(I (was (expecting more) (brackets (in (that transcript)))))
One way for the artist is to create music for people that actually put a value on it and don't want the artist to starve. Physical barriers are not the only things that stop people taking things without paying.
There are plenty of examples of this right now, for instance in the UK Warp Records (one of the bigger UK indie lables with an anual turn over around the $10million mark) have nearly their whole catalog in their online store as DRM free MP3 files (high quality VBR using LAME alt-preset standard). There are also other examples in this list.
Personally, I'm going to have my album downloadable as DRM-free MP3s - it will also be on iTunes for people that find that more convenient (?!) but it'll be more expensive (to make up for apple's cut) and obvious will have iTune's DRM there.
Meanwhile for anyone interested I finally fixed the effect on the front page - turns out the front page's URL was in www.burbleland.com, but the rest of the wordpress site was set to just burbleland.com... so the javascript and the stylesheet were in different domains, so the js couldn't get at the style information it needed to run.
I don't know if you are joking or not. But I'm going to pretend you're not.
I guess you are entitled to your opinion - most people seem to think it looks kinda cool. I tried to make the main music links obvious - they are not mangled at all. I still might tone it down a little, but then again the music is kind of wierd, so the website should be too I think... hmm or maybe I'll just do the headlines.
What version of firefox was the scrolling slow in? I'm running 1.5 on an old 700MHz P3 and it seems find?
Ha ha, thanks for letting me know and my apologies - the site is still in development - I mostly test it in firefox and occasionally in IE - yesterday I made a change that made nothing show in IE and forgot to test it (not related to the text effect). I've fixed that now.
I have no idea why it isn't working in firefox for you - what platform/version are you using?
There's also an intermitant bug in the cookie turn on/off handling which I'm trying to track down.
I still think (my incompetence aside) my initial point was still valid though.
What's with the javascript to generate the text then? Surely they could have done it with regular HTML so that people with no js would still be ok?
On my site I've tried to create 'an atmosphere' with text effects and yeah. it also makes it pretty hard to read.
But! I use regular HTML and with js to apply the effect - if you have js off you just get regular text. I also let you turn the effect off if you don't like it.
I can't wait for this - google can now give it away as Adword supprted clothing.
I think I'm going to patent "Pay per Prod" quickly.
- No word processor. Check.
- No spreadsheet. Check.
- No presentation tool. Check.
Seriously - how is this "Google Releasing an office suite"?They could have done something better with those cutouts: Stuck a copies of "The HP Way" under their arms, painted tears on their cheeks and propped them up on Page Mill Road outside HP's HQ. Well that's what I would have done.
- an ex-HP employee
Can I have this algorithm as a friend then? I'm strugling to reach double digits.
Isn't that what being a subscriber is all about?
You are not alone - I can't watch that stuff either - for exactly the same squirmy reasons.
A lot of UK comedy seems to be going that way too unfortunately
But my thumb seems to have some mayo on it
mmmm...
So this is essentially a giant tinfoil hat for your office? Will it stop the voices as well?
I don't think it will stop 'the voices' - they are probably your managers
Like how you stop the duvet blocking the ventilation holes. This is slashdot right?
That is google's whole business plan right there.
And if it can't there's always a chance for the sequel: Snakes on a sinking ship.