Latest Patent News

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Michael on December 29, 2008 at 11:42am

Microsoft patent applications published on 25 December 2008
Thursday December 25th 2008, 10:54 am
Filed under: Microsoft, Patent Applications

130 US patent applications published on 25 December 2008 and assigned to Microsoft
1 20080320601 PROVIDING ACCESS RIGHTS TO PORTIONS OF A SOFTWARE APPLICATION
2 20080320576 Unified online verification service
3 20080320568 CONTENT DISTRIBUTION AND EVALUATION PROVIDING REVIEWER STATUS
4 20080320566 Device provisioning and domain join emulation over non-secured networks
5 20080320565 Open enhanced federation security techniques
6 20080320554 SECURE DATA STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL INCORPORATING HUMAN PARTICIPATION
7 20080320551 Controlling access to multiple pieces of content of a presentation
8 20080320548 PROXY-BASED MALWARE SCAN
9 20080320525 Audio stream management for television content
10 20080320516 TAILORED CHANNEL FOR CONTENT CONSUMPTION
11 20080320515 Self-organizing media content
12 20080320513 DYNAMIC CHANNEL SURFING GUIDE AND CUSTOMIZED TELEVISION HOME PAGE
13 20080320511 High-speed programs review
14 20080320510 SHARING VIEWING STATISTICS
15 20080320503 URL Namespace to Support Multiple-Protocol Processing within Worker Processes
16 20080320502 Providing Information about Software Components
17 20080320501 Aggregate personal computer system
18 20080320500 Remote human interface device in an aggregate computer system
19 20080320498 High Performance Script Behavior Detection Through Browser Shimming
20 20080320475 Switching user mode thread context
21 20080320460 Fulfillment of requirement for versioned resource
22 20080320458 Using Memory Usage to Pinpoint Sub-Optimal Code for Gaming Systems
23 20080320457 Intermediate Code Metrics
24 20080320456 Targeted patching
25 20080320453 TYPE INFERENCE AND LATE BINDING
26 20080320444 LATE BOUND PROGRAMMATIC ASSISTANCE
27 20080320442 Execution-centric source code view
28 20080320440 FULLY CAPTURING OUTER VARIABLES AS DATA OBJECTS
29 20080320437 Constructing Petri Nets from traces for diagnostics
30 20080320413 Dynamic user interface for previewing live content
31 20080320410 VIRTUAL KEYBOARD TEXT REPLICATION
32 20080320400 String customization
33 20080320397 Integrated sharing of electronic documents
34 20080320392 State-Sensitive Navigation Aid
35 20080320383 Presentation of numerous and arbitrarily sized figures within a document
36 20080320343 Web page error reporting
37 20080320336 System and Method of Client Side Analysis for Identifying Failing RAM After a User Mode or Kernel Mode Exception
38 20080320334 Transactional debugger for a transactional memory system
39 20080320328 FUZZ TESTING AND ATTACK-SURFACE SCOPING FOR URI HANDLERS AND PLUGGABLE PROTOCOLS
40 20080320312 Hardware-Based Computer Theft Deterrence
41 20080320310 IMAGE BASED SHARED SECRET PROXY FOR SECURE PASSWORD ENTRY
42 20080320300 Authorisation and Authentication
43 20080320299 ACCESS CONTROL POLICY IN A WEAKLY-COHERENT DISTRIBUTED COLLECTION
44 20080320291 Concurrent exception handling
45 20080320275 Concurrent exception handling
46 20080320252 OPTIMIZED AND ROBUST IN-PLACE DATA TRANSFORMATION
47 20080320235 Processor cache management with software input via an intermediary
48 20080320194 MONITORED NOTIFICATION FACILITY FOR REDUCING INTER-PROCESS / INTER-PARTITION INTERRUPTS
49 20080320157 VIRTUAL FORMAT FOR THE STORAGE OF STREAMING DATA
50 20080320155 Aggregation and re-ordering of input/output requests for better performance in remote file systems
51 20080320152 METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR DETECTING A COMMUNICATION PROBLEM IN A COMPUTER NETWORK
52 20080320146 Establishing interaction between a process and a server process
53 20080320140 CREDIT-BASED PEER-TO-PEER STORAGE
54 20080320127 SECURE PUBLISHING OF DATA TO DMZ USING VIRTUAL HARD DRIVES
55 20080320126 ENVIRONMENT SENSING FOR INTERACTIVE ENTERTAINMENT
56 20080320119 Automatically identifying dynamic Internet protocol addresses
57 20080320109 COMPLEX SOFTWARE DEPLOYMENT
58 20080320108 Management Policies For Dense Wireless Access Point Infrastructures in Wireless Local Area Networks
59 20080320095 Determination Of Participation In A Malicious Software Campaign
60 20080320087 SWARM SENSING AND ACTUATING
61 20080320081 SERVICE COMPONENTIZATION AND COMPOSITION ARCHITECTURE
62 20080320075 DETECTING DATA PROPAGATION IN A DISTRIBUTED SYSTEM
63 20080320063 Transacting accesses via unmanaged pointers
64 20080320056 FUNCTION MATCHING IN BINARIES
65 20080320055 Bi-Directional Data Modification With Synchronization
66 20080320050 ASYNCHRONOUS UPDATING OF WEB PAGE DATA VIEWS
67 20080320028 CONFIGURABLE PLUG-IN ARCHITECTURE FOR MANIPULATING XML-FORMATTED INFORMATION
68 20080320027 Strongly typed tags
69 20080320025 GATHERING AND USING AWARENESS INFORMATION
70 20080320024 Portal and Key Management Service Database Schemas
71 20080320018 CUBE-BASED PERCENTILE CALCULATION
72 20080320011 INCREASING FILE STORAGE SCALE USING FEDERATED REPOSITORIES
73 20080320010 SENSITIVE WEBPAGE CONTENT DETECTION
74 20080320005 Relocating item in distributed storage system
75 20080320004 INFLUENCE BASED REWARDS FOR WORD-OF-MOUTH ADVERTISING ECOSYSTEMS
76 20080320003 SCALING NETWORK SERVICES USING DNS
77 20080319997 COMBINED PESSIMISTIC AND OPTIMISTIC CONCURRENCY CONTROL
78 20080319976 IDENTIFICATION AND USE OF WEB SEARCHER EXPERTISE
79 20080319975 Exploratory Search Technique
80 20080319974 MINING GEOGRAPHIC KNOWLEDGE USING A LOCATION AWARE TOPIC MODEL
81 20080319973 RECOMMENDING CONTENT USING DISCRIMINATIVELY TRAINED DOCUMENT SIMILARITY
82 20080319957 EXTENSIBLE COMMAND TREES FOR ENTITY DATA MODEL PLATFORM
83 20080319944 USER INTERFACES TO PERFORM MULTIPLE QUERY SEARCHES
84 20080319932 CLASSIFICATION USING A CASCADE APPROACH
85 20080319925 Computer Hardware Metering
86 20080319910 Metered Pay-As-You-Go Computing Experience
87 20080319908 Packet Schema for Pay-as-You-Go Service Provisioning
88 20080319852 Interactive advertisement overlays on full-screen content
89 20080319851 Using delegation for distributing protected content
90 20080319844 Image Advertising System
91 20080319827 MINING IMPLICIT BEHAVIOR
92 20080319818 MULTIMEDIA CALENDAR
93 20080319780 Defining reports for dimension based enterprise resource planning systems
94 20080319779 Activation system architecture
95 20080319773 PERSONALIZED TRAVEL GUIDE
96 20080319771 SELECTIVE DATA FEED DISTRIBUTION ARCHITECTURE
97 20080319750 CONCEPT MONITORING IN SPOKEN-WORD AUDIO
98 20080319749 GENERIC SPELLING MNEMONICS
99 20080319739 LOW COMPLEXITY DECODER FOR COMPLEX TRANSFORM CODING OF MULTI-CHANNEL SOUND
100 20080319736 Discriminative Syntactic Word Order Model for Machine Translation
101 20080319727 SELECTIVE SAMPLING OF USER STATE BASED ON EXPECTED UTILITY
102 20080319660 LANDMARK-BASED ROUTING
103 20080319659 LANDMARK-BASED ROUTING
104 20080319658 LANDMARK-BASED ROUTING
105 20080318687 Live Game Lobby
106 20080318676 Responsive Cutscenes in Video Games
107 20080318654 Combat action selection using situational awareness
108 20080318601 SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR OPTIMIZING NETWORK COMMUNICATION IN RESPONSE TO NETWORK CONDITIONS
109 20080318597 INTENSITY-BASED MAPS
110 20080317441 SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR RECEIVING, STORING, AND RENDERING DIGITAL VIDEO, MUSIC, AND PICTURES ON A PERSONAL MEDIA PLAYER
111 20080317439 SOCIAL NETWORK BASED RECORDING
112 20080317386 Playback of Digital Images
113 20080317376 Automatic image correction providing multiple user-selectable options
114 20080317371 VIDEO NOISE REDUCTION
115 20080317368 REVERSIBLE OVERLAP OPERATOR FOR EFFICIENT LOSSLESS DATA COMPRESSION
116 20080317346 Character and Object Recognition with a Mobile Photographic Device
117 20080317331 Recognizing Hand Poses and/or Object Classes
118 20080317292 AUTOMATIC CONFIGURATION OF DEVICES BASED ON BIOMETRIC DATA
119 20080317240 ALPHA CHARACTER SUPPORT AND TRANSLATION IN DIALER
120 20080317228 Message Recall Using Digital Rights Management
121 20080317068 SERVER-ASSISTED AND PEER-TO-PEER SYNCHRONIZATION
122 20080317050 Hybrid Tree/Mesh Overlay for Data Delivery
123 20080316982 Managing Dense Wireless Access Point Infrastructures in Wireless Local Area Networks
124 20080316926 Correlation-Based Rate Adaptation for Communication Networks
125 20080316925 AGGREGATING AND SEARCHING PROFILE DATA FROM MULTIPLE SERVICES
126 20080316362 MECHANISMS TO CONCEAL REAL TIME VIDEO ARTIFACTS CAUSED BY FRAME LOSS
127 20080316217 Hard/Soft Frame Latency Reduction
128 20080316214 PREFIX SUM PASS TO LINEARIZE A-BUFFER STORAGE
129 20080316202 DIRECT MANIPULATION OF SUBDIVISION SURFACES USING A GRAPHICS PROCESSING UNIT
130 20080316083 State-Sensitive Navigation Aid

▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Michael on December 29, 2008 at 11:44am

Microsoft patents granted on 23 December 2008
Tuesday December 23rd 2008, 11:02 am
Filed under: Microsoft, Patents

25 US patents granted on 23 December 2008 and assigned to Microsoft
1 D583,387 Transitional image for a portion of a display screen
2 D583,384 Portion of a keyboard
3 D583,315 Charging device
4 7,469,410 Playback control methods and arrangements for a DVD player
5 7,469,408 Document customization for transparent execution on a client and a server
6 7,469,388 Direction-based system and method of generating commands
7 7,469,386 Systems and methods for interfacing with computer devices
8 7,469,385 Methods and systems for abstraction of logical editing operations
9 7,469,380 Dynamic document and template previews
10 7,469,377 Dynamic properties of documents and the use of these properties
11 7,469,362 Using a call stack hash to record the state of a process
12 7,469,359 Method and apparatus for testing communication software
13 7,469,347 Methods to test multimedia devices on computer systems
14 7,469,343 Dynamic substitution of USB data for on-the-fly encryption/decryption
15 7,469,272 System and method utilizing test notifications
16 7,469,257 Generating and monitoring a multimedia database
17 7,469,253 Associative hash partitioning using pseudo-random number generator
18 7,469,251 Extraction of information from documents
19 7,469,143 Model and method for computing performance bounds in multi-hop wireless networks
20 7,469,050 Organization-based content rights management and systems, structures, and methods therefor
21 7,469,048 Methods for point compression for jacobians of hyperelliptic curves
22 7,469,011 Escape mode code resizing for fields and slices
23 7,468,801 Electronic ink processing
24 7,468,733 Method and system for improving color reduction
25 7,468,683 Encoding conversion fallback

▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Michael on December 29, 2008 at 11:53am

Making quieter windmills
December 2nd, 2008

When the greater majority of windmills are located at remote and often desolate locations, noise is hardly an issue. When installation of windmills is contemplated for suburban and even urban locations, however, noise becomes an important consideration.

Today the United States Patent Office issued yet another windmill related patent to General Electric Corporation. In this patent, a wind turbine is proposed which has a rigid “acoustic flap”, which extends outwardly from the trailing edge of the blade body. The distal end of the acoustic flap is smooth and continuous, and results in a reduction of the acoustic noise generated by the blade in use.



Download United States Patent No. 7,458,777

▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Michael on December 29, 2008 at 11:58am

Generating hydrogen from ocean wave energy
November 25th, 2008

Today, a Virginia Inventor received a United States Patent for a system that generates hydrogen, using ocean wave energy. This portable sea-powered electrolysis generator is an apparatus that continually and conveniently harnesses the energy emanating from sea-wave motion in order to propagate hydrogen to be stored for use as a clean, reusable energy source through the process of electrolysis. The motion of waves is used to power a agenerator that supplies power to water to produce hydrogen through electrolysis.

Download United States Patent No. 7,456,512

▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Michael, Houston on December 29, 2008 at 2:52pm

Microsoft patents "pay-as-you-use" computer leasing

By Joel Hruska | Published: December 29, 2008 - 03:32PM CT

Microsoft received a Christmas present from the USPTO this year in the form of a new patent on what the company describes as a type of pay-to-play computing. Although the specifics of the approved application are somewhat different from the ad-supported "free" PC business models of the late 1990s and early 2000s, a consideration of the merits of the patent identifies many of the same potential problems.

The patent abstract describes

a computer with scalable performance level components and selectable software and service options has a user interface that allows individual performance levels to be selected... Software and services may include word processing, email, browsing, database access, etc. To support a pay-per-use business model, each selectable item may have a cost associated with it, allowing a user to pay for the services actually selected and that presumably correspond to the task or tasks being performed. An administrator may use a similar user interface to set performance levels for each computer in a network, allowing performance and cost to be set according to a user's requirements.

We've seen pay-as-you-go systems before, particularly from certain big iron vendors, but Microsoft's now-patented nickel-and-dime system may run into many of the same snags that affected the "free PC" business. Skip back ten years, and the idea of handing over a no-cost PC system was an idea that drew considerable interest from press and consumers alike.

The concept worked as follows: instead of paying a large up-front cost, customers would sign a two-year ISP agreement at a rate of, say, $24.95 per month. In exchange for the system, lucky owners agreed to watch advertisements, receive special offers, or turn over their browsing histories. The terms varied, but at a time when users were rushing to get online and computers were still in the $700-$800 range, this was one heck of a deal—on paper.

In reality, the model proved unsustainable. The PCs in question were often slow, carried minimal amounts of RAM, and ISP service could be extremely spotty. As hungry as the US was for Internet access back then, the limitations and requirements of the systems turned off a number of potential buyers.

Microsoft's patent description makes a series of supportable claims, but the proposed solution is unattractive for a number of reasons. The problem, according to Redmond, is that consumers and businesses are forced to buy systems that can match their maximum potential performance needs, even if day-to-day usage requires only a fraction of that potential power. Similarly, expensive software packages, while necessary, may only be used intermittently or at certain times of the year. The company's goal is to provide an alternate solution to the inherent inefficiency of buying a system based on occasional need.

As the patent puts it:

A computer may have individually metered hardware and software components that a user can select and activate based on current need. Beyond simple activation, the user may be able to select a level of performance related to processor, memory, graphics power, etc. that is driven not by a lifetime maximum requirement, but rather by the need of the moment. When the need is browsing, a low level of performance may be used and when network-based interactive gaming is the need of the moment, the highest available performance may be made available to the user.

Microsoft presents the following example of how such a system might be priced. "The Office bundle may be $1.00 per hour, the Gaming bundle may be $1.25 per hour, and the Browsing bundle may be $0.80 per hour. Alternatively, a bundle may incur a one-time charge that is operable until changed or for a fixed usage period. Other pricing techniques are apparent."

The rest of the patent is devoted to describing the various ways in which fees could be implemented, adjusted, and metered. Redmond admits that the final cost of PC ownership could end up being higher than that of a one-time purchase, but notes that "the payments can be deferred and the user can extend the useful life of the computer beyond that of the one-time purchase machine."
Limited utility?

Maybe I'm just too old-fashioned, but if there's an upside to this, it seems quite limited. This type of approach to computer billing might theoretically allow a company to directly tailor system capabilities to user needs, but it does so by requiring a huge amount of additional logistical complexity. Any company wanting to adopt this sort of system would first have to conduct what amounts to a desk-by-desk survey of exactly what company employees do and how they do it. Usage models must then be mapped and modified against pricing structures, which could potentially create absurd operating environments.

Higher-performing systems would still cost more, but it's safe to assume that an employee's ability to operate in peak performance mode would be closely monitored. Any pressure from the accounting department to cut costs will land squarely on the shoulders of professionals who legitimately require high-performance systems in order to do their jobs effectively. ("Bill, this is Greg from accounting. Any chance you can stop using your graphics card for a week to save us a bit of cash?")

The nickel-and-dime approach might have worked when even basic computers were $1,500+, but Dell has Vostro systems for as little as $289. Even if we assume a pricing plan whereupon a computer using Microsoft's proposed payment system costs just $1.00 per day for 350 days a year, the machine ends up costing more than a base PC in only months. Such a setup would allow gamers to get more horsepower than they could otherwise afford up front, but allowing such systems into homes opens the obvious risk of hacking and cracking the devices.

At this point, the market has created computers at almost every price point imaginable—it's hard to imagine how any vendor could simultaneously entice a company with this type of offer and make itself a profit. Startups with virtually no capital might be interested, but these probably aren't the sorts of companies an OEM wants to build a business segment on.

▶ Reply to This