Eclectic Views

    
> only implementations were patentable, not general ideas

I suspect that defining the border is what a fair amount of patent
litigation is about. If an idea is "new, useful, and not obvious to a person
with ordinary skill in the field" it's unlikely to be too general, surely.
  

    

   Jingle Bowl

Just in time for holiday gift-giving and the entertainment of house guests
comes the Atech Flash iCarta: a combination iPod dock, music player, and
toilet paper roll holder. With four speakers it can produce full stereo,
though the proper listening position may involve leaning perilously forward.
The review says it is "compatible with most recent iPod models (and
presumably all brands of toilet paper)".  It can also recharge the docked
iPod, though that involves a power source; possibly water power, or
unrolling the paper charges the unit. If it plugs in, I hope it is properly
grounded; otherwise what a way to go, so to speak.  Details available at
http://atechflash.com/products-icarta.html
  

    
iPoop
  

    

   Fatboards

A new type of advertising billboard from a company called Magink can display
varied images like a giant LED screen but reportedly costs than half as much
and uses less than a tenth of the electricity.  Eight of them, each about 20
feet by 10, have been erected in London after a test at the Cannes film
festival and are expected to appear in the US in about a year. The medium is
cholesterol, whose "molecules change shape and size, forming full-color
images" when current is applied to them in a thin layer behind a transparent
screen. The cholesterol is synthetically produced, however, so don't expect
the company to pay people to do liposuction on them.
  

    

   The Self-Mutilating OS

By now most of us have heard of "rootkits", those malicious pieces of
software that embed themselves deep within a computer's operating system to
subvert or degrade its functioning.  Black-hat hackers have produced some,
and Sony recently suffered a public shaming and considerable litigation over
its use of one on its audio CDs.  According to a report at
  http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt
Microsoft has eliminated the middleman and bundled the function into its own
code in Windows Vista. Its rationale is said to be that of making MS a major
player in the DRM (Digital Rights Management, audio and video content
protection) arena. In the course of doing so, Vista will disable S/PDIF
(Sony/Philips Digital Interface Format) high-end audio, component (YPbPr)
video, and automatic echo cancellation (AEC) if it detects, or thinks it
detects, an attempt to play "premium" [protected] content without a note
from your mother. The author cites the example of someone using a medical
imaging system while trying to listen to a bootleg CD, or merely being
thought to by Vista; lo, their multi-megabucks high-resolution workstation
is transformed into the equivalent of an IBM PCjr.  At times the author
sounds a little overwrought and ready to believe the sky is falling; but if
even half of his claims are correct, a firestorm may be about to occur that
will dwarf the Sony brouhaha.  Other problems he cites:

"Once a weakness is found in a particular driver or device, that driver will
have its signature revoked by Microsoft, which means that it will cease to
function".

"Elimination of Open-source Hardware Support" and "Elimination of Unified
Drivers"

"Denial-of-Service via Driver Revocation" and "Decreased System Reliability"
raise the possibility that "voltage fluctuations" or other random anomalies
could trigger a hyper-sensitive Vista tripwire. So could some teenager from
Novosibirsk: as the story puts it, "With the number of easily-accessible
grenade pins that Vista's content protection provides, any piece of malware
that decides to pull a few of them will cause considerable damage."
  

    
\<a href="http://www.apple.com/getamac/";>What MS seems to be saying...\</a>