[Patents] Re: [Patents] Re: [Patents] Patent problem

[Mark Shewmaker mark@primefactor.com]

On Mon, Feb 14, 2000 at 07:04:48PM +0100, Bernard Lang wrote:
> 
> We are not just raving here ... many are building up ways of actively
> fighting software patenting. There is political action even if it does
> not always show on the list.
> 
> Bernard Lang

And there is the convince-businesses-to-license-the-patents-to-us
type action I'm putting together at www.openpatents.org, (plug, plug),
and the make-money-at-busting-patents that Gregory Aharonian is doing
at www.bustpatents.com.

Fortunately, there seem to be groups active on every angle.

> On Sun, Feb 13, 2000 at 05:12:33PM +0200, Juhana Sadeharju wrote:
> > 
> > Problem:
> > 
> > There are patents
> >   5811706  May 1997
> > and
> >   6008446  Jun 1998  (continuation of the above)
> > which states: "The software routine stores a first part of each waveform
> > signal in a sample pool of host memory and provides remaining portitions
> > of selected musical sounds from the hard drive to a stream cell array
> > without an audio perceivable delay."

I'm sure this was commonly done on the Amiga in the late 80's, (yes, I'm
one of *those* people), but I don't remember which programs did that off
the top of my head.  Looking at the relevant section of aminet,
http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/systems/amiga/aminet/info/www/public_html/dirs/mus_play.html
 ,
the first program I looked at was AGMSPlaySound8.lha.

Here's a paragraph from AGMSPlaySound.doc included in the archive at
http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/systems/amiga/aminet/info/www/public_html/dirs/aminet/mus/play/AGMSPlaySound8.lha
 :

|Since AGMSPlaySound doesn't load the whole sample into memory, you can
|play samples longer than your memory size (up to 2 gigabytes).  It also
|leaves lots of memory free for other uses (such as running several other
|AGMSPlaySounds simultaneously, for quadraphonic sound :-).  Unlike some
|other sound playing programs, AGMSPlaySound can play from floppy disk
|without annoying pauses.  It achieves this performance by processing the
|IFF file headers and locating the sound data before starting to play.
|It also opens all the files before playing so that no time is wasted
|during playback.

The datestamp on that documentation file is December 19, 1993.

(Most of the other programs I since looked through actually just loaded
the whole files into memory as a way of caching the data, as opposed to
just the start of files.  I know there had to be others that preloaded
just the beginnings of the files, because I remember talking about them
long ago.  I'll ask around.)

> > Consequence is that one of free software authors refused to write
> > a software with direct prefetching. (He is looking for an alternative
> > from Linux's virtual memory system.)

Begin Joke (in character of amiga fanatic):
Using Linux's virtual memory system?  He's obviously unaware
of the history of such things.

He should know that using a monolithic kernel's virtual memory system in
order to accomplish such a task is woefully inefficient.  It's
historically been proven that the best way to go about it is to instead
use a microkernel with more a limited functionality expandable by the
use of usermode mod-playing sound programs that implement their own
specialized virtual memory routines.

Linux is obsolete; Amiga Rules.  :-)
End Joke.

 -Mark Shewmaker
  mark@primefactor.com