5 ms·

Were you ever approached to have your lulz patents licensed?

WalterBright 5y ago
The people who paid for all the patent paperwork owned the patents, and they licensed them, but I don't think anything ever came of them. One was a method of texting that didn't require looking at the phone, the other was a way to display lo-res graphics data without pixelation.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > One was a method of texting that didn't require looking at the phone Oh that's easy, every phone before iPhone could do it - you need a) a physical keyboard, and b) a soft real-time OS. Tactile feedback of physical buttons + stable UI configuration with learnable delays = you could learn to operate the phone without taking it out of your pocket. :) Joking aside, what was your invention? Could you link to the patent?
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    Patent 7831208 Wireless mobile phone having encoded data entry facilities Patent 7812993 Lossy method for compressing images and video Patent 7711748 Method and apparatus for simplified access to online services Patent 7028033 Method and apparatus for simplified access to online services Patent 6897977 Lossy method for compressing pictures and video Patent 6850782 Wireless device with vibrational communication capabilities Patent 6657647 Controlling the order in which content is displayed in a browser Patent 6418323 Wireless mobile phone with Morse code and related capabilities AFAIK, none of these have been made use of. Though every time I see banding and blockiness in video, I think "they should implement triangles!"
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      Thanks! I've skimmed the ones related to vibrations/Morse code, I'll look at the rest later. At the risk of forever poisoning myself for related work, I guess. Whose bright idea was with that "you look at it, and you and everyone you know is now liable for 3x more damages for accidental infringement" law?...
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        > Whose bright idea Mine, obviously. All my ideas are Bright ideas. The patents may have expired, anyway. One of the reasons I did the patents was I was always pestering people with those ideas, as I wanted someone to implement them. So they said "patent them, which will get the ideas out there."
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    The idea was to put a rocker switch on the side, to rock between "dot" and "dash", and then use Morse code. To "read" Morse, the phone could vibrate, or at least decode it as text to read. You could text without walking into a tree (which I have done.) The graphics one was pretty straight forward. Instead of dividing up the picture into rectangles, divide it up into triangles. Set a color for each triangle based on an average of the color pixels in it. Then, smoothly shade the rendering of the triangle based on the colors at each vertex. This will prevent any banding or that ugly blockiness. The number and placement of the vertices depends on the where the complexity in the image is, and of course would be adjustable. The browser one is to have the browser rendering prioritize where the mouse cursor is. Great for slow connections.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      > The idea was to put a rocker switch on the side, to rock between "dot" and "dash", and then use Morse code. To "read" Morse, the phone could vibrate, or at least decode it as text to read. You could text without walking into a tree (which I have done.) I can imagine this working. Kind of like CW for HAMs, except with a 3-state switch and couple dozen more layers of abstraction between you and the wire :). I wish my Morse code wasn't so rusty though - and it makes me wonder, are there better text encodings that could be used for such purpose? The method for texting without looking I described was only limited to writing, but it's also something I've done in practice before smartphones, in particular on a Sony Ericsson K800i. This was possible because of good-quality keyboard (and joystick), and good UI decisions. I don't know if they put an actual soft-realtime OS in there (I suspect so), but all the UI delays were always the same - so I naturally memorized sequences like "unlock, menu, texting, wait ~0.5 second for it to load, open thread, type in message, send". It probably takes teenage-level or business-professional-level of use to get that kind of muscle memory, though. > Instead of dividing up the picture into rectangles, divide it up into triangles. (...) This will prevent any banding or that ugly blockiness. Is the insight here that a triangle-based subdivision like this will make areas of detail not align on horizontal/vertical lines, unless the underlying image has its details aligned on a band? Or am I misunderstanding this?
      - 5y ago

The people who paid for all the patent paperwork owned the patents, and they licensed them, but I don't think anything ever came of them. One was a method of texting that didn't require looking at the phone, the other was a way to display lo-res graphics data without pixelation.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
> One was a method of texting that didn't require looking at the phone Oh that's easy, every phone before iPhone could do it - you need a) a physical keyboard, and b) a soft real-time OS. Tactile feedback of physical buttons + stable UI configuration with learnable delays = you could learn to operate the phone without taking it out of your pocket. :) Joking aside, what was your invention? Could you link to the patent?
- WalterBright 5y ago
  Patent 7831208 Wireless mobile phone having encoded data entry facilities Patent 7812993 Lossy method for compressing images and video Patent 7711748 Method and apparatus for simplified access to online services Patent 7028033 Method and apparatus for simplified access to online services Patent 6897977 Lossy method for compressing pictures and video Patent 6850782 Wireless device with vibrational communication capabilities Patent 6657647 Controlling the order in which content is displayed in a browser Patent 6418323 Wireless mobile phone with Morse code and related capabilities AFAIK, none of these have been made use of. Though every time I see banding and blockiness in video, I think "they should implement triangles!"
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Thanks! I've skimmed the ones related to vibrations/Morse code, I'll look at the rest later. At the risk of forever poisoning myself for related work, I guess. Whose bright idea was with that "you look at it, and you and everyone you know is now liable for 3x more damages for accidental infringement" law?...
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      > Whose bright idea Mine, obviously. All my ideas are Bright ideas. The patents may have expired, anyway. One of the reasons I did the patents was I was always pestering people with those ideas, as I wanted someone to implement them. So they said "patent them, which will get the ideas out there."
- WalterBright 5y ago
  The idea was to put a rocker switch on the side, to rock between "dot" and "dash", and then use Morse code. To "read" Morse, the phone could vibrate, or at least decode it as text to read. You could text without walking into a tree (which I have done.) The graphics one was pretty straight forward. Instead of dividing up the picture into rectangles, divide it up into triangles. Set a color for each triangle based on an average of the color pixels in it. Then, smoothly shade the rendering of the triangle based on the colors at each vertex. This will prevent any banding or that ugly blockiness. The number and placement of the vertices depends on the where the complexity in the image is, and of course would be adjustable. The browser one is to have the browser rendering prioritize where the mouse cursor is. Great for slow connections.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    > The idea was to put a rocker switch on the side, to rock between "dot" and "dash", and then use Morse code. To "read" Morse, the phone could vibrate, or at least decode it as text to read. You could text without walking into a tree (which I have done.) I can imagine this working. Kind of like CW for HAMs, except with a 3-state switch and couple dozen more layers of abstraction between you and the wire :). I wish my Morse code wasn't so rusty though - and it makes me wonder, are there better text encodings that could be used for such purpose? The method for texting without looking I described was only limited to writing, but it's also something I've done in practice before smartphones, in particular on a Sony Ericsson K800i. This was possible because of good-quality keyboard (and joystick), and good UI decisions. I don't know if they put an actual soft-realtime OS in there (I suspect so), but all the UI delays were always the same - so I naturally memorized sequences like "unlock, menu, texting, wait ~0.5 second for it to load, open thread, type in message, send". It probably takes teenage-level or business-professional-level of use to get that kind of muscle memory, though. > Instead of dividing up the picture into rectangles, divide it up into triangles. (...) This will prevent any banding or that ugly blockiness. Is the insight here that a triangle-based subdivision like this will make areas of detail not align on horizontal/vertical lines, unless the underlying image has its details aligned on a band? Or am I misunderstanding this?
    - 5y ago