Patents

How much ink is really left in that cartridge?

Judi Hasson — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 14:37:19 -0500

As IT executives look for ways to tighten their belts, one item they may be overlooking is the cost of regularly replacing their printing cartridges. PCWorld decided to test cartridges and found what you have already been suspecting: Many manufacturer-branded and third-party vendor cartridges leave a vast amount of ink unused when they read empty. In some cases, the test found that some models reported ink cartridges as being empty when they had as much as 40 percent of the ink left in them.

There are plenty of reasons not to drain ink completely out of the cartridge, some experts say.

"Many inks, if they run dry, can cause significant damage to the printer," says Brian Hilton, a senior staff engineer at the Rochester Institute of Technology who holds 29 inkjet patents. "You always want to leave a buffer in the tank so that the printer never runs dry. There should always be a factor of safety included."

Other experts say that the quantity of leftover ink is often very small. "Printers have generally become more efficient over the years," says Andy Lippman, a printing analyst with Lyra Research. "In the past, you might have seen 40 milliliters of ink in the black cartridge. Today you're going to get the same amount of pages out of 7 or 8 milliliters."

There are plenty of opinions on this essential item to run any kind of office.

"I personally think that consumers are getting ripped off," says Steve Pociask, president of the American Consumer Institute, a nonprofit educational and research institute in Washington, D.C. Pociask recently coauthored a study on the cartridge market. "In some cases, we found that [the price of] the printer could be 1/8 of the total cost of printing," says Pociask. "Over the life of the printer--and by that I mean three years--you can easily spend $800 for the printer and ink."

For more on these test results:
- check out this PCWorld.com article

Microsoft: We are a 'mixed source' company

Paul Mah — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 12:05:27 -0400

Microsoft no longer believes it has to position itself as a proprietary software vendor against open source options. At a lunchtime interview, Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's top intellectual property lawyer, noted that Microsoft has released "plenty of stuffs" as open source. Similarly, a vendor like Red Hat also issues commercial licenses. As a result, the battle of open source solutions versus proprietary software is basically over. Gutierrez noted that, "increasingly in the future, we are all going to be 'mixed source.'"

You might be interested to know that Microsoft is currently defending about 50 patent cases right now--most of which are against companies that don't even make products related to the patents they hold.

For more:
- check out the CNET News article

Related Articles:
Microsoft news from FierceCIO

Microsoft patents 'page up' and 'page down'

Paul Mah — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 04:57:48 -0400

Microsoft was granted a patent on the ‘page up' and ‘page down' keystroke just a couple of weeks ago. As noted by ZDNet, US patent number 7,415,666 describes "a method and system in a document viewer for scrolling a substantially exact increment in a document, such as one page, regardless of whether the zoom is such that some, all or one page is currently being viewed." The patent was applied for by Microsoft in 2005, though I seem to remember seeing it on my first IBM-PC almost 15 years ago. Personally, I doubt Microsoft will be able to leverage this patent to milk any royalties. In all likelihood, the company is simply building up a war chest that it can use to mitigate patent litigation by other tech companies.

For more on this story:
- check out this ZDNet article

Top vendors form WiMAX patent alliance

Paul Mah — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 02:19:03 -0400

A group of six major vendors have announced the creation of a patent alliance to ensure that companies are able to access WiMAX technologies at predictable costs. The Open Patent Alliance (OPA) is made up of Cisco, Intel, Alcatel-Lucent, Clearwire, Samsung and Sprint. Another six to nine companies are expected to join the organization.

Companies interested in creating WiMAX equipment can approach the OPA directly, resulting in a "competitive and open intellectual property rights model." In turn, it is hoped that the WiMAX industry will be stimulated to create a healthy ecosystem. This way, it will be easier to reach the critical mass of equipment and users necessary for WiMAX to truly take-off.

For more the Open Patent Alliance:
- check out this CNET News.com article

Barracuda wants to buy Sourcefire

Paul Mah — Fri, 30 May 2008 07:21:43 -0400

Antispam appliance vendor Barracuda has revealed that it made a $186 million offer for Sourcefire. This is 13 percent more than the company's current stock price, though half of what it was worth a year ago. Founded by the creator of the well-known SNORT intrusion detection and prevention software, Sourcefire also owns the ClamAV open source antivirus project, which it acquired in August last year.

Barracuda leverages on ClamAV in its appliance products and it is not known if the offer is a direct result of the looming threat of litigation from competitor Trend Micro, which claims that ClamAV violates a patent it holds. In an open letter, Barracuda did note that it is "uniquely positioned to address and remedy" this situation.

For more on Barracuda's offer:
- check out this Network World article

Laptop batteries that won't die

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 06:59:58 -0500

Laptop batteries were never meant to die. But plenty of CIOs have a different kind of experience. Even when fully charged, a laptop battery might last for half the trip across the country, not even even a full non-stop flight. And plenty of executives know that carrying a spare makes for an awkward juggling experience on a crowded plane.

Now a professor at Stanford University has come up with a way of creating longer-life lithium batteries. Yi Cui, assistant professor of Materials Science and Engineering, has developed a way for batteries to produce 10 times the electricity that most batteries are able to do. And that results in as much as 20 hours of device power, nearly enough to fly from New York to Africa without changing batteries or halting your laptop work.

The technology is simple. Instead of using carbon inside a battery, silicon is used in the battery's anode. The silicon can hold much more lithium than carbon. Cui's battery also uses nanotechnology to increase capacity. Cui has already filed a patent, and he is considering the formation of a company that sells these batteries. As the world gets smaller, so does the technology that drives it around. We can only ask: What's coming next?

For more on charging batteries:
- Check out this CIO Magazine Article

Apple tablet confirmed by Asus?

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 06:59:54 -0500

Seems like we've been hearing rumors of a Multitouch-capable Mac since the day that the iPhone was revealed. And if history has taught us anything, it's that the most persistent Apple rumors usually have a ring of truth to them (iPhone, anyone?). So it's not too surprising that the once dormant Mac tablet rumor has again come to the fore. Crave UK claims to have the inside scoop on the top-secret device, provided by "friends" at Apple laptop contract manufacturer (and Eee PC vendor) Asus. Allegedly, "Asus is helping Apple build a Tablet PC" and the deets are as follows: "We checked back with our source at Asus on a different day and they confirmed that the Apple Tablet will not be based on existing Asus designs such as the R1. It will come from a completely new blueprint, possibly based on the patent Apple filed back in May 2005 [pictured above]. We're guessing it'll be based on Intel Core architecture, a tweaked version of Leopard, and have all the multi-touch, CoverFlow goodness we've seen in the iPhone and iPod touch." While that sounds great and all, one has to wonder whether Apple would really want to enter the floundering tablet PC market--especially this late in the game.

For more on the tablet rumors:
- see this Crave UK article

iPhone clones: Let the games begin

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 06:59:53 -0400

Sure, we've seen a number of convincing iPhone clones from shady OEMs in China but 2008 could see a deluge of iPhone-like devices from more familiar names, like Microsoft, Nokia and Asustek. Taiwanese OEM rag Digitimes reports that a number of manufacturers, including BenQ, Compal and Arima Communications are "aggressively developing iPhone-like products" that would launch in 2008. Supposedly, these new handsets would run on some variant of Windows Mobile (Windows Mobile eyeFone Edition?) and could boast some beefy specs like 3G and GPS. Additionally, Digitimes thinks that Nokia will launch its own Symbian-based iPhone ~~rip-off~~ killer early next year, which is said to look a lot like the suspiciously familiar prototype that the company showed off in August.

Meanwhile, in a little place called Redmond, Microsoft has been filing patents for...well, something that looks a lot like the iPhone. Microsoft's patent filing for "Extensible filtered lists for mobile device user interface" (seen above) looks to be a screen-by-screen copy of the iPhone. Is this the future version of Windows Mobile that all of those aforementioned OEMs plan to use? Is it the ZunePhone? Or is Microsoft simply attempting to patent the iPhone interface so that it can sue Apple? Only time will tell. One thing's for sure though: in the immortal words of Yoda, "Begun, this clone war has."

For more on the attack of the clones:
- see this Digitimes article
- this Engadget article on Nokia's device
- and this Gizmodo piece on Microsoft's recent patent filing

Hard drive shortage on the horizon?

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 06:59:58 -0400

Sure, you've heard it all before: manufacturing problems in an East Asian country could lead to a shortage of hard drives, take shelter in an underground bunker, etc. Well, this time around, it's a little different. Apparently, the International Trade Commission (ITC) has begun an investigation into the hard drive manufacturing/purchasing practices of Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell (i.e. every major drive vendor). The charge? That all five companies use technology that infringes on a patent held by California residents Steven and Mary Reiber. According to the couple, the sale of such drives in the U.S. violates section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930. But wait: there's more. Apparently "Section 337 of the Tariff Act bars the importation of products into the US that infringe on patents owned by others in the US." That means that any hard drives found to use the infringing tech might be banned from being imported into this country--and since the vast majority of hard drives used in the U.S. are manufactured overseas, that could spell some big trouble for little America. Could it really happen? Seems somewhat unlikely: As you may recall, the U.S. Court of Appeals stepped in to prevent a similar ruling on Qualcomm chips from crippling the wireless industry not too long ago. Still, if you feel like stocking up on hard drives and canned goods, go right ahead.

For more on the possible shortage:
- see this Ars Technica article

Judge orders Vonage to pay $69.5 million

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 06:59:58 -0400

There hasn't been too much news on the Vonage Deathwatch front lately but when it comes to the ailing VoIP service, no news is usually good news. Last we heard, the VoIP provider had bought itself a little more time with a temporary stay, though we all knew that that band-aid wouldn't keep the company from falling apart in the long term. Despite that fact, rumors swirled that Sprint--the next in line to sue Vonage--would simply scoop up the company for a song, in lieu of legal action. Well, so much for that rumor. In what might prove to be the killing blow, a Federal jury has ordered Vonage to "pay $69.5 million in damages for infringing on six telecommunications patents owned by competitor Sprint-Nextel." Additionally, Vonage must "pay a five-percent royalty on future revenues." Much like the Black Knight from that Monty Python movie, Vonage has vowed to fight on but let's be honest here: they're not fooling anyone. My advice? Do like old Kenny Rogers and know when to fold 'em.

For more on Vonage's plight:
- see this AP article