12 Dec
2002
12 Dec
'02
1:32 p.m.
On Tue, Nov 12 2002 at 10:17:01am -0500, Paul Davis wrote:
i've read the patent.
its innovation comes from applying a pre-existing technique
(read-ahead buffering) to a new software niche. the basic idea of "i
have this data on disk and i can't read it fast enough when i really
need to, so i should do read-ahead and cache it so that its ready to
go" is a common computer programming technique. they took that basic
idea, wrapped it up in patent language that restricts it to a specific
problem domain (playback of audio data in response to triggers), and
filed.
How about a (possibly diskless) computer-based sampler that takes it
samples from a network server? We just open a couple of TCP connections to
the server to retrieve the sample data from it. Obviously, we need to
pre-cache this data since it comes from the network. Voila'! Obviously,
just like X, the server and the client may share the same machine.
Does the patent cover this (i.e., does it cover *any* kind of audio
pre-caching) or is this a sufficiently different idea?
See ya,
Nelson