Peer to Patent, Community Patent Review

Date	Title	Reviewer

12/30/07	Program published in 1987 which contains all elements of claim	Tom Evslin

DISCUSSION

Bruce Wade (4 months ago)

Kevin Killbride's mention of the Windows Explorer file copy progres bar is especially appropriate here. As a technical professional, I had opportunity to observe a 45 gigabyte file copy from one drive to another on the same machine using Windows Vista Home Basic. Total time was about 65-70 minutes. During that time, my friend and I passed the time adjusting the base process priority that was executing the copy of files, seeing if raising or lowering would affect the estimated copy time. We did determine that changing the priority of the process did not change the estimated time by any great amount, but running other programs on the machine had significant effects on the estimated time to complete the copy. I consider this patent to have been invalidated by considerable prior art available in many venues of computing for at least the last ten years.

Fulton Wilcox (4 months ago)

It appears that the essence of the proposed patent depends on 1) using a "baseline" machine to characterize a step-by-step software install in terms of wall clock time, recording both total elapsed time and elapsed time per step, and 2) subsequently using that baseline timeline information in a relativistic way to project how much progress other machines have made toward 100% completion of the install. For example, if the baseline machine consumed 10% of the entire baseline install time to complete step 1, the second machine would when completing step 1 be credited with having completing 10% of the install and having 90% to go. Naming this process "interpolation" seems less appropriate then "extrapolation." For example, assume that the baseline machine completed step 1 of a multi-step install in 5 minutes, with step 1 representing 10% of the total multi-step baseline install time of 50 minutes. If subsequently an install is undertaken on some customer's machine and that machine requires 10 minutes to complete step 1, it will be credited with having completed 10% of the install. Implicitly, the process described in this patent will extrapolate from step 1 experience on the customer's machine that the customer's machine will complete the remaining steps in twice the time as the baseline machine. The advantage of this relativistic process is that the software supplier can create one baseline using some particular machine, but then apply it to many other machines with varied performance characteristics. The potential weakness is that differences in machine configuration or environmental factors can interfere with the extrapolation process. For example, it may be that "step 1" is particularly I/O intensive (or compute intensive or load sensitive), and that the baseline machine and customer machines differ in respects that particularly apply to the early steps, in which case the linear extrapolation will suffer by being too optimisitic or pessimistic. Note that the process does not depend on any reference to customer machine performance – e.g. tracking number of I/O's per unit of time, CPU load, etc. Consequently, granting this patent would presumably not foreclose other sorts of techniques to forecast wall clock completion.

Kevin Kilbride (4 months ago)

In versions of Windows going back at least to 1998, the file manager employed a progress indicator to track copy operations. A plurality of files could be selected for each copy operation, rendering the resulting operation "multi-step" for the purposes of the instant patent's claims; moreover, the Windows progress indicator was and is time-based to such an extent that it not only displayed an incrementally-interpolated graphical bar, but also displayed a numerical estimate of the remaining time immediately under the bar, based on the simple calculation of dividing the total number of octets remaining to be transferred by the average rate of said data transfer. Various HTML browsing applications, including Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator, have also employed similar indicators prior to the filing of this patent. These systems used various quantums for updating their progress indicators, the most notable being fixed octet increments that can be found to correspond to the instant patent's broad claim of "points" in a "cumulative point baseline." In light of the above, it would appear the second independent claim (9) and its children are immediately invalidated by prior art. Since the first independent claim is a direct generalization of the second independent claim, it is automatically invalidated by contradiction of claim 9 (a computer is a signal bearing medium covered by the first claim). The third independent claim (17) is, likewise, not actually independent and is invalidated by same. Surely the patent examiner will reference something similar to the above. Reading garbage like this makes me pity the poor people who have to read this kind of nonsense for a living.

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