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Pre-Grant Publication Number: 20080189562

Reducing power usage in a software application

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Discussion (9)

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Merlin Avery (about 1 month ago)

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/vista/VGPowerMonitor.aspx

An article submitted in 2006 that outlines a method of recieving notification when power settings change on the system in order to alter the path of execution in order to take advantage of this notification.

This request seems vague as it does not specify any low-level information about how the hardware/software integration works. As previously stated notifications from power level monitors has existed for some time in the computing world.

Christopher Wong (about 1 month ago)

Merlin, you should upload the article you're citing here as prior art. Anything that points in the general direction of the claimed invention is potentially relevant and would be useful to the examiner when this goes before the PTO.

Salil Gandhi (about 1 month ago)

It is a good idea and different from embedded systems, since it works on software resources and not hardware. The only issue is I do not find enough implementation details in this one. Like , how will the application switch to low power. Will need support from the application providers. Also , what if I am in between a change and the controller decides to switch the application in low functionality one. It seems that the user have very less control over deciding which functionality is available and which is not., or which application should move to a low functionality mode.

Villy Madsen (2 months ago)

Am I missing something ?? Reducing power consumption in applications in general is well known practice in embedded systems, and well documented in the data sheets for the ATMEL AVR series micro-controllers - and I assume others. So - I would suggest that the general process of reducing power consumption by mechanisms such as reducing clock frequency, going into a sleep state, powering down peripheral devices that are not in use is not new..(In fact this feature is already built into most PCs)

Matt Grady (2 months ago)

Villy, that is a good comment. To get this in front of the patent examiner, what you need to do next is upload prior art that supports what you are saying (Atmel datasheet?) and note which claims are anticipated by the prior art. I made the mistake in an earlier discussion on a different application of <not> uploading prior art. What I have learned since then about the peer-to-patent system is that only the prior art/research that people submit is considered by the patent examiners; the discussion threads are not part of what goes to the examiner.

Villy Madsen (2 months ago)

What does one do when the pertinent details are buried in a hundred pages of documentation. I have an application that I wrote for a micro-controller that pretends to be a light house - when it's dark, and then shuts down after some hours and waits until the next light/dark cycle.

No big deal - I guess my thought is that the whole approach is obvious for anyone writing an application that runs on a power (battery e.g.) constrained platform - that fact should be obvious based upon the idea that the controller has these power down features built into it..

How does one point this out to an examiner - who may not even have any experience in the field...

Claude Baudoin (2 months ago)

In the banking example, no credible claim is made that offering two operations instead of four would reduce the power consumption of this application. If the fact that two operations are unavailable disgusts some potential customers who turn away and don't use the system, then I can see how it might allow an ATM to go back to low-power mode, but surely that's not the scenario the authors are seriously considering. An invention has to be *useful* to be patentable, and this example is one in which the invention seems useless.

Claude Baudoin (2 months ago)

I don't understand what the authors mean by "switching an application to a low power path." For the application to change behavior (refresh a screen less often, offer fewer options, etc.) the application code has to be designed to test some condition and act differently as a consequence. You can't have a "controller" "tell" an application to switch to a "low power" mode if the application doesn't have any logic to do that, and doesn't query some condition itself. All an external "controller" could do, assuming it is running with the appropriate privileges, would be to kill or perhaps suspend a process. So I think there is a fundamentally flawed assumption here, or what am I missing?

Bradley Hertz (2 months ago)

could the application be a virtual power system, where a symbolic power level is reached by the system and tested logically?

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