Patent number RE40993 involves a system and method for recognizing touch typing under limited tactile feedback conditions. A system is disclosed for recognizing typing from typing transducers that provide the typist with only limited tactile feedback of key position. The system includes a typing decoder sensitive to the geometric pattern of a keystroke sequence as well as the distance between individual finger touches and nearby keys. The typing decoder hypothesizes plausible key sequences and compares their geometric pattern to the geometric pattern of corresponding finger touches. It may also hypothesize home row key locations for touches caused by hands resting on or near home row. The resulting pattern match metrics may be combined with character sequence transition probabilities from a spelling model. The typing decoder then chooses the hypothesis sequence with the best cumulative match metric and sends it as key codes or commands to a host computing device. The inventor is Carl Wayne Westerman.

Patent number RE41014 is for a system and method for preventing damage to media files within a digital camera device. It's for a system and method for preventing damage to media files within a digital camera comprise a power manager for detecting power failures, an interrupt handler for responsively incrementing a counter device and a removable memory driver for performing memory access operations, evaluating the counter device to determine whether a power failure has occurred during the memory access operation and for repeating the memory access operation whenever a power failure has occurred during the memory access operation. The inventor is Eric C. Anderson.

Patent number RE41010 involves a system for data transfer through an I/O device using a memory access controller that receives and stores indication of a data signal status. The invention indicates a method and system for transferring units of data between a computer memory and an external system in which a DMA controller stores and uses information from an I/O device interfacing with the external system to transfer data more efficiently. The inventor is Kevin M. Christiansen.

Patent number 7622950 is for a GPIO mux/dynamtic port configuration. Dynamically configurable routing logic coupled between physical I/O ports and special purpose I/O associated with functions within a panel ASIC is disclosed that provide different routing configurations between the physical I/O ports and the special purpose I/O. In one routing configuration, any special purpose output can be coupled to one or more physical I/O ports, providing flexibility to route any functional I/O to any physical I/O port. In a second routing configuration, any input signal on a physical I/O port can be coupled to one or more special purpose inputs. In a third routing configuration, the input signals on a number of physical I/O ports can be configured to independently assert a single special purpose input for interrupt triggering. The dynamically configurable nature of the routing logic allows routing to be changed on the fly. The inventors are Christoph Horst Krah and Richard James Reeve.

Patent number 7623077 involves antennas for compact wireless devices. Compact portable wireless devices and antennas for compact portable wireless devices are provided. The compact portable wireless device may be part of a piece of sports equipment. A compact portable wireless device may include a transceiver module that is used in communicating with equipment such as a handheld electronic device. An antenna for a compact portable wireless device can have a relatively small size while exhibiting high efficiency. A planar ground structure for the antenna may be formed from a circuit board on which integrated circuits have been mounted. A curved inverted-F resonating element may be attached to the ground structure. A battery may be provided to power the compact portable wireless device. The battery may be used as a parasitic antenna element. The inventors are Shu-Li Wang, Juan Zavala and Christopher David Prest.

Patent number 7623078 involves antenna for portable electronic device wireless communications adapter. Antennas are provided for portable electronic devices. A portable electronic device may have a port that receives a wireless communications adapter. The adapter may be used to provide wireless functionality for the portable electronic device. The adapter may contain a chip antenna that serves as an antenna resonating element. A printed circuit board within the adapter may contain conductor that has been patterned to form a ground plane for the antenna. The portable electronic device may have a conductive structure such as a housing portion. The conductive structure of the portable electronic device serves as a parasitic antenna element that improves antenna efficiency. The portable electronic device may be a handheld electronic device with music player functionality that communicates with a compact portable wireless device in a piece of sports equipment. The inventor is Shu-Li Wang.

Patent number 7623130 involves text rendering with improved command stream operations. A system, method, and computer program for high-speed, efficient text rendering are disclosed. In accordance with certain embodiments of the present invention, an image resource architecture is provided for optimal sub-image uploads to keep the glyph cache up to date. A glyph cache is divided into zones, or sub-caches, wherein requests for writing a glyph bitmap to the cache may be handled by destroying or clearing an entire zone. In accordance with other embodiments of the present invention, a highly efficient method of rendering is provided wherein commands are automatically combined and made into larger commands for the GPU. Alternatively, rather than performing a command stream flush upon each intersection, a texture cache flush may be implemented. All source glyph bitmaps may be placed into one texture. The inventor is John F. Burkey.

Patent number 7623667 is for an electronic device accessory with an ultrasonic tone generator. Electronic devices and accessories such as headsets for electronic devices are provided. A microphone may be included in an accessory to capture sound for an associated electronic device. Buttons and other user interfaces may be included in the accessories. An accessory may have an audio plug that connects to a mating audio jack in an electronic device, thereby establishing a wired communications link between the accessory and the electronic device. The electronic device may include power supply circuitry for applying bias voltages to the accessory. The bias voltages may bias a microphone and may adjust settings in the accessory such as settings related to operating modes. User input information may be conveyed between the accessory and the electronic device using ultrasonic tone transmission. The electronic device may also gather input from the accessory using a voltage detector coupled to lines in the communications path. The inventors are Wendell B. Sander, Jeffrey Terlizzi, Douglas M. Farrar, Timothy Johnson, Brian Sander, Brian J. Conner and Jesse L. Dorogusker.

Patent number 7623740 is for an image scaling arrangement. Methods and system for transferring images between devices are disclosed. For example, differently scaled images by a host device may automatically and/or selectively be transferred to a media player for display. In turn, appropriately scaled images may be transferred automatically and/or selectively to another display device for example a TV, camera or printer. The selectivity may occur either at the host level or at the player level. The inventors are Greg Marriott, Jesse Boettcher, Thomas Dowdy, David Heller, Jeff Miller and Jeffrey L. Robbin.

Patent number 7624021 is for an universal container for audio data. Storing audio data encoded in any of a plurality of different audio encoding formats is enabled by parametrically defining the underlying format in which the audio data is encoded, in audio format and packet table chunks. A flag can be used to manage storage of the size of the audio data portion of the file, such that premature termination of an audio recording session does not result in an unreadable corrupted file. This capability can be enabled by initially setting the flag to a value that does not correspond to a valid audio data size and that indicates that the last chunk in the file contains the audio data. State information for the audio data, to effectively denote a version of the file, and a dependency indicator for dependent metadata, may be maintained, where the dependency indicator indicates the state of the audio data on which the metadata is dependent. The inventors are William G. Stewart, James E. McCartney and Douglas S. Wyatt.

Patent number 7624163 involves automatic configuration generation for a distributed computing environment. A method and system for configuring information for a distributed computing environment is provided. The method and system comprises providing a job containing a list of tasks to a controller, the tasks including a bootstrap tool and configuration information related to the computer network. The method and system also comprises providing a task to each of a plurality of agents on the distributed computer network, each task being based on one of the tasks of the job. The method and system further comprises executing code by each of the plurality of agents based upon the tasks process, wherein the code provides configuration information for a master process and a plurality of slave processes within the distributed computer network.The present invention allows processes run on a distributed set of computers to be provided with appropriate configuration files without requiring the master node to pre-generate those files ahead of time. Specifically, the invention generates the configuration files on the computers that will host the processes. A special bootstrap tool is run on each machine. This tool provides a unique identifier to each process. Each machine running a slave process sends the master process its address, and the master returns a port number. The inventor is David A. Kramer.

Patent number 7624235 involves cache used as both cache and a staging buffer. In one embodiment of the invention, a cache comprises a data memory comprising a plurality of data entries, each data entry having capacity to store a cache block of data, and a cache control unit coupled to the data memory. The cache control unit is configured to dynamically allocate a given data entry in the data memory to store a cache block being cached or to store data that is not being cache but is being staged for retransmission on an interface to which the cache is coupled. The inventors are Ruchi Wadhawan, Jason M. Kassoff and George Kong Yiu.

Patent number 7624251 is for instructions for efficiently accessing unaligned partial vectors. One embodiment of the invention provides a processor that is configured to execute load-swapped-partial instructions. An instruction fetch unit within the processor is configured to fetch the load-swapped-partial instruction to be executed. Note that the load-swapped-partial instruction specifies a source address in a memory, which is possibly an unaligned address. Furthermore, an execution unit within the processor is configured to execute the load-swapped-partial instruction. This involves loading a partial-vector-sized datum from a naturally-aligned memory region encompassing the source address. While loading the partial-vector-sized datum, bytes of the partial-vector-sized datum are rotated to cause the byte at the specified source address to reside at the least-significant byte position within the partial-vector-sized datum for a little-endian memory transaction, or to cause the byte to be positioned at the most-significant byte position within the partial-vector-sized datum for a big-endian memory transaction. The inventors are Jeffry E. Gonion and Kieth E. Diefendorff.

Patent number D604729 is for the design of an electronic device (the iPod nano). The inventors are Bartley K. Andre, Daniel J. Coster, Daniele De Iuliis, Evans Hankey, Richard P. Howarth, Jonathan P. Ive, Robert Duncan Kerr, Shin Nishibori, Matthew Dean Rohrbach, Peter Russell-Clark, Douglas B. Satzger, Christopher J. Stringer, Eugene Antony Whang and Rico Zorkendorfer.

Patent number D604733 is for the ornamental design of a monitor (Apple's Cinema Display). The inventors are the same as those above.

Patent number D604736 is for the ornamental design of a keyboard. The inventors are the same as those above.

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