Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Michael H Tsang

Jacob Kappeler Oshins

Raman Chandrasekar

Tian Bai

William Hong Vong

Reed L Townsend

Steven P Dodge

Leroy Bertrand Keely, Jr

Doron J Holan

Bryan Douglas Scott

Barbee Eve Teasley

Adrian J Oney

Stephane Plante

Eric Justin Gould Bear

Olumuyiwa M Durojaiye

Eric I-Chao Chang

Grigory Borisovich Lyakhovitskiy

Tony Dwayne Pierce

Eric Chang

Sumit Mehrotra

Michael Patrick Hills

Andrew P Crick

Eliyas Yakub

Adam John Richardson

A self-encrypting drive allows finely grained control, i.e., the ability to create, protect, lock and unlock, of different volumes on the same drive. The different volumes enable multiple different operating systems to be booted, depending on the volume that is selected for booting.

Managing self-encrypting drives in decentralized environments

A software and/or hardware facility for inferring user context and delivering advertisements, such as coupons, using natural language and/or sentiment analysis is disclosed. The facility may infer context information based on a user's emotional state, attitude, needs, or intent from the user's interaction with or through a mobile device. The facility may then determine whether it is appropriate to deliver an advertisement to the user and select an advertisement for delivery. The facility may also determine an appropriate expiration time and/or discount amount for the advertisement.

Context based online advertising

The present technique provides a combined file space for files from multiple partner computing devices. An individual cache policy associated with each partner computing device determines the manner in which the files in the combined file space are filtered for the respective partner computing device. Files data that do not have content stored locally have metadata associated with the files stored locally in the combined file space.

Managing files on multiple computing devices

A virtual driver is enabled and a class driver is bypassed to provide at least one functionality different than that of the bypassed class driver. A filter driver is initialized in the stack of a class driver in order to bypass the class driver. The filter driver receives inputs associated with the input device and/or application emulating an input device and passes the input data to a virtual driver. The virtual driver provides data to an operating system for functionality that is at least partially different than that of the bypassed class driver.

Bypassing class drivers through virtual driver enablement

A method and system for correcting alignment and linearity errors in devices using a finger or stylus input device with a display device interactively coupled to a digitizer is disclosed. Touching intersections in a calibration grid on the display device may be performed to create a linearity map. Subsequently, detected stylus input is mapped to a sector in the linearity map, and resultant screen coordinates are calculated using ratios within a reference rectangle corresponding to the detected stylus input and the mapped sector.

Correction of alignment and linearity errors in a stylus input system

Aspects of the invention pertain to a processing device having a non-keyboard user interface. In an embodiment of the invention, a user makes a gesture indicating a request for a secured attention sequence, wherein the gesture is made without using a keyboard. The secured attention sequence is generated in response to the gesture. The gesture may include pressing a button on the device or pressing a combination of two buttons on the device. A secure login screen may be displayed as a result of generating the secured attention sequence. In an aspect of the invention, the generating of the secured attention sequence includes simulating the pressing of the Ctrl key, the Alt key and the delete key on a keyboard.

Method and apparatus for generating secured attention sequence

The present invention provides a systems, methods, and products for enhanced user navigation to compliment (but not necessarily replace) a computer keyboard and mouse by providing a robust navigation interface. The present invention may comprise: a minimally necessary group of commands; combining the functionality a set of at least two command calls into a single logical button; for a single button, prioritizing a set of command calls from first to last and then calling each until one is accepted; logically remapping commands to buttons for a navigational device coupled to a physically rotate-able display device; and mapping a substitute command to a logical button for when the button is engaged in a predetermined manner other than the primary manner in which the logical button is engaged (e.g., double-clicking, flicking, press-and-hold, etc.) so that a substitute command can in fact be issued, among others.

Systems and methods for interfacing with computer devices

A system that facilitates access to an SMBus is provided. The system includes a notification component that identifies an SMBus event and a driver that dispatches the SMBus event to an AML event handler. A method for SMBus event handling is also provided. The method includes receiving an SMBus event notification, identifying the SMBus event notification, dispatching the SMBus event notification to an AML event handler, and handling the SMBus event notification in AML code. Two new ACPI opcodes, which are a three parameter operation region read and a three parameter operation region write can be utilized in accordance with the present invention.

Employing three parameter buffer access in connection with SMBus notifications

Described is a fast boot mechanism that generally operates by persisting static data and/or code for a system component, and then providing the system component with access to the static data and/or code during a subsequent device boot. For example, the static data and/or code of one or more components may be restored from non-volatile memory to volatile memory, whereby subsequent reboots need not have the components re-compute their persisted static data, making subsequent reboots faster. A fast boot infrastructure may include an interface set, and provides first mechanism that persists static data and/or code for a system component, and a second mechanism that provides the system component with access to the static data and/or code. The fast boot infrastructure may also provide the component with a way to invalidate static data and/or code, along with a background mechanism that collects static data and/or code from the system component.

Fast booting an operating system from an off state

A tool that allows a user, such as a software developer, to create test data that can consistently be employed to simulate the operation of a hardware pen or stylus. Raw pen data, such as position coordinates, pen angle and pen properties, is captured. This data is then later injected into a system being tested in place of pen data from a device driver. The raw pen data may be captured through an application programming interface invoked by a host application. The captured data can then subsequently be injected through another application programming interface invoked by a host application, such as a software testing application for testing a variety of operations of another software application. Alternately, a stand-alone utility may be used for capturing and then injecting raw pen data.

Pen data capture and injection

An advanced configuration and power management system is described which supports an unload command by identifying those objects that are to be unloaded and, rather than simply attempting to delete the objects, detaches them from the namespace while keeping them in memory in a location accessible by the system. In this way, the system avoids the problem of trying to synchronize accesses to the objects, yet the objects not longer exist in the tree, so namespace collisions are avoided.

System and method for unloading namespace devices

A method and system for configuring and executing device drivers in a computer system. In a preferred embodiment, a device driver comprises a plurality of component drivers. Each component driver performs a function that may be used in accessing a device. The component drivers of a device driver are ordered from a top layer to a bottom layer. When accessing a device, the top layer component driver of the device driver is first invoked. Each component driver performs its function and invokes the next lower layer component driver to the bottom layer component driver, which interacts directly with the device. An operating system dynamically configures the device drivers at computer system startup. The operating system invokes each of a plurality of component drivers to determine based on device-specific information and configuration requirements of previously included component drivers whether the component driver should be selected to be included as a layer in a particular device driver. If selected, the component driver stores a reference to itself in a call-down table for the device driver and stores its configuration requirements with the unsatisfied configuration requirements of previously included component drivers. When accessing the device, if all configuration requirements for the device driver have been satisfied, the operating system first invokes the component driver referenced by the top reference in the call-down table. Each component driver in turn invokes the component driver referenced by the next lower reference in the call-down table.

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Bellevue, WA, United States of America

Michael H Tsang