Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Patents The Task List
theodp writes "'Better not get too fancy with your grocery list, now that Microsoft has patented a glorified form of the to-do list.' Issued Tuesday, the patent covers the use of a 'task list' generated from 'TODO' comments in source code."
// TODO: remove this line or face retribution
I seem to remember using the TODO list feature in Eclipse before it showed up in Visual Studio. Am I wrong?
Sigs cause cancer.
This feature has been in Eclipse for I can recall 2.5 years (not sure on date). The program automatically notices TODO comments in the code and creates a list for you.
What the hell is M$ thinking here?
So when did eclipse do it?
We just need to beat 2000 (when the patent was filed)
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
I'm too young for punch cards however my folks aren't. My father just let me know he has prior art. I'm sitting here with a very dusty item processing program on punch cards. On the cards themselves comments are written about things to be added and depricated. So where do I mail this 10lb stack of yellow cards?
What could possibly go wrong?
I created this sort of system in Hypercard for a massive stack development project. With abotu 50,000 lines of script in hundreds of stakc object, finding "TODO"s was a real pain so I made my own search & task list tool. A search tool on a card for developers found todo tokens in the stack's scripts and listed them for me. Double clicking a list item took me to the item. The thing also had a visitation counter so I could see which items I'd done.
The little tool was actually more versatile than the Microsoft system because I could search, list, and visit on any token (it search scripts for a string) - great for finding all the places that used a certain variable or accessed a particular stack feature. It also had a pull-down list for sorting the "task list" in several different ways. Other tools let me quickly visit "Next" and "Previous" or cull the list by deleting task list items that met different criteria.
The only thing different from my stack search tool and the patent is that my little tool did not change the script code in response to anything. But I suspect that someone with "ordinary skill in the art" could easily have do that.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
> Will it ever end?
Naah man, it's just beginning. I'm surprised Microsoft has taken so long to get on the case.
After a year or so more of this and we'll be ready for phase 2 - loads of legal action on patents (and not just in the software industry - I've seen cosmetics companies claim on huge posters that they patent n things a week).
Perhaps then there'll be a change in the law?
No, it IS the fault of ms, too. To use your analogy, I could go and rape someone on an island not governed by law. Nevermind her citizenship on another land, right?
That ms has an army of purportedly non-stupid (however arrogant or greedy) lawyers says they surely must come to a consensus that it's ultimately a toss-up, a grab bag. So, why not go for it, right? They're so voracious a bunch of ogres that they must not have bothered looking for prior art.
One problem with the patent law is that a broad enough, baseless, yet awarded patent could cause untold grief and stop-development/stop-ship out of fear that ms will come along and demand royalties or outright cessation of work.
Yes, the blame goes to the USPTO for upholding questionable practices or rule/regulations, but the business or individual filing when said filing is specious or warrantless at best also shares part of the fault.
No, microsoft is NOT off the hook, not by a longshot.
(Lower-casing/deprecation of microsoft (aka microshaft's) name is intentional, irreversible, and enduring. I guess they'll go and get a patent on forcing the proper-casing of electronic representation of corporate and other propernames in any electronic medium, whether search engine, home computer or PDA or cell phone, or LED signage... Sheesh)
Give us a break, USPTO/desperate/frivolous patent filers.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I am unsure if their claim is correct but, even if it is, it should have been thrown out as a totally obvious extension to routine, long standing software development methodologies.
Borland Delphi had this feature in version 5, which was released 1999, and was definitely in use by October of that year.
No, not quite.....
3. Sue everyone else.
This is what they're up to. I've been pondering what it was that they've been doing over the past year or so with all these settlements of lawsuits, and now we see all these patents being granted -- they're going to bombard the USPTO in patent applications hoping that given the sad state of affairs there that a fair amount like this will be granted, regardless of any prior art.
Then, once a critical mass of patents have been built, they'll bury the US legal system and competitors in so much paperwork for patent infringement that neither the courts nor the defendant parties will be able to react. With patents in hand (legit or not), there's little that the courts can do to them for bringing frivolous lawsuits, and the people being sued won't be able to keep up with the sheer amount of litigation in either time or cost.
Then, once a sufficient amount of patent lawsuit success is obtained and precedents are set, they launch the blitzkrieg against IBM. What better way to fight a patent war than to have your own arsenal of battle-tested patents.
And while all this is going on, they'll be able to do just about whatever the heck they want, a la the bully days of the 90's. Gobble up companies, steal ideas, squelch OSS innovation due to FUD over whether or not a given product is free of proprietary code....it all makes sense....
Damn....it's just one of those things that is so obvious and so simple, yet so well hidden. It may be worth doing a lookup of pending patents with the USPTO to see what's coming up -- I'm guessing the backlog from Redmond is substantial.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
It will be even more interesting when all of Gnome is implemented with Mono.
.NET compatible libraries, and Miguel doesn't really care about those.
When will that be? References, please?
The GNOME project is not Miguel de Icaza, and Miguel isn't the GNOME project, and there are no current plans to junk the C code base and replace it with Mono.
Miguel thinks there is so much prior art that Microsoft cannot shut down Mono. At worst MS can wall off the
Maybe I'm the only one who finds it ironic that a desktop environment founded because the KDE license wasn't free enough is falling over themselves to implement Microsoft technology.
GNOME isn't Miguel, etc. And Mono is a free implementation of some Microsoft ideas.
If you are right, and Miguel is wrong, then yes Mono is a huge mistake. Obviously Miguel doesn't agree with you.
Given that Miguel can point to prior art dating back to the UCSD P-System and maybe older, it's not clear to me that you are right and he's wrong. Microsoft could sue, of course, but it's not clear to me that they would win.
See also the FAQ:
http://www.go-mono.com/faq.html#patents
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
You know, there must an Emacs macro that does this - probably from the 80s.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
It's not quite that obvious. That's why nobody's done it. It's actually useful, so if it was obvious, you can imagine somebody would have done it.
Judging from your analogy: "putting a bunch of Post-Its in a book to come back later for review", I think you still misunderstand it.
It's more like the book intelligently analyzing itself, identifying where you'd probably like to put post-its, doing so itself, and then removing them when you don't need them anymore.
Granted, my description doesn't make it much clearer, but what the patent actually covers is relatively innovative and unobvious. Everything you currently do to manage tasks (which I assume are obvious things) you can continue doing. This just proposes a previously undocumented and unimplemented way to do it.
The real problem with most software patents isn't that they're obvious. It's that software technology is developing at an astounding place, but by granting patents to companies that abuse and mismanage them, exceedingly useful innovations don't get wide enough dispersion fast enough. Good patents are held onto for so long, or have licenses that are priced so high that further innovations that could be based on them don't have enough chance to develop. Ultimately, this means that software progress may be hindered by patents, at least until it slows down.
Generally speaking, patent rights provide a valuable incentive for investment into creative research and development. However, it seems that in very-fast-growing industries, they may impede overall industry development.
Exactly! I've been doing that with grep since Borland packaged it with their C compiler, which was before Windows 3.1 came out. I haven't read the patent, but since patents apply to the concept, not the copyrighted code itself, I'd say there's a good chance that this is prior art.
Open Standards Portal
A patent a day?
At that rate surely IBM (and/or others) have patents for just about everything MS are trying to patent... or for most components of the patents.....
Is "somebody else patented that before you did" a valid argument in patent law?
IBM won't enter into it unless MS are stupid enough to take them on directly, but the little people MS are using as a leg-up for their argument might just be able to say "your patent is just the combination of all these patents, all owned by other people" - which might remove any argument they can throw at you. (obligatory: IANAL)
All that remains is finding time to find all the necessary patents. Perhaps this is a good open project: looking up the patents that cover stuff MS has patents for/is patenting. Make the info available on a web site so anyone under threat has a ready-reference of defenses, and cases they hae been successfully used in. People will still get dragged into court, but it will only take them an hour to do the research, rather than possible years.
Who knows, maybe one day there will be a ruling of "invalid as listed on the Many Silly PATENTS web site - mspatents.net"
To the poster: I agree that many of the MS patents that have been popping up as front page news on Slashdot are ridiculous at face value. Whether that is because they are really so ludicrous, or because the details of a 100+ page patent can't be bioled down to a 1 paragraph summary by one of Microsoft's opponents, I can't say (because I am too lazy to read the stinkin' article). Perhaps it is a 50/50 split. Anyway, this patent doesn't look ludicrous to me from the summary. MS didn't patent a grocery list. They patented the autogeneration of coding task lists based on 'TODO:' comments in the code. This doesn't seem like a glaringly obvious idea to me, and I'm not aware of any prior art. If you are, or it seems glaringly obvious to you, speak up. But don't overgeneralize the patent just to make it sound overly ridiculous - that delegitamizes your argument.
---
WARNING:Slashdot karma not redeemable in the afterlife.
Delphi 5 had that feature in it. I know 4 was 1998, not sure of 5's release date, and I'm too lazy to look it up.
I use both. The eclipse development environment got this feature WELL after the dot net betas had it. However, I think they both cloned it from NetBeans...
I hate to point out the obvious, but this is a lot older than Eclipse or NetBeans. I don't know what it's called where you're from, but my people call it "grep".
Of course, our grep is a generalized tool, so not only can we build lists of "TODO" comments, we can hunt down "FIXME" and even "This is an ugly hack" and "I am so ashamed of this".
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
What's even scarier. Not only does IBM have a massive patent portfolio... But, since the antitrust trial in the early '80s, they never, ever abuse them. They know just how much damage attracting the government's attention and earning the ill will of the techies can cause. So instead, they take the simplest, most direct road to success. They play fair.
I can't be the only person who uses #WARNING statements in his code to do just that, create a task list.
My name fits again.
I had enough of such worthless patents. Whenever one thinks of
a simple obvious idea, one is forced to think "is this patented already?".
What a waste of time!
Here's an idea:
- a independent patent-rating site
(cross-linked to various gov patent sites worldwide)
- free membership
- members rate patents
- not all patents to be rated. reasons to rate a patent could be outragiousness, and history of patent abuse by patent holder
- members belong to various 'groups' which have their own
(enforceable) philosophy on admitting members, and rating patents
- patents ranked by 'patent worthiness rating' (as ranked by group you subscribe to)
- corporations ranked by 'patent abuse ranking' (as ranked by group you subscribe to)
- members to a 'default group' that (hopefully) would rate
the RSA 'PK crypto' patent valid, but the Eolas 'ActiveX' one invalid.
- maybe a federation of such sites internationally
I'd LOVE to see companies I buy things from, 'utilize' the patent system.
That's an awsome idea. I think we should setup a fund to create dumb patents to piss off the original holder. How about a utility patent for a method to shorten the TODO list? We can call this a WORK patent. Seriously, let's patent WORK as a way to decrease teh size of the TODO list patent.
I think you're wrong.
The point is, if Microsoft can patent things like the double click (its actually rather more specific than that), and this automated TODO list, then so can NPCs like EOLAS. Comparing EOLAS to microsoft quickly leads us to one being a parasitic swarm of lawyers looking to get rich of sueing companies that invest in R+D, and the other, rather surprisingly, is Microsoft, who have aparently never filed a patent violation case.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
USPTO takes anything from anywhere. They even have a team of translators to translate things into english if they look relevant.