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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."
I haven't read the patent (it is Slashdot after all), but the Eclipse development environment does this.
...unless you generate it from comments in your source code. ;)
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// 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?
3. Sue itself!
A beuracracy of legalities to work through before your project can ever be put in the public domain and Microsoft sueing people who bring us OSS.
Navigating all this will disuade a lot of potential help, and will only stifile Microsoft's competitors.
I can't be the only one seeing this coming.
~ Jon
Microsoft's latest patents:
It's a lot like submitting a story for slashdot, but easier, and way more double posts
"There is no spoon." - The Matrix
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?
There you have it folks. Patent infringment in one line.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Will it ever end? Funny that they get a patent on something I've been doing for 20+ years... I've always made it habit to use #TODO: in my comments for my code for pending things or things that need to be redone, then have a shell script parse my code for the comments and email them to me weekly prior to status meetings, etc. I wonder if any of these will count as "prior art" or its counterpart to fighting this atrocity?
Microsoft just patented the use of grep.
grep -r TODO * > tasklist
hopefully they won't catch me, this post infringes.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
This is another news post that throws crap into the face of the public. I could write the whole day comments like this and never be off-topic.
Remember our tea-throwing ancenstors. Corporations, governments cannot, must not control the people. This is another disgusting move to get to own each and every aspect of the peoples lives.
Remember the phrase "divide et impera" - it's used again one fringe minority each time. "No one cares about Microsoft but the zealots", "No one cares about civil liberties but the conspiracy nutcases", "No one cares about media consolidation but the art freaks", "No one cares about the environment but the rabid tree huggers", "No one can think $something but $fringe/criminal/outcastgroup_X"
Stop being indifferent about it. "First they came for the jews, then for them and for them and last for me", you remember that poem.
Ever asked why no one in Germany resisted Hitler? They always thought "it's not gonna be THAT worse, calm down!". They didn't believe the thing about Auschwitz even if they saw it afterwards.
The second page of the linked article in the parent explains that this might even be technology that Borland did give Microsoft from the Delphi stuff.
I searched for your prior in comp.emacs.* on google groups but all I could find was this.
1999 article discussing the ToDo features in Delphi 5:
Here you go.... From this page: http://www.marcocantu.com/papers/face5.htm
"The ToDo List is a great tool for tracking the progress of a single person or an entire team in developing and debugging a project. The ToDo Items window automatically scans the source code of the entire project, looking for ToDo comments and the project's special ToDo file. Its visual support is outstanding. I'm using the list frequently with my projects."
So as we have all been reading Eclipse has been doing this since November 2001. Well, sorry! The Microsfot patent was filed on March 6, 2000. Does this mean we will see a lawsuit from Microsoft against Eclipse? Or perhaps forcing Eclipse to license that "feature"?
Hmmm.
Good grief. I think we need to institute some kind of reasonable editorial policy here. As is so often the case in articles about Microsoft or patents, the lead is patently misleading.
//TODO *.c". It's about a smart IDE offering a useful and creative way of managing tasks. Should software processes be patentable? Maybe not. Are they? Yes. Does this infringe on prior art? Not really. So might this be a patentable software process? Sure looks like it.
The patent is on a relatively complex system that I've never seen or heard of before. It's about an IDE tool that dynamically identifies syntax errors and TODO comments throughout your code, associates them with named tasks and gives them priorities.
It is not about the little notebook you keep next to your computer, nor about running "grep
If anyone of you out there have been working on this kind of thing for emacs or Eclipse 5 years ago, I suggest you speak up now...
I don't think we'll be hearing much.
TO-DO LIST UPDATED:
3. Patent Profit*
4. Rule the world**
NOTE:
*It will be unprofitable to try to make profit for anyone else than MS. Injunction, will be deposited as soon as you try to make money.
**Patent the world if required.
In 1998-9 I created a system that would automatically update the company's bug database (arguably a TODO list) whenever a developer checked in code with the proper comments inserted. It was obvious to me, and it's been obvious to thousands of developers for many years.
Sigh.
Just waiting for someone to patent the concept of Prior Art itself.
A patent is a description of an invention. It covers the WHOLE invention, and the
requirement of the patent office is that the description of the invention is very
very specific.
Microsoft's "double click" patent you all keep going on about does NOT patent
the double click. It patents differentiating between different lengths of time
holding a button on a PDA, in order to start different applications or
application methods - for the sole purpose of reducing the need for 100 buttons
on devices with crap input and no screen estate.
That they mentioned the double click does not mean they patented it. They may
have patented the use of the double click when combined with time-based
selection of the application to be launched, but that is FAR from the same
thing. And as far as I know - hasn't been done on any system anyway. Personally
I think it'd be rather unwieldy which probably explains why nobody did it
What THIS new patent covers is, and if you go PAST the f**king summary and
actually read the PATENT:
In an IDE (interactive!), adding
automatically, and in real-time, added to a task list. When comments are removed
or the task is clicked off on the GUI (and possibly in combination with revision
control) you can see what stuff has been done and has not been done. In real
time. From an IDE.
Note that manually running "grep" does not act in real time as you type, display
it in an IDE or generally do anything listed in the patent.
It does not patent TODO comments merely because of their mention. Nor is it
patenting any other COMPONENT of the patented methods. Just the methods themselves
when brought to a whole.
It was also filed in 2000. People are whining that Eclipse is prior art. Sorry,
but Eclipse came about 18 months after the patent was filed.
The next time I read a "Microsoft patents wiping ass with soft paper" story on
Slashdot, remind me to explain this again. I'm sure I'll have to, because the
amount of goddamned idiots here who can't or don't read past the headline (and
that includes you, story submitter and mr. moderator) and jump to conclusions
is incredible.
Before we get started on this whole patent argument: yeah I think Amazon's
one-click shopping thing is a bit rich. But that's different, it's a feature we
can all remember using since the dark ages when cookies first arrived, the
current batch of MS patents are actually quite original thinking from people,
and generally well thought-out well-defendable inventions.
Neko
The topic seems a little alarmist concerning patenting #TODOs in source code. After reading the article, it doesn't seem that outrageous of a patent. Putting code/greps in to find TODO's and saving them off is trivia. Going the extra mile and cataloging them, managing them and "removing after the task has been completed" is complex and a little ingenious . While I appreciate the article, who ever posted this to slashdot should have summarized it without all this chicken little tactics.
We all know development at microsoft has stopped for IE, Longhorn is not comming along, we know MS market-share is falling, and recent
With all that cash lying around, and 'doing business' gets you problems in the EU, it might be better to change from a 'software' business to a 'investment'-business...
Less hassle, less employees, less lawsuits..
To keep it in a
See here...
Task List Window
No, they were all conditioned and believed firmly they are being attacked and threatened by the Jewish minority. No kidding, they would have sworn it was them who began the aggression and could have counted a looong list what they had done to them. That it all was faked and made up by the regime to incite hate and to create a scapegoat would not have sprung to their minds. And yes, they believed their newspapers were still independent. They believed anti-semitism and the assault on neighboring Poland was a kind of revenge on those who attacked them.
And so many people believe it is the Arabs who started a kind of war with the US and that a war on terror or torturing them in concentration camps is fair "revenge" for something "the Arabs" (all 800 million of them?) had supposedly done.
Add to that the incarceration without lawyer or notice, torture, prison camps outside the borders (like many German camps back then, most of them were in former Poland!) media and population control, a "war on everything" and you're pretty close on what kind of state 1936's Germany was in.
Hey, be fair to Microsoft!
I'm all for the usual baiting of Micro$oft as the evil monopoly that they are but this one's legitimate.
I think anyone who ever installed a copy of Windows ME will agree that Microsoft need all the help they can when it comes to itemising the TODO list in their source code.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Doxygen http://www.doxygen.org tags can be used to do lists on TODO since 1997. A nice example can is http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/lists.html
If Dyson owned that patent, and a tornado destroyed the Dyson factory, would Dyson be able to sue for patent abuse?
click-clack, front and back. I'm not moving this car otherwise.
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.
FYI - you are now beginning to get a tase of the new Microsoft Linux strategy.
That is - patent the daylights out of everything, hopeing to catch, snag, and delay Linux somewhere along the way. (Well you didn't actually expect them to innovate did you?)
The next frontier in liberty - Project Libertopia
Not on political, pro-Linux grounds, but because the company is starting to look a little desparate. First was this article where MS announced they were significantly lengthening support periods for older software versions. This was a dramatic reversal of its previous practice of using strong-arm tactics to force corporate customers into frequent and regular upgrades.
Then there was this article, discussing how Microsoft has begun making changes to its previously onerous licensing terms in favor of its customers.
Now we've seen two patents in recent weeks which seem to be the overly-broad type normally associated with companies who are desparate to produce licensing revenue, and not real products.
Combine this with the fact they have been forced to delay much new product development because they must finally start focusing on security, and it all adds up to clear indications of bad times coming for them. (Of course, they have plenty of cash to tide them over for quite a long period.)
What they actually get their money for is issuing patents.
And they are proud of the fact that they're one of the few parts of government that is a revenue center.
And other parts of government are hungry for their revenue.
This is one of those cases where following the bottom line is going to get you the wrong result.
Tweet, tweet.
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
The patent is titled "Task list window for use in an integrated development environment" at the patent office. So, run your grep on other machine. Then, you will have a DISTRIBUTED, not INTEGRATED development environment. Do not show results in "window", but call it "virtual screen". Patent showing results in window, especially if you have a 30 years old prior art.
Or, use emacs. That's a platform, not IDE....
There you are, staring at me again.
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.
...that way all future non-MS applications would be bugfree for fear of infringing patents. :)
Suddenly no-one uses MS's bugged products anymore!
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
Last time I checked, http://www.nat.org/dashboard/ has been doing this for a very long time.. So this patent probably isn't legal.. http://www.nat.org/dashboard/fixme.php3 thats their automatically generated todo list.. So, I guess this patent wont last long...
In accordance with Godwins Law, i hereby declare this thread over.
And the l33t shall inherit the 34r7h.
or the buffer overflow
s/TODO/FIXME/g
This sed script to avoid this patent is released under the GPL.
Fellowship 9/11
I've seen programmers littering the code with initialed comments like "FIX ME [NAME]" and running the highly complex "grep" and "find" utilities under *nix and Windows for a couple decades.
The fact that someone formatted it in a pretty dialog box is about as innovative as changing the color of your shoelaces.
The fact that anyone would apply for such a patent just demonstrates how sad and pathetic the American legal system has become as it self-destructs on a diet of lawyers and political kickbacks feeding on the very businesses that used to drive the economy. It's a shame, really. Probably no more than 10-15 years before the nation starts looking to India or Poland for handouts.
OTOH, maybe we should worry. Broke bullies with guns tend to become muggers, not beggars.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
In defense of the beast, they've been getting hit with bad patent law suits worse than anyone.
To name a few from the last couple years:
There was the incredibly broad Eolas patent.
There was the burst patent.
There was the down right stupid DRM patent.
There were a couple hand held device patents.
There was the supposed "relational database" patent, which really offended me.
And others.
If I were getting sued anywhere near as much as they are, you better believe I would patent every stupid feature I came up with.
Yet, in most of these stupid patent cases that actually make it to court, they lose. And they keep losing.
Not that they can't afford it.
It's the principle, I guess.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
For AutoDoc references, Google search for:
autodoc source code todo
Also I (and others) emailed Microsoft about 10 years ago, asking them to add what sounds like the patented functionality to their C++ compiler. They were keen on the idea, but eventually it wasn't high enough priority to make the cut.
No way is this a recent Microsoft invention.
- Pete Austin
I don't think so:
Meme, Counter-meme
Borland has had this feature in Delphi since at least version 5. I don't use C++ Builder but I'm sure that it has a similar feature. This whole patent thing is out of control.
Meddle thou not in the affairs of Dragons, for thou art crunchy and with most anything.