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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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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!
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
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?
Yup, definitely there in my copy of J++ 6.0
;-)
yeah, I know. J++ 6.0. I feel suitably ashamed, thank you.
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
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."
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.
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.
"It's not like this going to show up in a shipping product"
Are YOU crazy? "TODO" items must be like 98% of their code base. Here is a sample of their kernel that I yanked off the internet:
int main(){
TODO: WinFS
TODO: Trusted Computing
TODO: Network Security
TODO: Usable Kernel
bsod();
exit(-1);
}
"I am a patient boy. I wait I wait I wait. My time is water down the drain..." Fugazi
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.
The thing about patents is, when one that gets granted that's obvious, everyone
:D
runs around saying "WELL THAT'S OBVIOUS!!"
Yeah, and if you were really as smart as the inventor, you'd have patented it
first.
Just like someone patented sucking dust through a bit of cloth, and now every
house has one of these wonder-machines. There was a patent filed not long back
in the UK for using two little bits of plastic to stop shopping bags slicing
your fingers off. Now *THAT* was obvious - hundreds of people were doing that
with bits of plastic and cartons for years. Patenting it makes it commercially
someone's, as opposed to "used only in your own personal little world"
There are housewives and street bums inventing shit that is *so* obvious, but
they're the only people who go and try. Why? Maybe they're less cynical than
us. When we think "it's obvious!!!!!", we tend to think it's been done before.
Maybe it hasn't. Maybe it has. You gotta check first
By the way, your comments in code are not at risk. Neither is your perl script.
Unless by chance you had them all integrated into an IDE, which automatically
detected that you were typing a TODO comment, and added it to a pretty GUI list,
let you jump to the code in question, and so on, in real time. And then you
tried to sell it.
The Eclipse method may not even be at risk, since the patent MS have filed is
quite rightly quite specific in it's application, and does a lot of things
Eclipse does not.
Neko
--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.
Yeah, and if you were really as smart as the inventor, you'd have patented it first.
I figure that if I can (and did) come with it independently, then it must be obvious. The fact that the inventor chose to pursue a patent has no bearing on whether it is obvious or not.
This is not a case of hearing about an idea and saying "Oh that's obvious". This is a case of lot's of people (not just me) saying "I've been doing that for years."
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
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.
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.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
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...