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Microsoft Patents Grouped Taskbar Buttons
I_am_Rambi writes "According to the US Patent office, patent #6,756,999 belongs to Microsoft. The patent this time is grouping taskbar icons processes. This is included in Windows XP, and some prior art in X. Looks like it was accepted two days ago."
Was the prior art in X prior to Windows XP's release and/or wide beta?
Cue the "We need to abolish the patent system" posts and just get it over with...
I think M$ should pantent mouse clicking. After all, they invented it.
... how long has this been present in other windowing systems?
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
Microsoft (as well as any other corp out there) patents everything they can. The real headline should be "USPO grants Patent to MS for $DUH_GUIFEATURE". That's who your pitchforks should be pointed at unless you'd like to point them at IBM, Apple, Palm, Sun....
"Derp de derp."
THERE IS prior art.
BeOS' Tracker had that in 1999 before anyone else. All windows/instances from the same application are showing grouped in the BeOS Deskbar, under the same sub-menu.
Grouping in the taskbar has to be one of the most annoying "Features" ever seen in a taskbar.
Get your politicans to sort it out.
This is getting really silly.
It seems the big difference is in the 'time threshold' part:
"The system organizes like application files and clusters the corresponding taskbar buttons and, upon reaching a threshold limit, creates and displays a group button that contains the like application files and removes the like taskbar buttons from the taskbar. Further, upon reaching a second threshold limit, the system ungroups the application taskbar buttons, displays them on the taskbar and removes the group button from the taskbar."
Big difference? Probably not, but enough for it to be 'new'...
Everyone knows Al Gore invented that. ;-)
Microsoft Patents a function common to multiple desktops which has been used for several years. Can they now sue any vendor who implements that function in the future ? how about current implementations?
GNOME did this before Microsoft did I seem to recall. The date of the Patent Application is 2001 - I do not know if GNOME did this then. I am surprised if the concept was not published prior to Microsoft's application though.
Web Sig: Eddy Currents
Yeah, well, somewhere are patents concerning Sarin gas, the Tacoma Narrows bridge and the Edsel.
--- Ban humanity.
You can patent putting similar tools together? Like cut, copy and paste in any application? Or backwards and forwards in a web browser? How about +, -, * and / in a calculator?
What next? Ford applying for and getting a patent on the side-by-side arrangement of foot pedals in a car? Or the standard gear-stick arrangement? How about patenting putting the speedometer and revmeter next to each other? Or the fuel, water and temperature gauges within a certain distance of one another.
The USPTO is crazy. I swear they'd let you patent the colour of the sky if you paid your processing fee.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I wonder if you can claim as prior art the languages that have words for "one", "two" and the word "many".
While there is probably prior art for this, you have to realize that the issue date in not what determines if the prior art is relevant. It is the invention date or original filing date, which in this case was back in April 2000.
For the BSOD and rebooting a computer will be announced shortly...
I guess theres always prior art in an independant variable.
But seriously, what?
I just know someone's going to tell me you can do it in Window Manager XYZ, and if I'd just googled it, I'd know that. But if not, then I could actually celebrate that I had an original idea for once and go eat a steak dinner. Or maybe I should just go eat steak anyways.
Look at how freaking many people they claim it took to come up with the idea of "grouping similar shit together".
Stoakley; Richard W. (Seattle, WA); Kurtz; James B. (Bellevue, WA); Springfield; James F. (Woodinville, WA); Green; Todd J. (Seattle, WA); Andrew; Suzan M. (Seattle, WA); Mann; Justin (Lake Forest, WA)
Kinda lets you know where your $300 bucks that they charge for Windows XP goes.
BTW, my grandpa had the same idea when he'd keep his roofing nails in one coffee can, and his finish nails in another coffee can. I wonder if I can get a patent for that.
Method and system for clustering and grouping construction nails...
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Yes, annoying as hell.
That's right. All your base.
If my name was on this patent, I would be embarrassed.
I suppose it's time for some civil disobedience.
When it came to civil rights, people had to be willing to go to jail, willing to pack the prisons, to bring decency to the law.
Now, perhaps, it's time to be willing to go to civil court to bring sanity to the law. Maybe it's time to simply ignore patents on which there is known prior art. It's certainly not going to be an easy decision to make, to risk lengthy and expensive court proceedings. But maybe letting the owners of ridiculous patents stuff the courts with enforcement cases is an appropriate way to prod Congress to action.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Nice grouping!
Either the patent office is going to have to suddenly get its head bashed in by the Clue Stick. Or we are all fucked. Proper fucked. Like the rabbit in Snatch.
Kinda lets you know where your $300 bucks that they charge for Windows XP goes.
Your bucks cost you three hundred dollars? I wasn't aware that XP would cost you three hundred dollars bucks. $300 I could believe, but not $300 bucks.
I keep waiting for a company to try to patent the idea of a front facing computer. I mean really with all the shit that they patent you think that they'd patent "the idea of putting things in the front"
The is the FIRST feature I turn off on any XP computer I encounter. I cannot think of a single more annoying feature than hiding all of the windows I really have under one thing, where I have to spend an inordinate amount of time reaching the icon, waiting for the list to appear, then hunting through the list.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I don't see any mention of time in your snippet. Sounds more like the thresholds involved are how many open windows there are for the app.
I already have a patent on the act of breathing air... You all owe me royalties!!
...one of my .sigs used to say, "One day, we'll find Microsoft has patented the alphabet and we'll find ourselves paying royalties every time we sit down at the keyboard."
Now I'm waiting to see if it's a prophesy.
Sure it may seem obvious now...but the first time you saw it, you probably said "oh, that's weird". Even if you had thought of it years before, not everyone did. And they still had a right to patent it since you didn't, and you didn't implement it.
I don't know about you guys, but that's one thing I always disable when I sit down at a fresh terminal... it's just too troublesome to have to click through it that way to get to the window I'm looking for - I think the OSX task bar makes so much more sense.... make it real tiny, but make it magnifiy a lot and a lot when my mouse moves over - no idea why the default settings don't present it that way...
anyway, what i do when i have too many things on my task bar is to move it to the right instead of leaving it at the bottom - in that way i can squeeze more buttons in and still read some of the text.
My KDE taskbar does exactly what the patent describes ...
When I have only three or four Eterms open, they're buttoned separately, when I have a dozen, they're collapsed into the same button, with a dropdown for individual access.
Quick wafting zephyrs vex bold Jim
on patenting a patent that describes patenting a patent that has been patented by patenting a patent. Don't cry prior art either, because I've patented the patent on patenting a pantent on patenting a patent of refusing claims prior art, and I'll sue you!
Did KDE do it before 1999 though. Since it is impossible to prove obviousness, it requires prior art before 1999. Oh, and you better hope that MS doesn't get your prior art thrown out on a technicality even if it is valid, which is why you need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers even if you are right.
Maybe the USPTO simply does not 'scale' anymore? What is the average time to get a patent approved, and does this play a significant role in the current state of affairs?
The revolution will not be televised.
Oh shit, I am a poor college student... I have no way to pay you. Guess I'll have to stop brea..asdfjklsaj;dfsfvz.vsadf...fvaf
the process of breathing air, and charge everyone $699 for rights to use my IP!!!
It makes sense (Well, a Windows kind of sense) for Windows to have this because by default it doesn't have workspaces (yet), though that's in TweakUI I heard. They can keep their grouped tasks, I will give it up heartily.
Don't be a Karma Whore. Post AC. SCORE: -1 Troll. Does this mean I'm a bad troll or a good troll?
My bed room,
Every since I was a young child (25 odd years ago), i've been scattering things on the floor, and then when there's too many things I tity them up into groups, only to be scattered again when I have more space, ore some of them have been put away properly.
When I worked in a resturant we used to group meal tickets when there wasn't enough space on the 'task bar'
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
1. who cares?
2. Educate the people in the patent office.
3. Nuke the patent office.
4. Nuke Redmond.
5. Bend over and take it.
Ok now, 3 and 4 will get you charged with terrorism, not good. 5 is never good. 1 is what the majority will say. 2 is a great idea, but we are talking about Govt. employees, if they were really trainable they might have areal job.
I guess it's hopeless.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
My KDE apps most used are Konqueror and Konsole.
Why have grouped processes when a single Konsole gives me a as many active screens as I need (granted some people may need to see ALL at once) and Konqueror gives me tabbed browsing..
in my world, grouped icons are unnecessary.
"I split coffee all over my wife's nightie
The 100th time I saw it, I still said "What the hell?"
I really, really, really hate that "feature." It's a dumb idea which doesn't make good UI sense. Well, unless you don't have multiple workspaces. But that's no excuse for windows xp users, because you can use TweakUI to add multiple workspaces.
the Us patent office will allow a porn com[any to patent the idea of sex. Maybe a church will get patent on the bible. Hey, I think I'll apply for a patent on moving the mouse to the left.
This becomes somewhat more difficult if you're using an iBook.
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
You just don't use multiple workspaces like the rest of us do.
"Microsoft patents self"
Today Microsoft won a patent for, "a company with very few innovations, an insecure system, and a surprisngly decent, but very expensive office platform, who makes loads of money by killing off competetion and filing vague patents, such as this"
Would there be prior art?
When a case such as this is won, and the patent is revoked, is there any funding that is returned to the side that won to recover litigation costs?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It always helps to actually read the claims:
Claim 1 simply says that if for example you have a button for a word file x.doc (handled by winword.exe) and the system receives a request to create a button for y.doc it will figure out that x.doc and y.doc are both handled by winword.exe and place the button for y.doc adjacent to the x.doc button. That's all there is to it!
Couple corrections to other postings
- you do not claim prior art (it's not yours, is it) you disclose your knolwedge of prior art; that helps the examiner figure out the diffs
- the mentioned threshold talks about available space; not how much time has passed
Lastly, the innovation seems to be in the method for deciding how to arrange the buttons (claim 1)
all other claims are based on that method. Claims 2 & 3 (grouping) are novel when implemented using the method of claim 1.
By definition if the patent has been granted, than there is no prior art that is the same as the invention. To the extent that another system achieves a similar objective, it must be using a diffenrent method.
take a crap. You want to take a crap - I've got the patent baby. You want to use the toilet? Better be ready to pay up, buddy. No dolla, no crappa. I hope you have some stain resistant underwear. Next week, get ready to hold your bladder...
"What is the average time to get a patent approved,"
... they often take 2 years to examine your invention on the merits.
It mostly depends on the field of art. Because there has been a huge boom in computer patents, there is a backlog in that department
Once the patent is examined on the merits, the examiner often makes rejections, to which the applicant answers with arguments/ammendments, and that may repreat several times, until the examiner agrees on a version of the application that is patentable. That part may take several years as well.
Three years is not really a long time to get a patent. I have seen some patents that have been languishing for 5 years. And sometimes the delay is not due to the PTO, rather it is the applicant's fault.
What can we Patent Today!
I just don't get the point of patenting this kind of stuff. It will never stop anything. There will always be some incredible group of geeks in russia / china / whatever where that patents are like re-used toilet paper... and this guys will be working on new GUIs and use the ideas that are alredy patented by d34r microsoft...
Fucking a fat girl is like riding a scooter... it's fun 'til someone sees you.
This is getting out of hand!
God, I hate Microsoft!
How about the blue screen, then no other OS's would ever be able to crash.
I may patent the process of getting a stupid patent through the patent office and then start inforcing it. opps to late.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
How can anybody still take the US Patent Office and those patents in general seriously?
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Do the Patent Office have no clue ? Or are they just taking the application fees and putting them on the books to keep their coffers full ?
You forgot part. I have corrected it for you:
Guess I'll have to stop brea..asdfjklsaj;dfsfvz.vsadf...fvafNO CARRIER
You also may be interested in the fact that Apple computer also has a LOT of patents! Some of them are for seemingly silly things, too.
Best Buy can have you arrested
If this poster is correct, BeOS had this feature in 1999.
You mean the modem has to breath to?
A human being has just died because of a stupid patent!! How dare you try to make a joke out of it!
I don't have WinXP on my PC, and have never used it on anyone else's for more than a couple minutes at a time. I have never seen this feature, but it's blindingly obvious stuff, and plenty of reason to complain.
If every micro-innovation and 2 cent idea gets patented, and everyone starts sueing everyone else for every little thing, the technology industry will eventually come to a screetching halt, with the first casualties being everyone except for large American corporations with vast amounts of patent portfolios and lawyers, and the second casualty being the very same corporate America, for being so darned caught-up in gaining points in the game that is the legal system that the rest of the worlds says 'forget you punks' and leaves the brainlessly tyrannical USPTO-dictated courts-gaming nation in the dust until the voting US populace realizes all of the rebel anti-software patent nations have a significant advantage, and US's position as a superpower and dominant global market wanes too much to impose its software "patents" on the rest of the world.
Patents do have a valid purpose. However, people seem to have forgotten that this purpose is not to provide a means for corporations to grow fangs in the mouths of their lawyers.
(..Well, this USPTO stuff keeps making me madder by the day. I needed to vent, FWIW, just my $0.02, God Bless America, et al.)
...from Fark.
"Today's moronic patent brought to you by..."
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Nah, but this one is...
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
I hate this feature - but as I frequently have 20+ windows open at a time I just put the start bar up the right hand side of my widescreen D800, and can have masses of windows open at a time with no difficulty whatsoever in accessing them.
But then at heart (and at home) I'm a mac user - we tend to 'think different' ;-)
sig under construction...
I think all this patenting is actually a bad move on m$'s behalf..
Think about it, if they keep patenting little stupid things like this as an attempt to cripple and slow down alternate desktops such as X from advancing in the market place then this in the long run is probably a bad move,
As it's already been proved many times that if you make something not possible for someone they will work out a compromise and at least 70% of the time come up with something better and more efficient.
Obviously the desktop war is far from over but the industry needs innovation (Even if it has to be forced into it)
As many others have said, I find grouping annoying as hell. Kinda like the default XP theme. *shudder* I'm not looking forward to how cute they try to make Longhorn. (Well, if it has integrated DRM, I won't touch it with a ten foot stick anyway.)
But I digress... Several years back, I doubled-up my taskbar (so there are two rows at the bottom) and find that much more useful when I have many windows open.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
I was dragged kicking and screaming off my nice Win2K sytem into XP [When I am not working on my Linux Box] and that is really annoying.
Hmmm, come to think of it I think my Red Hat does that too... Oh, I get it...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I hereby claim the method of grouping icons in the third dimension and in the time domain. Leaving higher spatial dimensions (dementions?) untouched - rush to USPTO while it lasts! :-)
Apparently this patent was wordsmithed by a thirteen year old girl: "displays a group button that contains the like application files and removes the like taskbar buttons from the taskbar"
By the perception of illusion, we experience reality
look at the patent number...upside down: 666...
it's called the dock, not taskbar, people. do you even actually use a mac?
yes, yes - who cares? i just don't like the stubborness of it all - it's called the dock all over the os, so why stick with "taskbar?" (and it's not even a real task bar - active windows aren't listed down there)
or at least he "took the initiative" in creating it, which is what he said. The phrase "invented the internet" first appeared in a Republican National Committee hand out.
I wonder how KDE is going to deal with that. This is quite a useful feature.
Patents should be reserved for people, not corporations.
--RedVortex
If it hasn't been done already, somebody in the OSS community (Red Hat?, IBM?) should set up a fund that is devoted to obtaining patents and putting them under a free license or something. Maybe sales of a popular software product (or portion of sales of services from OSS software) could be funnelled into the fund.
Sure can! Right-click the taskbar, choose Properties. In the Taskbar tab (should be the first one), uncheck "Group Similar Taskbar Buttons".
:)
If you really want it to be nice like 2k, under Start, Settings, Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Services, disable the Themes service.
I recognize people by their sigs. Is that a bad thing?
When a case such as this is won, and the patent is revoked, is there any funding that is returned to the side that won to recover litigation costs?
I'd be satisfied with public flogging of the USPTO employee(s) who issued this absurdity. Twenty lashes per lame, revoked patent ought to do.
They filed like 3 years ago. Meanwhile, all these other companies decide it's a good idea and implement it. Now all these companies are going to take it up the (random explitive) just because the uspto is so (another random explitive) slow. Seriously though, I doubt M$ has ever had a truly original idea (or did i steal that line from A Beautiful Mind?), and I doubt they ever will. It's all about the money for them. They don't care about innovation, unless it gets them more money. We'd still be running M$-DOS if it could generate enough revenue, but go ahead and tell me how i'm wrong, and how they've donated crap to schools, and tried to share the source code. (one more random explitive) I'm done now
that your post perfectly describes the difference between clever and trying too hard. As such you'll be modded informative.
Tomorrow I'm going to go into work and make some hideous, torrential mistakes through gross negligence upon my part. I'm going to be twice as productive by doing everything half-assed. I'll be a rubber stamp for the dumbest, most obviously wrong ideas known to man. And then when the Boss finally catches my mistakes and goes through the costly process of repairing them, I'll simply say that these repairs are part of the process. Someone else will fix them, as that is what someone else is paid to do.
And when my kids ask me how I'm doing at work, I'll say that I'm doing my country proud.
The ______ Agenda
M$ also owns the patent for the blue screen of death. Its got a hefty price tag for the right's, so we wont be seeing it on OS X or linux anytime soon.
When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up... reading.-Henny Youngman
So now Bill owes 10 billion to have a penis.
hmmm...or does he ????
And thank goodness for the prior art patent rules, otherwise we could be in deeper faster.
a patent for tabbed browsing in internet explorer. hey, wait a minute...
Why did I lurk so long before registering for a Slashdot account? I could have had a Slashdot ID of less than 100000.
In the case of grandpa's nails they didn't count up to some limit in miliseconds and start grouping themselves.
And let me just say that if one did find a way to make fasteners that were cost competative, and would automatically sort themselves, one would be able to buy and sell Bill Gates before too long.
The OP's humor went way over your head. It's in orbit, man!
You have to wonder exactly what Microsoft's IP department was thinking when they decided to file this patent. Are they really going to go after open source projects with "taskbar grouping?" The negative PR cost alone would seriously outweigh any damages they'd get, not to mention the absurdity of trying to sue an OSS project. More likely, they're filing it so that no one else can file it and then sue Microsoft (e.g. Sun). Which is why patent laws should be changed to allow anything patentable to be "officially" placed in the public domain.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Here it is in PDF format: us pat# 6756999
How do you people keep track of all of the patents that are issued? Is there a mailing list or something that announces patent approvals? If not what are you doing? Do you work at the patent office? How do you have the time to find out who has gotten what patent (bogus or otherwise)? It always amazes me when I see these posts on /. simply because I don't understand how the poster intially becomes privy to such information.
Maybe the uspto has some kind of search engine that lets you type in recipient names and returns to you all patents held by that entity (in date awarded order no less)..
It'd be better if some F/OSS folk got together and patented "elimination of sytem crashes via use of stable, well tested code," and insisted on a non-closed license.
Shortly followed by "prevention of virus circulation via sane privileges.."
etc.
...patent the buffer overflow? Or for that matter patent writing sloppy code? Then at least they could patent something that they "innovated"
Prior art only matters if you can afford to buy congress.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Any Def Jux fans out there?
I just saw the video for El-P's Deep Space 9mm .. in the video he's walking around the city rapping and wherever he goes, somebody's pointing a glowing red gun at his head. Grandmas, a dude at Subway, the boy scouts, the indian shop-owner..
That's the fucking patent system! Microsoft will probably never use this patent. But they have it, and it's pointed at KDE. And Gnome. And any geek teenager who comes up with the same idea as they hack on the computer. (When I was a teen, I "invented" using XOR to do sprite animation. Little did I know it was patented.. by MIT I believe.)
Only two solutions: fix the system, or get your own gun.
No, it didnt! Or are you questioning the Patent Office credibility? :-)
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
Everyone seems to bitch about this feature. I personally like it. One thing did occur to me though while reading the threads.
:)
Why not implement a taskbar that gets bigger as app listing increases? Perhaps the taskbar needs to become a little more adaptable?
This way people can still read their taskbar entries (not too compressed).
Anyway, just a thought. (oddbudman Patent Pending
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
Don't worry, though. The EU will be going through the same things very soon! Welcome to the global economy.
I just had a thought. What if, as a result of fearing litigation from MS for attaining a patent, anybody working on UI doodads were to try to come up with something different. Isn't it possible that a new better way would be found? If only there was a way to have something good happen when stuff was patented...
"Derp de derp."
Microsoft (MSFT) today announced it's new patent on H2O and will begin licensing talks soon.
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
...patent crappy Operating System Security? They know they have the proof for it!
What do I have to do to get a sig around here?! www.bearscanfly.org
Normally I would say that you should go ahead and waste your vote by voting what you believe in, but under the circumstances don't you think we should do everything possible to get George W. Bush out of the White House? I hope you get fucked sideways by the GNAA.
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
That's what happens when you don't make money !! You lose !! case closed !!
I didn't spring for the VGA graphics card just to waste it on drawing a GUI.
I have four words for you: I love this company...yahhhhhhhhhh
They patent something that's annoying that I turn off anyway. That is if I even run XP.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
Isn't it part of the patent offices job to research this a little and find out of it's a VALID patent?
If not... then I'm going to go patent the back/forward button in web browsers (previously mentioned). Then once I get the patent I'll sue everyone who ever wrote a web browser and make money... probably more money then SCO is making off their issues (ooops, is that off topic?)
And since it looks as though the Australia-US so-called "Free" Trade Agreement will be legislated by both countries, all of us Aussies will soon be suffering this kind of madness...
Anyone who believes there's a difference between good intentions and actions might like to visit www.linux.org.au/fta
You know, what I'd really rather have is the ability to drag the taskbar items along the taskbar. Many times when I'm working, I find it really inconvenient that four windows I'm not using happen to be between window X and window Y that I'm flipping back and forth to test code, or copy paste, or what have you.
Sure, I can close the "dormant" windows, but often I really need them for later. I usually have unfinished work in them and, though I could save, don't want to lose my train of thought with where I left them at. Having to start application, open file, etc - I really don't want to do all that every time.
I realize I can use the quickswitch thing, but that still requires me to bring the dialog up, hit the proper arrow keys, etc. Besides, I like to use the mouse primarily, rather than the keyboard. Why do you think I have the mouse sensitivity cranked so high that other people go "WTF!" when they use my machine?
Comon, MS, show us mousers some love.
Oh, and if MS tries to patent taskbar dragging, this post about it in a public location should count for something! Though it probably won't, because some MS guy will claim he invented it sitting on the toilet in 1996.
That is all.
// harborpirate
// Slashbots off the starboard bow!
It gets thrown out because it wasn't introduced at the right time, or the motion to introduce it wasn't just right, so the prior art can't even be considered. This is civil court we are talking about, there are fairly complex timing rules and it is possible to have all your evidence thrown out on some technicality based on subsection XYZ of the rules of evidence.
How about patenting the BSOD? I'm sure there's no prior art involved...
www.rexguo.com - Technologist + Designer
PJ (from Groklaw) is right in predicting that Microsoft is gathering ammunition (re patents) to take on the Linux distributions. At the moment it seems to be the only manner in which they will be able to hold onto the desktop market in the long term.
So Apple had their "look and feel" suit thrown out. I guess the way to patent a UI is to do it incrementally.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
OpenLook did this with one of the default installed window managers on Sun 386i installs. That's in the 1980s. That does not eliminate the novel and non-obvious actions based on timings. Many patents are aggregations of non-patentable concepts or separately patented items. Look at any patent for some automotive device and you'll see lots of follow-on patents. It not like the basic idea of an automatic transmission would be granted a new patent (well maybe given the current USPTO :) but certainly one could use a novel fliud and valving setup (say an automatic transmission for extreme environments that uses molten tin for a combination lubricant and working fluid) and that would be patentable. In fact the above probably was patentable by anyone before just now, and I have a year to file in the US for it... Although from what I hear a combination of the BeOS tracker and tweak UI could achieve the results in 1999 prior to the MS filing date. So maybe there is a case if one were to care enough to wage the battle. Personally I like the Mac OS X dock behavior of listing the windows in a pop-up along with some common functions. It keeps me from bouncing around the display so much once you get ysed to it.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Plus it's FOSS. Also highly optimized assembly. Super small binary. http://www.palma.com.au/winroll/
What's a "modem" exactly? My great grandfather use to talk about such a thing...
If the MS "Recycling Bin" isn't a blatant rip-off of Apple's trash can I don't know what is.
It's patents like this that destroy competition. Every joe is going to hire the most expensive lawyer they can afford, and bend the rules. If you can patent taskbar anything, why not just patent whites lines no roads.
Actually, blue is already taken, or at least it was at one point.
It's really the process that is patented, but it still sounds funny having a patent on a color.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Someone please explain to me how having hundreds of patents on ridiculously simple things like these is benefiting consumers? That is the point of the patent system, isn't it?
XML to the rescue! :) Well if it can help solve your energy needs, then it can help resolve this issue.
there's a rather huge difference in patenting, and the way they enforce things. Lets compare patent a en b :
patent a) grouped taksbar buttons on a desktop.
patent b) audio codecs used by VoIP implementations.
with patent a) you can still use your desktop, only are not allowed to group your buttons inside a taskbar.
with patent b) you can not make a VoIP call at all. VoIP becomes unaccessable when patent b) is not obeyed.
Robert
He wasnt talking about the icons in the tray, he was talking about the whole *taskbar* all together. I agree that hiding tray icons is a good thing, and I like that XP does it automatically for ones you dont use very often.
:)
I used to have the taskbar hidden as well but the grandparent had a good point, that you have to move the mouse to show it, and then find what you want, and then click it. When it's always visible, you can see what you want before you even start moving the mouse. It is a lot quicker in my opinion. If you have low screen resolution, however, it's a good compromise to hide it.
Regarding task bar grouping, I think it's useless as well. It pisses me off a lot, because you have to do two clicks to re-open a window rather than one. It's one of the first things I always turn off with a fresh install of XP. It's still shitty that MS patented this, but at the same time, it's such a shitty feature that I dont care.
Joseph?
How long are you talking about?
I mean, yeah, we might come up with some new UberUI, but even if it was clearly more efficient and user-friendly to work with once you spent 5 minutes learning it, people would be unlikely to use it.
Look at Linux! I can move most Windows people straight to GNOME and have them doing just about everything they were within 5 minutes. But only if they are willing to sit down at my computer in the first place.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Emacs has exactly this sort of feature in its buffer selection menu. If you have a large number of buffers open, it will group them by mode in a menu for buffer selection (so for example, all c-code buffers are grouped for one submenu, all text buffers in a separate submenu, all python buffers, all TeX buffers etc)
On the other hand if only a few buffers are open, then you are presented with a single list.
You can even customize the behaviour to determine the point at which this splitting will take place.
Me neither! Monochrome text all the way, baby!
I even filter the emphasized text out of manpages!
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
Whether double clicking or alternate functions based on how long a button on some gadget is pressed, it's been done before and it's a bogus, bullshit waste of the legal system's time to have ever filed it.
Bill Gates and his crew should be ashamed. I didn't think even he would be so ignorantly, selfishly, and stupidly greedy as to patent the bloody obvious that's been done for years. Power switches, reset buttons, PDA backlight functions, there are dozens upon dozens of examples much older than the filing.
Bill needs to take another look at his legal staff -- somehow one of his SCO drones managed to get back in the building, or thinks that just because Microsoft covers the paycheque means they're supposed to be filing patents on Microsoft's behalf instead of SCO's.
Either that, or Bill is trying desperately to distract us from something that is actually important, like some tabled piece of legislation we haven't noticed.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
If someone patented the taskbar, then all patents relating to anything happening on the taskbar will be void.
Looks like Micro$oft has been at it again... Newest M$ Patent
The German Telecom has trademarked the color magenta, registered with the patent office.
So yes, you can patent the colour of the sky, you just have to pay patenting and waste money on marketing/being a big company.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Curses, the Unix/C text console library does not have a taskbar, so I guess it can't be foiled by the patent on taskbar grouping.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
You just scored high on our terrorist awareness program (TAP).
Now friendly patriotic truckers will guard your house day and night.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Am I the only one getting a little bored of all these 'MS patents this', 'MS patents that' articles and subsequent endless discussions trying to pintpoint prior art?
C'mon... enough already.
KDE can deal with it by removing the auto-grouping, and using something more complex, for example I suggest (you better archive my post since MS might patent it, or better find more ncient suggestions of this idea), so I suggest that you use a directory tree -like structure for the taskbar, meaning you can drag items into groups etc. Then you add user-definable filtering rules like those used for an email client, and this way you can enable the user to recreate the autogrouping behaviour by "scripting" filter rules in config files.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Late today Friday July 1, 2022, Microsoft (the second largest of the '5' remaining global omnicorporations), patented your frontal lobes.
By patenting your frontal lobes, they claim that any thoughts you've had or will have, are the results of there intellectual property and therefore also theirs (including any decenting arguements you might have about having your frontal lobes being patented.)
Rumor has it that Microsoft's next OS release (code named "Colossus") will have builtin popup tools that will provide you with direct charge information for the Microsoft thoughts you are having today.
My chance to shamelessly promote my taskbar grouping idea:
:)
Wouldn't it be a good compromise to group the documents/windows of any but the focused application?
The buttons representing documents of the focused application should fill the taskbar from the (bottom) right.
The grouped buttons repesenting unfocused application should fill the taskbar from the (top) left.
That way you won't get an unmanageable amount of taskbar buttons. And the documents of the focused
application are always accessible with one mouse click. Having the grouped and ungrouped taskbar buttons
fill the taskbar from different sides gives you a more precise idea where the button you want to access will be located.
Also the buttons representing documents would tend to fill up the lower row, which is faster to access.
(I deny to patent these ideas, but I would like so else to implement it
Windows 95 with IE4.0 installed had the taskbar icon-grouping...
Ask Microsoft to view the prior art and to relinquish the rights, someone fairly big and public must do this, and actually write to the department, and we should wait on the reply.
If this is public anough so the Business/IT user sees it, Microsoft may decide just to relinquish this patent, for the benefit of good publicity, but then we could turn around, and say how open software isn't 'viral' in a negative sense that microsoft use (yes it propagates, but 'viral' is a negative word, especially when juxtaposed against software).
We could show how software patent are more damaging and unecessary. I would also support the EFF fronting a scheme to vote into a software patent board some people who we would feel confident in addressing any real need for software patent, or copyleft issues.
This goes to show, I would bee 100% more happy with James Gosling being on the board, if we are appointing from large companies, than someone from M$ or even IBM (which lets face, are great guys, but would be Microsoft if they could!)
Of course I doubt James would want to, there are many figures in the industry with both the public standing and technical understanding who could work within a board (with other IT experts and advisers)
The Patent office shoudl still be the first point to reject, and then (if they reject a diamond idea) there should be an appeal - but we should stop the no doubt huge number of time wasting patent that get filed wasting thier time.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
that damned gouping ungrouping caused me to just go back to good old alt+tab switching. If only 2 or 3 windows are open, its a helluva lot faster, especially when I:m trying to between work, music nad some IM window, and with a bunch of windows, its easier to read through those than the bundled up taskbar XP gives you. I guess for me this was kinda like 1 step forward, about 8 steps back.....
-gordo3000
"the process of pressing three keys, ctrl, alt, and delete."
I shouldn't give them any ideas.
I love it in Windows XP, but I also use Linux. MEPIS to be specific and enlightenment to be even more specific. Although I don't use the grouping in Linux, it is quite ridiculous that they award patents for things like that. But let's face it. Gates is a genius, and if we could have gotten away with it, some of us would have, for the rest of us there is integrity.
In UNIX (X) all windows have a WM_CLASS attribute. KDE groups windows according to this attribute (IIRC). Very old WM's already did this! So I really think there are 2 reasons why this patent should be declared invalid:
1. there exists prior art
2. it is trivial to group windows according to their class.
Please. This is the way M$ works. They have to rely on stupid patents so linux doesn't "steal" their "neat" ideas on how to do stuff. It is silly that a commercial company can patent something like that. I mean M$ have the cash to pay for a patent, the patent gets approved, and all the innocent open-source people takes the hit. But hey, no worries! As previously stated this is _really_ an annoying feature in my oppinion. Who would trade multiple desktops to something like that? I have to have winblows for some of my music-apps (no wine please) and the first thing i do is throw out that fucked-up explorer (actually second, after throwing out ie). get blackbox4win or bblean or something. Cheers //erix
But I am sure a patent for saying whatever you just said there is in my portfolio somewhere.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
And that's why my regime will force the issuing officer and the applicant to eat 1000 printed copies of their patent if it's found to be frivolous in court. That'd put a stop to this nonsense...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I think you are talking about the System Tray now, right? Not the TaskBar. XP's TaskBar has grouping. XP's System Tray has auto-hide and hidden icons.
Who use taskbar anyway ?
No GNU has been Hurd during the making of this comment.
Hah, VGA (Video Graphics Array, not Very Good Adapter) is primitive in comparision to a lovely Hercules mono card. Now that was real luxury. Better text fonts, sharper image, ahhh memories.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Damnit I was going to patent that! :( Those big bad meanies...
Seems to me like the problems with the USPTO are fully understood by the community, or at least well documented. Part of the problem is big companies like MS and IBM are forced to develop large "defensive" patent collections. They try to grab as many and as trivial patents as they can so they can avoid defending against trivial patents. When was the last time you heard about MS going after someone with one of their patents? They are trying to protect themselves from the Eolases of the world. That MS or IBM or Sun obtains a patent on trivial concept xyz isn't interesting anymore. I don't like MS and I don't like the situation at the USPTO, but a news post about Just Another Stupid Patent, especially when it's MS rather than the many other companies doing this, seems like glorified trolling to me. I'd rather ./ let us know about positive things like the EFF patent busters or other new ideas on how to change, or get involved in changing, this sad situation, rather than nurturing our cynicism.
-numpf
[...] That, and it hides my hamstersex.com taskbar entries [...]
h p
My hamster says he'll be happy if you could hide his porn photos too:
http://www.ag0ny.com/misc-20040513-hamster-porn.p
My site
That I work in an industry with people who would put their name to this. It's like suddenly discovering that the real job of veterinarians is to drown puppies.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
You're making the usual fallacy of putting equals between software patents and silly patents. Which doesn't even hold true in either direction.
/. to bitch and moan about how you should be allowed to steal everyone's work. Whether it's copy-and-pasting someone's algorithm, or downloading every new movie on P2P, or whatever, the ISO-standard /. freeloader should never have to pay for anything.
1. There are plenty of silly patents which don't have anything to do with software. You can find plenty such barrels of laughs as a van with a horse on a treadmill instead of an engine. (Yes, believe it or not, someone patented something as impossible as that.)
2. There are plenty of software patents which are _not_ trivial.
E.g., ever since the GIF patent I keep hearing about how compression algorithms are something trivial and obvious. Well you invent a good new compression algorithm if it's that trivial. _Then_ you can say it's trivial. No, really. Try it.
E.g., I keep hearing the same about various movie and sound codecs. (A la "waah! MP3 shouldn't have been patentable!") You know what? _You_ come up quickly with a good codec, if that's trivial. I'll tell you a secret: back in the early 90s I actually tried coming up with my own algorithm to compress game movies. Turns out I had no bloody clue where to even start.
E.g., I keep hearing about how cryptographic algorithms are no-brainers and shouldn't be patentable. No shit, Sherlock? You try coming up with a new secure algorithm over the weekend, and only then you'll have earned the right to say it's trivial. In practice what virtually every "smart" programmer comes up with is some snake oil idea, like xoring the output of the random number generator to the input stream. Ask a real cryptographer why that's easier to crack than a brown paper bag.
Etc.
To cut it short: It only seems trivial because someone explained an existing algorithm to you already. But try actually inventing a new one. You'll quickly discover why such things are discovered by mathematicians not code monkeys.
In practice some people had to sit and _work_ to come up with that stuff. Sometimes for years. It also took a lot of testing. And someone had to pay for that research work. It's no less research work than, say, a pharmaceuticals company researching and testing a new drug.
Now I do understand that it's fashionable on
However, here's a new idea for all those complaining about patents: if you really want to convince me of your moral high ground, why don't you do the exact opposite? Why don't _you_ give a new algorithm away, instead of asking that others give you stuff for free? Go, actually _invent_ something new, and put it in the public domain.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
OK, granted, the OSS movement cannot afford to hold research divisions as is (universities are, to some extent, research divisions for OSS, but they are not focused on these things).
Most UI ideas evolve only as they are implemented, based on feedback from actual experience. There is a place for discussion of far-ahead ideas, if only to prevent Microsoft from patenting these ideas and stalling OSS development.
So, to prevent more patents like this one, I think we should create a GUI (or UI, or even more general) repository of ideas, probably based on a Wiki.
Aside from being prior art for many future patents to come, this may even help bring new GUI ideas.
Erm why when Tabs are so much better? Go Mozilla! and.. don't forget Go Opera!
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
Hah, VGA is primitive in comparision to a lovely Hercules mono card. Now that was real luxury. Better text fonts, sharper image, ahhh memories.
;)
Eh? VGA could do 640x480 with 16 colours no problem, and that easily looks better than Hercules' 720x348 mono - particularly as vertical resolution is so much more important for most applications. Word processing, spreadsheets... it's all portrait layout and columns unless you're editing widescreen movies.
Heck, even EGA could handle 640x350, and that's STILL nearly the same resolution as Hercules' mono display - but in colour!
Don't get me wrong, I too have fond memories of playing Sopwith in shades of amber using a CGA emulator, but frankly I think your rose-tinted spectacles are interfering with your hindsight.
Tasklist can group icons together when multiple instances of a program are running. A number in parentheses appears to next to the application. Clicking on the icon brings up a menu listing all of the running instances.
I love C++
You mean something like this:
if (Taskbar.getCurrentTaskIconWidth() < defaultTreshold) {
Taskbar.setTaskGrouping (true);
}
else {
Taskbar.setTaskGrouping (false);
}
Oooh. Seems like i got slashdot in trouble for blatant patent violation!
I can't believe patents like this are even granted. And with that statement I don't even consider the obvious prior art.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
Should this be moded Funny or Insightfull... I really can't tell.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
Not to be an a-hole, but I think 'such' preserves more of the original flavour. 'Application files' and 'taskbar buttons' must have been mentioned previously in the sentence/paragraph, and the word 'like' is used for clarity and brevity as a placeholder for the concept referred to in the original occurence.
Similar would imply that they're not identical, just 'like' as in 'being reminicent of'.
I have no idea what the release date of the first betas would be, but Taskbar Executive was a little application I got in Win98 days and working with it was awesome.
Now I run XP, and it offers a similar feature - but nowhere near as flexible as TE.
Unfortunately, TE doesn't run under XP, and it looks like they won't make an XP version. Shame.
I might be patenting the ESC]ape key next week if you don't mod this post up, so you had all better be nice to me or you can't leave your apps anymore...
Who would Microsoft have to sue in what court of law to enforce a patent against an independently developed open source implementation? How were they to know that Microsoft had already developed such an idea and that there was no prior art?
These patents are just submarine patents, they're landmines.
Perhaps my glasses have a tinge of rose to them, but I do seem to recall the herc card as having better text modes than the plain old VGA. The resolution is only half the game, the other part is the quality of the outputs, and the fonts used for text display. I know it crapped all over the CGA/EGA boards, and am pretty certain I preferred it to the VGA, even though VGA had colour and graphics. Herc had better text display, it was sharper, clearer. Of course, I could be completely mistaken, because it was the late 80's after all ;->
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
I've never heard this argument that crypto patents (et al) are trivial. The argument I have heard is that this is the implementation of a mathematical method.
Now, a lot of folk think that maths is about discovery of relationships that are consistent with the current mathematical/logical framework (like pure science). Further, that this isn't _invention_ (though it is very worthwhile and highly skilled work that I greatly admire). [You appear to think that maths is discovery and invention?]
So, the only bit left to be an invention then is the programming an algorithm into a computer, given the algorithm. This can be simple - technical but not inventive, the sort of thing programmers commonly do.
Often, it will be hard because of the optimisations required. So, claim the optimisations in a patent, but the mere implementation of the algorithm isn't inventive IMO. Basically, I don't think that mathematics is (nor should be) patentable. This way anyone can use the basic mathematics and produce their own optimisations.
PS: I don't think the optimisations should be patentable either (different argument). But I do feel that there is a strong argument that if anything else is patentable that such optimisations (that make inventive use of the platform) should be considered to have an inventive technical effect and so be patentable.
If that's the case, maybe Apple and Sun should get together to patent the newer 3-d desktops so that Microsoft can't put that in Longhorn. Slashdot article on Sun's new desktop... Screenshots here. If Apple and Sun work together we'll all have to wait 10 more years while M$ re-works all their code! Yay!
+5, informative?
Please.
Dumbasses.
The result of so many patens being granted will inevitably weaken the power that patents hold. They will become too expensive to enforce, and about the time that someone patents sleeping in a horizontal position...I think the general public will get in the habit of ignoring patents.
To: Microsoft Execs....
you are complete idiots. You want your operating system and people to develop on it. All you are doing is creating a proprietary piece of crap. You should be making "open" standards.
While windowmaker does not use a taskbar (good!), the mini-icons serve the same purpose. For each application, you have the option to use a shared application icon. I think this is the same thing. Dunno when the feature showed up, though. Windowmaker's changes are often quite subtle.
"shrink down to tiny (but still visible/readable), and a mouseover quickly brings things up to size."
Saw this in Enlightenment YEARS before there was even a hope of an OS-X. A *lot* of the "usability" features everyone rants about in OS-X were implemented in Enlightenment a looong time ago.
I have a wish-based package (network monitoring) that dates back to 1995. It has a "task bar" that at first glance seems similar to what people are talking about. It has a flock of buttons that trigger various actions. Some of the buttons are grouped within frames. Some of the buttons (and frames) are dynamic, appearing only when their actions are possible. Some disappear when not usable; others shrink to an "empty" button or frame as a placeholder. There are also a few entry widgets in the task bar with descriptive labels to their left; in such cases, an label and entry widget is within a frame to set them off visually. Of course, the border width of the frames is configurable, so setting it to 0 makes all the frame borders disappear.
So am I really in danger of being sued for patent infringement if Microsoft notices any of this stuff that I did about a decade ago?
Needless to say, I consider this all superficial cosmetics. It's rather trivial design work, to make the UI a bit more obvious to someone who doesn't use it every day. That's what the things described in other messages here also sounds like to me.
It's a sad day when superficial cosmetics can land you in a patent infringement lawsuit.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
it's all cool everybody, no one has hacked the gibson.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
Do I think we'd be better off, if anyone started patenting software algorithms since 1950? Damn right. We'd have had more people actually paying from research, instead of just hordes of people copy-and-pasting the same code over and over again.
I fully disagree. Locking up computing concepts in a royalty vault would SLOW progress in The Art (remember, THAT is the purpose of patents; fostering overall progress, NOT enriching inventors). Look at the Open Source vs closed-source paradigms for how it REALLY works.
First, consider the phone system. Until Ma Bell was broken up and local phone companies were encouraged to innovate to survive, and third-party manufacturers were allowed to make phone gizmos that could be freely connected to the POTS network, progress in that field was glacial. Caller ID, 3-way calling, cheap wireless phones, fax machines in a computer printer (hell, even just having MORE than one phone on your line)... Consider the point made.
NOW look at software. Compare the rate of progress of open systems (Linux, the Unices, Apache, Mozilla) with that of closed systems (Windows, IE, any number of others). The rate of improvement AND innovation in open efforts far exceeds closed efforts. Lock out all those "hordes of people copy-and-pasting the same code over and over again", and you'll get glacial progress there, as well. A big part of this is that the size of the developer comnmunity is not limited by pay-as-you-go royalty tollgates of the type patents promote. Tight royalty control would totally kill the open development in its areas of coverage.
Because of its infinite reproducibility and network synergies in development, software is fundamentally different from hardware or industrial processes, and needs a fundamentally different IP paradigm. Maybe it needs a patent model, maybe it doesn't. If, for the sake of argument, it does, that model must be vastly different from the 18th-century physical-device patent model now in use; at an absolute minimum, it would need MUCH shorter patent coverage to avoid stifling development.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
Wnen are they going to patent the system crash? I'm getting so sick of people copying that idea to other systems!
Maybe they could end of life the product (Crashes, DirectCrashes, Crashes#, Visual Crashes, Crashes CE, Crashes XP, Embedded Visual Crashes and Crashes.net), that ought to stop the crashes just like it stops the worms from spreading...
Make America grate again!
I haven't seen any posts in any of the Slashdot patent threads to make this particular point, so I think I'll throw it out there (BTW, IANAL):
If prior art for a patent can be found, then the patent is somehow not as legally threatening. I don't know if this means the patent is thrown out or completely invalid, but it does seem to help. Again, IANAL.
So if prior art is a good defense against nutty patent awards such as this, and if the open source community (whatever that is) wants to defend itself against such patents, it follows that finding and recording instances of prior art would be beneficial to the community at large.
The OSS world is a veritable machine when it comes to the production of new ideas. Not all of these ideas are necessarily GOOD, but OSS does nonetheless serve the potential of being the basis for prior art as a defense against HyperGlobalMegaCorp[R] Inc.'s silly patent on something completely obvious.
Maybe this would be a good addition to grokdoc, given their interest in both documenting OSS and in legal issues.
Now that is funny. =)
Which makes me wonder...Is this post redundant?
BSD is designed. Linux is grown. C++ libs
Why don't you take a look at this:
Windows tabs
Thumbnails
Between others.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
Shouldn't this be in "Your rights online"?
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
OS X has been doing this since the dock was introduced. one icon, access to all your windows if you right click or click and hold.
jeepers this is getting ridiculous
Just because a feature is useless for you doesn't mean it's useless for everyone.
Member of Orkut? Annoyed with spam?
Didn't MacPaint have a groupped button bar to begin with? wouldn't that be prior art?
Yes, i know the title of my post is not accurate. I only mean Slashdot's way of bringing new Microsoft patents in the news sucks. This is to show how ridiculous Slashdot does it themselves.
Microsoft did not patent "double mouse clicking". Microsoft did not patent "grouped taskbar buttons". They patented methods which incorporate these 2, but such descriptions are far from accurate _and_ creates all kind of shortsighted, hatred reactions with high moderations while those did not even read the specific patent. Thus, are ignorant.
If you want to hate Microsoft, hate them for specific reasons. There are many reasons, i agree, but don't hate Microsoft for things Microsoft did not do.
I think you're wrong in terms of timing and evidence being thrown out, but I could be wrong since I don't know what subsection of the FRE you are talking about. AFAIK, evidence can be inadmissable because it is not relevant, or it does not meet certain factual standards (e.g., heresay), but I don't know about timing.
As for what I was referring to, I was speaking of the examiner "throwing out" references during patent prosecution (meaning when the patent application was being examined). I cannot speak about what happnes during a trial though since that is outside of my experience.
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
"First, consider the phone system. Until Ma Bell was broken up and local phone companies were encouraged to innovate to survive, and third-party manufacturers were allowed to make phone gizmos that could be freely connected to the POTS network, progress in that field was glacial. Caller ID, 3-way calling, cheap wireless phones, fax machines in a computer printer (hell, even just having MORE than one phone on your line)... Consider the point made."
The point about patents is made... how? Far as I know the monopoly in question had _nothing_ to do with patents, but merely with who owns the infrastructure. So you point is?
"NOW look at software. Compare the rate of progress of open systems (Linux, the Unices, Apache, Mozilla) with that of closed systems (Windows, IE, any number of others). The rate of improvement AND innovation in open efforts far exceeds closed efforts."
Actually, I see very little invention in that field. I just see a ton of Open Source people _copying_ what's been invented by someone else. Maybe doing a better implementation of it, but copying someone else's idea nevertheless. Hence the constant bullshit from the OSS camp about how software patents are some utter disaster.
Almost all I see touted as some smashing advantage of Mozilla and other OSS projects, comes from someone paid to come up with that idea in a closed source project.
E.g., gestures? That wasn't invented by either Opera or Mozilla. Both jumped on board after the (awful) game Black and White hyped it to hell and back. Which in turn got it from PDAs.
E.g., the window-in-a-window interface of Opera or Mozilla? Stolen verbatim from Microsoft, who introduced it waaay back in its Windows API and own programs.
Apache? Now you make me curious. What is the groundbreaking innovation there? Quality, yes, but innovation? Am I missing something? It's a plain old HTTP server which alows plugins. No more, no less. And the idea to run stuff as dynamically loaded modules, instead of spawning a CGI process, now that was implemented in closed source servers (e.g., Netscape's) long before it.
You mean maybe stuff like PHP? Now THAT started as a shameless rip-off of Microsoft's ASP. Believe it or not, that was the first attempt to put executable code in the HTML template. (Some of us still call it an anti-pattern, but hey... might as well give Microsoft the credit it deserves for popularizing bad habits.)
MySQL? An implementation of the relational database architecture, and the language to use it, both researched and developped by someone else. (Unsurprisingly, since again it's an example of stuff that's heavy on the maths, and not something which a regular coder can just suddenly come up with.)
Etc, etc, etc.
And I also notice that whenever it comes to these patents, I see lots of bogus "well, duh, that was obvious", but usually noone actually offering examples of prior art. If it was that obvious, and OSS invents everything long before the evil corporations... you should have plenty of prior art, no?
But again, rather than arguing until we're both blue in the face, why not just do what I've said? Prove it. And I don't mean "prove it" in the "I want more posts", but "prove it" as in: then go patent all that new stuff you OSS folks are discovering, and donate the patents to the public domain. That ought to keep the corporations off for good, no?
You basically say that OSS creates most of the inventions, while the corporations just sit on their collective butt. Good. Well, then you shouldn't have any problem getting the patents before them, right? Or at least the prior art? What's the problem, then?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
One word: Lawyers
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
Yeah right. Like Microsoft intentionally ever would anything easy to script.
How would that support their closed structures, APIs and maintain their monopoly?
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
(I tried to look up patent #666, but it is not in the database yet.)
MS also patented the buffer overflow.
Scoffing at prior art claims, an MS spokesman stated "We'll protect our intellectual property and pursue legal action against anyone who uses this feature!"
This is the first instance of "prior art" that I've seen brought up which actually covers the features that Microsoft claims are unique in it's patent. The parent's example is the one to follow up on.
I keep forgetting my place. Jesus is for losers. Why do I still play to the crowd?
Let's just patent the concept of outputting information to a screen (monitor) That would solve some problems... Or just patent the taskbar. Take that M$!
Which is why it is very neat that at least in KDE 3.2x (I am using Mandrake 10.0, now) and even prior point releases you could tell the Kicker (panel) to either show all the tool bar's icons of an open app across all desktops, or just for the current desktop.
I think it might be worth it for people to review the book "Killer Windows Utilities":
"Published: Que, Indianapolis, USA, 1992 (ISBN: 0880229322)"
which I bought around March or so of 1992. I believe that the then proliferation of desktop add-ons to DOS and which were more functional than windoze 3.1 gave ms the pain and desire to make the NEXT release of windoze have a BOLT-ON interface that would be difficult if not impossible to displace. Hence, windoze 95.
That said, I am SURE there is a fine and great TON of prior art. If it doesn't torpedo the patents ms is trying to stealthily (until the last possible moment) get awarded, then the book and the types of products it bundled on 3 floppies will at least get ms laughed at a bit, or more.
I suggest that from NOW on the patent process be revamped so that anyone or any company trying to ram or slide a patent through has to publish it on their website, publish it in a tech paper and a tech publication (magazine, widely distributed), and then not get ANY USPTO sanction for it until maybe a six-month window or a year has past.
This could give time for ALL those who might later be able to prove they created the prior art, either to defend themselves and prevent ms and companies like ms from hijacking product ideas, OR to ensure that an idea that is CopyLefted, Open Sourced or otherwise "bequeathed" or "handed" to the public REMAINS globally, publicly, irrevocably available to all users and modifiers.
As for seeking and being awarded a patent for double-clicking on a PDA button... that is STUPID. Plenty of prior art examples exist from watches and calculators, to 8-track and cassete players.
Watches: Press and hold for 1, 3, or more seconds to invoke a feature or to change the time;
Calculators: press a "Shift" or "2nd" button to invoke an overlay to recall or to substitute a stored (cached) number for processing in a subsequent calculation;
8-Track and cassettes players: Press the REW button lightly and the rewind is not a full-auto rewind. Whether or not patented, it demonstrates that some common-sense stepsaving button (physical or virtual) should be unpatentable.
Even some of the very old telephones since the late 70's and early 80's had switchook/call waiting: Press quickly or maybe 1/2 second, switch calls. Press long enough, drop the call or hang up on one party.
Aren't there any games, lawn mowers, kitchen appliances (Puree, whip, blend), hair dryers and other umpteen number of devices that, while not being "PDAs", exhibit "the obvious" and unpatentability or non-patent-worthiness of user interfaces that don't deserve to be in a corporate war chest?
Copyrighting also is not really a solution. All the corporations now have to do is "triple-whammy" their product releases: Patent, Trademark, Copyright", and maybe more. Left unchecked, it will become impossible, or maybe very expensive, to improve upon or even get around silly patents, specious or dubious copyrights (registered or not), and so on.
Regards,
David Syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Or Microsoft just got tired of being sued by morons who patented the obvious and decided to start patenting the obvious...first. I'm not annoyed with MS for getting stupid patents; I will save my annoyance for when they start trying to enforce stupid patents (like IBM does).
When a company is as ridiculously profitable as MS, it makes sense to avoid potential problems by taking the safe route (apply for a patent on something that may not be patentable; if not patentable, great, you're only out a little money; if it is patentable, then still OK, since you got it first). If they did not, they might suddenly find themselves paying various people a dollar for every XP install. Or facing a SCO of their own that tries for maximum annoyance in order to get bought out.
... the patent does not show anything related to an invention. It is just a simple form of organizing task bar buttons.
Hell, on monday I'm going to get a patent for parking backwards into a parking lot. But wait, why not getting a patent for the complicated process of 'parking a vehicle' at all? I could describe it as an unbelievably efficient way to reduce maintenance costs for my car -- compared against those who are still employing drivers to keep their cars on track while shopping!
By the way: I HATE grouping task bar buttons. It makes them totally inaccessible. I should be gratious for not being forced to switch it off any more. *eg*
Heres an interesting essay on the subject. One of his three major points: "Central Planning or Licensure of Good Ideas in Software Won't Work. Just as any attempt to centralize or classify all original (or "non-obvious") literary, musical, or scientific writings in the patent office would fail, so any attempt to centralize information regarding all innovative software programs will also fail. No human can know all of software relevant to any large subject, just as no human can know all that has been written on any large subject, and for the same reasons. Current and near-term innovations in the writing of software will cause the amount of software developed every year by the one million professional programmers in the U.S. to grow at an ever-increasing rate. As a result, the burden of central licensing of innovation by the patent office will grow steadily more onerous, creating unnecessary and costly barriers to software progress." This guy saw what was coming in 1991.
Spot on. Indeed every series of actions is an algorithm is it not?!
Human civilization would not implode if patents ceased to exist tomorrow. In fact, I think you'd find it would be vastly more beneficial for the Many at the loss of a small bit of profit for a very few. Patents didn't always exist, did they? Do you suppose the sun only began to rise each day when patents were conceived? Human civilization did just fine before patents existed.
Beware of odd patents like this - Don't forget that IBM held the patents to audible key click and a blinking cursor - Lucent (before they spiraled into financial oblivion) had an entire department that generated real bottom line revenue solely through licensing and patent enforcement
The Apple handheld, the Newton Messagepad, had several ways of doing a tap on an icon/taskbar button or in an editing window. Tap, double tap, tap and hold (and scrub top erase it). Other programs added gestures and one half of an icon performing another function as the other half. We are talking 1994 to 1997 here.
Why don't you get your air using Airster? You can download copies of other people's air off the 'net, and because you're not making money, it's all covered by fair use!
Well, they tried to get some people to use their windows scripting host, and their offer "was well received" by viruses made by 1337 h4x025 ..
Also you could rename DirectX to "3D graphics scripting interface" if you want to anger a programmer.
They also have VBScript. They just were not met with cheers, but I guess theres a reason for it.
Uglyness, bad interfaces, no free documentation.
Probably another reason is that closed programming shops don't work unless you invest lots of money in it.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
I have been using Taskbar grouping in BeOS R4 since 1998,years before XP.
:)
Seems like MacOSX and XP keep trying to reinvent BeOS and Next
Most web browsers do something like this, given the chance. IE just gets too many such chances. IIRC, there is an option to disable this. It is buried somewhere under "internet options". Somewhere ("Advanced" ???) there is a list (scrollbox) containing many radio buttons, one of which amounts to "IE should check if it is default". Set this to "disable". I may be wrong as my only contact with XP is at school. At home, I use Mozilla.