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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."
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."
Grouping in the taskbar has to be one of the most annoying "Features" ever seen in a taskbar.
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
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 $300 bucks that they charge for Windows XP goes.
BTW, my grandpa had the same idea when he'd keep his roofing nails in one coffee can, and his finish nails in another coffee can. I wonder if I can get a patent for that.
Method and system for clustering and grouping construction nails...
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I keep waiting for a company to try to patent the idea of a front facing computer. I mean really with all the shit that they patent you think that they'd patent "the idea of putting things in the front"
The is the FIRST feature I turn off on any XP computer I encounter. I cannot think of a single more annoying feature than hiding all of the windows I really have under one thing, where I have to spend an inordinate amount of time reaching the icon, waiting for the list to appear, then hunting through the list.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Then retrieve the old source with the date in it and hang on to it. That's your 2 cent solution to destroying a 3000$ MS patent if they ever try to charge someone.
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.
Does it matter? I mean, really, does it matter?
TaskBar Grouping and Auto-Hide are the first to go, when working on someone's laptop. They are useless, and not terribly important.
Secondly, who wants to go challenge such a useless patent in court? I mean, principles aside, if someone did, we would be able to use it in {window manager}. Great, TaskBar Grouping, someone please kill me.
Security, Speed, User-friendliness. Basic GUI programming. These are all that count.
Annoying, stupid *features* like animated dogs and taskbar grouping which slow productivity and piss off users do not make the cut.
I am John Hurt.
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.
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.
But you did not do it on a computer. For whatever reason applying decades, centuries, heck, millennium old organizing methods to computers is a patentable item.
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.
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)
Like my brain isn't a computer.
The food order printouts came from a computer too.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
If this poster is correct, BeOS had this feature in 1999.
That is what the AC was getting at. Anything done on a Personal Computer is, at least according to the patent office, different from human thought processes.
Yes, and BeOS had it in 1999.
Last time I checked, 1999 was before 2000.
Of course, this is just more verification that Microsoft's never actually invented anything. Just taken ideas from other companies and then crushed them to try and make the world forget who really innovates.
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
Auto-hide:
Anything that give me more screen real estate and hides things I'm not looking at anyway is a Very Good Thing.
I didn't spring for the bigger monitor just to fit more clutter.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
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.
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.
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.
"Who's going to file a case? The Xfree86 committee? Sun? BeOS (which I also read had prior art)? There is no company even interested in fighting this."
Sounds like the beef should be with the patent office instead of Microsoft. Afterall, they didn't do anything that Apple or IBM wouldn't do.
"Derp de derp."
I used to think the same thing, but it's actually less usable than a visible taskbar.
You have to move your mouse just to see what's open.
You can't see any alerts blinking in the system tray (new email, network activity, CPU usage, bandwidth usage, etc).
Instead of flicking the mouse down to click something (knowing exactly where it is), you have to move the mouse, wait for the taskbar to appear, locate the button and then click it.
Maybe it's an issue if you're at 640x480 on a 14" screen though.
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
The trouble is with civil rights the worst that could happen is jail time. This time we're risking total financial ruin.
:-)
Personally, I've always considered loss of freedom as worse than loss of money. But then, I'm not a Republican.
You are aware you can customize the hiding - ie. force some icons to always be visible, and others to always be hidden. So just set the ones you frequently use to be always visible. You can't tell me you need _all_ of the icons in that tray, like Intellipoint (or Logitech equivalent), your video card drivers' resolution selector, Apache monitor, etc. more often than once in a blue moon?
Being able to hide the icons in that tray that you don't frequently use is the best thing since sliced bread.
"Why are you watching the washing machine?"
"I love entertainment, as long as it's clean"
I spend more time looking at the current window than switching windows. Therefore, speed in switching from one application to another, or viewing CPU usage, takes a backseat to screen real estate.
Defenestrate Windows...
such efforts are hardly mutually exclusive to a behemoth like M$.
ôó
like = similar.
replacing it, the sentence reads:
displays a group button that contains the similar application files and removes the smilar taskbar buttons from the taskbar"
kinda makes mkre sense, eh?
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?
"Secondly, who wants to go challenge such a useless patent in court? I mean, principles aside, if someone did, we would be able..."
The problem is that the Patent Office takes the attitude of, "The courts will rule on it if it's a bad patent", while the courts take the attitude, "It's patented, therefore they must have a valid claim on it", so it's a catch 22 for anyone who has to challenge it. This means that it needs to be challenged now, while it's a new, fresh patent, and while the collective "we" can come up with examples of prior art that are confirmable before the application was placed. If we don't do this, in a few years once history has been somehwat obfuscated over time it'll be harder and harder to challenge, and the patent holder might actually win if the people against the patent don't have what they need to challenge it properly.
Until we change either 1) the patent office or 2) the courts, we'll continue to have to fight this. I'm personally in favor of changing the patent office, requiring a given posting on "to be approved" patents giving a timeframe like six months for the pending patent to be challenged. This would keep the USPTO from being overworked by actively having to research themselves, yet would give the community a way to fight against stupid and overly constraining patents, or to help prevent patents on "well, duh!" types of things.
Of course, we really just need to abolish software patents altogether, but that's another argument.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
*yawn* typical slashdot comment. Just because things work a certain way for you does not mean they work the same for everyone else.
The sad thing, I just realized, is that a lot of us are computer scientists, who should know better.
To counter your arguments:
I currently have 11 programs open, 7 of which use the task bar, 4 of which use the system tray. That is a light load. Oh, and 2 of those have about 20 subwindows each. Keep track of that in your head, sure.
Think everyone likes leaving sounds enabled? How about even being in an environment that allows sounds (an office, library, lecture hall..)
Alt tab: Yeah, I use it, most experienced users do, but most people don't even know keyboard shortcuts exist.
no comment
Are you kidding? One look at my boss' screen and you'd think differently. I looked as his taskbar the other day, and it was full of 25-30 little Firefox icons (with a few others mixed in) followed by one, maybe two letters of the page name. He had no idea which window contained what (combine that with 3-10 tabs in each window to make for a worse picture). At least a taskbar grouping would have shown "firefox" and when clicked on would bring up another menu showing everything that he had open. Granted, he seems to like it like this (and yes, he was actively using/reading most of those web pages, and I'm sure all but one or two were related to something he was buying/selling/researching for the company), but personally I would have praised taskbar grouping and compressed those down to a handful of "buttons" like my (occasionally) beloved gnome taskbar does for me.
Though I'm forced to agree with you on auto-hiding. I've always thought it was a cool feature, but every time I turn it on, it gets turned off about 5 minutes later out of annoyance. Now something like OSX's bar would be cool. shrink down to tiny (but still visible/readable), and a mouseover quickly brings things up to size.
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
Does it matter? I mean, really, does it matter?
TaskBar Grouping and Auto-Hide are the first to go, when working on someone's laptop. They are useless, and not terribly important.
That is completelly irrelevant! The point is that MS has got another torpedo in their arsenal that they can launch on your project/company/... if you use that feature and dare to create a problem for them for any reason.
Are you saying "if there is something on your desktop that you aren't looking at" right now "your desktop is misconfigured."? Because I'm not looking at the clock all the time but I'm glad it's there, or is this a misconfiguration? Should I autohide the task bar so I have to move my mouse down to see what time it is? Or are you saying something you never look at?
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.
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.
Also, on a more general note -- the more patent activity this year (the more "problems" that need solving), the more revenue the patent office will "need" next year. When you're the head of a bureaucracy funded through force, your "success" is measured not by the usefulness of your service (the approval of your clients), but rather by the level of authority and funding you are granted by the higher-ups (the feds).
In other words, it's not in the patent office's best interest to operate fairly and efficiently, just as it's not in government's best interest to limit it's powers over the people. Sure, government could have followed the plan set forth by the founders (strictly limited government), but then, what's in it for them?
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!
Didn't MacPaint have a groupped button bar to begin with? wouldn't that be prior art?