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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."
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 $300 bucks that they charge for Windows XP goes.
BTW, my grandpa had the same idea when he'd keep his roofing nails in one coffee can, and his finish nails in another coffee can. I wonder if I can get a patent for that.
Method and system for clustering and grouping construction nails...
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
"Grouping in the taskbar has to be one of the most annoying "Features" ever seen in a taskbar."
It is? Funny, I've found it quite useful when having tons of windows open. Is my personal opinion insightful, too?
"Derp de derp."
The is the FIRST feature I turn off on any XP computer I encounter. I cannot think of a single more annoying feature than hiding all of the windows I really have under one thing, where I have to spend an inordinate amount of time reaching the icon, waiting for the list to appear, then hunting through the list.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Then retrieve the old source with the date in it and hang on to it. That's your 2 cent solution to destroying a 3000$ 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.
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.
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.
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.'
Speaking of KDE, did anyone notice that a KDE mailing list thread from 1999 was referenced in the application? Having followed those lists during that time, I know that a lot of similar ideas were batting around the lists before this patent application was placed. In fact, KDE (3.0, I believe, or maybe even the 2.x series) came out with the taskbar grouping feature prior to the release of XP.
Given Microsoft's tight reign over any software development, I find it unlikely that the idea made it from MS to KDE prior to the release of the version of KDE that had it.
If two parties were independently developing the same idea at the same time, and arrived at it approximately the same time, does this mean the idea was obvious? Or was it simply a sort of zeitgeist - that's the kind of thing people in the field were thinking about at that time.
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...
"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.
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?