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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?
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
I was using this on my 25MHz 486, that's how fucking old it is.
Yeah, well, somewhere are patents concerning Sarin gas, the Tacoma Narrows bridge and the Edsel.
--- Ban humanity.
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.
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
Wich is a behaviour that makes it really annoying, because you have to switch your mind-gears between "searching among open windows for the useful window" and "search for the app icon and then navigate to the useful window". I'd rather have "grouping always" or "grouping never", the latter being what you get when you disable the grouping 'feature'.
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
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.
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.
Big corps like M$ usually do not file patents in order to sue others, but to protect themselves from being sued.
bah, they can have the power button patent. I would just like to see who ever patented the reset button for laptop lax the fees a bit, its been years since I had a laptop with a reset button. And holding the power button while I conplate the meaning of life sucks.
I haven't seen a grouping yet that was particuliarly innovative. How about grouping by interrealtion? I group an Excel spreasheet together a Word document because they are sharing data and are obviously one task. I'm copying and pasting between IE and PowerPoint for a presentation. Shouldn't they be grouped together instead of all my IE session including the unrelated /. and Groklaw windows?
So no, I don't this stuff as non-obvious or innovative. Nor am I saying "I hate MS" for doing this. I'm saying it's a dumb patent.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
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)
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.
Problem: too many windows in the taskbar.
Solutions:
- not to open that many windows.
- hide windows that are not in use.
- group windows randomly.
- group windows by application type.
And I shouldn't have to be a patent lawyer to determine if a patent is valid or not! I just need to be sufficiently skilled in the art and capable of recreating the invention by RTFP!
By definition, patents are supposed to describe an invention such that a practioner skilled in the art can recreate the invention after having read the patent.
Being able to recreate the invention does not mean the patent is invalid. Just the opposite: it is in fact a basic requirement of a patent. When explained, anyone should be able to implement it. Patents are supposed to be obvious once someone else has come up with the idea and explained it.
If I was designing something like this I wouldn't even have considered it. That makes it non-obvious. Whether or not it is novel depends on whether or not someone else did it first. I have seen no such thing.
Could the macintosh dock's function be considered grouped taskbar buttons? Multiple windows of a single application are all associated with a single button... It's not the same, but depending upon the wording, it might fit. I'm not saying it's prior art by any means, but it could pose a problem to mac users.
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.
UI standards. If About is the only thing in Help, and you decide to push About to the top level, now you have differing behaviors for the menu bar. When you click on File, a menu drops down, but if you click on About, a dialog pops up. It's better to have a drop-down menu with the single item than to have that odd behavior. This goes for other menus, as well. I'm sure you've seen applications that only have Exit under File. You wouldn't want to push Exit up to the top-level. It may seem silly to have a menu with only one item in it, but it's better than a menu bar with multiple behaviors.
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!
>> Until I see prior art, yes, I believe this idea is both novel and non-obvious.
Seeing prior art has nothing to do with the non-obvious part.
>> If I was designing something like this I wouldn't even have considered it. That makes it non-obvious. Whether or not it is novel depends on whether or not someone else did it first. I have seen no such thing.
Just because you think it's non-obvious doesn't make it so. I find it very obvious, and think I would have done the same. I think a lot of people would have, too. In your car, do you find the buttons grouped, say for your radio, air flow? Absolutely. It's obvious.
The mouse was developed by Doug Englebart at Stanford Research Institute more than a decade before PARC came into existence.
Apple paid a lot of money to license PARC's technologies. Apple also hired several ex-PARC employees. Apple also heavily improved on PARC's ideas; it certainly wasn't the case that Apple simply "stole" the Star. And it certainly was NOT the case that the Star was the first GUI or even mouse-driven GUI. Apple added a hell of a lot of innovations to the technologies they licensed from Xerox. It was Microsoft who shamefully stole the MacOS interface without paying fees. Read folklore.org to hear the story straight from the horse's mouth.
As the saying goes: Microsoft has a brilliant Research and Development team, and they're called Apple. It's disgusting how little Microsoft adds to the industry, given their size and wealth.
You might want to read it again. From memory, Levy didn't do such a hatchet job on the history.
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?
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.
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.
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++
I don't wish to seem petty, but the examples you give are NOT software. They're mathematical algorithms which could be implemented in software if you wanted. Or you could build dedicated hardware to do it, or you could work it all out by hand, (in theory), or anything else you fancy.
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.
Just because somebody invented something, does not mean that he has supreme right over that thing. Do you think humanity will be where it is now with software patents ?
I'll paraphrase the same question right back at you: do you think medicine would be where it is today, if anyone was free to brew in a bathtub the formula you've spent half a billion to perfect? Why the heck would anyone invest in pharmaceutical research at all, if that was the case?
Yes, you could argue until you're blue in the face about how that would be good. You could buy cheaper medicine, for example. But then noone would invest in producing _new_ medicine. Good luck if your disease doesn't go away with just penicilin and/or aspirin, because in your ideal world noone invented anything newer than that. You're gonna die, but hey, surely that's a small price to pay to keep those greedy corporations from patenting obvious chemical formulas.
You see, the point of patents is to stimulate research. Yes, you pay for it by having a 20 year interval in which someone gets to collect royalties for their investment. But the benefit in the long run is that you actually get research.
Well, see, same thing with software. 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. (Algorithms copied from a book via memory, for all practical purposes I'll consider to be copied-and-pasted.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.
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.
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.