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."

Comments

Another one for the EFF to bust.

[Anononnyous Covvard]

Was the prior art in X prior to Windows XP's release and/or wide beta?

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[Meor]

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.

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[lightknight]

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.

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess I'm going to GNU/Hell, but I like taskbar grouping. It's sort of like MDI for the taskbar. That, and it hides my hamstersex.com taskbar entries among the work-related browsing, all without the tell-tale "auto-hide."

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[Anonymous Coward]

This actually has been in KDE before XP as far as I can remember. Nothing new here

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[EvanED]

XP's release date has nothing to do with it. You need to find a system than had it in use no later than April 1999, one year before the filing date, to be sure of prior art.

The regulations are that prior art disqualifies a patent if and only if it was in use or on sale or had a description published before the latter of the invention date (which might be hard to prove) or one year before the filing for the patent. (35 USC 102.) Because we are not sure of the invention date, we need to go off of the one year previous rule.

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[lightknight]

Look at it this way: if MS is busy wasting its time/money on stupid & useless patents like this, then they aren't spending their time patenting things that could deal damage to {other parties}.

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[Strange Ranger]

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.

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[antic]

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.

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[samrolken]

TaskBar Grouping and Auto-Hide are the first to go, when working on someone's laptop. They are useless, and not terribly important.

Well, laptop computer repairman, I am sure your customers enjoy you messing with their settings, and making decisions as to what's important or useful for them.

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[Furan]

I don't know about you, but I use taskbar grouping every day. I tend to have several apps open, and several *instances* of apps open at a time - enough that a doubleheight taskbar is not helpful. I really like the taskbar grouping feature.

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[bonhomme_de_neige]

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.

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[psi42]

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.

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[dasmegabyte]

You should try a spin on OS X 10.3. The dock counters your second problem -- blinking alerts -- by bouncing transparent alert messages just into your view. It counters your third problem with its Option-TAB switching...shows a transparency with BIG ICONS in the middle of the screen everything currently open, which you can TAB until you find the one you want OR you can click on it.

It's a pretty clean desktop. I wish I could dump my crotechety old win2k box at work!

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[binarybum]

such efforts are hardly mutually exclusive to a behemoth like M$.

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[mriker]

See, this is why I could never be a computer repairman. I'd spend half my time getting rid of those stupid-ass Jungle cursor/sound themes alone.

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[TWX]

"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.

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[AvitarX]

I fisrt saw this in BeOS

A long while before XP.

like a couple years.

KDE had it as an option for a while too, though maybe not pre XP Betas, but probable was.

Neither of these to my memory though had an auto grouping if X number of tasks are running option.

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[zapp]

*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.

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[forevermore]

TaskBar Grouping . . . useless, and not terribly important.

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.

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[rastos1]

(To hell with mod points)

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.

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[rusty0101]

To my certain knowledge, BeOS had 'task grouping' in version 4 which I beleive predates April 1999. Since I did not use BeOS before version 4, I do not know when it was introduced as a BeOS feature.

Then again, I could be wrong.

-Rusty

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[volinux]

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?

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[DCMonkey]

BeOS's taskbar wasn't the same thing. They always grouped windows of a single application together. This patent is on dynamically detecting the need to group and acting on it.

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[DCMonkey]

According to this, they added it around May 2001.

Sorry.

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[Handyman]

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.

Poor guy. Some hints for him:

1. Use Firefox's tabbed browsing, preferably with the Tabbrowser extension. You can still keep a couple of browser windows open, but you can open related pages in tabs within the same browser window.

2. If you use Windows, you should consider installing a tray minimizer to get rid of those programs that you recognize by the icon anyway but that take you hours to find in the task bar if they're stuck between 30 browser windows. At work I use a tray minimizer for Outlook (for work mail), the Novell Application Launcher, Mozilla Mail (for private mail) and PuTTY (the SSH client). The added advantage of putting them there is that they are gone from my Alt+Tab list, which means I can tab between the windows I'm actually *working* with. This is the one crucial feature that I still haven't found a replacement for in Linux -- applications still have to support minimizing to the tray themselves, so it's not always possible to minimize the applications to the tray that *I* want to put there.

3. If that doesn't help enough, extend the size of your task bar by a row, so that you can better see what's there.

4. Put the taskbar on the left/right of your desktop. This takes a bit more screen real estate, but at least you can control precisely how many characters of each window's name you can read.

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[Handyman]

Regarding (1), sorry, that was a reado.

Regarding (2), taskbar grouping != tray minimizing. Tray minimizing minimizes to the icon list in the lower right part of the screen (which is usually called the "system tray"), so that the only space taken is an icon's worth. If he has so many open windows that he can only see the icons anyway, why not minimize them so that they take *exactly* the real estate of one icon each? OK, there's a downside -- can't Alt+Tab through those windows anymore.

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[BlackHawk-666]

I'll second that one. With my browser on one desk, mail client on another, a terminal on a third, and misc apps on the fourth, I can have heaps more real estate for each program. I reserve a little strip down the side for Gaim and put that on all desks. Hey presto, a really usable desk. My only complaint is I haven't worked out (read, haven't looked for) the key combo under KDE to switch between the desks. Alt-tab is local to the desk, so it is less useful to me now since 3 of the desks only hold 1 main program. Any suggestions from the Slash crowd?

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[clymere]

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.

There are several SuperKaramba themes you can use to do this under Linux. Some are even virtually identical to what you have in OSX.

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[fatphil]

Really, is there any difference?

One is a reserved region of screen where representations of running programs can be found, the other is a reserved region of screen where representations of running programs can be found.

And given that the "taskbar" can be hidden, is there any real difference (I'll get to the "yes" answer later) between it and my Sawfish popup menu which not only contains representations of running programs, but, pertinant to this patent, groups all like programs together in order to save space at the expense of having to do a bit more mouse-work. Very little, apart from the fact that my popup can appear anywhere, and MS's only resides along one side of the screen.

The MS, Apple, KDE etc. weenies and patent lawyers who get off on pretending that there's anything novel about what's little more than making a selection by mouse movement and clicking need a serious dose of reality.

Is there anyone I've not included? Hmmm,actually the old Amiga and Atari/ST guys have got off scott free, I don't remember them (us, I was one, not saying which side, as it was a friendly rivalry)
getting so self-indulgent and obsessive.

Hexagonally oriented auto-hiding recusive popup icon menus, with gestures of course, that's where the future of GUI development lies, I's sure.

Either that or it's the DWIW button.

FatPhil

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[ratamacue]

The problem is that the Patent Office takes the attitude of, "The courts will rule on it if it's a bad patent"

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?

Re:Another one for the EFF to bust.

[tehcyder]

I'd spend half my time getting rid of those stupid-ass Jungle cursor/sound themes...

...and the other half copying all the pr0n off the hard disk. Oops.

*sigh* Here we go again...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cue the "We need to abolish the patent system" posts and just get it over with...

Re:*sigh* Here we go again...

[ScriptMonkey]

Don't worry, I patented posting about abolishing the patent system. Anyone making covered posts will be sent a bill to cover licensing costs.

Re:*sigh* Here we go again...

[BarryJacobsen]

Unfortunatly I patented posting about how you patented posting about abolishing the patent system...I think...that's a lot of patenting posted...potents pasted? Wait, now I'm really mixed up...

Wow..

[faldore]

I think M$ should pantent mouse clicking. After all, they invented it.

Re:Wow..

[cavebear42]

they did pantent it

Re:Wow..

[System.out.println()]

We should award them a pantent for the spell checker as well.

Re:Wow..

[suso]

They should also patent rebooting.

Re:Wow..

[erockett]

Well, M$ recieved a patent for double-clicking, as was discussed in a previous ./ article. The GUI was, I believe, developed at PARC, under Xerox, along with the mouse, etc. Apple basically stole the whole idea from them. If you want to learn more, read _Insanely Great_ by Steven Levy. It's an excellent book (I just finished reading it today), and very educational.

Re:Wow..

[Walt Dismal]

In related news, Microsoft was awarded patent #2933,824,12 for 'DeadBob: a way of notifying users their system has crashed'.

Re:Wow..

[sPaKr]

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.

Re:Wow..

[Hektor_Troy]

The GUI was, I believe, developed at PARC, under Xerox, along with the mouse, etc. Apple basically stole the whole idea from them.

No, they LICENCED it from them. Minor difference - one's quite legal, the other is not.

Re:Wow..

[MikeXpop]

If by stealing it you mean copied it...

Well then you're still partially wrong. They bought it off Xerox and drastically improved it.

And the mouse was invented by someone else I believe prior to Xerox.

Re:Wow..

[mrwonton]

No, that was invented by an IBM employee.

Re:Wow..

[Anonymous Coward]

They didn't patent double clicking. Go read the patent.... they patented application buttons on PDA's (and similar devices) that performs different functions depending on how long the buttons are pressed, and how many times it's clicked within a specific amount of time. Whether or not they should've been granted that patent debatable, but simply saying that they've been granted a patent on double clicking is just wrong, and just plain silly.

Re:Wow..

[Rabbitt]

The mouse was invented by Douglas Engelbart of Stanford Research Center in 1963. The patent on it was granted to the Stanford Research Institute in 1970 and (unfortunately from Mr. Engelbart) expired in 1987, just prior to the PC revolution. Cheers.

Re:Wow..

[dasmegabyte]

Stephen Levy often plays fast and loose with the facts in order to make a more entertaining book (hence all the "hey cool" but impossible anecdotes in "Hackers").

The GUI was invented aways back in the 1960s. At first, it was just a cursor, but it was definitely driven by a puck with a button on it. There's you're mouse, years before PARC. PARC, which was a research center, by the way, not a product development center, created a graphical interface for performing actions featuring windows and icons. This was brought to the attention of Steve Jobs, who thought it was neat and traded several million dollars worth of Apple stock to Xerox in exchange for a "field trip" with his developers to PARC. Apple didn't license the technology per se -- there was nothing to license at that point, there was no product yet -- but they also didn't use Xerox's idea. They took the interface for performing actions and used the basic premise to create an interface for managing objects. They turned icons as verbs into icons as nouns, inventing in the process such things as the first Desktop, the first file management system (Finder) and the first graphical forms, controls and alerts (Xerox's interface was basically a CLI in a window with buttons).

Microsoft's "patent for double clicking" pertains only to hardware buttons on palm sized devices, and only to the specific use of timed accesses. Sounds like double clicking, but it isn't -- the patent is on using one hardware button on a handheld to perform three distinct actions using three distinct input methods, not on any of the three methods. Want to avoid the patent? Make sure YOUR handheld device only uses two of the three methods. Of course, this doesn't make for quite so sensational an article as "OMG M$ Patentz dbl click," which is probably why you don't know about it. Or, like Mr. Levy, do you prefer spreading colorful and entertaining fictions so long as the outline is correct?

Re:Wow..

[nathanh]

The GUI was, I believe, developed at PARC, under Xerox, along with the mouse, etc. Apple basically stole the whole idea from them.

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.

If you want to learn more, read _Insanely Great_ by Steven Levy. It's an excellent book (I just finished reading it today), and very educational.

You might want to read it again. From memory, Levy didn't do such a hatchet job on the history.

Uh okay

[NanoGator]

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....

Re:Uh okay

[ergo98]

Actually Microsoft was a very infrequent user of the patent office a few years back, and actually seemed like a pretty upstanding intellectual property citizen (they were making boatloads of money anyways at a steadily increasing pace, so perhaps it seemed just too greedy to try to use patents to bully money out of new entrants in the market). This aggressive patent position is the sort of thing that people warned about a few years back - as the Windows dominance came under threat (not as much by Linux as by the ubiquitous web), and Microsoft finds it harder to compete with older versions of their own software (the biggest competitor to Office 2003 isn't OpenOffice, but rather is Office XP, 2000, 97, etc.), the easy money is harder to come by. The scenario the paranoid painted was that now would be the time that the screws start to get turned, and patents are one of the screwdrivers.

Re:Uh okay

[runderwo]

Microsoft (as well as any other corp out there) patents everything they can.

That's not true. Most non-software companies don't bother wasting the lawyer time and application fees necessary to get patents for ideas they will never pursue licensing for and will never be in a marketable product. It's just that in the world of software development, patents are a highly effective anticompetitive tool, and are thus worth far more to a company as a weapon against its competitors and customers than if they were used solely as a protective measure.

BeOS had that in 1999

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:BeOS had that in 1999

[SoTuA]

It seems like the "new" twist in WinXP is that the grouping happens only when there is no more room left in the taskbar, and when there's room again it ungroups.

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'.

Re:BeOS had that in 1999

[Anonymous Coward]

Watch out! Next time they are going to patent tabbed web-browsers.

Re:BeOS had that in 1999

[Wordplay]

Install the Tweak UI Powertoy. You get a "Group when N or more windows" option. Setting it to 2 gives you always. As you mention, the option to disable it entirely is in the standard taskbar preferences dialog.

Re:BeOS had that in 1999

[OblongPlatypus]

I fail to see how this new "twist" is non-obvious, though. It seems an extremely obvious combination of the Windows taskbar and the Be deskbar.

By the way, here is a USENET post from 1998 discussing the deskbar.

Re:BeOS had that in 1999

[Osty]

I've seen it before. The Help->About menu. I know that toolkits allow a plain About menu. Why someone would want to add a popup menu just for the sake of having all menu items leading to a popup menu is beyond me

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.

Re:BeOS had that in 1999

[fyngyrz]

Imagemaster (not an OS, but a program) for the Amiga had toolbars for processsing images. The toolbars had pop-up lists of windows containing images. These pop up (some of them "popped sideways", in fact) lists were dynamically generated, dynamically grouped, and dynamically positioned with the other tools. Images (we just called them "buffers") could be items without an assigned role, paintbrushes, composing sources, composing targets, filter sources, etc. And there could be any number of buffers loaded. So grouping by assigned role was a big issue.

The entire toolbar was dynamically generated, and could contain various assortments of tools, images, palettes and so forth - and there were a number of other dynamically instantiated things there too, such as proportional controls, buttons, text entry widgets and so forth. Various classes of things always grouped together. The toolbar itself could auto-hide and pop up when you moused down to it, or it could pop in and out based upon a right-click. And in fact, we had implemented both auto-hide of the toolbar, and auto-hide of contextually inapropriate and not recently used tools in May of 1990, in an earlier product called "reg-paint", now that I think about it.

The fact that the toolbars in Imagemaster were totally dynamic and context-sensitive with the specific aim of being reductionist was actually a selling point for the program, well beyond the convenience of having the UI configure itself for what you were doing at the moment. This was because the Amiga had a limited amount of what was called "chip" memory (1 or 2 mb), which was basically the only memory that could contain drawable graphics, playable sounds, and some other system stuff. So the fact that the program's huge number of controls, windows and so on were dynamically generated and accessed by a panel that only contained what you needed, as you needed it, was a pretty big deal. That made the panel itself a very stingy consumer of chip memory, and that was the primary inspiration for a lot of what it did.

Imagemaster was shipping in February of 1991. Tons of supporting documentation, magazine articles, manuals, users, you name it. Way too much to get lost in the sands of time. Very popular application, too. Imagemaster brought out the very first implementation of morphing on a desktop PC. Imagemaster shipped until Commodore's demise and for a little while thereafter, and that toolbar existed in every version.

So Billy can bite me. Either Pete Patterson and myself came up with the idea first, or someone before us did (which would be fine, I could care less), but it sure as heck wasn't Microsoft. Or Be. :)

Sideways remark: We used to say that if Commodore owned the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, they'd market it as "lukewarm, dead bird." The Amiga was amazing for its time. I still miss the machine at times. But I sure don't miss Commodore.

Not exactly the same

[Anonymous Coward]

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'...

Re:Not exactly the same

[fireman sam]

Nowhere does it mention time based threshold. The threshold in question could be "more than ten windows open". The second could be "less than ten windows open". Nothing to do with time at all.

GNOME did this before Microsoft...

[eamacnaghten]

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.

Re:GNOME did this before Microsoft...

[the eric conspiracy]

This is a continuation of a provisional application filed in April 2000. Not sure what the invention date is, but is certainly earlier.

Prior art has to beat the invention date which is probably no later than 1999 in this case, possibly earlier.

Patent this!

[HarveyBirdman]

Yeah, well, somewhere are patents concerning Sarin gas, the Tacoma Narrows bridge and the Edsel.

This is silly...

[WIAKywbfatw]

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.

Re:This is silly...

[Epistax]

I don't remember exactly but a while earlier there was a patent described on slashdot which was simply a mix of a couple basic techniques. My analogy (although incorrect and over-simplifed) was the notion of patenting the mix of peanut butter, jelly, and bread, even if you have no obvious ownership over the rest.

Actually I am remembering now. It was the concept of having a window fade when not in use, and fade more as it is not being used, patented by Apple. This combines time and variable transparency. Other examples already existed where putting the window in the background made the window more transparent but the Apple folks apparently were awarded a patent simply for fading it with respect to time. To reiterate: they took a preexisting idea, took the next logical step, and now own a patent on it. There was no advancement made by this in any way with the (very slight) possible exception that the UI itself can be said to be improved, and I think that'd be a hard case to prove.

Watch someone patent rotating desktop backgrounds based on the weather. To my knowledge it hasn't been done, so by the logic of the patent office it deserves a patent to protect it's.. uhh.. umm. money?

Prior Art

[the eric conspiracy]

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.

Re:Prior Art

[RickHunter]

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.

Re:Prior Art

[molarmass192]

Well, I know I can disprove at least the first 3 inventions:

Alt-Tab switching is not an invention. That's simply a key binding they used for task switching which was around in mainframes prior to the PC even being invented. Even at that, the Mac had this feature for GUI windows back in 1987.

As for the scroll wheel, a company named Genius had the EasyScroll mouse out long before MS's Intellimouse. MS may have popularized it, but they certainly didn't invent it.

Finally, Samba's networking protocol, SMB, has a twisted history. First came IBM's original PCLAN, on which Microsoft based the Microsoft PC LAN Server Message Block (SMB) which, itself, was a hybrid of the existing X/Open spec 2.07. So again, Microsoft didn't invent it although they certainly evolved it.

So, I'm still unconvinced there's any real innovation to have come out of Redmond -but- I do think that they are very good at taking existing technology and making it mainstream.

Stuff to manipulate taskbars...

[blamblamblam]

So if they're going to patent this crap, why don't they do something truly novel and innovative and let me rearrange the processes on my taskbar so that they're not arranged in a completely useless order (ie the order in which I opened them, earliest to latest). And maybe let me arbitrarily reduce some processes to systray icons instead of huge frickin rectangles.

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.

Here's the truly sad part

[Weaselmancer]

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...

submit patent anonymously?

[Low Key]

If my name was on this patent, I would be embarrassed.

I suppose it's time?

[peacefinder]

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.

Re:Patented Taskbar Grouping?

[Anonymous Coward]

Grouping in the taskbar has to be one of the most annoying "Features" ever seen in a taskbar.

I disagree. The annoying part about it is that it's not predictable. Depending on how many instances I have open of any given application, they may or may not be grouped.

The XP PowerToys allow you to set the minumum number of items before they're grouped to 2. That way, any given app always takes the same amount of space on the toolbar, as long as at least one instance is running. I think that's a great UI improvement.
Patentable? Not sure.

Re:Patented Taskbar Grouping?

[NanoGator]

"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?

Re:OK, so MS has had this since winXP...

[weierophinney]

I've seen it in Win98SE and W2K, in both cases with Symantec Enterprise (for grouping various Norton utilities, like AV, Ghost, etc.). First I saw it was last fall, however.

I'm typically a Linux user, though I use neither GNOME nor KDE, and didn't start using a system tray until this past fall with xfwm4 and the xfce taskbar -- and none of the apps I've used need any grouping.

The patent application dates to 2001; it may possible be valid.

on the subjected of retarded patents...

[spacerodent]

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"

They are welcome to it!

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:They are welcome to it!

[Dynedain]

so you'd rather have 30 buttons all with the IE logo and the text truncated so you can't tell which is which?

please....

Re:They are welcome to it!

[david_reese]

so you'd rather have 30 buttons all with the IE logo and the text truncated so you can't tell which is which?

No, I'd rather use a browser that has tabbed browsing... seriously, the browser is the only real application where I *consistently* need to have many instances open.

It's not funny any more....

[TastyWords]

...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.

This isn't obvious

[thedillybar]

This is not obvious stuff. If there is prior art, then there is reason to bitch. I haven't seen proof of such, and I don't think everyone should be jumping on the "I hate Microsoft" bandwagon until they see prior art.

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.

Re:This isn't obvious

[mcrbids]

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.

Perhaps you should take a look at what is supposed to be patentable before you warm up your fingers.

Two aspects of patent - it must be NOVEL, and it must be NON-OBVIOUS.

You figure this as both "NOVEL" and "NON-OBVIOUS"?

Neither do I, and that's why the complaining.

Re:This isn't obvious

[Flower]

Why isn't it obvious? One of the flaws with a taskbar is that if you have too many applications running your taskbar becomes nothing more than a non-descript button bar. There's only so many ways you can resolve this problem. Tooltips, autosizing the taskbar so the buttons are descriptive again and *gasp* grouping the buttons to free up real estate.

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.

Re:This isn't obvious

[Wolfbone]

Not obvious? You cannot be serious; not only is it obvious but I've seen it at least once before (KDE???). Yet the worst thing about it is not it's obviousness or whether there's any prior art but that it's the kind of thing I can imagine a highly configurable desktop or window manager might allow a user to figure out how to do by him/herself.

It's the kind of thing that I can imagine the developers of said configurable desktop might not actually have explicitly programmed into it in the first place. I can imagine one or more smart power users figuring something like this out for themselves and telling their friends how to do it. Who is infringing on such a patent now?

It's not so much a technology patent as it is a patent on a particular *use* of a technology. Do you really want people to be able to patent the way you use things? Or use patents to prevent others from making flexible and configurable things for users who like that kind of power?

This is just the kind of patent that ought to be waking people up to the idea that software patents are perverse and egregious thieves of diversity,creativity and individual liberty.

Re:This isn't obvious

[e40]

>> 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.

Re:This isn't obvious

[Macadamizer]

The problem everyone is hav ing here is that "obvious" doesn't mean "obivous". Sure, maybe it seems obvious to a user, but obvious in the context of patentability has a very specific definition:

From the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure, section 706.02(j):

"To establish a prima facie case of obviousness, three basic criteria must be met. First, there must be some suggestion or motivation, either in the references themselves or in the knowledge generally available to one of ordinary skill in the art, to modify the reference or to combine reference teachings. Second, there must be a reasonable expectation of success. Finally, the prior art reference (or references when combined) must teach or suggest all the claim limitations. The teaching or suggestion to make the claimed combination and the reasonable expectation of success must both be found in the prior art and not based on applicant's disclosure. In re Vaeck, 947 F.2d 488, 20 USPQ2d 1438 (Fed. Cir. 1991). See MPEP 2143 - 2143.03 for decisions pertinent to each of these criteria."

The basic notion is that there must be some prior art, or combination of prior art, that "teaches" EACH AND EVERY claim element in the later patent -- PLUS there has to be a "motivation" to combine them. Just because there is prior art, or because something seems "obvious" to a user, doesn't mean that it meets the LEGAL definition of "obvious" relevant to the USPTO.

Just thought I would mention that...

Re:OK, so MS has had this since winXP...

[ewhac]

BeOS. Since 1998, and probably much earlier.

Schwab

grouped buttons.... eeks....

[zlel]

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.

Prior Art

[Yojimbo-San]

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.

I'm going to patent a patent...

[bobjohnson]

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!

Re:Patented Taskbar Grouping?

[SoTuA]

It is? Funny, I've found it quite useful when having tons of windows open.

Well, it annoys me to no end. But that's just me. I hate UI inconsistency. You have found it useful when you have "tons of windows open". How useful is when it _just starts_ grouping? Say it has one or two groups of two windows? Not much, I'd say. Anyway, since mozilla got tabbed browsing I rarely have half a ton of windows open. Just a couple of mozillas with a quarter ton tabs each ;)

Is my personal opinion insightful, too?

Why yes, of course! Plenty of mod points for everyone... ;)

USPTO and time elapsed between filing and granting

[r.jimenezz]

I am not certain whether there is prior art regarding this issue (I couldn't care less for this feature, but that's not the point). What worries me is that it took well over 3 years to grant this patent, and if said prior art exists it wasn't found. And this is a relatively trivial invention.

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?

Re:Patented Taskbar Grouping?

[OblongPlatypus]

Apparently it is.

Which makes me wonder.. is this comment funny?

I've got prior art..

[oliverthered]

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'

Re:I've got prior art..

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I've got prior art..

[oliverthered]

Like my brain isn't a computer.
The food order printouts came from a computer too.

Funding

[nurb432]

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?

Re:Funding

[SilentChris]

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.

Re:Funding

[CaseyB]

You don't "file a case" to defeat a patent. You release a product that uses the patented work, and wait for them to come to you.

Re:Funding

[NanoGator]

"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.

Re:Funding

[Random Web Developer]

looking at what groklaw did with a little work it should be possible to create a free software patent task force of some sort.
Just gathering information and presenting it in a clean and well worded way.
There's just got to be a lawyer or 2 somewhere using linux and interested enough to get behind this.

About patents

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:USPTO and time elapsed between filing and grant

[Edmund Blackadder]

"What is the average time to get a patent approved,"

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 ... they often take 2 years to examine your invention on the merits.

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.

New Microsoft Slogan

[Another Voice]

What can we Patent Today!

Patents...patents...patents...

[kennycoder]

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...

BeOS tracker

[csirac]

If this poster is correct, BeOS had this feature in 1999.

This is potentially good for us...

[Scaz7]

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)

A 13 year old girl?

[Blackbird_Highway]

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"

Re:A 13 year old girl?

[Anonymous Coward]

like totally

KDE...

[RedVortex]

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

Re:KDE...

[electroniceric]

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.

Re:KDE...

[tackat]

Of course I noticed the thread -- especially as the reference featured MY NAME in the first place!

Of course I was surprised to see that Microsoft seems to patent something that is closely built after my thoughts mentioned on the kde-look mailing list in 1999 already.

One of the problems with considering my thread as prior art is that unfortunately it was implemented by Matthias Elter some months later. It only turned out during implementation that task grouping only becomes interesting if

- the user doesn't use virtual desktops already (because he already organizes his tasks himself already)
- the tasks are only grouped after a certain thresholded is reached.

It doesn't take to be a genius to get that threshold idea because it's just the logical next step once you implement it but it seems that Microsoft actually implemented my idea before we did and therefore realized this tiny step before us.

Anyways it's interesting to see how Microsoft seems to monitor the KDE mailinglists since 1997.
E.g. I had the idea to create kpersonalizer which featured a dialog with a slider which you could easily use to configure the amount of eyecandy versus performance in KDE.
It was funny to see a very similar dialog in XP Betas two months later which contained almost the same wording in some places :-)
So much for cross-polluting ideas between KDE and MS developers ;-)

preemptive strikes ?

[jdkane]

Is there a way to take preemptive action against patents for which prior art exits? Or do we have to wait for one of these seemingly foolish patents to go to court someday?

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.

Yes You Can!

[megabyte405]

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. :)

Re:Flogging

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

the next microsoft patent is...

[moojin]

a patent for tabbed browsing in internet explorer. hey, wait a minute...

Re:RTFP!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I regret to inform you

[complete loony]

Curses, foiled again.

And I would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for you meddling kids^H^H^H^H er Mods.

Who at Microsoft could have approved this?

[character_assassin]

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.

Prior art doesn't matter

[msobkow]

Prior art only matters if you can afford to buy congress.

Re:Famous words

[Bastian]

I didn't spring for the VGA graphics card just to waste it on drawing a GUI.

Re:OK, so MS has had this since winXP...

[spectre_240sx]

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.

here's something MS could patent..

[rexguo]

How about patenting the BSOD? I'm sure there's no prior art involved...

PJ is right

[fiori]

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.

Except for the time constraints to do and undo ...

[Tjp($)pjT]

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.

How does this benefit consumers?

[Dwonis]

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?

Re:Did Apple ever sue MS for the "Recycling Bin"?

[LO0G]

But Microsoft licensed the Apple trash can back in the 1980's.

That was the whole Apple/Microsoft lawsuit thingy.

useless patent mania

[stock]

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 tray

[billybob]

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. :)

Emacs has grouping on buffer selection

[viking_kiwi]

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.

Semantics

[msobkow]

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.

Re:Windows 95

[EvanED]

What? No it didn't. You must be thinking of something else...

This is the feature that when you open 20 different IE windows it will show only one taskbar icon for the group, and pop up a submenu once you click it.

This is a very trivial patent

[wbsoft]

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.

Hamster sex?

[ag0ny]

[...] That, and it hides my hamstersex.com taskbar entries [...]

My hamster says he'll be happy if you could hide his porn photos too:

http://www.ag0ny.com/misc-20040513-hamster-porn.ph p

I actually feel physically revolted

[Rogerborg]

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.

The usual convenient mistake, eh?

[Moraelin]

You're making the usual fallacy of putting equals between software patents and silly patents. Which doesn't even hold true in either direction.

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 /. 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.

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.

Re:The usual convenient mistake, eh?

[VdG]

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.

Re:The usual convenient mistake, eh?

[Moraelin]

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.)

Re:The usual convenient mistake, eh?

[26199]

Hmm. Are you a programmer? If so, I'm surprised...

Patents work for medicine, they don't work for software. A software patent is by definition a patent on a process, not a tangible result. The problem comes when you consider the scope of the patent.

Does the patent cover the same process with, say, one step added? Well, it has to, otherwise people could get around it easily. Similarly it has to cover the same process with maybe one or two steps removed, or swapped around. So what you get is a patent which is too broad, preventing people from addressing the same problem in even remotely the same way.

Let's say people had started patenting algorithms since the 1950s. It's almost too horrible to think of. Let's see, what would have made a good patent... binary trees, linked lists, B-trees, heaps, hash tables... oops, all your memory storage possibilities have gone. Better wait 20 years if you want to use a sensible data structure without paying royalties.

Let's see... quicksort, heap sort, merge sort... why not insertion sort and shell sort, too. Now you can't sort things without paying royalties, either.

Line drawing algorithms -- those weren't trivial to develop, either. So now you can't actually draw straight lines efficiently without paying royalties.

I know, how about compiler compilers, LR parsers, and so forth? Then nobody can actually program at all. I suppose that would solve the problem completely.

Codec and encryption patents are only sensible because a) you have to use exactly the same codec or encryption as the other person, so the scope of the patent can be narrow b) it's a really bad idea to be too restrictive about use of your wonderful new codec or ecryption scheme.

Software patents in general are a real menace, and I doubt you'll convince many programmers otherwise...

Re:The usual convenient mistake, eh?

[TS020]

The problem with this logic is that mathematical fact cannot be patented. The algorithms used to create compression techniques are just that - mathematical fact. The code that is used to turn the mathematical idea that was only an algorithm before is not easy to reproduce and it is copyright[able]. Thus, algorithms should not be patented because of their intrinsic mathematical nature. Recreating them in code is NOT simple, and that should be protected.

Now, the real issue here is that we, as users, need to make sure that we don't fall into the trap of using algorithms that are patented, for the time being that algorithmical patents exist, and use ones that are being developed by the highly skilled Open source communities. Who needs gif? use png. Do your work using XPM's (which work better with gtk+ anyhow), and just be vigilant. Eventually, these silly issues will start to go away.

Now, in your message you state something about copy-and-pasting someones algorithm. An algorithm is an IDEA. A mathematical construct. Nothing more. A good example is an AVL tree. Simple enough to code, as long as one is not completely novice, but it's been coded thousands of times by thousands of Comp-Sci graduates. Now, each person must write their own code when in class (some get away with this), and we can imagine that as a kind of copyright protection. Some code the same thing better than others. To be put simply, patenting reduces the quality of software released by removing the possibility of competition.

The problem with creating your own algorithms for this type of stuff is getting sufficient market saturation for it to be useful. Further, why should we have to reinvent the wheel. There are much better things to do then try and redo someones work. We should be advancing, not dealing with this bs.

But then again, capitalism promotes the status quo. I guess I'm just a socialist.

The patent was filed one day

[Alexis de Torquemada]

after GNOME added a discussion of this feature to CVS. It seems that at this time, it was already implemented. Excerpt:

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.

Re:The patent was filed one day

[Alexis de Torquemada]

> It seems that at this time, it was already implemented.

Confirmation of this can be found in gnome-core/applets/tasklist/tasklist_applet.c, version 1.83 (Jan 24 2001):

static gboolean
is_task_really_visible (TasklistTask *task)
{
g_return_val_if_fail (task != NULL, FALSE);

if (!task->tasklist->config.enable_grouping)
&nbs p; return is_task_visible (task);

/* we can probably unroll the length test */
if (task->group && g_slist_length (task->group->vtasks) > task->tasklist->config.grouping_min)
return FALSE;
else if (task->task_group)
return g_slist_length (task->vtasks) > task->tasklist->config.grouping_min;
return is_task_visible (task);
}

Here's the link:
http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gnome-core/app lets/tasklist/tasklist_applet.c?rev=1.83&view=mark up
(remove the spaces between "app" and "lets" + "mark" and "up")

Not only does the task list perform grouping, but it also uses a threshold to determine whether windows of the same application shall be grouped or not.

PS: Sorry that /. code display sucks so much.

taskbar executive

[Animaether]

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.

Crypto patents .. not trivial, just not patentable

[pbhj]

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.

Apple and Sun

[netdoode]

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!

Patents will weaken

[Coins]

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.

Also Patented by Microsoft

[famazza]

Why don't you take a look at this:

• Task bar with start menu
  Windows tabs
  Thumbnails
  

Between others.

What if I patented polution?

[MonsieurX]

Would I get immensely rich taxing on poluters, buy microshit in 1 or 2 years, and thus save the earth from idiots stealing good ideas and make the earth a nice place to live?

Didn't MacPaint have a groupped button bar to begin with? wouldn't that be prior art?

In related news...

[kcurtis]

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!"

Well...

[Cinquero]

... 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*

Read this!

[daijo78]

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.