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Microsoft Seeks Latitude/Longitude Patent
theodp writes "Q. What does Microsoft feel is unpatentable? A. Apparently nothing! On Thursday, the USPTO published Microsoft's patent application for the Compact text encoding of latitude/longitude coordinates, in which the software giant explains how a floating-point number can also be represented as a less-precise integer that's displayed in base-30 notation!" If ever I have seen a silly patent, this is it.
It just makes it shorter to represent numbers. 11111111 in binary is 255 in decimal which is FF in Hex. Representing large integers in base 30 allows them to appear shorter in URLs, using standard character like 0-9 a-z. Pretty smart idea, but I don't know if it's really worth a patent.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
This is not justification for a patent. I cite Atlantic Works vs Brady, 1882.
"It was never the object of patent laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures. Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tends rather to obstruct than to stimulate invention. It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement, and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax on the industry of the country, without contributing anything to the real advancement of the arts. It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions of unknown liability lawsuits and vexatious accounting for profits made in good faith."
Latitude and Longitude are normally expressed as base sixty rationals, so changing to base thirty integers isn't particularly innovative. This would never win a court case strictly; however, Microsoft has the money to keep this in court all the way to the U.S. Supreme court, so it would take a large amount of money to contest.
I used to read Caltizzle. I was a lot cooler than you.
0392670 and 1416000, seven digits each. You concatenate them together in a base-N alphabet. So if in base ten you have 03926701416000, nothing gained except I would like to know what is at that digit of pi maybe but no real use regarding the patent.
You could use a websafe alphabet (like I use when encrypting form data between one page and the next, based on a public CPAN module.. encryptform or some such) or a little bigger alphabet that would be MIME or Base64.
From item 8 they are dropping accuracy in order to encode in less characters. Um. Well yes you can shorten numbers to lose accuracy. If you write the numbers using letters instead, like in base 16 or some substitution alphabet it may look like you are shortening a word but really it is just dropping decimal places. Microsoft claims they are unique at being able to go back and forth between string length and allowable error. They have a patented subroutine that you feed say a floating point latitude, number of characters to use, the number of characters in the alphabet (i.e. the base) and required accuracy, and it will spit back something like "KXW" maybe.
Likewise you can feed another patented subroutine "KXWCMY" and it will give you back something like "39.3N, 142E" (well higher res than that really, it doesn't seem that useful unless you are measuring GPS coords to the inch). Perhaps this is the code a mobile device will shout whenever it can triangulate its location from a few known wifi points. :)
Well I just skimmed the end of it but it seems this is for use when you really don't want to use all those decimal places (8 digits for meter resolution). Needless to say 32 bits is enough to handle it but it looks so *long*! So instead of just lopping off the last few digits, they want to compress it (okay so far) but then they tell the compression algorithm how compressed they want the string to be, how much they are willing to give up (I would think in decimal places but ultimately in meters I suppose).
They then talk about personal info managers and map display programs on pdas, and the bs starts to pile up real fast. They start talking about nonvolatile memory, video tape, scanners, joysticks, office environments, what have you.
There is mention of an URL (301) that 'contains a geographic parameter "mapcoord", which has a parameter value "ry7cx4tp95"'. There is some talk about users inputting information which sounds interesting, until you realize that in the end this is really a quintessential rot13 for the 21st century, written by a corporation that does not care if users cannot decipher the codes or tell how accurate it is at a glance, or find it on a globe or non-M$ map, that assumes every gps manufacturer will liscense the patent, who cares if you don't have alpha input on your keypad etc. Someone should tell them you could do it all in just a couple characters on a kanji-equipped Japanese phone. While it gets more seductive as you read more and more, it also hits you with a sledgehammer that you have to have a calculator with the patented subroutines built into it, just to understand what codes your are typing.. it can only ever be useful among a weenies who have been brainwashed to think in corporate speak and that is the problem with Microsoft and Windows. If they just published it for free openly most people would forget it (it seems neat maybe but in the end it's just too much trouble unless it is an accepted standard like geo8 for an 8 letter string.. and even then). As it is I think it is utterly disgusting. Also it is probably beaten by error checking code, lossy image compression code, and the CPAN module I mentioned. Yuck!
This co-ordinate encoding scheme sounds similar to one used by US (and other) military forces for air targeting.
See this description of GEOREF co-ordinates for example. Basically you divvy the world up in to a grid and use letters to reference the major fractions of the co-ordinates and numbers the minor fractions. So 106 25' 44" W 310 48' 06" N becomes EJPB 3448.
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