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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.
The thing about Microsoft and patents is that they file them defensively, not offensively.
Pretty sure the US Patent Office has a say in what is and isn't patentable.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
Who care's what they patent? There's no chance in hell this would stand up in court, the judge would laugh it off and Microsoft's patent gets revoked.
Is there prior art? Probably.
Is it obvious?
Probably.
Is it capable of winning a course case? AAHAHAHAHAHAAHAA!!!
End of story.
Thats crazy. I think ill patten short ahnd AND 1337 speak.
Don't you think the title is a little trollish? I get it, already. MS is evil. But they're not going to deploy interceptors to stop ships using LAT/LON coordinates while out at sea.
Wait... maybe they will...
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
...why don't they also patent the number "30"?
They should really stick to just patenting things that someone else might want to do at some point. That said, anyone who actually read the patent would have to be squinting pretty hard to be upset with either MS or the patent guys about this one. I normally like me some MS bashing, but this one's pushing it.
doesn't that mean that any gps device manufacturer would have to pay licene fee to M$? damn... i should hurry up and patent the cartesian coordinates before it's too late! don't worry i'll open up the patent for OSS ;-)
If the patent application were restricted to base number 30, it would be trivial to circumvent. But in fact, it seems to claim every base greater than 2, such that even the common-practice expression of latitude and longitude appears to read on the claims. Prior art! Prior art!
Good gosh. 60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per degree, use base 60 for Pete's sake!
Good grief. This only confirms what we have all known for a long time, Microsoft is run by a bunch of morons. They can't even get a silly patent right.
Infuriate left and right
There is a long list of claims which are essentially the same, except that the later claims are more specific so that they are less likely to be kicked out in court. Before someone actually get sued using this patent, most lawyers in the US could not be sure which claims are valid, which are not. However do you want the power balance between inventors and the general public to be (personally I think abolishing patents in most fields might be a good idea), this uncertainty is bad for everyone.
They are filing to state that their routes across Europe are patently correct. Encarta is right, and the Europeans better move their landmasses NOW, see?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Tomorrow, they'll add an amendment to that patent saying that they own the location of that coordinate too, and if granted, Microsoft will own any piece of land they want. MS: We own this coordinate. Linus: But this is my house. MS: Not anymore. Linus: I'm homeless :-(.
This is a problem with USPTO, not Microsoft. I mean, how is this any different from me downloading pirated movies? It's wrong, but I do it anyway because I can (get away with it). It's the same with Microsoft, they can patent pretty much everything because the problem lies with "the system". Fix the USPTO, fix the problem. Fix the distribution system for movies, fix the warez problem.
I'm usually pretty lenient about what I consider a good patent, but this one seems dumb. It's not even an optimal way to do it. They're just using a fairly cheesy form of compression to make a string shorter.
So, they remove the ability for a human to tell what the lat/long is by inspecting the string, but compress the string suboptimally? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
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Harrison definatly gets the royalties on longitude.
it's not quite as nefarious as you seem to think
Fine....then I'll patent a process for using semi-voluntary human musculature for creating a partial vacuum sufficient to allow a positive flow of air into the lungs of a human being.
.
.
now, if only someone could patent a way to get it back out again. I'd do it myself, but I'm still working on how to get just the O2 molecules into the bloodstream.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
What happened to not being able to patent a mathematical formula? Isn't something like this basically just a math trick?
Manufacture in China
We implemented a base 64 packing for floating point data using printable ASCII characters, as we needed to transfer files from VAX/VMS to CRAY machines. Yes, that was about 20 years ago!!!!
This only confirms what we have all known for a long time, Microsoft is run by a bunch of morons.
For a "bunch of morons" they seem to have done a pretty good job establishing and maintaining desktop and office suite dominance.
For a "bunch of morons" they seem to have made a pretty big warchest of cash.
For a "bunch of morons" they seem to have gone from nothing to second place in the game console market rather quickly.
For a "bunch of morons," in other words, they're pretty damned successful. The last thing you or anyone should be doing is writing them off.
The coolest voice ever.
I'm going to patent this comment.
Wasn't FractInt doing this 10 years ago?
I'm going to patent this comment.
;)
Perhaps they will next try to patent a system in which each house is represented by a 4 or 5 digit number, followed by a name which will be used to designate each 'street', and they will then group some of theses 'streets' into 'towns'. Microsoft will then proceed to create some proprietary software called MS-Address, and they will sue the US Post Office for infringing on their intellectual property. For that matter, they can sue the patent office for using this system too, since I'm sure their headquarters uses a 'un-liscenses' address
maybe this is a precursor to microsoft patenting base-10 notation, then they would own all our money as well as the air...
I know it's in your blood to hate Microsoft, but least take the time to read the patent! What they are seeking to patent is a METHOD of encoding LAT/LONG in a URL in a better way than is currently employed. I think this patent is incredibly valid.
A blog like any other.
From the patent abstract:
"Methods are disclosed for encoding latitude/longitude coordinates within a URL in a relatively compact form. The method includes converting latitude and longitude coordinates from floating-point numbers to non-negative integers."
Where are tinyurl and similar websites to claim that they have been converting URLs to relatively-compact-form, using non-negative integers and letters?
Although M$ churns out mundane but fairly good software as the main line of business, this company has a huge R&D budget, and the central research laboratory at M$ is the equivalent of the old Bell Laboratory. I suspect that the M$ laboratory is not confined to only software research. There is likely small, upstart efforts exploring other technologies.
Certainly, X-Box took me by surprise as, up to its debut, I had always thought of M$ as a software company.
May be, there is something to the warning: "Resistance [in any technology] is future. You will be assimilated."
"The set deliberately omits vowels to avoid the possibility of the algorithm inadvertently generating real words that could be offensive."
Wow, that is SO "politically correct". Still it does't prevent people from constructing URLs saying fvck 0ff. It would be better if people would simply learn to respect other peoples freedom of speech.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
my password really is 'stinkypants'
I worked on something like this three or four years ago for my employers - lat/lon positions were stored in text fields with base 16 representation. I think we filed a patent application on it too (the lawyers' idea, not mine). I wonder whatever became of it...
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
The early claims of the patent are simply for converting a floating point representation for embedding in a URL. While this is all fine and dandy, wouldn't uuencoding the binary form of the coordinates be an obvious way to serve this purpose?
Microsoft Patents One's and Zero's... Sun & IBM Scared. The US Patent Office says, 'We're just doing our job.'
At least one part of this encoding method - converting floating-point to non-negative integers - looks like prior art.
For instance, ESRI does this for their spatial database (SDE):
URL is here.
And most likely it was known even before...
You can't see a sillier accepted patent than the "circular transportation facilitation device" patented in Australia. If you think that your patent system is stuffed, with the addition of software patents that seem likely in Australia our patent system will be thoroughly rooted.
This type of patent is NOT about protecting their rights to an innovation. It's about restricting interoperability.
After patenting this encoding method, they can create some kind of software interface based on it, e.g. have a web application that uses this encoding in it's URLs, or an extension to Internet Explorer that uses the encoding somehow. Then if the server/extension becomes popular, they can use the patent to lock out OSS and other vendor's applications.
Location-awareness is a hot topic these days -- that probably has something to do with this particular patent.
I suspect the real reason for this is so they can control/prevent deep linking into their Terraserver (etc) geographical systems. If my website has a way of generating their coordinate URLs and linking directly to their content bypassing their front page, they could now prevent me from doing this because of this patent.
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
For those too lazy to read even the article summary, here' the abstract...
/. Even the abstract is fairly specific. Relax, people, they're not patenting maps.
Honestly, it's threads like these that make me want to stop bothering with the comments on
Methods are disclosed for encoding latitude/longitude coordinates within a URL in a relatively compact form. The method includes converting latitude and longitude coordinates from floating-point numbers to non-negative integers. A set of base-N string representations are generated for the integers (N represents the number of characters in an implementation-defined character set being utilized). The latitude string and longitude string are then concatenated to yield a single output string. The output string is utilized as a geographic indicator with a URL.
Would it have killed the story submitter to say "encode latitude/longitude coordinates within an URL"? Then again, the story wouldn't have been trollish enough to be accepted then.
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
Don't you find it more believable that they are simply waiting for software patents to be established world wide, after which they'll take out all the major open source applications? I.e. Samba, Apache, Open Office, Mozilla, maybe gcc, etc.
The point of encoding lat/lons this way is to allow a compact coding in URLs.
That's useful in mobile devices, where URLs are limited. It's also useful in that now you might be able to memorize and type in your latitude/longitude, since in a higher base (30 is just an example) you can get good precision in few digits (their example is 5 characters, with 2-meter precision).
Why base 30? That's 10 digits and 26 letters, minus 6 vowels "to avoid the possibility of the algorithm inadvertently generating real words that could be offensive". Funny.
So it's useful. As far as I'm aware nobody's ever done it before, which makes it both non-obvious and novel. Those are the three tests of a patent. If you don't want to use it, keep using base 10. If you do want to use it, at least give Microsoft credit for coming up with a reasonably clever idea. As another poster pointed out, this is the type of patent MS usually uses defensively, so that nobody goes out and patents an idea they're already using in live software.
I think MS would like to see everybody memorize the lat-lon of their home as two five-digit strings, but it's not going to happen. First of all, the patent requires you to pick a precision beforehand; decimal degrees and degrees/minutes/seconds don't require that. Second, even if MS introduced a standard, they'd better release the patent for public use, or nobody will bother lest they risk being sued. Decimals are wordy, but everybody understands them and they're free.
I have one other gripe about the patent. They spend considerable time explaining how to convert a number in base 10 to a number in base N. It's not one of the claims, and it really could have been taken as given.
The headline is misleading, becuase they are not patenting lat/lon, just one method of representing it in a URL.
I do think there are a number of holes in it. For example, claiming a patent on the method of concatenating 2 strings together just because they generated those strings creatively to represent coordinates.
Wrapping up, I think the patent is valid, but is a mix of patentable and non-patentable statements. It is at least an interesting algorithm to study.
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
Clearly, msft is on a mission to patent every piece of prior-art msft can possibly imagine.
Could there be any downside for msft? Could this clearly unethical behavior possibly bite msft in the azz? Could the DOJ say "Um, msft, you have 4000 patents for stuff you didn't invent - that's no good."
Could somebody suing msft point out all the fake patents as evidence that msft is a scam organization?
Ok, so MS does crafty things. Been there, not changing, not going back.
:)
What about MS hardware though? I was thinking about it the other day and I *love* MS's hardware. I have since my first SideWinder. All my keyboards and mice are MS. I never used any WindowsCE devices but I'm told they are top notch also.
Does MS farm those out? And if so, to who? Anyone care to admit they love MS's hardware? You can post AC if you're afraid.
-- I have fans? Wow.
When you work at Microsoft, the job comes with salary, stock, and among other benefits the possibility for engineers to file patents. It must be very self-satisfying for an engineer to have a patent with his or her name on it.
Maybe it's worth the cost for Microsoft. It would be a way to tell engineers that the company thinks that what they are doing is important. The message only costs money and a lawer's time; it doesn't require much social sophistication.
Note -- This is only a theory. I have never worked at Microsoft, and those I know who did work at Microsoft never told me about this particular fact.
Is the definition-of-silly-pattents dept a subdepartment of the should-have-previewed-for-spelling dept?
The primary case law concerning what is and is not patentable was set forth in 1980's SCOTUS decision in Diamond v. Chakrabarty. The court ruled that "n choosing such expansive terms as "manufacture" and "composition of matter," modified by the comprehensive "any," Congress contemplated that the patent laws should be given wide scope, and the relevant legislative history also supports a broad construction. While laws of nature, physical phenomena, and abstract ideas are not patentable, respondent's claim is not to a hitherto unknown natural phenomenon, but to a nonnaturally occurring manufacture or composition of matter - a product of human ingenuity "having a distinctive name, character [and] use." Believe it or not, this is actually a compromise, because the respondent had actually argued the case based on a 1952 congressional memo (pertaining to the 1952 patent recodification) that "include anything under the sun that is made by man" is patentable.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Has anybody patented floating point yet? "A method of representing numbers using a dot operator to signify numbers less than one"? How much does a patent cost?
Eager to join the action...
So math done on a computer?
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
It's actually "Microsoft Corporation and A dress" that filed for the patent- they are in collusion with this dress, which was once part of Ballmers private collection.
This would easily be overturned. The amateur radio tracking protocol APRS has had a means to encode Lat/Lon as base 91 for at least 7 years. 91 was chosen to use all printing characters that can be sent over amateur packet radio without special encoding. Base 91 wasn't designed to be used in URLs, but they do claim uses outside URL, and all base numbering systems. Hopefully the patent office will Google before they grant this one...
Yesterday
Microsoft: Open source software isn't interoperable. Everyone should use Microsoft software because it is more interoperable.
Today:
Microsoft: Let's patent some obscure way of encoding Lattitude and Longitude so that no other systems will possibly be able to interoperate with our systems.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Ham Radio has been doing this sort of thing for years. There are several different coding schemes but the one that seems to have won out is the "Maidenhead Locator". I live in a 3x2 Km area in West Sussex, England which is located by IO90PW. I used to live in Norfolk, England located by JO02LQ.
This coding scheme has been around since the 1980's but there were others with greater or lesser degrees of accuracy before that.
Second, I think there's prior art possibly in the universe simulator Celestia which supports URL encoding of coordinates (I don't know if it's uses the lat/long system though, that's why I'm bit unsure), and there definitely seem to be prior art in NASA's World Wind application. It uses a compact Lat/Long => URL encoding scheme as follows:
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
2 * 26 + 10 = 62
No need to worry about confusing I/1 and O/0, these are not meant to be used by humans directly. Heck, you've even got two left over for E/W or N/S.
Infuriate left and right
Even though it'd probably not hold up in court, the patent is enough to bully around small companies/individuals that can't affort the enormous financial risk of actually taking it to court....
This could be a public service actually. This way anyone wishing to lie would have to pony up for a license fee. There would be an actual list of registered liars! Of course an automatic license might have to be granted to all politicians, but I'm sure that the politicians and Microsoft could work something out.
Microsoft could make even more billions! They hold seminars to teach people the proper use of prevarication.
Frankly, I can't imagine why they haven't already pursued patents in this area. Of course, they might be worried that such a patent might be too broad...
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
Like, Magellan, d00d?
Vasco de fricken' GAMA!
The Phoenecians?
EVER HEARD OF THOSE GUYS, GATES?
Shit. Why didn't we throw his fucking Altair out the fucking window when we had his head in the toilet?
I wonder if slashdot patented option-of-posting-replys-anonymously.
Radio amateurs have used this system for about 40 years. It is called "QTH Locator" or just "Locator". (QTH is the International Morse-code abbreviation of "my location is ...")
It first it was a European system, but it later has been modified for worldwide coverage. Longitudes and lattitudes are converted to letters and numbers, alternating between longitude and lattitude and between base-30 and base-10, so that a limited syntactical check can be made (if you miss one character you'll notice the letter in a place where a digit should be, or vice-versa)
The more characters you send, the more precise your location is specified.
For example, I could specify my location as "JO" which specifies the northwestern part of Europe, or "JO22" which specifies about the size of a province, or "JO22MC" which specifies the area of a small city, etc.
Of course this system was not patented. Nobody would think of patenting such a system.
But at least it exists as prior art.
Lets make a new law, patenting bullshit which shouldn't be patented (see breathing air, using a mouse, peeing etc.) has a 1 million dollar fine on it. We'd soon see how fast this bullshit stops then.
I like muppets.
its called Binary Angle Measurement System, BAMS and it has been used for YEARS !!
So, does this mean that my Garmin hand held GPS will have to start running CE in the near future? Because that 8 megs of ram is just going to waste right now.
The Internet is generally stupid
Using the MS method of encoding, a lat/long coordinate is "compressed" from 18 characters (e.g. 359.59.59, two times) to 10, a "compression" rate of 45%. Not too shabby.
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
Patent application in its wording uses conversion to compact ASCII string.
So, you can avoid infringement of this patent by using conversion to ISO-8859-1. Or perhaps a new patent, anyone? Just leave ISO-8859-2 for me, please.
There you are, staring at me again.
Just because no-one's ever done it before doesn't mean it isn't obvious - it usually means no-one's felt the need before. If you came to me and said "Paul, we need a compact way to represent latitude and longitude in URLs, what do you suggest?" this is exactly what I would have reeled off at my desk without even needing to pause for thought, modulo the rather silly thing about leaving out vowels. I'm sure the same is true of every programmer in my workplace.
MS aren't introducing a standard, quite the reverse - they are trying to prevent people interoperating with their servers.
Xenu loves you!
Under most circumstances pending applications are published right after 18 months after filing 35 USC 122. What is published is, pretty much, the application AS FILED (Although the applicant can request that the application , as amended within one month of filing be used), which means the generally broad, intially filed claims (which actually specify the reach of the invention) 37 CFR 1.215.The claims may well have been narrowed by amended by now (if examination on the merits has started).
Of course, as I'm sure the Slashborg will instantly react, it will probably issue with even broader claims.
Their plan manifests itself, Microsoft wants to pinpoint where both the legal owners of Longhorn live and where the hit squad can precicely go to get the pirates.
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!
that lat/long is outdated. UTM is a much more common standard. Its also a lot more useful
Welcome to the wonderful world of logic patents.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Microsoft may think this is patentable, but I really doubt the USPTO will agree. IANAPatentLawyer, but I work in IP law and correspond with patent attorneys on a regular basis.
I just happened across this commentary that claims "automatic copyright" isn't so automatic.
from the article: The set deliberately omits vowels to avoid the possibility of the algorithm inadvertently generating real words that could be offensive. The letter 1 has also been omitted to avoided possible confusion with the number 1
So, what's located at the following coordinates?
LAT: d1cks
LON: c11ts
Converting a floating point number to an integer
Converting that integer to a base-N string
The following line of code therefore infringes on this patent if we assume that f is a float or double variable containing that f is contained in a "geographically-oriented string," perhaps one such as "Forest covers 2.1% of Afghanistan."
printf("%d\n", (long int) (100000000000.0 * f));
The multiplication/typecast converts a float to an integer, and printf converts an integer to a base-N string. In this case N = 10, but that's nothing special; recall that uuencoding converts a base-256 integer to a base-64 integer. This patent is entirely frivolous.
I used to read Caltizzle. I was a lot cooler than you.
And it is famous for working nicely:
from norway to norway
What's the point of this enoding scheme? Everyone knows that the best way to encode a geolocation is just to use WGS-84 cartiesian coordinates (XYZ), and let the back-end convert to LLH for display or whatever.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
Since Microsoft has never really developed anything original themselves they were probably feeling left out. If they can copy software the can sure copy everything else.
I agree that lat-long->base 30 is (may be) original, but orginality does not, or should not, imply patentable. At the very least innovation should be required.
Otherwise why should I not be able to patent my unique URL scheme on the basis that nobody else has done it.
The parent post has the most significant comment: it's clear that Microsoft is using current US patent law to prevent interoperability. If they are able to go through with it then once again (US) law will have been shown to be an ass.
Look at: http://www.tapr.org/tapr/html/Fmic-e.html
Probably in all the GIS DB's everyone was so enchanted with in the late 80's
emt 377 emt 4
This looks quite similar: http://www.nacgeo.com/nacsite/documents/nac.asp/ ... right down to the base 30 representation.
Try it out:
http://www.travelgis.com/geocode/
I don't quite understand yet how they encode the accuracy. Bit depth? Well, in astronomy there have been for quite some time now two competing efforts to have a scheme of efficiently searching the sky. different outset, two angular coordinates with funny non-cartesian properties. They also come up with a single bit pattern to designate an area on the globe: HTM (hierarchical triangular mesh) and HEALPix. actually the HTM group at Hopkins has close ties to the MS Research group in the Bay area, under guidance of Jim Gray. It's fascinating stuff, as this makes searching large databases a lot more efficient. Something that is useful for the Virtual Observatory efforts.
With the danger of being modded way down by the zealotist crowd: If you are going to complain about Microsoft patents, could you instead point at the real problems:
That particular patent, if granted, will in effect make mod_rewrite infringe. Not that Microsoft would stand a chance in court with this patent, since mod_rewrite predates both the application, and referenced patents.
And if you want a laugh from the MS' patent portfoliom you should know that Microsoft holds a patent for an apple tree named Burchinal Red Delicious. (US Patent PP14,757
http://virtuelvis.com/
Markets are markets, and that's what's important. The widget you're manufacturing is just that: a widget, nothing more. How you position your widget in the appropriate widget market is the important thing. It really doesn't have much to do with the quality of the widget itself.
If you've ever seen a good salesman in action, you'll know what I'm talking about. I've seen sales guys close big deals (and make hefty commisions), when said sales guy knew nothing about the widget he was selling. Case in point: the widget was a big software suite (which was buggy to the point of being almost non-functional), but he closed the deal and made a metric buttload of commision. What's important here is that the sales guy could have been selling anything (say, tires). It's closing the deal that counts, not the widget itself.
Extend this philosophy to marketing (which itself extends to product design, etc., which in turn feeds into technical details), and you have what business is all about.
And since most businessmen are clueless morons, this is how business enables clueless morons to become rich.
QED.
So, there's your reality check.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
It's no secret that the system is screwed up. At least 3/4 of the patent applications are unpatentable things. The problem is that most of them get accepted nowadays. Mostly because there are far too many applications and far too less money to handle them all in a proper way. If I remember well, it all started back in 1990 when some really stupid decision was made in the US regarding patents.
If you have money, you can now get a patent. On almost anything.
One of these days, Microsoft will come up with a patent application on human reproduction. You won't be able to have a baby unless you pay a licence to Microsoft. The question is: will there be a "Baby Update" thingy, which will allow us to "patch" our babies whenever a health issue is discovered?
Since computers by their very nature are based on ints and not floating point values, convertion have basically existed as long as computers. Perhaps with different base, but then using a different base is more than trivial and not a patantable thing. That is just silly.
Just because a system is broken doesn't remove the ethical dilemma of taking advantage of it. You admit as much yourself when you say, "It's wrong, but I do it anyway because I can (get away with it)." Glib solutions aren't going to change the fact that people (and companies) take advantage of the system every day. There are two sides to the crime, and while nobody blames Microsoft for the problems of the USPTO, Microsoft is responsible for their own actions and should be held accountable for making a bad problem worse. To use an analogy nearly as strained as your equating the USPTO with the MPAA, your logic tells me that it's okay to beat up on people weaker than me because if they didn't want to get beat up they would become stronger and fight back.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
So the idea of encoding low-precision GPS in other formats is at least 7-8 years old.
I'm wondering this because to the best of my knowledge they were trying to patent the ability to display IPs on a map or something. With this little addition about maps something tells me they are up to something. Maybe they are adding some sort of mapping system to their Anti-Virus like other companies have done? It would appear if thats the case that somehow they want to take over the Anti-Virus market by patenting little things that will screw people over later.
They could patent a spoon with a bump in the middle of the bowl for eating calamari, and another one with ridges for eating baby carrots.
Packing data in this fashion is hardly new. They are just specifying a particular way of doing the packing for a particular purpose.
Maybe I shoud patent "Using a font-color of Red for the purpose of sending nasty mail to Bill"
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
It is not a valid patent request. I think the domain registrant would not allow this to go through. It would severely cause problem Throughout the internet. They did not invent the math. It was Albert Einstein if I recall correctly. Which mean it is public domain now. Microsoft wants to charge those people who use other oses money for what already paid for. Aclu and others will not let this happen.
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.
.sig?
How many Slashbots happily drive around in vehicles built by American manufacturers cursing Microsoft quality control? That, if it isn't already, should become the new definition of the term "irony".
-
Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
Domain names are case insignificant, but everything after the ? and all parts of the path after a found executable are entirely subject to the interpretation of the server. How the part of the path that leads to the executable is analyzed is probably also up to the server.
Considering that latitude and longitude would hardly ever be used except as a ? parameter, I doubt case would ever enter into it.
Perhaps you had better rethink your career choice of slashdot smart guy. Apparently you never even came close to getting it.
Infuriate left and right
The Maidenhead Grid Square mechanism has been in use by amateur radio for a long time. It's even supported directly by some Garmin GPS unts. Mine is CM87wk. I have an Emacs Lisp conversion tool though you can find many others at the links above.
Or should we all rush out and patent all translations we can think of?
If the Patent office grants this patent, then nobody need respect the USPTO or any of the patent grants they have issued or any court upholding such foolishness.
It really quite simple. Don't just demand, insist and persist with a boston tea party style denial of the validity of the USPTO, until they get back to real and can prove it.
Your defence? Simply the evidence that the USPTOs ability to identify genuinely patentable material has become distorted to the point of not being able to properly identify genuinely patentable material. As such, the court has been left with the task, and that being so, any paperwork the patent office issues, such as patent grants, should be worth zero in courtroom consideration.
I'm sure there are plenty of presidence for this stand. One such resource might very well be the USPTOs own list of patent grants overturned.
Why can't Microsoft do something beneficial, like patenting spam itself.
Actually, who sent the very first spam mail?
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
I came up with a scheme like this to send longer messages by alpha-numeric pager during the early 90s. The only drawback was you needed the program on both ends to decode it, and the internet was usurping the need for this kind of thing. :-D Oh and it wasn't terribly necessary cause you don't get a ton of compression.
... z = 62, j = 72, t = 82, space = 92 - swapped to avoid leading zero trouble) that will make a long integer (102030425262) etc, then turn this integer into a string representation of a base 30 number. Then this is what you send to the beeper. This is the stupid crap you do with Pascal in highschool.
Anyhow it worked pretty much just like this, except I didn't remove vowels because they could make offensive text, I removed letters that where ambiguous on the LCD 7-bar displays (like o, s, z, g, k, v [k looks like x, v looks like u]). Anyway, take a piece of [monocase, un-punctuated] text, encode it as a bunch of 2 digit codes (a = 10 b = 20
If only I had patented the concept. One could probably re-implement it in a one line Perl program.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
If you do make one of these patents, what legal rights does it give you ? Do people need your expressed written consent to use it on Television, or a business, what power do these patents hold ?
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
Come on, it's legitimate, it is innovation that supports their trademarked slogan. ;)
It seems you are the one who is on the clueless moron side. If you haven't noticed, capitalism is about selling people shit they don't need (which you do seem to notice). Very few things purchased today are truely needed. The perceived need is created by these "moron businessmen."
No Sally, you do not need that shiny new iPod, multiple GHz computer, or fancy new LCD screen. More importantly and to the point, you do not need computers. Society is entrenched in technology that they have *become* a need, but 30+ years ago there was no need. They have only become a need because of mass production's need for accounting and quality assurance purposes.
And if my point is still lost on you, then let me state it clearly. You cannot see the forest from the trees. You yourself have been bought and sold by these "moron businessmen" of capitalism. Now who is the bigger moron? Let me know when you build that log cabin out in the woods and plant your seeds.
Dijkstra Considered Dead
Non-obvious and novel? No. Radix-50 encoding is very similar.
Perhaps I'm a bit out to sea on this one...
Storage-wise, ASCII is certainly not more compact than a float.
Display-wise, this is a foreign format, that human readers will not want to read.
So, lets say that MS gets this patent... who cares? There are certainly more dangerous things in the world to patent than this.
Next on Microsofts patents: the concept of life. Human beings everywhere will be forced to purchase OEM licenses for their newborn children.
MS is the only OS maker that has had so many pervasive and systemic security problems - through the last15 years and 4 operating systems. They are the unchallenged leader in virus spreading, and new virus production. They are the only vender so afflicted, and just attributing that to "everybocy hates microsoft" doesn't cut anymore.
./ers just to deflect MS critisms will never help MS produce better software.
Even just this weekend, one of the DS3's where I work went down, and MS Exchange was the only product that choked. This kind of thing happens with their software, that they have earned every bit of critism they receive here.
So, while I wouldn't say MS is stupid, I wouldn't say they are smart either.
I think bashing
Or has he already done it?
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
an option is to go via US Congress to disallow patents on computer programs (as hopefully Europe, India can do).
Join eg https://lists.ffii.org/mailman/listinfo/us-parl for that.
(Another helpful thing would be patent situation analyses,
eg on database patenting).
The string encodes Lat, Lon, nature of the event and control digits to minimize errors.
Some characters are excluded, but not exactly vowels. The idea here is to prevent misreading (eg "O" (letter) and "0" (number). Or "l" (letter) and "1" (number) and so on). So the base used is not 36, but something around 30 (can't remember precisely).
"Even Microsoft seems to have first become aware of the danger after Sept. 11."
Yeah, we need some really tight anti-aviation security for windows now...
Is Sept. 11th a magic catch all:
*insert industry here* should have woken up to *insert issue here* after Sept. 11th.
For example:
The rare fruit preserves industry should have woken up to the problems of shifting climatic changing since Sept. 11th"
No, I didn't think so. I do not think that many Al Qaeda training camps are wired up with an OC12 and some uber geek types playing TA and writing syn attack code, shouting "OMG!!111 J1had!11 You are teh suck!" on irc channels and usenet.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
And then your software by a chance in a trillion points to Taiwan as "country". And you get banned from Chinese market. Way to go boy!
actually MS is simply creating a new map projection system.
... oh, but i guess you didnt read the article! ... so, when I read basically ANY map out there that has lat/long coordinates on it, am I somehow infringing on your uber NACS? NOO! In fact I'd say the NACS infringes on lat/long!
It infringes nothing, and will be valid globally.
It is simply a way to transmit lat/long data more easily through a URL
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
Base 36 has been used for decades. The three-letter airport codes (ATL, LAX, JFK, etc.) were designed for base-36 encoding. Forth programmers and bc programmers have been using this sort of "trick" since before MS existed. (Forth and bc have a variable that defines the base for input/output conversion) The only thing I see that's even vaguely original is omitting the vowels, in a (vain) attempt to avoid "naughty" words. And I'm really not convinced that's innovative enough to deserve a patent.
ignorance is bliss
but
your willful ignorance is just plain stupid.
And who's scared of what? 'Anonymous Coward'? huh?
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
Back in the day my dad worked as a manager for a meat packing plant. It was generally expected that if you were in the research part of the place that you would intermittently either publish some papers and/or get some patents. So while some of these patents are the companies making big plans (and this may or not be the case with this one), some patents are going to be people trying to get bonuses or meet their qouta.
Now someone probably oversees the patent submissions, but that doesn't mean the entire company would agree with a particular one, possibly that just one overseer does.
is really, really tight DRM regional encoding.
No doubt that MS License 7.0 will include a
USB keyfob with built-in GPS, all as part of
their Trusted Computing initiative. (Don't
you dare move that computer from one cubicle
to another without MSFT's okay + license fee.)
I can't wait for the droves of Microsofties
migrating over to F/OSS when this happens.
Essentially they have created their own numbering system to accurately take the place of lat/long numbers, to better suit their needs.
... Because of their upcoming location based information server system which shall revolutionize how you search for information, and how information is targetted at you.
Now if any of you know anything at all about GIS, you realize that really they have just created their own map projection system.
No they haven't made any such projection system. They have merely patented the function round((X+360)*10^N) -> convert to base 30, where X is your coordinate in decimal degrees, and N is your desired level of decimal accuracy. Take both latitude and longitude cooordinates, perform this function, pad the results, and tack them together in string representation, and there you go.
Just remember that 1 in any base is still 1.
It's almost exactly the same as converting 3.2 kilometers -> 3200 meters -> any number base besides 10. It still conveys the same measurement and the same base unit and the same scale. Do the steps in reverse and you are right back where you started.
Now why is MS making this patent?
Tool.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
High-base encoding like Base-36 and Base-40 is old hat. DEC used a base-40 encoding over 30 years ago, and MIME-encoding has been using high bases forever.
And leaving off the vowels won't K33P P30PL3 FR0M SP3LL1NG N4WT1 W0RDS!
The garmin protocol for GPS receivers returns lat/long as unsigned integers; i forget the range but it is something like 32 bits. Really, dont need floating point, just big enough ints. There is a finite amount of detail you need for most things, and millimetre resolution of a position on the planet is about it.
I wouldnt use Base30 compression when base64 is evern more compact. Or base 80.
Software pantents are plain wrong. Software can be protected by copyright , and the nations that allow patens for software will be the losers in the tech world.
I just hope those inovative programmers in asia GPL thier code or we will be lost.
Patents should be limited to physical machinery. Trying to own knowlage is wrong for the world.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
This is from the... Only a Geek Would Notice This... department...
;D
But I'd be laughing pretty hard if Microsoft was about to launch a GPS product.
#1) It's a pretty good bet only Geeks care about Geeky things like GPSes.
#2) If you want to know about truely geeky things you come to Slashdot.
#3) Slashdot readers care deeply about strange, unusual and stupid Patents.
#4) It's probably safe to presume at this point that Microsoft will come out with a GPS.
My Completely Unfounded Conclusion: Either way this is either suggestive advertising or Free advertising. This is all free advertising. Because hey -- you, the slashdot reader -- might be considering geocaching or just the cooleness of general geekery. If M$ is about to launch a very cool GPS product you'll probably go look....
Just a thought..
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
A person picks up a pen and writes their thoughts on a peice of paper. Thats encoding of thoughts. But can they claim ownership of the written word. MS think so. In the UK we spell "Colour" like that. But someone in the US thinks I can compact this to "Color" and then get payments off every one in the US. This is maddness I am glad we have not accepted software patents in europe, it would be a disaster.
I don't know about this one. The Barthomolews Atlas had a scheme where latitude and longitude were expressed in terms of an encoded number base 10, which is readily convertable to lattitude + longitude using alternate symbols. So the idea of comingling lattitude and longitude is by no means new. Their system involved letters and numbers as well, so the first letter is one of 24 time-zones, the first pair of digits were 9's, and there after decimal division: The only novelty here is the encoding in base 30, and i really can't call that "innovative". Also, representing numbers in base sqrt(-3) will automatically encode a plane as an alternating set of numbers. On the other hand, i used a system of calendar where 1 year = 12 months of 31 days, so you could store yymmdd in a 16-bit register, for a range of 178 years. (ie 178*12*31 > 65536), which is quite nifty.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
The whole X-Y co-ordinate system is a compact method of representing point on a cartesian plane using decimal digit strings in compact notation. If you add to this the html tag then you end up with a URL encoding a pair of co-ordinates. Doesnt this mean prior art?
Hey tool
... based on geographic coordinates and presumably the WGS84 or NAD83 datum.
... Keep your eyes closed. Stay in the stone age while the rest of us benefit from what the location server will bring.
Go learn something about map projections.
My coordinates where I'm sitting right now, whether expressed in lat/long, Nad83 UTM Zone 10N, BC Albers, or the patented MS encoded system all place me at the same location (within whatever accuracies you want to assume), just expressed differently.
The MS encoding system can absolutely be considered a projection
Your whole arguement against me simply proved my point more.
Tool.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
As far as I'm aware nobody's ever done it before, which makes it both non-obvious and novel
W.r.t. patents "obvious" doesn't refer to whether or not anyone's ever thought of doing it. It refers to whether or not the solution to a problem (i.e. the "method" being patented) would be obvious i.e. easy for a person somewhat skilled in the arts if asked to solve the problem. In other words, if you were a programmer and someone came up to you and said "we need to come up with a scheme for encoding lat/long values in a compact way", and you could come up with this idea in, what, a few hours max, then it's "obvious". If another programmer can look at the solution and understand it within a few minutes, as is the case here, it's also "obvious". "Non-obvious" would mean if you described it to a programmer, and he/she went off and scratched their heads for a few days/weeks/months thinking "HOW did they DO that?" (E.g. take MP3 compression: although many of us have now read descriptions how it works, at the time it was patented, if someone had asked "please come up with a method of compressing music at a factor greater than 10 with almost no audible quality loss", the solution would not have been obvious to, well, pretty much any programmer I would venture to guess, and also would have boggled the minds (and it did) of many programmers at the time, saying "HOW did they manage such good compression that still sounds so good", and take weeks or months to figure out how.
So there have been 150,000-300,000 software patents granted since 1998? Or is that merely when the appeals process for the lower court ruling ended? The problem I have with software patents, David, is that such a very small percentage of software is written for sale. Most is written for use. The USPTO seems to have no reasonable way of knowing what techniques have and have not been used by some programmer somewhere in the country. They can look at previous patents (there were none, initially), they can look at journals, but there is no viable way to prove lack of previous invention and use in someone's in-house code development. There are just too many programmers doing too much work. With 150-300k software patents out there, with some high fraction non-novel or obvious to experts in the field, programming has become a minefield.. even things that were nominally novel due to context, like writing software to do an old function on the Internet, are being locked away, and by companies that themselves benefited tremendously due to the use of software techniques developed and shared freely before software patentability. How does anyone but Microsoft benefit by Microsoft patenting a wide swath of approaches to reducing Spam? Microsoft gained many tens of billions of dollars of additional revenue due to the surge in PC sales brought about by the widespread adoption of the Internet, yet they and others are now putting roadblocks up as fast as they can to control any further elaboration of the Internet, or competition in providing compatible services on it. How can this possibly be defended?
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Sorry, once more with paragraphs
So there have been 150,000-300,000 software patents granted since 1998? Or is that merely when the appeals process for the lower court ruling ended?
The problem I have with software patents, David, is that such a very small percentage of software is written for sale. Most is written for use. The USPTO seems to have no reasonable way of knowing what techniques have and have not been used by some programmer somewhere in the country. They can look at previous patents (there were none, initially), they can look at journals, but there is no viable way to prove lack of previous invention and use in someone's in-house code development. There are just too many programmers doing too much work.
With 150-300k software patents out there, with some high fraction non-novel or obvious to experts in the field, programming has become a minefield.. even things that were nominally novel due to context, like writing software to do an old function on the Internet, are being locked away, and by companies that themselves benefited tremendously due to the use of software techniques developed and shared freely before software patentability.
How does anyone but Microsoft benefit by Microsoft patenting a wide swath of approaches to reducing Spam? Microsoft gained many tens of billions of dollars of additional revenue due to the surge in PC sales brought about by the widespread adoption of the Internet, yet they and others are now putting roadblocks up as fast as they can to control any further elaboration of the Internet, or competition in providing compatible services on it.
How can this possibly be defended?
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
What's new of the Microsoft scheme? A 30-based encoding scheme to compact lon/lat? That is the scheme introduced in the Natural Area Coding System (http://www.nacgeo.com/nacsite/nac.asp) ten years ago.
Okay, let me ask you some questions:
Let us take, for example, the latitude 36 degrees, 1 minute, 30 seconds. (Assume WGS-84 for the entire post.)
If I convert it to 36.025 degrees, is that a new projection?
If I convert it to 3.6025*10^1, is that a new projection?
If I say it in Spanish, or any other non-English language, is it a new projection?
If I write it thirty-six degrees, one minute, thirty seconds, have I made a new projection?
Now let's define a new unit, call it millidegrees. That is, one thousand millidegree = one degree.
If I write it as 36025 millidegrees, have I made a new projection?
Now let's take that number and write it in hexadecimal, 0x8CB9, is that a new projection?
None of these have made a new projection (or projection onto a plane at all), because we are taking the exact same geographic coordinate (forget about not having expressed a longitude for now, the same argument applies) in DEGREES LATITUDE.
In fact, we are still talking about spherical coordinates, are we not?
Now, let's take one of the above numbers, 36025 millidegrees, and convert that to Microsoft's base 30, and we get 1B0T millidegrees in Microsoft base 30 (the set of digits does not use vowels).
1B0T (base 30) millidegress = 36025 (base 10) millidegrees = 36.025 degrees (which is what Microsoft says the original coordinate is expressed in).
If we take both a latitude and longitude, and convert them into Microsoft's representation, then we have not made a new projection because:
(1) We have not changed the model used.
(2) We have not performed a transformation on the coordinates other than changing base. Particularly, we are still dealing with (spherical/ellipsoidal/geoidal) geographic coordinates.
(3) We have changed the scale, however, by expressing coordinates in millidegrees instead of degrees.
Since a map projection involves also doing (1) and (2) in addition to (3), which we have not done a projection. In particular, we have written geographic coordinates in degrees as geographic coordinates in millidegrees and then converted the number to base 30. This is not a projection.
Suppose you give me a map, how about the Carbury Creek Quadrangle, Oregon, Provisional Edition 1983. Now, if I cross out the scale in kilometers and draw one in in meters, and then cross out all the numbers on the map and write their base 30 (or hexadecimal, binary, or any other base) equivalents, have I changed the map projection into a new one? No, I haven't. The datum used to produce the map is still the same, and nothing I have done requires that the map be redrawn on its plane of projection. Likewise, the method described in Microsoft's patent has also not created a new projection.
Now, prove to me that they have created a new projection. (Since I have effectively disproven it.)
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
What Microsoft is claiming ownership of here is, basically, *any* encoding system whose output is subject to a length constraint. While the primary thrust of the patent is the collision of Natural Area Coding with the Heisenberg Uncertainity Principle (for the purposes of minimizing URL length on mobile devices), *this* part attempts to boldly snatch algorithms which have been part of science for decades. Anyone ever hear of a guy named Huffman? Or Morse?
Even more chilling are the implications for biologic patents. What, I submit, is RNA but an encoding scheme designed to cram information into 3-bit packets?
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Viz, they explicitly thought about using a non-base10 system, but had additonal design goals.
ArcSDE (and I suspect PostGIS) already stores geometry as (slightly less accurate) integer to avoid handling lots of floats. In fact, I'd also argue that the UK's postcode system is a hierarchical location identification system that uses a alpha-numeric namespace in order to generate short, memorable unique identifiers. I'd classify this as obvious, if it stands I'll just base64 encode my WKT geometries.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
http://www.kuesterlaw.com/saris.htm
Since this patent was held valid, after being held invalid by a lower court, the USPTO recieved a large number of applications. Since federal law is in part based off of precident, the Office was bound to issue patents since the initial State Street Decision determined that the claims of that patent passed the rules for determining if an invention was a statutory violation of 35 USC 101.
Lobbying would not likely change the rules. Most likely another court decision would.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
2500 years prior art, but that shouldn't be an issue these days. 10 digits plus upper and lower case letters - leaving out I because it looks exactly like l in Microsoft font. One character each for degrees minutes and seconds.
It would be a good idea if they also dropped duplicate-looking characters, ie 1 and l, 0 and O, l and I, and so on, at least if they are going for visual usability.
Several years I used Expediamaps for a list of the highest points of the world. It was easy to extrapolate the longitude/latitude in the good old days and the instructions told you how to link to its maps. For instance the Everest URL (which incidentally still works) was: http://www.expedia.com/pub/agent.dll?qscr=mrdr&lat s1=27.980665215563927&lons1=86.92149463948968&alts 1=400&ofsx=0&ofsy=0&ntid1=293b&plce1=&wpst1=1®n 1=2&cnty1=4&fmap=1&&tpid=1&&zz=1107746517414&
From that you could easily parse the latitude/longitude. In the Everest case
Latitude:
27.980665215563927 (North)
Longitude
86.92149463948968 (East)
That's pretty much overkill. None the less you could take the extrapolated latitude/longitude and drop it into any mapping program.
The new Expedia maps can only be arrived via search and you have to have the URL mailed to get it. Further it is impossible to extrapolate the longitude/latitude from the new Everest URL
http://www.expedia.com/pub/agent.dll?tpid=1&eapi=0 &qscr=mmvw&msds=EX0184EEAC17$40$F6$D2$B2$2B$F6$D2$ B294002!701000!4$FF!50!Q$FF0!8$FF$1A0Kgvoy.Plpspfy .$28wpmt$29$2C.Mfjm!2$FF$0D0Kgvoy.Plpspfy$87$C5$D1 $CA$0C$FB$3B$40$2F$0D$7E$C5$EE$BAV$40$C80001000!4$ FF$3B$29!50!2$FF0000!2$FF!6i$EE$3F$14000!6$FF!I0&r frr=-6600
Microsoft did not come to dominate the world by giving away anthing for free.
Since this is still in the application stage, some good instances of prior art can invalidate, or severely restrict, the final patient. More details here.
Summary: I was working on an LPMud which was darn well going to have a coordinate system for all "rooms" such that it would easily calculate who was within a certain radius of any action. I grabbed my old maths book, did the trigonometry, came up with the relevant equations, boiled them down, and then proceeded to implement them in the day's game driver. The game driver had NO support for floating point operations, so I used a few tricks:
- Refer to coordinates in degrees, but increased a couple of orders of magnitude to make fractions of coordinates representable (store a precise value as an acceptably less precise integer). I even scaled it - 800 "degrees" instead of 360 seemed to work best for my needs.
- Implement simple series for some trigonometric calculations - I got sufficiently accurate values with IIRC the first 5 steps in the series
- Where speed really was an issue, I used incomplete trigonometric lookup tables, with some allowance in the functions to approximate results as "x/yths between a[z] and a[z+1]."
- Bingo, one working coordinates scheme to accomodate the physics I wanted to allow for, with absolutely no real numbers in play.
I did not even think of patenting it. Why? Because it only took an afternoon's worth of thought to do all the necessary derivations and calculations, and it was all common sense! Besides, I might have had to have credited my high school math text!The implementation of all the basics in LPC took me probably the better part of a week, and was tested, and worked to an acceptable degree, but that was just coding. It's just a shame I went on to start University before I could release it and give it momentum to grow.
[rant]Grow up Microsoft, and patent something that a high school student can't do.[/rant]
...obvious and trivial patents is way more than enough to bankrupt just about any small or medium developer out there who gets accused of a patent violation by Microsofts teams of lawyers.(or some other large concern to be fair)
It doesn't matter if it's obviously bogus on a casual review, the fact remains that they have the most money to burn, and can drag almost anyone through the "justice" system until they are quivering whimpering paupers. It wouldn't take too many public and loud examples of this nature to throw quite the chill into independent development of the overt and above board kind. This is a company that successfully fought off the US government and pretty much got away with it. Their technical legal "loss" wasn't a loss,not to them anyway, when they are allowed to print up their own "money" to use to pay the fines, and that "money" went to brainwash the next generation into still using their products. How many other folks get to do that in this justice system? The only other example I can think of readily and off hand is the music industry folks getting busted for price fixing, and then forced to distribute copies of their songs as the fine. Same deal, IP, trivially cheap to mass produce, being used as money to pay off a court fine. Sweet deal for them, and it's not a loss, and not even close to being any inducement for them to "change their tune" on anything really. From one day to the next day, business as usual..
Then there's the question and observation that a construct such as "linux" isn't really owned by anyone, except the copyright Linus owns of course for the kernel. The groupings of softwares combined make a distro, various companies and orgs of both profit and not for profit status distribute these, along with individual files or groups of files called applications. Once the patent wars begin, which they will eventually (it is still in the scouting and skirmishing phase now, along with accumulating patent-ammunition stockpiles to use then), you'll see most of those dry up, be made illegal to distribute,be forced to either pay just scads of bewildering royalty licenses because of these thousands of trivial but still legal patents, or be forced into this dubious ephemeral "underground" existence at least to the point of a similarity to what the P2P networks are enjoying now,complete with take downs, raids, lawsuits, actual loss after loss in the court system, now even affecting joe and jane small fry when they choose to do it, and increasingly they are choosing to do it.
It is quite conceivable that software patenting per se will result in just a small number of "legal" (I am only speaking inside the US for now), operating systems and application vendors in the not too far away future.
They are not accumulating all these patents as a hobby.
They are claiming any encoding mapping integers to characters.
RTFP(atent)
[0083] It should be noted that embodiments of the present invention are generally beneficial in that they enable floating-point numbers to be converted into a compact ASCII string. Application within URL's is only one example where such compact strings are beneficial. Other application scenarios are within the scope of the present invention. The scheme for generating the compact strings can be applied in any place where one needs to transmit or store binary floating-point information, with the constraints that one has to limit some arbitrary character set and one wants to make it as compact as possible while preserving a desired level of accuracy. Relevant applications are not limited to those involving transmission over a network, but also include storage in data files, etc.
Is it outside of their character, considering their past?
BTW, there is a lot of money to be made with E commerce and a GPS device.. Its amazing that all anyone can come up with is geocaching..
I imagine Bill Gates already knows of the applications.. So it doesn't suprise me that he would try to patent anything he can about the technology before the ideas catch on..
Just say no to license servers!!
It never hurts to try.
I believe in God and I believe in science, and I will continue to profess them both.
It's an application for patent. It's not a patent yet, and hopefully it won't make it through the gauntlet. That said, it could easily make it through the gaps in the system.
Don't get bogged down by the "base 30" part. Patent applications have a "preferred embodiment" or current invention part, but this is not the part you have to worry about. Patent applications, if you have a good patent lawyer, try to cover off as broad a space as possible without getting summarily struck down. Look at the claims; they're the part that other companies can run afoul of. Other parts are supporting documentation to show that yes, it is an invention (you must make mention of the device the software runs on in software patents, for example) and to preemptively strike down the examiner's questions.
So, what we have here is a patent on turning lat/long information into fixed point (trivial), then represented as base anything. It does not have to be in a URL. It does not have to be base 30.
I don't think this one should stand.
I'm wondering how many other software developers hang out on here, and what they think of software patents. I'll say, for my part, that I've never had to refer to patents to help me in my line of work in any way whatsoever. Never mind the triple-indemnity-if-you-knew clauses. If you're given a problem to solve, you cover them with assumptions to make the problem easier, standard techniques and analysis, and other peoples' components to bring up the shortfall. Patents that are broad enough to worry about rarely contain content that's helpful.
I can't foresee patents helping software developers - unless you count learning to dance in minefields... 'helpful' :)
I don't even actually see Microsoft being the main worry on an ongoing basis. I see our industry being held to blackmail by IP "holding companies" who do not develop software, and thus who cannot be threatened or counterattacked in the same way as Microsoft can.
-- Ritchie
Binary geeks can count to 1,023 on their fingers
The wheel has already been patented here in Australia
I said nt. Jeez.
I don't think you understand the meaning of the phrase "not obvious". Any half-competent programmer would have suggested some scheme along these lines if asked "how can we represent all those numbers more easily" by their PHB.
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
My base 32 encoding system is alredy patent pending, and it knocks the socks off base 30.
SPAM
I love base-30 systems - we have one that is about to expire, and has already caused all sorts or predictions of doom and gloom here on slashdot: The Serial Number for the Vehicle Identification Numbering system (VIN).
Of course that was created to make it harder for your local sherrif and local auto dealer from writing down the VIN as "I2FO0000" instead of "12E00000" . . . despite the reality that rolling over the VINs at the end of this decade should only be an inconvenience for the corporate executives that have the "I must start numbering everything at 1" mind-set. But getting back on topic . . .
Let's break this down:
Sigh. Nevermind. Our entire society is built upon a foundation of information sharing - the public school system. We spend 12 years forcing our children to accept and regurgitate information from a small number of sources (teachers), and to share information freely amongst themselves (recitation in class), and then to prove that they know it (tests) . . . only to turn around and slap the label "Intellectual Property" and to forbid them from doing precisely what we just spent 12 years training them to do.
Self-defeating.
Information is the INFRASTRUCTURE of technological advance. Just like roads and the electrical grid is the infrastructure of modern society. Any nation that figures this out, and acts to build its infrastructure will do precisely what the United States did between 1865 (backwater nation fighting a civil war) and 1945 (superpower) . . .
Chivalry is not dead, it's just frequently misspelt. - M. Langley
The basic method doesn't seem to be that innovative or original. A program written in the late 1980's called ANGPLAN used the ASCII value of a character to compactly store data. For example, Ñ would be used represent the value of 165. It looks like the same basic concept to me. I can't imagine the Patent Office would know about the program (it was widely used in the Air National Guard for KC-135E mission planning), but I'm sure that other people could find similar examples.
I'm not sure I agree with everything you wrote, but that was a damned good argument! Never a mod point when you need one ...
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
Actually, I think the real reason M$ and others file so many patent applications is to flood the patent office, thus making the pendency time increase like mad. By the time any of their competitors are even able to have a patent granted, the protection value is almost nil since the usefulness of their novel idea has become obsolete. If they keep doing this, the pendency will inflate to 20 years, which will render any granted patents completely useless.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Hot off the press:
Microsoft has just patented the patent. Hereby making all patents property of microsoft.