Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's Bold Patent Move
theodp writes "On Thursday, the USPTO disclosed that Microsoft has a patent pending for displaying numbers in a box to make them stand out. " Check out the images to see the power of this breakthrough patent. That's almost impossible to do without patents.
Now, whether Microsoft (or anyone) should be allowed to patent such thing... I don't know.
I'm sure they are working on a patent that covers the process of applying for a patent.
what it patents is if there is data in a document that should be brought attention to, microsoft has patented the idea of giving it a standout attribute
like putting a box around it or underlining it or boldening it or making it a brighter color.
so if you have a document with an underlined word in it now you are infringing on microsofts patent. you better pay them your $699 or they will come after you.
The sooner we patent the building blocks of life, the sooner we own life. This is the ownership society, so lets own stuff!
Slashdotting a US Gov't website? Some pent up anger people?
Shouldn't the link text be Microsoft has a patent pending for displaying numbers in a box?
Not trying to be a grammar nazi, but there's a whole friggin' word missing there...
Wouldn't the context highlighting capabilites of, say, Emacs, Joe, and countless others be considererd prior art? It couldn't be that hard to created An Emacs Major Mode that did this, if there isn't one already. I don't see anything worthy of a fresh patent here. That it's MS doing it is irrelevant.
You are not the customer.
One of the inventors is named -
Thiti Wang-Aryattawanich
I'd just like to know his nickname, is all...
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Highliting (or otherwise bringing attention to) data (numeric or otherwise) has been done since the old DOS days, and probably before. This certainly isn't new, and isn't unique by a stretch of the imagination.
Of course, by filing the patent, they want it to seem that Microsoft is the originator if this technique. If the rules the USPTO seems to apply to software patents were applied to 'real world' patents, you'd see the whole lot of them thrown out on their asses, and the whole office revised from the janitor on up to the chief.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
defensive patents are ridiculously stupid
I am now dumber for the effort.
Has anyone come up with a patent for bringing down a website by posting a link to it on another website and counting on thousands and thousands of people to click through, thus generating high but perfectly legal traffic?
If not, I'm filling out my forms right now, and someone around here's gonna owe me a lot of money.
-- The reason it's called the right wing? Irony.
Does it highlight the word 'thousand'. You young whippersnappers, you think you know it all. But it took billions of dollars for MS to figure out how to highlight numbers written as words.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
My guess is that the submitter looked at the pretty pictures and jumped to conclusions.
/. poster would ever do such a thing! Especially not if his first glance at the story could show microsoft in a bad light. /.'s fact checking department.
No
And even if a poster did such a thing, it would never get through
I wish Slashdot would put a "Fuck Microsoft" button on the comment submittal page - it would save sooo much time for all of us.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
It's a tiff image, which is a pretty standard and pretty default way to store scanned images, so it's Firefox (gasp) rather the USPTO. Fetch the thing manually and try opening it in the GIMP.
I mean the stuff that you can patent now is getting really ridiculous and you know who gets hurt? The small guy? Microsoft can make a million patents and then ride off the tithes from them, and an independant person will have to dodge through a mine field of patents to make a product.
I'm all for the Office of Patents, which was an idea to show who was the first with the idea, granted there's some flaws, (Bell is created with created the phone while there's a good amount of evidence where he's not the originator)
But the original idea was for people to get credit for their ideas, and be able to own them.
However The Corporate world we live in today, has made patenting a game almost. You can patent any abstract idea, and even if your version completely fails and you couldn't program for crap, you can sue anyone else who succeeds at your worthless attempt even if it takes them 10 years, because you own the patent?
I think we need to revise the patent system to at least show that head way is made or such and if the system never gets implemented, the patent is worthless.
They're only extending the search to include all numbers and words representing numbers. Essentially instead of searching for just one word, number, or collection of symbols, they're searching for a whole bunch at the same time and emphasizing the results.
Essentially we get a preprogrammed search to pick out anything that might represent numerical data. I'm certain that something similar to this has been done before in exactness or in a very similar manner. I don't know of many programs that currently support the ability to search as broadly as this (i.e. pick out nouns, verbs, numbers, Names, etc. rather than just one number, word, collection of symbols) especially in terms of word processors and the like. Why not just patent the idea to search and emphasise certain types of symbols (i.e. numbers, Names, places, whatever else) rather than just going after this more specialized case of numbers?
Of course this brings us to wonder, should such an idea outlined above even be patentable? I really don't care much at this point, but it would be a useful feature to see in word processors and other things like this in the future. It would probably be better if it weren't just in one word processor though.
+----------+
| Amazing! |
+----------+
[Insert pithy quote here]
I've just patented using letters to form words.
Firefox can't show the images because of Bugzilla bug 160261. There's nothing wrong with the images on the web site, it's just that Firefox can't display TIFF images.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Note to self: Never sign any public petition for fear of being stalked by creepy people on the net or their friends with access to Google.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I've got some bad news and some good news.
The bad news is that the USPTO granted Microsoft assanine patent.
The good news is that we slashdotted the USPTO (and I just saved a bundle on my car insurance)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Actually, you might not. According to the patent, one of the major features of the software is the ability to remove the highlighting.
OK, so what if I enclose all numbers in DIV tags, setting the class on each to "number"? That's something that you might well want to do (i.e. fairly bloody obvious), and then it's possible to toggle borders using one line of CSS. Come on, we have an entire style system devoted to handling this sort of change!
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
Machines)used something called "Dynamic Windows" which was later further developed as CLIM (the "Common Lisp Interface Manager"). Among the various features of that system was the ability to annotate output with its datatype. e.g., and I'll simplify notation here for presentational clarity (and to save me looking it up) but it's substantially like this:
(with-output-as-presentation (stream 'integerThis would cause the user to see the string "a bit more than five" but the system to have backing store information (kind of like the HREF that underlies a URL presentation in a browser, except that's really more imperative in nature rather than declarative) that says that if the user clicks on that, he's really clicking on 5.3 instead.
What was interesting about the way Genera did it was that there was a conceptual relationship between "presentation" (the analog of printing output) and "accepting" (the analog of reading input). If someone later did:
(accept 'integerthen the mouse would become aware of all the occurrences of things that had been presented as integers (or even things that could be coerced to integers). The system could be further abstracted so that if you output British Pounds and someone asked for input of American Dollars, translators ran so that when you clicked on the value in pounds, it got translated at input time to the appropriate representation (presumably the translator you wrote knew how to acceess the currency exchange to do this). Output in inches could be converted to feet or meters, of course, without such network appliances.
But the key feature which seems to have been "obvious" even decades ago when Symbolics did this work was the idea of highlighting data of various kinds with boxes. In that case, it wasn't even limited to numeric data. It could be any kind of data, even things of different types that were hierachically presented (such a filename listing being sensitive on its whole line as a file, but as only part of the line for this and that date mentioned in the listing).
And it didn't get patented then, which to my understanding of patent law means it's missed its chance...
The really sad thing is that so few people know about this I/O paradigm, which had some very cool features. And then such sadness is compounded when others come along and attempt to say they dreamt up the idea.
I mean, geez, people have been drawing boxes around in paper for a long time. I don't doubt there's some implementation of a kids' book that has a piece of cellophane you can pull back and forth to highlight something. I recall things that use red over red text to make the text "become invisible" being implemented in physical books when I was a kid. That's a form of emphasis through boxes, too!
The patent office is way overboard these days. I think software copyright serves a critical purpose, but I think software patents are an abomination. I'd like to see the software patent system overhauled completely.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
well, what are you complaining about? apparently everyone else in the world has decided that when they sue MS, this is their stance. It's not a problem with them until MS has used their product for 15 years and they can sue for 500 million instead of sueing as soon as MS started "abusing" their patents for $50,000 and royalties from then on out... If everyone else does it with overbroad patents and they all attack MS, why is that OK and not for MS to do it the other way around? Double standard much? i think software patents are evil, but that goes for the people who use them against MS as well...
Microsoft files thousands of patents every year. They have their own patent examiners (!). Every patent is designed to be a land mine for anyone else trying to get in their face. This is probably not even close to the worst of all their patents, even if you only look at recent ones. So why pick on this particular one?
How about this then?
Marezy doats and dozey dotes an' liddle lamsy divey, a kiddly divey doo wooden shoe!
owa tagu siam.
These seem pretty simple to me. Whetehr or not it is simple and easy to read is subject to interpretation and opinion.
That is fucking beautiful, man.
- The fact that the numeric data test can be
expressed as a regular expression implies
obviousness (and that expression having
been described by a slashdot
reader within the first fifteen minutes
of posting); and
- The fact that run-time (re-)configurable
highlighting has a long history (I point
to syntax highlighting in your favorite
programming editor; I know that at least
for nedit it can be turned on/off
by a click)
implies to me that this is a combination of obviousness and prior art, hence should not be patentable."My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
they have a fact checking department.. can i meet them.. i have a few tools of distruction that they forgot to put on last weeks poll
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Not to defend MS but the problem isn't that they apply for these patents but that they can and that they have to.
Apple's case against MS defined the legal benchmark by which you could protect any new features in an OS and by extension, I think, in an application.
Companies, especially public companies, now know that the only way to defend themselves against litigation, especially in the US, is to establish patents covering features. Even if those patents are utterly bogus.
MS might also be in a position where they could be held legally responsible by their shareholders for not trying their upmost to defend the companies work via patents.
Its stupid that companies can get these sorts of non-trivial patents but don't complain about MS or other companies that do this. Complain about the legal precedents and the patent system that allows it.
Firefox's automatic plugin finder is unlikely to work because even though the patent images meet the TIFF standard their format is not recognized by most TIFF viewers.
Nothing is considered obvious anymore. After all, if it was THAT obvious, somebody would have patented it already. Yes, the US patent system is broken. The only disagreement possible is in exactly HOW it's broken. If you listen to patent lawyers, it's broken because the USPTO's fees go into the general budget. If you listen to patent victims, it's broken because mere thoughts are being patented. If you give me a problem, and I can solve it in my head using nothing more than pencil and paper as a scratchpad, that solution should not be patentable.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Next week, Microsoft will patent numbers, period.
http://home.att.net/~jbcole/humor/Microsoft_patent s.htm
It puts the lotion on it's skin, or else it gets the hose again.
In fact this is one of the regexp that I find easy to read.
/i is just for case insensitive...
For those who don't like Perl, the same regexp
is also valid for PHP, Python, Ruby, Java or JavaScript or Qt3.
Just get rid of the ?: which is just there to say
that the parenthesis should not be "tagging".
Basically, it's just a condensed enumeration of all possible numbering nouns with a bunch of -OR- operator all over the place with repetition where the language makes sense.
and the
of course, you could also rewrite it as a large sequence of small regexp if you prefer that...