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.
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.
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 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.
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[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.
That's right. For example, the military holds a patent on "A gene present in an Ancient space-faring culture, that is used as a security device for preventing alien access to sensitive technological equipment."
;-)
The claims made are:
"By inserting the gene into a compatible host via a retrovirus, that host becomes capable of using and activating advanced equipment left behind by our now dead anscestors who just happened to invent the Latin language."
I mean, does that sound rediculous or what? The patent office should go back to requiring working models of an invention as proof!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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
Heh. A close friend of mine is a Canadian patent examiner. A month or two ago, I got an email basically complaining about how the USPTO site was slow. Coincidentally, there was a /. story on patents on the front page. A couple of weeks later, same thing happened. I mentioned it this time and /. gained a new casual reader.
Not 5 minutes ago, I recieved an email consisting of, and I quote, "Goddamned slashdot linked the USPTO again during work hours, guess I'm staying late today..."
I assert reality.
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
- 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!"
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