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.
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...
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.
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
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[Insert pithy quote here]
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.
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
Biggest lies ever told (apologies for off-color reference):
1. The check is in the mail
2. Don't worry, I won't come in your mouth
3. We're from the government and we're here to help
4. This patent is only for defense
ACHTUNG! Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen.
- 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!"
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