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IBM Wants Patent For Lotus Notes-Free Meetings
theodp writes "Over at IBM, the Lotus Notes team has 'invented' preventing the use of their own product during meetings. Self-described patent reformer Big Blue has asked the USPTO for a patent covering Suppressing De-Focusing Activities During Selective Scheduled Meetings by forcing meeting attendees to 'submit to the computing system suspension requirements.' What's next — a patent for Verizon for blocking cellphone usage during movies?"
Do you speak it?
"Einstein argued that [...] God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." ~ Brooks
"What's next - a patent for Verizon for blocking cellphone usage during movies?"
DON'T. GIVE THEM. IDEAS.
3M Patents sticky notes for use when lotus notes has been restricted... :-P
But this seems pretty tepid. Software designed to enforce situation-specific social norms is not at all new(SMART's somewhat creepily named "Synchroneyes" is one that has been commercially available for a long while now, MS's "digital manners" application came out a while back, and I've run into a number of browser plugins and other utility programs designed to stop timewasting).
The only novelty, and it is a slender one, is using a calendar event as a stimulus, rather than time or location or some other variable.
If IBM patents meeting without Lotus Notes, and doesn't license it, then that means everyone will have to have meetings WITH Lotus Notes! Most companies don't have it, so now they'll need to license it.
The app seems like a verbose way of saying that the calendar system shuts down access to other apps during the meeting; which is a technical solution to a social problem (people banging away on laptop keyboards during meetings)
One part of IBM's strategy for patent reform has been to build as large a patent library as possible, but enforce only (what they see as) legitimate innovation while using the rest only to club patent trolls. While I have no objection to anti-software patent advocates, or full-blown anti-imaginary property advocates, insinuating that IBM is guilt of misrepresentation or hypocrisy with this filing is absurd.
IBM has been attempting to get patents for some of the craziest things lately, and I wonder how many of these were actually accepted. Are they trying an easy way to beef up their patent portfolio, for defensive tactics, to keep up the yearly count or simply to prove how broken the system is? In the meantime, they will ensure they keep getting noticed by Slashdot ;)
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I don't know of any existing products with this functionality. So they wrote it up first, and you're bitching because you lack the creativity or ambition to do so yourself.
For prior art, check out any MMORPG with a parental control feature, or firewalls with time lock options. Maybe there's a sliver of innovation in that it custom schedules it based on when your meetings are, but that's pretty thin.
Oh, you don't like software patents? So competitive corporations should just throw in the towel and abandon patents that are allowed in our current system?
No, my plan is to bitch about them to draw attention to how broken the system is until we have the support to legislate them away. Until then I support companies' rights to keep trying for these things, and the people's rights to mock them for it.
This is the tip of the iceberg. If IBM ever invents a method of stopping people reading slashdot then we're screwed.
called "cranio-rectal inversion".
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Want people's attention during your meeting? Try a few basic things:
Start on time.
Get to the point when speaking.
Keep the discussion on topic.
If the meeting is more than an hour, have a 5 minute break for email and bathroom.
Never read your slides to the audience.
Then again, I dislike speaking in front of people, even if I do it well, so I'm quick myself.
...would be to send a robot killer back in time to take out Ray Ozzie's mother before he was born.
I have been riding a downhill slope of enterprise email systems for the last half decade.
First I started working at a Novell shop, Groupwise was of course the flavor. Well, I thought
it was lacking in usability and features, until we ditched it for a worldwide Lotus Notes
enterprise solution. What groupwise lacks in features and usability, Notes takes and twists
into infinitely complex knots, lashings, and tangles. Preferences? We got em all over the
fucking place. Location preferences, user preferences, security prefernces, address book
preferences, all dispersed throughout different menus and buttons. There is no way
a non admin could properly configure this evil bitch. Want to archive some email and get
it out of your active database (oh yes, this is not a mail file, this is a full fledged encrypted
domino database, bitches) ? Ok, follow this simple 10 step process! To change the font size, you
have to leave the application and edit a preference file by hand on Macs. We had to send out
a small magazine to explain how to use an html signature. The default browser when you
install? Notes browser. Ugh.
I have come up with a fairly plausible theory that Lotus Notes is a conspiracy
of complexity to keep huge numbers of IBM engineers and testers, as well as external
Notes administrators in business. Witness the ease of use of modern email.
We have well over 20 Notes admins for our global enterprise. REALLY?
music lover since 1969
The only winning move is not to play.
~Philly
This looks like like a personnel management problem than a technological problem, and is easier and probably cheaper to approach it by traditional means. If one of your subordinates is goofing off with his email and not paying attention to you, tell him to stop. If he doesn't, call HR and determine the appropriate level of censure.
The good posts always come when I don't have mod points. Slashdot would be a much better place, if the phrase "My mocking something does not necessarily mean that I support the government suppressing it," were half as popular as that damned Franklin quote about security and liberty.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Indeed. We seem to be evolving a culture where we try to solve every problem with technology. Sometimes technology is not the answer. Sometimes you have to realise that technology is not curing the problem, it is just solving a symptom. And like most diseases, it will simply evolve around your attempt.
Ryans Tutorials - A collection of technology tutorials.
Do nothing. Schedule meetings all day. Prevents termination by Lotus Notes. Works for middle management!
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
Newsflash: Woman patents rejecting a guy's advances. The technology, dubbed Method and Apparatus to Block Male Advances, is patented under U.S. Patent #562434645779680584735235644. What that means for us geeks is that if you ask out a girl, she must say "Yes" unless she licenses that patent.
This is a great idea if your some draconian control freak company. If your primary line of business is trying to stifle innovation and make your employees miserable please by all means get this software installed on your obsolete mail system.
The concept of a "mail server" is slowly becoming obsolete. With Google Apps a company can do exactly what they did with Lotus Notes or Exchange just as securely for a fraction of the cost. Why do so many people still run mail servers and their own BES servers? They have blinders on. The refuse to see the world has changed and left them in the dust. All the normal functionality of mail and even custom written apps for e-mail and mobile devices can be done through Lotus Notes. Except for those crummy little Notes Databases that I avoided using like the plague because they sucked so bad and had outdated information in them. BTW Ex IBM employee here!
I would love it if my company installed this software on my Macbook. During meetings I am quietly tapping away and working while listening in the meeting. I would be more than happy to give up my shell and stare blankly at the meeting presenters and take notes on my legal pad. And it would cost my company 2 to 3 times as much to do the same amount of work as during meetings which often don't pertain directly to me I would be getting paid to do nothing!
An even better idea would be to take away most computer users ability to multitask all together. We should have green screen applications that run on 5250 terminals so we can concentrate on one task at a time. Sorry Mr. Manager I am reading my e-mail your dying server will have to wait until I have completed and replied to everything before closing out that application to log into the server and see whats going on.
IBM has a lot of innovators that work for them. They unfortunately are beat down by the draconian middle level managers and idiots that could never survive anywhere else. Ah yes. The putty colored cube farm with the overly bright florescent lights. The crappy 15 inch tube monitor faced toward the cube isle so you have no privacy. The "clean desk policy" forbidding people from leaving items on their desk. The security team that sniffed the network like crazy and who would roam the cube farm looking for someone who went to the bathroom and left their drawers unlocked. What innovative ideas!
We seem to be evolving a culture where we try to solve every problem with technology. Sometimes technology is not the answer.
No. Clearly the problem is that people are invited to meetings when they feel there is more value in doing something else than actually paying attention at the meeting.
Probably the best solution is to have fewer meetings and make them shorter and more focused.
If you then still need the meeting and making it shorter and focused does not keep the attention of the people involved, maybe they need a different job where they won't be distracted by such meetings.
I work for a large corporation and I believe we have far too many meetings that are not really needed. When I'm bored in one of these meetings, I like to look around the table and try to estimate the cost in salary and benefits of the particular meeting. With a VP, a handful of directors and several managers, a one-hour meeting easily costs the company a few thousand dollars.
This kind of technology won't solve the problem of people doing other things in meetings and it will most likely just piss them off.
The actual solution, assuming your not on a videoconference, is to just bring a magazine or book to work and read that when you're not supposed to be using your computer in the meeting. Or a PSP. They haven't invented a way yet to get disinterested people to be interested in stupid meetings. Even if you're face tp face, you can always just extensively take notes during meetings as a way to take your mind off having to actually pay attention. (If what I just wrote seems counter-intuitive, try it sometime -- extensive note taking both keeps you awake and creates a record of what happened, but it also enables you to totally turn off your brian and makes time pass quickly as you concentrate on things like your margins, handwriting, ink-pressure on the paper, etc.)
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
... such ridiculous patents that the patent office can no longer take itself seriously, if indeed it still does.
They're too late. Much too late:
766,171 "Apparatus for signalling from a grave" (before horror movies even existed)
1,749,090 "Apparatus for obtaining criminal confessions" (oooh, scary ghosts)
2,929,459 "Rocket-propelled pogo stick" (yay for Wile E Coyote!)
3,216,423 "Facilitating birth by centrifugal force" (I kid you not)
4,016,875 "Penis locking and lacerating vaginal insert" (the mind boggles)
4,429,685 "Surgical procedure for unicorns" (WTF?)
5,443,036 "Method for exercising a cat" (fun with a laser pointer)
5,456,625 "Jesus doll lights when crucified" (surreal BDSM toy, intended for kids!)
6,025,810 "Faster than light communication" (physics from another reality)
6,368,227 "Method of swinging on a swing" (eventually cancelled, alas)
This is just a sampling from my collection of US PTO brainfarts. Other wierd wonders have titles such as "Body condom", "Santa Claus detector", "Making a drink hop along a counter", "Thermochromic urinal mat", "Motorized ice-cream cone", "Electrified table cloth", and so forth. I've also collected turds from the French, German, Japanese, and UK patent offices, but they are less profligate than the US patent orifice.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Amen. A lot of people also like to blame new tech for these kinds of problems.
Have we really become a society that believes that the only way to prevent anti-social or anti-productive behavior is to use tech and patents to make it impossible?
If a company doesn't like what people are doing during their meetings, they should consider why people aren't paying attention (maybe the meeting wasn't necessary) and if they determine that the employees really are out of line, punish them.
These days, we've adopted this concept that you can't punish people for incompetence or negligence, as long as society didn't do anything to prevent the person from doing what they did. Trust me, within a few years, you're going to see the first murderer use the defense that they are not at fault because society allowed them to purchase the weapon, or a child-molester who says "neither she, nor her parents did anything to prevent me from having sex with her, If this 10 yr old didn't want to have sex, she should have said so, or her parents shouldn't have sent her to summer camp.
Several studies have shown that the productivity of a meeting begins to drop off rapidly when you add more than three people. The only real reason for bigger meetings is to share blame. Fewer meetings is not the correct solution, smaller and shorter (but potentially more) meetings is. If a lot of people need to know what was discussed at the meeting then email out detailed minutes, don't require them to all be there in person.
If someone is not paying attention in a meeting, it means that they don't feel that the meeting demands 100% of their attention, and if that is the case then they are probably right. Rather than force them to sit in a meeting which only demands 50% of their attention on average, split it into two meetings, one where they do have to pay attention 100% of the time, and one where they don't have to attend.
If you read any management theory textbook written in the last 30 years, you'll see exactly this advice.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I don't really understand the business problem that this "invention" is intended to solve. If a manager doesn't want people using their laptops during his meeting... he should, well, tell the guy sitting ten feet directly in front of him to kindly close his laptop.
This is a technical version of your old college roommate leaving you angry notes to clean up or change your habits... because the person was too weak and passive to simply have an adult conversation to your face. A manager who has to "communicate" with subordinates in such a manner should not be a manager in the first place.
The problem with software patents is that something like this is a great idea, but not patentable without much greater detail. Patenting "turn off non-sanctioned apps during web meetings" is hardly enough to go on. Such a patent would have to be much more specific... down to OS level hooks like how you're going to block screens from showing and restrict access to focus changes. The result would be a patent so specific to how Windows works that it wouldn't apply to Gnome or OSX.. and to "stretch" the patent wouldn't be right either because those systems do things differently.
I think the feature is cool. I've been in web meetings where somebody's email notification keeps popping on the screen... this could cause important "company private" information to be leaked, or worse somebody pop into their email while meeting then every body sees their mailbox. Blocking an app from showing during an web meeting is a useful and clever idea, without actually closing the app so the meeting users don't lose their workflow.
Crossword puzzles. Just put one on the top page of a clipboard holding a pad of paper and lean back a bit and it will look like you're listening and taking notes, but you're actually trying to figure out what 5 across is.
You clearly havent worked at any of the places I have. I worked at a cellphone manufacturer a while back (who shall remain nameless) and had access to a whole pile of sensitive information (including such things as prototype phones that had not yet been announced, ideas invented by the company and in the process of being patented, full source code to most of their (at the time) current phones and full details of exactly what customizations, lockdowns, restrictions and changes made for each carrier in the firmware for their specific phones). Some of this is stuff that competitors would love to get their hands on (especially details of upcoming products, new features etc).
Industrial Espionage is BIG business and companies DO care if this stuff is stolen.
If you are working on anything military, its even more strict.