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Microsoft Seeking Hot-Or-Not Patent
theodp writes "In its just-disclosed patent application for the Online Personal Appearance Advisor, Microsoft describes the 'invention' of its three Microsoft Research employees in these words: 'The contributor uploads self images for viewing and rating (or voting) by viewers who choose provide an opinion on different fashion and/or cosmetic looks of the contributor.' So what do you think — is Microsoft's invention really Hot or Not?"
It's not news, it's Slashdot.
I'm sure here are reams of sites with news on the Iran shenanigans. As important as the potential revolt may be, there *are* other things happening on planet Earth.
I vote that news "HOT".
I hate sunlight, fresh air and physical activity. I'm pasty white and commonly sport cheeto stains on my shirt.
Am I hot or not?
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Well Hot or Not is mainly about breasts and not about fashion. This is what might differ.
...and rated not so hot by developers, developers, developers the world over!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
They're trying to secure as many patents that could potentially bring them some sort of income NOW, lest they go bankrupt in the future.
The vagueness of this patent could easily cover someone's picture on Facebook if they said "Tell me how I look!", "What do you think of this makeup?", or "Do you think the pocket-protector goes with these pants?" Back off Microsoft - you're not IBM - leave the pointless patents to them...
This is pure bullshit. Social interacting websites and dating websites have been using this feature for years and Microsoft thinks it can get a patent for something someone else has discovered or has been using for the past 10 years?
Motherfucking Microsoft can suck my nasty balls.
The site is 50% spam and 50% sexual predators.
Enjoy your home-grown product, Microsoft.
Waaaaaah how can you run a story about Paris Hilton when people are being murdered in Darfur? Children are starving in Africa and you have the audacity to run a feel good story about the firemen rescuing a cat stuck in a tree?! Holy shit you act like you have never seen the news before.
Um, no. Nothing's going to keep the freepers and the conspiracy theorists from commenting. I've seen half a dozen of these already.
I'm having a very hard time seeing how this is not obvious.
Like anyone in their right mind would take the advice from MS on fashion issues. They have a hard enough time trying to keep their OS running and that's their main job. If they can't do that I hardly think their fashion advice will be any better.
http://aminaked.com already allows you to rate porn photo hotness.
I always preferred the approach of howmanywouldittake.com (now defunct)...
always seemed so much more realistic to rate attractiveness by required level of intoxication than some artificial 0-10 scale
You just wait.
Or don't you remember that the CIA was accused of releasing super secret spy squirrels into Iran?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12131243
Best link I can find, but I seem to remember hearing Iran also claim they've caught super secret spy pigeons, too.
This sort of stuff is full-blown crazy, not just weird. Moon landing deniers would chuckle at this. SPY SQUIRRELS.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
A world full of Bill clones - the horror, the horror!
In other news... there's a revolution going on in Iran and it's turned violent.
But that's not Stuff That Matters, so yeah, let's talk about Microsoft's stupid patent applications because that's News For Nerds.
Intellectual property is a serious point of discussion. China's monopoly on tea and silk caused empires to rise and fall.
If patents go to far, they can completely destroy the incentive people have to innovate, as all their innovations will be reliant on other patented processes. If Yahoo had owned a patent on internet search, then Google would never have had a chance to monetize Pagerank. But Yahoo would never have gotten so far, because previous companies would have patented the technology Yahoo used.
The medieval guilds arrested a lot of development, by guarding their secret knowledge. The Masons were not powerful because of their political connections, they had political connections because they simply knew how to build stone buildings. Sure, they had earned that knowledge from previous Masons, but the process of knowledge transfer was so opaque that corruption and inefficiencies were bound to creep in.
The printing press destroyed the monopolies of the guilds, because their knowledge could be cheaply and efficiently disseminated. Open source, the FSF, Wikipedia and other open movements are furthering this movement.
But patents are a way for the establishment to fight back, and try to create an environment in which they can reap more profits than a free market would allow.
So yes, it is Stuff That Matters.
I think a lot of these bogus patent filings from Microsoft simply show that the people at Microsoft have not the slightest idea of what is going on in the real world. Microsoft is designing software for the last century. Even Bing is merely a Google clone.
Although I enjoy bashing Microsoft as much as the next Slashdotter, haven't we seen enough obvious patents? We get about one per week. Maybe we could hear stories about people trying to change the system? Anything constructive? Judging from what I've heard on slashdot, the patent office is run by retarded rodents that approve patents based on the applications' fiber content.
Natashia, they re-elected squirrel.
Microsoft has passed the age of being Hot a long time ago, so this seems to be a feeble attempt to make money out of everyone else that's classed as hot.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
If I'd spent the last 25 years peddling shit to idiots for billions of $ I'd have too much time on my hands, too.
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
...Microsoft has just filed a patent on a revolutionary method for sending mail like messages over the Internet. They call it mmail.
Microsoft Employees get a $2500 bonus for every patent. They don't have to write it either, The patent lawyer does.
All you do is describe the idea and give any pertinent documentation and someone else converts it to a patent.
I have a few MS patents under my belt when I worked there.
Isn't the male brain prior art for this?
Wait a minute. Of course! The male brain can't be art! It's ugly and veiny (nervy?) all over. The only artistic brains are the female brains, which are beautifully curved with a consistent hue of light pink, and smell of jasmine. (How do I know these things, you ask? Just don't. Trust me.)
Microsoft, you cunning bastards!
(Score: -1, Delusions of Grandeur)
I thought that was obvious.
I would think the prior art of RateMyRack.com would destroy this patent.
Only the dimwits at M$ could try and patent this kind of teen-aged bull$hite... Talk about lowest common denominator! What is this, a Limbo Line???
~Just as a thing fails if it lacks a kernel, so too it fails if it lacks a skin. ~ Rumi, Discourses
I was told at school that patents were given to allow companies and individuals to recover the costs of the research necessary to create their product by granting a temporary monopoly on the product.
Now, people seem to be patenting anything they do regardless of research costs ($0 in most cases) and gaining monopolies for no reason save that they applied for it first. First come first served.
There will be no change though. Politicians and other shareholders want it this way to benefit themselves.
That's right. If MS gets this patent it'll never be implemented as GPL software. Hopefully, IBM will *buy* MS for a pittance and merge it into a small division in Iceland somewhere, someday.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
I'm sure you could even patent "An apparatus and method for making farts noiseless", there's a wealth of prior (f)art in the US Patent system. Oops -- it's already patented as US47263879273672? I should have thought so.
Intellectual Property: an immaterial non-entity, most fiercely contended by those with no proper intellect to speak of.
Prior Art...
I am married. When my wife asks me how she looks I always say "HOT". There is only one correct answer in my patent.
Maybe Microsloth thinks that there are 2 correct answers. Silly Company.
In other news, which is offtopic here... oh wait, let's just stop there.
Slashdot is news for nerds. If we want news for everyone, we know where to look. Thanks.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Didn't Yahoo! already do this a few years back?
I thought there was a hot or not website out in the wild a few years ago. Are they trying to patent that or have they made some significant change to putting your picture up and having people rate you not or not?
Gee I think I'll plow my life savings into MicroSlop stock now.
Maybe someone should let these guys know it's been done already, years ago.
See subject line.
[0003]A variation on this model is also applied to rating websites where users can rate other on physical appearance, pets, personality and other user traits and attributes. In voting sites, typically, it is a general purpose question posed to viewers, and once the viewers have answered the question they tend to leave the website to do something else. In other rating websites, when viewers have rated an image, the viewers are presented with a seemingly endless series of other images to be rated or voted on, the purpose of which is to generate a flow experience so the viewers will stay at the website to continue participating. This process can generate revenue for advertisers by presenting advertisements while the viewers are voting. Moreover, there is a fascination with anonymously critiquing the appearance of another person.
So, Microsoft is claiming this invention does something more than that. Now, l haven't read it, so I can't comment further, but the discussion should be "what's the supposed improvement", not "zomg Microsoft has never heard of Hot or Not!"
just tell your customers to unhitch their wagon from Microsoft, which is heading ever-faster toward a cliff.
It's not as if there are no better alternatives.
you had me at #!
But, I really don't think one should be able to patent this either. There is nothing innovative about showing a group of people two pictures of one's self dressed in different styles and asking them which is better.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
And yet, I haven't seen a patent for other innovations - which we've seen recently - like "a method of updating an operating system that allows a backdoor so that a normally secure browser (e.g., Firefox) can now allow sites to silently install software on a user's machine without their knowledge or consent"
That's a Firefox feature you ignorant idiot.
http://aminaked.com/
Yeah, unfortunately one of the things Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly on is poor software security. Although to be fair this issue with Firefox came to light because Microsoft exploited it.
By the way, that hideous .net helper plugin can't install in Linux versions of Firefox.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Sounds like it's time for someone to launch amihotornotornot.com to review code.
Look somewhere else for a sig.
I'm one of the founders of HOTorNOT.
We actually talked to potential retail partners about putting kiosks in their dressing rooms to provide the functionality outlined in the patent, back in 2001. That included a lot of the ideas outlined in this patent such as the ability to only get ratings from specific demographics as requested by the ratee.
Plenty of people have used HOTorNOT for the purpose of figuring out what clothes to wear / what hairstyle to wear, there have even been articles written by journalists who wrote about it in major fashion magazines.
I think HOTorNOT the company has enough prior art to shoot MS's application on this one. We sold hotornot last year though, so it's really up to the new owners whether they want to take action or not.
james
Guess what, we're capable of tracking more than one story at a time. Pretty amazing technology we have here.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Funnily enough the first thing that came into my head was not that Microsoft is the evil empire but that any country that could seriously have an intellectual property patent for "hot or not" has actually regressed to the intellectual capacity of a slime mold. You have to be kidding surely, you cannot patent "hot or not" and sell licenses to business corporations, not unless the corporations are run by thirteen year olds.
Maybe thats the answer, American corporations are run by thirteen year olds. That could possibly explain why four thousand trillion dollars has been lent to shysters and shoveled into holes in the ground known as housing for some inexplicable reason. It explains why the global financial system just went tits up and yours and my pension has been destroyed. The only consolation is that Iran is still an infinitely worse place to live than Disney land.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
As always when discussing patents most people get one small vital detail wrong. It is not the fluffy stuff in the patent abstract that is patented, it is the things enumerated in the claims that specify the patent. For example, in this case the claims say that the patent is for a system where you view two pictures of a person where they have changed one single thing and you then vote for the best picture. So any existing system which instead uses one picture is NOT prior art. Neither is any system with two pictures where two items of clothes changed prior art. A system with two pictures of a person with a single thing changed between the pictures but where you give a rating for the pictures is not prior art.
Please, please remember this so we will not have to endure any more stories about patents with prior art. Yes the patents are often trivial and should absolutely not be approved but they often don't have prior art since the claims normally are very specific.
This "Fashion Advisor" sounds to me like they are trying yet again to find a use for Clippy, the reviled and ultimately fired MS Office assistant. "I see that you are putting on white shoes after labor day. Would you like help?".