Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Patents OS Shutdown
An anonymous reader writes "You would think that shutting down software could be fairly simple from an end user's view. If I ask you to shut it down, would you mind shutting it actually down, please? Well, it's a bit more complicated than that, because you need to ask the user if they really want to shut down and if unsaved documents should be saved. And that warrants a patent that also covers Mac OS X. Next time you shut down Windows, remember how complicated it is for Windows to shut down. Perhaps that is the reason why this procedure can take minutes in some cases."
One has to wonder if they are also trying to patent the inadvertent "BSOD" shutdowns. They seem much more complex. ;-)
I can see someone patenting "Are you sure?" prompt.
Actually, when I think of it, alot of dumber patents have been accepted.
If you post as an AC, don't expect me to spend a mod point on you.
Or the process where you get halfway through the shutdown, and then it stops for no apparent reason and you have to go and order the shutdown again to get it to finish shutting down.
I read the internet for the articles.
Here's the USPTO link. The abstract:
A user interface and scheme is provided for facilitating shutting down an operating system. Aspects include the operating system receiving a command to initiate shut down, and automatically terminating graphical user interface (GUI) applications that delay shut down which do not have top level windows. Also, aspects provide a user, through a graphical user interface, the ability to automatically terminate all running applications in response to determining that a running GUI application has a top level window.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Shutting down Windows, evacuating ones bowels.
Potayto potahto.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Yes, but an Apple fanboy takes a lot longer to shut up.
I guess I should patent MY shutdown technique - goes back way before then. Make sure nothing important is going on (like a write operation), and just cut the power.
It still works great on modern OSes with a journaling file system - and the best part is that your whole desktop, including open apps and files, is restored next time you log in, and you only lose 2-5 seconds on reboot (which is less than the time you lose doing a clean shutdown), and you don't have to answer 3-4 dialogs asking if you want to save your session, etc.
Do that every time, and over the course of the year, you've saved 30 seconds x 250 days, oe 125 minutes - that's 2 HOURS of electricity. Be green - pull the plug :-)
Seriously, most of the time I shut down properly, but if I hear thunder close by, I just cut the power unless it's a laptop. Lightning doesn't have to be close enough to hear to induce surges in power lines, so I figure if I can hear it, it's already too close. I haven't lost any data doing this, but I *have* had to replace one cpu because of a power surge (and that was in the bad old days when you had to hand-solder them to the board).
Pull the plug. A *real* OS can handle it.
Oh fuck it. That was a troll by my roommate on my computer while I was AFK. Goodbye, karma :-(
--
that's been my sigfile for at least 10 years now (on slash), unchanged. I guess today's my day, huh?
(left it intact for this post, as well)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
When can I, um, patent shutting down the USPTO?
No, no, you have it wrong. Please patent keeping the Patent Authorities operational and then refuse to licencense that to anybody.
I can't figure out which patent or application the article is referring to. This patent issued to Microsoft last year and covers OS shutdown methods, so I think it's the right one. The first claim is this:
Basically it covers delaying shutdown while an application wraps something up and informing the user that this is happening via a GUI. The more detailed claims cover the circumstances under which this might occur (e.g., a negative response from the application, no response from the application, etc).
This patent does not cover what Windows XP or OS X do in this circumstance. In fact, the behaviors of XP and OS X are explicitly mentioned in the specification, and the patent is meant to cover an improved method for handling the situation.
"because you need to ask the user if they really want to shut down and if unsaved documents should be saved"
This is one of the most annoying things about computers. If I want to shut it down, shut it down!
It is to late for questions, I probably already left after I issued the shutdown command.
Any question about unsaved documents can be asked the next time I start the program, just save them in a temporary location in the meantime.
Standby and hibernate have somewhat mitigated this problem, but for multi-user systems there is still no practical solution.
I worked at Microsoft for the Windows 95 launch, where I provided Tier-1 support for BOOP (Bill and the Office of the President, i.e. CEO tradeshow tech support). I do recall that Bill specifically called out the 'shutdown' function on Windows 95 as an error. He didn't like it, he hated the idea of waiting for the OS to shutdown, and wanted simply to be able to push the power button to immediately turn the system off, like a DOS PC.
He may or may not have understood the concept of in-memory caches and unsaved user work, but it didn't much matter to him.
IIRC "No apparent reason" usually means "an application aborted the shutdown". It's a legitimate feature but apps can of course do it silently (AFAIK it's designed to happen if the user had unsaved work and they click "Cancel" in response to a Save/Don't Save/Cancel dialog.
99.9% of lawyers gave all of them a bad name.
Even a new version of "Hello World."
That, by itself, doesn't make the effort patentable. It also has to be non-obvious to other practitioners of the art, namely other programmers in the operating systems domain.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Asking about saving is the wrong question. Saving shouldn't be a question. A document's current state should be persisted at the drop of a hat and that means undo info as well.
A small faction at MS gets this.
Android, as a platform and as recommended dev practice, gets this. Many great IPhone apps get this.
An app should expect to be terminated rudely and abruptly at any time. You'll impress the hell out of your users if you follow this rule.
meh.
I always kind of wondered where Dr. Bunsen and Beaker went to work after the Muffet Show was canceled, not any longer...
In Soviet Russia, "patent patenting" joke kills YOU!
Check out my world simulator thingy.
It's yet another case of Windows taking a "don't tell the user anything, it might scare them" approach.
Are you sure?
Set your phasers on "funky"!
A: The USPTO looked in the mirror and found prior art!
Hope is the currency of fools
Except for a couple things:
A) You assume someone gives a shit about your sig, and more importantly,
B) You got the term wrong. The correct term is "It is now safe to turn off your computer".
You have had the wrong term in your sig for 10 years. If that isn't an Epic Fucking Fail I don't know what is.
If I want Windows to shut down quickly, I simply launch MS-Outlook.
Table-ized A.I.
which are usually conveniently buried in the middle
The claims are not buried in some kind of conspiratorial scheme. There's just so much stuff you can stick up top for convenient cursory browsing of freely available documents.
Just click the link and scroll down, lazy.
Even better was the time I told my laptop to shut down because I was low on battery. I came back 5 minutes later to find it hadn't shut down because a Windows dialog had popped up saying I should shut down because I was low on battery (true story).
My webcomic
> That's because the slashdot summary and the article are sensationalized. They aren't patenting "shutting down."
>
Um
What the hell else should I think they are trying to patent ?
Yes, where ever might we fnid the claims?
They are surely most elusive, and I cannot imagine where I would start if I wanted to read through them in detail, along with all of the context needed to understand them.
I mean, sure, GP provided the link to the patent, which by definition is the document containing the claims; I could start by clicking on the link and reading the claims. But it's so much less time consuming to just ask what the claims are and hope nobody calls my bluff.
There is TONS of prior art on this. Every single OS does some variant of this, after all that is the job of an OS in the first place. I can't understand how this got past the examiners !
"sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/kmem bs=8192"
is a lot more fun than just /sbin/halt
--Joe
You're missing the point. The point is that posting a copy of the abstract is not only pointless, but actually detracts from the conversation, because the abstract has absolutely nothing to do with why a patented invention is not anticipated by or obvious in view of the prior art.
So, here's claim 1:
A computer readable storage medium storing computer-executable instructions for performing a method for shutting down an operating system, the method comprising the steps of:
receiving a command to initiate operating system shut down;
sending a shut down request to a graphical user interface application without a top level window;
receiving no response to the shut down request with a predetermined period of time;
determining that the graphical user interface application without the top level window is not hung;
automatically terminating the graphical user interface application without the top level window;
determining whether any graphical user interface applications with a top level window delay shut down;
prompting a user for a user command to selectively shut down the graphical user interface applications with the top level window that delay shut down after determining that the graphical user interface applications with the top level window delay shut down; and
then after the determining step, automatically terminating all running applications responsive to the user command received from the user that has been prompted.
Which leads me to think that the simplest, most politically acceptable, and most immediately useful type of patent reform would be this: change the law to state that if one claim in a patent is held to be invalid, the entire patent is invalid. This would prevent absurdly broad "claim 1" items like the one you cite, and force patent filers to concentrate on specific aspects of the implementation instead of trying to seize ownership of general ideas. I know the game they're playing -- make absurdly overbroad claims early in the patent, and hope that if they're challenged, the court will accept only slightly less absurd later claims as a "compromise" -- but there's no reason We the People should allow this kind of crap.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Shutting down windows is like a bad breakup. It's a long and drawn-out process, that you wish you could just walk away from, but there's always some unnecessary complication that leaves you wondering why you settled for this in the first place and if you will have the willpower to avoid coming back tomorrow.
Not so fast! I have a patent on that.
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
As a naive user, why should I have to ask my computer for permission to shut down?
Because if you agree to let yourself be inconvenienced slightly around the edges, we (the systems designers) can make the big part in the middle much more convenient.
Ever encountered thrashing (excessive swap file reads/writes)? If you want to be able to turn the system off on moment's notice, you're asking for all data to be written to disk at all times. That is, instead of having RAM between CPU and disk, the CPU should just write straight to disk. That is, it should write to disk all the time.
You're asking for thrashing to be the way computers operate by default. You don't want that. We are in fact so certain you don't want it that we are arrogant enough to make the edge-inconvenient way the default without asking you.
Or rather, given what most people do with their computers, that's the best way for them to work. If you're really insistent, you're welcome to run on a diskless workstation or off a Linux LiveCD, or mount all your file systems read only.
Let's see, your TV doesn't store much data and can afford to sync every time anything changes; neither does your car. Your VCR, I would assume, can sync rather rapidly. Also, you don't install new applications on any of those, and you don't complain when your VCR player can't play the new "DVD" format. I don't know about your cell phone, but my 5 year old dumbphone has a cute shutdown animation to cover up the fact that it's a computer with all its inherent complexity. And my N900 which runs Linux; well, go figure...
In short: computer behave differently because they have to meet different demands. If you want something other than what computers give you, well, all the more power to you I guess. It might be expensive to build if it's only you who wants it, though.
Or my favorite, when you can still get to Task Manager, so you go into the Processes tab and start randomly killing stuff. Eventually you'll kill the right thing, because all of sudden Task Manager will close and the computer will then continue shutting down.
My current desktop environment is FROM 1998 - Enlightenment 0.16 with the Ganymede theme. Since then Enlightenment 0.16 has only really had bug fixes. I still keep it because it is fast and does those handy things like having iconified apps shown as thumbnails of the actual running window - something that is now in Windows7.