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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. ;-)
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.
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.
A: The USPTO looked in the mirror and found prior art!
Hope is the currency of fools
I know it's easy & popular to rag on BillG, but toward the end of his tenure at MS, he did occasionally come out as an advocate for users & pushed for simplicity & fixing broken things in their ecosystem. Take this example from when he attempted to install Windows Movie Maker in January 2003.
But back to the shutdown thing.
As a naive user, why should I have to ask my computer for permission to shut down? When I tell my TV to power off, it just does it. When I turn the ignition in my car off, the whole thing stops. Same with my VCR, my cell phone, you get the idea.
As a non-naive user, why is it that when I tell my XP laptop to Hibernate, 5% of the time it just flips out, every application crashes, and I can't do anything, including just shutting the damn thing down until I've cleared all the "this program has crashed, how would you like to debug?" messages and then wait for the UI to become responsive finally to the point where I can tell it to shut down. And then takes 5+ minutes to actually shut down. When I close the lid on my MacBook, OS X puts it to sleep. When I open the lid, it wakes up. Every time. Why can't Windows do this? I can't just go to Standby because it drains the battery too much, so I have to Hibernate.
Bill Gates had fight through Tier 1 support like the rest of us? Maybe I've been too hard on the guy.
-- Seq
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.
"sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/kmem bs=8192"
is a lot more fun than just /sbin/halt
--Joe