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How Joel Spolsky Shot Down a Microsoft Patent In 15 Minutes
Thornburg contributes news of a story spotted on Techmeme, writing: "[Joel Spolsky of] Joel On Software has a story about how he found and submitted prior art for a Microsoft patent listed on Ask Patents in 15 minutes. The patent was rejected based largely on the document he submitted." Spolsky gives a very readable introduction to the patent system, and software patents in particular; I especially like this part: "Software patent applications are of uniformly poor quality. They are remarkably easy to find prior art for. Ask Patents can be used to block them with very little work. And this kind of individual destruction of one software patent application at a time might start to make a dent in the mountain of bad patents getting granted. ... How cool would it be if Apple, Samsung, Oracle and Google got into a Mexican Standoff on Ask Patents? If each of those companies had three or four engineers dedicating a few hours every day to picking off their competitors’ applications, the number of granted patents to those companies would grind to a halt."
The big boys build weaponry to keep each other in check, and to eliminate all the smaller boys.
Works nicely for them all.
Don't know why they'd rock the boat.
If each of those companies had three or four engineers dedicating a few hours every day to picking off their competitorsâ(TM) applications, the number of granted patents to those companies would grind to a halt.
Why would these arguably-sociopathic organizations engage in what amounts to mutually-assured destruction for the sake of leveing the playing field?! :p
This outfit (previously covered on /. though I didn't find the link as quickly as I'd wanted it) does something similar, though with a different money model.
(Full disclosure: No connection to either, though I had email contact with article one at one time.)
I Welched on my bet and it led to a Mexican standoff with another guy who was an Indian giver. In the end we settled it with a game of Russian Roulette. It was chaos, a real Polish Parliament. In the end, the gun didn't go off and we all felt like we were Gypped.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Here is some more prior art: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mipmap
It already is a standoff. The big companies have an unwritten agreement not to assault each other's patents. When one things it has the upper hand it might start a battle such as Apple vs Samsung, but these are rare. This allows them to use their patents to crush smaller companies without being in danger of having their own patents assaulted.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I still don't understand it, but there was a patent issue a few years back, where the smaller player put up a plea to the community for help invalidating a certain patent that the megalocorp was wielding against it.
Being curious, I did a quick Google Groups search (Splotsky's 15 minutes sounds about right) and submitted the prior art (a then-defunct software package that was announced on a Usenet group which had the same functionality years before).
A few months later, I got a note from council, asking if I had any contacts with that software company and that they were using my submission as the basis as their challenge, which they ultimately won a couple years later.
Anyway, the surprise was how easy it was for me to find that prior art when the company hadn't managed to. The work I do overlaps with what they do, so, yeah, I had some domain expertise, but so did their employees.
FWIW, they never offered me a token copy of their software or anything for my help. I wasn't expecting it (I'd have no use for it anyway - they make complex proprietary configurations of open source software, while I tend to use the simple-blocks model), but it was also surprising to me that there was no follow-up or loop-closing after the fact. So, if you get into this kind of hobby, do it for the knowledge that you're helping defeat a dangerous patent system.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Have you ever seen a patent application that appears ridiculously broad? (“Good lord, they’re trying to patent CARS!”). Here’s why. The applicant is deliberately overreaching, that is, striving to get the broadest possible patent knowing that the worst thing that can happen is that the patent examiner whittles their claims down to what they were entitled to patent anyway...
An example might help. Imagine a simple application with these three claims:
1. A method of transportation
2. The method of transportation in claim 1, wherein there is an engine connected to wheels
3. The method of transportation in claim 2, wherein the engine runs on water
What he's done is equivalent to finding "a method of transportation," knocking out the ridiculously over-broad claim, which Joel describes as "a long shot lottery ticket". The narrower, dependent claims may still be patentable.
Additionally, this was the first office action in this patent application (not an issued patent, contrary to the /. summary). Would the Examiner have found this piece of prior art or another piece of prior art that knocks out that over-broad claim? Almost certainly, again according to Joel's logic. In fact, the Examiner went on to using 5 other pieces of prior art to address the dependent claims. Any of those could well anticipate the independent claim too.
Is it a good thing to crowdsource prior art searches? Absolutely. But people doing the search can't stop at just a single piece of prior art to knock out the one over-broad long shot lottery ticket claim. In Joel's example claims, finding prior art describing a method of transportation may allow you to run a victory lap and get a Slashdot story, but it does nothing for invalidating the claim to an engine that runs on water, which is really what the patent is about.
I Welched on my bet and it led to a Mexican standoff with another guy who was an Indian giver. In the end we settled it with a game of Russian Roulette. It was chaos, a real Polish Parliament. In the end, the gun didn't go off and we all felt like we were Gypped and the Canadians were sorry about the whole mess even though they were not involved at all.
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A patent application has been filed for "Single Seating Furniture Anger Relief System", submitted by, you guessed it, Steve Ballmer.
Has anyone ever detailed the relationship between this guy (J.S.) and Slashdot (editors, readers, seemingly everyone). He (not necessarily undeservedly) has gotten a steady stream of love from this site for many years.
There's no relationship. Joel's just a well-known blogger that writes fairly intelligently about computing topics. A sort of micro-celebrity in the programming world. People like that end up being quoted and talked about in places like slashdot. Particularly when they do things that relate to the general categories that slashdotters love to get angry about (patents, microsoft, etc).
The fact that not one of them is doing that is evidence of collusion. They're using patents to protect their circle and keep lesser entities out.
I Welched on my bet and it led to a Mexican standoff with another guy who was an Indian giver. In the end we settled it with a game of Russian Roulette. It was chaos, a real Polish Parliament. In the end, the gun didn't go off and we all felt like we were Gypped and the Canadians were sorry about the whole mess even though they were not involved at all.
That whole post was Double-Dutch to me. As confusing as a game of Chinese whispers.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
Pixel density can only be a measure as applied to a physical device, because 'density' is a measure of pixels per square cm/mm/um or other standard unit of measure. This is not to be confused with an image comprised of binary bits that can be displayed on anything having the total number of pixels necessary to hold the bits in its display storage, regardless of physical size of the device. A display in time square can have the same number of pixels as your cell phone, but they are orders of magnitudes different in pixel density! Pixel density makes no sense in the manner in which the patent uses it, as this terminology was only meant to obscure the true nature of the patent at issue.
It's a simple balance for me.. if they can beat me up, their opinion matters.
Are you just shilling? A quick 10 second Wiki search shows that MS now owns less than 40% of the server market share, down from 80% in their prime. Desktops, it depends on who's stats you believe. Most rate Windows in the high 70% range%, but there is a rating of over 90. Since I see how many people are using MAC now days, I tend to disbelieve the 90%. I won't even get into the amount of PCs as a whole declining so causing MS to lose tons of market share to IOS and Android.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Its not just licensing. The reason that most things use these older compression algorithms is that they are very near optimal for the memory requirements that they demand. If you want your data format to be decompressible on an embedded device with 1 meg of memory then clearly the decompression algorithm cant demand a 2 megabyte entropy model in practice.
Lots of compressors are much better than ZIP (with regard to compressed file size), and in fact lots are also much better than RAR which the pirate community so often uses. Nobody is using any of the top 10 methodologies.
The best compressor for raw bitmaps is currently PAQ8PX which is benchmarked at 1.0392 bits per byte while WINRAR and WINZIP are benchmarked at 1.5194 b/B and 2.4185 b/B respectively. To be clear what I am saying here, that PAQ8PX offers the same level of improvement over WINRAR than WINRAR offers over WINZIP yet still people mainly use ZIP, rarely RAR, and never PAQ.
If you have ever played with the PAQ family of compressors.. they are dog slow (less than 1 megabyte per second) and use lots of memory (often a gigabyte or more of memory.)
"His name was James Damore."