You haven't been doing it in the way the patent describes.
That's the difference.
The patent does NOT cover grepping for TODO comments in a file one rainy sunday afternoon.
It's an integrated, interactive, automatic, supercalafragilisticexpialadocious, wonderfeature for an IDE. The patent specifies this at great length. The whole point of doing that is because if it was in ANY way vague, it wouldn't be granted.
Inventions that are obvious are equally patentable as inventions that are genius.
The thing about patents is, when one that gets granted that's obvious, everyone runs around saying "WELL THAT'S OBVIOUS!!"
Yeah, and if you were really as smart as the inventor, you'd have patented it first.
Just like someone patented sucking dust through a bit of cloth, and now every house has one of these wonder-machines. There was a patent filed not long back in the UK for using two little bits of plastic to stop shopping bags slicing your fingers off. Now *THAT* was obvious - hundreds of people were doing that with bits of plastic and cartons for years. Patenting it makes it commercially someone's, as opposed to "used only in your own personal little world"
There are housewives and street bums inventing shit that is *so* obvious, but they're the only people who go and try. Why? Maybe they're less cynical than us. When we think "it's obvious!!!!!", we tend to think it's been done before.
Maybe it hasn't. Maybe it has. You gotta check first:D
By the way, your comments in code are not at risk. Neither is your perl script. Unless by chance you had them all integrated into an IDE, which automatically detected that you were typing a TODO comment, and added it to a pretty GUI list, let you jump to the code in question, and so on, in real time. And then you tried to sell it.
The Eclipse method may not even be at risk, since the patent MS have filed is quite rightly quite specific in it's application, and does a lot of things Eclipse does not.
The thing with Dyson is that they'd have LOVED to patent turbulent motion of air, but it's not something that is technically patentable. They'd have been able to patent all tropical storms and most of the weather in the midwest;)
A patent is a description of an invention. It covers the WHOLE invention, and the requirement of the patent office is that the description of the invention is very very specific.
Microsoft's "double click" patent you all keep going on about does NOT patent the double click. It patents differentiating between different lengths of time holding a button on a PDA, in order to start different applications or application methods - for the sole purpose of reducing the need for 100 buttons on devices with crap input and no screen estate.
That they mentioned the double click does not mean they patented it. They may have patented the use of the double click when combined with time-based selection of the application to be launched, but that is FAR from the same thing. And as far as I know - hasn't been done on any system anyway. Personally I think it'd be rather unwieldy which probably explains why nobody did it:)
What THIS new patent covers is, and if you go PAST the f**king summary and actually read the PATENT:
In an IDE (interactive!), adding/* TODO */ comments or suchlike are automatically, and in real-time, added to a task list. When comments are removed or the task is clicked off on the GUI (and possibly in combination with revision control) you can see what stuff has been done and has not been done. In real time. From an IDE.
Note that manually running "grep" does not act in real time as you type, display it in an IDE or generally do anything listed in the patent.
It does not patent TODO comments merely because of their mention. Nor is it patenting any other COMPONENT of the patented methods. Just the methods themselves when brought to a whole.
It was also filed in 2000. People are whining that Eclipse is prior art. Sorry, but Eclipse came about 18 months after the patent was filed.
The next time I read a "Microsoft patents wiping ass with soft paper" story on Slashdot, remind me to explain this again. I'm sure I'll have to, because the amount of goddamned idiots here who can't or don't read past the headline (and that includes you, story submitter and mr. moderator) and jump to conclusions is incredible.
Before we get started on this whole patent argument: yeah I think Amazon's one-click shopping thing is a bit rich. But that's different, it's a feature we can all remember using since the dark ages when cookies first arrived, the current batch of MS patents are actually quite original thinking from people, and generally well thought-out well-defendable inventions.
I can do this in WinAMP - the window fades out when I don't use it for a couple of seconds.... when did they put that feature in?
Neko
Re:If only they still supported PowerPC
on
Suse 9.1 Reviews?
·
· Score: 1
I'm all for official support of alternative processor platforms.
Personally, I work for a company that produces PowerPC hardware, so I have a kind of interest in having certain "commercial" Linux distributions running on PowerPC hardware by default.
Neither myself or the company I work for, however, has any interest in playing tech support for SuSE or Red Hat (expensive proposition, plus we'd have to create and validate the PPC builds ourselves, which is a time-consuming business)
If only they still supported PowerPC
on
Suse 9.1 Reviews?
·
· Score: 1
There's NOTHING stopping people downloading the security updates off the beaten track, on the actual Microsoft Security Updates site. Do you think companies running thousands of machines on policy-controlled domains let every Tom, Dick and Eric run Windows Update? It's in Microsoft's best interests to put the patches up as individual downloads:)
The benefit of Windows Update and ME/XP's auto-updates is it's automation for home users. But this should really be only an option for legitimate users. If we let software pirates get full functionality of the software they steal, they win. If we are going down that route, we may as well let SCO kill Linux and forget chasing those router people who refuse to follow the GPL:)
Weapons ARE banned from orbit (some of them anyho)
on
Weapons in Space
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, whose 35th anniversary we are commemorating this year, establishes the principles governing peaceful activities of States in outer space. The Treaty bans the orbiting and stationing of nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction. It further provides that the Moon and other celestial bodies shall be used exclusively for peaceful purposes and prohibits the establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any kind of weapon and the conduct of military manoeuvres on celestial bodies. These principles were further elaborated by the Moon Treaty of 1979.
So, pretty much any military activity in space is banned by THAT treaty. Okay so not everyone accepts it, but then the US not accepting the Kyoto agreement doesn't mean no-one else is going to uphold it.
"Repeat memories until they are accepted"?.. a Brave New World, for sure, where we can desensitise people to disasters and terrorism, and make promiscuity a citizen's duty!
Let's see.. TruSonic take my music without telling me, but I lose absolutely no rights on it, and they send me a royalty check every quarter. The only way I can find out if they used my music *is* the royalty check.
Personally, if some company started paying me without my knowledge, I'd be disoriented but RELATIVELY HAPPY!
.. before Gabucino accepts multi-thousand-dollar (i.e. a few dvd player sales worth:) sponsorship for MPlayer from KISS, as a shut-up compromise.
The GPL does not stop copyright owners selling their code, or making exceptions.
I doubt anyone involved is that pig-ignorant that they'll sit around until the end of days fighting it on a moral issue, when they can advance both projects in such positive, green, president-emblazoned* ways.
It's exactly the same featureset as WinFS (as in Longhorn)
Now, whenever anyone says "I hate MS, they have that fucking shitty WinFS!!!!", we can point them at the GNOME project which is doing precisely the same thing, and they can eat that humble pie right up with their hat.
There is nothing in Office 2003 which FORCES DRM signing on documents.
There is nothing in Office 2003 & Windows Server 2003 that is particularly malicious (unless you think signing all your documents with DES or your PGP key or so is malicious)
There is nothing to stop OpenOffice from reading ANY unencrypted documents, apart from just not interpreting features right (which means it will open Word docs just as well or badly as it did always..)
This is another one of those whines a lot of Geeks have that they think that somehow their rights are being infringed just because someone has the ability to stop them reading a document - or at least encourage them not to.
The same way they whine that "cctv cameras infringe on my civil liberties!" when what they really mean is "cctv cameras mean I can't get away with mugging old ladies!" and the classic "public non-smoking laws discriminate against smokers!" when really they mean "It's my God-given American right to cause lung cancer in my fellow human beings!"
Give it up. Most businesses would literally give the right wing of their office block to be able to stop people from reading other peoples' performance reviews, or to stop their secret info leaking into the hands of competitors, or negotiation meeting minutes being published on Slashdot.
.. since it's bound to be integrated into the Active Directory, too, (why else would you need 2K3 server?) which means when people quit your company and you delete their account, they lose all access to those documents too. Sounds like a great idea.
"wah wah Microsoft are stopping me from building my retirement fund by selling company secrets to someone else!!!"
There are nefarious purposes you could use it for though.. like, making sure your equivalent to the "Halloween Document" is unreadable, or auto-destruct capability for those spreadsheets that show much it'll cost to drive a rival browser company into the ground. But that stuff happens even without DRM, and they manage to prove it happens and win in court by other means than bringing up petty emails and Word documents.
If OpenOffice had gotten this first, nobody would be complaining.
And of course.. what's the betting that OpenOffice can actually use a standard Windows DRM/IRM API at some point to unencrypt documents based on their Windows 2003 Server authentication and signature key?
Looks relatively public to me. No less public than the new PKZIP encryption extensions:)
Hell, why doesn't someone talk to Microsoft and ask if they can use the API for interoperability purposes? It's not breaking the DMCA if they let you:)
Even the first version of MSN used an MD5 challenge authentication.
They send you a string.
You add it together - $email + $password+ $string
You MD5 that string.
You send that MD5 hash to Microsoft.
Microsoft hash the same way at their end and if they match, you're authenticated.
Simple, really. Just a little laborious. Newer MSN protocols use stuff like RSA keys. Never, EVER sends plaintext passwords, and ALWAYS challenges as far as I know.
ICQ and AOLIM do the same thing.
So as long as you don't go sending your password in a message to someone, you're pretty damned safe.
Slashdot Mirror
A patent is not invalid just because it's obvious.
People who say "THEY CAN'T HAVE THAT PATENT!! IT'S TOO OBVIOUS!!" are in the
realm of sour grapes.
Note: patent described which you are bitching about is for buttons in software,
on a display, not buttons on a watch. The details are EVERYTHING.
You haven't been doing it in the way the patent describes.
e for an IDE. The patent specifies this at great length. The whole
That's the difference.
The patent does NOT cover grepping for TODO comments in a file one rainy sunday
afternoon.
It's an integrated, interactive, automatic, supercalafragilisticexpialadocious,
wonderfeatur
point of doing that is because if it was in ANY way vague, it wouldn't be
granted.
Inventions that are obvious are equally patentable as inventions that are
genius.
The patent specifies something vastly more complex and useful than a tokenizer.
Go read it!
The thing about patents is, when one that gets granted that's obvious, everyone
:D
runs around saying "WELL THAT'S OBVIOUS!!"
Yeah, and if you were really as smart as the inventor, you'd have patented it
first.
Just like someone patented sucking dust through a bit of cloth, and now every
house has one of these wonder-machines. There was a patent filed not long back
in the UK for using two little bits of plastic to stop shopping bags slicing
your fingers off. Now *THAT* was obvious - hundreds of people were doing that
with bits of plastic and cartons for years. Patenting it makes it commercially
someone's, as opposed to "used only in your own personal little world"
There are housewives and street bums inventing shit that is *so* obvious, but
they're the only people who go and try. Why? Maybe they're less cynical than
us. When we think "it's obvious!!!!!", we tend to think it's been done before.
Maybe it hasn't. Maybe it has. You gotta check first
By the way, your comments in code are not at risk. Neither is your perl script.
Unless by chance you had them all integrated into an IDE, which automatically
detected that you were typing a TODO comment, and added it to a pretty GUI list,
let you jump to the code in question, and so on, in real time. And then you
tried to sell it.
The Eclipse method may not even be at risk, since the patent MS have filed is
quite rightly quite specific in it's application, and does a lot of things
Eclipse does not.
Neko
The thing with Dyson is that they'd have LOVED to patent turbulent motion of air, but it's not something that is technically patentable. They'd have been able to patent all tropical storms and most of the weather in the midwest ;)
A patent is a description of an invention. It covers the WHOLE invention, and the
requirement of the patent office is that the description of the invention is very
very specific.
Microsoft's "double click" patent you all keep going on about does NOT patent
the double click. It patents differentiating between different lengths of time
holding a button on a PDA, in order to start different applications or
application methods - for the sole purpose of reducing the need for 100 buttons
on devices with crap input and no screen estate.
That they mentioned the double click does not mean they patented it. They may
have patented the use of the double click when combined with time-based
selection of the application to be launched, but that is FAR from the same
thing. And as far as I know - hasn't been done on any system anyway. Personally
I think it'd be rather unwieldy which probably explains why nobody did it
What THIS new patent covers is, and if you go PAST the f**king summary and
actually read the PATENT:
In an IDE (interactive!), adding
automatically, and in real-time, added to a task list. When comments are removed
or the task is clicked off on the GUI (and possibly in combination with revision
control) you can see what stuff has been done and has not been done. In real
time. From an IDE.
Note that manually running "grep" does not act in real time as you type, display
it in an IDE or generally do anything listed in the patent.
It does not patent TODO comments merely because of their mention. Nor is it
patenting any other COMPONENT of the patented methods. Just the methods themselves
when brought to a whole.
It was also filed in 2000. People are whining that Eclipse is prior art. Sorry,
but Eclipse came about 18 months after the patent was filed.
The next time I read a "Microsoft patents wiping ass with soft paper" story on
Slashdot, remind me to explain this again. I'm sure I'll have to, because the
amount of goddamned idiots here who can't or don't read past the headline (and
that includes you, story submitter and mr. moderator) and jump to conclusions
is incredible.
Before we get started on this whole patent argument: yeah I think Amazon's
one-click shopping thing is a bit rich. But that's different, it's a feature we
can all remember using since the dark ages when cookies first arrived, the
current batch of MS patents are actually quite original thinking from people,
and generally well thought-out well-defendable inventions.
Neko
Eclipse wasn't released until 2001 at the very very earliest.
This patent was filed in 2000.
Microsoft wins.
Actually this is a bloody good patent, one that actually makes sense and is worth patenting.
1 plant down, only 20,000 to go to replace all need of foreign oil for the USA ;)
I can do this in WinAMP - the window fades out when I don't use it for a couple of seconds.. .. when did they put that feature in?
Neko
I'm all for official support of alternative processor platforms.
Personally, I work for a company that produces PowerPC hardware, so I have
a kind of interest in having certain "commercial" Linux distributions
running on PowerPC hardware by default.
Neither myself or the company I work for, however, has any interest in playing
tech support for SuSE or Red Hat (expensive proposition, plus we'd have to
create and validate the PPC builds ourselves, which is a time-consuming business)
(hint hint, Novell..
"Apparently" denied updates because of invalid security keys? Bull!
http://www.microsoft.com/security/There's NOTHING stopping people downloading the security updates off the beaten track, on the actual Microsoft Security Updates site. Do you think companies running thousands of machines on policy-controlled domains let every Tom, Dick and Eric run Windows Update? It's in Microsoft's best interests to put the patches up as individual downloads :)
The benefit of Windows Update and ME/XP's auto-updates is it's automation for home users. But this should really be only an option for legitimate users. If we let software pirates get full functionality of the software they steal, they win. If we are going down that route, we may as well let SCO kill Linux and forget chasing those router people who refuse to follow the GPL :)
Okay, just like Star Wars where the spaceships make noises like biplanes?
.. when Longhorn is released, that's all Dell and HP and every other high-volume box shifter will be shipping anyway.
Who cares?
www.w3.org isn't good enough for you?
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/
So, pretty much any military activity in space is banned by THAT treaty. Okay so not everyone accepts it, but then the US not accepting the Kyoto agreement doesn't mean no-one else is going to uphold it.
"Repeat memories until they are accepted"?
Let's see.. TruSonic take my music without telling me, but I lose absolutely no rights on it, and they send me a royalty check every quarter. The only way I can find out if they used my music *is* the royalty check.
:)
Personally, if some company started paying me without my knowledge, I'd be disoriented but RELATIVELY HAPPY!
I don't see what the "unfortunately" is for
.. gave this chart away in an issue a few weeks back. It looks MUCH nicer in colour ;)
.. before Gabucino accepts multi-thousand-dollar (i.e. a few dvd player sales worth :) sponsorship for MPlayer from KISS, as a shut-up compromise.
:)
The GPL does not stop copyright owners selling their code, or making exceptions.
I doubt anyone involved is that pig-ignorant that they'll sit around until the end of days fighting it on a moral issue, when they can advance both projects in such positive, green, president-emblazoned* ways.
*(or whatever your native bank notes look like
Buy a light USB keyboard for your tablet.
Tablet for tablet uses. Keyboard for other times.
There doesn't seem to be any direct need to have a fancy "swivel" motion. Just the presense of keys.
It's exactly the same featureset as WinFS (as in Longhorn)
Now, whenever anyone says "I hate MS, they have that fucking shitty WinFS!!!!", we can point them at the GNOME project which is doing precisely the same thing, and they can eat that humble pie right up with their hat.
There is nothing in Office 2003 which FORCES DRM signing on documents.
There is nothing in Office 2003 & Windows Server 2003 that is particularly malicious (unless you think signing all your documents with DES or your PGP key or so is malicious)
There is nothing to stop OpenOffice from reading ANY unencrypted documents, apart from just not interpreting features right (which means it will open Word docs just as well or badly as it did always..)
This is another one of those whines a lot of Geeks have that they think that somehow their rights are being infringed just because someone has the ability to stop them reading a document - or at least encourage them not to.
The same way they whine that "cctv cameras infringe on my civil liberties!" when what they really mean is "cctv cameras mean I can't get away with mugging old ladies!" and the classic "public non-smoking laws discriminate against smokers!" when really they mean "It's my God-given American right to cause lung cancer in my fellow human beings!"
Give it up. Most businesses would literally give the right wing of their office block to be able to stop people from reading other peoples' performance reviews, or to stop their secret info leaking into the hands of competitors, or negotiation meeting minutes being published on Slashdot.
.. since it's bound to be integrated into the Active Directory, too, (why else would you need 2K3 server?) which means when people quit your company and you delete their account, they lose all access to those documents too. Sounds like a great idea.
"wah wah Microsoft are stopping me from building my retirement fund by selling company secrets to someone else!!!"
There are nefarious purposes you could use it for though.. like, making sure your equivalent to the "Halloween Document" is unreadable, or auto-destruct capability for those spreadsheets that show much it'll cost to drive a rival browser company into the ground. But that stuff happens even without DRM, and they manage to prove it happens and win in court by other means than bringing up petty emails and Word documents.
If OpenOffice had gotten this first, nobody would be complaining.
And of course.. what's the betting that OpenOffice can actually use a standard Windows DRM/IRM API at some point to unencrypt documents based on their Windows 2003 Server authentication and signature key?
Developing a License Provider Service for Windows Media Encoder
Getting Started with Windows Media Rights Manager SDK
Looks relatively public to me. No less public than the new PKZIP encryption extensions :)
Hell, why doesn't someone talk to Microsoft and ask if they can use the API for interoperability purposes? It's not breaking the DMCA if they let you :)
Neat, thanks.
;)
I just applied, hopefully I'll get a quick yay or nay
Even the first version of MSN used an MD5 challenge authentication.
They send you a string.
You add it together - $email + $password+ $string
You MD5 that string.
You send that MD5 hash to Microsoft.
Microsoft hash the same way at their end and if they match, you're authenticated.
Simple, really. Just a little laborious. Newer MSN protocols use stuff like RSA keys. Never, EVER sends plaintext passwords, and ALWAYS challenges as far as I know.
ICQ and AOLIM do the same thing.
So as long as you don't go sending your password in a message to someone, you're pretty damned safe.