Microsoft Patents Grouped Taskbar Buttons 714
I_am_Rambi writes "According to the US Patent office, patent #6,756,999 belongs to Microsoft. The patent this time is grouping taskbar icons processes. This is included in Windows XP, and some prior art in X. Looks like it was accepted two days ago."
Another one for the EFF to bust. (Score:5, Interesting)
Funding (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Funding (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Funding (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Funding (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like the beef should be with the patent office instead of Microsoft. Afterall, they didn't do anything that Apple or IBM wouldn't do.
Re:Flogging (Score:3, Funny)
I'd be satisfied with public flogging of the USPTO employee(s) who issued this absurdity. Twenty lashes per lame, revoked patent ought to do.
Re:Another one for the EFF to bust. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Another one for the EFF to bust. (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry.
Re:Another one for the EFF to bust. (Score:5, Informative)
The regulations are that prior art disqualifies a patent if and only if it was in use or on sale or had a description published before the latter of the invention date (which might be hard to prove) or one year before the filing for the patent. (35 USC 102 [cornell.edu].) Because we are not sure of the invention date, we need to go off of the one year previous rule.
Re:Another one for the EFF to bust. (Score:5, Informative)
Then again, I could be wrong.
-Rusty
Prior art doesn't matter (Score:3, Insightful)
Prior art only matters if you can afford to buy congress.
Re:Another one for the EFF to bust. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Another one for the EFF to bust. (Score:4, Funny)
Hamster sex? (Score:5, Funny)
My hamster says he'll be happy if you could hide his porn photos too:
http://www.ag0ny.com/misc-20040513-hamster-porn.p
Re:Another one for the EFF to bust. (Score:5, Insightful)
Anything that give me more screen real estate and hides things I'm not looking at anyway is a Very Good Thing.
I didn't spring for the bigger monitor just to fit more clutter.
Re:Another one for the EFF to bust. (Score:5, Insightful)
You have to move your mouse just to see what's open.
You can't see any alerts blinking in the system tray (new email, network activity, CPU usage, bandwidth usage, etc).
Instead of flicking the mouse down to click something (knowing exactly where it is), you have to move the mouse, wait for the taskbar to appear, locate the button and then click it.
Maybe it's an issue if you're at 640x480 on a 14" screen though.
Re:Another one for the EFF to bust. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Another one for the EFF to bust. (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a pretty clean desktop. I wish I could dump my crotechety old win2k box at work!
Re:Famous words (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Another one for the EFF to bust. (Score:5, Funny)
Well, laptop computer repairman, I am sure your customers enjoy you messing with their settings, and making decisions as to what's important or useful for them.
Re:Another one for the EFF to bust. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that the Patent Office takes the attitude of, "The courts will rule on it if it's a bad patent", while the courts take the attitude, "It's patented, therefore they must have a valid claim on it", so it's a catch 22 for anyone who has to challenge it. This means that it needs to be challenged now, while it's a new, fresh patent, and while the collective "we" can come up with examples of prior art that are confirmable before the application was placed. If we don't do this, in a few years once history has been somehwat obfuscated over time it'll be harder and harder to challenge, and the patent holder might actually win if the people against the patent don't have what they need to challenge it properly.
Until we change either 1) the patent office or 2) the courts, we'll continue to have to fight this. I'm personally in favor of changing the patent office, requiring a given posting on "to be approved" patents giving a timeframe like six months for the pending patent to be challenged. This would keep the USPTO from being overworked by actively having to research themselves, yet would give the community a way to fight against stupid and overly constraining patents, or to help prevent patents on "well, duh!" types of things.
Of course, we really just need to abolish software patents altogether, but that's another argument.
The usual convenient mistake, eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
1. There are plenty of silly patents which don't have anything to do with software. You can find plenty such barrels of laughs as a van with a horse on a treadmill instead of an engine. (Yes, believe it or not, someone patented something as impossible as that.)
2. There are plenty of software patents which are _not_ trivial.
E.g., ever since the GIF patent I keep hearing about how compression algorithms are something trivial and obvious. Well you invent a good new compression algorithm if it's that trivial. _Then_ you can say it's trivial. No, really. Try it.
E.g., I keep hearing the same about various movie and sound codecs. (A la "waah! MP3 shouldn't have been patentable!") You know what? _You_ come up quickly with a good codec, if that's trivial. I'll tell you a secret: back in the early 90s I actually tried coming up with my own algorithm to compress game movies. Turns out I had no bloody clue where to even start.
E.g., I keep hearing about how cryptographic algorithms are no-brainers and shouldn't be patentable. No shit, Sherlock? You try coming up with a new secure algorithm over the weekend, and only then you'll have earned the right to say it's trivial. In practice what virtually every "smart" programmer comes up with is some snake oil idea, like xoring the output of the random number generator to the input stream. Ask a real cryptographer why that's easier to crack than a brown paper bag.
Etc.
To cut it short: It only seems trivial because someone explained an existing algorithm to you already. But try actually inventing a new one. You'll quickly discover why such things are discovered by mathematicians not code monkeys.
In practice some people had to sit and _work_ to come up with that stuff. Sometimes for years. It also took a lot of testing. And someone had to pay for that research work. It's no less research work than, say, a pharmaceuticals company researching and testing a new drug.
Now I do understand that it's fashionable on
However, here's a new idea for all those complaining about patents: if you really want to convince me of your moral high ground, why don't you do the exact opposite? Why don't _you_ give a new algorithm away, instead of asking that others give you stuff for free? Go, actually _invent_ something new, and put it in the public domain.
Re:The usual convenient mistake, eh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Crypto patents .. not trivial, just not patentable (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, a lot of folk think that maths is about discovery of relationships that are consistent with the current mathematical/logical framework (like pure science). Further, that this isn't _invention_ (though it is very worthwhile and highly skilled work that I greatly admire). [You appear to think that maths is discovery and invention?]
So, the only bit left to be an invention then is the programming an algorithm into a computer, given the algorithm. This can be simple - technical but not inventive, the sort of thing programmers commonly do.
Often, it will be hard because of the optimisations required. So, claim the optimisations in a patent, but the mere implementation of the algorithm isn't inventive IMO. Basically, I don't think that mathematics is (nor should be) patentable. This way anyone can use the basic mathematics and produce their own optimisations.
PS: I don't think the optimisations should be patentable either (different argument). But I do feel that there is a strong argument that if anything else is patentable that such optimisations (that make inventive use of the platform) should be considered to have an inventive technical effect and so be patentable.
Re:The usual convenient mistake, eh? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll paraphrase the same question right back at you: do you think medicine would be where it is today, if anyone was free to brew in a bathtub the formula you've spent half a billion to perfect? Why the heck would anyone invest in pharmaceutical research at all, if that was the case?
Yes, you could argue until you're blue in the face about how that would be good. You could buy cheaper medicine, for example. But then noone would invest in producing _new_ medicine. Good luck if your disease doesn't go away with just penicilin and/or aspirin, because in your ideal world noone invented anything newer than that. You're gonna die, but hey, surely that's a small price to pay to keep those greedy corporations from patenting obvious chemical formulas.
You see, the point of patents is to stimulate research. Yes, you pay for it by having a 20 year interval in which someone gets to collect royalties for their investment. But the benefit in the long run is that you actually get research.
Well, see, same thing with software. Do I think we'd be better off, if anyone started patenting software algorithms since 1950? Damn right. We'd have had more people actually paying from research, instead of just hordes of people copy-and-pasting the same code over and over again. (Algorithms copied from a book via memory, for all practical purposes I'll consider to be copied-and-pasted.)
Re:The usual convenient mistake, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm. Are you a programmer? If so, I'm surprised...
Patents work for medicine, they don't work for software. A software patent is by definition a patent on a process, not a tangible result. The problem comes when you consider the scope of the patent.
Does the patent cover the same process with, say, one step added? Well, it has to, otherwise people could get around it easily. Similarly it has to cover the same process with maybe one or two steps removed, or swapped around. So what you get is a patent which is too broad, preventing people from addressing the same problem in even remotely the same way.
Let's say people had started patenting algorithms since the 1950s. It's almost too horrible to think of. Let's see, what would have made a good patent... binary trees, linked lists, B-trees, heaps, hash tables... oops, all your memory storage possibilities have gone. Better wait 20 years if you want to use a sensible data structure without paying royalties.
Let's see... quicksort, heap sort, merge sort... why not insertion sort and shell sort, too. Now you can't sort things without paying royalties, either.
Line drawing algorithms -- those weren't trivial to develop, either. So now you can't actually draw straight lines efficiently without paying royalties.
I know, how about compiler compilers, LR parsers, and so forth? Then nobody can actually program at all. I suppose that would solve the problem completely.
Codec and encryption patents are only sensible because a) you have to use exactly the same codec or encryption as the other person, so the scope of the patent can be narrow b) it's a really bad idea to be too restrictive about use of your wonderful new codec or ecryption scheme.
Software patents in general are a real menace, and I doubt you'll convince many programmers otherwise...
Re:Another one for the EFF to bust. (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, on a more general note -- the more patent activity this year (the more "problems" that need solving), the more revenue the patent office will "need" next year. When you're the head of a bureaucracy funded through force, your "success" is measured not by the usefulness of your service (the approval of your clients), but rather by the level of authority and funding you are granted by the higher-ups (the feds).
In other words, it's not in the patent office's best interest to operate fairly and efficiently, just as it's not in government's best interest to limit it's powers over the people. Sure, government could have followed the plan set forth by the founders (strictly limited government), but then, what's in it for them?
Re:Another one for the EFF to bust. (Score:3, Insightful)
*sigh* Here we go again... (Score:4, Funny)
Cue the "We need to abolish the patent system" posts and just get it over with...
Re:*sigh* Here we go again... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:*sigh* Here we go again... (Score:5, Funny)
Wow.. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Wow.. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wow.. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Wow.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wow.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wow.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wow.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wow.. (Score:3, Informative)
Well then you're still partially wrong. They bought it off Xerox and drastically improved it.
And the mouse was invented by someone else I believe prior to Xerox.
Re:Wow.. (Score:4, Informative)
Semantics (Score:5, Interesting)
Whether double clicking or alternate functions based on how long a button on some gadget is pressed, it's been done before and it's a bogus, bullshit waste of the legal system's time to have ever filed it.
Bill Gates and his crew should be ashamed. I didn't think even he would be so ignorantly, selfishly, and stupidly greedy as to patent the bloody obvious that's been done for years. Power switches, reset buttons, PDA backlight functions, there are dozens upon dozens of examples much older than the filing.
Bill needs to take another look at his legal staff -- somehow one of his SCO drones managed to get back in the building, or thinks that just because Microsoft covers the paycheque means they're supposed to be filing patents on Microsoft's behalf instead of SCO's.
Either that, or Bill is trying desperately to distract us from something that is actually important, like some tabled piece of legislation we haven't noticed.
Re:Wow.. (Score:5, Informative)
The GUI was invented aways back in the 1960s. At first, it was just a cursor, but it was definitely driven by a puck with a button on it. There's you're mouse, years before PARC. PARC, which was a research center, by the way, not a product development center, created a graphical interface for performing actions featuring windows and icons. This was brought to the attention of Steve Jobs, who thought it was neat and traded several million dollars worth of Apple stock to Xerox in exchange for a "field trip" with his developers to PARC. Apple didn't license the technology per se -- there was nothing to license at that point, there was no product yet -- but they also didn't use Xerox's idea. They took the interface for performing actions and used the basic premise to create an interface for managing objects. They turned icons as verbs into icons as nouns, inventing in the process such things as the first Desktop, the first file management system (Finder) and the first graphical forms, controls and alerts (Xerox's interface was basically a CLI in a window with buttons).
Microsoft's "patent for double clicking" pertains only to hardware buttons on palm sized devices, and only to the specific use of timed accesses. Sounds like double clicking, but it isn't -- the patent is on using one hardware button on a handheld to perform three distinct actions using three distinct input methods, not on any of the three methods. Want to avoid the patent? Make sure YOUR handheld device only uses two of the three methods. Of course, this doesn't make for quite so sensational an article as "OMG M$ Patentz dbl click," which is probably why you don't know about it. Or, like Mr. Levy, do you prefer spreading colorful and entertaining fictions so long as the outline is correct?
Re:Wow.. (Score:3, Interesting)
The mouse was developed by Doug Englebart [ibiblio.org] at Stanford Research Institute more than a decade before PARC came into existence.
Apple paid a lot of money to license PARC's technologies. Apple also hired several ex-PARC employees. Apple also heavily improved on PARC's ideas; it certainly wasn't the case that Apple simply "stole" the Star. And it certainly was NOT the case
Re:Wow.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Uh okay (Score:5, Insightful)
BeOS had that in 1999 (Score:5, Informative)
BeOS' Tracker had that in 1999 before anyone else. All windows/instances from the same application are showing grouped in the BeOS Deskbar, under the same sub-menu.
Re:BeOS had that in 1999 (Score:5, Interesting)
Wich is a behaviour that makes it really annoying, because you have to switch your mind-gears between "searching among open windows for the useful window" and "search for the app icon and then navigate to the useful window". I'd rather have "grouping always" or "grouping never", the latter being what you get when you disable the grouping 'feature'.
Re:BeOS had that in 1999 (Score:3, Informative)
I've got prior art.. (Score:3, Funny)
Every since I was a young child (25 odd years ago), i've been scattering things on the floor, and then when there's too many things I tity them up into groups, only to be scattered again when I have more space, ore some of them have been put away properly.
When I worked in a resturant we used to group meal tickets when there wasn't enough space on the 'task bar'
Re:I've got prior art.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I've got prior art.. (Score:3, Insightful)
The food order printouts came from a computer too.
Re:BeOS had that in 1999 (Score:5, Informative)
By the way, here [google.com] is a USENET post from 1998 discussing the deskbar.
Re:BeOS had that in 1999 (Score:4, Informative)
The entire toolbar was dynamically generated, and could contain various assortments of tools, images, palettes and so forth - and there were a number of other dynamically instantiated things there too, such as proportional controls, buttons, text entry widgets and so forth. Various classes of things always grouped together. The toolbar itself could auto-hide and pop up when you moused down to it, or it could pop in and out based upon a right-click. And in fact, we had implemented both auto-hide of the toolbar, and auto-hide of contextually inapropriate and not recently used tools in May of 1990, in an earlier product called "reg-paint", now that I think about it.
The fact that the toolbars in Imagemaster were totally dynamic and context-sensitive with the specific aim of being reductionist was actually a selling point for the program, well beyond the convenience of having the UI configure itself for what you were doing at the moment. This was because the Amiga had a limited amount of what was called "chip" memory (1 or 2 mb), which was basically the only memory that could contain drawable graphics, playable sounds, and some other system stuff. So the fact that the program's huge number of controls, windows and so on were dynamically generated and accessed by a panel that only contained what you needed, as you needed it, was a pretty big deal. That made the panel itself a very stingy consumer of chip memory, and that was the primary inspiration for a lot of what it did.
Imagemaster was shipping in February of 1991. Tons of supporting documentation, magazine articles, manuals, users, you name it. Way too much to get lost in the sands of time. Very popular application, too. Imagemaster brought out the very first implementation of morphing on a desktop PC. Imagemaster shipped until Commodore's demise and for a little while thereafter, and that toolbar existed in every version.
So Billy can bite me. Either Pete Patterson and myself came up with the idea first, or someone before us did (which would be fine, I could care less), but it sure as heck wasn't Microsoft. Or Be. :)
Sideways remark: We used to say that if Commodore owned the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, they'd market it as "lukewarm, dead bird." The Amiga was amazing for its time. I still miss the machine at times. But I sure don't miss Commodore.
Re:BeOS had that in 1999 (Score:3, Funny)
Not exactly the same (Score:5, Informative)
"The system organizes like application files and clusters the corresponding taskbar buttons and, upon reaching a threshold limit, creates and displays a group button that contains the like application files and removes the like taskbar buttons from the taskbar. Further, upon reaching a second threshold limit, the system ungroups the application taskbar buttons, displays them on the taskbar and removes the group button from the taskbar."
Big difference? Probably not, but enough for it to be 'new'...
Re:Not exactly the same (Score:3, Informative)
GNOME did this before Microsoft... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:GNOME did this before Microsoft... (Score:3, Informative)
Prior art has to beat the invention date which is probably no later than 1999 in this case, possibly earlier.
Patent this! (Score:3, Interesting)
This is silly... (Score:5, Insightful)
What next? Ford applying for and getting a patent on the side-by-side arrangement of foot pedals in a car? Or the standard gear-stick arrangement? How about patenting putting the speedometer and revmeter next to each other? Or the fuel, water and temperature gauges within a certain distance of one another.
The USPTO is crazy. I swear they'd let you patent the colour of the sky if you paid your processing fee.
Re:This is silly... (Score:3, Informative)
Actually I am remembering now. It was the concept of having a window fade when not in use, and fade more as it is not being used, patented by Apple. This combines time and variable transparenc
Prior Art (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Prior Art (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, and BeOS had it in 1999.
Last time I checked, 1999 was before 2000.
Of course, this is just more verification that Microsoft's never actually invented anything. Just taken ideas from other companies and then crushed them to try and make the world forget who really innovates.
Stuff to manipulate taskbars... (Score:4, Interesting)
I just know someone's going to tell me you can do it in Window Manager XYZ, and if I'd just googled it, I'd know that. But if not, then I could actually celebrate that I had an original idea for once and go eat a steak dinner. Or maybe I should just go eat steak anyways.
Here's the truly sad part (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at how freaking many people they claim it took to come up with the idea of "grouping similar shit together".
Stoakley; Richard W. (Seattle, WA); Kurtz; James B. (Bellevue, WA); Springfield; James F. (Woodinville, WA); Green; Todd J. (Seattle, WA); Andrew; Suzan M. (Seattle, WA); Mann; Justin (Lake Forest, WA)
Kinda lets you know where your $300 bucks [compusa.com] that they charge for Windows XP goes.
BTW, my grandpa had the same idea when he'd keep his roofing nails in one coffee can, and his finish nails in another coffee can. I wonder if I can get a patent for that.
Method and system for clustering and grouping construction nails...
I suppose it's time? (Score:5, Interesting)
When it came to civil rights, people had to be willing to go to jail, willing to pack the prisons, to bring decency to the law.
Now, perhaps, it's time to be willing to go to civil court to bring sanity to the law. Maybe it's time to simply ignore patents on which there is known prior art. It's certainly not going to be an easy decision to make, to risk lengthy and expensive court proceedings. But maybe letting the owners of ridiculous patents stuff the courts with enforcement cases is an appropriate way to prod Congress to action.
They are welcome to it! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:They are welcome to it! (Score:5, Insightful)
please....
Re:They are welcome to it! (Score:3, Insightful)
No, I'd rather use a browser that has tabbed browsing [mozilla.org]... seriously, the browser [opera.com] is the only real application where I *consistently* need to have many instances open.
It's not funny any more.... (Score:5, Funny)
Now I'm waiting to see if it's a prophesy.
This isn't obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure it may seem obvious now...but the first time you saw it, you probably said "oh, that's weird". Even if you had thought of it years before, not everyone did. And they still had a right to patent it since you didn't, and you didn't implement it.
Re:This isn't obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps you should take a look at what is supposed to be patentable before you warm up your fingers. [nolo.com]
Two aspects of patent - it must be NOVEL, and it must be NON-OBVIOUS.
You figure this as both "NOVEL" and "NON-OBVIOUS"?
Neither do I, and that's why the complaining.
Re:This isn't obvious (Score:3, Interesting)
Seeing prior art has nothing to do with the non-obvious part.
>> If I was designing something like this I wouldn't even have considered it. That makes it non-obvious. Whether or not it is novel depends on whether or not someone else did it first. I have seen no such thing.
Just because you think it's non-obvious doesn't make it so. I find it very obvious, and think I would have done the same. I think a lot of pe
BeOS tracker (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This isn't obvious (Score:3, Interesting)
I haven't seen a grouping yet that was particuliarly innovative. How about grouping by interrealtion? I group an Excel spreasheet together a Word document beca
Re:This isn't obvious (Score:3, Informative)
It's the kind of thing that I can imagine the developers of said configurable desktop might not actually have explicitly programmed into it in the first place. I can
Re:This isn't obvious (Score:5, Informative)
From the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure, section 706.02(j):
"To establish a prima facie case of obviousness, three basic criteria must be met. First, there must be some suggestion or motivation, either in the references themselves or in the knowledge generally available to one of ordinary skill in the art, to modify the reference or to combine reference teachings. Second, there must be a reasonable expectation of success. Finally, the prior art reference (or references when combined) must teach or suggest all the claim limitations. The teaching or suggestion to make the claimed combination and the reasonable expectation of success must both be found in the prior art and not based on applicant's disclosure. In re Vaeck, 947 F.2d 488, 20 USPQ2d 1438 (Fed. Cir. 1991). See MPEP 2143 - 2143.03 for decisions pertinent to each of these criteria."
The basic notion is that there must be some prior art, or combination of prior art, that "teaches" EACH AND EVERY claim element in the later patent -- PLUS there has to be a "motivation" to combine them. Just because there is prior art, or because something seems "obvious" to a user, doesn't mean that it meets the LEGAL definition of "obvious" relevant to the USPTO.
Just thought I would mention that...
About patents (Score:3, Interesting)
Claim 1 simply says that if for example you have a button for a word file x.doc (handled by winword.exe) and the system receives a request to create a button for y.doc it will figure out that x.doc and y.doc are both handled by winword.exe and place the button for y.doc adjacent to the x.doc button. That's all there is to it!
Couple corrections to other postings
- you do not claim prior art (it's not yours, is it) you disclose your knolwedge of prior art; that helps the examiner figure out the diffs
- the mentioned threshold talks about available space; not how much time has passed
Lastly, the innovation seems to be in the method for deciding how to arrange the buttons (claim 1)
all other claims are based on that method. Claims 2 & 3 (grouping) are novel when implemented using the method of claim 1.
By definition if the patent has been granted, than there is no prior art that is the same as the invention. To the extent that another system achieves a similar objective, it must be using a diffenrent method.
This is potentially good for us... (Score:5, Interesting)
Think about it, if they keep patenting little stupid things like this as an attempt to cripple and slow down alternate desktops such as X from advancing in the market place then this in the long run is probably a bad move,
As it's already been proved many times that if you make something not possible for someone they will work out a compromise and at least 70% of the time come up with something better and more efficient.
Obviously the desktop war is far from over but the industry needs innovation (Even if it has to be forced into it)
A 13 year old girl? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:A 13 year old girl? (Score:3, Funny)
preemptive strikes ? (Score:3, Interesting)
If it hasn't been done already, somebody in the OSS community (Red Hat?, IBM?) should set up a fund that is devoted to obtaining patents and putting them under a free license or something. Maybe sales of a popular software product (or portion of sales of services from OSS software) could be funnelled into the fund.
the next microsoft patent is... (Score:3, Funny)
Who at Microsoft could have approved this? (Score:3, Insightful)
here's something MS could patent.. (Score:3, Funny)
PJ is right (Score:3, Interesting)
Except for the time constraints to do and undo ... (Score:5, Interesting)
How does this benefit consumers? (Score:3, Insightful)
Emacs has grouping on buffer selection (Score:4, Interesting)
On the other hand if only a few buffers are open, then you are presented with a single list.
You can even customize the behaviour to determine the point at which this splitting will take place.
Re:Patented Taskbar Grouping? (Score:5, Insightful)
It is? Funny, I've found it quite useful when having tons of windows open. Is my personal opinion insightful, too?
Re:Patented Taskbar Grouping? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, it annoys me to no end. But that's just me. I hate UI inconsistency. You have found it useful when you have "tons of windows open". How useful is when it _just starts_ grouping? Say it has one or two groups of two windows? Not much, I'd say. Anyway, since mozilla got tabbed browsing I rarely have half a ton of windows open. Just a couple of mozillas with a quarter ton tabs each ;)
Is my personal opinion insightful, too?
Why
Re:Patented Taskbar Grouping? (Score:5, Funny)
Which makes me wonder.. is this comment funny?
Re:I regret to inform you (Score:3, Funny)
And I would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for you meddling kids^H^H^H^H er Mods.
Re:OK, so MS has had this since winXP... (Score:5, Informative)
BeOS. Since 1998, and probably much earlier.
Schwab
Re:OK, so MS has had this since winXP... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm typically a Linux user, though I use neither GNOME nor KDE, and didn't start using a system tray until this past fall with xfwm4 and the xfce taskbar -- and none of the apps I've used need any grouping.
The patent application dates to 2001; it may possible be valid.
Re:OK, so MS has had this since winXP... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:USPTO and time elapsed between filing and grant (Score:5, Informative)
It mostly depends on the field of art. Because there has been a huge boom in computer patents, there is a backlog in that department
Once the patent is examined on the merits, the examiner often makes rejections, to which the applicant answers with arguments/ammendments, and that may repreat several times, until the examiner agrees on a version of the application that is patentable. That part may take several years as well.
Three years is not really a long time to get a patent. I have seen some patents that have been languishing for 5 years. And sometimes the delay is not due to the PTO, rather it is the applicant's fault.
Yes You Can! (Score:3, Informative)
If you really want it to be nice like 2k, under Start, Settings, Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Services, disable the Themes service.
Re:KDE... (Score:4, Insightful)
Given Microsoft's tight reign over any software development, I find it unlikely that the idea made it from MS to KDE prior to the release of the version of KDE that had it.
If two parties were independently developing the same idea at the same time, and arrived at it approximately the same time, does this mean the idea was obvious? Or was it simply a sort of zeitgeist - that's the kind of thing people in the field were thinking about at that time.
Re:KDE... (Score:5, Informative)
Of course I was surprised to see that Microsoft seems to patent something that is closely built after my thoughts mentioned on the kde-look mailing list in 1999 already.
One of the problems with considering my thread as prior art is that unfortunately it was implemented by Matthias Elter some months later. It only turned out during implementation that task grouping only becomes interesting if
- the user doesn't use virtual desktops already (because he already organizes his tasks himself already)
- the tasks are only grouped after a certain thresholded is reached.
It doesn't take to be a genius to get that threshold idea because it's just the logical next step once you implement it but it seems that Microsoft actually implemented my idea before we did and therefore realized this tiny step before us.
Anyways it's interesting to see how Microsoft seems to monitor the KDE mailinglists since 1997.
E.g. I had the idea to create kpersonalizer which featured a dialog with a slider which you could easily use to configure the amount of eyecandy versus performance in KDE.
It was funny to see a very similar dialog in XP Betas two months later which contained almost the same wording in some places
So much for cross-polluting ideas between KDE and MS developers