Microsoft's Decade-old Patent On Tree-view Mode! 183
BhaKi writes "Remember the Tree-View mode in many file management applications? It's shocking to know that this omnipresent feature was patented by Microsoft back in 1995 (granted in 1997). I'm not very sure about the implications, though. The patent is so general that it can be related to many things from tree-mode to virtual filesystems. Check out claim no. 3 of the patent for the most clear part."
This infringes on my 1992 patent... on trees (Score:5, Funny)
I patented trees in general in 1992. I'm going to sue.
Re:This infringes on my 1992 patent... on trees (Score:5, Funny)
I patented dirt.. Want to apply for a license? Without my dirt license, you can grow no trees.
Re:This infringes on my 1992 patent... on trees (Score:5, Funny)
Ever hear of hydroponics?
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Uh, yeah, of course he has, but that's been patented too, silly. The guy with the patent to hydroponics is a jerk and won't license it out. brxndxn is cool, though, and it'd be a lot easier to just license dirt from brxndxn.
Disclaimer: brxndxn did not pay me to say this, I'm just a happy customer.
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If we're going to be pedantic about 'tree,' I'll point out that they grow in soil, or sod. Not dirt [answers.com].
There are a few in the rainforest I live in.
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You claim that trees don't grown in dirt but soil, but then link a definition for dirt where the number one entry is "earth or soil". Cleary from your own link dirt is often a synonym for soil.
I would like to point out that you can't use a dictionary.
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Re:This infringes on my 1992 patent... on trees (Score:5, Funny)
Yes they do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai [wikipedia.org]
Re:This infringes on my 1992 patent... on trees (Score:5, Funny)
Reminds me of a old joke:
One day a group of Darwinian scientists got together and decided that man had come a long way and no longer needed God. So they picked one Darwinian to go and tell Him that they were done with Him.
The Darwinian walked up to God and said, "God, we've decided that we no
longer need you. We're to the point that we can clone people and do many miraculous things, so why don't you just get lost."
God listened very patiently and kindly to the man. After the Darwinian was done talking, God said, "Very well, how about this? Let's say we have a man-making contest." To which the Darwinian happily agreed.
God added, "Now, we're going to do this just like I did back in the old
days with Adam."
The Darwinian said, "Sure, no problem" and bent down and grabbed himself a handful of dirt.
God interrupted, saying, "Hold it. You go get your OWN dirt!!"
Re:This infringes on my 1992 patent... on trees (Score:5, Interesting)
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. - Carl Sagan
Re:This infringes on my 1992 patent... on trees (Score:5, Funny)
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. - Carl Sagan
Hell of a way to frighten away potential wives. No wonder nerds have problems in that area. It's like the dating couple admiring horses galloping in the sunshine, when the geeky guy turns to the girl and says, "You know, the purpose of a horse's tail is to keep flies off of its anus." Date over.
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frighten away potential wives
and potential boyfriends
Re:This infringes on my 1992 patent... on trees (Score:4, Insightful)
I patented trees in general in 1992. I'm going to sue.
That's kind of an interesting point here, they were granted the patent in '97 but I fail to recall any lawsuits over such a thing... Much ado about nothing?
Re:This infringes on my 1992 patent... on trees (Score:5, Insightful)
I would expect that no lawsuits would be pending, or ever brought to surface - for a few reasons.
1) They are far from the first to implement such a feature... too much prior art existed
2) One of the companies that made excessive use of "Tree View" was IBM, when they rewrote OS/2's GUI (without MS's involvement) for OS/2 v2 - which far predates both the application date of this patent and the granted date.
I doubt they want to sue IBM for something they (Microsoft) did not come up with.
I also doubt they want to sue anyone else, because doing so would invariably bring IBM into the picture for such reasons (listed in #2 above), as well as force IBM (and others) to bring up the prior existence of such a "structure" which would thus be ground to invalidate Microsoft's patent.
I am sure that IBM did not come up with this idea - but they did implement it long before Microsoft filed for a patent, and I am sure that the OS/2 GUI patents do cover it, and reference prior art as well.
This is a (pandora's) box that I doubt Microsoft wants to open. Instead, I think they will use it (or may have been using it, or may consider to use it) for nothing other than trying to force smaller companies without the legal wherewithal to pay them royalties for a technology they did not create.
Just my opinions.
Re:This infringes on my 1992 patent... on trees (Score:5, Informative)
I read the patent, and it does not patent tree views. Claim 1 patents adding objects visible in a file viewer, just like files, by registering such objects with the registry. Sounds fairly worthless to me, but Microsoft patents pretty much anything. Claim 3, which does mention tree views, is dependent on claim 1. In no way are simple tree views covered by this patent.
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Ah... well, the point still stands... Claim 1 and 3 would still be prior art (Commodore, IBM, and others).
DOS apps had tree view too (Score:2)
Tree view existed in DOS apps too. Anyone else remember KAMAS, the outlining program? it dates to 1987, and I doubt it was the first.
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I believe that I was using tree views on 2741 terminals in 1971 on cp67 and tss S/360 systems.
If you were to combine the patent on dirt and the tree view, you would effectively kill the keeping of potted plants in cubicles. :-P
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If you were to combine the patent on dirt and the tree view, you would effectively kill the keeping of potted plants in cubicles. :-P
So whom would companies employ then?
Why do people link ad-laden patent sites? (Score:5, Informative)
You can get patent results ad-free from Google [google.com] or straight from the USPTO [uspto.gov].
Re:Why do people link ad-laden patent sites? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why do people link ad-laden patent sites? (Score:5, Funny)
I notice that many of the flowchart illustrations are purely linear; no branches or loops. Why bother with a flowchart for such? Just do a text step list of the common kind:
1. Collect panties
2. Make a web-site about collected panties
3. Put Google Ads on it
4. Profit!
(List for illustration purposes only. Profits not guaranteed. Collecting panties risks lawsuits and may pose an environmental hazard.)
Re:Why do people link ad-laden patent sites? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Why do people link ad-laden patent sites? (Score:5, Funny)
(... Collecting panties risks lawsuits and may pose an environmental hazard.)
Man, oh man. What kind of chix do you DATE!?!?!?
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Hey, don't knock spicy-burrito-loving chicks until you've been with one.
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undoubtedly, Canadian Supermodels
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What, The Fir? The Larch? The Redwood? The mighty Scots Pine?
Sorry, but that's the only tall thin things that come out of Canada as far as my education went...
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may be easier to read from google patents (Score:2, Interesting)
Slashdot's in trouble (Score:5, Funny)
Hell, its vague enough to cover slashdot's hierarchical nesting message view. Pay up, slashy!
Midnight Commander and Ztree (Score:5, Informative)
Thank god for mc and ztree
Re:Midnight Commander and Ztree (Score:5, Informative)
Xtree Gold preceded this by a long time, IIRC.
I have a copy in my attic that I had from the mid 80s
There is just tons of prior art for this patent.
A truly-terribly named piece of software (Score:2)
The first thing I ever did when I was on a system with 'mc' was to add
alias mc mv
into my ~/.tcshrc - One loose keytap and suddenly my whole terminal exploded with weird stuff happening. It was even worse when you're on dialup over a 9600 baud line to a unix box at the university.
[insert deity] I loathed that program, if only for its name.
Simon
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The first thing I ever did when I was on a system with 'mc' was to add
alias mc mv
into my ~/.tcshrc - One loose keytap and suddenly my whole terminal exploded with weird stuff happening. It was even worse when you're on dialup over a 9600 baud line to a unix box at the university.
[insert deity] I loathed that program, if only for its name.
Simon
It wouldn't be so bad if it was easy to get out of. The other one I hate is dc because I sometimes type it instead of cd.
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According to the wikipedia, XTree as released in April 1985.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XTree [wikipedia.org]
Xtree FTW... (Score:2)
I loved the seamless way you could navigate the entire directory structure, and dip down into the files themselves without waiting around.
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Yes indeed, I love mc -- but Norton Commander was even before mc. In fact, I think it may be the only originally-for-DOS program still commonly used on every popular OS (correct me if I've missed another). I have mc running in an iTerm on my Mac at all times, in Eterm or xterm on BSD and Linux, and even in cmd.exe on Windows boxen. It's always the very first thing I install after a new OS.
Re:Midnight Commander and Ztree (Score:5, Insightful)
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There isn't much in the claims (and not clearly covered by prior art) that strikes me as particularly vital for a non-MS operating system.
UNIX (Score:4, Informative)
as a node at a level where it is not in the FS
You know, there is this old family [wikipedia.org] of operating systems dating back from the early 70s, that tend to represent pretty much everything as a file system [wikipedia.org], even things that aren't necesarily on the disk like processes or more recently USB devices.
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Things like, oh, say /dev/tty? Or a proc file system:
UNIX 8th Edition
Tom J. Killian implemented the UNIX 8th Edition version of /proc: he presented a paper titled "Processes as Files" at USENIX in June 1984. The design of procfs aimed to replace the ptrace system call used for process tracing.
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The patent covers including things which aren't in the filesystem as part of the tree view. I don't see the relevance of "well UNIX has been placing all devices in the filesystem for decades". What's your point?
background details (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see the relevance of "well UNIX has been placing all devices in the filesystem for decades".
FYI, in addition of "/dev/" which *is* a directory on the file system (but contains special files to communicates with the hardware), there are other things that *are not* in the file system.
The patent covers including things which aren't in the filesystem as part of the tree view.
There are entry point in the tree like "/proc" which aren't in the file system at all.
Instead they use a special module called PROCFS (it's a file system drive in unix world, and pretty much equivalent to the the extension that the patent mentions : both can be used to make structures not on a disk appear as directory-l
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First thing I thought of was PC Tools, and perhaps the most obvious: Tree.
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So you could view printers and email messages as files in Midnight Commander or Ztree?
Besides which, the patent doesn't cover tree views; it would work just as well if you had a list view or a collection of icons in one pane and a detailed view in another.
Norton Commander in the '80s (Score:3, Interesting)
provided a navigable file system browser for DOS - tree view of directory in the left pane, list of files in the currently selected directory on the right.
It was a best-selling product, too.
A few years later (but before 1995), IIRC Lotus Notes had a navigational pane in its client. I doubt it was even the first app to use that - it was just sort of common wisdom among UI designers at the time.
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The Windows FileManager goes quite a bit further back then Win 3.11. I first saw it in Win 3.0 and it existed in OS/2 ver 1.1 (which IIRC was '87 or'88) where MS copied it from. (not too bad as they wrote the OS/2 ver1.x FileManager)
Of course this patent isn't just about file systems but also displaying other objects eg the control panel. OS/2 v2 did this in '91 or so.
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Of course this patent isn't just about file systems but also displaying other objects eg the control panel. OS/2 v2 did this in '91 or so.
I wonder if the mac had something like that in the early 80s.
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Nice... (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to give MS kudos for not using this patent offensively.
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I'm offended, you insensitive clod!
Norton Commander (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure I was using something very much like what's described in point #3 back in the DOS days with Norton (or its clone Volkov) Commander.
Prior art anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Prior art anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Prior art anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
It's describing a mechanism whereby a hierarchical filesystem viewer can delegate the ability to display documents to other modules (e.g. a Word Viewer COM control).
Let's see.
Claim 1 refers to a file system browser that allows mounting non-file objects into the same namespace as the file system. UNIX did all this, and its "registry" was called /etc/fstab.
Claim 3 ("a first window for viewing a selected part of the name space and a second window for viewing in more detail an object") describes the approach taken in Mac OS since 1.0, whose Finder had the "Get Info" window.
But some of the claims are specific and possibly novel. Claim 6: "the non-file system objects include printer objects representing printers." Mac OS from the time of the patent did not have drag-and-drop for printer configuration; instead, it used a desk accessory called the Chooser.
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But some of the claims are specific and possibly novel. Claim 6: "the non-file system objects include printer objects representing printers." Mac OS from the time of the patent did not have drag-and-drop for printer configuration; instead, it used a desk accessory called the Chooser.
OS/2 ver 2 had printer objects that worked this way in '91 or '92. ver 1.1 introduced what would become the Windows 3.x FileManager in '87 or '88.
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But some of the claims are specific and possibly novel. Claim 6: "the non-file system objects include printer objects representing printers." Mac OS from the time of the patent did not have drag-and-drop for printer configuration; instead, it used a desk accessory called the Chooser.
Mac System 7 had 'desktop printers' a printer icon in the desktop where you could drag a document to print, and double-clicking it opened the queue (where you could manage it by drag&drop the items, not only by 'right-clicking' or menu items, like windows until today)
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AOCE: circa 1993 Apple was pushing this heavily. Mailboxes and business cards were desktop objects. Double clicking an icon in a mailbox brought up the message viewer. I don't remember if there was a tree view.
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Stated this way, this technology would closely resemble Mac OS X "QuickLook [apple.com]", though this particular feature pointedly does not work in a tree view, but in a separate not-so-modal window that can be summoned. Maybe Apple came up with coverflow view in the Finder and the QuickLook HUD window just to get around this particular patent.
But reading it myself, it seems more concerned with the presentation of "non-filesystem" objects in the filesystem, so you can open a folder and see email messages or printers
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Like what Konqueror does?
Re:Prior art anyone? (Score:4, Interesting)
The implications? (Score:5, Insightful)
Generally, very little. Yes, most low-level things in CS have been patented in some sense (XOR cursors, one-click checkout, run-length image encoding, multi-hash lookup, stacktrace error display strategies.)
In theory, all software development grinds to a halt. In practice, no one gives a damn.
Trying to enforce a very broad software patent usually just gets the entire patent invalidated. Even if you win, you get to play whack-a-mole with a thousand open-source projects. And most software is bespoke stuff within corporations: good luck tracking that down to enforce patent claims.
Unless you are a law firm with the business model of extorting cash for infringment, you lose by going to court. Bad press, skeptical judge (unless you are suing a direct competitor,) workarounds from the peanut gallery provided pro-bono, countersuits from others with overlapping clainms: it gets ugly fast. Better to just cross-license and get on with life.
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The problem with all of this is that it reveals that the USPTO doesn't even try to enforce novelty and non-obviousness in patents. The other problem is that it sets up a situation where every time one of the old dinosaurs dies it injures everything around it (perhaps fatally) in it's death spasms.
Just look at how much of other people's money SCO has managed to flush down the crapper trying to wring the last bit of ROI out before it dies.
MS hasn't done anything with it's fundamentally flawed patent thus far
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Unless you are a law firm with the business model of extorting cash for infringment, you lose by going to court.
Problem is, as numerous /. stories on patent trolling have shown, there are a fair number of companies with exactly that business model, and that model relies on overbroad patents like this one. No, it doesn't stop innovation from happening. What it does do is arbitrarily and capriciously penalize those who actually implement useful solutions to common problems, by taking money out of their pock
Wang: Clearview (1989), OIS (1977) (Score:3, Informative)
That's interesting, because a virtually identical view was available in a Wang Laboratories software product called Clearview, released in 1989, which ran on Windows 2.0.
(Clearview was one of a genre of Windows add-ons, HP NewWave being probably the best known, that plastered improved graphics shells or desktop managers on top of Windows).
And Clearview itself was nothing more than an improved version of a directory display that was used in the Wang Laboratories OIS circa 1977. They were logically the same, although visually different because the OIS was constrained by having a character-oriented screen. At least within Wang itself, Clearview's directory display was regarded a spiffy bitmapped graphic version of the OIS's display.
I seriously doubt that Wang was first or even close to first, but Wang was definitely shipping large numbers of commercial products that offered tree views of directories long before 1995.
Not just any tree (Score:5, Informative)
This patent isn't just about trees, or even file-system trees (which Microsoft made prior art for with the old Win3.1 File Manager). This is about file-system trees that also include things that aren't actually in the file system. It's about how things like Control Panel and My Network Places can appear in the same Windows Explorer tree with your C: drive.
Hopefully, though, the whole thing is now moot. [slashdot.org]
devfs, procfs, and tmpfs (Score:3, Interesting)
This is about file-system trees that also include things that aren't actually in the file system.
You mean things like devfs, procfs, and tmpfs?
Yet another misread patent on /. (Score:2, Interesting)
Perhaps Slashdot story submitters should have to certify that their understanding of patent law comes from something more than perusing the musing of RMS at the League for Programming Freedom [progfree.org]. A short course in claim construction would help in differentiating between broad patents that cover something commonly used and narrow patents that are easy to avoid.
The claims [wikipedia.org] of this patent all include the limitation of a "name space extension" that adds at least one "non-file system object" to the file system disp
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File system objects are themselves imaginary. Although it is useful to create and store a hierarchical system for referencing the data on the disk, these things are programmatic methods to reproduce consistent references of data locations and metadata for the convenience of absent minded humans. They do not in fact have any physical existence at all. There is not a magical manila folder factory inside your hard drive. Any patent that relies on the presence or absence of these imaginary objects is iffy a
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His point is that the harddisk to the computer is one long stream of bytes. There is no organization of files. What there is are special values stored at defined offsets that say a file starts here and continues for x blocks or is continues y more bytes in, etc etc. The hirearchy as we are generally presented often does not even exist. Lots of filesystems store directorys the same way as other files, the are just lists of what files are in the directory.
Still prior art (Score:3, Informative)
Thanks for clarifying that. Still OS/2 2.0, released in April 1992, had the ability to display "non file system object". Any (former) OS/2 developer (or user with knowledge of low lever working) will tell you that what you just described it is the main feature which makes the OS/2 workplace shell the best GUI shell ever.
As for handling ZIP: IBM never bothered but it was available to the WPS as third-party extension.
Martin
Please learn about patent law (Score:2)
This is so typical of slashdot patent troll arguments. You focus on one claim, ignoring the fact that individual claims are irrelevant. A patent must be taken *AS A WHOLE*. The claims are logically and'd, not or'd. All claims must be true for the patent to be enforceable. This patent does *NOT* patent general filesystem trees, that's merely one of the claims that must be true for the patent to be enforceable.
Patents are written from general to specific, with each claim becoming more and more specific.
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I really blame the slashdot editors. This has come up often enough over the years that they should know this by now. But, they also know that patent arguments (valid or not) will generate tons of page views, so they seem willing to put anything like this on the front page without even considering it's validity or not.
Question Regarding Prior Art (Score:4, Interesting)
I notice a lot of people tend to make really really really generic patents these days, presumably to give them more control over who they get to sue, but when it comes to Prior art, does just one instance invalidate the whole patent, or does it only invalidate certain aspects of it?
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1. A very broad claim
2. A thing as in 1 that also does something more specific
3. A thing as in 2 that also does something even more specific
And so on. If claim 1 gets thrown out, you can still fall back on 2... (Of course it can get much more complicated than that as there can be any number of broad claims and any number of more specific claims dependent on them)
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Oh.
Well that's a bit of a pisser. Really, they should make it so that one patent can be invalidated by any kind of prior art that applies to it, to stop big companies making stupid balloon patents that just encompass absolutely everything.
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they should make it so that one patent can be invalidated by any kind of prior art that applies to it
The exception is patent apps that properly disclose prior art and build on it. Attempting to actually patent said prior art should be forbidden, and grounds for overturning the entire patent. Recent Supreme Court and Patent Office decisions may indicate that we're headed that way. Finally some common sense.
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If we did adopt the principle that invalidating any claim in a patent invalidates the entire patent, that would go a long way toward reforming the patent system and making patent trolling less attractive, seems to me. There wouldn't be these absurd patents that start with claims that basically cover every technological advance since fire and the wheel, because companies would be much less likely to file patents that start with broad claims. And patent trolls would have fewer broad patents to buy up, sit o
Re:Question Regarding Prior Art (Score:5, Informative)
Each claim of a patent is presumed valid independently of the validity of the other claims. See 35 U.S.C. Sec. 282 [cornell.edu]. If one claim is invalid, then other claims that include additional or different limitations will still be presumed valid until proven otherwise.
You may have noticed that patent claims themselves form a hierarchy. At the top of the hierarchy are the independent claims. You can recognize them because they do not refer to other claims in the patent. Then there are dependent claims. These are claims that add additional limitations to the claims from which they derive. You can recognize them because they refer to other claims in the patent.
The independent claims, which have the fewest limitations, are the easiest to knock out with prior art references. The dependent claims, especially dependent claims that depend on dependent claims, are the hardest to knock out with prior art references, but are easier to engineer around (all you have to do is ensure that your own implementation does not include one of the limitations or its equivalent; but you still have to be careful because the courts often find weird equivalents when it comes to litigation). Patent practitioners usually draft a variety of independent and dependent claims to make a patent harder to fully invalidate or engineer around.
Because it is hard to knock out all the claims of a patent, defendants in patent litigation often look to ways to attack a patent as a whole. Defendants often accuse the patent applicant of withholding information from the patent office, such as knowledge of prior art or the best mode embodiment of the patent. They may even try to find inventors who were not named on the patent application and license the patent independently from them.
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You're asking Slashdot users a legal question?
You must be new here.
Non-story. (Score:2)
Sure it's "shocking" - but it's only news if you've been off-world for the last decade or so and weren't aware that the patent system had long since been brought into disrepute and turned into a tool for extortionists and thieves. Microsoft - hardly the only offender - has applied for many such patents (RSS feed subscription, BlueJ, Enlightenment-styl
virtual filesystems (Score:3, Interesting)
prior art from 1986 Plan 9 V 1.0 [9fans.net]
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The /proc filesystem was first introduced in Version 8, although I don't recall the exact date. Circa 1984, anyway. It was later made part of Sys V.
Is this why (Score:2)
there is no tree view widget on the mac (neither carbon nor cocoa)?
I can't help but notice that there is a tree view on Linux.
Tree view in Mac OS X (Score:2)
Sure there is a tree view in MAC OS X - it is merged with the details (list) view. Open a folder in list view and click on the little triangle.
Martin
So, basically Microsoft patented Mumps (ca 1967) (Score:2, Interesting)
The little known computer language Mumps (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multiprogramming System - http://www.cs.uni.edu/~okane) implemented all these claims 30 years earlier. Documentation from that earlier era pretty much shows all the features that M$ appears to be claiming. Another case of M$'s deja vu all over again?
Is there an analog in *nix for the DOS command? (Score:2)
I always liked the TREE command in DOS. Is there a similar command in UNIX?
Prior Art (Score:3, Interesting)
Burroughs (now Unisys) CANDE (command and edit language) had this feature in 1969.
no they didn't (Score:2)
The USPTO was apparently... (Score:2)
... broken even back then.
There were numerous DOS utilities for managing files that used a tree display with a window where the details could be viewed. Xtree was one of them, if memory serves, and I'm pretty sure that the early versions of Norton's Utilities had something like this as well. (Wasn't NU's little tool the inspiration for Midnight Commander?) They might qualify as prior art. They were certainly in wide use before 1995. Microsoft may not have even been the first to do this in a GUI. I'd bet
Remember? (Score:2)
Remember? What the heck do you mean by "remember? The tree view in a file system is ubiquitous for GUIs viewing the file system. I'm not talking about Windoze either. Both GTK+ and Qt have it in their file dialogs. It's in Konqueror, Dolphin, Nautilus and Thunar. Even the Mac Finder has it. The reason it is there is that the tree view is appropriate for viewing tree structures.
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Surely a family tree would be considered prior art?
Then why can't I use a mouse to drag my mother-in-law to the recycle bin?
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Surely a family tree would be considered prior art?
Then why can't I use a mouse to drag my mother-in-law to the recycle bin?
'cause not even your mouse will touch dat
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The rear view mirror (Score:2)
.
Everything looks obvious in retrospect.
But you aren't patenting an idea. You are patenting a workable implementation of that idea.
It doesn't matter that Dick Tracy has a two-way wrist radio in 1946 or Maxwell Smart a shoe phone in 1965 - even when the theatrical prop sells for $39,000 on eBay. [associatedcontent.com]
What matters is
....before telling others to learn how to read 'em (Score:2)
What do you mean? Of course they "set out to patent item #3" - surely you don't think it got in there by accident!
Yes they are "the target". Claims 1,7,10 are the independent claims. If you infringe any one of them, you infringe it irrespective of whether o