The Vaults of Innovation

What a joke. Every Palm Tungsten has this, every cell phone (hold '1' for dialling your voicemail) and probably 1 million other products with pushbuttons......

Meindert

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Vadim Borshchev wrote:

The obvious one that comes to mind is (and that I used in product in the early

90's) is the double functioning of a Long Key Press for reset function. A timer interrupt sampled a key and drove a state machine that selected various functions. Short key presses were differentiated from long key presses and used to either advance the state of the application or select a different execution pathway (Reset). This is not rocket science. There is a whole crew that seems to like to patent the obvious. I have little doubt that I was the first to use this. Someone probably did it 50 years with a toggle switch on the ENIAC.

Morse code?? long presses, short key presses

martin

Serious error. All shortcuts have disappeared. Screen. Mind. Both are blank.

How about the auto repeat on the keyboard I am using to type this? Or the ON/OFF button on the front of my (resource limited) PC? Press and release to put the machine in standby, press and hold to turn it off!!!

How did MS get a patent on this???

--

Rick "rickman" Collins

rick.collins@XYarius.com
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Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company
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My GSM phone has a button which if you press and hold for 3 secs turns it on. Thereafter it acts as the on hook button. To power off you once again press and hold for 3 secs.

Ian

Yes, that was the first example I thought of, it must go back to before Bill Gates was born. There is also an even older (true) hardware-time function on a Typewriter. 100% mechanical, the Auto-space button on this gives single spaces for short presses, and many spaces for longer presses. I'm sure that one pre-dates computers. 'double click' must date back to Xerox's research centre, and the first mouse. Whatever happened to 'must not be obvious to one skilled in the field' ?. This stuff is obvious to a school kid.

-jg

Speaking of 'hook buttons', and phones, we get into the time-hardware features of the phone systems. - All done with two wires, and time+switch sensing :

- Rotary Pulse Dialing - ancient

- Hook-flash, common in PBX for a very long time

And the time line on this, for USA at least: "In 1889, the rotary telephone dial was invented by Almon B. Strowger, a Kansas City undertaker. The first dial exchange was installed at La Porte, Indiana, in 1892."

Thus time+switch sensing was truly innovative circa 1889.

That a patent is granted in 2002 says rather more about the present state of the patent system, than it does about any technological innovation.

-jg

Software patents are silly things. It doesn't matter really if a Palm does this, because a Palm is not a Personal Computer. Old ideas that can be distinguished by new application can be patented apparently (or so I was told a few years back when superiors were begging us to start spewing out more patent claims).

The point of modern patents is not about innovation. There is no proof of novelty required anymore. All that is required today is to make it cheaper to pay a license fee than to challenge the patent. "IP" is all about stifling innovation.

--
Darin Johnson
    Support your right to own gnus.

Why does it matter if a Palm is not a PC? The patent refers to a "limited resource computing device". I believe this could cover nearly

*any* gadget that contains a CPU. Even a PC keyboard is a "limited resource"... you can't make it infinitely large. After they added the ALT key, MS added the "tap" ALT feature to select the menus. So the prior art from MS invalidates this patent.

I don't expect many to pay MS for this one...

Actually, if you read the patent in some detail, it covers some specific uses of "application" buttons that by default open the app, but if the button is held, several different things can happen, such as opening the previous document, opening a specific document, etc... So this patent can would cover the same functionality on similar devices, but if you implement different behavior (for example, open the standard doc by default and hold the button for starting the app without opening a doc) then you are clear of infringment.

But I agree that this is pretty obvious and not novel.

--

Rick "rickman" Collins

rick.collins@XYarius.com
Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY
removed.

Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company
Specializing in DSP and FPGA design      URL http://www.arius.com
4 King Ave                               301-682-7772 Voice
Frederick, MD 21701-3110                 301-682-7666 FAX

Digital watches in the mid 1970s used a long button press to enter time set mode.

Some Casio watches in the early 1980s used a long press to reset the stopwatch.

Silly like a freight train bearing down on you.

They are like all other patents. If you have boatloads of cash to pay lawyers, they are very useful indeed, even if they are vapid or even non- existent. If you haven't got the cash, you probably can't even afford to check if it's worth defending yourself.

Incidentally, if I come up with something to save the world, like a new source of power (say a quantum fluctuation reactor), I get 25 years of patent protection. If I write a novel (something as great, say, as Harry Potter), my heirs and assignees can cash in on royalties for 70 years after I'm dead, and even after that it can be extended if the copyright belongs to Walt Disney. Dunno why.

Paul Burke

More to the point, software patents, at least the way they are issued and used these days, especially in the U.S. of A., are the business world's perfect equivalent of anti-personnel mines:

• they're cheap and easily deployed

• they serve no useful purpose against big, hardened targets, which are the real enemy in the war they're used in

• their only real effect is to harm unarmed civilians, and that effect tends to significantly outlast the original conflict they were deployed in

The downfall probably began the day the US government decided that the primary goal of the USPTO should be to generate profits, rather than to carefully execute a function of the federal government. My strong impression these days is that it's virtually impossible to come up with a patent application that the PTO will decline. That is, unless it's about one of the things declared heretic by the government (perpetuum mobile, cold fusion, the likes).

Summing it up, software patents these days are worse than useless. They're a menace to society, and especially so to the small companies or individual inventors they were supposedly created to protect.

--
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (broeker@physik.rwth-aachen.de)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.

: The downfall probably began the day the US government decided that the : primary goal of the USPTO should be to generate profits, rather than : to carefully execute a function of the federal government. My strong : impression these days is that it's virtually impossible to come up : with a patent application that the PTO will decline. That is, unless : it's about one of the things declared heretic by the government : (perpetuum mobile, cold fusion, the likes).

USPTO issues patent's about 95% of the time compared to 65% in Japan. Some watchdog group did a prior art search on a random sample and suggested that 50% of all US patents should not have been issued.

John Eaton

You should also ask how many perpetual motion machines have been issued a patent by that patent office :-).

Paul

I can appreciate the logic behind hardware patents. But software patents are something completely different. I think it is nuts to issue patents for techniques like exclusive-oring data with display memory. I don't see it as much different than patenting the bit, or addition, or using Boolean logic, or storing data or programs in memory. Best Wishes

Yes. All the companies and individuals that have been squashed that I don't dismiss them as just silly.

Funny, and very true!

--
Jim McGinnis

A s/w patent for a "HARDWARE" button?