Better not get too fancy with your grocery list, now that Microsoft has patented a glorified form of the to-do list.
US Patent No. 6,748,582, granted and assigned on Tuesday to Microsoft, covers the use of a "task list" in a software-development environment.
The patented technology essentially integrates certain comments left in the source code of an application under development with an accompanying checklist. Leave a "TODO" comment in the source code, and an authoring application automatically creates an item in the task list. Check an item off on the task list, and the corresponding source code comment is changed.
A Microsoft representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
While the new patent is specific enough to software development that vacationers penning "what to pack" lists don't have to worry, it fits with Microsoft's ongoing efforts to enlarge its patent portfolio.
The company embarked on a campaign last year to generate more revenue from its intellectual-property portfolio and has since applied for hundreds of patents. The company has received patents covering everything from seemingly elementary aspects of computing technology, such as double-clicking, to arcana such as XML-scripting methods.
The software giant's patent push seemed to reach comical proportions earlier this year, when the company was accidentally granted a plant patent for a variety of apple tree.
Talkback
why does zd uk hate microsoft? cry babies.
Um double clicking?
What if I wish to fire two shots in rapid sucession in a game like Counter Strike? Can I be prosecuted for breach of intellectual copyright?
Maybe they should patent vacuum cleaners, so they can continue to suck alot.
You can count on some companies to innovate.
......and you can count on some companies to capitalize on existing innovation and tell their marketing department to act like they invented everything from sliced bread onwards.
..And promoting the IMAGE of innovation or any other type of IMAGE is what is destroying the world. Too much image and not enough substance. Even worse are the companies that go to great lengths to protect their exploitive image to the detriment of delivering reliable products. In the case of Microsoft, their image has become Modern Corporate Management's fear of incompatibility, which translates to the terrifying "Fear of Being Different".
Whatever happened to "Stop paving the cowpaths"? Apparently, the globalizing cows didn't agree with it.
And when did they register this ground-breaking and innovative idea?
It is far from original thought, automation or not!
The freely-available Eclipse IDE already includes automatic generation of task lists with entries corresponding to the appearance of TODO comments in code.
Isn't that just about what this patent appears to do?
USPTO are actually the biggest culprit here, Microsoft are just trying to take advantage of this totally ineffective organisation, at the expense of other software developers or would-be developers.
Once again Microsoft taking credit for something it didnt create...
anything to stand in the way of progress, that's Microsoft for you. way to go Billy.
and on top of it, taking other people's ideas, then charging them for it.
It would be interesting to see if this patent stands, since Borland introduced this very feature into it's programming languages IDEs long before M$ "thought" of the idea.
I've been using Comment-based TO-DO lists in my Netbeans IDE for years... and even farther back with Borland's C++ Builder.
I think it's bullshit, and completely irresponsible for the patents office to grant a copyright on a feature so widely used, no matter who gets it. Automated TO-DO lists are far from being original... and where certainly not introduced by Microsoft.