Microsoft [to patent] Verb Conjugation 382
streepje writes "Here [to be] the latest egregious patent application. Microsoft [to be] [to apply] for a patent for [to conjugate] verbs. Future postings [to look] like this."
UNIX is hot. It's more than hot. It's steaming. It's quicksilver lightning with a laserbeam kicker. -- Michael Jay Tucker
Re:Oh please (Score:5, Informative)
More prior art (Score:4, Informative)
Verbix (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Misleading headline.... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Oh please (Score:1, Informative)
But this isn't really that surprising, a book on STL functions doesn't tell you all of the possible 'conjugations' of a function call either. You will find something like:
template<class InputIterator, class EqualityComparable> InputIterator find(InputIterator first, InputIterator last, const EqualityComparable& value);
The conjugation to "p = find(a.begin(), a.end(), N);" is up to you.
Re:Oh please (Score:5, Informative)
It's trivial to do it for a fixed language, and it's trivial to iterate over any set of candidate languages with a well defined grammar, doing it for each.
The fact that a book doesn't list all possible forms for each possible verb in an explicit table is irrelevant. The book is enough to generate those forms on demand, which is all an algorithm is required to do.
Now, there are certainly optimal (smallest number of operations, or maybe smallest RAM requirements, etc) algorithms out there which perform equivalently to any given published grammar book, but finding those is at best a cause for buying the programmers a case of beer, it's not worthy of a patent. After all, it doesn't significantly advance the state of the art.
Re:Misleading headline.... (Score:5, Informative)
One highly publized example is VirtualDub which no longer support the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualDub [wikipedia.org]
So yes Microsoft has no qualms about using their patents to stop open software being developed.
Re:Oh please (Score:3, Informative)
Link to the actual implementation (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Oh please (Score:2, Informative)
If somebody needs a reference for prior art, feel free to contact me.
Re:Yay, whatever (Score:3, Informative)
A note on software patents (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Already been invented. (Score:5, Informative)
If you didn't publicize it, your prior invention only gives you the personal right to use your version of the technology without paying Microsoft. Until they sue you of course, then you'll either pay them or lawyers.
This piece of software [druide.com] has been for sale since 1996 (for French), and it does much more than what the patent covers (conjugate verbs), it's also a dictionnary with definitions (partly in the patent application for verbs), a thesaurus, a grammar, a spell and grammar checker (way better than what's embedded in MS-Word... it's a totally different league), and much much more. It's a must-have if you're even only remotely interrested in the French language.
Re:Already been invented. (Score:3, Informative)
This is not insightful.
The article is NOT in reference to a PATENT. There is no "patent to strike down unmercifully". The article describes a patent application. A PATENT APPLICATION PUBLICATION HAS NOT BEEN EXAMINED. All of your comments about the USPTO are literally, and according to the dictionary definition, BASELESS in this instance.
SLASHDOT IS THE FOX NEWS OF PATENTS.
Carry on.