LWN: Comments on "Fun patent of the day"

--keep

liamh — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 20:36:16 +0000

Yes, --keep. I always thought this was a great feature of xdvi. Since I have changed over exclusively to making pdfs (pdflatex), I miss this feature as xpdf does not seem to have anything equivalent. It's annoying to have to recenter the page every time a new page is displayed.

Liam

Don't forget KSR v. Teleflex

lysse — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:28:35 +0000

Um, I think this one might have other grounds for invalidity besides obviousness...

Fun patent of the day

jedbrown — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 19:08:40 +0000

-keep (.keepPosition) Sets a flag to indicate that xdvi should not move to the home position when moving to a new page. See also the k' keystroke. This flag is only honoured by the up() and down() actions, not by up-or-previous() and down-or-next().

Brought to you by...

WeiMarr — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:04:31 +0000

"Maybe, this was brought to you by the same idiots who made the Page Up key move a page down."

;-)
Cited as found in a newsgroup (http://groups.google.de/group/sci.image.processing/browse...)

Fun patent of the day

forthy — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 08:52:43 +0000

Actually, the xdvi I've here scrolls back to the top left of the page on pgup/dn. But gv does it exactly as described, and how old is gv? Development started 1992. The current version is from 1997, this program is too good to need an update ;-).

Fun patent of the day

ibukanov — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 21:16:43 +0000

> That's right, MS was claiming symbolic links as an "innovation".

Surely that was an innovation, since it was not just a symbolic link, but a symbolic link on NTFS! It must be greatest thought ever.

Fun patent of the day

flewellyn — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 15:24:43 +0000

This is almost as hilarious as what I read about back in 1999, concerning the new "innovation" Microsoft had for NTFS on Windows 2000: the "disk file pointer", a file which acted as a transparent link to another file.

That's right, MS was claiming symbolic links as an "innovation". It's a wonder they didn't try to patent the idea then.

Fun patent of the day

jonquark — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 23:53:47 +0000

IIRC This mode is called CSR on a zOS box (mainframe)

Don't forget KSR v. Teleflex

dmarti — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 19:26:34 +0000

KSR v. Teleflex puts the legal definition of "obvious" closer to the obvious definition of "obvious" so a lot of the lower-quality software patents are worthless now, probably including this one.

Thousands of lawyers, decades of work, all for nothing.

[[tag haha]]

Fun patent of the day

gjvo — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 19:14:33 +0000

I think xdvi has had this behaviour for as long as I have used it - late 1980s or so.

Fun patent of the day

kirkengaard — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:32:44 +0000

Alright, I suppose I can see the value in making the paging interface more word-processor
intuitive, as in "page" = one standard-sized paper piece. Which is essentially
re-granularizing the idea of document paging to be paper-page-compliant, as opposed to
more/less where the paging distance is based on display length (arguably more sensible for the
form).

But *patenting* such an obvious notion -- especially in the growing legal environment of
invalidity for "doing the above method in software on a computer" -- seems ridiculous! You're
going to license the idea of interpreting paging commands according to the actual pages of a
document? Amazon.com is calling, they want their lawsuit back.

Now, who do we know that might have done this before 2005? Adobe? Some other PDF-viewer
(like one of ours, where a documented commit might exist)?

Abstracting out the generic elements of a) software on storage medium, b) executed in a
computing environment, and the fact that c) you can't patent math (the equations by which they
calculate position and distance), the specific elements of the patent seem to be a
properly-constructed program/set of programs that displays a document, calculates position and
distance in pixels based on zoom level (which are also a detail that might be generic and
abstractable), and responds to PGUP/PGDN events by moving the current view to the same
relative location on the next or previous print-page representation. For bonus points, they
cover the idea of having variable page sizes within a document, and accounting for
program-generated white-space in the display view.

IOW, it seems they're patenting any piece of software that does print-page-size calculations
on generic hardware using the normal display unit of measure, can be configured to respond to
PGUP/PGDN with print-page granularity on decrement/increment, and has some of the bugs of GUI
implementation worked out.

They are patenting a formula

JoeBuck — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 17:35:23 +0000

Looking at the claims, it appears that they all depend on the use of the following formula:

{[(p-1)/c]h}+r, where p is equal to the number of pages in the document, c is equal to the number of columns of the document which are simultaneously displayed, h is equal to the height of at least the first page, and r is equal to the row offset of the starting point of the first page ...

Fun patent of the day

martinfick — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 17:14:45 +0000

Uh oh, better scrounge the kernel to remove any patent infringements of this one! ;)