Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
...and Vista Ultimate was one of the "best" products that suited your needs?

I'd love to see your 'Microsoft Plus!' collection sometime. I'm sure it's breathtaking.

What about Microshaft BOB? :rolleyes:

bobboot1.gif
 
Sorry. Cat's outta the bag. Aldous is an MS employee who admitted to what we've all suspected (and understood as an unwritten truism for years.)

When an MS employee actually comes right out, names the competition, praises them, and then goes on to say how his company was "inspired" by it, you know that the conversation around his company at some point revolved around "how can we rip off OS X without actually getting nailed for it?"

Aldous didn't just make this stuff up and praise Apple out of nowhere. This discourse was going on around MS.

MS' backpedaling on the issue is half-hearted damage-control. Too late.

LOL, "windowsteamblog." Exactly.

Sorry, but even the logic of this guy's statement has issues. Windows 7 is, well, pretty much the same as Vista, in terms of look and feel. It's more stable, and it has some UI tweaks here and there, but who can argue that it is drasticaly different from Vista? Heck, it's so close that you have a ton of reviews saying "this is what Vista should have been."

So if they designed Windows 7 to seem like OSX, that would mean they would have had to have designed Vista to look like it, but that's not what he said. He said they designed Windows 7 to imitate it. Furthermore, Vista was released in Jaunary of 07 (with the manufacturers getting it back in Nov. of 06), whereas Leopard wasn't out until October of 07, at least 8 months later.

Of course, we could go back to Tiger (November 05) or earlier, but then we wouldn't really be dealing with all of the "graphical" stuff that the MS employee was talking about. So there's a serious flaw here in the chronology of it all.
 
Answer: That all depends on whether it would be obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention to modify A to produce B. It's a complicated analysis that takes into account many factors, but my gut feel is that this was not obvious, mainly because despite lots of uses of touchscreens before iPhone, no one seems to have done swipe-to-unlock.

Prior art and obviousness are two separate tests. Obviously they are related, but not identical. When might an invention be obvious, yet there be no prior art? For example, maybe it's obvious but another solution is also obvious but also far better. What's the "state of the art" on this question, for a layman?
 
Prior art and obviousness are two separate tests. Obviously they are related, but not identical. When might an invention be obvious, yet there be no prior art? For example, maybe it's obvious but another solution is also obvious but also far better. What's the "state of the art" on this question, for a layman?

Not sure what you're getting at, but it's not quite correct. You may be referring to 35 USC 102 and 35 USC 103. 102 is generally called "anticipation," and it means a single other reference or product (*) has all of the elements of the anticipated claim, and the claim is thus invalid. 103 refers to obviousness. Obviousness generally refers to the need to combine multiple references because no single reference contains all of the claim elements. Sometimes you have one reference, but it is missing a few claim elements, but those claim elements would be obvious. But you never have something invalidated for obviousness without referring to prior art. (If for no other reason than you need to point at references to show the "state of the art.")

(*) there are a couple of other non-object types of anticipation, including another person first inventing it and not abandoning it, suppressing it, or concealing it, or another person inventing it and communicating the invention to the claimed inventor.
 
minor clarification

Furthermore, Vista was released in Jaunary of 07 (with the manufacturers getting it back in Nov. of 06), whereas Leopard wasn't out until October of 07, at least 8 months later.

The 30 November 2006 release of Vista was to all large customers,
not just to manufacturers. The RTM release was 8 November.

The very same bits were released in January at retail.
 
Not sure what you're getting at, but it's not quite correct. You may be referring to 35 USC 102 and 35 USC 103. 102 is generally called "anticipation," and it means a single other reference or product (*) has all of the elements of the anticipated claim, and the claim is thus invalid. 103 refers to obviousness. Obviousness generally refers to the need to combine multiple references because no single reference contains all of the claim elements. Sometimes you have one reference, but it is missing a few claim elements, but those claim elements would be obvious. But you never have something invalidated for obviousness without referring to prior art.

OK. That was essentially my question. So "obviousness" generally refers to an "obvious" combination of existing references--not an invention that is somehow "generally" obvious which is how many people seem to use it colloquially--whereas a prior-art invalidation rests on a single reference. More or less accurate?
 
OK. That was essentially my question. So "obviousness" generally refers to an "obvious" combination of existing references--not an invention that is somehow "generally" obvious which is how many people seem to use it colloquially--whereas a prior-art invalidation rests on a single reference. More or less accurate?

Right. The one exception is that every now and again you have an obviousness case where there is a single reference, but it is missing a couple of things.

Like if I had a claim:

1. A device to be sat on, comprising: three or more substantially parallel leg members, a seat member with a top and bottom surface, said bottom surface substantially perpendicularly connected to said three or more legs, wherein said legs are painted blue.

And my reference was a photo of a stool, but the legs were painted red.

It would be obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art of chair making that the color of stool legs could be blue, so there is no need to find a reference with blue legs to combine with the other reference.
 

Agreed. There's also something interesting in the comments:

"The typical problem with objects, or object-oriented components, in an operating system is that they don't really speak each other's language -- or more accurately, that they don't have a common language to speak. In Microsoft's COM, still at the heart of Windows, that problem is resolved through the System Registry."

This is correct for the most part in the upper layer of Windows; however, in NT itself there is the IPC and Object Manager, as NT does communicate internally as a object based OS.

Object oriented communication is the hallmark of the NT architecture model and why the CLI Powershell is impressive, as it is the first CLI to be running on a Object Based OS and able to deal with Objects and References directly instead of textual and pipelining communication methods.

Apple is playing with fire with all of this, because if they go after MS or force MS to get involved, MS could destroy virtually every Apple Product with patent infringement and prior art.
 
Sorry, but even the logic of this guy's statement has issues. Windows 7 is, well, pretty much the same as Vista, in terms of look and feel. It's more stable, and it has some UI tweaks here and there, but who can argue that it is drasticaly different from Vista? Heck, it's so close that you have a ton of reviews saying "this is what Vista should have been."

So if they designed Windows 7 to seem like OSX, that would mean they would have had to have designed Vista to look like it, but that's not what he said. He said they designed Windows 7 to imitate it. Furthermore, Vista was released in Jaunary of 07 (with the manufacturers getting it back in Nov. of 06), whereas Leopard wasn't out until October of 07, at least 8 months later.

Of course, we could go back to Tiger (November 05) or earlier, but then we wouldn't really be dealing with all of the "graphical" stuff that the MS employee was talking about. So there's a serious flaw here in the chronology of it all.

Interesting that you admit Windows 7 is basically a 'fixed' retread of Vista (NT, 2k, XP)...with the exception of a...vastly improved and more functional...bar...along...the bottom of the...screen...

Wait...what?

Oh, and they added a ribbon to 'Paint' and removed the email client, and made the whole OS slightly less obtrusive and obnoxious. Staggering display of innovation.
 
Interesting that you admit Windows 7 is basically a 'fixed' retread of Vista (NT, 2k, XP)...with the exception of a...vastly improved and more functional...bar...along...the bottom of the...screen...

Wait...what?

Oh, and they added a ribbon to 'Paint' and removed the email client, and made the whole OS slightly less obtrusive and obnoxious. Staggering display of innovation.

Well, the reality is that I personally never had a single problem with Vista. Honestly. In almost 2 years I have never seen what anyone has been complaining about, and I do a ton of stuff on the computer, do it all at once, and do it on a relatively low-powered laptop. I can't remember the last time it crashed. It's always operated fine for me. I never had a big problem with the User Account Controls (the "obtrusiveness") because it's without question the best way to secure a system. I've read things from IT Security people who basically say that short of implementing that kind of system, no computer will ever be all that safe. And honestly, clicking on a button when I wanted to change a system setting here and there is just not a big deal!
 
I'm not going to read 27 pages of whining, but I read a few pages and I'd like to respond to some points.

This isn't about Apple getting jealous of the competition. The fact is, Apple thought of their own ideas. They spent a lot of money in R&D on them. Now some other company is stealing their ideas and making money off of it. Would you want to sit idly by when they were doing that? I know for damn sure I wouldn't. As the quote said, competition is healthy, but they aren't going to sit back and let people take their ideas.
 
Well, the reality is that I personally never had a single problem with Vista. Honestly. In almost 2 years I have never seen what anyone has been complaining about, and I do a ton of stuff on the computer, do it all at once, and do it on a relatively low-powered laptop. I can't remember the last time it crashed. It's always operated fine for me. I never had a big problem with the User Account Controls (the "obtrusiveness") because it's without question the best way to secure a system. I've read things from IT Security people who basically say that short of implementing that kind of system, no computer will ever be all that safe. And honestly, clicking on a button when I wanted to change a system setting here and there is just not a big deal!

I think those are probably the kind of "IT Security" people who get paid to say that stuff to fill training room and column inch quotas. Most of the real security folks seem to regard it as theater, with good reason--in nearly every case, the user who doesn't know enough to know better to begin with doesn't know enough to understand or interpret the warning, and just defaults to "get on with it".
 
I think those are probably the kind of "IT Security" people who get paid to say that stuff to fill training room and column inch quotas. Most of the real security folks seem to regard it as theater, with good reason--in nearly every case, the user who doesn't know enough to know better to begin with doesn't know enough to understand or interpret the warning, and just defaults to "get on with it".

Well, the last place I read it was on Bob Cringely's site, and he's not only certainly not a Microsoft fan, but he's also a very well connected journalist who's sources I'd tend to trust very highly.
 
Well, the reality is that I personally never had a single problem with Vista. Honestly. In almost 2 years I have never seen what anyone has been complaining about, and I do a ton of stuff on the computer, do it all at once, and do it on a relatively low-powered laptop. I can't remember the last time it crashed. It's always operated fine for me. I never had a big problem with the User Account Controls (the "obtrusiveness") because it's without question the best way to secure a system. I've read things from IT Security people who basically say that short of implementing that kind of system, no computer will ever be all that safe. And honestly, clicking on a button when I wanted to change a system setting here and there is just not a big deal!

Vista was horrible primarily because it was a resource hog (until SP 2 iirc). Win7 is really nice. It runs great in a VM and hasn't given me any issues yet. It's not as fast or lean as XP, but it's getting close.
 
Well, the last place I read it was on Bob Cringely's site, and he's not only certainly not a Microsoft fan, but he's also a very well connected journalist who's sources I'd tend to trust very highly.

Cringely cited UAC because it was an implementation he was familiar with, but his argument was just in favor of (conceptually) sudo as opposed to running as root. There are a wide variety of ways to do this, and the UAC implementation was not particularly helpful--it was better than being logged in as administrator all the time, but that isn't saying much. Only Windows has ever been dumb enough to do that by default on a multi-user system.
 
On the other hand, how important is what actually happens when someone swipes the finger? In other words, if someone used/patented the swipe to do action "A" can someone realistically have a good claim for patenting swipe for action "B". While locking/unlocking is a somewhat special action but still it's just one action the device can do. Nothing more to it.

First: it's better than a hardware button.

Second: Because on a touch screen, the swipe to open is a better way than just a touch--which is far more likely to be inadvertent or inaccurate (depending on the button size).
 
Well, the reality is that I personally never had a single problem with Vista. Honestly. In almost 2 years I have never seen what anyone has been complaining about, and I do a ton of stuff on the computer, do it all at once, and do it on a relatively low-powered laptop. I can't

Yup. Consumers and the industry at large were all making it up. One big lie. Vista boxes were downgraded to XP in droves just for kicks.
 
Interesting that you admit Windows 7 is basically a 'fixed' retread of Vista (NT, 2k, XP)...with the exception of a...vastly improved and more functional...bar...along...the bottom of the...screen...

Wait...what?

Oh, and they added a ribbon to 'Paint' and removed the email client, and made the whole OS slightly less obtrusive and obnoxious. Staggering display of innovation.


Tell you the truth in less than the one year after Vista came out most of the problems were fixed. A vast majority of vista "problems" were 3rd party software/ driver related.
MS used Vista as the OS to take the heat for a lot of the fundamental chances they made to the OS that was going to ding 3rd parties. Windows 7 comes out with an update and does not have to deal with the 3rd parties be behind by all the stuff broken in Vista.

Vista was nothing more than the bridge to connect Windows XP to Windows 7 and it did its job damn well. If windows 7 had come out as today back when Vista was released it would of been called crap and broken because of all the driver issues it would of had.

Biggest real problem with Vista was it was so much different than XP.
 
Vista was nothing more than the bridge to connect Windows XP to Windows 7

ROFL. Uh-huh. Don't take Vista seriously while you're using it. Who are you that you think your time is so important?? Be more understanding! It's a bridge!!

A flop that users had to suffer through for over three years is not a bridge. Unless it's a bridge that runs under water.

rofl.GIF
 
Yup. Consumers and the industry at large were all making it up. One big lie. Vista boxes were downgraded to XP in droves just for kicks.

Consumers were buying Vista just fine (did you see many/any computers with XP in Best Buy?) Industry's problems had to do with the amount of legacy software they had (still have). It has nothing to do with the merits of the OS. Just an example you can read this article which talks about the problem Intel IT is facing now switching to Windows 7. All kinds of problems, including legacy 16-bit applications. Obviously, Apple customers who are mostly college students do not have these problems :D
 
ROFL. Uh-huh. Don't take Vista seriously while you're using it. Who are you that you think your time is so important?? Be more understanding! It's a bridge!!

rofl.GIF

Allow me to translate for Rodimus Prime; Windows 7 is proof that you can, in fact, polish a turd.
 
One. Last. Time. NOT REAL! Doesn't matter! Come on, people...try.:rolleyes:

Doesn't have to be real as long as it would enable a person having ordinary skill in the art to understand and practice the invention.

Of course, it actually has not appeared in the movies or television, so the point is moot.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.