Microsoft Wants Patent For Inserting User IDs In Filename
from the patents-patents-patents dept
theodp writes “In its just-published patent application for late-binding/dynamic pathname resolution, Microsoft explains that this invention allows a filename containing a variable such as ‘@username’ to map to completely different files depending on which user is logged on. Microsoft explains to the USPTO that such a mechanism ‘has, until now, eluded those skilled in the art,’ and its absence has ‘plagued computer system users and designers for some time.’ “
Comments on “Microsoft Wants Patent For Inserting User IDs In Filename”
This is the same as mail-merge
Mail-merge into URLs is an obvious technique used in bulk emailing. For example an image tag like the following would display the logo of your favorite sports team:
(href=”http://domain/teams/{field teamname}.gif” alt=”{field teamname}”)
Microsoft’s patent seems to be copying this.
No Subject Given
Would UNIX’s tilde (home directory) count as prior art? What about environment variables in a pathname?
Re: No Subject Given
Yes – countless thousands of unix shell scripts use this technique. This is nothing new.
GFS
I don’t know if this predates MSFT’s claim, but RedHat’s GFS supports variables as filenames — see http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/csgfs/admin-guide/s1-manage-pathnames.html for a description of this.
Automounter
We do this all the time w/ the automounter on unix (am-utils)… users, netgroups, all kinds of stuff.
ClearCase
Adding to the prior art parade…
In ClearCase, one can append ‘@@’ followed by all manner of arcane data to the end of a filename to select a specific version of the file’s contents, and this has worked for at least a decade.
Prior art?
OK, maybe I’m missing something here, but isn’t this something we’ve done for decades? Microsoft says:
Isn’t this accomplished with users have different /home directories in Unix? Or “chroot”?
Or how about the “user home directory” in Windows networking? Or using the environment variable %USERNAME% in the pathname? (After all, the Windows registry has many references to pathnames containing %SYSTEMROOT%, so it would work with %USERNAME% too.)
Again, maybe I’m missing something, but this hardly sounds like something that “until now, eluded those skilled in the art.”
What are they doing?
It sounds like M$ is trying to pull the wool over the USPTO’s eyes. We all know how little time they have to investigate each claim. So there’s M$…”if we make it sound really hard and really neat, they will let us dominate.”