Microsoft Pantents Emoticons?! omg...

[Mithshark 0]

I can't believe this...
Here are some of the interesting excerpts:

[0002] Emoticons have acquired immense popularity and hence importance in new email, chatroom, instant messaging, and even operating system applications. The variety of available emoticons has increased tremendously, from a few types of "happy faces" to a multitude of elaborate and colorful animations. In many cases, an increase in the number of available emoticons has been a selling feature for new releases of communications products. However, there are now so many emoticons available that some applications may be reaching a limit on the number of pre-established ("pre-packaged") emoticons that can be included with or managed by an application. There is an exhaustion point for trying to provide a pre-packaged emoticon for every human emotion. Still, users clamor for more emoticons, and especially for more nuanced emoticons that capture the subtleties of human emotions and situations.

[0004] With the increase in the number and "sophistication" of emoticons, some problems are inevitable. Many chatroom and instant messaging products, in which emoticons find perfect application in describing the users' real-time emotions, rely on limited bandwidth or the transmission of short communications ("messages") that contain relatively little data. In other words, many chatroom and instant messaging applications achieve their agility and speed by streamlining data bulk into "lean" messages that typically have a limited data size, such as 1-2 kilobytes or approximately 400 alphanumeric characters plus headers. Adding one or more complex emoticons--a graphic that may require an inordinate amount of data space compared with text--to one of these lean messages can be detrimental to the performance of the chatroom or instant messaging application. Still, an emoticon picture is often worth a thousand words of text, so techniques are needed for producing an even greater variety of emoticons and for being able to send them without increasing the data size of lean messages.

[Spectre 0]

How about a) Providing some more input into the topic - your opinions on the issue etc. ('I can't believe this...' doesn't really qualify as an 'opinion'), and Providing a link to where you obtained the information, or to where others can find out more about it? Personally, this doesn't suprise me. It seems if you have money, you can patent anything - and money is something that Microsoft certainly has a lot of. Although I haven't read into it extensively, this sounds similar to the software patent problem that's been creating waves in the development community for some time now. See: United States Patent Application 20050156873.

[Spectre 0]

Ugh. I hate smilies. My apologies, but that irritating, smirking character with sunglasses is intended to appear as ''.

[Mithshark 0]

Ya it sums my opinion up pretty good I was asking for yours.. whether you thought it was reasonable or not......

[Mithshark 0]

Dang, I hate double posting, But theres no edit button so.I would post that entire article but it would be cheating on my host so read that.... If microsoft spen less time typing stuff like that then maybee I wouldnt be on Linux Right now... ( i got XP PRO too just hate it.....)