Microsoft Patents Multithreaded Opening and Saving

News
By Wolfgang Gruener
published

Microsoft has been granted a patent that provides the rights to multithreaded opening and saving of documents as well as all other files that can be edited.

According to the patent, multithreaded opening and saving is beneficial in scenarios where files become increasingly complex and large and would take too long to be processed in a traditional single-threaded way, especially when the selected document requires the launch of an application that is not loaded yet.

Microsoft's idea describes a three process pipeline, in which the first pipeline is leverage to load a document into an application and the second to execute the application process thread, including "tasks associated with operating on the documents". A third pipeline is employed to execute the load process thread. The structure is designed as a synchronization primitive for regulating access to a "circular queue" as the technology is configured to "pass tokens from the first pipeline as input to the tasks in the second pipeline," and the tasks in the second pipeline "are configured to pass tokens as input to the tasks in the third pipeline."

Microsoft already owns similar patents, including the right to multi-threaded processing of spreadsheets.

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Wolfgang Gruener
34 Comments Comment from the forums
  • BoredErica
    Well, I don't recall having performance issues with simple Office, but multi-threaded can only be better than nothing.
    Reply
  • A Bad Day
    I wish that patent was actually being used before 2003. SimCity 4 takes at least several minutes for cities to load because of my 10 GB of plugins (ranging from several kilobytes to dozens of megabytes), even after using DatPacker to turn them into a gigantic 10 GB file. Even worse when the cities themselves have over several million population.

    dark_wizzieWell, I don't recall having performance issues with simple Office, but multi-threaded can only be better than nothing.
    The main issue arises when you open gigantic MS Office files, or if they were created with a different version of Office (thus requiring additional time to convert them).
    Reply
  • ojas
    Why do i see a server in the diagram?
    Reply
  • demonhorde665
    i don't see how MS can get this kind of patent , doesn't the patent office realize how important it is that something like this remain open ??? MS doesn't even make processors at all let alone processors that do multi threaded task. not to mention it helps cement the very thing that the US government went after MS over in the late 90's (that being monopolizing )
    Reply
  • excella1221
    Yet another patent to help slow down the evolution of technology.
    Reply
  • Onihikage
    ARGH I can't stand this kind of patent!
    Reply
  • bigdragon
    As a developer I see this as something obvious that shouldn't be patentable. Unfortunately, much of the government is run by a few clueless old people who make terrible decisions for the rest of us. I bet the patent office's approval rating would be as low as congress' if they measured such a thing.
    Reply
  • Shin-san
    demonhorde665i don't see how MS can get this kind of patent , doesn't the patent office realize how important it is that something like this remain open ??? MS doesn't even make processors at all let alone processors that do multi threaded task. not to mention it helps cement the very thing that the US government went after MS over in the late 90's (that being monopolizing )They make OSes, and multithreading isn't about multicore. This mechanism is actually quite common. Applications, Windows, iOS, Android, Linux, you name it, usually have a message loop. In that loop is the draw command. If that command isn't run, your application looks frozen.

    So, offloading the task to a thread on a single-core system would keep your app from looking frozen
    Reply
  • chewy1963
    Programming methods should not be patentable... The program itself can be copyrighted. There is your compensation for innovation. Otherwise we're going to see program loops and bubble sorts patented and that is just ridiculous!
    Reply
  • Photoshop already does that. I don't know since then though.
    Reply