5 ms·

What a perfectly ridiculous patent.

• tzs 16y ago
  I find it hard to believe that in the time between the story appearing and your comment you had time to read and understand the patent.
  • z0r 16y ago
    Admittedly, I only read up to the end of the claims section here: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5,893,120.PN.&OS=PN/5,893,120&RS=PN/5,893,120 http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec... If you read those and skim to see passages like these: "The problem, then, is to provide the speed of access of hashing techniques for large, heavily used information storage systems having expiring data and, at the same time, prevent the performance degradation resulting from the accumulation of many expired records. Although a hashing technique for dealing with expiring data is known and disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,121,495, issued Jun. 9, 1992, that technique is confined to linear probing and is entirely inapplicable to external chaining. The procedure shown there traverses, in reverse order, a consecutive sequence of records residing in the hash table array, continually relocating unexpired records to fill gaps left by the removal of expired ones. Unlike arrays, linked lists leave no gaps when items from it are removed, and furthermore it is not possible to efficiently traverse a singly linked list in reverse order. There are significant advantages to external chaining over linear probing that sometimes make it the method of choice, as discussed in considerable detail in the aforementioned texts, and so hashing techniques for dealing with expiring data that do not use external chaining prove wholly inadequate for certain applications. For example, if the data records are large, considerable memory can be saved using external chaining instead of linear probing. Accordingly, there is a need to develop hashing techniques for external chaining with expiring data. The methods of the above-mentioned patent are limited to arrays and cannot be used with linked lists due to the significant difference in the organization of the computer's memory." The triviality of the patent should be fairly evident (but if I've jumped to a bad conclusion, I'm happy to be corrected). Fair point though!
  • burgerbrain 16y ago
    It's pretty easy to assert that all software patents are "ridiculous". Math is generally held to be unpatentable after all.
    • tzs 16y ago
      Software is not math. If you think otherwise, please state OpenOffice in the form of a theorem and proof. :-) Seriously, though, software patents do not involve patenting math. They involve patenting at most the use of math in specific circumstances. By the same token, you can't patent physics or chemistry, but you can patent the application of physics (mechanical and electrical devices) and the application of chemistry (drugs).
      • burgerbrain 16y ago
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis It's pretty trivial to show that software is in fact math. Not "approximative with math", like a mechanical device with the laws of physics perhaps, but actually math^. If you want to express OpenOffice.org terms more easily recognizable to the layman as "math", simply translate the program from whatever it may be written in to lisp, at which point a conversion to lambda calculus is quite clear. (^ Unless perhaps you also have a definition of "math" that precludes something like the Pythagorean Theorem as well, which is absurd.) EDIT: Addendum: even if you for some reason don't agree with this, it remains a fact that someone that does hold software patents to be invalid for this reason can easily and reasonably criticize a software patent without first reading it.
        • tzs 16y ago
          Would you say I'm doing math when I write down my recipe chocolate chip cookies? I'd say I'm just describing steps to be executed in order to accomplish a particular real world task. Software is the same--it is steps to execute on a machine to accomplish a task. Software can be described in ways that sometimes make it amenable to mathematical analysis, but that doesn't make it math. The Pythagorean Theorem is math--and you can't patent it. However, if you designed, say, a new way to truss bridges, and a key aspect of that was that certain things were of lengths that formed right triangles via the Pythagorean Theorem, it would not be patenting math if a patent were issued on your truss system.
  • hvs 16y ago
    Actually, if it's a software patent, there's a really good chance that it is ridiculous on the face of it.
  • z0r 16y ago
    I don't think you deserve to be downvoted because I made a whitenoise comment. I should have pasted the explanation I made in my defensive response in the first place or not bothered at all. My bad.
  • Jabbles 16y ago
    I find it hard to believe that a jury, selected at random, would have the necessary background to understand the patent. US patent law is notoriously subtle and complicated.
  • jrockway 16y ago
    It's a software patent, so there's no need to read it in order to reach the grandparent's conclusion.