Jud McCranie wrote:
>This is getting off topic, but:
>The criteria for something to be patentable is that the average
>practitioner in the field wouldn't think of it. So it boils down to
>whether the average programmer would think of windowing, given the problem.
Well, that's the major criterion (non-obviousness) if no one has explicitly
demonstrated or patented a similar thing previously...
>" Dickens applied for the patent in October 1996 "
>
>I was using windowing in 1987, so his patent is invalid (prior invention).
...in that case windowing is considered "prior art," and the patent is invalid
on its face. Jud, assuming you have reasonable supporting documentation for
your use of windowing prior to 1996, you should consider sending it to the
U.S. patent and trademark office, http://www.uspto.gov (even if you have no
desire to attempt to patent it - clearly, showing that you merely thought of
it before 1996 in order to invalidate Joe Schmoe's patent is much easier than
proving that you thought of it before anyone else did and seeking a patent
yourself). Note that prior art is most easily established via publication,
public use or sale - if you only wrote a windowing script for your own use,
it may be more difficult to prove.
>From a programming perspective, my own top "why 2K" question is this this:
even given that the person(s) who first used a mere 2 characters to store
the year had good reason (e.g. severely limited computer memory) to do so,
why didn't they use those 2 precious bytes as a 2-byte integer?
Had they done so, we'd be talking instead about the "Y32K" or "Y64K" bug,
and even Microsoft might have had sufficient time to fix their software
by then. :)
-Ernst
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