Dan Harkless <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Neil W Rickert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>> >> This patch uses windowing, so it may be subject to stoopid patent claims
>> >> in some countries :-)
>> >Are you serious?? What countries have patent claims like that? Never heard
>> >of this issue...
>> I expect that he is referring to the good old U.S.A. Apparently the
>> patent office has awarded a patent to some sort of windowing methods
>> for y2k.
>That's insane! Who are the scum that patented that? Unisys or somebody?
It wasn't unisys. I don't remember who. NPR had a story on it on
Monday, but there is not enough detail on their web page to track
down the details.
>Are they at least trying to get other companies to license the patents or
>are they sticking to their exclusive use rights and saying that all other
>software will just have to remain Y2K-noncompliant???
I gather they are trying to extract license payments. I gather they
are being widely ignored, and that the patent office has ordered a
review.
>> I haven't been able to find the full details of what is
>> patented. I guess I am curious as to whether the windowing I used
>> for dates in 1983 will be retroactively declared to violate that
>> recent patent.
>Out of curiosity, what kind of windowing were you doing in 1983? A 1-digit
>year that had wrapped around or something?
I was wanting to represent the date as a 32 bit binary number, as the
number of days since the presumed (but non-existent) year 0000,
extrapolating backwards with the Gregorian calendar. So if the two
digit year given by the operating system date function was <= 25, I
took it to 2000 plus the year.
-NWR
