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Linked List Patented in 2006
An anonymous reader writes "Congratulations are in order to Ming-Jen Wang of LSI Logic Corporation who, in patent #10260471 managed to invent the linked list. From the abstract, "A computerized list is provided with auxiliary pointers for traversing the list in different sequences. One or more auxiliary pointers enable a fast, sequential traversal of the list with a minimum of computational time. Such lists may be used in any application where lists may be reordered for various purposes." Good-bye doubly linked list. We should also give praise to the extensive patent review performed by Cochran Freund & Young LLP."
The US patent office has proved its incompetence in this area time and time again.
If you must have software patents, why not a specialist software patent office to deal with them?
These, were the examiners. I wonder what it takes to be an examiner, surely you must have a little knowledge in that particular area?
Do they get a bonus at the end of the week, for the number of patents they have past.
See this is the sort of thing that should be penalized. How about ban LSI from filing patents for a year. See how they like them apples.
This doesn't really surprise me. Most likely this is the work of an over zealous marketing droid looking through some slides and thought, my god, we have invented perfection!
I'd like to think the engineers at LSI aren't going around thinking they invented computer science...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Tape? You whipper-snappers have all the new-fangeled gadgets. Why in my day our linked lists were on punch cards.
Who is the bigger idiot here? The engineer that actually thought "I'm going to submit this to my company for a patent" or his company for actually going ahead and submitting the patent on his behalf? Even if the employee is an idiot, you would think someone in the company would have given him the "um... someone already invented post-it notes like decades ago" speech.
People are immediatly shouting "prior art!" I don't care about prior art as much as I care about the fact that it's another software patent and unworthy of being patented.
I have yet to hear a convincing argument why Babbage's engine, which uses physical mechanical gears to implement an algorithm, is inherently more patentable than the same algorithm in software. How about if I use an FPGA instead? Is it patentable then?
I realize that software has seen more bad patents than it should, but that suggests that the system should be cleaned up, not tossed. And software patents aren't nearly as bad as the nebulous "business model" patents or "natural discovery" patents.
Note that the worst offender usually offered up as the problem child of software patents - "one-click" - was not a software patent, rather a business model patent.
Then LSI would sue and say they implicitly covered that and you'd counter sue for prior art, and that patent office wouldn't care either way. Now if every time someone challenged an approved patent for prior art or that it conflicts with an existing patent, the patent office had to put up the defense in court and spend the money, then things might change. They were the ones that said it was novel, let them defend their decision.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Back in lat 70s when I was a junior programmer, I did some hacking in SNOBOL to produce a list of thinkgs that had to be sorted two different ways. I had nodes that were in two separate list at the same time. Had I known I would have patented it (unfortunately I lost the card deck with the source).
...richie - It is a good day to code.
In Soviet Russia, cards punch you. Or is this "In Soviet Russia, lists link you"?
if your solution doesn't infringe leaf nodes in the tree of claims, it doesn't infringe.
As part of my work I submit quite a few patents. I've been told by the patent writing companies we use that hanging on extra claims do not invalidate the main claim. You seem to contradict exactly that, and I would be very glad if you could elaborate (or point me somewhere).
Thanks
Except that I note that the patent was ISSUED in April of 2006!
Takes idiocy to a whole new level, and thrusts it into the hands of the freeking Patent office.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
I think this is a global conspiracy to undermine the patent system by submitting totally invalid patents. Once it's found they're unenforcable they'll kill off the patent system that is broken. Yay for that. Congratulations to that law firm and whatever!?
:) concept. But AmigaOS gave you a linked list for nearly everything, stored all it's windows and objects and tasks in them, and expected you to traverse it with exec.library and utility.library.
Actually I'm curious, when was your first experience of a linked list implemented in a highly exposed manner? As far as I recall it was in AmigaOS (but then I am only just young enough to remember that as my first OS and the first OS I cared coding for). A lot of systems do use linked lists, it's a very old (1960's?
Along with tags (tagitems, taglists) and ReadArgs they're things I miss in modern operating systems which seem too 'hidden' and trying to feel too unixy. It's all pipes and sockets and syscalls, blagghhh.. I'm glad QNX puts message passing right in your face, and DragonFly is bringing it all back to me again. I can't wait until someone patents one of those again!
You need A) some kind of college degree and B) a pulse.
I know some people who applied to the patent office very recently. They were hired after only a phone interview, and given a very short time table to make a decision (something like a week). They also try and rope you in for three years with a signing bonus. So it looks like they're desperate for warm bodies.
Once you start though, the first 6+ weeks are training. But given the joys of government bureaucracy, who knows how much of that is actual training in patent law versus pro-life indoctrination.
lets say you had a bunch of objects and you wanted to display them in variable order (lets say the contents a folder in this case, listed by name, size and modification date. the user can switch around what the view is sorted by. If you had a multiply linked list you could have the same objects linked together in 3 different ways using different pointers and you could switch between the views without sorting your list.
OK, so that example is kind of contrived but I'm sure there are other situations in which one might use this. Still... this is not original. I would be amazed if nobody had ever used something like this before.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Actually, I've heard tell they do have a sort of quota. It's based on quantity, not quality. So, they don't really care if it's going to get contested later, so long that it's out of their hands.
I had a friend who was an EE and worked for the USPTO for a while. They were very aggressive in recruiting her, but after six months she was desperate to get out.
As a few nearby posts have said, they are apparently desperate for bodies. They seem to be in a chicken-and-egg situation - while they are understaffed, the reputation for stress and being underpaid makes it hard for them to hire/retain examiners. Inability to hire/retain examiners results in the existing examiners being overstressed.
Sadly, for a LONG time, the USPTO was one of the government's biggest moneymakers but was also one of the most underfunded, as all of their income went to what was basically a "generic" fund allocation pool. I've heard efforts are being made to rectify this (i.e. let the USPTO use the majority of what they bring in rather than sending it elsewhere), which should help make things a bit saner.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Programmers and are going to need protection from software patents like these. I say we need a GPL patent office ans start putting in every public-domain algorithm / methodology / GUI into it (asking permissions from the author(s) of course). That way we play by the rules of the game (use patents through USPTO), protect programmers (using a patent that has no strings attached / no royalties), and undercut every son-of-a-gun hack / corporation (and associated lawyer(s)) from profiting from what should be free.
Just an idea. I think the framework is already in place (a la GPL for source code) just need to extend it.
I'd hate if someone tried to patent the way I hold my pencil or tie my shoe or tie my tie or any of my handy macros.
Skip lists have been in the Solaris VM subsystem for a while. Back to 2.5 at least. I came across them in the source, then went wandering (at the time, through AltaVista) looking for info on them, and liked what I saw. Neat tool.