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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.
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.
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.
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!
'' Sure hippie. Just as soon as you explain to me how, without patents, a drug company would invest $100M in R&D for a drug that will take comptetitors $1M to copy, driving the price down to the point that they never recover their initial investment. ''
In German law, this would be very simple: You would sue your competitor for "unfair competition". That was for example the way to handle software pirates in the years before it was established that you could have copyright on software. Worked quite well. It is still used to protect phonebooks on CD, or maps, which are not the kind of material that can be protected by copyright: Copying phonebooks and selling the copies is "unfair competition" unless you hired a bunch of people who typed the material in themselves, using a scanner and OCR software to read them or just copying someone else's CDs is "unfair competition" and therefore illegal.
Now the more likely scenario is that the drug companies are mainly working on chemical solutions to psychological conditions like depression which were often previously treated with counselling. Those 100 million dollar drugs aren't curing anything, they're alleviating symptoms marginally better than the previous patent-protected drug did.
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?