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Linked List Patented in 2006

Posted by Hemos on from the good-thing-that's-protected-now-as-well dept.

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."

3 of 477 comments (clear)

  1. Seperate software patent office by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  2. Re:Patent is on multiply-linked lists by richieb · · Score: 4, Interesting
    If you RTFP, what's actually being patented is the idea of using multiple pointers so that the same item can be in more than one linked list at a time. This idea is also a long way from being novel, but it's slightly different from patenting the linked list. Arguably a doubly-linked list is prior art...

    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.
  3. Re:Software vs hardware? by montyzooooma · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Aside from old age, heart disease and cancer are the big killers in the developed world and they both see major improvement by simply eating healthy and exercising more. Now when someone comes up with a drug that cures cancer as effectively as healthy living prevents it happening in the first place then you can try convincing me about the benefits of drug research.

    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.