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HP Patents Bignum Implementation From 1912
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The authors of GMP (the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library) were invited to join Peer-to-Patent to review HP's recent patent on a very old technique for implementing bignums because their software might infringe. Basically, HP's patent claims choosing an exponent based on processor word size. If you choose a 4-bit word size and a binary number, you end up working in hexadecimal. Or for a computer with a 16-bit word and a base-10 number, you use base 10,000 so that each digit of the base-10,000 number would fit into a single 16-bit word. The obvious problem with that is that there's plenty of prior art here. Someone who spent a few minutes Googling found that Knuth describing the idea in TAOCP Vol. 2 and other citations go back to 1912 (which implemented the same algorithm using strips of cardboard and a calculating machine). None of this can be found in the 'references cited' section. Even though the patent examiner did add a couple of references, they appear to have cited some old patents. The patent issued a few months ago was filed back in October of 2004, and collected dust at the USPTO for some 834 days."
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as long as Jimbo isn't involved. Fuck him.
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Page widening doesnt work any more. Those are non-breaking spaces ^^^^. By the way, this is now the spam thread. Please reply below::
damn it's made me add spaces defeating the object. And it strips ampersandnbspsemicolon!
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Oops dumb time stuff going on there god I'm tired 04:59 and 05:01
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Grrrrr... do they think I'm crapflooding or something????
05:01 1st Submit 05:06 Last Submit
btw WTF is a "little bit" anyhows??
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It's possible to go from "Bad" to "Good" in one day with only the 10 posts you are given. Phew. Thanks
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The pie is a lie.