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Popular (& Common Sense) Y2k Fix Patented
GnrcMan writes "According to this news.com article, "windowing", a method of fixing Y2K bugs where there is a window (IE 00-39) of years recognized as being 20xx years, has been patented by McDonnell-Douglas. They are now threatening to sue Fortune 500 companies using this popular (and common sense) technique." The years not updated are considered to be 19xx for those systems. *sigh* I love patents. Honest. Really.
Let's combine the current trends of Internet IPOs, and Software patents on prior art, and make lots of money.
Here's what we do...
This will guarantee us lots of money, fame and power (not to mention that it will guarantee to annoy everyone).
"values of beta will give rise to dom!"
The example of 'prior art' that comes to mind most readily is in SAS.
There is a variable you can set that allows the system to institue windowing for two digit dates based on whichever date you choose. This 'feature' is at least 3-4 years old (I believe) and may in fact be even older.
Perhaps there should be some deliniation of specialty within the USPTO so that the people aproving the patents are required to have some background with the given field for which they
are aproving?
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
They've been Boeing for years now. What the...?
If anybody needs prior art, I have code here where I work from the early 80's that uses this technique. I'm sure other companies do too. This doesn't have a chance in court IMHO.
Is this really possible at all? Didn't McDonell Douglas get absorbed into Boeing's huge aircraft empire? How can MD get the patent then, there has to be some flaw in this somewhere that makes it illegal for MD to have a patent. Maybe it's something they filed for years ago and finally got approved after the great merger.
or maybe....what if Boeing is behind all this trying to find small cheap ways to get a crap load of money before lawsuits start getting filed over exploding fuel tanks (hell, Ford (or was it Chevy, me no remember had to deal with fueltank problems, and it was a very large lawsuit with only a few people filing against them.) If the Boeing fueltank cover up gets entirely proved they will have hell to pay to hundreds grievance-hungry families.
Personally, Boeing is my favorite aircraft manufacturer, with Airbus Industrie right behind. Taking a jet from point A to point B is a very big risk, one that many people are willing to take, it's safer than driving on the highway (especially the stretch of I-35 that runs through Austin, Texas.) But there can be unforseen accidents that can take out 200 people at once...it's a big loss, but people need to think carefully before they try to act out after a disaster. At least Boeing does maintenance on MD's aircraft, cus in my (somewhat) humble opinion, MD aircraft are pure shit, especially that DC-10 and its derivatives. I've never flown on one, and I would never do so in the future, somehting about that third engine being supported above the fuselage about 3 or 4 feet (727's third engine is integrated into the rear of the fuselage so there's more support).
Boeing may be scared, that could be why this patent thing is surfacing. But they (Boeing/MD, I guess) need to think of the consequences of the patent...world wide. Besides wasn't windowing used long before the y2k panic? I could have sworn that I heard about 00-39 being interpreted as 20xx 10 years ago, I guess no one really implemented it except in some software aps on PCs.
Oh well, enough drivel between classes.
Not entirely anonymously cowardly,
Alan
In the public hearing it was stated that there is a law "so-called Rule 56, which requires that that material prior art, of which the applicant is aware, be disclosed to the Office." It was said that they understand that it may be hard to comply to this rule. I looked through the patent but I could not find any references to prior art.
.tiff format Significantly, the author of the patent affirmatively discusses and discloses two IBM written proposals, including a more general windowing approach.
It's on the front page of the patent, for gosh sake! Also, you will typically find a prosaic discussion of prior art in the beginning of the specification. I commend rereading the patent, which can be found on-line in fulltext and
So it seems even if there is prior art that this does not stop it from being patented if it is "sufficiently different" (see below). So exactly what role does prior art play in the patent process then?
The prior art determines whether or not the patent is valid. Prior art not disclosed during examination can be a basis for later invalidation, either by a suit in federal court, or by a process called reexamination. The Congress recently tried to "pump up" the effectiveness of third party reexaminations, but independent inventors bitterly fought against this, and a fairly lukewarm substitute is now pending.
From the excellent document What can be patented it states that abstract ideas (read: windowing for the Y2K problem) are not patentable.
While abstract ideas are not patentable, a particular approach toward "windowing for the Y2K problem" is almost certainly a patentable "practical application of a mathematical algorithm, . . . [by] produc[ing] 'a useful, concrete and tangible result". The Federal Circuit's recent decision in AT&T v. Excel explains very well the state of the law on the "mathematical algorithm" and "method of doing business" subject matter issues.
From the same document referenced in the above paragraph it also states that "The subject matter sought to be patented must be sufficiently different from what has been used or described before that it may be said to be nonobvious to a person having ordinary skill in the area of technology related to the invention."
Be very wary of paraphrases, and understand that unobviousness in patent law is not the same as the common use of the term. This was discussed at length in a recentl slashdot discussion on patents. No flash of genius is required for patentability, merely that it hadn't appeared or been suggested in the prior art, taking individually or in aggregate form.
Notice also that the [Amazon] patent states that "one skilled in the art" will appreciate that the patent also covers other ordering mechanisms such as email. This is incredulous... this means that the patent convers all automated email-based order processing systems!
The claims are the thing to determine what is and what is not covered. It describes what is, and what is not, within the scope of the patent monopoly.
On a side note, on the US Patent and Trademark Office's web site in the definition of a patent they state that "US patent grants are effective only within the US, US territories, and US possessions." How exactly can this relate to the internet?
Whenever the invention is made, used, sold, offered for sale or imported into the United States, the Patent Act is triggered. The examples suggested by the author would probably give rise to claims for patent infringement within the United States.
"I say fuck em, and let a damn comet smash into the damn planet and bring on the wrath of god. "
Be careful what you wish for. There is already pictures of THREE objects heded for Earth. NASA knows where they will hit already. 1 in Siberia, 1 in B.C. (British Columbia) and 1 off the coast of the coast of Africa. They are talking November 3rd by the year 2003.
See:
http://www.enterprisemission.com/bismark.htm
The Truth is a Virus!!!
I implemented a 1-byte year system in a fabric
jobber inventory system in 1985, and used windowing for the purpose of determing decades. There's a chance that I can still dig up the code, if there is really any bebefit to doing so.
How 'bout if the patent system was structured similarly to the scientific review system?
Every submission would get reviewed by an anonymous group of peers who would get picked from a "qualified pool", and then published in whatever journal(s) were appropriate for that sort of invention. The peers would be responsible for determining whether the invention was "novel" for that field. This would take care of the problem where examiners who don't have any real knowledge of a field are making decisions about the inventions in that field.
I just patented a technique for allocating a sequence of bytes in a computers memory for the purpose of storing a date. Would write more, but I have to go sue McDonnell-Douglas for storing dates in their computers memory...
I can't believe somebody actually tried to patent this, and I find it pathetic that the patent was approved. Who in the government do you write to about this kind of stuff? Your congressman?
Dammit! I've bought my last FA-18 from those jerks!
Well, you don't necessarily need patents to play this game; trademarks can be used equaly well.
Example:
In Germany "webspace" was registered as a trademark and now a lawyer (Günther Freiherr von Gravenreuth - a specialist for trademark/copyright cases percieved as shady at best by many people) is suing ISPs all over the country who use the term in their products.
you have moved your mouse, please reboot to make this change take effect
Of course it seems silly since no one else probably runs the configuration and specific software that they do..
-- Dr. Firmware
Also my Timex Ironman watch uses windowing for the year. It knows to use the correct calender for 99, 01, 02....
yeah whatever....Kind of like talk radio. People only want to hear their own voice and suck around with a whole bunch of people who agree with them. All of these discussion type systems are just mental masturbation. No one ever changes anyone's mind anyway. Back in the good ole days, what got accomplished from the profound Slashdot discussions? Personally, I find the "kiddie" posts to be the most entertaing part of Slashdot. People here take themselves WAY too seriously, worrying about karma, and meta-moderation, and all that crap.
Just move the window, I guess....
Actually, I've heard a couple of differnt dates,
(20,29,34,40), and for almost all of them it means that one of my aunts, uncles or parents hasn't been born yet according to the algorithim... I wonder how that's handled.
RobK
Myddrin
I can see the patent application now:
A computer program for greeting the planet in a variety of machine readable formats.
What does it cost to file a patent application? This would almost be worth it to see just how rediculous the process has become.
Nice. Now not only can you patent somewhat clever algorithms that other people will probably think of themselves, but also dirty kluges that other people have thought of already and just never admitted it.
Too late I already patented it
I don't understand the mentality of these people. I mean, if they can patent this, then it appears that they can patent the way any method of doing things can be... Why doesn't someone quickly GPL it? I mean how stupid can they be.
I think I am going to patent the way I enter in information, or maybe I should patent the way I cook my eggs in the morning. I can't even believe this.
What the hell? I did this back in '92. My wristwatch did this back in '80. (Ever enter 01 for the year in a wristwatch?)
For obvious reasons, I'm posting this anonymously so I don't become a target of M-D's lawyers. My apologies for hiding... Starting in 1995 (or maybe 1994, but my zipped source file is dated 1995), I wrote an application, whose descendants are still in production, that uses the windowing technique in its most basic form: IF 2-digit-year > 90, base-century = 1990 ELSE base-century = 2000 Does this work (unpublished but dated, with a copyright notice, in a hardcopy printed in 1995) constitute prior art?
Think you can change the world?
Nope...
Why not look at it positively - be thankful that
you're soOOooOOoo much smarter than they are!
I find it's funnier if you think it's serious for a little while.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
I mentioned this to some coworkers and one of them said that he is going to patent the century digits in front of the year digits. I guess it will be a free for all now.
I was wondering if another way to fix the date problem would be to
Why? because, as the scheme of this patent now stands, after 20xx (whatever that date was? I can't remember), you have the same problem. it's only temporarily fixed. I realize that my "solution" is basically the same thing that they're doing, but who cares? Just ignore it if you don't like it. But the scheme of this patent is just as shoddy. I realize that software used now will probably not be in use however long from now, but it's still not fixing it, because even then, you'll have to change it for some stuff, right? I mean, especially if you're trying to have the oldest post-1900 computer! (ha-ha, funny-funny)
Insert mind here.
Hell, I'll go patent the Hello World program on every major language. I'll be rich! :)
-----
If Bill Gates had a nickel for every time Windows crashed...
My reading was the other way around, that Mr. Dickens invented it, but the actual IP belongs to M-D. As in the case of an employee who creates something, but the patent gets assigned to the employer.
In any case, all of this whining about absurd patents is a crock. This patent was published for review back in 1996, and was awared in 1998. If you really want to cut down on "absurd" patents, check out the USPTO and read their Gazette. They publish all of the patent filings. You might not find all of it online, and have to resort to paper. If you see an "absurd" patnet, challenge it!
Well, internal to the Teradata database system,
dates were orignally an integer YYMMDD, and
when we need to allow for 2000, it was changed
so that instead of YY it was CCYY-100, so
1999 was 99, 2000 was 100, just as you mentioned.
That way, existing dates stored in the database didn't need updating.
This was implemented 10 years ago...
Next thing you know, someone will be pateting the process of reaching for the power button to turn on your computer.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Recent releases of Tcl/Tk use that same windowing technique. I believe the cutoff date is 2050. I do not know if this is old enough to be used as prior art against this obvious patent.
So how did this "Y2K bug" thing happen in the first place? Or maybe I should ask, "who are the gzkdrmn fsckwits who decided that storing the year as ASCII would be a really smart thing to do?". After all, a single signed 8-bit byte can store the values 0 to 127 and a signed 16-bit integer can store from 0 to somewhere in the upper 30Ks.
A smart programmer could just write a small library or a header file with functions or macros to perform basic operations on these "offset years" and so forth. The only thing to remember would be to add the epoch start year to the offset-year and boom, the year just became printf()-able.
Now, either most of the people who wrote software that handles time on some form or another have fucked up royally or I'm just babbling about how the world should be the ideal world where pi is 3, too.
Can't anything be done for the common good of all?
This seems almost as despicable to me as the idea of Mayo Clinic saying only they get to use dialysis machines.
- Successful class-action suit against the US Patent Office and any companies exploiting the existing system
- Violent revolt against rapacious corporate greed
Robespierre was right.WHEN did you do your "Y38" fix, and WHEN did you make your source code publicly visible? (This does NOT necessarily mean GPL, just open for public inspection.) This patent was applied for on 10/3/96 - not that long ago, and if your code predates that, *and was open to public inspection*, you have prior art and presumably can invalidate the patent. That aside, it just doesn't seem to me that this passes the "obvious test". There's a GPL Y2K page that talks about date windowing. I'll have to check that, and it would be worthwhile getting some web page history from the maintainer.
This is unfortunant, because this is the patent system breaking down. The idea behind the patent system is that, to encourage individuals to publish their knowledge and advance the nation's technology base, we grant them a short term monopoly. The old 17 year (at one point I think it was shorted) patent was a short period of time in the lifetime of an invention, but the new 20 year from time of filing period is sometimes too long.
For computer technology, 20 years is silly. For this, it is rediculous. Society gets NOTHING from this publishing. Wow, you mean in 2019 we can all use, royalty free, windowing for fixing dates? Freaking retarded. Any invention that is of short useful duration (less than the patenting time) should not be eligable for patenting. They should have to protect it via trade secret. Society gets nothing.
I wouldn't worry too much. I'm sure that someone did something similar to deal with a 1 byte year (that would have a problem at the end of the decade) and will be able to show prior art. I'm sure that some has written SOMETHING that interprets certain 2 digit dates as 19xx and others as 20xx, so this isn't new and novel...
The patent system is not a bad idea, it is just being implemented poorly. We aren't getting benefits out of patent protection. I think that patent protection is fundamentally a good thing, but it should be reserved for REALLY new and novel ideas, not obvious, stupid ones.
Alex
They store the entire date, but to the end-user, we represent only two digits. Birth and such, should use full date input/view!
WHEN did you do your "Y38" fix, and WHEN did you make your source code publicly visible? (This does NOT necessarily mean GPL, just open for public inspection.)
This patent was applied for on 10/3/96 - not that long ago, and if your code predates that, *and was open to public inspection*, you have prior art and presumably can invalidate the patent.
That aside, it just doesn't seem to me that this passes the "obvious test".
There's also a GPL Y2K page that talks about date windowing. I'll have to check that, and it would be worthwhile getting some web page history from the maintainer.
Why does the US have a patent system where we can patent common sense things like this. Or equations for that matter. I understand the need for the system but other nations have less restrictive systems that still respect the rights of creators. -Squawk- Chocobo219
Unfortunately, I don't think there are too many people (or companies for that matter) that are willing to fork out the $20K (or whatever it takes) to apply for a patent just to prove a point which is plainly obvious for anyone with an IQ > 10.
This has got to be one of the most ridiculous things that I have ever heard about. I guess the fact that their technique almost perfectly matches with the 32-bit unix "Y38" problem is mere coincidence. Many, many people (including myself) have used 1938/2038 as the "window" in which old data gets updated to new dates for this very reason, and as "y2k" compliant date mechanisms and 64-bit dates become the norm, quite a few "pre2K" fixes are probably based on this technique.
Software patents are evil, and must be stopped before it is too late!!
If only "common" sense was actually that common...
What am I missing?
Lawyers for inventor Bruce Dickens are reportedly threatening legal action to enforce payments from Fortune 500 companies that have used software fixes based on the now-patented technology.
How can they possibly claim a solid patent with no prior art if the folks they're suing were using the method before the patent?
--
"You despise me, don't you?"
"You despise me, don't you?"
"If I gave you any thought, I probably would."
with this latest report about y2k i cant help thinking on thing.
i certainly hope im not the only one in the world who has thought; 'what about y3k?'
sure its sort of far-fetched, since by then im sure everything will have changed. but its still an interesting thought.
it seems like the governments around the world should take this into mild consideration. maybe leave a note on the whitehouse post it board that says "fix y3k problems long before jan 1st 3000"
tyler
Like this one. It should be that if you patent something and it's proven to be invalid because of prior art or whatever, you should be heavily fined and barred from filing patents for some period of years. This would force companies desiring to patent an idea to go the extra mile to prove that nobody ever had that idea and implemented it before.
The penalties need to be stiff, like paying court costs, all patent fees, and maybe a few million dollars in fines. They should be barred from applying for patents for like ten years. This should be enough to deter these pesky morons.
And if someone thinks that IBM didn't figure this out in the forties and/or fifties, they're smoking some pretty potent crack..
Your Working Boy,
Hmmmm, the US patent office appear to be accepting common-sense solutions to common problems...
Here's one:
An apparatus for firebombing the US patent office.
I should also patent the use of the phrase "patent this" in conjunction with any rude gesture.
Oh, there is definately prior art. I was working at BNR (Bell Northern Research, now Nortel Networks) in 1993 on a co-op work term when I 'invented' this technique. The system I was extracting data from used a 2-digit date. But there were none of these systems in existance before 1976, so I assigned '00' through '70' for the 21st century, and '71' through '99' for the 20th century.
Since this patent seems to have been submitted in 1996, the work I did predates their work by 3 years.
And I'm sure there are other examples of this. Hmmm, too bad I didn't patent this idea, I could be rich! Rich I say! Mwuhahahahaha!
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
I just spent a few minutes and emailed my Senator about the awful state of the US Patent Office. This Y2K patent is a a) topical and b) grievous example of this.
As far as I remember from civics class, each US Citizen has two Senators and a Representative. The Senate has a Web site that lists all of their addresses (they seem to mostly have email addresses, too). The House of Reps shouldn't be too hard to find. Outside the US, you're on your own.
I doubt any of them are aware of the regularity of these awful patent grants or the effects that they have on the Internet and the entire computer industry.
The patent process is probably long overdue for some kind of overhaul - we know it, but do the people who can actually change it know that?
This is probably a better use of /.ers' time than Mac bashing. Or for that matter, posting jokes about bad patents (post them after).
Scott
I have no idea if you're right, and I don't really care, because the point is that this is a common technique, and the patent is ridiculous. McDonnell-Douglas should disavow this idiotic move by one of their clueless employees, and even more clueless lawyers. Are the lawyers getting a percentage of the take, perhaps? As to the patent office, if this doesn't prove that they're incompetent, then I don't know what would.
So, no, I didn't patent (or publish) the idea because I'm not an idiot, and I don't try to patent things that are obvious. In fact, one of the criteria of a valid patent is that it must be non-obvious.
Here are some other things I have never patented:
1. Measuring 30 feet with a 20 foot tape measure by first marking off 20 feet, then measuring from the mark.
2. Determining the weight of a liquid by first weighing the empty container, and subtracting.
3. Calculating the mileage of my car by keeping track of whether the odometer has rolled over, and adding 100,000 if it has.
You're not really suggesting that this patent requires formal prior art in order to be invalidated, are you?
A wonderful idea. You didn't mention how beneficial it could be for developers/programmers to find useful ideas and information so that they can use and expand on them. Considering the amount of software, most notably open source/free software being written, it could help the (forgive me for being so bold...) world!
This movement would need someone to lead it in the sense that Linus does--start it, guide it, and let others take over parts of it. There has to be some entity (person or group) who has control in the beginning, getting things going. Sounds real fundamental, but who's gonna do it?
Hello little man. I will destroy you!
Besides, I know of many Cobol programs that were designed to go only 10 years. So in 67' fixed this with a window (hey why waste space with 2 digits) - after 0-9, they used A-Z. I am pleased to say this y2k remediated program is now good to 2003! As this app uses EBCDIC, not ASCII, these is still another bit left to extend this window again. Does a slide rule use windowing? Astrological wheels. Think ill go off and patent pointers, and using bits as flags. BTW. Cobol has had pointers and bits for yonks,
I did a windowing fix in a port of some Fortran software from PrimeOS to VAX-VMS. It was at most in 1986. The base of the window was 1985, so it was probably in 1985. Too bad it wasn't 1980, though.
Changes aren't permanent, but change is.
Well, I'm glad I live in Sweden and not in the US. But on the other hand, the EU is filled with lobbyists too. :-(
My Remind calendar program has been using this technique since 1990. The patent is clearly invalid.
If anyone wants to fight this patent, I will be happy to provide evidence and testimony of prior art.
goung to the patent office web page and doing a manual search for the inventer Bruce Dickens returns this number in the result - 5806063
My Father runs a computer company that made use of this idea since the early or mid 80's. Does their patent go back that far?
(Yes - we really did consider the Y2K problem then - like everyone else should have !)
Recall, they said McDonnel-douglas turned the patent over to it's inventor. Large companies with research departments tend to pay for patent filings on behalf of their employees in exchange for partial rights (the employee with th ecool idea doesn't get excluded just because the company filed) In this case, McDonnel douglas may have filed the patent, but they handed it over to the person who suggested it in the first place. The attempt at extorting money out of these Fortune 500 companies is coming from this person, not from MCdonnel Douglas.
Microsoft will come after you for using the term "window", or maybe it will be Apple, or maybe Xerox/PARC.
One of those anyway.
Yeah. Aren't most fortune 500 companies publicly owned? The 'class' is the shareholders of those copmanies.
I suspect this Y2K patent will fail to stand up in court, I'm guessing that some far-sighted engineer did something similar in the 80s and "prior art" will apply.
Dear IBM Canada,
Call me. I used this technique in the common date routines in your CPLC software inventory system in 1976. I have the printouts to prove it.
year += 2000;
which also wraps. This shows that all date handling algos will wrap unless they are using saturating logic, and how silly this patent is. Someone should patent wrapping integers.
RFC1925
You are totally clueless!!
You can create any sort of abstraction in the software world even thought the machine's instruction set is finite! The fact that you can patent software is equivalent to saying you can patent abstract ideas. Which means you can ultimately patent creative designs!
The patent system in the U.S. is totally messed up!
The patent system is supposed to be set up so that most patents issued are known valid. This is noit currently the case, anyone can get any junk patent (like this one). But the courts still assume that the PTO investgated and found the patent ok, so the burden of proof ends up not on the patentor to prove it is valid, but on the challenger to prove it's not valid.
I've seen some BAD patents here before, but this is incredibly stupid!
We've got old copies of DataEase for DOS from 1992 (v4.53) which allow you to set an arbitrary "pivot point" to determine which century a 2-digit year refers to. I'm sure this commonplace technique was around long before then.
Can someone please put a bullet in the head of the patent clerk who approved this?
But why does my TIME.H have this???
typedef long time_t;
Dammit, we're still gonna have Y2K.038 issues...
---
"Alas, the Coders worked hard to fix their calendar problem only to find the Lawyer tribe destroying their efforts. Y2K famine soon became Y2K cannibalism, and both Coders and Lawyers were happily eaten by the Armed Masses."
Maybe $20k is a small investment to be able to use some of the "obvious" ideas that other companies would have. Maybe this, maybe that, its hard to say exactly why they did it but these guys aren't idiots -- they did it for a reason. (and everyone agrees the obvious one is senseless)
Drawing everyones comtempt for the current system might force a rewrite that would be of better benefit.
Hypothetically, anything hypothetical is possible.
Actually, I have a patent on mature, grown-up conversation. Irregardless of what you claim to be prior art, I have a patent on it. My lawyers will be by to discuss payment for your use of my patent.
second first post!?!?!
In fact, lots of people already have. For one easy example, the Macintosh "Date and Time" control panel has a 1920-2019 window. It's been that way since the original System in 1984 I'm pretty sure.
The really annoying thing about this is that a Y2K century window is a complete algorithm (which I would allow in software patents) rather than a raw concept (which is unfair crap). Instead, it's just a stupid Stupid STUPID case of the patent office not paying any attention to prior art.
The code reads the CMOS (hardware battery) clock, and adjusts the year if the CMOS clock returns a year before 1970. This works nice until 2070.
Er, make that 2038 ;-)
Anyway, it's obvious PLENTY programmers already have applied the 'windowing' technique, there's nothing special or unique about it.
Besides, it's McDD VS The World.
---
>Hell, I'm just going to go out and patent Common Sense.
Only because you are a fellow slashdotter, I'll give you the chance to avoid falling into my trap, rather than me keeping quite, then suing.
If you go out and patent something obvious (like common sense), then sue people who use it, you are violating my patent (see my post). If you don't sue then you are failing to defend your patent and you lose it.
The joy of IP law - MUAHAHAHAH!
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
Hell, I'm just going to go out and patent Common Sense. And I'm not going to licence the technology to /anyone/. I'm going to keep it all to myself, muahahahaha!
Oh, I wouldn't worry. I don't think anyone is going to miss it that much.
IIRC thats the way you get the year value from some stanard(ish?) c function call....
i recall seeing in the y2k fear pamphlets how some c coders would just put 19 as a string infront of it, rather than adding 1900 to it like you should
resulting in 19120 as the date in 2020
Need a Catering Connection
Hate to reply to my own post, but here goes...
Forget about having a non-profit organization who actually *patents* things and release to the public domain (which costs a lot of time and money). Just have a non-profit organization that collects prior art (in the form of old ideas not yet patented and new ideas not yet patented) in some form and stores it away to refute these types of claims that would arise in the future. It would be a great resource as a repository that anyone and everyone could submit to, as long as it was categorized in a reasonable manner.
Again, probably not that original of an idea, but is anybody doing something like this?
The major problem was that is was openly user settable, not even hidden in the registry.
"Oh, lets see what this one does!"
Send one report to two people, and get different results.
OTOH, anyone suing Microsoft for patent infrigement isn't likely to have them just pay up.
The specifics on the particular patent in question can be found here.
In addition to this patent, see others granted in the US (and one jointly registered in Canada).
System and method for processing date-dependent information which spans one or two centuries
System and method for modifying and operating a computer system to perform date operations on date fields spanning centuries
Method and apparatus for recording and reading date data having coexisting formats
Two-digit hybrid radix year numbers for year 2000 and beyond
System for converting programs and databases to correct year 2000 processing errors
Canadian patent: System and method for identifying and correcting computer operations involving two digit year dates. This patent is also registered in the US as Patent #5,808,889.
Actually the name MACOS (the BBS system) is just an interesting coincidence. (The name means Modified All-purpose Communications Operating System) The original ACOS was written on CP/M and later ported to the Apple II, and later there was a derivative work (called Modified ACOS or MACOS) which among other things, fixed the y2k bug. At the time, Apple did not refer to the Macintosh Operating System as "MacOS" they called it "System 5" or "System 6" depending on which version they were shipping - this was before they started charging for OS upgrades.
I'm fairly sure this is prior art, so I'm not going to poke into that. It's obvious as well, and this has also been spoken to death.
;^)
Instead, I got a neat idea. Instead of complaining about stupid patents, why not create your own?! "What's that," you say? If I had the money, I'd come up with an extravegant and extremely obvious patent submission, patent it and then sue the pants off everybody I could just to get my own patent suit thrown out of court because its hideously stupid, thereby setting a precedent that bogus patents shouldn't be allowed. And I mean something mind-bogglingly obvious. Like patenting VRML or cellular respiration or something. I think it'd be great to patent cellular respiration and then start sending cease and desist letters to the boys in the Patent Office. Make them think twice before letting in stupid patents.
Although you are right about the buy out of MD They still exist as a division. The mostly build Military jets.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
Actually It was a lesson in my cobol class back in college circa 1975 (I'm old ok!) to build a two number date system that went from 1950 to 2050. It also is used in the pager on my belt. It goes from 1985 to 2030 (why the odd number I don't know) on it's calendar. This pager is now 6 years old. In other words prior art means nothing. Ask Tesla.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
At the risk of being a party pooper, check the date on that RFC.
must be using some kind of meta-prorgramming-language in which the patents and the evil-source is transfered and then compared.
Well, it's no longer unique. 19a0 = 199a = 2000.
A totally broken implementation of this would say 199a, a half broken implementation would say 19a0, (which is the internal representation) and a not at all broken implementation would also have the output code fixed to translate that to 2000.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Unfortunately, the research lab would probably not exist if not for patents, as thats how they get their money, but patents are time sensitive for the same reason.
perhaps the time period should be decreased, and the patent office educated wrt the sheer stupidity of some recent patents, but the usefulness of patents is still in effect.
the nice things about patents is after its expired, everybody has a specific method for doing whatever, unless of course the patent is really general, which according to other ppl on this thread would be enough to cause it to be an invalid patent if anybody cared to challenge it
Need a Catering Connection
This is important. It seems the patent applies to an arbitrarily selected window. From GnrcMan's comment above:
The window may be arbitrarily selected. For example, the decade could begin with the 1950's and end with the 2040's, or it could begin with the 1980's and end with the 2070's.)
This Global 2000 OS certainly sounds like it would have an arbitrary window. Wonder if there's more information on this OS somewhere?
Enjoy your job, make lots of money, work within the law. Choose any two.
> An Airbus A320 can be told what year to extend the flaps?
:-).
> I thought that airplane was faster than that.
Nope, but like most avionics computers it did time stamp & record events, actions and faults, and I'm fairly sure it does some 2digit->4digit expansion.
Recalling what I wrote from dim and distant memory, the control program doesn't really care what the date/ time is for normal operation, but we did have problems with timer/counter rollover when checking the data from the various sensors for normal operation. Sort of a Y2K problem compressed into a few milliseconds
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Sounds like your ready to explode yourself. Maybe we should just send you after em.
Here is a suggestion for "what should be done about it":
The threat I see here is that a clueless Patent and Trademark Office will grant patents on common programming techniques, impeding Open Source work; once granted, even an invalid patent is difficult and costly to fight.
The PTO examiners are NOT software-savvy, and without easily-accessible "prior art", they have little choice under PTO procedures but to grant the patents; there's great pressure on examiners to process applications as fast as possible. Miserably sad, but true.
We cannot easily change the PTO procedures (write to your Congressmen!), but we COULD set up a Web site or network of sites where brief examples of Open Source software "prior art" could be contributed (i.e. "published" in the patent sense) in the form of patent-abstract-like summaries, and could then be read by anyone.
I like to think of such a database as an "Anti-Patent Archive", the idea being that publishing an idea in this form prevents it from being patented later; hence "Anti-Patent". The archive would be a way to preeemptively disclose ideas, rendering them patent-resistent.
Such an archive would serve several distinct purposes:
1) It would provide a resource to people defending themselves against dubious software patents, since prior art disclosure is an effective anti-patent defense;
2) It would be a great general-use reference for unencumbered software techniques (this is what would make it both huge and busy, and could be its biggest attraction); and
3)Possibly most important, it would also provide PATENT EXAMINERS with one-stop-shopping for prior art, which could help preemptively squelch bad patents. If examiners can easily see documents showing that this stuff is already out there, it's less likely to show up in patents.
Of course, there ARE some difficult issues in setting up such an undertaking:
A) Who will pay for the server farms and bandwidth needed to hold and access all that data?
B) How will incoming submissions be catalogued, maintained, and culled of irrelevancies, trade secrets being spilled by malefactors, and stuff that has already been patented? What army of thousands will do this ongoing task?
C) How will such an endeavor protect itself from being destroyed by lawsuit attack? (There will certainly be those who find an Anti-Patent Archive threatening to their interests, and lawsuits can be a nasty weapon. Consider a company that anonymously "publishes" one of their expendable trade secrets, then sues to try to shut you down for stealing trade secrets...)
Here are some possible solutions for some of the above:
a) Funding it: Involve public libraries; they are a natural ally and an expert resource here. Use a distributed architecture hosted all over the place. Get the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, and/or civil-liberties groups to participate. Sell advertising space on the Web pages (ugh!). DON'T charge to read or submit Anti-Patents.
b) Cataloging and evaluating submissions: Use the PTO's category system (probably with software-specific extensions) for categorization. Develop submission guidelines (with a patent attorney's help!) on how best to "unclaim" the widest possible area of unpatentability for the ideas they are disclosing.
Use a distributed Slashdot-type moderation system; you'll still need some full-timers, but the load can be shared.
c) I'm no laywer, so I'm thin on ideas on how to avoid death by lawsuit. If the archive publishes submissions but does not exercise actual editorial control over the content, this should provide some First Amendment protection. Also, involving civil-liberties groups might provide access to legal resources.
Has the time arrived for the Anti-Patent, or is this just another silly idea?
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
Geesh, I had to do this on a Tandy 102 when I was in law school, and I finished in 1988. Hmm, and in crude financial projections in 1986.
And now that I think of it, I used this in a couple of different ways in the Nighthawk MIS system in 1982--and so has everyone else who used INKEY$ to map ascii to action codes.
And I seriously doubt that I did anything that hadn't been done 20 years earlier . . .
Someone told me recently of an incident that really leaves me to believe that patents aren't worth the paper they are printed on. I can't remember the exact details, but here's the basics.
Weed Eater originally came up with the idea for nylon string trimmers. They patented the idea, and were happy. Until Toro started making nylon string trimmers as well. They tried to sue Toro, and the lawsuit lasted for years. In the mean time, Toro continued to sell the trimmers. In the end, the judge decided that the patent really wasn't worth much, and that restricting Toro would mean they couldn't do business in trimmers, so Weed Eater lost, and since they put all of their money into the suit, they eventually went out of business. Case closed.
So, I think that these rediculous patents will never hold up in court, and anyone who tries to use them against corporations (especially big corporations) will fail.
I'm not sure when they started it, but Pick Systems has been using this technique in their operating systems and databases for years. 00-29 are considered 20xx and 30-99 are considered 19xx. This has been going on for probably at least 15-20 years. Any applications written on a Pick system (and probably other MultiValue systems) is already taking advantage of this feature. http://picksys.com PEACE
I know of several companies that had prior existing solutions that used windowing.. Mcdonald Douglas doesn't have a chance of upholding their pattent
Aside, Bruce Perens has an interesting proposal over at Technocrat.Net.
(Meta: Any good reason to not allowing attrs (esp. cite) with
Y2k Information for Global 2000 They mention that they first introduced windowing in Global System Manger 7.0. If my memory servs me correctly System Manger 7.0 was released about 1990.
;-)
Looking at this page brought back lots of memories of my first support job
Maybe you should patent that idea so nobody else can do it
sorry couldn't resist
Need a Catering Connection
ignoring the bad form of replying to myself . . .
*duh* Two's complement. This is just shifting the zero point. And all the other things we do to get a little negative range out of a positive variable.
Or abstract math and measure theory explained begining with bundles of sticks . . .
This website contains information on disclosure of prior art and how to challenge a patent either while it is pending or after it has been granted:
/toc.htm
http://inpress.com/knowbase/mpep/2000
We should collect examples of prior art and request a reexamination proceeding.
OK, so we're all in agreement; Software patents are A Bad Thing (tm). If we don't stop them, then we're going to see the knowledge base of common algorithms (and this 'watershed' algorithm is one of the most common when date processing) whittled away. I for one don't relish spending 90% of my time fighting court cases against bully-boy corporations for using algorithms and techniques that have been commonly available and shared within our community for years.
So the question is this. How do we get our voices heard by the people who control these processes? How do we put a stop to this ridiculous situation?
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
Slashdot has been overrun by a bunch of kiddiez. That's why I can go days (or weeks) without reading Slashdot, unlike a year+ ago when I had to read it on an hourly basis. /. is so mainstream now, they HAVE to post. Reminds me (sort of) of the comments on any ZDNET crap site.
What's the highest user account # now? Must be 6 digits by now, or pretty damn close. (I'm #3209)... Anyway, I post less and less these days because there's nothing to comment on. The same old shit that nobody cares about but because
Ah well. There's always bastards that are out to ruin a good thing. Thanks for succeeding with it, kidz.
I mean UNIX (TM) has been using this fix since 1972...
regards,
florian
P.S.
I do know, that AT&T doesn't own the UNIX Trademark anymore.
God knows that I wouldn't want to live in a world where rational thought is allowed to prosper. I can't believe a patent was granted for this. The windowing technique was in print more than a year ago in various articles refering how to fix the Y2K problem. Shouldn't this null the patent?
There are no stupid questions, only stupid people asking questions.
How about everyone pay the owner of the patent, and us a really short window, say 2 years (1903-2002). Then, when everything fails in two years, sue the owner for damages for selling a faulty Y2K solution?
:-)
If they're charging for use, they have to be responsible to some degree for the results.
[OF course, this will NEVER stand up in court, so it better be resolved by 2002].
I hope that whoever is responsible for this patent gets raped by space aliens. This is the most god awful cheap lousy way to make money. It bothers me that they were even issued a patent.
Oh, wasn't McDonnell Douglas bought by Boeing?
Quid rides ignare?
There may be a silver lining in this. There is plenty of proof of prior art on this. Software has been doing this since the early seventies and this is done large scale in much of the Y2K kludging these days. Maybe this will be the event that proves to the government that the patent office is incompentant, especially when it comes to issuing software pantents.
Ozwald
5668989 describes a ridiculous scheme of storing dates with the decade digit is hex, with '0-'5 for a-f. I can't conceive of why this would be useful, the patent is probably supposed to be a joke. This also is not even similar to what is described in the news.com article, although that doesn't mean much - how can I trust the article if it doesn't include the most basic information to check up on it (the patent number).
It doesn't mention Bruce Dickens or McDonnell Douglas, but 5806063 does. And it seems to describe the windowing technique from the news.com article.
I'd say it's fairly certain that 5806063 is the correct patent.
And I'd also say, that although I'm used to it, it's disgusting that the news.com story didn't include the patent number. It would have been trivial to do so, and would have been useful for the readers. I can only assume that they purposely didn't do it, to keep people from getting in the habit of checking up on what they are told.
If I recall, the SET EPOCH command was added in Clipper 5.0, which was released in 1990. (I know that Clipper S'87 did not have this command -- a fact that has caused me much grief in fixing old programs, since I have to recompile 'em with 5.x) I would think that the very existence of the SET EPOCH command, which is designed specifically for implementing this windowing technique, would count as prior art -- and that goes back to 1990.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
It's not that they're stupid, but they're overworked and don't have the necessary training. Most CS-type patents are probably handled by somebody whose training was in electrical engineer, not CS. They issue patents that are obvoius to programmers because they aren't programmers. They issue patents that any fool in the IT biz would know of prior art for because they aren't IT ppl.
Whenever somebody tells me that they are thinking of getting a law degree, I tell them that they should go for patent law. Not so that they can be one of the jerkoff lawyers who file these things, but so that they can be a patent examiner. I encourage anybody out there who is good at computers but not that terriffic of a programmer to work for the patent office. They need your help badly.
Moo. www.distributed.net
I recently wrote an article on /. explaining some basic points of patent law. One of my purposes in writing that piece was to inform people about a system which is clearly doing more harm than good. I used to be a patent attorney, but as my views evolved over time, I realized I could no longer help create patents anymore (now I do licensing -- drafting contracts).
I tend to think that the American people are in favor of the patent system because they don't understand it. They think of it as a wonderful way of helping out the Thomas Edison's of the country. In reality it works a lot more like a shake-down. I would be happy to do my part to help inform people about the problems with the patent system, but I am realistic enough to know that the opposing forces are gargantuan -- nothing is likely to change (for the positive, anyway) anytime soon.
-Steve
Democracy is a poor substitute for liberty.
That, and the fact that McDonnell Douglas no longer exists as a company anymore. Surprisingly, no one here noticed that they merged with Boeing back in August 1997. The military group is called McDonnell Aircraft and Missile Systems, and they kept MD's logo, but it's Boeing now.
That way, any time some one uses the patented process of Patent Lawyer processing, the Patent Lawyers will have to pay a fee to do their legal process, which will in turn drive up legal costs and put everyone out of business!
That ought to put an end to things.
Now if only my patent for capitalism would get accepted soon...
The patent says 1996. There is GPL'd code doing this dated 1994. Personally I think it is about time people started routinely countersuing patent abuses, and also charging the patent claimer with perjury since they claimed under oath that it was new when they obviously knew it was not
Any lawyer types think this is possible?
Maybe it's time for a community led organization that informs the general populace of the problems with the patent system?
--
This comment is (©) Copyright Deepak Saxena
Deepak Saxena
"Computers are useless, they can only give you answers" - Picasso
At the risk of being redundant with the replies I cannot see, this is just bad. Though I'm not surprised that someone did it.
When there is a quick and easy way to fix someting and it's fairly intuitive, someone will find a way to say that they came up with that idea and the rest of the people that have been using the same method for however long now have to pay. I'm just surprised it took this long for someone to patent this particular way of solving the year 2000 thing.
"I swear I won't break you if you let me take you where the willows never weep" -- Switchblade Symphony
In my first programming job 15 years ago we knew that the year 2000 was going to be an issue, and coded so that any year less than 50 was CC = '20' - the state of the art 1985 included this method in our little project. It's like patenting - like patenting blue air - like patenting breathing...
would it be unfair to give slashdotting McDonell Douglass employees some kind of automatic karma penalty to reflect the massive negative karma that McDonell Douglass earns for this heist?
Interested in learning Chinese or Japanese? check out Chinese/Japanese-English Dictiona
Speaking of MACOS, the original Macintosh OS used a 2-digit year for some things, and 'windowed' it as 1920-2019.
When was the patent applied for? I found no link to ibm's patent server. Anyway, I'm not proud to say it, but i wrote a small program in 1994 that wasn't Y2K-safe. I fixed it in 1995 using the 'windowing' fix that has apparantly been patented. I can't believe that every average programmer wouldn't come up with this on his own like I did, therefore the patent should never have been granted... / Krister
Freevo - Linux Multimedia Jukebox
I'll bet this solution has been published before McD-D can show they worked on it, I remember people telling me that's how they were solving Y2K problems in '92 -- I'm pretty sure that this solution is not novel, and unexpected by an expert, and I don't expect the patent to hold up in court.
So let them have the patent for all it's worth and fix the damn things right the first time!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The next thing you know, in 2029, they'll patent a revolutionary new "windowing method", where years 30 to 59 are treated as years 2030 to 2059. Wow.
For all the bitching and moaning, I haven't yet seen a post that mentions this link:
League for Programming Freedom
Funny, they used to be at lpr.org, but now "Students for Unity" is there ... does LPR have funding issues, or are they just charitable?
Anyway, this site explains in detail what is wrong with patents and what we can do about it. They are even old-school enough to use .xbm's just to prove a point ;-)
To get it operate consistently and correctly, only the second to last digit would be a hex digit. Otherwise, how do you interpret 198a? There would be too many redundant representations of years. The actual year 2002 could be represented as 199b or 19a2. 2010 could be represented as 19aa or 19b0. If you restrict hex to the second to last digit, there is exactly one correct representation for each year between 1900 and 2159 inclusive. The simple fact that I can figure this out without having it explained, BTW, should indicate that this is a non-patentable idea, shouldn't it?
I know for sure that this method to circumvent the Y2K problem has been used and taught in schools over and over for many years now, so how can this be patented?
Sometimes when I read the artciles on Slashdot I feel like I'm reading Segfault instead. This was one of those.
-= Scanline =-
"But I'm still like a little kid, see?
I just don't know when to quit."
- Rei
I'm not the greatest programmer in the world but it always puzzles me why we bother with windowing dates at all.
It takes twelve bits to encode numbers 0 to 4095. (Of course, this throws off byte/word alignment, but it's just an idea...) Why not just use these twelve bits (or a nice 16 bit number) to represent the complete date? In today's modern computing age where average Joe buying his first computer gets 128 Megabytes of RAM this should not be a problem...
Can anyone explain why a gradual switch to an absolute (as opposed to windowed) dating system would be difficult with new hardware and software?
I can immediately think of prior art for this problem, from an unlikely source too. Microsoft Excel 4.0 for Macintosh interpreted 1/1/10 as Jan 1 2010.
/. login.
As I recall the breaking point is 2014, so if the year number is part of the patent this may not be relevant, however that also makes the patent easy to circumvent.
-Dan5184
p.s. Not a.c, waiting for
Prior art is easy to prove. MS-DOS. IBM-DOS. DR-DOS. All of these accept two-digit years in various contexts within the OS. If the year is 80 or higher, these OS's assume 19xx; if the year is 79 or below, they assume 20xx. This is clearly an example of windowing.
In other words, the technique is at least 18 years old (was MS-DOS released in 1981?) and therefore the patent *must* be invalid.
Now for how long will McDonnell-Douglas insist on the validity of their patent if they have Microsoft's legal team after them?
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
I joined IBM in 1987, and was soon confronted with a 2 digit date. Immediately realising the stupidity of storing it as such, I came up with windowing in 15 seconds. That McDonnell Douglas (didn't they merge with Boeing) consider this "not obvious" might explain why large metal objects with their name stamped on the side fall out of the sky.
I've personally used this method to fix Y2K issues for 5 different companies I've freelanced to. Does this mean I should expect a call from M-D in the near future? Anyone got a patent number on this thing? I want to start researching my "prior art". Can I countersue them for annoying me?
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
Have you ever written a program and/or studied software engineering? The process is the same way you'd design anything else, whether it's a bridge, a car, or a piece of computer hardware. Certain things work, certain things don't. The only difference is that with software, there's no final product in the traditional sense. The whole thing is the design.
I can implement any kind of abstract shape in concrete too - That doesn't mean that A.] It will stand up or B.] It will make a good road. The application of a constraining set of laws makes all the difference.
Err, nice try, but the variable is unsigned long which rolls over in 2106. Do the math.
RFC1925
The SAS system, which I learned to program in 1987, already had a date window. By setting an option with a date (i.e. 1950), all two digit dates were interpred to occur in the 100 year span from date to date+99. This is exactly the claim in the patent. Many pre-1987 SAS manuals exist which document this option.
I only have a SAS manual from 1990. The YEARCUTOFF= system option is documented on page 790 of my SAS Language: Reference; Version 6; First Edition (ISBN 1-55544-381-8).
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Whoops! My bad. I read the title of that patent and thought it had to do with sorting dates. I guess this shows exactly how vague the patent is...
4 6__
If you want a laugh, I think another patent covers 2-digit dates as well. It's also vague, so who knows.
http://www.patents.ibm.com/details?&pn=US057583
æeee!
I have a citizen watch manufactured in 1980 that uses this patent, so, assuming that a respected company won't apply for a patent when prior art is easily verifiable, or that the efficient PTO won't issue such a patent, it means the patent
was issued before 1980, so it is expired by now.
--
Matan Ziv-Av (away from my password)
Sybase's databases still do this. So does Powerbuilder. If you use a 2 digit year edit mask on a date field, PB uses windowing to guess at the year the user really means.
Of course, for the programmer, this means I have to double check every date entry field in the app and make sure I specified a 4 digit date mask (default is 2).
"Anyone who can't laugh at himself is not taking life seriously enough." - Larry Wall
I wrote this a while ago about the Amazon patent. I have inserted new comments regarding this even more obvious patent...
I was reading through the transcript of a public hearing on prior art. It sounds like when a patent is submitted people look for prior art in current patent databases (including some foreign databases). They also try to review what they call "non-patent literature" (NPL). This information consists of abstracts from "technical journals" and, if needed, an "information specialist" can assist the person in researching prior art. They did mention that in the field of computers the NPL databases may or may not contain evidence of prior art.
In the public hearing it was stated that there is a law "so-called Rule 56, which requires that that material prior art, of which the applicant is aware, be disclosed to the Office." It was said that they understand that it may be hard to comply to this rule. I looked through the patent but I could not find any references to prior art. Maybe someone else knows where these types of things are posted (if they are disclosed)? It was said that most patent submissions include (on average) about 4 documents of prior art.
In the transcript Keith Stephens nicely explains the need to disclose all prior art... It would be interesting to know how much prior art Amazon.com submitted for this "1-Click" patent.
So it seems even if there is prior art that this does not stop it from being patented if it is "sufficiently different" (see below). So exactly what role does prior art play in the patent process then?
From the excellent document What can be patented it states that abstract ideas (read: windowing for the Y2K problem) are not patentable. So if "buying things remotely with one action" is an abstract idea, then the key in Amazon's patent must be the interaction between the client, server, and "communication medium" as well as supporting technologies (ex. read in the patent about combining single orders into one order: "expedited order selection"). So it may be that these less abstract ideas are enforceable, but then again at the top of the document the "claims" that were made were very general. How is the idea of "windowing" not abstract and how can the person even prove he thought of the idea. I was reading through an IBM pamphlet on Y2k and it stated that they had been doing research about Y2K for years, including the windowing technique...
From the same document referenced in the above paragraph it also states that "The subject matter sought to be patented must be sufficiently different from what has been used or described before that it may be said to be nonobvious to a person having ordinary skill in the area of technology related to the invention." So another question I pose is when did Amazon "invent" this type of ordering system? Surely "sufficiently similiar" systems could be found before Amazon "invented" its ordering system. What about the windowing system?? I'm sure any decent programmer could have thought of that one... perhaps we need a few programmers in higher political places (alas, programming and politics don't mix well -- and I rather like it that way).
Notice also that the [Amazon] patent states that "one skilled in the art" will appreciate that the patent also covers other ordering mechanisms such as email. This is incredulous... this means that the patent convers all automated email-based order processing systems!
On a side note, on the US Patent and Trademark Office's web site in the definition of a patent they state that "US patent grants are effective only within the US, US territories, and US possessions." How exactly can this relate to the internet? What if a U.S. company contracts with a foreign (ex. European) company to create an e-commerce web site that remembers users credit cards and allows buying an item with one click of a button. Would the patent affect the web site because a U.S. company sponsered the development of the site OR would it not be under the umbrella of the patent since it was hosted in the foreign company?
The economy has already been hurt by people afraid of Y2K (although arguably it has created more jobs temporarily etc), so why must someone come and try to create damage after the fact? Has anyone actually found the patent online? It would make for very interesting reading. Perhaps we should start writing Congress about these patents, eh?
The issues of patents is a tough one, and hopefully we can work through (around) situations like this Amazon patent and somehow manage to let innovation flourish still. The idea of (software) patents is really against the entire concept backing Open Source. The real question is, what should be done about it?
-Kevin
How about patenting the process of applying for a software patent that is obvious to everyone but the patent office without admitting to any prior art, and then using that patent to sue people who obviously did not steal your work. Now, if the patent office lets it go through, then you have a weapon against people who do stuff like this. If the patent office rejects it on account of prior art, they are admitting that this has already happened and they are letting garbage patents get through.
Setting aside the stupidity of granting this patent for a moment, it seems to me that this is a particularly hard patent to enforce. If I were a large corporation and McDonnel-Douglas came to me asking to see the code running my in house systems, wouldn't I just laugh at them? Can they somehow legally gain access to the code of every company that might have conveivably fixed a Y2K bug to see how it was done? Some programs are out in the world for anyone to examine, sure, but an awful lot of Y2K non-compliant code is tied up in ancient in-house systems. Does having any software patent at all entitle me to look at all the code in the world to make sure it isn't violating my patent? That seems far fetched, but only a bit more so than granting this patent in the first place.
This is one of the most retarded things I have ever heard. They're gonna sue companies for trying to fix a bug that some people think will alter civilization as we know it tremendously. I mean what kind of company wants a reputation for impeding process towards Y2K compliance?!? As if people aren't freaked out enough about the whole Y2K thing.
.Maybe this is a sign of the apocalypse...Stupid big businesses impedeing progress of the common good. Head for the hills everybody!
For once in my life, maybe I'll be glad I'm in a small town in Arkansas.
-- Only in America would the problem of dates not being represented in enough digits be abbreviated as "the Y2K bug"
In 1970, some mortgage banker invented windowing to deal with a 30-year mortgage which would be paid off in '00 (2000, not 1900) - and it had to be calculated correctly, because ACTUAL MONEY was involved. His computer used punch cards, so the technique of expanding the field to 4 digits was not possible. Viola! Windowing to the rescue! In 1970! This guy Bruce Dickens who claims to have invented it is a fraud, just as much as I would be if I were to say I invented the knot that people use to tie their shoes, and then try to sue Nike and Florsheim over it. But I'm not worried. The first target of M-D's lawsuits will obviously be Microsoft, which uses the technique a lot, in programs like Access. The second target might be IBM, which has been telling its customers to use Windowing in manuals it has been publishing for years before Mr. Dickens came along. This suit will be similar to, but more entertaining than, Mothra versus Godzilla, and will prove how silly this all is, and should hopefully end in the patent being invalidated. As long as we can keep the action limited to Mothra, Godzilla, and a bunch of pinheaded lawyers, the rest of us might be safe. Or not.
This is actually called a "cusp date". I know for a fact that Excel uses it, and has used it since at least 1995 (I did some really trivial y2k remediation stuff). DOS has been using this for ages as well (enter 1-1-00 as the date, it comes out 2000, most DOS file interrupts handles this the same way as well). As much as I hate to point to an MS product as prior art, well, it's the most readily available one in my brain right now. :)
This patent will fall hard. Don't worry.
æeee!
(Yes, I know the original post was tongue-in-cheek, but I couldn't resist the nitpick.)
I saw this article this morning. These guys are nothing but a bunch of golddiggers. I'm surprised a company like McDonnel-Douglas would be associated with something like this - it's not exactly the best way to keep your popularity with your customers.
What really strikes me as bizarre is that they admit that other companies were using the fix before it was patented. I know that the USA uses the patent-by-invention system rather than the patent-by-application system (in other words, the guy who invents it first gets to claim the patent, even if someone else makes the application first), while virtually every other country in the world with a patent office does it the other way, but this is still ridiculous. If they're going to try and extort money from other comnpanies, they'd damn well better be ready to prove that they invented the technique (if you can call it that) before anyone else.
And as for that bit about license fees going up after Y2K - that's nothing but cheap blackmail. Can't a big corporation with pots of money (like IBM) stomp them flat on this one before it spreads?
Is there a patent lawyer out there than can tell me if any of these is prior art?
1. In the mid-70's several U.S. Navy systems I worked on used 4-digit julian dates with the form YDDD. 'Y' was the last digit of the year and the software used a rolling window to determine which year. This software was written in the late 60's and persisted into the 80's through an emulator.
2. In 1991 I wrote the code for a system that allows the user to enter 2-digit years and determined the correct year based on a rolling base year. This code was Y2K Ready in 1991! The resulting dates are converted to serial numbers that are stored in the database. This serial number, like the patent's years, is offset from a base date. -- Does it really matter that the patent's serial numbers are 2-digit BCD and mine are 16-bit binary?
Here are several other thoughts:
1. Storing offsets is a fundmental computer technique. Every record pointer is an offset from the beginning of a file. Every C pointer is an offset from the beginning of memory. Every (christian) date is an offset from year zero!
2. It seems to me that storing '97' in the database, with an implied offset from 1900, is not significantly different than storing '17' with an explicit offset from 1980.
3. The "10-decade window" seems like a red herring and obfuscation factor. No matter how you slice it, 2 decimal digits are always limited to a 100 year window.
I was wondering if other windowing mechanisms are also covered in the patent like the sequence number in TCP or that piece of glass that goes up and down in my car ;-) Now seriously, if the windowing of the TCP sequence numbers is covered by this patent, then this will be even better than the patent of Amazon.com for 1-click credit-card shopping of. All e-commerce transactions would be using this invention!! However if the wrapping around of TCP sequence numbers was implemented before the patent was requested, then there is a good way of challenging the patent in court. After all a year in a computer is a number that increases monotonically pretty much like a sequence number. Pablo Molinero
I am sending this as AC so that my legally paranoid employer doesn't catch me giving away brain cell excreta.
/* (ie. 01998)*/
... etc. only optimized */ /* (ie. 02011)*/
The windowing algorithm SUCKS!!!! The inventor is an asshole!!!! This just delays the problem!!!!
Here is a better algorithm *** FOR FREE ***.
char* get_year(char date_yy[2])
{
int t_yy;
char new_yy[6];
t_yy = (int) (date_yy[0] * 256) + date_yy[1];
if ( t_yy LT 15000 ) {
/* It is a brain-dead Y2K buggy date */
/* Because ASCII 99 = x'3939' = 14649 */
strcpy (new_yy, '01900');
new_yy[3] = date_yy[0];
new_yy[4] = date_yy[1];
return new_yy;
}
else {
new_yy[4] = (char) (t_yy % 10) + 48;
new_yy[3] = (char) ((t_yy % 100) / 10) + 48;
/*
return new_yy;
}
}
The reverse is to convert new dates into integers, add 15000 (a nice round number), and move the value into the 16 bit field. This gives the bozos that invented the Y2K bug about 50,000 years to learn how to program.
OK, so we've all heard the arguments why patents are a bad idea for software, and believe me, I see the value in all of them. Consider, hypothetically, why they might be the best thing we have. (IE, it's the worst form of IP protection for software, except for all the others...)
In the US (and most other industrialized countries I'm assuming) we have two major methods of intellectual property protection: the patent and the copyright, with the former for technological designs and the latter for creative works.
In my mind, software is much more of a technological design than a creative work. Why? Because one is created and the other designed - yes, there is a difference. It's because software is constrained to a certain set of laws that it must follow to be considered software. Parts in a machine must obey the physical laws; programs must run on a machine with a limited instruction set. If you write a book, you can put whatever you want in it - several thousand pages of random scribbles if you like - and it's still copyrightable.
(Posted anonymously because I know I'm going to get flamed to all hell)
Here is the full text from the USPTO server.
It really is as simple as it sounds. Quite unbelievable.
I can show working code using Y2K windowing that I wrote in 1969. Maybe I should get a lawyer and take over the patent, huh?
Does the U.S. government really hire as many morons as us 2nd world countries?
Bill
I'm currently trying to get a patent on the idea of patenting, then I can screw over companies that I don't like like this.
Giga Information Group expects that Dickens's attorneys will seek lump sum payments ranging from $50,000 to $100,000 from firms that already have used the Y2K fix.
Doesn't the fact that they are seeking retroactive payments for before-the-fact patent violations in itself establish prior art?
"Oh by the way, that thing you've been doing for years, I just invented it yesterday. So you owe me money. Pay up."
"I have a good idea why it's hard to verify programs. They're usually wrong." --Manuel Blum, FOCS 94
Yes this method has been done,
Lanius Corp uses this method in their Maximus BBS & Squish message handling software (yeah fidonet..)
When did they claim to have invented this technique? If it's after 1989 then they will be in trouble. The popular DOS language Clipper had a command in the language to enable this date window. A simple SET EPOCH TO 1980 would mean that any date entered as 01/01/80 would be seen as 01 Jan 1980, and 01/01/79 would be seen as 01 Jan 2079. You can change this to any date window you desire. Are they going to go after every Clipper programmer who has used that command in their program. Do we all now owe this company money?
What about the free software project Harbour who are creating an open source, cross-platform Clipper compiler. Can the participants be sued for including the command in their compiler?
The US Patent system is a Joke. Software patents should not be allowed. I'm glad I don't live in the "Land of the free"
-- Hulver's site
- Ancient news, &
- Proof that western society is fucked in the head.
Sigh.Microsoft Excel 5.0 (the last 16-bit version of Excel, shipped with Office 4.3) uses this "windowing" technique. The date 12/31/19 is taken as 12/31/2019, but the date 1/1/20 is taken as 1/1/1920.
The copyright date on Excel 5.0 is 1993. The patent in question was applied for in 1996.
but still stupid.
8 989
;)
Here's the patent in question:
http://www.patents.ibm.com/details?&pn10=US0566
What does this mean? It means that you can represent years from 1900-2059 using a hexidecimal number, where the first digit is a decade indicator (10 years) and the second digit is an offset in the decade.
Okay, it's definately original, but I haven't seen anyone use this method yet. You may as well just represent your two-digit date as a byte, and use "100" as the value for 2000. This is good all the way up to 2155 too! If anyone has actually seen these dates anywhere, I'd like to know. Not a clean solution in any case...
Welcome to the year 19a0 everyone!
æeee!
Power button is no problem, I can't remember when I last used it. Patenting the process of pressing "reset" is going to fail even more horribly, I wonder if mine even still works :)
This is the wrong patent.. The patent in question is the actual windowing one at:
8 989
http://www.patents.ibm.com/details?&pn10=US0566
æeee!
Makes me wonder if this article was fabricated by someone unaware of MD's assimilation by Boeing.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Check out the other Y2K related patents (search for Y2K at US Patent & Trade Office's web site) and then look at the other referenced patents... (I count at least 14) It seems as though every common thing related to dates has been patented... What's next... patenting things like object oriented programming and data models??? -Kevin
ITU uses this exact same practice in the X.509 standard to interpret 2 year dates in certificates. I believe this practice has been in X.509 since at 1993. So prior art will make this patent useless.
(forgive my posting as Anonymous Coward, I didn't feel like creating an account for one posting).
-Terence Spielman
terence@globeset.com
Sarcasm is spoken here. Virtually every single digital device nowadays, including all microprocessors, use 2's complement arithmetic, which is just a colloraly of representing numbers by a finite sequence of digits.
Since submitting the article, I've found the patent in question. Here is a link to the abstract. The patent number is 5,806,063, and application was filed on 10/3/96. There's gotta be prior art.
Oh, and by way of correction. McDonnell Douglas assigned the patent to the inventor, Bruce Dickens. Mr. Dicken's (and his attorneys) are the ones running around threatening everyone.
--GnrcMan--
I have no sense of humour. Unless everyone is totally serious and nerdy they should just shut up. I like to fill my cardboard box up with sticks and then empty it and fill it up again. I think I'll paint my cardboard box all kinds of wonderful colors. From Martha Stewart. Then I'll patent my cardboard box and stick it up my butt. I'll patent that too and complain on slashdot when people post stupid messages like "hey stick that up your butt." Oh my, I wet my pants.
For you conspiricists out there:
Maybe the inventor is really an anti-patent fanatic who is trying to set up a test case. This patent has no chance of being upheld since it is obviously public domain. So he's sitting there thinking 'how would I demonstrate to the world that software patents are stupid?' and comes up with this farce.
The set-up is perfect, they have set up a system where they will infuriate every company that uses mainframes (the patent is somewhat specific to EBCDIC). This invites a real, open-court test of software patents which is highly visible. Mr. anarchist achieves his goal when Congress steps in and disallows all 'frivolous patents' and rewrites the laws.
It could happen...
Tony
A couple of points need to be addresed. Before commenting on Patents PERHAPS you should read up on the What and Why's of PATENTING.
Patenting(in a nutshell) just says that you're idea is Unique as far as they know. The courts decide if it is worth a damn.
go here->> http://www.uspto.gov/
Befor making ignorant comments about this patent PERHAPS you should read it, jeez.
McDonald Doulglas is NOT sueing anybody over this becaus THEY DON'T own the patent.
Some guy named Bruce Dickens, from Irvine California(USA)owns the Patent. Douglas allowed him to keep the rights to use it. like IBM allowed Bill Gate$ to keep the rights to DOS.
The patent number is 5806063
Sorry about the rant. I know some people have looked up this information
but so many people are spewing crap on this topic, it need to be said.
"Igonorance I can handle, It's stupidity I'll kick you're ass for!" nameless millitary TI
At least not yet. But you could probably trademark it and then sue everyone that uses it in an online discussion, like some people.
Although, since there is an operation associated with the phrase, I supose that constitutes a process, and processes can certainly be patented.
I withdraw my objection, your Honor.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
Abstract: The invention relates to obtaining exclusive use of products and ideas. Such products or ideas will be registered through a legislative body which will judge the applications to this body on it's merits including but not excluding to:
--
two-thousand-zero-zero
party over, it's out of time
Alright, let's just say that this patent holds.
There is surely a finite number of general technique for fixing the "Y2K bug". What happens when ALL techniques become patented? Do we have to just let our applications crash?
What about when someone patents the process of an application crashing due to the Y2k bug? Do we have to stop using computers at that point?
This is totally riduculous!
I posted earlier about the fact that Pick Systems has used this "windowing" technique in their operating systems and databases for probably at least 15-20 years.
I just remembered that the president of my company had an article published in "Computing News and Review" early this year (I think February), where he described how Pick products handle the years and pointed out that this would be a problem for mortgages and other programs starting in 2000 because the window cuts off at 2030.
I don't know if "Computing News and Review" has their old issues online or not, but if someone wants to dig out some old issues, the article was written by Scott Zachary.
Just trying to help.
PEACE
The fact that McDonnell-Douglas are prepared to testify that the fix is "nonobvious" suggests that none of McDonnell-Douglas' employees have basic common sense. And these guys make aeroplanes..
The patent you are referring to was not assigned to Bruce Dickens by McDonnell Douglas. The correct patent is 5,806,063
--GnrcMan--
I did that 2 years ago,
If ( year 70 ) year += 2000;
else year += 1900;
Man that must have taken some science and 12 PHDs man!
I say fuck em, and let a damn comet smash into the damn planet and bring on the wrath of god.
As always the open standards process has come up with a complete and well thought out document.
An excerpt:
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
Forget the fact that it's been done for a long time. The US Patent Office obviously has no time to thing about whether prior art exists.
Also, for those wondering, the patent mentioned in the article was filed October 3, 1996.
------
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
The AS/400 environment allows several kinds of dates, some of them with 4 digit years, but dates with 2 digit years are windowed such that 00-39 = 2000-2039.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
This appears to cover windowing *stored* dates, not applying a window as new two-digit values are entered.
So, don't be a putz, and always keep your dates in your databases with full four-digit years.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Oracle has had a built-in date conversion "dd-mon-rr" for quite a while now that works exactly this way. Values for RR from 0-49 are treated as 2000-2049 and values from 50-99 are treated as 1950-1999. Don't know how long this format has been around, but it sure might be prior art.
---
"Go Metallica. Die RIAA." -- Linus Torvalds
I'd like to patent the use of binary number 1xxxxxxx as -128 to -1, and 0xxxxxxx as 0 to 127. Every single digital device that uses 2's complement arithmetic should pay me one cent.
I've had it. It's time we the geeks who write these programs start flexing a little political muscle. It can begin with something as simple as flooding our Senators and Congressmen/women with e-mails faxes and yes even snail mail. It's getting to the point where you can't even write #include **** without violating some jackapes patent. We wrote the code and yet idiots like these patent it and steal the money from our hands. What's next a patent on breathing? Count the patent violations on this page alone. Links, gif images, color, lists, the very page I'm using to submit this ramble are all in violation of some jackape suits patent. It's time those fatcats in DC hear about this. For Non-Americans you can help as well write your governments. Inform them how patents like this stiffle your economies. How they inhibit your ability to import code and products into the US and abroad. Make your government put pressure on ours to change what has become a feeding trough for suits who can't create just steal. Nov 5th may be burn your gif day but frankly that isn't the answer, we need to stand up to these suit banstards and say FSCK Q!!! We aren't going to take it. It's time the fat cats learned the true power and influance of the geek communitte. We have the numbers, the brains and the means, lets use it. I therefore submit to the geek communitte a proposal. National flood the gov day. And just for fun let's make it Thanksgiving...
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
5,668,989 is for storing the decade digit as binary coded decimal, so 1905 -> 0x0005, 2005 -> 0x0A05.
5,806,063 is indeed the windowing patent given to McDonnell Douglas, as I posted.
Even more staggering, if anything, is 5,630,118. It just says "give it to a subroutine to decide" -- any subroutine!
>Welcome to the year 19a0 everyone! ;)
Uhm, after 1999 comes 199a.
- Gridle
(see above)
WOW !!!
I think there are ten (10!) years since somebody pointed out to me that there was a method to store dates so they could be sorted by time without any problem.
That is jan 12th 1999 would be written 19990112. If you name your logfiles Daemon.19991015 etc. They will be automaticly sorted by date when you do 'ls -l'. It came with the story that it was called "the Japanese Method of storing dates".
And now (1998) somebody has patented this practice ????
If this isn't a damn good reason for other countries NEVER to accept software patents, then nothing is.
--
Why pay for drugs when you can get Linux for free ?
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Okay, this calls for a boycott! I'm never gonna buy another aircraft from them again!!!!
I implemented windowed timing when I was working for GEC Avionics 1985-1987 for a slat/flap control computer on Airbus A320. Does this mean I can claim the patent from MD ?
[not that I really want too, because I'm sure other people have used it]
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I am not absolutely certain if this example pre-dates the patent date, but the Oracle database engine has a special date format, where you put in 'RR' instead of 'YY' when you format dates. It then windows the date around 1950/2049 (I think).
I remember using this on a project a number of years ago - I'm pretty sure it was before 10/1996. Even if it wasn't, it was close to then, and the people at Oracle must have been planning it for a while before release. If that was even the first oracle db release to use it.
bakes
--
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
I think that this may be a bogus report or a prank because there has been no McDonnald-Douglas company for some time now. It is The Boeing company now. So if a patent was issued, it would have been issued to Boeing.
Allow me to describe the world as I see it. First of all -- Whoa, what the... Hey look here, it's an "opposable thumb". This is really cool! Hey everybody look -- actually, nevermind -- I'm gonna quitely patent this thing. Then sue everybody that has one. And if you have two I'll sue you for three times as much. MooHooHaaHaa! Then I will invest all my money in Micro$oft: how evil can I get?
/etc/passwd /etc/passwd ~/.sig
--
> wc -l
67890
> rm ~/.sig ; ln -s
Amazingly enough, if you simply click on the related patents, you'll see a bunch of patents that are as stupid. For instance the one that says that if dates were stored with two bytes (such as ASCII), then use binary values out-of-range for the other years.
In 1987 or 1988 I wrote some code that parsed a date entered by the user, converting it to the form stored in a database - among other things it guessed which century was intended if a two digit year was entered. I can't believe it was a new idea then, or that using it on a database of existing dates isn't equally obvious.
(In fact, surely the very fact that so many other people have been using it independently proves that it is obvious).
(AFAIR, my code will get the 2100 leap year wrong, but someone will have to fix the 2038 bug in the language it uses before that matters).
rant
If I understand the news.com article correctly, I used that technique for at least one (probably more, don't remember) DOS program I wrote in the late '80s. It's the only reasonable way to interpret a two digit year.
I think the patent system as we know it is coming to an end.
This is my quick fix for the 'Patent2K bug.' Step 1: Patent Stupidity Step 2: Run every company with a stupid patent into ground with lawsuits Step 3: Run patent office into ground with lawsuits. Step 4: Place patent in public domain. -Tony
In the public hearing it was stated that there is a law "so-called Rule 56, which requires that that material prior art, of which the applicant is aware, be disclosed to the Office." It was said that they understand that it may be hard to comply to this rule. I looked through the patent but I could not find any references to prior art. Maybe someone else knows where these types of things are posted (if they are disclosed)? It was said that most patent submissions include (on average) about 4 documents of prior art.
Now I may be wrong but IIRC MS Office uses this technique to work out what year a two digit year field should be translated to. I wonder if any of the documents for this application were word-processed on MS Word....
Kithran
Here is summary of "Basic Patent Law for Programmers" -discussion. We should analyse possible solutions that were presented and see what of those should be employed.
And it's what you get when you have non-technical people in key management positions, who don't know their ass from page six. Some little under-nerd probably convinced his boss, who probably can't even TYPE "boss" on a computer, that he "discovered" the Y2k windowing technique. And of course, management, needing the occasional quick sense of gratification, and *certainly* not knowing any better, thinks it's worth a patent. It's times like these that remind us of what happens when you get caught in the act, with your pants down. I don't know about the one who initiated the push for this patent, but if it were me, I'd be *awfully* embarrassed - even humiliated - when I finally realized just how unoriginal this idea really is.
I almost feel bad for this guy. Why? It would only take a couple dozen or so consulting companies with a big influx of Y2K income to pool their funds and initiate a lawsuit of their own. $50,000 is pocket change to a big company, but small and medium companies would feel it.
.sig, no slogan.
Does anyone know if a "class" for a class-action suit (in American courts) includes companies, or is it just for individuals?
No
This is so old, there's prior art everywhere. I'm enough of a dinosaur that I used the technique back in the late 70's, and it was common practice. (Er, that's the 1970's, not the 2070's. Oh shit, I just used windowing, they're after me.)
-ac
If they really do start to sue fortune-500 companies, do you really think those companies will sit idly by and pay up? Hopefully they'll be just as incensed as you and I about this and start lobbying against these silly, stupid, common-sense software patents...
Works for me... all I get to see are the informative
and insightful replies.
Let's hear it for moderation
Friends don't let friends buy Compaq's. (Dell/Gateway... same same) You want a good computer? Build it yourself.
According to the patented method itself, the patent has already expired
(current_year > expiration_year),
and next year it is not even patented yet !
Can't be that either. The French motorways systems (at least SAPRR and AREA) have prior art: if you take the same motorway twice in a short time (there and back), and pay your toll with Visa, both tolls are combined, and show up as one single transaction on your monthly statement. They've been doing this for a looong time (at least ten years, as far as I know).
Hereby I declare I've just patented the wheel. I demand that everyone who uses my technology pays me $100 per wheel per year or $1000 per wheel for a lifetime. I've also patented the idea of drinking water and the concept of reading. Cash please! :)
"Sleazy, corrupt blackmailers."
:-)
I knew you could.
Even if it eventually gets thrown out, they probably figure they make enough from "nusiance fees" in the meantime to cover their court costs and make a profit. I hope that judge makes them pay everybody back, with interest and tacks on a huge penalty (donation to the FSF?) for pulling such a cynical criminal stunt.
Patents are supposed to operate in order to encourage innovation for the benefit of all. This is just the total polar opposite.
This one is going to cause a huge uproar, there are _way_ too many companies getting screwed on this one. If they pool their legal resources, (maybe a pre-emptive class action lawsiut?), they could easily outgun M-D.
(McDonnell Douglas? Didn't they get bought out by Boeing last year?)
Mayber this will be the one finally does a BSOD on the USPTO.
Ideology is for ideots.
Speaking as a European, I can't wait to file for my new patent -- on the business practice of moving your entire IT department out of the USA in order to evade stupid US patent lawsuits that would be unenforcable anywhere else in the world!
You people are god damned amazine, what are you going to patent next, Air? -"Don't breathe or we'll sue your butt off!"
go somewhere else then
*sigh* Not only do we have the usual cliches about patenting everything in sight (Stop breathing: You're infringing on patents 5,678,910 and 5,789,012), but also we have the (nowadays untrue) reiteration that the Y2K bug happened because programmers wanted to save a byte or two. When does this nonesense stop?
The Y2K bug happened because people window dates already. It of course seems absurd to patent the cause as the cure. The reason computers process dates with two-digit years is that humans process dates as two digit years. Twenty to thirty years ago, those two digits might have meant something in terms of storage, and yes, there is legacy COBOL code that is that old which exhibits the bug for that reason. Nowadays, those bytes are nothing, and the Y2K bug in modern software is mainly due to sloppy human custom being poorly translated to computer form.
Using two-digit years is a long-standing human practice, and let's face it, it's pretty arbitrary how we handle them. Humans generally have a pretty good sense of context, and I doubt machines will ever match it. Nonetheless, even humans can (and do) get tripped up.
*sigh*
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
The first time I saw windowing used as a Y2k
solution was in 1988 in the Global 2000 (BOS)
Operating System. The system admin got to choose
the century start date at install time or later
via the system admin menus.
Even though people are already doing it, and it is obvious to any parasite with a lawyer, I've patented the technique of applying for a patent for a direction that everybody in the industry is taking, even though such a patents such never be granted (isn't there a requirement for innovation?). Then saying nothing while everyone starts using "my idea", and hitting them for $$$ a few years later.
All these guys like McDonnell-Douglas are gonna get a huge bill from my lawyers pretty soon. They should have checked the patent archives before embarking on such a scam^H^H^H legal course of action, but now it is going to cost them!
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
Jeez, I remember years ago when I started programming my first database application with Sybase as the back-end there were two different date types they supported. A long (four-digit) format and a compressed format where anything before 35 (I think) was interpreted as 20xx. I know that wasn't all that long ago (no more than four years, I'm sure) but surely this wasn't a new feature then.
-Joe
US05630118
System and method for modifying and
operating a computer system to perform
date operations on date fields spanning
centuries
US5668989
Two-digit hybrid radix year numbers for
year 2000 and beyond
US5740442
Method and apparatus for identifying and
correcting date calculation errors caused
by truncated year values
US05797117
Month field division multiplexing
solution for year 2000 computer date
problem
US05808889
System and method for identifying and
correcting computer operations involving
two digit year dates
US05970247
Methods for encoding decoding and
processing six character date
designations for the year 2000 and
beyond
I found this code in linux/arch/i386/kernel/time.c
/* removed code to read the hardware clock */
unsigned long get_cmos_time(void)
{
if ((year += 1900) < 1970)
year += 100;
return mktime(year, mon, day, hour, min, sec);
}
The code reads the CMOS (hardware battery) clock, and adjusts the year if the CMOS clock returns a year before 1970. This works nice until 2070.
The comments in the file can indicate that this code was added by Alan Modra in 1994.
RFC1925
I'm looking at my SAS/Language book, Copyright 1990, and it documents the "YEARCUTOFF" option:
"The YEARCUTOFF= system option specifies the first of a 100-year span used as the default by various DATE and DATETIME informats and functions."
...
"For example, if you specify YEARCUTOFF=1950, any two-digit value between 50 and 99 inclusive refers to the first half of the 100-year span, which is in the 1900s. Any two-digit value between 00 and 49 inclusive refers to the second half of the 100-year span, which is in the 2000s."
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Yesterday I missed my daily /. because I was at a funeral for a lady who was born in 94. She spend 55 years as a minister in my church before her health forced her to retire.
Hmm... I wonder if we couldn't find a little prior art just by asking the old folks how their window changed. I'll bet some of them can honestly testify in court that at one time they considered anything before xx to be 19xx, otherwise it was 18xx.
It's barely two months before "Y2K" and it's certain that thousands of consultants are scrambling around computer systems all over this country trying to fix "Y2K bugs." Some of those consultants are working for the Federal Government. Some of those consultants working for the Gov't are using this "Windowing" technique to fix the bugs. McDonnel-Douglass is going to want to sue these consultants and/or the federal government for violating their patent, causing those consultants to have to re-do all their work with some other method...
...less than two months before "Y2K".
Can you say "National Security"? Can you see the federal government using its pull to invalidate this patent pretty f-ing quickly so it doesn't have to scrap everything they've been working on for the last couple of years?
This really could be a good thing. Of course, what will likely happen is that only this one patent will get overturned and the rest of the patent system will continue to be screwed up and useless just like it has been.
I'm kind of surprised that nobody has taken the tack that, as stated in the Contitution, the whole concept of "patents" and the "patent office" comes from the phrase, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" and that it seems pretty obvious that the patent system, as exists, no longer promotes Progress of Science and useful Arts.
Someone brave should just sue the patent office as it exists as being unconstitutional and use as evidence the huge number of patent lawsuits and the ways these massive technology corporations now keep "patent portfolios" not to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" but to use as essentially blackmail to keep other companies from suing them, or as in this case with McDonnel-Douglass, to threaten every computer-reliant corporation in the country with lawsuits for doing what's essentially government mandated work to update their computer systems. It might work.
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
So on the whole, it's probably best for patent applicants to put in references to any related work they know about: the PTO will probably not check anyway or engage in detailed analyses, but it will make it that much more difficult to challenge the patent on the basis of prior art.
I figure, all we need to dig up that stupid Pepsi Points topic, and then we will have an accurate, textbook example of a real waste of bandwidth.
This may be a bit of a naive approach and probably not original, but what about creating a non-profit organization (with funding from concerned programmers, companies, etc.) whose only job is to file patents on the sort of supposedly non-obvious things that are being patented and to legally release them into the public domain. I realize that most big companies would *never* want to fund something like this, but I would imagine there are some concerned bodies who would be willing to fund it.
I think this idea has some merit, but may not be feasible or even financially possible. Any comments?
Patents are not only killed by prior art they can be killed in several ways:
:))
1) Novelty: This means prior art, essentially the patent must be a new idea, or the patent must improve on an existing idea.
2) Non - obviousness: definition "so trivial as to be obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art" (which would appear to apply in this case, although it's wasn't obvious to me, but I'm of no skill in the art
3) Usefulness - has to be useful, that's about it.
4) Enablement - patent must teach how to make and use the invention. If the patent is poorly written or doesn't make any sense to "one of ordinary skill in the art" then you can kill the patent. You also have to disclose all information you have at the time, if you have some secret you don't want in the patent and someone finds out you knew in advance they can kill the patent.
5) Inventorship - name the 'actual' inventors, example: if your group manager automatically gets his name on all patents from his group even if he didn't do anything for them and someone can prove this later, the patent is invalid.
sorry to ramble on, but it really sounds like an obvious invention and would probably be best attacked on that front, course I would probably still do a prior art search... anyway no I'm not a lawyer.
There was a clock driver for ProDOS which had a limited date type and used a seven-year window, which I think was 1984-1991. I remember that the early 90s there were instructions on how to change the window for the next seven years.
Also there was a BBS system called ACOS which had a 1-byte year bug. In 1989, a modified version called MACOS was released which used two bytes for the year, and a window of 1980-2079.
This patent is total bullshit.
The Linux kernel is in violation of this. Check where it reads the bios date.
In 1974 a company called Microdata began selling the first commercial version of the Pick operating system. Microdata was purchased by McDonnell Douglas in 1981. One of the features of the OS is the date windowing described. Based on all the other practical features of the Pick environment it doesn't surprise me that they included this fix first. A good Pick stating point is the comp.databases.pick FAQ.
If this passes the muster of the courts, then we are all in trouble, because this indicates that the courts are clueless when it comes to technology. However, I don't think this merits serious discussion - after all, coffee drinkers didn't get up in arms over the lady who sued McDonalds (and won) over serving hot coffee. I think that this is just another frivolous lawsuit filed by someone who wants to get rich off of the Y2K problem.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Some are rather particular to formats used in mainframe applications, but some sure look like they'd represent common practice, things any programmer worth his salary should be able to recreate...
- US5758336: Date format and date conversion procedure using a packed binary format
- US5668989: Two-digit hybrid radix year numbers for year 2000 and beyond
- US5630118: System and method for modifying and operating a computer system to perform date operations on date fields spanning centuries
- US5761668: Method and apparatus for converting computer software and databases for the year 2000
- US5644762: Method and apparatus for recording and reading date data having coexisting formats
- US5737735: Method and apparatus for recording and reading date data having coexisting formats
- US5600836: System and method for processing date-dependent information which spans one or two centuries
Linux and Y2K...If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Greetings,
This falls into a domain I'm QUITE familiar with, oddly enough. NNTP.
The NNTP Specification in section 3.7.1 explicitly states that the closest century is assumed as part of the year (as the NNTP spec uses two digit year dates). In it's exact words:
The date is sent as 6 digits in the format YYMMDD, where YY is the last two digits of the year, MM is the two digits of the month (with leading zero, if appropriate), and DD is the day of the month (with leading zero, if appropriate). The closest century is assumed as part of the year (i.e., 86 specifies 1986, 30 specifies 2030, 99 is 1999, 00 is 2000).
This document was submitted in February, 1986.
Does the patent in question pre-date this prior art? If not, it's invalid, and nobody has to pay them a red nickel. They may have to pay lawyers, but it sure won't cost much. This is quicker to prove than the Compton's silliness, either for 'general harm in allowing the patent' (which I think is what Compton's multimedia patent died under), or this brutally obvious prior art, even.
Everyone always comments, 'Well, I'll just patent 'e' then!' But the truth is that if you BELIEVE there's prior art, that's not as useful as laying it on the table, and saying, 'section X.Y.Z of document FOO published in 19XX says explicitly BAR, which is exactly what is being patented. Give it up.'
Looking up the patent, here's my other comments... It was filed on October 3, 1996, granted September 8. 1998. This patent has obvious prior art in the NNTP package, and the Progress database development package (which implements the identical thing, with a customizable sliding date).
This is, frankly, a nuisance patent. Any company with even the slightest bit of research, will dig up programs from 15 years ago that did this exact same thing. Even had the patent pre-dated THOSE, it would be run out by now. The first company to fight it will win, and win handily.
This is a non-issue.
Cyberfox!
I was wondering what was going on as McD was merged with Boeing last year; there isn't a McD any more. The age of the patent is interesting; why'd it take them so long to award it when others seem to go through faster?
Never understimate the power of human stupidity -Lazarus Long
yeah.. im gonna patent Y10K windowing teknik and u fools are going down!!!! $#^%$#kerb$%^#@^%$#
I've obtained a patent on the one-foot-followed-by-another walking method, as no one has yet to do so. Anyone seen using this method between the hours of 11:30 AM and 1 PM in a public area with be charged an exorbitant license fee, lest they be sued. Thank you for your cooperation in this matter.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
All of you have written very good comments about this situation. However, there is one issue that I havn't seen anyone bring up yet that I think is probably the most important, and saddest detail of this entire deal.
There is much debate over whether the Y2K problem will be a fizzle or a bang. Truth is, there is no way to know until it happens. We can speculate endlessly, but the truth is, you don't know what the company next door is doing about it, and you don't know if what they make is vital to your success or not.
Therefore, it is in the best interest for the world to take things seriously, since the worst possible outcome is indeed -very- serious. The worst possible outcome would be a domino effect of events resulting in a severe step backwards in our technological advancements, perhaps even returning most of the commercialized world to a pre-industrial revolution state.
Now, of course, I'm not saying this will indeed happen. All I'm saying is that we should treat the situation as if that is very possible. If we do that, then we should consider this problem as a global crisis, and worthy of the same treatement that -any- global crisis should receive.
I think, the saddest thing about this whole event is that we have businesses and individuals running around worried more about their monatary acummulations than they are about the welfare of modern mankind. In my opinion this would be similiar to a scientist in a research lab discovering a cheap cure for HIV and then patenting it, restricting its use, and monopolizing on it. In my book such behavior would be criminal.
There comes along, every once in a while, certain inventions and discoveries that should -not- remain under the fists of greedy suits and corporations. In a way, some discoveries should be 'Open Source' if I may use such a poor comparison.
This is all a little melodramatic, I realize that. The sitaution is not as bad as the HIV comparison. What I am more frustrated about here is the -mindset- we have about this. Here we are, facing something as possibly damaging as any other crisis, and all we can think about doing is protecting our material wealth.
It is a sad commentary about the death of capatalism and its idealism, if they ever existed in the first place.
V