🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <709@silence.princeton.nj.us>,
jay@silence.princeton.nj.us (Jay Plett) writes:

>I have no quarrel with the points made in the captioned article;
>rather, I consider them well taken.  But I will object to one
>statement:
>
>In article <1727@opus.NMSU.Edu>, sitze@nmsu.edu (Richard Sitze) writes:
>> If [somebody] owns the patent on byte ordering, so be it.  THEY
>> HAVE THE RIGHT to protect their patent which they appear to be doing.
>
>If anybody owns a patent on byte ordering, or on using a network
>standard byte order for transferring data among diverse machines, they
>have the duty to dedicate that patent to the public domain.  Else
>reason has no meaning.
>
>	...jay

While I agree in principle, I maintain that byte ordering is
non-obvious in certain circumstances.  We keep looking at this from a
narrow point of view - of perhaps two or three different byte ordering
schemes.  Someone else pointed out possible prior art in the form of a
standard data format used by observatories, and I'm sure that quite
often they run into the situation where Scheme X is translated into
Scheme Y, and then used at the 'destination' by translating into
Scheme Z.  This is analogous to advocating that all books be
translated into English before they get put into the library, and when
you check the book out it gets translated into your native tongue.
The OBVIOUS solution is print (store) books in a variety of languages,
and then check out the appropriate book.  This can be done as easily
on a computer, except we must pay high storage costs to maintain all
the 'redundant' information, not to mention other data management
nightmares. (ie, there are alternatives to 'standard byte ordering'
that are 'more obvious' by analogy to the real world).

On this basis and under current law I feel that the idea is
patentable.  Now before I get more flames, I admit that I side with
most everyone else on this news group in that I feel strongly that the
patent should be placed into the public domain (along with other
software patents).

My only complaint is against those who feel that the idea is to
OBVIOUS.  Yes, it is simple and a beautiful solution to the problem.
But how many figured it out for themselves??  Like many of the BEST
ideas, it's only to obvious once you know it.
--
                            +--------------------------
                            | Richard A. Sitze
                            | sitze@nmsu.edu,    phone: (505) 646-6228
                              SH 163