"Windowing" Patent # 5,806,063

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Dickens Y2K Solution Patent Now Available to License: System Uses a Form of "Windowing" to Modify Databases So That They Automatically Incorporate the Correct Century Designation

Go News/Business Wire

"Bruce Dickens, president of Dickens2000, announced today that the Dickens Y2K Solution Patent is now available for corporations to license. The invention resolves the Y2K ambiguity problem that arises from the continuing use of existing two-digit dates. It accomplishes this through an improved approach to the representation and utilization of dates in databases which converts the existing dates in databases into a more useable form..."

Patent # 5,806,063

"Date formatting and sorting for dates spanning the turn of the century."

Any of the more techno-geek types wanna look this over?

-- pshannon (pshannon@inch.com), November 03, 1999

Answers

Is that the same Bruce Dickens of Dickens Cider Corp.?

You know that there is nothing more satisfying on a cold winter night than a hot Dickens Cider.

-- (just@little.joke), November 03, 1999.


P, read about you in the Wall St. Journal the other day. Are there any benefits to being a celebrity?

-- Puddintame (achillesg@hotmail.com), November 03, 1999.

Hmmmn.

Hope the FDIC and all of its banking associates paid the patent holder...they used windowing for the banking system change-over, with a "universal" 1973 cutoff date. Hope that means all those 30 mortgages processed between 1970 and 1973 are going to be okay next three years, and all retirement and savings accounts establishe before 1973 are okay.

-- Robert A. Cook, PE (Marietta, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), November 03, 1999.


This is gonna get real interesting, real fast.

-- Critt Jarvis (critt@critt.com), November 03, 1999.

Puddintame,

Was that the lame AP story that began "Forget the bottled water. Dump the cases of canned soup..." That reporter made me sound like I was stuttering.

Nope, no benefits...

-- (pshannon@inch.com), November 03, 1999.



FWIW, my interpretation of the patent description is that it describes windowing methods other than the common windowing methods.

The common methods consist of variations on picking some two digit year, such as 51, and adding 100 to any two digit year less than that, while leaving any two digit year not less than that as is. I did not find any part of the patent description that I could interpret as describing such a method.

Jerry

-- Jerry B (skeptic76@erols.com), November 03, 1999.


Okay, excuse my ignorance... but how can patent infringement be actionable against firms who implemented the technique before the patent was issued?

-- Grrr (grrr@grrr.net), November 03, 1999.

My browser could not read the attachments to this, so I could not see the actual code.

What he is describing is using windowing to temporarily expand a date in a database, so that the database records can be sorted in proper order. This does not seem to apply to most windowing, which is used where two dates, not necessarily in a database, are simply compared. It is also different from the windowing SORT that IBM uses.

Most large commercial data base programs use some variety of full expansion, or an embedded date format based on the Lillian date.

It is not clear who would use this technique.

-- kermit (colourmegreen@hotmail.com), November 03, 1999.


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