decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more...
decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


You won't find me on Facebook


Donate

Donate Paypal


No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.


What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments


Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
And another detail about "dynamic" that Google and David August did not miss | 439 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Ironic detail about "dynamic" that everyone seems to have missed
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 14 2012 @ 06:30 PM EDT
Another very important, and fundamentally very simple distinction: Dereferencing
a "symbolic" reference involves a table lookup, Dereferencing a
"non-symbolic" reference involves only an address/offset calculation.

An index in a table is not--and in no rational CompSci major's mind would ever
be considered--a symbolic reference. All pointers and indexes in modern
computers go through the same basic calculation: [root address]+[index]*[size of
datum]. Nothing more.

A symbolic dereference involves a lookup--SEARCH for symbol "ABC"
(considered a string, not a number, although all strings are represented as
numbers). Somehow, look through a table/database to find some entry that has
"ABC" stored in it. And then, take the (numeric) index/pointer out of
that table. Then, as a final step, Do the basic calculation on the index, as
above.

IF THERE'S NO TABLE LOOKUP ON THE SYMBOL, IT IS NOT A SYMBOLIC REFERENCE. IT IS
SIMPLY AN INDEX/POINTER.

No other distinction between symbolic and non-symbolic makes any sense at all in
this context.

The Boies folk made a really valiant effort to avoid this clear fact. They are
liars--so says this compiler writer who HAS done symbolic dereferencing (nearly
always at compile time) on multiple architectures and languages). And no
compiler writer you will find, will say any different.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

And another detail about "dynamic" that Google and David August did not miss
Authored by: bugstomper on Monday, May 14 2012 @ 06:55 PM EDT
Even though the specific 6 claims of '104 that are in the case have no mention
of "dynamic", Judge Alsup threw "dynamic" in to the case in
an unusual way - He made it part of the claim construction of the term
"symbolic reference" that is is something that is resolved
dynamically. (See filing #137) That does not match any standard use in computer
science of the term "symbolic reference".

David August picked up on this unusual claim construction to do exactly what
Oracle said they were afraid Google would do. It provided a way to make dynamic
resolution a requirement even in those claims where it is not mentioned. August
never said that symbol reference resolution is only ever done dynamically. He
said that according to the Court's claim construction something cannot be called
a "symbolic reference" for the purpose of the patent if it is not
resolved dynamically.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )