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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 23 2012 @ 05:49 PM EDT |
If any one is still using version 1.0 of the language,
the latest COBOL was 2002, Fortran 2003, C 2011, LISP 2004. Algol seems old
enough to have some experts, but I've never known anyone who uses it. I've
heard rumours that others use APL, but I haven't seen them since I left
university. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 23 2012 @ 06:12 PM EDT |
| Smalltalk. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, May 24 2012 @ 12:58 AM EDT |
and those languages are mere adolescents compared to some of the dinosaurs
people still write code for daily.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, May 24 2012 @ 10:00 AM EDT |
| Still around in specialized applications I'm told. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 25 2012 @ 03:32 PM EDT |
No, the full phrase in question is someone "normally skilled in the
art".
Using carpentry as an example, that's not a master cabinet maker. Nor is it a
random guy trying to build a box for the first time.
It does, however, cover someone who regularly does carpentry work, and is of a
competent skill level.
Using software development as an example, a kid fresh out of college probably
doesn't *quite* qualify as 'normally skilled in the art', yet. (Though there
are certainly exceptions, I'm talking about the general case.) On the other
hand, Linus Torvalds also doesn't qualify as 'normally skilled in the art' for
large swathes of software development, because he's *more* skilled than that.
Frankly, I feel that the *vast* majority of software patents should be
invalidated simply because they are not written so that someone 'ordinarily
skilled in the art' can actually understand them. Since documenting something
so that it can be copied (later) is the *purpose* of the patent system, any
patent which fails at that most basic task should be invalid on the face of it.
There's three reasons why software developers are told *not* to search for
patents they might be violating:
One is because it opens them up to 'willful violation' and tripled damages.
Another is because it would simply take too long because there are so many of
them. The developer would, frankly, spend more time searching for patents
covering an *individual* technique than they had budgeted for developing the
entire piece of software.
Finally, they aren't usually written in language that the developers could
understand.
I've seen this in action. An associate of mine at a prior job submitted
something for a patent application. He worked with the lawyers for a week or
so, getting together all of the necessary information. Months later, they held
a party for him to celebrate his patent application being accepted. He went to
uspto.gov, and looked it up so he could print himself a copy, and said that if
he didn't know what he'd submitted, he'd never have been able to build it from
the contents of the patent document.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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