McDonnell Douglas Patents Y2K Fix Technique

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Francis Bacon

The human understanding is no dry light, but receives infusion from the will and affections; which proceed sciences which may be called "sciences as one would." For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow hope; the deeper things of nature, from superstition; the light of experience, from arrogance and pride; things not commonly believed, out of deference to the opinion of the vulgar. Numberless in short are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections color and infect the understanding.

McDonnell Douglas Patents Y2K Fix Technique

Wed, 12/31/1997 - 20:05 — SpeedRacer

I am not sure if anyone else will get their panties in a wad about this one, but boy, I sure have. It seems McDonnell Douglas has applied for and received a patent for the Y2K fix called "windowing." Simply put, any date 00-29 is assumed to be 20xx, 30-99 is assumed to be 19xx. They are now threatening legal action against anyone using this technique.My main problem here is that I have seen that trick done all over the place. I spent 5 years maintaining Medicaid claims processing code (COBOL, and ugly COBOL at that), and we used this technique regularly in various situations that required date processing. Some of the code was written to account for folks who were born in 1898, since 1998 was years away at the time! Some subsystems did not even store the tens digit. We had to use "windowing" to decide if it was 198x or 199x!I find this immensely ironic in light of the recent furor over Unisys pursuing the patent it holds over the LZW algorithm (see Burn All GIFs Day). I can understand Unisys protecting something it purchased as part of the original company that invented it. But for McDonnell Douglas to patent a technique that has been in use for at least a decade, if not more, is absurd.news.com Story