Hi John, > On Saturday 20 March 2010 08:42:27 Terry Coles wrote: > > has any one ever found an innovative software patent? > > Wasn't Lempel-Ziv innovative, in its time ?
Was it? It's basically "the bytes from here on are the same as the N bytes from M bytes ago, followed by this new bit: `...'". Seems a pretty obvious way of compressing? An interesting twist is that N can be larger than M, e.g. output five bytes starting from two bytes back, so the bit being copied overlaps the destination, but other than that. Yes, I know. Easy to say "that's obvious" once it's explained, but I'm still don't think it was patent-worthy. Now, Huffman coding, that could be. Cheers, Ralph. -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Wed 2010-04-07 20:00 http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2645413 Chat: http://www.mibbit.com/?server=irc.blitzed.org&channel=%23dorset List info: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/dorset
