RE: [VANILLA-LIST:3019] technical question

["Chawla, Jay" <jchawla@cooley.com>]

Hey, I want to thank all of you guys again!  You are incredible!  I was
buried under paperwork for the last few days -- I had to get out an 'initial
disclosure of prior art' on the patent that you tore up with your analysis.
I will let you know how things proceed -- I've been assigned to perform the
'invalidity analysis' on the patent now that we've identified all of the
prior art.

Thanks, Trent & Dave for your assistance with my meager understanding of
TCP/IP.  You've given me a real boost.

FYI, I should qualify my statement that "a person who authors a patent is
his own lexicographer and grammarian".
They are only in terms of the wording of their patent application.  If a
claim uses the term 'aggregation' and 'aggregation' is defined in the patent
disclosure, then it is interpreted as it was defined in the disclosure.
They can't go in after the fact and say, "oh, I meant such and such" -- they
have to stick with their own wording in the application.  That makes it a
little fairer for us in trying to beat the patent!

Jay


> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Trent Piepho [SMTP:xyzzy@speakeasy.org]
> Sent:	Thursday, March 23, 2000 2:36 PM
> To:	vanilla-list@us.netrek.org
> Cc:	Chawla, Jay
> Subject:	RE: [VANILLA-LIST:3019] technical question
> 
> On Wed, 22 Mar 2000, Chawla, Jay wrote:
> > Also, a person who authors a patent is his own lexicographer and
> grammarian.
> 
> That would seem to give them quite the advantage, the ability to after the
> fact to decide exactly what there patent does and does not describe.  They
> can
> construct a definition of "aggregation" such that any example of prior art
> you
> may find does not apply, while your client's product still does.
> 
> > ftp://ftp.netrek.org/pub/netrek/ ).  Is there any other source code,
> design
> > documents, or instructions that I don't know about?
> 
> I would think that the source code is the definitive proof of what netrek
> does
> or does not do.  If you determine that netrek is prior art, you could
> establish the date it was created by contacting the appropriate author.
> The
> client/server separation of xtrek-II, which is when any "aggregation"
> function
> of the server would have been written, was done by Kevin P. Smith in 1989.
> 
> > As Dave says, I'm not a TCP/IP guru.  Can I ask you guys a novice
> question?
> > Please correct any mistakes I make and help me out here with my
> transport
> > layer ramblings:
> > 
> > TCP is a connection oriented protocol -- mail servers use it to send
> mail
> > and IRC servers use it to send messages.  TCP sockets are point to point
> and
> > one-way between two transport-level entities.  You write things to a
> socket
> 
> TCP/IP is two-way, not one-way.  Both endpoints are able to simultaneously
> send and receive data.
> 
> > whenever you want, and what you're writing goes into a buffer.  So if I
> send
> > 3 IP packets to the socket in a short enough time, they'll all be
> buffered.
> 
> You've already made a big mistake.  One does not send IP packets to a TCP
> socket.  The abstraction that TCP/IP provides is one of a byte-steam,
> there
> are no "packets" to the application.  The packets are created in a lower
> level
> by the networking stack.
> 
> > Periodically, the buffer is emptied.  So the three IP packets will be
> 
> That is somewhat of an oversimplification.  There are number of very
> complex
> rules controlling how the contents of the buffer are separated into
> packets
> and transmitted.  The contents of the buffer are not packets yet, as I
> said,
> but a stream of bytes.  The TCP stack will compose a single packet using
> some
> number of bytes from the beginning of the buffer.  It is entirely possible
> that the bytes the TCP stack chooses to form the payload of a single
> packet
> were originally placed into the buffer by the application at different
> times.
> 
> > UDP is a connectionless protocol -- real time applications use it to
> send
> > keystrokes (for telnet sessions), audio information (you can lose some
> of it
> 
> telnet uses TCP.
> 
> > Xpilot servers.  If you want aggregation with UDP, you need to do it
> > explicitly yourself, so Netrek does it explicitly, i.e. in its own
> source
> 
> With UDP, the application chooses how the data is divided into packets.
> With
> TCP, the networking stack controls how the data is divided into packets,
> but
> the application does have a bit of control over this.