Appeal No. 2005-2282 Page 5
Application No. 09/505,807
Here, the appellants argue claims 1, 9-16, and 21-23 as a group. (Appeal Br. at
4-9.) We select claim 16 from the group as representative of the claims therein.
With this representation in mind, rather than reiterate the positions of the
examiner or the appellants in toto, we focus on the point of contention therebetween.
The examiner correctly makes the following findings.
Woodring discloses that the storage manager 350 includes a free buffer
semaphore (FBSEM) mechanism 376 (Fig. 4). The FBSEM 376 controls
the producer 310, for example, by signaling the producer that one or more
buffers in buffer storage 372 (first queue) are free (col. 7, lines 61-63). The
storage manager 350 also includes the producer mutual exclusion
mechanism (MUTEX) 374, which controls the producer by placing a
requirement on the producer to acquire exclusive ownership (col. 7,
lines 52-60) before accessing management data for the buffer storage
(first queue). The storage manager 350 also includes a variety of
mechanisms to control the clients (consumers) as they receive data from
the buffer storage 372 (first queue) such as the mail slots (col. 7,
lines 1-20), management data structure and information streams (col. 7,
lines 19-39), and the buffer masks (col. 7, lines 45-52).
The appellants argue, "there is no notion that the storage manager (350) actively
controls the data source (producer) and the plurality of consumers to control the amount
of data stored in and consumed from the queue, as contemplated with the claimed
inventions." (Appeal Br. at 6-7.)
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