Appeal No. 1996-1715
Application No. 08/068,592
comparisons between the version numbers and the timestamps.
Even if one were to interpret Lowry as the examiner has done
and equate Lowry's checkpoint with appellant's synchronization
timestamp, there is no suggestion in Lowry to compare the
version numbers and the timestamps in a distributed network to
systematically update the system. Lowry merely teaches
replacing the master data structure when it is lost or
damaged. Accordingly, Lowry does not cure the defects of
Miller and Mathur.
In responding to appellant's arguments (Answer, page 5),
the examiner states that Miller shows "associating timestamp
and version number attributes with data objects, using these
attributes to uniquely identify the objects and comparing
these attributes to determine a version at a specific time."
However,
comparison in Miller is to determine if a particular
identifier has been used before, so as not to assign the same
identifier twice, not to determine whether or not an update
should be performed on a specific node in a distributed
network. Therefore, we cannot affirm the rejection of claim
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