Appeal No. 1999-2416
Application No. 08/705,449
In view of the objective teachings of the references, we agree with appellant that
the rejection of instant claim 1 is not well founded. In our opinion the artisan would not
have considered Ferguson’s teachings with respect to managing resource allocation
requests for non-critical tasks to have relevance with respect to administration of a disk
quota subsystem as disclosed by Camillone. We find the Camillone reference to
disclose the UNIX disk quota subsystem as separate from management of resource
consumption by a process. Although the references address critical and non-critical
tasks and processes, Camillone’s description of two levels of resource allocation is in
reference to the conventional UNIX disk quota subsystem. We find no reason that the
artisan would have been led to modify the “soft limits” -- presumably providing warnings
in response to requests for disk space approaching a level that will be denied -- such
that execution of effecting the request is suspended and rescheduled at an appropriate
time. Nor has the examiner provided any convincing rationale for the combination
proposed.
Each of independent claims 8 and 16 requires a “shared resource allocation
controller” which performs the method as substantially set forth in instant claim 1. Yet,
the statement of the rejection (Final Rejection at 4-5) does not refer to all portions of the
references that were addressed in the rejection against claim 1.1 We do not find
1 The Final Rejection at page 6 refers again to the “quota” and “soft limit” described at column 9,
lines 1 through 5 of Camillone as teaching the “allocation limit” and “selected level.” Both the “resource
allocation limit” and “selected level of resource allocation” are relevant to requirements of claims 8 and 16.
-5-
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