Appeal No. 2002-1797
Application 09/129,38
We find it difficult to understand the examiner's position
because it does not clearly point out the correspondence between
the claim limitations and the teachings of Lipa. While we
understand that the examiner considers the operations center 101
to correspond to the fault-tolerance service and the middleware
service, the examiner does not state what corresponds to the
claimed "application process" or how the operations center 101
monitors that application process, as claimed. Although not
relied on by the examiner, Lipa refers to a "fault-tolerant
network of [servers]" (col. 3, lines 51-52) and states that
"multiple redundant lobby list servers 102 are provided for fault
tolerance" (col. 3, line 67 to col. 4, line 1), but this fault
tolerance is for servers of the operations center, not for the
application process, as argued by appellants. In addition, we
are not persuaded by the examiner's finding that Lipa is a fault
tolerant system because it moves a user to a new server through
reconnect options, thereby preventing a system-wide failure, as
well as local failures. The only reference we find to "reconnect
options" is a menu option that appears when all of the zones are
rated "Forget It" (col. 7, line 55). We agree with appellants'
argument (at RBr4) that there is no detail about what "Reconnect
Options" may comprise, but at most it suggests that the user can
manually try to connect to the system if the network connections
for a zone are rated "Forget It." There is no absolutely no
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