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Hitachi Folds, Rambus Keeps On Rolling
macsen writes " Yet another company gives into Chipzilla's memory mongers, and it doesn't bode well. Hitachi appears to be going for an upfront settlement, and an agreement to drop litigation between the company and Rambus. Two companies in less than a week, and the Third Law of Thermodynamics begins to take hold.
See what
Tom's Hardware has to say." Check out a more informational original link. This is most ungood - see the first folding, as done by Toshiba last week.
Maybe so, but that's not the problem. The issue is, Rambus is trying to take an equal-performance (and cheaper) alternative to it's product and raise the price through royalties so it's not as competitive on the market.
Rambus claimed that the poor performance on P2's was due to slow CPU speeds and that faster CPU's would show how RDRAM shines. Well, between Tom's Hardware and the last review posted on here (don't have the link-sorry), on identical high-end P3's it's just barely the equal of SDRAM (at over twice the price). It shines in data streaming - one high-latency memory query, then lots of data flows. What SDRAM is good at is little file queries - I want to open a Word doc that's 4k. By the time RDRAM finishes it's slow query my SDRAM has already delivered the page...
If the world was fair, what people would do is boycott buying RDRAM modules, systems, etc. and buy more SDRAM. Enough to offset the higher royalties with economy in volume. Who cares if they're paying royalties - the chip makers are selling lots of SDRAM, there's no demand for RDRAM so they don't produce it, Rambus stock hits the toilet, then the royalties stop when Rambus goes bankrupt.
The world being what it is, the Rambus royalties will price SDRAM almost as high as RDRAM, people will put off buying it "until the price comes back down", by which time RDRAM boards and RIMMS will be more common. Big royalties to Rambus, lots of happy Rambus stockholders, lots of locked-in consumers. Gotta love the 'free-market' economy...
Well yes, and you're right - theory is different than reality. I was just complaining over the fact that these prices have been artificially inflated.. my bad if the wrong term was used.
Hmmm... with all the open source and hardware projects and the like going on, maybe someone should start an OpenRAM to develop patent-free RAM technology.
Not that I have any experience in developing hardware, but just an idea.
I've done this, but it doesn't seem like this is the kind of complaint this form is suited to, based on all the questions at the bottom for "How much did this company ask you to pay", "how did you pay them", et cetera. However, the form submission worked fine with those fields blank.
I pasted the URL to this discussion in the comments field, and a nice quote, so hopefully they won't just click delete, and will forward it where it belongs.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The reason it's not more common is that turbines are expensive to build. Sure, they are simple in principle, and they would be cheap to build if you didn't mind a complete engine replacement every 50 hours. But to get long life out of turbine fans requires *strategic minerals* like cobalt and vanadium. These things don't exist in the United States. The reason that they are called strategic minerals is that if we fought a protracted war with the Soviet Union, we'd lose it unless we secured the cobalt mines.
The turbine car that Chrysler build was expensive because of that. Mass production wouldn't have solved that problem.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Ummm - the Airbus consortium announced today that it was proceeding with the A3XX, a super jumbo. And a military variant that would dwarf Boeing's C51A (or whatever its called now since the last takeover).
Not that I totally disagree with you, or agree completely with the previous poster - but this argument of yours doesn't hold too much water...
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
It is an excellent PR move for Hitachi, and Rambus doesn't need to care about its PR image - just the legal system.
This seems like better PR for RAMBUS than it is for Hitachi. If the headline was what was used for your topic (IE, Hitachi maintains that they don't violate patents) then I see that as face-saving.
What this says to the public about Hitachi is a mixed bag. To the technically literate and aware (IE, the people contributing in this discussion, we hope, except for the exceptions proving the rule) this says that Hitachi would rather bend over and take it than fight for the side of right. To everyone else, this means that RAM prices will go up. Some people are going to believe that this is just Altruism on Hitachi's part, but Corporations Have No Soul. What's good for the quarterly report is good for the company.
I do agree with you that this is just over the cost of litigation. Any Hitachi-issued press release (Or RAMBUS-issued) is just an attempt to do some last-minute ass covering.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
For me, RAMBUS is yet another example in a long string of Things That Should Have Failed. Rambus didn't win on technical merits, nor did it win on a better price point, no - it won on the basis of a bad decision by Intel and some legal wrangling. AMD quietly adopted Rambus, and even went as far as to make it so their next generation CPU will not take anything but Rambus.
OK, I agree with you on the first part. If RAMBUS didn't have intel's support it would have failed long ago. But where on earther did you come up with that second part?! AMD adopted RAMBUS? Since when? You can't buy a Athlon motherboard that supports RAMBUS if you wanted to! They don't exist. Sure, AMD licensed RAMBUS, but only as a "just in case" measure. If the industry moved towards RAMBUS they didn't want to be left out in the cold. But the industry hasn't, and it doesn't look like they're going to.
And now you're saying that AMD's next-generation CPU will be RAMBUS-only?! Huh? Where do you come up with this stuff? AMD has announced strong support of DDR SDRAM for their Mustang (the next version of the Athlon to be released late this year) and has absolutely no plans to have it support RAMBUS. They haven't announced anything as far as what memory the K8/Sledgehammer will use, but there is no reason to believe that it will be RAMBUS-only. Especially now that AMD has officially started supporting DDR SDRAM. How on earth did you get the idea that AMD was only going to support RAMBUS? Is this just FUD, or did you really believe it?
I am not an idiot. Please use my name to email me.
"That's right, I'm quoting myself."
-Upsilon
As far as their next generation CPU (I assume you're talking about the K8) only working with RDRAM, that's the first I've heard about it. Where did you get that info, do you have a link? Are you sure you're not thinking of Intel's next generation processor, the Willamette?
It's all bullshit anyway. You don't make a CPU only talk to one kind of memory, you make a chipset only talk to one type of memory.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...Apple's TV ad: "Trade in your P2 or P3 RDRAM system and we'll send you a rebate check for 25% off the price of your new G4."
Apple, are you listening? Where do I sign up...
There's no such thing as an "equilbrium price." This is a fiction of economists, and has been thoroughly debunked.
Prices exist in a state of *disequilbrium*, fluxating with the changes in knowledge and preferences of economic actors. They *tend* towards a theoretic equilibrium, depending on the speed of information flow within the relevant market. Compare, for example, the consistency of crude oil prices from transaction to transaction vs. the inconsistency of, say, designing a web site.
The price for any given transaction is somewhere between the minimum the seller is willing to accept and the maximum the buyer is willing to pay. Each party's profit on the exchange is the difference between the *actual* price and their threshold price.
As far as whether this is capitalism -- well, I'll agree that the patents involved are questionable at best. I just thought there should be no delusions about "equilibrium price."
There is a reason we are all driving filthy petroleum burning cars despite having had the technology for clean hydrogen burning motors for over forty years. (The oil companies bought up the patents and buried them - only now are a few buses finally burning hydrogen fuel and filling the air with water vapor instead of carcinogens - the patents are expiring.)
No.
This something called "folklore." That is, information which is spread by word of mouth. Sometimes, folklore is true. More often, and in this case, it's not. I'm friends with a professor of English at The University of Colorado at Boulder whose specialization is folklore. He's even currently writing a book specifically on car lore. He looked into this, and found no factual support for these sorts of claims.
The reason has more to do with the cost of modifying and building assembly lines, developing assembly processes, etc. There's a big cost to switch over, and industries know all sorts of tricks and techniques for current technologies to make manufacture more cost efficent.
Of course, if you do find a patent which some automaker bought out and buried, you'll most probably make it into the credits of his book.
In a recent Intel press release, the company announced that boards that worked with both SDRAM and Rambus memory were being recalled because the systems were unstable. The systems were to be replaced with a new board with Rambus installed. The press release also announced that Intel was selling off their stake in Micron, which, as you know, manufactures SDRAM. This is a relatively obvious move on the part of Intel to distance themselves from SDRAM.
Soon customers will be forced to buy a more expensive and lower performing system because Rambus is bullying other companies around. They must have a good case. They probably got a very general patent on "fast memory" from the US Patent Office. Way to go, USPO!
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Besides which, as the benchmarks have shown, with 1ghz P3, a BX with PC133 SDRAM is faster than an 810 or 820 or whatever it was with PC800 RDRAM. What a joke.
We'll see what happens with intel's next chipset that actually has real support for RDRAM rather than something they just threw together over a weekend. However, since 133mhz bus DDR SDRAM has twice the bandwidth of PC800 RDRAM (Literally) I just don't see it being much of an issue; Likewise, the latency and bank-switching of RDRAM is going to hurt you whether you're doing short OR long reads. However, you could fix the bank switching problem by interleaving memory and having a really bright memory controller...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Maybe I'm missing something here - Apples still use RAM -- In fact, it's PC100 SDRAM. What makes you think they're not going to go to DDR SDRAM? What alternatives do we have for a big speed increase in memory besides DDR SDRAM and RAMBUS (Which as I'm fond of pointing out, isn't as big an increase in speed as they'd like us to think.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That this settlement may very well have nothing to do with whether or not Hitachi violated any patents. Rambus had also accused Hitachi of violating, and in fact practically ignoring, thier 1992 license agreement.
Natch, the details of that agreement are undisclosed. But I think that it's somewhat obvious that whatever the merits (or lack of) of Rambus' patent case against Hitachi, Rambus had a very strong case concerning the License agreement. That means that Hitachi woulda taken a hit either way.
Given that, I do not believe taht Rambus patents will stand up to a serious court challenge, But IANAL and that remains to be seen.
Nephs
The reason is that high pressure hydrogen is dangerous to work with. If the tank ruptures in an accident, your car goes up like a bomb. The gas station (if you can find one) needs to be able to fill your tank at high pressure. You have the chicken and egg problem as well. You need a gas station that can fill it, and a mechanic that can work on it. (God help you if you neglect the maintenance on your fuel system.)
Okay, I have to pee on this statement now. Berkeley (Well, I think it was UCB) did a demo where the (admittedly expensive) honeycomb system they were using was filled, set in a quad, and shot. Not only did it not catch fire, but someone was able to walk up to it with a lighter and light it. It burned peacefully.
In addition, gasoline engines are, again, a known quantity. Think about rotary engines. In theory, they are simpler and more reliable. In reality, the compression ratio sucks, so you have to turbocharge it for decent performance, and turbochargers have their own reliability problems. As soon as you turbocharge a rotary engine, you increase the likelyhood that it will blow its apex seals. This is the moral equivalent of a ring job for a piston engine.
All this can be designed out, if you're willing to put in the effort. The final generation of RX-7s ended up being pretty reliable, and seriously badassed.
In any case, there are a number of technologies other than the rotary engine that are sweet ideas. Some of them are minor concepts (The Slant six, for example, was just a normal combustion engine, and the Boxer engines are too, just opposed) which give you great dividends, mostly in the area of reliability. Then again, Hemi heads are pretty simple, and tend to make a big difference.
Hydrogen is a great way to go if you can make the vehicles cheap enough, and provide a filling station. The best way to go with hydrogen at the moment is probably with a hybrid, but the real problem is the infrastructure. However, since there's fuel cells you can load with methanol, and methanol is sold at the pump in a couple gas stations in my town of 50,000, maybe that's the commuter car answer.
Incidentally, if you really want to make automotive technology take a quantum leap forward, find a way to defeat patents on SuperCapacitors and make them dramatically cheaper; Then we can all just go electric in a practical, inexpensive, lightweight fashion.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It depends, really. And I can't vote for one way or another.
j an/0199ipppis.htm) ???
, 3374,00.html ???).
;-) ;-)
Let's take an example in biotech or medicine industry. Patents are everything there. It is an ability to reap reward for a huge investment in research. And what is that reward? just an ability to fund the further research! The end of a patent on some prescription drug means that the companies who has not invested a dime (and time) in research can produce the same formula drug and sell it as generic for much less. If some idiot will claim that they should be able to clone it right away because it's a capitalism, I'd say that such approach will destroy every long term research. Another bad side - do you remember how Necro$oft allegedly hijacked the design of the ergonomic mouse from Goldtouch (http://www.domis.com/sample/DOMIS/update/1999/01
On the other hand, there is an issue of Rambus that does not invest anything in the reserch and manufacturing and is pretty much an IP holding shack. I'd say that even better analogy would be with the robber who "owns" a forest a'la Robin Hood and collects his tax from everyone. Most of the software patents fit the same category (Remember http://www.thestandard.net/article/display/0,1151
To finalize, I'd have the following proposals:
1) Put a cap on the licensing fees;
2) Prevent companies from exclusive licensing;
3) Separate real researchers from racketeers
4) And, certainly, not grant patents that are too broad. It means that the US Patent Office should spend more of my taxes on hiring people who understand technology
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
No need to shout. Every form of fuel in the universe is an energy carrier, including the petroleum products you burn in your car.
If you use hydrogen to run your car (instead of gasoline), you end up producing more pollution (in order to make the hydrogen) and spending a lot more money. And there is no safe way to store and handle hydrogen.
Hydrogen is a much more reasonable alternative than fossil fuels are, as is becoming apparent now that enough patents have expired to make the technology available for use.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Well if you want truly kick in the ass acceleration, then you must really be looking forward to electric cars. They have constant torque. It's far easier to build an electric car that can smoke the tires through an entire 1/4 mile run than to build a gasoline car to do the same thing. Plus the motors don't take up much space in the car, and they are quiet. A turbine occupies a lot of space, and they sound like a jet. Actually, sounding like a jet might be a good thing! :-)
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
"Does anyone honestly believe that drug research would grind to a halt if there were no patents? If so, then why does open source software development not grind to a halt?"
Yes, drug research would grind (more-or-less) to a halt. The cost of developing a new medicine is staggering.
The tribute exacted by the drug company is even more staggering, resulting in a net loss to society versus some more efficient mechanism. Drug research should be funded by those with a strong interest in keeping people healthy. Notably health insurance companies.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
If all RAM companies start paying Rambus - then Rambus will be able to pressure then to make the lame RDRAM instead of DDR-SDRAM. After all they already state that SDRAM licences are more expensive than Rambus ones.
:(
Whatever the consumer choose, he will have to indirectly pay Rambus. I guess this is pretty bad news for us all
Where is DoJ at times like these? Seems that RAMbus is engaging in some pretty heavyhanded BS to wipe out competing technology. Innovation, consumer choice, price, are all negatively impacted by their tactics.
Is total boycott an option or are they so far into the meat of the RAM industry that it is impossible?
In space, no one can hear you moo.
Again we have a company that makes Rambus products (and gets Rambus warrents for this) settling with Rambus. When a Rambus prevails over a company that does not make Rambus memory, I will start to worry bigtime. Till then I approach this one with suspicion.
For me, RAMBUS is yet another example in a long string of Things That Should Have Failed. Rambus didn't win on technical merits, nor did it win on a better price point, no - it won on the basis of a bad decision by Intel and some legal wrangling. AMD quietly adopted Rambus, and even went as far as to make it so their next generation CPU will not take anything but Rambus.
As a consumer and a citizen of this country, I find this to be a failure in the capitalistic system. What happened to "equilibrium price" and competition to keep it down? It seemingly was thrown out. I blame it on government inaction, but others might blame it on government action - as this was caused directly by government intervention, specifically, a time-limited monopoly called a "patent" which prevents people from developing and purchasing alternatives at a lower price.
I look forward to the computer industry's UniCorp - a single massive company that owns everything, and you "lease" the products it produces and are subject entirely to its own bylaws and contracts. Competitors? No way. And all the while, our government officials and social elite will maintain that this was "the will of the market". No, it wasn't.. this isn't capitalism, this is facism with a different name!
Rambus is being backed by 2 of the most evil companies in the world; Intel and Sony. Their plan is ingenious. Have Rambus do the dirty work so that their names aren't sullied.
What we will begin to see over the next couple of years are memory makers moving to the Rambus platform. Why bother making other forms of memory when you're paying Rambus for a "licensing agreement"? It's really a form of taxation that we the consumers will have to kick out.
And for what? Memory that doesn't perform much better than the current technology? And at 5 times the cost?
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
The memory makers have been telling us for some time that RDRAM wasn't really all that great. Intel has said RDRAM was necessary to keep their CPUs going as fast as possible. And we haven't really been able to figure out who was telling the truth. Now that the memory makers have to pay more royalties on DDRRAM than DRAM (The royalties on SDRAM as still quite low, if I understand correctly.), it will be interesting to see if they change their tune. My guess is they will.
The only ones to be shafted will be the consumers.
p ?search=1&criteria=rmbs
And the investors, eventually. The insiders are liquidating huge positions. Their game is to keep the positive press going as long as possible while they cash in. Check this out:
http://www.insidertrading.com/freestuff/search.as
Ok can someone clear up the muddied waters
:)
1) What does Rambus own patents for??
-- Does Rambus own patents for all kinds of SDRAMs available? Does this mean that the current low prices of SDRAM are going to go up due to manufacturers paying royalties to Rambus?
-- Does Rambus own patents for the newer DDR SDRAMs so that they will be a lot more expensive than without the royalties? (I saw a comment somewhere that Rambus' stock price went down when IBM announced DDR SDRAM suggesting that Rambus does not own patents to that)
2) Why?
-- Obviously this seems a ploy by intel to get RDRAM memory into the mainstream market. Since Rambus has not too much to gain. Their RDRAM royalties are lower than SDRAM, and SDRAM volume can't even be touched by RDRAM. So Rambus gains very little by pusing RDRAM.
-- If Rambus does not own patents to all kinds of SDRAM and DDR SDRAM, then whats to prevent manufacturers settling on the kinds for which they don't have to pay licensing fees to Rambus?
-- Did Rambus/intel/Sony coerce/bribe/threten Hitachi and Toshiba (Will not provide chipsets/peripherels/CPUs if you guys do not publicly state that you are paying us royalties). This makes Rambus' case stronger. Maybe Hitachi and Toshiba are not really paying Rambus any money (Undisclosed amount), or maybe infact they getting some perks (cheaper prices/licensing fees) for this public announcement.
3) What can we do?
-- What kind of memory can I buy that Rambus does not get a cent for? Obviously I don't want any performance hits. So are there and DDR SDRAMs available that Rambus does not get any money for? So that when I buy that Athelon MB with DDR SDRAM support, I can buy memory without paying Rambus tax?
4) When will Athelon/Duron MultiProcessor MBs come out?
-- Sorry just had to put this one in. If you know then please please please let me know
cheers.
I forgot to add one concept:
To encourage inventors to apply for patents, and give them a competetive advantage, they could be granted a tax exemption for X number of years after the patent is approved, while their competitors (whether re-inventing the wheel or simply reverse engineering it) would enjoy no such tax incentive.
That should be more than sufficient financial reward for being the first to come forward with an idea.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
SDRAM wasn't even a product until 1993. Rambus patents were filed in 1990. It's all right here:
http://www.dramreview.com
Don't forget that most Rambus patents were filed in 1990 and the Jedec meetings in question occured in the "mid 90's".
Yes, there were some revisions to the patent applications (which were not approved until 1999, if you can believe that) that came after some of the JEDEC meetings. But the fundamental claims of the patents could NOT have come from the JEDEC meetings, because the patents in question were filed YEARS earlier.
Also, some of the 1990 patents cover characteristics of "plain old" SDRAM. Well, SDRAM didn't appear until 1993, which is the basis for Rambus claiming royalty rights on SDRAM, and which chronology also forms the basis for claims to BACK ROYALTIES for much of the memory production not only in the future but which has also occured back to 1993.
The fact that Hitachi and Toshiba have settled should tell you something: the Rambus case is very, very strong. Hitachi didn't face trial for 2 years, and did not face ITC action until next march.
The Rambus royalties are 1% to 2% for RDRAM, up to 5% for some other items (network controllers, for example). Everyone makes it sound like the royalties are crippling. They average 1-2% and decrease with volume, depending on the royalty agreement and stock offsets. If Dram prices go up 50%, please ask the manufacturers why a 1-2% royalty caused it.
Does anyone realize that for years (and perhaps still) Texas Instruments collected similar or larger royalties on virtually all memeory just because they held some patents on packaging silicon IC's in DIP packages ?
Royalties are not at all unusual in this business, almost all products carry either some cash royalties or some "cross licensing" royalties (in which no cash changes hand because two companies have signed mutual agreements in which each can use the other's patents royalty free).
I'm tired of reading articles trashing Rambus, making them sound greedy and Machevellian for doing something that all high-tech companies do every day. If you are a high-tech company, you ARE ALSO an IP company. It's just that Rambus is EXCLUSIVELY an IP company. But that doesn't give people a right to trash them for collecting a 1-2% royalty on technology which they developed prior to anyone else.
BTW, Rambus CEO Geoff Tate is a former AMD VP. AMD is a Rambus partner.
---
SDRAM and DDR-SDRAM aren't going away anytime soon despite whatever patents Rambus claims to own. Rambus have stated that the licence fees for RDRAM technology will be lower than for SDRAM/DDR-SDRAM. However, SDRAM and DDR-SDRAM will still be much cheaper for quite some time to come because the manufacturing cost of RDRAM will always be higher than for comparable SDRAM. This is the main reason why RIMMs are so much more expensive than DIMMs - not because of the licensing costs. See this EETimes story for more information.
There are a lot of patents out there that are trivial, overbroad or have plenty of previous prior art. We need to start treating abuses of the patent system as fraud and prosecuting companies for commiting it. You could probably get convictions for oh, about 100% of the patest stories on /. over the last year.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
when you have UMA?? ;)
High cost of litigation
What I mean by this, is not the legal costs - both companies have deep pockets. But by the nature of our legal system, it is quite likely (if it didn't happen already) that Rambus could have gotten a preliminary injunction to prevent Hitachi from selling chips. The economic damage from that far outweighs any litigation costs - hence they may have conceded simply to cut their losses. I think this tactic would fall on it's face and never be used if it was mutually inclusive - ie, if Rambus got an injunction against Hitachi, Rambus could not sell its chips either. That would put a severe damper on frivolous lawsuits, but considering the people who are in power in this country, I'd sooner see icicles hanging off the devil's arse than live to see that law passed.
The terms were not disclosed
For all we know, Hitachi might have gotten a very lucrative deal with Rambus to produce its chips while appearing to have been shafted. It is an excellent PR move for Hitachi, and Rambus doesn't need to care about its PR image - just the legal system.
Just a few things to keep you thinking.
~Signal 11, Fuck the Invalid Form Key Error.
As I have noted in earlier, more detailed posts, like this one, this agreement is simply a classic example of the 'patent sharing' (not always entirely voluntary) that is standard practice within the Japanese patent system. I'm not saying that it is entirely innocuous -- much of the Japanese system of doing business could be framed in terms that would provoke extreme outrage from much of the Western geek community (and indeed the business community). However, I *am* saying that it is not only part of 'business as usual' today, but has been an element of the electronics industry, back before the first cheap (and shoddy) Japanese transistor radios -- i.e. all our lives! It's not a disturbing new trend, if anything, it's milder than it once was.
Yes, Rambus isn't Japanese -- but look at its list of partners (recently divided up, regrettably into separate pages for each technology)
This system has several major goals: preserving hierarchy and the Japanese business structure (which is very different than ours, with strong, almost monopolistic vertical integration, pan-industry consortia, and many intermediate layers of supernumary distributors), 'maintaining relationships' in the Japanese sense, perhaps most importantly allowing Japanese industrial development in the face of foreign patents (in the early decades).
It is an expression of their culture, which retains very significant feudal elements. It would be disruptive and disrespectful to expect them to instantly adopt *our* values, as if we had some intrinsic superiority. If they even attempted this, to a greater degree than MITI already does, it could massively disrupt their economy and society (e.g. the supernumary distributors are a major part of the economy and cannot be eliminated easily; also, their approach to lifetime career and company affiliation could not be more alien to Silicon valley, where even founders like Steven Jobs leave, compete, return, etc.)
_________________
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
I've seen alot of griping here in the comments about Intel and their anti-competitive policies and where is the DOJ now, etc.
This situation will be a perfect example of why AntiTrust law is outdated and flawed as these strategies Intel is employing will end up making them even more unattractive to PC makers.
Who wants to get locked into a proprietary Slot configuration, memory subsystem and memory chip type when neither the performance nor the price give a significant benefit?
Intel will sink it's component business all by itself, without the DOJ's help.
Intergalactics - A pretty cool strategy game in a java applet
Kudos for your brilliant exposition. [*saves article for future reference*]
I'd like to add an observation of my own.
Patents are no longer a net benefit to society.
Supposedly, there was a time when many great innovations would never have happened if it were not for the patent system. That time, if indeed it ever existed, is long gone. Patents are now a net burden on society. The patent process has been almost completely subverted by large corporations - the days when a single inventor, acting alone could come up with something brilliant and be rewarded with riches are (again, if they ever actually existed) also long gone. What we have instead is a kind of a star system where every once in a long while a lone inventor *does* strike it rich, and is held up as a reason why the system should be perpetuated (much like the recording industry). But such tales are few and far between, and seem to be becoming rarer all the time.
Even with a few lone inventors benefiting, the patent system is a net burden on society (can anyone argue this?) Since we are a democratic society (I *still* believe that) then the patent system has only one way to go: the way of the dodo.
The time to tear down the system is now. Will we tear it down now? No - there are too many entrenched interests, almost exclusively on the corporate society. But knowing that the system must eventually die - to recap in darwinian terms: what is bad for society is not fit to survive - we can certainly hasten it's death. Some of us will work from within, becoming polititians, lawyers, businessmen, etc., and gain real power to make changes. Others will work from outside, for example, by ferreting out prior are and exposing technically indefensible patents. The best thing we can do is to make known to our non-technical friends and acquaintances just how much the patent system is hurting them, how much it is costing them in real dollars, and how much it is holding back real innovation.
Does anyone honestly believe that drug research would grind to a halt if there were no patents? If so, then why does open source software development not grind to a halt?
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Seems to be working fairly well without it. These aren't supercomputers you know.
Worse yet, none of these damn things have parity on control word inputs.
Uhh, that wasn't an accident - PCs don't need parity as it would only increase bandwidth requirements on an already tight channel.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
I see allot of posts decrying the evils of Rambus and/or its parent companies.
This is silly. The companies are not evil for working within the framework of the law to protect their profits.
The patent system, on the other hand, is evil, if one defines evil to be that which is harmful to progress and the public good.
There are only so many ways to interface memory with data. There are only so many ways to synch memory timing. Each patent provides an entity with what, in terms of computing, amounts to an eternal monopoly. Eternal, because 20 years from the filing date is an eternity in terms of how fast the technology moves. Or, at least, has until now.
I do not think it will be long before every useful method for interfacing one computing component with another, be it memory, mass storage, or what have you, will be patented by someone. Probably several someones, quite likely with conflicting patent claims. What then? No competition, as each entity will have a government enforced monopoly in its domain, which it may cross license to a competitor in the same way Rambus does - at a higher price to make the competitor's (possibly more popular or superior) product less competetive.
Without competition there will be no incentive to innovate.
With less innovation technological progress will be slowed, quite possibly to a crawl.
Then, of course, the patent advocates will proclaim that 20 years from the date of filing is a perfectly reasonable amount of time for a patent, as the technology is still in use 20 years later.
Of course, they neglect to point out that the reason the technology is still in use 20 years later is because progress has been stifled for so long by the very system of patents they advocate.
There is a reason the planes we fly in have 50 year old designs, despite advances in materials and aeronotical sciences. (Only now are some experimental craft finally using comosites and making real progress again -- many of the patents have expired!) There is a reason we are all driving filthy petroleum burning cars despite having had the technology for clean hydrogen burning motors for over forty years. (The oil companies bought up the patents and buried them - only now are a few buses finally burning hydrogen fuel and filling the air with water vapor instead of carcinogens - the patents are expiring.) Now we will begin seeing this same, slow crawl of technology coming to the area of computer science as well - the patent mongers have discovered us, and are locking up all of our ideas.
These areas of research are all characerized by an initial explosion of new technology followed by glacial progress. Not because people are unimaginative, or because all the possiblities have been explored, all the discoveries made. No. It is because all of the fundamental ideas are locked away, privatized into someones property, and further research is thereby severely stifled. Now we have the agonizing displeasure of seeing it happen to our field of endeavor as well.
Patents are bad for software. That much is obvious to nearly everyone here. What is less obvious, and far more insidious, is that patents are bad for hardware as well. In fact, patents are bad for every realm of scientific and technological endeavor: they lock down ideas, lock people out possibilities they might otherwise have explored (and that might have otherwise led to even greater discoveries), they stifle innovation and yes, even economic incentive. One guy gets a monopoly and maybe even gets rich, two or three others with the same idea (and maybe even a better implementation of it) are locked out, and a hundred others are prevented from making their contribution at all.
How much science, how much progress, has been lost to this despicable system? How much better could our lives have been, if only our thoughts and ideas hadn't been treated like land claims in a bad western?
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy