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Documents Reveal Rambus' Patent-Enforcement Plans
spiro_killglance writes: "Electronic News Online asked the U.S. District Court of San Jose to release the Rambus Internal Memos on JEDEC. The court did so
yesterday. Get the scoop here. But in brief, it looks like
they were planning to stick it to memory manufactures all along,
and did add patent claims from information gained at JEDEC in 1992." Hmmm. Rambus, slimy business practices? Say it ain't so.
In a suprise announcment today Rambus announced that they were retroactively announcing their patant for magenetic-core memory. Analysts speculate that this is a defensive move by Rambus in the event of a failure in their current bussiness model to patent other peoples' ideas that are currently applicable. This new initiative would patent other peoples' ideas that are already patented.
When questioned weather he expected to be granted a patent, the CEO of Rambus pointed out Amazon's One-Click patent, and said, "What do you think?"
When further questioned if he thought there was a market for slow memory in 128 byte chunks, he pointed out that people were buying RDRAM.
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We have fought the AC's, and they have won.
No, you're wrong.
r ev iews/1787/9/
Please go read Tomshardware stuff on RDRAM or
Hardwarecentrals article.
"However, when the memory system is under higher load the answer can be quite different. When one or more additional transactions are being serviced, factors such as bank conflicts and address bandwidth become important issues. The higher bank count of RIMMs versus DIMMs means that the probability of bank conflicts occurring is much lower. Therefore, the high latency and bandwidth penalties associated with bank conflicts occur far less often in RDRAM-based systems than in SDRAM-based systems. Furthermore, as illustrated in the previous timing diagrams, the need for 2-cycle addressing on an address bus used to specify both Row and Column addresses means that the address bus may not be available to start a subsequent transaction in SDRAM-based memory. During periods of higher memory utilization, when more than one request is sent to the memory controller, some memory requests may be delayed waiting for the address bus. For these reasons, under higher loads RDRAM-based memory can be much more efficient, achieving lower latency and higher bandwidth than SDRAM. "
http://www.hardwarecentral.com/hardwarecentral/
If you disagree, please provide some resources as foundation.
--sn0w
And it all crashes down, (the FTC and PTO, not to mention JEDEC, are going to grill Rambus for this.)
And you break your crown, (the Rambus speed crown was broken by DDR SDRAM)
And you point your finger but there's no one around!
Just want one thing, just to play the king, (the king of RAM designers, that is)
But your castle's crumbled and you're left with just a name (Rambus is a cool name, if only it wasn't so tarnished by this)
Where's your crown, King Nothing? (After all of this, they'll have their assets kicked to Neptune)
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
The primary issue here is not whether Rambus' patents are valid by themselves. The issue is that Rambus may have violated contractual obligations to JEDEC and its members. The JEDEC member rules specifically prohibit what Rambus allegedly did (sitting on patents while allowing them to become standards), and presumably if it's determined that Rambus violated those rules... then lots of penalties could be applied. I don't know what they might be (I don't know if they could actually invalidate the patent, or just force Rambus to pay huge settlements.)
There's no point in JEDEC having a set of rules for just this purpose if they can't be enforced. It seems that if Rambus really did violate them, they should be punished. Otherwise, standards organizations simply can't function, as long as for-profit members can get away with breaking the rules and producing tainted standards.
The other allegation, which is harder to prove, is that Rambus may actually have "stolen" ideas brought up duruing the JEDEC meetings. If that's the case, their claims on the patents may be illegitimate.
It is shocking that a corporation would invent something and then turn right around and patent it!
It's only shocking because Rambus agreed not to file patents on any of the SDRAM technology, but while the standard was being made, Rambus amended an existing patent application to include new claims that covered SDRAM.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
How d'ya s'pose TI managed to survive the latter half of the 1980's? Check out this guy's resume: http://www.jaeckle.com/attys/fitzgeraldthomas.asp -- "As part of the Texas Instruments licensing program that generated over one billion dollars in patent royalties, he was responsible for identifying and enforcing TI patents against unlicensed U.S. companies. This activity included identifying infringers, reverse engineering and analysis of infringing devices, and presentations of that analysis to potential licensees to encourage them to take a license."
I've been saying for the past three or four years that if we don't learn from the semiconductor industry, whose path we, the builders and users of the internet are following, we will end up with the same environment here, as well. Or, more succinctly, "Work toward your vision of tomorrow, or surely you will live in someone else's".
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Warning: This signature may offend some viewers.
RDRAM takes a 20 to 30% hit in performance (latency and bandwidth) when you install a 2nd RIMM in each channel. The main reason for this is the RDRAM control protocol for addressing each RIMM.
1. So on your super duper server with 4 channels of RDRAM, do you want a 20-30% drop in memory performance when you fully populate memory?
2. A lot of server work depends on response time (how fast the server does something). Most server processing is reading/manipulating/saving data to/from memory/IO.
With RDRAM latency being up to 50% more than SDRAM..
a) a LIGHTLY LOADED server will be upto 50% slower.
b) a HEAVILY LOADED server will ALSO be upto 50% slower. Why because faster processing of big chunks of data (more bandwidth) is OFFSET by more latency due to cache misses (heavily loaded server = more processes = more process switches)
A) The article linked to didn't make too good of choices in quotes...None of that info screamed 'MALICE' IMO.
/. story, it sounds like a cocktail party. Why are commercial entities the only ones pursuing this?
B) Enough talking...From what I've read in the comments to this
What's this Submit thingy do?
I wonder what will happen to things that use RAMBUS? Such as the PlayStation 2, and N64. Well, the N64 is on its way out but the PS2 has just begun, yet is already well established. They can't be expected to change the specs of their system at this point in time!
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
And your bases too!
Unfortunately, as Rambus is a corporation, the principals of Rambus are only liable for the amount they have invested in the company.
This means that the principals are not liable as individuals for what Rambus the corporation does.
What I see with the first release of the P4 is an incomplete processor pushed out the door by marketing 'droids. If the missing pieces of the P4 are ultimately implemented, it may actually turn out to be a decent processor with decent performance and expandability.
My jury is out on that one for the next year. When/if the "real" P4 comes out, we'll see if it can actually keep up with the Athlon. If I need a kick-ass box before then, I expect that I'd buy an Athlon.
As for RDRAM and a P4 with optimized code beating SDRAM (on what processor?), I think that you should be comparing a P4 with optimized code on RDRAM vs SDRAM (both using properly optimized chipsets), to know that it's not dependant on something other than the RAM protocol. Until then, though it seems that for the current state of the art, RDRAM doesn't seem like a very good bet.
That having been said, the fact that they had to pretty much blackmail various manufacturers into use RDRAM doesn't bode well for the technical superiority of the technology either.
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In fact, if Slashdot posts were more informative in general, it wouldn't be bad thing. Remember when people who actually used to know something about the subject at hand would post intelligent responses? These days it seems like half the posts are people with nothing bright to say who instead resort to posting a +5, Funny attempt.
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Well, I haven't really thought about the best way of interleaving data across banks with parallelization in mind. I think it's one of those things I'd have to see simulated before I could really picture it. You'd definately want more per bank in a higher-latency design, but the exact ratio isn't clear.
:)
I can definately agree with the idea of needing out of order transactions, that's one of the wins with SCSI. With many small requests you end up getting fairly large gains from serving some out of order where with large transfers the access cost is outweighed by raw transfer speed.
As for the job stuff... I have to agree with the idea of people being cross trained. I myself rant about high-level programmers not having any low-level experience, they think that all instructions take as long to process, despite one translating easily into a single opcode and the other being a o(n^2) list operation on complex data. Argh.
Anyways, I have to agree. People should know all parts of the system, even if they tend to specialize, because it enables them to better use the tools.
And yeah, the short build cycle of software is a huge plus compared to an actual physical process. I remember making circuit boards (simple stuff in high school) and how screwing something up meant spending about an hour, with correcting the mistake, reprinting the board, etching it (and dying your hands green in the process) and then redrilling and soldering the components on.
I'm so spoiled these days because I'm doing a lot of prototyping in stuff like perl. When I have to go to C I find myself saving the code and immediately trying to run the executable, forgetting completely about having to build it... heh. In some ways I can't imagine going back to a long build cycle.
Regardless, hardware seems more tangible, mainly because it's hard to just hack together, so it's a larger achievement. I've only done little projects, but they still feel more impressive than the much more complex stuff I've written in code, most of the time.
I guess a good mix of the two would be best. Some hardware design, but mainly writing the code to make the hardware do funky stuff. But then, being able to fix a hardware bug instead of having to just work around it.
All companies that aren't classified as non-profit ARE profit driven, everything they do is for profit. If they make an open standard, it is so they can make money in the long run. Making money is what companies do, it is not inherently evil.
Probably just dormant until they can reengineer the next big thing. It's not they don't have talent or technology, I think. They did sell their product to Sony for the PS2, Nintendo, for the N64, and Intel, for the P4.
Come to think of it, all three are having problems. I wonder if it really is because of Rambus?
Well, at least they have a good marketing department.
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GPL Deconstructed
To answer you and the AC who responded:
Many architectures support interleaving. If the CPU wants 32b at a time and the RAM is 16b wide, you simply use two banks. It's a bit more complex, but not by much.
What modern chipsets do is decouple the CPU and the RAM. In old computers traces ran straight from one to the other. Today they use the chipset as a gateway. For the most part these chipsets are fairly stupid, the IDE drives of the RAM world. They simply take one request and pass it along, interleaving directly across banks.
A server-level chipset is more like SCSI, it takes a list of requests and fills them in the quickest order. It also doesn't interleave just to get the number of bits / transfer that the CPU wants, it interleaves data across multiple banks which are each as wide as the regular data path.
With a translator (the chipset) between the RAM and CPU, you're free to fetch the data in any way you want and then just assemble it for transfer to the CPU in the most convenient way. Complex chipsets are able to do this with more banks at once.
That's a fairly gross oversimplification, but it's the jist of it.
As to why it's not done... chip size and number of traces. DIMMs are 168 pins, you basically need that many traces between the chipset and the RAM, and for two banks, you need twice that many. In addition to the traces from the chipset to the CPU, and everything else it handles.
Being that traces can only be so thin, you need more layers on the motherboard to cram them all in, which increases complexity and thus cost. Not to mention the chips being so big simply from the number of pins sticking out the bottom.
This is where RDRAM comes in, it's got a narrow bus so it takes less pins per bank. But, RDRAM is much more complex than SDRAM, making it take longer to do something, like ask for the data at a certain address. That latency makes it slower start sending data even though with more channels it's faster once it starts.
Compare this to SDRAM which is very fast to make requests of, meaning that it may be slower in the long haul but it's faster off the line.
So it comes down to a price/performance tradeoff. Multiple channels of SDRAM is always better, but more expensive and harder to do. So for some things where a little latency is less important, RDRAM might make sense. Unfortunately this isn't (IMHO) in regular computers, but instead in texture cache on a PS2 or something.
We're calling the Ironica now!!!
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
or more Yet there have been plenty of innovations before then.
Well, the Tomshardware link isnt very positive towards RDRAM really, and Sander Sassens articles on hardwarecentral have been rather controversial.
Theory is very nice, but unless there are some hard facts or at least consistent benchmarks made by several independent testers (rather than
the dubious ones that exist now), that show anything more than an infinitesimal performance difference either way for general applications (and which currently appear to show a generally worse performance for RDRAM), the price isnt even close to worth it. Even for servers.
http://www.inqst.com/ddrvrmbs.htm, tomshardware articles on ddr sdram, etc.
RDRAM is not the way to go, and not just because of price. DDR SDRAM is faster (benchmarks vary, but usually favor DDRSDRAM), cheaper (pricewatch $65 vs $129), more reliable (not because of RDRAM itself, but because of controller difficulties on motherboard), less power consuming, and cooler (RDRAM needs a fan). DDR SDRAM is also, by open source philosophy, ethically superior, because it is an open standard while RDRAM is closed. DDR SDRAM is superior to RDRAM in nearly every way.
Presently, no video card exists which uses RDRAM, and given the thermal and latency issues with RDRAM, it's probably going to remain that way indefinitely. The high-end GeForce cards use high-grade DDR SDRAM at very high clock frequencies, which is much faster but generally even more expensive than RDRAM.
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A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
The fact that these technologies could give them the patent to SDRAM isn't, in and of itself, at least relatively, worrisome. I think the idea that Microsoft owns the rights to Winblows has far more wide-ranging effects and is far more troubling than the possibility of a company owning rights to SDRAM.
If you think that IT patents are crazy, look at some of the non-IT patents that have had half the world paying royalties, over the years. For years anyone using plexiglass (thousands of engineers and architects around the world) had to pay the fellow who patented it. The paper clip was patented in 1899. Everyone knows the telephone was patented. Motorola patented the cell phone, for that matter. If the idea of SDRAM's rights being owned is scary, it's because we should be scared of the idea of patenting, itself, not because of any misuse of patent law by RAMBUS. Trademark Infringement: Just do it.
No videocards indeed,
but the Playstation 2 videochip
set uses Direct RDRAM though.
--sn0w
To ensure open standards remain open, I think all profit-driven members of standards committies should be banned. It's the only way.
I disagree with that viewpoint. Not all profit driven companies are scumbags. There is more than one ligitimate way to derive profit from a situation like this - pulling stunts like RAMBUS'es isn't nessisary. In fact, it's the really fscking lazy way to do it, or a last resort option.
And even funnier - how do you propose to determine which companies involved are simply profit driven, and which ones have a very ligitimate desire to be involved in the creation of an open standard? Or do ypu contend that all for-profit organizations (individuals, companies, etc.) should simply be banned - and anyone with any real stake in the subject be left out of it?
I could ramble on and on about this one - but I won't Yes, companies like RAMBUS piss me off, but, what are the realistic alternatives?
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
The technology must be pretty pathetic for it to be bitchslapped so badly by equipment that costs maybe a third as much.
(Either that, or you're John Corse, the RMBS Stock Shill, under a pseudonym. Then again, you're not coming across as shrill and strident as he does.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
To ensure open standards remain open, I think all profit-driven members of standards committies should be banned. It's the only way.
Then, no "profit-driven" member will adopt the technology. The whole point of standards is to avoid having the industry big-wigs develop redundant, incompatible technologies that lock in customers. With things like DRAM, no one who isn't "profit-driven" can really benefit from the work of a standards committee. Just try and manufacture a new RAM standard in your garage.
Standards bodies are good, and it's essential to get the big companies on board to adopt the technologies created and to bring the experience in manufacturing and design that other entities just simply don't have.
While I have a very low opinion of corporations in general, especially profit-driven public corporations, the majority of companies realize that acting against a standards organization is counter-productive. The only people who can afford to are all near-monopolies, such as Microsoft, or little underhanded IP clearinghouses with no actual product like Rambus.
I'm just worried that companies like Rambus have spoiled the process for everyone else. Just like the article said, it's like a sporting event where you expect everyone to be playing fair. When someone doesn't, it casts doubt on all the other athletes and the event itself. The last thing we need is for Rambus's actions to destroy confidence in open standards organizations.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
That's because Microsoft applications don't use standard ASCII for quotes in order to do their "smart quotes" feature. There's a program called the "Demoronizer" that fixes that and other damage if you want your web pages viewable outside Windoze.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
They may not be liable as individuals for what Rambus the corporation does, per se.
But what about the charge of performing crimiinal/illegal activites, lying and fraud, using Rambus as the tool from which they profit?
Framed differently, aren't they guilty of using and taking advantage of Rambus and it's employees and shareholders to perform acts of fraud and break of contract to their gain?
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
When Rambus dies, they'll get handy severence cheques. After that, they'll sadly pack their porches and drive off into the sunset, looking for another sweet deal.
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Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
In that case, IMO, if/when RAMBUS loses, the other members of JEDEC should sue RAMBUS's principals.
These memos seem to provide evidence RAMBUS execs were deliberately promoting fraud..
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
This is the main reason that RDRAM first appeared in graphics subsystems (with maximum frame buffer sizes - rambus appeared at about the same time that VRAM sizes grew so that a 64-bit wide framebuffer needed more VRAM that the size of the framebuffer) - it also showed up in game systems about the same time for the same reasons.
I also think there are real high-end places that RDRAM could be better (assuming the price comes down) - this is not so much due to the high bandwidth but due to the high potential concurrency (basicly the ability to sense many DRAM rows in parallel) - for today's CPUs with slow serializing buses between the CPU and the memory controller very little concurrency gets exposed to the memory subsystem - latency becomes everything - but on the other side of that bus is a superscalar CPU which is highly concurrent - potentially we could see 5-10 councurrent memory accesses (maybe more if you had speculative row senses) - applied to the memory if it were 'close by'.
Anyway - my point - there are real places where rambus makes sense - where they are changes from time to time (the higher cost IS a big deal).
(disclaimer - I'm a chip designer - I don't work for rambus, don't own any stock - but I've done 3 rambus based designs over the years for the above reasons [and 2 VRAM based ones and 1 SDRAM based one - you pick your design's sweet-spot whereever you can find it])
Do these industry groups JEDEC and all the other ones get patents on things that they standardize? I see the need for a patent holder non profit org that is around only to hold patents that can freely be used. No licensing crap, no legal this and that, just free patents. The only reason the patent company would be around is to hold the patents so that other greedy companies couldn't come about to do the rambus shuffle. Is there such a thing in place, and if not, why not?
exactly...as people they can still be liable. Suing them != suing the company. When someone sues a company, the people are liable to what they own because what they own is the company. But suing/charging the people has nothing to do with the company itself. They are liable as PEOPLE not as owners of the COMPANY. Incorporation creates a seperate entity. An executive usually owns stock(making its value part of the company) and is still a person able to be held personally liable for HIS actions. The tough part, well not-so-tough with these memos, is proving the individual had all knowledge of the crime committed.
I agree with you on that "use it where it makes sense". I just don't think that RDRAM makes sense as the main memory of a general purpose computer.
For video, which is dealing with large concurrent data, it's fairly good. For databases which are small non-linear pieces of data, it's not.
Your point about the concurrent memory busses is interesting, but I still think a general CPU would be best served by lower latency. And it'd be a different architecture, because you'd need to interleave the data across physical RAM a MB or so at a time instead of at the bit/byte level, or you'd need to hit all the busses anyways.
I personally think you'd be better served by a decent L3 cache which could actually deal with this sort of issue better than a general-purpose memory architecture. Sort of the way an L1 cache can be so low-latency because of the tradeoffs being made in design.
I can't say that I've tested this theory, but I think with the complexity of the controller you'd basically lose any speed benefits of the architecture.
Sounds like you've got a great job. I often think I was born many years too late considering I love playing with the bare metal so much.
A real server, not something on a Abit-VP6, but something on a Tyan dual or quad CPU board, would be best served by dual or quad SDR-SDRAM channels.
It's called the ServerWorks series of chipsets, read up here (on AnandTech): ServerWorks HEsl: DDR bandwidth without DDR SDRAM
It'd add a few hundred dollars to the price, but it'd easily outpace anything RDRAM could throw at it, with all the bandwidth needed AND the low latency of a good technology.
And they are expensive too...
Macs did this a long time ago (memory interleaving) and it's nice to finally see this feature implemented in motherboards again. It'd be nicer if they'd be implemented in lower-end motherboards as well (if Apple did it years and years ago, it can't be some sort of trade secret...).
Abit's "-RAID" boards should have it... they have RAID, why not use a "RAM RAID" as well?
80% of their money comes from fucking patents,
NOT ACTUAL PRODUCTS!
They don't give a fsck if no one buys their ram, they can still mooch off others...
Hope to seem them soon on FC, but it probably won't be so... remember that company that has a patent on http browsing? They are still around, slowly extorting money, "dubious IP and lawyers" can still get you a good living down in the USA
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
"dust off, and nuke em from orbit. It's the only way to be sure"
See? You're not really paranoid if they ARE really out to get you.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
all your base are belong to us
I bet all stinking capitalist corporations would do this if they had the chance, in fact I think Microsoft has a shitload of memos saying just this about their XML participations.
To ensure open standards remain open, I think all profit-driven members of standards committies should be banned. It's the only way.
Does my bum look big in this?
If the court wants to maintain any king of integrety then they will lock themselves in a room for six months and figure out how to preserve the integrety of patents where this case shows blatent misuse of patents which cuts accross the gain of what the US constitution had in mind. Not only do they have to withdraw the ammended claims, it is imperitive that they issue some type of penalty or there is bound to be copycats which will further bog down patent claims if they don't fear satctions. Plus if the court fails to completely and utterly slam Rambus, the majority of standards organizaions will disolve because the membership legal agreements will simply grow too exceedingly complex due to paranoia.
The Register is running a short
clip about the story. Also the PR department of Rambus has been active, the result can be seen
here (althoug nothing very original, just typical quoted out of context defence)..
It's anyway funny to see that Micro$oft isn't the only company which is conserned about the protection of "innovation"...
My DeCSS archive:
My amiga2000 with a fusion forthy had memory interleaving too :)
:)
(oh and it was emulating mac 100%)
Sorry I had to say it
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Documents Reveal Rambus? Patent-Enforcement Plans
Close guys. It is good you knew the "question mark" belonged somewhere in that phrase. And you were pretty close in putting it in the right position. Try one word over...closer....now try right after "Plans". There you go! I knew you could do it...
RDRAM is certainly the way to go, although the high price is not a factor when using RDRAM in servers. I think the desktop market will be still using cheap SDRAM for the next couple of years. RDRAM is nice for servers, but for normal pc-usage it's just too expensive. (Look at the videocard prices for the GeForce cards, mostly because of the expensive memory used....) I'll stick with SDRAM for awhile because it's very cheap. NB: Tom Hardware has a really neat article about Rambus: http://www.tomshardware.com/mainboard/00q1/000315/ index.html
--sn0w
We all know Rambus has been using sneaky tatics to gain market share, i hope something really comes out of this. They've been holding back innovation in the memory field. How many millions of dollars have been spent in court rather than researching new memory technologies? Rambus doesn't care they have nothing new coming and depend that nothing new and improved comes out.
Anyone seen the recent figures on their expenditures? 1/3rd of expenses is for lawyers!, i don't mind computer companies being run by marketers(MS) but its the ones run by lawyers that bother me. Think if there was a program like napster for computer memory, the creator would be on death row. Time for an anti-trust suit against rambus
This was all part of their plan! They applied for patents on RAM technology, and when they were approved, they lied in wait like a tiger ready to ambush its prey. And then, they saw their chance in 1992. To prevent suspicion of foul play, they waited 8 years to sue the RAM makers. And when they did, they claimed that they had patents established well in advance.
IMHO, this was the perfect patent scam. They remained aloof while SDRAM proliferated in the consumer market, and then when computers all over the world were infringing on "their patents", they struck.
I hope they all fry in a vat of their own excrement (or they can just have numerous stories on FC). Such a despicable death is only fitting for this company of weasels.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Now if Slashcode could do something when moronic characters are present...
Going behind the backs of other companies standards meeting just so you could make more profit? I think all memory manufacturers should sue the great satan of memory for every penny they have made off RAMBUST to teach them a lesson about breaking rules such as these!
Pud's gonna love this one!
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I think that these memos clearly show that RAMBUS all along intended to violate the legal agreements they had with the JEDEC members. And that they deliberately used JEDEC to get patents, and also to get their patented IP into the SDRAM standard...
Now all it will take is an honest court and judge to hear this case. Which seems to be hard to get these days...
However, time and money is against RAMBUS. RAMBUS is now left completely without friends in an industry that wants to see them gone. Micron, et all have time and revenue on their side... Even Intel is no longet their friend. Intel is speeding up the release of their own DDR chipset for the P4. RAMBUS memory has already failed in the marketplace, and royalties on that is about the only income RAMBUS has to feed their legal machine.
So, one way or another, I think that this is the beginning of the endgame for RAMBUS. They are not developing any new technology (that we know of) to counter DDR. They put all their eggs in the basket of dubious IP and lawyers.
And it will be good for the whole tech industry for RAMBUS to fall in a spectacular and final fashion. The RAMBUS business model (dishonestly patent shady IP then sue everyone) needs to be demonstrated to be a failure.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
Is that even a word?
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
genre posting.
thank you, drive through.
I believe that this change would more accurately reflect the true nature of Rambus: "The tech-lawsuit specialists. We never stop litigating."
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Hell, after this fiasco, it might be bumped up to July or August! Then, the P4 might become a viable choice.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I don't know how you call that but to me, what RAMBUS did is plain and dull patent fraud. When you take somebody else ideas and secretly amend your pending applications to cover those ideas, you actually wrongly pretend anteriority and knowingly lie to the US PTO.
Now that's specific to the US or, more exactly, it was until the reform of patent laws last year to comply with international standards. Up to last year, the US had a very special status for anteriority where it was when the idea was first formulated which mattered, and not when it was first filled with the patent office. Hence, the importance of escrowed lab logs where engineers had to write down and time-stamp every idea that flied through their mind.
As far as I know, those RAMBUS patents were granted before the reform and thus covered by the old status.
My $0.02
Here is the simpilest solution. Pettion ALL motherboard manufactureres to NOT support the RAMBUS memory. If RAMBUS want to be bunch of dicks - then let them get a dick in the ass. If no one will support their memory the'll be out of business. Just have the other memory manufactureres get together and develop another standard and exclude RAMBUS from the picture. Send the bitches(RAMBUS) into bankruptcy court next. .02 worth.
Done end of story!
Just my
The Truth is a Virus!!!
Thank you. May you find a nice cookie in your kitchen.
Since RAMBUS will becoming to UC Berkeley for an infosession, I was wondering if anyone had suggestions on how to protest, or what questions to ask them?
MMORPG fan-boy? Prove your worth
It is not under question here whether Rambus really could file for those patents. What is under question is whether these undisclosed patents violated existing contracts. If it can be proved that Rambus acted in bad faith on the contracts, all kinds of contract fun comes into place. IANAL, but this looks as those who are will make lots of money off of this. The lawyers may be the only ones who make good on this in the end...
More and more patents seem to seem like the intelectuall version of "First Post"s...
Rambus joins a group develuping new technology "First Patent"...
Amazon and one click shopping "If we didn't they would have"...
The whole busness of "We patented it before you could do it" is getting silly...
It's just a good thing for Microsoft somebody didn't patent FUD or they'd be sued up to there eyeballs...
I don't actually exist.
So the Rambus RIMMs were only a red herring to deceive the FTC and the PTO into believing that Rambus was actually making a new technology. It didn't even have to work well; it just had to function. And Intel fell for it.
After this one, Intel will probably announce their DDR chipset very soon! Who wouldn't, after finding out that the Rambus RIMMs were all part of one huge orchestrated lie?
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Hint: it's right there next to the return key. It's real hard to tell what is a quote and what is being written by the author without them. Apostrophes are missing, too. Looking at the HTML source shows that they really are missing, rather than using some wierd Windows-only characters. Someone must have been using some gooey HTML tool that stripped 'em. Youd think theyd notice theyre missing.
As for this revelation in the case, all I can say is send in the attack lawyers!
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"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
... was already grabbed by virtually everyone doing adertising out there (probably covering the grits down pants part too), and i really hope never to see the intellectual version of the goatse thing.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
... if Intel can't pull some legal tricks on Rambus for deliberately sabotaging RDRAM by annoying virtually every RAM Manufacturer out there with their royalty practices and hence hurt sales of Intel chipsets tied to RDRAM.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks