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Fortune on Rambus
Weasel Boy writes: "Fortune delivers a whithering attack on Rambus, which as previously reported here, was found guilty of fraud when it tried to sue Infineon for patent infringement. The article gives a capsule history of Rambus and how it was brought down by the 'duplicity and greed' that made it a darling on Wall Street and despised in Silicon Valley, but prudently stops short of writing its epitaph."
We need more companies to do this sort of thing so that we can challenge the current problems with the patent system.
Rambus' core memory is no faster than anyone elses. All RDRAM has is a different/novel way of communicating data across the bus. It's not even that good, when you get down to it in nitty-gritty detail: the RDRAM controller is a nightmare to implement well [even Rambus' own controller design sucks]. Precisely because of Rambus' wacky comms protocol. A good SDRAM controller is almost trivial.
Rambus can only go up to 1200MHz if they have core memory capable of that speed. And if they do, so do the SDRAM manufacturers. And if *they* do, they'll figure a way to get the same throughput and latency at a lower clockspeed without that comms bullshit.
Rambus is dead. Good riddance. RDRAM is the single worst feature of the PS2 so I'll be very happy if PS3 uses a more sensible memory architecture.
What the article didn't point out was that each of these ideas were already in RamBus's designs
Perhaps, but you have one year from the time a designe is publicly demonstrated (See a lawyer if you want an exact definition of this) to file for a patent. That is in the US, in most other countries, if it isn't patented when you demonstrate it then you can't patent it.
that's actually somewhat misleading. The amount of DAMAGES that you may recieve is capped at $350k.. the rest of the money goes straight to the govt. You can still sue people for 10 million, but you will only ever see $350k of it. I totally agree with it, because it keeps people from using lawsuits as a "get rich quick" scheme... and it still has the effect of 'hurting' the other party financially.
This may not be the case in virginia, but I know other states have laws like this.
It's cheaper. It's performance is closer to the promised performance of RDRAM, not the real.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
No! Punitive damages are meant to punish the guilty party, hence the name. Sometimes a defendant is found to have made a calculated decision to break the law because the expected financial benefit of doing so was greater than the expected damages. As I understand things, the threat of punitive damages is intended to deter such calculation.
It appears that that was the problem, that they knew as much about configuring routers as they did about spelling. :-)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I applaud these manufacturers for standing up to Rambus, and destroying their fraudulent patent-manipulation schemes.
Fortune recently wrote an article about the schemes of Jerome Lemelson, who, with his cohorts, extorted billions from various industries by similar patent manipulations. Some have said "he didn't patent inventions, he invented patents."
Cognex is going after them now, ready to fight the good fight, just like these other folks did. Hopefully they'll be as successful.
Here's to the good guys!
mostly for pedants such as yourself. you are making the assumption that poorly capitalized messages lack content. obviously you've never read alan cox's posts to the kernel mailing list
What bother me are the legions of engineering students and former engineering students who think that as technical people they don't need to be able to speak and write intelligently.
I am especially annoyed by people who write like that in email.
oh plz... iF tH3Y can understand what's being said between themselves then wtf cares .. Now, are we perhaps writing technical documentation or standards? Well, in that case there is certainly a need for precise language.
I don't feel email about snacks down the hall qualifies though. In fact I prefer the shorthand, it's quicker to read through. Your intolerance is also unlikely to make you friends among non-native english speakers.
There is a very real and unavoidable tendency for people to form their first impressions on others based on presentation as opposed to content. So stick with what the grammar nazis taught you if you're attempting to establish your credibility with a third party (even when you have none). Once that reputation is established, there is no reason to appease someone who gets flustered just because you don't dot your i's.
No... Those three have only subverted standards after they were established... Rambus seeked to (and basically suceeded) subvert a standard as it was being developed, by hiding the fact that the "suggestions" they were making to the DDR RAM consortium that they (Rambus) had already patented the "suggestions", until the day that manufacturing began (or so goes my understanding of it...)
Yes, MS might not be nice because they take an "open" standard, add "MS" before it, and viola! have their own standard... But i've yet to hear of them pulling what Rambus pulled...
Scion never heard from E&S again, and neither did anyone else.
This is OT, sorry.
E&S currently has ~80% of the market share in the government simulation business, IIRC, and they are focusing their sites on commercial business now as well. Just a list of some of their customers: most major airlines, NASA, some film and video studios, lots of planetariums (Digital Theater is lovely), and of course others.
And let's of course not forget their backing by Intel.
To say E&S has never been heard from again is silly considering how large of a company it is and how many contracts they have out. I haven't heard of the situation you described, but then again, that was quite a while ago.
-Frijoles-
... we'll be all set.
Of which the most wonderful law is that you can incorporate in Delaware without having to live there. :-)
More seriously, there are some tax advantages, which a number of "incorporate your firm in Delaware" websites will cheerily mention. But one of the more important advantages in the long term is that the court system there is very fair and very predictable in its application of corporate law. Precedent really controls the rulings, and there is a large body and long history of precedent in the state.
Babar
There is a big difference from being tolerant of people making honest grammatical mistakes, and from putting up with people who can't be bothered to even make an effort to get things right (and who think it doesn't matter if they get it wrong). I agree with a previous poster. There are too many engineers and computer science students who don't think English skills matter.
But DDR SDRAM typically transfers 64 bits per clock (or half clock), and Rambus typically does 16 bits per clock.
Do THAT math, and all of a sudden DDR comes out ahead of RAMBUS (but, this is all oversimplification)
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
(Granted I don't know that Rambus really innovated on anything-- from the article and what I've heard, RDRAM "technology" is nearly identical to SDRAM except for a handful of minor changes..)
That is far from the truth. RAMBUS is significantly different in many ways, and can't be criticized for its lack of innovation. But those changes have their tradeoffs.
See Ars Technica article for the technical details.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
(Todays managers ruthless and sadistic enough to do something like that)
It seems very clear that the managers at Rambus are primarily interested in money, so you may rest assured that when Rambus goes bust, its managers will be selling whatever legitimate technology Rambus owns for every penny they can get.
Maybe the next Slashdot Poll should be a Rambus Dead Pool: when do you expect Rambus to go bust: (1) next Tuesday, (2) six months, (3) 12 months, (4) two years, (5) five years, (6) 1996, (7) CowboyNeal.
In addition to assuming that SDRAM technology will stand still, you're also assuming that Rambus will still be around in 12 months and that any chip maker would ever trust them enough again to license any of their technology.
It's nice to see bad things happen to sleazy people. Kudos to Infineon for fighting the good fight.
Back in the early 80's, Evans & Sutherland tried something like this, sending letters to a number of graphics card makers claiming a patent on --are you ready for this?-- the memory-mapped frame buffer!
I was working for Scion corporation at the time, (makers of the MicroAngelo graphics card for the Altair bus).
Rather than cave in, Bill Follin got on the phone with Marty Alpert at Tecmar, and the CEO's of four or five other manufacturers, and they sent E&S a reply saying, (basically) cut this shit out, or we'll sue to overturn *all* of your patents on the grounds that they're obvious to one skilled in the art and should never have been issued in the first place.
Scion never heard from E&S again, and neither did anyone else.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Don't fraudulent patent applications carry penalties? Perjury?
First of all, reasonably proper spelling and grammar indicate that someone put time and thought into what they wrote. It indicates to me as a reader that the author thought the subject was worth spending more than a few minutes on, and therefore is more likely to be worth my time to read.
/. guys. They do a fine job, and as I said, their particular idiosyncrasies rarely bother me. What bother me are the legions of engineering students and former engineering students who think that as technical people they don't need to be able to speak and write intelligently.
Second, the ability to understand and apply the rules of English indicate a certain level of intelligence and education. Again, this is a clue to me as a reader that the author might have something worth reading.
Finally, poor spelling and grammar really do make things harder to read and understand. It causes the reader to spend more effort on understanding the important details, and less on deciphering the language. At the most extreme form of people trying to be cute with email "how r u doing", a lack of punctuation, capitalization, or any semblance of English is so distracting that the meager excuse for content is totally lost on the recipient.
That said, I have never found errors in the headlines and blurbs to be distracting. Sometimes the headlines do a poor job of conveying the topic of the link, but that is usually from some botched attempt at a journalistic "hook" than poor English.
This isn't meant to be a rant at the
I am especially annoyed by people who write like that in email. I don't really mind if people write like retarded 3rd graders to their friends (unless their friends includes me), but in an business setting even a brief and informal email to the person in the next cube deserves a few seconds of extra effort to translate it into real English.
One thing that's interesting about the story is that it describes how a RamBus employee went to standards meetings and came back with ideas for things to patent - then the company patented them. What the article didn't point out was that each of these ideas were already in RamBus's designs (for example the low voltage swings were a staple of their basic idea etc etc). It's more a case of them being prompted by the meetings to cover their butts than outright stealing of other people's ideas.
Having said that they obviously didn't bother to patent this stuff - IMHO much of it is "obvious to one skilled in the art" - proved by the fact that it was being independantly invented in the standards meetings by others who are obviously skilled in the art and therefore should never have been accepted as a patent by the USPTO (like they care, or bother to check)
foo@localhost:/usr/home/foo$ /usr/games/fortune -o
Rambus, like, sucks and stuff. They have dumb employees and they kinda smell like poo. Nyahh!!! Neener neener! Take that Rambus!
foo@localhost:/usr/home/foo$
A federal court jury here Wednesday afternoon found Rambus Inc. had committed fraud by failing to disclose its synchronous patent applications to the industry JEDEC standards body.
and
The damage amount, however, will likely be reduced to as low as $350,000 due to a Virginia state law capping the level of punitive awards.
Can someone explain why a federal award would be reduced under state law?
That's actually not a bad idea, but if any company did this, they'd probably duplicate the same predatory techniques. RMBS is getting pretty low now; I wonder if an Open Source community hostile takeover would work. If we could snarf up enough of their stock and all assign our stock votes to someone like Stallman, that'd kill the company dead in a way that'd make the business world sit up and take notice.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
what'll we see next?
Business Week: "Bill Gates - No Longer Our Hero"
ABC News: "Next up - Why Soundbite Journalism Sucks"
ZDNet: ... uh... well... I don't want to push my luck. ;-) Guess I'll just count my blessings.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
That's why I don't expect Rambus to be in business three years from now.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I'm still disapointed that Rambus hasn't been convicted of fraud ... Rambus is the definition of fraud, I'd like to see the company disasembled, its exectives heavily fined, and its patents released to the public.
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
Webvan's down to $35 million, so we could get them for about 1/10th the cost.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
That's the thing about non-mainstream press, isn't it? Someone else will often break the story first, long before the mainstream picks up on it, but you have to wade through so much garbage to get to it.
I think it's pretty clear that what Rambus was doing was pretty slimy, and they were found guilty with good reason. JEDEC members had an understanding. Rambus trampled on it and then jumped ship to avoid facing the music. I do think the "running scared" comment that someone pointed out does indicate a sense of delusion on the part of the Rambus partisans; I mean, I said the same thing about Intel's advertising FUD back when Apple started shipping Power Macs, but the comment actually made sense at the time.
I look at it this way: any memory bus that requires anything even vaguely resembling a terminator is probably broken anyway.
/Brian
I've posted this to many Rambus stories before and it has never recieved any moderation so has by and large gone unread: Raytheon and perhaps other manufacturers developed small bit buffers in the sixties that worked with quadra phase shift keying (QPSK) modems. English translation, they built memory that stored four data bits per clock cycle. Again, there is 40 years of prior art for Rambus's patents governing RDRAM. A specific raytheon device that had a QPSK bit buffer was the tropo modem found in the AN/TRC-170, a military digital transmission van, built in the early 70's and still in service today.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Getting Intel to declare your memory architecure as the defacto standard for their new upcoming processor(s) should have been enough. The money they were getting for licensing RDRAM was guaranteed, and about the only way they could have failed in the open market is if the Pentium 4 had failed (which it has, to an extent, but it's not entirely dead).
I do agree with the Fortune writer that Rambus got greedy, and that's too bad-- having more companies working on technology is never a bad thing, but in the case of Rambus, when a company tries to choke off their competitors, it's doomed to failure. I think everyone agrees that it was nice having 3DFX, nVidia and ATI competing in the 3D graphics chipset market-- which is why it's nice to have memory makers competing with different technologies or standards. As the competition is either bought or crushed, there's less incentive from the remaining companies to continue to innovate. (Granted I don't know that Rambus really innovated on anything-- from the article and what I've heard, RDRAM "technology" is nearly identical to SDRAM except for a handful of minor changes..)
It'll be interesting to see how these rulings against RMBS turn up on appeal (though I really doubt they'll get the verdicts overturned).
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
Oh, when I saw the words "Rambus" and "Fortune" together, I nearly wet my pants. I didn't think those belonged together. But now I see that it't "Fortune" the magazine.
Nevermind.
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
How can you make such an inane statement? The AMD Athlon's provide far more bang-for-the-buck than do the Intell PIIIs and PIVs. The floating point units in the Athlons are better than those in the Pentiums. I own an Athlon, Duron, Pentium III, and Celeron-based systems, so, unlike some people (you?), I'm not talking out of my a$$. I switched from Intel to AMD because AMD had a far-superior product for the money.
The parent to this was not a "troll." He's right. Intel does deserve to suffer for their pact with Rambus and I share his sentiments. I have to believe that the moderator owns an Intel-based PC...
Take a look at their response. You'll come to the conclusion that they've been brainwashed by the company's cult-like PR department.
The thing that I just don't understand about Rambus is this:
The tech industry said all along that it was too expensive. Most memory manufacturers who were far larger than Rambus ever dreamed to be were working on a competing standard that had higher performance at a lower cost. Nobody in the tech biz wanted to even mess with Rambus, even after Intel decided to go with RDRAM and basically bribed memory manufacturers to license the technology. Rambus's heavy-handed tactics were well-known in the industry and they were spurned for it.
How in the hell could any analyst or market researcher even pretend that Rambus was ever a smart buy (at any price)? It was obvious from the beginning that it was doomed to failure. And yet it became one of the hottest IPOs ever. And had an astronomical P/E ratio. It just goes to show you that when it comes to the stock market, even the "experts" are clueless.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
Now please allow me to translate for all of the technical types who feel that correct grammar and punctuation is not important: The English language is a standard. Our ability to comprehend is an API (which comes from being taught how to read). Your written words are code. Now code to the freaking standard already so that your writing will be compatible with our API! Most of the writing on Slashdot is just spaghetti code.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
Calling one that does not speak your protocol 'stupid' is ignorant, self-centered, and racist.
Pray tell, just where did my "ignorant, self-centered, and racist (racist???)" self call anybody stupid for not having correct grammar and punctuation?
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
But imagine how easily things could have gone very wrong. Imagine that Rambus was the giant in the industry, and the other manufacturers were small. In that case, Rambus would have won the lawsuits, or maybe settled. And there would be a company with Microsoft style monopoly.
You'd be paying $300 bucks for your 128 MB instead of $30.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
Their current owners/managers are obviusly not fit for the job, so someone should by 'em and sack 'em. This way we won't lose someone who've got the solution to the PC's currently largest problem, transfere rates between the CPU and the RAM. There is no use in a 1Thz CPU if the ram can only put data into it with a speed of 266Mhz (I know; you can't compare bus and CPU Mhz, but still...) Rambus is going for 1200Mhz within 2005 so someone should take over before someone burns the blueprints. (Todays managers ruthless and sadistic enough to do something like that)
Look a monkey!
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." - George Bush
I go there once in awhile for a few laughs and sometimes feel sorry for the 'longs', the ones who are in it for the long run. If you get a chance take a look at this post 'fortune takes on Rambus', here's the link http://www.rambusite.com/cgi-bin/forumcgi/display. cgi?preftemp=temp&page=topic0/sub1919.dat&preftemp =temp
Take a look at their response. You'll come to the conclusion that they've been brainwashed by the company's cult-like PR department.