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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."
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!
(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
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."
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)
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
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.