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Rambus Files Antitrust Suit Against Memory Makers
bender647 writes "Forbes reports: 'Chip designer Rambus sued several major computer memory makers Wednesday, claiming they illegally conspired to limit production and raise prices in an effort to block widespread adoption of Rambus' technology.' Rambus believes that RDRAM was not the success it should have been because chip makers did not want to pay their royalties."
Ok, so thier trying to have other companies pay for thier own stupidity?
I can't imagine why any manufacturer would have done a thing like that.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
maybe the prices will finally come down again
Because the technology was wonderful... or something.
60 percent of the time, my comments are right everytime.
The real reason RAMBUS wasnt a success was because it was so fuggin expensive! Why pay extra money for a motherboard that supports it to pay 2x-4x the amount for the RAM as well? Nearly doubles the PC cost!
-Imidazole2
The manufacturers didn't want to pay their royalties?
Think about that for a second. 'We weren't successful because they didn't want to pay for it.'
I tried that argument down at the Ducati dealer, didn't work there either.
Don't park drunk, accidents cause people.
Well, uhm, yeah that's probably it. Deal with it, losers. Sheesh.
They say vote with your wallet. Until you do. Then they sue your ass.
OK despite the odd interest in lawsuits.... I don't care. Seriously.
So I sue a set of companies who did not want to use a proprietary licensed technology over a open spec. I wonder if SCO's being giving them stupidity lessons.
Maybe RDRAM wasn't the success it should've been, because it was more expensive, and noone ever really adopted it?
No... no, that can't be it. We should sue!
So, RAMBUS gets a government monopoly on a given process (by shady means, or not), and then it's somehow illegal when other companies decide to use other processes instead? Yeah, that makes sense.
[
I love rambus myself, I have a gig of PC800 and its plenty fast.
Wasn't Rambus accused of monopolistic behavior when their designs first appeared?
This smells like SCO -- if you can't compete, litigate!
1. Design a product 2. Ensure it's Overpriced 3. ??? 4. Profit!!!
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
They blame a conspiracy to raise prices, and then they say chipmakers didn't want to pay Rambus licensing. You can't have it both ways... it's obviously your own fault if your licensing is too expensive.
There's no reason not to expect RAM makers to retaliate after what Rambus did at that technology conference.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
I can't even finr RDRAM for my system anymore...If I want to upgrade I have to get a whole new motherboard.
People didn't adopt your technology because
1) It sucked.
2) It was highly overrated.
3) It was overpriced.
4) You are a deceitful bunch of motherfuckers who nobody trusts.
Rambus believes that RDRAM was not the success it should have been because chip makers did not want to pay their royalties.
Or maybe it was because it was too expensive and better alternatives existed?
Ever consider that one, legal geniuses at Rambus?
The coolest voice ever.
Looks like someone forgot to use the Post Anonymously option ...
Well, at least you didn't fail it.
Rambus believes that RDRAM was not the success it should have been because chip makers did not want to pay their royalties.
So, this it is clearly the chipmakers fault then, huh?
Rambus should learn some basic business strategy. If someone comes out with a slightly less quality product, but sells it for a lot cheaper, that product will win. So, recognize the problem and lower your prices or significantly raise the benefits of paying them. In either case, don't resort to frivilous lawsuits if things don't go your way.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
i, for one, am pleased with my rdram. sure beats the hell out of your ddrram in terms of raw speed. just hope i never want to add any or need to replace it.
Bah, they're all a bunch of *ankers ;)
Disclaimer: this is actually a very deep comment.
I personally welcome our new RAMBUS overlords.
60 percent of the time, my comments are right everytime.
The only company violating anti-trust laws was RAMBUS! Entering into a standards committe and submitting technology while secretly patenting it is not only evil, it's illegal due to antitrust law.
And the reason their RAM cost so damn much is because of their royalty arrangements which most companies refused to enter into. And at the time RAMBUS was touting the profit margins on their products over DDR as a benefit and reason that companies should sell it!
Bastards.
Oh, please. Typical mentality. "Well it couldn't possibly be the fact that my product totally stunk. It was clearly something else, so I'll sue". Enough is enough. I'm sick and tired of this crap.
only in kenya !
... seriously
omg
"Rambus believes that RDRAM was not the success it should have been because chip makers did not want to pay their royalties."
Rambus stated its own failure, being the royalties; now they have to go around suing everyone for not using and not paying royalties?
They should roll over and die, but I guess its always romantic to put up one final fight to the death...
-Grump
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
The rest of us believe that the existing technology delivered acceptable levels of performance for far less money.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
You don't have a God-given right to collect royalties from people who would rather use a different technology.
If by "fix prices" you mean keep prices high because that is what is necessary to make a profit because other technologies that are almost as good are far cheaper, then the companies being sued by Rambus had better watch out.
1: Market crap no-one wants because of stupid royalties
2: Sue everyone for anti-competitive practises (ie, not buying said crap)
3: Profit!
On a more serious note... how can these people actually be considering suing? Is the american legal system that bad?
I bought a knife the other day, and it had no warning label on it, so i stabbed myself in the eye. 1 million please.
Intel was the company with the existing market clout that tried to force Rambus and their IP down everyone's throats.
I realize that in business these days it is not normal to consider how much of a scum your business partners may or may not be.
But for long term business I think it is worth review. We have to ask, in the end is the world going to be a better place because Intel and Rambus tried lock up a standards process in patents.
Folks need a longer memory then they get from playing XBOX games. These companies have histories.
thats all I have to say about that
Hey Rambus, there's a lesson you should have learned from your ol' pal Sony. Ask them what happened to their Betamax format.
Seriously, "cheap but good enough" almost always manages to beat "expensive and techically superior." Apple might be an exception, but that's open to debate. Too bad Rambus didn't read the history books.
did it ever enter their tiny little heads that the reason that their wunder-patent didn't sell as well as their very carefully crafted market research said it should have, might just have something to do with the fact that the CONSUMER (not the producer, they just pass the cost on) didn't want to pay their licence fee (100% price markup) for a product which provided minimal benefit in certain limited cases and a large handicap in a great many (more commonly encountered) cases?
stupid corporation, hopefully they and all the other "IP" companies will go the way of the tyrannosaurus rex (i.e. screaming in agony as a giant fireball from space lands on their heads)
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
The chip makers didn't want to pay there royalties oh darn they arent supposed to want to pay them. Rambus died because it was to expensive and it was to expensive because there were huge royalties gee shucks I guess another company with a brain dead business model. Rambus wasent good enough to compete at the prices. Yes at the time it was better but just wasent that much better.
If you want to take over a market you cant just be somewhat better it cant be a evolutionary better it needs to be revolutionary. They wernt and they had stiff compotition and bad business practices with there partners as well.
No sir I dont like it.
OK its a sign that they've reached the near death stage. Nothing left to do but pull the old pump-and-dump routine to screw a last few suckers before the end.
I wish there was a way to make the corp execs and legal teams like 10x PERSONALLY liable for this kind of bullshit behavior
Looks like they have been going to the SCO charm school. I bet SCO sues them for stealing business secrets.
The strong do what they can, while the weak suffer what they must.
"We have a fiduciary obligation to our shareholders to do something about this"
Ok from now on whoever says this, gets stabbed in the throat. That phrase is hereby forbidden, under penalty of Throatgestabben.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
``This is yet another example highlighting Rambus' pattern of using litigation as its only real business model,'' said Christoph Liedtke, an Infineon So this explains where SCO got their business model from... -A
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Their argument appears to be "These companies didn't want to pay us, so they used a competiting product. So we're sueing to make up the money we didn't make from not trying to be competitive in the open market."
You need to add more memory. Seriously. RAMBUS= much faster dhcp lease release. Seriously.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Somebody call me a lawyer! I would like to sue all toilet manufacturers and users for conspiring to put my online shitting dotcom, eToilet.com, out of business.
Sorry... some Onion stories just stay with you.
I read that as:
"Darl with it, losers."
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
for it to be an anti-trust issue, the companies would have had to have been purposefully colluding to effect the price (commonly called 'price-fixing') of the good (rambus memory). if they didn't produce large enough quantities to make rambus acceptible as a widely adopteble standard because the royalties made the technology inaccessibly priced (high royalties mean the profit margin shrinks, and can become negative...) , this is not a trust. the claims in the blurb are contradictory, and if they are the claims of rambus, then the case is trying to blame somebody else because a certain someone shot themself in the proverbial foot with excesive royalties...
These article make me want to sue myself.
RAMBUS! A new Division of SCO!
Following in the fine footsteps of legal idiocy in the technology industry!
/sarcasm
Things like this are not going to end until the industry is either a smoking ruin - or owned by one company only.
Neither one is really palatable to me...
"Bah!" - Dogbert
More competition for SCO! Maybe they should sue each other for infringing upon each other's business model.
Rambus is accusing them of colluding to fix prices. The only novell aspect of their argument is that this wasn't to reap the higher profit margins but to force the market to adopt technology preferential to the manufactures not the market. That second part. I'm not so interested in.
Because price fixing is price fixing is price fixing. If Rambus can prove it let loose a smackdown. Particularly in North America. A smackdown so brutal and draconian, the member states of the WTO collectively crap themselves (the reverberations being at 82 cents above the lowest E flat). Either you want a market with price fixing or without it. I for one like voting with my wallet, perhaps other people are not so inclined.
...illegally conspired to limit production and raise prices in an effort to block widespread adoption of Rambus' technology.' Rambus believes that RDRAM was not the success it should have been because chip makers did not want to pay their royalties."
I can say in all honesty that I didn't buy rambus because the cost was too damn high. I strongly suspect that chipmakers didn't want to sell an overpriced product, and focused on what consumers demanded. From my understanding AMD is outselling intel, and also near as i'm aware rambus isn't even an option for AMD supporting chipsets.
I'm damn sure chip makers didn't want to pay royalities, but this is neither immoral nor illegal when there is a viable cheeper alterantive.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
In its lawsuit, Rambus cites a series of e-mails dating from 1996 in which executives at Hynix, Siemens (nyse: SI - news - people ) and Micron (nyse: MU - news - people ) discussed...
Where in hell did they get those emails from? Did they fabricate them?
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
No doubt their legal team uses PCs without RAMBUS installed.
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
I don't know the whole history of this Rambus thing. Could someone explain what they did so wrong? I keep hearing about "what they did at that technology conference."
I have 640MB of RDRAM, and it is FAST. The installation-in-pairs thing is annoying, though.
Memory Maker 1: Damn this is expensive.
Memory Maker 2: And nobody is buying it.
Memory Maker 1: We're losing money on this crap.
Memory Maker 2: Let's do something else.
Memory Maker 1: Ok.
How much more conspiring can there be!?!
Not exactly. They are claiming that the chip makers deliberating conspired to make their chip FAIL because of higher prices because the chip makers weren't getting the profit margin they wanted on them.
It may very well be true, but it could easily be that all the chip makers said, Screw this we don't get the profit we want individually. The catch is that RDRAM really was much better, so the argument is none of them would have neglected it if they hadn't agreed to collectively neglect it, which is illegal.
Never confuse volume with power.
RDRAM was some pretty interesting technology, and very helpful in getting high-speed memory for things that needed it, such as game consoles and servers.
Too bad it was invented by such a nasty company with no vision.
We need to change civil law because of groups like RamBus and SCO
If you bring suits like this... failure to win the suit should be a public draw and quartering of all principles and the whole board of directors. The Budwiser horses come to mind as quality actors.
I think lawyers and law firms that persue these stupid cases should be used as feed for the gators in reptile world. Live video should be sent out over Animal Planet. Sort of funny home vids for the day.
Dear RAMBUS,
I don't know if you've heard of the story of Peter and the wolf.
I wouldn't give you the time of day - even if you said you had a cure for cancer.
AC
Oh, and "This is the world's smallest violin playing just for Rambus."
By this logic, Nintendo could sue Sony for luring gamers and developers away from the N64 to the PS1 because they didn't want to pay the costs of cartridges over CDs!
It's funny how companies turn against the supposed benefits of the free market when it stops working in their favour, isn't it?
If you design a widget that you think guarantees you a fortune, and then somebody comes up with a better and cheaper widget that everyone uses instead, then that's really tough shit on you. Innovate, not litigate.
You must think in Russian.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't these the same royalties that they snuck past JEDEC?
Seems pretty sneaky for them to try and do something really shady and then sue everyone for it.
Main Entry: hypocrisy
Pronunciation: hi-'pä-kr&-sE also hI-
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -sies
Etymology: Middle English ypocrisie, from Old French, from Late Latin hypocrisis, from Greek hypokrisis act of playing a part on the stage, hypocrisy, from hypokrinesthai to answer, act on the stage, from hypo- + krinein to decide -- more at CERTAIN
1 : a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not; especially : the false assumption of an appearance of virtue or religion
2 : an act or instance of hypocrisy
Rambus believes that RDRAM was not the success it should have been because chip makers did not want to pay their royalties.
You know, I think they may be onto something...
In all seriousness, this is exactly why it flopped: people didn't want to pay exorbitant pseudo-taxes to a single vendor. Of course, they do it all the time with Microsoft, but maybe there's something different about RAM. I don't know.
Ironically, most of the posts in this story corroborate the plaintiff's charge - that manufacturers limited production to create an artificial scarcity which drove prices of Rambus memory up. You can't counter the argument that nobody adopted Rambus technology because it was too expensive when the charge is that it was collusion on the part of manufacturers to artificially drive up price and prevent widespread adoption. Talk about logically shooting yourself in the foot...
Reading the article, it sounds like memory manufacturers could have colluded against Rambus. In my book, if none of the manufacturers independently wanted to produce Rambus memory and they communicated this fact that amongst themselves, that's not collusion. The details of who said what and at what time, though, are definitely something that will be worked out over the coming years. Depending on the nature of the communications and their timing, this could in fact be determined to look like collusion. If each firm can individually show why they didn't care to produce more Rambus memory, though, I think the case will fail.
Mind you, I'm not saying that I like Rambus, their practices, or anything - just that they perhaps do have a case. Only time will tell.
Hey pot 'yea kettle' your black.
Rambus believes that RDRAM was not the success it should have been because chip makers did not want to pay their royalties.
And Hitler thought his dictatorship wasn't the success it should have been because countries didn't want to be conquered.
This suit is so wrong I can't believe a judge could stop laughing while reading it.
Oh, and if they win the case I'll just use drugs as a escape from reality. For the rest of my (to be) short life.
Leading candidates are SCO and Rambus
They didn't buy enough licences from me! My business is failing because they conspired against me! They won't pay me what I want! Waaaaah, call my lawyer!
(Can we vote on this in the next slashdot poll, and Fed-ex the trophy to the winning company's head office?)
My rights don't need management.
The last 5 stories have been submitted by 5 different editors. I wonder if that's ever happened before?
??? ??? sue everybody reachable....
Except that most people here have been denying that it was better, except in certain cases. And, in particular, they've been denying that it was better for gaming, which is were many of the rather high end $$$ go.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
What the heck? There's like a bazlillion memory makers out there how can any one be sued for this? Their product was crap and everyone knew it. Sco and Rambus must have the same industry stratigist or something
As an employee of one of the mentioned companies in the lawsuit, IIRC, we were more pissed that intel was (again) trying to cram a technology we didn't develop down everyone's throats.
This was one of the first times a technology company other than intel and microsoft were able to control the direction of the market. I don't call it a conspiracy, I call it business sense and I'm proud that we "won"
I'm following suit just like SCO and Rambus.... From now on, everyone has to pay me a quarter everytime they use the word 'ASS'. That's right! 32 years ago, I defined the word 'ASS' and it's connotation, thus everyone who has every used the word 'ASS' must now pay me a quarter else I'll sue your 'ASS' for everything you've got!! Hmm...you'd think Rambus would take a hint and drop the freakin' patents. They're almost as bad as SCO and the FCC! Jezz!! What the hell is going on with all this 'control freak' madness going on lately!
Jeff Whitfield jeffwhitfield@gmail.com "I can learn to resist anything but temptation..."
I just can't believe that Kurt Rambus, the greatest man every to wear a purple and gold uniform, would sue over something that he wasn't entirely right about!
Kurt Rambus brought us some of the greatest Laker memories. Blocked shots, clutch rebounds, picks set for Magic and Worthy! Kurt Rambus was solid state back when that meant something.
We love you Kurt Rambus, and we support you in your cause!
You can't force someone to pay your royalties unless they actually use your technologies. Just because you set the royalties insanely high, and no one can pay, and finally opt for the cheaper solution, that is not a violation of anti-trust. For example, IBM had wanted vendors who implemented the MCA bus to pay a hefty royalty. Instead of making MCA devices, hardware developers opted for the PCI solution. IBM can't sue people just because IBM thought they had it in the bag. RAMBUS is just smoking the same crack, different day. Weirdos.... :P
I was hoping to read some technical opinions on slashdot about Rambus as a technology, or something about antitrust legislation being a good thing.
'Chip designer Rambus sued several major computer memory makers Wednesday, claiming they illegally conspired to limit production and raise prices in an effort to block widespread adoption of Rambus' technology.'
The prices are ridiculous right now. I believe that if the RIAA can conspire to raise the price of music other large multinational corporations could possibly conspire as well.
Why is Rambus bad technology? Expensive technology isn't necessarily bad, right?
The memory industry is dominated by a small number of large multinationals, what reason do we have to believe that they didn't actually do what Rambus is claiming?
I am no expert and don't claim to assert any authority on these topics, but I know somebody who reads slashdot does.
Help?
I bought a Dell 8100 a couple of years back, to only find out it took expensive RDRAM. It hurt to buy two sets of chips for each increment when the DDR folks were getting a much better deal. I suppose it was through falt of my own, but still ;)
Thanks Dell, you rock!
RAMBUSes wotn fit in my linix box!
Do i need to compile my kernol?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The problem is the consumers that don't even understand what rambus was. It is excellent technology that nobody gives a second look at because of the price. If more companies would have made/sold rambus then it would have been a greater success because more people would know what it actually is, and the price would go down. If you look at high quality DDR memory now it often costs even more than rdram did, with even poorer performance. I'm not talking about OEM samsung DDR with horrible timings, or those little 128 sticks you "conservative" gamer's buy. Rambus was meant to be use in large quantities (higher price) using a dual stick arch (higher price).
Lets look at some average prices,
RDRAM 512MB 800MHZ $179.95
RDRAM 512MB 1066MHz Original Rambus 32Bit $222.94
OCZ PC4000 EL Gold Edition Dual Channel 512MB $204.00
OCZ PC4200 EL Dual Channel 512MB $224.00
The problem is greedy stores say total 512 rambus and give you 2 sticks of 256 for a low price, thus screwing you over. Also people that don't like to buy in pairs buy 2x of the smaller size, or don't go with rambus at all because they can buy 1 at a time of ddr. Its simple, you get what you pay for.
New business model: If there's no demand for your product, sue your customers.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
It could be that RAMBUS is a victim of an industry-wide plot to eliminate American companies from the memory market.
Or it could be that their "technology" was overpriced and SLOW.
Has anyone pointed out yet that, while delivering extra bandwidth no one needed, RDRAM had higher latencies no one wanted?
Who inherits the title of litiguous bastards once IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Autozone, Daimler-Chryslers, et al finish flushing the current holder of the title down the crapper.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
RAMBUS seems to be arguing that industry leaders cannot partner to develop technologies that are unencumbered by I.P. license fees. This is a very common practice in the industry and saves us all a fortune in I.P. tax that would go to greedy non producers.
This problem was evident from day one. The fact that they didn't go through the trouble to secure independent production capacity to keep the other manufacturers honest just goes to show that they wanted to have their cake and eat it too. Doing so would have slimmed RDRAM profit margins but definitely insured that lack of supply doesn't kill their product.
It's a case of greed ruining their business model.
I'm surprised that Intel bought into this mess. Just goes to show that for all their glitz, Intel can be a bunch of geeks sometimes.
Politicus
It's not hypocritical, because we also willingly pay less then half for the pair of DDR's today then we would have paid for the pair of RAMBUS's.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Rambus believes that RDRAM was not the success it should have been because chip makers did not want to pay their royalties.
Yes....
So then it's obviously the fault of the marketplace for not wanting to pay the price for RDRAM licenses that RAMBUS wanted. The nerve of those companies!
Next thing you know there'll be a whole raft of litigation surrounding the unwillingness of people to pay US$16.99 for a CD with one good song on it.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
i hope everyone that manufactures SDRAM sues Rambus for conspiring to eliminate SDRAM.
Says who? Perhaps it went more like, all the companies were just waiting for someone else to strike it rich before taking the plunge? Obviously that didn't happen, or they'd have all have jumped right into it. The only people that know are the companies, everything else is purely speculation.
Btw, I wouldn't agree the Rambus was any better. The lone fact that it was proprietary alone makes it crap.
You're nothing; like me.
AFAIK Rambus is just a design firm with patents on some memory technology. In order to get these products to market, they must have contracted with memory manufacturers to have their chips produced. IANAL, but if I understand correctly, isn't the real issue whether these contracts were violated? Rambus could always have written up a contract with another manufacturer guranteeing certain yield rates and such, thus guranteeing the production volumes they seem to be complaining about. Failing this, I imagine they could have set up a plant of their own (at considerable cost of course).
If it's not in a contract somewhere, weren't these manufacturers within their rights to limit production volumes to a level that they expected the market would consume? Or do these allegations of collusion and such have merit?
Federal Trade Commission's 2002 complaint that Rambus behaved illegally when it got chip makers to include its patented technology into standards so that it could collect royalties.
There's a reasonable chance that Rambus, another lump of shit, will go bankrupt. If SCO and Rambus both go bankrupt in the same year, it's break-out-the-champagne time.
The fact is, whether or not it is presently recognized in a court of law, just about every feels that Rambus has behaved very unethically by inserting their designs and failing to disclose they are patented and could be held liable for using these "adopted industry standards."
Now everyone who makes Rambus stuff has to pay Rambus. Great! But what if you don't want to use Rambus? Correct! Make something else! What else is there to do but go back to the drawing board and agree upon yet another new standard that is free of patent issues!
If it's illegal to do that the second time, why wasn't it illegal to do it the first time when they all banded together to agree upon a singular design standard?
Is between can and have to. YOu can do dual channel DDR, and you get better performance for it. You HAVE to do dual channel RDRAM, it won't work in a single channel configuration.
In Soviet Russia, Monopolist sues YOU for anti-trust!
The fact that Rambus owns some patents does not in any way obligate memory vendors to license those patents, or to produce any particular amount of product using them. If Rambus had a contract with a particular memory vendor, and the vendor failed to meet their obligations under the contract, Rambus would have grounds to sue them for breach of contract, but this is not an antitrust issue.
When you sue the whole market because you failed, is that anti-trust, or just jealousy out of failure?
That CSS file that blocks ads
I didn't want to pay royalties to Rambus either so I never bought RDRAM. Let this be a lesson: If you promote a technology as a standard without telling anyone you have a patent on it, don't be surprised if noone buys your product.
Just like the RIAA, Rambus is blaming others for their own failures. The reason why Rambus (RDRAM) wasn't widely adopted was because it was an inferior product. Sure, in hypothetical and synthetic cases, RDRAM did outperform SDRAM, but in the real world, it got it's ass handed to them. (remember back in the day when Via had to fight Intel to be able to release a P3-compatible chipset using SDRAM? And how Via's low-end chipset was able to pounce Intel's expensive Rambus one and Intel eventually came to the realization that in order to compete, they would have to ditch Rambus). That combined with the expensive cost of RDRAM (even the ones maded by licensed RDRAM manufacturers like Samsung, etc.) and the disadvantage that you had to buy in pairs (talk about antitrust; "Sorry sir, you have to buy TWO copies of Windows for one to work.") or use a dummy stick which adds more cost and lackluster performance across real world appz (including games) lead to its demise. Not to mention, the abandonment by Intel which caused Rambus's stock to be cheaper than the Russian rubble (already used as toilet paper).
If anyone, they should sue themselves for bad business practices. Oh wait, the stockholders did try to sue but later dropped it.
"Rambus believes that RDRAM was not the success it should have been because chip makers did not want to pay their royalties."
Dam those other companies for making us fail by not buying our licenses. In related news SCO files suits against eveyone who runs a computer for not paying royalties if they ever heard of unix/linux, saw a magazine about unix/linux or saw a book about unix/linux. "The market conspired against us by releasing books, words, magazines based on our IP and they never paid us royalties."
Read the Rambus complaint for yourself instead of just believing the regurgitated crap. http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/nsd/rmbs /custom/050504pr3_civilcomplaint.pdf
There are lots of quotes attributed to HiNicks, MyCon and Infringeon execs, that were withheld by the thieves, but were found via 3rd party discovery, courtesy the FTC, whom the infringers designated to fry Rambus. Guess what? The FTC Chief ALJ exhonerated Rambus and instead cited Rambus's "superior" technology as the reason they enjoy a monopoly. Here is the 300+ page FTC Initial Decision with numerous findings of fact that support Rambus's antitrust case, in case you are interested.
http://www.ftc.gov/os/adjpro/d9302/040223initialde cision.pdf
In the Infringeon case, a Federal appeals court overturned findings of fraud and non-infringement against Rambus. The Supreme Court agreed.
BTW, the Department of Justice has their very own antitrust case against the same parties that Rambus is up against, for price-fixing.
Use RAMBUS? or are there any real benefits to it?
Rambus believes that RDRAM was not the success it should have been because chip makers did not want to pay their royalties.
I believe that too, along with numerous other reasons (such as the fact that the price/perf/quality ratios were really pathetic). It still doesn't mean anyone did anything illegal.
The business plan for many modern companies apparently goes something like this:
2. Whine, bitch, and sue because people aren't buying it.
3. Profit!
Sounds like the Rambus execs should have all failed basic economics.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
From an email by Jeff Mailloux (a senior Micron executive) to an executive at Hyundai:
I am tired of Intel or Rambus giving my customers cost estimates, so we called Anthony (EE Times) and I talked to him for about an hour and gave him Micron's story on it and encouraged him to call suppliers. In short I told him that at any density, and any process that is available in 1999, RDRAM is at least 30% cost adder for Micron. Just giving you a heads up and would encourage you to call him and give Hyundai's view on it....Here is what I basically told him, if you forward this article to anyone else, remove this part...Anyhow, please visit me if I end up in jail, but felt it was important and timely enough to get our message out there that 5% is not realistic in our opinion"
Why is he worried about going to jail? You don't joke about that just for fun. If you are on the up-and-up that doesn't even enter your mind.
Is it because he is blatantly lying to the press about their cost estimates AND colluding with a competitor to do the same?
....reminds me a lot of ISA vs MCA during the late 80s/early 90s. The MCA was better, but a pain to licence from IBM. What happened? The industry came together, made EISA. Except IBM had more brains than to sue over it.
I read the benchmarks for Rambus. The performance gains were noticable, but not stunning. They fell for nothing other than the chicken and egg problem. Since RAM producers didn't believe in Rambus on the mass market, there was no cheap mass production. Since there was no cheap mass production, it failed on the mass market. Self-fulfilling prediction.
It's like every other technology in the computer industry, it either has to hit critical mass or be overrun. SCSI was supposed to take over for IDE. What happened? PIO->UDMA->SATA and it just keeps going, SCSI is only holding their own on servers. Likewise with SDRAM->DDR->DDR-2, it simply evolved past the supposed "conqueror".
There was no foul play here. Rambus went up against momentum, and lost. Hell, even Intel appears to have lost it with the Itanic. With x86-64 and IA32e, momentum has spoken. People are used to computers improving all the time already. If you want them to change, you need either backwards compatibility or a small miracle in performance.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
how much do you pay a lawyer to go and make a case like this? "Well judge, you see, my clients product didn't sell because they charge money to use the product design, so i want to sue every company that makes a product that does the same thing" GD. the US needs a "sanity judge" to stop BS like this from wasting tax dollars. there should be enorumous (talking 500 million+) dollars for tieing up the court system with shiz like this. they should make the CEO's and any top exec's envolved in such crazy lawsuits be thrown into jail.
The catch is that RDRAM really was much better
Expect that it had too much patent/royalty baggage tacked onto it. I don't care how wonderful that bird is, you tie a bowling ball to its feet, it ain't going to fly.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Manufacturers should be able to conspire to tell Rambus to go take a hike if they like. I mean, manufacturers have "conspired" for decades to keep good technology out of the market (e.g., UNIX), by choosing inferior but cheaper technology. Why shouldn't the same be allowed to happen to Rambus's technology even if it were better?
If memory makers also conspired to keep memory prices high, that's, of course, bad and should be prosecuted by the FTC. But that is none of Rambus's business.
Believe it or not, Rambus corporation is likely no more unethical in their business practices as the DRAM manufacturers - see the Micron and Hynix squabble, with accompanying governmental levies and fines. Look to the fact that at least a few governments have cartel investigations on the books against these corporations.
Here is what can be stated most objectively:
-Rambus's RDRAM technology was, and is, technologically interesting
-The console gaming makers realized this and have used it extensively
-Intel designed the P4 around it - obviously there's some good ideas there
-Compared to conventional DRAM technology, RDRAM is unique in that it improves its latency characteristics with every generation. Have you guys read any technical documents about DDR and DDR2? DDR2 scales very poorly: latencies and timings get looser and looser while overall MHz speeds increment more and more slowly.
-To get any real benefit from DDR2 you need a dual-channel configuration which requires prohibitively complex board designs and more pcb layers on the mainboard. Compare this with RDRAM, with its lower pincount and simplified board design.
-Due to Rambus Inc's pariah status, Intel had to shy away from them. However, even Intel couldn't ignore the merits of Rambus technology and is developing a new DRAM tech suscpiciously similiar in nature to RDRAM: FB-DIMM.
One can find a good overview of FB-DIMM "fully buffered dual inline memory module" technology here:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15167
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15189
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15214
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15379
Peace
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
So? When I made my invention (Patent #349,991,444,910,487,238,329,219, "Method and Apparatus for Simulating a Blow Job"), it wasn't the success it should have been because companies didn't want to pay royalties. But did I sue? No, because I should have either lowered the royalty amounts, or I should have tried other marketing approaches.
Besides, can they read the future? Do they have proof that their technology should have been more successful? Only the market can decide if something should be successful or not. And more often than not, those companies that succeed do so because they made smart business moves.
I * HATE * companies that want to profit through litigation instead of through innovation, business sense, and smart marketing. The way I see it, a good businessman uses lawsuits only as a last resort. Those who immediately run to a lawyer for every little thing are either sleazeballs, or they expect the state to be their nanny.
Not to mention that litigation is expensive and wasteful, because I'm sure that given more time, the courts could improve the quality of their decisions, rather than the quantity thereof.
Oh, and finally, I didn't really invent that blow job machine I mentioned above.
DDR came close in bandwidth and smoked Rambus on latency. That's why DDR won. Owning a car that goes 200mph is only effective if you drive the autobahn. Likewise, 3.4GB/sec is only important high volume web servers and video processing applications.
Effectively, Rambus only had advantages for a very small portion of the market.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Specifically (and this is all from memory):
Its big advantage was streaming, pumping out a very fast flow of sequential bits. Intel and others were at the time enamored of "convergence" (e.g. playing movies on your computer, which we now know is evil :-),
and it was thought this was a good thing for multimedia.
Except there were of course tradeoffs: you paid several prices in addition to the royalties. The two killers were slow startup time, which made random access speeds bad (which turned out to be critical), and its bit? serial interface, which required something like 600MHz traces on a motherboard, which was well beyond the realistic state of the art at the time. Intel did two separate million part recalls, one for a chipset, and one for a motherboard (just weeks before shipping...). (Note that your fast FSB busses obtain their speeds by using the signal edges cleverly, not by pushing the motherboard trace speeds outrageously.)
(It was also said that Intel higher engineering management forced this down the throats of their engineers who had to try to make it work, and fired anyone who was too persistent in pointing out the Emperor had no clothes. Well, Intel paid a pretty big price for this debacle....)
As far as I'm concerned, it died a well deserved death. The only question I see in this case as others have pointed out is exactly what did the manufacturers say to each other, and can a judge or jury be convinced it was illegal collusion instead of trading gripes. You do have to be careful what you say to your competitors; many companies have strict rules to try to avoid this sort of mess, since it does happen.
You are all worthless and weak! Now get down on your hands and knees and give me 20! RMBS will crush you! RMBS will crush you!
RDRAM tech may have been better (in theory), but the implementations available certainly weren't.
i820, anyone?
The only volume chipset I recall that was faster with RDRAM was the dual-channel i840 (I think that's the right number). It was only a smidge faster, and only for a short while before DDR boards caught back up. And it cost an arm and a leg and at least your neighbor's first-born.
Better, aye, but at too high a cost. Intel had contractual obligations to push RDRAM, but everyone else in the market saw an immature, litigious company asking a lot of money for marginally better tech which may or may not have panned out in the market. That's a lot of risk to assume for precious little gain. It's no wonder the memory makers didn't jump on the bandwagon wholeheartedly.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
So your saying that an effort by independent producers to thwart a semi-monopoly is collusion????
The fact is that JEDEC had been meeting well before Rambus came into being. They had been developing memory standards for a very long time. In fact, Rambus joined JEDEC and attempted to monopolize the memory market via seeding JEDEC processes with patented technologies.
JEDEC is not a cartel. They aren't trying to squeeze or force anyone in or out of a market. They are an open association of companies that work to their common benefit. Anyone can join provided they have the capital. Anyone can license the technology.
Better watch out. If the logic behind this suit is successfull, Microsoft will sue Linus Torvalds for a conspiracy to make Microsoft Windows IP worthless by artificially driving down prices with "givaway" products. Every Linux contributor would be a co-defendant.
Rambus memory ultimately failed because it was ill-tailored for most of the PC market. The vast majority of PC applications rely on massive numbers of low bandwidth memory operations. Rambus memory carried significant penalties for latency. It's only appropriate for high volume web servers and video processing applications.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Not necessarily. RDRAM may have been better, but if they don't forecast a large market demand for the technology, they don't have to ramp up production. And while intel was certainly backing RDRAM at the time, the consumers and most other component makers disliked the closed nature of the technology.
Not only that, but because they also charged a royalty fee, nobody wanted to pay a higher price for their memory, even if it was better (and remember, back then, whatever benefits that were inherent in the nature of RDRAM couldn't be taken advantage of yet).
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
"It beats dealing with the Airlines."
*ahem*
Was there actual collusion to impact Rambus technology by limiting production of their chips (this is NOT the same as 'were the chips so expensive that nobody bought them')? This is remarkably hard to prove, but the judge who vindicated RAMBUS earlier this year seemed to think there was enough evidence to indicate some sort of behavior to that effect.
Even if there was a pattern of production shortfalls, it may stand to reason that these companies were simply making a business decision, based on their perception of the market, and the future of their businesses. It seems awfully hard to actually win a lawsuit here.
Of course the trial is set in California, so you never know.
hmmmm?
Maybe the just forgot.
i didnt know that saving money was a punishable offense. lock me up, i guess.
1) Rambus originally sued because technology they presented to JEDEC that became key for DDR memory was secretly patented by them. After DDR gained marketshare, they turned around & surprised everyone with a lawsuit over that technology. I don't see what your story has to do with that issue.
2) You have any references for any of this?
3) You just registered as RDRAMman & posted this one comment. If you're going to troll, don't be so obvious.
4) You suck.
Yes, it failed because it was expensive, but RAMBUS contends it was expensive NOT because of their royalties, but because the memory manufacturers didn't want it to be successful, so the memory manufacturers got together and conspired to MAKE it expensive.
RAMBUS believes that without the alleged price collusion of the manufacturers artificially inflating the price of the RAMBUS memory, RAMBUS's technology would have been more competitive and thus would not have failed.
Illustratively, it would be like you designing this great processor that was better than the processors made by any other vendor that had some great technology in it that you had patented. Unfortunately, you don't have multi-billions of dollars to create a fab, so you need people like Intel and IBM to make your chip for you.
Intel and IBM don't want your new technology to become accepted though, as then they'd have to pay for it, so they take your chip, which costs $100 to make, and which they pay you $2 royalties on, and all agree to sell it for $800 per chip, while selling their own chips for $200.
The price if you were not charging royalties would by $798; the price if the manufacturers had not gotten together and agreed not to sell your chip for less than $800 would have been $202.
paintball
pot says kettle is black. Ice says snow is cold. River says ocean is wet.
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
The truth is Farmwald and Horwitz had already applied for patents at the time of the initial JEDEC meeting you discuss.
That's okay.
What comes next isn't. The two of them proposed what became the RAMBUS standard as a proposal to the working group. Still okay, but.... what these two sleezoids did next was to "neglect" to tell everybody that RAMBUS was proprietary would require royalty payments to what became RAMBUS.
So everybody accepted the standard because RAMBUS was a decent idea. After adoption...POOF! "HEY GUYS! WE HAVE A PATENT ON THIS STUFF, AND YOU'RE GONNA PAY OUT THE ASS!"
Funny how that worked.
A judge heard the story and threw RAMBUS out of court on their RAMASS.
And lets look at the trouble with RAMBUS 1) Expensive because (2) Yields were so low (3) because the technology is inherently low-yield (4) Oh, and while it delivers high bandwidth it has (5) Horrible latency.
Please just go away. The RAMBUS company wasn't a company like you might imagine. It was simply a con game that tricked everybody.
DDR 3200 today kicks RAMBUS's ass in performance and price.
And oh, we don't have to pay a ridiculous amount to use it.
Ask Intel. They basically screwed up by supporting RAMBUS. The public didn't want it.
So go away. RAMBUS never had any advantages, and had oh-so-many disadvantages.
Rambus at the time was hugely expensive.
DRAM at the time was no.
Gee whiz what are people going to buy.
And Intel supporting Rambus to me only seems as a attempt to make a buck through backdoor investments.
Memory prices are low. I just bought 1G for $100. That's pretty cheap.
I remember back when Dell was pushing RDRAM, the price was $800 for 256M. And that, my friend was only 2 1/2 years ago.
The whoe reason Intel is now in a battle with AMD is that AMD supported DDR and Intel backed RDRAM. The public didn't want RDRAM because it was (a) expensive -- see above (b) had no performance advantage. Dell got burned pretty badly when their very expensive PC's were being outgunned by DDR laden PC's at 1/2 the price.
Few bought RDRAM willingly, and those that did were horrified by the RAM prices.
Really amazingly bad technology. I think RAMBUS did well to trick Intel into using it for about 18 months. Even Intel came to their senses.
The REAL truth is that it was "fuggin expensive" in part due to royalty costs and in part due to the "collusion" that RAMBUS complains about. The problem is that RAMBUS management is too retarded to see the motive behind the collusion, which is what has to be established to prove the chip makers were acting illegally.
To put it briefly: RAMBUS invents a nifty new technology and thinks its kung-fu is so good that it patents the crap out of it and does a fancy dog and pony show to the linkes of Intel, Micron, Siemens and so on. Said show is well received and people get on board. When everyone is rip roarin' to go, RAMBUS says "oh yeah, we forgot to mention the little thing about our protection money---pay up or we'll break your kneecaps so you can never run again".
This is where the collusion comes in. Micron and other chip makers have a choice between the old, open standby PC100/PC133/SDR/DDR/whatever that is widely known and pretty much vendor neutral, or a new, incompatible and more expensive technology that puts their gonads squarely in the slowly clenching fists of RAMBUS (and Intel to some degree).
One company owns all the patents and gets all the royalties and can decide on a whim to jack up royalies or take away your license to use their technology on a whim. Based on RAMBUS's behaviour to that point who could blame the chip makers for shutting out RAMBUS en-masse? It didn't take great deal of effort and coordination for all parties to reach the same decision.
It's kind of ironic really. RAMBUS is whining about collusion and monopolistic practises of others because their attempt at monopolistic practises failed. This "collusion" wasn't driven by the desire to eliminate a competitor and cement market share, it was a common sense decision that any company would've made.
You'd think someone at RAMBUS would've heard the well worn case studies on Betamax video tape and IBMs MCA bus and avoided such bone-headedness. At least Sony didn't sue JVC, Panasonic and Toshiba because they preferred to make VHS machines instead of giving a cut of their profits to competitor Sony, and IBM didn't sue Compaq et al for creating their own EISA and VLB instead of buying MCA from IBM...
Has this been thrown out of court yet?
La de da de da gotta wait my 20 seconds....
I suppose the next steps would be:
:-)
6. Realize that your product is deader than a doornail
7. Sue the hell out of every major player in the industry
8. PROFIT???
Now where have we heard that before
So what?
Industries players negotiate standards all the time, and they're entitled to change their minds. If management at Rambus was a little more intelligent, it would have released the patent torpedoes a little later when it would be too expensive for memory makers to retool.
In any case, it would be a mistake for the courts to reward extortionists by limiting what industries can do to respond to this kind of unethical behavior.
Also, for an antitrust case to be successful, they have to prove the consumer was harmed, which will be hard to do given the cost of Rambus license fees. Antitrust law isn't focused on protecting companies.
Ah, if only RAMBUS did not decide to backstab the JEDEC members, perhaps we would all be happily using RDRAM now. But RAMBUS had to squeeze every last cent, legally or illegally, ethically or unethically, and now it's reaping what it sowed. Can you say Karma?
I wish companies would realize that ethical conduct is not an optional part of doing business.
Still that is legal.
Memory manufactors want open standards and not lose profits from licensing agreements.
If they prefer an open standard over a proprietary one then its their business.
If ram prices went up for both memories then yes Rambus would have a case but they do not.
Microsoft and Intel do these things all the time when deciding what people use and setting standards for all pc's.
Nothing illegal here.
http://saveie6.com/
Rambus believes that RDRAM was not the success it should have been because chip makers did not want to pay their royalties.
Well, they're probably right. They thought that they could corner the market and be the only show in town. They were wrong, people opted not to pay their royalties when their patent frenzy failed.
Companies chose to go with technologies that didn't include the Rambus tax. Tough shit for them. Live with it.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
This is how I remember it. I was looking for a new PC right about the time the RD and SD struggle was heating up. I bought a PIII with SD in it because it was cheaper. I hadn't done much research on it because I had heard RD was only good for servers or graphics. I would have bought AMD, but I really didn't know jack about them. I suspect that this happened to a lot more people than just me. Now maybe other companies did conspire against them. Fine, I'll give them that. But if the technology is indeed better for servers and those kind of applications, then why is SCSI still doing just fine and RD is dead? I'm a hardcore gamer, and latency is where it's at for me. I'm not going to knock RD just because I don't use it, but I don't have a use FOR it. Plenty of people swear by it, and that's fine. But I can't abide a company that would do what it did. By that I mean licensing behind JEDEC's back, not suing others. Oh, and I better see some damn evidence like PRONTO if and when this case actually begins. I don't want to have to wait for months for the "evidence" like SCO.
"Yeah, that's only going to happen when a paper dog sucessfully chases an asbestos cat through hell." The Chosen One
Rambus invented an interface in the late '80s early '90s, long before they got to JEDEC. An interface most people said was impossible.
They provided information under NDAs to the memory manufacturers long before attending a single JEDEC meeting so everyone around the table knew what they had before the meetings started.
Intel recognized the value of the interface and incorporated it into their design. It has happened before, say the entire PC architecture, with a tip of the hat to IBM (another evil empire according to some).
There are many royalties paid and you haven't a clue you've paid them.
People who critize have obviously never attended a standards committee meeting. It's like a card game where all the members worry about the player with the full house. The patents are the cards by the way and these players are there for high stakes.
Maybe one day you'd like to be rewarded for your hard work, or don't you believe in Capitalism?
Get a clue.
"Rambus believes that RDRAM was not the success it should have been because chip makers did not want to pay their royalties."
rambus, sco, that fuckin IP compnay that tried to patent e-commerce and a few other fuckheads can all suck a donkey's dick.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
Solly Cholly says YOU FAIL IT!
Yes. It's sad that it is illegal for a bunch of companies to agree on an open standard that doesn't involve Rambus. If this sort of thing is illegal, why are /.ers supporting antitrust legislation against Microsoft. It seems these same laws have come back and are going to bite consumers in the ass with higher prices to pay off Rambus lawsuits. Down with antitrust legislation.
Vote for Pedro
my diapers dirty. I soiled myself. Someone clean me ( bail me out).
> The catch is that RDRAM really was much better
I'd take issue with this one. RDRAM had much higher latencies than SDRAM, mainly imposed by its proprietary serializer-deserializer at both the RAM as well as the memory controller. However, its burst bandwidth was better than SDRAM.
In other words, you had to wait a long time to get the first byte from RDRAM, but you could then get the next several bytes very quickly.
In actual benchmarks, RDRAM fared much worse than SDRAM on most real-world benchmarks with fairly random (non-local) access patterns, but did well on a few benchmarks (like image processing or array processing) with more structured memory accesses.
Bottomline: RDRAM was generally slower than SDRAM, but cost about twice as much to manufacture and more than 4 times as much at retail, so it failed.
Rambus Shambus. No matter how technologically advanced a new product is, it has to be accepted by the consumer, i.e., it has to sell well. Rambus simply does not convince enough people that their extra edge is worth the additional money. In order to use the RDRAM, you can't just toss it on you current system. You have to either upgrade your motherboard or buy a new system.
While it may be worth it for a lot of geeks and gamers or for high-end application users, the demand for this technology does not outweigh the cost it takes to make the upgrade.
Rambus could overcome this by increasing consumer awarenss by doing massive advertising or making their product more 'sexy.' That's still a long chance though, because they are trying to get the train of public opinion to jump the tracks...
Honor belongs to those who dare, not to the critic who sits by and stares
OTOH,
Rambus just sucks and no one wanted to use it so the price stayed high.
Rambus is nice, but it has some serious scaleability/latency issues.
They attempted to sue an ENTIRE INDUSTRY of huge companies....It's not so much collusion as a general feeling of NEVER doing business with them again!!!
And if that's the case, no company would have had to collude in any way to keep Rambus down - each company would make that (rather easy) decision for itself. However, if Rambus is correct, and they do have a paper trail that suggests companies acted in concert, then (as much as it disgusts me to say this) they may have a case.
I'm playing a substantial portion of devil's advocate here, since the story's still thin on facts, but it's not completely farfetched.
Dear Mr. R. Ambus,
We are writing to you today to notify you that you have been accepted to the SCO School of Law and Business Strategy.
School starts on or about August 28, 2004. However, you will need to access our website with the username/password printed below to obtain your course schedule.
Work is due on the FIRST day of class! You must be prepared if you are going to succeed.
Some minor revisions:
1) Constitutional law is undergoing massive rewrites and revisions, and as such will be covered in Year 2 rather than Year 1. In fact, you can just burn the copy that came with your books as we'll have a new one printed up for you if you pass year 1 and enter into year 2.
2) Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights are no longer covered in the Intellectual Property Course. In fact, that course was scrapped, and has been recast as Modern Business Weaponry. This will be covered in Year one, and will be taught by our honored chair Dr. D. McBride.
Revisions to the revisions above may be revised without prior notice, so you need to review the site often for changes! You are responsible for knowing all changes and complying with them.
Again, welcome to the program. We look forward to meeting you in August!
Best Regards,
Dewey Cheatem Howe,
Registrar
Those dirty bastards don't want to pay me to use my product, because they're using something else! I'm going to sue!!
WTF? Its called a free market...
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Let me guess, the memory makers couldn't remember...
Similar line of reasoning as SCO: sue your (potential) customers if they don't pay your prices.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
must post to Slashdot!!!!!!!
Maybe it's not better, but that is still the argument that RDRAM is presenting to the court. The fact that it is speculation is the core of the lawsuit. Without seeing evidence, it's impossible to know whether their claim is without merit; they could very well be right about the colusion even if they deserved what they got.
Most things computer related are proprietary, it's only their interfaces to the rest of the components that is standardized.
Never confuse volume with power.
No, it's illegal.
Very simply put:
YOUR company decides not to make something or how to price something -- Legal
YOUR company and OTHER companies together discuss and agree to not making something or how to price something -- Illegal
Never confuse volume with power.
No, no, no. You need to find some maize kernels and put them inside. Best to fill it to the top. Make sure you have yellow AND blue evenly mixed.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
It's too early to decide. It looks like Rambus has a case, but the court will have to decide.
Hopefully, the FTC will win on appeal and this will look more like companies working together to eliminate an injustice.
Fiduciary:
Normally, the term is synonymous to a trustee, which is the classic form of a fiduciary relationship. A fiduciary has rights and powers which would normally belong to another person. The fiduciary holds those rights which he or she must exercise to the benefit of the beneficiary. A fiduciary must not allow any conflict of interest to infect their duties towards the beneficiary and must exercise a high standard of care in protecting or promoting the interests of the beneficiary. Fiduciary responsibilities exist for persons other than trustees such as between solicitor and client and principal and agent.
Source
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
This is just another case of a business using the courts to cover up the fact that their business plan sucked. This is just like the RIAA and MPAA. If you offer a product that the consumer thinks is worth paying for, then you'll make money. In Rambus' case, if they offered a product that memory makers felt was worth the royalty payments, they would make money. But instead, the market told Rambus "NO!" and now the courts are allowing Rambus to sue. Does the U.S. need to overhaul it's judicial system? Hell yeah!