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Amiga Demonstration Helps Win Against Patent Troll
Amigan writes "Over on Groklaw, PJ is reporting that an actual demonstration of the Amiga OS (circa 1988) on an Amiga A1000 may have been the turning point in the lawsuit of IP Innovation v. Red Hat/Novell."
I always loved the way the Amiga offered functions other computers of the same era never came close to matching..
I love the quote from the owner who produced the working model.. "My Amiga Killed a Troll!"
http://www.hawknest.com/
More prior art plskthx.
But that's the problem in itself right there. Yes, chances are that there is little "new" being done in software for the most part, and that someone has done [patent idea] before, but just imagine trying to find just the right bit of software, or just the right platform to show it's been done before.
The patent office couldn't instigate a "Prove no-one has done it before" process as that would be just ludicrous, but at the same time, having the right people on hand to show "just exactly where it HAS been done before" may not be 1) cheap, 2) practical and 3) possible.
There simply isn't an easy solution to this. If you abolish software patents, it makes it very difficult for companies to realistically spend millions on development of new concepts and ideas when someone can then just take the ground breaking UI or process etc. If you don't abolish patents, you still end up with the farcical joke that we have now.
Here, it really is a lose - lose scenario. Except if you are a patent lawyer.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
The success is all very nice and all, but what was the disputed issue?
The actual dispute is irrelevant ... Linux won a patent suit and that's all we care about. A patent troll lost and will have to pay court costs. Double bonus points!
Here's the slashdot story about the court victory
Here's a link to the post that details the patents
Let us not forget that OS-9 was doing it before Amiga.... and that was also submitted by someone as prior art from 1983:
http://www.post-issue.org/prior_art/83/detail
OS-9 was my first "real" OS, before eventually switching to Unix, then Linux. Back in the day, it was extremely impressive.
(Ecclesiastes 1:9-14 NIV) What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. {10} Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. {11} There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow.
citation
/I'm not prone to cite bible verse, but there you go. All your software patents are invalid. It sez so in the Good Book. The verse itself is an uncited theft of the work of Sophocles c. 429 BCE - himself a synthesist who didn't cite the vast realms of prior art from which he distilled his digests of the written and performed arts into their purest forms. Sophocles was a hack, but we don't have records of the prior art he stole, or today he'd be a pirate. His synthesis though? Timeless art in and of itself. It's good thing for us ancient Greece didn't have DMCA, DRM, and eternal copyright or he'd be Sophowho? To most he already is.
If only ancient Greece, or modern Phoenix, had a sort of distributed Library of Alexandria where one works could not be forgotten - where the wisdom of our fathers and their fathers (and their foolishness too) might be preserved and so remain available to our children and their children. Something like a Google for books. Alas, copyright prevents it and copyright is now eternal in every practical sense. So it is that each new generation, constrained by previously patented and copyrighted art has diminishing realms of imagination to work with - until the lawyers finally abolish imagination altogether and we reach the asymptote where creation ends. So then we lay upon our children the duty to rethink the thoughts we've had, to re-invent our inventions, and to do so in peril of the trolls who lay claim to a third degree ownership of any potential perceived reference to characters or invented places in a brief manuscript published in 100 copies only, 200 years before - and upon their children we lay a logarithmically greater burden.
As patents are the death of invention, copyrights are the death of art. A pity our children must climb these mountains we've built for them without the benefit of a culture, but culture itself is deprecated in this regime in preference to whatever mindless new drivel can escape lawsuits long enough to become popular - and then is itself extinguished in a flurry of lawyers and cocaine.
We might have stood on the shoulders of giants, but now we huddle in fear of lawyers.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You could slide each screen down by grabbing the bar at the top of the screen with your mouse, to reveal those beneath. So at times, and quite commonly, you would have different visible parts of your monitor displaying parts of screens with different resolutions (and, if I recall correctly, their own color depths as well).
That really was super-cool. I believe you are correct about the different color depths, too. There was just something compelling about that mechanism, it was like peeking behind a curtain to see backstage, perhaps? Maybe the youngsters would say it would be like seeing the matrix or something. It just had this incredible fluidity to it. Editing a document or program, and want to take a peek at how your 3D render in the background is going? Oooh... nice, just 8 more hours to go, looking good so far.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Former Amiga programmers realized
Look I was a game programmer back then, I worked on PC, Apple //, and Commodore 64-series products among others ... and you're just wrong. You don't know what you're talking about. I never did anything for the Amiga, and I find it kinda irritating that you believe programmers like me required Amiga experience in order to be good at our jobs. Geez, you Amiga guys sound like Mac fanboys sometimes. You just make shit up. I spent seven years before that failed attempt at a personal computer ever hit the market, hacking high-speed graphics code on a number of different microprocessors, and neither I nor my employers ever felt that I needed to learn to study the Amiga to write graphics an animation code for other systems.
... pretty much bare metal and raw assembler all the way through. That's because the CPU had to do everything, except maybe sound if you had an early Soundblaster. No fancy graphics or sound chips, no sirree.
// lines. That's because many things that were easy on the Amiga took some very sharp, largely ex-Apple ][ programmers to do well on the PC.
You're giving all the credit to ex-Amiga coders for driving the game market forward and that's just ridiculous. Most of the guys I knew that bought into the Amiga hype went over to the Mac because they didn't want to be dealing with the bare metal. Most of them hadn't a clue what an I/O port was, much less how to screw around with refresh timing or anything else on a VGA card. They let the custom ASICs do all the work. Arcade game development on the IBM compatibles of the era was a lot like it was on the Apple ][
The Amiga had many hardware and other advantages, and the reality is that experience with the Amiga's custom chips didn't count for SQUAT when it came to coding for what passed as video on PCs at the time. Matter of fact, the Amiga's hardware support spoiled the typical Amiga developer and put him at a distinct disadvantage when it came to working on the PC or Apple
That's the real history. You can assign credit any way you like, but those of us who were there will likely go all Guru Meditation on you.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.