Graphics Rendering Patent Suits Target Apple, Samsung, HTC, RIM, LG and Sony

angry tapir writes "Formerly known as Silicon Graphics, Graphics Properties Holdings has filed six separate patent cases against Apple, Samsung, Research In Motion, HTC, Sony and LG with the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware. The patent at issue in the lawsuits relates to floating point calculations to render graphics, and is registered as patent number 8,144,158 with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office."

Comments

This makes me sad

[mikael_j]

I was hoping SGI would at least somewhat gracefully fade away, instead someone decided to do a cash grab before the remnants of a once-great company finally disappear...

Re:This makes me sad

[Rich0]

This seems to be the norm these days - a company that was formerly massively successful begins to die down and fade away, so in a last ditch attempt to cling to live they sue anyone and everyone that has ever done anything remotely similar to them.

Every successful company usually becomes that way under a founder. Or a founder-like figure (maybe the company was obscure for 100 years and then takes the world by storm - the leader in this case is like a founder). Under the founder all is well, and the company generally makes net-positive contributions to society.

Then the founder retires, and his hand-picked successor takes over. They usually start having more of an eye towards whatever the founder hired them for (often marketing, or finance, or whatever). However, they were mentored by the founder and usually are fairly true to the original dream.

After that the next succession is managed by the board's CEO search committee, and everybody after this could care less about visions and dreams, and instead aim to min/max their balance sheet and bonus check. Companies don't sue people - their leaders do. By the time a company reaches the state SGI is in, nobody who had anything to do with creating anything of worth is in charge.

Going by this logic, it does also mean that Apple must be ready to die soon. I mean, they can't have that much money, can they?

Every company is doomed to follow this cycle - it is the nature of wall street. Apple is now operating under the hand-picked successor. He will probably do reasonably well, but one day he will retire. Everything after that will be inertia. Oh, it takes a long time for a huge company to fail, and sometimes you get lucky and the wall street pick might actually turn out to be visionary. However, by-and-large the only innovations at Apple starting with the next CEO will be in the balance sheet.

Sooner or later you can only cut the bottom line so much before the fall in the top line starts. At that point the company will bleed off anything of worth it still has left, until its only function can be that decreed by law - it is still able to collect money, write checks to the decision-makers, and file lawsuits, shielding the decision-makers from personal liability. It is nothing more than a front at that point, but it will continue on.

Apple has always been lawsuit-happy, so who knows - perhaps we won't even last another CEO before the slide starts. It all depends on whether they start rewarding the lawyers more than the innovators like they do at most companies.

Re:New line of business

[TheRaven64]

Not all of them, they kept the bits that were still useful. The things related to high-speed interconnects and efficient NUMA systems, which are still relevant in the supercomputer market, they kept. The obsolete crap, they sold to a patent troll.

Re:shitty patent

[TheRaven64]

32 bits is obvious. The half precision floating point format was actually quite neat. It's pretty much useless for anything except graphics, but with 16 bit floats you can represent a far more useful range of colours (for humans) than with 16 bit integers and get a rendering quality that is much closer to 32-bit floats than to 8-bit integers. Maybe not deserving of a patent, but it was considered pretty clever at the time. It made it into OpenGL ES, because it was useful for saving memory on small-footprint devices.

Re:shitty patent

[Anonymous Coward]

Sort of. 32 bits is not obvious. The IEEE standard for this stuff is actually pretty fucking complicated once you realize how much numerical analysis goes into the design. IEEE standardized on a set of formats, and half float is just a variant on those (e.g. the exponent bias is still 2^(E-1)-1). I templatized this for a compiler once - you could have a float with any number of mantissa bits and any number of exponent bits. Shit, should have patented it.

Plus, this patent is not a patent on half float, it's a patent on using floating-point AT ALL within a GPU. Talk about homesteading the noosphere :)

This is stupid

[msobkow]

This is one of the stupidest patents I've ever heard of.

Even back in the fall of 1986 at University of Saskatchewan in my graphics class, the algorithms we started with were presented as floating point algorithms. We were then shown the integer variants on those algorithms, which we were told bluntly were used only because they were faster than floating point emulation.

So they got a patent for doing something that we were told not to do purely for performance reasons, not for any reason of logic or functionality. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind this whole patent should be overturned.

And, yes, I was heavily into computer graphics at the time. I even was a contributing publisher to a paper on the "Fast Line Clipping" algorithm, which really, in retrospect, was not so much an innovation as an example of a very advanced special case of loop and conditional unrolling that some of the more advanced modern compilers can probably to automatically at this present time. If you want to check out that crufty old article, you'll have a better chance of finding it by searching for Yang or Pospisil, the professor and grad student for the project; I was just a fourth year programmer at the time.

No, we didn't patent our algorithm. Back then the point of research and development was to learn and share, not to squat and sue.

Re:SGI patent portfolio

[VortexCortex]

I don't think there is anyone who is going to question SGI's degree of innovation or importance in the industry.

What the fuck am I reading? Did you read their patent?! There's a big difference between being Innovative, and being the first iteration. It's sure great to be the latter, but it shouldn't grant you monopolies over the iterative shit you do. You, sir, are seriously WRONG. I, for one, question SGI's degree of "innovation" considering it was primarily obvious iteration. Furthermore, I put it to you that if SGI didn't exist, someone else would have done it just as well, possibly even better. Ergo, they weren't at all more important than the next guy.

"Genius" isn't. Hey, what's the symbol for an ingenious idea? A light bulb? Edison's "invention" was iterative. Two years prior there was an improved incandescent light in a vacuum patent in the European patent office... It wasn't some remarkable leap of insight, Edison just tried stuff until it worked! Elisha Gray and Gram Bell BOTH invented the telephone i.e. using mercury as a variable resistor to put voice down the line that we were already using for communication (telegraph) -- Bell was AN HOUR sooner to the patent office, Gray went to the poorhouse. It was clearly ITERATION. People knew that you could detect sound waves and people knew you could communicate via wire. Are you saying that the twain would never have met if it weren't for a single Marvellous Brilliant Genius? WRONG! If the problem is important enough it WILL be solved (if it's solvable). SGI was first. SO WHAT. Edison was first to make a marketable bulb. We'd still have incandescent bulbs today if he had been struck and killed by the fabled lightning... We'd have had the Telephone AN HOUR LATER if Mr Bell had never existed.

We've increased the population of humans H in the problem space to the point that any monopoly on an idea nearly immediately harms independent "inventors". The average technician skilled in the art has a chance of creating the solution S. The number of new ie "patentable" solutions P to a problem in a given time interval T is P = SH/T
It's plain to see that as H increases, so to does the number of patentable solutions.
( This is because THERE IS NO TEST FOR OBVIOUSNESS -- The PTO does not employ individuals adequately skilled in the arts [these folk are WORKING in their fields]! Consequently, the PTO just ensures that the forms are signed, grants patents over anything that's not already in their Database and let's the court sort it out )

The problem is that there are actually VASTLY more people just getting shit done and realising that their work is iterative, than there are dumb lazy fucks who can't think for themselves so they look through the patent system database to see who's ideas they can use -- THE LATTER DOES NOT ACTUALLY EXIST! Everyone just solves their own damn problems rather than pay Patent Tax! The system is useless! Since EVERYONE is some degree of a Genius, Geniuses aren't special, otherwise we would actually search for patented solutions to use. In some fields where the research cost is high, you may do this, but in Software?! It's just Math, and Math is EASY.

Patents reward investment in research OF ONLY THE FIRST RESEARCHER. It's moronic to think that an idea monopoly won't harm THE ENTIRE REST OF THE FIELD as they're taxed for not getting there first or have to work around an obvious solution to avoid legal fees to invalidate P. It's even more retarding to get on your knees and worship the first iterating company as if it's the ONLY one in the field because it can pay for more H to produce P in less T. If you can pay for more H, then you get more P in less T; It's quite simple.

The bar for "Genius" has been lowered to average Joe engineer. It's your style of Mental Fellatio that's to blame for our current state of affairs...