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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."
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 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.
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.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.