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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."
Back in the mid-late '90s, I was a dedicated SGI user, working on an Indy with PhotoShop 3.0 and all that good stuff.
I'm disappointed to see SGI apparently taking the SCO path here.
(Ironically, I administered a SCO OpenSewer box far more recently than I got to use any SGI kit.)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
"Silicon Graphics -> Graphics Properties Holdings"
Now you have to change your name when you go from "making and selling" to "patent trolling"?
Ludicrous! What will be next? Bankers renaming themselves to Society Leeches?
You've only read the damn abstract haven't you?
How many times do people have to say READ THE CLAIMS before it sinks in that the abstract normally only gives an example and the patents claims normally go far beyond that. In some patents the abstract comes close to being completely misleading. Incidentally the claims are not restricted to 16 bit floating point representations or any other size of floating point accuracy, plus it's a continuation of other patents, so don't forget to read their claims too.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
really. using 16 bit floating point to hold color.
"yo we patented opengl with 16bit floating point in the 2000's". should be fucking obvious. increasing it to 32bit and 64bit too and other number holding formats.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Yes.
They just described an 'apparatus' that uses a rasterizer, geometry processor, and frame buffer (i.e. a GPU), the only specific of which is that it uses floating point data (somehow repeated over 10 claims).
Fuck this.
So, im pretty sure there exists prior art for putting a . behind a number to mark some fraction of a number
Sigh. Independent claim 7 doesn't even have a geometry processor. Filed in 2011, so it's not like it was a good idea from way back.
It's hard to see how this differs from one of their own cited prior arts patent, US7518615, which contains, for example:
> 1. A computer system, comprising: a processor for performing geometric calculations on a plurality of vertices of a primitive; a rasterization
> circuit coupled to the processor that rasterizes the primitive according to a scan conversion process which operates using a floating point
> format; and a frame buffer coupled to the rasterization circuit for storing a plurality of color values in the floating point format.
Its a continuation patent, so I suspect it inherits the filing date of the original patents in exchange for a shorter duration.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
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.
So patent trolls are terrrrrists? Interesting theory, let's see...
Hate us for our freedom to produce and innovate? Check.
Cripple the economy? Check.
Try to influence politics by their practices? Check.
I think you're on to something here...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I shudder at the thought what will happen to our economy should Microsoft and Apple start to become obsolete...
I don't dare to think about IBM.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This isn't the first time SGI has sued over these type of patents, see Slashdot 2006, and the 2010 ruling in SILICON GRAPHICS V ATI TECHNOLOGIES
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.
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...
I would question the idea that Jobs 'knew how to make a company successful.' He had a particular knack for making one company successful. Which is more of a 'fate' thing that anything else. Jobs had quite a few fairly unsuccessful ventures after first leaving Apple and before returning. And he would not, ever, be the sort of person who could immerse himself into any random company and make it successful. His success was in a particular niche of a particular industry. His success was more of a quirk than anything else.
Trying to 'learn business success by studying what Apple has done' is similar to when American businesses in the 90's strived to 'learn business success by studying Japanese companies.' It doesn't work. There's no formula there, just an odd phenomenon.
The claim that "Graphics Properties Holdings" is the former SGI is wrong.
SGI still exists, and has nothing to do with "Graphics Properties Holdings."
SGI had a troubled history in the dot com bust, and sold off many assets to keep itself afloat. SGI stopped making their own graphics hardware years ago; a number of patents were sold at the time, apparently a few made it to patent trolls. The current "Cray" was another case of SGI selling the trademarks and brands to Tera Computer Company - SGI kept most of the Cray engineers.
Silicon Graphics Inc. then died a slow death, going into bankruptcy twice before being bought by Rackable, which kept most of the SGI employees, and renamed itself SGI.
SGI still exists more or less unchanged from the SGI of yesteryear (though without MIPS, IRIX, or graphics workstations) - and is not part of "Graphics Properties Holdings."
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.