The rambus story is an easy one. Here it goes: company creates a high bandwidth
DRAM device that no one wants. It's too expensive, and the bandwidth comes at
the expense of latency, which turns out to be more important. The product fails
in the market at the hands of an open standard. The company isn't done, though:
they learned about the open standard when they attended the standard's group
meetings, and they use loopholes in the patent system to morph what they invented
into where the industry was headed. So even though their product fails, they
can leech royalties off of the successful product the industry created.
I like this story; it feels right to me. It appeals to me on several visceral
levels: the patent system is broken, open standards that work are superior to
proprietary ones that don't, sometimes everything works out and bad things
happen to bad people.
Here's my problem, though: I'm an athiest. I make an effort not to believe
things just because I want to and because it feels good. That's either
arrogant or ignorant, and I don't want to be either. When I
decide to believe something, I try to prove it first: this code is better
than that code because it _works_ better, not just because I don't like that
code or the person who wrote it. Works for me; maybe too much Ann Rynd when
I was little.
So here's my problem with the rambus issue that I've been watching off and
on most of this decade: I can't prove what I want to
believe. Worse, millions of dollars of investigation and litigation can't seem
to prove it either. Hundreds of thousands of documents, emails, depositions,
a 3 judge appeals court, an adminstrative law judge at the FTC, and now a
jury with some actual technical people in San Jose, and... nothing. What
I want to believe cannot be proved.
I have several choices: I could choose to feel good, believe that what I want
to be true is simply true. But I suck at that. I could blame the system, which is
broken in so many ways that it becomes definitional: when the outcome is
opposite of what I want, it's proof that the system is broken. Or, and flame
away if you need to, I have to ask if what I want to believe just isn't so.
Sometimes even people I dislike turn out to be telling the truth.
Slashdot Mirror
The rambus story is an easy one. Here it goes: company creates a high bandwidth DRAM device that no one wants. It's too expensive, and the bandwidth comes at the expense of latency, which turns out to be more important. The product fails in the market at the hands of an open standard. The company isn't done, though: they learned about the open standard when they attended the standard's group meetings, and they use loopholes in the patent system to morph what they invented into where the industry was headed. So even though their product fails, they can leech royalties off of the successful product the industry created.
I like this story; it feels right to me. It appeals to me on several visceral levels: the patent system is broken, open standards that work are superior to proprietary ones that don't, sometimes everything works out and bad things happen to bad people.
Here's my problem, though: I'm an athiest. I make an effort not to believe things just because I want to and because it feels good. That's either arrogant or ignorant, and I don't want to be either. When I decide to believe something, I try to prove it first: this code is better than that code because it _works_ better, not just because I don't like that code or the person who wrote it. Works for me; maybe too much Ann Rynd when I was little.
So here's my problem with the rambus issue that I've been watching off and on most of this decade: I can't prove what I want to believe. Worse, millions of dollars of investigation and litigation can't seem to prove it either. Hundreds of thousands of documents, emails, depositions, a 3 judge appeals court, an adminstrative law judge at the FTC, and now a jury with some actual technical people in San Jose, and ... nothing. What
I want to believe cannot be proved.
I have several choices: I could choose to feel good, believe that what I want to be true is simply true. But I suck at that. I could blame the system, which is broken in so many ways that it becomes definitional: when the outcome is opposite of what I want, it's proof that the system is broken. Or, and flame away if you need to, I have to ask if what I want to believe just isn't so. Sometimes even people I dislike turn out to be telling the truth.
-jk