Then they sued everyone and if it were not for AMD Rambus would be the next monopoly in ram. AMD still used Sdram which many of us preferred over the high latency and $$$ rambus. They lost and thank god.
And the share market punished them today. Like really punished. Opening Stock price $18.04. Closing stock price $7.11. That's a 60% drop, and when you consider that the company (was) worth in the billions, that is a massive massive drop for a single day.
This is either amazingly asinine or a brilliant troll because I can't work out which.
If you (America) wants to keep the tech in-house, stop selling the manufacture contract to the lowest bidder, i.e. another country. Pony up with the money to build it in the US. Yes, the manufacturing costs will be much higher, but if you have a monopoly on the market for that particular product, then price isn't that much of an issue.
All your debt, all your trade deficit. It's dead simple to fix. You could fix it tomorrow. Stop buying imported goods. You want to help your country, buy the products that you make domestically. Will you (the people) pay a lot more? Yes. Will your selection be smaller? Yes, greatly. Will it be better for your country? Sure it will. With some luck you might even then be able to start selling some of your goods overseas to help pay back that stupidly high debt.
While I am knowingly replying to two trolls, it makes for a poignant comment.
The rest of the world isn't too worried about this I think. With actions like this, America is just making itself more and more of a laughing stock in the eyes of the world. The credibility of America has been in decline for decades and eventually it will write itself out of the world stage that it so desperately want to stay in.
I am not saying that everyone in the US is to be painted with the same broad brush, but the folks at the top certainly seem to have free reign to write their own legislation and rules. With that sort of playing field, it is only a matter of time before all the other teams stop turning up to matches.
Even single celled organisms can be quite amazing right here on earth. These puppies were recently found in the depths of our oceans. I can't wait to see what life will come up with on another planet/moon with a totally different set of playing rules.
I only meddle in biology, but what I have learned is that for each time you think that life can't get any stranger, you soon enough discover something that proves you wrong yet again.
While the government may "get the job done" as you say, I really think it is merely a matter of having the biggest budget to throw at a problem and getting the worst possible job done. Not saying that it is like this in every single case, but a lot of the time when I look at large government projects, they are bloated badly, implemented poorly and there are many obvious improvements possible that could have saved money or made a better solution - had the right person been there to say "Yes" or "No" rather than a "Project Manager" who knows how to use visio and project manager.
While I am in Sydney, here are two comparable examples: The M7 is a four to six lane motorway that was built completely from scratch. It is around 40 kilometers long (25 miles?). This included around 90 bridges so as to not interrupt current roads (The road sometimes goes over existing roads, other times, bridges were built over the motorway). The road was built in three years, came in six months ahead of schedule and cost around $1.8 billion.
Now, another major road project is the F5 widening. The project started in 2005 and is still running. While I have searched for a total cost, I can only find the cost of the current stage, which has cost $138 million to widen a single section of this project.
A private contractor could have done this much quicker (just ask anyone living in south western Sydney) and better and probably for a lot less money. While a government may "get it done" it's not the best or cheapest option the vast majority of the time.
Well, then it's sort of your "civic responsibility" to EDUCATE said "chumps/noobs" vs. this type of threat.
I agree and I try to educate as many people as I can on as much as I can and hope that the majority of/. uers would, but most of my time is spent teaching people to run analysis, or how to write some basic SQL so that our IT folks aren't being constantly hounded by ad-hoc requests, but most of all I try to teach people to think for themselves and look at a business from a scientific approach. That said, our business has over 4,000 emplyees just at head office and a further 200,000 throughout the business, a single nerd trying to educate will only go so far. As far as my parents, flatmates and friends, I have certainly gone to the effort of ensuring that they know enough about what are basic do's and don'ts - but even then, they know that they can call anytime to check if they should do something.
As for the spearphishing, look if we are looking at the pros and cons of Duqu for goodness sake and how it has been implemented, I think that statement is valid. Yes, spearphising is a bit on the naughty side, but as we are talking about something that is totally on the naughty side, I think that the delivery mechanism can be said to have nothing wrong with it in terms of implementation.
Via email attachments?? Please - Nowadays, you'd have to be an UTTER CHUMP to fall for that "old trick"..........
Are you kidding me? While I agree that most people reading/. wouldn't fall for that trick, I can assure you that the company I work in (multinational retailer, I work in their head office) nine out of ten people wouldn't hesitate to open a Word attachment from someone they didn't know. Actually, I think the ratio may well be higher.
Now, it's being called "beautiful" in its interior code work, & it very well MAY BE quite elegant but... its deliver mechanism is "2nd rate", imo @ least.
Actually, I would disagree with that. Just because there are nicer ways to do it, doesn't mean that you need to use them. If you can send a single.doc attachment to a user within an organisation to get into it, why isn't that a perfect way to do it? There isn't anything wrong with spearphising. To use the car analogy, if you want to get to your letterbox, there isn't any point in driving a supercar to get to it - just walk from the front door.
Yes, I am sure that over time, the net will have been eroded by lobby groups and the like enough to have it and biggest companies with the deepest wallets will have bollocksed it up to that level - but that isn't to say that I want to see it tomorrow.
Even given something as simple as how much malware and how sophisticated it is becoming, the last thing I want right now is people being able to completely administer their own TLDs. I mean, we can shut down C&C servers now to a degree because those domains can be brought down, but I can't imagine it would be easier to do with people owning and administering their own TLDs - which was the proposal if I recall correctly. $200,000 was going to buy you the TLD and you had complete control and administration over it. At the moment, I generally tend to mentally avoid domains that are clearly hosted in places where there is a lot of funny business going on - yeah, I'm looking at you.ru suffix....
Are you crazy? Do you really want anyone to be able to have their own TLD?
How about this simple example then: Harry Harvard runs his own plumbing company that employs two other plumbers and registers the.harvard. Apart from the obvious Harvard that misses out on its own TLD now, anyone else also loses it. What about Harvard Pizzas in the town of Harvard. What about the town Harvard.
I think the best thing about a.com is the fact that you generally have the biggest companies where they are easy to find (apart from a few amusing examples - I'm looking at you Mr Nissan and your cheeky computer store that you have run forever and ever!) which is under a.com.
This is common in other countries as well, where.com should not be in their default namespace.
You do realize that.com was meant to mean commercial not US, as there is a.us siffix which is meant to be used for US websites? A.com is an OPEN TLD meaning anyone can use it without any specific country affiliation.
I can't imagine how an action like this can be legal in terms of anyone wanting to take it to court - surely the employee would win hands down, but I can't also see how it would be beneficial in the long run. Srely if you took your employer to court like this (and assuming you won) and went back to work - surely the culture there after that must be very antagonistic. Wouldn't the employer then be looking for any excuse and going through all the hoops to have that person leave the company anyhow.
The only way I can imagine to pursue this would be to take them to court, win (I assume quite easily) and then start looking for another job as the workplace has become hostile - which sort of leads to where they are going in the first place... "Give it back or you are fired" OR "Ha, I won, now I need to find other work...". It just seems to be a half dozen here and six there.
It's a bit of playing with numbers. Lets say that the worlds production of drinkable water is 1 litre an hour. If normally, the world only uses 9/10ths of that litre, there is 100mL left over that can be saved. Now, if over the course of ten hours, that 100 mL is put aside into a tank for an experiment. The experiment then squirts a high pressure jet of water that uses the entire litre that has been saved up in a mere second. The experiment can be said to have expended 3,600 times the Earth's water production because normally it would take an hour to amass that volume, not the second that it took to expend.
I'm sure they'll also love the lawsuit from AMD for breaking trade secret laws.
Bring in detailed plans on a USB and it's easy to prove by your former employer. Bring ideas in your head as well as comments like "Yeah, we tried that direction, but came up against issues with...." are certainly not easy to prove. Besides, Intel isn't going to be stupid enough to try to get schematics and diagrams. It's much more about knowing long term plans, where companies are steering. What ideas they are looking to develop.
In our case, it's about finding as much as is possible about how their supply chain differs from ours. What details they take into account in their forecasting models, things like that. Half the value is simply seeing our issues from a completely different angle, then having our own ideas on how to best come up with solutions. Getting someone to prove that in a court of law? Good luck.
I am sure that there are many companies out there who would be more than happy to hire these folks to gain some insight into what plans are for the next few years from AMD. While cost cutting and laying off some people is never nice, certain industries that are so competitive will always be looking to hire (even bad employees) to gain access to their knowledge.
Heck, I work in a multinational retailer (read: tough times in terms of profits and trends) and we hired a guy who works for a competitor chain in Europe without so much as an interview - even knowing it is just for a few months while his girlfiend is on study vacation out here. Sometimes the more competitive the industry, the safer the employees.
Apple lawyers contact a farmer in Texas about his infringement for having "Apples" on his inventory when they have exclusive distribution rights.
In related news, Apple contacted the Indian government about possible product dilution of their Siri software. Although even Apple had to admit that a Sari wasn't exactly the same pronounciation, they requested that the garment be renamed to something that wouldn't be so close to stave off any possible trouble down the line.
I like this guy, he gets intrigued by some rather simple common things, then does the research to actually understand it, publishes it and closes the case. Here is another curiosity that he has researched. Perhaps not amazingly useful at face value, but it may well help someone else with an idea or understanding of something else.
I'll call them liars because if they aren't liars, its even worse for their reputation.
Yes, it does seem to be a choice of calling them a) incompetent or b) liars. I really don't know which is worse. Do you trust the incometent fool or do you trust the sneaky but savvy businessman?
Quite possibly, but it is still the lesser of two evils isn't it? Seriously, if I was to pick an addiction for a friend, and I had the choices of heroin or PS3 gaming, it would be an easy choice.
They are the ones that screwed their reputation by violating its privacy policy.
What I find most ironic is that they seem to be breaking their privacy policy in an attempt to enfore it. "Here is the big email list of people you CAN'T send emails to. We promised, so don't send stuff OK?". It's simply dripping with irony.
Why would they protect a company that screwed their reputation?
Probably because they have a long standing business relationship with them. If the other company makes them plenty of new customers, they might be the company that helps them regain all the customers they lost from this fiasco.
Haven't you ever had an employee, or friend for that matter that did something stupid, you took them aside, spoke with them and they ended up being a fantastic employee or amazing friend from that point onward?
Their privacy policy to their customers gives a bunch of rules that they have said they will follow. Some of those rules have been broken. I think it is actually right that they discuss this privately with the third parties to try to engage them to do the right thing. If the other parties don't come to the party, so to speak, only then should it go further.
Some people don't even have enough money to get it in their homes.
You know, I would be quite happy if every prisoner had a playstation or xbox while they were doing time. Even if one in a hundred got really into gaming, and when they got out kept playing rather than going back to crime, it would certainly be worth the investment. It's probably a bit too optimistic, but that's the way I roll these days.
Slashdot Mirror
Rambus is or was pretty evil.
Then they sued everyone and if it were not for AMD Rambus would be the next monopoly in ram. AMD still used Sdram which many of us preferred over the high latency and $$$ rambus. They lost and thank god.
And the share market punished them today. Like really punished. Opening Stock price $18.04. Closing stock price $7.11. That's a 60% drop, and when you consider that the company (was) worth in the billions, that is a massive massive drop for a single day.
This is either amazingly asinine or a brilliant troll because I can't work out which.
If you (America) wants to keep the tech in-house, stop selling the manufacture contract to the lowest bidder, i.e. another country. Pony up with the money to build it in the US. Yes, the manufacturing costs will be much higher, but if you have a monopoly on the market for that particular product, then price isn't that much of an issue.
All your debt, all your trade deficit. It's dead simple to fix. You could fix it tomorrow. Stop buying imported goods. You want to help your country, buy the products that you make domestically. Will you (the people) pay a lot more? Yes. Will your selection be smaller? Yes, greatly. Will it be better for your country? Sure it will. With some luck you might even then be able to start selling some of your goods overseas to help pay back that stupidly high debt.
Copyrighting an algorithm is almost impossible, depending on which national legal jurisdiction you're in. And patenting could be expensive
Oh yes, we developed this lovely little algorithm, we want to patent it. Can someone spot us $50k to pay for patent bills?
Hey, maybe that's where you could use that $50k in prize money?
While I am knowingly replying to two trolls, it makes for a poignant comment.
The rest of the world isn't too worried about this I think. With actions like this, America is just making itself more and more of a laughing stock in the eyes of the world. The credibility of America has been in decline for decades and eventually it will write itself out of the world stage that it so desperately want to stay in.
I am not saying that everyone in the US is to be painted with the same broad brush, but the folks at the top certainly seem to have free reign to write their own legislation and rules. With that sort of playing field, it is only a matter of time before all the other teams stop turning up to matches.
Most likely microbes
Even single celled organisms can be quite amazing right here on earth. These puppies were recently found in the depths of our oceans. I can't wait to see what life will come up with on another planet/moon with a totally different set of playing rules.
I only meddle in biology, but what I have learned is that for each time you think that life can't get any stranger, you soon enough discover something that proves you wrong yet again.
While the government may "get the job done" as you say, I really think it is merely a matter of having the biggest budget to throw at a problem and getting the worst possible job done. Not saying that it is like this in every single case, but a lot of the time when I look at large government projects, they are bloated badly, implemented poorly and there are many obvious improvements possible that could have saved money or made a better solution - had the right person been there to say "Yes" or "No" rather than a "Project Manager" who knows how to use visio and project manager.
While I am in Sydney, here are two comparable examples: The M7 is a four to six lane motorway that was built completely from scratch. It is around 40 kilometers long (25 miles?). This included around 90 bridges so as to not interrupt current roads (The road sometimes goes over existing roads, other times, bridges were built over the motorway). The road was built in three years, came in six months ahead of schedule and cost around $1.8 billion.
Now, another major road project is the F5 widening. The project started in 2005 and is still running. While I have searched for a total cost, I can only find the cost of the current stage, which has cost $138 million to widen a single section of this project.
A private contractor could have done this much quicker (just ask anyone living in south western Sydney) and better and probably for a lot less money. While a government may "get it done" it's not the best or cheapest option the vast majority of the time.
Well, then it's sort of your "civic responsibility" to EDUCATE said "chumps/noobs" vs. this type of threat.
I agree and I try to educate as many people as I can on as much as I can and hope that the majority of /. uers would, but most of my time is spent teaching people to run analysis, or how to write some basic SQL so that our IT folks aren't being constantly hounded by ad-hoc requests, but most of all I try to teach people to think for themselves and look at a business from a scientific approach. That said, our business has over 4,000 emplyees just at head office and a further 200,000 throughout the business, a single nerd trying to educate will only go so far. As far as my parents, flatmates and friends, I have certainly gone to the effort of ensuring that they know enough about what are basic do's and don'ts - but even then, they know that they can call anytime to check if they should do something.
As for the spearphishing, look if we are looking at the pros and cons of Duqu for goodness sake and how it has been implemented, I think that statement is valid. Yes, spearphising is a bit on the naughty side, but as we are talking about something that is totally on the naughty side, I think that the delivery mechanism can be said to have nothing wrong with it in terms of implementation.
Via email attachments?? Please - Nowadays, you'd have to be an UTTER CHUMP to fall for that "old trick"..........
Are you kidding me? While I agree that most people reading /. wouldn't fall for that trick, I can assure you that the company I work in (multinational retailer, I work in their head office) nine out of ten people wouldn't hesitate to open a Word attachment from someone they didn't know. Actually, I think the ratio may well be higher.
Now, it's being called "beautiful" in its interior code work, & it very well MAY BE quite elegant but... its deliver mechanism is "2nd rate", imo @ least.
Actually, I would disagree with that. Just because there are nicer ways to do it, doesn't mean that you need to use them. If you can send a single .doc attachment to a user within an organisation to get into it, why isn't that a perfect way to do it? There isn't anything wrong with spearphising. To use the car analogy, if you want to get to your letterbox, there isn't any point in driving a supercar to get to it - just walk from the front door.
Yes, I am sure that over time, the net will have been eroded by lobby groups and the like enough to have it and biggest companies with the deepest wallets will have bollocksed it up to that level - but that isn't to say that I want to see it tomorrow.
Even given something as simple as how much malware and how sophisticated it is becoming, the last thing I want right now is people being able to completely administer their own TLDs. I mean, we can shut down C&C servers now to a degree because those domains can be brought down, but I can't imagine it would be easier to do with people owning and administering their own TLDs - which was the proposal if I recall correctly. $200,000 was going to buy you the TLD and you had complete control and administration over it. At the moment, I generally tend to mentally avoid domains that are clearly hosted in places where there is a lot of funny business going on - yeah, I'm looking at you .ru suffix....
Are you crazy? Do you really want anyone to be able to have their own TLD?
How about this simple example then: Harry Harvard runs his own plumbing company that employs two other plumbers and registers the .harvard. Apart from the obvious Harvard that misses out on its own TLD now, anyone else also loses it. What about Harvard Pizzas in the town of Harvard. What about the town Harvard.
I think the best thing about a .com is the fact that you generally have the biggest companies where they are easy to find (apart from a few amusing examples - I'm looking at you Mr Nissan and your cheeky computer store that you have run forever and ever!) which is under a .com.
Yes, it is actually. I wonder if any employees over at ICANN were previously employed by Big Music...
This is common in other countries as well, where .com should not be in their default namespace.
You do realize that .com was meant to mean commercial not US, as there is a .us siffix which is meant to be used for US websites? A .com is an OPEN TLD meaning anyone can use it without any specific country affiliation.
I can't imagine how an action like this can be legal in terms of anyone wanting to take it to court - surely the employee would win hands down, but I can't also see how it would be beneficial in the long run. Srely if you took your employer to court like this (and assuming you won) and went back to work - surely the culture there after that must be very antagonistic. Wouldn't the employer then be looking for any excuse and going through all the hoops to have that person leave the company anyhow.
The only way I can imagine to pursue this would be to take them to court, win (I assume quite easily) and then start looking for another job as the workplace has become hostile - which sort of leads to where they are going in the first place... "Give it back or you are fired" OR "Ha, I won, now I need to find other work...". It just seems to be a half dozen here and six there.
It's a bit of playing with numbers. Lets say that the worlds production of drinkable water is 1 litre an hour. If normally, the world only uses 9/10ths of that litre, there is 100mL left over that can be saved. Now, if over the course of ten hours, that 100 mL is put aside into a tank for an experiment. The experiment then squirts a high pressure jet of water that uses the entire litre that has been saved up in a mere second. The experiment can be said to have expended 3,600 times the Earth's water production because normally it would take an hour to amass that volume, not the second that it took to expend.
Cause America keeps starting all the cool new Middle East wars and have no play money left over?
I'm sure they'll also love the lawsuit from AMD for breaking trade secret laws.
Bring in detailed plans on a USB and it's easy to prove by your former employer. Bring ideas in your head as well as comments like "Yeah, we tried that direction, but came up against issues with ...." are certainly not easy to prove. Besides, Intel isn't going to be stupid enough to try to get schematics and diagrams. It's much more about knowing long term plans, where companies are steering. What ideas they are looking to develop.
In our case, it's about finding as much as is possible about how their supply chain differs from ours. What details they take into account in their forecasting models, things like that. Half the value is simply seeing our issues from a completely different angle, then having our own ideas on how to best come up with solutions. Getting someone to prove that in a court of law? Good luck.
I am sure that there are many companies out there who would be more than happy to hire these folks to gain some insight into what plans are for the next few years from AMD. While cost cutting and laying off some people is never nice, certain industries that are so competitive will always be looking to hire (even bad employees) to gain access to their knowledge.
Heck, I work in a multinational retailer (read: tough times in terms of profits and trends) and we hired a guy who works for a competitor chain in Europe without so much as an interview - even knowing it is just for a few months while his girlfiend is on study vacation out here. Sometimes the more competitive the industry, the safer the employees.
Apple lawyers contact a farmer in Texas about his infringement for having "Apples" on his inventory when they have exclusive distribution rights.
In related news, Apple contacted the Indian government about possible product dilution of their Siri software. Although even Apple had to admit that a Sari wasn't exactly the same pronounciation, they requested that the garment be renamed to something that wouldn't be so close to stave off any possible trouble down the line.
Thanks for watching, enjoy the movie...
I like this guy, he gets intrigued by some rather simple common things, then does the research to actually understand it, publishes it and closes the case. Here is another curiosity that he has researched. Perhaps not amazingly useful at face value, but it may well help someone else with an idea or understanding of something else.
I'll call them liars because if they aren't liars, its even worse for their reputation.
Yes, it does seem to be a choice of calling them a) incompetent or b) liars. I really don't know which is worse. Do you trust the incometent fool or do you trust the sneaky but savvy businessman?
Quite possibly, but it is still the lesser of two evils isn't it? Seriously, if I was to pick an addiction for a friend, and I had the choices of heroin or PS3 gaming, it would be an easy choice.
They are the ones that screwed their reputation by violating its privacy policy.
What I find most ironic is that they seem to be breaking their privacy policy in an attempt to enfore it. "Here is the big email list of people you CAN'T send emails to. We promised, so don't send stuff OK?". It's simply dripping with irony.
Why would they protect a company that screwed their reputation?
Probably because they have a long standing business relationship with them. If the other company makes them plenty of new customers, they might be the company that helps them regain all the customers they lost from this fiasco.
Haven't you ever had an employee, or friend for that matter that did something stupid, you took them aside, spoke with them and they ended up being a fantastic employee or amazing friend from that point onward?
Actually, I think it does.
Their privacy policy to their customers gives a bunch of rules that they have said they will follow. Some of those rules have been broken. I think it is actually right that they discuss this privately with the third parties to try to engage them to do the right thing. If the other parties don't come to the party, so to speak, only then should it go further.
Some people don't even have enough money to get it in their homes.
You know, I would be quite happy if every prisoner had a playstation or xbox while they were doing time. Even if one in a hundred got really into gaming, and when they got out kept playing rather than going back to crime, it would certainly be worth the investment. It's probably a bit too optimistic, but that's the way I roll these days.