Room temp 1GHz 21164!!?? Maybe it didn't have cryotech cooling but it must have had some (Alphas dissipate more heat than anyone else)
The IBM PPC demo was really room-temp but it was not a complete CPU (no fpu etc.) and was just a 'technology demo', but it also used a older process technology (It was around when IBM announced copper interconnects but the 1GHz demo was in aluminium)
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
I thought that stupid arguement died out years ago. There are few "true" RISC systems still out there. The PowerPC surely isn't one.
Claim: The last general-purpose-designed-for-performance CPU that's internally RISC like was the DEC/CPQ Alpha 21164, today the core of every such CPU is very much like dataflow!
The "breakthrough" of the RISC design wasn't coming up with simplier instructions, it was breaking the CPU into independant subsystems that could work in parallel. Doing an integer operation at the same time as doing a floating point one, while loading data from the bus/memory means 3 things are going on at once. A "simple" instruction set means that it is more obvious where the pieces are, but is fundamentally irrelevant.
A few things to consider;
Everybody does not agree 'why RISC is better than CISC, and why it came when it came'.
Some say that it's all in the title of a book "Computer Architecture A Quantitative Approach". i.e. that pre-RISC designers had a flawed design philosophy.
Some say that it was because you could finally get enough transistors on a single die to make a pipelined non microcoded general purpose CPU in a single die.
Some say it's because pre-RISC cpus were designed for assembler programmers and RISC CPUs are designed for compilers.
And: What makes RISC RISC?
Is it the load-store architecture (must load data into registers before manipulating it)?
Is it the uniform insn length?
Is it the design philosophy?
IIRC the first RISCs (the first CPUs that were called RISC) didn't do multi-issue of insns in the same cycle and they most definitely were not out-of-order..
Oh, well - mostly pointless for anyone but historians and markerers:-)
When programming in assembly (the only time RISC/CISC is visible to a programmer), you want it to be as CSICy as possible, it makes your life easier. Think about
C = A + B
In an old assembler that is one instruction. Simple, easy to read (for assembly). In a load-and-store system that is
load A to r1 load B to r2 add r1 to r2 store r2 to C
4 vs 1. You tell me which one you want to hand code in.
The flaw with this example is that you assume that we won't use C for some time - usually C will get used again (maybe the only reason it ever was in main memory was that the CISC where the asm was written was register starved)? But yes - RISC systems generally do more insns than CISC systems - just not four times as many:-):-)
Also, RISC pushes more of the work to the software, which is fundamentally slower than hardware. Lets do as much stuff as low as possible so our systems run faster. Adding layers sucks.
I assume this is irony? Software in-and-of itself has no 'speed' - only when executed on hardware does the software have 'speed' - and RISC is supposed to make the hardware solve the same problem in a smaller amount of time than a CISC design in the same process with the same constraints (cost, power..) and the same amount of development money...
Imagine a future with CISC instructions with pipelined cores. How one gets translated to the other is meaningless to programmers although an interesting research topic for the hardware folks. Think of it as a library. You just care what the interface is (the opcodes), let the library designer (EEs) handle the details of getting that interface to work well. Maybe some of the ease of the monster CISC stuff needs to go away to help out the core (trade-offs are part of an engineer's life), but as a rule CISC is better for programmers. Just lest RISC vs CISC be forgotten. We need bits and pieces of each one.
Must be heavy irony, because thats what we have today - the P6 (used in PPro, PII and PIII), K6 and K7 cores are multi-issue super-pipelines ones, they happen to be implemented as translators to 'internally RISC' that's really a kind of dataflow (just like all current RISC CPUs)..
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
ThinkPad PowerSeries 8x0 (850, 820 that I know of and was there a 830 too?), CHRP portable! You can't buy them anymore though:-( I think the CPU was PPC601 or somesuch..
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
Well, the S70 AIX box is very similar to the largest AS/400 PowerAS. It uses the same CPU too. And it ought to be able to support Linux (don't think anyone has done that yet though), I don't know if the current AS/400 hardware is capable of running in 'tag-less' mode (neccesary for running any UNIX like system). On the VM front I've seen some work being done and I even tried to boot a kernel but it didn't work:-/ (I'm no '390 guru) see Linux on the IBM ESA/390 Mainframe Architecture for some info..
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
If you 'read between the lines' you see that he said he worked with hardware design (actually where they design the hardware, he didn't say that he was a hardware designer) and that the "cards they sent us" worked OK. Implying that it was the software (from Lucent I persume) that failed (I dont't think he meant that "the software on the punched cards that they sent us was OK..."). He's correct that running a critical system at or close to 100% utilization is a far, far less than brilliant thing to do... All systems that I've worked with tend to fail more often when they are stressed in that way, and quite a few of todays computer systems are not designed to behave well if you put 'too much' load on them...
I've got no hard facts to back those statements up, just experience:-)
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
Oh, no - they (and a lot of others) see themselves as more-or-less serious. Much of the stuff on theregister.co.uk is true - the problem is that their philosophy seems to be "it's more important to have all the correct news than it is to have no incorrect news" and the result isn't hard to guess. All the signal is there - but so is most of the noise:-/
It's also good to remember that they have a good sense of humor too - else it would be utter rubbish (now it's fun but you have to take care not to believe everything)
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
Well, they have all the news - the problem is to know which of them are true... But they are certainly entertaining;-)
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
Re:what about Coppermind? Hello????
on
Athlon Reviews
·
· Score: 1
It's called Coppermine but will not use copper, still aluminium.. The name is from a river like all other intel CPU codenames. Why they got to that river just now when everybody except intel are talking about their new copper based process?
;-)
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
Ok, so I did something wrong - here . The error of my ways was that slashdot no longer likes single quotes around the URL - need to use double quotes..
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
Re:22 million transistors?
on
Athlon Reviews
·
· Score: 1
Well, the HPPA 8500 has 140 million transistors:-) (1.5 MiByte L1 (yes level-one) cache).
Here are some approx numbers:
Intel: PII was 7.5 M transistors in a.25 micron process and an area of 131 mm^2. The PIII is 9.5 M transistors but I've got no area for it, I believe it's made in the same.25 micron process (not 100% certain) but you can't just scale the area (different types of transistors take a different amount of area, and if the placement is 'suboptimal'..)
AMD: K6-III 21.3 M transistors and 135 mm^2 in.25 micron process (not same as intels process) and Athlon shouldn't be too different (in that process).
IBM/Moto (PPC): PPC750 is 6.35 M transistors 40 mm^2 in IBMs.22 micron process and dissipates 5.5 W at 466MHz. IBMs POWER3 is 160 mm^2 in a.2 micron (should this be the same.22 micron as above?) process.
SUN (SPARC): USII is 5.4 M transistors and 126 mm^2 in some.25 micron process and dissipates 21 W at 400 MHz.
COMPAQ (ALPHA): 21264 is 15.2 M transistors in a.35 (!) micron process and takes 302 mm^2 and dissipates 72 W at 666 (;-) ) MHz
SGI (MIPS): The R10k was 6.8 M transistors (no numbers for R12k) and took 298 mm^2 and dissipates ca 30 W at 195 MHz in a.35 micron process (this CPU shipped '96, don't have numbers for any later).
HP (PA-RISC): 140 M transistors and an unknown area and an unknown heat-dissipation. The process is intels.25 micron.
Larger (in area) processors are usually more expensive to manufacture because the errors are per-area more than per-transistor. And that means that if you make larger chips your 'yield' (percentage of the made chips that works) becomes lower at the same time as you get fewer chips per wafer... Now compare the 21264 and PPC750... The PPC750 designers weren't incompetent - they had other goals than the Alpha designers..
Intels processes has traditionally been very well tuned with very high yields.
The full report please... What compiler? What flags?... And what are the peak numbers? Die size?.. Some people probably think Intel is as good as dead (;-) ) - no chance. Why? nobody else can manufacture enough processors! When will dual systems be availible?..
Oh, almost forgot: I'M GOING TO BUY ONE!
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
Blade Runner was a very good movie, and I think there was even some Science Fiction left in it:-). But the original book "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep" by Philip K. Dick (one of the very best SF authors) is one of the best books ever written! It's impressive that they didn't destroy it more;-) Now, the worst they (Hollywood) ever did was filming Starship Troopers - another one of the best books ever and they managed to... The only saving grace being that they apparently decided to buy in the S-T name quite late in the process...
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
Harlan Ellison wrote a screenplay based on "I Robot" by Asimov - in '74 or so... Came in book form a few yeas ago (as an illustrated screenplay). I've heard a rumor that it wasn't filmed because Star Wars made Hollywood think robots should be 'cute' or somesuch...
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
To elaborate on previous posters, Clarke described a system of satellites in a geostationary orbit in "Wireless World" (a british radio journal) in October '45. (IIRC on the date)
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
Re:.. and who's vpenis is biggest now?
on
Carmack on the K7
·
· Score: 1
That a large (for some definition of large) part of the human race likes 'dick-sizing', usually these individuals also happen to be in the part of humanity that make the most noise and they also happen to be in the part of humanity with the 'largest-dicks' (for some definitions of largest, dick and humanity)
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
The size (the maximum size of an ATX board is smaller)
Where the holes are (to attach it to the box)
The power connector (Both the actual connector and the 'soft-power-off' stuff)
The connectors for keyboard, serial etc. are in a standardized position at the edge of the board (the same way ISA/PCI cards have been) and don't require cables inside the box.
And certainly some other small stuff I've forgotten to mention:-)
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
Thank you for the explanation of the US law, I've started to look into the local (Swedish) law on patents and immediately found that computer programs are not patentable in Sweden, the law explicitly names computer programs. (1967:837 Patentlag, availible in Swedish only from http://rixlex.riksdagen.se).
I'd be interested if anyone knows of an url for the international agreements.
Then there seems to be a EU "Greenbook" on patents, it wasn't availible electronacally so I'll have to order it..
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
Ahh, so they are allowed to "recover their losses"... Could be a lot if the free software is successful... Is this only in the US or in those wonderfull international agreements too?
I read you wrong on the tax issue, after rereading what you wrote I can't see why I misunderstood. I thought you had written about mandatory licensing of patents but missed the word "royalty":-/
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
1. First you say it's boring and then you... Please tell me if you want a response, here or by mail...
2. So if I make a GPLed program that uses software patents foo and bar the owners of foo and bar have no chance whatsoever to win if they sue me for patent infringment (if I let everybody download the program from my web site or whatever)? This is news to me and to many others.. Thinking more about it, as it's OK to use a patent unless you sell it, I believr you're correct. Now they'll probably clim that free software that infringes on a patent "takes away their business".. I thank you for lessening my ignorance.
3. But how should the rule to determine how much of an objects value is in the patented part be constructed?? You were suggesting a tax by the government unless I completely misunderstood you...
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
Lessening the amount of money to get that approval would, IMO, be a better way of "fixing" it.
As for the testing. No, I can see no way of proving this or that but today I haven't heard of any serious (in effort) study on the effects of IP legislation. All the claims that "it'll ruin invention" is based on "it's self eveident". And "self evident" or "everybody knows" things are by my way of figuring plain wrong per definition... My suggestion is to lessen the terms and stop lessening them "when it starts to hurt". Finding "hurt" will certainly be hard:-/ Another thing to make IP "cleaner" would be to force the granting authority to pay lots of money if a patent was defeated on the "self evident" (;-) ) or "prior art" grounds (to whomever challanged the patent).
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
So just because it's in the US declaration of independance I've got to agree with it? Talk about Imperialism.. Yes I don't agree with that part of it, let me dissect it for you.
1. The right of Life. If God had given you this then everybody would be immortal, looking at nature I can't find any such right at all.. And thats from a country with death penalty...
2. Liberty. Liberty of what!? Thinking free? No government can keep me from that! They can punish me if they find out bt they can't prevent me (short of preventing me from thinking at all)
3. Pursuit of Happiness. It's simple to make it harder for you to pursue happiness, but it's impossible (short of killing you) to make the pursuit of happiness impossible..
Finally: I'm a citizen of the Kingdom of Sweden and this country weren't founded on any such principles.
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
1. Why isn't a "right by contract" property? What is the definition of property anyway??
2. They do harm because "small fish" don't dare to go against them. Either because they don't know their rights or because they are afraid of being sued.
3. I don't want to say no to the tax proposal, but if the patented "thing" is only a small part of the product?
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
1. In my "personal" page (where you get after pressing "bwz") where my twenty latest comments are listed. I'd like to see their score too. Actually, it would be nice if I could see the score of all comments in the link to them.
3. That assumes the number of moderators stays at that level, I've already posted the theoretical min though.
I'm sorry you got me wrong. I dont say "this is FSCKed" I say "I dont want this for ME because I value the thoughts of all humans". I'm also saying "Could you please provide some ways by which we can judge the 'fairness'[*] of the moderation". I regrett that my post was interpreted the way it was...
Erik
[*] fair is not absolute..
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
Slashdot Mirror
Room temp 1GHz 21164!!?? Maybe it didn't have cryotech cooling but it must have had some (Alphas dissipate more heat than anyone else)
The IBM PPC demo was really room-temp but it was not a complete CPU (no fpu etc.) and was just a 'technology demo', but it also used a older process technology (It was around when IBM announced copper interconnects but the 1GHz demo was in aluminium)
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
I thought that stupid arguement died out years ago. There are few "true" RISC systems still out there. The PowerPC surely isn't one.
:-)
:-) :-)
Claim: The last general-purpose-designed-for-performance CPU that's internally RISC like was the DEC/CPQ Alpha 21164, today the core of every such CPU is very much like dataflow!
The "breakthrough" of the RISC design wasn't coming up with simplier instructions, it was breaking the CPU into independant subsystems that could work in parallel. Doing an integer operation at the same time as doing a floating point one, while loading data from the bus/memory means 3 things are going on at once. A "simple" instruction set means that it is more obvious where the pieces are, but is fundamentally irrelevant.
A few things to consider;
Everybody does not agree 'why RISC is better than CISC, and why it came when it came'.
Some say that it's all in the title of a book "Computer Architecture A Quantitative Approach". i.e. that pre-RISC designers had a flawed design philosophy.
Some say that it was because you could finally get enough transistors on a single die to make a pipelined non microcoded general purpose CPU in a single die.
Some say it's because pre-RISC cpus were designed for assembler programmers and RISC CPUs are designed for compilers.
And: What makes RISC RISC?
Is it the load-store architecture (must load data into registers before manipulating it)?
Is it the uniform insn length?
Is it the design philosophy?
IIRC the first RISCs (the first CPUs that were called RISC) didn't do multi-issue of insns in the same cycle and they most definitely were not out-of-order..
Oh, well - mostly pointless for anyone but historians and markerers
When programming in assembly (the only time RISC/CISC is visible to a programmer), you want it to be as CSICy as possible, it makes your life easier. Think about
C = A + B
In an old assembler that is one instruction. Simple, easy to read (for assembly). In a load-and-store system that is
load A to r1
load B to r2
add r1 to r2
store r2 to C
4 vs 1. You tell me which one you want to hand code in.
The flaw with this example is that you assume that we won't use C for some time - usually C will get used again (maybe the only reason it ever was in main memory was that the CISC where the asm was written was register starved)? But yes - RISC systems generally do more insns than CISC systems - just not four times as many
Also, RISC pushes more of the work to the software, which is fundamentally slower than hardware. Lets do as much stuff as low as possible so our systems run faster. Adding layers sucks.
I assume this is irony? Software in-and-of itself has no 'speed' - only when executed on hardware does the software have 'speed' - and RISC is supposed to make the hardware solve the same problem in a smaller amount of time than a CISC design in the same process with the same constraints (cost, power..) and the same amount of development money...
Imagine a future with CISC instructions with pipelined cores. How one gets translated to the other is meaningless to programmers although an interesting research topic for the hardware folks. Think of it as a library. You just care what the interface is (the opcodes), let the library designer (EEs) handle the details of getting that interface to work well. Maybe some of the ease of the monster CISC stuff needs to go away to help out the core (trade-offs are part of an engineer's life), but as a rule CISC is better for programmers. Just lest RISC vs CISC be forgotten. We need bits and pieces of each one.
Must be heavy irony, because thats what we have today - the P6 (used in PPro, PII and PIII), K6 and K7 cores are multi-issue super-pipelines ones, they happen to be implemented as translators to 'internally RISC' that's really a kind of dataflow (just like all current RISC CPUs)..
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
ThinkPad PowerSeries 8x0 (850, 820 that I know of and was there a 830 too?), CHRP portable! You can't buy them anymore though :-( I think the CPU was PPC601 or somesuch..
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
Well, the S70 AIX box is very similar to the largest AS/400 PowerAS. It uses the same CPU too. And it ought to be able to support Linux (don't think anyone has done that yet though), I don't know if the current AS/400 hardware is capable of running in 'tag-less' mode (neccesary for running any UNIX like system). On the VM front I've seen some work being done and I even tried to boot a kernel but it didn't work :-/ (I'm no '390 guru) see Linux on the IBM ESA/390 Mainframe Architecture for some info..
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
If you 'read between the lines' you see that he said he worked with hardware design (actually where they design the hardware, he didn't say that he was a hardware designer) and that the "cards they sent us" worked OK. Implying that it was the software (from Lucent I persume) that failed (I dont't think he meant that "the software on the punched cards that they sent us was OK..."). He's correct that running a critical system at or close to 100% utilization is a far, far less than brilliant thing to do... All systems that I've worked with tend to fail more often when they are stressed in that way, and quite a few of todays computer systems are not designed to behave well if you put 'too much' load on them...
:-)
I've got no hard facts to back those statements up, just experience
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
It ought to be a lot cheaper, see my earlier post Re:22 million transistors?
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
Oh, no - they (and a lot of others) see themselves as more-or-less serious. Much of the stuff on theregister.co.uk is true - the problem is that their philosophy seems to be "it's more important to have all the correct news than it is to have no incorrect news" and the result isn't hard to guess. All the signal is there - but so is most of the noise :-/
It's also good to remember that they have a good sense of humor too - else it would be utter rubbish (now it's fun but you have to take care not to believe everything)
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
Well, they have all the news - the problem is to know which of them are true... But they are certainly entertaining ;-)
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
It's called Coppermine but will not use copper, still aluminium.. The name is from a river like all other intel CPU codenames. Why they got to that river just now when everybody except intel are talking about their new copper based process?
;-)
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
Ok, so I did something wrong - here . The error of my ways was that slashdot no longer likes single quotes around the URL - need to use double quotes..
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
Well, the HPPA 8500 has 140 million transistors :-) (1.5 MiByte L1 (yes level-one) cache).
.25 micron process and an area of 131 mm^2. The PIII is 9.5 M transistors but I've got no area for it, I believe it's made in the same .25 micron process (not 100% certain) but you can't just scale the area (different types of transistors take a different amount of area, and if the placement is 'suboptimal'..)
.25 micron process (not same as intels process) and Athlon shouldn't be too different (in that process).
.22 micron process and dissipates 5.5 W at 466MHz. IBMs POWER3 is 160 mm^2 in a .2 micron (should this be the same .22 micron as above?) process.
.25 micron process and dissipates 21 W at 400 MHz.
.35 (!) micron process and takes 302 mm^2 and dissipates 72 W at 666 ( ;-) ) MHz
.35 micron process (this CPU shipped '96, don't have numbers for any later).
.25 micron.
Here are some approx numbers:
Intel: PII was 7.5 M transistors in a
AMD: K6-III 21.3 M transistors and 135 mm^2 in
IBM/Moto (PPC): PPC750 is 6.35 M transistors 40 mm^2 in IBMs
SUN (SPARC): USII is 5.4 M transistors and 126 mm^2 in some
COMPAQ (ALPHA): 21264 is 15.2 M transistors in a
SGI (MIPS): The R10k was 6.8 M transistors (no numbers for R12k) and took 298 mm^2 and dissipates ca 30 W at 195 MHz in a
HP (PA-RISC): 140 M transistors and an unknown area and an unknown heat-dissipation. The process is intels
Larger (in area) processors are usually more expensive to manufacture because the errors are per-area more than per-transistor. And that means that if you make larger chips your 'yield' (percentage of the made chips that works) becomes lower at the same time as you get fewer chips per wafer... Now compare the 21264 and PPC750... The PPC750 designers weren't incompetent - they had other goals than the Alpha designers..
Intels processes has traditionally been very well tuned with very high yields.
The raw data is availible here
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
The full report please... What compiler? What flags?... And what are the peak numbers? Die size?.. Some people probably think Intel is as good as dead ( ;-) ) - no chance. Why? nobody else can manufacture enough processors! When will dual systems be availible?..
Oh, almost forgot: I'M GOING TO BUY ONE!
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
Blade Runner was a very good movie, and I think there was even some Science Fiction left in it :-). But the original book "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep" by Philip K. Dick (one of the very best SF authors) is one of the best books ever written! It's impressive that they didn't destroy it more ;-) Now, the worst they (Hollywood) ever did was filming Starship Troopers - another one of the best books ever and they managed to... The only saving grace being that they apparently decided to buy in the S-T name quite late in the process...
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
Harlan Ellison wrote a screenplay based on "I Robot" by Asimov - in '74 or so... Came in book form a few yeas ago (as an illustrated screenplay). I've heard a rumor that it wasn't filmed because Star Wars made Hollywood think robots should be 'cute' or somesuch...
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
To elaborate on previous posters, Clarke described a system of satellites in a geostationary orbit in "Wireless World" (a british radio journal) in October '45. (IIRC on the date)
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
That a large (for some definition of large) part of the human race likes 'dick-sizing', usually these individuals also happen to be in the part of humanity that make the most noise and they also happen to be in the part of humanity with the 'largest-dicks' (for some definitions of largest, dick and humanity)
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
The size (the maximum size of an ATX board is smaller)
:-)
Where the holes are (to attach it to the box)
The power connector (Both the actual connector and the 'soft-power-off' stuff)
The connectors for keyboard, serial etc. are in a standardized position at the edge of the board (the same way ISA/PCI cards have been) and don't require cables inside the box.
And certainly some other small stuff I've forgotten to mention
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
Thank you for the explanation of the US law, I've started to look into the local (Swedish) law on patents and immediately found that computer programs are not patentable in Sweden, the law explicitly names computer programs. (1967:837 Patentlag, availible in Swedish only from http://rixlex.riksdagen.se).
I'd be interested if anyone knows of an url for the international agreements.
Then there seems to be a EU "Greenbook" on patents, it wasn't availible electronacally so I'll have to order it..
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
Ahh, so they are allowed to "recover their losses"... Could be a lot if the free software is successful... Is this only in the US or in those wonderfull international agreements too?
:-/
I read you wrong on the tax issue, after rereading what you wrote I can't see why I misunderstood. I thought you had written about mandatory licensing of patents but missed the word "royalty"
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
1. First you say it's boring and then you... Please tell me if you want a response, here or by mail...
2. So if I make a GPLed program that uses software patents foo and bar the owners of foo and bar have no chance whatsoever to win if they sue me for patent infringment (if I let everybody download the program from my web site or whatever)? This is news to me and to many others.. Thinking more about it, as it's OK to use a patent unless you sell it, I believr you're correct. Now they'll probably clim that free software that infringes on a patent "takes away their business".. I thank you for lessening my ignorance.
3. But how should the rule to determine how much of an objects value is in the patented part be constructed?? You were suggesting a tax by the government unless I completely misunderstood you...
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
Lessening the amount of money to get that approval would, IMO, be a better way of "fixing" it.
:-/ Another thing to make IP "cleaner" would be to force the granting authority to pay lots of money if a patent was defeated on the "self evident" ( ;-) ) or "prior art" grounds (to whomever challanged the patent).
As for the testing. No, I can see no way of proving this or that but today I haven't heard of any serious (in effort) study on the effects of IP legislation. All the claims that "it'll ruin invention" is based on "it's self eveident". And "self evident" or "everybody knows" things are by my way of figuring plain wrong per definition... My suggestion is to lessen the terms and stop lessening them "when it starts to hurt". Finding "hurt" will certainly be hard
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
So just because it's in the US declaration of independance I've got to agree with it? Talk about Imperialism.. Yes I don't agree with that part of it, let me dissect it for you.
1. The right of Life. If God had given you this then everybody would be immortal, looking at nature I can't find any such right at all.. And thats from a country with death penalty...
2. Liberty. Liberty of what!? Thinking free? No government can keep me from that! They can punish me if they find out bt they can't prevent me (short of preventing me from thinking at all)
3. Pursuit of Happiness. It's simple to make it harder for you to pursue happiness, but it's impossible (short of killing you) to make the pursuit of happiness impossible..
Finally: I'm a citizen of the Kingdom of Sweden and this country weren't founded on any such principles.
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
1. I was only nitpicking on "patents not being property". Without any kind of property I believe that society wouldn't function very well..
:-) :-)
3. I didn't read it that way, but I certainly don't know the mind of the poster. Reading it again I find I might've been a bit hasty.
4. I claim that noone has yet used the new method of the Diety class
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
1. Why isn't a "right by contract" property? What is the definition of property anyway??
2. They do harm because "small fish" don't dare to go against them. Either because they don't know their rights or because they are afraid of being sued.
3. I don't want to say no to the tax proposal, but if the patented "thing" is only a small part of the product?
Erik
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
1. In my "personal" page (where you get after pressing "bwz") where my twenty latest comments are listed. I'd like to see their score too. Actually, it would be nice if I could see the score of all comments in the link to them.
3. That assumes the number of moderators stays at that level, I've already posted the theoretical min though.
I'm sorry you got me wrong. I dont say "this is FSCKed" I say "I dont want this for ME because I value the thoughts of all humans". I'm also saying "Could you please provide some ways by which we can judge the 'fairness'[*] of the moderation". I regrett that my post was interpreted the way it was...
Erik
[*] fair is not absolute..
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?