Where exactly in this agreement do you see Novell saying that they're going to be unable to give royalty-free versions to anyone?
Novell and Microsoft haven't entered into any licensing arrangements here and Novell isn't doing anything strange at all.
These types of agreements are glossed over in the news when its IBM and Novell or Nokia and RedHat (hypothetically), but this is only interesting because its the "evil empire" of Microsoft.
Do I like the idea of working with Microsoft? Not really. Do I think its really cool that Microsoft wants to try and play buddy-buddy with its old competitor Novell? Yes. Think about the long-term repercussions from a business perspective for a few minutes and stop reading into the agreement things that aren't there.
Often low prices encourage initial bidding, despite not being willing to sell it that low. Its a psychological effect. Say you want to sell your PS3 for at least $800 and you set the reserve there, you might start the bidding at $500 (cheaper than retail) to interest the first few bidders.
Eventually, someone comes along and sees "PS3 for $785, 35 bidders" and bids higher to try and win it... and you break reserve. If it was "$800, 0 bidders" they might pass on it.
Next, there's the "I don't really want to sell it" category. You list that rare antique clock you have at home for $100 and set a reserve of $5000 because if anyone actually offered you $5k, you'd sell it. Then you see that the bidding only hits $1300 and you know basically how much the item is worth.
As I like to remind people, most of the 'hot' girls on the covers of magazines are below the age of majority in many countries. Many of them are in fact 12-14 years old.
PS, they're also not called Pedophiles, but Ephebophiles, for sexual attraction to teenagers.
I was thinking exactly this -- if XP was so easy to use, why do I get paid so much to consult for people on how to use it properly?
Its not easier to use, people are just accustomed to it and they accept its failings because its the standard. Its hard to explain to someone that my old webcam doesn't work on Linux; they simply mock me and ssay it would work on Windows. However, everything else I have works better on Linux than it does on their Windows box, but they just take those things as normal.
You're assuming they'll stamp their names on everything they release and not be the least be subversive or pass off their version of the news as someone else's by working under cover as 'leaks' and such.
I'd love to watch the Military CNN too but that isn't going to be what happens -- we're going to get guerrilla tactic media disinformation instead.
Amarok has issues in some versions with some output methods. I had problems on FC4 with Amarok crashing on ESD or ALSA output. I recompiled it myself on my FC5 box and its been 99% stable. Amarok is undoubtably the best music player / manager going and is extremely extensible by third parties. I'm hoping it becomes even more stable and easy to use for beginners as time goes on.
Re:What can hurt business is a technical site that
on
Slashdot's Vastu
·
· Score: 1
A) agree.
B) I disagree -- a site with an URL of "http://www.ibm.com/developer" is much more appealing to me at a deep level than "http://www.ibm.com/checkurl?id=sdafwerud23432&sit eid=ibm&location=canada&user=12315asdfasdggfdjsdfg &destination=developer"
C) Yellow sucks -- its the most apparent colour to the human eye, so use it sparingly or appropriately. Her own website gave me a headache looking at the title bar.
D) Graphically, depends on your audience. I think Slashdot could use a little spice in the background graphics and such (not where the text is, but in between). Several good CSS demos (CSS Zen garden for example) show how to do this tastefully.
E) Scrolling sucks, but its necessary. Do your users prefer scrolling or clicking? Do whichever makes them happier. Offer a copy of each and see which one people use more. Try iframes and such, etc.
The only exception that I can think of is at a full-serve gas station where they'd bring you a wireless keypad or your credit card bill to sign while you're in your car. In that case, I should hope that if it's -40C you'd have the sense to take the pin pad/clipboard into your heated car,
You're close -- I use the self-serve gas station pumps with pay-at-the-pump on a regular basis. I insert my membership card for a discount, then my credit card, then wait, then take my receipt and leave.
I don't mind standing out in the cold pumping the gas myself, I'm canadian, but being able to do all of the above without trying to get a card out of my pocket is a nice feature, and I don't trust wireless keyfobs that don't use passcodes for authentication.
I choose channels on my stereo in my car while wearing normal winter gloves regularly. The buttons are large and mashable as they are on most debit machines up here too.
I've never had a problem entering passcodes with gloves on at a bank machine anywhere in Canada, and although the smaller pin-code entry pads used indoors for debit payments use smaller buttons, they're indoors, so its not an issue.
PS, this type of technology would be very useful in other situations, like delivery drivers that use portable units keyed to a specific truck/driver, etc.
On a really cold winter's day up here in Canada, I'd quite like a system that didn't require removing the card from my wallet while wearing heavy gloves. That would require a keyfob that worked from several feet and had some form of passcode required of course, but it would be awful nice.
The storyline in God of War, Black, Grandia III, Jak & Daxter, Maximo, Ratchet & Clank, Donkey Kong Country, etc. cannot be easily replicated outdoors... and definately not legally.
You go join a fight club, I'll play Tekken and save myself the concussions. You can go snowboarding and get arrested for punching out other people on the mountain and/or break your neck while I play SSX on Tour.
Outdoors is great, and I quite enjoy it on my mountain bike, but I'm not allowed to drive my car the way I do in Burnout 4 (so the officers keep telling me).
Real life does have its limitations (fatality being a minor one).
Its possible he did -- but the only case where I'd agree is something like Tekken where the cut scenes and the gameplay are so completely discongruous as to be strange (or Armored Core Nexus).
Even there -- I played through many characters in Tekken 5 just to see those end cut scenes, not because the gameplay was particularly fantastic (although perfecting moves against your friends is just good fun).... then I got GameShark and unlocked all characters and all cut-scenes so I could just watch them all instead and use any characters I wanted when friends came over without "wasting" all that time playing against the computer to unlock them.
There are quite a few multi-disc games already for the PS2. And a lot of > 4GB games on DVD9. I'm pretty sure if PS2 games were filling the discs (and more) then raising the resolution by 3 to 7 times the on-screen pixels (higher resolution textures required times the amount of extra detail required to not make in-game areas look sparse and boxy) would certainly require a larger disc format for the same content.
God of War is huge and looks awsome, Black is huge and looks awsome, both are already pushing the limits on the PS2 in storage capacity and resolution. If 720p or 1080p versions of the same games were released today, they would not fit on a DVD, and I expect my next-gen gaming system not to require disc swapping.
Its been studied already. The results are already in. Survey says around 10 million people are presently willing to purchase a PS3 at full price. The problem isn't pricing -- its going to be whether Sony manages to move the 8 million consoles out the door by March as they planned on doing.
I was watching Studio 60 last night with my wife and when Sting started performing in full DD 5.1 I cranked up my livingroom system to about 65% and just enjoyed the near-perfect sound. Then I looked at her and said "that's why I bought a good receiver and 5.1 speaker system" and she just said 'shhh'.
If you aren't enjoying HDTV and high quality sound from good speakers, I wouldn't expect you to care about SACD or BD or HDDVD or the PS3 either, but for [insert higher life form's name here]'s sake, just realize you're out of the loop and this isn't about you. Its about those of us who want high definition beauty.
PS, for the rest of you, the PS2 is going to be supported for a long time to come -- God of War 2 is coming out in a few months in fact and should be an awsome game. Sony will be promoting and pushing the PS2 for many years just like they have the PS1 (PSOne) which allows them two tiers of game production and marketing.
Last I checked, a PS2 is only $130. Buy one. Or an XBox for that matter (but I wouldn't expect too many new games on it).
What's this crap about immersion exactly? Do you only play FPSs or something?
Cutscenes can be an awsome part of the gaming experience. Consider Jak 2 -- you play 90% or more of the game time, but new missions and debriefs and shots of the side-effects of your behaviours are all in cut-scenes.
How about Resident Evil 4? It has some great cut scenes and none of them detract from immersion or gameplay and quite often its the opposite (for those who haven't played, Resident Evil will let you die in the middle of a cut-scene if you're not paying attention with your fingers on the buttons).
Sure, FFX overdoes them, so don't play japanese style fantasy games. Simple.
The compression point is a good one -- if you use uncompressed (or barely compressed MPEG-2) video instead of CPU-hungry VC-1 type codecs, you have more horsepower left over for everything else. And since the BD disc format gives you 10x or more space for storage, you can take advantage of this situation in a way you couldn't on (for example) a 360.
As for hard drives, the hard drive would best be used for caching of in-game data (like live savegames) and executable code. With a 20 or 60GB hard drive and a possibly 50GB game, the drive won't help you much if you start trying to 'install' the games like a PC does.
by Anonymous Coward on Tue October 17, 11:13 AM (#16469285) You sound like a game dev who has actually had to work with streaming content on a console:) I have tried to explain this exact same thing to so many people, and they just don't understand. Like the other response to this message.
In response to the other guy:
Yes, the disc based media used by all consoles has a directory, but no sane developer who wants decent load times would even think of using it. You will notice that most games do not have a million little files in their directories. The files are packed into large archive files. Most of these archive files contain all of the assets needed for a certain level, or zone. The developer will usually have the console read the sector list once, cache it in memory, and then seek to the archive file they want to use. They then do a read of that entire archive file into memory. This is done because Seeks (the drive finding a specific sector) is orders of maginitude slower than doing a read. If you tried to seek across the disc for every little bit of data you needed, your load times would be total ass.
In the PS2, sony went so far as to allow game data to be multiplexed into Cinematic sequences. This meant the game was loading while you were watching an intro. (The next time you find yourself complaining that you can't skip an FMV on the Ps2.. this is probably the reason why.)
As for everyone else who seems to be posting today:
I don't understand why people think that more space is useless. I know they don't like the cost of the PS3, and seem to attribute that to the bluray drive, but, as everyone has seen, optical drives are one of the fastest things to become commodity components. How cheap can you buy a DVD drive for now?
Sony positions their consoles for a 10 year lifespan. They would be shooting themselves in the foot if they were not forward looking. Believe it or not, console software hits peak sales about 5-6 years after the consoles are introduced to the market. Will you have an HDTV in 5 years? Will you expect to have content that supports this? With Blue lasers being commodity at this point in time, would you pick up a PS3 for $150-$200? I'm sure millions will, and this is what sony is banking on. The console race is not about who can sell the most launch units. It's about who has the the consoles the casual buyer wants 5 years after launch. The first 5 years of a consoles lifetime is a time of building userbase, and a title library. Sony understands this. Microsoft chose (at least this generation) to stop driving XBOX sales. Sony will be making money on the PS2 for 5 more years, as they find their way to other consumers as hand me downs. (This is why older consoles have a much larger selection of children's titles)
The anti-sony "me-too" sentiment on these boards really shocks me. Sony has been like a multi-headed hydra at times, true, with each division having different agendas. I assure you, SCEA, and Sony electronics had nothing to do with Rootkit DRM, and were probably not even aware of it. That was a brainchild of Sony Music/Columbia. SCEA has kept the entire corporation afloat for years.
I am just as excited as anyone else here about the wii. I am going to purchase one and enjoy it, and it will sit next to my XBOX360. The PS3 is a little expensive for me right now, so I am probably going to wait a few months before I get one. Does that mean that sony is doomed? Not at all. But 3 years from now, I do believe that the WII will be relinquished to the kids' room, where the only Standard Def TV in the house is. And the Xbox360 will have a whole lot of disc switching, or less content/quality due to size constraints. And the PS3 will be the only one left that really fills the needs of the millions of people who will be purchasing HDTVs because of SDTV's impending obsolesence.
Just my 2 cents. Not that anyone will read this because i'm posting as an AC:P
Go back and read that review again. That statement comes after the authors practically drooling over every aspect of how futuristic and smooth the PS3 looks and feels. Then when they got to the controller, they were underwhelmed. They complained that is felt cheap and plasticky in comparison. Nowhere did they say flimsy or any synonym of flimsy (easily broken or not durable). You can derive what you will, but it wasn't said and the misquote shouldn't live on.
The jist of the review was "this system is awsome, I wish the controller were just as awsome, but we'll probably get used to it"
You (and a number of other people) don't seem to understand patents. A patent doesn't stop anyone else from using your invention if you're willing to license it to them, and its quite probably Transmeta would have done so (did you look at how many millions of dollars they already make from licensing to Texas Instruments, et al.?).
Intel and AMD for example have huge patent portfolios that they have sued each other over and often come down to "you can use mine if I can use yours" types of resolutions. Transmeta has nowhere near this many patents in its pocket, but when Intel wants to use its technology, they should very well be calling and asking 'how much' not just stealing it.
Welcome to the world of invention over the last 100+ years.
Who says it was shown to Ford explicitly? They could just buy one and reverse engineer it.
PS, how do you prove they invented it independantly? That's what the patent office is for -- you patent your idea when you do it, so you know you're first or not.
Just because the slashdot crowd has lambasted software and methods patents doesn't mean good old fashioned protection of inventions should be abandoned.
Slashdot Mirror
No offence, but you're an idiot.
Where exactly in this agreement do you see Novell saying that they're going to be unable to give royalty-free versions to anyone?
Novell and Microsoft haven't entered into any licensing arrangements here and Novell isn't doing anything strange at all.
These types of agreements are glossed over in the news when its IBM and Novell or Nokia and RedHat (hypothetically), but this is only interesting because its the "evil empire" of Microsoft.
Do I like the idea of working with Microsoft? Not really. Do I think its really cool that Microsoft wants to try and play buddy-buddy with its old competitor Novell? Yes. Think about the long-term repercussions from a business perspective for a few minutes and stop reading into the agreement things that aren't there.
Often low prices encourage initial bidding, despite not being willing to sell it that low. Its a psychological effect. Say you want to sell your PS3 for at least $800 and you set the reserve there, you might start the bidding at $500 (cheaper than retail) to interest the first few bidders.
... and you break reserve. If it was "$800, 0 bidders" they might pass on it.
Eventually, someone comes along and sees "PS3 for $785, 35 bidders" and bids higher to try and win it
Next, there's the "I don't really want to sell it" category. You list that rare antique clock you have at home for $100 and set a reserve of $5000 because if anyone actually offered you $5k, you'd sell it. Then you see that the bidding only hits $1300 and you know basically how much the item is worth.
As I like to remind people, most of the 'hot' girls on the covers of magazines are below the age of majority in many countries. Many of them are in fact 12-14 years old.
PS, they're also not called Pedophiles, but Ephebophiles, for sexual attraction to teenagers.
I was thinking exactly this -- if XP was so easy to use, why do I get paid so much to consult for people on how to use it properly?
Its not easier to use, people are just accustomed to it and they accept its failings because its the standard. Its hard to explain to someone that my old webcam doesn't work on Linux; they simply mock me and ssay it would work on Windows. However, everything else I have works better on Linux than it does on their Windows box, but they just take those things as normal.
You're assuming they'll stamp their names on everything they release and not be the least be subversive or pass off their version of the news as someone else's by working under cover as 'leaks' and such.
I'd love to watch the Military CNN too but that isn't going to be what happens -- we're going to get guerrilla tactic media disinformation instead.
Amarok has issues in some versions with some output methods. I had problems on FC4 with Amarok crashing on ESD or ALSA output. I recompiled it myself on my FC5 box and its been 99% stable. Amarok is undoubtably the best music player / manager going and is extremely extensible by third parties. I'm hoping it becomes even more stable and easy to use for beginners as time goes on.
A) agree.
t eid=ibm&location=canada&user=12315asdfasdggfdjsdfg &destination=developer"
B) I disagree -- a site with an URL of "http://www.ibm.com/developer" is much more appealing to me at a deep level than "http://www.ibm.com/checkurl?id=sdafwerud23432&si
C) Yellow sucks -- its the most apparent colour to the human eye, so use it sparingly or appropriately. Her own website gave me a headache looking at the title bar.
D) Graphically, depends on your audience. I think Slashdot could use a little spice in the background graphics and such (not where the text is, but in between). Several good CSS demos (CSS Zen garden for example) show how to do this tastefully.
E) Scrolling sucks, but its necessary. Do your users prefer scrolling or clicking? Do whichever makes them happier. Offer a copy of each and see which one people use more. Try iframes and such, etc.
F) Footers get ignored by most people, period.
You're close -- I use the self-serve gas station pumps with pay-at-the-pump on a regular basis. I insert my membership card for a discount, then my credit card, then wait, then take my receipt and leave.
I don't mind standing out in the cold pumping the gas myself, I'm canadian, but being able to do all of the above without trying to get a card out of my pocket is a nice feature, and I don't trust wireless keyfobs that don't use passcodes for authentication.
I choose channels on my stereo in my car while wearing normal winter gloves regularly. The buttons are large and mashable as they are on most debit machines up here too.
I've never had a problem entering passcodes with gloves on at a bank machine anywhere in Canada, and although the smaller pin-code entry pads used indoors for debit payments use smaller buttons, they're indoors, so its not an issue.
PS, this type of technology would be very useful in other situations, like delivery drivers that use portable units keyed to a specific truck/driver, etc.
On a really cold winter's day up here in Canada, I'd quite like a system that didn't require removing the card from my wallet while wearing heavy gloves. That would require a keyfob that worked from several feet and had some form of passcode required of course, but it would be awful nice.
I was going to say something similar, but you out-rank me in this penis-size contest.
That was priceless ... thank-you for that. :-)
-- PS, I'm canadian
... I hope that was intended to be funny.
... and definately not legally.
The storyline in God of War, Black, Grandia III, Jak & Daxter, Maximo, Ratchet & Clank, Donkey Kong Country, etc. cannot be easily replicated outdoors
You go join a fight club, I'll play Tekken and save myself the concussions.
You can go snowboarding and get arrested for punching out other people on the mountain and/or break your neck while I play SSX on Tour.
Outdoors is great, and I quite enjoy it on my mountain bike, but I'm not allowed to drive my car the way I do in Burnout 4 (so the officers keep telling me).
Real life does have its limitations (fatality being a minor one).
Its possible he did -- but the only case where I'd agree is something like Tekken where the cut scenes and the gameplay are so completely discongruous as to be strange (or Armored Core Nexus).
... then I got GameShark and unlocked all characters and all cut-scenes so I could just watch them all instead and use any characters I wanted when friends came over without "wasting" all that time playing against the computer to unlock them.
Even there -- I played through many characters in Tekken 5 just to see those end cut scenes, not because the gameplay was particularly fantastic (although perfecting moves against your friends is just good fun).
There are quite a few multi-disc games already for the PS2. And a lot of > 4GB games on DVD9. I'm pretty sure if PS2 games were filling the discs (and more) then raising the resolution by 3 to 7 times the on-screen pixels (higher resolution textures required times the amount of extra detail required to not make in-game areas look sparse and boxy) would certainly require a larger disc format for the same content.
God of War is huge and looks awsome, Black is huge and looks awsome, both are already pushing the limits on the PS2 in storage capacity and resolution. If 720p or 1080p versions of the same games were released today, they would not fit on a DVD, and I expect my next-gen gaming system not to require disc swapping.
Its been studied already. The results are already in. Survey says around 10 million people are presently willing to purchase a PS3 at full price. The problem isn't pricing -- its going to be whether Sony manages to move the 8 million consoles out the door by March as they planned on doing.
I was watching Studio 60 last night with my wife and when Sting started performing in full DD 5.1 I cranked up my livingroom system to about 65% and just enjoyed the near-perfect sound. Then I looked at her and said "that's why I bought a good receiver and 5.1 speaker system" and she just said 'shhh'.
If you aren't enjoying HDTV and high quality sound from good speakers, I wouldn't expect you to care about SACD or BD or HDDVD or the PS3 either, but for [insert higher life form's name here]'s sake, just realize you're out of the loop and this isn't about you. Its about those of us who want high definition beauty.
PS, for the rest of you, the PS2 is going to be supported for a long time to come -- God of War 2 is coming out in a few months in fact and should be an awsome game. Sony will be promoting and pushing the PS2 for many years just like they have the PS1 (PSOne) which allows them two tiers of game production and marketing.
Last I checked, a PS2 is only $130. Buy one. Or an XBox for that matter (but I wouldn't expect too many new games on it).
What's this crap about immersion exactly? Do you only play FPSs or something?
Cutscenes can be an awsome part of the gaming experience. Consider Jak 2 -- you play 90% or more of the game time, but new missions and debriefs and shots of the side-effects of your behaviours are all in cut-scenes.
How about Resident Evil 4? It has some great cut scenes and none of them detract from immersion or gameplay and quite often its the opposite (for those who haven't played, Resident Evil will let you die in the middle of a cut-scene if you're not paying attention with your fingers on the buttons).
Sure, FFX overdoes them, so don't play japanese style fantasy games. Simple.
The compression point is a good one -- if you use uncompressed (or barely compressed MPEG-2) video instead of CPU-hungry VC-1 type codecs, you have more horsepower left over for everything else. And since the BD disc format gives you 10x or more space for storage, you can take advantage of this situation in a way you couldn't on (for example) a 360.
As for hard drives, the hard drive would best be used for caching of in-game data (like live savegames) and executable code. With a 20 or 60GB hard drive and a possibly 50GB game, the drive won't help you much if you start trying to 'install' the games like a PC does.
Repost of AC comment above using my karma bonus:
:) I have tried to explain this exact same thing to so many people, and they just don't understand. Like the other response to this message.
:P
by Anonymous Coward on Tue October 17, 11:13 AM (#16469285)
You sound like a game dev who has actually had to work with streaming content on a console
In response to the other guy:
Yes, the disc based media used by all consoles has a directory, but no sane developer who wants decent load times would even think of using it. You will notice that most games do not have a million little files in their directories. The files are packed into large archive files. Most of these archive files contain all of the assets needed for a certain level, or zone. The developer will usually have the console read the sector list once, cache it in memory, and then seek to the archive file they want to use. They then do a read of that entire archive file into memory. This is done because Seeks (the drive finding a specific sector) is orders of maginitude slower than doing a read. If you tried to seek across the disc for every little bit of data you needed, your load times would be total ass.
In the PS2, sony went so far as to allow game data to be multiplexed into Cinematic sequences. This meant the game was loading while you were watching an intro. (The next time you find yourself complaining that you can't skip an FMV on the Ps2.. this is probably the reason why.)
As for everyone else who seems to be posting today:
I don't understand why people think that more space is useless. I know they don't like the cost of the PS3, and seem to attribute that to the bluray drive, but, as everyone has seen, optical drives are one of the fastest things to become commodity components. How cheap can you buy a DVD drive for now?
Sony positions their consoles for a 10 year lifespan. They would be shooting themselves in the foot if they were not forward looking. Believe it or not, console software hits peak sales about 5-6 years after the consoles are introduced to the market. Will you have an HDTV in 5 years? Will you expect to have content that supports this? With Blue lasers being commodity at this point in time, would you pick up a PS3 for $150-$200? I'm sure millions will, and this is what sony is banking on. The console race is not about who can sell the most launch units. It's about who has the the consoles the casual buyer wants 5 years after launch. The first 5 years of a consoles lifetime is a time of building userbase, and a title library. Sony understands this. Microsoft chose (at least this generation) to stop driving XBOX sales. Sony will be making money on the PS2 for 5 more years, as they find their way to other consumers as hand me downs. (This is why older consoles have a much larger selection of children's titles)
The anti-sony "me-too" sentiment on these boards really shocks me. Sony has been like a multi-headed hydra at times, true, with each division having different agendas. I assure you, SCEA, and Sony electronics had nothing to do with Rootkit DRM, and were probably not even aware of it. That was a brainchild of Sony Music/Columbia. SCEA has kept the entire corporation afloat for years.
I am just as excited as anyone else here about the wii. I am going to purchase one and enjoy it, and it will sit next to my XBOX360. The PS3 is a little expensive for me right now, so I am probably going to wait a few months before I get one. Does that mean that sony is doomed? Not at all. But 3 years from now, I do believe that the WII will be relinquished to the kids' room, where the only Standard Def TV in the house is. And the Xbox360 will have a whole lot of disc switching, or less content/quality due to size constraints. And the PS3 will be the only one left that really fills the needs of the millions of people who will be purchasing HDTVs because of SDTV's impending obsolesence.
Just my 2 cents. Not that anyone will read this because i'm posting as an AC
Go back and read that review again. That statement comes after the authors practically drooling over every aspect of how futuristic and smooth the PS3 looks and feels. Then when they got to the controller, they were underwhelmed. They complained that is felt cheap and plasticky in comparison. Nowhere did they say flimsy or any synonym of flimsy (easily broken or not durable). You can derive what you will, but it wasn't said and the misquote shouldn't live on.
The jist of the review was "this system is awsome, I wish the controller were just as awsome, but we'll probably get used to it"
If you're a shareholder who cares that the company's being good to your planet so you can live to reap the benefits, you should be thrilled.
I'd never invest in a company that I know dumps toxins into the rivers (it has happened a lot) but this makes me happy to invest.
Just the opposite in fact -- "I'm privately funded so I have to do things that garner more funding or appeal to my existing donations base"
Being privately funded gives you less freedom, not more.
You (and a number of other people) don't seem to understand patents. A patent doesn't stop anyone else from using your invention if you're willing to license it to them, and its quite probably Transmeta would have done so (did you look at how many millions of dollars they already make from licensing to Texas Instruments, et al.?).
Intel and AMD for example have huge patent portfolios that they have sued each other over and often come down to "you can use mine if I can use yours" types of resolutions. Transmeta has nowhere near this many patents in its pocket, but when Intel wants to use its technology, they should very well be calling and asking 'how much' not just stealing it.
Welcome to the world of invention over the last 100+ years.
Who says it was shown to Ford explicitly? They could just buy one and reverse engineer it.
PS, how do you prove they invented it independantly? That's what the patent office is for -- you patent your idea when you do it, so you know you're first or not.
Just because the slashdot crowd has lambasted software and methods patents doesn't mean good old fashioned protection of inventions should be abandoned.