Hmm, wondered why it was so dark, oh wait, maybe my head wasn't up my ass.
Sheesh people, the comment was merely meant to postulate on why the USPTO suddenly decided to review several of the patents. It doesn't make a bit of difference whether it was Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Oracle, *insert big tech company here* but more so what actually triggered it. It just seems especially odd that suddenly the review is triggered when there have been several significant efforts to get some of the more questionable patents looked in the first place for quite some time.
I think it is a sad commentary when the only way to get changes done is through back door channels rather than overt/open channels (i.e. review process, etc.). The "in the bad" comment which seems get everyone's feathers all in a tizzy is really addressing this fact, can Joe Citizen go out and drive these changes or is it limited to those with sufficient $ to participate in the process.
Not to be entirely cynical but what are the odds that Microsoft had a little bit to do with the review by the USPTO. It would seem the best way to avoid paying the billion dollar+ damages claim would be to get the USPTO to invalidate the claim. In this case, I am not sure though that MS would be entirely in the bad as the plug-in patent seems a bit too broad in the first place.
Wrong! Sun's R&D budget did not get slashed over those years at all , contrary to the above poster. Did you looked at Sun's R&D budget over those years? The R&D vs. revenue ratio was on-par vs. IBM, HP, Intel, etc. In fact, Sun has consistently increased its R&D budget over the last few years.
Before folks get on the Sun-is-doomed bandwagon, take a look at some of the latest offerings from Sun. While it probably does not yield the huge margins of big-iron, the lower-end systems that have recently come out are extremely price competitive. In fact, the x86 servers (the v60 and v65) came in much lower than Dell/HP and most of the white-box vendors for a recent price quote that we did.
They seem to finally have their head on straight for the lower end of the market.
Now if only they would come out with an Opteron-based lower end board. The Inquirer had a good article about how Sun and IBM could use the Opteron/AMD64 platform to effectively smother Itanium cutting out both Intel and HP at the same time.
Ummm, this has nothing to do with VoIP. VoIP is not ATM. ATM can be used to transport VoIP but the two are entirely separate technologies.
FYI, ATM is about as close as you can get to circuit-switching and really is not a phenomenal leap forward (for the telcos maybe but in terms of network technology, not really). While ATM does virtualize the link to allow for packets, it still has the notion of virtual circuits/virtual paths. ATM very much follows the circuit-switched paradigm of yesteryear, just with a different flavor.
ATM was all the rage about 5-8 years ago, best of luck trying to do any cutting edge work with ATM right now.
An even better question to ask is, should they choose to use IP, are they mixing data and voice? If you just decide to use IP for voice, it is not a huge deal provided you sufficiently overprovision the network. Right now, it probably isn't a big deal but it would be interesting to see what would happen come Mother's Day or other big call days of the year.
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Sheesh people, the comment was merely meant to postulate on why the USPTO suddenly decided to review several of the patents. It doesn't make a bit of difference whether it was Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Oracle, *insert big tech company here* but more so what actually triggered it. It just seems especially odd that suddenly the review is triggered when there have been several significant efforts to get some of the more questionable patents looked in the first place for quite some time.
I think it is a sad commentary when the only way to get changes done is through back door channels rather than overt/open channels (i.e. review process, etc.). The "in the bad" comment which seems get everyone's feathers all in a tizzy is really addressing this fact, can Joe Citizen go out and drive these changes or is it limited to those with sufficient $ to participate in the process.
Not to be entirely cynical but what are the odds that Microsoft had a little bit to do with the review by the USPTO. It would seem the best way to avoid paying the billion dollar+ damages claim would be to get the USPTO to invalidate the claim. In this case, I am not sure though that MS would be entirely in the bad as the plug-in patent seems a bit too broad in the first place.
Before folks get on the Sun-is-doomed bandwagon, take a look at some of the latest offerings from Sun. While it probably does not yield the huge margins of big-iron, the lower-end systems that have recently come out are extremely price competitive. In fact, the x86 servers (the v60 and v65) came in much lower than Dell/HP and most of the white-box vendors for a recent price quote that we did. They seem to finally have their head on straight for the lower end of the market.
Now if only they would come out with an Opteron-based lower end board. The Inquirer had a good article about how Sun and IBM could use the Opteron/AMD64 platform to effectively smother Itanium cutting out both Intel and HP at the same time.
Amen. Amen. Speak on brother!
FYI, ATM is about as close as you can get to circuit-switching and really is not a phenomenal leap forward (for the telcos maybe but in terms of network technology, not really). While ATM does virtualize the link to allow for packets, it still has the notion of virtual circuits/virtual paths. ATM very much follows the circuit-switched paradigm of yesteryear, just with a different flavor.
ATM was all the rage about 5-8 years ago, best of luck trying to do any cutting edge work with ATM right now.
An even better question to ask is, should they choose to use IP, are they mixing data and voice? If you just decide to use IP for voice, it is not a huge deal provided you sufficiently overprovision the network. Right now, it probably isn't a big deal but it would be interesting to see what would happen come Mother's Day or other big call days of the year.