Your observation is a little bit dated, things have changes. Brian has a good relationship with SGI and has AFAIK was given the conformance tests to run a long time ago under a special agreement to ensure Mesa is high quality.
Also the license for OpenGL has changed recently, the SI is now Open Source and you can pretty much use the OpenGL trademark if it runs of a free operating system and passes the appropriate tests. The conformance tests are also more freely available as announced recently.
The big issue for OpenGL is quality, you can't call any old thing OpenGL. It requires testing, and everyone who has ever shipped OpenGL has been required under license to pass those tests. Basing a driver on Mesa is not sufficient, you must test the driver implementation to be allowed to call it OpenGL. So saying a particular implementation on a specific set of hardware is OpenGL has a very specific meaning. If this wasn't the case OpenGL would be of much less value as a standard.
You're perception here is that I'm unsympathetic. I'm not, but the consistent Alice in Wonderland approach to the real world, (as opposed to the world of geek opinion) is beyond a joke.
Contrarian views and real insight is ignored here and farcical inflammatory and misinformed nonsense rises to the surface.
This is a forum about opinion important or not, my opinion provoked a response from you so in your little corner of the world my opinion seems to matter more than most. I'm not trying to influence the system, you are. I'm just pointing out that a lot of the crap posted here is plain wrong and offer an alternative view of what's happening in the real world as opposed to the wet dreams of/.ters.
Well if you're going to point fingers at least get a handle instead of anonymous coward. It is tenuous to claim that JEDEC negates a company's rights to hundreds of their own patents. Rambus design RAM, and that's all, for them to give up rights on their I.P puts them out of business instantly. You're really claiming that's what they did?
As I've already said, it's not about the patents in the press releases. When they roll the big guns into the negotiations it's game over, no counter infringement claims and a portfolio that would sink a battleship, that's the harsh reality here. This JEDEC thing is a smoke screen to cover the fact that Micron is buck naked. Their only defence is a blanket claim (and get this) that Rambus has no rights to their own inventions.
The opinion expressed in not informative, it's profoundly ignorant. Invention is the process of one idea on another and it's very much about the implementation of those ideas.
You can't patent going to Mars, or the idea of a time machine. In legal terms you must "reduce to practice". It's just not enough to write some high level speculative and vague view of the future. That is not invention. It is quite ridiculous to cite some whimsical essay of yesteryear and say it is the precursor to that which has followed. It might be visionary or it might be one kernel in a storm of chaff from the same author but in either case it is NOT invention, it's just speculation.
I don't think folks watching this realize the sheer volume of patents Rambus is garnering or what's going on behind the scenes, the Patents under discussion now were actually filed years ago. It's easy to say something was obvious or not original years after the fact. What the major RAM makers need to worry about is the other patents Rambus throws on the table when negotiations start. They might go into a case thinking they are on solid ground but when Rambus throws their entire patent portfolio into the ring, and in addition the RAM maker realizes that Rambus makes *NO* RAM and cannot therefore be sued for breach of their own I.P. they realize in short order that they are screwed if they take it to a trial. This is what you are seeing and why everyone is caving. Micron is in deep trouble here.
It's just amazing how this slashdot article was worded and the comments it has provoked. There seems to be a real issue with slashdot's perception of intellectual property right.
This isn't an attempt by Rambus to win in court instead of the market. Rambus IS an intellectual property company. The filed patents on DDR years ago. They own this I.P. and this is what their ENTIRE business model is based on. They pay hundreds of engineers to sit around all day and design memory technology, they file patents then they license it. They do not make ANY memory. If that's what you do then your entire revenue stream is going to come from your ideas, and your ability to collect royalties from them.
Now I don't disagree that the patent system is screwed up, especially as it relates to software and companies building roadblocks, but that ain't the fault of Rambus.
It's Micron who are trying to sue Rambus and win in court instead of the market. They are hoping to cheat them out of the royalties they are due, as if Micron didn't benefit from their own Licenses. It would be unprecedented if Micron won in court over this. They are basically saying Rambus has no right to wholesale technology they invented. Micron are dreaming if they think it's going to work.
Just great, now we have the great intellectuals Metallica going after our centers of learning to restrict the software they use.
I was a Metallica fan but this does it for me. When a bunch of hick rock artists can blow into town and demand restrictions on the use of software in Universities it's time to put them in their place.
This is stereotypical nonsense with not a shred of evidence to back it up. In fact the gross generalizations are in complete disagreement with my own anecdotal observations that hackers tend to be engineering & science oriented folks with a healthy contempt for the sort of wishy washy nonsense peddled in this article. A fondness for science & sci-fi (the latter optional) and a tinkering, curious, analytical rather objective approach to everything is the norm. To dress this up with all this talk of mystic nonsense & magic is to completely misunderstand the culture. Aside from RPG's like D&D & related Tolkein-esque material there's no mysticism, and this connection has nothing to do with conventional notions of mysticism or magic.
There is a Quantum3D logo on the bottom left corner of the board photographed in the article. Quantum3D have been claiming to have boards based on lot's of VSA-100 parts for months so this doesn't say a lot about the general availability of the 6000 boards from high volume OEM's. FYI Quantum3D offer board sets with up to 16 VSA-100 chips in a single graphics system.
Microsoft has a history of bait & switch software efforts.
Remember their Unix compatibility interface development software? It put competing products completely out of business, then they turn off the air supply on the Microsoft version having eliminated the threat. By this time it's too late for the now defunct product. Augment this with a few strategic patents and you have a winning strategy.
So, Linux and Star Office represents a potential threat on the desktop and if it begins to grow in that market Microsoft will release Office on Linux and in doing so eliminate Star Office in short order through increased mindshare and leveraging their monopoly where they can. Once this is done they let the Linux version trail the Windows version and drop a few 'unsupportable' features and eventually perhaps eliminate the Linux version of the product altogether citing insufficient demand or technological hurdles.
That said, with the.NET strategy presumably desktop Linux systems become simply a client option (and second rate ones at that?). The client side office suite becomes the interface and maybe the desktop and it runs anywhere on multiple platforms. The back end server infrastructure & database is all Microsoft too. So the focus simply moves away from the OS as the desktop and you end up with an OS neutral strategy which still grows revenue because you've got a new license model which is way more lucrative.
This sounds like a classic Steve move. Having seen the kind of damage a leak can do I think it's great that one of the slime balls who betrays a trust gets to feel the sharp end of an action like this. They might have enjoyed their 15 minutes of infamy, now they are paying the price and good riddance. If this is the only way to take away the stock benefits someone has accrued from employment at the company he betrayed then so be it.
I wonder just how many parts they really had to recall. Maybe a dozen or so circulating in the benchmark community, but I hardly expect that there will be any great volumes of CPU's in the wild which need to be pulled back.
It seems this is one instance where Intel's failure to ship product might have saved them some pain.
They are looking pretty foolish right now. First the unavailable 1GHz PIII launched for PR purposes, now the broken 1.13GHz launched for the same reasons. I had heard that the PR tail was wagging the engineering dog over there, looks like the rumours were true. Anyone betting that Dell ship an AMD system next quarter?
So that's it for libraries then. I assume that this would make a library unworkable unless they paid a fee for every book withdrawal. More like renting a video.
This seems unjust. If I purchase a book I should be able to transfer it to another person, just like any other software I purchase. Infact this seems utterly unique in terms of the extent restrictions being applied. Imagine a music CD with similar restrictions for example, I wouldn't be able to let friends borrow it, and what about playing it at a party?
This can be taken to utterly riddiculous extremes, for example, what about a childens story book? Presumably I wouldn't be allowed to read it to twins without an additional license.
Apart from the second language argument, much of the technological innovation comes from countries who either speak English or have it as a dominant second language.
I don't see China designing new Microprocessors, or encouraging the kind of free thinking needed to compete on internet time. For the most part the high volume contenders are mostly rural and second world (?) in nature.
Murdoch is probably pandering because he wants to move into China. Let's face it when it comes to online business Murdoch has shown so much acumen that his ventures to date have been an utter disaster.
I can see the merits of something like Akira, but not all Anime is good. DBZ and Sailor Moon don't even have Kitch value, they are just plain bad. Watching them is like watching paint dry and the plots and ideas are purile or infantile or both. Give me Tom and Jerry over this rubbish any day.
Anyone can hack Linux but they can't force you to run their version. The official kernel and distros are the ones you'd stick to and are probably safer in terms of scrutiny, just look at the recent MS "netscape programmers are weanies" debacle. A security hole (back door!) right there in the proprietary closed source system.
As usual the security issue is FUD. Any security expert knows that security through obscurity is no security.
This is a highly biased article.
on
KDE Strikes Back
·
· Score: 3
It's surprising the way he sweeps the whole license issue under the carpet. Can even the free non-profit license be withdrawn like he says?
This is way worse than I had realized.
The other amazing thing is in the same breath he notes that the KDE GUI is free for NON profit uses then says these commercial companies backed the wrong horse. Why the heck should any commercial entity back a proprietary standard as the desktop for Linux? Does he really expect they are lining up to pay royalties, or to force their customers to pay royalties? They can do that now with Motif et.al. You can get the whole of Windows for less than just the library license fees for the darned Motif GUI on a Unix workstation, in the mean time unix custs are asking why their workstations cost more than wintel systems. The consortium wants to change this and get a standard adopted, not recreate this attrocious situation.
When are these KDE folks going to get it? The license is CRITICAL. It's THE major obstacle for KDE, it's not enough to dismiss these concerns or say "trust us". KDE-Qt is doomed to be marginalized in the long term unless it ditches the QPL.
I expect we'd all be quite safe standing on the same block as your 'nuke' as you've described it.
The biggest problem is that it needs to be highly enriched Uranium. The other minor problems are that you need to bring them together fast and with enough of an initial release of neutrons to get the chain reaction started quickly and also make the sphere dense enough so that the material does infact go boom and not fizz.
No, the hard part is enriching the material to make the weapons grade material. The atomic weights of the different isotopes is extremely close and it makes separation extremely difficult. There is no chemical difference so there is no easy means of separation.
The manufacture of a fission bomb is not very hard for knowledgeable engineers, this was done over fifty years ago from scratch, it is easily doable today and the design doesn't have to be at all sophisticated. A fusion bomb is more tricky but the info about the Teller-Ulam design is already out there and easily obtainable.
There's supposed to be an international effort to prevent nuclear proliferation, including civil applications like power generation because of the obvious application to weapons production. The bottom line is that this material is a prerequisite for anyone embarking on a WOMAD program. How does a site like this comply with international non proliferation objectives? I expect it does this the same way the market handles it now, with export licenses and restrictions on the point to point trade. This is just another market place, these things are already traded, at least this way the DOE can outbid the terrorists instead of having to beat them to the salesman every time, although it seems unlikely that unsavory trades would pass through such a public forum.
Let's get this straight, teling people Linux is good at some stuff and correcting some errors is not FUD.
FUD is when you spread misrepresentations to cast doubt on a competing product. In general I don't think this is widely done by the Linux community.
I've seen FUD get spread by Microsoft in other areas, it ain't pretty and it's obvious what's going on to the well informed.
If someone did this in the Linux community there would be a chorus of objections correcting the FUD. Heck just look at what's happened in this thread. Honest comparrisons are not FUD.
Dispelling Myths is not the same as casting FUD about another product. If you defend a product honestly or point out it's merits it ain't FUD.
If on the other hand you were to spread half truths about a competitive product, and imply bad things will happen when you use a competing product that would be spreading FUD.
Well at over eighty bucks a pop retail there's certainly money to be made from the Red Hat boxed distro.
For bundling purposes though how much of a discount does Dell give you for Linux being loaded? None. So which box is more profitable, the Linux system or the Windows? I don't know, the support contract may cost and Windows is peanuts for Dell but there's at least more to the economics than you're suggesting.
There is NO WAY your average user could get past Windows installation. I've installed both Windows and Red Hat on PC's and Red hat is marginally easier. Neither are ideal for novice users.
Installation is not the acid test for the desktop, and Linux can be pre installed these days.
Slashdot Mirror
Your observation is a little bit dated, things have changes. Brian has a good relationship with SGI and has AFAIK was given the conformance tests to run a long time ago under a special agreement to ensure Mesa is high quality.
Also the license for OpenGL has changed recently, the SI is now Open Source and you can pretty much use the OpenGL trademark if it runs of a free operating system and passes the appropriate tests. The conformance tests are also more freely available as announced recently.
The big issue for OpenGL is quality, you can't call any old thing OpenGL. It requires testing, and everyone who has ever shipped OpenGL has been required under license to pass those tests. Basing a driver on Mesa is not sufficient, you must test the driver implementation to be allowed to call it OpenGL. So saying a particular implementation on a specific set of hardware is OpenGL has a very specific meaning. If this wasn't the case OpenGL would be of much less value as a standard.
You're perception here is that I'm unsympathetic. I'm not, but the consistent Alice in Wonderland approach to the real world, (as opposed to the world of geek opinion) is beyond a joke.
/.ters.
Contrarian views and real insight is ignored here and farcical inflammatory and misinformed nonsense rises to the surface.
This is a forum about opinion important or not, my opinion provoked a response from you so in your little corner of the world my opinion seems to matter more than most. I'm not trying to influence the system, you are. I'm just pointing out that a lot of the crap posted here is plain wrong and offer an alternative view of what's happening in the real world as opposed to the wet dreams of
Well if you're going to point fingers at least get a handle instead of anonymous coward. It is tenuous to claim that JEDEC negates a company's rights to hundreds of their own patents. Rambus design RAM, and that's all, for them to give up rights on their I.P puts them out of business instantly. You're really claiming that's what they did?
As I've already said, it's not about the patents in the press releases. When they roll the big guns into the negotiations it's game over, no counter infringement claims and a portfolio that would sink a battleship, that's the harsh reality here. This JEDEC thing is a smoke screen to cover the fact that Micron is buck naked. Their only defence is a blanket claim (and get this) that Rambus has no rights to their own inventions.
The opinion expressed in not informative, it's profoundly ignorant. Invention is the process of one idea on another and it's very much about the implementation of those ideas.
You can't patent going to Mars, or the idea of a time machine. In legal terms you must "reduce to practice". It's just not enough to write some high level speculative and vague view of the future. That is not invention. It is quite ridiculous to cite some whimsical essay of yesteryear and say it is the precursor to that which has followed. It might be visionary or it might be one kernel in a storm of chaff from the same author but in either case it is NOT invention, it's just speculation.
You can knock something for six, or blow something out of the water but you don't knock something out of the water.
I don't think folks watching this realize the sheer volume of patents Rambus is garnering or what's going on behind the scenes, the Patents under discussion now were actually filed years ago. It's easy to say something was obvious or not original years after the fact. What the major RAM makers need to worry about is the other patents Rambus throws on the table when negotiations start. They might go into a case thinking they are on solid ground but when Rambus throws their entire patent portfolio into the ring, and in addition the RAM maker realizes that Rambus makes *NO* RAM and cannot therefore be sued for breach of their own I.P. they realize in short order that they are screwed if they take it to a trial. This is what you are seeing and why everyone is caving. Micron is in deep trouble here.
It's just amazing how this slashdot article was worded and the comments it has provoked. There seems to be a real issue with slashdot's perception of intellectual property right.
This isn't an attempt by Rambus to win in court instead of the market. Rambus IS an intellectual property company. The filed patents on DDR years ago. They own this I.P. and this is what their ENTIRE business model is based on. They pay hundreds of engineers to sit around all day and design memory technology, they file patents then they license it. They do not make ANY memory. If that's what you do then your entire revenue stream is going to come from your ideas, and your ability to collect royalties from them.
Now I don't disagree that the patent system is screwed up, especially as it relates to software and companies building roadblocks, but that ain't the fault of Rambus.
It's Micron who are trying to sue Rambus and win in court instead of the market. They are hoping to cheat them out of the royalties they are due, as if Micron didn't benefit from their own Licenses. It would be unprecedented if Micron won in court over this. They are basically saying Rambus has no right to wholesale technology they invented. Micron are dreaming if they think it's going to work.
Just great, now we have the great intellectuals Metallica going after our centers of learning to restrict the software they use.
I was a Metallica fan but this does it for me. When a bunch of hick rock artists can blow into town and demand restrictions on the use of software in Universities it's time to put them in their place.
This is stereotypical nonsense with not a shred of evidence to back it up. In fact the gross generalizations are in complete disagreement with my own anecdotal observations that hackers tend to be engineering & science oriented folks with a healthy contempt for the sort of wishy washy nonsense peddled in this article. A fondness for science & sci-fi (the latter optional) and a tinkering, curious, analytical rather objective approach to everything is the norm. To dress this up with all this talk of mystic nonsense & magic is to completely misunderstand the culture. Aside from RPG's like D&D & related Tolkein-esque material there's no mysticism, and this connection has nothing to do with conventional notions of mysticism or magic.
Downloading their microcode from the chip is not reverse engineering, it's theft. If you can try to figure it out yourself, don't download their code.
There is a Quantum3D logo on the bottom left corner of the board photographed in the article. Quantum3D have been claiming to have boards based on lot's of VSA-100 parts for months so this doesn't say a lot about the general availability of the 6000 boards from high volume OEM's. FYI Quantum3D offer board sets with up to 16 VSA-100 chips in a single graphics system.
Microsoft has a history of bait & switch software efforts.
.NET strategy presumably desktop Linux systems become simply a client option (and second rate ones at that?). The client side office suite becomes the interface and maybe the desktop and it runs anywhere on multiple platforms. The back end server infrastructure & database is all Microsoft too. So the focus simply moves away from the OS as the desktop and you end up with an OS neutral strategy which still grows revenue because you've got a new license model which is way more lucrative.
Remember their Unix compatibility interface development software? It put competing products completely out of business, then they turn off the air supply on the Microsoft version having eliminated the threat. By this time it's too late for the now defunct product. Augment this with a few strategic patents and you have a winning strategy.
So, Linux and Star Office represents a potential threat on the desktop and if it begins to grow in that market Microsoft will release Office on Linux and in doing so eliminate Star Office in short order through increased mindshare and leveraging their monopoly where they can. Once this is done they let the Linux version trail the Windows version and drop a few 'unsupportable' features and eventually perhaps eliminate the Linux version of the product altogether citing insufficient demand or technological hurdles.
That said, with the
This sounds like a classic Steve move. Having seen the kind of damage a leak can do I think it's great that one of the slime balls who betrays a trust gets to feel the sharp end of an action like this. They might have enjoyed their 15 minutes of infamy, now they are paying the price and good riddance. If this is the only way to take away the stock benefits someone has accrued from employment at the company he betrayed then so be it.
I have no sympathy for them.
I wonder just how many parts they really had to recall. Maybe a dozen or so circulating in the benchmark community, but I hardly expect that there will be any great volumes of CPU's in the wild which need to be pulled back.
It seems this is one instance where Intel's failure to ship product might have saved them some pain.
They are looking pretty foolish right now. First the unavailable 1GHz PIII launched for PR purposes, now the broken 1.13GHz launched for the same reasons. I had heard that the PR tail was wagging the engineering dog over there, looks like the rumours were true. Anyone betting that Dell ship an AMD system next quarter?
CHeers,Angus.
So that's it for libraries then. I assume that this would make a library unworkable unless they paid a fee for every book withdrawal. More like renting a video.
This seems unjust. If I purchase a book I should be able to transfer it to another person, just like any other software I purchase. Infact this seems utterly unique in terms of the extent restrictions being applied. Imagine a music CD with similar restrictions for example, I wouldn't be able to let friends borrow it, and what about playing it at a party?
This can be taken to utterly riddiculous extremes, for example, what about a childens story book? Presumably I wouldn't be allowed to read it to twins without an additional license.
Apart from the second language argument, much of the technological innovation comes from countries who either speak English or have it as a dominant second language.
I don't see China designing new Microprocessors, or encouraging the kind of free thinking needed to compete on internet time. For the most part the high volume contenders are mostly rural and second world (?) in nature.
Murdoch is probably pandering because he wants to move into China. Let's face it when it comes to online business Murdoch has shown so much acumen that his ventures to date have been an utter disaster.
What is it with this Anime fetish?
I can see the merits of something like Akira, but not all Anime is good. DBZ and Sailor Moon don't even have Kitch value, they are just plain bad. Watching them is like watching paint dry and the plots and ideas are purile or infantile or both. Give me Tom and Jerry over this rubbish any day.
There is no security compromise here.
Anyone can hack Linux but they can't force you to run their version. The official kernel and distros are the ones you'd stick to and are probably safer in terms of scrutiny, just look at the recent MS "netscape programmers are weanies" debacle. A security hole (back door!) right there in the proprietary closed source system.
As usual the security issue is FUD. Any security expert knows that security through obscurity is no security.
It's surprising the way he sweeps the whole license issue under the carpet. Can even the free non-profit license be withdrawn like he says?
This is way worse than I had realized.
The other amazing thing is in the same breath he notes that the KDE GUI is free for NON profit uses then says these commercial companies backed the wrong horse. Why the heck should any commercial entity back a proprietary standard as the desktop for Linux? Does he really expect they are lining up to pay royalties, or to force their customers to pay royalties? They can do that now with Motif et.al. You can get the whole of Windows for less than just the library license fees for the darned Motif GUI on a Unix workstation, in the mean time unix custs are asking why their workstations cost more than wintel systems. The consortium wants to change this and get a standard adopted, not recreate this attrocious situation.
When are these KDE folks going to get it? The license is CRITICAL. It's THE major obstacle for KDE, it's not enough to dismiss these concerns or say "trust us". KDE-Qt is doomed to be marginalized in the long term unless it ditches the QPL.
I expect we'd all be quite safe standing on the same block as your 'nuke' as you've described it.
The biggest problem is that it needs to be highly enriched Uranium. The other minor problems are that you need to bring them together fast and with enough of an initial release of neutrons to get the chain reaction started quickly and also make the sphere dense enough so that the material does infact go boom and not fizz.
No, the hard part is enriching the material to make the weapons grade material. The atomic weights of the different isotopes is extremely close and it makes separation extremely difficult. There is no chemical difference so there is no easy means of separation.
The manufacture of a fission bomb is not very hard for knowledgeable engineers, this was done over fifty years ago from scratch, it is easily doable today and the design doesn't have to be at all sophisticated. A fusion bomb is more tricky but the info about the Teller-Ulam design is already out there and easily obtainable.
There's supposed to be an international effort to prevent nuclear proliferation, including civil applications like power generation because of the obvious application to weapons production. The bottom line is that this material is a prerequisite for anyone embarking on a WOMAD program. How does a site like this comply with international non proliferation objectives? I expect it does this the same way the market handles it now, with export licenses and restrictions on the point to point trade. This is just another market place, these things are already traded, at least this way the DOE can outbid the terrorists instead of having to beat them to the salesman every time, although it seems unlikely that unsavory trades would pass through such a public forum.
Let's get this straight, teling people Linux is good at some stuff and correcting some errors is not FUD.
FUD is when you spread misrepresentations to cast doubt on a competing product. In general I don't think this is widely done by the Linux community.
I've seen FUD get spread by Microsoft in other areas, it ain't pretty and it's obvious what's going on to the well informed.
If someone did this in the Linux community there would be a chorus of objections correcting the FUD. Heck just look at what's happened in this thread. Honest comparrisons are not FUD.
No.
Dispelling Myths is not the same as casting FUD about another product. If you defend a product honestly or point out it's merits it ain't FUD.
If on the other hand you were to spread half truths about a competitive product, and imply bad things will happen when you use a competing product that would be spreading FUD.
Well at over eighty bucks a pop retail there's certainly money to be made from the Red Hat boxed distro.
For bundling purposes though how much of a discount does Dell give you for Linux being loaded? None. So which box is more profitable, the Linux system or the Windows? I don't know, the support contract may cost and Windows is peanuts for Dell but there's at least more to the economics than you're suggesting.
There is NO WAY your average user could get past Windows installation. I've installed both Windows and Red Hat on PC's and Red hat is marginally easier. Neither are ideal for novice users.
Installation is not the acid test for the desktop, and Linux can be pre installed these days.