Your response is interesting, but I think it perfectly illustrates the old adage: "One lawyer in a town will starve to death; two lawyers will make out like bandits."
I'd love to see Red Hat litigate this. Even more, I'd love to see how this Conservative Supreme Court would rule on an intellectual property rights issue like this.
The article notes "The Securities & Exchange Commission says there's no copyright protection on documents filed with it, so copying the verbiage from another company's prospectus isn't illegal."
This is complete nonsense, and demonstrates how totally bogus information is fed to us by the "most prestigious" media outlets in the country. I'm not a lawyer, but I've been writing and publishing tech articles and books for over 20 years.
Neither the SEC nor any other body has the right or power to remove copyright protection from ANY written work. Copyright protection is provided by an international treaty that has been signed by almost all of the countries of the world except China. Before we could approve the treaty, we were required to bring the U.S. copyright statues into conformance with international law. For example, our copyright protection was extended from 29 years until the author's death, and then to the death of the person who first inherited the right from the author. This prevented classic works from passing into the public domain before the author's death, something that happened routinely to authors who didn't understand their requirements to re-register the work after 29 years.
The salient part of the treaty here is something called "common law copyright." Under this provision any original work, whether written by an individual or a company, is protected by common law copyright from the instant that it is placed in a form accessible to human beings -- that is, when it is written down or recorded. The process of registering your work with the Copyright Office is simply a legal protection, so that you can prove that you claimed authorship from such and such a date. It is absolutely not required that you apply for or be granted an official copyright in order for your work to protected>/B>. All you must prove is original authorship.
Notice the following disclaimer on SlashDot: "The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. Slashdot is not responsible for what they say." This little bit of legalese simply restates the common law copyright rule: if you wrote it, you own it!
This device supports speculative emulation of CISC machine instructions. If TransMeta is really implementing this device, it appears to me that they're developing a very high performance RISC machine that will be able to emulate the X86 architecture at a speed significantly faster than the current generation of Pentiums.
Speculative execution makes it possible to optimize conditional branches so that they take no more time to execute than a non-branching instruction stream. In order to do this, the processor "sees" the branch coming in its lookahead buffer. It then begins fetching instructions located at both possible branch targets and executes them "speculatively" before the branch is reached. This is speculative execution because the processor doesn't know which branch path will be taken.
On a RISC machine, very few instructions reference memory, so it is easy to execute long instruction streams speculatively without the possibility of incurring a page fault. This is not the case with CISC architectures like the x86 family. Here, you can easily have three-address instructions that load two operands out of memory, add them together, and store the result at a third address. All three of these memory references can generate a page fault, which themselves cause a branch to the OS's interrupt handler.
The new device simply makes it possible for the emulator to speculative execute these instructions as long as they don't generate a page fault. When the original branch is ready to be executed, the processor checks the speculatively emulated instructions in the chosen path. If they completed without error, the device is instructed to write out the contents of its local store for any memory locations that were changed. The processor then continues to execute at the instruction after the speculative execution, without ever experiencing a pipeline stall.
If the chosen branch path that was speculatively emulated would have resulted in a page fault, the device is instructed to write out any stores that did not cause a fault, and then take the page fault. In this case, the pipeline will stall, but this stall could not have been avoided, because the page fault was inevitable.
Dave Ditzel (the founder of TransMeta) was the principal architect for the SPARC-V9 64-bit RISC machine. The SPARC Architecture Manual-V9 contains extensive information about branch prediction and speculative execution. You can get it on Amazon.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd love to see Red Hat litigate this. Even more, I'd love to see how this Conservative Supreme Court would rule on an intellectual property rights issue like this.
This is complete nonsense, and demonstrates how totally bogus information is fed to us by the "most prestigious" media outlets in the country. I'm not a lawyer, but I've been writing and publishing tech articles and books for over 20 years.
Neither the SEC nor any other body has the right or power to remove copyright protection from ANY written work. Copyright protection is provided by an international treaty that has been signed by almost all of the countries of the world except China. Before we could approve the treaty, we were required to bring the U.S. copyright statues into conformance with international law. For example, our copyright protection was extended from 29 years until the author's death, and then to the death of the person who first inherited the right from the author. This prevented classic works from passing into the public domain before the author's death, something that happened routinely to authors who didn't understand their requirements to re-register the work after 29 years.
The salient part of the treaty here is something called "common law copyright." Under this provision any original work, whether written by an individual or a company, is protected by common law copyright from the instant that it is placed in a form accessible to human beings -- that is, when it is written down or recorded. The process of registering your work with the Copyright Office is simply a legal protection, so that you can prove that you claimed authorship from such and such a date. It is absolutely not required that you apply for or be granted an official copyright in order for your work to protected>/B>. All you must prove is original authorship.
Notice the following disclaimer on SlashDot: "The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. Slashdot is not responsible for what they say." This little bit of legalese simply restates the common law copyright rule: if you wrote it, you own it!
Speculative execution makes it possible to optimize conditional branches so that they take no more time to execute than a non-branching instruction stream. In order to do this, the processor "sees" the branch coming in its lookahead buffer. It then begins fetching instructions located at both possible branch targets and executes them "speculatively" before the branch is reached. This is speculative execution because the processor doesn't know which branch path will be taken.
On a RISC machine, very few instructions reference memory, so it is easy to execute long instruction streams speculatively without the possibility of incurring a page fault. This is not the case with CISC architectures like the x86 family. Here, you can easily have three-address instructions that load two operands out of memory, add them together, and store the result at a third address. All three of these memory references can generate a page fault, which themselves cause a branch to the OS's interrupt handler.
The new device simply makes it possible for the emulator to speculative execute these instructions as long as they don't generate a page fault. When the original branch is ready to be executed, the processor checks the speculatively emulated instructions in the chosen path. If they completed without error, the device is instructed to write out the contents of its local store for any memory locations that were changed. The processor then continues to execute at the instruction after the speculative execution, without ever experiencing a pipeline stall.
If the chosen branch path that was speculatively emulated would have resulted in a page fault, the device is instructed to write out any stores that did not cause a fault, and then take the page fault. In this case, the pipeline will stall, but this stall could not have been avoided, because the page fault was inevitable.
Dave Ditzel (the founder of TransMeta) was the principal architect for the SPARC-V9 64-bit RISC machine. The SPARC Architecture Manual-V9 contains extensive information about branch prediction and speculative execution. You can get it on Amazon.