Amiga Demonstration Helps Win Against Patent Troll 239
Amigan writes "Over on Groklaw, PJ is reporting that an actual demonstration of the Amiga OS (circa 1988) on an Amiga A1000 may have been the turning point in the lawsuit of IP Innovation v. Red Hat/Novell."
Amiga demos rocked! (Score:5, Insightful)
No respect. (Score:3, Insightful)
Say what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:MORE (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:MORE (Score:3, Insightful)
Best scenario that I can think of is make the USPTO website really a lot easier to use. I think they do a good job considering the volume of crap they have to deal with, but it could be easier.
Second, allow anyone to submit comments regarding any prior art relevant to the claims of any patent application. So if someone posts an application with claims X, Y and Z and it's a rehash of an old idea, someone can just post a comment "Yo examiner, this was done in FVWM in 1995. Reject this shit."
And voila, it is rejected. That would be a perfect world(excluding all other worlds that would be better but are political suicide).
Upton Sinclair to the rescue by way of Al Gore (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:MORE (Score:4, Insightful)
There simply isn't an easy solution to this. If you abolish software patents, it makes it very difficult for companies to realistically spend millions on development of new concepts and ideas when someone can then just take the ground breaking UI or process etc.
How about the fact that one company will be first to market and develop continously improving iterations staying ahead of the competition? To take for example graphics card as an example, the designs are often started 3-4 years in advance. Let's say they start now with a released card and probably spend the first year reverse engineering it, whatever they learn might be out in 2015. And then they'll be five years behind copying the 2015 models. You have to weigh that against the impact of granting a monopoly for 20 years - why should they continue to invent when they have an essential patent and can basically price gouge the market any way they want? It's really important to understand that software patents will stifle innovation too, and they're only worth it if the good outweigh the bad.
Re:Ahead of the curve (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Amiga demos rocked! (Score:2, Insightful)
Steak Tartare
Time for another overrated comment.
David Gay
Re:Amiga demos rocked! (Score:3, Insightful)
Sushi became popular exactly because of this
really? Here I thought it was because it was yummy...
Re:Amiga demos rocked! (Score:5, Insightful)
Eating meat raw has always been a sign of unsophistication in Western culture.
As the other reply notes - Steak Tartare and Carpaccio have long been considered at the heights of sophisticated Western dining.
Sushi became popular exactly because of this - by rejecting our own culture and embracing an alien one, you show how sophisticated and different you are from the masses. In addition, the high cost (in the 80s anyway) kept the morons out.
I don't buy this argument. Firstly, it contradicts itself - if you are eating a certain food just to show how different you are, doesn't that make you a moron? So if this were the case, wouldn't it be keeping the morons in?
I think there's a much simpler explanation - Globalization exposed people to different foreign cultures, and sushi is delicious. Over time, foreign foods become normalized. In the 1980s, there just weren't very many sushi restaurants outside of Japan, so few people got exposed to it. I very much doubt that most customers ate it simply to be snobby or different.
So what would be your current day example of such behavior? I mean, you don't see people going to, say, Danish restaurants and acting "oh, look how edgy and different I am eating this food that hardly anybody eats!"
Re:MORE (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is an illustration of the IP problem. A design is a textbook case of something which clearly belongs to copyright protection, not patent.
Re:Amiga demos rocked! (Score:4, Insightful)
Nah. Eating meat raw has always been a sign of the very most expensive dining. Go into a very posh restaurant and try ordering a steak "well done" and see the looks it'll get you; your choice is "rare" or "blue", if you want to fit in. Fish is often served raw in western culture too; smoked salmon is basically uncooked, oysters are usually served raw, sea bass is best uncooked (in the best restaurants).
Well cooking food is a peasant thing- if the meat is cheap, you need to cook it lots to stop it killing you. If the meat is raw, it has to be high quality and expensive.
Anyway, sushi is yummy. That's all that really matters.
Re:Say what? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes it was done with a custom chip (the copper), a simple chip with very few commands (4?) that could sit and wait for a specific scanline.
When the compare triggered it could change the registers that controlled screen resolution, depth, data source etc.
So in theory every scanline of the screen could have its own resolution, subtracting the cycles it takes for the copper to work.
So theres no actual moving of screen data when you pull it down, it just starts displaying furher down the screen, which makes for very smooth movement no matter content.
It is not completely seamless, if you look there will be a couple blanked scanlines between screens, which is where the copper does its thing.
Was very nice to use, typically when waiting for something to finish you just pulled the screen down to peek quickly, no messy slow context switching.
Re:As seen on Oprah (Score:4, Insightful)
As a matter of fact, Oprah has Rugbrød flown in straight from Denmark for her breakfast (google Oprah, Rugbrød, and check the Danish-press articles. I couldn't find a decent English one).
But that doesn't mean she's trying to show how edgy and different she is. Maybe she just really likes it? There's a difference between being a foodie and eating food to make a statement.
The point of such behavior: what we eat is the primary social differentiators.
Why would Oprah need anything to differentiate herself? She has a fuckton of money more than the average person, and is one of the most influential people in America. She doesn't need to prove herself by trying to be different.
But the ability to serve sushi, and to eat it, indicates belonging to a social group of wealthy, educated elites.
Oh bullshit, even middle-class people in the US can afford fine sushi. Hell, I make it from scratch, and it can cost less than what people typically spend on a fast-food meal for the family.
That's also why in the US, they make sickly sweet "blush" wines and overoaked chardonnays: Americans associated drinking wine with bourgeois status, but many don't like the taste.
Again, they buy them because they prefer the taste. It has little to do with social status. Nobody seriously links drinking wine with sophistication anymore.
Re:It's True. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice comment, but I'm not sure you're speaking the absolute truth. John Carmack pretty much reinvented the side scroller for PC hardware with the Commander Keen series (scrolling is easy on the Amiga, but difficult to do well on a primitive EGA/VGA screen), and he wasn't an Amiga programmer. When he went on to make the more influential Wolfenstein and Doom, he still wasn't an Amiga programmer. On the demo scene, the legendary Future Crew apparently moved from the C64. Wing Commander, the game that finally took the computer gaming crown to the PC, was certainly not done in Amiga style -- it was full of DOS hacks, and the graphics didn't replicate any of the techniques made popular by the Amiga.
Re:It's True. (Score:5, Insightful)
The IIgs's 3200 color mode literally had a unique 16 color palette for each and every scanline, hence 16 * 200 = 3200.
HAM had a 16 color (4-bit) palette for the entire screen, and then a pixel (which were 6-bit, not 4-bit) could be flagged to be a modification of the previous (from the scanline above) pixel color. HAM mode was an ugly thing to program for and was certainly not suitable for efficient rendering.
The IIgs thrived on its per-scanline capabilities. Each scanline could literally have a different palette and resolution.
It was lacking a blitter chip so was deficient compared to the amiga in 2D sprite based stuff, but it was much better at vector and 3D rendering (because of its Fill Mode) than the Amiga.
It also had 32 channel mono wavetable synthesis (16 stereo), compared to Amiga's 4 pannable mono channels.
So no, the Amiga was not way ahead of the pack in capabilities. The Amiga was good, but it really wasn't as special as Amiga users made it out to be. The Amiga had a much bigger install base so got a lot more games written for it. Apple was playing two-faced during this period, pushing the Mac instead of the IIgs.