USPTO Declares Invalid Third of Three Critical Rambus Patents 113
slew writes "This is a followup to this earlier story about 2 of 3 of Rambus's 'critical' patents being invalidated. Apparently now it's a hat-trick."
There's something that seems unsavory and wasteful about a business environment in which a company's stock value "fluctuates sharply on its successes and failures in patent litigation and licensing." The linked article offers a brief but decent summary of the way Rambus has profited over the years from these now-invalidated patents.
Slashdot declares invalid split infinitive (Score:5, Funny)
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I think that the grammar police should have their own theme music.
or maybe just cue the minor key.
(due props to "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka")
In other words ... (Score:4, Insightful)
The way Rambus has profited over the years from these now-invalidated patents ...
In other words, Rambus is nothing but a scam
And the amazing part is that the America knowingly allows such a scam to exist for such a looooooooooonnng time !!
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The U.S. government: Corruption, corruption, corruption.
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Has nobody here heard the (in)famous quote by Churchill? All the grammar griping, and no attribution.
Re:Slashdot declares invalid split infinitive (Score:4, Insightful)
So you don't know what infinitive is, right?
Yoda? (Score:2, Troll)
He right know what infinitive is, don't this need prove for criticizing grammar prescriptivist.
How sense this criticism make, another matter is.
Yet no proof there is of malapropism.
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I think it is deeply ironic and hilarious that you think he is speaking like Yoda and has been modded troll.
In this case Yoda is making less sense than usual, and I have absolutely no idea what he could be trolling for.
Should I be offended?
I think there should be a +5 Perplexed instead.
suck it (Score:1)
Any money back? (Score:5, Interesting)
So do Nvidia, Hewlett-Packard , et al have any chance of recovering any money they paid to Rambus, or are they simply out the entire amount, or has no actual money traded hands yet?
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Most licences are in fact in return for indemnity from suit; this isn't quite the same as saying that the patent is being violated. Rambus hasn't sued them post-agreement, so there it is. There's an arguable misrepresentation claim though.
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So do Nvidia, Hewlett-Packard , et al have any chance of recovering any money they paid to Rambus
Depends on the exact wording of the agreement they signed ... but probably not.
Patent agreements usually start out "we accept that the patent is valid...", I never saw one with an "If this patent turns out to be invalid..." clause.
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NAS, but I believe the legal principle of caseus durusapplies, and rightly so.
There's zero incentive to fight patent trolls if you can roll over (which encourages them to seek further victims) and then press the big reset button when someone with more principles makes a stand.
Re:HP got it's money-worth of Rambus in Alpha. (Score:5, Informative)
Must we continually remind you that Rambus technology was never Rambus technology, but rather stolen technology? [wikipedia.org]
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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This quote is too good not to bring up when it comes to mentioning Intel and Rambus.
October 2000
Craig Barrett, Intel's president and CEO, tells the Financial Times: "We made a big bet on Rambus, and it did not work out ... In retrospect, it was a mistake to be dependent on a third party for a technology that gates your performance."
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Actually, the RDRAM architecture was excellent. It didn't have any problem scaling at all, in fact it scaled much better than what we have now. It just never went much further than the beginning stages. The really nice thing about RDRAM was that since it was a serial technology, it was dead simple to route traces to multiple banks of memory, unlink DDR3, which has so many pins that trying to accommodate anything more than 4 slots per processor is an amazing feat.
Hard enough that you didn't see more than
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Although RDRAM was good at providing high bandwidth, being serial and having more logic between row activation and the last data bit of the cache line propagated through the complicated deserialization logic on the way to the front side bus, it sucked at latency. Unfortunatly, what misses and evictions that dribbles out of the typical CPU cache are often pretty random, so although RDRAM generally had more banks than standard SDRAM of the time, for most use cases, the randomness of the access patterns cause
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Funny, Sony hasn't announced the PS4 yet.
Rambus RDRAM is in the most popular console to date, and is also in a current gen console. The PS2 (world's bestselling cnnsole) has 32MB of RDRAM (the same stuff you guys had to fork 3x the $$$ over).
The PS3 includes 256MB of XDR-DRAM, which is it's successor using multi-level signalling (much like how MLC flash stores data) to transfer 2 bits every clock edge.
So singlehandedly, gamers are keeping Rambus
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So singlehandedly, gamers are keeping Rambus alive.
Or to put it bluntly, evil Sony and evil Microsoft are keeping evil Rambus alive.
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"Stolen"? How so?
I don't know. Maybe you should follow the link the parent provided for you. If you don't want to do that, need I remind you about all the standards meetings that Rambus attended, and mysteriously patented the future standards shortly afterwards. At least, that's the rumor I remember. And I specifically remember Rambus suing everyone trying to get money for DDR patents, even though DDR had been around for ages. Being in every P4 machine wasn't enough. They needed to make money from every computer, whe
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Rambus's patent applications predated the JEDEC meetings.
Their amendments to their applications to match what they'd heard in the JEDEC meetings, on the other hand...
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Once upon a time I was in the thick of this, both working for a Rambus licensee on our implementation of their design, and later reading the patents, including the original 1990 submarine.
I don't see from your Wikipedia link where they say Rambus "stole" their IP from anyone.
As a fun aside, the original 1990 submarine patent application, was abandoned, but not before being continued, which I guess is part of what let it stay submerged for so long. I believe even the first continuation was abandoned as well
Re:HP got it's money-worth of Rambus in Alpha. (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps there should be greater incentivization for companies that are directly involved in making products based on patents, or at least on companies that have a reasonably large interest in companies that do produce products based on patents. Since we've all decided that Intellectual Property is Real Property, we've essentially allowed companies to use patents like they would apartment buildings, if we're not going to redefine what constitutes property, then at least there should, say, tax incentives for companies that patent and then produce products, are take ownership stakes in companies that do produce products based on patents. Or, we could just simply set the tax rate extremely high on licensing income, and then if you can demonstrate that you are in any substantial way responsible for making products based on patents you hold, then you get a break on those taxes. So let's say a company that makes its money purely from acquiring and licensing patents has to pay 95% of said income in taxes, but where they actually are involved in production that uses said patents they get an increasingly greater cut up to what we would currently consider normal corporate rates, so that companies like Apple (though I have my own issues with their using patents to bludgeon, but at least they do actually manufacture products based on their portfolios) are not penalized. I think you could make it very fine-grained, based upon each patent, so that there is no incentive to patent lots of things and then strategically use patents that one has no intention of making products from to attack competitors.
It wouldn't be a perfect solution, and still leaves open questionable patent suits like Apples', but perhaps we might also look at rules to require that licensing fees plus some level of interest be returned to the licensees, thus making it far riskier for a company to use dubious patents slipped past overworked examiners to bludgeon or force licensing fees from competitors. How willing would Microsoft be to go after Android manufacturers if there was a law on the books that would require them to return those fees plus interest if the patents got overturned?
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Nice view of the process.
Makes me wonder if the market is failing here due to the issue of patents (which are a privilege granted by the government to create artificial scarcity) being so profligate that we have some sort of patent boom fuelled by lawyers?
If so, it's due to head for bust any time soon - I wouldn't want to be holding stock in any company with that business model.
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Or, we could just simply set the tax rate extremely high on licensing income, and then if you can demonstrate that you are in any substantial way responsible for making products based on patents you hold, then you get a break on those taxes.
I like this idea, because the original intent of patents was to allow the inventor a certain period of exclusive use of his patent before it became available for others to use. Its not at all clear that licensing was ever contemplated.
The theory was that the inventor could make more money selling a product incorporating a new invention than a competitor could make without it. But the money came from the selling of the products, not the licensing of the patent.
If you do not want to use tax law, (and there
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First, the length of patents should be significantly shorter. If you get your product out there, and get people buying it, 5 year should be enough of a head start for you to get brand awareness built, get the bugs worked out, and grow enough to be able to fend off competition.
Along with that, I would overturn the current 'obvious' test. Instead, give a description of the invention. If anybody can come forward in three or six months with the same idea, then your idea was obvious enough to not warrent protec
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First off, patents don't protect "products" per se. They protect inventive concepts, of which a given product is but one embodiment (usually). In any case, a patent can comfortably take 5 years from filing to grant, and if you want to decrease that you're going to have to accept a lower standard of examination. Secondly, most jurisdictions have a mechanism wherein the renewal fees on patents (because you have to keep paying every year to keep it in place) rise quite sharply for the latter half of the term o
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No solution is perfect, and every change will make winners and losers. That's life. I fail to see why we should prop up a badly malfunctioning IP system just so ARM can keep making money.
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If you can patent something that someone with the same problem/task could independently come up with in a day or less, and thus make them spend weeks in patent negotiation or litigation, that slows down progress.
Does it encourage more innovation? I think many of the people and companies actually trying to make stuff will still do so in the absence of patents.
Anyone seriously think that Apple wouldn't be making money from the iPhone if there
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Anyone seriously think that Apple wouldn't be making money from the iPhone if there were no patents at all? They can still prevent fakes and copies with trademark and copyright laws.
Which also applies to ARM. The primary protection of a processor design is copyright, and by the time you have gone away sufficiently from the design to no longer be covered by copyright you would probably be easier to start over. There's definitely plenty of extra difficulty in starting over caused by patents, but getting rid of them definitely doesn't rule out a business like ARM.
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One of the upshots of this whole discussion is that the pattent system works better or worse depending on the context. For software it is a disaster. The chemical industry seems to be quite comfortable with it.
For some inventions, like drugs, one can make the argument that patents are the wrong vehicle to start with. I once attended a talk by an exec where he e
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Say goodbye to ARM processors then. ARM Holdings doesn't make anything, they just license out processor designs.
That's covered by copyright.
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You're taking away the ability for companies to specialize. Let those that are good at R&D do R&D,
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What's with trying to make Rambus sound like a hardworking bunch. Yes, in the day they did practical things, but then they stole an entire group's process. Now, fortunately, they're reaching the end of the tether. If there was justice, their principles would be taken out and shot.
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I'm amazed. A Rambus astroturfer. The SCO checks bouncing now?
A long, long path to justice (Score:3)
And it ain't over, yet, because they can still appeal - considering the loss of revenue, you can bet they will.
Can't really call this a victory, because Rambus received a cut of memory sales for years, which every PC buyer ultimately paid.
ARM holdings? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's something that seems unsavory and wasteful about a business environment in which a company's stock value "fluctuates sharply on its successes and failures in patent litigation and licensing."
If ARM holdings licensing came into question it would probably destroy the company's stock. I am loving the way the ARM architecture is handled, a lot more competition than x86, and it seems to be advancing quickly now that it has becoming popular.
I was trying to imagine today if ARM holdings could survive in a world without IP laws. I think yes it could. It seems that getting a hold of ARM holdings processor plans, from something like bittorrent, would not be super useful even to Texas Instruments, Samsung, or Nvidia engineers. ARM works with them to implement the design, so the payment agreement would probably just be altered slightly and ARM would have to protect its disclosure of ARM architecture details a little more closely. Perhaps ARM would morph more into a standards body and not be as profitable though? I am curious what someone with more info on the topic can share please!
Re:ARM holdings? (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think anyone has ever made a particularly strong argument for eliminating hardware patents. The reason why people so very loathe Rambus was not the quality of their patents (although they did, as it turns out, happen to be invalid) -- it was that they went to the JEDEC standards meetings and encouraged the standards body to adopt their technology, without saying a word about it potentially infringing their patents, and then proceeded to sue everyone in the memory industry after the standard was set in stone and shipped on millions of motherboards.
It was the troll behavior that got everyone up in arms: Nobody whatsoever minds if you come to them and offer a license for your validly patented hardware technology before they ship it in their products. If the amount you're asking is less than the value of the technology to their company, you have yourself a mutually-agreeable deal. The problem is when someone (like Rambus, but unlike ARM) waits until you've unknowingly committed to ship several million infringing units before jumping out from under a bridge and flinging lawsuits in every direction.
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If ARM holdings licensing came into question it would probably destroy the company's stock.
Their interests would be more than adequately protected by copyright.
What's wrong... (Score:5, Informative)
It's not that a company's price fluctuates with the state of its patent portfolio. The problem is that 3 patents, which should have never been issued in the first place, terrorized inventors and suppressed innovation for multiple years. This is squarely an indictment of the USPTO and of the Congress.
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This is squarely an indictment of the USPTO and of the Congress.
Or if you go in for root-cause analysis, the State mechanism.
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What do you mean by that?
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The idea that some people who claim to know best should be able to make and impose arbitrary rules upon everybody else and back those rules up with violence. The US Patent System is one example.
The rules of the US patent system were dreampt up by some central planners, and in this case were exploited by the corporations to the detriment of the progress of arts and science.
Unintended consequences, corruption, incompetence - the 'why' doesn't matter so much as the actual outcomes and the means by which the o
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Are you arguing for the complete absence of laws? Or that we only adopt laws that are agreed upon by every member of society?
I'm assuming you mean something more moderate.
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I'm assuming you mean something more moderate.
No, probably more radical.
States killed half a billion people in the 20th Century. So, in addition to the economic damage they wreak, that death-toll has to be included in the desire to keep them around.
That's not to argue for an unregulated society, but rather one in which the regulations are voluntarily accepted. Robert Murphy is one scholar who is working out systems of private laws, which may provide an alternative. Violent action is not initiated under hi
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But how do you enforce this without at least a core set of laws? For example:
Me: I want to kick puppies.
Community: No, our private laws don't allow that.
Me: I'll do it anyway. Try to stop me! You can't, because you don't believe in violence-enforced legal systems.
or...
Me: I want to kick puppies.
Community: No, our private laws don't allow that.
Me: I'm actually my own community. In my private laws, that's allowed. So go pound sand.
Of all the solutions that seem workable to me, the one that seems most
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Me: I'll do it anyway. Try to stop me! You can't, because you don't believe in violence-enforced legal systems.
You can't be arrested today for saying you want to kick puppies. If you kick puppies, the State may exact retributive justice upon you. Some States also prevent the puppies' owner from defending the puppies, before or after the fact. The private law systems I've seen allow property owners to defend their properties. Individuals may use violence in self- or third-party defense. The 'not-State' j
Of course Stock costs fluctuate. (Score:3)
Patents are a property; changes to the scope of existence of a property right change the value of the property governed by that right.
The market should estimate the possibility of a company's winning or losing a patent case; once the decision is made, the actual value of the company has changed because of the new determination of whether the company has the right.
The only alternative would be to split the patent right King-solomon style. But that only happens if both parties are willing to settle.
Parties are sometimes not willing to settle. They may know or mistakenly believe that they are in the right, or they may expect they can force the other side to settle for more later.
In addition, mucking up their estimation as to whether they will win--and thus whether it makes sense to settle--is the fact that empirical research demonstrates that lawyers are more attractive to clients when they project a higher chance of winning. Thus it is in the interest of the lawyers to artificially inflate the chance of winning by at least some margin--whether done subconsciously or deliberately--and this means parties have biased information when they decide whether to settle.
Finally, occasionally a court will do something nobody expected, either legitimately for reasons people did not anticipate would motivate them or out of stupidity.
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Patents are a property;
What I really like about your comment here is that you begin by using grammar to make it clear that the word "property" means something completely different to you from what it means to the average Slashdot reader. I would normally say "patents are property" but I have this horrible feeling that you are legally right :-)
Other than that your comment is completely sensible in the context of patents as they are. However, I think what most of us are arguing is that patents are simply too powerful. If someo
Compulsory Licensing (Score:2)
True--a compulsory licensing scheme is one option that could make more sense. IIRC, courts have sometimes awarded compulsory licenses in the past in patent cases, but it is relatively rare. It may have to do with those cases where there is a strong public interest in allowing the infringing party to continue to infringe, but don't quote me on that--I'd have to look it up.
One problem with it is that it leaves courts to figure out after-the-fact what "fair" royalty would have been negotiated between the par
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One thing that would be a problem with it as applied to software patents is how to deal with free software when a company would not have been willing to license its patent for free.
I don't really see that that's a problem. If you limit licenses to 5% of sales price, then 5% of nothing is nothing. If you are talking about free software companies that are selling software for money then I don't see that it's much more of a problem for them to pay 5% than for another proprietary software company to pay 5%.
The real problem comes, and this is one of the things which shows why patents should never apply to software in the first case, when you start to apply fixed costs per patent. If t
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The problem is that if you limit licenses to 5% of nothing, and make licensing compulsory, then free software is competing unfairly, and you have the problem of commercial software using free software that uses patents. The purpose of the patent system is to incentivize creation, and if you are going to have software patents, then letting free software ignore the patents really defeats that purpose by giving the licensee a major disadvantage over free solutions.
I agree that the proliferation is a problem.
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The problem is that if you limit licenses to 5% of nothing, and make licensing compulsory, then free software is competing unfairly,
That is like arguing that the atmosphere competes unfairly with commercial suppliers of breathing gas. It's 100% true, and it's 100% missing the point. The right to use free software with the source code is a matter of fundamental freedom of speech and should be allowed no matter what. This is also the only way that things can work since most free software authors simply don't have the resources to hire lawyers to check if the patents exist. If patents, as a system, can't cope with that, then patents, a
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There's something that seems unsavory and wasteful about a business environment in which a company's stock value "fluctuates sharply on its successes and failures in patent litigation and licensing."
No, there's not. Do you see the bulk of silicon made in the USA? Thought so. Buy any consumer-grade electronics, and it will say Made in China. Made in Taiwan is already higher-end. I've been given some Christmas candy that was friggin' made in China. The only thing left is R&D. Research should lead to inventions, which should lead to patents.
In the end, if you are not doing your own manufacturing to some level you are in deep shit. To the extent that patents work as you described they are making the problem worse by putting of dealing with it. Innovation and R&D largely (though not completely) come from being inspired by practically involved in making, building, designing and manufacturing. For some time, people who used to be involved in those will be able to put out patents, but that is already slowing down (China is already starting t
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In the end, if you are not doing your own manufacturing to some level you are in deep shit
Oh yeah, like ARM Holdings. Sucks to be them, right?
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Perfect example; the ARM IP came out of trying to manufacture first the BBC micro and then the Acorn Archimedes. Even the raspberry PI can be seen as a legacy of that. Now that the UK no longer tries to do such manufacturing the next generation of such systems it becomes relatively much more likely that the next generation of such ideas will come out of China.
Even then, remember the UK has a history of maverick individual inventors with little business success. This is something which is fully cultura
Re:Parser error. (Score:5, Funny)
1 and 2 were already invalidated.
The third of 3, i.e. the last one, has now also been invalidated.
You're welcome.
I HAD to buy it... Once... (Score:2)
I was given a very nice Compaq Deskpro series computer with about a 1.5G P4 (this was a while ago!) and it used their awful RAM. Apparently Compaq designed motherboards for a short time with their product, then rapidly moved away from them because I shortly thereafter got the same exact series computer with about a 2.0G processor and it used normal RAM. Thankfully, they got away from using it quickly.
I had to purchase a RAM upgrade to bring it from 512K to 1G RAM, and felt absolutely disgusted about HAVIN
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You didn't *have* to buy it.
It was the most convenient path, or you didn't really care about that which you care about now, or you didn't feel like working with a larger swap space, or you didn't feel like shelling out for another computer, or...
Actually, he HAD to buy it. When the P4 first came out, it only supported Rambus RAM. DDR was not supported in the early days of the P4.
So, if was going to upgrade his RAM on an early P4 system, yes, he HAD to buy from Rambus.
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I was given a very nice Compaq Deskpro series computer with about a 1.5G P4 (this was a while ago!)
Is the reference to time based on the fact that it was a 1.5G P4, or that it was a very nice Compaq? For the later, it must have been a very long time ago indeed!
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I was given a very nice Compaq Deskpro series computer with about a 1.5G P4 (this was a while ago!)
The 1.5GHz P4 was never very nice, even a long while ago. A late model P3 of the same time frame would handily outrun it at half the power consumption.
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Yeah, I know, I just used it for email and to play Quake II...
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Not back then. I paid about $250 for the RAM upgrade IIRC, and a new MB, RAM would have been about $350-400 or so. Things were a bit more expensive back then, and that was a nearly state of the art machine at the time. Nowadays, yeah it would be a no-brainer, but believe me, I did the mental arithmetic about a dozen times before begrudgingly shelling out for the RDRAM's.
Oh, yeah, another annoying thing; they were only 16 bit I guess, because you had to have two of everything, and had to have a bus termin
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Man, you are preaching to the choir - you sound like you are describing my house! I just got rid of my Matrox and TARGA cards on e-Bay a few weeks ago,,, I have a whole house full of old computer shit dating back to TRS-80 Model I and Apple II days. And I do mean FULL. I'm in the process of e-Baying anything I think may have some value, the rest is hitting the curb. Unfortunately my stupid state (IL) just passed a law and now I can't throw out ANY electronic devices or risk a $7000.00 fine. Needless
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Uhhh...you DO realize that most likely for the price you paid for that RDRAM you could have just shitcanned the board and put a MUCH nicer board in its place?
Not in a Compaq system. Compaq systems were very proprietary and probably would not accept any other boards. He would also have to buy a new case, power supply, RAM, motherboard, and video card (probably on board in the Compaq).
I think he would have broken even price wise, but he would have spent an awful lot of time to simply salvage the processor, HDD keyboard, mouse and monitor.
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Actually, the later Deskpro's and Evo's from about PII-450 through P4-2.0G had nearly ISA or ATX standard form-factor motherboards. They had the chassis wiring harness arranged for whatever board they made runs of, so for most of the Deskpro's you could use a generic MB, you might have a bit of a time getting the LED's and reset switches wired up, but the board/slot/chassis form-factor was the same as the generic PC motherboards of the day.
Not so much for the early machines and server products (and of cour
The original name for RAMBUS (Score:2)
Many PC builders and customers are still sore today.
Fraud (Score:5, Interesting)
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That's a stupid idea. If you do that they'll never bother overturning a patent again as it just invites another lawsuit.
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The problem is when the inventor uses litigation as a club to force licensing on those who "infringe". Once they collect a royalty they can keep it, and use it to
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The problem is with the whole patent system. Society would be better off without it, and richer, and technology would progress faster. Engineers in particular would be happier.
Not unsavory or wasteful (Score:2)
I don't think it's an unsavory or wasteful business environment when a company stock price "fluctuates sharply on its successes and failures in patent litigation and licensing."
Think of a university research group which discovers a new drug candidate, and forms a company to pursue its further clinical trials and licensing. The financial health of this company will be wholly determined by its ability to patent and license.
Think of a pharma company which spends $200mil research on each drug candidate, and eve
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That, and millions of gamers around the world financed these lawsuits. And I doubt Rambus will be going out of business anytime soon, as millions more gamers will continue to finance Rambus.
(The PS2 has 32MB of RDRAM, back in the days when RDRAM DIMMs were horrendously overpriced. The PS3 has 256MB of XDR-DRAM, it's successor). I'm g
Could it be? (Score:1)
A sudden outbreak of commonsense at the USPTO?
Whatever it is, it couldn't have happened to a more deserving company.
It's a shame that the terms of the past settlements probably have clauses keeping the paying party from getting anything back.
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Whatever it is, it couldn't have happened to a more deserving company.
NOTREA~1.TXT
3 down.... (Score:3)
Seal team 6 (Score:1)
Calling in Seal Team 6 on the board of directors would have been a preferable solution.
A hint of invalidating patents ? (Score:2)
This might be a fair mechanism to slow down patent trolls because the act of taking out as patent is also a potential risk as well as a reward.
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Stock still has room to drop (Score:1)