Posts by Dazed and Confused

And when

Apple bring out a 7" tablet, they'll clearly have copied the Android crowd and so will be guilty of copying them. So we'll see the iPad mini banned.

With any luck we'll see everybody and everything banned by the court.

"And in a moving speech the judge moved that life itself was in contempt of court and so confiscated it from all there present" - The late great Douglas Adams.

@When do the EU get fined for having a monopoly on Beurocratic stupidity?

The EU don't have a monopoly on Bureaucratic stupidity.

The EU are mere upstarts on the Bureaucratic stupidity front. As such they do feel inclined to try a little harder at times. But it is a commonly acknowledged truism that all bureaucracies are a) largely self severing, the purpose for bureaucracy is to invent more work for bureaucrats. and b) prepared to follow any rule to the point of abject stupidity. As part of point a) it is necessary to ensure that all rules written allow for the maximum possibility of rule b).

how longs your road?

I don't think that Intel have published any road maps for Xeon CPUs that extend any further than the Itanium's one. Intel have said that after Poulson there will be Kittson. Their Xeon roadmap doesn't go any further than this.

The difference is that everybody expects there to be new Xeons, so not publishing a longer roadmap isn't seen as a problem, like there is no road map telling the sun will come up tomorrow morning. You just assume it will and are happy to live your life on this basis.

And another word for...

Fast attack boats is "Sitting ducks" to an airborne force that is just happy to shoot first and forget about the whole concept of asking questions. Mini subs are likely to be more of a problem but they aren't likely to need to blow many out of the water before the crews start to think twice.

Looks kinda chunky

but at least it has a Ethernet port

Is this the same government that

is trying to fill all our land fill sites by outlawing "normal" radio and forcing a reluctant world to go digital?

hoist with his own petard

The funny thing here is that both of companies deliberately campaigned to have patent encumbered technologies included into the video standards specifically to freeze out the open source "enemy"

@Not secret

There are nothing secretive about the meetings or the agreement. All those parties that needed to be involved were there and added their input.

No need for pesky open government types, whinging civil libertarians or victims (sorry I meant to type customers). They don't need to have no say, they're just their to pay and pay and pay again.

Actually IP creators don't need to be involved either. There are too many of them.

No what's needed is a small easily coordinated cabal of monopolistic enterprises who can sensibly make the right decisions to maximise their own payola.

Can't you just see that? What's wrong with you David?

Joking aside

Now personally I can see the need to have an anti counterfeiting treaty, and I can see that negotiating in an open way is very difficult. But surely the whole process does need to be much more open that it was. Proposals need to be openly published. All interested parties need a chance to have their say. That doesn't necessarily mean that anyone will listen, but some good ideas will come from unexpected sources. They normally do. In the case of the Music industry for instance then the idea of making it easy to download an album in the middle of a rainy night started life as ripping off the music business and artists, but what it really told us was that people wanted to be able to be able to get music when ever and where ever they happened to be, not to have to conform to an existing distribution channel. This or course turned out to be a business opportunity, but it took those that the traditional record companies view as their enemies to point it out to them.

At the end of the day there needs to be an incentive for people to invest in developing things. The modern world makes developing new drugs eye poppingly expensive, but we would quite like to avoid another thalidomide case. Unless there is some way for drug companies to recoup their investment in new drugs there won't be many new drugs. Charities, even the Welcome trust, can't do it all on their own.

But consumers need to be allowed to have a say in the rules that govern what and how they consume.

Loose Loose

This is a typical loose loose situation law suit.

If Oracle loose in court they loose face and have to support a competitor.

If Oracle win in court they just piss off a massive number of highly lucrative customers. Oracle on HP-UX was worth 3 times as much to them as Oracle on Solaris + the Sun HW business, according to other articles on here.

The only winner will be IBM, who must be laughing all the way to the bank.

The lawyers will no doubt win too, I guess.

Is a noise cancelling patent standards essential?

Is this one, one of the FRAND patents?

On the general case with the 3G essential patents, the system was really setup for "the old boys club" the idea was that all the phone companies pooled their patents and the costing were based on the idea that everyone had chipped into the pool in the first place.

Apple then came along and hadn't contributed anything and for a long time weren't even prepared to talk about the idea of having to pay anyone else anything at all.

The whole crowd should be locked into a room together and not allowed out till they grown up beyond the stage of throwing their toys out of the pram every few minutes.

The lawyers must love all this.

More cases like the Oracle one where they fight for years and end up with a settlement of $0 and the chance of costs going against them would be good for the industry. Perhaps then they'd all concentrate on trying to win by making better products rather than sulking petulantly at any potential rival.

@L.B.

My apologies, my recollection was that the Alpha 21264 was also limited to completing only 4 instructions per clock, although like PA2 could be executing a lot more. But as you say, it was over 15 years backs and never a primary interest of mine.

Merced wasn't a great success was it :-)

McKinnely was designed at HP, and came in on target. Merced had largely done its damage by then.

Or more precisely the DEC/Intel deal to sell the Alpha team had resulted in AMD acquiring a fired up group of chip engineers who went off an produced the x86_64.... sadly the rest is history.

Wouldn't a simler scheme be

Scrap the current crap about HD, because todays high will be tomorrows pathetic

why not then just follow the camera convention and refer to mega pixels, since this is something many people have already at least heard of this.

so todays HD and which can either be 768 or 1080 lines should become 1MP and 2MP and the new ones would just be 8MP and 32MP.

As a self confessed pixel junky I can't wait to have a 32MP screen, besides it would give me an excuse to go out and buy a D800 to I could use all those lovely pixels. :-)

feature called program localization.

You mean native language support?

No idea of its origins but HP-UX had that when they released the PA-Risc version, so surely it has to be out of patent life by now.

Limited to $150K

> damages in the separate copyright suit are limited to $150,000

I hope that all the lawyers fees have to come out of that.

They probably expect to earn those numbers before breakfast :-)

Then they wonder why

people are nervous of the government (and others) building giant databases with all our info in. Its just too easy for these types of illegal access to occur.

Then they want to out source running the operation. So the people looking after the info have even less likelihood of feeling obliged to treat it with up most respect. Lets face it, the out sourcing deal is going to go to the lowest cost bidder, so you get three effects

1) you pay peanuts you get monkeys

2) its generally held to be easier (or at least cheaper) to bribe under paid people

3) all the staff know the "customer" doesn't give a flying f*&^ about them, so feelings are likely to be mutual.

This is going to be fun

This is going to be fun

Since HP own the fundamental patents on this technology I can just see the EULA banning the use of these device to support any Oracle product.

If you scratch my eyes out, I'll scratch your's out.... Bitch