111–120 of 145 posts
In general, I welcome the day when universities get what is coming to them for this kind of stuff (see also: Marvell vs CMU for 300+ million, reduced from 1.5 billion on appeal, etc). In particular, given how much industry funds them, collaborates with their professors, etc, what is going on now is a remarkably stupid approach mostly driven by tech transfer offices that want to prove their value. Which will be "zero"…
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What is your basis for the claim they've not evaluated the tradeoffs or tried to design an efficient implementation? The patent seems to be based on this paper: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=264189 . It has an extensive experimental evaluation. Another thing to keep in mind is that Sohi, Vijaykumar and Moshovos are all respected computer architecture researchers, and this paper was published in ISCA, which is the…
That might be true, but that doesn't mean it's something that should be patented.
Architectural optimizations are often dismissed by outsiders as being "obvious", but what they don't see are all the other "obvious" ideas that don't work for various subtle reasons. I worry that if you make these techniques unpatentable, they'd become trade secrets and nobody would publish them, and we'd be worse off as a community.
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Bear in mind the patent was filed in 1996 when considering the level of innovation.
There were branch-predicting mainframes back in the 80s, though it really came to the fore with the advent of superscalar microprocessors in the early 90s (MIPS R8000 and DEC Alpha 21064), what is the paper's innovations above these?
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I guess the university can provide better services[1] to the public if it's profitable. [1] Like an NFL-class stadium.
I'm not trying to be snarky but are you being serious ? Because NFL-Class Stadium is not one of the features I would think of if I was doing a bullet list of things a university should have. My 30k student university has a sports hall and a gym.
http://www.ibj.com/blogs/4-the-score/post/45498-notre-dame-n...
How is this journalism? It doesn't even tell you the damn patent number.
At the top of the gray bar there's a "Contact BBC News" link. (Not the "contact us" link at the very bottom of the page.) For this article it's here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/20039682 Please do let them know that they need to start linking, or at least naming, documents that they're talking about. They do it all the time and I agree it's annoying. They'll discuss a medical study and not have any links to it. Sometim…
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No, it could have been one sentence long, which is why the opening section is only one sentence long. To quote directly from the article (the first sentence, in bold): > Apple faces a bill of $862m (£565m) after losing a patent lawsuit. It then goes on to describe what products the patent covers, when the patent was filed, what it does, what other companies have been sued infringing, what the outcomes was, what the l…
> It then goes on to describe what products the patent covers, when the patent was filed, what it does, what other companies have been sued infringing, what the outcomes was, what the likely outcomes is going to be in this case and the factors that are likely to have an effect. Oddly enough, they got lots of these things wrong. Here's the patent in question: http://www.google.com/patents/US5781752 1. It was filed in…
> 1. It was filed in 1996, not 1998.
Ok they used 'filed' when they should have used 'issued' or 'granted'. That's technically incorrect although unlikely to matter to layreader.
> The patent itself doesn't say anything about power efficiency (although perhaps that was argued at trial), so I'm not sure where they got that.
It's argued explicitly in the complaint. Not sure how you count this as something they got wrong since they're right just because it's not footnoted to a level you're comfortable with.
> That may be true, but it's so vague as to be pretty information-free.
It is in fact true and I don't find it vague at all. What information do you think need to be included in an article pointed at the casual reader?
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That might be true, but that doesn't mean it's something that should be patented.
Would you like to expand on why you think it shouldn't be patented? Architectural optimizations are often dismissed by outsiders as being "obvious", but what they don't see are all the other "obvious" ideas that don't work for various subtle reasons. I worry that if you make these techniques unpatentable, they'd become trade secrets and nobody would publish them, and we'd be worse off as a community.
These were University researchers. It's not like they're in it for the crazy-$$. In my experience, they'd publish anyway... for all the right reasons: furthering humanity, intellectual curiosity, academic prestige, etc.
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That might be true, but that doesn't mean it's something that should be patented.
Would you like to expand on why you think it shouldn't be patented? Architectural optimizations are often dismissed by outsiders as being "obvious", but what they don't see are all the other "obvious" ideas that don't work for various subtle reasons. I worry that if you make these techniques unpatentable, they'd become trade secrets and nobody would publish them, and we'd be worse off as a community.
If someone did implement this into a chip that was successful, it would take a lot less than 20 years to reverse engineer how they did it, even if they took steps to avoid reverse engineering.
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I'm not trying to be snarky but are you being serious ? Because NFL-Class Stadium is not one of the features I would think of if I was doing a bullet list of things a university should have. My 30k student university has a sports hall and a gym.
Some of the major college football programs have a net worth over half a billion dollars each. The University of Texas Leghorns (men's football program) brings in over USD$130 million a year. UT has 50K students. http://www.ibj.com/blogs/4-the-score/post/45498-notre-dame-n...
Also, just the ticket sales for one game at Camp Randall Stadium bring in ~$4 million.