This is sort of a depressing precedent. Do we really want to turn our universities into patent trolls?
If they are trolling other patent trolls, then why not?
Only on HackerNews is Apple and Intel labeled patent trolls.
Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case
121–130 of 145 posts
Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the information content, this article could have been two sentences long.
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…
All I'm asking for is that they link to the patent (if it's a patent case) or the study (if it's a report on a study).
Have a look at this story: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-34520631
That has an inline hyperlink to a previous story. It has a list at the end of the article to other articles about the same topic. And it also has a related Internet links.
So a link to the patent could be:
_The patent, filed in 1998_
Or it could be listed in related Internet information.
Most people aren't going to use it, but it saves time for everyone who does use it. And for medical studies it's probably important to get people into the habit of trying to read and understand them.
Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case
#123This PDF explains what I discuss below in more detail: http://moodle.technion.ac.il/pluginfile.php/315285/mod_resou... . Prediction of aliasing is discussed on slide 25. The patent in question pertains to an optimization of what these days you'd call "memory disambiguation." In a processor executing instructions out of order, data dependencies can be known or ambiguous. A known data dependency is, for example, summin…
> Maybe this is worth a patent, or maybe not.
Maybe start with another question. What do you think the odds are that there was any kind of causal chain from the invention of this technique by the patent holder to Apple's use of the technique?
Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
>slide to unlock is brilliant How? It's a digital slide bolt. They just digitized a simple mechanism that's been in use for hundreds of years.
Right, but using that in a human/computer interface was not possible/intuitive until capacitive touch screen was available, and even then it was a stroke of genius to "port" real life object interaction into the software realm. They didn't patent the gesture, the patented its usage in the human/software interface context.
That is the only context in which that gesture makes sense.
You couldn't patent the steering wheel just because you stick it in something that's not a car. You'd have to use it for something that's not steering or wheeling. Slide-to-unlock is obvious because it's based on a bolt that you ... slide to unlock. There's no novelty in unlocking something, software or not, by solving such a simple 'puzzle' as moving your finger sideways. It's certainly not a stroke of genius.
Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
That must be why tuition fees are so high and record levels of student debt is required.
What an upside down system!
Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://www.theonion.com/blogpost/fuck-everything-were-doing-... So inductive patent expansion. Take previous innovation, add 1, profit. What about L0 and L4 caches? Or Renaming sets of renamed registers? The problem as others have outlined, that patents are not concrete enough. Simply describing a problem is enough to be granted a patent. The value of the description of most patents is zero, which afaik this opposite…
The blithe dismissal of the value incremental improvement doesn't make you look smarter.
Thanks for the bespoke advice.
Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I hear that "nobody would publish" argument bandied about... but is there any evidence to back it up? 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.
University researchers like John Hennessy (current President of Stanford), who made a bunch of money founding MIPS and Atheros (both of which were valued heavily for their patent portfolios)?
Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case
#128I have no sympathy for Apple in this matter. Considering the worthless, prior art ridden patents they used against their competitors they deserve the blowback. And in keeping with their modus operandi they ignored the University of Wisconsin and wilfully infringed the patent.
UW should take the money and use it to endow a chair of processor engineering.
Or maybe a table of processor engineering. That could work too.
Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case
#129This PDF explains what I discuss below in more detail: http://moodle.technion.ac.il/pluginfile.php/315285/mod_resou... . Prediction of aliasing is discussed on slide 25. The patent in question pertains to an optimization of what these days you'd call "memory disambiguation." In a processor executing instructions out of order, data dependencies can be known or ambiguous. A known data dependency is, for example, summin…
> Maybe this is worth a patent, or maybe not. Maybe start with another question. What do you think the odds are that there was any kind of causal chain from the invention of this technique by the patent holder to Apple's use of the technique?
An early paper by the inventor on the technique is cited over 300+ in Google Scholar, including by Hennessy & Patterson.
Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Yeah, in the conferences with TV deals the sports programs are not a money sink. The Big 10 certainly has a TV deal (it even has its own cable network). Also, just the ticket sales for one game at Camp Randall Stadium bring in ~$4 million.
Notre Dame's television deal with NBC was just extended to 2025, at $15 million per season.