IEEE Spectrum has an article on Rambus, mostly about the company and how it started. It kind of glosses over the failure of RDRAM to take over the world (because it's too darn expensive to make, even discounting the licensing costs) and Rambus suing a few of the major DRAM companies over SDRAM and DDR SDRAM, which they claim are covered by their patents.

Actually that's most likely true, DDR/SDRAM does use some technology based on RDRAM while remaining compatible with current DRAM manufacturing processes (and hence it doesn't require building a brand new fabrication plant). DDR/ SDRAM is a JEDEC standard and what has been ruled is that Rambus committed fraud by not disclosing that it had the patents when JEDEC was considering the technology (Rambus is a member of JEDEC).

It's interesting what a company will do to secure its revenue stream. Rambus lives and dies by its patents, since it only licenses its designs, it doesn't make anything concrete. Lots of people on Slashdot are really against big companies because of the immoral things they do in pursuit of profits. It's kind of hard for a company to have morals but it is made up of people and companies have many of the same rights as normal citizens under US laws.

Eric said that we are not a nation of people or ideals, but a nation of laws. Our laws define our way of life, and because our laws have a certain civilized bias they favor certain acts of immorality and unfair play. (And I'm probably putting words into his mouth now.) Pure capitalism works fine because it has checks and balances. The archaic image of an angry mob burning down your store because of price gouging tactics being one example of a check. But since our laws prevent that sort of retaliatory behavior, there is less of a check on certain business practices. This leads to creating laws to replace those checks. It all leads to an artificiality that's rather fragile at times and prone to abuse.

The next IEEE Spectrum article is "Year of the Rocket". It tries to answer the question of whether or not China stole US missile technology. The author has a bit of an anti-big government/information wants to be free view of the world which makes reading the article a little distasteful. Basically it says that China's missile development has been aided by western aid (through various legal co-development efforts with US aerospace companies), that the Cox Report (a report authored by a Congressional commission headed by Rep. Christopher Cox of California) has many easy factual errors therefore it's all wrong, and that no country would steal technological secrets because that dooms you to always playing catch up.

To me it all reads biased, not taking into account how illogical humans and countries can be. It does have a good point in that one of the best ways to mitigate stolen technologies is to make them obsolete by researching better technologies. Still, that doesn't help the fact that every country (and by every I obviously mean most, with the rest wanting to but not having the resource to do it) does conduct industrial espionage on each other. If for no other reason than to keep track of the competition. So security should still be a concern.

On a lighter note, an interesting article on sorround sound. You've heard of 5.1 sorround sound, where you have left, center, right, left rear and right rear speakers, supplemented by a subwoofer. Heck, it't one of the big DVD features you see advertised on commercial DVDs. The problem with 5.1 is that it's expensive and really hard to set up in the home.

And then there's Virtual Sorround Sound. Two speakers that can generate sound that appears to come from almost anywhere, even above and below you and from the room you're in. How is that done? The speakers aren't any different than normal speakers. The secret is that the ear is designed to create different frequency distribution of sounds, and the distribution changes depending on where the sound is coming from relative to your ears. Hence, if you encode those frequency distributions and decode them before sending them to the speakers, your brain is fooled into thinking that a sound is coming from anywhere. Pretty neat, huh?

The last article of note is about Robosoccer. I saw a robot show on one of the cable channels. Two robots fighting it out. The only problem being that they were really just remote control toys because people had to control them. Something like Robosoccer is much better, where the robots are not controlled by people.

The RoboCup is held in different places, the last one was in Melbourne, Australia. There are different competitions. One is for small robots, a 5 on 5 match on a pingpong ball size table. The robots are too small for their own processing so a separate computer controls the robots, viewing the action with a tv camera. There is a competition for larger robots, on a field 9 times larger than the first one. It's a 4 on 4 match though this time the robots have to be independent (no central control but they can communicate via radio). The last competition is for four-legged robots, notably special Aibos supplied by Sony. I forgot one more competition, RoboRescue where a team of robots have to navigate a disaster area and rescue "people".

At least it sounds interesting.