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$1,040,000,000 for this? News for crackpots, stuff that really doesn't matter at all.

I want something better. I've got the domain "cluedot.{org,net,com}". I've got collaborative filtering technology, implemented on Advogato that might just solve the problem of miniscule S/N ratios. I just don't have the time myself to put it into production right now, as I'm too busy developing free software projects. Anyone?

Yes, yes, I know. Troll, Offtopic, Flamebait, whatever. Karma be damned, I'm pissed off to see a site that used to be my kind of news site indulge in such stupid crap.

This looks like a case of yas/.spa.

Yes, the trick of using shift-and-add to do multiplies is well known. Yes, using it in the context of a FFT (or DCT, as in this case) is obvious. But that's not what they've done here.

It looks to me like they've invented (or discovered) a new transform which is similar to the DCT, and shares many properties with the DCT, but is not simply an approximate DCT. In other words, you'd use this for designing a new video coder in which high processing speed is more important than compression ratio (they take about a 1dB hit in compression, my brain is too fuzzy convert this into percent right now).

The transform has some other interesting properties, such as the fact that the transform and its inverse are in fact exact even when you use limited-precision arithmetic, unlike DCT. This would seem to imply that repeatedly compressing and decompressing aren't going to lead to any quality degradation. Also, it might make for a more efficient lossless coder. Neither of these is a very big deal, but still interesting.

So it looks like what we have is something new, interesting, and primarily useful for video compression in hardware. I don't see a compelling reason why it shouldn't be patentable, and it certainly seems well within the scope of what the current patent system allows. Believe me, I've seen far worse in issued patents.

Lest you think I'm defending the patent system, I'm not. It's badly in need of reform. A very large fraction of issued software patents are simply bad patents. I actually believe that no software patents at all would be better than the current system, although I'm idealistic enough to hope that fixing the patent system to prevent abuses would be even better. I'm just saying that if you're going to pick on an invention, choose a better scapegoat than this one.

Finally, a shameless plug: since the discussion of patents and intellectual property on Slashdot seems to be as misinformed as it is lively, one of the explicit goals for my new site, Advogato is to host intelligent discussion of these issues. From the discussion so far, I have reason to be encouraged.

I can't believe this flame has been moderated up as "insightful." Let's go down the list of reasons, shall we?

1) Whining and moaning about how much cooler your version of slashdot would be takes no intelligence or insight of any type. If you want to whine about the quality of /. news, go the route of advogato and have the balls to do it yourself. That would be insightful.
2) This issue has been re-hashed on slashdot for a long, long time. This is nothing that hasn't been posted literally a thousand times- it's not creative or new. It probably ranks right up near "first post" in the length of time and amount of times it's been said.
3) Are you contributing anything? Are you saying anything? No, you are whining that nothing insightful has been said instead of going to the source and finding out for yourself whether there are new features or fixed bugs. If someone posts the answers to those questions, then it should merit an insightful. But it doesn't.
Sometimes I think moderation is a good thing. But then I see moderations like this and say "thank god for M2!"
~luge

I nominate Advogato for best open source advocate. While the better-known open source advocates have been racking up major publicity points for themselves and doing the impossibly hard work of selling big business the idea of software that doesn't cost them anything, Advogato has been working for the most part quietly to help the community of open source developers, the people who actually write all this code the rest of you are so fond of evangelizing.

P.S. The rules said nothing about nominations not being allowed to be self-serving :)

Basically, for the Metaverse to work, you need a massive, distributed, dynamically load-balanced database. You need near-zero latency between servers to handle synchronization. You need to be able to have servers dynamically hand off clients to one another without the user being able to perceive it happening. You need to be able to support the one guy wandering off by him/herself in the "frontiers" of the metaverse.

I may be over-simplifying things here, but I don't see why this should be such a problematic issue.

If you want to build a realistic universe, you need to provide a way for the players to move freely from one area to another without even noticing that the two areas of the universe are handled by different servers.

You could of course include teleporters, subways, or special doors to move the player from one server to another (IIRC, that idea was mentioned by John Carmack and also by John Romero in the pre-Quake days). But that would not really give the feeling of a single large universe because switching from one server to another would still require a specific action. So the areas would only be semi-connected.

Note that even this simple scheme contains some interesting problems:

• Server A must check that server B is on-line before attempting to transfer the player. Server B must be reacheable by server A but also by the user.
• Server A must also check that server B is ready to accept a new player. What if B is full? Will the player be stuck? Will a new server be spawned automatically?
• The transfer must be performed as an atomic operation, so that the player does not get lost or duplicated if there is a failure in one server, in the client or in the network.
• The transfer should also be performed in a somewhat secure way (depending on the application, you may want to prevent spoofing, replay attacks, etc.)
• The servers must trust each other to some extent, and maybe trust the client too (depending on the application). i.e. if you use the metaverse concept for a game, you do not want someone to insert a new server that will modify some players and send them back into the game with unfair advantages or disadvantages.

But the real challenge is to implement a seamless world, in which people can move around as if everything was part of a single huge map. The players should not be able to see that they are moving to a different server. In addition to the problems mentioned above, you get a lot of problems in the "frontiers" of the metaverse, as mentioned by the original poster.

For example, how will you be able to see an area that is handled by a different server than the one you are connected to? One solution would be to replicate (cache) the visible parts of the "foreign" areas on each server, but that would not work for players or any other moving objects. So the servers must exchange some informations whenever something changes near the frontiers. But there are some latency problems. If you are familiar with the QuakeWorld/QuakeII/QuakeIII problems regarding lag and movement prediction, you can imagine what will happen if more than one server is involved.

Anyway, I have been playing around with these ideas for a while and I think that I have found some solutions for building a fully distributed world (taking input from Quake, CrossFire and my personal experience about building distributed and redundant systems). Maybe I will write them down someday, and maybe even build a library that implements the necessary network protocols. Maybe...

Obviously they're too busy trying to ride the wave they've created to worry about something as trivial as security.

I am one of the Gnomers who has been following this issue, and was also present at one of the irc conversations with the Napster people. I've done a little writeup of the events, which I'm hoping will help set the record straight.

The writeup is here, posted on Advogato. As usual, anyone can read, but posting is restricting to free software developers.

First, let me add my voice to those who say that Slashdot's patent stories could use a clue or two. These sensationalistic headlines don't help anybody. I'll be adding a patent section to Advogato soon, and it's my hope that this will become a good place for informed discussion of patents relating to free software.

When you analyze a patent, the most important thing to look at is the claims. The abstract has little or no legal force, it's just there to help people searching (it's on the front page of paper patents, which was important back in the days when people searched through stacks of them :). The language of the claims has to be read in the context of the disclosure of the patent, and to really do it right, you have to read the file history too.

That said, this is another example of the US Patent and Trademark Office screwing up royally. Claim 1 covers a pretty generic computation load-sharing system - a central computer keeping track of a bunch of tasks, sending a start message to a remote computer to ask it to take the task, and the remote computer sending a complete message back to the server.

The problem here is that there is prior art up the wazoo. I'm sure experts in the field could come up with more, but just about any operating system with process migration, such as Sprite should do. The main work on this project was all done in the early '90s, plenty of time to serve as prior art.

The disclosure doesn't help the case. It talks about the types of tasks to be distributed in extraordinarily vague terms, so much so as to not make much sense. Compressing MPEG's remotely? Are they on crack? Even a 320x200 at 30fps is over 5 megabytes per second of raw data. And of course serving up web pages is fraught with problems, such as latency, security, admin costs, reliability, and so on. The patent does not so much as mention these problems, let alone propose a reasonable method of dealing with them.

So what do you do when you have such a crappy patent? I think a reasonable thing for free software authors to do is ignore it. In theory, Intel could bring suit against a free software project for violating this patent. However, in that case it seems likely to me that we'd be able to get a good pro bono legal team together, and the patent would almost certainly be overturned.

In the meantime, I think our best option is to keep well informed about patents in general, and about specific patents that may be relevant. Shallow, "golly gee-whiz, look at the patent they just got on breathing" stories don't help much.

While we're on the subject of free resources for open source/free software developers, I would like ot take this opportunity to shamelessly plug Advogato, a new site I'm launching.

Advogato is an advocate for free software developers, as opposed to free software users or free software businesses. The main features now are a Slashdot-style news flow and a cool diary server.

One of the central features is an implementation of the peer certification work I'm doing for my PhD research. The site uses a group trust metric to determine membership in the community of free software developers. Only members can post, which is my crack at the S/N problem.

If you are a free software developer, you are warmly invited to join, poke around, and participate. Others are welcome to poke around.

ObOnTopic: From a look over their site, SourceForge looks impressive as hell. With VA's backing, they inspire quite a bit of confidence that they'll be able to handle the load. This can only be of benefit to Linux, free software in general, and of course VA.

This week's editorial on Advogato has some more discussion of Linus's talk, from the specific viewpoint of free software developers.

Everyone is welcome to read, but Advogato limits posting to members of the free software development community. It's my hope that this will make Advogato a more useful resource for developers.

I am not a lawyer, although I've been known to play one in my consulting fees.

Slashdot ran an excellent article on the basics of patent law a few weeks ago. It's reposted on Advogato, the new community site I'm starting for free software developers. I'm hoping to collect a solid set of patent resources at Advogato over time, among other things.

Hope this helps!