Its possible, though I don't know if MythTV uses the exact methods specified by the patent having never used MythTV or looked into how it worked. The patents are pretty specific.
The key to the Echostar patent is the ability by the broadcaster to mark certain sections of the video stream as unskippable meaning you can't fast forward past them. This is something the tivo does not do.
So why is it that we still don't have an open source project that truely does what tivo does? MythTV and similar projects are close but no bananna. Sorry Tivo had a lot of innovations that have yet to be truely matched. Doing it all by hand (even with your computer involved) is not close to the same as what tivo does. Where did you automatically gather tv guide data from in 1998? Did your capture software allow you to enter keywords, search that guide data, and automatically start and stop recording when the show you wanted was playing? Were you interacting with the recording and playing and searching software with an IR remote?
Tivo was unique, not that any of its parts alone were unique, but the entire combination was. Patents can be granted on novel combinations of already existing and obvious parts. I would say that the method for doing what tivo does is not obvious and definitely was not obvious in 1998.
Each little idea is obvious, but I'd say that the combination of all the ideas (which is what the patent is on) is not. The tivo is a truely unique idea, not in its parts, but in the combination which is far more than the sum of said parts.
The part that tivo patented was the glue to put all of those ideas together into a useful machine. That is valid to patent. I would have to read the "time warp" patent but I would assume that its the combination of all the above ideas into a single machine capable of the automatic time shifting of video with minimal interaction from the user. At the time tivo started it was an innovative idea and it hit big, thats what patents are for, to allow the creator of the idea to get rewarded for the work.
I think you hit on a big key to the computer industry that will make it very hard for linux to overtake windows, and if linux does overtake windows make it incredibly hard for windows to make it back in to the arena.
The key point is this, users in general want to use a single product that works, a commodity. Most people will pick the application that has the most other users provided its at an affordable price to them. Thats why office and windows keep growing in popularity, they work, they are affordable, and TONS of people use it. The economic network affects in the industry are amazing and will be hard to break. For that reason linux must form a united front to collect up lots of users that can all use the same app in nearly the same way in order to bring other users into the fold.
Unfortunately the whole idea of linux is lots of choice and lots of different ways to use it and so the general mainstream user will be fearful of it in general.
The reason (from what I've seen) that DVD+RW drives are cheaper is that the 5 or 6 big names are subsidising the hell out of them in order to win the battle. It was less than 1 year ago and they were far more expensive. As far as things go since the parts inside the drives are remarkably similar the material cost should be close to even, however I think that the big names are heavily subsidising the chipsets for +r drives so that -r gets blown out of the water.
In the end I don't care because I will just replace my drive when the time comes and the blanks I've already burned work fine in all of my devices so there isn't an issue there.
I agree, the problem being that regardless of how many ways there are to fix the issue, it costs your employer money, and if someone can do your job but doesn't have a past link to open source code they will cost the company less money and thus you go on the bottom of the stack. I'm just pointing out where a "stigma" of past work maybe have real consequences to the employer and why its not necessary an invalid method of filtering.
I've seen (over the last maybe 5 months) that +R media has dropped in price drastically to where I can usually find it for the same or cheaper price than the -r media that I use.
My thoughts are that the people with the drives that use the losing media will use up what they can buy and when it comes to the point where its no longer available they will dump the drive and buy a $100 burner that uses the easy to find media. I don't see it as a huge problem.
Except its an "easy" way to filter out a lot of people. For instance if you are a company scare of your software being forced open source (bad subject to bring up but a reasonable one for a hiring manager to have to think about) you might avoid any employees with a great deal of open source work experience for fear that they might bring along with them too much open code that could get stuck into your code base. Its sort of an absurd problem but its one that I'm sure managers have to think about.
Re:Much more expensive now...
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Yeah that is true, though here in seattle you need 3 blockers with guns to get to anything good on those racks, its totally crazy.
Re:And the question is
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Lots of places, so long as its a salary based job and you meet all your deadlines it often doesn't matter if you take a few moments off to do something interesting. My boss would be happy that I was finding a way to prevent my burn out since that seems to be one of the big things where I work now days.
Much more expensive now...
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· Score: 4, Informative
The key to making the first books listed interesting to the parents of the geeks was that the projects were quite cheap to work on and used scraps from around the house. Unfortunately the linux projects use very expensive scraps that a majority of people don't have. I think that its very cool stuff but it is the sort of thing that I think most kids will only get to read and drool over because thier parents won't have the supplies to complete the projects.
As far as buying the supplies surplus it seems that the people that have them readily available think they are gold and want around $100 to $500 for the apparant junk. It would be cool if you could collect the stuff on its way to the landfill however and use it. Thats where I got a lot of my computer pieces before I had money.
It may be fair use, but last time I signed up for comcast cable renting the cable box was an obligation under the contract. I think they expressly wrote a contract that prevented use of third party boxes.
What this may be able to do is kill the record industry as a requirement to market. If you have everything you need to sell your music in a box for a cheap price, someone should be able to open a portal site that links you back to the author. All that is necessary at that point is getting radio playtime.
Then again not many people won big by marketing direct through mp3.com so maybe its a dead end. Would be nice if selling music became so easy that every band did it for themself, would solve the record industry problem in 10 or 15 years as thier locked in contracts ran out and no new bands would sign with them.
Yeah, I was surprised they even mentioned a price in the article as I was under the impression that the operator was able to set whatever price he wanted by mucking with the settings on the coin slot part of the machine.
I think what he was saying is that the fact that it runs on the n-gage may not be that exciting but that having mame for the model of phone mentioned is much cooler.
Actually I understand the situation, it just irks me that I have to pay (with no other choice since recently all of the other viable providers in my area started charging portability fees as well) for a service I really don't want.
The reason people pushed for number portability is that it costs a LOT to tell people a new phone number when your number changes. Businesses especially need the phone number to stay static because any person that has the old number and not the new one is a lost sale.
Your analogy of moving and being required to get a new phone number is not applicable to the number portability issue. A better analogy would be your home line service is provided by Qwest who you think really sucks so you switch to Verizon because you think they are better. You can do this without being forced to get a different phone number. Unfortunately this causes us to pay extra fees as well (look on your land line phone bill at those extra silly fees that make your bill $50 instead of the reported $29.95) which sucks.
My personal opinion is that the burden of the cost to port a phone number from one carrier to another should be placed on the people that actually make the switch. There should be a fee to move your number from one company to the other and only then. Its silly that I (who doesn't want to move) would have to pay the $5 a month (thats what I think sprint PCS is adding to the bill) so that other people can have the luxury of bouncing between carriers and keeping thier number.
Drupal (I use this on my site) is actually pretty easy to use. You log in (most people understand that concept), click "create a story", fill out the web form with your cool stuff, and bam new webpage in your website. It automatically gets sorted and formatted and all that fun stuff. I really like it.
The downside to this whole thing is that as of 4.1.0 of drupal there were still some large bugs that made it unusable in some ways. The photo module for instance is pretty poor. I like it because the underlying code is simple enough that I, even though I don't know php for the most part, am able to work around the issues with small code hacks.
Version 4.3.0 is out now and I think its time for me to upgrade to see if any of the things that upset me are fixed. If drupal worked perfectly it would be a great solution for the type of site that the poster seems to want to set up. Lets hope they get to that point.
The solution is to sell something more than the content as your product. I'm not sure what that might be, though honestly its most of the time worth it to just go buy music I want as opposed to searching around the net to find a decent sounding file. A reduction of prices and added features (larger cover art, easier to use lyrics, info about the artist or something fun) would give incentive to buy a cd as opposed to just getting the content.
There would still be heat generated, but I think the key is that by storing the energy after it passed through a gate so that it may be reused we can get more decisions made with the same amount of energy.
Right now it takes one "pulse" of electricity to make one decision, with reversable logic it seems that you could get more, maybe 2 "pulses" for ever 3 decisions because you could save 1/2 the energy from each of the first two decisions which would allow you to pay for the third.
Heat would still be genererated in the process but instead of blowing 3 "pulses" worth of electricity off into heat you would only lose 2 to make the same number of decisions.
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Its possible, though I don't know if MythTV uses the exact methods specified by the patent having never used MythTV or looked into how it worked. The patents are pretty specific.
The key to the Echostar patent is the ability by the broadcaster to mark certain sections of the video stream as unskippable meaning you can't fast forward past them. This is something the tivo does not do.
Tivo was unique, not that any of its parts alone were unique, but the entire combination was. Patents can be granted on novel combinations of already existing and obvious parts. I would say that the method for doing what tivo does is not obvious and definitely was not obvious in 1998.
Each little idea is obvious, but I'd say that the combination of all the ideas (which is what the patent is on) is not. The tivo is a truely unique idea, not in its parts, but in the combination which is far more than the sum of said parts.
The part that tivo patented was the glue to put all of those ideas together into a useful machine. That is valid to patent. I would have to read the "time warp" patent but I would assume that its the combination of all the above ideas into a single machine capable of the automatic time shifting of video with minimal interaction from the user. At the time tivo started it was an innovative idea and it hit big, thats what patents are for, to allow the creator of the idea to get rewarded for the work.
The key point is this, users in general want to use a single product that works, a commodity. Most people will pick the application that has the most other users provided its at an affordable price to them. Thats why office and windows keep growing in popularity, they work, they are affordable, and TONS of people use it. The economic network affects in the industry are amazing and will be hard to break. For that reason linux must form a united front to collect up lots of users that can all use the same app in nearly the same way in order to bring other users into the fold.
Unfortunately the whole idea of linux is lots of choice and lots of different ways to use it and so the general mainstream user will be fearful of it in general.
In the end I don't care because I will just replace my drive when the time comes and the blanks I've already burned work fine in all of my devices so there isn't an issue there.
I agree, the problem being that regardless of how many ways there are to fix the issue, it costs your employer money, and if someone can do your job but doesn't have a past link to open source code they will cost the company less money and thus you go on the bottom of the stack. I'm just pointing out where a "stigma" of past work maybe have real consequences to the employer and why its not necessary an invalid method of filtering.
My thoughts are that the people with the drives that use the losing media will use up what they can buy and when it comes to the point where its no longer available they will dump the drive and buy a $100 burner that uses the easy to find media. I don't see it as a huge problem.
Except its an "easy" way to filter out a lot of people. For instance if you are a company scare of your software being forced open source (bad subject to bring up but a reasonable one for a hiring manager to have to think about) you might avoid any employees with a great deal of open source work experience for fear that they might bring along with them too much open code that could get stuck into your code base. Its sort of an absurd problem but its one that I'm sure managers have to think about.
Yeah that is true, though here in seattle you need 3 blockers with guns to get to anything good on those racks, its totally crazy.
Lots of places, so long as its a salary based job and you meet all your deadlines it often doesn't matter if you take a few moments off to do something interesting. My boss would be happy that I was finding a way to prevent my burn out since that seems to be one of the big things where I work now days.
As far as buying the supplies surplus it seems that the people that have them readily available think they are gold and want around $100 to $500 for the apparant junk. It would be cool if you could collect the stuff on its way to the landfill however and use it. Thats where I got a lot of my computer pieces before I had money.
It may be fair use, but last time I signed up for comcast cable renting the cable box was an obligation under the contract. I think they expressly wrote a contract that prevented use of third party boxes.
might as well take a double dose of either, since the only difference I can see between the two is the antihistamine is left out of dayquil.
Then again not many people won big by marketing direct through mp3.com so maybe its a dead end. Would be nice if selling music became so easy that every band did it for themself, would solve the record industry problem in 10 or 15 years as thier locked in contracts ran out and no new bands would sign with them.
I guess I can dream.
I think that only applies to trademarks, I think copyright and patent rights are kept even if not defended 100%.
Yeah, I was surprised they even mentioned a price in the article as I was under the impression that the operator was able to set whatever price he wanted by mucking with the settings on the coin slot part of the machine.
I think what he was saying is that the fact that it runs on the n-gage may not be that exciting but that having mame for the model of phone mentioned is much cooler.
Actually I understand the situation, it just irks me that I have to pay (with no other choice since recently all of the other viable providers in my area started charging portability fees as well) for a service I really don't want.
Your analogy of moving and being required to get a new phone number is not applicable to the number portability issue. A better analogy would be your home line service is provided by Qwest who you think really sucks so you switch to Verizon because you think they are better. You can do this without being forced to get a different phone number. Unfortunately this causes us to pay extra fees as well (look on your land line phone bill at those extra silly fees that make your bill $50 instead of the reported $29.95) which sucks.
My personal opinion is that the burden of the cost to port a phone number from one carrier to another should be placed on the people that actually make the switch. There should be a fee to move your number from one company to the other and only then. Its silly that I (who doesn't want to move) would have to pay the $5 a month (thats what I think sprint PCS is adding to the bill) so that other people can have the luxury of bouncing between carriers and keeping thier number.
The downside to this whole thing is that as of 4.1.0 of drupal there were still some large bugs that made it unusable in some ways. The photo module for instance is pretty poor. I like it because the underlying code is simple enough that I, even though I don't know php for the most part, am able to work around the issues with small code hacks.
Version 4.3.0 is out now and I think its time for me to upgrade to see if any of the things that upset me are fixed. If drupal worked perfectly it would be a great solution for the type of site that the poster seems to want to set up. Lets hope they get to that point.
The solution is to sell something more than the content as your product. I'm not sure what that might be, though honestly its most of the time worth it to just go buy music I want as opposed to searching around the net to find a decent sounding file. A reduction of prices and added features (larger cover art, easier to use lyrics, info about the artist or something fun) would give incentive to buy a cd as opposed to just getting the content.
Right now it takes one "pulse" of electricity to make one decision, with reversable logic it seems that you could get more, maybe 2 "pulses" for ever 3 decisions because you could save 1/2 the energy from each of the first two decisions which would allow you to pay for the third.
Heat would still be genererated in the process but instead of blowing 3 "pulses" worth of electricity off into heat you would only lose 2 to make the same number of decisions.
Maybe you are thinking of an Ebay store or one of the other special programs they provide for high volumn venders.