[Only a habitual user of freebase cocaine would believe that] it really costs $19.95 to ship a CD.
What does it cost to produce a glass master and replicate the run of CDs? What does it cost for jewel case? What does it cost to print paper manuals and boxes? What does it cost to hire wage earners to put the CDs and manuals in the boxes? What does it cost to handle the payroll and benefits of said wage earners? What does it cost to insure the business? What does it cost to ship them and insure them?
Saying "Apple sells hardware, not software" is just false, because they charge over $100 for the latest OS and $50 for AppleWorks
Apple's primary competition charges $300 for the latest desktop OS (Windows XP Professional) and $400 for its office suite. At those prices, Apple is practically giving them away, no?
B - Microsoft doesn't freely distibute Windows on a PC that they have sold
The XBox operating system is based on a stripped-down version of Microsoft Windows 2000.
Besides, even if you don't count the XBox, what happens when hardware prices fall so much that the price of a Windows license becomes more than half the cost of a new computer system? Then who made most of the computer?
One is an end user making a patch to software they have bought, on their machine. The other is a company distributing tools to alter the software of one of their competitors, in order to sell more of their competing product.
So then should the patch be distributed as a source code package that the end user./configures and makes? That didn't work for the DeCSS source code.
No current DVD players have MPEG-4 support, not even early DVD players from Circuit City called "DIVX". The early "DIVX" referred to a pay-per-view program that has since been terminated.
To get a DVD player with MPEG-4 support, buy a Dell laptop computer (no, a fellow can't currently build his own laptop to my knowledge) and download and install the DivX codec. Then connect its S-Video and headphone outputs to a regular TV, or connect its VGA and headphone outputs to a compatible HDTV.
and usually the proceeds of sale from your previous house.
Which are taxed out the wazoo. After taxes and other fees, the amount a typical homeowner keeps from the sale of a house is barely enough to make the downpayment.
Besides, you can't buy a $200,000 house for $200,000. The bank will want a lot of that in finance charges.
ADSL is available only within two miles of the phone company's switch. In order to live within two miles of the phone company's switch, some people would have to move house. Buying a house may cost $200,000 payable over 360 months, and for that price, you might as well get a T1 line to your home.
Seriously, I would be very disapointed if a movie about such an accident didn't portray the people in this situation as annoyed enough to swear.
If the IMAX company wants to remove George Carlin's favorite words from all movies shown on its screens, but it wants to preserve the plot, it could use a standard sound effect for each word, as I do in my custom clean versions of popular rap songs:
Fuck: 1000 Hz triangle wave
Shit: two sawtooth waves, increasing from 60 to 75 Hz and from 62 to 80 Hz
Cocksucker: Rooster crowing
Piss: Snake or cat hiss, or faucet
Tit(s): four triangle waves at 300, 375, 2400, and 2700 Hz
Valium (or other tranquilizing drugs): "Volume" sample from "Pump Up the Volume" by M/A/R/R/S
Bitch: Dog bark
Asshole: Donkey braying
Head, as in "Give head": Record scratch
For other cuss words, either just use silence, or think up some other sound.
What about LAME? They've managed to create an MP3 encoder without, from what I understand, infringing upon FhG's patents.
As I mentioned in another comment, LAME is covered by the same patents that affect all other MP3 software. The only thing the LAME developers have managed to work their way out of was the copyright on the ISO reference encoder. The patents on the basic process of MP3 encoding (spectral transform, hearing model, bit allocation in critical bands, quantization of spectral coefficients, entropy coding) and decoding (reversing the process) still cover any coder that creates an MP3 compatible bitstream.
This is an open standard. It's just patented. Patents expire.
Not if Fraunhofer and the pharmaceutical companies manage to stuff a few thousand dollars down a few senators' pants and get some sort of "Cherilyn Lapierre Patent Term Extension Act" passed. Hell, if it worked for Sonny...
I'll publish them at least in MP3 format, and maybe Ogg if I can get a good encoder.
Also, the USPTO does not operate at a profit. They spend more then they take in (as of last I looked, anyway)
You seem mistaken. The USPTO produces a net profit from patent and trademark application fees, which Congress siphons off into the general treasury, leaving the USPTO unable to hire more examiners to handle the influx of patent applications properly, with a full prior art search.
US patent law doesn't require you to disclose your patent within any given period of time.
Not exactly. The common-law doctrine of laches states that if a patent holder is aware of an infringement that has been ongoing for years, he can't sue for damages on infringements that occurred before the suit was filed; all he can get is an injunction and perhaps damages for infringements that occurred during litigation. If it has been going on for six or more years, the alleged infringer has more of a chance in court because the burden of proof shifts to the patent holder.
If you had bought an iPod for your MP3 player, you could have been secure in the knowledge that ogg can be added at any time with an extremely simple firmware upgrade.
Are you sure? How do you know that the iPod player doesn't have a dedicated MP3 chip that takes an MPEG audio bitstream on one set of pins and produces WAV audio on another? (It does.)
You can submarine a patent for as long as you like *cough*GIF*cough*.
Nope, that's copyright. A patent lasts only 20 years after it is filed, plus any time necessary for products such as new drugs to get federal regulatory approval.
Is it -any- MP3 player, or just ones that use the Frauenhoffer reference implementation?
The very act of encoding a waveform into an MPEG audio layer 3 stream is patented, no matter how it is performed (because all possible methods simplify ultimately to the invention listed in the patent claims), and I'd assume decoding is patented as well.
I mean, LAME has managed to get arround patent issues by completely reimplementing the encoder.
Wrong. LAME managed to get around the copyright on the ISO MPEG audio distribution. Copyrights are not patents, and patents are not copyrights. Unlike copyrights, which can be circumvented through "clean room" reverse engineering because they have a limited defense of "independent creation of a work" that those with enough money for a legal defense (i.e. not an individual songwriter) can use, once an invention is patented, it's considered published to the whole United States, and you can't clean-room around it.
Let them come to me to cough-out 75 for my license.
If they win, they get not 75 cents but $15,000 in actual damages, as that's the annual minimum royalty. From the software royalty rate page:
Annual minimum royalties are payable upon signature and each following year in January and are fully creditable against annual royalties: US$ 15 000.00 per calendar year
I agree that charging fees after the format is underhanded, and possibly grounds for anti-trust violations
It is in no way an antitrust violation to change the license of a patent, or to discriminate in licensing the patent to (say) black people, unless the patent holder has been found to hold "market power" as defined in the antitrust law. 35 USC 271:
No patent owner otherwise entitled to relief for infringement or contributory infringement of a patent shall be denied relief or deemed guilty of misuse or illegal extension of the patent right by reason of his having done one or more of the following:... refused to license or use any rights to the patent... unless, in view of the circumstances, the patent owner has market power in the relevant market for the patent or patented product on which the license or sale is conditioned.
I predict that Fraunhofer will argue that the existence of RealPlayer, WMA, and Ogg proves that Fraunhofer lacks market power in the market for audio coding technology.
I like DAT best. It's pure digital, and doesn't do any compression
DAT is lossy. It loses all frequencies above 24 kHz (48 kHz sample rate + Nyquist-Shannon theorem). It loses all signals below -120 dB due to the effective 20-bit performance of 16-bit dithered PCM. It loses the front-and-back dimension.
The question becomes how much loss a fellow can tolerate. For audio engineers, 24-bit 96 kHz WAV works well (AIFF is limited to 65,535 Hz). (Cool Edit Pro supports 32-bit floating-point, which has incredible dynamic range.) For consumers, even audiophiles with high-quality amps and speakers, 192 kbps Ogg is more than enough for stereo audio.
I've heard plenty of stories of bands with demos on DAT where the master was destroyed/lost. All the backups are worthless.
The Audio Home Recording Act requires consumer DAT decks sold in the United States to follow a Serial Copy Management System standard. However, professional DAT decks are completely exempt. Do these bands not know of a local small-time recording studio that can recover their audio?
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[Only a habitual user of freebase cocaine would believe that] it really costs $19.95 to ship a CD.
What does it cost to produce a glass master and replicate the run of CDs? What does it cost for jewel case? What does it cost to print paper manuals and boxes? What does it cost to hire wage earners to put the CDs and manuals in the boxes? What does it cost to handle the payroll and benefits of said wage earners? What does it cost to insure the business? What does it cost to ship them and insure them?
Saying "Apple sells hardware, not software" is just false, because they charge over $100 for the latest OS and $50 for AppleWorks
Apple's primary competition charges $300 for the latest desktop OS (Windows XP Professional) and $400 for its office suite. At those prices, Apple is practically giving them away, no?
A - Microsoft doesn't manufacture PCs
then what's this?
B - Microsoft doesn't freely distibute Windows on a PC that they have sold
The XBox operating system is based on a stripped-down version of Microsoft Windows 2000.
Besides, even if you don't count the XBox, what happens when hardware prices fall so much that the price of a Windows license becomes more than half the cost of a new computer system? Then who made most of the computer?
One is an end user making a patch to software they have bought, on their machine. The other is a company distributing tools to alter the software of one of their competitors, in order to sell more of their competing product.
So then should the patch be distributed as a source code package that the end user ./configures and makes? That didn't work for the DeCSS source code.
but how many DVD players have DivX encoding?
No current DVD players have MPEG-4 support, not even early DVD players from Circuit City called "DIVX". The early "DIVX" referred to a pay-per-view program that has since been terminated.
To get a DVD player with MPEG-4 support, buy a Dell laptop computer (no, a fellow can't currently build his own laptop to my knowledge) and download and install the DivX codec. Then connect its S-Video and headphone outputs to a regular TV, or connect its VGA and headphone outputs to a compatible HDTV.
and usually the proceeds of sale from your previous house.
Which are taxed out the wazoo. After taxes and other fees, the amount a typical homeowner keeps from the sale of a house is barely enough to make the downpayment.
Besides, you can't buy a $200,000 house for $200,000. The bank will want a lot of that in finance charges.
Obviously this author hasn't heard of DSL/ADSL.
ADSL is available only within two miles of the phone company's switch. In order to live within two miles of the phone company's switch, some people would have to move house. Buying a house may cost $200,000 payable over 360 months, and for that price, you might as well get a T1 line to your home.
I'm considering moving just to get [an Internet connection with throughput greater than 56 kbps and ping less than 1 second].
It costs $200,000 to buy a new house, generally with 360 month financing. For that price, you can probably get a T1 line to your current home.
Is there any chance that the Word that comes with even the $99 Works is not full-featured?
Probably some EULA difference, some restriction that they put on $99 Word that they don't put on $350 Word.
Seriously, I would be very disapointed if a movie about such an accident didn't portray the people in this situation as annoyed enough to swear.
If the IMAX company wants to remove George Carlin's favorite words from all movies shown on its screens, but it wants to preserve the plot, it could use a standard sound effect for each word, as I do in my custom clean versions of popular rap songs:
For other cuss words, either just use silence, or think up some other sound.
There was some very offensive material in that filthy movie!
I counted twenty-seven obscene or profane words in Apollo 13 when I saw it in the theater.
I have no life.
We, after all, don't own broadband providers, we're merely customers.
Some of us do own (a small piece of) Verizon Communications.
What about LAME? They've managed to create an MP3 encoder without, from what I understand, infringing upon FhG's patents.
As I mentioned in another comment, LAME is covered by the same patents that affect all other MP3 software. The only thing the LAME developers have managed to work their way out of was the copyright on the ISO reference encoder. The patents on the basic process of MP3 encoding (spectral transform, hearing model, bit allocation in critical bands, quantization of spectral coefficients, entropy coding) and decoding (reversing the process) still cover any coder that creates an MP3 compatible bitstream.
The concept of a lossy or lossless encoder is relative to the digital source material.
What if the digital source material is from a camcorder that captures directly to DVD-RW or DVD+RW? Does that make MPEG-2 no longer lossy?
This is an open standard. It's just patented. Patents expire.
Not if Fraunhofer and the pharmaceutical companies manage to stuff a few thousand dollars down a few senators' pants and get some sort of "Cherilyn Lapierre Patent Term Extension Act" passed. Hell, if it worked for Sonny...
I'll publish them at least in MP3 format, and maybe Ogg if I can get a good encoder.
OggDropXPd.
I have a feeling that if I publish Ogg, it's not going to get downloaded very much
As !Xabbu mentioned, Winamp 2.80 and later support Ogg out of the box.
Also, the USPTO does not operate at a profit. They spend more then they take in (as of last I looked, anyway)
You seem mistaken. The USPTO produces a net profit from patent and trademark application fees, which Congress siphons off into the general treasury, leaving the USPTO unable to hire more examiners to handle the influx of patent applications properly, with a full prior art search.
US patent law doesn't require you to disclose your patent within any given period of time.
Not exactly. The common-law doctrine of laches states that if a patent holder is aware of an infringement that has been ongoing for years, he can't sue for damages on infringements that occurred before the suit was filed; all he can get is an injunction and perhaps damages for infringements that occurred during litigation. If it has been going on for six or more years, the alleged infringer has more of a chance in court because the burden of proof shifts to the patent holder.
If you had bought an iPod for your MP3 player, you could have been secure in the knowledge that ogg can be added at any time with an extremely simple firmware upgrade.
Are you sure? How do you know that the iPod player doesn't have a dedicated MP3 chip that takes an MPEG audio bitstream on one set of pins and produces WAV audio on another? (It does.)
You can submarine a patent for as long as you like *cough*GIF*cough*.
Nope, that's copyright. A patent lasts only 20 years after it is filed, plus any time necessary for products such as new drugs to get federal regulatory approval.
You could always get a sharp zaurus and use it to play your ogg files.
Sharp Zaurus PDA: $350.
Cheap low-end MP3 CD player at Best Buy: $50.
Is it -any- MP3 player, or just ones that use the Frauenhoffer reference implementation?
The very act of encoding a waveform into an MPEG audio layer 3 stream is patented, no matter how it is performed (because all possible methods simplify ultimately to the invention listed in the patent claims), and I'd assume decoding is patented as well.
I mean, LAME has managed to get arround patent issues by completely reimplementing the encoder.
Wrong. LAME managed to get around the copyright on the ISO MPEG audio distribution. Copyrights are not patents, and patents are not copyrights. Unlike copyrights, which can be circumvented through "clean room" reverse engineering because they have a limited defense of "independent creation of a work" that those with enough money for a legal defense (i.e. not an individual songwriter) can use, once an invention is patented, it's considered published to the whole United States, and you can't clean-room around it.
Let them come to me to cough-out 75 for my license.
If they win, they get not 75 cents but $15,000 in actual damages, as that's the annual minimum royalty. From the software royalty rate page:
I agree that charging fees after the format is underhanded, and possibly grounds for anti-trust violations
It is in no way an antitrust violation to change the license of a patent, or to discriminate in licensing the patent to (say) black people, unless the patent holder has been found to hold "market power" as defined in the antitrust law. 35 USC 271:
I predict that Fraunhofer will argue that the existence of RealPlayer, WMA, and Ogg proves that Fraunhofer lacks market power in the market for audio coding technology.
I like DAT best. It's pure digital, and doesn't do any compression
DAT is lossy. It loses all frequencies above 24 kHz (48 kHz sample rate + Nyquist-Shannon theorem). It loses all signals below -120 dB due to the effective 20-bit performance of 16-bit dithered PCM. It loses the front-and-back dimension.
The question becomes how much loss a fellow can tolerate. For audio engineers, 24-bit 96 kHz WAV works well (AIFF is limited to 65,535 Hz). (Cool Edit Pro supports 32-bit floating-point, which has incredible dynamic range.) For consumers, even audiophiles with high-quality amps and speakers, 192 kbps Ogg is more than enough for stereo audio.
I've heard plenty of stories of bands with demos on DAT where the master was destroyed/lost. All the backups are worthless.
The Audio Home Recording Act requires consumer DAT decks sold in the United States to follow a Serial Copy Management System standard. However, professional DAT decks are completely exempt. Do these bands not know of a local small-time recording studio that can recover their audio?