Not necessarily. I just invented an inaudible watermarking scheme for lossless digital audio. It should work for digital copying, but because it isn't resistant to the analog hole, it doesn't introduce any audible noise.
PRIOR ART ALERT!
Digital audio on CDs is typically dithered from 24-bit down to 16-bit using random noise. Modern noise-shaping techniques limit this noise to low levels in the 16-22 kHz band, where it has been shown to be inaudible even to golden ears. I was thinking, if the seller uses a hash of the user's ID to generate the dither pattern embedded in the 16-bit audio, it will be able to prove that the track was generated for that user.
I admit that this scheme will not withstand analog hole or lossy digital compression. However, it should allow for tracing the source of mass duplicators' audio files.
Everything else has come down in cost over the years (DVD players, CDRW drives, etc) but not this.
Unlike production of DVD players and other electronic devices that conform to established standards, production of copyrighted works is highly labor-intensive, and labor prices tend to rise vs. the U.S. dollar. In fact, the inflation-adjusted price of a new release CD has fallen over the last two decades. Unlike DVD movies, which have often already recouped production and promotion costs while in theaters, CD albums do not have such a high-revenue theatrical exhibition tier.
Could distribution companies make money at a few bucks a CD? I don't see why not.
The songwriter wants his cut; that's $1. FedEx wants its cut to deliver the disc and its packaging to the mail-order customer; that's $3 more. The recording studio, the recording engineers, the commercial radio stations (there's currently no other way to reach listeners in moving vehicles), and the rest of the chain want their cuts as well. Can you see where it begins to add up far beyond the 4 USD price that you suggested?
if you cannot produce a CD-R copy for less than a dollar you're doing something seriously wrong.
The songwriter gets about eight cents per track, some of which goes to the songwriter's sheet music publisher, and some of which goes to the professional musicologist who declared the work original and not a subconscious copy of an existing copyrighted work. A dollar would cover only the songwriting royalties for an album and wouldn't cover the cost of recording the album, promoting the album, replicating the album, nor shipping the album.
Here you have a mature technology, economies of scale up the wazoo, yet the price does not go down.
Why doesn't the price of a fresh loaf of bread go down over time?
Thanks; I had forgotten about discounts for Microsoft application software installed on a K-12 student's home computer. I wasn't aware of that offer.
it's hard to ignore the enormous base of support for MS Office.
I'm not ignoring it entirely. OOo can read and write Microsoft Office documents (doc, xls, ppt) at least as well as the next version of MS Office can. From the limited use I've had of MS Office and OOo, the UIs are so similar that skills learned in one would easily transfer to the other.
free certification programs for the disabled
Does a diagnosis of Asperger syndrome (a mild form of autism, sometimes called "geek disease") count as a disability?
Really? Isn't Sun's StarOffice 7 suite the commercial distribution of OOo 1.1? What makes SO7 so much faster? If "startup time", then try making OOo load on startup (a la Mozilla).
Nero? It's Easy CD Creator that comes with most [CD recorders].
My CD recorder came with Roxio's Easy CD Creator as well. What does Nero do that Easy CD Creator doesn't, other than burn specific formats (such as.nrg) that are popular among warez traders?
Mine came with a no-name program
I'd imagine that the absolute cheapest way to go for a CD recorder manufacturer would be a VB shell around mkisofs (for data CDs), sox (for audio CDs), and cdrecord.
(even though it said on the site, on the box, and in the quick start guide that it came with Nero)
If you can find a bunch of different pieces of software that fill parts of the claim so that they, in sum, cover the claim, it is NOT prior art.
If I can find a bunch of different widely-used pieces of software that fill parts of the claim so that they, in sum, cover the claim, then though it may not be prior art, it may count as evidence that the invention was obvious to one skilled in the art.
Ad hominem. Just because the page was written by a person who prefers Opera does not mean that its conclusions are necessarily correct nor necessarily incorrect. What specific details does the pro-Opera page to which I linked get wrong?
This pattent covers a very specific way of showing activity to the user
Not as I read it. Let me reproduce here the first claim of the patent:
A method of indicating user input activity comprising:
receiving, at a first electronic device, an activity indication message indicative of a user having operated, within a predefined period of time, an input device associated with a second electronic device remote from said first electronic device;
rendering an activity indicator indicating that said user is currently operating said input device;
receiving a content message from said second electronic device, said content message comprising information entered by said user using said input device;
determining, based on receipt of said content message, that said user has stopped typing; and
ceasing to render said activity indicator based on said determining step.
Wouldn't displaying what the user is typing count as "rendering an activity indicator"? Please feel free to pick apart the rest of the claim and show how it does not apply to anything released before MSN Messenger.
Even a one-seat license is too expensive for the typical family. I'd suggest OpenOffice.org 1.1 instead.
Norton Anti-Virus
What about AVG's product, which is much cheaper for home use?
TurboTax
"If your printer jams, tough s***. You've chosen the Print command once, and you have to pay $20 more for the right to choose the Print command again. Oh, and we're not responsible if your computer doesn't boot after installing our DRM software over your partition table." Unlike Intuit's TurboTax, H&R Block's TaxCut doesn't have digital restrictions management that annoys the user.
Nero
Doesn't Ahead's Nero Burning ROM software come with the CD recorder that was ordered with the computer?
Backyard Baseball
Sports simulations that license their characters from major sports leagues will be obsolete after a year. Subscription software becomes very expensive very quickly, especially in a home with several mouths to feed.
Grand Theft Auto
Games in Rockstar's GTA series are rated M (equivalent of MPAA's R) and are not suitable for a household containing children under 17.
Are you sure that Mozilla Firebird has a smaller disk and RAM footprint and draws pages more quickly than Opera 7? What does this pro-Opera page get wrong?
Clarification: They don't use 'E' in maths either. They use a Greek capital S called "Sigma", which may look like an E to people not familiar with Greek.
If an inventor distributes embodiments of an invention to the public in the United States, the inventor must either have already applied for a U.S. patent, or he loses the patent (35 USC 102(a)). This patent was applied for in December 2002. I remember using a version of MSN Messenger with this feature in 2000.
Those keystrokes are correct for Windows 2000. However, in Windows 98 and Windows ME, C-M-Del brings up a primitive task manager; C-M-Del from that screen syncs all drives and returns to the bootloader.
Microsoft Visual Studio.NET and their CLR, including Windows Forms and everything else, ARE the standards
Mono's implementation of System.Windows.Forms isn't done yet, but it's apparently coming along nicely. There's a heavyweight version implemented in terms of Winelib and a lightweight version that wraps Gtk#. Publishers of apps that stick to the Gtk# compatible subset of Windows.Forms (i.e. don't P/Invoke Win32 and don't override Wndproc) will be able to put a penguin on their boxes as an extra bullet point. (Yes, I know Microsoft will not be such a publisher.)
Slashdot Mirror
If they water marked it there goes your quality.
Not necessarily. I just invented an inaudible watermarking scheme for lossless digital audio. It should work for digital copying, but because it isn't resistant to the analog hole, it doesn't introduce any audible noise.
PRIOR ART ALERT!
Digital audio on CDs is typically dithered from 24-bit down to 16-bit using random noise. Modern noise-shaping techniques limit this noise to low levels in the 16-22 kHz band, where it has been shown to be inaudible even to golden ears. I was thinking, if the seller uses a hash of the user's ID to generate the dither pattern embedded in the 16-bit audio, it will be able to prove that the track was generated for that user.
I admit that this scheme will not withstand analog hole or lossy digital compression. However, it should allow for tracing the source of mass duplicators' audio files.
Everything else has come down in cost over the years (DVD players, CDRW drives, etc) but not this.
Unlike production of DVD players and other electronic devices that conform to established standards, production of copyrighted works is highly labor-intensive, and labor prices tend to rise vs. the U.S. dollar. In fact, the inflation-adjusted price of a new release CD has fallen over the last two decades. Unlike DVD movies, which have often already recouped production and promotion costs while in theaters, CD albums do not have such a high-revenue theatrical exhibition tier.
Could distribution companies make money at a few bucks a CD? I don't see why not.
The songwriter wants his cut; that's $1. FedEx wants its cut to deliver the disc and its packaging to the mail-order customer; that's $3 more. The recording studio, the recording engineers, the commercial radio stations (there's currently no other way to reach listeners in moving vehicles), and the rest of the chain want their cuts as well. Can you see where it begins to add up far beyond the 4 USD price that you suggested?
if you cannot produce a CD-R copy for less than a dollar you're doing something seriously wrong.
The songwriter gets about eight cents per track, some of which goes to the songwriter's sheet music publisher, and some of which goes to the professional musicologist who declared the work original and not a subconscious copy of an existing copyrighted work. A dollar would cover only the songwriting royalties for an album and wouldn't cover the cost of recording the album, promoting the album, replicating the album, nor shipping the album.
Here you have a mature technology, economies of scale up the wazoo, yet the price does not go down.
Why doesn't the price of a fresh loaf of bread go down over time?
Thanks; I had forgotten about discounts for Microsoft application software installed on a K-12 student's home computer. I wasn't aware of that offer.
it's hard to ignore the enormous base of support for MS Office.
I'm not ignoring it entirely. OOo can read and write Microsoft Office documents (doc, xls, ppt) at least as well as the next version of MS Office can. From the limited use I've had of MS Office and OOo, the UIs are so similar that skills learned in one would easily transfer to the other.
free certification programs for the disabled
Does a diagnosis of Asperger syndrome (a mild form of autism, sometimes called "geek disease") count as a disability?
considering how much faster SO7 is.
Really? Isn't Sun's StarOffice 7 suite the commercial distribution of OOo 1.1? What makes SO7 so much faster? If "startup time", then try making OOo load on startup (a la Mozilla).
Nero? It's Easy CD Creator that comes with most [CD recorders].
My CD recorder came with Roxio's Easy CD Creator as well. What does Nero do that Easy CD Creator doesn't, other than burn specific formats (such as .nrg) that are popular among warez traders?
Mine came with a no-name program
I'd imagine that the absolute cheapest way to go for a CD recorder manufacturer would be a VB shell around mkisofs (for data CDs), sox (for audio CDs), and cdrecord.
(even though it said on the site, on the box, and in the quick start guide that it came with Nero)
Did you take this up with the manufacturer?
Why bother with Dev-C++ when you can get gcc and the rest of the standard unix developer tools as part of cygwin?
Because Dev-C++ provides a GUI around GCC.
Fortunately, software doesn't get hot.
Tell that to an Athlon owner. An Athlon processor can run more software per second, but it sure does heat the room.
If you can find a bunch of different pieces of software that fill parts of the claim so that they, in sum, cover the claim, it is NOT prior art.
If I can find a bunch of different widely-used pieces of software that fill parts of the claim so that they, in sum, cover the claim, then though it may not be prior art, it may count as evidence that the invention was obvious to one skilled in the art.
Ad hominem. Just because the page was written by a person who prefers Opera does not mean that its conclusions are necessarily correct nor necessarily incorrect. What specific details does the pro-Opera page to which I linked get wrong?
This pattent covers a very specific way of showing activity to the user
Not as I read it. Let me reproduce here the first claim of the patent:
Wouldn't displaying what the user is typing count as "rendering an activity indicator"? Please feel free to pick apart the rest of the claim and show how it does not apply to anything released before MSN Messenger.
Microsoft Office
Even a one-seat license is too expensive for the typical family. I'd suggest OpenOffice.org 1.1 instead.
Norton Anti-Virus
What about AVG's product, which is much cheaper for home use?
TurboTax
"If your printer jams, tough s***. You've chosen the Print command once, and you have to pay $20 more for the right to choose the Print command again. Oh, and we're not responsible if your computer doesn't boot after installing our DRM software over your partition table." Unlike Intuit's TurboTax, H&R Block's TaxCut doesn't have digital restrictions management that annoys the user.
Nero
Doesn't Ahead's Nero Burning ROM software come with the CD recorder that was ordered with the computer?
Backyard Baseball
Sports simulations that license their characters from major sports leagues will be obsolete after a year. Subscription software becomes very expensive very quickly, especially in a home with several mouths to feed.
Grand Theft Auto
Games in Rockstar's GTA series are rated M (equivalent of MPAA's R) and are not suitable for a household containing children under 17.
FileZilla appears to do FTP and SFTP but not SCP. Some web hosting services (such as SourceForge.net) require SCP.
use openssh from cygwin
Does Cygwin OpenSSH have GUI configuration? PuTTY does.
use emacs AND vim from cygwin
Cygwin Emacs seems to have problems with key bindings. And does Cygwin Emacs support use of a pointing device without having to install Cygwin XFree86? Or is it a TTY app?
>Dev-C++ a free C++ compiler.
*cough* cygwin
Dev-C++ is an IDE that wraps GCC, either the GCC from MinGW or the GCC from Cygwin. Does Cygwin come with an IDE (and don't say Emacs)?
Are you sure that Mozilla Firebird has a smaller disk and RAM footprint and draws pages more quickly than Opera 7? What does this pro-Opera page get wrong?
Free for non-commercial, non-networked use.
So do you claim that AVG Anti-Virus doesn't protect against viruses and worms that spread through network applications, such as mass-mailing worms?
In that case, wouldn't Powwow and UNIX talk still count as prior art against at least a few of the claims?
We don't use 'E' to write a summing loop in C
Clarification: They don't use 'E' in maths either. They use a Greek capital S called "Sigma", which may look like an E to people not familiar with Greek.
If an inventor distributes embodiments of an invention to the public in the United States, the inventor must either have already applied for a U.S. patent, or he loses the patent (35 USC 102(a)). This patent was applied for in December 2002. I remember using a version of MSN Messenger with this feature in 2000.
You should find what you're looking for in one of the results from the following Google query: remap windows key
Those keystrokes are correct for Windows 2000. However, in Windows 98 and Windows ME, C-M-Del brings up a primitive task manager; C-M-Del from that screen syncs all drives and returns to the bootloader.
those rights work very differently from other property rights. For example, they expire. You should think of them more as a temporary contract
Temporary? Trademarks registered in the USPTO don't expire as long as the holder keeps filling the meter, and neither do trade secrets. Copyrights will not expire in the United States as long as The Walt Disney Company continues to use proceeds from home video sales to pay off legislators. In other words, only patents expire.
Name one truly new useful idea that has been created by the "open sourcers" that wasn't just a lame copy of some pre-existing proprietary product.
How about RTLinux, whose invention resulted in a U.S. patent? (The patent is licensed for use in any GPL program.)
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and their CLR, including Windows Forms and everything else, ARE the standards
Mono's implementation of System.Windows.Forms isn't done yet, but it's apparently coming along nicely. There's a heavyweight version implemented in terms of Winelib and a lightweight version that wraps Gtk#. Publishers of apps that stick to the Gtk# compatible subset of Windows.Forms (i.e. don't P/Invoke Win32 and don't override Wndproc) will be able to put a penguin on their boxes as an extra bullet point. (Yes, I know Microsoft will not be such a publisher.)
Microsoft has built in a way to access the underlying Win32 API into .NET.
As I understand it, only an application fully trusted by an administrator can P/Invoke native code such as raw Win32 APIs.