Some people (like myself) also have crippled CD-ROM drives that can't do a proper rip. READ_LONG or whatever not supported. Another CD-ROM drive I had inserted random pops throughout the music and/or didn't keep time properly. (Granted, this was in the days when Napster didn't exist and Scour ran out of someone's dorm room, so the technology has probably hadvanced since then.)
Maybe I should have been a bit more specific... I was referring to this Matrix-like thing, not the one in the commercial. (Since I don't live in the U.S., I didn't see the E*Trade Matrix commercial. I'll have to check them out on AdCritic later)
Well, the little Matrix-like effect they're doing this year falls in the "news for nerds" category. What does everyone think of that? I find it pretty cool -- a bit jumpy, but what can you expect for live video processing? In a few years, they'll be able to make it as smooth as a movie effect.
The thing I didn't get was the Backstreet Boys (or N*Sync of 98 Degrees or whoever they were -- I wasn't paying attention, and they're all the same to me.) Does the superbowl have a huge audience of pre-teen girls I'm not aware of?
Very informative. From the media coverage I have seen in recent years, I always thought it was a sudden "fine one second, gone the next" explosion. Now I understand that there was video evidence of problems within 1 second of launch. I've seen news coverage today in the form of 15 second clips on CNN, but I wonder if there is any source (online or TV documentary) that has a more detailed explanation of what went wrong.
Re:Interesting Moderation
on
The Challenger
·
· Score: 1
There seems to be some sort of bug in the way the moderation is calculated. (Or maybe it's a feature?)
Moderation Totals:Insightful=3, Funny=1, Total=4.
Looks like it should be insightful, but somehow got funny.
While I see the point, I'm wondering whether that makes whole "patent (my method for) doing something obvious" any less sinister. You have to wonder just how many different ways there are to index the net. Knowing nothing about AltaVista's internals, I could probably come up with a way that's close enough to get their lawyers grinning. And if Megacorp X's lawyers came after Joe User (or even a Minicorp with a lot of competitive potential), what do you think would happen?
Regardless of anything else, the more noise we make about silly patents, whether or not all of that fear is justified, the more likely we are to get people thinking about changing the system. And there is certainly no shortage of truly bad patents -- and lawyers itching to enforce them. The infamous Amazon.com "One-Click Patent" is one example we all know.
On a somewhat-related note, I just came acrooss tet another example of Megacorp sending a truckload of lawyers after some little kid:
Hasbro vs. Dinobot.org. (From the we-wish-we-had-registered-that-domain-first file.)
So the company should just lay off all of its engineers and product developement people until the PS2 is a few years old? Every company is always planning furture product releases. I heard that Microsoft was working on the successor to Windows 2000 before W2K was even in beta.
Also, consumers, developers, and especially shareholders would like to be assured that there is a future in the PlayStation line, and they're not buying into a dead-end technology.
But remember that this is Slashdot, not CNN. It's not as if Sony is announcing this to the world just yet.:)
Most people don't like ads, so they get ingored. Why don't people like ads?
90% of them look like they were slapped together in 2 minutes. A cheap-looking ad does not inspire confidence in the quality of the site behind the link. Every ad I remember clicking on looked like it was made by a professional graphic artist. Yes, computers are capable of displaying more than 16 colours.
No originality. Oh look, someone else is trying to make their ad look like a Windows dialog box. It was cool the first time, now I just ignore them.
Animated garbage to catch our attention. Whether they be dancing credit cards, animation in a fake windows dialog box, or just a flashing background -- almost all animation is there just to get my attention. Well, it works -- I say, "my god that's annoying", and scroll down the page without a second thought.
Misleading messages. Click the fast-moving object and win a prize! Okay, maybe this belongs under item 2.
Unclear messages. A surprising number of ads don't give enough of an idea what you'll get by clicking. In the beginning, this was a marketing tactic -- "hmm, I wonder what this means... maybe I'll check it out." I admit, I did it myself. Now, it's so common, it's not worth our time to look at every obscure ad.
Dislike of interruption. Unlike traditional media, the internet is interactive. While surfing, I have a "plan", if you will. I know where I want to go next -- and it's not to that advertiser's web site. The ad has to be more interesting than the other content on the same page. It doesn't help that most ads cause the page I'm currently reading to disappear.
Lack of other interesting ads. If 98% of the ads aren't worth my attention, my eyes will be trained to automatically ignore the ad.
Untargeted ads. A corollary to the above, most of the ads I have zero interest in even if I did notice them. Online casinos, credit cards, some shareware program -- I'm not interested in any of these things.
Perception that ads are annoying. Corollary 2: popup windows, animated visual pollution, and the rest of the above -- all contributing to the notion that ads are a scurge that should be ignored.
And that's just what came to the top of my head at the moment.;)
Since I am a Canadian citizen, I am allowed to copy other people's CDs for my own use. Does that apply to things like Naspter as well? There are two computers involved in the copying, but I am the one who initiates the copy, not the person providing the music. (It's the same as my co-worker leaving his CD collection on his desk and saying "borrow whatever you like.")
We have taken control of the internet naming system. We have claimed ownership to any and all TLDs that didn't exist before January 2000. That's right -- we own words that haven't been invented yet and ccTLDs for countries that don't exist yet. Every permutation of the ASCII alphabet is ours. Furthermore, we have patented them all. Since we now own everything, none of the new TLDs you create will work, because they belong to us. You might as well close up shop, as you are now obsolete.
Anyone can register a TLD through our organization. Naturally, we are willing to negotiate licencing for the TLDs you have recommended. For a small fee.
SECONDLY
We must protest that you cater to geeks, rather than to "Internet Business Modellers" such as ourselves. The New Media world is rough on business who just want to strike it rich off this Internet thing.
Our organization hereby believes that ICANN sucks.
I quite often hear the argument that "no matter what protections they create, there will be a way to bypass it." While this may be true, I certainly hope that nobody allows themselves to be more accepting of such restrictive technologies as a result. Not only would a circumvention device be illegal under the DCMA, but Joe Average Consumer would not purchase such a device, for ethical reasons. Right now, you can buy macrovision strippers, illegal cable descramblers, and any number of similar things, but most people wouldn't buy one. If the corproations manage to convince the public that freedoms we now enjoy (such as recording a program for later viewing) are illegal, people will feel the same reluctance to purchase a device designed to circumvent that restriction. Unless the default settings on all future televisions, VCRs, CD players, and other devices preserve the fair use rights we now enjoy, we may as well give up those rights ourselves.
I quite often hear the argument that "no matter what protections they create, there will be a way to bypass it." While this may be true, I certainly hope that nobody allows themselves to be more accepting of such restrictive technologies as a result. Not only would a circumvention device be illegal under the DCMA, but Joe Average Consumer would not purchase such a device, for ethical reasons. Right now, you can buy macrovision strippers, illegal cable descramblers, and any number of similar things, but most people wouldn't buy one. If the corproations manage to convince the public that freedoms we now enjoy (such as recording a program for later viewing) are illegal, people will feel the same reluctance to purchase a device designed to circumvent that restriction. Unless the default settings on all future televisions, VCRs, CD players, and other devices preserve the fair use rights we now enjoy, we may as well give up those rights ourselves.
I'd say we should all hope that all region 2-8 discs remain of poor quality and lack the special features of the region 1 discs! Yes, I live in region 1 (which I used to refer to as North America), but I'm not trying to be elitist or anything. Think about it... when people in other parts of the world demand region 1 discs, it creates a corresponding demand for region-free players. Isn't that what we want? If all discs were of equal quality and were available in all regions, people wouldn't care so much about region-free players, and the market would vanish. Even though the only perfect solution would be to have regional restrictions declared illegal under international trade or antitrust laws, it's better to keep the noose as loose as possible. If people in the rest of the world demand region 1 discs, more power to them.
> What about 2001, weren't more problems predicted?
I see one problem: it's that people are going to try to express the 1st of January as 01-01-01. The day after that will be 01-01-02. Or will it be 02-01-01? Or is it 01-02-01? For the next 12 years, people who like those silly date formats will confuse the heck out of the rest of the world. It's best we all start using the international standard, 2000-01-02.
>So, it sounds like it's specific to online auctions
So, when you take something that has been done thousands of times before, and stick it on an auction site, it somehow becomes a brillint innovation that requires legal protection?
As for thumbnail galleries... I'd say the Sears catalogue beat them to this by a few years.
The solution, as always, lies in science fiction -- hold the whole thing in front of you, like a PDA. Sure, the whole room will be able to hear your conversation, and the microphone will have to be super high quality, but sci-fi can't be wrong!
Montreal also has the horizontal ones. In some parts of New Brunswick, they use horizontal ones for pedestrian crosswalks and vertical ones for intersections. The horizontal traffic lights tend to be the ones that use different shapes -- square for stop, circle for green, yellow diamonds.
Given that sounds get from your ear to your brain through neurons, could you make a codec which encodes sound as a representation of which neurons would be fired as you perceive that sound? (To increase compression, you could lower the sampling rate and the percentage of neurons represetned.) That seems like the obvious form of perceptual encoding, since it's what they'd have to use to make an artifical ear for a deaf person. If perceptual encoding is much like that, wouldn't it be too obvious to patent?
Disclaimer: I realize that anyone who knows anything about physiology is probably laughing at me now. I know almost nothing of the subject.
I wouldn't want to have laws that were applied so strictly and asbolutely. A legal system that allows for such flexibility based on ths situation is quite admirable. You hit the nail right on the head when you pointed out the reasoning: it is "demonstrably justifiable in a free and democratic society"
This law is designed to protect democracy. If you knew the probable outcome of the election before you voted, wouldn't you take that into consideration when casting your ballot, or when deciding whether to vote at all? This is a very intelligent law, which exists to maintain the integrity of the electoral process.
This law was not written with the internet in mind -- it was designed to prevent television and radio stations from prematurely broadcasting results from more easterly time zones. Since the internet will become more of an issue as each year passes, the law will probably cease to become effective. If this happens, the simple solution would be to keep ballot boxes closed across the country until polls close on the west coast.
We could do that right now. It would certainly eliminate any "free speech" concerns. Fortunately, Canadians are willing to look at the big picture, instead of seeing laws only in black and white.
I thought of a few more examples of applictions doing #2 before CDDB did...
- Winamp's minibrowser. If you leave it open, it will take you to a web page with more info on the song you are playing. (Specifically, links to Amazon.com and eBay.)
- I wrote a program that did this. Many of you are probably familiar with the mIRC script that informs everyone what MP3 they are playing. Back when lyrics.ch was still around, I wrote a script that would search the lyrics database and automatically display the lyrics for a given song. That sounds similar to what they claim, and was before 1999. (Lyrics.ch has been closed for a while.)
I did that. (I didn't publish it anywhere, though.) Many of you are probably familiar with the mIRC script that informs everyone what MP3 they are playing. Back in the days of lyrics.ch (the international lyrics server, shut down for copyright reasons), I set up a script that would search the lyrics database and automatically display the lyrics for a given song. That sounds similar to what they claim, and was before 1999. (Lyrics.ch has been closed for a while.)
Wouldn't even Winamp's minibrowser be prior art? If you leave it open, it takes you to a web page with info on the song. (ie a link to Amazon where you can buy it.)
Slashdot Mirror
Some people (like myself) also have crippled CD-ROM drives that can't do a proper rip. READ_LONG or whatever not supported. Another CD-ROM drive I had inserted random pops throughout the music and/or didn't keep time properly. (Granted, this was in the days when Napster didn't exist and Scour ran out of someone's dorm room, so the technology has probably hadvanced since then.)
Maybe I should have been a bit more specific... I was referring to this Matrix-like thing, not the one in the commercial. (Since I don't live in the U.S., I didn't see the E*Trade Matrix commercial. I'll have to check them out on AdCritic later)
Well, the little Matrix-like effect they're doing this year falls in the "news for nerds" category. What does everyone think of that? I find it pretty cool -- a bit jumpy, but what can you expect for live video processing? In a few years, they'll be able to make it as smooth as a movie effect.
The thing I didn't get was the Backstreet Boys (or N*Sync of 98 Degrees or whoever they were -- I wasn't paying attention, and they're all the same to me.) Does the superbowl have a huge audience of pre-teen girls I'm not aware of?
Very informative. From the media coverage I have seen in recent years, I always thought it was a sudden "fine one second, gone the next" explosion. Now I understand that there was video evidence of problems within 1 second of launch. I've seen news coverage today in the form of 15 second clips on CNN, but I wonder if there is any source (online or TV documentary) that has a more detailed explanation of what went wrong.
There seems to be some sort of bug in the way the moderation is calculated. (Or maybe it's a feature?)
Moderation Totals:Insightful=3, Funny=1, Total=4.
Looks like it should be insightful, but somehow got funny.
At this time, they are sold out.
:) I guess it applies to inventory as well.
Darn Slashdot effect.
While I see the point, I'm wondering whether that makes whole "patent (my method for) doing something obvious" any less sinister. You have to wonder just how many different ways there are to index the net. Knowing nothing about AltaVista's internals, I could probably come up with a way that's close enough to get their lawyers grinning. And if Megacorp X's lawyers came after Joe User (or even a Minicorp with a lot of competitive potential), what do you think would happen?
Regardless of anything else, the more noise we make about silly patents, whether or not all of that fear is justified, the more likely we are to get people thinking about changing the system. And there is certainly no shortage of truly bad patents -- and lawyers itching to enforce them. The infamous Amazon.com "One-Click Patent" is one example we all know.
On a somewhat-related note, I just came acrooss tet another example of Megacorp sending a truckload of lawyers after some little kid: Hasbro vs. Dinobot.org. (From the we-wish-we-had-registered-that-domain-first file.)
So the company should just lay off all of its engineers and product developement people until the PS2 is a few years old? Every company is always planning furture product releases. I heard that Microsoft was working on the successor to Windows 2000 before W2K was even in beta.
:)
Also, consumers, developers, and especially shareholders would like to be assured that there is a future in the PlayStation line, and they're not buying into a dead-end technology.
But remember that this is Slashdot, not CNN. It's not as if Sony is announcing this to the world just yet.
- 90% of them look like they were slapped together in 2 minutes. A cheap-looking ad does not inspire confidence in the quality of the site behind the link. Every ad I remember clicking on looked like it was made by a professional graphic artist. Yes, computers are capable of displaying more than 16 colours.
- No originality. Oh look, someone else is trying to make their ad look like a Windows dialog box. It was cool the first time, now I just ignore them.
- Animated garbage to catch our attention. Whether they be dancing credit cards, animation in a fake windows dialog box, or just a flashing background -- almost all animation is there just to get my attention. Well, it works -- I say, "my god that's annoying", and scroll down the page without a second thought.
- Misleading messages. Click the fast-moving object and win a prize! Okay, maybe this belongs under item 2.
- Unclear messages. A surprising number of ads don't give enough of an idea what you'll get by clicking. In the beginning, this was a marketing tactic -- "hmm, I wonder what this means... maybe I'll check it out." I admit, I did it myself. Now, it's so common, it's not worth our time to look at every obscure ad.
- Dislike of interruption. Unlike traditional media, the internet is interactive. While surfing, I have a "plan", if you will. I know where I want to go next -- and it's not to that advertiser's web site. The ad has to be more interesting than the other content on the same page. It doesn't help that most ads cause the page I'm currently reading to disappear.
- Lack of other interesting ads. If 98% of the ads aren't worth my attention, my eyes will be trained to automatically ignore the ad.
- Untargeted ads. A corollary to the above, most of the ads I have zero interest in even if I did notice them. Online casinos, credit cards, some shareware program -- I'm not interested in any of these things.
- Perception that ads are annoying. Corollary 2: popup windows, animated visual pollution, and the rest of the above -- all contributing to the notion that ads are a scurge that should be ignored.
And that's just what came to the top of my head at the moment.So...
Since I am a Canadian citizen, I am allowed to copy other people's CDs for my own use. Does that apply to things like Naspter as well? There are two computers involved in the copying, but I am the one who initiates the copy, not the person providing the music. (It's the same as my co-worker leaving his CD collection on his desk and saying "borrow whatever you like.")
The article actually states that the offending corporation is QVC, not JVC.
Has anyone heard of QVC?
Here's a summary of what the letter says:
Dear ICANN:
We have taken control of the internet naming system. We have claimed ownership to any and all TLDs that didn't exist before January 2000. That's right -- we own words that haven't been invented yet and ccTLDs for countries that don't exist yet. Every permutation of the ASCII alphabet is ours. Furthermore, we have patented them all. Since we now own everything, none of the new TLDs you create will work, because they belong to us. You might as well close up shop, as you are now obsolete.
Anyone can register a TLD through our organization. Naturally, we are willing to negotiate licencing for the TLDs you have recommended. For a small fee.
SECONDLY
We must protest that you cater to geeks, rather than to "Internet Business Modellers" such as ourselves. The New Media world is rough on business who just want to strike it rich off this Internet thing.
Our organization hereby believes that ICANN sucks.
We will 0wn you.
Your sincerely,
Anthony Harrison
Director
e2p Limited
I quite often hear the argument that "no matter what protections they create, there will be a way to bypass it." While this may be true, I certainly hope that nobody allows themselves to be more accepting of such restrictive technologies as a result. Not only would a circumvention device be illegal under the DCMA, but Joe Average Consumer would not purchase such a device, for ethical reasons. Right now, you can buy macrovision strippers, illegal cable descramblers, and any number of similar things, but most people wouldn't buy one. If the corproations manage to convince the public that freedoms we now enjoy (such as recording a program for later viewing) are illegal, people will feel the same reluctance to purchase a device designed to circumvent that restriction. Unless the default settings on all future televisions, VCRs, CD players, and other devices preserve the fair use rights we now enjoy, we may as well give up those rights ourselves.
I quite often hear the argument that "no matter what protections they create, there will be a way to bypass it." While this may be true, I certainly hope that nobody allows themselves to be more accepting of such restrictive technologies as a result. Not only would a circumvention device be illegal under the DCMA, but Joe Average Consumer would not purchase such a device, for ethical reasons. Right now, you can buy macrovision strippers, illegal cable descramblers, and any number of similar things, but most people wouldn't buy one. If the corproations manage to convince the public that freedoms we now enjoy (such as recording a program for later viewing) are illegal, people will feel the same reluctance to purchase a device designed to circumvent that restriction. Unless the default settings on all future televisions, VCRs, CD players, and other devices preserve the fair use rights we now enjoy, we may as well give up those rights ourselves.
I'd say we should all hope that all region 2-8 discs remain of poor quality and lack the special features of the region 1 discs! Yes, I live in region 1 (which I used to refer to as North America), but I'm not trying to be elitist or anything. Think about it... when people in other parts of the world demand region 1 discs, it creates a corresponding demand for region-free players. Isn't that what we want? If all discs were of equal quality and were available in all regions, people wouldn't care so much about region-free players, and the market would vanish. Even though the only perfect solution would be to have regional restrictions declared illegal under international trade or antitrust laws, it's better to keep the noose as loose as possible. If people in the rest of the world demand region 1 discs, more power to them.
That sounds like the Ferengi philosophy: "nobody would do anything good for humanity unless they were guaranteed a financial reward."
But of course, I'm tend to be the opposite, and take an "all corproations are evil" approach. (All corporations except the one I work for, of course.)
> What about 2001, weren't more problems predicted?
I see one problem: it's that people are going to try to express the 1st of January as 01-01-01. The day after that will be 01-01-02. Or will it be 02-01-01? Or is it 01-02-01? For the next 12 years, people who like those silly date formats will confuse the heck out of the rest of the world. It's best we all start using the international standard, 2000-01-02.
>So, it sounds like it's specific to online auctions
So, when you take something that has been done thousands of times before, and stick it on an auction site, it somehow becomes a brillint innovation that requires legal protection?
As for thumbnail galleries... I'd say the Sears catalogue beat them to this by a few years.
The solution, as always, lies in science fiction -- hold the whole thing in front of you, like a PDA. Sure, the whole room will be able to hear your conversation, and the microphone will have to be super high quality, but sci-fi can't be wrong!
It's sad that "silly patents" has become a weekly topic on Slashdot. Just today I came across these two silly patents:
Patent on interactive TV: How long have these sorts of ideas been around?
Patent on prepaid cellular plans: Paying for something in advance -- what a novel concept!
Montreal also has the horizontal ones. In some parts of New Brunswick, they use horizontal ones for pedestrian crosswalks and vertical ones for intersections. The horizontal traffic lights tend to be the ones that use different shapes -- square for stop, circle for green, yellow diamonds.
Given that sounds get from your ear to your brain through neurons, could you make a codec which encodes sound as a representation of which neurons would be fired as you perceive that sound? (To increase compression, you could lower the sampling rate and the percentage of neurons represetned.) That seems like the obvious form of perceptual encoding, since it's what they'd have to use to make an artifical ear for a deaf person. If perceptual encoding is much like that, wouldn't it be too obvious to patent?
Disclaimer: I realize that anyone who knows anything about physiology is probably laughing at me now. I know almost nothing of the subject.
I wouldn't want to have laws that were applied so strictly and asbolutely. A legal system that allows for such flexibility based on ths situation is quite admirable. You hit the nail right on the head when you pointed out the reasoning: it is "demonstrably justifiable in a free and democratic society"
This law is designed to protect democracy. If you knew the probable outcome of the election before you voted, wouldn't you take that into consideration when casting your ballot, or when deciding whether to vote at all? This is a very intelligent law, which exists to maintain the integrity of the electoral process.
This law was not written with the internet in mind -- it was designed to prevent television and radio stations from prematurely broadcasting results from more easterly time zones. Since the internet will become more of an issue as each year passes, the law will probably cease to become effective. If this happens, the simple solution would be to keep ballot boxes closed across the country until polls close on the west coast.
We could do that right now. It would certainly eliminate any "free speech" concerns. Fortunately, Canadians are willing to look at the big picture, instead of seeing laws only in black and white.
I thought of a few more examples of applictions doing #2 before CDDB did...
- Winamp's minibrowser. If you leave it open, it will take you to a web page with more info on the song you are playing. (Specifically, links to Amazon.com and eBay.)
- I wrote a program that did this. Many of you are probably familiar with the mIRC script that informs everyone what MP3 they are playing. Back when lyrics.ch was still around, I wrote a script that would search the lyrics database and automatically display the lyrics for a given song. That sounds similar to what they claim, and was before 1999. (Lyrics.ch has been closed for a while.)
I did that. (I didn't publish it anywhere, though.) Many of you are probably familiar with the mIRC script that informs everyone what MP3 they are playing. Back in the days of lyrics.ch (the international lyrics server, shut down for copyright reasons), I set up a script that would search the lyrics database and automatically display the lyrics for a given song. That sounds similar to what they claim, and was before 1999. (Lyrics.ch has been closed for a while.)
Wouldn't even Winamp's minibrowser be prior art? If you leave it open, it takes you to a web page with info on the song. (ie a link to Amazon where you can buy it.)