if a third party provides developer tools (such as Adobe with Flash) and that third party decides to take their time offering support for those new features or to outright not offer it at all then those features do not make it to the customer.
You're missing about a hundred QUALIFIERS in your comment, here...
Installing Flash does not take over a platform. Those platform features that Adobe refuses to add don't get used IF YOU ONLY USE FLASH. Adobe can do whatever the hell they want, and iPhone developers can still write native apps with the Apple SDK and use all the new features.
And if you're going down that road, why doesn't Apple ban HTML and Javascript, since Apple might add new features to their devices and, horror of horrors, HTML and Javascript might not immediately get updated to take advantage of them...
If a country doesn't recognise software patents, why would a company feel obliged to pay licence fees for software ideas such as h.264?
Once your H.264/MP3 decoder gets flashed into the firmware of a device, it's no longer just a software patent. You'll have to pay license fees on it in practically every country in the world...
So the problem is really the reverse of what you think it is... Why should H.264 be patentable when a purpose built chip is constructed for it, but NOT when you use those same techniques in a program?
Eliminating software patents magically solves all our problems because then anyone could implement h.264, mp3 etc. without having to think about, or pay for, patent issues.
Yes, I suspected your solution works only based on ignorance. You've merely confirmed it.
What's so impossible about taking the h264 frame for frame and turning out the same quality video in Theora?
Lossy codecs selectively discard information, and H.264 and Theora are vastly different, so no chance of a special code to allow skipping some of the steps, and offering fast and/or lossless conversion from one format into the other. If you want exactly the same quality, you can use a LOSSLESS video codec like Huffyuv, but you'll find the file sizes are far larger than the input.
Ever tried making a copy of a copy, of a copy, with an audio tape? Each generation adds on to the artifacts before it, and adds it's own. Advanced lossy codecs have the same issue, but much, much worse.
If that doesn't explain it sufficiently for you, you'll just have to take my word on it, and take some time to learn the details of lossy video compression. I would recomend starting with http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/MPEG-1
The version on WP also hasn't been too badly damaged yet.
A flat exclusion of software from patentability is one solution, and its the best one.
Devices that are sold in countries which do not enfore software patents, still require paying the patent license fees for H.264, MP3, and the like. So how does eliminating software patents magically solve all our problems, again?
Actually, there's no reason a virus writer couldn't examine the Ext2 source code in Linux, find a null pointer or such, and write a payload to the file system that would be executed by your Live CD environment upon trying to mount the file system. From there, it could do any number of things to bypass any virus scanners or other utilities you might us to get rid of it.
how would one convert a clear h.264 HD video to Theora and have it come out with the same quality.
It's 100% impossible to convert a video into a lossy format and not lose quality. When the video was converted to H.264, quality was lost. When you convert it, AGAIN, to Theora, you will get all the quality loss and artifacts from H.264, and also all the quality loss and artifacts from Theora.
For "big buck bunny" in particular, you can download the lossless video yourself, and try converting that into Theora and H.264 and see how each turns out. Converting from H.264 to Theora is unfair, and the quality would likely be just as bad if you converted from Theora to H.264.
What if someone like ISO or ITU-T could publish the standard, demand that any patent claims must be done within three months and if none were made you knew with 100% certainty that any later claims are null and void?
Wow, talk about a dystopian future...
So the onus is on the individual patent holders to follow the published information from all major standards bodies, and scour them on the astronomical chance that somebody has introduced SOMETHING into the standard, SOMEWHERE, that uses any bit of your patented technologies?
That's an incredible onerous rule you're slamming down on the head of any and all patent holders.
What people don't realize is that you could never patent the end result of an invention, only the particular way in which you solved the problem. With software, they are patenting end results,
Your entire post is a non-sequitor in the context of H.264. H.264 patents are most certainly based on the specific way in which the data is transformed, and have nothing to do with the "end result".
Ranting about "software" patents is also irrational. If you eliminate software patents, you only move the problem a step further down the line. While you could then distribute a software H.264 codec, as soon as that software is attached to a piece of hardware, it's falls under the realm of traditional patented technology, and would still have to pay royalties.
So, eliminating software patents would make the loophole a bit larger, but that's all.
This is news we needed 20 years ago. SSD is going to replace mechanical HD over the next couple of years
You're probably off by an order of magnitude, there. SSDs will get adopted pretty quickly for somewhat large, and very frequently accessed/updated databases, and pretty much nothing else...
It makes sense the consumer market is adopting SSDs... SSDs vastly outperform a single HDD, but in a server environment, both throughput and seek times can be improved linearly, by just continuing to add more drives to the array... And to add insult to injury, hard drive manufacturers continue to improve the perform of their drives, while costs continue decreasing, so the baseline will continue moving as well... It's going to take a LOT longer than 2 years before SSDs can compete on price with traditional HDDs.
Appeasement is also a calculation based on statistics.
The problem is, such calculations ignore moral hazards. ie. Insurance companies find that claims for less than $5,000 are cheaper to settle than to fight in court. Therefore, they do so. Shortly there-after, huge numbers of people start making frivolous $4,500 claims... Sure, it wasn't until such claims actually come in that the "calculation changed", but it should have been painfully obvious to ANYONE what could and would likely happen.
Ignoring the moral hazard, and rewarding the criminals, was absolutely GUARANTEED to end horribly. A couple decades ago, I was concerned about the same issue... I fully expected some suicidal idiot to hijack a plane with a handgun, and intentionally crash it into the ground. This was sadly confirmed a few years late in 1996, with Flight ET961. And that's not to mention previous hijackings where eg. the jets were flown to a terrorist-friendly country, and all the Jewish passengers were summarily executed.
The only thing September 11th did was to bring the idiots up-to-speed on what was painfully obvious for many decades.
The one thing missing from PXE is authentication: A PXE system will accept any DHCP address and with it any boot server configuration. Without cryptographic boot image authentication, network security is the Achilles' heel of PXE.
If untrusted machines are being attached to the same network segment you are, you've got a hell of a lot of problems, netbooting or not...
Well, one issue is boot payload is getting bigger and bigger. One distro has about 20MB of download that would be tftped in the default case. Windows uses tftp for a *lot* more.
This is nonsense. Nobody in their right mind loads up the boot image in the first stage. The first stage is to download syslinux/grub/etc via TFTP. From there, you have all the features included in the boot loader of your choice, and can ignore PXE limitations. Want support for HTTPS? Good idea! Go include it in your boot loader.
The only reason PXE may need to be updated is because of IPv6 addressing.
Cooperation and appeasement with criminals was just as idiotic an idea then, as it is now. We have a sad, sad culture where we are supposed to leave criminals alone, and do nothing but call the police. Why? Because the police tell us to do so.
Imagine if what happened to hijackings happened to day-to-day crime... When a few cops are fighting against you, you have a pretty good chance. When the entire public is fighting against you, you have no chance at all...
"Do you have support for smooth, full-screen Flash video yet?"
A) Yes, I do. MPlayer will play any Flash videos, with a bare minimum of resources, and fully supports multiple video output methods, like xv and gl.
The PROBLEM is that Flash videos aren't directly available anywhere... You have to parse through a SWF video player object to even determine where to FIND the URL of the actual FLV or MP4 file. And add to that extremely aggressive plugin detection scripts on many sites, which will refuse to even embed the SWF if you happen to have an unknown VERSION of the flash player. Unfortunately, I've mentioned this before, and got several interested replies, but nobody has thus far written a browser plug-in that will masquerade as Flash 10, and understand just enough SWF to find the URLs, and either present them to the users, or automatically pass them to MPlayer. A sad, sad failing, to be sure, since
B) I (and many, many others) care VASTLY more about Linux's support for massive storage arrays than we do for it's support of Flash, and other user-level fluff. My servers never need to visit YouTube... But booting from a hard drive more than 2 terabytes??? Don't expect Windows to let you do that, without very specialized hardware (EFI firmware). Linux, however, can do it out of the box with many common distros.
That doesn't suggest any legal opinion, in lieu of something more specific.
While being stereotypically vague, the ISO has indicated "baseline" MPEG-2 Video and MPEG-1 Audio Layer 2 codecs could be made without infringing patents: SC 29/WG 11 N 10876
A camera is NOT software. These are NOT software patents.
Software in the firmware of a device becomes hardware... Just try selling an MP3 player without paying the patent license fees. You're screwed in Europe, or anywhere else.
It may be possible to define an MPEG 4 baseline which doesn't have some of the bells and whistles but is based entirely on technology for which the patents have run out.
Yes there is, it's called MPEG-1. There are very few, very small technical differences between MPEG-4 ASP and MPEG-1 Video.
But then how do you get that Internet access? If you cut your cable, you can't easily get cable Internet, and if you switch to a cell phone, you can't easily get DSL.
I think it's just been a couple years since you checked on this... A dry-loop is maybe a $10 charge from Verizon at worst, and with the deals, you'll get it cheaper. Time Warner doesn't charge extra for internet without TV, at all.
With the cost of cable, it's as easy decision there. For phone service, it's closer, but cell phone prices are dropping as well.
surely MPEG 1 is either at or close to the end of its patent life (at least in the US)?
Yes, frankly, it's been a long time since anyone has tried to extract royalties from even major users. MPEG-1 Layer-3 Audio (Better known as MP3) is not free, however.
MPEG-1 Video, in fact, has an overwhelming amount in common with MPEG-4 ASP, and with a modern encoder, can look very, very nearly as good as Divx5/Xvid/FMP4/etc. Sadly, most people have never seen MPEG-1 compressed with something like MEncoder (http://mplayerhq.hu/).
Pulls about 8 watts from the wall, though I've got video disabled, second ethernet disabled, etc. Couldn't be happier with the thing.
I've got a K6-3 550 underclocked and undervolted, drawing 8 watts from the wall. Cost me $20 for CPU+mobo. PSU, case, and HDD (flash) were would probably put the total price around $60 if I didn't have it all lying around... Been my firewall/router for years now. Couldn't be happier.
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You're missing about a hundred QUALIFIERS in your comment, here...
Installing Flash does not take over a platform. Those platform features that Adobe refuses to add don't get used IF YOU ONLY USE FLASH. Adobe can do whatever the hell they want, and iPhone developers can still write native apps with the Apple SDK and use all the new features.
And if you're going down that road, why doesn't Apple ban HTML and Javascript, since Apple might add new features to their devices and, horror of horrors, HTML and Javascript might not immediately get updated to take advantage of them...
Once your H.264/MP3 decoder gets flashed into the firmware of a device, it's no longer just a software patent. You'll have to pay license fees on it in practically every country in the world...
So the problem is really the reverse of what you think it is... Why should H.264 be patentable when a purpose built chip is constructed for it, but NOT when you use those same techniques in a program?
Yes, I suspected your solution works only based on ignorance. You've merely confirmed it.
It is indeed much better for one group... And vastly, horrendously worse for another group...
The question is, is it ethically okay to steal so much from group B, and give it to group A.
Lossy codecs selectively discard information, and H.264 and Theora are vastly different, so no chance of a special code to allow skipping some of the steps, and offering fast and/or lossless conversion from one format into the other. If you want exactly the same quality, you can use a LOSSLESS video codec like Huffyuv, but you'll find the file sizes are far larger than the input.
Ever tried making a copy of a copy, of a copy, with an audio tape? Each generation adds on to the artifacts before it, and adds it's own. Advanced lossy codecs have the same issue, but much, much worse.
If that doesn't explain it sufficiently for you, you'll just have to take my word on it, and take some time to learn the details of lossy video compression. I would recomend starting with http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/MPEG-1
The version on WP also hasn't been too badly damaged yet.
Devices that are sold in countries which do not enfore software patents, still require paying the patent license fees for H.264, MP3, and the like. So how does eliminating software patents magically solve all our problems, again?
Actually, there's no reason a virus writer couldn't examine the Ext2 source code in Linux, find a null pointer or such, and write a payload to the file system that would be executed by your Live CD environment upon trying to mount the file system. From there, it could do any number of things to bypass any virus scanners or other utilities you might us to get rid of it.
A patent is your property.
The legality of the product your company manufactures, is NOT your property.
Eminent domain applies to one, and not the other.
It's 100% impossible to convert a video into a lossy format and not lose quality. When the video was converted to H.264, quality was lost. When you convert it, AGAIN, to Theora, you will get all the quality loss and artifacts from H.264, and also all the quality loss and artifacts from Theora.
For "big buck bunny" in particular, you can download the lossless video yourself, and try converting that into Theora and H.264 and see how each turns out. Converting from H.264 to Theora is unfair, and the quality would likely be just as bad if you converted from Theora to H.264.
Wow, talk about a dystopian future...
So the onus is on the individual patent holders to follow the published information from all major standards bodies, and scour them on the astronomical chance that somebody has introduced SOMETHING into the standard, SOMEWHERE, that uses any bit of your patented technologies?
That's an incredible onerous rule you're slamming down on the head of any and all patent holders.
Your entire post is a non-sequitor in the context of H.264. H.264 patents are most certainly based on the specific way in which the data is transformed, and have nothing to do with the "end result".
Ranting about "software" patents is also irrational. If you eliminate software patents, you only move the problem a step further down the line. While you could then distribute a software H.264 codec, as soon as that software is attached to a piece of hardware, it's falls under the realm of traditional patented technology, and would still have to pay royalties.
So, eliminating software patents would make the loophole a bit larger, but that's all.
You're probably off by an order of magnitude, there. SSDs will get adopted pretty quickly for somewhat large, and very frequently accessed/updated databases, and pretty much nothing else...
It makes sense the consumer market is adopting SSDs... SSDs vastly outperform a single HDD, but in a server environment, both throughput and seek times can be improved linearly, by just continuing to add more drives to the array... And to add insult to injury, hard drive manufacturers continue to improve the perform of their drives, while costs continue decreasing, so the baseline will continue moving as well... It's going to take a LOT longer than 2 years before SSDs can compete on price with traditional HDDs.
Appeasement is also a calculation based on statistics.
The problem is, such calculations ignore moral hazards. ie. Insurance companies find that claims for less than $5,000 are cheaper to settle than to fight in court. Therefore, they do so. Shortly there-after, huge numbers of people start making frivolous $4,500 claims... Sure, it wasn't until such claims actually come in that the "calculation changed", but it should have been painfully obvious to ANYONE what could and would likely happen.
Ignoring the moral hazard, and rewarding the criminals, was absolutely GUARANTEED to end horribly. A couple decades ago, I was concerned about the same issue... I fully expected some suicidal idiot to hijack a plane with a handgun, and intentionally crash it into the ground. This was sadly confirmed a few years late in 1996, with Flight ET961. And that's not to mention previous hijackings where eg. the jets were flown to a terrorist-friendly country, and all the Jewish passengers were summarily executed.
The only thing September 11th did was to bring the idiots up-to-speed on what was painfully obvious for many decades.
If untrusted machines are being attached to the same network segment you are, you've got a hell of a lot of problems, netbooting or not...
This is nonsense. Nobody in their right mind loads up the boot image in the first stage. The first stage is to download syslinux/grub/etc via TFTP. From there, you have all the features included in the boot loader of your choice, and can ignore PXE limitations. Want support for HTTPS? Good idea! Go include it in your boot loader.
The only reason PXE may need to be updated is because of IPv6 addressing.
Cooperation and appeasement with criminals was just as idiotic an idea then, as it is now. We have a sad, sad culture where we are supposed to leave criminals alone, and do nothing but call the police. Why? Because the police tell us to do so.
Imagine if what happened to hijackings happened to day-to-day crime... When a few cops are fighting against you, you have a pretty good chance. When the entire public is fighting against you, you have no chance at all...
Oh good... Because we all came here to find out if YOU prefer Flash or HTML5.
The phone booths in my country smell like urine and feces, so I suppose they have sewage lines as well...
A) Yes, I do. MPlayer will play any Flash videos, with a bare minimum of resources, and fully supports multiple video output methods, like xv and gl.
The PROBLEM is that Flash videos aren't directly available anywhere... You have to parse through a SWF video player object to even determine where to FIND the URL of the actual FLV or MP4 file. And add to that extremely aggressive plugin detection scripts on many sites, which will refuse to even embed the SWF if you happen to have an unknown VERSION of the flash player. Unfortunately, I've mentioned this before, and got several interested replies, but nobody has thus far written a browser plug-in that will masquerade as Flash 10, and understand just enough SWF to find the URLs, and either present them to the users, or automatically pass them to MPlayer. A sad, sad failing, to be sure, since
B) I (and many, many others) care VASTLY more about Linux's support for massive storage arrays than we do for it's support of Flash, and other user-level fluff. My servers never need to visit YouTube... But booting from a hard drive more than 2 terabytes??? Don't expect Windows to let you do that, without very specialized hardware (EFI firmware). Linux, however, can do it out of the box with many common distros.
That doesn't suggest any legal opinion, in lieu of something more specific.
While being stereotypically vague, the ISO has indicated "baseline" MPEG-2 Video and MPEG-1 Audio Layer 2 codecs could be made without infringing patents: SC 29/WG 11 N 10876
A camera is NOT software. These are NOT software patents.
Software in the firmware of a device becomes hardware... Just try selling an MP3 player without paying the patent license fees. You're screwed in Europe, or anywhere else.
Yes there is, it's called MPEG-1. There are very few, very small technical differences between MPEG-4 ASP and MPEG-1 Video.
I think it's just been a couple years since you checked on this... A dry-loop is maybe a $10 charge from Verizon at worst, and with the deals, you'll get it cheaper. Time Warner doesn't charge extra for internet without TV, at all.
With the cost of cable, it's as easy decision there. For phone service, it's closer, but cell phone prices are dropping as well.
Yes, frankly, it's been a long time since anyone has tried to extract royalties from even major users. MPEG-1 Layer-3 Audio (Better known as MP3) is not free, however.
MPEG-1 Video, in fact, has an overwhelming amount in common with MPEG-4 ASP, and with a modern encoder, can look very, very nearly as good as Divx5/Xvid/FMP4/etc. Sadly, most people have never seen MPEG-1 compressed with something like MEncoder (http://mplayerhq.hu/).
Because VMWare, Xen, et al. on 1 or 2 full-fledged servers would provide better performance for less money, and less power.
I've got a K6-3 550 underclocked and undervolted, drawing 8 watts from the wall. Cost me $20 for CPU+mobo. PSU, case, and HDD (flash) were would probably put the total price around $60 if I didn't have it all lying around... Been my firewall/router for years now. Couldn't be happier.