So Tivo has patented the idea of recording television
NO NO NO.
TiVo patented a METHOD of recording television.
There are many original and non-obvious aspects to the Tivo design. The ability to record television, and (!!!) play it back at the same time, do not count.
Because those are not aspects of the design, yes. They part of the functionality specification -- which is not patentable. The method by which TiVo implements that functionality IS patentable, and patented. TiVo is suing EchoStar because they allegedly use the same method.
I don't know why I bother reading patent stories on/. anymore. Very few people here seem to understand the basic concepts on which patent law is founded.
Pausing live TV. What's involved in that? A storage device with a write head for recording incoming data and an independently targettable read head.
That's one way it could be implemented, sure. Another one would be to have two storage devices side-by-side, and write to one while reading from the other.
Which way does TiVo do it? Is that the way EchoStar does it too?
TiVo implements a mechanical tape VCR using digital storage and processing, and suddenly an old idea with loads of prior are is patent-worthy?
Surely you're aware that patents are designed to cover implementations, not concepts?
Moving an old idea to a new implementation is not patent-worthy, IMHO.
I guess not.
Even if TiVO does do the exact same thing as a VCR, just with a hard disk and MPEG encoder instead of a spool of magnetic tape, the differences in implementation are enough to validate the patent. That's how it works. That's how it's supposed to work.
When we no longer produce anything of value here, what do we have to trade?
How about food?
The United States has more acres of farmland than most countries have acres, period. All the manufacturing jobs in the world can migrate out of the US, but if the people working at them have to trade with the US in order to eat, America will always have bargaining power.
The 1 percent of are population that controls most of the worlds wealth and now wants more.
They CONTROL it. In most cases they don't OWN it. The CEO of Sony, for example, may control billions of dollars, but can't do whatever he likes with it. The benefits of having those assets are shared by every single employee of Sony worldwide.
There's a difference between influence exerted by corporations, and influence exerted by individuals. People need to understand this.
Wait, so "corporations" and "wealthy corporate executives" are completely interchangeable?
Sure, the execs could live the high life in India... but if the entire company up and moves across the ocean, they can kiss the North American market goodbye. No sales means no company means the gravy train comes to an end.
If you provide no balance to the violence of video games, the outcome can only be violent behavior.
I don't know, twiddling a joystick and mashing some buttons doesn't seem all that violent to me.
Or did you mean to imply that on-screen violence is psychologically equivalent to real-life violence? I have yet to see any studies that suggest that fully mentally developed, mature adults have any difficulty differentiating the two.
I doubt WhenU held a gun to people's head forcing them to install the WhenU client.
When I was using IE with the default security settings, I found WHenU had "magically" installed itself on my PC without even prompting me. More than once.
To say it plainly, if it's MY computer, I'll install what I choose, and if I'm not happy, I know exactly where the uninstall is located.
To respond just as plainly, WhenU doesn't give a crap what you want. If they have an opportunity to get their software onto your system, they'll take advantage of it. Their uninstall doesn't even work -- I had to use Spybot to clean my system afterward.
Now that I'm running Firebird and have whenu.com nullrouted in my Hosts file, life is much better.
The internet gets more and more VALUABLE to me everyday, as the amount of news, information, opinion, and opportunity keeps growing incrementally. Yes, some of that growth is commercial activity, and some of THAT is undesirable crap, but I wouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Think about it. It has a special version of WinXP, that means access to the Win32 API.
Do you really think they would put the entire Win32 API in an embedded version of XP? All a gaming/entertainment console needs is the basics, plus DirectX.
Also, this product is clearly designed to compete with the Xbox, and thus Microsoft has more incentive to see it fail than to see it succeed. Putting Embedded XP on this console is/will be a huge mistake.
I don't think the comparasion to Dot Bombs is entirely accurate
Then post a comment stating such, like the rest of us do. Your opinion doesn't belong attached to the story submission, even if you are Hemos.
And in the last article you put up, you saw fit to append your own insight too -- you said that Okokrim is the equivalent to the RIAA. This is simply factually untrue. The commenters who immediately corrected you got modded up -- but how come we couldn't mod your comment down?
Given that SMTP will transmit sender or recipient addresses over the wire as cleartext, someone can use a sniffer to discover your address even if you don't "put it online". The only way to avoid this is to make sure every link between you and your correspondent tunnels through a secure connection, or just not user or even have an email address at all.
I have results to share from my own "pew" study... it concludes that the RIAA's tactics STINK.
Re:Two comments, just to alienate everyone equally
on
Windows 98 Phased Out
·
· Score: 1
No, because there's not a Powerbook in existence that can boot OS 6.
Shouldn't we be incensed about that too? It's all a ploy by Apple to make us upgrade to OS 7 or better! Right?
I think Dell will give you a hard time about it as well if you upgrade your OS and go calling them for support.
I would guess that Dell stopped shipping PCs with Win98 pre-installed at least 3 years ago. Exactly who would still have a manufacturer support plan for a PC that old?
If your non-supported version of RedHat turns out to have a critical flaw, which are you going to do: plan an upgrade to a supported version, or hire some coders to paw through the source, find the cause of the flaw, patch it, and apply your ad-hoc patch to all your systems?
Products have lifecycles. Life cycles must include a death phase. Better to move on than to constantly attempt to cheat death.
They then wield the power via copyright law and DMCA
FATAL CREDIBILITY ERROR: irrelevant buzzwords detected on line 2.
if cars had as many defects and ran as poorly as windows, people would go back to riding horses.
If cars were like Linux, you'd have to assemble the engine yourself and each company that sold them would have a different fuel formulation. The moonroof wouldn't work right out-of-the-box and you'd have to dig through enormous piles of CAD diagrams to figure out why (hint: it's a setting in an obscure text file under the passenger seat).
I upgraded my home and work PCs in late 2003, for the first time in 5 years. IDE ribbons still everywhere inside -- though it's nice that they now have handles molded onto the connectors to make them easier to detach.
It generally takes a couple years between when a hardware technology is introduced, and when it truly starts to become popular. My PCs both came with floppy drive controllers and PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors, even though USB's been mature for years.
99% of web designers today seem to have no idea why they should be using 'em' instead of 'b' tags
On behalf of that 99%...
"em" has an extra character in each open and close tag, meaning the source document is larger, meaning it takes longer to serve to the user, meaning fewer total pages can be served.
99% of interactive web browsers are visually oriented. ALL modern browsers render emphasized text by making it bold. In practice, and are identical.
Let's say someone invents an HTML-to-speech browser for the visually impaired, and everyone starts using it to have web pages read to them. This is a case where the semantics of "em" are more appropriate than the typesetting instruction "b", but... it doesn't matter. The speech browser is surely going to be backwards-compatible with today's "bad" HTML, and will interpret any "b" in a logical manner for speech, basically meaning "b" still equals "em".
Sorry, but this is a pet peeve of mine. What Al Gore claimed was: [...]
Yes, we're all aware of this. Someone inevitably posts this same explanation each and every time someone makes reference to the claim that Al Gore "invented" the Internet.
In fact, I did price out Macs and PCs of comparable power not too long ago -- my specs included some accessories like TV tuners and high end sound cards that don't normally come standard.
A headless dual-G4 (cheaper than the lowest-end G5 available) config would have cost me $1800. HP priced a comparabkle P4 package at $1300. I'm running XP instead of OSX as a result.
Perhaps for general purpose computing, the price rift is minimal. But if your needs differ at all from what Apple's hardware focus is on, the gap can open right back up.
Given that, if you only have 5 or 10% of the market, you will always be at the big guy's anticompetitive whim as they decide on some new proprietary standard that locks you out.
Apple's been at 5-10% of the market share (if even that) for like 10 years now. What examples of them being damaged by the "anticompetitive whims" of the "big guts" can you cite?
Slashdot Mirror
So Tivo has patented the idea of recording television
/. anymore. Very few people here seem to understand the basic concepts on which patent law is founded.
NO NO NO.
TiVo patented a METHOD of recording television.
There are many original and non-obvious aspects to the Tivo design. The ability to record television, and (!!!) play it back at the same time, do not count.
Because those are not aspects of the design, yes. They part of the functionality specification -- which is not patentable. The method by which TiVo implements that functionality IS patentable, and patented. TiVo is suing EchoStar because they allegedly use the same method.
I don't know why I bother reading patent stories on
Pausing live TV. What's involved in that? A storage device with a write head for recording incoming data and an independently targettable read head.
That's one way it could be implemented, sure. Another one would be to have two storage devices side-by-side, and write to one while reading from the other.
Which way does TiVo do it? Is that the way EchoStar does it too?
Have you even READ the patent?
TiVo implements a mechanical tape VCR using digital storage and processing, and suddenly an old idea with loads of prior are is patent-worthy?
Surely you're aware that patents are designed to cover implementations, not concepts?
Moving an old idea to a new implementation is not patent-worthy, IMHO.
I guess not.
Even if TiVO does do the exact same thing as a VCR, just with a hard disk and MPEG encoder instead of a spool of magnetic tape, the differences in implementation are enough to validate the patent. That's how it works. That's how it's supposed to work.
When we no longer produce anything of value here, what do we have to trade?
How about food?
The United States has more acres of farmland than most countries have acres, period. All the manufacturing jobs in the world can migrate out of the US, but if the people working at them have to trade with the US in order to eat, America will always have bargaining power.
The 1 percent of are population that controls most of the worlds wealth and now wants more.
They CONTROL it. In most cases they don't OWN it. The CEO of Sony, for example, may control billions of dollars, but can't do whatever he likes with it. The benefits of having those assets are shared by every single employee of Sony worldwide.
There's a difference between influence exerted by corporations, and influence exerted by individuals. People need to understand this.
Wait, so "corporations" and "wealthy corporate executives" are completely interchangeable?
Sure, the execs could live the high life in India... but if the entire company up and moves across the ocean, they can kiss the North American market goodbye. No sales means no company means the gravy train comes to an end.
If you provide no balance to the violence of video games, the outcome can only be violent behavior.
I don't know, twiddling a joystick and mashing some buttons doesn't seem all that violent to me.
Or did you mean to imply that on-screen violence is psychologically equivalent to real-life violence? I have yet to see any studies that suggest that fully mentally developed, mature adults have any difficulty differentiating the two.
One of the benefits of the First Amendment is that various idiots can't say "the state is repressing our ideas"
Actually, because of the First Amendment they can say that all they want.
Obscenity laws are censorship.
Where do we draw the line people? what is acceptable and what is not?
How about we don't criminalize ANY interactive fiction, and let people decide with their wallets, on an individual basis, where to draw the line?
I doubt WhenU held a gun to people's head forcing them to install the WhenU client.
When I was using IE with the default security settings, I found WHenU had "magically" installed itself on my PC without even prompting me. More than once.
To say it plainly, if it's MY computer, I'll install what I choose, and if I'm not happy, I know exactly where the uninstall is located.
To respond just as plainly, WhenU doesn't give a crap what you want. If they have an opportunity to get their software onto your system, they'll take advantage of it. Their uninstall doesn't even work -- I had to use Spybot to clean my system afterward.
Now that I'm running Firebird and have whenu.com nullrouted in my Hosts file, life is much better.
Says you.
The internet gets more and more VALUABLE to me everyday, as the amount of news, information, opinion, and opportunity keeps growing incrementally. Yes, some of that growth is commercial activity, and some of THAT is undesirable crap, but I wouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Think about it. It has a special version of WinXP, that means access to the Win32 API.
Do you really think they would put the entire Win32 API in an embedded version of XP? All a gaming/entertainment console needs is the basics, plus DirectX.
Also, this product is clearly designed to compete with the Xbox, and thus Microsoft has more incentive to see it fail than to see it succeed. Putting Embedded XP on this console is/will be a huge mistake.
I don't think the comparasion to Dot Bombs is entirely accurate
Then post a comment stating such, like the rest of us do. Your opinion doesn't belong attached to the story submission, even if you are Hemos.
And in the last article you put up, you saw fit to append your own insight too -- you said that Okokrim is the equivalent to the RIAA. This is simply factually untrue. The commenters who immediately corrected you got modded up -- but how come we couldn't mod your comment down?
Don't put your email address online, period.
Given that SMTP will transmit sender or recipient addresses over the wire as cleartext, someone can use a sniffer to discover your address even if you don't "put it online". The only way to avoid this is to make sure every link between you and your correspondent tunnels through a secure connection, or just not user or even have an email address at all.
I have results to share from my own "pew" study... it concludes that the RIAA's tactics STINK.
No, because there's not a Powerbook in existence that can boot OS 6.
Shouldn't we be incensed about that too? It's all a ploy by Apple to make us upgrade to OS 7 or better! Right?
I think Dell will give you a hard time about it as well if you upgrade your OS and go calling them for support.
I would guess that Dell stopped shipping PCs with Win98 pre-installed at least 3 years ago. Exactly who would still have a manufacturer support plan for a PC that old?
If your non-supported version of RedHat turns out to have a critical flaw, which are you going to do: plan an upgrade to a supported version, or hire some coders to paw through the source, find the cause of the flaw, patch it, and apply your ad-hoc patch to all your systems?
Products have lifecycles. Life cycles must include a death phase. Better to move on than to constantly attempt to cheat death.
They then wield the power via copyright law and DMCA
FATAL CREDIBILITY ERROR: irrelevant buzzwords detected on line 2.
if cars had as many defects and ran as poorly as windows, people would go back to riding horses.
If cars were like Linux, you'd have to assemble the engine yourself and each company that sold them would have a different fuel formulation. The moonroof wouldn't work right out-of-the-box and you'd have to dig through enormous piles of CAD diagrams to figure out why (hint: it's a setting in an obscure text file under the passenger seat).
Whee! Simplistic and inelegant analogies are FUN!
I don't think the VHS/BETA fight took this long to figure out a winner.
The VCR format war lasted roughly from 1975 to 1985.
SATA... popular? I dunno about that.
I upgraded my home and work PCs in late 2003, for the first time in 5 years. IDE ribbons still everywhere inside -- though it's nice that they now have handles molded onto the connectors to make them easier to detach.
It generally takes a couple years between when a hardware technology is introduced, and when it truly starts to become popular. My PCs both came with floppy drive controllers and PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors, even though USB's been mature for years.
If he had found a truly elegant proof of the general case, and believed it was true, why not pose the general challenge?
hmm... because the margins were too small to pose it in?
99% of web designers today seem to have no idea why they should be using 'em' instead of 'b' tags
On behalf of that 99%...
"em" has an extra character in each open and close tag, meaning the source document is larger, meaning it takes longer to serve to the user, meaning fewer total pages can be served.
99% of interactive web browsers are visually oriented. ALL modern browsers render emphasized text by making it bold. In practice, and are identical.
Let's say someone invents an HTML-to-speech browser for the visually impaired, and everyone starts using it to have web pages read to them. This is a case where the semantics of "em" are more appropriate than the typesetting instruction "b", but... it doesn't matter. The speech browser is surely going to be backwards-compatible with today's "bad" HTML, and will interpret any "b" in a logical manner for speech, basically meaning "b" still equals "em".
Sorry, but this is a pet peeve of mine. What Al Gore claimed was: [...]
Yes, we're all aware of this. Someone inevitably posts this same explanation each and every time someone makes reference to the claim that Al Gore "invented" the Internet.
In fact, I did price out Macs and PCs of comparable power not too long ago -- my specs included some accessories like TV tuners and high end sound cards that don't normally come standard.
A headless dual-G4 (cheaper than the lowest-end G5 available) config would have cost me $1800. HP priced a comparabkle P4 package at $1300. I'm running XP instead of OSX as a result.
Perhaps for general purpose computing, the price rift is minimal. But if your needs differ at all from what Apple's hardware focus is on, the gap can open right back up.
I can now have the most efficient OS and the fastest CPU available in one platform.
How'd you get MS-DOS 3.1 to even run on a G5 chip?
Given that, if you only have 5 or 10% of the market, you will always be at the big guy's anticompetitive whim as they decide on some new proprietary standard that locks you out.
Apple's been at 5-10% of the market share (if even that) for like 10 years now. What examples of them being damaged by the "anticompetitive whims" of the "big guts" can you cite?