It may be both an ISO standard and a de facto standard. The latter is more relevant, because there are multiple official standards -- MPEG-1 (ISO/IEC 11172), MPEG-2 (ISO/IEC 13818) and MPEG-4 (ISO/IEC 14496). Each of these standards contain multiple parts that can be used independently or together. A format is a de facto standard if it is in use in a reasonably large majority of cases, which given multiple ISO standards is much more important than whether any particular format is or is not one of them.
The question of whether it actually _is_ the de facto standard is an interesting one. My suspicion is that a larger chunk of the video being consumed out there is actually MPEG-4 Part 2, as I understand this is what is used in most digital TV systems, along with a very large chunk of what's available on TPB (DivX and xvid both being implementations of it).
US, Germany and Japan I've heard about. I didn't realise patents had been enabled in the UK more than other EU countries. AFAIK in EU software patents are unenforceable but still granted in the hope that they will one day be enforceable
1. Germany is another EU country. 2. Software patentability in the EU is a murky area, full of contradictory case law. The latest cases suggest that some software patents are considered acceptable. The legislation states that "programs for computers" aren't patentable, but courts have interpreted this to mean that just because something is a computer program doesn't mean it is automatically patentable, and the patent holder has to show that there is an invention that stands apart from mere implementation of an algorithm using a computer. That means you can't patent stuff like "a computer program to do [some thing that has been done before without computers]" and shit like that. But a completely new compression algorithm might just pass.
There aren't many UK cases where software patents have been considered, but it's worth noting that in RIM v Inpro, concerning RIM's patent on a proxying server that simplifies web pages before sending them to a mobile device, the patent was held to be invalid not because the subject matter of the patent wan't patentable, but because the supposed invention was held to be obvious to an expert in the art.
8 comments already, and not one of them mentioning anything about who this add is actually for. I'd have thought/. would have had something to say about Carly I'm shocked and amazed.
Probably because you have to pay attention to realise who the ad is for. For anyone who didn't spot it, it's Carly Fiorina. Note that at roughly the same time as her target in this ad was making the supposedly poor decisions described in it, Carly was being forced to resign as CEO of HP, having presided over a 60% reduction in its stock value, at a time when most of its competitors were doing well. And wasn't there some kind of bugging scandal as well? Not that it's mentioned on the Wikipedia article about her... presumably it's been whitewashed by her publicists.
That wouldn't even cover the expenses incurred covering your tracks, nevermind having to get by after the fact until you can find a new job.
I'd do it for half that, but my guess is they won't let somebody outside the US take part (site's slashdotted, so I can't check). They only want about a month's worth of hiding, so I'd need about $2500 for expenses. I'm willing to give up my time for another $2500. Might be an interesting way of spending a month.
It reminds me of a scam that a site called RedSave.com ran in the UK. Hidden way, way down in the tiny small print of their Terms and Conditions when you made a purchase was a line that stated "We will charge you £20 every month unless you contact us to opt out". Apparently this isn't against the letter of the law, but it sure as hell isn't a good business practice and isn't in the interests of the consumer.
While I don't suspect it's illegal (i.e. the owners of the business aren't going to end up in jail over it), I also don't suspect it's legally enforceable -- i.e. if you take them to court and demand your money back, they'll probably end up having to give it to you. There's a principle of English contract law that when dealing with consumers, the business must call the consumer's attention to anything which is unusual and detrimental to the consumer, otherwise it may not be an eforceable term of the contract. As Lord Justice Denning said:
"The more unreasonable a clause is, the greater the notice which must be given of it. Some clauses which I have seen would need to be printed in red ink on the face of the document with a red hand pointing to it before the notice could be held to be sufficient." (J Spurling Ltd v Bradshaw [1956] 1 WLR 461)
(IANAL, this is not legal advice, but I'd certainly suggest if you paid any money to this company within the last 7 years that you get some...)
Anyone in the US should realize that, its the same job the Supreme Court is supposed to fill (and sometime even does).
The problem with that is that SCOTUS is strictly limited in what it can and cannot overrule, on the basis that they can only declare a law invalid if they can find some constitutional reason for it.
In the UK, the House of Lords is quite able to prevent an otherwise acceptable law reaching statute simply on the grounds that it would be a bad idea. This is forever beyond the power of SCOTUS, constitutional amendments excepted.
If I went to someone and said "You have wronged me so pay me money or I'll report you to the cops", I could be reported and sent to jail
No you couldn't, at least not legally. This kind of threat is considered perfectly acceptable and is the basis of the "civil recovery" schemes that shops use against shoplifters: people caught stealing don't want the police involved, so will happily pay not just for what they stole but also a small amount extra, which is theoretically supposed to cover the costs of the civil recovery scheme, but is basically a fine imposed by the store they stole from, with the penalty for not paying = police involvement.
Is it simply that a cross-platform language like Java is strategic to Sun just because it makes it so that one vendor doesn't dominate the entire market, therefore also-rans and non-dominating manufacturers (like Sun) have a better change at making sales?
Essentially, the Java strategy is or was all about leveling the playing field?
Essentially, yes. Java attracts developers away from Microsoft-only environments and enables them to easily develop applications that will run on Sun hardware, even if they're using Windows as their development environment.
This is the same reason that IBM pours money into both Java and Linux development: both enable portability from commodity PCs to hardware platforms IBM sell with few or no changes to the application code.
Sure, Microsoft could release ARM versions of Word, etc, but if all you can run on your netbook is IE, Word and Powerpoint, why not run Linux instead?
Well, IE and Word are the killer apps for many people. Lets face it: you're not going to get a netbook to run photoshop on, so what else would most people want to run?
Also note that there would be plenty of third party apps available in the situation described by the OP: he would have a WinCE thunk layer and therefore you would be able to execute WinCE (aka Windows Mobile) apps, and as a large proportion of the devices running this OS are already based on ARM chips, you'd have little trouble getting hold of the apps.
The original paper claimed that the subjects were selected because they had all been referred to Wakefield within a certain time period, and all the patients referred in that time period were used as subjects, i.e. a close-to-random process that Wakefield could not have influenced.
On investigation, it turns out that Wakefield hand-picked the test subjects on the basis (IIRC) that their parents suspected the links with the MMR vaccine, i.e. a non-random process that would heavily skew the results.
This is enough to invalidate any results reported. The ethical considerations are secondary, but definitely worth reporting.
Caucho Resin has a mostly pluggable replacement for PHP which is written in Java. It adds web friendly features to PHP like distributed sessions and load balancing. Given the JVM JIT is already plenty fast and the benchmarks show that Java/PHP beats regular PHP handily - I wonder if Facebook considered using it at some point.
The main problem is lack of support for some of the quite popular extensions that are widely used in PHP apps. Just looking over the list of what's supported and what isn't, I find quite a few items missing that would be needed to support PHP projects I've worked on over the years, including raw cookie suport, unix filesystem integration functions (readlink and umask), call_user_method, the pspell module, the imap module, the mailparse module, the gnupg module, posix shared memory support, a rather large chunk of the stream handling functions, and by the looks of it the curl integration.
Along similar lines: why different rules for different forms of storytelling? Why can I have a copy of, say, A Clockwork Orange, containing a scene in which the main character takes two young kids back to his house and rapes them (and they call it literature)... but if a graphic novel wanted to tell that same story they basically wouldn't legally be able to without making shit up suggesting the kids are much older than they are supposed to be? What's the difference between these two in any sense that is relevant to why this law exists?
I suggest that from now : - Flat chested women stop having sex, this is obscene, they are like, you know, children, that's unhealthy - People having sex with flat women should be charged as pedophiles. - Pubic shaving should be forbidden. It makes the body look juvenile. - Men should have mandatory beard, otherwise they look too similar to children - Men without beard should be barred from doing porn.
Admit it, you're astroturfing on behalf of Color Climax, aren't you?
Would the US have to follow, or see their software industry collapse?
No. The US is, I believe, the world's largest market for selling software. To sell into it, you have to follow US law, including patent law. So for anyone who wants access to that market (i.e. the majority of software developers), they have to follow US law wherever they are; therefore why bother relocating outside the US?
Reform the laws so that people can't cash in on something they did not contribute to, no more random lawsuits aimed at people who did all their own work to bring things into existence.
So if I buy a house, I'm not allowed to rent it out? Or sue somebody who built their own house on my land, thus attempting to live off what I paid for fair-and-square?
We studied something like this in my social computing university class, only it was about slime mold "solving" a maze. I never understood why that (or this) was at all interesting; the growth of the slime mold is just a brute force search for food. What you end up with is a minimum spanning tree between the food "nodes." Meh.
It's useful because it's an extremely parallel algorithm; I believe it will execute in around O(log n) time steps with n nodes, making it a member of the class of fastest known algorithms for solving this kind of problem.
the proper conclusion is that japanese transportation engineers are no smarter than slime molds
Or indeed soap, which is also able to perform similar optimization tasks: take two pieces of perspex and join them together using bolts arranged in the pattern of your major destinations with a gap of around 1-2cm between them. Dip in a strong soap/water mixture and remove carefully. You should find a series of large bubbles have formed, with edges running between the bolts. Surface tension will probably have resulted in those edges being an optimal or close to optimal solution to the problem of joining them together with the most efficient network. Repeat several times, take the most common result.
Simple energy reduction problems like this aren't a useful test of anything. There are plenty of natural processes that don't involve intelligence that are more than capable of solving them.
Yes. 250W is only "twice as much power as you provide" if you're taking it very easy. Based on measurements provided by the exercise bikes at my gym, I know I'm able to produce around a kilowatt for 5 minutes or so at a time, and can sustain 500W practically indefinitely.
OTOH, there are regulatory reasons for the motor being 250W: at least here in the UK, you'd need a full drivers licence, annual vehicle inspection and all-around crash helmet to ride it if it were more powerful. It should also be designed so that the motor cannot make the bike go faster than 15mph.
I wish *EA* would use hashes or something of the sort on their databases. Last time I tried to reset my password the damn thing mailed me that actual PW in plaintext, which indicates to me that they're too stupid to realize that:
a) Storing non-hashed passwords in a DB is a good way to get hacked and expose all your customers accounts. It's really quite dumb b) Email is an insecure medium for sending somebody's password down the wire
You can guarantee there's a dev team and a DBA who sat over there in EA's offices, tearing their hear out en masse over this decision. Fact is, it happens all the time, and the cause is very simple: management writing functional specifications of software. Somebody, somewhere, put on the functional spec that there must be a password recovery function that sends your original password back to you. That person didn't understand encryption, and was too sure of himself and his ideas about how the system's supposed to work to listen to lowly developers about whether or not it's a good idea. Of course it's a good idea. He's the boss for a reason, you know?
Just how steep is the performance drop from HTTPS? With a 15 Mbit residential connection and a 2Ghz processor, I find it hard to believe that the performance drop will matter...to me.
More relevant is your ping times to the server. Opening an SSL connection requires (IIRC) 6 extra round trips as the protocol handshake and key exchange take place. On my reasonably fast connection (admittedly not a 15Mbit one) I see ping times of around 100ms for most web sites (50-60 for really high performance ones, like google and high profile sites using content distribution networks). This means using SSL would add over half a second to my page load times, which is why I usually do notice when a site is using it.
Slashdot Mirror
"in practice few players understand IDs for anything but the "official" codecs - which do not include e.g. AC3."
AC3 is an officially registered codec, with the code "ac-3".
Replying to your subject, not the content:
It may be both an ISO standard and a de facto standard. The latter is more relevant, because there are multiple official standards -- MPEG-1 (ISO/IEC 11172), MPEG-2 (ISO/IEC 13818) and MPEG-4 (ISO/IEC 14496). Each of these standards contain multiple parts that can be used independently or together. A format is a de facto standard if it is in use in a reasonably large majority of cases, which given multiple ISO standards is much more important than whether any particular format is or is not one of them.
The question of whether it actually _is_ the de facto standard is an interesting one. My suspicion is that a larger chunk of the video being consumed out there is actually MPEG-4 Part 2, as I understand this is what is used in most digital TV systems, along with a very large chunk of what's available on TPB (DivX and xvid both being implementations of it).
US, Germany and Japan I've heard about. I didn't realise patents had been enabled in the UK more than other EU countries. AFAIK in EU software patents are unenforceable but still granted in the hope that they will one day be enforceable
1. Germany is another EU country.
2. Software patentability in the EU is a murky area, full of contradictory case law. The latest cases suggest that some software patents are considered acceptable. The legislation states that "programs for computers" aren't patentable, but courts have interpreted this to mean that just because something is a computer program doesn't mean it is automatically patentable, and the patent holder has to show that there is an invention that stands apart from mere implementation of an algorithm using a computer. That means you can't patent stuff like "a computer program to do [some thing that has been done before without computers]" and shit like that. But a completely new compression algorithm might just pass.
There aren't many UK cases where software patents have been considered, but it's worth noting that in RIM v Inpro, concerning RIM's patent on a proxying server that simplifies web pages before sending them to a mobile device, the patent was held to be invalid not because the subject matter of the patent wan't patentable, but because the supposed invention was held to be obvious to an expert in the art.
8 comments already, and not one of them mentioning anything about who this add is actually for. I'd have thought /. would have had something to say about Carly I'm shocked and amazed.
Probably because you have to pay attention to realise who the ad is for. For anyone who didn't spot it, it's Carly Fiorina. Note that at roughly the same time as her target in this ad was making the supposedly poor decisions described in it, Carly was being forced to resign as CEO of HP, having presided over a 60% reduction in its stock value, at a time when most of its competitors were doing well. And wasn't there some kind of bugging scandal as well? Not that it's mentioned on the Wikipedia article about her... presumably it's been whitewashed by her publicists.
Good to hear they are finally making a sequel to the greatest movie of all time, Repo Man.
Unfortunately, the films are not related. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1053424/
You're not making much more than if you just went to work for those 30 days.
Some of us don't have jobs at the moment. I predict no shortage of volunteers.
That wouldn't even cover the expenses incurred covering your tracks, nevermind having to get by after the fact until you can find a new job.
I'd do it for half that, but my guess is they won't let somebody outside the US take part (site's slashdotted, so I can't check). They only want about a month's worth of hiding, so I'd need about $2500 for expenses. I'm willing to give up my time for another $2500. Might be an interesting way of spending a month.
It reminds me of a scam that a site called RedSave.com ran in the UK. Hidden way, way down in the tiny small print of their Terms and Conditions when you made a purchase was a line that stated "We will charge you £20 every month unless you contact us to opt out". Apparently this isn't against the letter of the law, but it sure as hell isn't a good business practice and isn't in the interests of the consumer.
While I don't suspect it's illegal (i.e. the owners of the business aren't going to end up in jail over it), I also don't suspect it's legally enforceable -- i.e. if you take them to court and demand your money back, they'll probably end up having to give it to you. There's a principle of English contract law that when dealing with consumers, the business must call the consumer's attention to anything which is unusual and detrimental to the consumer, otherwise it may not be an eforceable term of the contract. As Lord Justice Denning said:
"The more unreasonable a clause is, the greater the notice which must be given of it. Some clauses which I have seen would need to be printed in red ink on the face of the document with a red hand pointing to it before the notice could be held to be sufficient." (J Spurling Ltd v Bradshaw [1956] 1 WLR 461)
(IANAL, this is not legal advice, but I'd certainly suggest if you paid any money to this company within the last 7 years that you get some...)
Anyone in the US should realize that, its the same job the Supreme Court is supposed to fill (and sometime even does).
The problem with that is that SCOTUS is strictly limited in what it can and cannot overrule, on the basis that they can only declare a law invalid if they can find some constitutional reason for it.
In the UK, the House of Lords is quite able to prevent an otherwise acceptable law reaching statute simply on the grounds that it would be a bad idea. This is forever beyond the power of SCOTUS, constitutional amendments excepted.
If I went to someone and said "You have wronged me so pay me money or I'll report you to the cops", I could be reported and sent to jail
No you couldn't, at least not legally. This kind of threat is considered perfectly acceptable and is the basis of the "civil recovery" schemes that shops use against shoplifters: people caught stealing don't want the police involved, so will happily pay not just for what they stole but also a small amount extra, which is theoretically supposed to cover the costs of the civil recovery scheme, but is basically a fine imposed by the store they stole from, with the penalty for not paying = police involvement.
Is it simply that a cross-platform language like Java is strategic to Sun just because it makes it so that one vendor doesn't dominate the entire market, therefore also-rans and non-dominating manufacturers (like Sun) have a better change at making sales?
Essentially, the Java strategy is or was all about leveling the playing field?
Essentially, yes. Java attracts developers away from Microsoft-only environments and enables them to easily develop applications that will run on Sun hardware, even if they're using Windows as their development environment.
This is the same reason that IBM pours money into both Java and Linux development: both enable portability from commodity PCs to hardware platforms IBM sell with few or no changes to the application code.
Sure, Microsoft could release ARM versions of Word, etc, but if all you can run on your netbook is IE, Word and Powerpoint, why not run Linux instead?
Well, IE and Word are the killer apps for many people. Lets face it: you're not going to get a netbook to run photoshop on, so what else would most people want to run?
Also note that there would be plenty of third party apps available in the situation described by the OP: he would have a WinCE thunk layer and therefore you would be able to execute WinCE (aka Windows Mobile) apps, and as a large proportion of the devices running this OS are already based on ARM chips, you'd have little trouble getting hold of the apps.
Everyone knows autism is caused by plastic contaminated foods.
Vaccines? Is that guy crazy?
He probably consumed something that was sweetened with aspartame. Did you know that stuff was originally developed as a nerve toxin, and has 92 side effects including DEATH?!??!!!one!slash?!
What does that mean?
The original paper claimed that the subjects were selected because they had all been referred to Wakefield within a certain time period, and all the patients referred in that time period were used as subjects, i.e. a close-to-random process that Wakefield could not have influenced.
On investigation, it turns out that Wakefield hand-picked the test subjects on the basis (IIRC) that their parents suspected the links with the MMR vaccine, i.e. a non-random process that would heavily skew the results.
This is enough to invalidate any results reported. The ethical considerations are secondary, but definitely worth reporting.
Caucho Resin has a mostly pluggable replacement for PHP which is written in Java. It adds web friendly features to PHP like distributed sessions and load balancing. Given the JVM JIT is already plenty fast and the benchmarks show that Java/PHP beats regular PHP handily - I wonder if Facebook considered using it at some point.
The main problem is lack of support for some of the quite popular extensions that are widely used in PHP apps. Just looking over the list of what's supported and what isn't, I find quite a few items missing that would be needed to support PHP projects I've worked on over the years, including raw cookie suport, unix filesystem integration functions (readlink and umask), call_user_method, the pspell module, the imap module, the mailparse module, the gnupg module, posix shared memory support, a rather large chunk of the stream handling functions, and by the looks of it the curl integration.
Along similar lines: why different rules for different forms of storytelling? Why can I have a copy of, say, A Clockwork Orange, containing a scene in which the main character takes two young kids back to his house and rapes them (and they call it literature) ... but if a graphic novel wanted to tell that same story they basically wouldn't legally be able to without making shit up suggesting the kids are much older than they are supposed to be? What's the difference between these two in any sense that is relevant to why this law exists?
I suggest that from now :
- Flat chested women stop having sex, this is obscene, they are like, you know, children, that's unhealthy
- People having sex with flat women should be charged as pedophiles.
- Pubic shaving should be forbidden. It makes the body look juvenile.
- Men should have mandatory beard, otherwise they look too similar to children
- Men without beard should be barred from doing porn.
Admit it, you're astroturfing on behalf of Color Climax, aren't you?
Would the US have to follow, or see their software industry collapse?
No. The US is, I believe, the world's largest market for selling software. To sell into it, you have to follow US law, including patent law. So for anyone who wants access to that market (i.e. the majority of software developers), they have to follow US law wherever they are; therefore why bother relocating outside the US?
Reform the laws so that people can't cash in on something they did not contribute to, no more random lawsuits aimed at people who did all their own work to bring things into existence.
So if I buy a house, I'm not allowed to rent it out? Or sue somebody who built their own house on my land, thus attempting to live off what I paid for fair-and-square?
It is a scam for the artist, but if you read TFA, you will see that it says "give Larsen 15 percent of any increase in value of the artwork".
Of course, this is in _addition_ to the stuff he'll be able to rake in anyway.
We studied something like this in my social computing university class, only it was about slime mold "solving" a maze. I never understood why that (or this) was at all interesting; the growth of the slime mold is just a brute force search for food. What you end up with is a minimum spanning tree between the food "nodes." Meh.
It's useful because it's an extremely parallel algorithm; I believe it will execute in around O(log n) time steps with n nodes, making it a member of the class of fastest known algorithms for solving this kind of problem.
the proper conclusion is that japanese transportation engineers are no smarter than slime molds
Or indeed soap, which is also able to perform similar optimization tasks: take two pieces of perspex and join them together using bolts arranged in the pattern of your major destinations with a gap of around 1-2cm between them. Dip in a strong soap/water mixture and remove carefully. You should find a series of large bubbles have formed, with edges running between the bolts. Surface tension will probably have resulted in those edges being an optimal or close to optimal solution to the problem of joining them together with the most efficient network. Repeat several times, take the most common result.
Simple energy reduction problems like this aren't a useful test of anything. There are plenty of natural processes that don't involve intelligence that are more than capable of solving them.
Surely humans can produce well in excess of 250W.
Yes. 250W is only "twice as much power as you provide" if you're taking it very easy. Based on measurements provided by the exercise bikes at my gym, I know I'm able to produce around a kilowatt for 5 minutes or so at a time, and can sustain 500W practically indefinitely.
OTOH, there are regulatory reasons for the motor being 250W: at least here in the UK, you'd need a full drivers licence, annual vehicle inspection and all-around crash helmet to ride it if it were more powerful. It should also be designed so that the motor cannot make the bike go faster than 15mph.
You can guarantee there's a dev team and a DBA who sat over there in EA's offices, tearing their hear out en masse over this decision. Fact is, it happens all the time, and the cause is very simple: management writing functional specifications of software. Somebody, somewhere, put on the functional spec that there must be a password recovery function that sends your original password back to you. That person didn't understand encryption, and was too sure of himself and his ideas about how the system's supposed to work to listen to lowly developers about whether or not it's a good idea. Of course it's a good idea. He's the boss for a reason, you know?
Just how steep is the performance drop from HTTPS? With a 15 Mbit residential connection and a 2Ghz processor, I find it hard to believe that the performance drop will matter...to me.
More relevant is your ping times to the server. Opening an SSL connection requires (IIRC) 6 extra round trips as the protocol handshake and key exchange take place. On my reasonably fast connection (admittedly not a 15Mbit one) I see ping times of around 100ms for most web sites (50-60 for really high performance ones, like google and high profile sites using content distribution networks). This means using SSL would add over half a second to my page load times, which is why I usually do notice when a site is using it.