this will further fail because MPEG-2 decoders are fast enough that they can decode the stream in it's entirety fast enough for a practical fast-forward (my 5 yo computer can do it on CPU only, 1 core only at about 200fps).
But most DVRs out there (which is the way the vast majority watches TV, not on a computer) use SoC's with dedicated HW decoders that only have to be fast enough to do what they were designed to do. I have been able to get a (relatively high end) BRCM SoC to about 2-3x FF using all frames with HD, and even smooth 1x RW for SD (which is a cool thing when you realize what it takes to do, and is kinda fun to watch as well:) And most services have converted to H.264 for all of their HD, anyway.
this will fail even further because a trivial firmware hack could detect this "cue tone" and skip the ads _entirely_. they're basically implanting a trivially readable signal that usefully tells us what are the ads and what is the show.
I'm sure the same headend hardware that messes with the I frames can remove the cue.
What I'm not clean on about the patent, though is:
1) how does this prevent 30 second skip-type function? Skip past the commercials, rewind to the first I frame of the content. The only thing I can think of is that they leave out I frames for the first X seconds of the content, which means you miss that bit if you skip, which would be annoying...
2) why wouldn't a DVR just skip to the first full I frame after the commercials directly (on FF or skip). DVRs all parse the stream and generate an index file of I frames as they record the content off the air - that's how they know where to seek/skip in the first place. As long as that parsing/index generation can tell the I frames are incomplete, it should be able to trivially work around this (effectively would be the same result as your suggestion...) So that goes back to the prevention in #1 I guess - don't provide a full I frame until well into the content after it resumes, and just annoy the hell out of everyone if they do something as seemingly innocuous as skipping back 10 seconds too close to the commercial boundary...
Prior art just means those methods of signalling the trickplay restricted region aren't patentable - but that's not really the patent, it's about a NDVR protocol design and dynamically reprocessing I frames (in two fairly separate sections, which I find bizarre... seems like this should have been 2 patents since it's achieving a similar goal in two *completely* different implementations...)
Yeah, this is one DVR patent I can't imagine Dish Network won't be shamelessly stealing, given they are currently being sued for *adding* a smart commercial skip feature to their DVRs...
Yeah, Bush went even further, he and his administration basically lied to Congress to get the votes. Throw perjury and contempt of Congress onto their offenses...
I think the term you are looking for it "espionage". I'd hardly call it sabotage when the point was to collect information without being detected and after being discovered it was programmed to remove itself without a trace.
It's hard to claim that the primary *intent* was to incite fear when it was created to be so stealthy it may have been running for years without anyone even noticing...
To quote a well-respected Dr. on the subject... "Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*! Why didn't you tell the world, EH?"
Hussein wasn't a martyr because everyone hated him, including most terrorist groups and the people in his own country (who were the ones to execute him).
Bin Laden would have been tried in the US, where it takes a decade of (automatic) appeals before anyone is executed; and even if he ever lived that long (unlikely) it would be the US performing the execution. All that time he'd be a visible symbol to Al Queda's cause. Not like I'm going out on a limb here, this take on it was practically a consensus of all of the political commentators and pundits as well...
Yeah, keep telling yourself that was the actual goal... taking bin Laden alive would have been hugely "inconvenient" for the US government, and they had no interest in creating a political martyr. The outcome was exactly as hoped/planned, I'm sure...
Eh, I wasn't talking about what it did for the movie, I was talking about about the reputation Navy SEALs have with middle America after the whole bin Laden thing (and the movie, etc).
If you are a 65 year old retiree in Kansas, who's security software are you going to use, something called "McAfee" with commercials featuring boring guys in suits talking about IT infrastructure, or one called "Silent Circle" with a fucking Navy SEAL guarding your computer!;)
I just went to Google's financial page for AAPL and used the chart to look at the price on their first and most recent day of trading. It also tells you the % gain over a window, which for the whole period was "15,875.57%" (based on daily closing prices).
I used the closing price on 12/12/80, which was around $29, giving only 184 shares. I figured no one but insiders and institutional investors usually manage to get the offering price, and if you were one of those you wouldn't be worried about where to best spend $666;)
$105 832 based on today's close. So I guess the Apple 1 was still a good investment! (if you were one of the 5 people who managed to keep it functional for 30 years).
It's unfortunate because Seagate doesn't *have* a consumer SSD product. In the end "growth" on it's own doesn't mean much. It's about margin and profitability, and when you only grow 100% in a market where your competitors are growing by 2000%+ you are going to lose that market.
I'm sure you could have said "Sony Betamax had 100% sales growth" back in the 80's when VHS was growing by 1000%... how'd that work out?
And the most insightful post of the thread is from an AC... if you had posted non-AC I might have modded you up;)
It also points out how the GP post talking about slow off-die IO is way overrated and really not all that relevant to the mobile/embedded space.
ARM is winning the embedded STB/TV/BD/phone wars because their core is tiny and integrates well in SoCs. Many of these SoCs have graphics, Ethernet, Wifi, USB, SATA, HW crypto, MPEG decoding, etc all on die, on a $10-20 part. Intel may have something a bit faster, but they don't have anything close in overall features for that price.
I find this and greed to be a very likely explanation.
You keep saying their DRM is motivated by "greed". In what way? Are you actually saying preventing people from playing their game without paying for it is being greedy??
I actually agree with you that it would have been nice to provide a real single player offline experience. I have been disconnected several times because of their server issues, and it's annoying (though I have played both alone and with others with the same character and that's pretty convenient - which of course is not possible in a Diablo II style single vs multiplayer game).
But in the end Blizzard decided to unify the experience (given their similar model for WoW has been fully accepted by players as well as a CASH COW) and like *any* product it's up to the consumer to decide if it's something they want. And given they sold 3.5M in the first 24 hours, it was clearly the right decision for *their business*...
Good point about the pausing... I guess it is a "mini-mode";) Though it seems if I ever pause for more than a few minutes I get disconnected from the server anyway. Gotta make the bathroom breaks brief!
But to contribute to the pedantry... a "mode" in a software program is generally an explicitly configured state of the application. Your usage is really just talking about a style of playing the game. It's a multiplayer game with N players where N can be from 1-4.
You could start calling a wolf a big mean shaggy dog if you want, but don't expect people to agree with you or take you seriously in a discussion about dog breeds. Or you could reply to my post in ALL CAPS, BUT THAT'S JUST A STYLE OF TYPING AND NOT A MODE OF SLASHDOT;)
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I wouldn't put it past Dish. Charlie Ergen is a devious bastard.
It's sort of like AT&T's fee for being listed in the phone book.
$0.35 / month for basic phone book listing.
$.0.50 / month for an unlisted number.
Just try convincing a customer support rep you don't want either of those services...
this will further fail because MPEG-2 decoders are fast enough that they can decode the stream in it's entirety fast enough for a practical fast-forward (my 5 yo computer can do it on CPU only, 1 core only at about 200fps).
But most DVRs out there (which is the way the vast majority watches TV, not on a computer) use SoC's with dedicated HW decoders that only have to be fast enough to do what they were designed to do. I have been able to get a (relatively high end) BRCM SoC to about 2-3x FF using all frames with HD, and even smooth 1x RW for SD (which is a cool thing when you realize what it takes to do, and is kinda fun to watch as well :) And most services have converted to H.264 for all of their HD, anyway.
this will fail even further because a trivial firmware hack could detect this "cue tone" and skip the ads _entirely_. they're basically implanting a trivially readable signal that usefully tells us what are the ads and what is the show.
I'm sure the same headend hardware that messes with the I frames can remove the cue.
What I'm not clean on about the patent, though is:
1) how does this prevent 30 second skip-type function? Skip past the commercials, rewind to the first I frame of the content. The only thing I can think of is that they leave out I frames for the first X seconds of the content, which means you miss that bit if you skip, which would be annoying...
2) why wouldn't a DVR just skip to the first full I frame after the commercials directly (on FF or skip). DVRs all parse the stream and generate an index file of I frames as they record the content off the air - that's how they know where to seek/skip in the first place. As long as that parsing/index generation can tell the I frames are incomplete, it should be able to trivially work around this (effectively would be the same result as your suggestion...) So that goes back to the prevention in #1 I guess - don't provide a full I frame until well into the content after it resumes, and just annoy the hell out of everyone if they do something as seemingly innocuous as skipping back 10 seconds too close to the commercial boundary...
Prior art just means those methods of signalling the trickplay restricted region aren't patentable - but that's not really the patent, it's about a NDVR protocol design and dynamically reprocessing I frames (in two fairly separate sections, which I find bizarre... seems like this should have been 2 patents since it's achieving a similar goal in two *completely* different implementations...)
Yeah, this is one DVR patent I can't imagine Dish Network won't be shamelessly stealing, given they are currently being sued for *adding* a smart commercial skip feature to their DVRs...
Unless you are buying cable headend equipment, don't expect to see it listed in anything you buy.
Yeah, Bush went even further, he and his administration basically lied to Congress to get the votes. Throw perjury and contempt of Congress onto their offenses...
I think the term you are looking for it "espionage". I'd hardly call it sabotage when the point was to collect information without being detected and after being discovered it was programmed to remove itself without a trace.
Yeah, sure. And every president since Roosevelt, as he was the last one who actually asked Congress before going to war.
It's hard to claim that the primary *intent* was to incite fear when it was created to be so stealthy it may have been running for years without anyone even noticing...
To quote a well-respected Dr. on the subject... "Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*! Why didn't you tell the world, EH?"
Hussein wasn't a martyr because everyone hated him, including most terrorist groups and the people in his own country (who were the ones to execute him).
Bin Laden would have been tried in the US, where it takes a decade of (automatic) appeals before anyone is executed; and even if he ever lived that long (unlikely) it would be the US performing the execution. All that time he'd be a visible symbol to Al Queda's cause. Not like I'm going out on a limb here, this take on it was practically a consensus of all of the political commentators and pundits as well...
Yeah, keep telling yourself that was the actual goal... taking bin Laden alive would have been hugely "inconvenient" for the US government, and they had no interest in creating a political martyr. The outcome was exactly as hoped/planned, I'm sure...
Eh, I wasn't talking about what it did for the movie, I was talking about about the reputation Navy SEALs have with middle America after the whole bin Laden thing (and the movie, etc).
If you are a 65 year old retiree in Kansas, who's security software are you going to use, something called "McAfee" with commercials featuring boring guys in suits talking about IT infrastructure, or one called "Silent Circle" with a fucking Navy SEAL guarding your computer! ;)
No, because it showed they don't have to be...
No, duh. They are launching a subscription service in the US. The SEALs are there for the TV commercials.
They just nee to make sure they don't discuss any details of the service at the airport...
I just went to Google's financial page for AAPL and used the chart to look at the price on their first and most recent day of trading. It also tells you the % gain over a window, which for the whole period was "15,875.57%" (based on daily closing prices).
I used the closing price on 12/12/80, which was around $29, giving only 184 shares. I figured no one but insiders and institutional investors usually manage to get the offering price, and if you were one of those you wouldn't be worried about where to best spend $666 ;)
$105 832 based on today's close. So I guess the Apple 1 was still a good investment! (if you were one of the 5 people who managed to keep it functional for 30 years).
It's unfortunate because Seagate doesn't *have* a consumer SSD product. In the end "growth" on it's own doesn't mean much. It's about margin and profitability, and when you only grow 100% in a market where your competitors are growing by 2000%+ you are going to lose that market.
I'm sure you could have said "Sony Betamax had 100% sales growth" back in the 80's when VHS was growing by 1000%... how'd that work out?
Except I contributed to the discussion, and you did not. Hypocrite much?
And the most insightful post of the thread is from an AC... if you had posted non-AC I might have modded you up ;)
It also points out how the GP post talking about slow off-die IO is way overrated and really not all that relevant to the mobile/embedded space.
ARM is winning the embedded STB/TV/BD/phone wars because their core is tiny and integrates well in SoCs. Many of these SoCs have graphics, Ethernet, Wifi, USB, SATA, HW crypto, MPEG decoding, etc all on die, on a $10-20 part. Intel may have something a bit faster, but they don't have anything close in overall features for that price.
You are welcome to go "pirate" the Diablo 3 DVD as much as you want, since it's useless without a battle.net account and activation code.
So, really, the only way to play without paying *is* in fact to steal a legal copy of the game...
I find this and greed to be a very likely explanation.
You keep saying their DRM is motivated by "greed". In what way? Are you actually saying preventing people from playing their game without paying for it is being greedy??
I actually agree with you that it would have been nice to provide a real single player offline experience. I have been disconnected several times because of their server issues, and it's annoying (though I have played both alone and with others with the same character and that's pretty convenient - which of course is not possible in a Diablo II style single vs multiplayer game).
But in the end Blizzard decided to unify the experience (given their similar model for WoW has been fully accepted by players as well as a CASH COW) and like *any* product it's up to the consumer to decide if it's something they want. And given they sold 3.5M in the first 24 hours, it was clearly the right decision for *their business*...
Good point about the pausing... I guess it is a "mini-mode" ;) Though it seems if I ever pause for more than a few minutes I get disconnected from the server anyway. Gotta make the bathroom breaks brief!
You are both just being pedantic, really.
But to contribute to the pedantry... a "mode" in a software program is generally an explicitly configured state of the application. Your usage is really just talking about a style of playing the game. It's a multiplayer game with N players where N can be from 1-4.
You could start calling a wolf a big mean shaggy dog if you want, but don't expect people to agree with you or take you seriously in a discussion about dog breeds. Or you could reply to my post in ALL CAPS, BUT THAT'S JUST A STYLE OF TYPING AND NOT A MODE OF SLASHDOT ;)