If you patent, it'll be expensive. If you don't patent, but end up making it, someone else will patent it and sue you, that will be more expensive.
No to the second part-- if you publish before they file the patent, their patent filing won't help them, the patent is invalidated by prior art (=your publication).
That is the theory and, in some countries, patent examiners will look through reputable journals etc when looking for prior art but, in my experience, US examiners only look in existing US patents (and patent applications). Once a patent is granted it sounds like it is very difficult - in the US at least - to get it overturned.
The question is also where do you publish? If you can't get it into a journal, AFAIU one possible option might be just to file it as a patent and then abandon it before the really expensive charges occur. It should then, (again AFAIU), end up in the public domain.
Interesting viewpoint. How much does Oz contribute to DARPA for the use of internet? Or to England for Penicillin?
According to the wonderful BBC documentary, "Breaking the Mould",, Florey, the Australian heading the team, was completely against patenting the technology needed to produce it in sufficient quantities, even though one of his colleagues insisted he should.
Because it was needed during the war, it was shown to a US pharmaceutical(?) company who did patent the process, which meant that the original inventors would have to pay for their own invention.
CSIRO exists because it's publicly funded. It's publicly funded because it's supposed to benefit the public and create research results usable by everybody.
It's publicly funded, yes, but by the people of Australia,, not of the people of other nations. In that sense CSIRO are absolutely entitled to obtain license fees from international companies. I'd also argue that they are entitled to collect fees from Australian companies since that should then allow them to decrease their funding from Australian tax payers.
Or maybe advertising your use of Linux moves you from being a mere annoyance to a mortal enemy of the Redmond cabal.
:-)... but I think a far more likely limitation would be that there is probably no version of Windows CE for the processor in the radio, i.e. Imgtec/Pure's Meta
Maybe, but only between programs. Not by interrupting a program, say, 10x every hour.
Actually, at least the UK commercial stations are quite good in this respect with relatively few commercial breaks. Shame the same can't be said for many other countries where the time ratio of advert:program seems to approach 1:1 or worse!
What did kill the DC was Sega needed to make 10 million more units and had no money to do it. Limited growth potential, limited developer support.
That and the fact that no money meant they couldn't afford to go to 3rd party game developers/publishers and buy "exclusivity" for top titles.
One other money related factor might have been not being able to discount the console at an amount comparable to the competition.
Of course, the fact that the PS2 also doubled as a DVD player, when such things were quite expensive, probably gave it a significant foothold. IIRC the quoted number of games sold with new PS2s at launch was significantly lower than that of DC so the DVD factor seems plausible.
The trickier one was "who made mosquitoes?" and I think I need to work on my explanation of evolution:-)
You will first have to explain that "Who" is not the right way to ask because it implies a specific answer.....;-)
Yes, I already explained the "nobody made" bit, but then trying to say that the mosquito's great-great-great-great-great (x LOTS) great-grandfather was probably just a fly that took a bite out of some amphibian one day is difficult for a child who thinks a 100 is a very big number.
Wow, I got the "where does the sun go" question just last week from my daughter and, as we were sitting in a cafe, we scrunched up some paper napkins to make a sun and earth.
The trickier one was "who made mosquitoes?" and I think I need to work on my explanation of evolution:-)
The BBC is the last group of people I'd imagine would help such a cause. Let's not forget:
What are you talking about? The BBC is merely reporting some news. What is your problem with that? Are you confusing the British Library with the BBC?
- "The GENIUS of Charles Darwin" - "The God Who wasn't There" - "The Secret Diary of a Call Girl" with everyone's favorite Dr Who girl, giving a blow-job on national TV.
Errr... unless I'm very much mistaken, "The Secret Diary of a Call Girl" was an ITV program, not from the BBC... not that it matters. FWIW, I only saw one episode, but it seemed ok to me.
Not just more pleasing, but more healthy too... My eyes get tired a lot more easily under fluorescents, just as an example. A lot of people get migraines, etc. I'm not saying fluorescents aren't good for some uses, but taking away all other choices is not right either.
Is it really the fluorescents that are causing a problem or is it the algorithm in your signature 8P.
For now. But since we can build clustered LED's with multiple light spectrums, we could within a few years build a LED "bulb" that could be just as warm as an incandescent light bulb but it'll use only 1-2 watts of power compared to 40 watts of power for the incandescent equivalent.
These seem to produce far better lighting than the GU-10 models that contain multiple low-power LEDs. Having said that, the ones I have (which are a few years old now) are a bit too blue.
Oh? That's exactly what it looks like for me (Opera 9.64). The funny buttons only seem to appear once per page, so I don't really mind.
I also sometimes get the random buttons appearing in Firefox but it seemed to me that they tended to occur if I stopped scrolling and then started again .
green computing hardware video acceleration is the present and the future
It is great to fully utilise hardware that you have now, but H.264, DivX, and WMV hardware acceleration is not the future. Why lockdown hardware to accelerate a specific video coding format that will change in the future? Instead, if the engineering effort is spent making the CPU & video operations faster (and smaller die size, more cores, lower power requirements) then all applications benefit, not just H.264, DivX, and WMV video playback. The hardware industry is taking this concept further, investing heavily in CPU & video on the one chip.
Because dedicated hardware will use only a small fraction of the power programmable hardware will use. For example, H.264 HD high profile can be decoded in dedicated hardware that's running at 200MHz. A CPU (plus GPU assistance) is surely going to need several GHz to do the same job.
Anyway, the silicon cost of dedicated hardware is small and, if it's not being used it can be switched off entirely. Furthermore, if programmable hardware CPU/GPU is being used to do video decode then it will slow down the CPU etc for other tasks it may be required for.
Maybe the NVIDIA writer should have written that NVIDIA invented the General Purpose GPU? From the wiki it seems like they might have been pioneers there.
I still don't think it's a valid claim. Try reading Myer & Sutherland'sOn the Design of Display Processors, or Levinthal and Porter's Chap - a SIMD graphics processor. There was also the Ti graphics chips eg (34010). It happens all the time. IIRC many of the SGI machines were done with programmable hardware but I guess that wasn't exposed to the end user.
So what TFA says is that electric trains are only green if the power is generated by non-fossil fuels. Take for example the Portland MAX, whose power is generated by wind farms. (at least they pay for their power to be generated by a wind farm.) This makes the MAX WAAAY green.
Not disagreeing with the latter comment, but surely electric trains are at least greener than, say, diesel-electric in that...
the former is not carrying the weight of the diesel engine + alternator
the former can do regenerative braking.
Even saying that, surely even diesel-electric trains are greener than road haulage.
If I told someone in the 1700's or 1800's that many people across the country often travel 50+ miles a day to and from work and home, I imagine they would be very awestruck.
Maybe... but perhaps that'd be because they're simply bewildered as to why everyone doesn't just move closer to where they work 8P
To be perfectly clear, it's h264 that's a patent lawsuit magnet. Theora makes the patent lawsuit problem go away because there are no patents to worry about..
Really?
The Theora FAQ says that it is based on patented technology but that that a licensing deal permits free use. That's all well and good for the parts that are in that/those patent(s). What concerns me is the features section of the Theora wiki lists things that are also in other standards or are variants thereof.
A patent is usually meant to cover a single "invention" but I suspect that a video coding scheme would have scope for multiple different inventions. I'd be worried some of those may already be patented
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IANAPL but...
If you patent, it'll be expensive.
If you don't patent, but end up making it, someone else will patent it and sue you, that will be more expensive.
No to the second part-- if you publish before they file the patent, their patent filing won't help them, the patent is invalidated by prior art (=your publication).
That is the theory and, in some countries, patent examiners will look through reputable journals etc when looking for prior art but, in my experience, US examiners only look in existing US patents (and patent applications). Once a patent is granted it sounds like it is very difficult - in the US at least - to get it overturned.
The question is also where do you publish? If you can't get it into a journal, AFAIU one possible option might be just to file it as a patent and then abandon it before the really expensive charges occur. It should then, (again AFAIU), end up in the public domain.
Interesting viewpoint. How much does Oz contribute to DARPA for the use of internet?
Or to England for Penicillin?
According to the wonderful BBC documentary, "Breaking the Mould",, Florey, the Australian heading the team, was completely against patenting the technology needed to produce it in sufficient quantities, even though one of his colleagues insisted he should.
Because it was needed during the war, it was shown to a US pharmaceutical(?) company who did patent the process, which meant that the original inventors would have to pay for their own invention.
CSIRO exists because it's publicly funded. It's publicly funded because it's supposed to benefit the public and create research results usable by everybody.
It's publicly funded, yes, but by the people of Australia,, not of the people of other nations. In that sense CSIRO are absolutely entitled to obtain license fees from international companies. I'd also argue that they are entitled to collect fees from Australian companies since that should then allow them to decrease their funding from Australian tax payers.
The the same should apply for tape/cd players, mp3 players, and radios.
Why stop at just phones and gps devices?
It doesn't even stop there. You could be fined (at least in the UK) for not having both hands on the wheel because you were eating an apple while driving
In the UK we have a thing called the Privvy Council. Amusing really as privvy is a slang word for toilet.
Since "Privy" is derived from an old french word for "private", I don't think it is that surprising.
Or maybe advertising your use of Linux moves you from being a mere annoyance to a mortal enemy of the Redmond cabal.
:-) ... but I think a far more likely limitation would be that there is probably no version of Windows CE for the processor in the radio, i.e. Imgtec/Pure's Meta
I generally like the BBC too, but just one point:
All of it without adverts.
They happily advertise their own stuff on there.
Maybe, but only between programs. Not by interrupting a program, say, 10x every hour.
Actually, at least the UK commercial stations are quite good in this respect with relatively few commercial breaks. Shame the same can't be said for many other countries where the time ratio of advert:program seems to approach 1:1 or worse!
Piracy did not kill the Dreamcast.
What did kill the DC was Sega needed to make 10 million more units and had no money to do it. Limited growth potential, limited developer support.
That and the fact that no money meant they couldn't afford to go to 3rd party game developers/publishers and buy "exclusivity" for top titles.
One other money related factor might have been not being able to discount the console at an amount comparable to the competition.
Of course, the fact that the PS2 also doubled as a DVD player, when such things were quite expensive, probably gave it a significant foothold. IIRC the quoted number of games sold with new PS2s at launch was significantly lower than that of DC so the DVD factor seems plausible.
I asked her if she wanted the red pill or the blue one, but the just glared at me.
Surely she should be taking the red pill if you are taking the blue...
No no no....we are stardust
Alternatively, as (IIRC) Bill Bryson says in "A short history of everything", we could just consider ourselves to be nuclear waste.
You will first have to explain that "Who" is not the right way to ask because it implies a specific answer..... ;-)
Yes, I already explained the "nobody made" bit, but then trying to say that the mosquito's great-great-great-great-great (x LOTS) great-grandfather was probably just a fly that took a bite out of some amphibian one day is difficult for a child who thinks a 100 is a very big number.
Well, since they're in Europe, some of them might have bidets.
Why just Europe? Surely everyone has a b-day once a year 8-P
Obviously many parents parents need to be more like Calvin's Dad. He was never stumped by Calvin's science questions.
(More)
Wow, I got the "where does the sun go" question just last week from my daughter and, as we were sitting in a cafe, we scrunched up some paper napkins to make a sun and earth.
The trickier one was "who made mosquitoes?" and I think I need to work on my explanation of evolution :-)
...it must be pretty abstract, since an "automated teller machine machine" is apparently running in emulation anyhow.
No. It has to be an "ATM Machine" to in order to be able to enter a "PIN number".
No, silly. You need to cool it down to 1.4 kilograms. How ones does that, though, I have no idea.
Simple. Pack it in ice and and then accelerate it to 0.9999*c :-)
The BBC is the last group of people I'd imagine would help such a cause. Let's not forget:
What are you talking about? The BBC is merely reporting some news. What is your problem with that? Are you confusing the British Library with the BBC?
- "The GENIUS of Charles Darwin"
- "The God Who wasn't There"
- "The Secret Diary of a Call Girl" with everyone's favorite Dr Who girl, giving a blow-job on national TV.
Errr... unless I'm very much mistaken, "The Secret Diary of a Call Girl" was an ITV program, not from the BBC... not that it matters. FWIW, I only saw one episode, but it seemed ok to me.
Not just more pleasing, but more healthy too... My eyes get tired a lot more easily under fluorescents, just as an example. A lot of people get migraines, etc. I'm not saying fluorescents aren't good for some uses, but taking away all other choices is not right either.
Is it really the fluorescents that are causing a problem or is it the algorithm in your signature 8P.
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE ......
For now. But since we can build clustered LED's with multiple light spectrums, we could within a few years build a LED "bulb" that could be just as warm as an incandescent light bulb but it'll use only 1-2 watts of power compared to 40 watts of power for the incandescent equivalent.
The LED GU-10 bulbs I use at home are ~3w each and use a single LED which, AFAIU, is effectively equivalent to a fluorescent in that the LED itself is probably blue and which, in turn, excites phosphors.
These seem to produce far better lighting than the GU-10 models that contain multiple low-power LEDs. Having said that, the ones I have (which are a few years old now) are a bit too blue.
Could be worse. You could OD on a laser powerful enough to vaporize a hole your head!
A friend of mine used to work with very high powered C02 lasers. For demonstration purposes they used to destroy bricks. Sounds like just the ticket!
Oh? That's exactly what it looks like for me (Opera 9.64). The funny buttons only seem to appear once per page, so I don't really mind.
I also sometimes get the random buttons appearing in Firefox but it seemed to me that they tended to occur if I stopped scrolling and then started again .
It is great to fully utilise hardware that you have now, but H.264, DivX, and WMV hardware acceleration is not the future. Why lockdown hardware to accelerate a specific video coding format that will change in the future? Instead, if the engineering effort is spent making the CPU & video operations faster (and smaller die size, more cores, lower power requirements) then all applications benefit, not just H.264, DivX, and WMV video playback. The hardware industry is taking this concept further, investing heavily in CPU & video on the one chip.
Because dedicated hardware will use only a small fraction of the power programmable hardware will use. For example, H.264 HD high profile can be decoded in dedicated hardware that's running at 200MHz. A CPU (plus GPU assistance) is surely going to need several GHz to do the same job.
Anyway, the silicon cost of dedicated hardware is small and, if it's not being used it can be switched off entirely. Furthermore, if programmable hardware CPU/GPU is being used to do video decode then it will slow down the CPU etc for other tasks it may be required for.
Maybe the NVIDIA writer should have written that NVIDIA invented the General Purpose GPU ? From the wiki it seems like they might have been pioneers there.
I still don't think it's a valid claim. Try reading Myer & Sutherland'sOn the Design of Display Processors, or Levinthal and Porter's Chap - a SIMD graphics processor. There was also the Ti graphics chips eg (34010). It happens all the time. IIRC many of the SGI machines were done with programmable hardware but I guess that wasn't exposed to the end user.
So what TFA says is that electric trains are only green if the power is generated by non-fossil fuels. Take for example the Portland MAX, whose power is generated by wind farms. (at least they pay for their power to be generated by a wind farm.) This makes the MAX WAAAY green.
Not disagreeing with the latter comment, but surely electric trains are at least greener than, say, diesel-electric in that...
Even saying that, surely even diesel-electric trains are greener than road haulage.
If I told someone in the 1700's or 1800's that many people across the country often travel 50+ miles a day to and from work and home, I imagine they would be very awestruck.
Maybe... but perhaps that'd be because they're simply bewildered as to why everyone doesn't just move closer to where they work 8P
To be perfectly clear, it's h264 that's a patent lawsuit magnet. Theora makes the patent lawsuit problem go away because there are no patents to worry about..
Really?
The Theora FAQ says that it is based on patented technology but that that a licensing deal permits free use. That's all well and good for the parts that are in that/those patent(s). What concerns me is the features section of the Theora wiki lists things that are also in other standards or are variants thereof.
A patent is usually meant to cover a single "invention" but I suspect that a video coding scheme would have scope for multiple different inventions. I'd be worried some of those may already be patented