That's nice that you were able to get the IR blaster working. I never could, but then, I have digital cable from Qwest (the local phone monopoly in Phoenix, AZ) rather than Cox or AT&T. I contacted ReplayTV about supporting my cable box, and although they supposedly implemented support, it never worked.
What we really need is a standard bus for consumer electronics devices to communicate with one another, so that hard-disk TV recorder devices can talk to cable boxes without kludges like "IR blasters."
Personally, I can say that it really sucks having to program two different devices in my house to record shows.
Many of the people posting on this topic have written a slew of repetitive comments, some of them clearly written as an attempt at humor, implying that it's hypocritical to hold these companies to a higher ethical standard because their primary products are either intended to promote music piracy, or else they easily facilitate music piracy.
I'd like to analyze this for a moment. First off, many are equating the theft of music with the theft of monies targeted at charities. It seems clear to me that stealing copyrighted work is a form of theft, but obviously not in the same category as stealing money outright. My reasoning is as follows: When you copy an MP3 from someone else, an MP3 which may be a song you don't already own a legitimate copy of, you are not depriving the record label of actual revenue. You are depriving them, at best, of potential revenue. I'll get back to this concept in a moment, but bear with me. When these companies install sleazeware to redirect actual dollars intended for charities into their own coffers, they are no better than a pickpocket (a poor analogy) or a bank robber (better analogy). Sure, the end user doesn't get harmed, but the intended charity is irreparably harmed. Funds have been diverted; these are REAL dollars and cents.
Getting back to the idea of actual profits versus potential profits: The RIAA argues that music piracy costs them millions of dollars annually. This argument is based on a logical fallacy. The people who steal music aren't going to pay for that music if the vehicle for theft is taken away. They'll either rely on slower vehicles (personal copies from a friend's CD collection, for instance, or direct file trading from one person to another without an intermediary service -- both very difficult to trace) or they'll consume less music overall. Oh, sure, some people will pony up the dough for music that they can't easily find copies of, but in those cases, it's usually music that's out of print or hard to find. (I snagged MP3s of two October Project CDs from a friend of mine months before I found copies of those CDs in a Zia Records in Tucson.)
Bottom line: You can't assume that people who pirate music would otherwise pay if that means of piracy were taken away. Besides, piracy will always find an avenue. File trading still runs rampant on IRC and various instant messenger services.
Therefore, record companies reporting losses due to piracy are tallying up imaginary numbers. They have no reason to believe they would have received those monies if the so-called 'pirate networks' didn't exist.
Having said all that, I would like to reiterate that although the Gnutella network is often used for illicit file trading, it has significant non-infringing applications that cannot be overlooked -- many universities rely on Gnutella for disseminating files to faculty and students. (It seems to work very well for a finite, closed network.)
A few months ago, Slashdot ran a story about the major Gnutella client developers banding together to figure out how to 'lock out' less well behaved Gnutella clients. One of the biggest complainers was LimeWire. Now we learn that LimeWire is one of the companies involved in theft of funds from charities. They're also very quick to lay the blame for poor network performance at the feet of many open sourced clients such as Gnucleus. (Yes, the LimeWire core is also open sourced, but they're still trying to capitalize off of it in a for-profit manner. Gnucleus, AFAIK, is totally free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech.) Makes you wonder if their complaints about 'badly behaved' clients are just a ploy to lock down control of the Gnutella network -- followed of course by closing their source tree to outsiders and then making future revisions of the Gnutella spec only available to those who pay to play with the big boys.
What a lovely ad-hominem attack. Next time, stick to attacking what someone says, not the person herself.
And incidentally, that report, while biased, does bring up a few good, valid points. Also, in my humble opinion, since most Americans are still stuck on slow dialup connections (most of which don't come anywhere close to 56K), forcing people to download a 30 megabyte update just to bring them into compliance with the proposed settlement is too much of a barrier.
The only alternative to the 30 megabyte download is a CD you have to pay for. No user should have to pay to install software that should be free, especially since Microsoft is releasing this patch as part of its attempt to comply with proposed remedies for their antitrust violations. They broke the law, and they need to pay for it; the end users do not need to subsidize Microsoft's compliance. After all, if the end user is forced to pay for the "upgrade," then Microsoft isn't really being punished at all.
In my opinion, the report was dead-on in this regard.
Voyager was stuck in the Delta quadrant, not the Alpha sector. They were trying to get back to the Alpha quadrant, where Earth (and Starfleet) is located.
Babylon 5 was J.Michael Straczynski's baby, not Roddenberry's.
I personally disagree that Farscape is in a plot decline, although I'm a bit skeptical of the move to include Scorpius in the crew of Moya. Then again, it does open up all kinds of plot possibilities, and we no longer have to deal with the hokey neural clone in John Crichton's head business.
Positive and Negative uses (and a reminiscence)
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CD Copy Stopper
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· Score: 1
I remember a product for the Amiga called Brilliance. This product was a direct competitor to Deluxe Paint, and it supported the (then new) AGA chipset. Brilliance was dongleware -- the dongle plugged into one of the Amiga's mouse/joystick ports. The company was very proud of their copy protection, saying they had spent many extra months implementing dongle checks throughout the software. This dongle apparently didn't just provide a unique signal that it was there, or an encryption key or a serial number. The dongle apparently had some circuitry in it that was used to perform part of certain calculations in the code, and so was an integral part of the software. Difficult to crack, right?
Well, as some of you may know, there was plenty of dongleware for the Amiga. Most high-end commercial Amiga software required a dongle -- Lightwave, for instance (although for the longest time, the Video Toaster card was the dongle). Several software packages also demanded that you plug a dongle into one of the joystick ports. Since one port was needed for the mouse, that only left one port for all those dongles, and most didn't have pass-throughs on them! Since hot-plugging devices in these ports could fry chips on the motherboard, chips that were soldered in place in some revisions, you had to turn the computer off, unplug the old dongle, plug the new one in, and then start everything from scratch.
The solution came in the form of a crack -- some teenage Amiga hacker spent about 48 hours straight cracking Brilliance, even reverse-engineering the few computational tricks that this uber-dongle supposedly performed. He did it, he said, for he challenge, but probably also because he, like many Amiga users, didn't want to be forced to plug anything into the spare port except a joystick or other I/O device. The company that released Brilliance decided to release a slightly more expensive un-dongled version of their software.
Fast-forward to today. I see three main copy protection applications for this new device:
A DVD which has code embedded in it to check the smart card for a serial number or encryption key. This is the least likely to be circumvented by casual consumers.
Application software on CD which has an installer that uses an encryption key supplied by the smart card to decrypt the installer packages during installation. There may also be code to query the smart card to see how many times this software has been installed on a given machine. (Presumably some Microsoftian hash code will be computed based on your hardware IDs to determine the identity of the computer, and the smart card would store a list or hash table of all systems the software had been installed on.) There might even be an option so when you uninstall the application, the uninstaller asks you to insert the CD and then informs the smart card on the CD that this machine is no longer on the list of installed systems. Obviously, this is the most likely scenario for a warez crack.
A software company decides to get clever, just like the company that created Brilliance, and makes the CD into a dongle. This might incorporate the previous scenario, or might be done without the encryption/copy protection/installation management. The smart card is probably running some variant of J2ME, so it should be trivial to ask it to perform some kind of computation and get results back in real time. Not as nice as a hardware dongle such as a PCI card, but less intrusive to the end user, meaning game publishers might opt for this to insure that games are not copied. Users are forced to keep the game CD in the drive, of course, which sucks for various reasons. (Forget playing your favorite music CD while playing your favorite strategy game.) This is harder to crack, but obviously not impossible. Owing to the latency of CD-ROM drives, such dongle-computations won't occur too frequently lest they interfere with application responsiveness.
Having said all that, I think that this technology is interesting, but not for the purpose of copy protection. Imagine enterprise application software that could keep track of what systems it was installed on in a company, how many times it was (re)installed for each seat, and when the master CD had to be used to do a repair or to install optional software components. I know a lot of system administrators who would love to keep metrics like this, and the beauty is, the metric are kept with the distribution media!
OK, you could do this without the smart card inside the CD, but unless the software publisher gives you the option of setting up a central server on your own network for keeping these metrics, where do you think the metric data is going to go? Yeah, probably to some server that the software vendor controls. And maybe for internal security reasons, a company might not want any metric data being transmitted, even encrypted, over their intranet/extranet.
At this point, I'm just throwing ideas out, but the bottom line is, I'm sure some clever person could find a use for this technology that isn't related to copy protection.
Side note: How come Slashdot now filters out entities such as (non-breaking space, commonly used) and ü? I tried using the ü entity above to insert a U with an umlaut over it, but Slashdot filtered it.
Why would Sony do that? Games like Doom aren't all that popular among PS2 owners.
Don't be so quick to dismiss First Person Shooters on the PS2. After all, Sony paid some major jack to get a port of QuakeIII done for the PS2 early in its life. As I recall, Carmack was all gung-ho about doing a Dreamcast port of Q3 (and it showed, the Dreamcast version was actually pretty decent). But he was not very enthusiastic about porting it to the PS2. As it turns out, the PS2 version of QuakeIII turned out to be a rotten port, and I don't think id did it. The Dreamcast version had some cool stuff that made it much better looking, and more fun to play.
In short, I think Sony believed that they needed to capture the market segment that encompasses FPS players. This was partially to get people to take the PS2 seriously as a platform for playing more than Square RPGs and racing games. Don't forget that Sony's strategy for the Playstation series of consoles is to supplant the PC in all arenas. (They also have ambitions for the PlayStation platform that go beyond games. Why else include an IEEE1394 port and USB?) They call it a Computer Entertainment System, after all.
Whether Sony still thinks FPS games are necessary is anyone's guess. But I don't imagine they'll sit idly by and watch DoomIII only come out for Xbox. That would sway a lot of users to buy an Xbox, people who can't afford a decent PC with a decent video card.
It's worth noting that Limewire is one of the big guns in the Gnutella world, and they're very quick to lay the blame for any perceived problems at the feet of ill behaved clients. I've been fighting with their singularly unresponsive team of developers for some time now, reporting bugs and getting zero feedback on them. Since many of these bugs are not in the open sourced Limewire engine, but in the user interface code, it's not really easy for me to diagnose the problem and fix it for them. However, as a Java developer, I see much behavior in the 2.X Limewire clients which is indicative of very bad Java programming practices.
When I noticed some severe breakage in the user interface on Mac OS X (one of Limewire's supported platforms, and a premiere Java development environment), I reported it, and much of my complaints were ascribed to other gnutella clients behaving badly on the network. While I can understand why badly behaved clients on the network would cause failed searches, I don't see how that could possibly explain mangled UI elements in the application which do not behave as expected (or as documented)! All subsequent follow-ups to the Limewire staff were never responded to, and I can only conclude that bug reports are being ignored; the last several releases of Limewire that I've checked have fixed some, but certainly not all, application problems.
The most telling experiment conducted to date was when I used version 1.7 of Limewire, which I happened to keep a copy of; it was able to complete searches faster than the version 2.X clients that have been foisted on the public, and in many cases returned results where the 2.X clients would not. The main upgrade from version 1.X to 2.X of Limewire is the inclusion of the Ultrapeer protocol support. This leads me to conclude that Limewire's Ultrapeer support is either broken, or that Ultrapeer itself is fundamentally flawed. In an attempt to make Gnutella clients better behaved, the major vendors of Gnutella software have crippled the users of that software, rendering it useless.
What's sad is, I paid money to support the development of Limewire by purchasing Limewire Pro (so I wouldn't have to watch adware). As thanks, I've received product updates from Limewire that have given me less and less functionality, and more eye-candy that results in a broken user experience. (Last time I checked, I still couldn't successfully conduct a search for music using the specifically [re]designed interface for entering parameters such as artist or track or album title. This interface would never even instantiate the search in the first place. I had to instead use the most generic method of querying the Gnutella network, based on wildcard matching to filenames.)
In summary, I believe that some of the motivation behind claims that badly behaved clients are destroying the Gnutella network is simply a cover-up for incompetently written code written by the major players. I also believe that Ultrapeer is either badly implemented or badly specced in the first place. Turning Gnutella into a closed protocol flies in the face of what it purports to be -- an open standard. And since the major Gnutella players have a vested economic interest in keeping others out of the sandbox, I'm a bit skeptical of this proposed solution. If Gnutella becomes closed off, expect to see a major splintering of the community as people seek truly open standards.
Ugh, I have to disagree. David Brin's original novel, The Postman, was much better. The movie erased most of the Sci Fi elements from the book, and Costner re-wrote a bunch of dialog in the portions of the story that the script retained. I think Kevin Costner believed that the Sci Fi angle is what killed Waterworld, and didn't want a debacle, but he wound up destroying everything that made The Postman a good story -- and in the process, severely dumbed down every aspect of the film to the point where it appealed to almost nobody.
Then again, Costner has proven that he can't do high-brow concept film. Pretty cinematography in some cases (e.g., Dances With Wolves), but nothing else to recommend his movies.
Someone else pointed out that there was a novelization of the film version of The Postman, which is different from the original book. That sickens me.
I've said this elsewhere, but I'll say it again. At least in the U.S., you can't make someone "sign away" their legal rights with a contract. In this case, the U.S. laws say that reverse engineering (with a couple caveats) is perfectly legal, and that modification of hardware you buy in the store is perfectly legal. Modification can mean anything, including taking a sledge hammer to it.:-) Law takes precedence over contractual agreements. I might point out that this is why, despite Sony's legal efforts to kill Bleem! and Connectix Virtual Game Station, they couldn't kill these products on the basis that the Playstation license agreement forbade reverse engineering. Some things in the U.S. are sacrosanct, thankfully. (Sony later killed the Connectix product by buying the rights to it and then sitting on it.)
This is why all contracts have boiler plate stating that if one part of a contract is found to be legally unenforceable (e.g., because that stipulation violates local law), the rest of the contract remains in force.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but I am pretty well aware of my legal rights.
Contracts are NOT iron-clad in all cases. If they were, you could have someone sign a contract making them an indentured servant... but indentured servitude and slavery are illegal in most countries these days.
Now, since Canadian law applies to this particular case, this man's rights may in fact be different... Canada may allow such contractual legerdemain to take away someone's property rights. I can't imagine living in a country where I don't have the rights to do anything I want to a physical piece of merchandise that I buy with my own money... although now that I think of it, companies are trying to circumvent that long-standing principle of U.S. law, and soon I may not enjoy that right even in my own country.
The license agreement that comes with the PS/2 isn't something you sign, and most people don't read these ridiculously restrictive licenses. You might argue that ignoring the license agreement is the purchaser's fault, but the fact remains, Sony is counting on the fact that you won't delve too deeply into it. Furthermore, merely opening the box and using the PS/2 constitutes acceptance of the license. This is similar to shrink-wrap licenses on software, and has come under fire here in the U.S. Personally, I find such licensing schemes to be morally reprehensible.
In addition, the license agreement is not legally enforceable in many regions, since it attempts to abridge rights that the purchaser already has. In the U.S., the right to reverse engineer is legally sanctioned and assured. Plenty of case law already exists in this area. Most Playstation emulators that Sony tried to squash squeaked by because they were developed from specs that were arrived at through a "clean room" reverse engineering effort. Sony resorted to paying off the developers or buying them out in most cases (e.g., Connectix no longer sells Virtual Game Station because Sony bought the rights to it, and then sat on it).
I signed a lease agreement for an apartment that I rented once upon a time, and the lease agreement stipulated that I agreed to certain terms which were actually in violation of Arizona's Landlord-Tenant laws. When the management company broke Arizona law, they tried to nail me for leaving the apartment before my lease expired, and so I consulted an attorney. She pointed out that they can't take away my legal rights by having me sign them away in a contract. The property management company broke the law by failing to repair air conditioning in the apartment in a timely fashion (AC is considered an essential service in Arizona by law), and although they had a clause in the lease agreement that "excused" the company from liability if they were unable to perform a repair in a timely fashion, the law took precedence over the contract, and I was vindicated.
This is why most contracts, including license agreements for software and hardware, include boilerplate clauses that state that if any portion of the contract is found to be unenforceable (e.g., because local law forbids something stipulated in the contract), the rest of the contract remains in force.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but I know bullshit when I see it. I can sign a contract that says that I agree to any number of things, but if the contract is legally unenforceable, then I'm not breaking the law or doing anything morally questionable by ignoring the clauses in the contract that are unenforceable and/or illegal.
If I buy a piece of hardware in the United States, I can do whatever I want to it -- take a sledge hammer to it, desolder the chips on the motherboard, add things to it, etc. The laws in Canada may be different in this regard, so putting mod chips on a PS/2 in Canada might very well be illegal. All the more reason for me to enjoy being a U.S. citizen (until such time as the laws here are modified by corporate interests).
So? I could care less about JPEG anyway. PNG is a lot better. Better compression and better image quality. If JPEG wants to get itself into legal shit then it's its' own business. My wallpapers and my website images are all PNG and thats the way it will stay.
OK, I'll take the bait, since I'm qualified to respond. I'm credited on the PNG specification as a contributor, and I wrote one of the first (if not the first) commercial implementations of PNG, for a little company called Mastersoft that eventually got acquired by Adobe (via Frame Technologies). Your facts are half-right -- PNG does give better image quality by virtue of supporting up to 16 bits per channel (16 bits each of R, G, B, and optionally A), and by virtue of using lossless compression, but it does not give better compression in the general case.
JPEG is designed to use lossy compression, and as such, it can attain much tighter compression ratios than PNG can. In some cases, PNG can generate a smaller file than JPEG, but this is a corner case where the original image has a limited color space (e.g., uses indexed color with very few unique colors), and where the original image has abrupt transitions (e.g., line art, or art where regions are solidly colored). JPEG is designed to work well on photographic images, where continuous tones are the norm.
If we lose JPEG as an open standard, there isn't anything left to adequately replace it. PNG was supposed to replace GIF to get around the Unisys patent (GIF tax). JPEG2000 is too new, and there are too few software packages supporting it. JPEG2000 also requires the use of wavelets, and a lot of legacy hardware might be severely taxed processing these new images.
I'm not a lawyer, but I was one of the people in the working group that developed PNG. (I'm credited in the spec under the name Robert Poole, although I don't think they updated my contact info recently.) PNG uses the same compression scheme used in GNU gzip, and that scheme was chosen specifically because it had been well researched and found to not conflict with any current patents. It also gives fairly decent performance and compression ratios for highly entropic data.
That's not to say that some other aspect of the PNG spec won't come under fire -- the file format is similar enough to TIFF and the Amiga's IFF/ILBM that if there are some core patents on tagged file formats, we could be in trouble. But that's doubtful, since prior art would probably play a role in any defense against such a patent assault. Bottom line -- if PNG comes under fire, the FSF lawyers would be all over the situation.
I'm not saying that the patent is valid, or that BT, Amazon, etc. are in the right in previous frivolous lawsuits. I'm merely saying that anyone in business today has to know what the environment is, and has to proceed cautiously. They can't claim that they were caught unaware of the potential liability of moving forward blindly, particularly when the tools to assess their risk are so easily and cheaply available to everyone.
The problem is, JPEG wasn't just a product of big business. JPEG was the result of efforts by many people in the Joint Photographic Experts Group. JPEG was designed to be an open, royalty-free standard (although there are provisions in JPEG for some types of compression that are covered by patent, as I recall, and these alternate compression schemes are not widely implemented).
I know JPEG 2000 has even more potential land mines in it... someone correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't JPEG 2000 include support for wavelet compression? I know wavelets were an IP minefield at one time because several companies claimed fundamental patents on wavelet technology.
Surely, someone in the working group checked on the fundamental technology to see what was covered by patent and what wasn't. However, a best-faith effort, even to the extent of hiring attorneys to do a patent search (something only big corporations have the deep pockets to subsidize) isn't a guarantee that nothing will be missed. And opportunists can always swoop in and claim that some overly-broad patent applies.
I think that frivolous lawsuits of this nature are only going to serve to stifle the development of open, royalty-free standards. They're also going to insure that very little original development or research is done outside of large corporations, since nobody wants to assume personal liability for running afoul of patent nazis.
Hopefully, someone will step up to the plate, since JPEG is so widely used, and will defend against these sleazebags. I remember a similar situation not so long ago, where Apple was forced to defend against a company suing over ColorSync, claiming that this technology infringed their patent...
It would be nice to discuss this matter with a lawyer and see what they have to say, since I am fairly certain that there are penalties for failure to enforce one's patent rights.
Since SonicBlue announced the ReplayTV 4000, I am sure that content providers are crapping themselves trying to find a way to short-circuit the features of this device. Briefly, the ReplayTV 4000 uses your existing home network and broadband connection to both obtain programming information fromt he ReplayTV servers, as well as enable users to share TV shows both over their local networks and over the Internet.
Granted, it could take hours to transmit a single show from your ReplayTV to someone else's across the country, but certainly less time than it would take to ship a video tape.
When ReplayTV was a brand new venture, they started selling units on their own which had built-in FireWire (IEEE 1394) ports on them. The idea was to be able to archive existing program content stored in the DVR onto external media, or to supplement the hard disk already in the DVR. These ports were never activated, apparently under pressure from the entertainment industry which feared rampant piracy.
Plans to create DVR devices that took removable media (such as ORB disks, a plan which CastleWood had been discussing openly on their web site) were similarly scrapped by other manufacturers.
Now, it would seem that SonicBlue, which acquired ReplayTV, is making it trivial for people to effectively copy TV shows to their friends. Granted, this system probably doesn't allow anonymous copying, so casual piracy will be reduced (no "Napster-esque" video sharing), but there's nothing preventing someone in one geographic region from sharing a show that is either blocked or unavailable in another geographic region. Pay-per-view for sporting events will suffer if such devices proliferate -- you can easily get around blackout restrictions by having your friend in another area record the game for you.
But even if it is a valid patent, it still doesn't explain why they're suing Roxio instead of freeDB. Any ideas on that one?
Because you generally sue the guy with the money. FreeDB.org has no resources to speak of. But Roxio is a for-profit venture, and as such, they make a tasty target.
I know a guy who runs a small company which owns numerous patents on crystal growing and its applications in sensors for oil wells. He wrote the patents to be sufficiently broad so that it would be impossible for a competitor to duplicate his devices without violating the patent. As it turns out, some competitors tried to steal the patent anyway; my friend sent cease and desist letters to the thieves, but he also sent threatening letters to those who were customers of this thief, informing them that they were committing contributory infringement.
The idea isn't necessarily to put these customers out of business; many of them didn't know there was patent infringement going on. But the rationale in this case was, these guys could put pressure on the company that was infringing.
What boggles my mind is the claim that Roxio was violating the DMCA. Exactly what measures did Gracenote put in place to prevent a software vendor from writing code to access a third party database? To me, this claim seems baseless. I'm much more concerned about the patent on generating a unique key to identify a CD. Clearly, they use track lengths and compute a hash function based on this; however, there's enough 'give' that Gracenote will correctly identify a CD even if some tracks are off by a few seconds in either direction. To me, there should be plenty of examples of prior art for something like this, possibly even an example lurking in a Computer Science textbook somewhere...
What the heck did a math degree every [sic] have to do with programming?
Math has a lot to do with programming, especially if you analyze algorithms and optimize them. This is how you discover that, for large arrays of values, Quicksort is way faster than insertion sort, which is faster than bubble sort, and why. (Check out this site for a demo.) This is how you find really clever ways to speed up multiplying really huge matrices, and when the payoff is big enough to warrant using the "clever" algorithm.
Granted, you don't need the piece of paper (i.e., the degree) to have the mathematical knowledge. But the degree is a credential that lets other people know that you know what you're talking about, to some extent. It's a yardstick, however flawed it might be. This is why many employers in my area are now eschewing self-taught programmers for those with real Comp Sci (or related) degrees.
On a personal note, I have noticed that many self-taught programmers feel they are somehow superior to those who actually busted their chops learning things like compiler theory. They often sneer at those of us who wasted our time getting that piece of paper. But you know what? Those of us from theory land often have this knack for finding better ways of doing things, and we even (gasp!) have some very nice skills at creating good abstraction frameworks.
The down side is, we sometimes don't follow-through issues to their logical conclusion. After all, in academia, as long as something works, you've proven that it's doable in theory. No sense wasting time making it better, when you could be pursuing your next big problem to solve.
To speak to the original point, I think there will always be room in this world for the highly skilled programmer, someone who has both a theoretical foundation and the industry experience to make it practical.
Maybe you misunderstand the MO technology? You need the laser beam in order to change the magnetic properties of the medium.
Actually, you both have it wrong, although you're closer than the person you were responding to. During recording, a MiniDisc uses a laser in high-power mode to heat a domain on the disc itself; a magnetic field is then applied to change the optical phase of this domain, setting a "bit" on or off. During playback, a low-power laser is used to read the phase of these domains. A strong magnetic field applied to a MiniDisc, therefore, will have no discernible effect on the data stored on the disc unless the media were heated somehow, such as being hit with a high-power laser pulse.
This is one of the reasons I like MO technologies; the shelf life of MO media is typically better than many other types of media, magnetic and pure optical alike.
I think I'll stick with CD's until DVD-audio becomes a reality.
I've seen the DVD-Audio players in Fry's electronics. Originally retailing for around a cool $1000, the prices have now dropped to where mere mortals can afford them. The Panasonic player is $300 at Fry's; the Technics player, which is technically the same unit with upgraded cosmetics (brushed metal finish) and slightly upgraded components, is $500. They're also selling DVD-Audio discs for slightly more than the CD equivalent; I saw Natalie Merchant's Tigerlily for sale in DVD-Audio format.
Unfortunately, we are already experiencing the first format war. SACD is an alternate format being pushed by Sony and Philips. It has many virtues, including storing a CD-compatible layer of data (for older CD players) in addition to a SACD layer of high-resolution audio. It supports multi-channel audio. It has been out for longer than DVD-Audio, so there are more titles available. The drawbacks: SACD is more expensive overall. The first two players were about $5000 and $3500, respectively. The cheapest SACD player now is about $1250. The discs retail for $25 a pop. And only Sony Music is backing it currently, with a few other audiophile labels showing some support for SACD.
Even though SACD is technically superior in many areas, and is preferred by audiophiles because it does not impose watermarking on the music (while DVD-Audio purportedly does), it will probably die. In the meantime, we've got two new high-end audio formats duking it out. We also have this new format trying to edge into the market. Why?
Clearly, record labels realize that tape is dying a richly-deserved death, but why push yet another MiniDisc wannabe? This format can't even be rewritten, whereas CD-RW compatible audio CD recorders are now cheaply available at Best Buy and other mass market retailers. For a format to replace tape, it has to at least give you what tape does: rewritability. MiniDisc, despite its flaws, did this.
500 megs of storage in a tiny format is great, but fumble-fingered and forgetful humans won't like it. Being forced to burn a brand-new disc every time you want to create a mix is another problem. But then, the company creating this medium probably figured they'd have a better revenue stream by forcing users to buy more media.
Oh well, go ahead Sony, alienate a big part of your market. I'd love to see it go to DC, GC, or XBOX anyway.
A pity that the Dreamcast is end-of-life hardware. Although from what I've seen, plenty of people out there are passionate enough about the DC to keep it alive... at least as a hobbyist platform.
Let me ask you this, though: Do you really want to cede this market to Microsoft's XBox? That prospect frightens me. We all know the GameCube isn't going to make as much of a splash, since Nintendo seems content to saddle itself with being the "niche" player here.
Returns to retail stores will be a MAJOR hassle, and many stores may cease their return policies altogether because of the increased costs in handling returns.
My console is broken! Rather than spend a ridiculous sum of money repairing it, and being without a PS2 the entire time, I buy a new one. Oops! I can't play any of my games now -- at least, not the ones requiring authentication.
I have a kid who's rather rough on CDs and DVDs. OOPS! The disc is broken/hopelessly scratched up/whatever. (Beyond any hope of using some tool to polish out the scratches, for instance.) Too bad I wasn't able to make backup copies, which I'm legally entitled to do.
The rest of this thought experiment is left as an exercise for the reader.
There were several proposals for making HDTV broadcasts backwards compatible with analog TV, including using the digital portion of the signal to convey the "additional" resolution information. There was even a proposal to make the center portion of the image the analog broadcast, and the surrounding imagery would be stitched in from the digital signal. Clever, but ultimately, this and other similar proposals were rejected.
The U.S. has had the crappiest color television standard in the world, and I don't think it's unreasonable to upgrade to something significantly better. If that means jettisoning backwards compatibility, I'm all for it. The MPEG encoding scheme for HDTV (and 4:3 format DTV) is already lossy, why sacrifice yet more quality just to retain analog compatibility? I am bothered that 80% of the image quality of the current HDTV standard is considered "good enough." What ever happened to standards of quality?
I think the mix-up is due to nomenclature. Obviously, the original poster should have used (2cm)^2 (to denote a square area, 2 cm on a side) as opposed to 2cm^2 (two square centimeters, which would be equivalent to a rectangular area one centimeter on a side by two centimeters on a side). Just because we understood the original poster's intent doesn't mean he shouldn't be taken to task for improper notation.
Clearly, the equation Area = width * height applies. Doubling the length of a side of a square region quadruples its area. 2cm * 2cm = (2cm)^2 = 4 cm^2. (Four square centimeters, not four centimeters squared.) The notational convention is that the exponent applies to the unit of measurement only, and not to the numeric values preceding it. Any high school science student knows this.
I agree that most existing Java2D implementations are sub-optimal, and this contributes to Swing's inefficiency. I'm amazed at how Smalltalk-ish Swing's approach to creating a GUI is. (Then again, many Java developers are Smalltalk expatriates who saw a way to take what they were already doing and move it to a more popular language/platform. It's no accident that Java's object model owes more to Smalltalk and Objective C than to C++.)
You really can't blame all of Swing's problems on Java2D, however. There are many who'd claim that its architecture lends itself to certain inherent inefficiencies. Not being a Swing expert myself, I can't rightly comment on those in depth. But I believe that much of its architecture was done more with theoretical concerns than practical matters in mind.
One thing I do know is that some Java2D implementations rock, and as a result, Swing performs very acceptably on those systems. One such implementation is Apple's, under MacOS X. Under MacOS X, Java2D is peered onto the Quartz drawing engine, giving you great speed at drawing vector graphics in addition to freebies such as anti-aliasing. (This also means the G4's AltiVec unit is leveraged whenever possible to improve rendering speeds even more.) I've run Swing apps on an iBook running MacOS X beta, and can report that they ran fabulously even though the iBook was under-spec (96 MB of RAM instead of 128, slower G3 processor with no AltiVec to take advantage of, beta OS with debug assertions still in place, etc.).
The only disadvantage of Java2D on MacOS X is that, because of the anti-aliasing, some types of vector-based animation that work on most other Java2D implementations leave "trails" or "turds" on your drawing canvas in the Apple implementation. It's that darned anti-aliasing working against you, in that case, because over-drawing a spline (for example) with the same spline in the background color will not fully erase all the pixels that were originally drawn. The pixels bordering the spline will remain a blend of the spline's foreground color and the canvas background color.
For one thing, the PowerPC chips used in Macs are 32-bit chips; the SPARC in the Blade 100 is a 64-bit architecture. For another thing, the software bundled with the PowerMac, and the software generally available for it, is more consumer oriented. Yes, there is overlap; for instance, Photoshop exists for the Mac, and that's more of a professional graphics editing package. Photoshop also exists for SGI boxen, though I doubt most people would buy an SGI machine just to run Photoshop.
There are a lot of hidden costs to running a proprietary UNIX box. The Blade 100 makes great strides toward using commodity hardware, but there's so much more Sun could do on the software side. Then again, if Solaris were viewed as a mainstream OS, would Sun's server share decrease?
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That's nice that you were able to get the IR blaster working. I never could, but then, I have digital cable from Qwest (the local phone monopoly in Phoenix, AZ) rather than Cox or AT&T. I contacted ReplayTV about supporting my cable box, and although they supposedly implemented support, it never worked.
What we really need is a standard bus for consumer electronics devices to communicate with one another, so that hard-disk TV recorder devices can talk to cable boxes without kludges like "IR blasters."
Personally, I can say that it really sucks having to program two different devices in my house to record shows.
Many of the people posting on this topic have written a slew of repetitive comments, some of them clearly written as an attempt at humor, implying that it's hypocritical to hold these companies to a higher ethical standard because their primary products are either intended to promote music piracy, or else they easily facilitate music piracy.
I'd like to analyze this for a moment. First off, many are equating the theft of music with the theft of monies targeted at charities. It seems clear to me that stealing copyrighted work is a form of theft, but obviously not in the same category as stealing money outright. My reasoning is as follows: When you copy an MP3 from someone else, an MP3 which may be a song you don't already own a legitimate copy of, you are not depriving the record label of actual revenue. You are depriving them, at best, of potential revenue. I'll get back to this concept in a moment, but bear with me. When these companies install sleazeware to redirect actual dollars intended for charities into their own coffers, they are no better than a pickpocket (a poor analogy) or a bank robber (better analogy). Sure, the end user doesn't get harmed, but the intended charity is irreparably harmed. Funds have been diverted; these are REAL dollars and cents.
Getting back to the idea of actual profits versus potential profits: The RIAA argues that music piracy costs them millions of dollars annually. This argument is based on a logical fallacy. The people who steal music aren't going to pay for that music if the vehicle for theft is taken away. They'll either rely on slower vehicles (personal copies from a friend's CD collection, for instance, or direct file trading from one person to another without an intermediary service -- both very difficult to trace) or they'll consume less music overall. Oh, sure, some people will pony up the dough for music that they can't easily find copies of, but in those cases, it's usually music that's out of print or hard to find. (I snagged MP3s of two October Project CDs from a friend of mine months before I found copies of those CDs in a Zia Records in Tucson.)
Bottom line: You can't assume that people who pirate music would otherwise pay if that means of piracy were taken away. Besides, piracy will always find an avenue. File trading still runs rampant on IRC and various instant messenger services.
Therefore, record companies reporting losses due to piracy are tallying up imaginary numbers. They have no reason to believe they would have received those monies if the so-called 'pirate networks' didn't exist.
Having said all that, I would like to reiterate that although the Gnutella network is often used for illicit file trading, it has significant non-infringing applications that cannot be overlooked -- many universities rely on Gnutella for disseminating files to faculty and students. (It seems to work very well for a finite, closed network.)
A few months ago, Slashdot ran a story about the major Gnutella client developers banding together to figure out how to 'lock out' less well behaved Gnutella clients. One of the biggest complainers was LimeWire. Now we learn that LimeWire is one of the companies involved in theft of funds from charities. They're also very quick to lay the blame for poor network performance at the feet of many open sourced clients such as Gnucleus. (Yes, the LimeWire core is also open sourced, but they're still trying to capitalize off of it in a for-profit manner. Gnucleus, AFAIK, is totally free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech.) Makes you wonder if their complaints about 'badly behaved' clients are just a ploy to lock down control of the Gnutella network -- followed of course by closing their source tree to outsiders and then making future revisions of the Gnutella spec only available to those who pay to play with the big boys.
What a lovely ad-hominem attack. Next time, stick to attacking what someone says, not the person herself.
And incidentally, that report, while biased, does bring up a few good, valid points. Also, in my humble opinion, since most Americans are still stuck on slow dialup connections (most of which don't come anywhere close to 56K), forcing people to download a 30 megabyte update just to bring them into compliance with the proposed settlement is too much of a barrier.
The only alternative to the 30 megabyte download is a CD you have to pay for. No user should have to pay to install software that should be free, especially since Microsoft is releasing this patch as part of its attempt to comply with proposed remedies for their antitrust violations. They broke the law, and they need to pay for it; the end users do not need to subsidize Microsoft's compliance. After all, if the end user is forced to pay for the "upgrade," then Microsoft isn't really being punished at all.
In my opinion, the report was dead-on in this regard.
A couple points:
- Voyager was stuck in the Delta quadrant, not the Alpha sector. They were trying to get back to the Alpha quadrant, where Earth (and Starfleet) is located.
- Babylon 5 was J.Michael Straczynski's baby, not Roddenberry's.
I personally disagree that Farscape is in a plot decline, although I'm a bit skeptical of the move to include Scorpius in the crew of Moya. Then again, it does open up all kinds of plot possibilities, and we no longer have to deal with the hokey neural clone in John Crichton's head business.I remember a product for the Amiga called Brilliance. This product was a direct competitor to Deluxe Paint, and it supported the (then new) AGA chipset. Brilliance was dongleware -- the dongle plugged into one of the Amiga's mouse/joystick ports. The company was very proud of their copy protection, saying they had spent many extra months implementing dongle checks throughout the software. This dongle apparently didn't just provide a unique signal that it was there, or an encryption key or a serial number. The dongle apparently had some circuitry in it that was used to perform part of certain calculations in the code, and so was an integral part of the software. Difficult to crack, right?
Well, as some of you may know, there was plenty of dongleware for the Amiga. Most high-end commercial Amiga software required a dongle -- Lightwave, for instance (although for the longest time, the Video Toaster card was the dongle). Several software packages also demanded that you plug a dongle into one of the joystick ports. Since one port was needed for the mouse, that only left one port for all those dongles, and most didn't have pass-throughs on them! Since hot-plugging devices in these ports could fry chips on the motherboard, chips that were soldered in place in some revisions, you had to turn the computer off, unplug the old dongle, plug the new one in, and then start everything from scratch.
The solution came in the form of a crack -- some teenage Amiga hacker spent about 48 hours straight cracking Brilliance, even reverse-engineering the few computational tricks that this uber-dongle supposedly performed. He did it, he said, for he challenge, but probably also because he, like many Amiga users, didn't want to be forced to plug anything into the spare port except a joystick or other I/O device. The company that released Brilliance decided to release a slightly more expensive un-dongled version of their software.
Fast-forward to today. I see three main copy protection applications for this new device:
Having said all that, I think that this technology is interesting, but not for the purpose of copy protection. Imagine enterprise application software that could keep track of what systems it was installed on in a company, how many times it was (re)installed for each seat, and when the master CD had to be used to do a repair or to install optional software components. I know a lot of system administrators who would love to keep metrics like this, and the beauty is, the metric are kept with the distribution media!
OK, you could do this without the smart card inside the CD, but unless the software publisher gives you the option of setting up a central server on your own network for keeping these metrics, where do you think the metric data is going to go? Yeah, probably to some server that the software vendor controls. And maybe for internal security reasons, a company might not want any metric data being transmitted, even encrypted, over their intranet/extranet.
At this point, I'm just throwing ideas out, but the bottom line is, I'm sure some clever person could find a use for this technology that isn't related to copy protection.
Side note: How come Slashdot now filters out entities such as (non-breaking space, commonly used) and ü? I tried using the ü entity above to insert a U with an umlaut over it, but Slashdot filtered it.
Don't be so quick to dismiss First Person Shooters on the PS2. After all, Sony paid some major jack to get a port of QuakeIII done for the PS2 early in its life. As I recall, Carmack was all gung-ho about doing a Dreamcast port of Q3 (and it showed, the Dreamcast version was actually pretty decent). But he was not very enthusiastic about porting it to the PS2. As it turns out, the PS2 version of QuakeIII turned out to be a rotten port, and I don't think id did it. The Dreamcast version had some cool stuff that made it much better looking, and more fun to play.
In short, I think Sony believed that they needed to capture the market segment that encompasses FPS players. This was partially to get people to take the PS2 seriously as a platform for playing more than Square RPGs and racing games. Don't forget that Sony's strategy for the Playstation series of consoles is to supplant the PC in all arenas. (They also have ambitions for the PlayStation platform that go beyond games. Why else include an IEEE1394 port and USB?) They call it a Computer Entertainment System, after all.
Whether Sony still thinks FPS games are necessary is anyone's guess. But I don't imagine they'll sit idly by and watch DoomIII only come out for Xbox. That would sway a lot of users to buy an Xbox, people who can't afford a decent PC with a decent video card.
It's worth noting that Limewire is one of the big guns in the Gnutella world, and they're very quick to lay the blame for any perceived problems at the feet of ill behaved clients. I've been fighting with their singularly unresponsive team of developers for some time now, reporting bugs and getting zero feedback on them. Since many of these bugs are not in the open sourced Limewire engine, but in the user interface code, it's not really easy for me to diagnose the problem and fix it for them. However, as a Java developer, I see much behavior in the 2.X Limewire clients which is indicative of very bad Java programming practices.
When I noticed some severe breakage in the user interface on Mac OS X (one of Limewire's supported platforms, and a premiere Java development environment), I reported it, and much of my complaints were ascribed to other gnutella clients behaving badly on the network. While I can understand why badly behaved clients on the network would cause failed searches, I don't see how that could possibly explain mangled UI elements in the application which do not behave as expected (or as documented)! All subsequent follow-ups to the Limewire staff were never responded to, and I can only conclude that bug reports are being ignored; the last several releases of Limewire that I've checked have fixed some, but certainly not all, application problems.
The most telling experiment conducted to date was when I used version 1.7 of Limewire, which I happened to keep a copy of; it was able to complete searches faster than the version 2.X clients that have been foisted on the public, and in many cases returned results where the 2.X clients would not. The main upgrade from version 1.X to 2.X of Limewire is the inclusion of the Ultrapeer protocol support. This leads me to conclude that Limewire's Ultrapeer support is either broken, or that Ultrapeer itself is fundamentally flawed. In an attempt to make Gnutella clients better behaved, the major vendors of Gnutella software have crippled the users of that software, rendering it useless.
What's sad is, I paid money to support the development of Limewire by purchasing Limewire Pro (so I wouldn't have to watch adware). As thanks, I've received product updates from Limewire that have given me less and less functionality, and more eye-candy that results in a broken user experience. (Last time I checked, I still couldn't successfully conduct a search for music using the specifically [re]designed interface for entering parameters such as artist or track or album title. This interface would never even instantiate the search in the first place. I had to instead use the most generic method of querying the Gnutella network, based on wildcard matching to filenames.)
In summary, I believe that some of the motivation behind claims that badly behaved clients are destroying the Gnutella network is simply a cover-up for incompetently written code written by the major players. I also believe that Ultrapeer is either badly implemented or badly specced in the first place. Turning Gnutella into a closed protocol flies in the face of what it purports to be -- an open standard. And since the major Gnutella players have a vested economic interest in keeping others out of the sandbox, I'm a bit skeptical of this proposed solution. If Gnutella becomes closed off, expect to see a major splintering of the community as people seek truly open standards.
Ugh, I have to disagree. David Brin's original novel, The Postman, was much better. The movie erased most of the Sci Fi elements from the book, and Costner re-wrote a bunch of dialog in the portions of the story that the script retained. I think Kevin Costner believed that the Sci Fi angle is what killed Waterworld, and didn't want a debacle, but he wound up destroying everything that made The Postman a good story -- and in the process, severely dumbed down every aspect of the film to the point where it appealed to almost nobody.
Then again, Costner has proven that he can't do high-brow concept film. Pretty cinematography in some cases (e.g., Dances With Wolves), but nothing else to recommend his movies.
Someone else pointed out that there was a novelization of the film version of The Postman, which is different from the original book. That sickens me.
I've said this elsewhere, but I'll say it again. At least in the U.S., you can't make someone "sign away" their legal rights with a contract. In this case, the U.S. laws say that reverse engineering (with a couple caveats) is perfectly legal, and that modification of hardware you buy in the store is perfectly legal. Modification can mean anything, including taking a sledge hammer to it. :-) Law takes precedence over contractual agreements. I might point out that this is why, despite Sony's legal efforts to kill Bleem! and Connectix Virtual Game Station, they couldn't kill these products on the basis that the Playstation license agreement forbade reverse engineering. Some things in the U.S. are sacrosanct, thankfully. (Sony later killed the Connectix product by buying the rights to it and then sitting on it.)
This is why all contracts have boiler plate stating that if one part of a contract is found to be legally unenforceable (e.g., because that stipulation violates local law), the rest of the contract remains in force.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but I am pretty well aware of my legal rights.
Contracts are NOT iron-clad in all cases. If they were, you could have someone sign a contract making them an indentured servant... but indentured servitude and slavery are illegal in most countries these days.
Now, since Canadian law applies to this particular case, this man's rights may in fact be different... Canada may allow such contractual legerdemain to take away someone's property rights. I can't imagine living in a country where I don't have the rights to do anything I want to a physical piece of merchandise that I buy with my own money... although now that I think of it, companies are trying to circumvent that long-standing principle of U.S. law, and soon I may not enjoy that right even in my own country.
The license agreement that comes with the PS/2 isn't something you sign, and most people don't read these ridiculously restrictive licenses. You might argue that ignoring the license agreement is the purchaser's fault, but the fact remains, Sony is counting on the fact that you won't delve too deeply into it. Furthermore, merely opening the box and using the PS/2 constitutes acceptance of the license. This is similar to shrink-wrap licenses on software, and has come under fire here in the U.S. Personally, I find such licensing schemes to be morally reprehensible.
In addition, the license agreement is not legally enforceable in many regions, since it attempts to abridge rights that the purchaser already has. In the U.S., the right to reverse engineer is legally sanctioned and assured. Plenty of case law already exists in this area. Most Playstation emulators that Sony tried to squash squeaked by because they were developed from specs that were arrived at through a "clean room" reverse engineering effort. Sony resorted to paying off the developers or buying them out in most cases (e.g., Connectix no longer sells Virtual Game Station because Sony bought the rights to it, and then sat on it).
I signed a lease agreement for an apartment that I rented once upon a time, and the lease agreement stipulated that I agreed to certain terms which were actually in violation of Arizona's Landlord-Tenant laws. When the management company broke Arizona law, they tried to nail me for leaving the apartment before my lease expired, and so I consulted an attorney. She pointed out that they can't take away my legal rights by having me sign them away in a contract. The property management company broke the law by failing to repair air conditioning in the apartment in a timely fashion (AC is considered an essential service in Arizona by law), and although they had a clause in the lease agreement that "excused" the company from liability if they were unable to perform a repair in a timely fashion, the law took precedence over the contract, and I was vindicated.
This is why most contracts, including license agreements for software and hardware, include boilerplate clauses that state that if any portion of the contract is found to be unenforceable (e.g., because local law forbids something stipulated in the contract), the rest of the contract remains in force.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but I know bullshit when I see it. I can sign a contract that says that I agree to any number of things, but if the contract is legally unenforceable, then I'm not breaking the law or doing anything morally questionable by ignoring the clauses in the contract that are unenforceable and/or illegal.
If I buy a piece of hardware in the United States, I can do whatever I want to it -- take a sledge hammer to it, desolder the chips on the motherboard, add things to it, etc. The laws in Canada may be different in this regard, so putting mod chips on a PS/2 in Canada might very well be illegal. All the more reason for me to enjoy being a U.S. citizen (until such time as the laws here are modified by corporate interests).
OK, I'll take the bait, since I'm qualified to respond. I'm credited on the PNG specification as a contributor, and I wrote one of the first (if not the first) commercial implementations of PNG, for a little company called Mastersoft that eventually got acquired by Adobe (via Frame Technologies). Your facts are half-right -- PNG does give better image quality by virtue of supporting up to 16 bits per channel (16 bits each of R, G, B, and optionally A), and by virtue of using lossless compression, but it does not give better compression in the general case.
JPEG is designed to use lossy compression, and as such, it can attain much tighter compression ratios than PNG can. In some cases, PNG can generate a smaller file than JPEG, but this is a corner case where the original image has a limited color space (e.g., uses indexed color with very few unique colors), and where the original image has abrupt transitions (e.g., line art, or art where regions are solidly colored). JPEG is designed to work well on photographic images, where continuous tones are the norm.
If we lose JPEG as an open standard, there isn't anything left to adequately replace it. PNG was supposed to replace GIF to get around the Unisys patent (GIF tax). JPEG2000 is too new, and there are too few software packages supporting it. JPEG2000 also requires the use of wavelets, and a lot of legacy hardware might be severely taxed processing these new images.
I'm not a lawyer, but I was one of the people in the working group that developed PNG. (I'm credited in the spec under the name Robert Poole, although I don't think they updated my contact info recently.) PNG uses the same compression scheme used in GNU gzip, and that scheme was chosen specifically because it had been well researched and found to not conflict with any current patents. It also gives fairly decent performance and compression ratios for highly entropic data.
That's not to say that some other aspect of the PNG spec won't come under fire -- the file format is similar enough to TIFF and the Amiga's IFF/ILBM that if there are some core patents on tagged file formats, we could be in trouble. But that's doubtful, since prior art would probably play a role in any defense against such a patent assault. Bottom line -- if PNG comes under fire, the FSF lawyers would be all over the situation.
The problem is, JPEG wasn't just a product of big business. JPEG was the result of efforts by many people in the Joint Photographic Experts Group. JPEG was designed to be an open, royalty-free standard (although there are provisions in JPEG for some types of compression that are covered by patent, as I recall, and these alternate compression schemes are not widely implemented).
I know JPEG 2000 has even more potential land mines in it... someone correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't JPEG 2000 include support for wavelet compression? I know wavelets were an IP minefield at one time because several companies claimed fundamental patents on wavelet technology.
Surely, someone in the working group checked on the fundamental technology to see what was covered by patent and what wasn't. However, a best-faith effort, even to the extent of hiring attorneys to do a patent search (something only big corporations have the deep pockets to subsidize) isn't a guarantee that nothing will be missed. And opportunists can always swoop in and claim that some overly-broad patent applies.
I think that frivolous lawsuits of this nature are only going to serve to stifle the development of open, royalty-free standards. They're also going to insure that very little original development or research is done outside of large corporations, since nobody wants to assume personal liability for running afoul of patent nazis.
Hopefully, someone will step up to the plate, since JPEG is so widely used, and will defend against these sleazebags. I remember a similar situation not so long ago, where Apple was forced to defend against a company suing over ColorSync, claiming that this technology infringed their patent...
It would be nice to discuss this matter with a lawyer and see what they have to say, since I am fairly certain that there are penalties for failure to enforce one's patent rights.
You forgot to mention the one fact that most people will recognize: Maricopa county contains Phoenix, Scottsdale, and Tempe.
Phoenix is, as I recall, the fifth largest city in the U.S.
Since SonicBlue announced the ReplayTV 4000, I am sure that content providers are crapping themselves trying to find a way to short-circuit the features of this device. Briefly, the ReplayTV 4000 uses your existing home network and broadband connection to both obtain programming information fromt he ReplayTV servers, as well as enable users to share TV shows both over their local networks and over the Internet. Granted, it could take hours to transmit a single show from your ReplayTV to someone else's across the country, but certainly less time than it would take to ship a video tape.
When ReplayTV was a brand new venture, they started selling units on their own which had built-in FireWire (IEEE 1394) ports on them. The idea was to be able to archive existing program content stored in the DVR onto external media, or to supplement the hard disk already in the DVR. These ports were never activated, apparently under pressure from the entertainment industry which feared rampant piracy. Plans to create DVR devices that took removable media (such as ORB disks, a plan which CastleWood had been discussing openly on their web site) were similarly scrapped by other manufacturers.
Now, it would seem that SonicBlue, which acquired ReplayTV, is making it trivial for people to effectively copy TV shows to their friends. Granted, this system probably doesn't allow anonymous copying, so casual piracy will be reduced (no "Napster-esque" video sharing), but there's nothing preventing someone in one geographic region from sharing a show that is either blocked or unavailable in another geographic region. Pay-per-view for sporting events will suffer if such devices proliferate -- you can easily get around blackout restrictions by having your friend in another area record the game for you.
Because you generally sue the guy with the money. FreeDB.org has no resources to speak of. But Roxio is a for-profit venture, and as such, they make a tasty target.
I know a guy who runs a small company which owns numerous patents on crystal growing and its applications in sensors for oil wells. He wrote the patents to be sufficiently broad so that it would be impossible for a competitor to duplicate his devices without violating the patent. As it turns out, some competitors tried to steal the patent anyway; my friend sent cease and desist letters to the thieves, but he also sent threatening letters to those who were customers of this thief, informing them that they were committing contributory infringement.
The idea isn't necessarily to put these customers out of business; many of them didn't know there was patent infringement going on. But the rationale in this case was, these guys could put pressure on the company that was infringing.
What boggles my mind is the claim that Roxio was violating the DMCA. Exactly what measures did Gracenote put in place to prevent a software vendor from writing code to access a third party database? To me, this claim seems baseless. I'm much more concerned about the patent on generating a unique key to identify a CD. Clearly, they use track lengths and compute a hash function based on this; however, there's enough 'give' that Gracenote will correctly identify a CD even if some tracks are off by a few seconds in either direction. To me, there should be plenty of examples of prior art for something like this, possibly even an example lurking in a Computer Science textbook somewhere...
Math has a lot to do with programming, especially if you analyze algorithms and optimize them. This is how you discover that, for large arrays of values, Quicksort is way faster than insertion sort, which is faster than bubble sort, and why. (Check out this site for a demo.) This is how you find really clever ways to speed up multiplying really huge matrices, and when the payoff is big enough to warrant using the "clever" algorithm.
Granted, you don't need the piece of paper (i.e., the degree) to have the mathematical knowledge. But the degree is a credential that lets other people know that you know what you're talking about, to some extent. It's a yardstick, however flawed it might be. This is why many employers in my area are now eschewing self-taught programmers for those with real Comp Sci (or related) degrees.
On a personal note, I have noticed that many self-taught programmers feel they are somehow superior to those who actually busted their chops learning things like compiler theory. They often sneer at those of us who wasted our time getting that piece of paper. But you know what? Those of us from theory land often have this knack for finding better ways of doing things, and we even (gasp!) have some very nice skills at creating good abstraction frameworks. The down side is, we sometimes don't follow-through issues to their logical conclusion. After all, in academia, as long as something works, you've proven that it's doable in theory. No sense wasting time making it better, when you could be pursuing your next big problem to solve.
To speak to the original point, I think there will always be room in this world for the highly skilled programmer, someone who has both a theoretical foundation and the industry experience to make it practical.
Actually, you both have it wrong, although you're closer than the person you were responding to. During recording, a MiniDisc uses a laser in high-power mode to heat a domain on the disc itself; a magnetic field is then applied to change the optical phase of this domain, setting a "bit" on or off. During playback, a low-power laser is used to read the phase of these domains. A strong magnetic field applied to a MiniDisc, therefore, will have no discernible effect on the data stored on the disc unless the media were heated somehow, such as being hit with a high-power laser pulse.
This is one of the reasons I like MO technologies; the shelf life of MO media is typically better than many other types of media, magnetic and pure optical alike.
I've seen the DVD-Audio players in Fry's electronics. Originally retailing for around a cool $1000, the prices have now dropped to where mere mortals can afford them. The Panasonic player is $300 at Fry's; the Technics player, which is technically the same unit with upgraded cosmetics (brushed metal finish) and slightly upgraded components, is $500. They're also selling DVD-Audio discs for slightly more than the CD equivalent; I saw Natalie Merchant's Tigerlily for sale in DVD-Audio format.
Unfortunately, we are already experiencing the first format war. SACD is an alternate format being pushed by Sony and Philips. It has many virtues, including storing a CD-compatible layer of data (for older CD players) in addition to a SACD layer of high-resolution audio. It supports multi-channel audio. It has been out for longer than DVD-Audio, so there are more titles available. The drawbacks: SACD is more expensive overall. The first two players were about $5000 and $3500, respectively. The cheapest SACD player now is about $1250. The discs retail for $25 a pop. And only Sony Music is backing it currently, with a few other audiophile labels showing some support for SACD.
Even though SACD is technically superior in many areas, and is preferred by audiophiles because it does not impose watermarking on the music (while DVD-Audio purportedly does), it will probably die. In the meantime, we've got two new high-end audio formats duking it out. We also have this new format trying to edge into the market. Why?
Clearly, record labels realize that tape is dying a richly-deserved death, but why push yet another MiniDisc wannabe? This format can't even be rewritten, whereas CD-RW compatible audio CD recorders are now cheaply available at Best Buy and other mass market retailers. For a format to replace tape, it has to at least give you what tape does: rewritability. MiniDisc, despite its flaws, did this.
500 megs of storage in a tiny format is great, but fumble-fingered and forgetful humans won't like it. Being forced to burn a brand-new disc every time you want to create a mix is another problem. But then, the company creating this medium probably figured they'd have a better revenue stream by forcing users to buy more media.
A pity that the Dreamcast is end-of-life hardware. Although from what I've seen, plenty of people out there are passionate enough about the DC to keep it alive... at least as a hobbyist platform.
Let me ask you this, though: Do you really want to cede this market to Microsoft's XBox? That prospect frightens me. We all know the GameCube isn't going to make as much of a splash, since Nintendo seems content to saddle itself with being the "niche" player here.
Let me enumerate some reasons:
The rest of this thought experiment is left as an exercise for the reader.
There were several proposals for making HDTV broadcasts backwards compatible with analog TV, including using the digital portion of the signal to convey the "additional" resolution information. There was even a proposal to make the center portion of the image the analog broadcast, and the surrounding imagery would be stitched in from the digital signal. Clever, but ultimately, this and other similar proposals were rejected.
The U.S. has had the crappiest color television standard in the world, and I don't think it's unreasonable to upgrade to something significantly better. If that means jettisoning backwards compatibility, I'm all for it. The MPEG encoding scheme for HDTV (and 4:3 format DTV) is already lossy, why sacrifice yet more quality just to retain analog compatibility? I am bothered that 80% of the image quality of the current HDTV standard is considered "good enough." What ever happened to standards of quality?
I think the mix-up is due to nomenclature. Obviously, the original poster should have used (2cm)^2 (to denote a square area, 2 cm on a side) as opposed to 2cm^2 (two square centimeters, which would be equivalent to a rectangular area one centimeter on a side by two centimeters on a side). Just because we understood the original poster's intent doesn't mean he shouldn't be taken to task for improper notation.
Clearly, the equation Area = width * height applies. Doubling the length of a side of a square region quadruples its area. 2cm * 2cm = (2cm)^2 = 4 cm^2. (Four square centimeters, not four centimeters squared.) The notational convention is that the exponent applies to the unit of measurement only, and not to the numeric values preceding it. Any high school science student knows this.
I agree that most existing Java2D implementations are sub-optimal, and this contributes to Swing's inefficiency. I'm amazed at how Smalltalk-ish Swing's approach to creating a GUI is. (Then again, many Java developers are Smalltalk expatriates who saw a way to take what they were already doing and move it to a more popular language/platform. It's no accident that Java's object model owes more to Smalltalk and Objective C than to C++.)
You really can't blame all of Swing's problems on Java2D, however. There are many who'd claim that its architecture lends itself to certain inherent inefficiencies. Not being a Swing expert myself, I can't rightly comment on those in depth. But I believe that much of its architecture was done more with theoretical concerns than practical matters in mind.
One thing I do know is that some Java2D implementations rock, and as a result, Swing performs very acceptably on those systems. One such implementation is Apple's, under MacOS X. Under MacOS X, Java2D is peered onto the Quartz drawing engine, giving you great speed at drawing vector graphics in addition to freebies such as anti-aliasing. (This also means the G4's AltiVec unit is leveraged whenever possible to improve rendering speeds even more.) I've run Swing apps on an iBook running MacOS X beta, and can report that they ran fabulously even though the iBook was under-spec (96 MB of RAM instead of 128, slower G3 processor with no AltiVec to take advantage of, beta OS with debug assertions still in place, etc.).
The only disadvantage of Java2D on MacOS X is that, because of the anti-aliasing, some types of vector-based animation that work on most other Java2D implementations leave "trails" or "turds" on your drawing canvas in the Apple implementation. It's that darned anti-aliasing working against you, in that case, because over-drawing a spline (for example) with the same spline in the background color will not fully erase all the pixels that were originally drawn. The pixels bordering the spline will remain a blend of the spline's foreground color and the canvas background color.
For one thing, the PowerPC chips used in Macs are 32-bit chips; the SPARC in the Blade 100 is a 64-bit architecture. For another thing, the software bundled with the PowerMac, and the software generally available for it, is more consumer oriented. Yes, there is overlap; for instance, Photoshop exists for the Mac, and that's more of a professional graphics editing package. Photoshop also exists for SGI boxen, though I doubt most people would buy an SGI machine just to run Photoshop.
There are a lot of hidden costs to running a proprietary UNIX box. The Blade 100 makes great strides toward using commodity hardware, but there's so much more Sun could do on the software side. Then again, if Solaris were viewed as a mainstream OS, would Sun's server share decrease?