No. There is not a single algorithm that is the one true way to produce mpeg-1 layer 3 compliant bitstreams. You could create an MP3 encoder that just whacked away all frequencies below 1,000 hertz and above 1002 hertz. Yes it would sound like crap, but it would be a perfectly legit mp3 encoder and would create a perfectly correct mp3 bitstream. The trick is finding out which bits of sound can be removed without affecting the sound quality.
Actually, a better analogy would be your neighbor spending 3 years, mortgages his house twice, sells a kidney and a testicle, sells his luxury automobile, to pay for the designing of a DNA sequence for an UberCow. You have the proper equipment to do DNA sequencing. You hop the fence one night take a sample and then raise your own cows. Now your neighbor works at burger king selling burgers made of "his" ubercow but from your farm. Now why exactly will people put the massive amount of time, tremendous effort and bags and bags of money into creating these things?
You need to understand exactly how mp3 encoding works. The algorithm isn't set in stone. It's not a mathematical solution to a set problem. mp3 encoding doesn't require the use of the fraunhoffer model. You only have to come up with a compliant bitstream. And that's not patented. The whole point of LAME was to take the ISO codec (which only contains a partial implementation the fraunhoffer model, which is why at a given bitrate an mp3 from the ISO implementation will sound much worse than an mp3 from the Fraunhoffer codec) and rewrite it to improve it's audio qualities. Nobody knows the precise details (yes even though it's patented) of the Fraunhoffer method, so they had to develop their own methods of reducing the audio sizes.
If you could come up with a way to create data that had the proper attributes of a zip file you could write your own zip that didn't use the same algorithm as PKWare. Not sure why you would want to, but you could.
Because it's hard to make a good encoder. Just like MPEG-1/MPEG-2 are standards, the ways of encoding them are an art form. Fraunhoffer has a big lead time advantage on their competitors. Even with all the hard work that has gone into LAME, they wouldn't be anywhere near where they are if they hadn't had the Fraunhoffer/ISO codecs to work from and test against.
What's so special about MP3 or RSA PKE? Pretty much the same thing that was special about LZW compression back in 1983. Sure these things are plain to us now, because we've seen the methods and are familiar with the research. 30 years ago there weren't a lot of people who understood compression, so compression techniques were pretty revolutionary. In 10 years nobody will be impressed with perceptual audio coding (which is really only a variant of perceptual video coding [ie. jpeg]). And everybody will be pissed because it's patented.
This doesn't effect microsofts patent at all. If you haven't read the application carefully enough to know that then maybe you shouldn't make such comments. Hint: Check the filing date. It's way before "the beginning of the year [2000]."
Rather than being a complete reactionary, why don't you address the issue of the irresponsible way the moron at ZeroPaid is handling this. Why do you think that we don't hear about kids being locked up, fined, etc. for child porn all the time? They do have pictures of each other. They do get caught. Yet they don't get persecuted or prosecuted. Why? Because it's normal and natural and as minors the laws are applied to them in very special and carefully considered ways.
The whole point of disagreement here is about how dumb this is being handled. Other than a few obvious trolls nobody is saying that child porn is good or even protected. The problem is that there is no regard for correctness of the information he is putting out. Even the filenames he uses as bait are ambiguous and clearly not indicative of the conclusion he wishes that everyone will arrive at. His approach is inept and clumsy.
(And you are wrong about the law prohibiting the possesion of nude pictures of underage girls.)
So you're saying you're outraged at the government then? Local governments do this all the time. Ever hear of the vicesquad? It's not illegal or wrong for the police to respond undercover to all sorts of illegal propositions. Everything from prostitution to assasination for hire have been pursued using these methods.
The main difference is that the police are usually much more interested in being right in their accusations than this fellow. What happens to the guy who is looking for pictures of Sean Young, types in "young", clicks on the first name in the list, grabs the scroll bar and pulls it down to the bottom, shift-clicks on the last name in the list and hits download, all without ever reading each and every filename? "Golly Gee Batman! He just inadvertantly downloaded a whole slew of files called 'youngassfuck'." Without having any desire or tendancy towards pedophilia. Do you think this irresponsible fellow at ZeroPaid is going to do any checking to see? No, he's going to stick their name up there in some righteous fit of holy retribution.
Oh, he's not trying to get them to stop using his site. If he wanted to get them off his site he wouldn't have filenames that drew them in. Gnutella is not his personal property to dictate what is appropriate or not. And given that he seems to be completely behind the rampant copyright violations, he's not even working from a moral high ground. Apparrently he feels he's some kind of moral policeman. The only problem is that he doesn't have any of the checks and standards that a police force would have in place to protect people who may inadvertantly get involved in his little sting operation.
It's also an interesting way for a known lawbreaker to bash people he doesn't like. Can you trust a person you know violates copyright law to not violate various defamation laws?
Or finding ways to draw attention to yourself and your other illegal activities. How stupid is it to do this? These guys are probably going to make a point of collecting IP addresses so their going to get connected regularily. Now all the RIAA has to do is search for some of those keywords from their site and then go visit. If these numbnuts weren't distributing other illegal material this might be a vaguely less stupid action.
I agree. It was pretty ironic to see them hiding that copyright violating who managed to get mixed in with their child porn.
How funny do you think it will be when they get a visit from the FBI investigating the distribution of child porn. I don't think Agent Bob of the FBI will be too forgiving when he finds his time wasted. With such a nice collection of copyright violations right there it looks like these guys might just be asking to get the free asshole size upgrade by drawing attention to themselves.
So what you are saying is that a 15 year old boy shouldn't be looking at a 14 year old girl? Come on here. There's no point in ostracizing a young kid because he has natural interests in the opposite sex. This sort of "monitoring" borders on the criminal. First if the person here is presenting this material as if it were kiddie porn, that's illegal in some jurisdictions. Second he may be collecting information about the actions of some young kids, which is illegal in the US. Third some of those filenames are not clearly indicative of pedophilia. This is not a lot different than some king of vigilante action to stop, oh, door to door salesmen.
The host's perspective is irrelevant in this issue. We want to know how some random server can tell if an address is dynamic. You can't. Not to mention that the address isn't the dynamic part, it's the host that changes not the address.
They're smarter than you are. You see Metallica going after users. A smart person sees Metallica causing Napster to have to block 300K of their users. And keep doing it as long as Metallica wants to provide them with names. Eventually the technical and administrative costs will destroy napster. QED.
They don't have to prove it. They just have to show that it's likely. Napster can't make it difficult for the proper parties to enforce their property rights. If they intentionally put roadblocks up then they get closer and closer to finding themselves making that $80,000,000 check out to "Lars".
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The general assembly of the UN is incapable of governing themselves, why would we want them trying to police the Internet?
or maybe a : to really make it less awkward:
LAME: An MP3 Encoder.
Nope. Communism isn't about the right to make money. Capitalism is the right to attempt to make money, not that nobody has any right to make money.
No. There is not a single algorithm that is the one true way to produce mpeg-1 layer 3 compliant bitstreams. You could create an MP3 encoder that just whacked away all frequencies below 1,000 hertz and above 1002 hertz. Yes it would sound like crap, but it would be a perfectly legit mp3 encoder and would create a perfectly correct mp3 bitstream. The trick is finding out which bits of sound can be removed without affecting the sound quality.
Actually, a better analogy would be your neighbor spending 3 years, mortgages his house twice, sells a kidney and a testicle, sells his luxury automobile, to pay for the designing of a DNA sequence for an UberCow. You have the proper equipment to do DNA sequencing. You hop the fence one night take a sample and then raise your own cows. Now your neighbor works at burger king selling burgers made of "his" ubercow but from your farm. Now why exactly will people put the massive amount of time, tremendous effort and bags and bags of money into creating these things?
You need to understand exactly how mp3 encoding works. The algorithm isn't set in stone. It's not a mathematical solution to a set problem. mp3 encoding doesn't require the use of the fraunhoffer model. You only have to come up with a compliant bitstream. And that's not patented. The whole point of LAME was to take the ISO codec (which only contains a partial implementation the fraunhoffer model, which is why at a given bitrate an mp3 from the ISO implementation will sound much worse than an mp3 from the Fraunhoffer codec) and rewrite it to improve it's audio qualities. Nobody knows the precise details (yes even though it's patented) of the Fraunhoffer method, so they had to develop their own methods of reducing the audio sizes.
If you could come up with a way to create data that had the proper attributes of a zip file you could write your own zip that didn't use the same algorithm as PKWare. Not sure why you would want to, but you could.
Because it's hard to make a good encoder. Just like MPEG-1/MPEG-2 are standards, the ways of encoding them are an art form. Fraunhoffer has a big lead time advantage on their competitors. Even with all the hard work that has gone into LAME, they wouldn't be anywhere near where they are if they hadn't had the Fraunhoffer/ISO codecs to work from and test against.
WinNT has had better file/directory permissions that traditional unix file systems for quite a while.
Copyright protection is automatic. Patent isn't. Copyright can be registered. Patents have to be.
RPM has nothing to do with this. This is about an automated, internet based, update system, that may update only partial modules of programs.
What's so special about MP3 or RSA PKE? Pretty much the same thing that was special about LZW compression back in 1983. Sure these things are plain to us now, because we've seen the methods and are familiar with the research. 30 years ago there weren't a lot of people who understood compression, so compression techniques were pretty revolutionary. In 10 years nobody will be impressed with perceptual audio coding (which is really only a variant of perceptual video coding [ie. jpeg]). And everybody will be pissed because it's patented.
This doesn't effect microsofts patent at all. If you haven't read the application carefully enough to know that then maybe you shouldn't make such comments. Hint: Check the filing date. It's way before "the beginning of the year [2000]."
What relevance does RPM have to this?
So has microsoft, that's why the patent was filed in Nov 1997. Apple didn't have it then, nor did Debian.
Doesn't sound like a new and patentable concept to me, but hey, they let you patent everything nowadays.
It's not new. It was filed for in Nov 1997. It may have been new then.
(and yes, the internet IS public property)
No it's not. It's a collection of private networks. Companies like Sprint, AT&T, Qwest, own their national networks and lease the bandwidth.
Rather than being a complete reactionary, why don't you address the issue of the irresponsible way the moron at ZeroPaid is handling this. Why do you think that we don't hear about kids being locked up, fined, etc. for child porn all the time? They do have pictures of each other. They do get caught. Yet they don't get persecuted or prosecuted. Why? Because it's normal and natural and as minors the laws are applied to them in very special and carefully considered ways.
The whole point of disagreement here is about how dumb this is being handled. Other than a few obvious trolls nobody is saying that child porn is good or even protected. The problem is that there is no regard for correctness of the information he is putting out. Even the filenames he uses as bait are ambiguous and clearly not indicative of the conclusion he wishes that everyone will arrive at. His approach is inept and clumsy.
(And you are wrong about the law prohibiting the possesion of nude pictures of underage girls.)
So you're saying you're outraged at the government then? Local governments do this all the time. Ever hear of the vicesquad? It's not illegal or wrong for the police to respond undercover to all sorts of illegal propositions. Everything from prostitution to assasination for hire have been pursued using these methods.
The main difference is that the police are usually much more interested in being right in their accusations than this fellow. What happens to the guy who is looking for pictures of Sean Young, types in "young", clicks on the first name in the list, grabs the scroll bar and pulls it down to the bottom, shift-clicks on the last name in the list and hits download, all without ever reading each and every filename? "Golly Gee Batman! He just inadvertantly downloaded a whole slew of files called 'youngassfuck'." Without having any desire or tendancy towards pedophilia. Do you think this irresponsible fellow at ZeroPaid is going to do any checking to see? No, he's going to stick their name up there in some righteous fit of holy retribution.
Oh, he's not trying to get them to stop using his site. If he wanted to get them off his site he wouldn't have filenames that drew them in. Gnutella is not his personal property to dictate what is appropriate or not. And given that he seems to be completely behind the rampant copyright violations, he's not even working from a moral high ground. Apparrently he feels he's some kind of moral policeman. The only problem is that he doesn't have any of the checks and standards that a police force would have in place to protect people who may inadvertantly get involved in his little sting operation.
It's also an interesting way for a known lawbreaker to bash people he doesn't like. Can you trust a person you know violates copyright law to not violate various defamation laws?
Or finding ways to draw attention to yourself and your other illegal activities. How stupid is it to do this? These guys are probably going to make a point of collecting IP addresses so their going to get connected regularily. Now all the RIAA has to do is search for some of those keywords from their site and then go visit. If these numbnuts weren't distributing other illegal material this might be a vaguely less stupid action.
I agree. It was pretty ironic to see them hiding that copyright violating who managed to get mixed in with their child porn.
How funny do you think it will be when they get a visit from the FBI investigating the distribution of child porn. I don't think Agent Bob of the FBI will be too forgiving when he finds his time wasted. With such a nice collection of copyright violations right there it looks like these guys might just be asking to get the free asshole size upgrade by drawing attention to themselves.
So what you are saying is that a 15 year old boy shouldn't be looking at a 14 year old girl? Come on here. There's no point in ostracizing a young kid because he has natural interests in the opposite sex. This sort of "monitoring" borders on the criminal. First if the person here is presenting this material as if it were kiddie porn, that's illegal in some jurisdictions. Second he may be collecting information about the actions of some young kids, which is illegal in the US. Third some of those filenames are not clearly indicative of pedophilia. This is not a lot different than some king of vigilante action to stop, oh, door to door salesmen.
Right. And the address never changes. It's just a set of numbers. The host might change, but the address doesn't.
The host's perspective is irrelevant in this issue. We want to know how some random server can tell if an address is dynamic. You can't. Not to mention that the address isn't the dynamic part, it's the host that changes not the address.
They're smarter than you are. You see Metallica going after users. A smart person sees Metallica causing Napster to have to block 300K of their users. And keep doing it as long as Metallica wants to provide them with names. Eventually the technical and administrative costs will destroy napster. QED.
They don't have to prove it. They just have to show that it's likely. Napster can't make it difficult for the proper parties to enforce their property rights. If they intentionally put roadblocks up then they get closer and closer to finding themselves making that $80,000,000 check out to "Lars".