I'm sorry, but there are perfectly legal ways to use MP3.
*sigh*... name one (except playback) involving nothing but Free Software.
The MP3 issues I was referring to have nothing to do with content; they have everything to do with licensing the Fraunhoffer patents.
From mp3licensing.com:
mp3 Software Encoders
(patents and object code developed by Fraunhoffer IIS)
Fraunhofer IIS developed fast, efficient and high-quality implementations for mp3 encoding, supporting bitrates from 8 kbps to 320 kbps, samplerates from 8 kHz to 48 kHz, mono and stereo. Evaluation copies are available upon request, after signing an mp3 evaluation agreement. Please contact us for details.
US$ 5.00 per unit
US$ 15,000 annual minimum, payable upon signature and each following year in January, fully creditable against annual sales.
mp3 Software Encoders
(patents-only)
If you have developed your own implementation of an mp3 encoder or if you have licensed such an implementation from a third party, you need a patent-only license.
US$ 2.50 per unit
US$ 15,000 annual minimum, payable upon signature and each following year in January, fully creditable against annual sales.
Oh yes, and LAME is not exempt... from the LAME page:
Personal and commercial use of compiled versions of LAME (or any other mp3 encoder) requires a patent license in some countries.
...and no, I don't have US$ 15,000 to throw around. Do you?
Is it all that finalized? I heard something about wavelet support being in the works.
Good catch. Short answer: Yes, everything specified so far has been finalized, will not change, and is already superior to MP3. As I understand it, the proposed wavelet stuff would be another level, rather like MPEG has layers.
My original point was twofold:
Vorbis audio encoded today will remain playable by all future Vorbis players
Vorbis is nowhere near a "quality ceiling" yet; the only quality limitation we're currently hitting is the relative immaturity of Vorbis encoders, and it's still better than MP3 now despite that
...but of stripping watermarks; hidden signals in the audio that are supposed to be able to survive re-encoding and other audio transformations.
The watermarks don't have to be perfectly robust, just robust enough that removing them requires sufficient manipulation of the media stream to appreciably destroy the quality.
Unfortunately, I can think of better methods than what were ostensibly used in the SDMI stuff that was cracked here... interferometry and holography have a lot of related technology to offer...
After all...that just gives MP3's more of a chance.
Ahem, leaving SDMI for MP3 is just leaving the DMCA Swamp for the Patent Quagmire. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
Why don't we go for the option that doesn't involve breaking the law (and has nice fringe benefits -- MP3 is old tech now), when we can?
And, by the way, the Vorbis format is finalized and has been for some time. bps limitations of current encoders are only a result of the encoding software, not of limitations of the underlying format. Not to mention that.ogg seems to be sounding better than higher-bitrate.mp3s as the encoders improve...
This does it, I'm re-encoding[1] all the music on my site to.ogg when I get the chance. I need the space savings anyway.
---
[1] that is -- encoding new.oggs from pristine audio, not "converting" the existing.mp3s.
"converting" among lossy formats is always going to sound bad.
Any hypothetical scenario that depends on the invention of "tamper-proof hardware" isn't worth worrying about.
Ah, but it doesn't require tamper-proof hardware, only hardware that is sufficiently tamper-resistant.
Here's one piece of the puzzle: let's say that the digital link between a future digital monitor and your video card is encrypted, meaning that open-source software with the keys embedded would defeat the purpose.
...meaning that open-source video drivers for such hardware could conceivably be illegal for much the same reason DeCSS is.
Unless the notes specifically amount to a transcript or outline of the lecture (some students admittedly do take notes this way), the school ought to be able to claim no rights over the notes.
It's certainly sick when the ideas (which are generally speaking public domain) expressed in the lecture themselves are considered the intellectual property of the school, just because that's where you happened to get them from.
Of course, I suppose there is precedent for this treatment of public domain content -- companies who sell access to databases have been lobbying for IP "protection" for public domain content extracted from their databases for a long time.
Let's say I become a teacher... is my alma mater going to start demanding royalties?
How could Jeff Bezos have started this if their patent was filed 3 years before the Amazon patent?
It was his decision to use the Amazon business method patent offensively rather than just defensively that set the ball rolling.
Stupid patents have exited for a while, but only now are corporations starting to really put a hurting on each other.
To use the playground analogy (again), it's like a bunch of kids playing in a yard with a lot of big sticks laying around. Occasionally a kid will pick one up and wave it around, and then forget about it for a while.
Then, suddenly, one of the kids (Jeff Bezos) picks up a stick and whacks another kid with it. Now, one of two things are going to happen:
The whackee goes crying to the resident authority figure (the patent is seriously challenged)
The whackee doesn't (runs away, throws dirt, whatever), and pretty soon the yard is full of kids fighting each other with sticks. (this is what actually happened)
OpenTV was just the second kid to pick up a stick (in this case, one that looks rather like the one Jeff had). Watch for more. And yes, I do think the coming state of affairs will be very much Mr. Jeffery Bezos's fault.
Sounds like they can meet the 1kW power requirement well enough, but it needs [nearly] 1kg of "fuel" (for plasma) also per day. The numbers quoted at the top for a 200kg vehicle isn't all the heavy. By the time you add yourself, a friend, and the obligatory Beowolf/Linux cluster, well, I just start wondering if it would truly attain their listed speed *or* endurance rating. Just my thoughts.
Turnabout's fair play, I suppose. Jeff Bezos, just look what you started.
The idea is so basic that I doubt OpenTV is really the first entity with a patent covering "one-click" either. This could get interesting.
It's like the idea of Mutually Insured Destruction with nuclear weapons, except the participants are a bunch of kids holding their fingers in the "gun" configuration.
Like as not, they'll stand there for a few seconds, there'll be a big argument over who yelled "bang!" first, and it'll degenerate into a big fistfight.
Hopefully they'll learn their lesson and the corporate world will back off from IP abuse, but I doubt it.
"Gimme another hit on the patent bong, Jimmy..."
I bet Steve Jobs (Apple was the first "one-click" licensee) feels stupid now, at any rate.
Have you ever heard the expression "voting with your feet" (or money)? I really don't feel like financially supporting Microsoft.
It's one thing when a company does some crappy things and some nice things -- as long as it's not too bad, you just patronize them where they do good.
However, for a company that creates daily pain for me at work whether or not I buy their game cosnole -- obscene licensing agreements, insane APIs, unstable implementations and a penchant for thwarting all my attempts at constructing interoperability solutions (except occasionally on their terms) -- there's just not enough incentive there for me.
It seems even the most idealogically pure karma whore can't find anything bad to say about _this_ Microsoft product.
It doesn't exist yet, and the specs will be outmoded by the time it does.
A friend's father works for a company that was contracted for one of the subsystems. Not all the details were even finalized on that until relatively recently.
Yes, Virginia, that means the screenshots you've been seeing are somewhat "bogus".
Most everything so far with the X-Box has been the usual tactic of "spew vapor until we clear out the marketplace".
Needless to say, I'm not getting one, even if the final design turns out not to suck.
Agreed. Writing a program GNU/gnulix starves its success
That really depends on how you measure success. If it means a lot of people using and contributing to the software, then it's generally very successful. Iff it's under a free license, and you have sufficient people skills to manage a project. Otherwise it's like pissing in Niagra Falls.
plus, the users of that program tend to be completely unthankful for the effort you put in.
I've noticed. It didn't used to be that way, though. I have the nagging feeling that Slashdot's done for the Free Software userbase what AOL has done for the Internet's userbase.
Yes, thank God. Granted, as pointed out in the article, you're not legally allowed to compile it on non-windows platforms.
and I believe it's intended to be portable.
As someone who's done a fair amount of programming with MFC before, I don't really see how you could say that. Intended... maybe... but in practice it's not at all.
MFC even has a whole bunch of (very badly designed) STL-equivalent classes that are used very pervasively. This basically means that, if you're doing a decent Model-View-Controller style program you either:
use STL in your "backend" (model) code, and convert to the MFC equivalent classes when you have to interact with MFC, destroying performance
use the MFC equivalents throughout, meaning your backend code is non-portable to any environment without the MFC container classes
I'm not really fond of MFC in general, either. It's a really poor object-oriented design. It has a horrid set of macros that tend to obfuscate things during debugging, and it really abuses templates (much worse than STL), too.
It's just another app framework dude. Just happens to be MS's.
Since when is it being a Microsoft product an excuse for anything?
...a high-quality MPEG4 codec used quite heavily by DVD pirates to recompress movies...
Well, I'm glad you couldn't think of any legitimate uses for it.
Maybe we should make it illegal to write or distribute CODECs without appropriate copy protection facilities?
In practice, this means cryptographically signed drivers, with the OS under the control of a single vendor who will honor the wishes of the MPAA/RIAA... which is just what Microsoft does in W2K. "copy-protected" content can't be used with unsigned drivers.
Realistically, though, people are going to manage to get copy-protected content out somehow.
This means that it will also eventually be necessary to disallow drivers from displaying/rendering content that is not digitally signed by an approved content provider (who can presumably be trusted not to distribute pirated content).
With sufficient legal protection and penalties (e.g. making the use of operating environments that cannot effectively implement these protections illegal (e.g. Linux and any pure Open Source OS)), this will effectively eliminate most piracy.
Thank you, Slashdot, for providing one more implicit argument for such a world.
It's also going to be illegal to broadcast analog TV signals after... 2008, I think. Yes, that regulation has already been made. At the behest of the media conglomerates.
Oh yes. You all remember that the digital TV standard is now being retooled to allow for "content protection"? (at the behest of same congolomerates -- this was on/., even, as you may recall)
Well, so obviously the only reason anyone would have analog equipment after 2015 or so would be for "piracy", right? Certainly isn't any good for viewing "legitimate" media.
Legacy is very easy to deal with indeed. Just make it illegal.
The only way we're going to be able to deal with this is to start producing significant amounts of our own media, which must be at least as unencumbered as GPLed software.
Otherwise, what argument can we make to the public for free OSes and uncrippled equipment that can only (easily) view "unprotected" content?
I've been using CSS2 constructs on my pages for ages now, and testing them in Mozilla. Granted, there are some things I can't do thanks to IE's broken (and much more incomplete) CSS2 support, but in particular I've found:before and:after to be quite safe.
Slashdot Mirror
*sigh* ... name one (except playback) involving nothing but Free Software.
The MP3 issues I was referring to have nothing to do with content; they have everything to do with licensing the Fraunhoffer patents.
From mp3licensing.com:
Oh yes, and LAME is not exempt... from the LAME page:
...and no, I don't have US$ 15,000 to throw around. Do you?
Good catch. Short answer: Yes, everything specified so far has been finalized, will not change, and is already superior to MP3. As I understand it, the proposed wavelet stuff would be another level, rather like MPEG has layers.
My original point was twofold:
If they accept the prize, it will be clear that the answers are, respectively: "Money is good," and "about $10k."
...but of stripping watermarks; hidden signals in the audio that are supposed to be able to survive re-encoding and other audio transformations.
The watermarks don't have to be perfectly robust, just robust enough that removing them requires sufficient manipulation of the media stream to appreciably destroy the quality.
Unfortunately, I can think of better methods than what were ostensibly used in the SDMI stuff that was cracked here... interferometry and holography have a lot of related technology to offer...
They had professional cryptographers working on this, and I expect the cryptographers told them as much, which is why this gives me the willies.
My gut feeling says that they may well have been angling for this crack, in order to take advantage of some legal or PR leverage it would give them.
One way or another, the successful crack is a worth a lot more than $10k to them...
We'll have to wait and see...
Ahem, leaving SDMI for MP3 is just leaving the DMCA Swamp for the Patent Quagmire. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
Why don't we go for the option that doesn't involve breaking the law (and has nice fringe benefits -- MP3 is old tech now), when we can?
And, by the way, the Vorbis format is finalized and has been for some time. bps limitations of current encoders are only a result of the encoding software, not of limitations of the underlying format. Not to mention that .ogg seems to be sounding better than higher-bitrate .mp3s as the encoders improve...
This does it, I'm re-encoding[1] all the music on my site to .ogg when I get the chance. I need the space savings anyway.
---[1] that is -- encoding new .oggs from pristine audio, not "converting" the existing .mp3s.
"converting" among lossy formats is always going to sound bad.
If you post to an article you've moderated, your moderations are cancelled.
Ah, but it doesn't require tamper-proof hardware, only hardware that is sufficiently tamper-resistant.
Here's one piece of the puzzle: let's say that the digital link between a future digital monitor and your video card is encrypted, meaning that open-source software with the keys embedded would defeat the purpose.
...meaning that open-source video drivers for such hardware could conceivably be illegal for much the same reason DeCSS is.
Open Source operating systems suddenly become very, very screwed.
Expand this approach to other hardware.
Game, set, match. I hope you enjoyed your right to read while it lasted.
By the way, Intel is already working on this.
HAND ^_^
Unless the notes specifically amount to a transcript or outline of the lecture (some students admittedly do take notes this way), the school ought to be able to claim no rights over the notes.
It's certainly sick when the ideas (which are generally speaking public domain) expressed in the lecture themselves are considered the intellectual property of the school, just because that's where you happened to get them from.
Of course, I suppose there is precedent for this treatment of public domain content -- companies who sell access to databases have been lobbying for IP "protection" for public domain content extracted from their databases for a long time.
Let's say I become a teacher... is my alma mater going to start demanding royalties?
Either that, or we're going to start seeing a lot of CG spokespersons in commercials from here on in...
Right, then they get to pay OpenTV instead, and how much do you want to bet that he isn't going to get his money back from Amazon?
(for that matter, OpenTV might be inclined to charge him retroactively for his unlicensed (by them) use of the ... ahem ... technology)
Yes, thank you. I actually spelled Ensured incorrectly too.
It was his decision to use the Amazon business method patent offensively rather than just defensively that set the ball rolling.
Stupid patents have exited for a while, but only now are corporations starting to really put a hurting on each other.
To use the playground analogy (again), it's like a bunch of kids playing in a yard with a lot of big sticks laying around. Occasionally a kid will pick one up and wave it around, and then forget about it for a while.
Then, suddenly, one of the kids (Jeff Bezos) picks up a stick and whacks another kid with it. Now, one of two things are going to happen:
OpenTV was just the second kid to pick up a stick (in this case, one that looks rather like the one Jeff had). Watch for more. And yes, I do think the coming state of affairs will be very much Mr. Jeffery Bezos's fault.
Easy:
</EVIL>
Turnabout's fair play, I suppose. Jeff Bezos, just look what you started.
The idea is so basic that I doubt OpenTV is really the first entity with a patent covering "one-click" either. This could get interesting.
It's like the idea of Mutually Insured Destruction with nuclear weapons, except the participants are a bunch of kids holding their fingers in the "gun" configuration.
Like as not, they'll stand there for a few seconds, there'll be a big argument over who yelled "bang!" first, and it'll degenerate into a big fistfight.
Hopefully they'll learn their lesson and the corporate world will back off from IP abuse, but I doubt it.
"Gimme another hit on the patent bong, Jimmy..."
I bet Steve Jobs (Apple was the first "one-click" licensee) feels stupid now, at any rate.
Hrm, okay. I stand corrected on the MFC licensing issue, then. We're still at VC++5 at work for sundry reasons.
Have you ever heard the expression "voting with your feet" (or money)? I really don't feel like financially supporting Microsoft.
It's one thing when a company does some crappy things and some nice things -- as long as it's not too bad, you just patronize them where they do good.
However, for a company that creates daily pain for me at work whether or not I buy their game cosnole -- obscene licensing agreements, insane APIs, unstable implementations and a penchant for thwarting all my attempts at constructing interoperability solutions (except occasionally on their terms) -- there's just not enough incentive there for me.
I am not joking. From the article:
It doesn't exist yet, and the specs will be outmoded by the time it does.
A friend's father works for a company that was contracted for one of the subsystems. Not all the details were even finalized on that until relatively recently.
Yes, Virginia, that means the screenshots you've been seeing are somewhat "bogus".
Most everything so far with the X-Box has been the usual tactic of "spew vapor until we clear out the marketplace".
Needless to say, I'm not getting one, even if the final design turns out not to suck.
That really depends on how you measure success. If it means a lot of people using and contributing to the software, then it's generally very successful. Iff it's under a free license, and you have sufficient people skills to manage a project. Otherwise it's like pissing in Niagra Falls.
I've noticed. It didn't used to be that way, though. I have the nagging feeling that Slashdot's done for the Free Software userbase what AOL has done for the Internet's userbase.
Yes, thank God. Granted, as pointed out in the article, you're not legally allowed to compile it on non-windows platforms.
As someone who's done a fair amount of programming with MFC before, I don't really see how you could say that. Intended... maybe... but in practice it's not at all.
MFC even has a whole bunch of (very badly designed) STL-equivalent classes that are used very pervasively. This basically means that, if you're doing a decent Model-View-Controller style program you either:
I'm not really fond of MFC in general, either. It's a really poor object-oriented design. It has a horrid set of macros that tend to obfuscate things during debugging, and it really abuses templates (much worse than STL), too.
Since when is it being a Microsoft product an excuse for anything?
Well, I'm glad you couldn't think of any legitimate uses for it.
Maybe we should make it illegal to write or distribute CODECs without appropriate copy protection facilities?
In practice, this means cryptographically signed drivers, with the OS under the control of a single vendor who will honor the wishes of the MPAA/RIAA ... which is just what Microsoft does in W2K. "copy-protected" content can't be used with unsigned drivers.
Realistically, though, people are going to manage to get copy-protected content out somehow.
This means that it will also eventually be necessary to disallow drivers from displaying/rendering content that is not digitally signed by an approved content provider (who can presumably be trusted not to distribute pirated content).
With sufficient legal protection and penalties (e.g. making the use of operating environments that cannot effectively implement these protections illegal (e.g. Linux and any pure Open Source OS)), this will effectively eliminate most piracy.
Thank you, Slashdot, for providing one more implicit argument for such a world.
It's also going to be illegal to broadcast analog TV signals after ... 2008, I think. Yes, that regulation has already been made. At the behest of the media conglomerates.
Oh yes. You all remember that the digital TV standard is now being retooled to allow for "content protection"? (at the behest of same congolomerates -- this was on /., even, as you may recall)
Well, so obviously the only reason anyone would have analog equipment after 2015 or so would be for "piracy", right? Certainly isn't any good for viewing "legitimate" media.
Legacy is very easy to deal with indeed. Just make it illegal.
The only way we're going to be able to deal with this is to start producing significant amounts of our own media, which must be at least as unencumbered as GPLed software.
Otherwise, what argument can we make to the public for free OSes and uncrippled equipment that can only (easily) view "unprotected" content?
I've been using CSS2 constructs on my pages for ages now, and testing them in Mozilla. Granted, there are some things I can't do thanks to IE's broken (and much more incomplete) CSS2 support, but in particular I've found :before and :after to be quite safe.
I did. Thank you for the information.
(someone mod him up please?)