I'm all for copyrights being made only 50 years or even less (that gives me enough time to sell the painting), but they should be copyrighted the instant they are created.
I'd rather have a short-term automatic copyright (say, 5 years) followed by an inexpensive registration (in a digital era, this isn't hard to do) that could extend it up to, say, 35 years.
I don't think that any individual artists would be left penniless with a "mere" 35 years, but it would let works that have been milked heavily by producers enter the public domain and let people make derivative works (like Tolkien and so forth).
Actually, I think it should be legal to reuse characters as long as something is labeled "unofficial". Japan is much less uptight about this than the US.
So, as far as I can tell from the discussion, he tried running stuff on his own server for a bit instead of Userland. I'm going to guess that his bandwidth usage for this month exceeded whatever he purchased for the month -- this would explain why he's refusing to provide any access until the first of next month, when he's sending people's blogs back to them.
Of course, that doesn't explain why he'd use an audio message to get the word out.
Bof the GC this is not the issue that it is in C++. For example if you're writing high performance C++ code you'll often end up with private heaps and specialized allocators that are designed to reduce the cost of many allocations in a short period. Other times you'll make use of these heaps to allow you to quickly free large amounts of memory. In either case you do it because the allocation or deallocation cost is too high (because it needs to ensure it doesn't fragment memory horribly).
In Java (and C#/.NET as well as well) though you typically have a garbage collector that can move memory around. This allows the garbage collector to not care about where it allocates memory from. It can fragment it to all hell, and clean up later. And the GC can even optimize clean up later to allow it to quickly reclaim large areas of memory (as for the cost of this it can often be done when the program would otherwise not be doing anything).
Mmm...I dunno if I can agree with you here. I don't think the overriding cost is likely to be simply in the GC to allocate a block of memory -- it's in the allocation and handling of metadata and in the execution of constructors. I'm also a little surprised that a JVM would do defragmentation (clearly it's possible, yes). The only general-purpose defragmenting PC-class system that I've run into is the (now obsolete) classic Mac OS, which initially ran on hardware lacking an MMU or hard drive and thus really needed to defragment what was there. Defragmentation got a lot less valuable and more expensive when quantities of memory involved rose.
So the only way Java can win is by having better algorithms. Memory is the one area where they've really done a good job.
I just can't agree. It's easy to see that Java-implemented software requires significantly more memory (I've yet to see software with a C++ and a Java implementation where the C++ implementation requires more memory), and I can't see how GC vs allocation/destruction costs are likely to be significantly more than constructor runtimes (I *have* seen some convincing arguments based on more researchy, performance-oriented software like ML).
Interestingly, in Java 1.5, generics are actually syntactic sugar to make your code look pretty. When you define an int list or a String list, it just creates an object list and prepends a cast to your object accesses.
Ah, thank you. Yes, this is sort of what I was suspicious of when reading the 1.5 feature list, but I hadn't read anything on it from any language people yet.
But I get cranky when I click a button and the application doesn't, y'know, appear.
If I have to wait for 19 seconds for anything to appear, I'm not going to be a happy camper, ignoring what technical reasons cause the slowdown.
Furthermore, from a technical standpoint, Java has a number of fundamental performance flaws:
* Java bounds-checks all array accesses. This is pretty par for the course for safe languages, and it's a good bet that compilers optimize some of this out, but it's a hit.
* Java technically can avoid rapid allocation/deallocation by use of object pools and use of primitives and the like. However, it's *very easy* to have an excessive number of allocation/deallocations. The language definitely encourages this.
* Java lacks generics (I haven't checked out 1.5, not sure whether this can provide performance improvements). This is bad because casting and hence run-time typechecking has to take place every time an object in a container is accessed.
Plus, Java eats memory for breakfast. Yes, memory is cheap and all that, but as a user, I'd definitely take a C/C++ app over a Java app any day.
Java's great for lightweight networking, it's nice that it has a cross-platform GUI, and it's good for rapid development due to the scads of library functionality.
The problem is that it got way overhyped as a C/C++ replacement (which it isn't) or even a good choice for general application development (including horizontal-market client stuff) which it isn't.
Huh? You are seriously getting screwed over if your phone company is oversubscribing their DSL service. DSL is point-to-point, straight from your house to the CO, there is no "segment" like you have with cable service.
Consumer ISPs always oversubscribe.
They oversubscribed when people used 28.8 modems, much less DSL.
The average user doesn't use more than a tiny percentage of their potential constant bandwidth, and it'd be silly for them to spend far more than they need.
Now, if you buy a business package with guaranteed bandwidth, it might be a different story.
The only reason heavy bandwidth users can get away with things is that there aren't that many of them and it's a pain in the ass for the ISP to root them out.
How much time will it take for to Slashdot be blocked?
Slashdot *does* criticize Chinese policy, including information control and the like.
However, it's also extremely critical of the current US administration, which China's current administration is not a tremendous fan of.
Also, Slashdot (at least the English slashdot.org) is not in Chinese, limiting the number of people that can read it. Wikipedia is translated to Chinese.
I do agree that this sucks. Technically, China is still communist, and Wikipedia is about as fine an example of the triumph of successful communist principles (community-owned, from according to assets, to according to need) as you could ask for. Seems like a stupid idea on the part of China.
English may be lingua franca, but there's a billion native speakers of Chinese (though different dialects) and Ebay serves the globe.
Yes, but he isn't *selling* to those people. He's posting the sale in English on a US website. If he wanted to sell to Japanese users, he could simply use the eBay Japan website. Instead, he chose to target a particular market.
Yes, the world does revolve around the USA but not every merchant is obligated to revolve in lockstep. Those who choose not to may lose some sales, but isn't that entirely their problem? You act as if it was a deliberate offense to you
I don't think I am -- I certainly don't feel offended. I will, however, debate the point that his grammatical errors should not be considered a minus when considering the legitimacy of the deal, however, which was the OP's thesis.
This package is a steal at its price from what I'm reading, so maybe you should be kicking in with the international staff, since you are the one who feels put at risk.
If it's all legitimate and legal.
The only good reason he'd have to get an English-speaking assistant is if it would improve the bidding. If he chooses not to do so, maybe it does hurt his bidding but why should you be so offended about it?
He doesn't need to do so -- it's quite possible to hire a translation firm to go over a single document, and for a $100K deal, it seems like this would be expected from a legitimate businessperson -- the idea is that if you're a legitimate business, you'll care about reputation, and if you care about reputation, you'll care about and be willing to have a polished presentation. Again, if I were selling a $100K car in France, I'd certainly have a French speaker read over my advertisement.
Yes, but heat, noise, and lifetime are also factors.
If you just want bytes for the penny, WD is probably the way to go.
Re:TechnoAntiBlogDystopia
on
Meet Joe Blog
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I would boil my boring post down as, "I am sick of the engineers who run the Internet judging and bitching about how I am using this fabulous network infrastructure they have built, when they're not exactly writing universally fascinating stuff."
I don't think it's exactly unexpected.
If you go to a forum on a particular topic, the people there will tend to be, y'know, interested in that topic, and probably there's a general feeling that that topic is more interesting than other topics.
Go to a dog-breeding forum and see whether they might be a bit scornful of people that, oh, I don't know, waste time talking about "other things" and don't appreciate the love and companionship that a dog will give you.
Is Slashdot a blog, anyway? It's not really what I think of when I think of a blog.
I can't figure for the life of me how Americans, who generally have a limp hold on a single language, can be so critical of an Asian who isn't in perfect command of English.
(a) English is somewhat of a lingua franca in many areas these days, especially WRT technology -- and this guy is selling stuff that would really only be of interest to a developer.
(b) The guy isn't selling this on an Asian website. He's selling it on a US one, and asking for a decent chunk of change for it. If I'm selling a $100K car in France, you can be damned sure that I'm going to find a French speaker to proofread what I wrote.
I used classic MacOS for years, and loved spatial directories. I think that they're a really good idea, and a serious lack in Windows.
That being said, it absolutely drives people bananas when you force them to use things differently than they'd prefer. I remember moving from spatial directories on the Mac OS to non-spatials on Windows and *hating* it.
I'd *strongly* suggest that this be GUI-toggleable. The current trend in GNOME has been to increase usability by removing all the options from the GUI config (but leaving them in to keep the hackers that complain "that isn't there") happy. Emacs keybindings, user-rebindable accerators, viewport (vs workspace) support, non-solid-dragging. I really don't think this does a whole lot of good -- having an "advanced" tab is perfectly legitimate, if some UI guy freaks out about the idea of user-rebindable accelerators.
I find it extremely irritating that there is a significant and ever-growing portion of GNOME that is hidden from the "power users" that would normally get a lot of good out of it. These features are not gone, but they are not immediately apparent. This has been a growing trend since GNOME 2, and it is *not* a good thing.
(note to all you amateur lawyers, obvious has a special meaning, and it has to be at the time of the alleged invention WITHOUT reference to disclosure in the applicant's application -- it's easy to say that something is obvious once someone has already pointed out the problem and the solution).
The problem is that there are a vast number of processes that are very straightforward modifications of existing processes that have not been used before that *will* be used.
When the Web came around, a large number of patents were granted for [former process] on the Web.
If a VR protocol becomes standard and widely used, it's not unreasonable to assume that people will patent [former process] on the VR protocol.
You've biased your own argument that the fees are biased by picking inter partes re-examination, which does have a fee of $8800. But if you insist on the ability to go toe to toe with the patent owner, rather than let the examiner perform the analysis (note that most people are complaining about the quality of the prior art SEARCHES in the patent office), you're going to pay for the privilege.
Fair enough. Ex parte should be sufficient for a lot of cases. The last time I brought this up, I listed both fees. This time I didn't want to go through quite such a long post (since then I really need to include the differences between ex parte and inter partes).
You've also biased your own argument by seriously underreporting the fees and costs associated with obtaining a patent. $1000 is the issue fee for a small entity ( less than 500 employees) for a basic patent with no difficulties whatsoever during prosecution. Double that for most businesses, add the publication fee ($300), the fee for the information disclosure statement that lists prior art ($180), and fees for extensions and other common prosecution expenses and you're up to around $3000. Legal fees to prosecute a patent through the patent and trademark office average $15K or more. Some large corporations were budgeting costs and driving it down toward about $10K in the very late 90s, until they found that the quality of the applications suffered too badly.
Hmm. Okay. Slightly under $20K a patent. I assure you that this was not intentional -- it's just not as if the USPTO provides nice typical cost numbers.
Oh, and the average suit to enfore a patent, assuming that the patent owner goes after an economically viable target, costs over $1 million to litigate if there's no settlement before trial. That's a pretty large incentive to obtain a valid patent.
The issue that people have been complaining about recently are shakedowns of numbers relatively small businesses for small fees. The people infringing on the patents don't have the money available to fight either.
BTW: There is no pro-bono work in IP law. Lawyers prefer to donate their time to the indigent, who have bigger problems and less money than the Slashdotters who whine about patents, copyrights and trademarks, or to support non-profits that benefit the indigent.
The EFF is given a good deal of pro-bono work by generous lawyers -- the EFF also helps connect people in need with lawyers willing to help with pro bono issues. That doesn't mean people that are violently anti-IP. It does mean people that are impacted by unwarranted patents that impact large swaths of technology, like One-Click.
It certainly may be true that IP work is a small portion of pro bono work, though.
WRONG. There is no legal requirement for a patent applicant to perform a prior art search. If you don't like it, take it up with Congress. Read 37 CFR 1.56 - the applicant is only required to disclose the information known by that individual (and the attorney) to be material to patentability. The applicant is not required to do the examiner's search for them.
Ooops -- you're absolutely right. All the patents I've seen being applied for have always had a pri
First off they hired Bram Cohen, the Bittorrent author, so they have serious technical chutzpah under the hood.
I certainly appreciate Bram's work, but BitTorrent was not a terribly difficult system to build -- it is just about the simplest of the P2P systems.
Bram's earlier work on Mojo Nation is actually technically much more interesting.
Bram does a better job of analyzing node actions from a game-theoretic standpoint and not trusting nodes at all, which is a viewpoint sorely lacking in the P2P community.
I do really wish that Valve had done even an unsupported Linux release -- or done what id does, and release source in a year or two but not the data files, giving them more sales and free maintenance, plus letting Linux folks get in on the fun. Lucasarts enjoys many of these benefits through ScummVM (though they didn't even bother to open-source their engine).
1) VP3 was not beating MPEG4 in usage before they donated it.
2) The only video comparison I've seen done with Theora, which compared against a number of MPEG4 implementations, had Theora putting out significantly worse video. The reason I didn't want to mention this is that in the past, significant quality improvements have been made in a relatively short period of time with Vorbis and MP3 compression by tweaking the compressor without changing the format.
My intent was not to argue that Theora was worse, which is why I clearly pointed out that I hadn't used it. It was to assist people in avoiding irrationally tying the claims that "Vorbis is good" and "Theora is good" together, since some people are likely to confuse them.
If you feel that you are more qualified than I to make statements regarding Theora's relative quality, I'm sure that other Slashdotters would love to benefit from your knowledge -- please post away.
No, thank you for your time and knowledge. It's the knowledgeable people that pop up with criticism and information that few people have to hand that make Slashdot really worth reading.
but you seem to have a reasoned view of the issue, unlike the all too typical/. still-in-mom's-basement-rabid-libertairian-except- on-the-outsourcing-issue code geek.
Yes, but they have no financial justification to prosecute.
The reason publishers occasionally go after people running warez servers or in cracking groups is because they *propagate* things to other people, and when combined with the dissuasion factor, there isn't a huge issue.
Trying to go after an individual person who still sent in their money and wrote feedback...well, there are always risks in life, but I'm much more concerned about being whacked in the head by a meteorite.
Why do people seem to think that GNU/Linux is superior for embedded media devices than *BSD? This is an honest question because it seems that a company would rather be subject to BSD licensing than GPL so there must be some other reason
I doubt that GNU/Linux is being used -- probably Linux with a replacement mini libc.
1) Linux has been ported to MMUless systems. This is, like, important for devices without MMUs. I do not believe that any of the BSDs can run without an MMU.
2) Just a guess -- BSD kernels may use more memory than the Linux kernel, which would also be important.
3) Another guess -- I have no idea what the state of real-time scheduling is on BSD, nor what maximum scheduling latency is. Either could be a cause.
Vorbis is a really, really good codec. It competes well against the other audio codecs out there.
Theora is based on a video codec that isn't the latest and greatest. I haven't tried Theora, but I'm not sure whether it can top MPEG4 from a quality perspective.
I mean, it's nice to be unencumbered, but it's also nice to have top-notch video quality.
Slashdot Mirror
I used Google.
I'm all for copyrights being made only 50 years or even less (that gives me enough time to sell the painting), but they should be copyrighted the instant they are created.
I'd rather have a short-term automatic copyright (say, 5 years) followed by an inexpensive registration (in a digital era, this isn't hard to do) that could extend it up to, say, 35 years.
I don't think that any individual artists would be left penniless with a "mere" 35 years, but it would let works that have been milked heavily by producers enter the public domain and let people make derivative works (like Tolkien and so forth).
Don't forget Nosferatu, the first vampire movie.
Actually, I think it should be legal to reuse characters as long as something is labeled "unofficial". Japan is much less uptight about this than the US.
So, as far as I can tell from the discussion, he tried running stuff on his own server for a bit instead of Userland. I'm going to guess that his bandwidth usage for this month exceeded whatever he purchased for the month -- this would explain why he's refusing to provide any access until the first of next month, when he's sending people's blogs back to them.
Of course, that doesn't explain why he'd use an audio message to get the word out.
Bof the GC this is not the issue that it is in C++. For example if you're writing high performance C++ code you'll often end up with private heaps and specialized allocators that are designed to reduce the cost of many allocations in a short period. Other times you'll make use of these heaps to allow you to quickly free large amounts of memory. In either case you do it because the allocation or deallocation cost is too high (because it needs to ensure it doesn't fragment memory horribly).
In Java (and C#/.NET as well as well) though you typically have a garbage collector that can move memory around. This allows the garbage collector to not care about where it allocates memory from. It can fragment it to all hell, and clean up later. And the GC can even optimize clean up later to allow it to quickly reclaim large areas of memory (as for the cost of this it can often be done when the program would otherwise not be doing anything).
Mmm...I dunno if I can agree with you here. I don't think the overriding cost is likely to be simply in the GC to allocate a block of memory -- it's in the allocation and handling of metadata and in the execution of constructors. I'm also a little surprised that a JVM would do defragmentation (clearly it's possible, yes). The only general-purpose defragmenting PC-class system that I've run into is the (now obsolete) classic Mac OS, which initially ran on hardware lacking an MMU or hard drive and thus really needed to defragment what was there. Defragmentation got a lot less valuable and more expensive when quantities of memory involved rose.
So the only way Java can win is by having better algorithms. Memory is the one area where they've really done a good job.
I just can't agree. It's easy to see that Java-implemented software requires significantly more memory (I've yet to see software with a C++ and a Java implementation where the C++ implementation requires more memory), and I can't see how GC vs allocation/destruction costs are likely to be significantly more than constructor runtimes (I *have* seen some convincing arguments based on more researchy, performance-oriented software like ML).
Interestingly, in Java 1.5, generics are actually syntactic sugar to make your code look pretty. When you define an int list or a String list, it just creates an object list and prepends a cast to your object accesses.
Ah, thank you. Yes, this is sort of what I was suspicious of when reading the 1.5 feature list, but I hadn't read anything on it from any language people yet.
It might become less significant.
But I get cranky when I click a button and the application doesn't, y'know, appear.
If I have to wait for 19 seconds for anything to appear, I'm not going to be a happy camper, ignoring what technical reasons cause the slowdown.
Furthermore, from a technical standpoint, Java has a number of fundamental performance flaws:
* Java bounds-checks all array accesses. This is pretty par for the course for safe languages, and it's a good bet that compilers optimize some of this out, but it's a hit.
* Java technically can avoid rapid allocation/deallocation by use of object pools and use of primitives and the like. However, it's *very easy* to have an excessive number of allocation/deallocations. The language definitely encourages this.
* Java lacks generics (I haven't checked out 1.5, not sure whether this can provide performance improvements). This is bad because casting and hence run-time typechecking has to take place every time an object in a container is accessed.
Plus, Java eats memory for breakfast. Yes, memory is cheap and all that, but as a user, I'd definitely take a C/C++ app over a Java app any day.
Java's great for lightweight networking, it's nice that it has a cross-platform GUI, and it's good for rapid development due to the scads of library functionality.
The problem is that it got way overhyped as a C/C++ replacement (which it isn't) or even a good choice for general application development (including horizontal-market client stuff) which it isn't.
Huh? You are seriously getting screwed over if your phone company is oversubscribing their DSL service. DSL is point-to-point, straight from your house to the CO, there is no "segment" like you have with cable service.
Consumer ISPs always oversubscribe.
They oversubscribed when people used 28.8 modems, much less DSL.
The average user doesn't use more than a tiny percentage of their potential constant bandwidth, and it'd be silly for them to spend far more than they need.
Now, if you buy a business package with guaranteed bandwidth, it might be a different story.
The only reason heavy bandwidth users can get away with things is that there aren't that many of them and it's a pain in the ass for the ISP to root them out.
How much time will it take for to Slashdot be blocked?
Slashdot *does* criticize Chinese policy, including information control and the like.
However, it's also extremely critical of the current US administration, which China's current administration is not a tremendous fan of.
Also, Slashdot (at least the English slashdot.org) is not in Chinese, limiting the number of people that can read it. Wikipedia is translated to Chinese.
I do agree that this sucks. Technically, China is still communist, and Wikipedia is about as fine an example of the triumph of successful communist principles (community-owned, from according to assets, to according to need) as you could ask for. Seems like a stupid idea on the part of China.
English may be lingua franca, but there's a billion native speakers of Chinese (though different dialects) and Ebay serves the globe.
Yes, but he isn't *selling* to those people. He's posting the sale in English on a US website. If he wanted to sell to Japanese users, he could simply use the eBay Japan website. Instead, he chose to target a particular market.
Yes, the world does revolve around the USA but not every merchant is obligated to revolve in lockstep. Those who choose not to may lose some sales, but isn't that entirely their problem? You act as if it was a deliberate offense to you
I don't think I am -- I certainly don't feel offended. I will, however, debate the point that his grammatical errors should not be considered a minus when considering the legitimacy of the deal, however, which was the OP's thesis.
This package is a steal at its price from what I'm reading, so maybe you should be kicking in with the international staff, since you are the one who feels put at risk.
If it's all legitimate and legal.
The only good reason he'd have to get an English-speaking assistant is if it would improve the bidding. If he chooses not to do so, maybe it does hurt his bidding but why should you be so offended about it?
He doesn't need to do so -- it's quite possible to hire a translation firm to go over a single document, and for a $100K deal, it seems like this would be expected from a legitimate businessperson -- the idea is that if you're a legitimate business, you'll care about reputation, and if you care about reputation, you'll care about and be willing to have a polished presentation. Again, if I were selling a $100K car in France, I'd certainly have a French speaker read over my advertisement.
Yes, but heat, noise, and lifetime are also factors.
If you just want bytes for the penny, WD is probably the way to go.
I would boil my boring post down as, "I am sick of the engineers who run the Internet judging and bitching about how I am using this fabulous network infrastructure they have built, when they're not exactly writing universally fascinating stuff."
I don't think it's exactly unexpected.
If you go to a forum on a particular topic, the people there will tend to be, y'know, interested in that topic, and probably there's a general feeling that that topic is more interesting than other topics.
Go to a dog-breeding forum and see whether they might be a bit scornful of people that, oh, I don't know, waste time talking about "other things" and don't appreciate the love and companionship that a dog will give you.
Is Slashdot a blog, anyway? It's not really what I think of when I think of a blog.
I can't figure for the life of me how Americans, who generally have a limp hold on a single language, can be so critical of an Asian who isn't in perfect command of English.
(a) English is somewhat of a lingua franca in many areas these days, especially WRT technology -- and this guy is selling stuff that would really only be of interest to a developer.
(b) The guy isn't selling this on an Asian website. He's selling it on a US one, and asking for a decent chunk of change for it. If I'm selling a $100K car in France, you can be damned sure that I'm going to find a French speaker to proofread what I wrote.
This is way too much thought put into something that was essentially just me telling a moron to go fornicate himself with a stick. ;)
"Fornicate" is an intransitive verb.
I personally still would be very dubious about giving $100K to someone that flubbed their English.
If I was selling $100K of hardware in Japan, I'd have a Japanese speaker take a look at it.
I used classic MacOS for years, and loved spatial directories. I think that they're a really good idea, and a serious lack in Windows.
That being said, it absolutely drives people bananas when you force them to use things differently than they'd prefer. I remember moving from spatial directories on the Mac OS to non-spatials on Windows and *hating* it.
I'd *strongly* suggest that this be GUI-toggleable. The current trend in GNOME has been to increase usability by removing all the options from the GUI config (but leaving them in to keep the hackers that complain "that isn't there") happy. Emacs keybindings, user-rebindable accerators, viewport (vs workspace) support, non-solid-dragging. I really don't think this does a whole lot of good -- having an "advanced" tab is perfectly legitimate, if some UI guy freaks out about the idea of user-rebindable accelerators.
I find it extremely irritating that there is a significant and ever-growing portion of GNOME that is hidden from the "power users" that would normally get a lot of good out of it. These features are not gone, but they are not immediately apparent. This has been a growing trend since GNOME 2, and it is *not* a good thing.
(note to all you amateur lawyers, obvious has a special meaning, and it has to be at the time of the alleged invention WITHOUT reference to disclosure in the applicant's application -- it's easy to say that something is obvious once someone has already pointed out the problem and the solution).
The problem is that there are a vast number of processes that are very straightforward modifications of existing processes that have not been used before that *will* be used.
When the Web came around, a large number of patents were granted for [former process] on the Web.
If a VR protocol becomes standard and widely used, it's not unreasonable to assume that people will patent [former process] on the VR protocol.
You've biased your own argument that the fees are biased by picking inter partes re-examination, which does have a fee of $8800. But if you insist on the ability to go toe to toe with the patent owner, rather than let the examiner perform the analysis (note that most people are complaining about the quality of the prior art SEARCHES in the patent office), you're going to pay for the privilege.
Fair enough. Ex parte should be sufficient for a lot of cases. The last time I brought this up, I listed both fees. This time I didn't want to go through quite such a long post (since then I really need to include the differences between ex parte and inter partes).
You've also biased your own argument by seriously underreporting the fees and costs associated with obtaining a patent. $1000 is the issue fee for a small entity ( less than 500 employees) for a basic patent with no difficulties whatsoever during prosecution. Double that for most businesses, add the publication fee ($300), the fee for the information disclosure statement that lists prior art ($180), and fees for extensions and other common prosecution expenses and you're up to around $3000. Legal fees to prosecute a patent through the patent and trademark office average $15K or more. Some large corporations were budgeting costs and driving it down toward about $10K in the very late 90s, until they found that the quality of the applications suffered too badly.
Hmm. Okay. Slightly under $20K a patent. I assure you that this was not intentional -- it's just not as if the USPTO provides nice typical cost numbers.
Oh, and the average suit to enfore a patent, assuming that the patent owner goes after an economically viable target, costs over $1 million to litigate if there's no settlement before trial. That's a pretty large incentive to obtain a valid patent.
The issue that people have been complaining about recently are shakedowns of numbers relatively small businesses for small fees. The people infringing on the patents don't have the money available to fight either.
BTW: There is no pro-bono work in IP law. Lawyers prefer to donate their time to the indigent, who have bigger problems and less money than the Slashdotters who whine about patents, copyrights and trademarks, or to support non-profits that benefit the indigent.
The EFF is given a good deal of pro-bono work by generous lawyers -- the EFF also helps connect people in need with lawyers willing to help with pro bono issues. That doesn't mean people that are violently anti-IP. It does mean people that are impacted by unwarranted patents that impact large swaths of technology, like One-Click.
It certainly may be true that IP work is a small portion of pro bono work, though.
WRONG. There is no legal requirement for a patent applicant to perform a prior art search. If you don't like it, take it up with Congress. Read 37 CFR 1.56 - the applicant is only required to disclose the information known by that individual (and the attorney) to be material to patentability. The applicant is not required to do the examiner's search for them.
Ooops -- you're absolutely right. All the patents I've seen being applied for have always had a pri
Perhaps my recent journal entry can help explain why full white is not a good color for surfaces intended to emulate paper.
First off they hired Bram Cohen, the Bittorrent author, so they have serious technical chutzpah under the hood.
I certainly appreciate Bram's work, but BitTorrent was not a terribly difficult system to build -- it is just about the simplest of the P2P systems.
Bram's earlier work on Mojo Nation is actually technically much more interesting.
Bram does a better job of analyzing node actions from a game-theoretic standpoint and not trusting nodes at all, which is a viewpoint sorely lacking in the P2P community.
I do really wish that Valve had done even an unsupported Linux release -- or done what id does, and release source in a year or two but not the data files, giving them more sales and free maintenance, plus letting Linux folks get in on the fun. Lucasarts enjoys many of these benefits through ScummVM (though they didn't even bother to open-source their engine).
Coal power plants produce cheaper energy than nuclear power plants.
I spoke up because I am aware of two facts.
1) VP3 was not beating MPEG4 in usage before they donated it.
2) The only video comparison I've seen done with Theora, which compared against a number of MPEG4 implementations, had Theora putting out significantly worse video. The reason I didn't want to mention this is that in the past, significant quality improvements have been made in a relatively short period of time with Vorbis and MP3 compression by tweaking the compressor without changing the format.
My intent was not to argue that Theora was worse, which is why I clearly pointed out that I hadn't used it. It was to assist people in avoiding irrationally tying the claims that "Vorbis is good" and "Theora is good" together, since some people are likely to confuse them.
If you feel that you are more qualified than I to make statements regarding Theora's relative quality, I'm sure that other Slashdotters would love to benefit from your knowledge -- please post away.
Sorry for the long winded comment.
/. still-in-mom's-basement-rabid-libertairian-except- on-the-outsourcing-issue code geek.
No, thank you for your time and knowledge. It's the knowledgeable people that pop up with criticism and information that few people have to hand that make Slashdot really worth reading.
but you seem to have a reasoned view of the issue, unlike the all too typical
Thanks again.
Yes, but they have no financial justification to prosecute.
The reason publishers occasionally go after people running warez servers or in cracking groups is because they *propagate* things to other people, and when combined with the dissuasion factor, there isn't a huge issue.
Trying to go after an individual person who still sent in their money and wrote feedback...well, there are always risks in life, but I'm much more concerned about being whacked in the head by a meteorite.
Why do people seem to think that GNU/Linux is superior for embedded media devices than *BSD? This is an honest question because it seems that a company would rather be subject to BSD licensing than GPL so there must be some other reason
I doubt that GNU/Linux is being used -- probably Linux with a replacement mini libc.
1) Linux has been ported to MMUless systems. This is, like, important for devices without MMUs. I do not believe that any of the BSDs can run without an MMU.
2) Just a guess -- BSD kernels may use more memory than the Linux kernel, which would also be important.
3) Another guess -- I have no idea what the state of real-time scheduling is on BSD, nor what maximum scheduling latency is. Either could be a cause.
I dunno about Theora.
Vorbis is a really, really good codec. It competes well against the other audio codecs out there.
Theora is based on a video codec that isn't the latest and greatest. I haven't tried Theora, but I'm not sure whether it can top MPEG4 from a quality perspective.
I mean, it's nice to be unencumbered, but it's also nice to have top-notch video quality.