I carefully considered the meaning of the word, and I'm pretty sure that it applies in the literal sense.
I'm pretty sure it doesn't. Wikipedia says "Extortion... occurs when a person unlawfully obtains either money, property or services from a person(s), entity, or institution, through coercion." Merriam-Webster defines extort as "to obtain from a person by force, intimidation, or undue or illegal power."
I think it's a stretch to say that Sony is actually obtaining anything from you with this update. They are merely taking.
Still potentially actionable, especially if they advertised the other OS thing as a feature, but not extortion.
My question is: did they advertise the "other OS" thing as a feature of the PS3?
If so, now that they are removing it, would you have a case if you took them to small claims court for false advertising? You might want to consider trying that actually, if you feel like parting with your PS3.
It never even occurred to me until now that perhaps the people who support standard patents but are against software patents would see a valid patent on an engine in a different manner. Is this true?
I think I might be able to express this thought a bit better now.
What would a patent on the internal combustion engine cover? I see it as covering the operation of the engine -- basically, how it works. And this is perhaps why I don't see a difference between patenting an engine and patenting RSA.
You seem to see it covering the engine itself. But I don't know what that could mean, except for the exact physical form of the engine. And it's my understanding that patents cover more than that (i.e. if you make an engine that's a fair bit different but still operates with the same basic principle, that'd be covered), and I definitely feel that they should cover more than that.
You're describing a motor, not the law of physics that combusting something causes it to expand, causing pressure against its container.
This is what I would say:
The motor is a way to harness several laws of physics in order to create rotational motion. Those laws include things like "burning stuff expands" and "if I push on a pole from one end, that transfers the force to the other end" and "if I apply a force in one direction but the object is constrained from moving in exactly that direction, it will move in as close to that direction as it can" (which in the case of the engine is around in a circle).
An algorithm is a way to harness several laws of math in order to perform whatever task. For example, for RSA those laws includes things (I'm pulling from Wikipedia here; my number theory is pretty weak) like "modular arithmetic behaves a lot like standard arithmetic", Euler's theorem, and the Chinese Remainder Theorem.
And actually, this just now occurs to me:
If somebody patented "The combustion of fuel causing the resulting pressure to push against an object, therefore causing motion", it might be analogous to a patent on an algorithm.
See, that's actually very close as to what I envision the patent on an engine being, except that I'd flesh out the description a bit more. In another post I said that the following should be patentable: "a motor that operates by drawing fuel into a combustion chamber through a valve, closing that valve, compressing the fuel and air, igniting it, opening a valve, and exhausting the burned products through that valve, during four successive strokes."
It never even occurred to me until now that perhaps the people who support standard patents but are against software patents would see a valid patent on an engine in a different manner. Is this true?
You seem to think that if you spend $X on a task or project you somehow deserve $X+n in return.
I don't necessarily think quite that. I would say that you deserve a chance to get that much in return without someone else being able to come in and undercut your R&D costs. If your R&D didn't produce something that is worth $X+n, then of course you shouldn't get it back. The catch is that by "is worth $X+n," what I mean precisely is something like "people would be willing to pay $X+n for your gadget if you were the sole source."
Now if I used a different encryption algorithm then am I circumventing someone else's algorithm?
No, of course not. (With a possible exception if, 4000 years ago or whatever, some guy invented the entire concept of encryption; depending on circumstances, I might say that should be patentable.)
No one is suggesting H246 should be forced to be released under an open source license or any other than specified by the author.
If by "H264" you mean "the code to a particular implementation of H264", then yes, you're correct. But I think protecting just a particular implementation of H264 doesn't go far enough, for reasons I've already said (since I think it's reasonable that a cleanroom implementation of the same algorithm shouldn't be allowed for the same reason I think a cleanroom implementation of an engine shouldn't be allowed).
If by "H264" you mean the general algorithm, then yes, that's exactly what lots of people here are saying. (More precisely, they are saying that the original author should have no say in what happens to the algorithm at all, because there should be no protection for an algorithm.)
What I am saying is if you were to research and develop a method that even exceeded RSA's implementation then should you not be able to recoup your costs as well?
Yes, you should. And the patent you'd get on your algorithm would let you do that.:-) What you shouldn't be able to do IMO is to basically ride on the coattails of RSA and use what they developed. You can license RSA's patent or wait for it to expire.
Through random misfortune, you might be doing something that tickles a few bugs. 1,000 other people could be asked to make two slides and compare and none of them hit both bugs, few hitting one, and their conclusions would be totally different. It is just basic statistics.
Okay, let me reiterate, and I've added more evidence, that Impress screws up dead simple presentations. See here. Again, I'm not doing anything weird modifying the slide templates or masters or anything, and these bugs show up across mulitple installations of PowerPoint. The bugs that these tests illustrate I don't see how they wouldn't surface in almost every PPTX presentation out there.
I created six presentations that consist of a slightly-modified default, blank presentation; they vary along 2 axes:
Titles: present or deleted
Background: default (white), "manually set" (red), set using the "background styles" dropdown in the ribbon (tan)
I also put up the default presentation.
What did I (re-?)learn:
You can have a slide which, in PPT, appears to be completely blank (as in you can try to lasso the entire slide and select no object) and Impress may still insert a text box. (In this case, that text box is present on the master slide. However, it does not show up in PowerPoint either in edit or presentation mode.)
The above continues to hold if you leave the ephemeral "click to add title" and "click to add subtitle" text fields in place and fill them out. (Knowing that it's coming from the master slide means this makes some amount of sense.) The result is text overlayed with text.
The above problems do seem to be confined to the titles slides: other slide layouts don't have this problem.
The text formatting is wrong on my subtitle. It should be grey and centered; instead, it's black and left-justified.
If you right click on a slide and choose "format background" and set it to a solid color, it works (that's the point of the ugly red background), but if you use the "background styles" dropdown in the "design" ribbon, then it doesn't; even if it looks like it's just setting it to a solid color. (This is the one place where I think that you're right about my original comparisons not being entirely fair.)
While we're at it, look at how crappy the not-anti-aliased text looks. (Is there a way to get it to? Perhaps. I'm using a fresh, default installation. But if there is, why the heck isn't it on by default?) This seems to be a problem with Impress in general (and they seem to be working on it), not the import filter.
As far as I'm concerned, if you hand me a calculator and I try "1+1", "2*3", and "sqrt(9)" and it gets all of those wrong, I'm pretty comfortable proclaiming that calculator "barely alpha quality" even if it did every single other thing right, and even if it said "2.1", "6.5", and "4" or something for my tests.
And that is why when I find a repeatable bug, I spend a significant amount of time boiling it down, documenting it, and reporting it to qa.openoffice.org. Did you?
If I had to report everything about Impress that keeps me from using it, I'd be writing and testing for a couple days at least. I'm not that invested in the project. Until now, those screenshots were just something I threw together in 5 minutes when a new version of OpenOffice was released since I think it's good to check the status anyway, so I can see what I could assume if I need to distribute slides. Now that I've written more up and put together a page that acutally presents all the screenshots all nicely (before yesterday I'd just give a link to the directory listing and let people click on the individual files) I might see about what bugs exist.
At the same time, I feel that it's very unlikely that I'd be able to bring much new to the table; the stuff I'm doing is not exactly out there. You don't have to wade
So were several physical inventions. The airplane might have been one of them. (And yes, the Wright brothers did get a patent on several aspects of their plane, and were apparently actually pretty fiercely litigious about it, with some success.)
So while you're right that RSA I guess shouldn't have been patentable, the reason was just prior art which isn't particularly germane to this discussion. I would still say that the first guy to come up with it should have been able to patent it, had it not been bound up by a bunch of secrecy.
I do agree that if you were to or have created an algorithm that preformed a task in an incredibly unique or efficient way you should be able to be protected from people using your particular algorithm but you cannot stop someone from preforming the actual task.
I really like these words, but I think we still may disagree on what extent software "inventions" should be patentable.
The problem I see is a lot of the time, "algorithm" and "task" are pretty tightly intertwined; further, I think we would often take different positions on which is which. Take the decryption portion of RSA. I would say that the task it performs is "given a cyphertext c that was encrypted with RSA, along with the private key (n,d), determine the original message." I would say the algorithm for decryption is "take c^d modulo n." But in this case, the algorithm is the only way to accomplish that particular task. (Except for brute force search and the NSA's super-secret RSA-breaker, neither of which I think should be covered by an RSA patent.)
In the context of H.264, I suspect the case is similar: presumably there are steps of the encoding and decoding process that can only be done (at least by current knowledge) in one particular way; and these would then presumably be reasonably valid candidates for a software patent.
At the end of the day if you develop a logic system you own that exact sequence of events no more no less, they are just math but you do own the copyright if you can prove you were the first one to do it but you cannot patent the input or the result, just your transition between the two.
Maybe what we really need is something between the two, or a special kind of patent. The problem I have with all the people saying "software gets copyrighted" is I don't think that protection goes far enough. If I give you a general description of (to use my example from the other portion of this thread) an internal combustion engine, some machining tools, and a bunch of time and hunks of metal, you might be able to develop your own engine. It'd probably look quite a bit different from the original one, yet the physical patent presumably would cover your reengineered version. (See my reply to another of your posts in this thread.) And I think that position is quite reasonable. Yet if I give you a general description of the RSA algorithm and you go implement it, copyright alone doesn't cover your reengineered effort (which is the whole purpose of a cleanroom implementation). But I think there are plenty of things in the software world that are deserving of such protection.
(Perhaps I should justify that last statement a bit more. Why are copyright and patents, in general, a good thing? The reason is that they protect R&D investments in some sense, because someone can't take the money and effort that you invested figuring out how to do something (e.g. make an engine) and just copy it, until you've had a bit of time to recoup your losses yourself. When actually selling whatever product is the consequence of the R&D, you have to charge the incremental cost of whatever you're selling plus something to recoup your investment, while a "pirate" would only have to charge the incremental cost. The pirate thus undercuts your price, and "robs" you of sales. This general principle is true of both copyright and patents.
And I don't understand why so many people here (many more than seem to be against copyright and patents in general) think that this principle applies to algorithms and software any less than another invention. Algorithms still have a R&D cost. How many different things did R, S, and A try before coming up with something that worked? How much effort was put into figuring out how H.264 should drop out things that don't matter to the viewer? To me, saying that things like these shouldn't be patentable, if you accept non-software patents, is saying the R&D cost of algorithms is zero. And I don't understand how you can take that last position.)
You could patent the size of your combustion chamber, the length of your push rods, the dimensions of your crank shaft and the exact design of your fuel delivery system but you cannot patent the laws of Physics that allow you to harness combustion and demand all uses of combustion to be your invention.
You seriously think that the guy who invented the internal combustion engine* could have patented all those dimensions and such, but shouldn't have been able to patent something as general as "a motor that operates by drawing fuel into a combustion chamber through a valve, closing that valve, compressing the fuel and air, igniting it, opening a valve, and exhausting the burned products through that valve during four successive strokes"?
If so, then we disagree on rather more than just software patents.;-)
* Disclaimer: I'm not sure how discrete this invention actually was; for purposes of argument, assume that the idea was suitably novel.
Wow, I did not know that; this is the first I've heard of it. Interesting.
On Windows and OS X, Opera uses its own local copy of GStreamer, which only has Vorbis & Theora codecs, so you'll need to compile gstreamer-ffmpeg yourself.
Do you happen to know of a HOWTO or anything for doing this and integrating it with Opera? If you don't have one handy don't bother looking or anything, I just thought you might have run across one. A very quick and cursory Google search didn't turn up anything that looks immediately promising to me.
To take it even further, if we're talking about someone lecturing with slides that are provided to students after a lecture, it seems pretty silly to distribute it in a slideshow / presentation format at all. The slideshow is there for the lecture, so one can rely on revealing the next bullet point on cue, which will vary lecture to lecture. Students have no need whatsoever for that, they just need the information.
This, I think, is a wholly incorrect statement. The information is inextricably bound up, to some degree, with the mode and context in which you learn it. It's not uncommon for me, as a student, to relate concepts based upon when the instructor discussed them, even to the point of envisioning the chalkboard or slide on which they were covered. If a student is someone who forms connections like this, having the slides could easily help.
But even this overlooks another way in which slides can help some people, which is it can help with note taking. There is some balance to be struck when taking notes between spending so much time scribbling down everything that you are only paying half attention during lecture (but have everything for later), and listening more carefully to the instructor, being able to think about what he or she says, but perhaps writing down too little so that you have a hard time reconstructing what was said later. Having the slides before class allows the students, if they wish, to print them out and take notes on them -- this allows them to have everything just as it was presented during class while not forcing them to write furiously to keep up. It does have the downside of anyone doing this not actually writing things down themselves, but there isn't a perfect solution as far as this is concerned IMO. (Yes, for the lectures I used PPT (about 1/3 of them) I did post the slides before the lecture. Most of the time, anyway.)
(One of the better CS classes I had when I was an undergrad was taught by a guy who lectured from PPT notes, and I used the slides in more or less this way. That class did have another interesting aspect from a pedagogical standpoint, which was that we had a quiz at the beginning of each class on the very basics of what we would be covering that day. This forced everyone to at least skim through the slides before class, and let the lecture not be as tied to the slides themselves as most classes that use PPT.)
On a separate issue: professors, please stop using slideshows in lectures.
Ah yes, this issue. I'm kinda torn on this.
My opinion from the perspective of a student: There are a lot of benefits to using slides. There's almost never an issue with handwriting. You can look at what the instructor used to teach from, and get the other benefits I explain above. (I definitely liked these things as a student.) It's easier to go up to the instructor and say "on slide such-and-such, what did you mean by that" and point to the slide than to bring them your notes, hope you didn't mistranscribe something, and then have the instructor figure out how what you wrote down corresponds to what he said/wrote during class. Other kinds of media, like photos and videos, can be integrated more smoothly into a presentation from PowerPoint than from the blackboard.
Some of my best classes were taught from PowerPoint slides. More to the point, a couple of my best-taught classes were taught from PowerPoint slides, most notably the one I mentioned above. In that case it certainly wasn't because it was taught from PowerPoint, but I don't think the slides hurt the professor either. Further, if I had to name the worst few or worst-taught few classes I had, there's probably only one that would show up that was a PPT class. (And a large part of why that was the case was because of the content anyway, which the slides presumably didn't affect.)
In a nutshell, I don't feel that, as a student, there was much of a quality difference between PPT-based classes and chalkboard-bas
Admitedly OO.o's import filters are far from perfect but this doesn't seem entirely fair, have you compared to powerpoint 2003 loading the pptx files with a plugin
I pulled out my Office XP discs and installed it and the import filters. It has the same problem that exporting to plain PPT has: it rasterizes the images.
So in some sense Impress isn't any worse off than older versions of PowerPoint, at least if you can run the converters that MS distributes.
I'm curious, is OO.o simply getting the object stack orders totally wrong when it drops the text below the boxes or are you using filters to allow the text to show through from below in office?
There's no stack at all; the text is contained within the shapes themselves. You can move the boxes around all day and you won't uncover any text.
After playing around a little more I did find a way to get at it though: set the fill for those objects to none.
Go-OO.org's version of openoffice 3.2 makes less of a hash of things(no dates or boxes) than the version you tested with, but only barely.
You might have been looking at the wrong line too: vanilla OO.org 3.2 doesn't render the dates or boxes on the textual slides either.
Until MS office gets perfect ODF export or OpenOffice perfect emulation of office 2007 graphics filters, I suppose your best bet is to create presentations in OpenOffice and save ppt versions for those students who don't have access to it.
That's more or less what I did; I exported to PDF and distributed those.
Or for him to at least not use (as he puts it) "fancy new 3Dish effects introduced in PowerPoint 2007"! Comparing just two slides, created by one person, who even admits using "fancy new" effects is hardly a rational or reasonable comparison.
Yeah, I should just not use the features my software gives me. That'll teach them to not improve.
Less facetiously, take a look at the screen shots. It's not really doing anything that fancy, just an extra little edge for aesthetics. (And no matter how much a lot of people here deny it or wish it were otherwise, the perceived quality of almost anything is determined by how polished it looks.)
That said... look at the first column. Simple slide: it has one text box on it with some text, on a colored background. That's all. Impress doesn't even get that right -- it ignores my background color. Previous versions looked even worse, to the point where I think you could save the default, blank document from PPT 2007 and load it in Impress, and it would screw that up. An empty document!...but declaring it to be "barely alpha quality" is way beyond inaccurate.
I stand by my assertion of "barely alpha quality" given the difficulties it has with even plain slides.
What do you do for all the users of Windows XP who dont have OS support for H.264?
Either the same thing they will do now (with FF not supporting H.264 at all), which is either continue to use Flash or switch to a browser that does support H.264, or they'll go download a third-party H.264 codec.
(What did all the Linux people do to watch DVDs before there was a licensed DVD player for the platform? And probably the situation wouldn't be that dire.)
You do the realize that at the heart of the RSA algorithm (and most if not all cyptography algorthims for that matter) is a series of mathematical equations...
You could say the same thing about physical inventions, and it would only be a bit more far-fetched IMO. "At the heart of an internal combustion engine is just the physical principle that a fuel-air mixture burning will create an increase in volume." The presumably patentable thing in the case of the internal combustion engine is the clever idea that you can harness that increase in volume to turn linear motion into rotational motion, and use that to, for instance, move a car forward. Similarly, there may "just" be some number theory behind the RSA algorithm, but the thing I think should be patentable in its case is the clever idea that you can harness those equations in order to do public-key cryptography.
(I don't actually know whether the internal combustion engine was patented, or what parts of it were, etc.; but you get the idea.)
Therefore under US law it should not be patentable, yet for some reason because it relates to computing it is was granted a patent.
I can't speak to what should or shouldn't be patentable under current law; I'm just saying that I think a system that allows at least some aspects of software to be patented makes perfect sense.
Ok then. Please pay me $10.99 for your Firefox license and drmed closed source Linux kernel module? What you do not want to pay? I own it. Oh and the license says it must be a drmed system so I guess you have to use Windows or use a drmed version of Linux sorry.
Right, because those are the only two options, and something like a generic Gstreamer-like "let's use the OS's codec" solution isn't possible. </sarcasm>
BTW, that's not to say that I support the current status quo regarding software patents. I think software patents should undergo some reform to make them both more restrictive (Amazon one-click? really?) and probably shorter duration. That said, I definitely think something like the RSA algorithm was as worthy of a patent as most anything else out there.
Unfortunately you're dealing with someone who is quite clearly not a computer scientist or mathematician.
Huh?
I consider myself a computer scientist (and the fact that I have a BS in both math and comp sci and am halfwayish through a CS PhD program would seem to support that assertion), and I firmly believe that a sufficiently clever algorithm is as much an invention as a sufficiently clever physical invention.
Saying "algorithms are just math" is about as convincing to me as saying "your prototype is just matter."
I also am curious if this'll happen myself, but I take a pretty zen approach. Don't fear it. I don't think we're in much danger of going back to a completely IE-dominated webscape (sorry for that word) like we had 10 years ago or whenever it was. Non-PC browsers (read: "smartphones") are increasingly popular. Macs are increasingly popular. On Windows, Chrome is increasingly popular.
If Firefox stagnates, the other browsers will continue forward. Either that will be a kick in the pants for Firefox and it'll catch back up (like the last 5+ years have been to IE, if IE9 is actually decent again), or Firefox will fall away like so many pieces of software have before. If the latter happens, in part it'll be sad, but at the same time I don't really go "man, it's too bad Netscape isn't around" or anything like that.
If Firefox dies, something else will rise to take its place. Maybe they could call it Phoenix.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I totally agree... I'd love to see how a false advertising claim would play out. I suspect it wouldn't go well for Sony.
However, it's not extortion. This is occurring long after Sony obtained the money for the system, so it basically can't be.
Same thing.
You'll notice I did cite more than Wikipedia too if you stop trying to be difficult.
I carefully considered the meaning of the word, and I'm pretty sure that it applies in the literal sense.
I'm pretty sure it doesn't. Wikipedia says "Extortion ... occurs when a person unlawfully obtains either money, property or services from a person(s), entity, or institution, through coercion." Merriam-Webster defines extort as "to obtain from a person by force, intimidation, or undue or illegal power."
I think it's a stretch to say that Sony is actually obtaining anything from you with this update. They are merely taking.
Still potentially actionable, especially if they advertised the other OS thing as a feature, but not extortion.
My question is: did they advertise the "other OS" thing as a feature of the PS3?
If so, now that they are removing it, would you have a case if you took them to small claims court for false advertising? You might want to consider trying that actually, if you feel like parting with your PS3.
As far as recommended tools: Firefox 3.5/3.6 is the best cross platform recommendation I've heard.
I don't care about cross platform, and I can't make either Firefox or Opera display the video full-screen, which means I can't fairly test it.
It never even occurred to me until now that perhaps the people who support standard patents but are against software patents would see a valid patent on an engine in a different manner. Is this true?
I think I might be able to express this thought a bit better now.
What would a patent on the internal combustion engine cover? I see it as covering the operation of the engine -- basically, how it works. And this is perhaps why I don't see a difference between patenting an engine and patenting RSA.
You seem to see it covering the engine itself. But I don't know what that could mean, except for the exact physical form of the engine. And it's my understanding that patents cover more than that (i.e. if you make an engine that's a fair bit different but still operates with the same basic principle, that'd be covered), and I definitely feel that they should cover more than that.
You're describing a motor, not the law of physics that combusting something causes it to expand, causing pressure against its container.
This is what I would say:
The motor is a way to harness several laws of physics in order to create rotational motion. Those laws include things like "burning stuff expands" and "if I push on a pole from one end, that transfers the force to the other end" and "if I apply a force in one direction but the object is constrained from moving in exactly that direction, it will move in as close to that direction as it can" (which in the case of the engine is around in a circle).
An algorithm is a way to harness several laws of math in order to perform whatever task. For example, for RSA those laws includes things (I'm pulling from Wikipedia here; my number theory is pretty weak) like "modular arithmetic behaves a lot like standard arithmetic", Euler's theorem, and the Chinese Remainder Theorem.
And actually, this just now occurs to me:
If somebody patented "The combustion of fuel causing the resulting pressure to push against an object, therefore causing motion", it might be analogous to a patent on an algorithm.
See, that's actually very close as to what I envision the patent on an engine being, except that I'd flesh out the description a bit more. In another post I said that the following should be patentable: "a motor that operates by drawing fuel into a combustion chamber through a valve, closing that valve, compressing the fuel and air, igniting it, opening a valve, and exhausting the burned products through that valve, during four successive strokes."
It never even occurred to me until now that perhaps the people who support standard patents but are against software patents would see a valid patent on an engine in a different manner. Is this true?
You seem to think that if you spend $X on a task or project you somehow deserve $X+n in return.
I don't necessarily think quite that. I would say that you deserve a chance to get that much in return without someone else being able to come in and undercut your R&D costs. If your R&D didn't produce something that is worth $X+n, then of course you shouldn't get it back. The catch is that by "is worth $X+n," what I mean precisely is something like "people would be willing to pay $X+n for your gadget if you were the sole source."
Now if I used a different encryption algorithm then am I circumventing someone else's algorithm?
No, of course not. (With a possible exception if, 4000 years ago or whatever, some guy invented the entire concept of encryption; depending on circumstances, I might say that should be patentable.)
No one is suggesting H246 should be forced to be released under an open source license or any other than specified by the author.
If by "H264" you mean "the code to a particular implementation of H264", then yes, you're correct. But I think protecting just a particular implementation of H264 doesn't go far enough, for reasons I've already said (since I think it's reasonable that a cleanroom implementation of the same algorithm shouldn't be allowed for the same reason I think a cleanroom implementation of an engine shouldn't be allowed).
If by "H264" you mean the general algorithm, then yes, that's exactly what lots of people here are saying. (More precisely, they are saying that the original author should have no say in what happens to the algorithm at all, because there should be no protection for an algorithm.)
What I am saying is if you were to research and develop a method that even exceeded RSA's implementation then should you not be able to recoup your costs as well?
Yes, you should. And the patent you'd get on your algorithm would let you do that. :-) What you shouldn't be able to do IMO is to basically ride on the coattails of RSA and use what they developed. You can license RSA's patent or wait for it to expire.
Through random misfortune, you might be doing something that tickles a few bugs. 1,000 other people could be asked to make two slides and compare and none of them hit both bugs, few hitting one, and their conclusions would be totally different. It is just basic statistics.
Okay, let me reiterate, and I've added more evidence, that Impress screws up dead simple presentations. See here. Again, I'm not doing anything weird modifying the slide templates or masters or anything, and these bugs show up across mulitple installations of PowerPoint. The bugs that these tests illustrate I don't see how they wouldn't surface in almost every PPTX presentation out there.
I created six presentations that consist of a slightly-modified default, blank presentation; they vary along 2 axes:
I also put up the default presentation.
What did I (re-?)learn:
As far as I'm concerned, if you hand me a calculator and I try "1+1", "2*3", and "sqrt(9)" and it gets all of those wrong, I'm pretty comfortable proclaiming that calculator "barely alpha quality" even if it did every single other thing right, and even if it said "2.1", "6.5", and "4" or something for my tests.
And that is why when I find a repeatable bug, I spend a significant amount of time boiling it down, documenting it, and reporting it to qa.openoffice.org. Did you?
If I had to report everything about Impress that keeps me from using it, I'd be writing and testing for a couple days at least. I'm not that invested in the project. Until now, those screenshots were just something I threw together in 5 minutes when a new version of OpenOffice was released since I think it's good to check the status anyway, so I can see what I could assume if I need to distribute slides. Now that I've written more up and put together a page that acutally presents all the screenshots all nicely (before yesterday I'd just give a link to the directory listing and let people click on the individual files) I might see about what bugs exist.
At the same time, I feel that it's very unlikely that I'd be able to bring much new to the table; the stuff I'm doing is not exactly out there. You don't have to wade
So were several physical inventions. The airplane might have been one of them. (And yes, the Wright brothers did get a patent on several aspects of their plane, and were apparently actually pretty fiercely litigious about it, with some success.)
So while you're right that RSA I guess shouldn't have been patentable, the reason was just prior art which isn't particularly germane to this discussion. I would still say that the first guy to come up with it should have been able to patent it, had it not been bound up by a bunch of secrecy.
At the time, it involved an SDTV monitor and an $80 DVD player bought at a local WAL*MART.
For most Linux users who wanted to watch DVDs, I suspect you're BSing yourself; it involved libdecss.
If/when I get that working, I'll share it (I'm residing in Canada, so there should be no need to worry about software patents for me).
Awesome, thanks.
You might want to put up a page somewhere; if you submit it to /. as a story, I at least hope it'd be posted. If you don't have hosting, let me know.
I do agree that if you were to or have created an algorithm that preformed a task in an incredibly unique or efficient way you should be able to be protected from people using your particular algorithm but you cannot stop someone from preforming the actual task.
I really like these words, but I think we still may disagree on what extent software "inventions" should be patentable.
The problem I see is a lot of the time, "algorithm" and "task" are pretty tightly intertwined; further, I think we would often take different positions on which is which. Take the decryption portion of RSA. I would say that the task it performs is "given a cyphertext c that was encrypted with RSA, along with the private key (n,d), determine the original message." I would say the algorithm for decryption is "take c^d modulo n." But in this case, the algorithm is the only way to accomplish that particular task. (Except for brute force search and the NSA's super-secret RSA-breaker, neither of which I think should be covered by an RSA patent.)
In the context of H.264, I suspect the case is similar: presumably there are steps of the encoding and decoding process that can only be done (at least by current knowledge) in one particular way; and these would then presumably be reasonably valid candidates for a software patent.
At the end of the day if you develop a logic system you own that exact sequence of events no more no less, they are just math but you do own the copyright if you can prove you were the first one to do it but you cannot patent the input or the result, just your transition between the two.
Maybe what we really need is something between the two, or a special kind of patent. The problem I have with all the people saying "software gets copyrighted" is I don't think that protection goes far enough. If I give you a general description of (to use my example from the other portion of this thread) an internal combustion engine, some machining tools, and a bunch of time and hunks of metal, you might be able to develop your own engine. It'd probably look quite a bit different from the original one, yet the physical patent presumably would cover your reengineered version. (See my reply to another of your posts in this thread.) And I think that position is quite reasonable. Yet if I give you a general description of the RSA algorithm and you go implement it, copyright alone doesn't cover your reengineered effort (which is the whole purpose of a cleanroom implementation). But I think there are plenty of things in the software world that are deserving of such protection.
(Perhaps I should justify that last statement a bit more. Why are copyright and patents, in general, a good thing? The reason is that they protect R&D investments in some sense, because someone can't take the money and effort that you invested figuring out how to do something (e.g. make an engine) and just copy it, until you've had a bit of time to recoup your losses yourself. When actually selling whatever product is the consequence of the R&D, you have to charge the incremental cost of whatever you're selling plus something to recoup your investment, while a "pirate" would only have to charge the incremental cost. The pirate thus undercuts your price, and "robs" you of sales. This general principle is true of both copyright and patents.
And I don't understand why so many people here (many more than seem to be against copyright and patents in general) think that this principle applies to algorithms and software any less than another invention. Algorithms still have a R&D cost. How many different things did R, S, and A try before coming up with something that worked? How much effort was put into figuring out how H.264 should drop out things that don't matter to the viewer? To me, saying that things like these shouldn't be patentable, if you accept non-software patents, is saying the R&D cost of algorithms is zero. And I don't understand how you can take that last position.)
You could patent the size of your combustion chamber, the length of your push rods, the dimensions of your crank shaft and the exact design of your fuel delivery system but you cannot patent the laws of Physics that allow you to harness combustion and demand all uses of combustion to be your invention.
You seriously think that the guy who invented the internal combustion engine* could have patented all those dimensions and such, but shouldn't have been able to patent something as general as "a motor that operates by drawing fuel into a combustion chamber through a valve, closing that valve, compressing the fuel and air, igniting it, opening a valve, and exhausting the burned products through that valve during four successive strokes"?
If so, then we disagree on rather more than just software patents. ;-)
* Disclaimer: I'm not sure how discrete this invention actually was; for purposes of argument, assume that the idea was suitably novel.
Wow, I did not know that; this is the first I've heard of it. Interesting.
On Windows and OS X, Opera uses its own local copy of GStreamer, which only has Vorbis & Theora codecs, so you'll need to compile gstreamer-ffmpeg yourself.
Do you happen to know of a HOWTO or anything for doing this and integrating it with Opera? If you don't have one handy don't bother looking or anything, I just thought you might have run across one. A very quick and cursory Google search didn't turn up anything that looks immediately promising to me.
To take it even further, if we're talking about someone lecturing with slides that are provided to students after a lecture, it seems pretty silly to distribute it in a slideshow / presentation format at all. The slideshow is there for the lecture, so one can rely on revealing the next bullet point on cue, which will vary lecture to lecture. Students have no need whatsoever for that, they just need the information.
This, I think, is a wholly incorrect statement. The information is inextricably bound up, to some degree, with the mode and context in which you learn it. It's not uncommon for me, as a student, to relate concepts based upon when the instructor discussed them, even to the point of envisioning the chalkboard or slide on which they were covered. If a student is someone who forms connections like this, having the slides could easily help.
But even this overlooks another way in which slides can help some people, which is it can help with note taking. There is some balance to be struck when taking notes between spending so much time scribbling down everything that you are only paying half attention during lecture (but have everything for later), and listening more carefully to the instructor, being able to think about what he or she says, but perhaps writing down too little so that you have a hard time reconstructing what was said later. Having the slides before class allows the students, if they wish, to print them out and take notes on them -- this allows them to have everything just as it was presented during class while not forcing them to write furiously to keep up. It does have the downside of anyone doing this not actually writing things down themselves, but there isn't a perfect solution as far as this is concerned IMO. (Yes, for the lectures I used PPT (about 1/3 of them) I did post the slides before the lecture. Most of the time, anyway.)
(One of the better CS classes I had when I was an undergrad was taught by a guy who lectured from PPT notes, and I used the slides in more or less this way. That class did have another interesting aspect from a pedagogical standpoint, which was that we had a quiz at the beginning of each class on the very basics of what we would be covering that day. This forced everyone to at least skim through the slides before class, and let the lecture not be as tied to the slides themselves as most classes that use PPT.)
On a separate issue: professors, please stop using slideshows in lectures.
Ah yes, this issue. I'm kinda torn on this.
My opinion from the perspective of a student: There are a lot of benefits to using slides. There's almost never an issue with handwriting. You can look at what the instructor used to teach from, and get the other benefits I explain above. (I definitely liked these things as a student.) It's easier to go up to the instructor and say "on slide such-and-such, what did you mean by that" and point to the slide than to bring them your notes, hope you didn't mistranscribe something, and then have the instructor figure out how what you wrote down corresponds to what he said/wrote during class. Other kinds of media, like photos and videos, can be integrated more smoothly into a presentation from PowerPoint than from the blackboard.
Some of my best classes were taught from PowerPoint slides. More to the point, a couple of my best-taught classes were taught from PowerPoint slides, most notably the one I mentioned above. In that case it certainly wasn't because it was taught from PowerPoint, but I don't think the slides hurt the professor either. Further, if I had to name the worst few or worst-taught few classes I had, there's probably only one that would show up that was a PPT class. (And a large part of why that was the case was because of the content anyway, which the slides presumably didn't affect.)
In a nutshell, I don't feel that, as a student, there was much of a quality difference between PPT-based classes and chalkboard-bas
Admitedly OO.o's import filters are far from perfect but this doesn't seem entirely fair, have you compared to powerpoint 2003 loading the pptx files with a plugin
I pulled out my Office XP discs and installed it and the import filters. It has the same problem that exporting to plain PPT has: it rasterizes the images.
So in some sense Impress isn't any worse off than older versions of PowerPoint, at least if you can run the converters that MS distributes.
I'm curious, is OO.o simply getting the object stack orders totally wrong when it drops the text below the boxes or are you using filters to allow the text to show through from below in office?
There's no stack at all; the text is contained within the shapes themselves. You can move the boxes around all day and you won't uncover any text.
After playing around a little more I did find a way to get at it though: set the fill for those objects to none.
Go-OO.org's version of openoffice 3.2 makes less of a hash of things(no dates or boxes) than the version you tested with, but only barely.
You might have been looking at the wrong line too: vanilla OO.org 3.2 doesn't render the dates or boxes on the textual slides either.
Until MS office gets perfect ODF export or OpenOffice perfect emulation of office 2007 graphics filters, I suppose your best bet is to create presentations in OpenOffice and save ppt versions for those students who don't have access to it.
That's more or less what I did; I exported to PDF and distributed those.
Or for him to at least not use (as he puts it) "fancy new 3Dish effects introduced in PowerPoint 2007"! Comparing just two slides, created by one person, who even admits using "fancy new" effects is hardly a rational or reasonable comparison.
Yeah, I should just not use the features my software gives me. That'll teach them to not improve.
Less facetiously, take a look at the screen shots. It's not really doing anything that fancy, just an extra little edge for aesthetics. (And no matter how much a lot of people here deny it or wish it were otherwise, the perceived quality of almost anything is determined by how polished it looks.)
That said... look at the first column. Simple slide: it has one text box on it with some text, on a colored background. That's all. Impress doesn't even get that right -- it ignores my background color. Previous versions looked even worse, to the point where I think you could save the default, blank document from PPT 2007 and load it in Impress, and it would screw that up. An empty document! ...but declaring it to be "barely alpha quality" is way beyond inaccurate.
I stand by my assertion of "barely alpha quality" given the difficulties it has with even plain slides.
What do you do for all the users of Windows XP who dont have OS support for H.264?
Either the same thing they will do now (with FF not supporting H.264 at all), which is either continue to use Flash or switch to a browser that does support H.264, or they'll go download a third-party H.264 codec.
(What did all the Linux people do to watch DVDs before there was a licensed DVD player for the platform? And probably the situation wouldn't be that dire.)
You do the realize that at the heart of the RSA algorithm (and most if not all cyptography algorthims for that matter) is a series of mathematical equations...
You could say the same thing about physical inventions, and it would only be a bit more far-fetched IMO. "At the heart of an internal combustion engine is just the physical principle that a fuel-air mixture burning will create an increase in volume." The presumably patentable thing in the case of the internal combustion engine is the clever idea that you can harness that increase in volume to turn linear motion into rotational motion, and use that to, for instance, move a car forward. Similarly, there may "just" be some number theory behind the RSA algorithm, but the thing I think should be patentable in its case is the clever idea that you can harness those equations in order to do public-key cryptography.
(I don't actually know whether the internal combustion engine was patented, or what parts of it were, etc.; but you get the idea.)
Therefore under US law it should not be patentable, yet for some reason because it relates to computing it is was granted a patent.
I can't speak to what should or shouldn't be patentable under current law; I'm just saying that I think a system that allows at least some aspects of software to be patented makes perfect sense.
Ok then. Please pay me $10.99 for your Firefox license and drmed closed source Linux kernel module? What you do not want to pay? I own it. Oh and the license says it must be a drmed system so I guess you have to use Windows or use a drmed version of Linux sorry.
Right, because those are the only two options, and something like a generic Gstreamer-like "let's use the OS's codec" solution isn't possible. </sarcasm>
BTW, that's not to say that I support the current status quo regarding software patents. I think software patents should undergo some reform to make them both more restrictive (Amazon one-click? really?) and probably shorter duration. That said, I definitely think something like the RSA algorithm was as worthy of a patent as most anything else out there.
Unfortunately you're dealing with someone who is quite clearly not a computer scientist or mathematician.
Huh?
I consider myself a computer scientist (and the fact that I have a BS in both math and comp sci and am halfwayish through a CS PhD program would seem to support that assertion), and I firmly believe that a sufficiently clever algorithm is as much an invention as a sufficiently clever physical invention.
Saying "algorithms are just math" is about as convincing to me as saying "your prototype is just matter."
It's more like FireFox risks becoming the IE6 of internet video. H.264 is supported by IE, Safari, Chrome, and Opera.
That's not true, at least according to my installation of Opera 10.50, as well as the couple searches I've done.
One of my fears here...
I also am curious if this'll happen myself, but I take a pretty zen approach. Don't fear it. I don't think we're in much danger of going back to a completely IE-dominated webscape (sorry for that word) like we had 10 years ago or whenever it was. Non-PC browsers (read: "smartphones") are increasingly popular. Macs are increasingly popular. On Windows, Chrome is increasingly popular.
If Firefox stagnates, the other browsers will continue forward. Either that will be a kick in the pants for Firefox and it'll catch back up (like the last 5+ years have been to IE, if IE9 is actually decent again), or Firefox will fall away like so many pieces of software have before. If the latter happens, in part it'll be sad, but at the same time I don't really go "man, it's too bad Netscape isn't around" or anything like that.
If Firefox dies, something else will rise to take its place. Maybe they could call it Phoenix. :-)