I do beleive that the blur is from the cam taking a long picture, not the speed or frame rate being transfered.
Camera blur certainly occurs, but with modern sensors and under reasonable lighting conditions, is much less common than it used to be.
For example, the frame-by-frame slow-motion shown during sporting events (from regular video, not from the "super slo-mo" high-frame-rate cameras that are sometimes used) is much sharper than it was in the past.
OTOH, if you hold your hand palm-out at arm's length and whip your fingers back and forth as fast as you can, you will see a blurred image.
There are definite limits to the speed at which the human eye/brain detect and respond to changes in what they are seeing.
Blurring can also occur due to slow response in the display technology -- some forms of LCD are notorious for this.
Visably blurred video is a combination of all of the effects.
IIRC, we humans really don't resolve moving objects much better than 24 fps.
The higher field rates for video (relative to film) were chosen to (a) reduce visible flicker, which we can resolve at higher rates, and (b) allow the use of local AC power as a time base.
If you're old enough, you remember televisions with manual horizontal and vertical scan adjustments that sometimes had to be tweaked in order to get the frequencies close enough that the crude (by today's standard) circuitry could lock.
Another consequence of the way our eyes/brain work is that we can, generally speaking, see motion or see fine detail, but not both at the same time.
Some compression schemes attempt to take advantage of this by coding portions of the frame that are changing rapidly using less detail in order to save some bits.
Everyone, and I mean everyone, who has at least rudimentary human intelligence and capability, can pay for their own healthcare.
True for many, particularly the young and the healthy, and for normal sorts of care.
However, there are chronic conditions that very few individuals can pay for.
The drug bill alone for treating some chronic conditions exceeds $60,000 per year.
The median income for a family of four in the US is about $55,000.
That family CANNOT pay for the health care for that child.
It is not uncommon for an elderly person to run up $500,000 in health care costs during the last two or three years of their life.
Few have that kind of resources available.
"Society" is already bending over backwards to help people out in need, voluntarily, without a menacing tax collector ripping people off selectively
TTBOMK, there are no private charities whose purpose is to pay that type of large bill for anyone who is in need.
In general, all of the programs that do so involve some degree of coercion.
For Medicare and Medicaid, the government pays out of its tax base.
In employer-provided insurance plans, the young and healthy pay more than their share in premiums to cover the costs of the older and sicker (the coercion in that case looking a bit more like a carrot than a stick -- the company plan provides more coverage than you need, but is "free").
And don't even think about buying private health insurance for your family if you have a child with such a pre-existing condition -- no one is going to sell you a policy at any price.
Similarly if you're 93.
And, do you have any idea how absurd it is to see some upper-middle class family on a six figure salary using medical insurance from work to pay for doctor visits? Why in the hell does their employer even offer that kind of insurance?
I agree that many aspects of the current coverage seem silly.
IIRC, this form of "insurance" started with Kaiser during WWII.
Among other things, Kaiser built fleets of standardized ships for the US Navy that were at least one of the critical factors in determining who won that war.
Anyway, he found that it was cheaper to operate subsidized clinics to take care of workers and their families than to pay the cost of days lost to sickness or injury.
In order to compete for workers, other companies had to offer some sort of similar benefit; most of them did it through private doctors and hospitals; at some point, insurance companies got involved in administering the plans.
Such health care arrangements became a standard benefit demanded by the large unions.
Keep in mind that health care was a LOT cheaper 60 years ago, so it seemed like a reasonable deal to the companies.
Of course, if you're the top management at a company paying the line workers' health insurance premiums, you want the same benefit for yourself.
A system that made some degree of sense 60 years ago has been outstripped by changes in health care technology and society.
Conditions that were fatal in the short term then can be treated (at high cost) and people can live for another 30 years.
Doctors today come out of medical school owing $100,000 or more, and may face malpractice premiums of $100,000 per year.
The US is the richest country in the world, and spends a larger percentage of its GDP on health care than any other industrial nation.
At some point, I believe, we'll get this mess straightened out, although things will probably have to get worse before we're willing to take the needed steps.
about the hand gestures being understood at 15 fps, does that include motion blur?
If I understand the question correctly, the answer is no.
If someone waves their hand rapidly -- little Johnny to Grandma, for example -- at 15 fps Grandma will clearly see and understand the wave, but there's no visible blurring.
I'm not sure what frame rate is needed to get visible blurring -- higher than we could generate with the hardware, software, and network arrangements we were testing at the time.
It might be worth mentioning that some compression schemes introduce the possibility of having different nominal and effective frame rates.
Depending on how motion is detected and how much motion is required to trigger recoding a portion of the frame, slowly-changing portions of the image may get updated at something less than the nominal frame rate.
This can create some ugly artifacts.
Several years ago I helped run some informal studies of people using small-frame video over IP for real-time communications.
IIRC, some of the useful things that we learned were:
People who watch 15 fps video on a regular basis rate it higher than people who hardly ever watch low-frame-rate video.
15 fps is clearly not as smooth as 24 or 30 fps, but people do get used to it.
At 15 fps, body language and hand gestures are easily understood.
For desktop conferencing, people tended to use the video as a body-language signaling channel -- I'm bored, I'm excited, I need to say something now.
At 15 fps, you can tell whether the audio and video are properly synced by watching people's mouths -- at 10-12 fps the motion is too jerky to tell.
At 15 fps, out-of-sync audio and video will drive you crazy -- many people have to look away so they can't see the video in order to continue the conversation.
A black-and-white option can be useful.
A black-and-white frame typically requires only about half as many bits as a color frame, so you can trade off color for fps.
Some people preferred black-and-white at higher frame rates, some people preferred color at lower rates.
Re:That's how discovery works in litigation
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SCOrched Earth
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Say I am a fizzy drinks manufacturer. I want to know what Coca-cola's secret formula is. I start a case against them saying that they've copied my formula, and that they have to give me their formula so I can prove it.
Can you lay a proper foundation for your request?
Does your product predate Coke?
Did Coke's product change from something else to something that is close to your product?
You do have to make a plausible argument for your claim that Coke stole your formula.
In the case of trade secrets, even if you do get a chance to look at their formula in court in private, you may be constrained from talking about it (much less using it) outside of court.
I would imagine source code is esentially a trade secret. A competitor has asked IBM to hand over their trade secrets, because they may have copied theirs. Doesn't seem right to me. If SCO cannot provide some other proof that copying has occurred - for instance, evidence from an IBM employee - then I don't think they should be allowed to see IBMs trade secrets.
SCO is not asking IBM to reveal trade secrets; IBM has already done the revealing, the case is about whether IBM had the right to reveal them.
SCO's foundation, weak though it may be, is the old contract between IBM and AT&T.
In it, IBM may have agreed that anything they develop in a context that derives from the old UNIX is a trade secret and that AT&T (whose rights are now held by SCO) must give approval before IBM can reveal those secrets to third parties.
SCO has named specific technologies that IBM has released -- JFS is a clearcut example.
JFS is clearly part of IBM's current AIX offering and the code has clearly been revealed by donating it to Linux.
ASSUMING the contract is binding and that AIX is "derived from" the old UNIX, what remains at issue is the development history of JFS.
SCO cannot know that history without access to IBM's internal documentation -- and US civil law allows them access to those records (discovery).
Some of the current argument is over the degree to which IBM must organize the material -- have they satisfied the discovery rules if they simply dump 100M pages of documentation and old e-mail on SCO?
IBM wins this case if they can prove (ie, get the court to agree) that any of several different things are true:
The contract is not binding, or
AIX is not "derived from" the old UNIX after some point in history (and if the development of the particular features postdate that), or
The features over which SCO is suing were developed in an environment not covered by the contract and ported to Linux from there, or
SCO's distribution of Linux source that includes the code in question provided implicit approval for revealing the secrets.
As long as those countries don't pull out their money, the U.S. is not currently in as much debt as you think.
A big IF there. Not likely in the near term but it's a dangerous game the capitalists are playing with USA (or for that matter any other country). If Japanese (who is the largest majority foreign owner of US debt), and a bunch of other foreign investors asked for their money back, USA will collapse overnight.
Certainly have to agree with you here.
Both Japan and China are buying lots of dollars (in the form of US government debt) these days, to keep their currencies "cheap" relative to the dollar and let them continue to prop up their economies with exports to the US.
At some point this will stop: either they will hold so much US debt that they won't be able to stand the risk, or they'll find another export market, or their domestic demand will grow enough that they don't need to export so much, or something.
Whether things unwind nicely at that point depends on so many variables no one can possibly predict it (other than by "lucky guess").
It is probably in those countries' interests to have it unwind nicely -- if you hold $1T in US debt, you don't want to dump so much so fast that the dollar crashes and your remaining holdings are worthless.
That's why, when capitalism collapses (which I think it will--probably within 50 years)
But not here.
There could certainly be problems -- currency crashes, local and even worldwide depression, etc. But the end of capitalism (which I think is what you're saying) implies that some other system will take its place.
The currency system may be screwed up, but that doesn't mean that we'll give up on market economies and private ownership of capital.
Unless you get specific permission from the actual 'company', the actions of any individual can still be considered improper. ( excluding the board, or CEO,etc.. I'm talking 'employees' here, regardless of position )
Different companies have different policies.
At the last giant corporation I worked for, there was a written policy that said that any employee at the VP level or above could approve the release of information to the outside.
All of the VPs that I knew took the responsibility quite seriously -- on multiple occasions I had to have long talks with multiple VPs about the consequences of us releasing code.
Employees below that level very specifically could not give approval.
Non-employees, including non-employee members of the board, could not give approval.
Wonder if SCO (or predecessor companies) had a written policy about release approval?
Maybe SCO will start suing their former employees for improper release?
Because of this fact, as U.S. citizens, we have to be prepared to switch careers throughout our lifetime, depending on how new technologies are evolving. For instance, the movie, computer gaming and biotech industries here are light years ahead of most other countries and good places to find tech jobs.
This may work, or may not.
Consider that in many cases it will take at least four-five years from the time you enter a new field until you become TRULY valuable to the firm -- not only do you need to learn the field, but you need to learn THAT PARTICULAR COMPANY.
Consider that it may take one or more years in school in order to become qualified for entry-level positions in the new field -- my knowledge of telecom technology means next to nothing in the biotech field.
Consider that taking two years off out of seven for training, plus starting over at an entry-level position every time, imposes severe limits on your earning potential -- hence on your ability to buy a house, raise a family, save for your old age, etc.
OTOH, if we all specialized in fields that moved easily from one industry to another, we'd all have studied finance and business management, and be looking for where we could hire the cheapest possible developers to do the job... oops!
Perhaps we should adopt both approaches: First register all guns - complete with ballistic fingerprinting, etc. - then require every household in America to contain one.
If I recall my history correctly (and there's some probability that I'm not), records of who owned guns used to be kept by local militia leaders.
Then, if the call came down to provide militia, he knew who he could call on.
If you're one of those that reads the 2nd amendment to mean that the states can maintain their own local armed forces, then all of that made sense.
If you believe that the amendment refers to individual rights, well, the people of that day seemed to trust their local leaders more than people today do.
I'm trying to be reasonable here, no offense intended.
In rural areas, hunting is considered entertainment.
If that's not beneficial, then neither are movie theaters.
Also in rural areas, vermin control is often most easily achieved by the judicious application of a piece of lead and a bit of smokeless powder.
In some people's minds, the only thing that keeps the government from using the military to "take over" in a despotic sense is that the citizens of the US are heavily armed.
I might argue that the situation in Iraq, where there appear to be a lot of guns in citizens' hands, didn't stop the Baathists.
In a high-density urban setting, in the absence of good crime-reduction arguments, owning a gun doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.
Of course, neither does owning a car.
Around 1% (value subject to debate) have immunity to it.
Not surprising, and AFAIK, true for almost any infectious agent.
Evolution has no apparent problem with "kill off 99% of the species in order to gain immunity."
The web is easy to search, but -- as a recent article pointed out -- it's very ephemeral. Web pages have an average lifespan of 100 days
As a part-time academic, one of the other problems with the Web is the lack of "pedigree" for much of the information that one finds there.
When you find a page containing what you believe to be useful information, sometimes in its original location and sometimes in an archive, you are often faced with unanswerable questions about it: who wrote this, when did they write it, has it been modified since then?
Books and paper journals generally make the pedigree quite obvious, and are much harder to modify (which can sometimes be a good thing).
Present day researchers were surprised to find that centuries after first contact in the far north, the native oral histories of the episodes were pretty much in agreement with the written logs of the explorers of that time.
Cool!
But... now let's see them do it with scientific and engineering knowledge.
Heck, most of the people that I know that work with mathematics can't even carry on a reasonable conversation without paper or a blackboard.
Having said that, I'm pretty confident that you are allowed to make copies of music for your listening and that you can give copies to your friends (as long as you don't sell it). See here
IANAL, but following your link, my reading is that it says fair use implies that YOU can make a copy so that YOU can play it in another location on a different device (in their example, copying a CD to tape for use in your car). Nothing about making a copy for a friend, whether you charge for it or not.
If my wife can't listen to my music in her car, while I listen to our music at home or on my bike, the DRM sytem simply sucks. Sure, I can work around it with tapes and other stuff that will rocket me back to the 1980s. What good is that? I'm happier with my simple oggfiles that I can serve out as I please and put on as many computers as I want. When I bought the music, I had every intention of everyone in my house being able to enjoy it. Anything more complicated than that is simply not going to catch on.
I just want to make sure that I'm understanding you -- when you bought the music, you had every intention of making a limited number of copies so that everyone who lives in the house could enjoy it at different places at the same time?
Rather than passing around a single copy which multiple people could enjoy, but only at different times?
Wouldn't such copying violate analog as well as digital copyright law?
At what point do you draw a line?
When my son moved out of the house to live on his own, should he have given back his copies?
I won't criticize, as I've been guilty of the same type of occasional limited copying within my family over the years.
Nevertheless, such copies do appear to violate the general spirit of copyright.
or you're on the increasingly rare "R" side of "R&D"
I think, unfortunately, that your comment is spot on.
Unfortunately, that is, for a number of US industries in the intermediate to long term.
I was lucky enough (because the work was both challenging and FUN) to spend the last 15 years doing applied research in the telecom and cable industry.
We worked on studying how customers interacted with existing and potential services, doing some prototypes to study what problems might arise in a real implementation, etc.
In addition to helping the company set some important technology directions, we were able to identify a number of situations where the company was about to make stupid, expensive choices.
Over the last four years, however, the cost cutters were in charge and slowly squeezed the research efforts (which were some very small fraction of one percent of the company's total expenditures) out of existance.
This type of research has been squeezed nearly out of existance throughout the industry.
While it helped make one quarter's cost numbers look better, I believe that they will pay for the decision in the longer term.
New services will arrive later and will not work as well as they might.
My impression is that the same kind of decisions are being made in a variety of industries these days.
What if they prefer to have it untrademarked, as they don't believe such a term should be able to be trademarked.
Then they're probably being logically inconsistent.
If you assert that a term is too generic to be subject to trademark, then you are asserting that no one, including yourself, is entitled to exclusive use of it.
If they claim that the term is too generic but that it's okay for both themselves and RedHat to use the term (which doesn't seem to be what they want), that's consistent, but given an existing trademark, will require a court case to settle the issue -- and the court may tell them that they're wrong, it's specific enough.
If they maintain that they are the ones who should be entitled to the exclusive use of the term because they used it first, then the rules of the game say that they need to file an opposition and obtain their own trademark.
I suspect that, deep down, the real problem is that they want exclusive use but having their project "own" a trademark requires that there be some persistent legal entity to do the owning, and unless the university is willing to act in that role, it takes a certain amount of hassle and money to create and maintain such an entity.
Most universities do hold trademarks (particularly on their name) so it may just be a matter of the money.
Note that different projects seem to take different attitudes towards this.
While there are a number of trademarks on the term "PERL", including one for canned meat, none of them appear to cover a computer language.
The term "VISUAL PERL" for an environment for writing programs is registered.
One suspects that anyone filing an application for a "PERL" trademark, other than Larry himself, would have problems.
OTOH, the term "PYTHON" for a programming language appears to be registered.
Re:Does IT Matter?
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Does IT Matter?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Let's consider each of these in a business context, which is the article's setting.
Send e-mail and instantly communicate with IM services
No question that this is useful, although I have to admit that there are some downsides to having senior management with e-mail at their disposal -- since they can send a message "instantly", they expect an answer "instantly", even when that answer requires some days of effort to obtain.
But to the article's point, you DON'T need the latest and greatest hardware to do this; most messages are text-only, and many that are not text-only should be.
Pay bills and manage finances online
Again in a business context: complete expense vouchers, purchase orders, obtain current totals for department running expenses, etc.
One of the largest impediments to this is the insistance on paper trails for audit purposes.
The IRS, for example, requires that original receipts be available for audits.
An online system must operate in parallel with the paper system.
In my experience, some places have done it well and some have not.
Up-to-date expense tracking would be wonderful, but is seldom delivered.
Again, doing equivalent or improved paper processes should not require more computer power than is already available.
Get lot of information about anything you can think of within seconds.
For most businesses, getting the information you want about the current state of the operation would be a godsend.
As many, many articles point out, though, much of the problem is that the information is already in computers, but not in a coherent fashion.
At one point, it was trendy to work on corporate-wide data models; don't know if that is still the case or not.
One of the biggest problems is a method for asking the question in a coherent and usable fashion.
It's one things to type "tallest buildings in the world" into Google and peruse the results.
It's quite another to do the equivalent of "Show me the sales results for the last three quarters for the regions with the worst performance" and get a good answer.
Especially when the data is not sitting on hosts that are as friendly about scanning and indexing as the WWW.
Manage every aspect of your life ( jobs, health, you name it) with the help of technology
Let me pick one of these -- health care.
Everybody has too many forms to fill out with regard to company-provided health insurance.
Signing up for the health plan of your choice.
Claims forms in many cases.
As I mentioned above, in many cases there are requirements for a paper trail for audit purposes.
Also as mentioned repeatedly, the answers to this do not require any more computing power than is currently available.
Yes, IT matters in the sense of making most aspects of the business run better.
But for many of the improvements that could give large benefits immediately, you don't need to spend more money on desktop and LAN hardware.
This is a test of whether man or machine is superior at chess.
Exactly. In terms of more general superiority, my question is always, "Now, let's see that chess-playing program write a book that explains how to play chess to other people." Any of the good chess players that I've met could write something, and most of the great players have written multiple books on the subject.
Bill Gates has to pay people to work for him. Linus does not. Advantage: Linus.
Not to be overly negative, but...
Bill Gates pays people to work for him.
When there's some ugly, tedious piece of code that has to be written in order to complete some piece of functionality, it gets written.
When there's a necessary piece of documentation that needs to be finished, Bill doesn't hope for volunteers.
In some commercial settings, advantage: Bill.
DVD licensing fees paid by Chinese manufacturers are something like $9 per player
I'm not saying that this is wrong, but can someone provide a pointer to something that could substantiate this? I just find it difficult to believe that I can buy a DVD player where nearly 25% of the retail price goes to licensing fees. Similarly, since a DVD drive for a computer should be subject to the same fees, and I can buy one for $30, nearly 33% of the retail price would be the licensing fees. From what I recall reading about consumer electronics markups and the expenses of getting the product to the point of sale, this would seem to imply that the manufacturers of these devices are taking a substantial loss.
Avoiding paying royaties to US and EU is a major component of any sensible comercial or industrial policy in a developing country.
Just out of curiousity, what do the licensing fees run per DVD player?
I can buy a bottom-end player for less than $40 at Circuit City or Best Buy.
That has to cover the cost of the original manufacture in the Far East, shipping to the US West Coast, transport to Denver, and the fixed costs of the retailer (floor space, etc).
I'm guessing the licensing fee is $1, $2?
What will it cost China to develop a complete standard that does not infringe on any of the international patents -- $10M? $100M?
I know China is a potentially large market, but that's a lot of sales.
I suspect that there are more political motives afoot.
but rather the sophisticated pattern-recognition mechanisms in the brain that compensate for this
Humans are extremely good at extracting (and making sense of) frequency information. Here's an interesting experiment that I've seen performed.
Start with a clip of someone talking, relatively slowly and clearly, digitally recorded with 8-bit linear samples and the MSB a sign bit (ie, the range is -128 to 127). Play that and, while there is audible static, the speech is still clear. Now replace the LSB with one, effectively converting to 7-bit samples. Play the modified clip, the static level has increased, but you can still understand the speech. Replace the next LSB with one, yielding 6-bit samples, play it again. Each time you replace another bit position with ones, the static level increases. At more significant bit positions, the total volume tends to increase as well, so you'll have to turn the volume on the playback device down, or scale things in some fashion.
The amazing thing is that, when only the sign bit remains, most people can still make out what is being said. At that point, the only information present is the frequency data (zero crossings). OTOH, humans are miserably bad at hearing phase phenomena.
But that doesn't preclude someone from setting up a private paid email service where you have to pay,in the form of micropayments, to send mail to its customers. Business opportunity here.
Might not even need micropayments if the prices were set properly. Since spammers seem to depend on being able to send millions of messages, perhaps a scheme where there was a VERY large charge for more than 50,000 messages per month would do the job? You would have to deal with large entities that generate that many legitimate messages per month -- I used to work for a giant corporation and while there was an enormous amount of internal e-mail, there was quite a bit of e-mail that went to vendors, etc.
Might be better to simply cut off service for the first infraction, in the sense of forcing people to close down open relays. What fraction of hosts doing open relaying are doing so by design?
I expect that ATT has a policy of patenting everything any of their researchers works on, regardless of what it is.
Quite likely, as an extensive patent portfolio has several different uses.
The portfolio can be used in an offensive fashion, generating revenue both directly and indirectly. Licensing generates revenue directly -- I believe that TI, for example, generates >$750M per year in patent licensing.
By temporarily restricting competition -- that's what patents are supposed to do -- patents give some degree of pricing power, indirectly increasing revenues.
The portfolio can also be used in a defensive fashion -- a company I worked for pursued a patent on some of my work not because they intended to stop others from using the technique, but in order to keep someone else from getting a patent and stopping us from using the technique.
The costs of obtaining a patent are much less than the cost of taking your prior art to court and invalidating someone else's patent.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you won't have to wait quite that long. Once enough of us die, you can outvote us :^)
Camera blur certainly occurs, but with modern sensors and under reasonable lighting conditions, is much less common than it used to be. For example, the frame-by-frame slow-motion shown during sporting events (from regular video, not from the "super slo-mo" high-frame-rate cameras that are sometimes used) is much sharper than it was in the past. OTOH, if you hold your hand palm-out at arm's length and whip your fingers back and forth as fast as you can, you will see a blurred image. There are definite limits to the speed at which the human eye/brain detect and respond to changes in what they are seeing. Blurring can also occur due to slow response in the display technology -- some forms of LCD are notorious for this. Visably blurred video is a combination of all of the effects.
IIRC, we humans really don't resolve moving objects much better than 24 fps. The higher field rates for video (relative to film) were chosen to (a) reduce visible flicker, which we can resolve at higher rates, and (b) allow the use of local AC power as a time base. If you're old enough, you remember televisions with manual horizontal and vertical scan adjustments that sometimes had to be tweaked in order to get the frequencies close enough that the crude (by today's standard) circuitry could lock.
Another consequence of the way our eyes/brain work is that we can, generally speaking, see motion or see fine detail, but not both at the same time. Some compression schemes attempt to take advantage of this by coding portions of the frame that are changing rapidly using less detail in order to save some bits.
True for many, particularly the young and the healthy, and for normal sorts of care. However, there are chronic conditions that very few individuals can pay for. The drug bill alone for treating some chronic conditions exceeds $60,000 per year. The median income for a family of four in the US is about $55,000. That family CANNOT pay for the health care for that child. It is not uncommon for an elderly person to run up $500,000 in health care costs during the last two or three years of their life. Few have that kind of resources available.
TTBOMK, there are no private charities whose purpose is to pay that type of large bill for anyone who is in need. In general, all of the programs that do so involve some degree of coercion. For Medicare and Medicaid, the government pays out of its tax base. In employer-provided insurance plans, the young and healthy pay more than their share in premiums to cover the costs of the older and sicker (the coercion in that case looking a bit more like a carrot than a stick -- the company plan provides more coverage than you need, but is "free"). And don't even think about buying private health insurance for your family if you have a child with such a pre-existing condition -- no one is going to sell you a policy at any price. Similarly if you're 93.
I agree that many aspects of the current coverage seem silly. IIRC, this form of "insurance" started with Kaiser during WWII. Among other things, Kaiser built fleets of standardized ships for the US Navy that were at least one of the critical factors in determining who won that war. Anyway, he found that it was cheaper to operate subsidized clinics to take care of workers and their families than to pay the cost of days lost to sickness or injury. In order to compete for workers, other companies had to offer some sort of similar benefit; most of them did it through private doctors and hospitals; at some point, insurance companies got involved in administering the plans. Such health care arrangements became a standard benefit demanded by the large unions. Keep in mind that health care was a LOT cheaper 60 years ago, so it seemed like a reasonable deal to the companies. Of course, if you're the top management at a company paying the line workers' health insurance premiums, you want the same benefit for yourself.
A system that made some degree of sense 60 years ago has been outstripped by changes in health care technology and society. Conditions that were fatal in the short term then can be treated (at high cost) and people can live for another 30 years. Doctors today come out of medical school owing $100,000 or more, and may face malpractice premiums of $100,000 per year. The US is the richest country in the world, and spends a larger percentage of its GDP on health care than any other industrial nation. At some point, I believe, we'll get this mess straightened out, although things will probably have to get worse before we're willing to take the needed steps.
If I understand the question correctly, the answer is no. If someone waves their hand rapidly -- little Johnny to Grandma, for example -- at 15 fps Grandma will clearly see and understand the wave, but there's no visible blurring. I'm not sure what frame rate is needed to get visible blurring -- higher than we could generate with the hardware, software, and network arrangements we were testing at the time.
It might be worth mentioning that some compression schemes introduce the possibility of having different nominal and effective frame rates. Depending on how motion is detected and how much motion is required to trigger recoding a portion of the frame, slowly-changing portions of the image may get updated at something less than the nominal frame rate. This can create some ugly artifacts.
Several years ago I helped run some informal studies of people using small-frame video over IP for real-time communications. IIRC, some of the useful things that we learned were:
Can you lay a proper foundation for your request? Does your product predate Coke? Did Coke's product change from something else to something that is close to your product? You do have to make a plausible argument for your claim that Coke stole your formula. In the case of trade secrets, even if you do get a chance to look at their formula in court in private, you may be constrained from talking about it (much less using it) outside of court.
SCO is not asking IBM to reveal trade secrets; IBM has already done the revealing, the case is about whether IBM had the right to reveal them. SCO's foundation, weak though it may be, is the old contract between IBM and AT&T. In it, IBM may have agreed that anything they develop in a context that derives from the old UNIX is a trade secret and that AT&T (whose rights are now held by SCO) must give approval before IBM can reveal those secrets to third parties.
SCO has named specific technologies that IBM has released -- JFS is a clearcut example. JFS is clearly part of IBM's current AIX offering and the code has clearly been revealed by donating it to Linux. ASSUMING the contract is binding and that AIX is "derived from" the old UNIX, what remains at issue is the development history of JFS. SCO cannot know that history without access to IBM's internal documentation -- and US civil law allows them access to those records (discovery). Some of the current argument is over the degree to which IBM must organize the material -- have they satisfied the discovery rules if they simply dump 100M pages of documentation and old e-mail on SCO?
IBM wins this case if they can prove (ie, get the court to agree) that any of several different things are true:
Certainly have to agree with you here. Both Japan and China are buying lots of dollars (in the form of US government debt) these days, to keep their currencies "cheap" relative to the dollar and let them continue to prop up their economies with exports to the US. At some point this will stop: either they will hold so much US debt that they won't be able to stand the risk, or they'll find another export market, or their domestic demand will grow enough that they don't need to export so much, or something. Whether things unwind nicely at that point depends on so many variables no one can possibly predict it (other than by "lucky guess"). It is probably in those countries' interests to have it unwind nicely -- if you hold $1T in US debt, you don't want to dump so much so fast that the dollar crashes and your remaining holdings are worthless.
But not here. There could certainly be problems -- currency crashes, local and even worldwide depression, etc. But the end of capitalism (which I think is what you're saying) implies that some other system will take its place. The currency system may be screwed up, but that doesn't mean that we'll give up on market economies and private ownership of capital.
Different companies have different policies. At the last giant corporation I worked for, there was a written policy that said that any employee at the VP level or above could approve the release of information to the outside. All of the VPs that I knew took the responsibility quite seriously -- on multiple occasions I had to have long talks with multiple VPs about the consequences of us releasing code. Employees below that level very specifically could not give approval. Non-employees, including non-employee members of the board, could not give approval. Wonder if SCO (or predecessor companies) had a written policy about release approval? Maybe SCO will start suing their former employees for improper release?
This may work, or may not. Consider that in many cases it will take at least four-five years from the time you enter a new field until you become TRULY valuable to the firm -- not only do you need to learn the field, but you need to learn THAT PARTICULAR COMPANY. Consider that it may take one or more years in school in order to become qualified for entry-level positions in the new field -- my knowledge of telecom technology means next to nothing in the biotech field. Consider that taking two years off out of seven for training, plus starting over at an entry-level position every time, imposes severe limits on your earning potential -- hence on your ability to buy a house, raise a family, save for your old age, etc. OTOH, if we all specialized in fields that moved easily from one industry to another, we'd all have studied finance and business management, and be looking for where we could hire the cheapest possible developers to do the job... oops!
If I recall my history correctly (and there's some probability that I'm not), records of who owned guns used to be kept by local militia leaders. Then, if the call came down to provide militia, he knew who he could call on. If you're one of those that reads the 2nd amendment to mean that the states can maintain their own local armed forces, then all of that made sense. If you believe that the amendment refers to individual rights, well, the people of that day seemed to trust their local leaders more than people today do.
I'm trying to be reasonable here, no offense intended. In rural areas, hunting is considered entertainment. If that's not beneficial, then neither are movie theaters. Also in rural areas, vermin control is often most easily achieved by the judicious application of a piece of lead and a bit of smokeless powder. In some people's minds, the only thing that keeps the government from using the military to "take over" in a despotic sense is that the citizens of the US are heavily armed. I might argue that the situation in Iraq, where there appear to be a lot of guns in citizens' hands, didn't stop the Baathists.
In a high-density urban setting, in the absence of good crime-reduction arguments, owning a gun doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. Of course, neither does owning a car.
Not surprising, and AFAIK, true for almost any infectious agent. Evolution has no apparent problem with "kill off 99% of the species in order to gain immunity."
As a part-time academic, one of the other problems with the Web is the lack of "pedigree" for much of the information that one finds there. When you find a page containing what you believe to be useful information, sometimes in its original location and sometimes in an archive, you are often faced with unanswerable questions about it: who wrote this, when did they write it, has it been modified since then? Books and paper journals generally make the pedigree quite obvious, and are much harder to modify (which can sometimes be a good thing).
Cool! But... now let's see them do it with scientific and engineering knowledge. Heck, most of the people that I know that work with mathematics can't even carry on a reasonable conversation without paper or a blackboard.
IANAL, but following your link, my reading is that it says fair use implies that YOU can make a copy so that YOU can play it in another location on a different device (in their example, copying a CD to tape for use in your car). Nothing about making a copy for a friend, whether you charge for it or not.
I just want to make sure that I'm understanding you -- when you bought the music, you had every intention of making a limited number of copies so that everyone who lives in the house could enjoy it at different places at the same time? Rather than passing around a single copy which multiple people could enjoy, but only at different times? Wouldn't such copying violate analog as well as digital copyright law? At what point do you draw a line? When my son moved out of the house to live on his own, should he have given back his copies? I won't criticize, as I've been guilty of the same type of occasional limited copying within my family over the years. Nevertheless, such copies do appear to violate the general spirit of copyright.
I think, unfortunately, that your comment is spot on. Unfortunately, that is, for a number of US industries in the intermediate to long term. I was lucky enough (because the work was both challenging and FUN) to spend the last 15 years doing applied research in the telecom and cable industry. We worked on studying how customers interacted with existing and potential services, doing some prototypes to study what problems might arise in a real implementation, etc. In addition to helping the company set some important technology directions, we were able to identify a number of situations where the company was about to make stupid, expensive choices. Over the last four years, however, the cost cutters were in charge and slowly squeezed the research efforts (which were some very small fraction of one percent of the company's total expenditures) out of existance. This type of research has been squeezed nearly out of existance throughout the industry.
While it helped make one quarter's cost numbers look better, I believe that they will pay for the decision in the longer term. New services will arrive later and will not work as well as they might. My impression is that the same kind of decisions are being made in a variety of industries these days.
Then they're probably being logically inconsistent. If you assert that a term is too generic to be subject to trademark, then you are asserting that no one, including yourself, is entitled to exclusive use of it. If they claim that the term is too generic but that it's okay for both themselves and RedHat to use the term (which doesn't seem to be what they want), that's consistent, but given an existing trademark, will require a court case to settle the issue -- and the court may tell them that they're wrong, it's specific enough. If they maintain that they are the ones who should be entitled to the exclusive use of the term because they used it first, then the rules of the game say that they need to file an opposition and obtain their own trademark. I suspect that, deep down, the real problem is that they want exclusive use but having their project "own" a trademark requires that there be some persistent legal entity to do the owning, and unless the university is willing to act in that role, it takes a certain amount of hassle and money to create and maintain such an entity. Most universities do hold trademarks (particularly on their name) so it may just be a matter of the money.
Note that different projects seem to take different attitudes towards this. While there are a number of trademarks on the term "PERL", including one for canned meat, none of them appear to cover a computer language. The term "VISUAL PERL" for an environment for writing programs is registered. One suspects that anyone filing an application for a "PERL" trademark, other than Larry himself, would have problems. OTOH, the term "PYTHON" for a programming language appears to be registered.
Let's consider each of these in a business context, which is the article's setting.
Send e-mail and instantly communicate with IM services
Pay bills and manage finances online
Get lot of information about anything you can think of within seconds.
Manage every aspect of your life ( jobs, health, you name it) with the help of technology
Yes, IT matters in the sense of making most aspects of the business run better. But for many of the improvements that could give large benefits immediately, you don't need to spend more money on desktop and LAN hardware.
Not to be overly negative, but... Bill Gates pays people to work for him. When there's some ugly, tedious piece of code that has to be written in order to complete some piece of functionality, it gets written. When there's a necessary piece of documentation that needs to be finished, Bill doesn't hope for volunteers. In some commercial settings, advantage: Bill.
I'm not saying that this is wrong, but can someone provide a pointer to something that could substantiate this? I just find it difficult to believe that I can buy a DVD player where nearly 25% of the retail price goes to licensing fees. Similarly, since a DVD drive for a computer should be subject to the same fees, and I can buy one for $30, nearly 33% of the retail price would be the licensing fees. From what I recall reading about consumer electronics markups and the expenses of getting the product to the point of sale, this would seem to imply that the manufacturers of these devices are taking a substantial loss.
Just out of curiousity, what do the licensing fees run per DVD player? I can buy a bottom-end player for less than $40 at Circuit City or Best Buy. That has to cover the cost of the original manufacture in the Far East, shipping to the US West Coast, transport to Denver, and the fixed costs of the retailer (floor space, etc). I'm guessing the licensing fee is $1, $2? What will it cost China to develop a complete standard that does not infringe on any of the international patents -- $10M? $100M? I know China is a potentially large market, but that's a lot of sales. I suspect that there are more political motives afoot.
Humans are extremely good at extracting (and making sense of) frequency information. Here's an interesting experiment that I've seen performed.
Start with a clip of someone talking, relatively slowly and clearly, digitally recorded with 8-bit linear samples and the MSB a sign bit (ie, the range is -128 to 127). Play that and, while there is audible static, the speech is still clear. Now replace the LSB with one, effectively converting to 7-bit samples. Play the modified clip, the static level has increased, but you can still understand the speech. Replace the next LSB with one, yielding 6-bit samples, play it again. Each time you replace another bit position with ones, the static level increases. At more significant bit positions, the total volume tends to increase as well, so you'll have to turn the volume on the playback device down, or scale things in some fashion.
The amazing thing is that, when only the sign bit remains, most people can still make out what is being said. At that point, the only information present is the frequency data (zero crossings). OTOH, humans are miserably bad at hearing phase phenomena.
Might be better to simply cut off service for the first infraction, in the sense of forcing people to close down open relays. What fraction of hosts doing open relaying are doing so by design?