I have here an Edison "Gold Moulded Record" aka a wax drum. I don't have a date on it, but it's presumably older than the record...
Label on the bottom reads: "This record is sold by the National Phonograph Company Limited upon the condition as a license to use the patent record that it shall not be sold retail to the public in the British Isles for less than 1/6 nett".
That last notation, btw, means "1 shilling and sixpence" in old money, since replaced around 1970. In new money that's 7.5p, or approximately 15c US.
No. The $113m is not the equity cost of the acquisition. That gets treated differently for accounting purposes, and doesn't appear in the profit/loss numbers, rather it appears in the capital investment/assets part of the balance sheet.
The $113m is "acquisition related charges", which is all the other costs they can think of associated with the acquisition, like paying lawyers and possibly some write-offs of inventory or in-process technology. The numbers generally are rather fungible, and I'm not speaking here with any particular knowledge of the actual acounting treatment used.
But, bottom line: No, ATI was certainly not valued at $113m - the number was in single digit billions IIRC.
Article title says material is "tougher" than diamond. Article actually says material is "stiffer" than diamond. That's a completely different material property. Can we please get stuff like that right?
So, let me see... that's where you give them the money now, and they send you the product later?
Sounds ok to me. I mean, what could possibly go wrong? I'm sure my $129 will be perfectly safe.
I work for a large US microprocessor manufacturer (yes, the one many/.ers seem to love to hate...). Naturally the following is my own observations and should not be taken to imply any official policy position yadda yadda yadda...
Not only is Skype not banned, its use is encouraged. There is a requirement to use a company-specific modified client (IIRC we paid Skype to produce a variant for us) - I think it adds VLAN tags to prioritize the traffic.
It isn't oficially supported by IT, rather there's a "you guys know what to do" kind of attitude, and to that end there's an internal Wiki for users to exchange tips on setup and use. There's also talk of creating a Skype endpoint that hooks into the internal phone system so that employees can call any employee worldwide for free if they have an Internet connection, including the internal conference bridges.
...and therefore assumes that it will be carried out under a no-bid contract awarded to Halliburton, who will bill Cat-5 cables at $10,000 each. Sounds a fair estimate to me:-)
Anita,
I disagree - I think parent post is exactly correct - and notes exactly what you say, that is, that in some cases you do have the right to cross the line.
I believe that was exactly the parent posts' point: it's a speed bump to tell you to think about it - but if you've thought about it, and still decide that you have the right to proceed, you actually can
Makes total sense to me
it's different from channel bonding because the independent streams in a MIMO system use the same channel. It uses spatial diversity, not frequency diversity, to increase the channel capacity.
Proposals were submitted back in August for 802.11n, and all proposals still in the running use MIMO+OFDM (the technique described here). Hardware supporting various prototypes is already around in a usable form.
It seems unlikely that 3x4 MIMO will be around in the first wave, due to cost constraints - 2x3 (2 tx, 3 rx) is the most likely initial configuration.
It seems like an awful big hassle to deal with the fucktards that apparently inhabit Valve.
why the problem? It works just fine for me, and it's a great game.
If people choose to try to crack the system that's been set up to prevent copying, why shouldn't their accounts be deactivated? There's no hassle whatsoever getting it to work the legit way - it just works.
I found right at the top of the article, where Maureen states:
...which, alas, is under seal reportedly because it's based on some e-mail that turned up during discovery that IBM now claims is privileged though there's supposedly no hint of attorney-client communication about it.
Which is plainly incorrect. The hearing is not under seal because the email is priviledged (if it was, SCO's lawyers wouldn't have it), but because it's confidential. So Maureen's allusion here is completely wrong.
This article seems to imply that OFDM (used in 802.11a and 802.11g) is somehow a "new" technology. It isn't.
It turns out to be quite hard to find the oldest use of OFDM, because it appears to have been used in military systems which were classified long before it became publicly known. However, the oldest published document I know of is a patent for orthogonal frequency multiplexing, filed in 1966 (granted in 1970) by Robert W. Chang of Bell Labs. I don't remember the patent number off the top of my head.:-)
The real change to get enormous data rate with increased spectral efficiency (which you'll really need...) over a useful range is MIMO (multiple input multiple output) which uses spatial diversity to effectively create many spatially diverse (mostly) independent communication channels simultaneously on the same frequency channel.
Methods combining OFDM and MIMO make up all of the front running proposals for the future 802.11n standard currently in the works.
this is a myth, promoted by the faceintel site (run by a disgruntled former employee).
There is no requirement to fit a bell curve. There is a guideline that says how many should fit into the upper and lower reaches of expectations, given a large enough sample. But I know of many instances of exactly what you describe (a small group of excellent people) where the guideline is ignored for the obvious reasons.
The language you cite is at the end of the detailed description section, and is not in the claims.
It's standard language to avoid them getting hung up on specifics within limits permitted by patent law. It can't get around the fact that, in order to infringe, you must do everything in the relevant claim. Read claim 1 - it's very specific. Anything in there overrides anything in the description.
before responding with the usual "Microsoft patents something that's been done before" responses, can I please encourage people to read the patent properly?
Just FYI, but the abstract means (almost) nothing. Scroll down the page and read the text of claim 1. In order to infringe on this patent, somebody would have to do everything the relevant claim says, not just some of it.
My reading says this is actually very specific, and certainly doesn't cover any generic method for "encouraging people to watch tv" - it's only the specific method described in the claims. But read for yourself - and be sure to read the claims, not just the abstract.
I hate the term "IP" because it is typically used to obfuscate exactly which law might be relevant. Are we talking about patent, copyright or trademark here?
SCO must surely know that they can't possibly "own" an implementation of a standard such as ELF unless they have patents in the methods used - and I'm pretty sure they don't. They kind of try to imply that this is about copyright, and talk about the "codes" to ELF being copied, but that surely isn't at issue here. Whilst it is possible that they own copyright on the source code to a specific implementation that reads/writes ELF format, copyright wouldn't extend to any other implementation, just because it reads/writes the ELF format.
So what are they talking about here? And why don't they say? The only viable reason I can imagine for them not stating whether they claim to own copyright, patent or trademark in the format is because if they did, it would be transparently obvious they're holding nothing in their hand and it's all a big bluff.
Of course, I'd be deeply shocked if it turned out SCO was just bluffing...
yes, I know, but.... don't judge them on this particular insanity just yet. The/. story indicates that the RIAA has "teamed up" with the company that has produced this device, but I see nothing in the referenced article which supports that assertion. In fact, I can't see anything anywhere which does.
If you read the originating companies (there's two of them) PR, they state only that they have "demonstrated it to" the RIAA. That's very different, and shouldn't be taken to be an endorsement by them. My guess is that what this amounts to is they called up the RIAA and said "we have a brand new DRM system that will solve all your problems!!! Do you want us to come and show you?", and the RIAA said "sure, we'd love to take a look".
That the best they can now say in a press release is that they "demonstrated it to" the RIAA makes me think that the reception was lukewarm. I guess we'll have to wait and see. The RIAA have certainly supported dumb ideas before, but at this point I don't see any evidence they're actually backing this one.
Linux is a leprosy; and is having a deleterious effect on the U.S. IT industry because it is steadily depreciating the value of the software industry sector. Software is also embedded in hardware, chips, printers and even consumer electronics. Should embedded software become 'free' too, it would be natural to conclude the value of hardware will spiral downward as well.
I barely know where to start with such rampant twaddle as this. I'll try to go through it line by line...
Linux is a leprosy
no, no, no, Ken. Check your song sheet again. It's cancer remember?
and is having a deleterious effect on the U.S. IT industry
BWAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA...
Whatever could you mean, Ken? Could you be possibly be talking about our friends in the North I mean, North West? I think we should be told. Ken, just because some companies find it hard to compete with something that provides the same thing they do at lower cost, why is that necessarily bad?
because it is steadily depreciating the value of the software industry sector
I'm not sure what you mean here. You seem to have put an economics for dummies book in a blender and selected some random effluent thereof. Do you really mean value here, or the ability of some particular companies to make money with their old business model? News flash: this is what happens to industries that can't or won't change their business model when a lower cost paradigm for doing the same thing comes along. They die. I don't know of anybody who talks about this kind of disruptive influence as destryoying value; it is, in fact, exactly the reverse. It reduces cost, and prices - but it increases the value.
Software is also embedded in hardware, chips, printers and even consumer electronics. Should embedded software become 'free' too, it would be natural to conclude the value of hardware will spiral downward as well.
Well, your premise is wrong, as described above - but even if it wasn't, this is a completely ridiculous leap. Once again, you are confusing (deliberately?) the concepts of value, cost and price. They are not the same thing. In fact, free software (what you like to call "hybrid" software for reasons known only to you) is routinely used today by hardware manufacturers in exactly the kinds of devices you describe. They run, not walk, to use it. Why do you suppose that is? Are they stupid? Or is it perhaps because they understand the difference between the concepts that you so readily confuse? Hardware manufacturers use free software in such embedded applications because it reduces the cost of their products, while at the same time actually increasing the value, because they can devote their software resources to developing value-added applications (which don't have to be released under the GPL as you have inferred) instead. You're also ignoring one rather important distinction between software and hardware: whilst the marginal cost of manufacturing software approaches zero, the same is not true of hardware. The price of each item is dictated by the market, and, in a maximally efficient market approximates the lowest price at which any manufacturer can sell the product. Embedded software having a marginal cost approaching zero will certainly encourage their competitors to seek similar zero-cost embedded software in order to compete - but it has no bearing on the market price of the hardware. That market pressure only occurs when your competitors find ways to reduce the cost of their hardware and lower the price accordingly. There simply isn't any connection between the software and hardware pricing.
I would write a critique of the rest of the "article", but frankly the idiocy-per-paragraph density makes this a rather onerous task. Just pointing out the nonsense in one short paragraph took a rather voluminous amount of text.
yes, that would be it.
And what's the problem? Why is open sourcing something they developed and allowing others to make changes a bad thing just because Intel does it?
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Yes, HDCP is broken. It was broken quite some time ago by Niels Ferguson (a well known cryptographer).
"Bring 'em on"
I have here an Edison "Gold Moulded Record" aka a wax drum. I don't have a date on it, but it's presumably older than the record... Label on the bottom reads: "This record is sold by the National Phonograph Company Limited upon the condition as a license to use the patent record that it shall not be sold retail to the public in the British Isles for less than 1/6 nett". That last notation, btw, means "1 shilling and sixpence" in old money, since replaced around 1970. In new money that's 7.5p, or approximately 15c US.
No. The $113m is not the equity cost of the acquisition. That gets treated differently for accounting purposes, and doesn't appear in the profit/loss numbers, rather it appears in the capital investment/assets part of the balance sheet. The $113m is "acquisition related charges", which is all the other costs they can think of associated with the acquisition, like paying lawyers and possibly some write-offs of inventory or in-process technology. The numbers generally are rather fungible, and I'm not speaking here with any particular knowledge of the actual acounting treatment used. But, bottom line: No, ATI was certainly not valued at $113m - the number was in single digit billions IIRC.
Article title says material is "tougher" than diamond. Article actually says material is "stiffer" than diamond. That's a completely different material property. Can we please get stuff like that right?
So, let me see... that's where you give them the money now, and they send you the product later? Sounds ok to me. I mean, what could possibly go wrong? I'm sure my $129 will be perfectly safe.
Not only is Skype not banned, its use is encouraged. There is a requirement to use a company-specific modified client (IIRC we paid Skype to produce a variant for us) - I think it adds VLAN tags to prioritize the traffic.
It isn't oficially supported by IT, rather there's a "you guys know what to do" kind of attitude, and to that end there's an internal Wiki for users to exchange tips on setup and use. There's also talk of creating a Skype endpoint that hooks into the internal phone system so that employees can call any employee worldwide for free if they have an Internet connection, including the internal conference bridges.
...and therefore assumes that it will be carried out under a no-bid contract awarded to Halliburton, who will bill Cat-5 cables at $10,000 each. Sounds a fair estimate to me :-)
Anita, I disagree - I think parent post is exactly correct - and notes exactly what you say, that is, that in some cases you do have the right to cross the line. I believe that was exactly the parent posts' point: it's a speed bump to tell you to think about it - but if you've thought about it, and still decide that you have the right to proceed, you actually can Makes total sense to me
" the result is that video clips embedded into Microsoft Word documents don't run properly, for example."
so what are they asking for? If they asked for a version without media player, what do they expect the video to be rendered with?
it's different from channel bonding because the independent streams in a MIMO system use the same channel. It uses spatial diversity, not frequency diversity, to increase the channel capacity.
...for standardization as 802.11n
Proposals were submitted back in August for 802.11n, and all proposals still in the running use MIMO+OFDM (the technique described here). Hardware supporting various prototypes is already around in a usable form.
It seems unlikely that 3x4 MIMO will be around in the first wave, due to cost constraints - 2x3 (2 tx, 3 rx) is the most likely initial configuration.
why the problem? It works just fine for me, and it's a great game.
If people choose to try to crack the system that's been set up to prevent copying, why shouldn't their accounts be deactivated? There's no hassle whatsoever getting it to work the legit way - it just works.
yes, it was. Saw the movie earlier today (and it is *very* good). Intel is listed in the closing credits.
Which is plainly incorrect. The hearing is not under seal because the email is priviledged (if it was, SCO's lawyers wouldn't have it), but because it's confidential. So Maureen's allusion here is completely wrong.
err, we weren't attacked by Iraq, dude. That would be Bin Laden. Who we're doing what about exactly?
This article seems to imply that OFDM (used in 802.11a and 802.11g) is somehow a "new" technology. It isn't. It turns out to be quite hard to find the oldest use of OFDM, because it appears to have been used in military systems which were classified long before it became publicly known. However, the oldest published document I know of is a patent for orthogonal frequency multiplexing, filed in 1966 (granted in 1970) by Robert W. Chang of Bell Labs. I don't remember the patent number off the top of my head. :-)
The real change to get enormous data rate with increased spectral efficiency (which you'll really need...) over a useful range is MIMO (multiple input multiple output) which uses spatial diversity to effectively create many spatially diverse (mostly) independent communication channels simultaneously on the same frequency channel.
Methods combining OFDM and MIMO make up all of the front running proposals for the future 802.11n standard currently in the works.
this is a myth, promoted by the faceintel site (run by a disgruntled former employee).
There is no requirement to fit a bell curve. There is a guideline that says how many should fit into the upper and lower reaches of expectations, given a large enough sample. But I know of many instances of exactly what you describe (a small group of excellent people) where the guideline is ignored for the obvious reasons.
The language you cite is at the end of the detailed description section, and is not in the claims. It's standard language to avoid them getting hung up on specifics within limits permitted by patent law. It can't get around the fact that, in order to infringe, you must do everything in the relevant claim. Read claim 1 - it's very specific. Anything in there overrides anything in the description.
Just FYI, but the abstract means (almost) nothing. Scroll down the page and read the text of claim 1. In order to infringe on this patent, somebody would have to do everything the relevant claim says, not just some of it.
My reading says this is actually very specific, and certainly doesn't cover any generic method for "encouraging people to watch tv" - it's only the specific method described in the claims. But read for yourself - and be sure to read the claims, not just the abstract.
SCO must surely know that they can't possibly "own" an implementation of a standard such as ELF unless they have patents in the methods used - and I'm pretty sure they don't. They kind of try to imply that this is about copyright, and talk about the "codes" to ELF being copied, but that surely isn't at issue here. Whilst it is possible that they own copyright on the source code to a specific implementation that reads/writes ELF format, copyright wouldn't extend to any other implementation, just because it reads/writes the ELF format.
So what are they talking about here? And why don't they say? The only viable reason I can imagine for them not stating whether they claim to own copyright, patent or trademark in the format is because if they did, it would be transparently obvious they're holding nothing in their hand and it's all a big bluff.
Of course, I'd be deeply shocked if it turned out SCO was just bluffing...
If you read the originating companies (there's two of them) PR, they state only that they have "demonstrated it to" the RIAA. That's very different, and shouldn't be taken to be an endorsement by them. My guess is that what this amounts to is they called up the RIAA and said "we have a brand new DRM system that will solve all your problems!!! Do you want us to come and show you?", and the RIAA said "sure, we'd love to take a look".
That the best they can now say in a press release is that they "demonstrated it to" the RIAA makes me think that the reception was lukewarm. I guess we'll have to wait and see. The RIAA have certainly supported dumb ideas before, but at this point I don't see any evidence they're actually backing this one.
I barely know where to start with such rampant twaddle as this. I'll try to go through it line by line...
Linux is a leprosy
no, no, no, Ken. Check your song sheet again. It's cancer remember?
and is having a deleterious effect on the U.S. IT industry
BWAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA...
Whatever could you mean, Ken? Could you be possibly be talking about our friends in the North I mean, North West? I think we should be told. Ken, just because some companies find it hard to compete with something that provides the same thing they do at lower cost, why is that necessarily bad?
because it is steadily depreciating the value of the software industry sector
I'm not sure what you mean here. You seem to have put an economics for dummies book in a blender and selected some random effluent thereof. Do you really mean value here, or the ability of some particular companies to make money with their old business model? News flash: this is what happens to industries that can't or won't change their business model when a lower cost paradigm for doing the same thing comes along. They die. I don't know of anybody who talks about this kind of disruptive influence as destryoying value; it is, in fact, exactly the reverse. It reduces cost, and prices - but it increases the value.
Software is also embedded in hardware, chips, printers and even consumer electronics. Should embedded software become 'free' too, it would be natural to conclude the value of hardware will spiral downward as well.
Well, your premise is wrong, as described above - but even if it wasn't, this is a completely ridiculous leap. Once again, you are confusing (deliberately?) the concepts of value, cost and price. They are not the same thing. In fact, free software (what you like to call "hybrid" software for reasons known only to you) is routinely used today by hardware manufacturers in exactly the kinds of devices you describe. They run, not walk, to use it. Why do you suppose that is? Are they stupid? Or is it perhaps because they understand the difference between the concepts that you so readily confuse? Hardware manufacturers use free software in such embedded applications because it reduces the cost of their products, while at the same time actually increasing the value, because they can devote their software resources to developing value-added applications (which don't have to be released under the GPL as you have inferred) instead. You're also ignoring one rather important distinction between software and hardware: whilst the marginal cost of manufacturing software approaches zero, the same is not true of hardware. The price of each item is dictated by the market, and, in a maximally efficient market approximates the lowest price at which any manufacturer can sell the product. Embedded software having a marginal cost approaching zero will certainly encourage their competitors to seek similar zero-cost embedded software in order to compete - but it has no bearing on the market price of the hardware. That market pressure only occurs when your competitors find ways to reduce the cost of their hardware and lower the price accordingly. There simply isn't any connection between the software and hardware pricing.
I would write a critique of the rest of the "article", but frankly the idiocy-per-paragraph density makes this a rather onerous task. Just pointing out the nonsense in one short paragraph took a rather voluminous amount of text.
And free software is about price now? Quick! Call the police and send them to Red Hat...
yes, that would be it. And what's the problem? Why is open sourcing something they developed and allowing others to make changes a bad thing just because Intel does it?