The problem can be simply stated as that the camera is 4D, because it is a 2D array of 2D cameras, while the image is 3D.
You cannot simply add the dimensions, it depends on how you integrate the image data together. Us people who don't know very much call this integration 3D reconstruction. "The image is 3D" - do you mean the real world is 3D ? The image, as you put it, is a projection from 3D onto a 2D plane and is most definitely 2D.
Humans possess a stereoscopic vision system, each eye is capturing a 2D image at any moment in time. I expect you would call that a 4D vision system ?
SOLUTIONS: All solutions rely on making the camera 3D instead of 4D.
1. Take a short movie while changing focus on a 2D camera.
So now you add a third dimension - time. And the concept of Depth from Focus is not your idea at all, it has been around for a very long time.
Your other idea involving "somehow" doing something cannot be considered prior art. In the grand scheme of things an invention has to be realisable.
I also consider it to be evidence that I am better at this stuff than almost all 3D camera engineers.
If I could see a smiley on the above line I wouldn't think you are an idiot.
Don't get your hopes up. This is regarding some action being taken by a watchdog body. We don't know what the outcome is yet, we don't know if they will take any action or how strong any reprimand, if any, will be given. Furthermore, this won't be enshrined in law or necessarily have any relevance to future cases. I believe there is a very high chance they will get a light slap on the wrists and a don't do it again.
The Falklands War is quite interesting here, not because it demonstrated some lingering imperial might, in fact the opposite - the UK depended heavily on the USA.
The most interesting part, IMO, is that the RAF wanted to use the base at Ascension Island (a British territory) for refuelling of long distance missions prior to the main fleet arrival. Apparently the Americans who had been using the base for a nominal $1 a year fee said no, we couldn't use it.
I think the relationship between Britain and the US was immediately redefined at that point. Note the wikipedia article "Only after Mrs Thatcher intervened with Ronald Reagan did the Americans reluctantly concede."
Britain should know better than to ask for such an idiotic thing in the first place.
Well, no actually. You're assuming that British people study the US constitution - they don't. Secondly, it is up to the American people to determine how to interpret the US constitution. There is nothing idiotic about that.
If a friend and ally makes a request, you can certainly consider it (before you say no). Constitution or not, quite possibly the specific videos in question might infringe some law or regulation, so there could be reasons to take down these videos if you look hard enough.
I think it's a massive simplification that you are going to join a project to "fix up stuff". You need to know what needs fixing, what is important to fix, what desperately needs to be fixed. Otherwise you are just going to be tweaking hardly used, unimportant, soon to be deprecated code. Your contribution will be welcome but irrelevant.
If you like Boost: download it. Use it. You absolutely must be using it. Read the mailing list. Find out where the real problems are for yourself. Then discuss making fixes with the other devs.
You expected people who came up with OpenOffice.org as a name to come up with a "good" name ?
You're a xenophobic idiot. There are many other countries outside your own one, not all of them speak English
No one in the US will care anyway. They'll autoupdate to the next version and barely notice that the name changed. It will still be free and arguably better than MS.
... but after skimming through the code, I'm not terribly surprised to hear that it has issues, because there are virtually no comments or design docs.
And they used the old coversheet for their TPS reports.
Seriously though, how can you expect them to have design documents ? Four guys putting together a prototype version of something they have no idea what will come out in the end. Once interested parties have had a chance to play with it and see what can be done with it, then a serious attempt can be made at defining exactly how it is supposed to work.
I'm not saying the patent system isn't broken, but...
It's not a software patent
Let's see the author/owner try to extract license fees from someone, anyone
The patent system is not about holding back stupid ideas. You are allowed to patent both clever and dumb inventions
It's not funny and it's not clever
If I understand the story correctly, the company lost a lot of money because of a patent they thought was a bit stupid, decided to get patent protection for all their new projects, this guy and his buddies thought it would be a great idea to waste even more money patenting dumb stuff. Does he still work there ?
If the RISC patent was so obvious, why didn't the company spend money getting it invalidated and then get all their costs back? (rather than wasting it on something they believed to be pointless)
I'm sure you could game it by switching the routers on but disabling WiFi, change any classes using computers so that the work they are doing doesn't need it or can make do with a few wired connections. Surely not every class needs access to the net. The kids wouldn't notice the difference and still go home saying "school makes them feel ill".
What they actually need; is some kind of proof from which to start making a hypothesis. But so far they have no proof whatsoever, just "concern".
A simple test: switch off WiFi for the first week of term without telling anyone. See if the number of complaints changes.
This is the real problem right here:
Professor Magda Havas of Trent University in Peterborough, Ont., who does research on the health effects of electromagnetic radiation, issued an open letter to parents and boards saying she is "increasingly concerned" about Wi-Fi and cellphone use at schools.
So no real hard evidence, just "concern". When are the experts going to take responsibility for giving clear and fact based advice. Wait, oh here it is: Magda Havas' homepage where it seems clear to me she has already made up her mind in advance and is very vocal about publicising herself. I'm surprised she's not out there campaigning against water fluoridation and wearing clothes made from mixed fibres.
This is what happens when Psychologists study something technical. At first I thought that I must be an exception because I look at the quality of the video I want to watch, but then I read the article.
Using four studies, Kortum, along with co-author Marc Sullivan of AT&T Labs, showed 100 study participants 180 movie clips encoded at nine different levels, from 550 kilobits per second up to DVD quality. Participants viewed the two-minute clips and then were asked about the video quality of the clips and desirability of the movie content.
Bit rate is not the same as quality. Changing the bit rate is not the same as changing the quality. Different rate-distortion algorithms can allocate bits differently depending on how many bits are available. It's not really a suprise that a lower bit rate video can have higher quality.
I haven't read their paper but I would guess that they didn't look at what bit allocation strategy would be chosen depending on the bit rate. Furthermore I expect they just plonked the coded video on a laptop and showed it using Windows media player; so they didn't take into account that higher bit rates can have choppier playback and again it all depends on the specifics of the codec, whether it needs a lot of grunt for decoding or it puts all the effort in the coding part. There is actually a lot of work involved in preparing video for storage on a DVD or transmission, it's not just a question of selecting a bit rate.
If their article didn't say things like "probably not going to notice or even concern yourself with how many pixels the video is or" then I might believe they knew what they were doing. Had they Googled things like "MPEG video quality assessment" they would have found that there is a lot of work in this area, done before video coding standards are finalised and with the help of psychology!
This is totally a non story. Man tries to write proof of concept malicious phone app. There is so little content in the story, the BBC can easily re-use this story again and again without worrying about it losing relevance. Any vaguely competent programmer could have easily done whatever they did (don't bother checking the article they don't explain anything). The sad fact is, there probably really are thousands of "hackers" out there trying to write malicious apps and we should all be careful with security blah blah blah, but instead of leading to any actual news in this area the BBC only want the "big bad Internet" angle.
The BBC have never quite "got it" when it comes to technology and technology stories. Everything has to be dumbed down enough so that the technical content is zero, but I don't think this is because they are trying to make it easy to understand, it's because they never understood themselves in the first place. Therefore, they eat up promo stories like this one, fed to them from companies in the IT security business saying how "scary" things are, and amping up the FUD.
At the end of the day, you don't need to go to the trouble of writing a malicious app; as Kevin Mitnick would say, you just ask people for the information you want. But c'mon BBC, a 14 year old would be able to write a much better, easy to understand, technically competent, story with some detail. I'm so glad I'm not paying a TV licence fee any more.
The exercise didn't prove much of anything other than that Warhol was able to use the paint program's fill command
Although the demo was mostly Warhol using fill on a digitized image, you can clearly see him using some screenmode with >32 colours, which would have been a struggle for the average PC of the time as they usually had motherboard graphics only. Also Windows 2 was nowhere near as slick as Workbench 1. The Amiga had hardware sprites giving smooth pointers (or is that "cursors" ?) since day 1.
At that time PCs were only used for boring spreadsheets and business applications. The turning point was Doom, after which people got interested in graphics and sound hardware; and the PC became a lot more general purpose as a media machine.
Amiga started the revolution. If they hadn't shown what was possible, we would all be much more split between applications based computing and gaming consoles.
Why are the big companies cheapest products $200 or more?
Because they are trying to make a profit for their shareholders, their company and most importantly so they can continue having jobs.
Because they have to recoup research and development costs. The commercial market demands products that are progressive. Not many people would buy a tablet running Android 0.9, certainly not enough to be viable. For schools though, functional is all that matters. So what if the kids have to wait a few seconds longer for their browser to load up a page ?
Remember the MacBook Air teardown where they showed it could be made cheaper ? Of course it can be done if you cut all the corners and you're not interested in profit.
Hopefully, after (if) these get rolled out in India, the other manufacturers will start competing a little harder.
As an engineer I just love how people anticipate that gadgets will continually fall in price and "hopefully" get even cheaper. While I'm working my ass off to get something competitive out the door that might make me enough profit to pay for food, electricity and internet.
I hope someone undercuts your job!
Also, if this Indian tablet supports flash, I'll have a nice little chuckle.
Supporting Flash is a political decision not a technical decision. What makes you think a bottom rung ARM will run Flash anyway ?
It just means that the coders implemented functions with the same names
They copied the API ? Then the question is it possible to copyright an API ? AFAIK, it is. So this is not permissible. However, it seems that some of the API was copied from BSD, not UNIX, and the BSD licence allows you to do this.
Counter argument: just suppose libelf was a Linux creation. SCO writes their own version with exactly the same API, but it's closed source. They sell their version as part of UNIX^TM. A Linux kernel developer comes across the header files for SCO's version during their day job and notices the API is identical. OSS community up in arms ? GPL violation claim ?
No, this is completely fair. It's patented and as such is protected IP.
The guy may not like it, he may not agree with the patent but it's not his judgement to make. If it is patented he can't release his version to the OSS community and he can't give it away for free. He can use it at home for his own personal use though.
I didn't think this was a "nastygram". It was a polite letter pointing out potential patent infringement. It was clear, concise and firm; exactly how you should word a necessary legal warning.
If he puts his code on an EU based webserver and someone downloads it in the states then it could be argued that he is distributing his code in the states - that's why it's a grey area and one you don't want to be in unless you have deep pockets.
The second C&D letter about his blog post he can safely ignore. Unless he is giving out the code, I can't see any way he could be infringing.
You're right, it's not newsworthy: "Guy doesn't understand patents, nearly releases IP patented by someone else, gets a warning letter from a lawyer".
Similarly, the Longyan bureau of land and resources in Fujian province reportedly meted out administrative punishment to a Japanese who measured 195 locations inside Longyan and located 80 of them on his map.
It sounds to me that this could mean: he got a caning because he took 195 photos with GPS logging and looked up 80 of them.
That will give you (a) an idea of what journals publish on that subject and hence what researchers in that area read, (b) examples of published articles in that field to use as a stylistic template and (c) some idea of which academics are active in the area
If he hasn't done this already then there is an extremely high probability that his work is not new, and is therefore already known, proven, accepted and won't be worthy of publication. Furthermore he will have a hell of a lot of work to do to generate the comparisons and measurements required to write something meaningful about the subject.
Even if his work is new, it may not get published if the subject is not fashionable unless his work is a huge breakthrough. Some papers do get published that purely review the state of the art, but they are rare and cover many methods in detail.
Whilst I applaud the OP's enthusiasm; from his description it sounds like he has found a small improvement and it's unlikely he will get it published. Give it a go but don't get your hopes up.
1. Copyright law protects both copying of the source and the binaries, and software licenses and/or EULAs can legally limit things like reverse engineering, specific types of usage, etc.
Copyright law does not protect an invention. If I come up with something totally revolutionary someone else can possibly make another implementation of it. All of my hard work, research and effort has been bypassed. What's my incentive to make something magical ?
Or, on the other hand, if I invent something totally mind blowing but no one else can work out how to do it. Can you guarantee that all the details will be fully disclosed in a limited period of time ?
2. Those protections might be sufficient even if a large company (e.g., Microsoft) decided to appropriate the tech. An obvious appropriation may require legal action,
Tell me more about all these individuals successfully suing large companies who have stolen their IP.
3. The source to successful proprietary programs has been released on a number of occasions. 4DOS, Doom/Quake, and DR-DOS are three potentially interesting examples.
What has this got to do with software patents ? 99.99% of proprietary software is never made open source. There is a lot of software that is more then 20 years old for which you cannot get access to the core algorithms. These outliers don't prove anything.
1. He can get a monopoly on not just his specific implementation of an idea, but ON ALL POSSIBLE IMPLEMENTIONS of that idea. This prevents even those approaches to solving the problem which are technically quite dissimilar from being independently invented and used.
No, he gets a patent on that invention. If your algorithm uses his invention then you have got to get a licence. If your algorithm is "technically quite dissimilar" either you are using the invention or not, it's quite simple. The patent document can be used to seek new and completely different ways of solving the problem at any time after it has been published, without waiting 20 years.
2. He can make the patent application without disclosing source code, and without disclosing enough meaningful technical information for someone else to actually reimplement the idea.
This is not specific to software patents. Your problem is with the patent system itself. The majority of examiners are highly qualified and check whether or not the patent disclosure is sufficient for someone else to recreate the invention. If the disclosure is insufficient then the examiner is bad and the patent can be challenged.
3. The patent will effectively last forever in an information technology context
Again, this is not software specific. Most patents are for technology, therefore any amount of time is "forever". The patent has to last long enough to make it worthwhile to the inventor. You've got to give him a chance to recoup his investment, develop a product, license it out, etc.
What about the little guy inventor who comes up with an incredible and magical piece of software that no one would never have thought of in a million years ?
Without software patents: 1. He has to hide it and obfuscate it so that no one can copy his idea. 2. He can't protect it so if anyone works it out they can copy it. 3. If he successfully hides it, no one ever gets to know how he did it.
With software patents: 1. He can get a government enforced monopoly. 2. Everyone learns how his idea works, from standardised documentation, spurring on further innovations. 3. After 20 years anyone can copy it and use it, no charge.
Facebook's UI is absolutely dire: this on the web. I assume that the mobile applications are written by people who try to make them usable.
Over time every application that I use has got better. Facebook is the only UI I have seen get more difficult to use, uglier, more complicated. It's not like they are adding seriously different functionality to previous versions like, for example, The GIMP. The concept remains exactly the same: allow users to selectively share and interact with personal information.
How is it, every time they add more privacy options, more of my personal information that was restricted access gets exposed to more people ? If I still have an account this time next year I will probably only have my name and one photograph on there...
> I'm guessing that he didn't use the same names in his design partly because that would be inviting a patent infringement lawsuit. It would be trivial to convince a judge (let alone a jury) to bring down the legal hammer because the two specs use the same terminology.
It wouldn't happen, you can't patent terminology. You might be able to copyright names, if they are specific enough.
MPEG is commonly thought of as "patent encumbered" but the patents only refer to some specific components. These components are not necessary for implementing a codec but if you do use these valuable methods then you get better results. Think of it like the patents that apply to glyph hinting for TrueType fonts: We still have lib FreeType and use TTF in Linux.
Ogg is full of strange fields and difficult to read structures. The author of the criticism is right to question it, especially when Ogg used similar fields but changed the names. There was never any need to change terminologies. H.261 and MPEG-1 were well written standards but not freely available and included patented technologies. The "not freely available" means that you have to buy it, not that it's secret.
If Xiph wanted to produce a free standard for video coding they could easily have adopted the same terminologies and similar structures, defining their own versions of them and recommending unpatented technologies. Instead they chose their weird
terminology and rushed to come out with something different without spending the time to work out how difficult it would be for users to implement and what quality it would give. H.261 and MPEG were backed up by masses of research by companies and universities of which much was freely available in journals and conference proceedings.
The idea that "MPEG was hardly dominant" is the thought of someone who either didn't do his homework at the time or a revisionist. VCD (created 1993) was massively popular in the second half of the nineties, or doesn't that count ?
From the summary:
it's far better written than the attack.
I wish it had been. If you want to refute a rant, pick some illustrative points and clearly answer them. Don't pick apart the text, all of it, sentence by sentence. Fancy colouring and highlighting don't make it better written.
Slashdot Mirror
You cannot simply add the dimensions, it depends on how you integrate the image data together. Us people who don't know very much call this integration 3D reconstruction. "The image is 3D" - do you mean the real world is 3D ? The image, as you put it, is a projection from 3D onto a 2D plane and is most definitely 2D.
Humans possess a stereoscopic vision system, each eye is capturing a 2D image at any moment in time. I expect you would call that a 4D vision system ?
So now you add a third dimension - time. And the concept of Depth from Focus is not your idea at all, it has been around for a very long time.
Your other idea involving "somehow" doing something cannot be considered prior art. In the grand scheme of things an invention has to be realisable.
If I could see a smiley on the above line I wouldn't think you are an idiot.
What licence is this ? http://www.bipp.com/Default.aspx?tabid=203&search=licence produces zero hits.
I regularly take high resolution photos, HD video, etc in London and I have never been stopped by anyone.
Every time I am in London I see tourists carrying DSLRs but I have never seen anyone being harrassed by the police.
Don't get your hopes up. This is regarding some action being taken by a watchdog body. We don't know what the outcome is yet, we don't know if they will take any action or how strong any reprimand, if any, will be given. Furthermore, this won't be enshrined in law or necessarily have any relevance to future cases. I believe there is a very high chance they will get a light slap on the wrists and a don't do it again.
The most interesting part, IMO, is that the RAF wanted to use the base at Ascension Island (a British territory) for refuelling of long distance missions prior to the main fleet arrival. Apparently the Americans who had been using the base for a nominal $1 a year fee said no, we couldn't use it.
I think the relationship between Britain and the US was immediately redefined at that point. Note the wikipedia article "Only after Mrs Thatcher intervened with Ronald Reagan did the Americans reluctantly concede."
Well, no actually. You're assuming that British people study the US constitution - they don't. Secondly, it is up to the American people to determine how to interpret the US constitution. There is nothing idiotic about that.
If a friend and ally makes a request, you can certainly consider it (before you say no). Constitution or not, quite possibly the specific videos in question might infringe some law or regulation, so there could be reasons to take down these videos if you look hard enough.
Time to set up a spam server. Let the ISPs and police try to monitor my email when it is interleaved with a billion emails per day.
I think it's a massive simplification that you are going to join a project to "fix up stuff". You need to know what needs fixing, what is important to fix, what desperately needs to be fixed. Otherwise you are just going to be tweaking hardly used, unimportant, soon to be deprecated code. Your contribution will be welcome but irrelevant.
If you like Boost: download it. Use it. You absolutely must be using it. Read the mailing list. Find out where the real problems are for yourself. Then discuss making fixes with the other devs.
And they used the old coversheet for their TPS reports.
Seriously though, how can you expect them to have design documents ? Four guys putting together a prototype version of something they have no idea what will come out in the end. Once interested parties have had a chance to play with it and see what can be done with it, then a serious attempt can be made at defining exactly how it is supposed to work.
I'm not saying the patent system isn't broken, but...
If I understand the story correctly, the company lost a lot of money because of a patent they thought was a bit stupid, decided to get patent protection for all their new projects, this guy and his buddies thought it would be a great idea to waste even more money patenting dumb stuff. Does he still work there ?
If the RISC patent was so obvious, why didn't the company spend money getting it invalidated and then get all their costs back? (rather than wasting it on something they believed to be pointless)
Surely they'd notice if they can't get online
I'm sure you could game it by switching the routers on but disabling WiFi, change any classes using computers so that the work they are doing doesn't need it or can make do with a few wired connections. Surely not every class needs access to the net. The kids wouldn't notice the difference and still go home saying "school makes them feel ill".
What they actually need; is some kind of proof from which to start making a hypothesis. But so far they have no proof whatsoever, just "concern".
A simple test: switch off WiFi for the first week of term without telling anyone. See if the number of complaints changes.
This is the real problem right here:
So no real hard evidence, just "concern". When are the experts going to take responsibility for giving clear and fact based advice. Wait, oh here it is: Magda Havas' homepage where it seems clear to me she has already made up her mind in advance and is very vocal about publicising herself. I'm surprised she's not out there campaigning against water fluoridation and wearing clothes made from mixed fibres.
This is what happens when Psychologists study something technical. At first I thought that I must be an exception because I look at the quality of the video I want to watch, but then I read the article.
Bit rate is not the same as quality. Changing the bit rate is not the same as changing the quality. Different rate-distortion algorithms can allocate bits differently depending on how many bits are available. It's not really a suprise that a lower bit rate video can have higher quality.
I haven't read their paper but I would guess that they didn't look at what bit allocation strategy would be chosen depending on the bit rate. Furthermore I expect they just plonked the coded video on a laptop and showed it using Windows media player; so they didn't take into account that higher bit rates can have choppier playback and again it all depends on the specifics of the codec, whether it needs a lot of grunt for decoding or it puts all the effort in the coding part. There is actually a lot of work involved in preparing video for storage on a DVD or transmission, it's not just a question of selecting a bit rate.
If their article didn't say things like "probably not going to notice or even concern yourself with how many pixels the video is or" then I might believe they knew what they were doing. Had they Googled things like "MPEG video quality assessment" they would have found that there is a lot of work in this area, done before video coding standards are finalised and with the help of psychology!
This is totally a non story. Man tries to write proof of concept malicious phone app. There is so little content in the story, the BBC can easily re-use this story again and again without worrying about it losing relevance. Any vaguely competent programmer could have easily done whatever they did (don't bother checking the article they don't explain anything). The sad fact is, there probably really are thousands of "hackers" out there trying to write malicious apps and we should all be careful with security blah blah blah, but instead of leading to any actual news in this area the BBC only want the "big bad Internet" angle.
The BBC have never quite "got it" when it comes to technology and technology stories. Everything has to be dumbed down enough so that the technical content is zero, but I don't think this is because they are trying to make it easy to understand, it's because they never understood themselves in the first place. Therefore, they eat up promo stories like this one, fed to them from companies in the IT security business saying how "scary" things are, and amping up the FUD.
At the end of the day, you don't need to go to the trouble of writing a malicious app; as Kevin Mitnick would say, you just ask people for the information you want. But c'mon BBC, a 14 year old would be able to write a much better, easy to understand, technically competent, story with some detail. I'm so glad I'm not paying a TV licence fee any more.
Although the demo was mostly Warhol using fill on a digitized image, you can clearly see him using some screenmode with >32 colours, which would have been a struggle for the average PC of the time as they usually had motherboard graphics only. Also Windows 2 was nowhere near as slick as Workbench 1. The Amiga had hardware sprites giving smooth pointers (or is that "cursors" ?) since day 1.
At that time PCs were only used for boring spreadsheets and business applications. The turning point was Doom, after which people got interested in graphics and sound hardware; and the PC became a lot more general purpose as a media machine.
Amiga started the revolution. If they hadn't shown what was possible, we would all be much more split between applications based computing and gaming consoles.
Remember the MacBook Air teardown where they showed it could be made cheaper ? Of course it can be done if you cut all the corners and you're not interested in profit.
As an engineer I just love how people anticipate that gadgets will continually fall in price and "hopefully" get even cheaper. While I'm working my ass off to get something competitive out the door that might make me enough profit to pay for food, electricity and internet.
I hope someone undercuts your job!
Supporting Flash is a political decision not a technical decision. What makes you think a bottom rung ARM will run Flash anyway ?
They copied the API ? Then the question is it possible to copyright an API ? AFAIK, it is. So this is not permissible. However, it seems that some of the API was copied from BSD, not UNIX, and the BSD licence allows you to do this.
Counter argument: just suppose libelf was a Linux creation. SCO writes their own version with exactly the same API, but it's closed source. They sell their version as part of UNIX^TM. A Linux kernel developer comes across the header files for SCO's version during their day job and notices the API is identical. OSS community up in arms ? GPL violation claim ?
No, this is completely fair. It's patented and as such is protected IP.
The guy may not like it, he may not agree with the patent but it's not his judgement to make. If it is patented he can't release his version to the OSS community and he can't give it away for free. He can use it at home for his own personal use though.
I didn't think this was a "nastygram". It was a polite letter pointing out potential patent infringement. It was clear, concise and firm; exactly how you should word a necessary legal warning.
If he puts his code on an EU based webserver and someone downloads it in the states then it could be argued that he is distributing his code in the states - that's why it's a grey area and one you don't want to be in unless you have deep pockets.
The second C&D letter about his blog post he can safely ignore. Unless he is giving out the code, I can't see any way he could be infringing.
You're right, it's not newsworthy: "Guy doesn't understand patents, nearly releases IP patented by someone else, gets a warning letter from a lawyer".
It sounds to me that this could mean: he got a caning because he took 195 photos with GPS logging and looked up 80 of them.
If he hasn't done this already then there is an extremely high probability that his work is not new, and is therefore already known, proven, accepted and won't be worthy of publication. Furthermore he will have a hell of a lot of work to do to generate the comparisons and measurements required to write something meaningful about the subject.
Even if his work is new, it may not get published if the subject is not fashionable unless his work is a huge breakthrough. Some papers do get published that purely review the state of the art, but they are rare and cover many methods in detail.
Whilst I applaud the OP's enthusiasm; from his description it sounds like he has found a small improvement and it's unlikely he will get it published. Give it a go but don't get your hopes up.
Copyright law does not protect an invention. If I come up with something totally revolutionary someone else can possibly make another implementation of it. All of my hard work, research and effort has been bypassed. What's my incentive to make something magical ?
Or, on the other hand, if I invent something totally mind blowing but no one else can work out how to do it. Can you guarantee that all the details will be fully disclosed in a limited period of time ?
Tell me more about all these individuals successfully suing large companies who have stolen their IP.
What has this got to do with software patents ? 99.99% of proprietary software is never made open source. There is a lot of software that is more then 20 years old for which you cannot get access to the core algorithms. These outliers don't prove anything.
No, he gets a patent on that invention. If your algorithm uses his invention then you have got to get a licence. If your algorithm is "technically quite dissimilar" either you are using the invention or not, it's quite simple. The patent document can be used to seek new and completely different ways of solving the problem at any time after it has been published, without waiting 20 years.
This is not specific to software patents. Your problem is with the patent system itself. The majority of examiners are highly qualified and check whether or not the patent disclosure is sufficient for someone else to recreate the invention. If the disclosure is insufficient then the examiner is bad and the patent can be challenged.
Again, this is not software specific. Most patents are for technology, therefore any amount of time is "forever". The patent has to last long enough to make it worthwhile to the inventor. You've got to give him a chance to recoup his investment, develop a product, license it out, etc.
What about the little guy inventor who comes up with an incredible and magical piece of software that no one would never have thought of in a million years ?
Without software patents:
1. He has to hide it and obfuscate it so that no one can copy his idea.
2. He can't protect it so if anyone works it out they can copy it.
3. If he successfully hides it, no one ever gets to know how he did it.
With software patents:
1. He can get a government enforced monopoly.
2. Everyone learns how his idea works, from standardised documentation, spurring on further innovations.
3. After 20 years anyone can copy it and use it, no charge.
Facebook's UI is absolutely dire: this on the web. I assume that the mobile applications are written by people who try to make them usable.
Over time every application that I use has got better. Facebook is the only UI I have seen get more difficult to use, uglier, more complicated. It's not like they are adding seriously different functionality to previous versions like, for example, The GIMP. The concept remains exactly the same: allow users to selectively share and interact with personal information.
How is it, every time they add more privacy options, more of my personal information that was restricted access gets exposed to more people ? If I still have an account this time next year I will probably only have my name and one photograph on there...
> I'm guessing that he didn't use the same names in his design partly because that would be inviting a patent infringement lawsuit. It would be trivial to convince a judge (let alone a jury) to bring down the legal hammer because the two specs use the same terminology.
It wouldn't happen, you can't patent terminology. You might be able to copyright names, if they are specific enough.
MPEG is commonly thought of as "patent encumbered" but the patents only refer to some specific components. These components are not necessary for implementing a codec but if you do use these valuable methods then you get better results. Think of it like the patents that apply to glyph hinting for TrueType fonts: We still have lib FreeType and use TTF in Linux.
From the article:
When MPEG-1 started it closely followed H.261. H.261 was very well written. Back in 1994 when Xiph started, MPEG-1 had already been going 6 years.
Ogg is full of strange fields and difficult to read structures. The author of the criticism is right to question it, especially when Ogg used similar fields but changed the names. There was never any need to change terminologies. H.261 and MPEG-1 were well written standards but not freely available and included patented technologies. The "not freely available" means that you have to buy it, not that it's secret.
If Xiph wanted to produce a free standard for video coding they could easily have adopted the same terminologies and similar structures, defining their own versions of them and recommending unpatented technologies. Instead they chose their weird terminology and rushed to come out with something different without spending the time to work out how difficult it would be for users to implement and what quality it would give. H.261 and MPEG were backed up by masses of research by companies and universities of which much was freely available in journals and conference proceedings.
The idea that "MPEG was hardly dominant" is the thought of someone who either didn't do his homework at the time or a revisionist. VCD (created 1993) was massively popular in the second half of the nineties, or doesn't that count ?
From the summary:
I wish it had been. If you want to refute a rant, pick some illustrative points and clearly answer them. Don't pick apart the text, all of it, sentence by sentence. Fancy colouring and highlighting don't make it better written.