We have more people than jobs i.e. unemployment. We have a budget deficit.
We also have a shortage of organs for transplant.
I therefore suggest we butcher the unemployed in order to provide organs. Excess viscera will be sold on the open market in order to drive down prices.
My Asus G1S had to be fixed twice. The second time it came back with a new motherboard with an 9500M GS replacing the 8600M GT. So Asus had actually done a board revision to switch the GPU. Even more remarkably this was only about a month before the warranty run out.
Most other comanies would have just kept handing out doomed 8600M GT boards until the warranties run out on the machines.
Customers are funny like that. Rather than buying large number of products even after multiple bad experiences products to prove they are bad in a statistically significant way they just stop buying your products after a small number of bad experiences and try the competition.
This loop is called even when the CPU goes idle, in order to implement the OnIdle call in MFC
GetMessage will block until a message is received. That being said MFC apps do call OnIdle when the message queue is empty. Mind you if you look at CWinThread::Run() you only call OnIdle() message when the queue becomes empty not when it stays empty.
PC keyboards have a micro controller in them that does the keyboard scanning. When it gets a key it triggers an interrupt. The OS reads the scancode from a port for a PS/2 keyboard.
If you have a USB keyboard it works the same but instead of IO port access the OS ends up reading the data from a USB Interrupt end point. It sets up linked lists in memory which the (UHCI,OHCI or EHCI) USB host controller scans through to poll the end points at the frequency they request
So is there a keyboard scan loop? Yes, but it's runs on a micro controller (actually you cold probably set up things on the micro controller so it sits in a halt instruction until there's an interrupt and you get an interrupt when any key is pressed, so you only scan when you know you'll find something for power efficiency). Is there polling? Yes, but the USB host controller does that by looping through a linked list of end point descriptors that the OS set up in memory. There's no code executing on the host CPU.
Incidentally the USB scheme changes in USB 3.0 and XHCI controllers to save power.
I also like the way it converts smart quotes pasted from the web into gibberish like âoe and â, because smart quotes were invented by Microsoft and people that use them need to be punished until they recant and learn to replace them with ASCII.
So clearly Slashdot either making them render correctly or converting them automagically to ASCII is right out.
It's not the question that's dumb, it's the answers. If the comments were full of anecdotes about discovering obscure code in a common system that was executed really frequently by accident (e.g. you changed it and all hell broke loose) then it would be (IMO obviously) interesting.
Have you heard of prions? They have no DNA or RNA. They're just misfolded proteins. However they can catalyse other correctly folded proteins to misfold too. So they can sorta kinda reproduce but they don't have any genes.
Which would also cut down on the airline's repeat customer possibilities.
Are you kidding me? Watching some Gordon Gecko wannabe get stuffed screaming into an airlock by the stewardesses because he refused to stop using his phone would be the greatest thing ever.
If you look at her Google+(tm) site she's got screenshots of Google Glass(tm) showing message from a fitness app from the company she presumably shills for
One of her loathsome friends tweeted, or rather LynxFitted "I'm out here doing burpees in the middle of nowhere", and it popped up on her Google Glass(tm) display. Possibly this is self parody, and I'm not hip enough to get it.
Amusingly I used Google Chrome(tm) to view her Google+(tm) site and it's almost completely unusable. Scrolling is so slow I thought my scroll wheel had broken.
Well, then, if it's not a sufficient reason to say H264 is unsafe and troublesome, then it's not sufficient reason to say WebM is unsafe or troublesome.
Except that Google ended up licensing the MPEG LA patents whilst AVC has been in use for ages and no one who has paid the license fee for the MPEG LA patents has successfully been sued by a third party.
It looks like Google ended up paying the MPEG LA for the patents that WebM infringed. Google then licenses those patents out for free to anyone who wants to use WebM.
"... I was not making fun of you personally; I was heaping scorn on an inexcusably silly idea -- a practice I shall always follow. Anyone who clings to the historically untrue and thoroughly immoral doctrine that violence never settles anything I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history that has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms."
So you can say they're not legitimate and they can say the same about you. However they've got the power to back up their decisions and you don't because no one uses naked force as effectively as the US Government. If it makes you feel any better consider the bit in bold to be descriptive rather than prescriptive - i.e. a statement of how the world does work rather than how the world should work.
Your ability to learn new stuff definitely drops off with age. Physicists and mathematicians for example tend to do their best work when they're young. Same with programmers.
Probably your brain starts off in a low entropy state and as you get old the entropy increases and performance drops. Like an old file system installation getting all fragmented and or SSD perfomance dropping with time.
Even animals seem to have it. Kittens are very curious and playful. Older cats are lazy as shit.
It's very unlikely we'll ever be able to reverse this process non destructively even if we figure out how to reverse physical ageing. And actually physical ageing happens because of selective pressure. Once you've bred then selective pressure ceases. So basically evolution has to produce humans that are healthy for the first thirty years or so so they can breed but any bugs that appear after that it regards as WONTFIX because by that point people have either bred in which case their genes have found a new body to live in, or they've failed to breed. Either way, from an genes eye view their health doesn't matter.
However I could imagine medicine being to improve significantly on physical health. What I think is much harder is reversing mental ageing.
When people talk about USB flash drives 'self destructing' they presumably mean that the flash memory gets completely erased rather than blow to bits with explosives.
E.g. with a flash chip you could just loop through all the physical blocks and erase them. With a SATA drive you could do a secure erase of the whole device. That could take some 30 minutes to 1 hours. However if you power cycle the device it will just restart until the process completes
A full erase using SE can take 30 minutes to over an hour to complete. The thing is that the drive will restart the wipe if it is power cycled. So just restarting the host will not stop the process.
Another option would be to encrypt the data with AES with a random key. When you need to self destruct just erase the flash memory containing the key. So you've still got the data it's just incomprehensible.
Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Toolkit has always been able to uninstall software. They distribute a version once a month or so through Windows Update.
They could theoretically use it to remove or update old, unsecure versions of Java, Flash and Acrobat but as far as I know they've never done this, presumably because they fear anti trust action from Adobe and Oracle.
Robert Hensing linked to a post by Thomas Ptacek over on the Matasano Chargen blog. Thomas (who is both a good hacker AND a good writer) has a writeup of a "game-over" vulnerability that was just published by Mark Dowd over at IBM's ISS X-Force that affects Flash. For those that don't speak hacker-speak, in this case, a "game-over" vulnerability is one that can be easily weaponized (his techniques appear to be reliable and can be combined to run an arbitrary payload). As an added bonus, because it's a vulnerability in Flash, it allows the attacker to write a cross-browser, cross-platform exploit - this puppy works just fine in both IE and Firefox (and potentially in Safari and Opera).
This vulnerability doesn't affect Windows directly, but it DOES show how a determined attacker can take what was previously thought to be an unexploitable failure (a null pointer dereference) and turn it into something that can be used to 0wn the machine.
Every one of the "except not quite" issues that Thomas writes about in the article represented a stumbling block that the attacker (who had no access to the source to Flash) had to overcome - there are about 4 of them, but the attacker managed to overcome all of them.
As far as I know Microsoft have never removed or updated Flash or Java even if it is insecure.
Since the people who write Tor are unlikely to sue them, I guess they decided it was OK.
Actually I'm surprised that Google doesn't have a formal license fee for Android. They could charge for a license that they'd guarantee would cover all patents. Some would go on the patents they know the rest would go to fighting patent lawsuits in the future.
E.g. suppose Google knows that most licensees for Android pay $5 in license fees. They set up Android Licensing Inc which offers a patent indemnity license for say $10 per device. If you pay the license Android Licensing Inc will fight patent violation lawsuits for you. They could build in a patent pooling clause too.
You'd also be free to take your chances. Of course it's debatable how many Android OEMS would actually go for this. The big ones - Samsung, HTC, Sony etc have already negotiated their own arrangements and would presumably not want to patent pool. The small ones probably take their chances and negotiate licenses as they need to.
Probably they missed their chance to do this back when Android was announced. If they set it up as an industry consortium with patent pooling and a board of directors that governed the standard they could have done this. Android doesn't actually work like that - Google license the base OS for free but Google Apps are licensed.
By licensing Android, Google could begin to extract even more money from smartphones--which, I thought, was the whole point of being in business.
Won't licensing Android turn phone makers away from Google's OS? That may have been a worry a few years ago, before manufacturers had committed to the OS. But now Google and major handset makers are stuck on the Android train. They've built their entire businesses around the OS, and many of their customers love it. And, anyway, phone makers know that Android isn't really free in the first place--not to Google and not to handset makers. In addition to the cost of developing the OS, Google has lately been spending billions on patents to protect it. Nearly every handset maker, meanwhile, has signed licensing agreements with Microsoft to settle patent suits. Estimates suggest that each copy of Android costs phone makers $10 to $15 in licensing fees to Microsoft. That's still a bargain--Windows Phone 7 costs $20 to $30 per copy.
So here's Google's opportunity: It could charge phone makers $10 per Android license, raising the total per-copy cost of Android to between $20 and $25. Sure, Samsung, HTC and others may balk, but what are they going to do about the added cost? Going to Windows would be more expensive and confusing to their businesses. As an inducement, Google could also begin settlement negotiations with Microsoft and other patent litigants to reduce Android's licensing costs. Given all this, phone manufacturers would stick with Android--and Google would make a killing.
The reason I think they won't do this is that Samsung sell most Android phones. There have always been hints that Samsung would fork Android for its own ends and I think if Google tried to make them
Q: Bottom line: Should I be worried about patent issues if I use FFmpeg? A: Are you a private user working with FFmpeg for your own personal purposes? If so, there is remarkably little reason to be concerned. Are you using FFmpeg in a commercial software product? Read on to the next question...
Q: Is it perfectly alright to incorporate the whole FFmpeg core into my own commercial product? A: You might have a problem here. There have been cases where companies have used FFmpeg in their products. These companies found out that once you start trying to make money from patented technologies, the owners of the patents will come after their licensing fees. Notably, MPEG LA is vigilant and diligent about collecting for MPEG-related technologies.
So what happens in practice is if you use FFMpeg non commercially there's no reason for them to pursue you for license fees. However if your company uses H.264 commercially and starts to make money they would.
It's sort of like if you violate a software patent in your FOSS library you will not be sued. However if someone uses that FOSS library in a device and they start to make money the patent holder may well come after you.
A good example would be Linux. Linux implements things like FAT32 long filenames which are most likely patented. You don't get sued as an individual user. However suppose TomTom make millions selling GPS devices in the US. Then there is a fair chance they helpful folks at Microsoft may sue you and demand you sign a license. At that point you can pony up the cash or counter sue them
Note there actually is a lot wrong with this system. It gives old, large companies with an extensive patent portfolio an advantage over new, small ones with a smaller portfolio for example and that seems to me to be the opposite of what the law should do in the interests of competition. Many software patents are of dubious originality. Even companies like Google and Microsoft have fallen victim to dubious patents. In fact the reason they build up patent portfolios is primarily defensive - it means that if they are sued for patent violation they most likely have a patent which the company suing them is violating too.
Still the idea that people will be sued because they encode or decode videos using FFMPEG is bogus. As is the idea that putting a H.264 video on the internet will mean you need to pay a license fee. In practice only people who are making enough profit to make them a target get sued for patent infringement. Or that the Linux Foundation of people like Canonical will be sued for infringing patents. Canonical declined to discuss patents with Microsoft but they did license the MPEG LA patents. They also joined the PCI SIG. So it seems like industry standards with a patent pool are something they accept. Microsoft trying to collect royalties on their patents unilaterally they won't. There's a certain amount of sense in this position.
Incidentally once you understand how the system works you can see why FFMPEG or other open source products don't get granted 'unlimited no cost license'. Not to distribute - they can already do that for free. What they can't do is to offer a free license to their end users to decode or encode H.264. If they could do that people would just use FFMPEG in their products and not pay the license fee to the MPEG LA.
Of course another point people miss is about video is that 'not patent encumbered' is a rather dishonest phrase. With something like WebM all you can say is that they are not currently known to use any technology, rather than they ar
You can decode/encode to H.264 with FFMPEG and not pay a penny. More to the point most consumer devices support H.264 decode and or encode in hardware. Back when you bought the device your bought the chip and the chip vendor joined the MPEG LA and thus got access to the patent pool.
It's like PCI Express or USB. Sure it's patented but end users don't pay patent fees. Rather they buy hardware from companies who joined an industry body which has a patent pool. All the members paid a few thousand bucks and they all pooled their patents. Also they all get a vendor ID and get to influence the standard. It's all very civilised.
On August 26, 2010 MPEG LA announced that H.264 encoded internet video that is free to end users will never be charged royalties. All other royalties remain in place, such as royalties for products that decode and encode H.264 video. The license terms are updated in 5-year blocks
You know why they could say that? Because their business mode is not to go after Johnny Linux user for watching an H.264 video on Youtube. They don't need to. Johnny Linux user probably decoded that H.264 video using VDPAU or some other API which hands the decode off to his GPU. And the GPU vendor is a member of the MPEG LA and has thus already paid the license fee.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure you'll fit in here just fine. Has anyone told you what happened to John Katz yet? Oh, yeah. We Don't Talk About That.
Back to work, peasant.
We have more people than jobs i.e. unemployment. We have a budget deficit.
We also have a shortage of organs for transplant.
I therefore suggest we butcher the unemployed in order to provide organs. Excess viscera will be sold on the open market in order to drive down prices.
NVidia had a similar problem with GPUs
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-failure-g84-g86-settlement,11400.html
My Asus G1S had to be fixed twice. The second time it came back with a new motherboard with an 9500M GS replacing the 8600M GT. So Asus had actually done a board revision to switch the GPU. Even more remarkably this was only about a month before the warranty run out.
Most other comanies would have just kept handing out doomed 8600M GT boards until the warranties run out on the machines.
Customers are funny like that. Rather than buying large number of products even after multiple bad experiences products to prove they are bad in a statistically significant way they just stop buying your products after a small number of bad experiences and try the competition.
Is your mother a) white and b) one of the cool people by any chance?
This loop is called even when the CPU goes idle, in order to implement the OnIdle call in MFC
GetMessage will block until a message is received. That being said MFC apps do call OnIdle when the message queue is empty. Mind you if you look at CWinThread::Run() you only call OnIdle() message when the queue becomes empty not when it stays empty.
PC keyboards have a micro controller in them that does the keyboard scanning. When it gets a key it triggers an interrupt. The OS reads the scancode from a port for a PS/2 keyboard.
http://wiki.osdev.org/%228042%22_PS/2_Controller#Interrupts
If you have a USB keyboard it works the same but instead of IO port access the OS ends up reading the data from a USB Interrupt end point. It sets up linked lists in memory which the (UHCI,OHCI or EHCI) USB host controller scans through to poll the end points at the frequency they request
So is there a keyboard scan loop? Yes, but it's runs on a micro controller (actually you cold probably set up things on the micro controller so it sits in a halt instruction until there's an interrupt and you get an interrupt when any key is pressed, so you only scan when you know you'll find something for power efficiency). Is there polling? Yes, but the USB host controller does that by looping through a linked list of end point descriptors that the OS set up in memory. There's no code executing on the host CPU.
Incidentally the USB scheme changes in USB 3.0 and XHCI controllers to save power.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Host_Controller_Interface#Power_efficiency
I also like the way it converts smart quotes pasted from the web into gibberish like âoe and â, because smart quotes were invented by Microsoft and people that use them need to be punished until they recant and learn to replace them with ASCII.
So clearly Slashdot either making them render correctly or converting them automagically to ASCII is right out.
It's not the question that's dumb, it's the answers. If the comments were full of anecdotes about discovering obscure code in a common system that was executed really frequently by accident (e.g. you changed it and all hell broke loose) then it would be (IMO obviously) interesting.
Have you heard of prions? They have no DNA or RNA. They're just misfolded proteins. However they can catalyse other correctly folded proteins to misfold too. So they can sorta kinda reproduce but they don't have any genes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion
Which would also cut down on the airline's repeat customer possibilities.
Are you kidding me? Watching some Gordon Gecko wannabe get stuffed screaming into an airlock by the stewardesses because he refused to stop using his phone would be the greatest thing ever.
Maybe over on bizarro slashdot. Here in real slashdot they are used to reward adherents of the True Faith and punish heretics and dissemblers.
Say "viri" drives pendanti wild.
If you look at her Google+(tm) site she's got screenshots of Google Glass(tm) showing message from a fitness app from the company she presumably shills for
https://plus.google.com/+CeciliaAbadie/posts/4N67WWGbEtS
One of her loathsome friends tweeted, or rather LynxFitted "I'm out here doing burpees in the middle of nowhere", and it popped up on her Google Glass(tm) display. Possibly this is self parody, and I'm not hip enough to get it.
Amusingly I used Google Chrome(tm) to view her Google+(tm) site and it's almost completely unusable. Scrolling is so slow I thought my scroll wheel had broken.
Well, then, if it's not a sufficient reason to say H264 is unsafe and troublesome, then it's not sufficient reason to say WebM is unsafe or troublesome.
Except that Google ended up licensing the MPEG LA patents whilst AVC has been in use for ages and no one who has paid the license fee for the MPEG LA patents has successfully been sued by a third party.
If you look here
http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/07/google-and-mpeg-la-sign-licensing-agreement-covering-googles-vp8-video-codec-clearing-the-way-for-wider-adoption/
It looks like Google ended up paying the MPEG LA for the patents that WebM infringed. Google then licenses those patents out for free to anyone who wants to use WebM.
It's futile to get into arguments about legitimacy with the US Government. Legitimacy depends on force as Heinlein observed.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers#Chapter_2
" ... I was not making fun of you personally; I was heaping scorn on an inexcusably silly idea -- a practice I shall always follow. Anyone who clings to the historically untrue and thoroughly immoral doctrine that violence never settles anything I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history that has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms."
So you can say they're not legitimate and they can say the same about you. However they've got the power to back up their decisions and you don't because no one uses naked force as effectively as the US Government. If it makes you feel any better consider the bit in bold to be descriptive rather than prescriptive - i.e. a statement of how the world does work rather than how the world should work.
Your ability to learn new stuff definitely drops off with age. Physicists and mathematicians for example tend to do their best work when they're young. Same with programmers.
Probably your brain starts off in a low entropy state and as you get old the entropy increases and performance drops. Like an old file system installation getting all fragmented and or SSD perfomance dropping with time.
Even animals seem to have it. Kittens are very curious and playful. Older cats are lazy as shit.
It's very unlikely we'll ever be able to reverse this process non destructively even if we figure out how to reverse physical ageing. And actually physical ageing happens because of selective pressure. Once you've bred then selective pressure ceases. So basically evolution has to produce humans that are healthy for the first thirty years or so so they can breed but any bugs that appear after that it regards as WONTFIX because by that point people have either bred in which case their genes have found a new body to live in, or they've failed to breed. Either way, from an genes eye view their health doesn't matter.
However I could imagine medicine being to improve significantly on physical health. What I think is much harder is reversing mental ageing.
When people talk about USB flash drives 'self destructing' they presumably mean that the flash memory gets completely erased rather than blow to bits with explosives.
E.g. with a flash chip you could just loop through all the physical blocks and erase them. With a SATA drive you could do a secure erase of the whole device. That could take some 30 minutes to 1 hours. However if you power cycle the device it will just restart until the process completes
http://computer-forensics.sans.org/blog/2011/01/25/digital-forensics-erasing-drives-quick-easy
A full erase using SE can take 30 minutes to over an hour to complete. The thing is that the drive will restart the wipe if it is power cycled. So just restarting the host will not stop the process.
Another option would be to encrypt the data with AES with a random key. When you need to self destruct just erase the flash memory containing the key. So you've still got the data it's just incomprehensible.
Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Toolkit has always been able to uninstall software. They distribute a version once a month or so through Windows Update.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Malicious_Software_Removal_Tool
They could theoretically use it to remove or update old, unsecure versions of Java, Flash and Acrobat but as far as I know they've never done this, presumably because they fear anti trust action from Adobe and Oracle.
E.g.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/archive/2008/04/16/this-is-the-way-the-world-wide-web-ends.aspx
Robert Hensing linked to a post by Thomas Ptacek over on the Matasano Chargen blog. Thomas (who is both a good hacker AND a good writer) has a writeup of a "game-over" vulnerability that was just published by Mark Dowd over at IBM's ISS X-Force that affects Flash. For those that don't speak hacker-speak, in this case, a "game-over" vulnerability is one that can be easily weaponized (his techniques appear to be reliable and can be combined to run an arbitrary payload). As an added bonus, because it's a vulnerability in Flash, it allows the attacker to write a cross-browser, cross-platform exploit - this puppy works just fine in both IE and Firefox (and potentially in Safari and Opera).
This vulnerability doesn't affect Windows directly, but it DOES show how a determined attacker can take what was previously thought to be an unexploitable failure (a null pointer dereference) and turn it into something that can be used to 0wn the machine.
Every one of the "except not quite" issues that Thomas writes about in the article represented a stumbling block that the attacker (who had no access to the source to Flash) had to overcome - there are about 4 of them, but the attacker managed to overcome all of them.
As far as I know Microsoft have never removed or updated Flash or Java even if it is insecure.
Since the people who write Tor are unlikely to sue them, I guess they decided it was OK.
Meanwhile less big companies like TomTom get sued for infringement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._TomTom_Inc.
And HTC pay Microsoft a $5 license for every Android device
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/10/microsoft-collects-license-fees-on-50-of-android-devices-tells-google-to-wake-up/
Actually I'm surprised that Google doesn't have a formal license fee for Android. They could charge for a license that they'd guarantee would cover all patents. Some would go on the patents they know the rest would go to fighting patent lawsuits in the future.
E.g. suppose Google knows that most licensees for Android pay $5 in license fees. They set up Android Licensing Inc which offers a patent indemnity license for say $10 per device. If you pay the license Android Licensing Inc will fight patent violation lawsuits for you. They could build in a patent pooling clause too.
You'd also be free to take your chances. Of course it's debatable how many Android OEMS would actually go for this. The big ones - Samsung, HTC, Sony etc have already negotiated their own arrangements and would presumably not want to patent pool. The small ones probably take their chances and negotiate licenses as they need to.
Probably they missed their chance to do this back when Android was announced. If they set it up as an industry consortium with patent pooling and a board of directors that governed the standard they could have done this. Android doesn't actually work like that - Google license the base OS for free but Google Apps are licensed.
http://source.android.com/faqs.html#how-can-i-get-access-to-the-google-apps-for-android-such-as-maps
Someone discussed this here
http://pando.com/2012/01/28/how-google-can-save-android-close-it-license-it-swim-in-the-profits/
By licensing Android, Google could begin to extract even more money from smartphones--which, I thought, was the whole point of being in business.
Won't licensing Android turn phone makers away from Google's OS? That may have been a worry a few years ago, before manufacturers had committed to the OS. But now Google and major handset makers are stuck on the Android train. They've built their entire businesses around the OS, and many of their customers love it. And, anyway, phone makers know that Android isn't really free in the first place--not to Google and not to handset makers. In addition to the cost of developing the OS, Google has lately been spending billions on patents to protect it. Nearly every handset maker, meanwhile, has signed licensing agreements with Microsoft to settle patent suits. Estimates suggest that each copy of Android costs phone makers $10 to $15 in licensing fees to Microsoft. That's still a bargain--Windows Phone 7 costs $20 to $30 per copy.
So here's Google's opportunity: It could charge phone makers $10 per Android license, raising the total per-copy cost of Android to between $20 and $25. Sure, Samsung, HTC and others may balk, but what are they going to do about the added cost? Going to Windows would be more expensive and confusing to their businesses. As an inducement, Google could also begin settlement negotiations with Microsoft and other patent litigants to reduce Android's licensing costs. Given all this, phone manufacturers would stick with Android--and Google would make a killing.
The reason I think they won't do this is that Samsung sell most Android phones. There have always been hints that Samsung would fork Android for its own ends and I think if Google tried to make them
Well no, however consider this
http://www.ffmpeg.org/legal.html
Q: Bottom line: Should I be worried about patent issues if I use FFmpeg?
A: Are you a private user working with FFmpeg for your own personal purposes? If so, there is remarkably little reason to be concerned. Are you using FFmpeg in a commercial software product? Read on to the next question...
Q: Is it perfectly alright to incorporate the whole FFmpeg core into my own commercial product?
A: You might have a problem here. There have been cases where companies have used FFmpeg in their products. These companies found out that once you start trying to make money from patented technologies, the owners of the patents will come after their licensing fees. Notably, MPEG LA is vigilant and diligent about collecting for MPEG-related technologies.
So what happens in practice is if you use FFMpeg non commercially there's no reason for them to pursue you for license fees. However if your company uses H.264 commercially and starts to make money they would.
It's sort of like if you violate a software patent in your FOSS library you will not be sued. However if someone uses that FOSS library in a device and they start to make money the patent holder may well come after you.
A good example would be Linux. Linux implements things like FAT32 long filenames which are most likely patented. You don't get sued as an individual user. However suppose TomTom make millions selling GPS devices in the US. Then there is a fair chance they helpful folks at Microsoft may sue you and demand you sign a license. At that point you can pony up the cash or counter sue them
E.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._TomTom_Inc.
Note there actually is a lot wrong with this system. It gives old, large companies with an extensive patent portfolio an advantage over new, small ones with a smaller portfolio for example and that seems to me to be the opposite of what the law should do in the interests of competition. Many software patents are of dubious originality. Even companies like Google and Microsoft have fallen victim to dubious patents. In fact the reason they build up patent portfolios is primarily defensive - it means that if they are sued for patent violation they most likely have a patent which the company suing them is violating too.
Still the idea that people will be sued because they encode or decode videos using FFMPEG is bogus. As is the idea that putting a H.264 video on the internet will mean you need to pay a license fee. In practice only people who are making enough profit to make them a target get sued for patent infringement. Or that the Linux Foundation of people like Canonical will be sued for infringing patents. Canonical declined to discuss patents with Microsoft but they did license the MPEG LA patents. They also joined the PCI SIG. So it seems like industry standards with a patent pool are something they accept. Microsoft trying to collect royalties on their patents unilaterally they won't. There's a certain amount of sense in this position.
Incidentally once you understand how the system works you can see why FFMPEG or other open source products don't get granted 'unlimited no cost license'. Not to distribute - they can already do that for free. What they can't do is to offer a free license to their end users to decode or encode H.264. If they could do that people would just use FFMPEG in their products and not pay the license fee to the MPEG LA.
Of course another point people miss is about video is that 'not patent encumbered' is a rather dishonest phrase. With something like WebM all you can say is that they are not currently known to use any technology, rather than they ar
You can decode/encode to H.264 with FFMPEG and not pay a penny. More to the point most consumer devices support H.264 decode and or encode in hardware. Back when you bought the device your bought the chip and the chip vendor joined the MPEG LA and thus got access to the patent pool.
It's like PCI Express or USB. Sure it's patented but end users don't pay patent fees. Rather they buy hardware from companies who joined an industry body which has a patent pool. All the members paid a few thousand bucks and they all pooled their patents. Also they all get a vendor ID and get to influence the standard. It's all very civilised.
That's why the MPEG LA said this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_licensing
On August 26, 2010 MPEG LA announced that H.264 encoded internet video that is free to end users will never be charged royalties. All other royalties remain in place, such as royalties for products that decode and encode H.264 video. The license terms are updated in 5-year blocks
You know why they could say that? Because their business mode is not to go after Johnny Linux user for watching an H.264 video on Youtube. They don't need to. Johnny Linux user probably decoded that H.264 video using VDPAU or some other API which hands the decode off to his GPU. And the GPU vendor is a member of the MPEG LA and has thus already paid the license fee.
#googlepaidmylegalcosts #igotawaywithspeeding
They deserve jail for those scruffy beards alone.