Not just with the IPTV loophole, but on the commissioners too. Adelstein said: "the Commission takes a long-awaited and momentous step in this Order by requiring the applicants to maintain neutral network and neutral routing in the provision of their wireline broadband Internet access service. This provision was critical for my support of this merger and will serve as a "5th principle," ensuring that the combined company does not privilege, degrade, or prioritize the traffic of Internet content, applications or service providers, including their own affiliates." but Martin said "These conditions are voluntary, enforceable commitments by AT&T but are not general statements of Commission policy and do not alter Commission precedent or bind future Commission policy or rules."
Are Slashdot readers as good at signing petitions as dead musicians?
I'm not sure why the Slashdot editors trimmed the ORG petition off my original submission - do they prefer whinging to doing something politically influential?
Computer Users: DRM turns your computer against you
I know sometimes it seems like your computer has it's own agenda, when it refuses to print or copy or find your documents. DRM does this on purpose. It is designed to stop you copying and pasting, printing and sharing things. I don't think you want this.
Computer Scientists: DRM will fail through emulation
One of the basic precepts of Computer Science is the Church-Turing thesis, which shows that any computer can emulate any other one. This is not theory, but something we all use every day, whether it is Java virtual machines, or CPU's emulating older ones for software compatibility.
The corollary of this is that code can never really know where it is running. For a rock solid example, look at MAME, the Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator, that runs almost any video game from the last 30 years. The games think you have paid a quarter when you press the '5' key.
Corporations: DRM has to be undone to be used
Microsoft has been touting DRM features in the next version of Office that will only allow approved people to copy or forward or print documents that they can read. But if they can read them, they can describe, paraphrase, retype or photograph them. If you can't trust your employees, but think you can trust your computers more, you have deeper problems than document leakage.
Lawyers: DRM makes machines judge, jury and executioner
Law is complex and subtle, with elaborate and oft-satirised processes and procedures for making, enforcing, fight and settling contentious issues. Due process is there for good reasons which I don't need to rehearse to you.
DRM undoes all this with the simplistic, hard-edged certainty of a machine. It will refuse to let you copy video you have shot yourself, or prevent citation by copying and pasting. It will make presumptions of guilt rather than innocence. Some tasks we can delegate to machines; law and jurisprudence should not be one.
Media Companies: DRM destroys value
By adding DRM to your products, you make them less attractive to your potential customers. This will reduce the amount they are willing to pay for them, significantly.
Companies that bet on DRM die off. Apple's iTunes store (often cited as a DRM success) will burn Audio CDs, so it preserves the customer value.
I put a comparison table on my blog (slashcode strips table tags, or I'd copy it here, sorry.) Overall, the options are awkward. I can see some interesting gaps there - if I could subscribe to DVDs by mail every fortnight or month, while the series is still airing, that would be attractive (much more attractive than US networks' scheduling, which seems designed to confuse and disappoint and lose the flow of plot). The iTunes series subscription could be attractive, if it was closer to the quality you get from HD-ripped Bittorrent or DVD. Tom Coates was saying something similar recently.
The other missing piece follows on from my post about net video last week- what if the cable companies had a cache of shows for a while after airing, or let you retrieve them from each others' PVRs? As the smarter ones have very high speed networks in their served neigbourhoods, this could be very responsive.
from my blog I broadly agree with Paul Graham's essay on Software Patents, but I do think he underestimates the damage from patent trolls, and from what he calls the mafia-like behaviour of some patent holders. Paul has been lucky in the field he has worked in, but in the Audio and Video area there are many patent thickets. Perhaps it is the history of Farnsworth's victory over RCA that makes video engineers patent hungry. My first startup, The MultiMedia Corporation, was a spin-out from the BBC in 1990. One of our products was a program called MediaMaker that combined video from tape or videodisc, CD Audio, Pictures, digitised audio and Director animations into picture icons on a timeline for making presentations. It was demoed on stage at Macworld by the CEO of Apple, and we got Macromind to publish it. Then the patent troll showed up. A company called Montage had made a video editing system that included several video monitors showing edit points from tape. The company had gone out of business but a lawyer had bought up the patents, including one on using a still image to represent a video sequence. The troll was working his way round the video companies, and he caused enough trouble to stop work on the product while we worked on a legal defence instead. Later, while I was at Apple on QuickTime, there was a steady stream of patent trolls claiming that Apple should pay them royalties; enough to keep several lawyers busy, and a lot of engineers spending time working on prior art evidence demonstrations. Several potential features were excluded from QuickTime due to patent thickets. The obvious one was the Unisys LZW patent that encumbered GIF, but there were other more subtle pressures that meant adopting open source codecs was discouraged. Working on the patent license agreements for MPEG meant that technology ready to ship was deferred pending legal agreement on more than one occasion. So I'm much lass sanguine than Paul about this. I think software patents should not be granted, and the European Union's banning of them is the right decision. I hope the Gowers Review in the UK makes this UK law as well.
If all I had had to go on was my own memory,
I would not have pushed the
point, but I did link to video of
my demonstration in the footnote.
See my blog for more detail on my recollections.
The ORG are having a public meeting in London next week, so RSVP if you can make it. The pledge drive is getting close to completion, so if you want to be one of the thousand founding donors, you need to hurry as there are 39 places left.
This kind of Government over-reach is exactly why we have founded the Open Rights Group - read the detailed analysis and rebuttal of Clarke's proposal there. Join the 800+ of us already supporting ORG by signing the pledge to fund it.
If your weblog server implements ETag and Last-Modified, my spider can send a one packet request with the values I last saw from you, and you can send a one packet 304 response if nothing has changed.
Dean then started to talk about the power of the enclosure element in RSS 2.0. What is great about it is that it enables one to syndicate all sorts of digital content. One can syndicate video, music, calendar events, contacts, photos and so on using RSS due to the flexibility of enclosures.
Amar then showed a demo using Outlook 2003 and an RSS feed of the Gnomedex schedule he had created. The RSS feed had an item for each event on the schedule and each item had an iCalendar file as an enclosure. Amar had written a 200 line C# program that subscribed to this feed then inserted the events into his Outlook calendar so he could overlay his personal schedule with the Gnomedex schedule. The point of this demo was to show that RSS isn't just for aggregators subscribing to blogs and news sites.
Now you can subscribe to it directly using the x2v link. This is available today, not in a future release of IE, and you can easily add events to your blog or webpage this way for people to subscribe to. (from my blog)
...she had the band of the Coldstream Guards playing a medley of show tunes and oldies. There was something very surreal about sitting in Buckingham Palace in the presence of Her Majesty while a gaggle of beefy soldiers in red and gold uniforms play 'Let me take you by the hand and show you the streets of London' on brass instruments.
The XML part of XmlHttpRequest is a bit misleading - you don't have to use XML and parse it in the client. If you use a server process that generates an HTML fragment, you can replace the innerHTML of a target id easily. I made a JAH example to show how easy this is. JAH stands for Just Async HTML
Get yourself a copy of the book reading Reflex, and work through it with your brother. Unlike Phonics schemes, which require the ability to apply nested rule-based deductions, or 'whole words' methods, which expect the learner to derive everything themselves, this works by teaching the correspondence between sounds and symbols in a way that suits the brain's natural pattern matching.
Actually, picking a high turnover tag like tsunami will make you show up on the front page for less time than on a more appropriate one. Also, with all these services you can't post and run. Flickr and delicious require sign-up; Technorati requires you to have a persistent blog url to tag your posts.
Slashdot Mirror
Not just with the IPTV loophole, but on the commissioners too. Adelstein said: "the Commission takes a long-awaited and momentous step in this Order by requiring the applicants to maintain neutral network and neutral routing in the provision of their wireline broadband Internet access service. This provision was critical for my support of this merger and will serve as a "5th principle," ensuring that the combined company does not privilege, degrade, or prioritize the traffic of Internet content, applications or service providers, including their own affiliates."
but Martin said "These conditions are voluntary, enforceable commitments by AT&T but are not general statements of Commission policy and do not alter Commission precedent or bind future Commission policy or rules."
More here
The Open Rights Group is running a Release The Music campaign, with a petition against term extension that you can sign. There's also one asking for the right to privately copy CDs to iPods.
Are Slashdot readers as good at signing petitions as dead musicians?
I'm not sure why the Slashdot editors trimmed the ORG petition off my original submission - do they prefer whinging to doing something politically influential?
Computer Users: DRM turns your computer against you I know sometimes it seems like your computer has it's own agenda, when it refuses to print or copy or find your documents. DRM does this on purpose. It is designed to stop you copying and pasting, printing and sharing things. I don't think you want this. Computer Scientists: DRM will fail through emulation One of the basic precepts of Computer Science is the Church-Turing thesis, which shows that any computer can emulate any other one. This is not theory, but something we all use every day, whether it is Java virtual machines, or CPU's emulating older ones for software compatibility. The corollary of this is that code can never really know where it is running. For a rock solid example, look at MAME, the Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator, that runs almost any video game from the last 30 years. The games think you have paid a quarter when you press the '5' key. Corporations: DRM has to be undone to be used Microsoft has been touting DRM features in the next version of Office that will only allow approved people to copy or forward or print documents that they can read. But if they can read them, they can describe, paraphrase, retype or photograph them. If you can't trust your employees, but think you can trust your computers more, you have deeper problems than document leakage. Lawyers: DRM makes machines judge, jury and executioner Law is complex and subtle, with elaborate and oft-satirised processes and procedures for making, enforcing, fight and settling contentious issues. Due process is there for good reasons which I don't need to rehearse to you. DRM undoes all this with the simplistic, hard-edged certainty of a machine. It will refuse to let you copy video you have shot yourself, or prevent citation by copying and pasting. It will make presumptions of guilt rather than innocence. Some tasks we can delegate to machines; law and jurisprudence should not be one. Media Companies: DRM destroys value By adding DRM to your products, you make them less attractive to your potential customers. This will reduce the amount they are willing to pay for them, significantly. Companies that bet on DRM die off. Apple's iTunes store (often cited as a DRM success) will burn Audio CDs, so it preserves the customer value.
I put a comparison table on my blog (slashcode strips table tags, or I'd copy it here, sorry.)
Overall, the options are awkward. I can see some interesting gaps there - if I could subscribe to DVDs by mail every fortnight or month, while the series is still airing, that would be attractive (much more attractive than US networks' scheduling, which seems designed to confuse and disappoint and lose the flow of plot).
The iTunes series subscription could be attractive, if it was closer to the quality you get from HD-ripped Bittorrent or DVD. Tom Coates was saying something similar recently.
The other missing piece follows on from my post about net video last week- what if the cable companies had a cache of shows for a while after airing, or let you retrieve them from each others' PVRs? As the smarter ones have very high speed networks in their served neigbourhoods, this could be very responsive.
from my blog
I broadly agree with Paul Graham's essay on Software Patents, but I do think he underestimates the damage from patent trolls, and from what he calls the mafia-like behaviour of some patent holders.
Paul has been lucky in the field he has worked in, but in the Audio and Video area there are many patent thickets. Perhaps it is the history of Farnsworth's victory over RCA that makes video engineers patent hungry.
My first startup, The MultiMedia Corporation, was a spin-out from the BBC in 1990. One of our products was a program called MediaMaker that combined video from tape or videodisc, CD Audio, Pictures, digitised audio and Director animations into picture icons on a timeline for making presentations. It was demoed on stage at Macworld by the CEO of Apple, and we got Macromind to publish it.
Then the patent troll showed up. A company called Montage had made a video editing system that included several video monitors showing edit points from tape. The company had gone out of business but a lawyer had bought up the patents, including one on using a still image to represent a video sequence. The troll was working his way round the video companies, and he caused enough trouble to stop work on the product while we worked on a legal defence instead.
Later, while I was at Apple on QuickTime, there was a steady stream of patent trolls claiming that Apple should pay them royalties; enough to keep several lawyers busy, and a lot of engineers spending time working on prior art evidence demonstrations.
Several potential features were excluded from QuickTime due to patent thickets. The obvious one was the Unisys LZW patent that encumbered GIF, but there were other more subtle pressures that meant adopting open source codecs was discouraged. Working on the patent license agreements for MPEG meant that technology ready to ship was deferred pending legal agreement on more than one occasion.
So I'm much lass sanguine than Paul about this. I think software patents should not be granted, and the European Union's banning of them is the right decision. I hope the Gowers Review in the UK makes this UK law as well.
The Open Rights Group have been writing on this for a while.
Do join them in fighting this and other legislation that limits our digital freedoms.
The Open Rights Grou have been tracking this legislation, and have details on how to lobby your Meps
Do join us in fighting this.
If all I had had to go on was my own memory, I would not have pushed the point, but I did link to video of my demonstration in the footnote. See my blog for more detail on my recollections.
Which is a handy improvement, given that these are showing up a lot now.
The ORG are having a public meeting in London next week, so RSVP if you can make it.
The pledge drive is getting close to completion, so if you want to be one of the thousand founding donors, you need to hurry as there are 39 places left.
What is distressing is that the chap in charge of European e-commerce and telecoms regulation is waffling away like this while the record labels are hijacking EU anti-terrorism regulations so they can get everyone's browser histories to start vexatious prosecutions.
This kind of Government over-reach is exactly why we have founded the Open Rights Group - read the detailed analysis and rebuttal of Clarke's proposal there.
Join the 800+ of us already supporting ORG by signing the pledge to fund it.
But it is one that will solve itself, as DRM reduces the value of products that use it to the point where their sales disappear.
If your weblog server implements ETag and Last-Modified, my spider can send a one packet request with the values I last saw from you, and you can send a one packet 304 response if nothing has changed.
Charles Miller explained this well a few years ago.
(I run the spiders at Technorati).
I run the spiders at Technorati, and it is 0.9 million posts a day, which Kevin Burton had correct in the post cited. Is the is the no dot effect?
Now, being able to subscribe to an event calendar is very handy, but there is a much simpler way - using hCalendar and Brian Suda's x2v calendar parsing tool.
I adapted the conference calendar page, to add an "hevent" to each session ( with help from Ryan and his hCalendar creator).
Now you can subscribe to it directly using the x2v link. This is available today, not in a future release of IE, and you can easily add events to your blog or webpage this way for people to subscribe to. (from my blog)
...she had the band of the Coldstream Guards playing a medley of show tunes and oldies.
There was something very surreal about sitting in Buckingham Palace in the presence of Her Majesty while a gaggle of beefy soldiers in red and gold uniforms play 'Let me take you by the hand and show you the streets of London' on brass instruments.
I added a chapter track to the keynote movie so you can skip the filler bits more easily:
WWDC keynote in chunks
The XML part of XmlHttpRequest is a bit misleading - you don't have to use XML and parse it in the client. If you use a server process that generates an HTML fragment, you can replace the innerHTML of a target id easily.
I made a JAH example to show how easy this is.
JAH stands for Just Async HTML
Get yourself a copy of the book reading Reflex, and work through it with your brother.
Unlike Phonics schemes, which require the ability to apply nested rule-based deductions, or 'whole words' methods, which expect the learner to derive everything themselves, this works by teaching the correspondence between sounds and symbols in a way that suits the brain's natural pattern matching.
Yes, but all 3 for these systems offer a degree of verifiability of persistent identity that has a better chance of allowing spam filtering.
You might find the stuff Tantek and I have been writing about the 'lowercase semantic web' interesting:
Real World Semantics
Can your website be your API?
These outline the principles behind these new XHTML microformats we are building on at Technorati,
Yes, it is compliant XHTML - the values for rel are explicitly described to be extensible in the html spec. Check my blog for the exact details.
Actually, picking a high turnover tag like tsunami will make you show up on the front page for less time than on a more appropriate one.
Also, with all these services you can't post and run. Flickr and delicious require sign-up; Technorati requires you to have a persistent blog url to tag your posts.
It's different because it is visible as part of the blog post, as an explicit link.
It's different because it points to something useful (the tag collation page)
It's different because by sharing terms people come up wiht interesting clusters.