FYI, RIAA only gets royalties on blank 'music' cd-r media that sell for a buck or two at Best Buy. You need the music media for the standalone cd recorders used with a stereo system.They don't get anything on data media that most of us are using.
The MAC address includes fields to determine the manufacturer of the device and a manufacturer specific value to indicate the model number. It would be fairly easy to detect standalone firewall/routers like Sonicwall, SMC, etc. When I first got broadband from MediaOne I had to call a couple of times to find someone savy enough to activate the modem to work with my Sonicwall SOHO firewall. The other reps wouldn't enter the MAC address because it didn't show up in their card database.
But that's of limited use on a lot of the consumer grade devices because they can change the MAC address to whatever you want. On my SMC unit you hit a button on the Admin page and it changes it's MAC address to that of the machine you're using to connect. That saves a call to the provider to change the IP matched to the cable modem.
The usual way it gets settled is that the lawyers get a butt-load of cash and the plaintiffs get coupons good for $20 off on their next Microsoft purchase.
You obviously don't know anything about the structure of Iridium. In order to get the local PTT's to sign on, Iridium signals go from the phone to the satellite to an earth station that dumps the call onto the PTT system in the originating country. The local PTT was able to add an additional per minute charge to the bill.
So in the end, you got the expensive connection with the same poor quality as local service.
That's nonsense. You can certainly get a patent for the results of research. Look at the patents granted to protect various drugs. Patents have been granted in cases similar to wavlet and fractal compression, i.e. Unisys owns the patent underlying LZW compression and Stanford owns the patent for the Hartley transform which is a real number analog of FFT. Or how about RSA'a patent on public key encryption?
It use to be that you could patent hardware. Things like LZW compression were patented as hardware based compression which then protected software emulations as well. Wavelet and fractal compression would have been easy to handle in the same way.
The software patent issue that bothers most people are things like Amazons One-click checkout which is more a business process than software. There are all sorts of really obvious stuff that has been granted patents that probably won't stand up to legal challenge, but someone will have to pay the cost of the challenge.
All it takes is one person who doesn't understand the math or statistics to produce a client that hoses the experiment. They want to spend their time doing science rather than doing code reviews, system tests and preparing benchmarks - it doesn't seem like an unreasonable desire given that it is their project.
I'm curious, how many people on the planet do you thing are qualified to review the methodology and code behind the SETI client?
The third reason is that it is a research project, not a software development project. If you're doing research and you don't have complete control over the environment, you're just producing junk. These guys are doing exactly what they should be doing.
I don't know how well the conversion works for DVB, but having seen the artifacts generated by a converter mapping a 1080i HDTV signal onto a 480i display here in the State, I don't plan to use a converter to keep my old sets going when the final switch happens in 2006.
I wasn't aware that the US was demanding a different cell phone standard. I thought that GSM-3 and Wide-CDMA were still on track. AT&T was clinging to their current system, but it is easy enough to change to another provider; afterall, I have 7 different providers to choose from.
About 8 years ago I worked on a cancer screening project in the Twin Cities. Our results got reasonably decent coverage, but it was amazing to watch the story migrate on CNN.
We started out in the 4 o'clock segment as being researchers at the University of Minnesota, and the facts slowly slipped until by 7:30 we were, researchers in Boston.
It would have been funny if it wasn't so sad... and these are the same people who get on Dan Quayle's case for adding an extra e to potato:-)
Slashdot Mirror
--rick
But that's of limited use on a lot of the consumer grade devices because they can change the MAC address to whatever you want. On my SMC unit you hit a button on the Admin page and it changes it's MAC address to that of the machine you're using to connect. That saves a call to the provider to change the IP matched to the cable modem.
--rick
The usual way it gets settled is that the lawyers get a butt-load of cash and the plaintiffs get coupons good for $20 off on their next Microsoft purchase.
So in the end, you got the expensive connection with the same poor quality as local service.
--rick
It use to be that you could patent hardware. Things like LZW compression were patented as hardware based compression which then protected software emulations as well. Wavelet and fractal compression would have been easy to handle in the same way.
The software patent issue that bothers most people are things like Amazons One-click checkout which is more a business process than software. There are all sorts of really obvious stuff that has been granted patents that probably won't stand up to legal challenge, but someone will have to pay the cost of the challenge.
--rick
I'm curious, how many people on the planet do you thing are qualified to review the methodology and code behind the SETI client?
--rick
The third reason is that it is a research project, not a software development project. If you're doing research and you don't have complete control over the environment, you're just producing junk. These guys are doing exactly what they should be doing.
They aren't talking about Open Source. They're talking about forcing MS to *license* the code to other vendors. That means royalties, etc. --rick
MSFT makes very little hardware: keyboards, mice, a remote control and a cordless phone and that's it.
I don't know how well the conversion works for DVB, but having seen the artifacts generated by a converter mapping a 1080i HDTV signal onto a 480i display here in the State, I don't plan to use a converter to keep my old sets going when the final switch happens in 2006.
I wasn't aware that the US was demanding a different cell phone standard. I thought that GSM-3 and Wide-CDMA were still on track. AT&T was clinging to their current system, but it is easy enough to change to another provider; afterall, I have 7 different providers to choose from.
--rick
About 8 years ago I worked on a cancer screening project in the Twin Cities. Our results got reasonably decent coverage, but it was amazing to watch the story migrate on CNN.
... and these are the same people who get on Dan Quayle's case for adding an extra e to potato :-)
We started out in the 4 o'clock segment as being researchers at the University of Minnesota, and the facts slowly slipped until by 7:30 we were, researchers in Boston.
It would have been funny if it wasn't so sad