If this is a weed-out course in computer science, why is there programming involved? Yes, as a prospective computer engineer or scientist, you do need to learn to program a computer at some practical level. But that's also true for any other engineering or science degree -- at least as true today as when I was in college in the early 80s. And at least at CMU back then, every Freshman in engineering, the sciences, probably even fields like psychology, took a computer programming course. But these were specifically not weed-out courses.
The actual weed out course (and one could rightly ask why, in a school as hard to get into as CMU, did they need additional weed-out courses, but that was 15-211 in 1980 in the CS department) had exactly one real programming assignment, and that was the last one of the course. The emphasis in the course was, as you might expect, computer science: finite state machines, turing machines, lamba calculus, various bits about the design of high level languages, etc. They eventually split the same material into two courses, and made it weed-outy.
And no, this was not a course designed to be of much practical use in a job... on the surface, anyway. But it was the gateway course to every other CS course, many of which were going to cover more practical topics, like the computer engineering or CAD course, both of which worked on large projects, with every class member contributing components, or Compiler Design (well, practical for me anyway, since I had a job writing a compiler for a few years back in the 1990s).
Note, also, that none of these are really "programming" course. If you think you need college to teach you a computer language, you have no business studying computer science or computer engineering -- go to a trade school and become a computer programmer. A computer language is something you can learn on your own in a couple of evenings, if you don't already know it. And unless you're only planning to code for a couple of years, you WILL need to do this at some point in your career. When I was in college, the big languages used at CMU, at least for undergrad projects, were Pascal (with CMU extensions) and LISP. One summer job at Bell Labs, and I had picked up two more (C and PL/M). The point of a college education should be to get you to the point where a new language is just that simple exercise of a day or two. And to teach things general concepts applicable to any programming task in any language.
Sure looks like a Nokia-killed project. And Intel, I guess, as they were partners with Nokia in this, and certainly have the funds to keep it alive indefinitely if they choose to.
The quality of Netflix video is crap. This 40GB represents about 24.5 hours of Netflixing, which is certainly a totally believable number. That's about one film at Blu-ray rates. Netflix is savvy enough to not totally piss off the average ISP, and as well, they're playing on enough small devices (BD players, game consoles) that they have to be concerned about network thoughput with smaller buffers. In short, their quality isn't getting better any time soon. And no love for more restricted systems like satellite.
If the local school is able to get any cable or FiOS company to wire me in, I'll absolutely support my kids to being tortured with the typical snowday or two we're likely to experience in rural South Jersey. Some people are going to have to be provided with PCs, too, to make this work.
Hurry up, though... only one kid left in public school....
Duh. Everyone knows Apple is a religion. This is like studying the effect of guys seeing beer or tits, and being surprised that they're stimulated in the way everyone else in the country knows as a given.
Like many FOSS projects, the development itself isn't open.... Google does all the work, gets a new version to the point it needs a device. Then they anoint one new device, such as the Xoom in the Honeycomb case, and work with the associated company to get a release done. The rest of the OEMs don't get the source until the day that device ships.
I think this is the big mistake. It's definitely a legit case for holding back source distribution -- the code that's released to the OEMs is probably not even beta quality. It certainly hasn't seen a proper amount of outside testing. This probably worked ok for simple releases, as we've seen with 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, etc. And not so well with the Honeycomb devices, even ignoring that the phone code is "all messed up". On the other hand, it's on the overall better to not release code that's not better tested, as long as this ultimately doesn't become an excuse for never releasing the code.
Their ability to exercise quality control in this case is coupled to their ability to exorcise the old code... push OTA updates to Xooms and a handful of other Honeycomb devices, and the old bugs are gone forever (assuming they're fixed in the update). Release that code and you have the same buggy code out there on every other tablet, smart phone, and who knows what. Maybe in very small quantities, sure, but it's going to damage the reputation of Android, more than a delay to wait for a better release will. Again, as long as we're not waiting forever.
Here's the problem... a show called "Ghost Hunters" on a "science fiction" channel. Yeah, we know it's all fake, but it's too reality to be on a sci-fi channel, and not fake enough to find actual ghosts and be even slightly entertaining. Watching a bunch of dunderheads poke around in the dark and jump at every sound and shadow is not entertaining.
As for wrestling.. that actually is science fiction. If the quality were not so bad that it makes "Dinoshark vs. Ultragator" look like Kubrick or Spielberg, more geeks might tune in. Or people in general. Why (weakly) try to convince people it's real, when everyone knows it's not? How about some deadly weapons, cyborgs, arms and legs being hacked off ("I'm not dead yet!"), etc.
You can't always get more. I need 100 more... the cheapest fab I can find has a minimum run of ten 300mm wafers... you get 2500 chips per wafer, etc. And I'm the only one who needs one this year? No thanks... I'll do better buying from an actual chip company.
The real answer is that you're safe with the open design in an FPGA, because there will always be some big evil chip company making FPGAs. Then again, they also make microcontrollers, CPUs, SOCs, etc. and aren't going to stop anytime soon. I do not believe this approach buys anyone additional security in their ability to obtain a specific micro.
CPUs, in particular, thrive on volume. The main reason RISC largely failed on the desktop wasn't that RISC couldn't keep up with x86, it was simply that RISC couldn't afford to keep up with x86. Intel can amortize development costs over 100M+ devices per year. And ok, sure, they charge a premium right now. So how about ARM... they come from multiple suppliers, and at least some of the cost of development is amortized over 1000M+ devices per year. I can buy a basic ARM7TDMI SOC starting at under $3.00.... and that's single quantity, on DigiKey. Ok, you need a bit more juice to run Linux, sure. An ARM Cortex A8 SOC from TI, at 800MHz, will run you as little as $27.50, again, single quantity.
In short, there are dozens of companies making microprocessors and microcontrollers, and there's intense pressure on price. It hard to imagine this project yielding anything competitive on either price or performance. Without that, where's your market? If every FOSS enthusiast drops their x86s or whatever and buys one, all this does is slow down the rate of code development a few orders of magnitude.
I like the idea of open source hardware based on FPGAs, from a purely hacker's appeal point of view. Not every computer needs to be used for "real work". I've attended a number of retro-computing shows, having been involved in some of the more popular computers from Pennsylvania, back before they were "classics". The folks who still hack these things do so because hacking the computer is their hobby. Not Linux, not photography or video or websurfing or CAD or anything else that makes the modern computer a tool -- the computer itself is their passion. But once the computer is just a tool, why choose a poor tool?
I mean, sure, you could make hammers in your back yard and invite people to bring steel or lead or whatever else they had, some coal, etc. and throw hammer making parties, get out from under the repressive hardware manufacturers' thumb. But I'll probably just get mine at Sears, thanks.
The question I would really have: even if they can do it, after all the cost cutting and everything, is there any chance of the end result actually beating a state of the art FPGA on cost, much less an off-the-shelf micro or SOC.
Apple never brought "it" in-house. What they bought were the chip designers, not the fab. PA-Semi and Intrinsity are both fabless. Quite a few big semiconductor companies are: Qualcomm, Broadcom, nVidia, Marvell, SanDisk, Xilinx, Altera, etc.
Yes... software itself is just a document. You need a machine to actually violate the patent. That's why MS is going after B&N, not Google. Well, that, and Google's cash reserves, I rekon.
MS may not want to go directly after Google. But not just because Google has huge cash reserves, their own legal staff, and less love for Microsoft than most companies MS goes after. But as well, Google doesn't really make hardware.
The whole loophole by which software patents were made "legal" in the 80s was the idea that the simple fact of software being part of a hardware system was not sufficient to invalidate the patentability of the whole system. This sort of makes sense... here's my system. The PTO had previously held that if this black box contained hardware (electronics, mechanicals) that was ok, but if I were to replace that box with something that also contained software, it couldn't be patented. Anyway, that's the essence of how all these software patents started being issued.
So, in order to maintain this loophole, it's not the software alone that violates a patent. You can't go after Google for developing the software, because alone, that software doesn't do anything... it's just a document. The software causes some piece of hardware to actually violate the patent. So that's who Microsoft goes after... it's an easier case, and there are more royalties to be had. And, of course, if their real purpose is to spread FUD about Android, they don't even have to care about royalties. They just want to frighten the next guy away from using Android or Linux.
There's an awfully good chance Microsoft knows these "violating patents" are drek. They also understand the difficulty of fighting patents in court, simply because the presumption is that a granted patent is valid. It's a long and expensive process.
However, with the patents revealed, all sorts of other parties get involved. And if there's a patent of absurdity in these patents, whether its blatent disregard to obvious prior art, or simply Microsoft making absurd claims of what they do cover, the case could go well beyond B&N. The PTO themselves could launch an investigation, for example, if there's a patten of abuse of the process by Microsoft on these patents. As well, they presumably have licensees paying for these now, who also have a financial interest in seeing these killed. But under NDA, they really don't know each other. When done in public, this could be much worse for MS than they counted on.
And I like B&N's attitude on the NDA -- there is absolutely no legal reason B&N needs to consider signing that NDA. If they're going to court for patent violation, Microsoft will eventually have to put up or shut up. In public.
There are a couple of reasons a company will use patents offensively. One big one is simple: to make money. In this case, it's fairly critical that the company has either very solid and very current patents, that they have hundreds or thousands of patents to throw your way, and/or that they price the patent licensing such that it's ultimately more expensive to fight than to pay.
There may be other reasons for a company to license, too. For example, Microsoft could be after money, but if they're going after a modern smart phone company, they may also be worried about getting hit with patents themselves. So they may really be after a cross-license.
An example of all of this was IBM in the late 80s. I was a primary technical adviser to Commodore's legal team when IBM came after the Amiga computer. IBM had some amazingly awful patents in those days: they had a department that had learned to hack the patent system, and they had flooded the PTO with thousands of software patents with absolute mountains of prior art. But the PTO didn't even have software people in those days. So how, for example, would the examiner have known that IBM's 1984 application for "Cut and Paste Between Multiple Text Buffers" (or whatever they called it) perfectly described the behavior of Emacs in the 1970s.
But IBM had pretty unlimited patents. If you succeeded in defending or invalidating that first stack of 25-50 patents, they'd be happy to toss another 25-50 your way. The licensing arrangements charged for 1, 2, or 3-or-more. So basically, you had to fight off nearly everything to be able to not sign a licensing deal. And IBM was also after our patents, back then. They pretty much wanted a cross license with every other computer company, so they wouldn't have to worry about being caught on something.
So there's a very good chance HTC just found it easier to sign with MS than fight them. Maybe it was just chump change to them... they're not going to be paying royalties on hardware sold outside of the US, in all likelihood. And perhaps they also wanted a cross licensing deal with MS, who knows. That says absolutely nothing about the validity of the patents.
Patent holders with shaky patents (which includes many if not most software patents) have to be careful, too, about rousing a foe. If MS does go to court and has some of these patents struck down, that's very bad news for them. Since these licensing agreements are all done in secret for the most part, no one really knows the details of all their agreements. But it might mean dozens or hundreds of companies paying on the basis of one of these dead patents, who will not only stop paying, but possibly end cross-licensing, sue Microsoft, etc. And this makes any of their other patents more likely to come under the magnifying glass. If there's enough patent abuse, the PTO may step in and re-examine these, without the need for opponents to pay for an expensive trial.
The original purpose of a patent was never to stifle the competition... quite the opposite. The patent gave you a very temporary monopoly (17 years from date of acceptance, originally, back in an era in which nothing all that significant happened technologically in 5-10 year spans) in exchange for your publicly revealing the specific process of your invention. This would allow others to build new things on top of your invention.
As well, the invention doesn't cover an idea. Rather, it's a very specific implementation of a "useful" process or machine. Nothing abstract can or should be patented. They've kind of fallen off track on that part at the PTO, but haven't really justified why. I know originally, at least in the early days of software patents, software couldn't actually violate any patent... it was your hardware running the software that in effect violated someone's software patent. That's why, even today, Microsoft or Apple sue the Android HW companies, not Google itself, if they think they have some patents to hold over Android.
Someone really should be arguing against some of the ludicrous ways in which patents are awarded. I mean, software patents are bad, but not even the worst. There are a slew of "business method" patents that basically just take something we've done for thousands of years, tacked "on the internet" to it, and essentially patented not a specific method or process of doing this thing on the internet, but the basic idea.
They'll make up at least a chunk of it in sponsorships ("Coke: first soft drink on Mars") and licensing: toys, video games, film, television. Companies like Coke, Annheiser-Bush (at least before InBev), etc. easily spend over 1/10th of the total NASA budget each year on ads. Billions in product licensing for things like Star Wars. They could certainly generate a chunk of change this way.
The US actually can afford universal healthcare. If you look any county that's enacted it, they're spending about half of what we're spending on healthcare, and getting a much better result. The fundamental flaw in the US is that there is no organized healthcare, it's all health insurance. Which is absolutely the wrong approach to healthcare.
The US lacks the political will to enact universal healthcare. It's only about money when you look at the millions spent by the insurance industry to buy Congress and ensure they get to keep making record profits selling health insurance. And the "Obamacare" reforms, while they do cover more people, do not alter this in any fundamental way -- it's still largely a big handout to the insurance industry.
I'm personally for space travel, whether it directly stimulates the economy or not. Solving any big technical problem does eventually mean a real technological trickle-down into the economy -- the only kind of trickle-down proven to actually work. Of course, the so called budget hawks out there will look at the relatively tiny budget at NASA (about $18 billion) as a waste, despite the huge potential.... and ignore the trillions being spent on the military.
The reality of the problem, though, is that these things aren't usually built out of new funds... they're more than likely re-directing NASA's budget, yet again. So the "real science" guys, who don't think we get much science out of manned space exploration, get kneecapped.
And I actually do agree... we don't get as much real science out of manned space exploration, at least in terms of astrophysics, etc. But I think we get more engineering benefits. And maybe something else, too... I think it's a big emotional stimulation. The Space Program was a big reason why 60's kids like me became the engineers that delivered the Personal Computer and Internet revolutions. The entire NASA budget is less than month of just one of the wars we're fighting, to put it in perspective. And we actually get something in return for it.
#1: This may be asking to simply re-target NASA's existing budget. The moon mission stuff under Bush did essentially that... and it was fairly unpopular within the scientific community -- grandstanding stuff drawing funds away from real science.
I don't reject the idea of actual human space travel, not at all. But doing it wrong is the best way to ensure that it gets shut down for another few decades.
#2: The Republicans as a group are not really backing the goal of balancing the budget. Rather, they're using the deficit (which they largely created) as the latest means of blasting back social progress to pre-New Deal levels. If not necessarily those of Feudal Europe. You know this because, while they're quick to take on a group of programs that might total 1% of the whole budget as the place to make all cuts.. ignoring the 2.5 trillion plus spent on military adventures. And they continue to cut taxes, despite the fact that tax cuts never create jobs (in fact, companies are taxed on business profit -- jobs are always a business expense). These tax cuts simply lead to less revenue, more deficit, and thus, more proposals to cut social programs. There's nothing in the mainstream Republican agenda about balancing the budget.
Not that Democrats are doing much better at this, or taking on any major programs funded out of the general tax pool (taking on Medicare and Social Security is a strawman -- these are funded via direct taxes, and if there's a shortfall, it's simple: you raise the exclusion level... tax on the first $150,000 or $200,000 or whatever, rather than the first $90,000 or whatever it is today). But I digress....
Apple loses a small percentage of their high-end, media industry users every year. In the USA, they've been replacing them, and more, with iMac buyers, won over by the iPhone. But this hasn't translated to international sales, or a significant change in their global market share, which has been hovering around 5% for over a decade (since the dust settled on the x86 Mac).
Or, to look at it another way, the iPad made nearly as much money as all Macs combined last year. A market they didn't even have in 2009. I don't think Apple's ready to toss out the Mac yet, but that does add some perspective. The engineering effort on the iPad had to be minor compared to all of the work put into all 2010 Mac models. It would be interesting to get a real ROI on each product line.
Not a shock.... they supposedly made almost as much on the iPad last year as the Macintosh PC. And the iPad wasn't even around the whole year.
The Mac has experienced a bit of the "iPhone coattails" boost in the USA recently, but not world-wide. It's been stuck at about 5% of the global PC market for years, and even after this boost, it's still usually listed as less than 6%. But the iOS devices have been growing like crazy.
And it's a very smart market to have that kind of chunk in. Apple's getting revenue from every software and hardware product sold for all iOS devices. The iPhone, being a "Phone", is tossed out and replaced every year or two... people sometimes hang on their PCs for a decade.
Apple may not be top dog on unit sales, but they're winning on profits... just what they did on PCs. That will continue to keep them in a unique position in the business.
Updates are certainly possible. Likely... that's another story. It's generally difficult to get most CE-type companies to support anything that's moved much beyond "new".
Most mobile devices don't contain H.264 decoders specifically... they contain DCT acceleration engines, which are usually capable of decoding various standards within the family: H.264, MPEG1/2, even VC-1/WMV9.
Here's the first problem: each of these is usually a proprietary trade secret. Not documented in public. TI, nVidia, QualComm, etc. may be quite capable of supporting VP8... doesn't mean they will. Or that anyone else can. Others, like Samsung or Apple, may be using similar hardware that's a standard logic block from PowerVR or ARM. Those may be a little better understood by people outside the companies. Maybe.
Either way, this is not as simple as on a desktop. H.264 as accelerated on Windows via DXVA 2.0 works exceptionally well, and it's independent of GPU type. So one well coded, accelerated VP8 decoder fixes every PC with a GPU... could be as good as H.264 overnight, new and old systems together. For portables... not so quick. And while these chip companies may well support VP8/WebM going forward, not a huge chance for devices already in the field.
Most simple STBs have even more locked down MPEG-2/AVC/VC-1 support, and probably have little need for WebM. Game consoles do it all in software/GPU anyway, but you'd need Sony or Microsoft committing to WebM support. Given they're the guys actually promoting H.264 and VC-1, respectively, I don't exactly see that happening.
On any PC with a Blu-ray disc, the BD inserts and plays just dandy. Sure, there's some kind of BD player software, but the same is also true when DVD plays -- no appropriate player software, and it fails.
Windows 7 actually does ship with the necessary components to play Blu-ray. It supports UDF 2.5 by default, and ships with MPEG-2 (at least if can play DVDs), AVC and VC-1 (standard in Windows now) CODECs. No bundled player application, but if you do have a Blu-ray player in your PC, that's included, too.
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If this is a weed-out course in computer science, why is there programming involved? Yes, as a prospective computer engineer or scientist, you do need to learn to program a computer at some practical level. But that's also true for any other engineering or science degree -- at least as true today as when I was in college in the early 80s. And at least at CMU back then, every Freshman in engineering, the sciences, probably even fields like psychology, took a computer programming course. But these were specifically not weed-out courses.
The actual weed out course (and one could rightly ask why, in a school as hard to get into as CMU, did they need additional weed-out courses, but that was 15-211 in 1980 in the CS department) had exactly one real programming assignment, and that was the last one of the course. The emphasis in the course was, as you might expect, computer science: finite state machines, turing machines, lamba calculus, various bits about the design of high level languages, etc. They eventually split the same material into two courses, and made it weed-outy.
And no, this was not a course designed to be of much practical use in a job... on the surface, anyway. But it was the gateway course to every other CS course, many of which were going to cover more practical topics, like the computer engineering or CAD course, both of which worked on large projects, with every class member contributing components, or Compiler Design (well, practical for me anyway, since I had a job writing a compiler for a few years back in the 1990s).
Note, also, that none of these are really "programming" course. If you think you need college to teach you a computer language, you have no business studying computer science or computer engineering -- go to a trade school and become a computer programmer. A computer language is something you can learn on your own in a couple of evenings, if you don't already know it. And unless you're only planning to code for a couple of years, you WILL need to do this at some point in your career. When I was in college, the big languages used at CMU, at least for undergrad projects, were Pascal (with CMU extensions) and LISP. One summer job at Bell Labs, and I had picked up two more (C and PL/M). The point of a college education should be to get you to the point where a new language is just that simple exercise of a day or two. And to teach things general concepts applicable to any programming task in any language.
Sure looks like a Nokia-killed project. And Intel, I guess, as they were partners with Nokia in this, and certainly have the funds to keep it alive indefinitely if they choose to.
The quality of Netflix video is crap. This 40GB represents about 24.5 hours of Netflixing, which is certainly a totally believable number. That's about one film at Blu-ray rates. Netflix is savvy enough to not totally piss off the average ISP, and as well, they're playing on enough small devices (BD players, game consoles) that they have to be concerned about network thoughput with smaller buffers. In short, their quality isn't getting better any time soon. And no love for more restricted systems like satellite.
Well, Bullshit anyway. Haven't heard much actual English from that side of the fence.
If the local school is able to get any cable or FiOS company to wire me in, I'll absolutely support my kids to being tortured with the typical snowday or two we're likely to experience in rural South Jersey. Some people are going to have to be provided with PCs, too, to make this work.
Hurry up, though... only one kid left in public school....
Duh. Everyone knows Apple is a religion. This is like studying the effect of guys seeing beer or tits, and being surprised that they're stimulated in the way everyone else in the country knows as a given.
Like many FOSS projects, the development itself isn't open.... Google does all the work, gets a new version to the point it needs a device. Then they anoint one new device, such as the Xoom in the Honeycomb case, and work with the associated company to get a release done. The rest of the OEMs don't get the source until the day that device ships.
I think this is the big mistake. It's definitely a legit case for holding back source distribution -- the code that's released to the OEMs is probably not even beta quality. It certainly hasn't seen a proper amount of outside testing. This probably worked ok for simple releases, as we've seen with 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, etc. And not so well with the Honeycomb devices, even ignoring that the phone code is "all messed up". On the other hand, it's on the overall better to not release code that's not better tested, as long as this ultimately doesn't become an excuse for never releasing the code.
Their ability to exercise quality control in this case is coupled to their ability to exorcise the old code... push OTA updates to Xooms and a handful of other Honeycomb devices, and the old bugs are gone forever (assuming they're fixed in the update). Release that code and you have the same buggy code out there on every other tablet, smart phone, and who knows what. Maybe in very small quantities, sure, but it's going to damage the reputation of Android, more than a delay to wait for a better release will. Again, as long as we're not waiting forever.
Here's the problem... a show called "Ghost Hunters" on a "science fiction" channel. Yeah, we know it's all fake, but it's too reality to be on a sci-fi channel, and not fake enough to find actual ghosts and be even slightly entertaining. Watching a bunch of dunderheads poke around in the dark and jump at every sound and shadow is not entertaining.
As for wrestling.. that actually is science fiction. If the quality were not so bad that it makes "Dinoshark vs. Ultragator" look like Kubrick or Spielberg, more geeks might tune in. Or people in general. Why (weakly) try to convince people it's real, when everyone knows it's not? How about some deadly weapons, cyborgs, arms and legs being hacked off ("I'm not dead yet!"), etc.
You can't always get more. I need 100 more ... the cheapest fab I can find has a minimum run of ten 300mm wafers... you get 2500 chips per wafer, etc. And I'm the only one who needs one this year? No thanks... I'll do better buying from an actual chip company.
The real answer is that you're safe with the open design in an FPGA, because there will always be some big evil chip company making FPGAs. Then again, they also make microcontrollers, CPUs, SOCs, etc. and aren't going to stop anytime soon. I do not believe this approach buys anyone additional security in their ability to obtain a specific micro.
CPUs, in particular, thrive on volume. The main reason RISC largely failed on the desktop wasn't that RISC couldn't keep up with x86, it was simply that RISC couldn't afford to keep up with x86. Intel can amortize development costs over 100M+ devices per year. And ok, sure, they charge a premium right now. So how about ARM... they come from multiple suppliers, and at least some of the cost of development is amortized over 1000M+ devices per year. I can buy a basic ARM7TDMI SOC starting at under $3.00.... and that's single quantity, on DigiKey. Ok, you need a bit more juice to run Linux, sure. An ARM Cortex A8 SOC from TI, at 800MHz, will run you as little as $27.50, again, single quantity.
In short, there are dozens of companies making microprocessors and microcontrollers, and there's intense pressure on price. It hard to imagine this project yielding anything competitive on either price or performance. Without that, where's your market? If every FOSS enthusiast drops their x86s or whatever and buys one, all this does is slow down the rate of code development a few orders of magnitude.
I like the idea of open source hardware based on FPGAs, from a purely hacker's appeal point of view. Not every computer needs to be used for "real work". I've attended a number of retro-computing shows, having been involved in some of the more popular computers from Pennsylvania, back before they were "classics". The folks who still hack these things do so because hacking the computer is their hobby. Not Linux, not photography or video or websurfing or CAD or anything else that makes the modern computer a tool -- the computer itself is their passion. But once the computer is just a tool, why choose a poor tool?
I mean, sure, you could make hammers in your back yard and invite people to bring steel or lead or whatever else they had, some coal, etc. and throw hammer making parties, get out from under the repressive hardware manufacturers' thumb. But I'll probably just get mine at Sears, thanks.
The question I would really have: even if they can do it, after all the cost cutting and everything, is there any chance of the end result actually beating a state of the art FPGA on cost, much less an off-the-shelf micro or SOC.
Apple never brought "it" in-house. What they bought were the chip designers, not the fab. PA-Semi and Intrinsity are both fabless. Quite a few big semiconductor companies are: Qualcomm, Broadcom, nVidia, Marvell, SanDisk, Xilinx, Altera, etc.
Yes... software itself is just a document. You need a machine to actually violate the patent. That's why MS is going after B&N, not Google. Well, that, and Google's cash reserves, I rekon.
MS may not want to go directly after Google. But not just because Google has huge cash reserves, their own legal staff, and less love for Microsoft than most companies MS goes after. But as well, Google doesn't really make hardware.
The whole loophole by which software patents were made "legal" in the 80s was the idea that the simple fact of software being part of a hardware system was not sufficient to invalidate the patentability of the whole system. This sort of makes sense... here's my system. The PTO had previously held that if this black box contained hardware (electronics, mechanicals) that was ok, but if I were to replace that box with something that also contained software, it couldn't be patented. Anyway, that's the essence of how all these software patents started being issued.
So, in order to maintain this loophole, it's not the software alone that violates a patent. You can't go after Google for developing the software, because alone, that software doesn't do anything ... it's just a document. The software causes some piece of hardware to actually violate the patent. So that's who Microsoft goes after... it's an easier case, and there are more royalties to be had. And, of course, if their real purpose is to spread FUD about Android, they don't even have to care about royalties. They just want to frighten the next guy away from using Android or Linux.
There's an awfully good chance Microsoft knows these "violating patents" are drek. They also understand the difficulty of fighting patents in court, simply because the presumption is that a granted patent is valid. It's a long and expensive process.
However, with the patents revealed, all sorts of other parties get involved. And if there's a patent of absurdity in these patents, whether its blatent disregard to obvious prior art, or simply Microsoft making absurd claims of what they do cover, the case could go well beyond B&N. The PTO themselves could launch an investigation, for example, if there's a patten of abuse of the process by Microsoft on these patents. As well, they presumably have licensees paying for these now, who also have a financial interest in seeing these killed. But under NDA, they really don't know each other. When done in public, this could be much worse for MS than they counted on.
And I like B&N's attitude on the NDA -- there is absolutely no legal reason B&N needs to consider signing that NDA. If they're going to court for patent violation, Microsoft will eventually have to put up or shut up. In public.
There are a couple of reasons a company will use patents offensively. One big one is simple: to make money. In this case, it's fairly critical that the company has either very solid and very current patents, that they have hundreds or thousands of patents to throw your way, and/or that they price the patent licensing such that it's ultimately more expensive to fight than to pay.
There may be other reasons for a company to license, too. For example, Microsoft could be after money, but if they're going after a modern smart phone company, they may also be worried about getting hit with patents themselves. So they may really be after a cross-license.
An example of all of this was IBM in the late 80s. I was a primary technical adviser to Commodore's legal team when IBM came after the Amiga computer. IBM had some amazingly awful patents in those days: they had a department that had learned to hack the patent system, and they had flooded the PTO with thousands of software patents with absolute mountains of prior art. But the PTO didn't even have software people in those days. So how, for example, would the examiner have known that IBM's 1984 application for "Cut and Paste Between Multiple Text Buffers" (or whatever they called it) perfectly described the behavior of Emacs in the 1970s.
But IBM had pretty unlimited patents. If you succeeded in defending or invalidating that first stack of 25-50 patents, they'd be happy to toss another 25-50 your way. The licensing arrangements charged for 1, 2, or 3-or-more. So basically, you had to fight off nearly everything to be able to not sign a licensing deal. And IBM was also after our patents, back then. They pretty much wanted a cross license with every other computer company, so they wouldn't have to worry about being caught on something.
So there's a very good chance HTC just found it easier to sign with MS than fight them. Maybe it was just chump change to them... they're not going to be paying royalties on hardware sold outside of the US, in all likelihood. And perhaps they also wanted a cross licensing deal with MS, who knows. That says absolutely nothing about the validity of the patents.
Patent holders with shaky patents (which includes many if not most software patents) have to be careful, too, about rousing a foe. If MS does go to court and has some of these patents struck down, that's very bad news for them. Since these licensing agreements are all done in secret for the most part, no one really knows the details of all their agreements. But it might mean dozens or hundreds of companies paying on the basis of one of these dead patents, who will not only stop paying, but possibly end cross-licensing, sue Microsoft, etc. And this makes any of their other patents more likely to come under the magnifying glass. If there's enough patent abuse, the PTO may step in and re-examine these, without the need for opponents to pay for an expensive trial.
And of course, B&N and their lawyers know this.
The original purpose of a patent was never to stifle the competition... quite the opposite. The patent gave you a very temporary monopoly (17 years from date of acceptance, originally, back in an era in which nothing all that significant happened technologically in 5-10 year spans) in exchange for your publicly revealing the specific process of your invention. This would allow others to build new things on top of your invention.
As well, the invention doesn't cover an idea. Rather, it's a very specific implementation of a "useful" process or machine. Nothing abstract can or should be patented. They've kind of fallen off track on that part at the PTO, but haven't really justified why. I know originally, at least in the early days of software patents, software couldn't actually violate any patent... it was your hardware running the software that in effect violated someone's software patent. That's why, even today, Microsoft or Apple sue the Android HW companies, not Google itself, if they think they have some patents to hold over Android.
Someone really should be arguing against some of the ludicrous ways in which patents are awarded. I mean, software patents are bad, but not even the worst. There are a slew of "business method" patents that basically just take something we've done for thousands of years, tacked "on the internet" to it, and essentially patented not a specific method or process of doing this thing on the internet, but the basic idea.
They'll make up at least a chunk of it in sponsorships ("Coke: first soft drink on Mars") and licensing: toys, video games, film, television. Companies like Coke, Annheiser-Bush (at least before InBev), etc. easily spend over 1/10th of the total NASA budget each year on ads. Billions in product licensing for things like Star Wars. They could certainly generate a chunk of change this way.
The US actually can afford universal healthcare. If you look any county that's enacted it, they're spending about half of what we're spending on healthcare, and getting a much better result. The fundamental flaw in the US is that there is no organized healthcare, it's all health insurance. Which is absolutely the wrong approach to healthcare.
The US lacks the political will to enact universal healthcare. It's only about money when you look at the millions spent by the insurance industry to buy Congress and ensure they get to keep making record profits selling health insurance. And the "Obamacare" reforms, while they do cover more people, do not alter this in any fundamental way -- it's still largely a big handout to the insurance industry.
I'm personally for space travel, whether it directly stimulates the economy or not. Solving any big technical problem does eventually mean a real technological trickle-down into the economy -- the only kind of trickle-down proven to actually work. Of course, the so called budget hawks out there will look at the relatively tiny budget at NASA (about $18 billion) as a waste, despite the huge potential.... and ignore the trillions being spent on the military.
The reality of the problem, though, is that these things aren't usually built out of new funds... they're more than likely re-directing NASA's budget, yet again. So the "real science" guys, who don't think we get much science out of manned space exploration, get kneecapped.
And I actually do agree... we don't get as much real science out of manned space exploration, at least in terms of astrophysics, etc. But I think we get more engineering benefits. And maybe something else, too... I think it's a big emotional stimulation. The Space Program was a big reason why 60's kids like me became the engineers that delivered the Personal Computer and Internet revolutions. The entire NASA budget is less than month of just one of the wars we're fighting, to put it in perspective. And we actually get something in return for it.
#1: This may be asking to simply re-target NASA's existing budget. The moon mission stuff under Bush did essentially that... and it was fairly unpopular within the scientific community -- grandstanding stuff drawing funds away from real science.
I don't reject the idea of actual human space travel, not at all. But doing it wrong is the best way to ensure that it gets shut down for another few decades.
#2: The Republicans as a group are not really backing the goal of balancing the budget. Rather, they're using the deficit (which they largely created) as the latest means of blasting back social progress to pre-New Deal levels. If not necessarily those of Feudal Europe. You know this because, while they're quick to take on a group of programs that might total 1% of the whole budget as the place to make all cuts.. ignoring the 2.5 trillion plus spent on military adventures. And they continue to cut taxes, despite the fact that tax cuts never create jobs (in fact, companies are taxed on business profit -- jobs are always a business expense). These tax cuts simply lead to less revenue, more deficit, and thus, more proposals to cut social programs. There's nothing in the mainstream Republican agenda about balancing the budget.
Not that Democrats are doing much better at this, or taking on any major programs funded out of the general tax pool (taking on Medicare and Social Security is a strawman -- these are funded via direct taxes, and if there's a shortfall, it's simple: you raise the exclusion level... tax on the first $150,000 or $200,000 or whatever, rather than the first $90,000 or whatever it is today). But I digress....
Apple loses a small percentage of their high-end, media industry users every year. In the USA, they've been replacing them, and more, with iMac buyers, won over by the iPhone. But this hasn't translated to international sales, or a significant change in their global market share, which has been hovering around 5% for over a decade (since the dust settled on the x86 Mac).
Or, to look at it another way, the iPad made nearly as much money as all Macs combined last year. A market they didn't even have in 2009. I don't think Apple's ready to toss out the Mac yet, but that does add some perspective. The engineering effort on the iPad had to be minor compared to all of the work put into all 2010 Mac models. It would be interesting to get a real ROI on each product line.
Not a shock.... they supposedly made almost as much on the iPad last year as the Macintosh PC. And the iPad wasn't even around the whole year.
The Mac has experienced a bit of the "iPhone coattails" boost in the USA recently, but not world-wide. It's been stuck at about 5% of the global PC market for years, and even after this boost, it's still usually listed as less than 6%. But the iOS devices have been growing like crazy.
And it's a very smart market to have that kind of chunk in. Apple's getting revenue from every software and hardware product sold for all iOS devices. The iPhone, being a "Phone", is tossed out and replaced every year or two... people sometimes hang on their PCs for a decade.
Apple may not be top dog on unit sales, but they're winning on profits... just what they did on PCs. That will continue to keep them in a unique position in the business.
Updates are certainly possible. Likely... that's another story. It's generally difficult to get most CE-type companies to support anything that's moved much beyond "new".
Most mobile devices don't contain H.264 decoders specifically... they contain DCT acceleration engines, which are usually capable of decoding various standards within the family: H.264, MPEG1/2, even VC-1/WMV9.
Here's the first problem: each of these is usually a proprietary trade secret. Not documented in public. TI, nVidia, QualComm, etc. may be quite capable of supporting VP8... doesn't mean they will. Or that anyone else can. Others, like Samsung or Apple, may be using similar hardware that's a standard logic block from PowerVR or ARM. Those may be a little better understood by people outside the companies. Maybe.
Either way, this is not as simple as on a desktop. H.264 as accelerated on Windows via DXVA 2.0 works exceptionally well, and it's independent of GPU type. So one well coded, accelerated VP8 decoder fixes every PC with a GPU... could be as good as H.264 overnight, new and old systems together. For portables... not so quick. And while these chip companies may well support VP8/WebM going forward, not a huge chance for devices already in the field.
Most simple STBs have even more locked down MPEG-2/AVC/VC-1 support, and probably have little need for WebM. Game consoles do it all in software/GPU anyway, but you'd need Sony or Microsoft committing to WebM support. Given they're the guys actually promoting H.264 and VC-1, respectively, I don't exactly see that happening.
On any PC with a Blu-ray disc, the BD inserts and plays just dandy. Sure, there's some kind of BD player software, but the same is also true when DVD plays -- no appropriate player software, and it fails.
Windows 7 actually does ship with the necessary components to play Blu-ray. It supports UDF 2.5 by default, and ships with MPEG-2 (at least if can play DVDs), AVC and VC-1 (standard in Windows now) CODECs. No bundled player application, but if you do have a Blu-ray player in your PC, that's included, too.