Fixed term would be my preference. say 10-20 years. 10 by default, and extra with fees. Keep em transferable, but after 20, not matter what its public domain.
But the current terms are far too long. We need to redo the Bern convention. This goes for patents as well.
Not sure why this is modded funny. Since this is the point, it should be informative or something. The joke is that some folk think this stuff is somehow inventive. The functions are very obvious.
Much of this DVR technology is "obvious" now but when TIVO first began building these boxes there was no one out there doing it.
This does not make it non-obvious. In fact it was and still is obvious. Circular buffers are obvious and guess what, have been used in broadcasting since the magnetic tape.
I have posted/shipped things in the US. There is nothing easy or timely about it. If I'm going to a conference I don't schedule an extra day of travel so I can still have a laptop at that conference.
Sorry, but right along with a lot of others. Its still too much and I will not come to the US with this policy in place. There are plenty of other places to go and the good conferences are world wide, and are in fact cutting the US out of the loop.
That is in fact a really good idea. But you know what, there are a lot of R&D folk without a job if you recycle designs, even good ones. NASA and aerospace in general is just as much pork as other high government funded sectors.
Before these things were baned in F1 racing (traction control and ASB type brakes, but I think they are allowed anti skid braking now) all the cars had them. So a F1 driver is quicker around a race track pulling 3g in turns and 4g braking and at the very least is safer. But *you* are better off without them? Perhaps you should give them some pointers. Or perhaps you aren't as good a driver as you think you are.
The main reason ABS is a good thing is that you can still steer the car, which you can't do if locked up. Also the static friction coefficient is *higher* than the dynamic friction coefficient.
I really don't quite get this. If you can't buy something because *credit* has dried up, then well the fact is that you didn't have the money in the first place. If you can only "afford" something with a line of credit, then by definition you couldn't afford it in the first place, right. Same logic applies for companies.
In fact the temperature is higher but reentry is much faster and hence there is less time for the hot reentry air to deposit this heat into the craft. So a capsule needs to handle higher temperatures (hence ablative heat sheilds) for less time than say the space shuttle. But the total amount of heat energy is less. This of course does not work for hypersonic craft as they don't want to slow down, while the whole point of reentry is to slow down without using rocket fuel.
It depends on the design/shape of the object. But generally a bit above mach 1. A blunt reentry object will cause a very strong shock wave at the front of the craft and will cause much more heating than a sharp object. Once you hit about Mach 5 IIRC the heating issue is getting quite serious. Reentry is about >7000m/s (speed of sound at that height does not really make sense) and causes extreme heating no matter what the design. For comparison Mach 1 is about 350 m/s at sea level.
Well as a non EU person in the EU I am required to carry ID everywhere (more or less). It really does not bother me, I mean a cop or border personnel can find out my name and resident status. Big deal so what. Knowing my name is not an invasion of my privacy.
But there is a difference between "here" and "there". The information from boarder crossing etc are well protected by privacy laws here in most of the EU. This is not the case in the US. And as someone has posted below. The fear in the UK is that the ID are backed by a national database with fingerprint information and that sort of thing.
So the fear is not the idea of a ID card per say, but rather the lack of checks and balances in place.
Its really not all that bad. What we need is say, a local name space for each county. Then if that country wants xxx.$COUNTRYCODE they can. Oh wait a minute we already have that!
Here in Austria most people will use some *.at address and if not then *.de etc. What country the Website is in matters. The only problem is not so much the top level domains but the perhaps less than ideal distribution of root servers. As I understand they are somewhat distributed, but are still very dependent on a root-root server rather than a true distributed system.
However as I live in Vienna I can say that moving the control over to the UN will not improve matters at all.
Try breathing the martin atmosphere and weighing only a few dozen kgs and eat nothing but sunsine below zero. We haven't even started with how you got there.
Soft humans are not as well adapted to space and mars as you seem to think.
Dev time. There are more people working on xvid etc than theora. Folks seem to be more interested in helping out the patent encumbered formats by providing good encoders and decoders. While the bulk (if not all) of Theora work is done by only a few people. And thats a lot of work even if you get to do it full time.
A patent free codec is still good as long as its pretty close to say mpeg4. It would end up in a lot of games etc, and it keeps everyone else playing nice because there are alternatives. It not going to replace mpeg4/h.264 anymore than mp3 was replaced with vorbis, unless MPEG-LA gets stroppy with the OS encoders and decoders and the fees for produced content.
Is it still illegal if you are with your parents. I mean the whole drinking age thing in the US is weird enough (its 16 for beer and wine here), but surly you are allowed a beer at family parties/occasions?
So now I can't also distribute binary but my freedom is not affected? I don't think I would want to test source=ok, binarys=!ok as far as patent law is concerned with my wallet. Economic harm is all thats needed if software patents are valid.
Theoretically true, although that hasn't happened much in practice, at least in this space.
So you pay a crap load of money and only don't get sued much? Thats a raw deal. There has been at least one case I know of with mpeg4 | h.264, and thats a lot more than what both theora and dirac have had to deal with. Add the fact that theora is based on VP3 with a active company now with VP7. That they are active with this "IP".
and don't have the market effect of lots of companies looking for patents to assert to get a share of the MPEG-LA revenue.
And yet these codecs are the only ones that have any history of problems.
Have you actually all of the H.264 or VC-1 patents?
Not all, but most of them. I even got "advice" and we did decide that most could be overturned with prior art, patenting math, and obviousness. But the cost and most importantly *time* that this would take... Its not that there is one, its that there 10+ or more for each company in the pool.
If anything H.264 and VC-1 are much more reasonable than MPEG-2...
This is true. Its a lot better. And yet still discriminates against OS ideals of freedom and free. Yes you lose freedom, no matter how slice it.
There are patents that are free to license for free GPL type products. These do not reduce freedom. The patents we are talking about do. Software patents in general do. Our freedom is reduced if they apply to code we write.
Another problem is what you are expected to sign up to when you get a license. This license itself is also restrictive. So if you donate that +3 million per annum cap to the mplayer/ffmpeg whatever group so they can release legal worldwide free codecs, I think you will find that the license will prevent this. After all what would all the other licensees think.... If the license dose not prevent this it would not take long to do so, as mpeg-la reduce themselfs to a single licensee (everyone else can just use mplayer/ffmpeg code even in hardware players).
The same people that think youtube videos are good enough or even good. Really a lot of people don't see the artifacts. I showed my wife what some look like and she kicked me, because now she can see them too. I also find that when you up the bitrate for "artifact" free encoding, h.264/mpeg4 etc all perform about the same. The differences come out at low bitrate where I'm not all that interested.
You are right and wrong. If I want to keep MPEG-LA happy, i need to pay quite a bit of money if there are more than 100K downloads IIRC. For a open source project that is *not* selling the code it is a lot of money. Most OS projects are not done with money, but with time.
How many copies of mplayer do you think are out there? Its a lot more than 100K copies.
But here is the real rub. Even if you pay the fees, they give *no* guarantee what so ever that you are not infringing some other patent.
Also these non discriminatory terms are crap. If the fee is high enough, it discriminates plenty. Add to that the bulk of these patents are utter rubbish. I would say there are not with the spirit of anything free, freedom, beer, or otherwise.
All the R&D papers I have read and from folk in the field working on this. Its well recognized that psychoacoustic models are far more developed than psycho visual models.
I don't doubt that some people can tell the difference between flac and mp3/ogg/aac. But the true number is far less than the claimed number (do a proper blind test to really find out). Also you don't design codecs for 0.5% of the population that can hear the difference, but for the 90% that can't and the other 9.5% that don't care.
Now its a fact that PSNR is used in most encoders. Its also widely recognized that it is not a good measure. I have done my own image compression and got better PSNR than jpeg per bit, and yet it looked far worse.
So I'm not really sure where you getting the idea that is even in the same category as audio.
In sound the idea of masking works really well. That is if there is a loud sound at a particular frequency we tend to not be able to hear sounds that are a low in pitch and a bit quieter (IIRC). Its effectively masked. The other big advantage is also the linear nature of sound.
But the human visual system is a *lot* more complicated. IIRC about 1/3 or our brains are used for visual perception. Currently we use PSNR (Peek signal to noise ratio) as a measure. But this has been shown many times to be a very poor indication of what we perceive. One example is blocking. Blocking cause straight lines to form in the image and our brains lock on to them far more quickly that other artifacts.
Next is the colour and the 2d nature of a image. Then add that the eyes do a bunch of preprocessing on motion perception and its getting quite difficult. Finally we have the method of comparison. Which often involves comparing still images from the video stream. Yet if thats a high motion scene the codec might be better off encoding these frames with low quality because we can't perceive the quality loss combined with fast motion.
Lets also not forget how many people think youtube is good quality or at worse, good enough!
This is a big point. The Encoder is far more important that the rest of the codec. Folks talk about xvid and divx as if they are codecs when really they are different encoders for mpeg4.
Both Theora and Dirac have plenty of space to move with regard to encoders.
However there is no easy way to measure "distortion" of the encoded image that matches the human visual system all that well. (unlike audio). But I expect most codecs to get better in the next few years because of encoders. (including h264).
Ironically h264 does so well because of the availability of a free, fast and good quality encoder done my the community. Not the license owners.
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Fixed term would be my preference. say 10-20 years. 10 by default, and extra with fees. Keep em transferable, but after 20, not matter what its public domain.
But the current terms are far too long. We need to redo the Bern convention. This goes for patents as well.
Not sure why this is modded funny. Since this is the point, it should be informative or something. The joke is that some folk think this stuff is somehow inventive. The functions are very obvious.
Much of this DVR technology is "obvious" now but when TIVO first began building these boxes there was no one out there doing it.
This does not make it non-obvious. In fact it was and still is obvious. Circular buffers are obvious and guess what, have been used in broadcasting since the magnetic tape.
I have posted/shipped things in the US. There is nothing easy or timely about it. If I'm going to a conference I don't schedule an extra day of travel so I can still have a laptop at that conference.
Sorry, but right along with a lot of others. Its still too much and I will not come to the US with this policy in place. There are plenty of other places to go and the good conferences are world wide, and are in fact cutting the US out of the loop.
That is in fact a really good idea. But you know what, there are a lot of R&D folk without a job if you recycle designs, even good ones. NASA and aerospace in general is just as much pork as other high government funded sectors.
I'm starting to see where this credit crisis has come from.
Before these things were baned in F1 racing (traction control and ASB type brakes, but I think they are allowed anti skid braking now) all the cars had them. So a F1 driver is quicker around a race track pulling 3g in turns and 4g braking and at the very least is safer. But *you* are better off without them? Perhaps you should give them some pointers. Or perhaps you aren't as good a driver as you think you are.
The main reason ABS is a good thing is that you can still steer the car, which you can't do if locked up. Also the static friction coefficient is *higher* than the dynamic friction coefficient.
I really don't quite get this. If you can't buy something because *credit* has dried up, then well the fact is that you didn't have the money in the first place. If you can only "afford" something with a line of credit, then by definition you couldn't afford it in the first place, right. Same logic applies for companies.
In fact the temperature is higher but reentry is much faster and hence there is less time for the hot reentry air to deposit this heat into the craft. So a capsule needs to handle higher temperatures (hence ablative heat sheilds) for less time than say the space shuttle. But the total amount of heat energy is less. This of course does not work for hypersonic craft as they don't want to slow down, while the whole point of reentry is to slow down without using rocket fuel.
It depends on the design/shape of the object. But generally a bit above mach 1. A blunt reentry object will cause a very strong shock wave at the front of the craft and will cause much more heating than a sharp object. Once you hit about Mach 5 IIRC the heating issue is getting quite serious. Reentry is about >7000m/s (speed of sound at that height does not really make sense) and causes extreme heating no matter what the design. For comparison Mach 1 is about 350 m/s at sea level.
But some people aren't, and you can't really complain about that.
I'm pretty sure I can complain about it. In fact if clueless people make clueless claims people who know better should say something.
Well as a non EU person in the EU I am required to carry ID everywhere (more or less). It really does not bother me, I mean a cop or border personnel can find out my name and resident status. Big deal so what. Knowing my name is not an invasion of my privacy.
But there is a difference between "here" and "there". The information from boarder crossing etc are well protected by privacy laws here in most of the EU. This is not the case in the US. And as someone has posted below. The fear in the UK is that the ID are backed by a national database with fingerprint information and that sort of thing.
So the fear is not the idea of a ID card per say, but rather the lack of checks and balances in place.
Its really not all that bad. What we need is say, a local name space for each county. Then if that country wants xxx.$COUNTRYCODE they can. Oh wait a minute we already have that!
Here in Austria most people will use some *.at address and if not then *.de etc. What country the Website is in matters. The only problem is not so much the top level domains but the perhaps less than ideal distribution of root servers. As I understand they are somewhat distributed, but are still very dependent on a root-root server rather than a true distributed system.
However as I live in Vienna I can say that moving the control over to the UN will not improve matters at all.
Try breathing the martin atmosphere and weighing only a few dozen kgs and eat nothing but sunsine below zero. We haven't even started with how you got there.
Soft humans are not as well adapted to space and mars as you seem to think.
Dev time. There are more people working on xvid etc than theora. Folks seem to be more interested in helping out the patent encumbered formats by providing good encoders and decoders. While the bulk (if not all) of Theora work is done by only a few people. And thats a lot of work even if you get to do it full time.
A patent free codec is still good as long as its pretty close to say mpeg4. It would end up in a lot of games etc, and it keeps everyone else playing nice because there are alternatives. It not going to replace mpeg4/h.264 anymore than mp3 was replaced with vorbis, unless MPEG-LA gets stroppy with the OS encoders and decoders and the fees for produced content.
Is it still illegal if you are with your parents. I mean the whole drinking age thing in the US is weird enough (its 16 for beer and wine here), but surly you are allowed a beer at family parties/occasions?
Yea, cus every who has a beer at a party is a alcoholic.
I mean *Beer* at a *party*!
Unless your being sarcastic in which case i missed it completely.
But if you're just distributing the source..
So now I can't also distribute binary but my freedom is not affected? I don't think I would want to test source=ok, binarys=!ok as far as patent law is concerned with my wallet. Economic harm is all thats needed if software patents are valid.
Theoretically true, although that hasn't happened much in practice, at least in this space.
So you pay a crap load of money and only don't get sued much? Thats a raw deal. There has been at least one case I know of with mpeg4 | h.264, and thats a lot more than what both theora and dirac have had to deal with. Add the fact that theora is based on VP3 with a active company now with VP7. That they are active with this "IP".
and don't have the market effect of lots of companies looking for patents to assert to get a share of the MPEG-LA revenue.
And yet these codecs are the only ones that have any history of problems.
Have you actually all of the H.264 or VC-1 patents?
Not all, but most of them. I even got "advice" and we did decide that most could be overturned with prior art, patenting math, and obviousness. But the cost and most importantly *time* that this would take... Its not that there is one, its that there 10+ or more for each company in the pool.
If anything H.264 and VC-1 are much more reasonable than MPEG-2...
This is true. Its a lot better. And yet still discriminates against OS ideals of freedom and free. Yes you lose freedom, no matter how slice it.
There are patents that are free to license for free GPL type products. These do not reduce freedom. The patents we are talking about do. Software patents in general do. Our freedom is reduced if they apply to code we write.
Another problem is what you are expected to sign up to when you get a license. This license itself is also restrictive. So if you donate that +3 million per annum cap to the mplayer/ffmpeg whatever group so they can release legal worldwide free codecs, I think you will find that the license will prevent this. After all what would all the other licensees think.... If the license dose not prevent this it would not take long to do so, as mpeg-la reduce themselfs to a single licensee (everyone else can just use mplayer/ffmpeg code even in hardware players).
The same people that think youtube videos are good enough or even good. Really a lot of people don't see the artifacts. I showed my wife what some look like and she kicked me, because now she can see them too. I also find that when you up the bitrate for "artifact" free encoding, h.264/mpeg4 etc all perform about the same. The differences come out at low bitrate where I'm not all that interested.
You are right and wrong. If I want to keep MPEG-LA happy, i need to pay quite a bit of money if there are more than 100K downloads IIRC. For a open source project that is *not* selling the code it is a lot of money. Most OS projects are not done with money, but with time.
How many copies of mplayer do you think are out there? Its a lot more than 100K copies.
But here is the real rub. Even if you pay the fees, they give *no* guarantee what so ever that you are not infringing some other patent.
Also these non discriminatory terms are crap. If the fee is high enough, it discriminates plenty. Add to that the bulk of these patents are utter rubbish. I would say there are not with the spirit of anything free, freedom, beer, or otherwise.
All the R&D papers I have read and from folk in the field working on this. Its well recognized that psychoacoustic models are far more developed than psycho visual models.
I don't doubt that some people can tell the difference between flac and mp3/ogg/aac. But the true number is far less than the claimed number (do a proper blind test to really find out). Also you don't design codecs for 0.5% of the population that can hear the difference, but for the 90% that can't and the other 9.5% that don't care.
Now its a fact that PSNR is used in most encoders. Its also widely recognized that it is not a good measure. I have done my own image compression and got better PSNR than jpeg per bit, and yet it looked far worse.
So I'm not really sure where you getting the idea that is even in the same category as audio.
In sound the idea of masking works really well. That is if there is a loud sound at a particular frequency we tend to not be able to hear sounds that are a low in pitch and a bit quieter (IIRC). Its effectively masked. The other big advantage is also the linear nature of sound.
But the human visual system is a *lot* more complicated. IIRC about 1/3 or our brains are used for visual perception. Currently we use PSNR (Peek signal to noise ratio) as a measure. But this has been shown many times to be a very poor indication of what we perceive. One example is blocking. Blocking cause straight lines to form in the image and our brains lock on to them far more quickly that other artifacts.
Next is the colour and the 2d nature of a image. Then add that the eyes do a bunch of preprocessing on motion perception and its getting quite difficult. Finally we have the method of comparison. Which often involves comparing still images from the video stream. Yet if thats a high motion scene the codec might be better off encoding these frames with low quality because we can't perceive the quality loss combined with fast motion.
Lets also not forget how many people think youtube is good quality or at worse, good enough!
As I state below. Most of codecs performance has to do with the encoder. At 1.0.0 its too early to tell if the format/codec design is limited.
However a great codec without a good encoder is no good at all. But its early days yet considering h.264 has been around for 5+ years.
This is a big point. The Encoder is far more important that the rest of the codec. Folks talk about xvid and divx as if they are codecs when really they are different encoders for mpeg4.
Both Theora and Dirac have plenty of space to move with regard to encoders.
However there is no easy way to measure "distortion" of the encoded image that matches the human visual system all that well. (unlike audio). But I expect most codecs to get better in the next few years because of encoders. (including h264).
Ironically h264 does so well because of the availability of a free, fast and good quality encoder done my the community. Not the license owners.
Thats the price difference of insisting on *maned* spacecraft vers unmanned.