posted by Thom Holwerda on Fri 11th Feb 2011 16:00 UTC, submitted by aa
Well, well, well. The MPEG-LA is showing its true colours. After a decade of threatening to patent troll the living heck out of Theora, the company led by a patent troll has now finally put its money where its mouth is. Well, sort of. They don't actually have any patents yet, they're asking people to submit patents they believe are essential to the VP8 specification. Update: MPEG (so not the MPEG-LA) has announced its intent to develop a new video compression standard for the web which will be royalty-free. "The new standard is intended to achieve substantially better compression performance than that offered by MPEG-2 and possibly comparable to that offered by the AVC Baseline Profile. MPEG will issue a call for proposals on video compression technology at the end of its upcoming meeting in March 2011 that is expected to lead to a standard falling under ISO/IEC 'Type-1 licensing', i.e. intended to be 'royalty free'."For over a decade now, the MPEG-LA has been lobbing empty threats at Theora and the rest of the video world, with the goal to ingrain in the world's collective consciousness the idea that you can't create any video codec without stepping on the patents held by its licensors. Today, they started calling for people and companies to submit licenses that these people or companies believe might be essential to VP8.
"MPEG LA, LLC, world leader in alternative one-stop patent licenses, announces a call for patents essential to the VP8 video codec specification used to deliver video images. The VP8 video codec is defined by the WebM Project at http://www.webmproject.org," the press release reads.
"In order to participate in the creation of, and determine licensing terms for, a joint VP8 patent license, any party that believes it has patents that are essential to the VP8 video codec specification is invited to submit them for a determination of their essentiality by MPEG LA’s patent evaluators," it adds.
It would seem that the MPEG-LA is getting a little bit nervous. They're looking at the massive market adoption of WebM/VP8 (browser majority, basically all chip makers except Intel), and they're seeing their license to mafia the entire video industry into paying protection money go up in smoke.
Dance monkey, dance.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/27/12 16:12 UTC, submitted by azrael29a
"What is interesting is that you can use the new system to play around and notice that Microsoft doesn't always seem to take down from its search engine, Bing, the same links that it orders Google to takedown." Funny, but since Microsoft outsources their takedown requests to a different company, most likely just a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/25/12 23:24 UTC, submitted by martini
The Verge is reporting that some important members of the WebOS developer team are going to Google. According to a reply from HP, Open webOS project is on schedule, but a number of people are indeed transferring to Google. Fun times - let's see some of that webOS in Android.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/25/12 14:55 UTC
James Hague: "But all the little bits of complexity, all those cases where indecision caused one option that probably wasn't even needed in the first place to be replaced by two options, all those bad choices that were never remedied for fear of someone somewhere having to change a line of code... They slowly accreted until it all got out of control, and we got comfortable with systems that were impossible to understand." Counterpoint by John Cook: "Some of the growth in complexity is understandable. It's a lot easier to maintain an orthogonal design when your software isn't being used. Software that gets used becomes less orthogonal and develops diagonal shortcuts." If there's ever been a system in dire need of a complete redesign, it's UNIX and its derivatives. A mess doesn't even begin to describe it (for those already frantically reaching for the comment button, note that this applies to other systems as well).
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/25/12 8:40 UTC
"Dozens of teachers specialising in computer science are to work in English schools thanks to a partnership between Google and the charity Teach First. Google's chairman Eric Schmidt said money would also be provided to buy 'teaching aids, such as Raspberry Pi's or Arduino starter kits'. He said that without investment in the subject, the UK risked 'losing a generation' of scientists." My Raspberry Pi should arrive via UPS today, assuming they don't mess up. I'll try and get a few photos and first impressions up if it does arrive.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/25/12 7:39 UTC
Dish' DVR has an 'auto-hop' feature, which automatically skips commercials on recorded TV. Fox is now suing Dish over this feature, because they claim it will destroy the business model of ad-driven television. "We were given no choice but to file suit against one of our largest distributors, Dish Network, because of their surprising move to market a product with the clear goal of violating copyrights and destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem," said Fox. This is the photographic film industry suing digital camera makers. It's so utterly absurd I can hardly believe it's for real.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/24/12 23:07 UTC
"Today, we've been informed that Apple has removed Airfoil Speakers Touch from the iOS App Store. We first heard from Apple about this decision two days ago, and we've been discussing the pending removal with them since then. However, we still do not yet have a clear answer on why Apple has chosen to remove Airfoil Speakers Touch. Needless to say, we're quite disappointed with their decision, and we're working hard to once again make the application available for you, our users. As far as we can tell, Airfoil Speakers Touch is in full compliance with Apple's posted rules and developer agreements. We've already filed an appeal with Apple's App Review Board, and we're awaiting further information. Unfortunately, Apple has full control of application distribution on iOS, leaving us with no other recourse here." Alternative headline: 'iOS 6 to greatly expand AirPlay functionality'.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/24/12 21:32 UTC
"Touchscreens, zoomable maps, page swiping, and more, all integrated into one Eames-chair-equipped media room." MIT, late '70s, and noted by Andy Hertzfeld as a direct influence for the original Macintosh. Fantastic story by The Verge. Favourite part: even back then, there was concern among the scientists that the touch screen page flipping animation was frivolous.
Linked by Howard Fosdick on 05/24/12 19:41 UTC
Hewlett Packard announced the company would lay off nearly nine percent of its 300,000 person workforce over the next two years, or about 27,000 people. The move is expected to save HP $3 billion to $3.5 billion annually. HP stock went up 5% in response to the news Thursday morning. Research firm Ovum asks "...the key missing piece is [Whitman's] long-term company vision and strategy, which hopefully will be revealed to an anxious customer base soon... the question still remains: Just what kind of company does HP want to be next year, three years, five years from now?"
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/24/12 18:46 UTC
"Intel has released the long awaited x86 system image of Ice Cream Sandwich for the Android SDK and emulator. This will allow the Android emulator (long plagued with slow and buggy performance) to run at native speed on computers using the Intel x86 architecture."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/24/12 17:23 UTC
"For their part, most Apple employees seem more than satisfied with Cook. He often sits down randomly with employees in the cafeteria at lunchtime, whereas Jobs typically dined with design chief Jonathan Ive. It is a small difference that speaks volumes about how employees can expect to interact with their CEO. At Apple, Jobs was simultaneously revered, loved, and feared. Cook clearly is a demanding boss, but he's not scary. He's well-respected, but not worshiped. As Apple enters a complex new phase of its corporate history, perhaps it doesn't need a god as CEO but a mere mortal who understands how to get the job done." A must-read. Quite fascinating.More News »
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