Aehso’s Output

I got a useful email from a Yukiko Ogura (secretary, at ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29) pointing me to an article on jpeg.org’s website regarding the patent situation on JPEG.

It looks like the ISO or ITU-T have never been dragged into the whole debacle, but they are making historical archives of the process that was undertaken during JPEG standardization available to members of JPEG.org. I guess since they don’t operate within just one jurasdiction that’s about all they can do. Was the onus on Forgent to declare their patent way back in the early stages of the standardization process? The FAQ statement seems to imply that ISO were unaware, but it doesn’t state what the implications are.

Sorry to hear you’re about to get hit with a storage tax. But hey, it’s the EU, it’s an open market - go buy your hardware in Germany, Belgium or Luxemburg. And never, ever buy a music in the Netherlands again - buy it from an online service elsewhere.

I have a history of not treating my phones with much respect. I think the longest one has ever lasted is my current SonyEricsson T610 - after a year, I think it’s about to crack, literally.

I got mildly excited when I saw Nokia’s latest toy today - the N91 phone.

The good points:

• It has 3G, Wifi(!) and Bluetooth wireless networking
• 4Gigs of storage
• Plays MP3s
• A decent colour screen

The bad points:

• Storage is hard drive based, not flash (1Gig of flash would have been plenty!)
• No FM Tuner
• A below average 2 megapixel camera
• Crap battery life (I charge my phone once a week, not once a day)
• The price tag (a small fortune no doubt)

Oh well…

I ended up at Microsoft’s homepage today and was greeted by a far more colourful affair than ever before - are they trying to do an Apple on their homepage or something? There’s no more “3 ways to ensure your system is protected (1) Stop downloading p0rn, 2) stop using P2P networks and 3) buy one or all of these firewall products because the OS you’re using is defenseless).

Oh, the reason I was at microsoft’s page? I was looking for something that could remove a lot document metadata that Microsoft Word insists in retaining. I discovered a document that I was about to send to a customer contained revision histories from several earlier unrelated projects - folks in work had used the CTRL-A, Delete, type-like-crazy approach instead of starting with a clean document template each time. I found what I was looking for - the Office 2003/XP Add-in: Remove Hidden Data. Yet another hour wasted with MS tools.

Forgent “own” JPEG - that’s right, the image encoding format used by every man and his dog on the internet for the past 15 years is “owned” by one company who recently (with the aid of a large team of rabid lawyers no doubt) managed to squeeze over $100 million out of some of the largest hardware, software & media companies in the world - Sony included. Most of their customers settled up front for past and future use, some for the paltry sum of $15million. If you want to read the patent in question, go to the US Patent office and search for “4,698,672″.

Standing on the shoulders of giants my ar$e - these guys are just a bunch of chancers with no history of innovation. It would appear they may have bitten off more than they can chew, when they tried milking Microsoft - they have been counter sued and given Microsoft’s recent tangle with Eolas, they won’t give in easly.

Over two years ago, it was reported that the ISO would withdraw ISO/IEC 10918-1:1994 which was based on JPEG encoding/decoding but looking at their website now, the standard is still a published standard - one wonders why?

Here’s a quote from a piece in Imaging Resource over two years ago:

…since this item broke we’ve seen much comment around the web to the effect that other standards should be used - perhaps the most commonly suggested being PNG (Portable Network Graphics). The problem is that it is difficult - if not impossible - to be sure that any standard doesn’t infringe on a patent you’re not even aware of. This was the case with the GIF standard, which CompuServe developed whilst being unaware that UniSys held a patent on the compression method it used. There’s also the possibility of patents being issued whilst a standard is being debated, or potentially even after it has been finalised. This is where the real problem lies.

This whole patent thing will have us all going around in circles chasing our tails, solving the same problems in a multitude of different ways just to avoid what everyone else is doing. That doesn’t bode well for interoperability and hetrogenous networking, the foundations of the IP and the internet as we know it today. Speaking of which, Microsoft have been served with an injunction against shipping Longhorn because a small startup called Alacritech has a patent on the idea of offloading TCP network traffic from the main server CPU. It goes on and on and on…

Still want software patents in the EU?

There’s a debate today in the European Parliament on the software patent directive and Michel Rocard, the Parliament’s rapporteur (and former French prime minister to boot) has submitted a great report for discussion at the debate. The FFII even like it.

Lets hope this debate leads to the amendments Rocard outlines.

Ars Technica have referenced a note on the Apple support site that basically says they broke something big in Java with Panther Update 10.3.9.

I like their way of detecting if your system is affected:

“open up a Terminal window and type java -version. If you get the message “segmentation fault” then you will need to follow the workaround”

LOL.

At least there is a way to recover though.

Kudos to the Beeb! Via iPodder, iTunes & my iPod, I’ve been listening to weekly podcasts of Fighting Talk (quick-fire sports journalism with a cutting edge) and Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time for some time now. In Our Time in particular is a fascinating program that in recent weeks has covered topics as diverse as Stoicism, The Mind and Body Problem, Alchema, Angels and Dark Energy - philosophy topics you just don’t learn about in school

Yesterday, the BBC announced they will begin podcasting 20 more radio shows. I’m looking forward to a listen-to-when-I-want-to diet of more excellent Beeb content like From Our Own Correspondent and The Reith Lectures 2003

I have scratched my head more than once and wondered how Sony initally missed the boat in the portable MP3 players market. On its own, it looks like they bet the wrong way but I found a fascinating Wired article about The Civil War Inside Sony that explains the internal conflicts this new market presents for Sony.

The shocker? This article was written in February 2003 - amazing how much has changed since then. Equally amazing, I’m sure, were the boardroom meetings between Sony Music and Sony Electronics over the past few years.

I recently went through a little bit of hassle getting Linux onto my old Dell Inspiron 5000e at home but once I tried MandrakeLinux (now known as “Mandriva Linux”) everything went incredibly smoothly. Well, OK, it took a while to get my 3Com 802.11b card working but only because they were not allowed to distribute the firmware (thanks Luis) for the prism54 kernel module that shipped with Mandrake.

Anyway, to get to the point, SlashDot linked to what is supposed to be The State of Linux On Laptops, 2005. Any mention of Mandrake? Or Red Hat, or Debian, Gentoo? Not a sausage. Oh dear, note to SlashDot editors - do *some* quality control on the submissions you are posting…