Posts by Vic 5860 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Dec 2007
> it wasn't actually "flying". More like just lying around making noises
That's not important.
The technical description for many forms of aircraft is stil "flying machine", even when they're parked up on the ground.
So it is with a Flying Object - it's still a Flying Object, even if it's not currently an object in flight.
Vic.
It's like how when you say 'Coke' you generally mean 'Coca Cola' and not Pepsi, even though technically you could mean both
Not so. "Coke" is a Registered Trademark of the Coca-Cola Company (it even says so on their advertising), and does not mean Pepsi, which has its own Registered Trademarks.
I should've known the Linux comment would've got me downvotes though
Indeed you should. Bigotry of all kinds tends to be downvoted here, and I for one am glad of that.
Vic.
> Apart from the fact that salvage laws basically apply to seagoing vessels and cargoes
Salvage law applies to pretty much anything retrieved from the water. The purpose of that law is to encourage people to raise stuff that can be salvaged, no matter what its provenance.
> salvage entitles you to a monetary reward related to the value of the salvage
Most salvage laws[1] entitle the salvor to a claim against the wreck; that *might* be monetary, or it might be ownership (or part-ownership). That's generally down to the agreement struck between salvor and owner. In the event of such an agreement not being forthcoming, the Authorities will settle the matter - in the UK, that's a job performed by the Receiver of Wreck. I don't know what law has jurisdiction where this wreck was found.
Vic.
[1] Salvage laws do differ dramatically from place to place, but the core concept generally seems to be the same.
> as if they have a right to walk alongside - and in front of - cars
Other than in certain prohibited areas (such as motorways), they do indeed have that right. It's all in the Highway Code.
If you can't deal with that happening, perhaps you'd like to reconsider the agreement you made when you accepted a driving licence...
Vic.
> extensive driver training and enforcement does not work that well.
I'm not aware of any country that does either of those.
Most countries do *minimal* training and superficial enforcement. Except when it comes to speed cameras, of course...
Vic.
> the government went to Verisign et al. and told them "you have to help us decrypt this traffic"
My server has a self-signed, out-of-date certificate.
If ever I connect and I *don't* get a warning, I know someone is intercepting the traffic.
The fingerprintprint lives on a piece of paper in my wallet (I usually only check each end from memory).
Vic.
> its obscene complexity actually threatens security rather than enforces it
It does not.
SELinux does not permit operations that would otherwise be disallowed; it further restricts operations to the contexts in which they should be performed.
In the event that the policy prevents an operation which ought to be allowed - usually because the files in question are local to this machine only, and have not been labelled at all - the operation fails. This is why so many people disable SELinux.
In the event that the policy permits an operation that should be prevented, that operation only succeeds if the underlying DAC permits it; in other words, it is *exactly* the same situation as if SELinux were disabled.
SELinux is very far from perfect, but it does not threaten security.
Vic.
> In the 30 at least one sub was built with a (small) aircraft hangar.
HMS M2 was launched in 1919. She sank in 1932. It is believed that the hangar door was opened before she was fully clear of the water.
She iles in about 35m of water just off Portland. A nice dive the last time I was there...
Vic.
> Don't forget colour resolution while we're at it.
Actually, chroma resolution really isn't that important. Even contribution encoding - where you are encoding video from, say, an OB to feed into the broadcaster's network - typically subsamples to 4:2:2. Broadcast video is generally lower - often 4:2:0. And all that happens before the compressor, which drops resolution again.
We're actually not very sensitive to chroma changes; luma is where it matters.
Vic.
> Fact is the average user isn't trained to see the difference between a good and bad picture.
When Sky Digital first launched, I walked into a TV shifter shop. Dixons, Currys, one of them.
The salesman was making a huge fuss about how clear the picture was, how much better it was than I had ever seen. I had to tell him to stop lying to me.
He was initially affronted, but calmed down somewhat when I explained to him that I knew what digital TV looked like, and it certainly wasn't supposed to have a very clear VHS hum bar in the middle of the screen...
Vic.
> other coding techniques using models etc. that actually "inerpret" what is being viewed
H.264 has various modes that do that. I don't believe any broadcasters are currently using those modes, though.
> These have the potential to make the whole framerate/resolution discussion a little redundant
No they don't. They *might* cause the mean bitrate to be reduced, but you still have the huge requirement at synthetic edges, even if it's no longer a true I-frame. That either means you need headroom (which costs money), or you get fields of artefacts at scene changes...
Vic.
> you haven't seen how badly sky compress the *normal* SD stuff,
A vicious rumour from way back when said that the extra compression wasn't to "make room" for the HD content, it was to give it a reason to exist...
That's second-hand, though. I haven't even been to Sky in a decade.
Vic.
> but think the conductive quality of the two or three metres of cable in their own house matters.
For home kit, you're absolutely right.
For professional kit, it's a little different - if you're setting up a PA, it needs to work. The couple of quid extra you pay for gold-flashed connectors is nothing compared to the hussle of having a dodgy lead in a live show. Think of it as insurance :-)
Vic.
> while some people sit close enough to their screens to make high definition worthwhile, most don't
The "worthwhile" nature of these resolutions comes about as screen sizes grow. We've got a load of 4K kit here, and it looks *beautiful*. On an very big telly.
I still cannot for the life of me understand why people want to stream HDTV over 3G/4G to a mobile phone. But that's what people pay for...
Vic.
> a light flickering at 50 Hz appears, to almost everyone, as a constant unvarying light
That depends on how you look at it.
Human vision is essentially made up of two parts - the high-resolution, full colour bit in the centre of yuor vision (the "foveal view"), and the low-resolution, monochrome bit[1] that surrounds it.
The monochrome sensors are *much* more sensitive and *much* faster to react; they may well see a 50Hz[2] LED as flickering, but once you turn your eyeballs to look at the light, you will see it as steady...
Vic.
[1] Most of what you can currently see is actually viewed in monochrome, with your eyes & brain filling in the colour. There's an excellent party trick you can show people - get someone to look straight ahead, and slowly bring into their view a white card with a vivid red dot on it. Ask them not to look at the card, but to tell you what colour the dot is. It's black. As you move the card towards the centre of your subject's vision, the dot will suddenly change to red - and you can then back it out along the same path and it remains red.
[2] I can't remember the cutoff frequencies, but a 50Hz TV will flicker visibly when you're not looking at it, and stabilise when you do. I sometimes wonder if that means that content on 50Hz broadcasts needs to be more enthralling, so that you never look away :-)
...But the author has made so many mistakes in this piece, it's simply garbage.
I'm going to pick on just one topic - motion estimation. The author claims this is to deal with eye tracking.
Utter, utter nonsense. Motion estimation is used to get a best-estimate of what the camera is doing so that temporal compression (aka inter-frame compression) can be used. This essentially says "this frame is just like the last one, except shifted a bit". You then only need encode the delta between that predicted frame and what you really want, and you have an efficient use of your bandwidth. This is basic MPEG-2 stuff...
I might have a rant about the author's incorrect description of interlacing later - both the reason it is used and the fact that HD1080 is perfectly able to support progressive scan. But I'll read through some of the comments first to see how many others have beaten me to it.
Disclosure: I've worked in digital TV for ~20 years now.
Vic.
> I thought copyright infringement was a civil offence?
Things have changed...
Section 107 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 says :-
A person commits an offence who, without the licence of the copyright owner—(a)makes for sale or hire, or
(b)imports into the United Kingdom otherwise than for his private and domestic use, or
(c)possesses in the course of a business with a view to committing any act infringing the copyright, or
(d)in the course of a business —
(i)sells or lets for hire, or
(ii)offers or exposes for sale or hire, or
(iii)exhibits in public, or
(iv)distributes, or
(e)distributes otherwise than in the course of a business to such an extent as to affect prejudicially the owner of the copyright,
an article which is, and which he knows or has reason to believe is, an infringing copy of a copyright work.
It's evil legislation, but it criminalises commercial copyright infringement.
Vic.
> The best place to look is probably the copyright notices in the header files for each release.
No, that's the worst place to look...
AT&T were exceptionally blase about copyright notices. That's quite a bit of what was behind the BSD scuffle, and part of the reason there are very few protectable copyrights left in Unix.
The whole thing is a tortuous mess. Although there may be no-one with the right to contest open-sourcing it, *proving* that would be nigh-on impossible...
Vic.
although through a contractual quirk (SCO not having enough money at the time), the copyright (and I believe that this includes the right to use and license the code) remained with Novell.
Hardly a "contractual quirk"; SCO had a small fraction of the asking price, so the deal was re-nogotiated such that SCO just bought the distribution business.
SCO then sold itself to Caldera, which then renamed itself the SCO Group.
SCO sold part of its business to Caldera. The other part renamed itself Tarantella. Caldera then changed its name to SCO. Ther was, quite obviously, no attempt to confuse or deceive. Nope, none at all.
These cases have never been concluded
Some have - e.g. SCO vs. Daimler-Chrysler.
But most importantly, the Court has already concluded[1] that Novell retained ownership of "the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights" (although ISTR there was some discussion over what was actually in that set). SCO vs. Novell is closed[2], with a resounding win for Novell (although we all know that SCO will never actually pay up). The Court has confirmed Novell's ownership of everything in Unix that can be owned, and the Supreme Court has dismissed certiorari. SCO has appealed that, but the chances of the Supreme Court deciding to rule against itself are pretty slim...
Most of the remainnig cases were stayed pending the outcome of SCO vs. IBM. That was unstayed just a few days ago. It's not currently clear whether or not SCO has anything at all left to litigate after the demolition of the Novell case.
I was never clear about whether this IP included any of UNIX, or if that remained with Novell.
Well, there were all those patents. I don't know what those patents covered - indeed, I'm not even sure that was ever disclosed. But patents have a comparatively short lifespan, so there's nothing to worry about there (they'll have expired). Besides which, section 7 of GPLv2 contains an implicit patent grant; if Novell had not licensed any patents it might have had, it would be in breach of copyright. There will not be a patent case against Linux on the back of those patents.
Copyrights, on the other hand, are long-lived. But GPLv2 section 6 explicitly gives all recipients the right to redistribute. There will not be a copyright case against Linux on the back of these copyrights.
If it went to CPTN Holdings, this is how it could be used
It can't - because Novell distributed Linux under the GPL.
Confused? You will be after this years episode of SCO
The case itself is not that confusing - SCO claimed the contract gave them certain rights, whereas the contract said the exact opposite. The only bit I find confusing is how supposedly intelligent people can stand up in court and expect this turd of a case to go anywhere.
Please, please! Whoever own the UNIX copyright, publish the non-ancient code under an open license. There's no commercial reason not to any more.
There is. Many of the original contributors cannot be traced, and thus their code is orphaned, but the copyright persists. There are also, apparently, a number of commercial organisations who do not want their code publshed.
Someone tried to open-source Unix a few years back - I *think* it was Sun, but I'm not certain. It turned out to be an intractable problem...
Vic.
[1] Memorandum Decision and Order
[2] Final Judgement
> I never fully understood where Novell's IP went to when SuSE got bought.
Novell's copyrights - if any existed - went to Attachmate with the rest of the company.
> consolidating SCO's claim with the ex-Novell's IP could prove more than an annoyance
It won't even be that much.
If Novell had no copyrights, there is nothing to sue over.
If Novell had some Unix copyrights, it licensed them under the GPL to all recipients of Linux. So still nothing to sue over.
Vic.
> a textbook example for other lawyers on how to totally milk a case for maximum reputational damage
Indeed. But that damage appears to have happened to BSF...
> it's about creating uncertainty in the minds of the clueless (read: managers) about using Linux
I think that boat has sailed.
Vic.
> There are time limits to file and respond to civil cases.
Doesn't apply here.
The SCO v. IBM case was filed in plenty of time - but was stayed because of the bankruptcy[1].
Vic.
[1] SCO wasn't actually bankrupt when it filed that - it just expected to become so when it lost its case. And the judge allowed it...
> Yes, but who owns Novell these days?
Doesn't matter.
Novell knowingly and deliberately released code under the GPL, and has been very open about that.
Should Novell actually own any Unix copyrights - if there are any to own - everything they have released under the GPL is properly licensed as such. Anyone who subsequently owns these putative copyrights cannot rescind that license; it is permanent.
Vic.
> both before and after the changes you get the choice of who (on the legal aid roster) you want
There was a trailer on R4 the other day that said differently.
I didn't catch the prgogramme itself, so I don't know whether that as fact or opinion...
Vic.
> who in their right mind would want to interact with the police.
Many years ago, I was a witness in the prosecution of two police officers.
Because of a major prosecution cock-up, I only found out about the hearing the night before, which meant getting to court was going to be difficult for me.
So they sent a marked car round to pick me up. There were two coppers in the front, with me in the back. And all the neighbours saw.
A frostier atmosphere you could not imagine...
Vic.
> Suspicion of having committed a crime is not proof of your guilt.
And therein lies the problem.
Being on the PNC, or having been arrested is seen to be a flag that the individual is, somehow, "dodgy". Hence the ineligibility for the US visa waiver programme.
But that's not what it means at all - it could indeed be evidence of police incompetence.
Were the PNC records to be interpreted *correctly*, there would be no reason to object to their being kept. But we all know they aren't interpreted correctly, and they never will be.
Vic.
> Wonder when he's going to sell MariaDB for another fortune to some company
He won't. He can't.
When he sold MySQL to Sun, he owned the copyrights. That's what he sold.
Those copyrights - or at least the bulk of them - now belong to Oracle. If they get sold, it won't be Widenius getting the cash...
Vic.
> the good old "Hi we are xxx computer company here to fix that desktop" scam.
Many years ago, I worked in field service for a Health Authority.
I went to a site one afternoon to replace a failed terminal[1]. The manager was apoplectic and demanded ID.
"I don't carry any", I told him truthfully.
"Well I'm not going to give you access to our equipment" he retorted.
"Suit yourself", says I, "it's your terminal that's broken. I'll just take this new one back to the depot".
At which point, he suddenly changed his mind and gave me all the access I needed...
Vic.
[1] Yes, it was a terminal, not a PC. The network was a serial net running on statistical multiplexers, with all the end-user kit appearing to connect to the mainframe over a simple serial link. It was a long time ago...
> in the USofA we are being annoyed by a small group of tea drinkers
I doubt it.
I've spent quite a bit of time in the US. It was *very* rare for me to find any tea there - just some pale brown liquid that was almost entirely unlike tea in every respect...
Vic.
> the eternal lie "temporary"
The Romans had the right idea about temporary powers.
In times of crisis, they would choose a dictator. Said dictator had *absolute* power, including life or death.
The position lasted 6 months, after which the dictator would be tried for everything he had done.
Vic.
These days they tend to start the pilot training in the simulator and only let them fly the real thing after they reach a certain skill level.
That is most assuredly not true in any EASA country. Nor, I suspect, is it true in any country covered by the Chicago Convention (which is pretty much all of them).
Simulators have a huge part to play in teaching pilots to fly expensive equipment, but each and every ATPL minor deity began his or her career in a single-engine piston aircraft and had to demonstrate adequate capability in that before being allowed to progress to the bigger stuff.
Vic.
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