Mawbid - Slashdot User

Submission + - Software Patents in the New York Times (nytimes.com)

Submitted by

Timothy B. Lee

on Saturday June 09, 2007 @06:57AM

Timothy B. Lee writes: "I've got an article in the New York Times in which I make the case against software patents. Expanding on a point I first made on my blog, I point out that Microsoft has had a change of heart on the patent issue. In 1991, Bill Gates worried that "some large company will patent some obvious thing" and use it to blackmail smaller companies. Now that Microsoft is a large company with a patent war-chest of their own, they don't seem so concerned about abuse of the patent system. I then point out that Verizon's efforts to shut down Vonage are a perfect illustration of Gates's fears."

Submission + - High Quality Real Time Streaming Video

Submitted by neomage86 on Saturday June 09, 2007 @06:55AM

neomage86 writes: I work for a relatively small company that has a head office, and about half a dozen small branches dispersed throughout the country. Our CEO wishes to make make a real-time video broadcast to all our remote locations once a month, while having people ask him questions in real time via a POTS conference call.

We are relatively fortunate that our corporate headquarters (where the CEO is) has a very fat pipe (~100 mbps with approx 50ms round trip to each remote office) while each remote office has at least a T1 (so figure free bandwidth of ~900 kbps). Unfortunately, we do not have any way of multicasting out to the remote offices, so we will be stuck using multiple plain old Point-to-Point connections.

My research has lead me to believe that h.264 or mpeg4 seem like the way to go. After playing with a few things (Quick Time Broadcaster, VLC, etc), nothing really struck us as being extraordinary. Right now I'm looking into a firewire camcorder and some sort of hardware encoding, but google hasn't turned up any mpeg4/h.264 hardware encoders that have known compatibility with streaming software (I'm hoping that elgato's turbo.264 works, but no evidence yet). So, any suggestions as to what's the best way to actually encode and send out the streams in realtime (so there isn't too much lag between the conference call and video broadcast)? What's the highest quality video that I can reasonably hope to squeeze into 800kbps?

We're hoping to spend just a few hundred dollars on this, but would be willing to go up to a few thousand if that's what it takes. I'm just hoping to avoid the $10K+ that the enterprise products (like vBrick) are asking for.

Submission + - Attorney sues website over his online rating (nwsource.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09, 2007 @05:11AM

An anonymous reader writes: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is reporting that a local attorney is suing legal startup Avvo.com over a rating that was algorithmically assigned. The story touches over the controversy of computers grading humans. Such practices are not new: the New York Times earlier this year reported on Google using algorithms to determine applicant suitability. But what happens when you don't like the result? Can a computer program be considered defamatory?

Slashdot Top Deals