Comments for Bubble Foundry

Comment on Office Space by Sander

Sander — Thu, 29 May 2008 13:29:53 +0000

Comment on From the Laboratory: Closed Standards by Peter

Peter — Wed, 28 May 2008 11:29:06 +0000

Yes, I do. However, my understanding is that they’ve been somewhat more liberal/loose with the patents, particularly from 1994-1998. Also quoting the Wikipedia article:

Additionally, patent holders declined to enforce license fees on free and open source decoders, which allows many free MP3 decoders to develop.[20] Furthermore, while attempts have been made to discourage distribution of encoder binaries, Thomson has stated that individuals who use free MP3 encoders are not required to pay fees. Thus, while patent fees have been an issue for companies that attempt to use MP3, they have not meaningfully impacted users, which allows the format to grow in popularity.

I sent my father, who works for Motorola in digital video, the post and he said:

Your rant is understandable but reflects your inexperience in this technology space.

MPEG has always incorporated patented technolgies into the advanced profiles of the standard. Attendees and contributors to ITU and ISO (a UN body and the parent of MPEG) meetings are required to agree to allow ‘fair and reasonable’ licensing of any of their contributions. ‘Mpeg Licensing Authority (MPLA)’ was established to consolidate and simplify the commercial use of the patents. When companies spend billions on R&D, then they expect some compensation and control of the results. The internet has made up too familiar with ‘free’ advertising-driven content. The codecs you are using don’t fit that model.

I fully appreciate that companies spend lots on R&D and deserve to be compensated, but it strikes me as wrong and, for adoption, ultimately counter-productive to encourage the use of their proprietary technology in international standards. Granted, the MPEG standards are wildly popular, but the 3GPP formats aren’t… Maybe I just need to become a FLAC, Vorbis, and Theora evangelist. As my father notes, ITU and ISO participants have to allow fair and reasonable licensing. The restrictions on the AMR reference code documentation doesn’t strike me as reasonable.

Comment on From the Laboratory: Closed Standards by PanMan

PanMan — Tue, 27 May 2008 07:47:31 +0000

You do know that MP3 is also not a free standard? From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3 :
“Thomson Consumer Electronics claims to control MP3 licensing of the MPEG-1/2 Layer 3 patents in many countries, including the United States, Japan, Canada and EU countries.[17] Thomson has been actively enforcing these patents.
For current information about Fraunhofer IIS and Thomson’s patent portfolio and licensing terms and fees see their website mp3licensing.com. MP3 license revenues generated ca. 100 million Euro revenue to the Fraunhofer Society in 2005.[18]”

Comment on A Website Is Not A Brochure by Mary Francis

Mary Francis — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:59:21 +0000

This is very interesting to me

Comment on Don’t Annoy Your Users by Mary Francis

Mary Francis — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:47:49 +0000

Good lad, you’ve taken my complaints to heart! Love this site, good promo. . .

Comment on Office Space by PanMan

PanMan — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:17:58 +0000

Fanu told us the old ABN building is pretty much full. They are however working on a new project, DW10

Comment on From the Laboratory: Image Resizing and Thumbnail Creation by PanMan

PanMan — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 14:03:22 +0000

How would you offload the image manipulation: often when new photo’s are added, you do want to see the thumbnails immediately, so you do want to have a realtime system. You just use a different server here, or you have a more sophisticated method?

Comment on Dutch Web Companies by Bubble Foundry » Startups In The Netherlands?

Bubble Foundry » Startups In The Netherlands? — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 11:24:45 +0000

[…] at The Next Web last week. I’ve been gathering a list over the last month, and I now how a list of almost 40 companies. I’ll admit that CrunchBase coming to Europe has also forced my hand. […]

Comment on From the Laboratory: Image Resizing and Thumbnail Creation by Blagovest

Blagovest — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 22:47:14 +0000

Another point I have is that image processing is a too CPU intensive job for a webserver, even if you do the processing only the first time. Offloading both the image processing and the delivery of the thumbnails is a must for any web application that demands performance and responsiveness.

Comment on From the Laboratory: Image Resizing and Thumbnail Creation by Peter

Peter — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 21:41:45 +0000

Thanks Blagovest, that’s an interesting service you mention.

And Robert suggested using attachment_fu for Ruby on Rails projects.