Then you wouldn't have 3G cellular. Or 4G. Or 5G cellular. It costs tens of millions of dollars to drive around san diego in those vans taking traces of a new cellular system design and discovering improvements so that the standard works everywhere else on earth (San Diego is a worst case that's comparable to Hong Kong.). We wouldn't have CDMA cellular. Or LTE cellular. Recall that CDMA cellular was 3x more efficient in bits/second/Hz than 2G/GSM, so that cell phone providers could literally give you a free phone or PAY YOU to throw away your phone and they would still come out ahead, financially.
No standard has ever been developed using money obtained by selling copies of the standard.
The kind of work described by you, which is indeed needed for developing a new communication standard cannot be made profitable by selling copies of a text describing its results.
If such work provides valuable techniques that are necessary for the implementation of the standard, they are patented and those who want to implement the standard for commercial purposes must license the patents.
Any owner of a device that implements a standard has the right to know what the standard does, so all standards should be distributed if not for free only for a small price covering the distribution expenses and not for the prices with many digits that are in use now.
The big prices that are requested for certain standards have a single purpose, to protect the incumbent companies from new competitors, or sometimes to prevent the owners of some devices to do whatever they want with what they own.
The very high prices that are demanded for many standards nowadays are a recent phenomenon, of the same kind with the fact that nowadays most sellers of electronic devices no longer provide schematics and maintenance manuals for them as it was the rule until a few decades ago, in order to force the owners to either never repair their devices or to repair them at a few authorized repair shops, which do not have competitors. These kinds of harmful behavior of the corporations have been made possible by the lack of adequate legislation for consumer protection, as the legislators in most countries are much less interested in making laws for the benefit of their voters than they are interested in things like facilitating the surveillance of the voters by the government, to prevent any opposition against unpopular measures.
In the more distant past, there was no way to download standards over the Internet for a negligible cost, but you could still avoid to pay for a printed standard by consulting it in a public library and making a copy. There were no secret standards that you could not access without paying a yearly subscription of thousands of $, like today.
Most of the development costs are recouped through licenses on the base-stations and somewhat on the very low patent licenses per chip/device, not the price of access to the standard.
Back to the the HDMI standard, the licensing fee has already been paid by the hardware manufacturer. Restricting software is unnecessary, as the patent license fees have already been collected on the device.
In the telecom world, that would be a pretty terrible business model, as the list of entities who would need a copy of the standard is relatively short.
> The people developing standards are in the business of developing standards
Are they? Usually these standards consortiums are composed of the companies that develop products based on the standards, where their products gain value from having a standard (a Blu-ray player and a TV with no way to connect them together is worth less). Even if they couldn't gatekeep the standards they would still have developed them out of necessity.
There is no business developing standards. All the technical parts are written by engineers from the various companies wanting to implement the standard. All that's left for the standards association is to host a mailing list and potentially organise some in-person meetings. And hosting the resulting PDF doesn't exactly cost $4000 / download either.
That's what patents are for. The handful of standards that actually cost money to produce (i.e. MPEG, 3GPP, LTE etc) have patent holders that are specifically required to provide "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory" licensing terms. If paywalling the spec paid for those standards we wouldn't have had a decade of HTML5 video not specifying a baseline codec.
Yeah, I'm curious about this too. I would think that making a standard freely available (and at most doing what NVMe does where you pay membership dues) would make the standard be adopted far more universally than putting up weird barriers to even access the standard.
Honest answer (since your not trolling): The difference is more of time than anything else. If I somehow find $5000 to buy access to the PCIe spec, my understanding is that it's per access request. NVMe doesn't charge at all for their specifications; instead, you can join for just $500 per year last time I checked.
I don't think the fee to get access to the standard is generating much income for anyone. Most of what your talking about seems to be money made from licensing of the technology, right?
Bad example, the 3GPP standards are not at all closed like HDMI 2.1 is, unlike HDMI 2.1 there are open source implementations https://osmocom.org/projects
My wife is obsessed with a woman in Scandinavia who makes videos glorifying cottage life in the wilderness in Scandinavia ... I guess this is similar ...
See also depictions of vaguely European historical trappings in anime, especially as in Miyazaki’s works, a variety of shojo manga and anime since the 70s, and many isekai settings.
“Representations of Europe in Japanese Anime: An Overview of Case Studies and Theoretical Frameworks”. Mutual Images Journal, no. 8, June 2020, pp. 47-84, https://doi.org/10.32926/2020.8.ara.europ .
An especially interesting quote from the above:
> According to Frederik Schodt, Jaqueline Berndt, and Deborah Shamoon, the European settings, depicted in the 1970s shōjo series took the role of a remote idealised elsewhere with a strong exotic appeal, radically different from Japanese society and reality, where the recurrent conventions of the shōjo narratives were developed. Some of these themes, like the deconstruction of the feminine subject and the development of transgressive romantic stories (which contain incests, infidelities, idyllic and allusive sexual scenes or homosexual relationships), were hard to conceive in the Japanese society of that moment, which enabled the European setting with a range of creative possibilities due to the depiction of foreign cultures (Schodt, 2012 [1983]: 88-93; Berndt, 1996: 93-4, Shamoon, 2007, 2008). Such a use and depiction of Europe fits with what Pellitteri has coined as the “mimecultural” scenario of anime, a mode of representation present in those anime series that adopt contents, settings, and other visual elements from different cultural backgrounds to develop their original narratives and plots (2010: 396). [italics added for emphasis]
The concept of “mimecultral” aspects of anime and manga is not new to me, but that phrasing itself is, and it reminds me of Dawkins’ conception of memes.
Don't go ANYWHERE near a macbook pro 2019. Piece of garbage. I had to set mine to 100% fans and it went from 100% to 0% battery in 70 mins when I was streaming a meeting PLUGGED IN WITH A 90W CHARGER! The next time I buy Intel is NEVER.
The 2019 MBP series had serious thermal issues, and a high failure rate. They became insanely hot. Mine died 3 weeks after falling out of AppleCare - just switched off and never on during usage. A friend with the same model had the same thing happending just a few months after. You hardly see any of those still in use (which might also be because people upgrade to M-Series chips which are way better).
I'm had 15 months of daily usage (8+ hours per day) of an Asus S16 and it's been pretty great. I haven't been lugging it around very much - mostly just using the 10 cores at my desk to run minikube and WSL and Windows and also gaming on it and I upgraded the SSD to 2GB. I was a longtime thinkpad bigot (T41, T42, T60, T430, T460s) but their near-complete shunning of AMD CPUs has been a FAIL. This laptop had some MediaTek WiFi issues and STILL doesn't always come out of sleep, but the 16" oled is fantastic, it's thinner and lighter and FASTER than a macbook air, I love the build quality and ceraluminum ceramic coating, and it plays just about any 3D game you can think about ... The 31 watt power limit clips all the performance off the hx370 / 890m GPU (32GB RAM) so I went with the hx365 / 880m GPU (24GB RAM). The low amount of RAM is my only complaint.
I have an original line printer printout of 1970s "Adventure" (translated from Fortran into C for UIUC's CAC PDP-11/70 running UNIX v7.) Adventure is the father of Zork. Zork is a clone of Adventure.
> Google X is a complete failure
- Google Brain
- Google Watch/Wear OS
- Gcam/Pixel Camera
- Insight (indoor GMaps)
- Waymo
- Verily
It is a moonshot factory after all, not a "we're only going to do things that are likely to succeed" factory. It's an internal startup space, which comes with high failure rates. But these successes seem pretty successful. Even the failed Google Glass seems to have led to learning, though they probably should have kept the team going considering the success of Meta Raybands and with things like Snap's glasses.
Didn't the current LLMs stem from this...? Or it might be Google Brain instead. For Google X, there is Waymo? I know a lot of stuff didn't pan out. This is expected. These were 'moonshots'.
But the principle is there. I think that when a company sits on a load of cash, that's what they should do. Either that or become a kind of alternative investments allocator. These are risky bets. But they should be incentivized to take those risks. From a fiscal policy standpoint for instance.
Well it probably is the case already via lower taxation of capital gains and so on.
But there should probably exist a more streamlined framework to make sure incentives are aligned.
And/or assigned government projects?
Besides implementing their Cloud infrastructure that is...
The minimum cost of capital just to run fusion experiments is probably $100m. And the power bills are probably almost as high as the ones from OpenAI, which is to say, they are the highest power bills in the history of mankind ...
I have a feeling the author compressed 8 million copies of Moby Dick with LZW compression using a huge token cache, then printed the binary results in a 1000-page book. Each successive copy would become smaller and smaller.
