The MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 cases described above demonstrate the power of standards as the enablers of communication. But what is a standard? There is so much confusion around this word that I want to use this page is to try and dissipate it. If you take the Webster’s under the…
Patents And Standards
Johannes Gutenberg had the great idea of developing a system to print books using movable characters. He had not just the idea, which had been floating around for a long time (actually, it had been in use in China for centuries), but also the skill and will to develop a…
The MPEG Way Of Standards Making
It is always so difficult to make a person outside the group understand that MPEG is not in the business of running beauty contests, i.e. of choosing one or a few established solutions from a set of candidates. Indeed MPEG does not typically choose complete solutions, it assembles them from…
An MPEG Meeting
Starting from the idea of compressing digital video to fit it in the low throughput of 1.4 Mbit/s of a CD, MPEG had to develop newer areas of expertise to provide standard component technologies to build complete solutions. The size of the group (some 300 participants from early on, 500…
Life In ISO
A free translation of the fake Latin proverb “Homo homini lupus, femina feminae lupior, sacerdos sacerdoti lupissimus” could go like this: man behaves like a wolf toward another man, a woman behaves with another woman in a more ferocious way than a man with another man, and a priest behaves…
Craft, Intellect And Art
In primitive societies every able individual was capable of making for himself all that was needed for a living: bows, arrows, shoes, tents, pottery, etc. From early on the social organisation, with a complexity originally so far from today’s, gradually evolved towards a specialisation of functions: the stronger ones became…
Fixating Works
Advancement in society – and ingenuity in developing appropriate technologies – created written works. If one takes the remaining samples of old written works, it is easy to imagine that they just record the textual parts of very complex events where different “media” were involved: recitations, musics, songs, dances, choruses,…
Rights
Being able to own “rights” to something is a fundamental concept of living beings: ants own the “right” to suck aphids, but they are “obliged” to feed them, if they want to continue sucking them. A dog pisses at all trees and poles in the area he happens to be…
Protecting Rights
The MPEG-1 standard was an offspring of its age. Just as CD Audio had no content protection provision – something the music industry had come to regret – the MPEG-1 standard has no content protection provision. MPEG-2 is a different story. Even without considering subscription-based CATV, pay TV, both on…
Computer Programming
Electronic computers have been a great invention indeed and the progress of the hardware that has enabled the building of machines that get smaller and smaller year after year while, at the same time, they get more powerful in processing data, has been and continues to be astonishing. In 70…