wrote:

Alan Browne wrote:


48V twisted pair POTS is a "standard" invented at the dawn of the
telephone era. There are many engineers who wish we could rip the
entire mess out of the ground, off the poles and start over again.
Offer praises to Allah or whoever that cell phones, VOIP and the rest
of it are doing the job indirectly.

Backward compatibilty is not compromised by forward progress where data
formats are concerned.


Then you must agree that OpenRAW is without a legitimate function.
What's good for the goose, etc.

I don't follow that one. What makes sense is that what gets recorded
onto the memory card is the property of the photographer or employer,
not the camera OEM.


Or, if you prefer, open RAW does not mean 'cast in concrete'. Each OEM
can do as he likes as long as the format is readable by all, and special
data sections are clearly documented.


As I said, this will in many instances necessarily reveal trade secrets
or other facets of the technology that the manufacturers would likely
be unwilling to disclose. And if part of the OpenRAW is the signing of
an NDA, then can we honestly call it "open"?

Since these trade secrets have a half life in the wild of about 3 days,
they are no more useful to the OEM's than encryption has been for the
DVD producers. NDA's don't protect anything of this nature.

"Trade Secret"? Why hasn't the dcraw author been sued into
homelessness? If he can do it, the folks at competing OEM's can do it
just as quick.




Regarding the olde telephone analog standard it has served extremely
well for a very long time. Real engineers are too practical to "wish"
for solutions that don't make economic sense.


If some djinn were to remove the need to work against the crazy POTS
nonsense, many communications engineers would be profoundly thankful.

But that's not engineering. The same could be said about many
infrastructures from roadways to airways. If we were to design "World
2.0" do you think we would have LA, Mexico and Cairo (to name very few).

Indeed, they must be: look at where all the innovation is occuring
today telephony. I can cite similar software and hardware
examples. _NO ONE_ likes to deal with legacy systems.

If it is economically sensible to do so, it is done. That is
engineering in large part. "Like" has little to with it.



This backward compatibilty 'tax' is far cheaper than "ripping the
entire mess out of the ground..."


You are forgetting or ignoring the cost of innovations that are simply
unimplementable within the legacy framework. It is for this and other
reasons that the sensible person does not want camera manufacturers
constrained by some Adobe or OpenRAW or otherwise committee drafted
multi-volume 2356 page standard written in dense legalese.

See above, World 2.0.

If that's so, why are they all committe members, participants and
signatories to various other standards?

Feel free to have the last word ... this is it for me.

Cheers,
Alan


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