Black Hole
May contain traces of nut
Let me try to explain for the uninitiated, because the general media bandies words about software about as if it's easy.
Writing a computer program isn't very difficult, because for the last many years it has been possible to write instructions that look like reasonably sensible English (although the more advanced programming that goes on these days has diverged away from sensible English again because it makes things easier to express more complex requirements - and programmers understand it). A program written in this way is fairly straight-forward to read and understand, and make changes to, especially if the original author has put in plenty of comments about his intentions.
The problem is that computers cannot understand and execute such programs. Computers only understand very simple instruction codes, conveyed in binary. So one instruction code might be an instruction to add the number stored in one memory location to the number stored in another memory location, and store the result in the first location replacing what was there previously. Programs are made of millions of individual simple steps like this, and computers only seem clever because they are able to process millions or billions of these simple instructions every second and the cumulative effect is a clever program that does something useful.
In order to convert the English description of what you want the computer to do into the simple steps that a computer can understand and execute requires a very clever piece of programming called a compiler. This takes the description (the program) and converts it step by step into a series of instructions for a particular computer processor (and different types of processor understand the binary instruction codes differently, which is why you can't run a Mac program on a Windows machine), so that the processor can then do what it's been told and thus achieve the effect intended by the original description.
So, what you have within the HDR-FOX is a program in binary codes which the processor understands, but is not in a Human-readable form. The Humax programmers have the original source code with all the necessary commentary, but that is commercially sensitive and kept to themselves. It is possible to decode the binary into primitive instructions, but it would then take a huge amount of analysis to work out what all those primitive instructions are meant to achieve. Just comparing two sections of binary instruction code (even if you knew which sections to look at) would yield nothing useful, because the instructions only have to be displaced by a single address for the actual binary to change, even if the instructions themselves are otherwise identical. You would have no idea whether the binary differences were significant or not.
What "we" are able to do is look at and modify the parts of the code that Humax have incorporated from the public domain (rather than expend the effort to recreate for themselves) - which means the Linux operating system stuff. We are also able to observe the effect that the data has on the HDR-FOX code, and how the HDR-FOX code alters the data, so we have been able to deduce that altering the data in particular ways has various desired effects.
Writing a computer program isn't very difficult, because for the last many years it has been possible to write instructions that look like reasonably sensible English (although the more advanced programming that goes on these days has diverged away from sensible English again because it makes things easier to express more complex requirements - and programmers understand it). A program written in this way is fairly straight-forward to read and understand, and make changes to, especially if the original author has put in plenty of comments about his intentions.
The problem is that computers cannot understand and execute such programs. Computers only understand very simple instruction codes, conveyed in binary. So one instruction code might be an instruction to add the number stored in one memory location to the number stored in another memory location, and store the result in the first location replacing what was there previously. Programs are made of millions of individual simple steps like this, and computers only seem clever because they are able to process millions or billions of these simple instructions every second and the cumulative effect is a clever program that does something useful.
In order to convert the English description of what you want the computer to do into the simple steps that a computer can understand and execute requires a very clever piece of programming called a compiler. This takes the description (the program) and converts it step by step into a series of instructions for a particular computer processor (and different types of processor understand the binary instruction codes differently, which is why you can't run a Mac program on a Windows machine), so that the processor can then do what it's been told and thus achieve the effect intended by the original description.
So, what you have within the HDR-FOX is a program in binary codes which the processor understands, but is not in a Human-readable form. The Humax programmers have the original source code with all the necessary commentary, but that is commercially sensitive and kept to themselves. It is possible to decode the binary into primitive instructions, but it would then take a huge amount of analysis to work out what all those primitive instructions are meant to achieve. Just comparing two sections of binary instruction code (even if you knew which sections to look at) would yield nothing useful, because the instructions only have to be displaced by a single address for the actual binary to change, even if the instructions themselves are otherwise identical. You would have no idea whether the binary differences were significant or not.
What "we" are able to do is look at and modify the parts of the code that Humax have incorporated from the public domain (rather than expend the effort to recreate for themselves) - which means the Linux operating system stuff. We are also able to observe the effect that the data has on the HDR-FOX code, and how the HDR-FOX code alters the data, so we have been able to deduce that altering the data in particular ways has various desired effects.
