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H.264 and VP8 Compared
TheReal_sabret00the writes with a snippet from StreamingMedia.com: "VP8 is now free, but if the quality is substandard, who cares? Well, it turns out that the quality isn't substandard, so that's not an issue, but neither is it twice the quality of H.264 at half the bandwidth. See for yourself."
Yeah, because OMFGWTFBBQ!!! Google has just release something new and it must be a revolutionary product because I somehow conveniently forget their failures!!
Google takes a shotgun approach to everything because all they need to do is get a few ideas to hang around long enough for them to generate additional ad revenue. As long as they release new products on a consistent schedule and keep people interested in at least trying it out, they're maintaining if not increasing their revenue stream which makes investors happy and makes everyone at Google happy. Sorry, but Google is not as altruistic as everyone likes to believe and they're also not flawless in their execution of new ideas.
The analysis of the main x264 developer says "VP8 is poo". How "unexpected". No bias there or anything.
Clever signature text goes here.
I hear people make this sort of claim all the time on Slashdot, and I have yet to see evidence for it. It also conveniently ignores one of the primary motivators for patents: defense of R&D. Creating a new object or technology costs a lot of money. In come cases many, many orders of magnitude more than when patent protection was created. Without the enticement of being able to reap the monetary rewards from a temporary, sanctioned monopoly on the invention, where is the motivation? It becomes a competitive *liability* to put money into R&D when your competitors can just wait for you to do the work and carry the development costs for them. With the current system, you aren't guaranteed protection if your competitor is developing the same ideas and patents first, but there is a good chance.
Without patents, we will have essentially no technological or scientific development at all, except where funded by the government (and, in case you didn't know, the US government profits handsomely from patents they fund). The current US Federal budget is woefully inadequate to take on that role.
The argument that every major advance came more-or-less simultaneously from multiple sources ... evidence please? Let me just think of a few major advances: antibiotics, internal combustion, electrical motors, the light bulb, the electron tube, the transistor, the integrated circuit, plastics, x-ray and magnetic resonance imaging, PCR, refrigeration, feedback control, anesthetics, injection molding, etc. And how about all of the minor ones without which we would not enjoy nearly every facet of modern life? I'm thinking latex paint, radial tires, pyrex, autoclaves, velcro, computerized typesetting, robotic assembly lines, the sewing machine, radio, cathode-ray tubes, power tools, the bimetallic strip, epoxy, AM/FM/FSK encoding, etc.
It is, frankly, a naive and ill-conceived notion that we should eliminate patents, or equivalently, that intellectual property should not be protected by law just as physical property is. Pointing out one patent that should not have been issued does not prove the system is broken.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
When even the x264 developers comment that it's very similar to H.264 you can bet that some of the 1000+ patents on H.264 apply.
Most of those "1000+ patents" are likely to be junk. The rest? We'll see.
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Has the Least Patentable Unit reached zero yet?