I suggest, instead of actually installing the.deb, you simply extract the files from the archive to a local directory using dpkg -x chrome.deb.
This way, you're not giving Google any special permissions on your machine, which effectively amount to root access.
Chrome runs perfectly from a local user's home directory when extracted like this.
Yes, you're only giving them enough access to read all of your files and send them back to Google. That sounds like a great improvement. At least they won't be able to take over your computer! Except that they will, since taking over the sole user account on a single-user system is equivalent to getting root for most practical purposes. And if they were actually malicious, they could use any of a million privilege escalation exploits to get root. (Create ~/bin/sudo, add ~/bin to $PATH, wait . . . or replace the GUI shortcuts that you expect to prompt for elevation, if you use a GUI.)
Seriously, if you're that paranoid, use your distro's Chromium package. The application code is still being pulled from Google without review, of course, but at least the installation parts aren't, if you're so worried about giving Google root access.
Try copying the whole URL and you get http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%A2%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%93_%D7%A8%D7%90%D7%A9%D7%99, urlencoded. Try copying just the end and you get _, not urlencoded. (Chrome behaves the same.) Giving you the non-urlencoded version when copying the whole URL (which Opera does, at least the version I have lying around) is a bad idea, because not all places you might paste it will actually support IRIs, or even Unicode at all, so it might not work if not urlencoded.
Thank you for making my point for me, Slashdot. Trying to copy the main page's name (which is Hebrew) didn't work. But the encoded URL, which is not what I see in the URL bar, works fine.
So if I copy all but the first character, I get exactly what I copied, but if I copy the first character it prepends the protocol to the front on the clipboard? That's incredibly inconsistent.
Most browsers are inconsistent about copying from the URL bar anyway. For instance, go to he.wikipedia.org in Firefox. Try copying the whole URL and you get http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%A2%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%93_%D7%A8%D7%90%D7%A9%D7%99, urlencoded. Try copying just the end and you get _, not urlencoded. (Chrome behaves the same.) Giving you the non-urlencoded version when copying the whole URL (which Opera does, at least the version I have lying around) is a bad idea, because not all places you might paste it will actually support IRIs, or even Unicode at all, so it might not work if not urlencoded.
Consistency is nice, but it's not everything. I haven't noticed any real-world problems that come up when using Chrome's URL bar, so I'm fine with it.
Neither of these allow software patents (despite what the European Patent Office might tell you).
Do you have a source for that? Better yet, since who knows what "software patent" technically means to a patent lawyer, do you have a source for the claim that H.264 is not patent-encumbered in the UK (for instance)? Because the MPEG-LA's official patent list does include UK patents. Has your lawyer told you those won't actually stand up in court, or are you just parroting wishful thinking that you read on some non-lawyer's blog?
Newer research is in intraframe coding and interframe prediction. VP8 uses the same methods as x264. VP8 will most likely infringe the same patents. Google does not hold these patents.
Read this take from someone who is without a doubt an expert in these matters.
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=377
He's without a doubt an expert in video codecs, but he's not a lawyer and has no clue what he's talking about when it comes to patents. He even admits this himself, although it didn't stop him from speaking confidently on the subject.
Here's the decision. Go read it, at least the first few pages. This is not a due process case. It's a states' rights case:
[The defendants] moved to dismiss on the ground [that] Congress exceeded its powers under the Necessary and Proper Clause, U. S. Const., Art. I, 8, cl. 18. . . .
The Court does not reach or decide any claim that the statute or its application denies equal protection, procedural or substantive due process, or any other constitutional rights.
All the court said is that this falls within the federal government's powers, and doesn't violate the Tenth Amendment (which reserves some rights to the states). It didn't say it was okay on due process grounds. In fact, a district court did rule that the law was unconstitutional on due process grounds, and an appeals court upheld that (citations omitted):
The District Court, accepting two of the respondents’ [i.e., defendants'] claims, granted their motion to dismiss. It agreed with respondents that the Constitution requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt, and it agreed that, in enacting the statute, Congress exceeded its Article I legislative powers. On appeal, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld the dismissal on this latter, legislative-power ground. It did not decide the standard-of-proof question, nor did it address any of respondents’ other constitutional challenges.
In short, the law has been struck down. The district court struck it down on two grounds. The government appealed both to the appeals court. The appeals court upheld the district court on one of the grounds without addressing the second one. The Supreme Court overruled the lower courts on that ground (legislative powers). The law is still struck down for violating due process, pending further appeals. This case has nothing to do with due process.
There's always Chromium; I run it on Ubuntu. For Windows there's SRWare Iron. I'm not sure which is the preferred build for OSX; perhaps Crossover Chromium. TFA doesn't say whether Chromium is affected. Some comments under TFA state that the effect lasts only until Chrome is restarted, suggesting that the information is stored only in the memory cache.
Chromium is the exact same code as Chrome. Of course it will be affected, unless you patch it out.
And seriously, people, get a grip. It's not like this tells Google what sites you visited. It just stores it on your computer. It has nothing to do with Google wanting your information, that's a complete non sequitur here. Geez.
the filesystem, which doesn't even know about the sector size
The filesystem certainly might know about the sector size, if it cares to have that information. On Windows, it can ask the storage stack for the sector size using an ioctl. I imagine (though I'm not certain) there would be something similar on other platforms. A filesystem doesn't necessarily "need" to know the sector size; the storage stack should always do the right thing regardless. But knowledge of the sector size can be useful for certain performance optimizations.
You're correct, of course. The filesystem probably does know about the sector size as an implementation detail. It might not allow a block/cluster size that's not an integer multiple of the sector size, for instance (AFAIK this is the case for NTFS). It would have been more accurate to say that in practice, switching from a 512-byte sector to a 4 KB sector will not significantly affect the features of commonly-used filesystems.
You're seriously delusional if you think that Windows servers are inferior to Linux servers in any way. (Well, "any" way is an overstatement, but any practical way.)
You're seriously delusional if you think that Windows servers are as good as Linux servers in every practical way. Linux has advantages beyond cost. For some large organizations, like Google, being able to tinker with the software is essential. For other organizations, some particular feature of Linux might be essential: like DRDB, or support for some application, or good software RAID (much better than Windows from what I've heard), or (soon) btrfs, or performance on their particular workload.
If Windows Server were really as good as Linux in every "practical" way, only the cash-strapped would use Linux. That's simply not the case. The only top websites that use Windows, for example, are owned by Microsoft. On the other side of things, most shared hosts support only Linux, although typical web apps are completely portable. Why is this? Some of these are big companies; they would pay if Windows were better. But Linux does have advantages over Windows. Usually different advantages to different people, but they're there.
I'm not dissing Windows Server. I'm sure it's a lot less hassle to work with unless you're a Linux guru, and it surely has some other great features that Linux doesn't. But Linux has real advantages too. If you deny that, I have no idea how you can explain its success.
Then again Linux is a "server" OS and seen that way from the kernel maintainers.
I'm pretty sure all the kernel maintainers use Linux on their desktops, too. Certainly Linus Torvalds does! The problem is that desktop hardware is so heterogeneous. Just because it works for them, doesn't mean it works for you. If a prominent kernel developer had an RT2500, you can bet that it would be supported just fine to this day.
Because 512 byte sectors allow for less empty space waste than anything larger.
Um, no. The sector size dictates what boundaries the OS has to do reads and writes on. It doesn't dictate how the OS uses the space. 4k sectors means that to read or write an aligned 4k filesystem block, the OS has to do one I/O operation instead of eight; and that if it wants to write a 512-byte block, it has to do a read-modify-write cycle.
How efficiently small files get stored is a property of the filesystem, which doesn't even know about the sector size. Common filesystems all use 4k blocks or bigger anyway. Some filesystems store files smaller than 4k efficiently by packing them in with the metadata or dedicating some blocks to store several files per block. Filesystems that do this include, most notably, NTFS, and also some Linux filesystems like ReiserFS and btrfs. Wikipedia calls this block suballocation (don't know if this term is standard). This is totally orthogonal to the sector size.
But when the shoe is on the other foot, and that foot is the foot of a sweatshop worker who gets paid a dollar a day for creating thousands of dollars of value for some corporate clothing outlet, suddenly the question isn't, "How does her salary stack up to all the value she's creating," but "What's the minimum amount we can get away with paying her?"
That's the same question that should be asked about CEOs. If a CEO's salary could be halved and he wouldn't care, he's obviously being paid more than he should be. If there are lots of such CEOs, then that speaks to a systemic irrationality in the market. It's possible. I don't know, since I'm not in the market for hiring or being a CEO. I imagine that most CEOs would actually care if their salary was halved, just because of the message it sends, even if the money itself means nothing to them.
But the actual market price for a good CEO, if everyone has good information, should in principle be much higher than the market price for an unskilled labor. I'm arguing that in principle, some people may deserve to be paid a thousand times what other people are paid. In practice, maybe some people are grossly overpaid, I don't know; I'm arguing about principles, not practice.
I doubt many athletes would complain about making a hundred grand a year, if that were the going rate.
Which accomplishes what? The owner of their team gets to keep the extra money instead? That's even less just. At least the athlete has managed to become popular somehow through hard work and talent. The owner could very well just be lucky.
(It's curious how people are complaining about highly-paid people who actually do a lot of work. Surely it makes more sense to attack the capitalists, who make orders of magnitude more money – billions instead of millions – and don't necessarily do any work at all.)
There is, however, ample evidence that CEOs and boards of directors collude to get each other cushy, can't fail contracts. If they were so sure they were creating real value, they'd happily agree to contracts where their compensation was tied to the long-term performance of the company.
CEOs like low-risk jobs, same as anyone. Companies can fail even under a competent CEO, through no fault of his. So CEOs are offered a lot of money guaranteed, and even more if the company does well. (E.g., they're given lots of stock, which automatically becomes more valuable if the company does well.) This is really no different from any job, except the stakes are far higher. You get a certain amount guaranteed, and more for good performance.
This assumes the companies profitability is down to the CEO. Of course, when the company loses money it's the fault of the market. Considering that the vast majority of people never get to be a CEO (it's not like these jobs are advertised to us commoners, they're headhunted from the existing executive class), how do you know that if it wasn't for that CEO, profits would have gone up even more?
You don't. Uncertainty is, unfortunately, part of life. But if the company makes billions, it's worth it to pay a few extra million to get someone you just suspect will make the company do better. Even if you aren't sure.
If two CEOs, one of company A that makes a million dollars a year, and another of company B that makes a billion dollars, both increase their companies profitability by the same proportion, both paid a proportion of the profits, CEO A will make a thousand times less money than B, for the same results. Running a company with twice the revenues isn't twice as difficult.
No, of course not. That's why both of the CEOs would prefer to be CEO of company B if possible. The board of company B will, in theory, pick whichever one is better, outbidding company A (which would also like the better CEO). If CEOs were truly interchangeable, and there was no reason to think you could guess which one was better in advance, they would all get paid the same in a competitive market. But they aren't, so the ones that are thought to be better get paid more, by the companies that can afford to pay more.
Of course, boards of directors probably do a poor job of guessing who a good CEO will be. And might have other kinds of biases that hurt the quality of their decision. But that's a separate issue – I was talking about principles, not practice. In practice, CEOs might well be substantially overpaid.
I don't think there should be a law or anything (and they are paying plenty of taxes with today's rates). I just think the analysis that says "they're worth it" is poppycock. Look at the Detroit automakers. Sure, they were in dire straights 20 years ago, but the only CEO of any of those companies in the last 20 years that has been worth a damn has been Alan Mulally. That's a pretty bad success rate.
In all types of jobs, you have individuals who are being underpaid or overpaid, because the employer misestimates how much they're worth. A good CEO is paid millions of dollars because he's actually worth that much to the company. A bad CEO is paid the same, but only because the board can't always figure out if a CEO is good or bad in advance. Everyone agrees bad CEOs should be paid less (or, better, fired) – most of all the companies themselves. But first you have to figure out if they're bad. That's the trick.
Yes, this is a result of supply and demand, and a result of mass media and popular culture, and is an "economic" truth. THAT DOES NOT MAKE IT RIGHT OR DESIRABLE. It offends me that some idiot THUG who CAN THROW A BALL 1% better than OTHER BALL THROWERS makes hundreds of millions while the doctor who saves my life by spotting and removing a melanoma makes $200k/year working 80 hour weeks and has to spend 40 of those hours filling out BS health insurance forms. (And incidentally, by catching this melanoma early, this doctor also saves my health insurer $1M in cancer treatment bills!)
The doctor provides an enormous amount of value to a small number of people, while the sports player provides a small amount of value to an enormous amount of people. It would be nice to think that the two types of value – entertainment and saving lives – were incommensurable, but that's not tenable. Amusing someone for a couple of hours is worth a certain finite amount of money, and saving someone's life is worth a much larger but still finite amount of money. (Because only a finite amount of money exists, and we can't spend it all on saving lives.) If you can entertain enough people, that's as important a service as saving one person's life, harsh though that may seem to our intuition.
This is pure social inequity and I have NO problem fixing this brokenness in the market via VERY progressive taxation at the high end. The capitalist free market is NOT holy, it is NOT moral, and it should serve HUMANS not the other way around!
95% marginal tax rates for the wealthiest sounds like a great idea, but it's probably going to collect less money than lower tax rates, not more. Consider: at a 0% marginal tax rate the government collects no money, but at a 100% marginal tax rate it also collects no money (because no one would bother accepting money if they have to hand 100% to the government). Thus the amount of money the government collects begins at 0, goes up as you increase the marginal tax rate, and eventually goes down again. What's the turning point? Do you really think it's as high as 95%? (There's probably some research about this, but I don't know what it is . ..)
By the way, I think your anger is misplaced. CEOs might get paid a few million dollars, but rarely much more than that, and they at least do put in a real day's work. The real injustice (and I agree that it is unjust) is when you make billions of dollars not because of your work, but because you invested in a business that happened to succeed massively. Bill Gates is not the richest man in the world because of his salary as a CEO, but because he owns so much of Microsoft. That's the real inequity here.
But the capacity for enormous wealth from investment is what makes capitalism work. People fund businesses only because they hope to make back their investment a hundredfold or more. Trying to bar that possibility on the basis that it's unfair, without regard to the consequences, is the fatal error of communism. Sometimes you really have to trade away fairness for more long-term wealth for society as a whole. It's the injustice of capitalism that has ensured that even the poorest people in developed nations are better off than the average person in the third world.
With any luck, capitalism-driven technological progress will eventually give us all so much wealth that the poor of the future will be better off than the wealthy today. That's what we should be aiming for: raising the bar in the long term, not trying to level things in the short term.
I'm pretty sure the only XHTML-compliant place to put script tags is inside the <head> tag
You're mistaken. HTML5 permits scripts "Where phrasing content is expected", and phrasing content is the stuff that goes in regular old paragraphs and so forth. HTML 4.01 (thus also XHTML 1.0) also says scripts "may appear any number of times in the HEAD or BODY of an HTML document."
In fact, it's a good idea to put scripts in the body if possible, ideally at the end of the page. That way they won't block page rendering. "Put Scripts at the Bottom" is Rule 6 of High Performance Web Sites, an O'Reilly book that's worth reading if you're interested in the subject.
This is the exact right thing to do if you plan to use JQuery. Yeah, sure, you could be an idiot and host it yourself (it's an OSS project, after all), but then you're wasting people's bandwidth
All 24k of it.
The bytes aren't the problem. A script load will block page rendering until the script is fully downloaded and executed. Slightly older browsers won't even fetch scripts in parallel with anything else: they just totally stop parsing the page when they hit a script, so they don't even notice later resources until they've run the script. If you're lucky, 24 KB will fit in one TCP window and you'll only have to do what, two or three round-trips? That's potentially quite a few extra ms you're adding to every page load.
Of course, caches are horribly ineffective on the modern web, since browsers tend to allocate 50 MB or something and that gets churned up almost immediately. So I doubt caching will actually help you much here. But don't sneeze at the cost of an extra script load – it's significant.
Are these the same economists that didn't see the tech or housing bubble? The same ones who thought sub-primes were contained and wouldn't spread to the rest of the economy.
I'm pretty sure there were some high-profile economists who foresaw all of those. Heck, those mortgages were called "subprime" for a reason. The government and businesses just refused to listen, for political or financial reasons.
Perhaps they are the ones that have America's debt rated AAA.
The federal government will only go bankrupt if people are unwilling to lend it more money. As long as that's not likely, it can always borrow from Peter to pay Paul. It doesn't look likely that people will be unwilling to lend to the Fed anytime soon – which is why it can get away with extremely low interest rates. So AAA it is.
Why do we emphasize the importance of some jobs, like advertising executive or investment banker, that add nothing of real value to humanity
Investment bankers add nothing of real value to humanity? Really? They seem essential for the stock market to function. Do you think the stock market adds nothing of real value to humanity? It's a great way for businesses to get capital without having to get so much support from the rich, I'd think.
[Why do we denigrate] those who pick up our trash?
We denigrate those who pick up our trash because it's an unskilled job. Most people will only become a garbage worker if they're incapable of getting a better job, so people naturally assume that garbage workers are not particularly smart or capable. This reduces most people's opinion of them. (This is a sociological observation here, not a statement of what I believe.)
Maybe we should instead strive for a more egalitarian society where everyone's contribution is respected. I respect a dishwasher who works hard and does a good job more than I respect a CEO who golfs all the time and takes credit for his underlings hard work.
You're basically restating Marx's maxim of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." It's a nice attitude in principle, but experience shows that if you reward people based on your perception of what's valuable instead of what jobs actually need to be done (as determined by employers who don't want to go out of business), you get massive inefficiency. Washing dishes is easy – anyone can do it. The people who can do things other than washing dishes need to be encouraged to do those other things, such as by higher pay, or else everyone will just take an easy job like dishwashing.
(Granted, being CEO isn't the hardest job in the world, and some people would want to be CEO even if it didn't pay well. I'm not disputing that CEOs might get paid too much, but your logic doesn't work in general.)
The rhetoricians need to start treating 100 million dollar salaries as glaring signs of economic inefficiency.
It is very unlikely that each person earning 100 million in today's economy are actually producing that much more value than the next best candidate (or even, the minimally acceptable alternative candidate, if you want to go that far).
Um, really? How about someone who's running a company that makes a hundred billion dollars? If they can increase revenue a tenth of a percent more than the next guy, it's worth it for the company to pay them $100 million more, because the gain will be more than the cost. Typically, CEOs are paid less than 0.1% of the company's revenue, although that might be millions of dollars in absolute terms. Stock brokers and so on are similar. They get paid millions because if they do a good job, they're making their customers billions. (Whether they still get paid if they mess up is a separate question.)
Another reason for someone to be highly-paid is because they provide a small service to an enormous number of people. Pro sports players can get paid millions of dollars. Why? Because millions of people are willing to pay to watch sports games. If one player will attract just a small percentage more viewers than another would (for instance, by being a better player), it makes sense to pay that person a million dollars or more.
Objections to enormous salaries are usually grounded in some wishy-washy analysis that's crippled by the human mind's inability to intuitively grasp huge numbers. The fact is, some jobs are really worth thousands of times as much as others, in economic terms. If you're going to point to injustice, point to the people who make millions of dollars from inheritance, not people who are paid for services that are really worth millions to someone.
Of course positive sum may still mean you being royally screwed if the selection is poor like a local Internet monopoly, it just still happens to be a better choice than being completely without. It may simply be that the total sum of living there versus living somewhere else where means you let yourself be voluntarily ripped off.
Yep, definitely. It's also positive-sum to sell yourself into slavery, as long as the alternative is starving to death. (Well, assuming you prefer slavery to death.) Positive-sum doesn't mean "good".
There seem to be very few transactions these days that are a positive-sum. This is one of them.
Any voluntary transaction between two parties with full knowledge (or close enough to full knowledge) is positive-sum. In particular, each party must be benefiting, because otherwise he wouldn't participate. You give money to a store owner in exchange for a product because you want the product more than the money, and he wants the money more than the product: you're both better off afterwards. This is why economic activity creates wealth, rather than just shifting it around.
The term submarine patent originally referred to a scenario in which you'd file a patent, let the procedure stall indefinitely, and only complete the process once you have someone to sue. Formerly in the U.S., you'd then get the full patent term starting from when the patent was actually granted, which could give you extra years of patent life. It also meant that nobody could possibly know about the patent, because it didn't get published until the end. But you still got most of benefits of having the patent.
The rules for granting patents in the United States were changed years ago, so this is no longer possible. Submarine patents thus do not, strictly speaking, exist anymore. But the term has caught on to just mean "patents no one knows about", and in that sense of course you still do have submarine patents.
Secondly, and most important, software patents are only really valid in one country with particularly skewed laws, the USA. Even there you'd need to spend minimum US$1 million on a patent lawsuit to see if the patent is even valid, let alone whether it applies to someone using it privately on a home computer.
I don't know about Ubuntu but for Opensuse the patented media codecs are hosted by the Packman project, a perfectly legitimate packaging project based in Germany that provides around 5000 extra packages that aren't in the main Opensuse repo.
The MPEG-LA claims patents in Europe just as in America. Here are some of the ones they have in Germany, following that link: 69129595, 69130329, 3767919, 50306371.1, 50305419, 50311129.5, 69127504, 69109346.6 . . . well, that's going up to page 8 out of 56, and I got bored.
Hey, maybe these are all so frivolous that the MPEG-LA wouldn't even bother suing. But I wouldn't bet on that unless a German patent lawyer has told you so. If the patent office granted them, you'd think a judge would uphold at least some of them, and you only need one to be in big trouble. Packman probably gets away with it because it doesn't have enough money to be worth suing, not because it's actually abiding by the law.
Unless the term piracy now also includes patent infringement those codecs aren't pirated. They are simply illegal to distribute in the United States because the US allows software patents, and the software is covered by such US patents. The codecs in questions are perfectly legal in any country where software is not patentable.
The MPEG-LA claims H.264 patents in many European countries, including at least: Germany, France, UK, Finland, Italy, Sweden, Belgium, Bulgaria, Liechtenstein, Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Spain, Hungary, Ireland, The Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Portugal, Slovenia. Probably more.
Has your lawyer told you that none of these patents will stand up in court in your country? Or is it your own personal expertise that allows you to know what's patentable better than your country's patent office?
Slashdot Mirror
I suggest, instead of actually installing the .deb, you simply extract the files from the archive to a local directory using dpkg -x chrome.deb.
This way, you're not giving Google any special permissions on your machine, which effectively amount to root access.
Chrome runs perfectly from a local user's home directory when extracted like this.
Yes, you're only giving them enough access to read all of your files and send them back to Google. That sounds like a great improvement. At least they won't be able to take over your computer! Except that they will, since taking over the sole user account on a single-user system is equivalent to getting root for most practical purposes. And if they were actually malicious, they could use any of a million privilege escalation exploits to get root. (Create ~/bin/sudo, add ~/bin to $PATH, wait . . . or replace the GUI shortcuts that you expect to prompt for elevation, if you use a GUI.)
Seriously, if you're that paranoid, use your distro's Chromium package. The application code is still being pulled from Google without review, of course, but at least the installation parts aren't, if you're so worried about giving Google root access.
Try copying the whole URL and you get http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%A2%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%93_%D7%A8%D7%90%D7%A9%D7%99, urlencoded. Try copying just the end and you get _, not urlencoded. (Chrome behaves the same.) Giving you the non-urlencoded version when copying the whole URL (which Opera does, at least the version I have lying around) is a bad idea, because not all places you might paste it will actually support IRIs, or even Unicode at all, so it might not work if not urlencoded.
Thank you for making my point for me, Slashdot. Trying to copy the main page's name (which is Hebrew) didn't work. But the encoded URL, which is not what I see in the URL bar, works fine.
So if I copy all but the first character, I get exactly what I copied, but if I copy the first character it prepends the protocol to the front on the clipboard? That's incredibly inconsistent.
Most browsers are inconsistent about copying from the URL bar anyway. For instance, go to he.wikipedia.org in Firefox. Try copying the whole URL and you get http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%A2%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%93_%D7%A8%D7%90%D7%A9%D7%99, urlencoded. Try copying just the end and you get _, not urlencoded. (Chrome behaves the same.) Giving you the non-urlencoded version when copying the whole URL (which Opera does, at least the version I have lying around) is a bad idea, because not all places you might paste it will actually support IRIs, or even Unicode at all, so it might not work if not urlencoded.
Consistency is nice, but it's not everything. I haven't noticed any real-world problems that come up when using Chrome's URL bar, so I'm fine with it.
Neither of these allow software patents (despite what the European Patent Office might tell you).
Do you have a source for that? Better yet, since who knows what "software patent" technically means to a patent lawyer, do you have a source for the claim that H.264 is not patent-encumbered in the UK (for instance)? Because the MPEG-LA's official patent list does include UK patents. Has your lawyer told you those won't actually stand up in court, or are you just parroting wishful thinking that you read on some non-lawyer's blog?
Newer research is in intraframe coding and interframe prediction. VP8 uses the same methods as x264. VP8 will most likely infringe the same patents. Google does not hold these patents.
Read this take from someone who is without a doubt an expert in these matters.
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=377
He's without a doubt an expert in video codecs, but he's not a lawyer and has no clue what he's talking about when it comes to patents. He even admits this himself, although it didn't stop him from speaking confidently on the subject.
Here's the decision. Go read it, at least the first few pages. This is not a due process case. It's a states' rights case:
All the court said is that this falls within the federal government's powers, and doesn't violate the Tenth Amendment (which reserves some rights to the states). It didn't say it was okay on due process grounds. In fact, a district court did rule that the law was unconstitutional on due process grounds, and an appeals court upheld that (citations omitted):
In short, the law has been struck down. The district court struck it down on two grounds. The government appealed both to the appeals court. The appeals court upheld the district court on one of the grounds without addressing the second one. The Supreme Court overruled the lower courts on that ground (legislative powers). The law is still struck down for violating due process, pending further appeals. This case has nothing to do with due process.
There's always Chromium; I run it on Ubuntu. For Windows there's SRWare Iron. I'm not sure which is the preferred build for OSX; perhaps Crossover Chromium. TFA doesn't say whether Chromium is affected. Some comments under TFA state that the effect lasts only until Chrome is restarted, suggesting that the information is stored only in the memory cache.
Chromium is the exact same code as Chrome. Of course it will be affected, unless you patch it out.
And seriously, people, get a grip. It's not like this tells Google what sites you visited. It just stores it on your computer. It has nothing to do with Google wanting your information, that's a complete non sequitur here. Geez.
the filesystem, which doesn't even know about the sector size The filesystem certainly might know about the sector size, if it cares to have that information. On Windows, it can ask the storage stack for the sector size using an ioctl. I imagine (though I'm not certain) there would be something similar on other platforms. A filesystem doesn't necessarily "need" to know the sector size; the storage stack should always do the right thing regardless. But knowledge of the sector size can be useful for certain performance optimizations.
You're correct, of course. The filesystem probably does know about the sector size as an implementation detail. It might not allow a block/cluster size that's not an integer multiple of the sector size, for instance (AFAIK this is the case for NTFS). It would have been more accurate to say that in practice, switching from a 512-byte sector to a 4 KB sector will not significantly affect the features of commonly-used filesystems.
You're seriously delusional if you think that Windows servers are inferior to Linux servers in any way. (Well, "any" way is an overstatement, but any practical way.)
You're seriously delusional if you think that Windows servers are as good as Linux servers in every practical way. Linux has advantages beyond cost. For some large organizations, like Google, being able to tinker with the software is essential. For other organizations, some particular feature of Linux might be essential: like DRDB, or support for some application, or good software RAID (much better than Windows from what I've heard), or (soon) btrfs, or performance on their particular workload.
If Windows Server were really as good as Linux in every "practical" way, only the cash-strapped would use Linux. That's simply not the case. The only top websites that use Windows, for example, are owned by Microsoft. On the other side of things, most shared hosts support only Linux, although typical web apps are completely portable. Why is this? Some of these are big companies; they would pay if Windows were better. But Linux does have advantages over Windows. Usually different advantages to different people, but they're there.
I'm not dissing Windows Server. I'm sure it's a lot less hassle to work with unless you're a Linux guru, and it surely has some other great features that Linux doesn't. But Linux has real advantages too. If you deny that, I have no idea how you can explain its success.
Then again Linux is a "server" OS and seen that way from the kernel maintainers.
I'm pretty sure all the kernel maintainers use Linux on their desktops, too. Certainly Linus Torvalds does! The problem is that desktop hardware is so heterogeneous. Just because it works for them, doesn't mean it works for you. If a prominent kernel developer had an RT2500, you can bet that it would be supported just fine to this day.
Because 512 byte sectors allow for less empty space waste than anything larger.
Um, no. The sector size dictates what boundaries the OS has to do reads and writes on. It doesn't dictate how the OS uses the space. 4k sectors means that to read or write an aligned 4k filesystem block, the OS has to do one I/O operation instead of eight; and that if it wants to write a 512-byte block, it has to do a read-modify-write cycle.
How efficiently small files get stored is a property of the filesystem, which doesn't even know about the sector size. Common filesystems all use 4k blocks or bigger anyway. Some filesystems store files smaller than 4k efficiently by packing them in with the metadata or dedicating some blocks to store several files per block. Filesystems that do this include, most notably, NTFS, and also some Linux filesystems like ReiserFS and btrfs. Wikipedia calls this block suballocation (don't know if this term is standard). This is totally orthogonal to the sector size.
But when the shoe is on the other foot, and that foot is the foot of a sweatshop worker who gets paid a dollar a day for creating thousands of dollars of value for some corporate clothing outlet, suddenly the question isn't, "How does her salary stack up to all the value she's creating," but "What's the minimum amount we can get away with paying her?"
That's the same question that should be asked about CEOs. If a CEO's salary could be halved and he wouldn't care, he's obviously being paid more than he should be. If there are lots of such CEOs, then that speaks to a systemic irrationality in the market. It's possible. I don't know, since I'm not in the market for hiring or being a CEO. I imagine that most CEOs would actually care if their salary was halved, just because of the message it sends, even if the money itself means nothing to them.
But the actual market price for a good CEO, if everyone has good information, should in principle be much higher than the market price for an unskilled labor. I'm arguing that in principle, some people may deserve to be paid a thousand times what other people are paid. In practice, maybe some people are grossly overpaid, I don't know; I'm arguing about principles, not practice.
I doubt many athletes would complain about making a hundred grand a year, if that were the going rate.
Which accomplishes what? The owner of their team gets to keep the extra money instead? That's even less just. At least the athlete has managed to become popular somehow through hard work and talent. The owner could very well just be lucky.
(It's curious how people are complaining about highly-paid people who actually do a lot of work. Surely it makes more sense to attack the capitalists, who make orders of magnitude more money – billions instead of millions – and don't necessarily do any work at all.)
There is, however, ample evidence that CEOs and boards of directors collude to get each other cushy, can't fail contracts. If they were so sure they were creating real value, they'd happily agree to contracts where their compensation was tied to the long-term performance of the company.
CEOs like low-risk jobs, same as anyone. Companies can fail even under a competent CEO, through no fault of his. So CEOs are offered a lot of money guaranteed, and even more if the company does well. (E.g., they're given lots of stock, which automatically becomes more valuable if the company does well.) This is really no different from any job, except the stakes are far higher. You get a certain amount guaranteed, and more for good performance.
This assumes the companies profitability is down to the CEO. Of course, when the company loses money it's the fault of the market. Considering that the vast majority of people never get to be a CEO (it's not like these jobs are advertised to us commoners, they're headhunted from the existing executive class), how do you know that if it wasn't for that CEO, profits would have gone up even more?
You don't. Uncertainty is, unfortunately, part of life. But if the company makes billions, it's worth it to pay a few extra million to get someone you just suspect will make the company do better. Even if you aren't sure.
If two CEOs, one of company A that makes a million dollars a year, and another of company B that makes a billion dollars, both increase their companies profitability by the same proportion, both paid a proportion of the profits, CEO A will make a thousand times less money than B, for the same results. Running a company with twice the revenues isn't twice as difficult.
No, of course not. That's why both of the CEOs would prefer to be CEO of company B if possible. The board of company B will, in theory, pick whichever one is better, outbidding company A (which would also like the better CEO). If CEOs were truly interchangeable, and there was no reason to think you could guess which one was better in advance, they would all get paid the same in a competitive market. But they aren't, so the ones that are thought to be better get paid more, by the companies that can afford to pay more.
Of course, boards of directors probably do a poor job of guessing who a good CEO will be. And might have other kinds of biases that hurt the quality of their decision. But that's a separate issue – I was talking about principles, not practice. In practice, CEOs might well be substantially overpaid.
I don't think there should be a law or anything (and they are paying plenty of taxes with today's rates). I just think the analysis that says "they're worth it" is poppycock. Look at the Detroit automakers. Sure, they were in dire straights 20 years ago, but the only CEO of any of those companies in the last 20 years that has been worth a damn has been Alan Mulally. That's a pretty bad success rate.
In all types of jobs, you have individuals who are being underpaid or overpaid, because the employer misestimates how much they're worth. A good CEO is paid millions of dollars because he's actually worth that much to the company. A bad CEO is paid the same, but only because the board can't always figure out if a CEO is good or bad in advance. Everyone agrees bad CEOs should be paid less (or, better, fired) – most of all the companies themselves. But first you have to figure out if they're bad. That's the trick.
Yes, this is a result of supply and demand, and a result of mass media and popular culture, and is an "economic" truth. THAT DOES NOT MAKE IT RIGHT OR DESIRABLE. It offends me that some idiot THUG who CAN THROW A BALL 1% better than OTHER BALL THROWERS makes hundreds of millions while the doctor who saves my life by spotting and removing a melanoma makes $200k/year working 80 hour weeks and has to spend 40 of those hours filling out BS health insurance forms. (And incidentally, by catching this melanoma early, this doctor also saves my health insurer $1M in cancer treatment bills!)
The doctor provides an enormous amount of value to a small number of people, while the sports player provides a small amount of value to an enormous amount of people. It would be nice to think that the two types of value – entertainment and saving lives – were incommensurable, but that's not tenable. Amusing someone for a couple of hours is worth a certain finite amount of money, and saving someone's life is worth a much larger but still finite amount of money. (Because only a finite amount of money exists, and we can't spend it all on saving lives.) If you can entertain enough people, that's as important a service as saving one person's life, harsh though that may seem to our intuition.
This is pure social inequity and I have NO problem fixing this brokenness in the market via VERY progressive taxation at the high end. The capitalist free market is NOT holy, it is NOT moral, and it should serve HUMANS not the other way around!
95% marginal tax rates for the wealthiest sounds like a great idea, but it's probably going to collect less money than lower tax rates, not more. Consider: at a 0% marginal tax rate the government collects no money, but at a 100% marginal tax rate it also collects no money (because no one would bother accepting money if they have to hand 100% to the government). Thus the amount of money the government collects begins at 0, goes up as you increase the marginal tax rate, and eventually goes down again. What's the turning point? Do you really think it's as high as 95%? (There's probably some research about this, but I don't know what it is . . .)
By the way, I think your anger is misplaced. CEOs might get paid a few million dollars, but rarely much more than that, and they at least do put in a real day's work. The real injustice (and I agree that it is unjust) is when you make billions of dollars not because of your work, but because you invested in a business that happened to succeed massively. Bill Gates is not the richest man in the world because of his salary as a CEO, but because he owns so much of Microsoft. That's the real inequity here.
But the capacity for enormous wealth from investment is what makes capitalism work. People fund businesses only because they hope to make back their investment a hundredfold or more. Trying to bar that possibility on the basis that it's unfair, without regard to the consequences, is the fatal error of communism. Sometimes you really have to trade away fairness for more long-term wealth for society as a whole. It's the injustice of capitalism that has ensured that even the poorest people in developed nations are better off than the average person in the third world.
With any luck, capitalism-driven technological progress will eventually give us all so much wealth that the poor of the future will be better off than the wealthy today. That's what we should be aiming for: raising the bar in the long term, not trying to level things in the short term.
I'm pretty sure the only XHTML-compliant place to put script tags is inside the <head> tag
You're mistaken. HTML5 permits scripts "Where phrasing content is expected", and phrasing content is the stuff that goes in regular old paragraphs and so forth. HTML 4.01 (thus also XHTML 1.0) also says scripts "may appear any number of times in the HEAD or BODY of an HTML document."
In fact, it's a good idea to put scripts in the body if possible, ideally at the end of the page. That way they won't block page rendering. "Put Scripts at the Bottom" is Rule 6 of High Performance Web Sites, an O'Reilly book that's worth reading if you're interested in the subject.
This is the exact right thing to do if you plan to use JQuery. Yeah, sure, you could be an idiot and host it yourself (it's an OSS project, after all), but then you're wasting people's bandwidth
All 24k of it.
The bytes aren't the problem. A script load will block page rendering until the script is fully downloaded and executed. Slightly older browsers won't even fetch scripts in parallel with anything else: they just totally stop parsing the page when they hit a script, so they don't even notice later resources until they've run the script. If you're lucky, 24 KB will fit in one TCP window and you'll only have to do what, two or three round-trips? That's potentially quite a few extra ms you're adding to every page load.
Of course, caches are horribly ineffective on the modern web, since browsers tend to allocate 50 MB or something and that gets churned up almost immediately. So I doubt caching will actually help you much here. But don't sneeze at the cost of an extra script load – it's significant.
Are these the same economists that didn't see the tech or housing bubble? The same ones who thought sub-primes were contained and wouldn't spread to the rest of the economy.
I'm pretty sure there were some high-profile economists who foresaw all of those. Heck, those mortgages were called "subprime" for a reason. The government and businesses just refused to listen, for political or financial reasons.
Perhaps they are the ones that have America's debt rated AAA.
The federal government will only go bankrupt if people are unwilling to lend it more money. As long as that's not likely, it can always borrow from Peter to pay Paul. It doesn't look likely that people will be unwilling to lend to the Fed anytime soon – which is why it can get away with extremely low interest rates. So AAA it is.
Why do we emphasize the importance of some jobs, like advertising executive or investment banker, that add nothing of real value to humanity
Investment bankers add nothing of real value to humanity? Really? They seem essential for the stock market to function. Do you think the stock market adds nothing of real value to humanity? It's a great way for businesses to get capital without having to get so much support from the rich, I'd think.
[Why do we denigrate] those who pick up our trash?
We denigrate those who pick up our trash because it's an unskilled job. Most people will only become a garbage worker if they're incapable of getting a better job, so people naturally assume that garbage workers are not particularly smart or capable. This reduces most people's opinion of them. (This is a sociological observation here, not a statement of what I believe.)
Maybe we should instead strive for a more egalitarian society where everyone's contribution is respected. I respect a dishwasher who works hard and does a good job more than I respect a CEO who golfs all the time and takes credit for his underlings hard work.
You're basically restating Marx's maxim of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." It's a nice attitude in principle, but experience shows that if you reward people based on your perception of what's valuable instead of what jobs actually need to be done (as determined by employers who don't want to go out of business), you get massive inefficiency. Washing dishes is easy – anyone can do it. The people who can do things other than washing dishes need to be encouraged to do those other things, such as by higher pay, or else everyone will just take an easy job like dishwashing.
(Granted, being CEO isn't the hardest job in the world, and some people would want to be CEO even if it didn't pay well. I'm not disputing that CEOs might get paid too much, but your logic doesn't work in general.)
The rhetoricians need to start treating 100 million dollar salaries as glaring signs of economic inefficiency.
It is very unlikely that each person earning 100 million in today's economy are actually producing that much more value than the next best candidate (or even, the minimally acceptable alternative candidate, if you want to go that far).
Um, really? How about someone who's running a company that makes a hundred billion dollars? If they can increase revenue a tenth of a percent more than the next guy, it's worth it for the company to pay them $100 million more, because the gain will be more than the cost. Typically, CEOs are paid less than 0.1% of the company's revenue, although that might be millions of dollars in absolute terms. Stock brokers and so on are similar. They get paid millions because if they do a good job, they're making their customers billions. (Whether they still get paid if they mess up is a separate question.)
Another reason for someone to be highly-paid is because they provide a small service to an enormous number of people. Pro sports players can get paid millions of dollars. Why? Because millions of people are willing to pay to watch sports games. If one player will attract just a small percentage more viewers than another would (for instance, by being a better player), it makes sense to pay that person a million dollars or more.
Objections to enormous salaries are usually grounded in some wishy-washy analysis that's crippled by the human mind's inability to intuitively grasp huge numbers. The fact is, some jobs are really worth thousands of times as much as others, in economic terms. If you're going to point to injustice, point to the people who make millions of dollars from inheritance, not people who are paid for services that are really worth millions to someone.
Of course positive sum may still mean you being royally screwed if the selection is poor like a local Internet monopoly, it just still happens to be a better choice than being completely without. It may simply be that the total sum of living there versus living somewhere else where means you let yourself be voluntarily ripped off.
Yep, definitely. It's also positive-sum to sell yourself into slavery, as long as the alternative is starving to death. (Well, assuming you prefer slavery to death.) Positive-sum doesn't mean "good".
There seem to be very few transactions these days that are a positive-sum. This is one of them.
Any voluntary transaction between two parties with full knowledge (or close enough to full knowledge) is positive-sum. In particular, each party must be benefiting, because otherwise he wouldn't participate. You give money to a store owner in exchange for a product because you want the product more than the money, and he wants the money more than the product: you're both better off afterwards. This is why economic activity creates wealth, rather than just shifting it around.
And submarine patents do exist
The term submarine patent originally referred to a scenario in which you'd file a patent, let the procedure stall indefinitely, and only complete the process once you have someone to sue. Formerly in the U.S., you'd then get the full patent term starting from when the patent was actually granted, which could give you extra years of patent life. It also meant that nobody could possibly know about the patent, because it didn't get published until the end. But you still got most of benefits of having the patent.
The rules for granting patents in the United States were changed years ago, so this is no longer possible. Submarine patents thus do not, strictly speaking, exist anymore. But the term has caught on to just mean "patents no one knows about", and in that sense of course you still do have submarine patents.
Secondly, and most important, software patents are only really valid in one country with particularly skewed laws, the USA. Even there you'd need to spend minimum US$1 million on a patent lawsuit to see if the patent is even valid, let alone whether it applies to someone using it privately on a home computer.
I don't know about Ubuntu but for Opensuse the patented media codecs are hosted by the Packman project, a perfectly legitimate packaging project based in Germany that provides around 5000 extra packages that aren't in the main Opensuse repo.
The MPEG-LA claims patents in Europe just as in America. Here are some of the ones they have in Germany, following that link: 69129595, 69130329, 3767919, 50306371.1, 50305419, 50311129.5, 69127504, 69109346.6 . . . well, that's going up to page 8 out of 56, and I got bored.
Hey, maybe these are all so frivolous that the MPEG-LA wouldn't even bother suing. But I wouldn't bet on that unless a German patent lawyer has told you so. If the patent office granted them, you'd think a judge would uphold at least some of them, and you only need one to be in big trouble. Packman probably gets away with it because it doesn't have enough money to be worth suing, not because it's actually abiding by the law.
Unless the term piracy now also includes patent infringement those codecs aren't pirated. They are simply illegal to distribute in the United States because the US allows software patents, and the software is covered by such US patents. The codecs in questions are perfectly legal in any country where software is not patentable.
The MPEG-LA claims H.264 patents in many European countries, including at least: Germany, France, UK, Finland, Italy, Sweden, Belgium, Bulgaria, Liechtenstein, Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Spain, Hungary, Ireland, The Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Portugal, Slovenia. Probably more.
Has your lawyer told you that none of these patents will stand up in court in your country? Or is it your own personal expertise that allows you to know what's patentable better than your country's patent office?