I think your point amounts to this: computer science undergrads love Python, so surely Ph.D. mathematicians will like it better than the language they already know and love
No, my point amounts actually to this: mathematics and statistics undergraduates love R, Matlab, and Mathematica, and so do mathematics and statistics researchers whose main goal in life is to write 20 line functions and run them on three examples in order to publish the next paper.
like if you have a Ph.D., you are probably locked in to the one field for quite a while, you should probably learn the specific purpose language.
That kind of attitude is probably while the different communities that use R, Matlab, and Mathematica keep reinventing each other's wheels. And those tools bias researchers towards looking for specific kinds of methods and ignoring others, another bad side-effect.
you are probably locked in to the one field for quite a while, you should probably learn the specific purpose language.
Quite to the contrary: Ph.D.'s in those fields are doing computer science and they should learn to become familiar with general purpose programming and software engineering concepts. And there is no reason not to: Python makes it quite painless.
Ogg is not "equal or superior to most other codecs" because it's not a codec. It's a container file that holds content compressed using a codec.
You're splitting hairs and not being reasonable. The term "Ogg" has taken on the meaning of "Vorbis inside an Ogg container" and "Theora inside an Ogg container". That's why people talk about audio and video players "supporting Ogg".
For the WC3 to push an obscure format that nobody uses as the baseline of web video of the future is absurd.
Nobody was using any of the other video standards before they were adopted as standards either.
In any case, you're completely missing the point here. The issue is not whether Ogg is a good format for video on the web, it's what Nokia's opposition to it means. And Nokia's opposition is plainly driven by a desire to keep new and smaller players out, because Nokia is quite comfortable with costly and proprietary standards.
There is no need to re-encode. I'd say about 1/3 of the players in the store (at least where I shop) support Ogg; anything from cheap Asian players to high-end multimedia monsters. Samsung supports Ogg on many (all?) of their players.
Either you haven't been looking very hard, or you're trolling.
But it does. Ogg "supports" DRM in the same way any other codec "supports" DRM: you can add DRM as a proprietary hack on top of it. The only difference is that for other codecs, people have already bothered to implement DRM, while for Ogg, they haven't.
Seriously, does anyone have an explanation for that?
See my other posts; basically, if people are forced to adopt proprietary, patent-encumbered standards, that serves as a barrier to entry to smaller players. Big, established players like Nokia like that sort of thing. In addition, Nokia is moving into services, and they are probably going to roll out some kind of cell phone video service based on proprietary video formats.
Nokia argues that they need DRM for their business model and that H.264 supports it while Ogg doesn't. Well, they are wrong. H.264 doesn't support DRM any more or any less than Ogg does.
All DRM solutions right now are non-standard and proprietary, so which codec one chooses for video is immaterial. Furthermore, a DRM standard that is tied to a particular codec is a really bad idea, because it means that the DRM mechanisms will have to be reimplemented when the video codec changes.
So, maybe there should be an open DRM standard. If so, it should be a generic DRM container format, and it should be standardized separately from the codec.
DRM-related arguments, however, are unrelated to which codec to pick. The only reason Nokia would care is because either they just don't like patent-unencumbered codecs, or because they already have their own proprietary DRM solution for an existing standard and don't want to change. Actually, I think in the case of Nokia, it's both.
Although Nokia is doing well world-wide, Nokia has an aging, proprietary software infrastructure, and they are now facing open source Android in addition to iPhone and Windows Mobile. It is in Nokia's interest to narrow the field and impose additional costs on their competitors, and forcing the adoption of proprietary and DRM'ed audio and video codecs is one way of doing that.
In addition, a non-DRM'ed codec simply doesn't fit in with their new "service"-oriented business model, where, in addition to charging for the handset, they want to be able to sell you lots of stuff over the air--ring tones, video clips, TV channels--stuff that in Google's world view would simply end up being free and ad supported.
Also, as a student, it'll cost me [...] When you're a kid, Adobe prices seem so off-putting that you can't see why people wouldn't flock to the free alternative.
Let me correct that for you: "When you're a kid (i.e., a student), you can't imagine that rich businesses can't make the $2500 for a full license appear like magic. And when you're a student in the rich world, you can't imagine that these packages are out of reach even at academic pricing to many people. When you enter the real world (if ever you do), you discover that these are real problems."
At some point the line is drawn, and you combine a trust in the reputation of your vendor with the fact that usually you're prototyping and modelling.
If you're betting on the reputation of Matlab and Mathematica, you're betting on the wrong thing. I lost weeks of work because of bugs in Mathematica, and Matlab just couldn't scale up even for research work. Let's not even get into the idiotic language semantics and the amount of time wasted learning and teaching yet another ad hoc language.
The real reason to use tools like Sage is not just the cost savings, it's that the commercial offerings are simply not very good.
Since R has a great user base and is so easy to add extensions to, wouldn't it make more sense to put sage inside of R?
Not really. Sage is based on a general purpose programming language (Python) with tons of extensions. R's programming language is rather quirky, and while R has a large number of statistical extensions, that pales in comparison to what's available for Python.
name already used by a very well known piece of software is a bad idea
There are already many different pieces of software called "Sage", several of them commercial, so adding one more doesn't really change things.
It being a different type of app is no help: remember Pheonix/Firebird?
FOSS projects often change their name when there's a threat of a lawsuit even if, strictly legally speaking, there isn't actually a trademark violation.
[sarcasm]Doubtlessly, it's a lot better for China if the Chinese kick out Yahoo and Google for non-compliance and then go ahead and create their own government controlled alternatives![/sarcasm]
Maxima, Axiom, and Yacas were all developed specifically as computer algebra systems, with everything best done within their framework, and based on their own languages.
Sage, on the other hand, focuses on gluing together other packages and uses Python. That means that Sage gets a lot of functionality out of the box that you don't easily get in those other packages. For example, Sage uses Twisted for its web service, Pyrex for native code compilation, Numpy for numerical computations, Vtk for 3D visualization, etc.
Also, Sage can invoke packages like Maxima, Axiom, and Yacas and glue them together with each other and other packages.
I'd be happy with a $1 registration fee; that would at least release the massive number of unclaimed works into the public domain and create a registry where people can actually find owners and license works. Combined with a reasonable maximum copyright term (say, 20-30 years), I think this would be a boon for creativity and the arts.
Whether Putin has been good for the country or not is unrelated to whether Russia is democratic. There are many instances of benevolent potentates that rule their empires well. But the hallmark of a working democracy is still the orderly transition of power, in particular from popular rulers.
Putin could have done Russia a great deal of good by leaving office and retiring with no ifs or buts.
When discussing the history of dictators and Russia, comparisons with Hitler are entirely appropriate.
Maybe we should formulate a corollary to Godwin's law that in any history discussing that appropriately talks about Hitler and WWII, some adolescent nitwit will try to quell the debate by invoking Godwin's law.
I couldn't even get a phone locked to the OLD ATT (ATT Blue, for those counting) unlocked by them to work on the NEW ATT
What's wrong with what they told you? You can have your phone unlocked at the mall. AT&T probably doesn't even know how to unlock an old model.
When AT&T says that their networks are open, it means that you can use unlocked devices on their network. And you can: I've been doing that for years, and it works like a charm.
I very kindly told them what they could do with themselves, and switched carriers.
Don't let the door hit you in the back on the way out.
But with AT&T, you can use a regular GSM phone with no restrictions. And if you bought a decent phone from AT&T, you can just install generic firmware on it.
If you want a nice phone without restrictions on AT&T, the Nokia N95-3 seems to be a good choice right now.
Why do you think Hitler became popular in Germany? The country was in economic shambles after WW I, and the squabbling nascent democracy just didn't manage to put things together again. Hitler was a law-and-order, family values candidate who managed to put people to work and had simple, straightforward answers; this was just a few years before he then turned into a genocidal maniac who killed millions of people.
And make no mistake about it: every nation is always at risk for those kinds of people.
I agree except for the required explicit registration. Every time you make a new blog post, you have to register?
You get a grace period after creation (a small number of years); if you don't register it within that grace period, it's in the public domain. So, you register your blog once a year. You register your sports events once a year. Etc.
Or, if you like, you can think of it this way: you get a default copyright term of a small number of years. You can extend that term through explicit registration. That might even satisfy the Berne convention without renegotiating it.
Besides, the US is a signatory country on the Berne Convention. That requires copyright upon entering into a fixed format.
If a law is bad and we created that law in response to an international treaty, we can renegotiate that treaty. I think lots of other nations would breathe a sigh of relief as well if oppressive copyright terms were lifted.
as opposed to traditional media, blogs, and rags like The Register, where 100% of the content are controlled by a "cabal" of self-appointed guardians-of-the-truth.
Thanks, but I take Wikipedia over The Register any day.
and yes, you can have a copyright on intellectual property, written or recorded material is not "imaginary" or fake or in any other way any less real than any asset
Oh, but it is very much "less real". In fact, there is no such thing as "intellectual property". Unlike physical property, you don't own your creations, you merely get a temporary monopoly. And you get that not as an inalienable right, but merely as an economic incentive. It's in the Constitution. Go look it up.
Why is it specifically in favour of 'Big' media companies?
Because big media companies get to write it.
What is it that prevents this also helping out small media companies, and even individuals who create copyrighted works?
As one of those people, I can tell you that it does not help me.
Copyright law needs to be clarified and reformed.
Copyright should not be clarified and reformed, it should be taken back to its original design: about 20 years protection, required explicit registration, and no protection on content that has DRM applied to it. That's what copyright is.
The bullshit that passes as "coypright law" today is legalized extortion.
If you think this is true, you should consider where a significant amount of your country's fresh water comes from, and who controls said land upstream. The economic and environmental decisions made in this country can affect your water supply.
Meaning what? Canada is going to build a big dam along the border if Canadians don't get their way? That would not only be rather unwise, it would also be in violation of international law. Somehow, I don't see anybody in the US losing sleep over that.
So yes you CAN influence them even after they get elected by writing to them and complaining
Yes, and if you complain to them after election with the threat of not voting for them in the next election, then that's part of the extended four year campaign.
And with US presidents, this fails to work for periods of four years at a time, since they couldn't care less who you vote for next time.
Slashdot Mirror
I think your point amounts to this: computer science undergrads love Python, so surely Ph.D. mathematicians will like it better than the language they already know and love
No, my point amounts actually to this: mathematics and statistics undergraduates love R, Matlab, and Mathematica, and so do mathematics and statistics researchers whose main goal in life is to write 20 line functions and run them on three examples in order to publish the next paper.
like if you have a Ph.D., you are probably locked in to the one field for quite a while, you should probably learn the specific purpose language.
That kind of attitude is probably while the different communities that use R, Matlab, and Mathematica keep reinventing each other's wheels. And those tools bias researchers towards looking for specific kinds of methods and ignoring others, another bad side-effect.
you are probably locked in to the one field for quite a while, you should probably learn the specific purpose language.
Quite to the contrary: Ph.D.'s in those fields are doing computer science and they should learn to become familiar with general purpose programming and software engineering concepts. And there is no reason not to: Python makes it quite painless.
Ogg is not "equal or superior to most other codecs" because it's not a codec. It's a container file that holds content compressed using a codec.
You're splitting hairs and not being reasonable. The term "Ogg" has taken on the meaning of "Vorbis inside an Ogg container" and "Theora inside an Ogg container". That's why people talk about audio and video players "supporting Ogg".
For the WC3 to push an obscure format that nobody uses as the baseline of web video of the future is absurd.
Nobody was using any of the other video standards before they were adopted as standards either.
In any case, you're completely missing the point here. The issue is not whether Ogg is a good format for video on the web, it's what Nokia's opposition to it means. And Nokia's opposition is plainly driven by a desire to keep new and smaller players out, because Nokia is quite comfortable with costly and proprietary standards.
There is no need to re-encode. I'd say about 1/3 of the players in the store (at least where I shop) support Ogg; anything from cheap Asian players to high-end multimedia monsters. Samsung supports Ogg on many (all?) of their players.
Either you haven't been looking very hard, or you're trolling.
Apart from it not supporting DRM,
But it does. Ogg "supports" DRM in the same way any other codec "supports" DRM: you can add DRM as a proprietary hack on top of it. The only difference is that for other codecs, people have already bothered to implement DRM, while for Ogg, they haven't.
Seriously, does anyone have an explanation for that?
See my other posts; basically, if people are forced to adopt proprietary, patent-encumbered standards, that serves as a barrier to entry to smaller players. Big, established players like Nokia like that sort of thing. In addition, Nokia is moving into services, and they are probably going to roll out some kind of cell phone video service based on proprietary video formats.
Nokia argues that they need DRM for their business model and that H.264 supports it while Ogg doesn't. Well, they are wrong. H.264 doesn't support DRM any more or any less than Ogg does.
All DRM solutions right now are non-standard and proprietary, so which codec one chooses for video is immaterial. Furthermore, a DRM standard that is tied to a particular codec is a really bad idea, because it means that the DRM mechanisms will have to be reimplemented when the video codec changes.
So, maybe there should be an open DRM standard. If so, it should be a generic DRM container format, and it should be standardized separately from the codec.
DRM-related arguments, however, are unrelated to which codec to pick. The only reason Nokia would care is because either they just don't like patent-unencumbered codecs, or because they already have their own proprietary DRM solution for an existing standard and don't want to change. Actually, I think in the case of Nokia, it's both.
Although Nokia is doing well world-wide, Nokia has an aging, proprietary software infrastructure, and they are now facing open source Android in addition to iPhone and Windows Mobile. It is in Nokia's interest to narrow the field and impose additional costs on their competitors, and forcing the adoption of proprietary and DRM'ed audio and video codecs is one way of doing that.
In addition, a non-DRM'ed codec simply doesn't fit in with their new "service"-oriented business model, where, in addition to charging for the handset, they want to be able to sell you lots of stuff over the air--ring tones, video clips, TV channels--stuff that in Google's world view would simply end up being free and ad supported.
Also, as a student, it'll cost me [...] When you're a kid, Adobe prices seem so off-putting that you can't see why people wouldn't flock to the free alternative.
Let me correct that for you: "When you're a kid (i.e., a student), you can't imagine that rich businesses can't make the $2500 for a full license appear like magic. And when you're a student in the rich world, you can't imagine that these packages are out of reach even at academic pricing to many people. When you enter the real world (if ever you do), you discover that these are real problems."
At some point the line is drawn, and you combine a trust in the reputation of your vendor with the fact that usually you're prototyping and modelling.
If you're betting on the reputation of Matlab and Mathematica, you're betting on the wrong thing. I lost weeks of work because of bugs in Mathematica, and Matlab just couldn't scale up even for research work. Let's not even get into the idiotic language semantics and the amount of time wasted learning and teaching yet another ad hoc language.
The real reason to use tools like Sage is not just the cost savings, it's that the commercial offerings are simply not very good.
Since R has a great user base and is so easy to add extensions to, wouldn't it make more sense to put sage inside of R?
Not really. Sage is based on a general purpose programming language (Python) with tons of extensions. R's programming language is rather quirky, and while R has a large number of statistical extensions, that pales in comparison to what's available for Python.
name already used by a very well known piece of software is a bad idea
There are already many different pieces of software called "Sage", several of them commercial, so adding one more doesn't really change things.
It being a different type of app is no help: remember Pheonix/Firebird?
FOSS projects often change their name when there's a threat of a lawsuit even if, strictly legally speaking, there isn't actually a trademark violation.
[sarcasm]Doubtlessly, it's a lot better for China if the Chinese kick out Yahoo and Google for non-compliance and then go ahead and create their own government controlled alternatives![/sarcasm]
Maxima, Axiom, and Yacas were all developed specifically as computer algebra systems, with everything best done within their framework, and based on their own languages.
Sage, on the other hand, focuses on gluing together other packages and uses Python. That means that Sage gets a lot of functionality out of the box that you don't easily get in those other packages. For example, Sage uses Twisted for its web service, Pyrex for native code compilation, Numpy for numerical computations, Vtk for 3D visualization, etc.
Also, Sage can invoke packages like Maxima, Axiom, and Yacas and glue them together with each other and other packages.
I'd be happy with a $1 registration fee; that would at least release the massive number of unclaimed works into the public domain and create a registry where people can actually find owners and license works. Combined with a reasonable maximum copyright term (say, 20-30 years), I think this would be a boon for creativity and the arts.
Whether Putin has been good for the country or not is unrelated to whether Russia is democratic. There are many instances of benevolent potentates that rule their empires well. But the hallmark of a working democracy is still the orderly transition of power, in particular from popular rulers.
Putin could have done Russia a great deal of good by leaving office and retiring with no ifs or buts.
When discussing the history of dictators and Russia, comparisons with Hitler are entirely appropriate.
Maybe we should formulate a corollary to Godwin's law that in any history discussing that appropriately talks about Hitler and WWII, some adolescent nitwit will try to quell the debate by invoking Godwin's law.
That's 27% of the *smartphone* market,
I don't think the iPhone is a "smartphone"; it's more like a fashion phone.
I couldn't even get a phone locked to the OLD ATT (ATT Blue, for those counting) unlocked by them to work on the NEW ATT
What's wrong with what they told you? You can have your phone unlocked at the mall. AT&T probably doesn't even know how to unlock an old model.
When AT&T says that their networks are open, it means that you can use unlocked devices on their network. And you can: I've been doing that for years, and it works like a charm.
I very kindly told them what they could do with themselves, and switched carriers.
Don't let the door hit you in the back on the way out.
But with AT&T, you can use a regular GSM phone with no restrictions. And if you bought a decent phone from AT&T, you can just install generic firmware on it.
If you want a nice phone without restrictions on AT&T, the Nokia N95-3 seems to be a good choice right now.
Maybe IE8 will be just a rebranding of Firefox? They're probably busy picking the default theme.
If it isn't, then it should be...
Why do you think Hitler became popular in Germany? The country was in economic shambles after WW I, and the squabbling nascent democracy just didn't manage to put things together again. Hitler was a law-and-order, family values candidate who managed to put people to work and had simple, straightforward answers; this was just a few years before he then turned into a genocidal maniac who killed millions of people.
And make no mistake about it: every nation is always at risk for those kinds of people.
I agree except for the required explicit registration. Every time you make a new blog post, you have to register?
You get a grace period after creation (a small number of years); if you don't register it within that grace period, it's in the public domain. So, you register your blog once a year. You register your sports events once a year. Etc.
Or, if you like, you can think of it this way: you get a default copyright term of a small number of years. You can extend that term through explicit registration. That might even satisfy the Berne convention without renegotiating it.
Besides, the US is a signatory country on the Berne Convention. That requires copyright upon entering into a fixed format.
If a law is bad and we created that law in response to an international treaty, we can renegotiate that treaty. I think lots of other nations would breathe a sigh of relief as well if oppressive copyright terms were lifted.
as opposed to traditional media, blogs, and rags like The Register, where 100% of the content are controlled by a "cabal" of self-appointed guardians-of-the-truth.
Thanks, but I take Wikipedia over The Register any day.
and yes, you can have a copyright on intellectual property, written or recorded material is not "imaginary" or fake or in any other way any less real than any asset
Oh, but it is very much "less real". In fact, there is no such thing as "intellectual property". Unlike physical property, you don't own your creations, you merely get a temporary monopoly. And you get that not as an inalienable right, but merely as an economic incentive. It's in the Constitution. Go look it up.
Why is it specifically in favour of 'Big' media companies?
Because big media companies get to write it.
What is it that prevents this also helping out small media companies, and even individuals who create copyrighted works?
As one of those people, I can tell you that it does not help me.
Copyright law needs to be clarified and reformed.
Copyright should not be clarified and reformed, it should be taken back to its original design: about 20 years protection, required explicit registration, and no protection on content that has DRM applied to it. That's what copyright is.
The bullshit that passes as "coypright law" today is legalized extortion.
If you think this is true, you should consider where a significant amount of your country's fresh water comes from, and who controls said land upstream. The economic and environmental decisions made in this country can affect your water supply.
Meaning what? Canada is going to build a big dam along the border if Canadians don't get their way? That would not only be rather unwise, it would also be in violation of international law. Somehow, I don't see anybody in the US losing sleep over that.
So yes you CAN influence them even after they get elected by writing to them and complaining
Yes, and if you complain to them after election with the threat of not voting for them in the next election, then that's part of the extended four year campaign.
And with US presidents, this fails to work for periods of four years at a time, since they couldn't care less who you vote for next time.