Open Source software is often developed based on need. Individuals looking for something to do in an open source project are simply hard pressed to figure out what they should do next in the kernel.
At this point in time, the areas where the kernel can benefit most are simply off limits due to political or religious issues. A stable ABI for driver and module development is a clear example of this.
Additionally, the other tasks are simply too overwhelming for an individual or a small group of part time developers to undertake. A new make system is an example of this. Even if an individual managed to pull this off, the commitment to maintain this type of code is beyond the boundaries of trust of a single relatively unknown individual to make the change permanent. After all, if a new guy pops up and says "here's my new build system for Linux", it would never make it into the main tree since no one knows the coder well enough to know if they can be trusted to own the project over a long term.
There are sometimes places such as the Video4Linux project or Alsa where the projects were developed externally for an extended period before being integrated into the kernel. But, it would be hard to find a new project to do the same with.
I'm sure that somewhere there are some truly talented and creative individuals that are young who will find the next big area for improvement, but these days, the kernel is mostly about bug fixing and adding drivers or file system modules. And drivers are most often being developed by the companies who produce the hardware and file system drivers are either corporate sponsored tasks or hacker experiments. Thanks to projects like Fuse, kernel mode file system drivers are even far less relevant than they once were.. well unless you were intending to make a replacement boot level file system.
Fact is, that developers with the talent required to actually work on the Linux Kernel are drawn to other projects where they aren't simply starting off from day one as a bug fixer. Great programmers who are creative and talented are more likely to find projects where they feel they can make a difference and make something new and exciting.
I might also lean in the direction of believing that the truly talented youth in operating system development might instead be looking towards the future to an operating system which is designed to function in a virtual machine using technologies such as.NET, Java (heaven forbid) or LLVM type architectures. Linux has become so stable now, that "revolutionary new technologies" would turn it into something else entirely. For most guys, working on the "next great thing" means working on something nearly entirely new.
To conclude, Linux is a great operating system. It has completely taken over the UNIX market and has even taken over many areas of the Windows world. The only other UNIX with such a large following is Mac OS X and that is a truly limited platform in comparison. I'm looking forward to seeing what the next best thing is, after all, wouldn't it be cool to get a new OS kernel that would compile itself for the best performance and functionality possible on the system it is running on? Even better, imagine doing it with a compiler present on the machine. That would be a great "user" OS.
This is one of those things which gets me fuming more than the video tag being the most poorly thought out design issue ever on the web.
Apple delivers video through the Quicktime architecture and Microsoft delivers video either through DirectShow or MediaFoundation. These frameworks are pluggable and CODECs can be easily installed on these platforms.
What is missing is a method of delivering the CODECs to the users. Google can make the CODEC part of Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Earth, etc... there are countless ways in which Google can proliferate the CODEC to the consumer. The real issue comes in mobile devices. Delivering to the Microsoft and Apple phones. On the desktop, the CODEC issue is already taken care of.
As for supporting the VP8 CODEC on iPhone, I don't recall seeing anything that specifically bans third party CODECs on the phone itself. In fact, given that the hardware encoder in slingbox appears to be either WMV9 or VC-1 (I haven't verified it, but I read it somewhere), SlingPlayer for iPhone almost certainly is delivering a 3rd party CODEC to the device. It might simply be an issue of making a new player that triggers on VP8 media.
As for the Microsoft phone, it's both easier and harder. I have implemented low complexity CODECs in.NET in the past, but nothing with as much complexity as VP8. H.261 works with minimal CPU consumption on.NET. I've also implemented much of H.262 with little additional overhead. With the exception of the more expensive prediction methods which are definitely points where highly optimized code is beneficial, CODECs with the complexity of H.264 and VP8 should be doable.
My greatest dreams at the moment is Microsoft implementing vectorization extensions in.NET and I know it's supposedly scheduled, but cross platform vectorization frameworks are EXTREMELY complex. And to avoid them ending up with a piece of crap VM design like Java's, I'm truly hoping they'll delay the feature until they get it right.
All said and done, VP8 can be proliferated pretty easily. At least for a company like Google who has both the means to implement it as well as the means to deploy it.
It should be required by law that all vehicles (including used ones passing through car lots) must be equipped with bluetooth hands free and steering wheel controls. The money gained from ticketing phone users should have a part set aside to sponser a program where all vehicle inspection centers will be required to pair telephones to car hands-free units either free of charge or for a nominal fee of $5 or so.
In order to renew a car's tags, the car owner must have documentation that a bluetooth hands-free is in-fact installed correctly in the vehicle.
Does this punish a shit-load of people who don't talk in their cars on their phones? No. It's a tax that makes it safer for them to drive on the roads with the idiots who do. (I'm one of those idiots, but I have a handsfree).
I would very much like to see something that requires stereo integration as well. Some sort of modular system that would make the phone communicate with a console mounted screen so that people who want to change which song they're listening to don't have to dig in their purses or pockets to break out their phones to do it.
In our current police state (not just the U.S., but most of the western world now) where the police departments have cameras all over the cities and traffic systems, can't they just have 2-3 people sitting at a console, taking snap shots of drivers with their phones to their ears and clicking a mouse button to send them a ticket in the mail?
Seriously, it seems to me, a single person with a 30" screen should be able to monitor 16 locations simultaneously without even trying. Using simple motion detection on each camera, it would be possible to make sure each of the 16 windows on their screen could be guaranteed to have traffic on them. As a result, they could probably be sending out 2-3 tickets every minute. At $200 a ticket, that would yield about $500 a minute for $30,000 an hour, $180,000 a day for at least a while.
So they're willing to chip in a whole $200,000 to make this happen? Are you serious? I mean, this could be the biggest cash cow in the history of traffic duty. Forget the policemans' ball, a single full time employee could raise more money for the police department than all the traffic cops in a state combined. Eventually when people start getting better at hiding their phones from the cameras (you don't think they'll stop doing it do you?) people will be cautious most of the time and simply expect they're being watched.
I just can't figure out if the article also talks about banning hands free use of phones as well. Are they seriously saying they want to simply ban cell phone use while driving altogether? It won't happen. It's a waste of time. If they want get people to stop holding phones up to their ears, they have to agree to the hands free or people will just prefer to pay the tickets.
Taking a pirate and turning them into corporate drones where they have ready availability to free media (I used to get a box of 100 DVDs at a time for free from Warner) makes it so that their pirate instincts turn dull quickly. Fact is, while these guys would be resourceful in the beginning, they would quickly become dead weight since they'd stop thinking like pirates.
It would make more sense to hire computer science graduates and have the work on the problem from a technical aspect as opposed to the social aspect.
As a senior level developer that has in the past worked at major software firms on key projects, I often tend to find myself a bit annoyed when encountering a coding test. It has an unfortunate effect of tipping the negotiating scales in favor of the employer before an interview even happens. However for entry level positions, they are HIGHLY useful.
I regularly mentor "The New Guy", a guy who just finished a masters or Ph.D. in signal processing, mathematics, computer science, etc... and more often than not, they can't code anything more complex than a 50 line simulation which is barely readable. Of course, these are really bright guys and can be pushed gently in the right direction very easily, so I take the opportunity to get them started as quickly as possible, after all, the faster they learn, the more work I can send in their direction.
I applied for a position at Skype a few years back and everything went well up until they sent me a "coding test" which consisted of making a simple HTTP server which would handle database requests using the PostgreSQL API. It was a fun project, but most importantly, it said "we know you've been programming for 15 years as lead developer on major projects. But can you code?" Initially I was a bit annoyed by this and I decided not to bother with the position as I don't like negotiating terms of employment with an employer who takes the upper hand so early. But, for entry level positions this opportunity could really open up a great deal of positions to guys who CAN program but don't know how to get their foot in the door.
Because of this, when we're looking for new people for entry level positions, I recommend we provide a similar test. Something that can be accomplished in 1000 lines or less (an evening coding) and shows that the applicant has the skills necessary. Then when we call the guy in for an interview, we can tell them before we've even started that his abilities are NOT in question and we are interested in him/her. Therefore when it comes to negotiating salary and such, they have can feel confident asking for thing and can actually get their needs taken care of without accepting the first offer we make fearing we'll toss him/her out since they're unproven. It becomes an issue of personality and office compatibility instead and sometimes we might feel the candidate is just "so promising" that we're willing to try anyway.
I regularly talk with and work with people who never use math more complex that what they learned in the 3rd grade. In fact, with the exception of people who use math in their careers, I doubt most people could pass a 4th grade math exam without the use of a calculator. This almost definitely applies directly to shrinks like the guy who wrote the article.
When first introduced to the concept of a recursive algorithm in the 4th grade when being taught a method of calculating Pi, later in the day, by using the properties of a right triangle I learned from geometry, I derived (accurately) the laws of trigonometry and by applying what I had learned from drawing a circle using LOGO, even taught myself spherical geometry. My son already appears to be advancing through math (he's in 2nd grade) at about twice the rate I ever did.
If we cut back on teaching basic math theory to children, it may not make any impact later in life to the average person, but it will almost definitely impact the brightest of us by robbing us of a 5 year head start. This would have dramatic negative effects on society overall.
Using the arguments posed by this person, maybe it would be better to simply keep kids in day care an extra 1-4 years to allow them to mature a bit more before being exposed to academia. Equally, they should delay the children's entry to the real world by an equal number of years. I can make numerous arguments in favor of this, not of the least being that since people are working later in life, it would decrease the competition over many of the jobs out there where people are retiring later and later from without leaving openings for new younger replacements. This would have a tremendous positive impact by decreasing age discrimination from the work place. Also, it would give children a better chance to get through their rebellious stages (early adulthood) before making long term decisions with regards to the future direction of their lives.
Maybe it would be best to come up with a stronger vocational studies program in the schools for kids who are less likely to use their brains in an intellectual fashion past a certain grade level. If you're going to be a businessman, a shrink, etc... you shouldn't be forced to spend 5 more years than necessary in high school which will serve as little more than a day care service.
Seriously, I'm a huge fan of protecting intellectual property... FAIRLY. It also needs to be intellectual property. I have no arguments that movie makers and musicians MUST be rewarded for their work. In fact, I personally own 1000 DVDs, 1-2,000 books, about 500 audiobooks and who knows what else. But I DO NOT consider them intellectual property. They are art. There needs to be a difference.
The technology used to produce the movie IS intellectual property. The design of a guitar IS intellectual property. The music and films produced with these tools IS ART.
Artists SHOULD be rewarded for their efforts and what they have produced. But it is not the art they're producing which makes a country like America great. People everywhere make art. If you're to give some form of intellectual property for making the U.S. great, it's tangible items designed by Americans that do. Everything from the battery powered nail gun to the fan assisted finger nail drier. It's their creativity when designing solutions to problems that makes them great.
Intellectual Property rights that reward people for coming up with solutions to problems should exist. They should not stop competitors from riding their coat tails, but instead should require the competitor to pay for the rights to make use of the ideas.
It's about time that the government stops considering art and solutions to problems to be the same thing. I highly respect artists and movie makes, but the fact is, I'm offended as a creator of solutions to be mushed into the same group with someone else like this!
FSF has a background of being considered a liberal, damn near terrorist group by politicians and corporate leaders. The FSF has many good sides, but is politically is known for attempting to bully corporations and political leaders into seeing their way of thinking. I can't think of specific examples of threats, but Richard Stallman has been known to berate political leaders (his attempted encounter with the French president comes to mind) for not permitting him to sidestep the song and dance which makes politics politics.
When loud mouthed critics start making big stinks about political issues without taking the time to recognize how they are in fact deterring the exact causes they are "fighting for" they do more damage than good. Leaders of companies and governments are highly dependent on cooperation from political opponents and possibly hostile board members that would like nothing better than to label them as "liberal pussies who shouldn't be in charge of anything". There were somewhat legitimate conspiracy theories that the Vietnam War could have ended sooner if the politicians didn't have to worry about looking like they were "Doing what John Lennon told them to" when he would immaturely berate them publicly for their stupidity.
Richard Stallman has gained Michael Moore status. Meaning that leaders have to wait a certain period after they've had their tie raids before doing the things they had intended to do anyway. Before they can support a cause, they have to do damage control to detach the cause from the loud mouthed buffoons that insist on making the causes political death traps before they can support the changes.
Google is a company that has been very supportive of open source in the past and more than likely will be. They might be able to launch VP8 under a free license now by saying "Well, we were planning on doing it when we bought the company". But the FSF needs to learn when to fight for things and they also need to learn when to just sit back and wait a while before making too much noise.
This is an excellent example of a time where it would have been best to let Google have a chance to breath. After all, before committing VP8 to the open source, they need to let a pile of patent attorneys find out every possible portion of the code which could be considered patentable and then perform patent searches to try and eliminate the possibilities of VP8 being hit by submarine patents. Now that Google owns VP3, it's entirely possible submarine patents will surface, but it would be far more intelligent to let VP8 out into the open and make it an integral part of the web first. Google then can have a chance, after letting the suits find submarine patents to produce a VP9 codec which avoids them.
First off, just to join the pissing contest, here in Oslo, Norway 100 up and down is $200 a month which given cost of living adjustments is like $120 a month there. Pretty sad that you guys don't get symmetric bandwidth. It's just their way of keeping you from sharing files.
The real problem isn't their ability to deliver to the consumer premises. VDSL2 already does it over copper, in fact, it can hit 250MBit/sec. Of course single-mode fiber can already handle gigabit over a single strand in last mile installations.
The problem IS being able to deliver bandwidth to the servers which need to deliver to the customer. 100MBit/s doesn't sound like much until you start watching 50MBit/sec video streams from online distributors. Or when Apple releases a new iPhone patch and the entire world rushes to their web site. Their web servers can't keep up with that kind of traffic. Machines WILL be faster then and servers WILL be much much more powerful, but places currently sporting 10GBit/sec fiber will need Tb/sec connections to keep up.
What is definitely more important would be the requirement for multicast support. With multicast, it becomes possible for high-bandwidth streams to be distributed over the backbone a lot easier. Multicast is probably the #1 improvement that should be government mandated before forcing ISPs to offer huge bandwidth pipes to the house.
Another thing I'd like to see is that the government requires that neighbors passing through a single switch should be allowed to communicate at port-speed to one another over their networks. So, while you're connection to the internet is 10MBit/sec, it should be possible to communicate with your neighbor at gigabit speeds. Limiting the bandwidth to other ports within the switch is stupid.
A good measure of a programmer's competence is based on measuring two temporal differences.
First, measure the time it takes from when he starts the job until he makes the comment "I really think we need to rewrite this".
Second measure the time it takes from the first point until he realizes that it's better to maintain what you have since it's too big of a job and even if it were "done properly", deadlines would screw up the new codebase as well.
Cylinders, head, sector addressing really needs to go anyway. MBR has been hacked so many times over the years to support this method of formatting but in reality it's a total waste. Old operating systems that were forced to work with this method of addressing had to translate to and from the CHS format since sector allocation has ALWAYS been linear. Even FAT-12 used linear addressing methods.
CHS is also misleading and CHS optimizations are wasteful. Since all modern drives (starting with the first Connor IDE 20 meg drive in the early days) supported some form of intelligent sector remapping that would keep spare sectors available for relocating data after the magnetic medium of a heavily used sector elsewhere began to fail.
Sector remapping makes it so that CHS optimizations are entirely irrelevant since even brand new drives, straight off the production line ship with bad sectors that have been remapped elsewhere. For better drive performance, algorithms space out the spare sectors across the drive so that when accessing a spare sector, the head doesn't have to slam to the inner or outer rings of the disc. But still, CHS doesn't apply to absolute positions anymore.
This is 2010 now, I wrote file systems which functioned on 4096 byte sectors on ESDI drives back in the 80's. Made my drives much bigger doing it too. It's time that we move to larger sector sizes again. Modern ECC isn't that much better than 80's grade, however the processing power available to us is so much more that performing ECC on larger blocks of data is achievable. Also, using RAID-5, 5EE or RAID6 makes it so that we can depend less on single drive redundancy. SCSI and IDE should be extended so that controller can inform the drive of bad sectors it finds when performing RAID XORing.
Flying on KLM (the Dutch national airline) which has the narrowest seats I've ever seen on any plane from Amsterdam to Singapore, I was placed in between two Swedish body builders. This was a 20 hour flight! At the time, I wasn't very thin, at 5'10", 170lbs, but I wasn't overly large either.
I asked the two gentlemen if they'd be kind enough to sit beside one another so I could either have the aisle or the window, using the excuse that "I don't like flying much and would appreciate sleeping as much of the flight as possible, and their conversation would hinder that." They told me, "Well, you see, we don't fit too well sitting side by side in coach."
So they intentionally sat with a seat in-between them knowing perfectly well that they were almost guaranteed to have someone smaller in-between them who's seat they can overflow into. And yet, this didn't appear to matter.
Well, I survived barely... however on the way back, there was an old Dutch married couple who apparently had the same idea... and they were fat. Their excuse was "Well dear, we've been married so long and it's nice to meet new people to talk to". I nearly died, not only did they want to have their fat asses overflowing into my seat, but they wanted to keep me awake too!
This has become such a problem that now, when I'm traveling on a family trip and my sister is going too, I actually wait to find out which plane she's flying on so I can book another flight. She's 5' tall and weighs in a little over 300lbs (by a little, I mean she's not 400lbs yet). I feel sorry for her kids who are also becoming "shapely" as they are growing up because noone should be forced to sit still in one place with their seats overflowed on by another person.
I think airlines should start advertising comfort features in their coach class like "We have arm rests on EVERY seat so noone else's ass can be in yours!", or "We have seats which are REALLY REALLY uncomfortable for large people", or "We only serve vegetables and water on our flights". I would actually fly more often then.
Symbian has classicaly made use of the most complex build environment of any system. In the old days they lacked any GCC expertise so instead chose to "post process" elf files output by the compiler to hack them to work with their application loader which is more of a shared library loader than an application loader.
Things haven't improved over time. Their build environments and formats are still an utter disaster. Their hacks to Eclipse are half assed at best as well.
The only way Symbian will ever compete with Android is if the community works like the Netscape community did when it went open... rewrite the thing since it's pretty much crap from the bottom up.
Sometimes you can ship relatively good products even if they are built as a mountain of dung. The trick is to stick a pretty box around it. But if anyone ever takes enough interest in this OS when there are so many MUCH better alternatives out there, it's going to get rewritten if for consistency and modernization if nothing else.
Who the hell ever heard of an OS that DEMANDS you use a programming model like MVC (and a misinterpretation of it as well) just to write a hello world program. Coding for this thing is painful at best.
I am a huge fan of e-books and audio books. In fact, I went from reading 50-100 printed books per year to reading 3 or less since e-books and audio books won my heart.
This raises the question of archival. To this day, we find scrolls buried in the dead sea. We find clay tablets from Mesopotamia. The death of paper is a real issue since a major world wide energy crisis would mean the permanent loss of information. Let's imagine for a moment that another world war did in fact occur (not too hard to imagine at times sadly). Among the first attacks would be energy sources. After all, no energy = no weapons production. Attacking oil resources is also likely.
Whoever wins such a war might find it in their best interest to keep their opponents in the dark long enough to make them easily controlled afterwards. Energy resources not dependent on the grids would eventually run out. Solar cells and wind mills might keep working, but their resources will not be directed to protecting information, but instead to running hospitals and other critical systems.
Books MUST be printed. It is critical. There needs to be redundant storage houses around the world where at least one copy of each book printed is stored. Even if it's in a cardboard box in an abandoned mine.
What steps are being taken so that once devices like Kindle, iPad and the likes start making "Published direct to e-Book" popular to keep books archived. Amazon, B&N, Borders and others should be required by law that for each book they publish "direct to e-book", they must use their "Print On Demand" systems to produce at least one copy to be stored at archival locations around the world in printed form.
I'm convinced that in countries like Norway (where I live) it is very likely the government would even sponser an archive here. We don't have a library on the scale of the Library of Congress, but we sure do have plenty of abandoned mines that can be used for archival.
I really hope that someone thinks about these problems before it's too late.
Microsoft supported many different platforms with their Windows NT versions in the past. Early incarnations of the XBox360 SDK shipped with a PowerPC based Mac running a modified Windows XP.
Microsoft has produced compilers for x86, MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, Itanium and others. They have ported NT based operating systems to different platforms as well. The issue that the ARM guy is forgetting is that Microsoft produces Windows CE for ARM because they choose to. The other platforms we supported through other agreements. I remember reading some outrageous figure on a shareholder report from DEC in the old days which had them paying over $100 million to simply continue development and maintain the Alpha AXP port of Windows NT, Visual Studio and Office.
I have ported major applications to different platforms including most of these processors and often simply on X Windows. The fact is, even when the instruction sets and operating systems are almost identical, there are ALWAYS issues.
ARM would not be the hardest port that Microsoft will have performed of Windows. The systems are technically very similar, however it would require Microsoft to maintain and support a second high-volume platform. They had huge problems with Pocket PC across multiple chip platforms in the past and eventually everything ended up on ARM.
Imagine the millions of e-mails they'd receive "WinZip doesn't work on my Windows 7 based netbook" or "When I try to play this YouTube based video on my netbook, it tells me I need Flash, but Adobe says they don't have a version which runs on it."
Let's also point out that there are NOOOO powerhouse ARM systems which can be used for running Visual Studio with a debugger and tools. Even now, my little machine for compiling a tiny 500,000 line project is a Core i7. If I had to do the same work on an ARM, I'd kill myself. Sure, I can remote debug, but that SUCKS!!!! when developing desktop apps. So, no, I wouldn't bother porting my code to ARM based Windows, not until there was an ARM on par with my Core i7 or my 8-core Xeon to work on.
Microsoft could employ some technology similar to Apple's Rosetta, but Microsoft spent YEARS in the past trying to do that on the Itanium and the Alpha platforms and it proved to be a waste of time. Besides, you end up having to ship "fat binaries" supporting the host machine AND the emulated machine making Windows twice the size.
Let's not forget that Microsoft's compilers for x86 are EXCELLENT. If they're not good enough, Intel's and Portland Groups are FANTASTIC. GCC for x86 is Wonderful. ARM compilers still suck and Intel doesn't even bother making them anymore now that they sold XScale to Marvell.
Tell you want ARM guys... enjoy your "NetBook OS"'s. I'll keep waiting for my pocket sized x86 2Ghz machine.
Implemented the first two. Now that I read this, I implemented the first one in a way which was more efficient and possibly better quality (though I'd have to spend a week in Matlab to prove it) and even better wouldn't infringe. This patent definitely wouldn't be an issue for Theora given its specificity. It's made to get Nokia a cut of the licensing pie.
Second one... that's the prediction patent. I'd love to own this one since it is practically the foundation of the greatest improvement made in H.264 over previous incarnations. Don't know how Theora does it, but it practically covers all modern forms of prediction that I've seen. It's a hell of a well written patent also since it can be easily interpreted to cover pretty much any modern CODEC (except wavelet ones which are nailed by a thousand other patents).
Third one, I got lost in the lawyer gibberish, but from what I read, it would probably not survive a court case, I think practically the entire thing is covered in MPEG-2 patents. It's really just a matter of transmitting quantization values as part of the stream to the decoder. The only thing "new" about it is the issue of the "default values", and I'm pretty sure a good lawyer would get that tossed out as being obvious. But I'm almost 100% sure that all the tech of interest in it is covered in H.262 under the quantizer extension.
I'm really not a lawyer, but of the 3 patents you mentioned, the first is avoidable and the third has to be easy to get tossed out, but could awaken the exercise of the H.262 patent for the quantizer extension (if it's still alive). The second one could pretty much force the world to a wavelet based model, but motion compensation for wavelet compressions is UGLY.
Fact is, if the web site has the ability to choose the CODEC, then they should have a means of providing the CODEC. An architecture via DOM, EcmaScript, WebGL and an audio object should have been designed so that CODECs could be distributed to the web browser as byte code that can be compiled optimized for the platform.
Sure, initially it would be slow, but now that pretty much all EcmaScript implementations compile to native, it would make sense to push the limits and force the ability to produce vectorized code as well. There's simply no reason that EcmaScript couldn't be used for implementing CODECs. WebGL provides video textures which can be used for pushing the media to. Additionally, GLSL might be able to be used for GPU accelerated Video CODECs.
As far as I can see, the only thing missing is a method of outputting audio data from EcmaScript as a stream.
Interesting. Here in Norway, all my financial data is provided to the IRS equivilent via computer. The company I work for, when they transfer my salary to my bank account also reports to the government the data. Then, when I buy or sell stocks, mutuals or bonds, the transactions as they are processed are updated in the same database.
The only time things get a little confusing is based on whether I'm exercising the same stock in blocks. I can alter my tax records to adjust for which blocks I am purchasing vs. which blocks I'm selling. That's a bit confusing at times, but a simple spread sheet makes it easy.
With an average of 200 investment transactions during a period of a year plus what really works out to about 30 or more special cases, my taxes generally require 25 minutes a year to prepare and file.
The only issue here is that some lame-brain probably is complaining about privacy issues. But come on, whether the government gets the data in real time or gets the data at the end of the year, does it really make a difference?
I hate statistics that are produced but read incorrectly. It's fine to gather data to prove your point about something, but in reality, these stats are talking about a downturn in community support. I'd say that it's a show of a much higher level of community support.
Except with rare exceptions a volunteer developer that does it purely in their spare time might be able to contribute 1/4 to 1/2 the time of a full time paid developer. Given the "hacker factor" many of the paid developers are working greater than 40 hours a week by a considerable margin. That means that either there's a HUGE number of volunteer developers or that the ones that are there are producing a great deal more than the paid developers in the same period of time. This is more likely since volunteer developers are more likely to work on what interests them and given that, will be more motivated and move more rapidly.
Also keep in mind that a commitment on this scale from volunteers if doubly impressive since given that there are SOOOO many paid developers producing SOOOO much code, these guys (gals inclusive in the masculine form) are still pumping out so much even though they probably don't have to.
The downside of course is that there's a possibility that the volunteer developers have become counter-productive to the project since companies don't find a need to finance a commitment of 10 developers, 2 documenters and 5 testers on a project because some guy in his basement is hacking on it at home while munching Doritos and sucking down The Dew.
I don't remember the exact figures and I'm too lazy to look it up, but if I recall, 4 members of the Department of Justice was actually hired from the RIAA by Obama.
Someone should take actions to guarantee that the members of the DOJ can not for the rest of their lives collect money or gifts from the RIAA or MPAA since I'm almost 100% certain that all the guys that started at the RIAA over there will be moving into massive corner offices at RIAA when they're done with their 4-8 years.
It's probably about time someone started an investigation into the DOJ with regards to their possibly illegal ties to the RIAA. I'm no expert on the topic, but it seems to me that lawyers that came from the RIAA into the DOJ interfering with huge case like this IN FAVOR OF the RIAA just screams out corruption to me.
I like Obama, but I knew when he started hiring these guys that there would eventually be a scandal attached to it.
How long before they start buying up all the journalists on AP? Times are tough at The Times, Wall Street Journal, etc... how long before Google starts hiring their best writers and makes their own new system.
You know what happens then to all these new outlets complaining about Google News stealing their articles? It's simple, people stop seeing news from those sources instead.
Google seems to have a long track record of cooperating with other organizations and eventually learning that whatever technology they provide is cheaper to replace.
They made Android, got vendors like HTC to commit to it and now they're making their own phone instead. They paid browser vendors for search and clicks, and now are making their own browser which is quickly gaining market share. Opera and Firefox make a considerable amount of their income from Google, but how long before Google decides they don't need them anymore?
They make their own servers, OCR software, office software, mapping system, launched their own satellites, have attempted to buy wireless spectrums, built a library, etc...
In reality, they're consuming the Internet at a rate far faster than Microsoft ever managed against the PC world. They throw money at all the businesses that are selling software until the vendor feels the false sense of confidence allowing them to offer the software nearly for free. Then they make their own alternative to those apps. Of course, from what I understand, they haven't stopped paying the smaller vendors for their clicks, but they produce and market their own products through the most successful marketing tool of the past decade... Google.
I love the Google search engine, Earth is great, maps is wonderful, translate isn't too bad, gmail is fantastic. I also love Microsoft's stuff, Windows, Office, Visual Studio, etc... but I hate both of their businesses.
It's a bit of a shame that such horrible organizations make some of the best stuff.
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Open Source software is often developed based on need. Individuals looking for something to do in an open source project are simply hard pressed to figure out what they should do next in the kernel.
.NET, Java (heaven forbid) or LLVM type architectures. Linux has become so stable now, that "revolutionary new technologies" would turn it into something else entirely. For most guys, working on the "next great thing" means working on something nearly entirely new.
At this point in time, the areas where the kernel can benefit most are simply off limits due to political or religious issues. A stable ABI for driver and module development is a clear example of this.
Additionally, the other tasks are simply too overwhelming for an individual or a small group of part time developers to undertake. A new make system is an example of this. Even if an individual managed to pull this off, the commitment to maintain this type of code is beyond the boundaries of trust of a single relatively unknown individual to make the change permanent. After all, if a new guy pops up and says "here's my new build system for Linux", it would never make it into the main tree since no one knows the coder well enough to know if they can be trusted to own the project over a long term.
There are sometimes places such as the Video4Linux project or Alsa where the projects were developed externally for an extended period before being integrated into the kernel. But, it would be hard to find a new project to do the same with.
I'm sure that somewhere there are some truly talented and creative individuals that are young who will find the next big area for improvement, but these days, the kernel is mostly about bug fixing and adding drivers or file system modules. And drivers are most often being developed by the companies who produce the hardware and file system drivers are either corporate sponsored tasks or hacker experiments. Thanks to projects like Fuse, kernel mode file system drivers are even far less relevant than they once were.. well unless you were intending to make a replacement boot level file system.
Fact is, that developers with the talent required to actually work on the Linux Kernel are drawn to other projects where they aren't simply starting off from day one as a bug fixer. Great programmers who are creative and talented are more likely to find projects where they feel they can make a difference and make something new and exciting.
I might also lean in the direction of believing that the truly talented youth in operating system development might instead be looking towards the future to an operating system which is designed to function in a virtual machine using technologies such as
To conclude, Linux is a great operating system. It has completely taken over the UNIX market and has even taken over many areas of the Windows world. The only other UNIX with such a large following is Mac OS X and that is a truly limited platform in comparison. I'm looking forward to seeing what the next best thing is, after all, wouldn't it be cool to get a new OS kernel that would compile itself for the best performance and functionality possible on the system it is running on? Even better, imagine doing it with a compiler present on the machine. That would be a great "user" OS.
This is one of those things which gets me fuming more than the video tag being the most poorly thought out design issue ever on the web.
.NET in the past, but nothing with as much complexity as VP8. H.261 works with minimal CPU consumption on .NET. I've also implemented much of H.262 with little additional overhead. With the exception of the more expensive prediction methods which are definitely points where highly optimized code is beneficial, CODECs with the complexity of H.264 and VP8 should be doable.
.NET and I know it's supposedly scheduled, but cross platform vectorization frameworks are EXTREMELY complex. And to avoid them ending up with a piece of crap VM design like Java's, I'm truly hoping they'll delay the feature until they get it right.
Apple delivers video through the Quicktime architecture and Microsoft delivers video either through DirectShow or MediaFoundation. These frameworks are pluggable and CODECs can be easily installed on these platforms.
What is missing is a method of delivering the CODECs to the users. Google can make the CODEC part of Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Earth, etc... there are countless ways in which Google can proliferate the CODEC to the consumer. The real issue comes in mobile devices. Delivering to the Microsoft and Apple phones. On the desktop, the CODEC issue is already taken care of.
As for supporting the VP8 CODEC on iPhone, I don't recall seeing anything that specifically bans third party CODECs on the phone itself. In fact, given that the hardware encoder in slingbox appears to be either WMV9 or VC-1 (I haven't verified it, but I read it somewhere), SlingPlayer for iPhone almost certainly is delivering a 3rd party CODEC to the device. It might simply be an issue of making a new player that triggers on VP8 media.
As for the Microsoft phone, it's both easier and harder. I have implemented low complexity CODECs in
My greatest dreams at the moment is Microsoft implementing vectorization extensions in
All said and done, VP8 can be proliferated pretty easily. At least for a company like Google who has both the means to implement it as well as the means to deploy it.
It should be required by law that all vehicles (including used ones passing through car lots) must be equipped with bluetooth hands free and steering wheel controls. The money gained from ticketing phone users should have a part set aside to sponser a program where all vehicle inspection centers will be required to pair telephones to car hands-free units either free of charge or for a nominal fee of $5 or so.
In order to renew a car's tags, the car owner must have documentation that a bluetooth hands-free is in-fact installed correctly in the vehicle.
Does this punish a shit-load of people who don't talk in their cars on their phones? No. It's a tax that makes it safer for them to drive on the roads with the idiots who do. (I'm one of those idiots, but I have a handsfree).
I would very much like to see something that requires stereo integration as well. Some sort of modular system that would make the phone communicate with a console mounted screen so that people who want to change which song they're listening to don't have to dig in their purses or pockets to break out their phones to do it.
In our current police state (not just the U.S., but most of the western world now) where the police departments have cameras all over the cities and traffic systems, can't they just have 2-3 people sitting at a console, taking snap shots of drivers with their phones to their ears and clicking a mouse button to send them a ticket in the mail?
Seriously, it seems to me, a single person with a 30" screen should be able to monitor 16 locations simultaneously without even trying. Using simple motion detection on each camera, it would be possible to make sure each of the 16 windows on their screen could be guaranteed to have traffic on them. As a result, they could probably be sending out 2-3 tickets every minute. At $200 a ticket, that would yield about $500 a minute for $30,000 an hour, $180,000 a day for at least a while.
So they're willing to chip in a whole $200,000 to make this happen? Are you serious? I mean, this could be the biggest cash cow in the history of traffic duty. Forget the policemans' ball, a single full time employee could raise more money for the police department than all the traffic cops in a state combined. Eventually when people start getting better at hiding their phones from the cameras (you don't think they'll stop doing it do you?) people will be cautious most of the time and simply expect they're being watched.
I just can't figure out if the article also talks about banning hands free use of phones as well. Are they seriously saying they want to simply ban cell phone use while driving altogether? It won't happen. It's a waste of time. If they want get people to stop holding phones up to their ears, they have to agree to the hands free or people will just prefer to pay the tickets.
I saw it yesterday. Not only are they too dumb to pull over to do it, but they're apparently also too dumb to use google maps
Taking a pirate and turning them into corporate drones where they have ready availability to free media (I used to get a box of 100 DVDs at a time for free from Warner) makes it so that their pirate instincts turn dull quickly. Fact is, while these guys would be resourceful in the beginning, they would quickly become dead weight since they'd stop thinking like pirates.
It would make more sense to hire computer science graduates and have the work on the problem from a technical aspect as opposed to the social aspect.
As a senior level developer that has in the past worked at major software firms on key projects, I often tend to find myself a bit annoyed when encountering a coding test. It has an unfortunate effect of tipping the negotiating scales in favor of the employer before an interview even happens. However for entry level positions, they are HIGHLY useful.
I regularly mentor "The New Guy", a guy who just finished a masters or Ph.D. in signal processing, mathematics, computer science, etc... and more often than not, they can't code anything more complex than a 50 line simulation which is barely readable. Of course, these are really bright guys and can be pushed gently in the right direction very easily, so I take the opportunity to get them started as quickly as possible, after all, the faster they learn, the more work I can send in their direction.
I applied for a position at Skype a few years back and everything went well up until they sent me a "coding test" which consisted of making a simple HTTP server which would handle database requests using the PostgreSQL API. It was a fun project, but most importantly, it said "we know you've been programming for 15 years as lead developer on major projects. But can you code?" Initially I was a bit annoyed by this and I decided not to bother with the position as I don't like negotiating terms of employment with an employer who takes the upper hand so early. But, for entry level positions this opportunity could really open up a great deal of positions to guys who CAN program but don't know how to get their foot in the door.
Because of this, when we're looking for new people for entry level positions, I recommend we provide a similar test. Something that can be accomplished in 1000 lines or less (an evening coding) and shows that the applicant has the skills necessary. Then when we call the guy in for an interview, we can tell them before we've even started that his abilities are NOT in question and we are interested in him/her. Therefore when it comes to negotiating salary and such, they have can feel confident asking for thing and can actually get their needs taken care of without accepting the first offer we make fearing we'll toss him/her out since they're unproven. It becomes an issue of personality and office compatibility instead and sometimes we might feel the candidate is just "so promising" that we're willing to try anyway.
I regularly talk with and work with people who never use math more complex that what they learned in the 3rd grade. In fact, with the exception of people who use math in their careers, I doubt most people could pass a 4th grade math exam without the use of a calculator. This almost definitely applies directly to shrinks like the guy who wrote the article.
When first introduced to the concept of a recursive algorithm in the 4th grade when being taught a method of calculating Pi, later in the day, by using the properties of a right triangle I learned from geometry, I derived (accurately) the laws of trigonometry and by applying what I had learned from drawing a circle using LOGO, even taught myself spherical geometry. My son already appears to be advancing through math (he's in 2nd grade) at about twice the rate I ever did.
If we cut back on teaching basic math theory to children, it may not make any impact later in life to the average person, but it will almost definitely impact the brightest of us by robbing us of a 5 year head start. This would have dramatic negative effects on society overall.
Using the arguments posed by this person, maybe it would be better to simply keep kids in day care an extra 1-4 years to allow them to mature a bit more before being exposed to academia. Equally, they should delay the children's entry to the real world by an equal number of years. I can make numerous arguments in favor of this, not of the least being that since people are working later in life, it would decrease the competition over many of the jobs out there where people are retiring later and later from without leaving openings for new younger replacements. This would have a tremendous positive impact by decreasing age discrimination from the work place. Also, it would give children a better chance to get through their rebellious stages (early adulthood) before making long term decisions with regards to the future direction of their lives.
Maybe it would be best to come up with a stronger vocational studies program in the schools for kids who are less likely to use their brains in an intellectual fashion past a certain grade level. If you're going to be a businessman, a shrink, etc... you shouldn't be forced to spend 5 more years than necessary in high school which will serve as little more than a day care service.
Simply tar the entire hard drive and direct it to a serial port. No special tools needed.
/dev/serialportdevice
:)
Oh... if I recall correctly, it also had compress, so you can probably tar | compress >
no problems
Seriously, I'm a huge fan of protecting intellectual property... FAIRLY. It also needs to be intellectual property. I have no arguments that movie makers and musicians MUST be rewarded for their work. In fact, I personally own 1000 DVDs, 1-2,000 books, about 500 audiobooks and who knows what else. But I DO NOT consider them intellectual property. They are art. There needs to be a difference.
The technology used to produce the movie IS intellectual property. The design of a guitar IS intellectual property. The music and films produced with these tools IS ART.
Artists SHOULD be rewarded for their efforts and what they have produced. But it is not the art they're producing which makes a country like America great. People everywhere make art. If you're to give some form of intellectual property for making the U.S. great, it's tangible items designed by Americans that do. Everything from the battery powered nail gun to the fan assisted finger nail drier. It's their creativity when designing solutions to problems that makes them great.
Intellectual Property rights that reward people for coming up with solutions to problems should exist. They should not stop competitors from riding their coat tails, but instead should require the competitor to pay for the rights to make use of the ideas.
It's about time that the government stops considering art and solutions to problems to be the same thing. I highly respect artists and movie makes, but the fact is, I'm offended as a creator of solutions to be mushed into the same group with someone else like this!
FSF has a background of being considered a liberal, damn near terrorist group by politicians and corporate leaders. The FSF has many good sides, but is politically is known for attempting to bully corporations and political leaders into seeing their way of thinking. I can't think of specific examples of threats, but Richard Stallman has been known to berate political leaders (his attempted encounter with the French president comes to mind) for not permitting him to sidestep the song and dance which makes politics politics.
When loud mouthed critics start making big stinks about political issues without taking the time to recognize how they are in fact deterring the exact causes they are "fighting for" they do more damage than good. Leaders of companies and governments are highly dependent on cooperation from political opponents and possibly hostile board members that would like nothing better than to label them as "liberal pussies who shouldn't be in charge of anything". There were somewhat legitimate conspiracy theories that the Vietnam War could have ended sooner if the politicians didn't have to worry about looking like they were "Doing what John Lennon told them to" when he would immaturely berate them publicly for their stupidity.
Richard Stallman has gained Michael Moore status. Meaning that leaders have to wait a certain period after they've had their tie raids before doing the things they had intended to do anyway. Before they can support a cause, they have to do damage control to detach the cause from the loud mouthed buffoons that insist on making the causes political death traps before they can support the changes.
Google is a company that has been very supportive of open source in the past and more than likely will be. They might be able to launch VP8 under a free license now by saying "Well, we were planning on doing it when we bought the company". But the FSF needs to learn when to fight for things and they also need to learn when to just sit back and wait a while before making too much noise.
This is an excellent example of a time where it would have been best to let Google have a chance to breath. After all, before committing VP8 to the open source, they need to let a pile of patent attorneys find out every possible portion of the code which could be considered patentable and then perform patent searches to try and eliminate the possibilities of VP8 being hit by submarine patents. Now that Google owns VP3, it's entirely possible submarine patents will surface, but it would be far more intelligent to let VP8 out into the open and make it an integral part of the web first. Google then can have a chance, after letting the suits find submarine patents to produce a VP9 codec which avoids them.
First off, just to join the pissing contest, here in Oslo, Norway 100 up and down is $200 a month which given cost of living adjustments is like $120 a month there. Pretty sad that you guys don't get symmetric bandwidth. It's just their way of keeping you from sharing files.
The real problem isn't their ability to deliver to the consumer premises. VDSL2 already does it over copper, in fact, it can hit 250MBit/sec. Of course single-mode fiber can already handle gigabit over a single strand in last mile installations.
The problem IS being able to deliver bandwidth to the servers which need to deliver to the customer. 100MBit/s doesn't sound like much until you start watching 50MBit/sec video streams from online distributors. Or when Apple releases a new iPhone patch and the entire world rushes to their web site. Their web servers can't keep up with that kind of traffic. Machines WILL be faster then and servers WILL be much much more powerful, but places currently sporting 10GBit/sec fiber will need Tb/sec connections to keep up.
What is definitely more important would be the requirement for multicast support. With multicast, it becomes possible for high-bandwidth streams to be distributed over the backbone a lot easier. Multicast is probably the #1 improvement that should be government mandated before forcing ISPs to offer huge bandwidth pipes to the house.
Another thing I'd like to see is that the government requires that neighbors passing through a single switch should be allowed to communicate at port-speed to one another over their networks. So, while you're connection to the internet is 10MBit/sec, it should be possible to communicate with your neighbor at gigabit speeds. Limiting the bandwidth to other ports within the switch is stupid.
A good measure of a programmer's competence is based on measuring two temporal differences.
First, measure the time it takes from when he starts the job until he makes the comment "I really think we need to rewrite this".
Second measure the time it takes from the first point until he realizes that it's better to maintain what you have since it's too big of a job and even if it were "done properly", deadlines would screw up the new codebase as well.
Cylinders, head, sector addressing really needs to go anyway. MBR has been hacked so many times over the years to support this method of formatting but in reality it's a total waste. Old operating systems that were forced to work with this method of addressing had to translate to and from the CHS format since sector allocation has ALWAYS been linear. Even FAT-12 used linear addressing methods.
CHS is also misleading and CHS optimizations are wasteful. Since all modern drives (starting with the first Connor IDE 20 meg drive in the early days) supported some form of intelligent sector remapping that would keep spare sectors available for relocating data after the magnetic medium of a heavily used sector elsewhere began to fail.
Sector remapping makes it so that CHS optimizations are entirely irrelevant since even brand new drives, straight off the production line ship with bad sectors that have been remapped elsewhere. For better drive performance, algorithms space out the spare sectors across the drive so that when accessing a spare sector, the head doesn't have to slam to the inner or outer rings of the disc. But still, CHS doesn't apply to absolute positions anymore.
This is 2010 now, I wrote file systems which functioned on 4096 byte sectors on ESDI drives back in the 80's. Made my drives much bigger doing it too. It's time that we move to larger sector sizes again. Modern ECC isn't that much better than 80's grade, however the processing power available to us is so much more that performing ECC on larger blocks of data is achievable. Also, using RAID-5, 5EE or RAID6 makes it so that we can depend less on single drive redundancy. SCSI and IDE should be extended so that controller can inform the drive of bad sectors it finds when performing RAID XORing.
Flying on KLM (the Dutch national airline) which has the narrowest seats I've ever seen on any plane from Amsterdam to Singapore, I was placed in between two Swedish body builders. This was a 20 hour flight! At the time, I wasn't very thin, at 5'10", 170lbs, but I wasn't overly large either.
I asked the two gentlemen if they'd be kind enough to sit beside one another so I could either have the aisle or the window, using the excuse that "I don't like flying much and would appreciate sleeping as much of the flight as possible, and their conversation would hinder that." They told me, "Well, you see, we don't fit too well sitting side by side in coach."
So they intentionally sat with a seat in-between them knowing perfectly well that they were almost guaranteed to have someone smaller in-between them who's seat they can overflow into. And yet, this didn't appear to matter.
Well, I survived barely... however on the way back, there was an old Dutch married couple who apparently had the same idea... and they were fat. Their excuse was "Well dear, we've been married so long and it's nice to meet new people to talk to". I nearly died, not only did they want to have their fat asses overflowing into my seat, but they wanted to keep me awake too!
This has become such a problem that now, when I'm traveling on a family trip and my sister is going too, I actually wait to find out which plane she's flying on so I can book another flight. She's 5' tall and weighs in a little over 300lbs (by a little, I mean she's not 400lbs yet). I feel sorry for her kids who are also becoming "shapely" as they are growing up because noone should be forced to sit still in one place with their seats overflowed on by another person.
I think airlines should start advertising comfort features in their coach class like "We have arm rests on EVERY seat so noone else's ass can be in yours!", or "We have seats which are REALLY REALLY uncomfortable for large people", or "We only serve vegetables and water on our flights". I would actually fly more often then.
Symbian has classicaly made use of the most complex build environment of any system. In the old days they lacked any GCC expertise so instead chose to "post process" elf files output by the compiler to hack them to work with their application loader which is more of a shared library loader than an application loader.
Things haven't improved over time. Their build environments and formats are still an utter disaster. Their hacks to Eclipse are half assed at best as well.
The only way Symbian will ever compete with Android is if the community works like the Netscape community did when it went open... rewrite the thing since it's pretty much crap from the bottom up.
Sometimes you can ship relatively good products even if they are built as a mountain of dung. The trick is to stick a pretty box around it. But if anyone ever takes enough interest in this OS when there are so many MUCH better alternatives out there, it's going to get rewritten if for consistency and modernization if nothing else.
Who the hell ever heard of an OS that DEMANDS you use a programming model like MVC (and a misinterpretation of it as well) just to write a hello world program. Coding for this thing is painful at best.
I am a huge fan of e-books and audio books. In fact, I went from reading 50-100 printed books per year to reading 3 or less since e-books and audio books won my heart.
This raises the question of archival. To this day, we find scrolls buried in the dead sea. We find clay tablets from Mesopotamia. The death of paper is a real issue since a major world wide energy crisis would mean the permanent loss of information. Let's imagine for a moment that another world war did in fact occur (not too hard to imagine at times sadly). Among the first attacks would be energy sources. After all, no energy = no weapons production. Attacking oil resources is also likely.
Whoever wins such a war might find it in their best interest to keep their opponents in the dark long enough to make them easily controlled afterwards. Energy resources not dependent on the grids would eventually run out. Solar cells and wind mills might keep working, but their resources will not be directed to protecting information, but instead to running hospitals and other critical systems.
Books MUST be printed. It is critical. There needs to be redundant storage houses around the world where at least one copy of each book printed is stored. Even if it's in a cardboard box in an abandoned mine.
What steps are being taken so that once devices like Kindle, iPad and the likes start making "Published direct to e-Book" popular to keep books archived. Amazon, B&N, Borders and others should be required by law that for each book they publish "direct to e-book", they must use their "Print On Demand" systems to produce at least one copy to be stored at archival locations around the world in printed form.
I'm convinced that in countries like Norway (where I live) it is very likely the government would even sponser an archive here. We don't have a library on the scale of the Library of Congress, but we sure do have plenty of abandoned mines that can be used for archival.
I really hope that someone thinks about these problems before it's too late.
Microsoft supported many different platforms with their Windows NT versions in the past. Early incarnations of the XBox360 SDK shipped with a PowerPC based Mac running a modified Windows XP.
Microsoft has produced compilers for x86, MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, Itanium and others. They have ported NT based operating systems to different platforms as well. The issue that the ARM guy is forgetting is that Microsoft produces Windows CE for ARM because they choose to. The other platforms we supported through other agreements. I remember reading some outrageous figure on a shareholder report from DEC in the old days which had them paying over $100 million to simply continue development and maintain the Alpha AXP port of Windows NT, Visual Studio and Office.
I have ported major applications to different platforms including most of these processors and often simply on X Windows. The fact is, even when the instruction sets and operating systems are almost identical, there are ALWAYS issues.
ARM would not be the hardest port that Microsoft will have performed of Windows. The systems are technically very similar, however it would require Microsoft to maintain and support a second high-volume platform. They had huge problems with Pocket PC across multiple chip platforms in the past and eventually everything ended up on ARM.
Imagine the millions of e-mails they'd receive "WinZip doesn't work on my Windows 7 based netbook" or "When I try to play this YouTube based video on my netbook, it tells me I need Flash, but Adobe says they don't have a version which runs on it."
Let's also point out that there are NOOOO powerhouse ARM systems which can be used for running Visual Studio with a debugger and tools. Even now, my little machine for compiling a tiny 500,000 line project is a Core i7. If I had to do the same work on an ARM, I'd kill myself. Sure, I can remote debug, but that SUCKS!!!! when developing desktop apps. So, no, I wouldn't bother porting my code to ARM based Windows, not until there was an ARM on par with my Core i7 or my 8-core Xeon to work on.
Microsoft could employ some technology similar to Apple's Rosetta, but Microsoft spent YEARS in the past trying to do that on the Itanium and the Alpha platforms and it proved to be a waste of time. Besides, you end up having to ship "fat binaries" supporting the host machine AND the emulated machine making Windows twice the size.
Let's not forget that Microsoft's compilers for x86 are EXCELLENT. If they're not good enough, Intel's and Portland Groups are FANTASTIC. GCC for x86 is Wonderful. ARM compilers still suck and Intel doesn't even bother making them anymore now that they sold XScale to Marvell.
Tell you want ARM guys... enjoy your "NetBook OS"'s. I'll keep waiting for my pocket sized x86 2Ghz machine.
Implemented the first two. Now that I read this, I implemented the first one in a way which was more efficient and possibly better quality (though I'd have to spend a week in Matlab to prove it) and even better wouldn't infringe. This patent definitely wouldn't be an issue for Theora given its specificity. It's made to get Nokia a cut of the licensing pie.
Second one... that's the prediction patent. I'd love to own this one since it is practically the foundation of the greatest improvement made in H.264 over previous incarnations. Don't know how Theora does it, but it practically covers all modern forms of prediction that I've seen. It's a hell of a well written patent also since it can be easily interpreted to cover pretty much any modern CODEC (except wavelet ones which are nailed by a thousand other patents).
Third one, I got lost in the lawyer gibberish, but from what I read, it would probably not survive a court case, I think practically the entire thing is covered in MPEG-2 patents. It's really just a matter of transmitting quantization values as part of the stream to the decoder. The only thing "new" about it is the issue of the "default values", and I'm pretty sure a good lawyer would get that tossed out as being obvious. But I'm almost 100% sure that all the tech of interest in it is covered in H.262 under the quantizer extension.
I'm really not a lawyer, but of the 3 patents you mentioned, the first is avoidable and the third has to be easy to get tossed out, but could awaken the exercise of the H.262 patent for the quantizer extension (if it's still alive). The second one could pretty much force the world to a wavelet based model, but motion compensation for wavelet compressions is UGLY.
Fact is, if the web site has the ability to choose the CODEC, then they should have a means of providing the CODEC. An architecture via DOM, EcmaScript, WebGL and an audio object should have been designed so that CODECs could be distributed to the web browser as byte code that can be compiled optimized for the platform.
Sure, initially it would be slow, but now that pretty much all EcmaScript implementations compile to native, it would make sense to push the limits and force the ability to produce vectorized code as well. There's simply no reason that EcmaScript couldn't be used for implementing CODECs. WebGL provides video textures which can be used for pushing the media to. Additionally, GLSL might be able to be used for GPU accelerated Video CODECs.
As far as I can see, the only thing missing is a method of outputting audio data from EcmaScript as a stream.
Interesting. Here in Norway, all my financial data is provided to the IRS equivilent via computer. The company I work for, when they transfer my salary to my bank account also reports to the government the data. Then, when I buy or sell stocks, mutuals or bonds, the transactions as they are processed are updated in the same database.
The only time things get a little confusing is based on whether I'm exercising the same stock in blocks. I can alter my tax records to adjust for which blocks I am purchasing vs. which blocks I'm selling. That's a bit confusing at times, but a simple spread sheet makes it easy.
With an average of 200 investment transactions during a period of a year plus what really works out to about 30 or more special cases, my taxes generally require 25 minutes a year to prepare and file.
The only issue here is that some lame-brain probably is complaining about privacy issues. But come on, whether the government gets the data in real time or gets the data at the end of the year, does it really make a difference?
I hate statistics that are produced but read incorrectly. It's fine to gather data to prove your point about something, but in reality, these stats are talking about a downturn in community support. I'd say that it's a show of a much higher level of community support.
Except with rare exceptions a volunteer developer that does it purely in their spare time might be able to contribute 1/4 to 1/2 the time of a full time paid developer. Given the "hacker factor" many of the paid developers are working greater than 40 hours a week by a considerable margin. That means that either there's a HUGE number of volunteer developers or that the ones that are there are producing a great deal more than the paid developers in the same period of time. This is more likely since volunteer developers are more likely to work on what interests them and given that, will be more motivated and move more rapidly.
Also keep in mind that a commitment on this scale from volunteers if doubly impressive since given that there are SOOOO many paid developers producing SOOOO much code, these guys (gals inclusive in the masculine form) are still pumping out so much even though they probably don't have to.
The downside of course is that there's a possibility that the volunteer developers have become counter-productive to the project since companies don't find a need to finance a commitment of 10 developers, 2 documenters and 5 testers on a project because some guy in his basement is hacking on it at home while munching Doritos and sucking down The Dew.
I don't remember the exact figures and I'm too lazy to look it up, but if I recall, 4 members of the Department of Justice was actually hired from the RIAA by Obama.
Someone should take actions to guarantee that the members of the DOJ can not for the rest of their lives collect money or gifts from the RIAA or MPAA since I'm almost 100% certain that all the guys that started at the RIAA over there will be moving into massive corner offices at RIAA when they're done with their 4-8 years.
It's probably about time someone started an investigation into the DOJ with regards to their possibly illegal ties to the RIAA. I'm no expert on the topic, but it seems to me that lawyers that came from the RIAA into the DOJ interfering with huge case like this IN FAVOR OF the RIAA just screams out corruption to me.
I like Obama, but I knew when he started hiring these guys that there would eventually be a scandal attached to it.
Forgot to make my point...
Next stop... Google News Organization.
How long before they start buying up all the journalists on AP? Times are tough at The Times, Wall Street Journal, etc... how long before Google starts hiring their best writers and makes their own new system.
You know what happens then to all these new outlets complaining about Google News stealing their articles? It's simple, people stop seeing news from those sources instead.
Google seems to have a long track record of cooperating with other organizations and eventually learning that whatever technology they provide is cheaper to replace.
They made Android, got vendors like HTC to commit to it and now they're making their own phone instead. They paid browser vendors for search and clicks, and now are making their own browser which is quickly gaining market share. Opera and Firefox make a considerable amount of their income from Google, but how long before Google decides they don't need them anymore?
They make their own servers, OCR software, office software, mapping system, launched their own satellites, have attempted to buy wireless spectrums, built a library, etc...
In reality, they're consuming the Internet at a rate far faster than Microsoft ever managed against the PC world. They throw money at all the businesses that are selling software until the vendor feels the false sense of confidence allowing them to offer the software nearly for free. Then they make their own alternative to those apps. Of course, from what I understand, they haven't stopped paying the smaller vendors for their clicks, but they produce and market their own products through the most successful marketing tool of the past decade... Google.
I love the Google search engine, Earth is great, maps is wonderful, translate isn't too bad, gmail is fantastic. I also love Microsoft's stuff, Windows, Office, Visual Studio, etc... but I hate both of their businesses.
It's a bit of a shame that such horrible organizations make some of the best stuff.