If there is sufficient motivation to create open source patent free licenses then they'll happen...
It isn't the license of the OSS that needs to be aware of the patents. If the software does something that a different piece of patented software does, then it is infringing. During the development of the Dirac codec, they had to peruse existing patents and make sure what they implemented didn't infringe (to the best of their knowledge) on existing patents. It isn't quick or easy to know whether you infringe on someone else.
...then they'll happen regardless if there are patented competitors
If what they want to implement has already been patented by competitors, then they can't implement it without an agreement with the patent holder or risk of lawsuit.
This is a case where the FOSS community wants all of the benefits of patented software
The FOSS community doesn't want patents at all, and instead prefer to rely on copyright for protection of software. It's easy to avoid copyright infringement, just don't copy the code. It's hard to avoid patent infringement, accidentally coming up with the same idea independently without knowing you did is enough to screw you over.
He's quite rightly suggesting that HTML5 should support all codecs.
Which means that open source software is now in violation of not paying royalty payments on certain codecs because they implemented an open specification requiring proprietary codecs.
Physical engineering (at least many of the fields) still use English units - inches, feet, yards, miles. Bridges, buildings, and most of what you see around you are
Perhaps in the USA, most notably with NASA, but every civil and mechanical engineer I know uses the metric system, as do the "physical" engineering text books that I have sitting on the shelf.
What application designer wants to waste space on two different but similar units?
Probably not many. But if application designers want to follow the guidelines that are set to help users (not developers), they can't really complain too much.
Not really. When doing the calculations in hardware, the prefix is irrelevant as the numbers are stored (or converted before the calculation) to be all in the same scale so you don't really need to know much about the prefixes. When doing it in your head as you did above, replace KB (JEDEC) with KiB (IEC) and you get the same result, knowing that kB (SI) and KiB are slightly different values (you need to be aware of the 1000/1024 distinction anyway even without the juggling of the prefixes). You can then give the result as 16TiB off the top of your head or convert to 17.6TB if it matters. The prefixes are really just a way to simplify the display of the result for humans so we don't have to read 17592186044416B (which using your top of the head style calculations wouldn't be easy to acknowledge as exactly 16TiB).
To counter your example, let's say I have 10 files at 450 bytes each. What is their combined total? By my count, that's 4500 bytes or 4.5kB. What is that in base 2, off the top of your head?
About the only other SI quantity that you ever see in an equation with bytes is seconds and you almost never talk about kiloseconds or megaseconds...
And every time you do see bytes with seconds, you should know that bandwidth traditionally uses the base 10 and not the base 2 definition of the prefixes.
It only looks that way because we aren't leaping by 10^3, we are leaping by 2^10.
Except that the hardware doing the "leaping" are the hard drives that are measured in base 10, so we are "leaping" by 10^3.
The byte itself is 2^3.
First of all, a byte is not always defined as 2^3, it depends on the architecture (you are thinking of the octet, which on most common hardware is equivalent to a byte). Also, the size of a byte is not governed by SI prefixes as it isn't a prefix. Applying an SI prefix to the byte should still follow SI prefix rules.
Notice any similarities?
I noticed that 2^3 is 7 orders of magnitude off (in a power of 2 system) being a match to the 2^10 convention. The only reason 2^10 is chosen is because it comes close enough to emulating 10^3. Why emulate when you can just use 10^3 directly?
If manufacturer's didn't try to fudge their numbers by breaking convention, a "300gb" drive would actually show up as 300gb exactly in your computer.
While it might be a convention to use 2^10, it's not the SI standard (so it shouldn't try to redefine SI prefixes, it should use it's own system). Also, on my computer it does report as 300GB in the partitioning tool that I use (cfdisk).
You keep coming back to the byte being 2^3. This is a somewhat silly argument as the byte is the smallest addressable unit in RAM. The size of the byte itself is largely irrelevant to the discussion of the prefix definition.
Then that bug just sits in the bug tracker and doesn't get fixed. That tard user isn't happy, but it's not the end of the world until a reproducible test case comes along from a different user. There's a difference between helping developers produce a driver and supporting end users.
How is that an insurmountable process challenge to a group of 100 smart people coding device drivers for billion transistor chips of mind boggling complexity?
The 1 gig card still caused problems until I finally (after several months of posting errors to my trouble ticket at Diamond) got the ok to return it. Since its return, it hasn't had a single problem (it's been a week). Keeping my fingers crossed.
I'm curious how faulty hardware can be used to blame the drivers in this instance.
So let's get this straight. You are claiming that NVIDIA products are more stable than ATI because you have a dead NVIDIA card (285 hardware isn't that old, it's nowhere near its used by date) and an ATI card that works but has some issues.
Hibernation works fine. It's suspend to RAM that's the hard part and often fails. Back when I used NVIDIA, some driver releases worked and some crashed on resume.
Just bought a 5670 recently to replace a dying NVIDIA card.
...the open source one runs smooth as a baby's cheek. Granted, 3D acceleration support is kinda outdated if you only follow the stable releases...
Even bleeding edge trunk doesn't have anything remotely close to 2D let alone 3D for 5000 series cards.
Yes, I knew about the state of the drivers before I bought the card. Luckily, I have Intel graphics for when I want to play with Linux, and it works beautifully. I agree with the original sentiment, buy Intel video hardware.
What, to explain that a legally binding decision actually is legally binding? In all seriousness, here's a link that states such a legally binding commitment exists.
Just because the "english" Wikipedia calls it Cronus it is long not right. It is Kronos, and if you insist to write it "more enlish" then it is still Cronos, and not Cronus... the later would be latin and not greek.
angel'o'sphere
Um... what? That's an awful lot of mistakes for someone trying to be picky about the correct way to spell something (and I didn't even highlight the lack of capitalisation and generally poor grammar).
And I'm sure they will do a good job at exposing all the shavers and vibrators etc stored in someones luggage. There's always X-Ray scanners in the mean time.
Or, you know, if you wanted to go to the trouble of making a dodgy looking device that will go off on a timer and stash it in a plane with the sole intent of disrupting service, you could just use explosives. Or turn your cellphone on, I'm always getting told by the flight attendants that my cellphone will disrupt the navigation equipment.
Ah, I forgot about that half of the route. I get on at the St Kilda Beach end of line heading to the city, and even then I only get a seat about a third of the time.
Melbourne, Australia is not part of Europe. As some other commenters have already noted, the route is most likely the 96 tram. I take the tram all the time (in Melbourne), does that make me a Eurodouche too?
Slashdot Mirror
If there is sufficient motivation to create open source patent free licenses then they'll happen...
It isn't the license of the OSS that needs to be aware of the patents. If the software does something that a different piece of patented software does, then it is infringing. During the development of the Dirac codec, they had to peruse existing patents and make sure what they implemented didn't infringe (to the best of their knowledge) on existing patents. It isn't quick or easy to know whether you infringe on someone else.
...then they'll happen regardless if there are patented competitors
If what they want to implement has already been patented by competitors, then they can't implement it without an agreement with the patent holder or risk of lawsuit.
This is a case where the FOSS community wants all of the benefits of patented software
The FOSS community doesn't want patents at all, and instead prefer to rely on copyright for protection of software. It's easy to avoid copyright infringement, just don't copy the code. It's hard to avoid patent infringement, accidentally coming up with the same idea independently without knowing you did is enough to screw you over.
He's quite rightly suggesting that HTML5 should support all codecs.
Which means that open source software is now in violation of not paying royalty payments on certain codecs because they implemented an open specification requiring proprietary codecs.
Physical engineering (at least many of the fields) still use English units - inches, feet, yards, miles. Bridges, buildings, and most of what you see around you are
Perhaps in the USA, most notably with NASA, but every civil and mechanical engineer I know uses the metric system, as do the "physical" engineering text books that I have sitting on the shelf.
What application designer wants to waste space on two different but similar units?
Probably not many. But if application designers want to follow the guidelines that are set to help users (not developers), they can't really complain too much.
Redefining KB makes these calculations harder.
Not really. When doing the calculations in hardware, the prefix is irrelevant as the numbers are stored (or converted before the calculation) to be all in the same scale so you don't really need to know much about the prefixes. When doing it in your head as you did above, replace KB (JEDEC) with KiB (IEC) and you get the same result, knowing that kB (SI) and KiB are slightly different values (you need to be aware of the 1000/1024 distinction anyway even without the juggling of the prefixes). You can then give the result as 16TiB off the top of your head or convert to 17.6TB if it matters. The prefixes are really just a way to simplify the display of the result for humans so we don't have to read 17592186044416B (which using your top of the head style calculations wouldn't be easy to acknowledge as exactly 16TiB).
To counter your example, let's say I have 10 files at 450 bytes each. What is their combined total? By my count, that's 4500 bytes or 4.5kB. What is that in base 2, off the top of your head?
About the only other SI quantity that you ever see in an equation with bytes is seconds and you almost never talk about kiloseconds or megaseconds...
And every time you do see bytes with seconds, you should know that bandwidth traditionally uses the base 10 and not the base 2 definition of the prefixes.
The unit 1024 had to be given another name
It's not a unit, it's a scalar prefix.
Windows XP uses base 2 but IIRC Windows Vista and later displays in base 10.
Negative. Vista/7 still use base 2.
That's the great thing about standards. There are so many to choose from.
It only looks that way because we aren't leaping by 10^3, we are leaping by 2^10.
Except that the hardware doing the "leaping" are the hard drives that are measured in base 10, so we are "leaping" by 10^3.
The byte itself is 2^3.
First of all, a byte is not always defined as 2^3, it depends on the architecture (you are thinking of the octet, which on most common hardware is equivalent to a byte). Also, the size of a byte is not governed by SI prefixes as it isn't a prefix. Applying an SI prefix to the byte should still follow SI prefix rules.
Notice any similarities?
I noticed that 2^3 is 7 orders of magnitude off (in a power of 2 system) being a match to the 2^10 convention. The only reason 2^10 is chosen is because it comes close enough to emulating 10^3. Why emulate when you can just use 10^3 directly?
If manufacturer's didn't try to fudge their numbers by breaking convention, a "300gb" drive would actually show up as 300gb exactly in your computer.
While it might be a convention to use 2^10, it's not the SI standard (so it shouldn't try to redefine SI prefixes, it should use it's own system). Also, on my computer it does report as 300GB in the partitioning tool that I use (cfdisk).
You keep coming back to the byte being 2^3. This is a somewhat silly argument as the byte is the smallest addressable unit in RAM. The size of the byte itself is largely irrelevant to the discussion of the prefix definition.
Then that bug just sits in the bug tracker and doesn't get fixed. That tard user isn't happy, but it's not the end of the world until a reproducible test case comes along from a different user. There's a difference between helping developers produce a driver and supporting end users.
How is that an insurmountable process challenge to a group of 100 smart people coding device drivers for billion transistor chips of mind boggling complexity?
Even smart people get lazy too.
The 1 gig card still caused problems until I finally (after several months of posting errors to my trouble ticket at Diamond) got the ok to return it. Since its return, it hasn't had a single problem (it's been a week). Keeping my fingers crossed.
I'm curious how faulty hardware can be used to blame the drivers in this instance.
I don't use XP. I never used XP, it was, and will always be shit.
How can you make that claim if you have never used it?
But by all means, accuse me of being incompetent.
If you insist... perhaps you shouldn't be so incompetent ;)
So let's get this straight. You are claiming that NVIDIA products are more stable than ATI because you have a dead NVIDIA card (285 hardware isn't that old, it's nowhere near its used by date) and an ATI card that works but has some issues.
Hibernation works fine. It's suspend to RAM that's the hard part and often fails. Back when I used NVIDIA, some driver releases worked and some crashed on resume.
You meant "buy ATI video cards".
Just bought a 5670 recently to replace a dying NVIDIA card.
...the open source one runs smooth as a baby's cheek. Granted, 3D acceleration support is kinda outdated if you only follow the stable releases...
Even bleeding edge trunk doesn't have anything remotely close to 2D let alone 3D for 5000 series cards.
Yes, I knew about the state of the drivers before I bought the card. Luckily, I have Intel graphics for when I want to play with Linux, and it works beautifully. I agree with the original sentiment, buy Intel video hardware.
What, to explain that a legally binding decision actually is legally binding? In all seriousness, here's a link that states such a legally binding commitment exists.
Just because the "english" Wikipedia calls it Cronus it is long not right. It is Kronos, and if you insist to write it "more enlish" then it is still Cronos, and not Cronus ... the later would be latin and not greek.
angel'o'sphere
Um... what? That's an awful lot of mistakes for someone trying to be picky about the correct way to spell something (and I didn't even highlight the lack of capitalisation and generally poor grammar).
And I'm sure they will do a good job at exposing all the shavers and vibrators etc stored in someones luggage. There's always X-Ray scanners in the mean time.
Or, you know, if you wanted to go to the trouble of making a dodgy looking device that will go off on a timer and stash it in a plane with the sole intent of disrupting service, you could just use explosives. Or turn your cellphone on, I'm always getting told by the flight attendants that my cellphone will disrupt the navigation equipment.
Ah, I forgot about that half of the route. I get on at the St Kilda Beach end of line heading to the city, and even then I only get a seat about a third of the time.
I code on the tram, going to and from work and I noticed that there are a lot of wifi access points along the way.
I thought about it.
Sincerely,
Derp
Melbourne, Australia is not part of Europe. As some other commenters have already noted, the route is most likely the 96 tram. I take the tram all the time (in Melbourne), does that make me a Eurodouche too?
Because symbols such as (){};.+-=/ are much harder to type on a standard cellphone keypad than alphanumeric characters. It would drive someone insane.
AC should have said "your're" instead of "your"
Your're wrong.