To be perfectly clear, it's h264 that's a patent lawsuit magnet. Theora makes the patent lawsuit problem go away because there are no patents to worry about. I can only assume the GP was a troll.
There's also the question of MP3 patent expiration, which seems to be coming fairly soon. It feels like in the time it would take to arrive at a meaningful standard, MP3 will gracefully become public domain.
Try putting Firefox in front of a user. At my last job, my boss used IE6. Everyone in the office assumed that she was too backwards to upgrade. I went in and told her her browser was out of date, and that she should upgrade it, but I really thought she should use Firefox instead. Her response - "I'll use whatever you think I should use."
Most users can't tell the difference between IE6 and Firefox if you port your apps. You can safely tell the rest to shut up and deal. Just change the 'Mozilla Firefox' icon to say 'Internet.' If you like, 'Internet (Mozilla Firefox.)'
All the user sees is a slight change in Window dressing, and a shiny new toy.
And as for the bit about making developers' lives easier, that's fine. Use IE8. However, you need to have a strategy to update any internet-facing unencrypted programs (especially an ubiquitous browser) every year. The security issues will not wait more than a few months for you to catch up.
You need hardware video codecs (which this thing has) to do the sort of thing that flash does.
I have a 2.8 ghz celeron with 1.5 gigs of ram, and Hulu positively crawls. YouTube too for that matter.
Windows is between 10 and 30% faster than the Linux version, on this hardware (bear in mind, this is due to the maturity of Adobe's Flash implementation. Windows XP itself is a resource hog.)
I know what you're thinking, this thing has a screen that's only a quarter the size of yours, it has to be better. Problem is, I run Hulu videos 'popped out' so I can watch them at about the same size as a netbook screen. Fullscreen is not really a viable option.
Moral of the story? Flash is a bad standard for video. We need something with hardware like Dirac or Theora, with zero dollar margins to get the codec, and we need it on everything.
On how many cores? On my single core KDE4.2 was far and away more buggy, slow, and memory-bloated than KDE 3.5 - which is why I uninstalled it entirely (I used to run a mix of Gnome and KDE apps, so this is not a huge switch.)
I do miss Amarok, but there were too many feature regressions and general slowness.
When MS doesn't make their new toys (Click Once) play nice with other browsers, people attack them. When MS develops an add-on that adds desirable functionality to a competitors browser - again, people get upset.
And both are perfectly valid reasons to be upset. On the interoperability front, this represents no real change. First of all, there's the fact that you can't uninstall this add-on without uninstalling.NET. That's something that malware does. If Mozilla installed an IE plugin that made Firefox extensions available on IE whenever you installed Firefox, people would be understandably angry with Firefox. Modifying software that isn't yours in a regular update is not "playing nice." That's almost the definition of embrace and extinguish. Microsoft wants Firefox so dependent on MS's proprietary stack that it doesn't matter if people are using Firefox or IE - just so they're using Windows. The browser is only a piece of the puzzle.
Imagine if Firefox 'helpfully' and silently installed an IE plugin that allowed Firefox extensions to run under IE. How would that in any way be helping? Your.NET argument is equally applicable - obviously if someone wants Firefox they want Firefox extensions in IE. Obviously it's in no way obvious, and violates a trust boundary that's implied when a company offers automatic updates. Offering automatic updates that add functionality outside the bounds of the obvious is not acceptable, and something only malware authors do.
Rhythmbox took about 5 seconds just now. Amarok, on my machine, will take about 10, and it locks up at least once every other week so I have to kill it.
Ktorrent is a similar story with respect to transmission. I like their features, but they're slow and buggy. I suspect it's because I have one core, and no one is debugging on single-core machines.
Yes it is, they successfully killed Netscape, so they have all the power. Mozilla's 20% market share was hard won, and may slip away in an instant. Microsoft needs to lose their massive edge, which they gained before the antitrust settlement even got off the ground.
I think the post is less about MS bashing, and more about how horrifying it is that people can patent genes, when carried to its logical conclusion.
MS can do whatever the fuck it wants with its software, but companies are already to a certain extent trying to pull the same sort of shit with God-given DNA. And it is completely unacceptable to claim authorship and control over God's creation.
Patents/copyright on genes are simply blasphemous.
Windows 7 Starter does not include:
* Personalization features for changing desktop backgrounds, window colors, or sound schemes.
* DVD playback.
* Windows Media Center for watching recorded TV or other media.
* Remote Media Streaming for streaming your music, videos, and recorded TV from your home computer.
* Domain support for business customers.
* XP Mode for those that want the ability to run older Windows XP programs on Windows 7.
I especially like the part about not supporting XP mode... so it can't run XP apps... which are the only apps spec'd to run on it. Granted, XP mode is a VM hack that really can't run on it, but if you're not sticking with Windows for compatability on your netbook, wtf are you sticking with Windows for? Honestly, the only remaining compatibility issues on Linux are precisely the things Microsoft has banned from starter.
You can't get news of comparable quality to The Economist for free. I haven't taken the plunge and bought it yet, but that's only because I'm freshly out of college and looking for work. When I get a proper job, that's one of the first things I'm getting. (It was a new computer, but my parents offered to pay for one as a graduation present.)
No, the issue is Moore's law. I'm sitting here on a four year old 2.8ghz Celeron with a Gig of ram, and Slashdot slows my comptuer to a crawl. Between that, rhythmbox, and some DHTML in another tab I need to do something about, I actually can see the lag as I type this.
Commercial programmers couldn't have made 8 years ago's hardware run at 1000 times the speed.
Our unusual tradition of private infrastructure development, including the railroad and telephone networks, made America fertile ground for the development of the Internet.
Firstly, the department of defense collaborated with educational institutions to create the Internet. The things he's extolling about the Internet are in fact the things that come from excessive U.S. government intervention in the network.
If private industry controlled the tubes half as much as they want to, we'd all be paying out the ass for pay-per-view YouTube videos. Thank God for American government.
I went ahead and installed it (160 mb for the entire kde runtime... lightweight, right) and it wouldn't run.
kword(4657) KServiceFactory::findServiceByDesktopPath: "findServiceByDesktopPath: Office/kword.desktop not found"
That's enough screwing around with KDE, at least until I get a new computer. I swear the devs are all running 4+ gb of Ram on multicore machines. Granted, this old thing is a 4-year-old celeron 2.8ghz, but still. Abiword runs fine. Granted, Abiword doesn't faithfully reproduce the full bloated complexity of the modern.doc, but I really don't want to.
You just killed the joke. The guy with "Yes, I am a Microsoft shill" in his sig posts saying yes, it is better with Windows, then "SpamBot Owner" posts touting how much he prefers Windows' security...
I guess it's my turn to put in that Jesus would have used Windows.
Please stop peddling that nonsense. The decline since 1998 was a seasonal variation. You have to recognize that there is a fundamental difference between climate and temperature, and that climate changes over decades and centuries, while temperature changes from day to day.
It's a proven fact that man has caused a warming of the planet, and it's generally accepted that this warming will continue until 2100. However, that's no reason to continue the behaviors that caused the warming. Any steps we can take will slow the warming and contribute to an eventual slow reversal.
The point of that study you mentioned is that the climate fight is a trans-generational battle, and gestures that look like a drop in the sand to us are necessary to eventually reverse the tide.
Yeah, sure, it's software. But it's essentially the same scenario: rather than creating a lower-power but equal cost imprinting of the processor (a Pro disc also costs exactly the same as a Home disk) they just disable shit and sell you the same thing at a lower cost.
The article gushes about how the efffects were not overdone, and only put in to enhance the story. The problem is, the story itself is the screenwriting equivalent of the overzealous effects producers the article complains about.
Don't get me wrong, the movie was awesome. It was a masterpiece, but it wasn't in any way morally superior to the Star Wars prequels - they just did the special effects right.
It just didn't live up to the older Star Treks, where the focus was on the sheer joy of discovery and the strength of the human spirit. There was a bit of the latter, but it was mostly just standard action-movie fare.
Slashdot Mirror
To be perfectly clear, it's h264 that's a patent lawsuit magnet. Theora makes the patent lawsuit problem go away because there are no patents to worry about. I can only assume the GP was a troll.
There's also the question of MP3 patent expiration, which seems to be coming fairly soon. It feels like in the time it would take to arrive at a meaningful standard, MP3 will gracefully become public domain.
Try putting Firefox in front of a user. At my last job, my boss used IE6. Everyone in the office assumed that she was too backwards to upgrade. I went in and told her her browser was out of date, and that she should upgrade it, but I really thought she should use Firefox instead. Her response - "I'll use whatever you think I should use."
Most users can't tell the difference between IE6 and Firefox if you port your apps. You can safely tell the rest to shut up and deal. Just change the 'Mozilla Firefox' icon to say 'Internet.' If you like, 'Internet (Mozilla Firefox.)'
All the user sees is a slight change in Window dressing, and a shiny new toy.
And as for the bit about making developers' lives easier, that's fine. Use IE8. However, you need to have a strategy to update any internet-facing unencrypted programs (especially an ubiquitous browser) every year. The security issues will not wait more than a few months for you to catch up.
I'm pretty sure the Hotmail block is just an extension of the Live/Bing block, which is itself an extension of the YouTube block.
China doesn't care about free email clients, just YouTube.
You need hardware video codecs (which this thing has) to do the sort of thing that flash does.
I have a 2.8 ghz celeron with 1.5 gigs of ram, and Hulu positively crawls. YouTube too for that matter.
Windows is between 10 and 30% faster than the Linux version, on this hardware (bear in mind, this is due to the maturity of Adobe's Flash implementation. Windows XP itself is a resource hog.)
I know what you're thinking, this thing has a screen that's only a quarter the size of yours, it has to be better. Problem is, I run Hulu videos 'popped out' so I can watch them at about the same size as a netbook screen. Fullscreen is not really a viable option.
Moral of the story? Flash is a bad standard for video. We need something with hardware like Dirac or Theora, with zero dollar margins to get the codec, and we need it on everything.
On how many cores? On my single core KDE4.2 was far and away more buggy, slow, and memory-bloated than KDE 3.5 - which is why I uninstalled it entirely (I used to run a mix of Gnome and KDE apps, so this is not a huge switch.)
I do miss Amarok, but there were too many feature regressions and general slowness.
And both are perfectly valid reasons to be upset. On the interoperability front, this represents no real change. First of all, there's the fact that you can't uninstall this add-on without uninstalling .NET. That's something that malware does. If Mozilla installed an IE plugin that made Firefox extensions available on IE whenever you installed Firefox, people would be understandably angry with Firefox. Modifying software that isn't yours in a regular update is not "playing nice." That's almost the definition of embrace and extinguish. Microsoft wants Firefox so dependent on MS's proprietary stack that it doesn't matter if people are using Firefox or IE - just so they're using Windows. The browser is only a piece of the puzzle.
Imagine if Firefox 'helpfully' and silently installed an IE plugin that allowed Firefox extensions to run under IE. How would that in any way be helping? Your .NET argument is equally applicable - obviously if someone wants Firefox they want Firefox extensions in IE. Obviously it's in no way obvious, and violates a trust boundary that's implied when a company offers automatic updates. Offering automatic updates that add functionality outside the bounds of the obvious is not acceptable, and something only malware authors do.
Rhythmbox took about 5 seconds just now. Amarok, on my machine, will take about 10, and it locks up at least once every other week so I have to kill it.
Ktorrent is a similar story with respect to transmission. I like their features, but they're slow and buggy. I suspect it's because I have one core, and no one is debugging on single-core machines.
Yes it is, they successfully killed Netscape, so they have all the power. Mozilla's 20% market share was hard won, and may slip away in an instant. Microsoft needs to lose their massive edge, which they gained before the antitrust settlement even got off the ground.
As an end-user, speed is pretty much all I care about.
Especially when the difference between Gnome and KDE is easily a factor of 4.
I think the post is less about MS bashing, and more about how horrifying it is that people can patent genes, when carried to its logical conclusion.
MS can do whatever the fuck it wants with its software, but companies are already to a certain extent trying to pull the same sort of shit with God-given DNA. And it is completely unacceptable to claim authorship and control over God's creation.
Patents/copyright on genes are simply blasphemous.
I was quoting the MS blog verbatim. If there's no problem, they're going out of their way to insist there is.
I especially like the part about not supporting XP mode... so it can't run XP apps... which are the only apps spec'd to run on it. Granted, XP mode is a VM hack that really can't run on it, but if you're not sticking with Windows for compatability on your netbook, wtf are you sticking with Windows for? Honestly, the only remaining compatibility issues on Linux are precisely the things Microsoft has banned from starter.
You can't get news of comparable quality to The Economist for free. I haven't taken the plunge and bought it yet, but that's only because I'm freshly out of college and looking for work. When I get a proper job, that's one of the first things I'm getting. (It was a new computer, but my parents offered to pay for one as a graduation present.)
And why was the codec for the built-in DVD player not installed? DRM licensing.
No, the issue is Moore's law. I'm sitting here on a four year old 2.8ghz Celeron with a Gig of ram, and Slashdot slows my comptuer to a crawl. Between that, rhythmbox, and some DHTML in another tab I need to do something about, I actually can see the lag as I type this.
Commercial programmers couldn't have made 8 years ago's hardware run at 1000 times the speed.
Google doesn't sound like a euphemism for sexual intercourse when used as a verb.
Also, Google is a reference to the massive number of webpages available through their service.
Bing! is a mindless word MS expects to 'sound cool.'
I'd call it an epic fail. Compare:
I just Google'd Jessica Alba.
I just Bing'd Jessica Alba.
?
How many times have you used it period?
Also, how many times have you used it in your professional life, or have you never used it when there might have been a better tool for the job?
FTA:
Firstly, the department of defense collaborated with educational institutions to create the Internet. The things he's extolling about the Internet are in fact the things that come from excessive U.S. government intervention in the network.
If private industry controlled the tubes half as much as they want to, we'd all be paying out the ass for pay-per-view YouTube videos. Thank God for American government.
I went ahead and installed it (160 mb for the entire kde runtime... lightweight, right) and it wouldn't run.
kword(4657) KServiceFactory::findServiceByDesktopPath: "findServiceByDesktopPath: Office/kword.desktop not found"
That's enough screwing around with KDE, at least until I get a new computer. I swear the devs are all running 4+ gb of Ram on multicore machines. Granted, this old thing is a 4-year-old celeron 2.8ghz, but still. Abiword runs fine. Granted, Abiword doesn't faithfully reproduce the full bloated complexity of the modern .doc, but I really don't want to.
*whoosh*
You just killed the joke. The guy with "Yes, I am a Microsoft shill" in his sig posts saying yes, it is better with Windows, then "SpamBot Owner" posts touting how much he prefers Windows' security...
I guess it's my turn to put in that Jesus would have used Windows.
On an airplane.
Please stop peddling that nonsense. The decline since 1998 was a seasonal variation. You have to recognize that there is a fundamental difference between climate and temperature, and that climate changes over decades and centuries, while temperature changes from day to day.
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/environment/2005_warmest.html
http://www.grist.org/article/global-warming-stopped-in-1998
It's a proven fact that man has caused a warming of the planet, and it's generally accepted that this warming will continue until 2100. However, that's no reason to continue the behaviors that caused the warming. Any steps we can take will slow the warming and contribute to an eventual slow reversal.
The point of that study you mentioned is that the climate fight is a trans-generational battle, and gestures that look like a drop in the sand to us are necessary to eventually reverse the tide.
*cough cough* Windows 7 *cough* Starter *cough*
Honestly, that's every Windows OS since XP.
Yeah, sure, it's software. But it's essentially the same scenario: rather than creating a lower-power but equal cost imprinting of the processor (a Pro disc also costs exactly the same as a Home disk) they just disable shit and sell you the same thing at a lower cost.
The article gushes about how the efffects were not overdone, and only put in to enhance the story. The problem is, the story itself is the screenwriting equivalent of the overzealous effects producers the article complains about.
Don't get me wrong, the movie was awesome. It was a masterpiece, but it wasn't in any way morally superior to the Star Wars prequels - they just did the special effects right.
It just didn't live up to the older Star Treks, where the focus was on the sheer joy of discovery and the strength of the human spirit. There was a bit of the latter, but it was mostly just standard action-movie fare.