They want a codec that is as efficient as H.264 that they can open source and get into HTML5.
VP3 was open sourced. Google open sourcing VP8 will do NOTHING to obviate Apple's supposed concern with submarine patents. Forming a patent-pool around Theora, or any other codec, would (or at least, should).
So, Google won't save much money and won't make much money by buying On2. I think they are up to something else.
On2 bought Flix... On2 became the one-stop shop for Flash video encoding.
It's readily apparent that Youtube was and is using Flix for Linux, based on all the capabilities and limitations YouTube encoding shares with the open source MPlayer project (http://multimedia.cx/eggs/poking-at-youtube/), which is used by Flix for Linux (http://support.on2.com/gpl/mplayer/).
It wouldn't be the first time Google bought-up an unprofitable company, just to make sure their competitors don't get control of it first...
I always thought it interesting how mythology gets distorted and passed down through time. The heart, for example, is the only organ with special, emotional status these days. Strange for an unseen hunk of ugly muscle.
Yet even a cursory look at some classic literature would find that others used to be special. The spleen is my favorite. Yes, "I hate you from the bottom of my spleen," is so terribly under-used these days. I slip it into casual conversations at every opportunity...
The liver is a good one too... "In Plato, and in later physiology, the liver represented the darkest passions, particularly the bloody, smoky ones of wrath, jealousy, and greed which drive men to action. Thus the liver meant the impulsive attachment to life itself."
The NRDC found more than just that, they found: "Contaminates of synthetic organic chemicals, bacteria, and arsenic were found to exceed the allowable limits under both state and water industry standards."
The link you've provided doesn't expand on what "synthetic organic chemicals" they found, so I can't possibly argue with that. They could just as well be inert, as not.
We've already discussed bacteria...
Arsenic is the only "problem" listed, and that's an interesting case. It's only recently that the US substantially increased the restrictions on arsenic. Now, many natural sources of water have arsenic levels that are too high to qualify. Surely, water bottlers aren't intentionally ADDING arsenic to their "tap water". It's the non-tap water sources (natural springs) which you've stated a preference for, which is, in fact, the "unhealthy" water, according to that report.
Additionally, arsenic is a special case, in that it takes a lifetime of drinking water with arsenic levels in excess of that allowed in tap water, to potentially cause any minor health consequences.
When I was young and foolish, I was willing to 'put up' with things. I would replace my own oil, put on a new muffler, and lots of PIA things.
Now I pay people to do it. Because I can afford to. I have no desire to become 'uncomfortable' as long as I can afford to buy the gas for my truck.
In exchange, you "put up" with your job X more years of your life to pay for the convenience.
The question is NOT is something "comfortable" or not, but whether an few minutes of your spare time working on your car is more or less comfortable than getting up in the morning, driving to/from work, and putting in another 8 hours.
If you're a neat freak, afraid of ever touching grease, I can see why you'd prefer the latter.
I'll be in my 20mpg truck with a window cracked, smoking a cigar and enjoying my day.
That's not called "comfortable," it's called being a sociopath...
Still, I can't understand the sentiment at all... Are you the type of person who drives directly from enclosed structure, to enclosed structure (one garage to another) all the time, and never goes outside, for fear of leaving themselves exposed to unconditioned air? Because I can assure you, all this talk of being "comfortable" is for not once you step outside, and are forced to endure (*GASP*) the climate in which you live... If you can't handle it in your car, I can't see how you can handle it even in your own yard...
What I find amazing is that people will pay for bottled water
I highly object to paying for bottled water for numerous reasons... The disgusting taste of plastic leeching into the water, the tiny amount of value provided for an exorbitant price, the gross inconvenience, etc. but I don't claim there's NO REASON to buy bottled water.
even though a lot of it comes from the water tap.
Yes it does. But THEN it goes through massive processing... industrial-strength filtration, and processes to add and remove, eg. minerals as required to alter the taste.
Certainly, where I lived before, tap water run through a simple carbon filter (to eliminate the now-pervasive chlorine taste found in tap water) tasted far better than bottled water. Moving to a new area, even after filtration, city water tastes horrible... I don't know if it's the high concentration of minerals ("hard" water), lack of oxygenation, et al., but it's undeniably lousy for drinking.
A couple of years ago Consumer Digest tested bottled water from different companies, and some of it was worse than city water.
No, it wasn't. The media is infatuated with scaring people, so they report without any context.
All they found was a higher bacteria count in bottled water... By that same metric, tap water is "worse" than drinking bleach... And that IS the primary difference. Heavily chlorinated water kills EVERYTHING, but most people wouldn't agree that it's BETTER for you.
Furthermore, the idea that bacteria is BAD is a long pervasive myth that has caused substantial harm to mankind, and which scientists continually try to break people of... People raised where they were exposed to more bacteria generally become much healthier over their lifetime than those in a largely sterile environment.
Why drive around a 5 liter V8 truck when you're hauling around yourself and perhaps a hundreds pounds of small cargo 90% of the time?
Because the 10% of the time you NEED to haul something, you can't do it with a car... Therefore, you strictly REQUIRE a truck.
Once we've established that a truck is required, then YOU need to try and justify owning a second vehicle...
Insurance, parking, registration, maintenance, etc. That's not to mention the initial purchase price of the car. Some costs are sunk no matter whether you drive your vehicle 10% of the time, or 90% of the time.
In MANY cases, a few more gallons of gas (to drive the truck the other 90% of the time) is less expensive than owning two vehicles.
I know its an old-fashioned idea and all, but geez, whatever happened to letting software *authors* decide how their software may be used?
Oh no! People are being CRITICIZED! Horror of horrors!
Look, software authors DO have the LEGAL right to decide what license to release their code under, which is, by far, the most important part. That doesn't change the fact that their choice in this case is foolish. And it certainly doesn't preclude them from criticism.
Not really. Venereal IS the proper pluralization of Venus.
Cytherean is something cooked-up, pretty much at random, because so many people simply refused to use the proper terminology. And point of fact, isn't even the observed terminology these days, as it was some years ago.
In other news, I don't like the word "dog". They're now to be called untigs. Anyone that doesn't observe this new proper wording is stupid and wrong...
That said - IMHO, a journaling file system is an important first step to data security. NTFS and Ext3 are about equal, in my experience.
Journaling does NOTHING to improve "data security". Absolutely nothing, either in practice, or in theory. What it does is obviate the need for fsck. It doesn't even do that particularly well, as non-journaled filesystems like FreeBSD's UFS2 can be used much more quickly after an unclean shutdown, and is extremely reliable.
Turning off caching features is an important second step.
No, disabling on-drive caching has to be #1. Without it, no file system can possibly act sanely.
The important thing is, if data is mission critical, you want it written IMMEDIATELY, not floating around in RAM.
Unless the RAM in question is battery-backed, as many higher-end RAID controllers are.
Why are developers who don't want their code to be ripped off (used without payment in a closed product) by companies and incorporated into a product are labeled zealots?
Perhaps because they are writing software which is by FAR most useful when it is used as far and wide as possible, while using a license which makes that goal extremely difficult to achieve, unnecessarily.
Honestly, the only reason anyone cares about Btrfs is because the license on ZFS is too restrictive for inclusion in Linux, and NOBODY has opted to write their own implementation under a GPL or other, freer, license.
Seriously though, who wants to fly 100 mph, except for short hops?
If the comforts were up to par, I would be happy to.
It's only BECAUSE flights are so short that they can get away with squeezing people into so little space. That's why a trip that is 4X longer on a train, can be much less stressful than flying.
The reason DES lasted so long as an algorithm was that cryptography was not as vital to day to day operations as it is now, so a complete break would have been more of an academic excercise than one that would get the cryptographer financial gain.
That's utter nonsense. DES was used extensively, and for plenty of critical data. What do you think all those web browsers have been using for SSL?
DES STILL hasn't been broken. It's short key-length just ran up against Moore's law. 3DES is still a sound algo, but damn slow, which is one of the major reasons for AES. The very large keys possible with AES mean it should remain practical for a long time.
And have you ever heard of the Soviet Union? They were highly interested in cracking DES for a lot more reasons than the mere challenge of it... More than mere MONEY was on the line.
Yet without other professions to do the actual work of your company, there's not even a need for you and your servers.
I've setup MANY systems specifically designed to replace 100 people, performing time-consuming tasks, with 1 guy hitting a few buttons and moving some paper around.
If that guy didn't exist, I could do that job myself, in-between other tasks.
My company has other employees, of course, but certain companies can be almost COMPLETELY automated by computers, and some entire industries have disappeared because of it.
Oh good. Then anyone with international interests has to maintain several hundred domains, to make sure they are easily found by people around the world looking for them...
Buying "Sporf.com" and sitting on it in hopes that a company called "Sporf" will have to buy the domain from you will no longer be a good business model.
Oh good. Then it'll just be Sporf farm equipment fighting with Sporf housewares, and Sporf online store, fighting it out for control of their mutual namesake...
And the US government is going to drop everything to make sure our domain names stay clean, right? And Colombia certainly wouldn't sell off identically named domains to companies looking to catch the typos of Canadians...
The fact is that earth has heated and cooled all on its own for billions of years.
It sure has.
Just like cows have lived, bred, fed, and died on their own for millions of years... Thereby contradicting those fools who claim cattle ranches are man-made...
I see you're preparing for a nice big dinner of red herring. Enjoy.
Given that the i.MX515 can encode H.264 in realtime in under 1W, what on earth can the i5 do with 82 times as much power?
Multimedia operations are performed by integrated DSPs on the chips, so the fact that it can decode H.264 tells you NOTHING about the speed of the processor, any more than the speed of your GPU tells you how fast the CPU is.
And before anyone starts yelling that desktop CPUs should have DSPs in them, as ALWAYS happens on/., go look it up. The pros and cons have been known for decades, and it has been tried over and over again.
Except for the first time in a century, the average height for men in the US has gone down... Just an inch (5' 8" IIRC), but a reduction still.
Nutrition is provably the cause of men (and women, BTW) getting taller, and over-eating is now reversing the trend. If women's attractiveness is similiarly nutrition-based, we should see that trend reverse as well, with plenty of overweight women.
Which of you readers of Slashdot is going to put up a popular web site and run it totally free to access [...] Unless you are already filthy rich and want to blow it on this, it ain't gonna happen.
Its entirely doable, even for those of modest means.
Most websites today have an inexplicable focus on being shiny... They can afford to, so they do, and if they get just a tiny number more visitors because of it, it might make it worthwhile for their advertisers.
To keep bandwidth server overhead to a minimum, you just need to go through and start finding every possible corner to cut... Strip out images anywhere possible, reduce each page to the minimum. Replace fancy logos with simple solid colors and fonts that can be represented with 15bytes of HTML/CSS rather than 50KByte images. Where you do strictly need images, reduce the color depth (for PNG/GIF) or quality (JPEG) until the images are looking just a bit ugly... you'll see filesizes fall dramatically, as quality is only minimally harmed. In fact, most sites could be reduced to plain text + hyperlinks, and serve up MILLIONS of hits a day, with a minuscule bandwidth bill.
Any web-page processing needed should be done before-hand, perhaps once a week or once a day at worst, and just generate a static HTML document from it. No need to constantly hit a cluster of DB servers, unless you insist on giving each user full customizability. And no need for users to fetch the page from your servers every time, since they've got everything cached.
Sure, you're not going to run the equivalent of Flikr or Youtube, but anything where textual information is king is EASILY possible. In fact you could do so off your home DSL line, and barely notice the bandwidth hit, since your own usage will be all download, while your visitors will be all upload. You've probably got more bandwidth than most companies I've worked for, many of whom run major ECommerce websites... you just don't get the same reliability guarantees.
Slashdot Mirror
On2 disclaimed their patents to VP3 as well. What I already said continues to apply...
VP3 was open sourced. Google open sourcing VP8 will do NOTHING to obviate Apple's supposed concern with submarine patents. Forming a patent-pool around Theora, or any other codec, would (or at least, should).
You are quite wrong. In fact "Youtube VP6 HD downloads" is a trumpeted feature in youtube-dl.
Or see: http://www.videos-dl.com/en
On2 bought Flix... On2 became the one-stop shop for Flash video encoding.
It's readily apparent that Youtube was and is using Flix for Linux, based on all the capabilities and limitations YouTube encoding shares with the open source MPlayer project (http://multimedia.cx/eggs/poking-at-youtube/), which is used by Flix for Linux (http://support.on2.com/gpl/mplayer/).
It wouldn't be the first time Google bought-up an unprofitable company, just to make sure their competitors don't get control of it first...
Some topics just aren't discussed in polite company.
I always thought it interesting how mythology gets distorted and passed down through time. The heart, for example, is the only organ with special, emotional status these days. Strange for an unseen hunk of ugly muscle.
Yet even a cursory look at some classic literature would find that others used to be special. The spleen is my favorite. Yes, "I hate you from the bottom of my spleen," is so terribly under-used these days. I slip it into casual conversations at every opportunity...
The liver is a good one too... "In Plato, and in later physiology, the liver represented the darkest passions, particularly the bloody, smoky ones of wrath, jealousy, and greed which drive men to action. Thus the liver meant the impulsive attachment to life itself."
The link you've provided doesn't expand on what "synthetic organic chemicals" they found, so I can't possibly argue with that. They could just as well be inert, as not.
We've already discussed bacteria...
Arsenic is the only "problem" listed, and that's an interesting case. It's only recently that the US substantially increased the restrictions on arsenic. Now, many natural sources of water have arsenic levels that are too high to qualify. Surely, water bottlers aren't intentionally ADDING arsenic to their "tap water". It's the non-tap water sources (natural springs) which you've stated a preference for, which is, in fact, the "unhealthy" water, according to that report.
Additionally, arsenic is a special case, in that it takes a lifetime of drinking water with arsenic levels in excess of that allowed in tap water, to potentially cause any minor health consequences.
In exchange, you "put up" with your job X more years of your life to pay for the convenience.
The question is NOT is something "comfortable" or not, but whether an few minutes of your spare time working on your car is more or less comfortable than getting up in the morning, driving to/from work, and putting in another 8 hours.
If you're a neat freak, afraid of ever touching grease, I can see why you'd prefer the latter.
That's not called "comfortable," it's called being a sociopath...
Still, I can't understand the sentiment at all... Are you the type of person who drives directly from enclosed structure, to enclosed structure (one garage to another) all the time, and never goes outside, for fear of leaving themselves exposed to unconditioned air? Because I can assure you, all this talk of being "comfortable" is for not once you step outside, and are forced to endure (*GASP*) the climate in which you live... If you can't handle it in your car, I can't see how you can handle it even in your own yard...
I highly object to paying for bottled water for numerous reasons... The disgusting taste of plastic leeching into the water, the tiny amount of value provided for an exorbitant price, the gross inconvenience, etc. but I don't claim there's NO REASON to buy bottled water.
Yes it does. But THEN it goes through massive processing... industrial-strength filtration, and processes to add and remove, eg. minerals as required to alter the taste.
Certainly, where I lived before, tap water run through a simple carbon filter (to eliminate the now-pervasive chlorine taste found in tap water) tasted far better than bottled water. Moving to a new area, even after filtration, city water tastes horrible... I don't know if it's the high concentration of minerals ("hard" water), lack of oxygenation, et al., but it's undeniably lousy for drinking.
No, it wasn't. The media is infatuated with scaring people, so they report without any context.
All they found was a higher bacteria count in bottled water... By that same metric, tap water is "worse" than drinking bleach... And that IS the primary difference. Heavily chlorinated water kills EVERYTHING, but most people wouldn't agree that it's BETTER for you.
Furthermore, the idea that bacteria is BAD is a long pervasive myth that has caused substantial harm to mankind, and which scientists continually try to break people of... People raised where they were exposed to more bacteria generally become much healthier over their lifetime than those in a largely sterile environment.
No, but you certainly can open the vents and turn on the fan to get outside air, without using the AC.
That's idiotic nonsense. A/C uses a relatively small amount of power. Less than 10% of the rated horsepower of even small cars.
Sitting and "idling" in an electric car with the A/C on will use vastly less power than idling a gasoline engine.
Because the 10% of the time you NEED to haul something, you can't do it with a car... Therefore, you strictly REQUIRE a truck.
Once we've established that a truck is required, then YOU need to try and justify owning a second vehicle...
Insurance, parking, registration, maintenance, etc. That's not to mention the initial purchase price of the car. Some costs are sunk no matter whether you drive your vehicle 10% of the time, or 90% of the time.
In MANY cases, a few more gallons of gas (to drive the truck the other 90% of the time) is less expensive than owning two vehicles.
Oh no! People are being CRITICIZED! Horror of horrors!
Look, software authors DO have the LEGAL right to decide what license to release their code under, which is, by far, the most important part. That doesn't change the fact that their choice in this case is foolish. And it certainly doesn't preclude them from criticism.
Not really. Venereal IS the proper pluralization of Venus.
Cytherean is something cooked-up, pretty much at random, because so many people simply refused to use the proper terminology. And point of fact, isn't even the observed terminology these days, as it was some years ago.
In other news, I don't like the word "dog". They're now to be called untigs. Anyone that doesn't observe this new proper wording is stupid and wrong...
Journaling does NOTHING to improve "data security". Absolutely nothing, either in practice, or in theory. What it does is obviate the need for fsck. It doesn't even do that particularly well, as non-journaled filesystems like FreeBSD's UFS2 can be used much more quickly after an unclean shutdown, and is extremely reliable.
No, disabling on-drive caching has to be #1. Without it, no file system can possibly act sanely.
Unless the RAM in question is battery-backed, as many higher-end RAID controllers are.
Perhaps because they are writing software which is by FAR most useful when it is used as far and wide as possible, while using a license which makes that goal extremely difficult to achieve, unnecessarily.
Honestly, the only reason anyone cares about Btrfs is because the license on ZFS is too restrictive for inclusion in Linux, and NOBODY has opted to write their own implementation under a GPL or other, freer, license.
No, you pronounce 'es', yet nobody is advocating the use of es instead of 's everywhere just because it's pronounced that way...
It stands to reason that what stands to reason doesn't determine the rules of written english.
If the comforts were up to par, I would be happy to.
It's only BECAUSE flights are so short that they can get away with squeezing people into so little space. That's why a trip that is 4X longer on a train, can be much less stressful than flying.
And let's not forget cargo...
That's utter nonsense. DES was used extensively, and for plenty of critical data. What do you think all those web browsers have been using for SSL?
DES STILL hasn't been broken. It's short key-length just ran up against Moore's law. 3DES is still a sound algo, but damn slow, which is one of the major reasons for AES. The very large keys possible with AES mean it should remain practical for a long time.
And have you ever heard of the Soviet Union? They were highly interested in cracking DES for a lot more reasons than the mere challenge of it... More than mere MONEY was on the line.
I've setup MANY systems specifically designed to replace 100 people, performing time-consuming tasks, with 1 guy hitting a few buttons and moving some paper around.
If that guy didn't exist, I could do that job myself, in-between other tasks.
My company has other employees, of course, but certain companies can be almost COMPLETELY automated by computers, and some entire industries have disappeared because of it.
Oh good. Then anyone with international interests has to maintain several hundred domains, to make sure they are easily found by people around the world looking for them...
Oh good. Then it'll just be Sporf farm equipment fighting with Sporf housewares, and Sporf online store, fighting it out for control of their mutual namesake...
And the US government is going to drop everything to make sure our domain names stay clean, right? And Colombia certainly wouldn't sell off identically named domains to companies looking to catch the typos of Canadians...
It sure has.
Just like cows have lived, bred, fed, and died on their own for millions of years...
Thereby contradicting those fools who claim cattle ranches are man-made...
I see you're preparing for a nice big dinner of red herring. Enjoy.
Yes... Yes it is.
Multimedia operations are performed by integrated DSPs on the chips, so the fact that it can decode H.264 tells you NOTHING about the speed of the processor, any more than the speed of your GPU tells you how fast the CPU is.
And before anyone starts yelling that desktop CPUs should have DSPs in them, as ALWAYS happens on /., go look it up. The pros and cons have been known for decades, and it has been tried over and over again.
Except for the first time in a century, the average height for men in the US has gone down... Just an inch (5' 8" IIRC), but a reduction still.
Nutrition is provably the cause of men (and women, BTW) getting taller, and over-eating is now reversing the trend. If women's attractiveness is similiarly nutrition-based, we should see that trend reverse as well, with plenty of overweight women.
Yes, and the one with "Internet" in the name is guaranteed to be chosen by the clueless, 100% of the time.
After all, they don't want to go to the Opera, they want to go to the Internet.
Its entirely doable, even for those of modest means.
Most websites today have an inexplicable focus on being shiny... They can afford to, so they do, and if they get just a tiny number more visitors because of it, it might make it worthwhile for their advertisers.
To keep bandwidth server overhead to a minimum, you just need to go through and start finding every possible corner to cut... Strip out images anywhere possible, reduce each page to the minimum. Replace fancy logos with simple solid colors and fonts that can be represented with 15bytes of HTML/CSS rather than 50KByte images. Where you do strictly need images, reduce the color depth (for PNG/GIF) or quality (JPEG) until the images are looking just a bit ugly... you'll see filesizes fall dramatically, as quality is only minimally harmed. In fact, most sites could be reduced to plain text + hyperlinks, and serve up MILLIONS of hits a day, with a minuscule bandwidth bill.
Any web-page processing needed should be done before-hand, perhaps once a week or once a day at worst, and just generate a static HTML document from it. No need to constantly hit a cluster of DB servers, unless you insist on giving each user full customizability. And no need for users to fetch the page from your servers every time, since they've got everything cached.
Sure, you're not going to run the equivalent of Flikr or Youtube, but anything where textual information is king is EASILY possible. In fact you could do so off your home DSL line, and barely notice the bandwidth hit, since your own usage will be all download, while your visitors will be all upload. You've probably got more bandwidth than most companies I've worked for, many of whom run major ECommerce websites... you just don't get the same reliability guarantees.