This is the US Military. If they decide to use your software, you ASK THEM NICELY to follow the copyright terms.
They have an awful big club to wield in all three branches of government... You could well see The President being awoken at 3am to order Congress into an emergency session, all to pass a law that says the GPL doesn't apply to the US Military
Just ask Marconi... He decided the US Mil should pay patent license fees to him, on all those radios they used in WWII. They decided they would rather just invalidate all his patents, and not pay him anything.
Amazon.com is staffed by idiots... They thought it would be safe to stream the ENTIRE MOVIE, to anyone, FOR FREE. The ONLY protection being that they send a command to the Flash Player to "pause" playback after 2 minutes for those that haven't paid to watch the whole thing. Cheap software and instructions have sprung up all over the web, and everybody knows Amazon.com is going to get a boot up the ass by the media companies, and fix this "security" issue any second now.
DRM is utterly redundant. They just need someone with 3-digit IQ in the company to teach them how to make a 2 minute excerpt clip that is free and publicly accessible, while keeping the full video password-protected.
This is about on-par with an Apache "security announcement" that even if you don't make a link to a document on your HTTP server, it's still accessible! The horror!
So what feature does Linux have that has everybody talking about Linux?
The same feature that Gov. Palin has...
The same feature that Wikipedia has...
The same feature that Paris Hilton has...
Linux is famous because it makes for a story dynamic that the press likes... A story about a bunch of young geeky kids writing code and trying to take over the world from their basement just makes for a more interesting read than a bunch of boring, pragmatic, 40 year-old professional tech veterans (with a life) quietly working hard, donating their work to make a reliable system that the world has been quietly making use of for 30 years.
Then, it becomes a self-sustaining cycle... Companies want some of that press, so they get in on "Linux" (not BSD, not open source, not Free Software, but LINUX) development. In the process they generate more interest in Linux, and so on.
Its license.
The license is only incidentally involved in any of this. A great many companies can and do contribute to BSD projects, without going out of business. "Competitive advantage" is a red herring... Binaries can be reverse engineered fairly easily, and having code available to the public under ANY license other than NDA gives away all of your secrets, which can then be used (clean-room) by anyone that wants to, they just have to find them valuable enough to put a bit of effort into in ANY case.
the share and share alike requirement laid down by the GPL, which turns the Tragedy of the Commons around on its ear so that everybody is pushing the project along together,
The tragedy of the commons requires YOU to take something away from the rest of us. Copying my code without contributing back doesn't stop me or anyone else from using it.
In fact there is a software analogy to the tragedy of the commons, however... It's the that when you require everyone else to play by your rules, or else you'll take your ball and go home, people decide to ignore you all together... BSD-licensed code becomes a world-wide standard: BSD TCP/IP stack, BIND, Sendmail, NFS, OpenSSH, etc. GPL-licensed code does not, ever. GPL code ends up always being a reimplementation of established protocols, while BSD code often ends up becoming the established protocol that everyone else uses and reimplements.
That's the relevant "tragedy" that applies to the software world. Good luck getting your audio format, with only a GPL-licensed decoder, included in hardware MP3 players and DVD players.
Show me a $40 Solaris-based router, or a Solaris phone, or a Solaris-based pocket calculator.
That's a bit like saying Nokia (or ARM) is going to take over the supercomputer market, because they're so dominant in the low-end.
It's the high end of cheap. $170 is going to get you a midrange graphics card, which, while not cheap in an absolute sense, is cheap compared to other graphics cards out there.
It's also the low end of expensive. Not expensive in an absolute sense, but expensive compared to many other highly capable graphics cards out there.
Slashdot was _the_ site for breaking news a few years ago,
Err, umm, not so much.
Sure, they weren't too far behind, but being first was NEVER the motivation behind/. I can recall numerous times they waited for DAYS after some major event before picking the best of 100,000 submissions to finally post.
and sites would be regularly slashdotted, etc.
The internet has bigger pipes, as do providers.
There are now numerous large 3rd parties that are happy to offer central hosting services of large images, videos, and the like, each with more bandwidth than god (Youtube, Blogger, Flickr, etc.).
And yes, it does seem like even fewer/.ers RTFA.
Now, blogs have taken over, and push out news MUCH faster than slashdot.
There have always been other sites out there that would get the stories first. That's not what blogs have made possible. Now that EVERYONE has their own blog, it's fairly easy to find one that EXACTLY matches the category of content YOU want. However,/. allows customization so that you can stay here and still only get the stories you want... or at least it would work that way if someone would teach Samzenpus to properly categorize stories, esp. "Ask Slashdot" (yes, I know it's ironic that this is one of the few he properly categorized) so I don't have to read half the mindless crap that is going up on the front page these days.
I used to read the comments of slashdot for more insight, as there are truely intelligent people on this site that leave comments, but lately, the S/N ratio has gone bad.
Quite true. For some reason, the most moronic tripe that has been covered in the first line of TFA, and other idiocy, is constantly getting modded up. Ditto for mindless memes. I guess there's next to no-one offering insight anymore, or at least the vast majority are more interesting in mindless ranting about how much they hate Blu-ray, that only jokes get points, and this place slowly turns into Fark.
Stories like this are (I think) an attempt to bring back the good S/N ratio.
No. Stories like this, and all the others, are an attempt to bring in more eyeballs and page loads./. has been drastically dumbed down over the past year +, so it's all become scare-tactic political stories, software release announcements, and non-technical stories about what product has the best market share this week.
So when I read this story, I read it because I'm looking to learn something from the comments.
As it always was. But even when some story is ideal for technical discussion, such as wireless internet access over unused TV spectrum, Dirac 1.0 being released, etc. the summary most of the time gets twisted every which way to make it all about politics/patents/etc., and trying to push the buttons of the readers, rather than promting technical discussions. THAT is what's been killing this site and keeping the old "community" on the sidelines.
But enjoy drinking from that firehose. Maybe/. can pull a few more eyeballs away from digg.
Well, that was supposed to be "at least a thousand miles", referring to MEO. But it's probably true that the vast majority of people are only familiar with geosynch. orbit satellites.
The terrestrial stations are selected by frequency (and geographical location.) Satellites are selected by exact pointing to a location in space but reuse the same frequencies.
That's a strange distinction to make... Terrestrial frequencies are reused as well, and as much as possible.
And depending on the location of the respective transmitters, and the gain of your antenna, it's quite likely you're required to aim at each individual broadcaster, and are only receiving a single (coherent) broadcaster's frequency at any time.
Given how touchy satellite service is in even the slightest amount of rain, I can only imagine just how touchy some the local stuff will become to any form of interference.
- I don't see ANY signal degradation AT ALL, even with extremely heavy cloud cover, and pouring rain. It sounds like your dish isn't pointed very well, and/or isn't mounted firmly enough (moving in the wind).
- Ku-Band satellite signals are at FAR higher frequencies than are used for terrestrial TV, which makes them far more susceptible to interference, like moisture.
- The modulation, error correction, polarization, antennas, etc. used to broadcast/receive satellite signals are completely and totally different than those for terrestrial broadcasts.
- Satellites are broadcasting about a thousand miles further away than terrestrial antennas will be, and at FAR, FAR lower power.
- All these issues have next to nothing to do with "digital" versus "analog".
And unlike the satellite stuff, the local stuff is only being obtained from a single source.
I'm utterly confused. There are multiple broadcasting antennas, just as there are multiple satellites. In both cases, you're only "obtaining" a signal from one at a time.
Because a company who can't find a better place to invest their cash in expanding themselves into new areas (as opposed to merely buying back their stock) clearly has no vision or wish to be anything more than they already are.
Meanwhile, a company that IS expanding themselves into new areas that they don't have as much expertise (as opposed to focusing on their core competency) clearly has no desire to improve their business/products, and would rather use all their spare cash to become a holding company... That is, until the next economic downturn, when they're forced to sell most of their holdings back (at a loss) to companies who actually have the core competency to run those OTHER types of businesses.
sony: you lost a LOT of money on people like me who BOYCOTT you for all your various evil ways.
So, is this just Sony-branded products? If so, there's PLENTY of Blu-Ray players (and movies) from firms with no association with Sony.
Or is this also about Sony's patents on the Blu-ray disc tech? If so, you also have to stop using CDs & DVDs, since they (and Phillips) played a major part in developing both.
Enjoy your VHS tapes. They make 1080i upscaling VHS players, right?
Sales dropped, and it was the beginning of the end for Sears.
Sears was on a severe decline long before the Discover card was even introduced.
And "the end"? Sears stores around here are doing quite well. It's certainly not the behemoth it was in the 1970s, but it's a long way from "the end".
In fact I'd put Sears as the only brick and mortar retailer I actually trust today... I'd be perfectly happy buying some no-name appliance from Sears, while I wouldn't even think about touching some no-name appliance in a Wal-Mart.
My mistake. It is rather simplistic, but it is in fact an in-loop deblocking filter.
I have read the documentation more than once.
Interesting you should say that, because I just looked through the specs and I see NO indication at all that Theora can use "adaptive block sizes" as claimed in the parent post. In fact it repeatedly says Theora uses fixed 8x8 blocks, just like MPEG-1/2/4ASP.
Have you ever heard of H.263? H.264 is not new in either in history or ideas.
*Ahem*. I did not claim it was significantly improved, or theoretically revolutionary.
The point I was making are that previous codecs have done just fine without dynamic block sizes, multiple reference frames, deblocking, etc. And that encoding improvements happen not from new features, but from newer/better encoders.
Did you know you are suppose to pay fees (or will soon) just to produce *content* in these formats. ie put a movie up on your web page.
Yes, I know the licensing terms in-detail, since I do quite a bit of work in the industry.
Oh and even if you pay your fees, there is no protection from parties that may have a patent on h264 from suing you.
There is never any guarantee that you won't be sued by anyone in the world, for some ridiculous reason. That's the nature of the legal system. Using Theora isn't going to prevent you from being sued, either, so claiming that as a benefit is a red herring.
This is why we need patent free codecs.
We have them. H.261 and MPEG-1 are patent-free. MPEG-1 is rather efficient at low-bitrate encoding (on par with MPEG-4 ASP) and likely the most widely supported video format in the world, by both hardware and software. I'd put it up against Theora any day, as well.
So why don't you use it? Why wait for Dirac or Theora?
I think the fact that there are people who *can* tell the difference between a 256kbs MP3 and CD-audio and those who *can't* perhaps shows that there's no easy way to map quality of audio onto something that matches human perception.
In fact you're wrong.
MP3 was never designed to be indistinguishable from CD-audio. It was designed to sound GOOD at even lower bitrates (64kbps mono). MP3 has several limitations that prevent it from doing so. It's immensely ironic that people are now cranking up the bitrates on MP3s to try and get it to do so.
In fact it's possible to get far superior sound, that next to nobody can distinguish from the original, at lower bitrates, using better audio codecs, like MUSEPACK, or the even older MPEG-1 Layer II (yes, MP3's "little brother").
Now, the models of the human auditory system AREN'T theoretically perfect by any stretch of the imagination. They are defined through practical testing rather than some proven law of perception. However, it is exhaustively testing, and very well defined, thanks in large part to Bell Labs' work back in the 80s. You can find ou all the details you could possibly want about this by looking through the old 1980s research papers by J. D. Johnston about "Perceptual Entropy".
Also you don't design codecs for 0.5% of the population that can hear the difference, but for the 90% that can't and the other 9.5% that don't care.
In fact you do design for the 0.5%. Testing of codecs specifically uses expert listeners, with an in-depth double-blind testing setup, hidden anchors, and the like. Of course you aren't going to please everyone, all the time, but codec developers certainly do try their best to do so.
but it does have a few advantages over MPEG-4 ASP: the loop filter, adaptive block sizes, and multiple reference frames, putting it closer to H.264 than MPEG-4 ASP.
AFAIK, the deblocker in VP3/Theora is NOT an in-loop filter, but just a simple post-processor, with just a little more smarts due to being codec-specific.
VP3/Theora also has some significant inherent DISADVANTAGES over MPEG-4 ASP, such as lacking B-frames (which Xvid uses to great effect). And yet, while VP3/Theora isn't competitive with H.264 or MPEG-4 ASP, it is a monster on CPU usage (worse than H.264 in most cases), which makes playback on modest hardware impossible (where the likes of Divx have no problems).
But, IMHO, codec design issues are relatively minor where quality is concerned. H.264/AVC is the first significant change to video coding since MPEG-1. MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 ASP merely change coding around slightly, and offer nominal inherent improvements, yet most people don't believe that MPEG-1/MPEG-2 is competitive with Divx/Xvid/FMP4 (though they technically are). And all the neat tricks that the likes of H.264 do still can only help on low-bitrate material, as there are inherent limitations at high bitrates that even the ancient MPEG-2 can approach. Yet, VP3/Theora do quite poorly at high bitrates as well, encoding tricks or no,
Theora could have been a very good video codec, but some 6 years of development time have been completely squandered, with no design nor quality improvements to speak of. Honestly, developers would do just as well to work on tweaking the VP3.2 codec as Theora's code base, and get a somewhat larger installed base of decoders that will be able to play the video (Theora offers backwards compatibility).
With these features, it's really a pretty strong showing from Xiph,
All the features you have described are present in On2's VP3.2 code base, which they donated to the public. Xiph.org didn't have anything to do with developing them.
Why do these have to be proprietary? The open source equivalents are far and away better, and you don't have to pay to reimplement them, and increase the price for the users.
There's nothing illegal about libavcodec, used by MPlayer, VLC, Xine, etc. The only issue is whether you've paid your patent license fees. Just nearly all popular codecs are licensed on RAND terms, so anybody can send in a check to make themselves legal, no matter what software they use.
So why isn't someone just selling a copy of Xine, with only a few of the most popular audio and video codecs enabled, and setting the price just above the price of license fees?
Antarctica would be kind of a neat place for a data center.
Yes. Particularly because NOBODY WOULD CARE if it went offline for any length of time, since it's just about the furthest distance it could be away from people that might want to USE IT. With hundreds and hundreds of miles of cabling to connect it to the nearest population centers, you're looking at an awfully expensive link, and plenty of lag.
If you want cold air, just go find the nearest mountain, and build your data center as near to the top as possible.
No one realised that they were buying sub-prime until it was too late.
That's nonsense. Anybody who was remotely paying attention would have been able to find out quite easily, and so should have known. Hell, the US news media was reporting about it (and how risky it all was) over and over for months before it all crashed.
And no, you (every country in the world) weren't forced to buy American debt (whatever the rating) in the first place... You could have put that money elsewhere, and not been hit. That's doubly true if you were suspicious of the US leadership, and believed the economy was going to have trouble... If everyone had pulled their portfolios out of the US 8 years ago, the world wouldn't have been hit remotely so hard.
It's not "interfering" in US internal affairs, but self-preservation. What happens in the USA has a direct impact on my wallet.
Yes, and I'm sure YOU would be oh-so-receptive to those in the US trying to influence British politics... after all, your economy has an effect on our wallets as well.
Of course it doesn't help that my own government has also mismanaged what little power it had, but I'm not taking the blame for mistakes made by the American electorate.
Your government, and private company had a lot more power than you give them credit for. You didn't have to keep your stocks in US banks while all this was going on. Your banks didn't have to go and buy up sub-prime debt. etc., etc. Of course they couldn't have stopped the problem, but it wouldn't have been nearly so significant.
I'm not speaking just of the UK, though. The world economy wouldn't have been hit so hard if the entire world hadn't done the same thing, to varying extents.
The world also wouldn't have been hit so hard if the trade imbalance between them and the US hadn't been so large (in their favor)... but it was, and they were quite happy to keep it that way. Those who import lots of US manufactured products are getting a steep discount now that the economy is in a slump... and are incidentally helpful in keeping the US economy stable and reasonably strong.
what real effect would it have on the encyclopedia other than another record in the database that nobody other than the author would ever access?
Well, if nothing else, title collisions would be pretty serious.
When you're looking for information about "video", and hit search, a list of every single one-man company with "video" in the name, that existed for all of a week, 15 years ago, would be a bitch and a half to wade through... Throw in every single bit of software ever created with "video" in it's name, and you're in for trouble.
Looking up information on Pocahontas and John Smith? Good luck. Everybody on the planet named "John Smith" thinks they deserve their own WP article.
"Notability" is important for verifiability, as well. Hey, if you've got a product no-one has ever heard of before, you can put up whatever far fetched bullshit you want on your website, and use yourself as the citation... Bingo, WP says my company makes "the best product, EVER.[1] It will make your life better. You should really go and buy one.[2]". Until something has become "notable", the sole source of info can say any nonsense they want, for inclusion into WP. WP is suddenly an endless source of BS.
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This is the US Military. If they decide to use your software, you ASK THEM NICELY to follow the copyright terms.
They have an awful big club to wield in all three branches of government... You could well see The President being awoken at 3am to order Congress into an emergency session, all to pass a law that says the GPL doesn't apply to the US Military
Just ask Marconi... He decided the US Mil should pay patent license fees to him, on all those radios they used in WWII. They decided they would rather just invalidate all his patents, and not pay him anything.
Just because there's a (trivial) workaround, doesn't mean there isn't a limit.
In summary:
Amazon.com is staffed by idiots... They thought it would be safe to stream the ENTIRE MOVIE, to anyone, FOR FREE. The ONLY protection being that they send a command to the Flash Player to "pause" playback after 2 minutes for those that haven't paid to watch the whole thing. Cheap software and instructions have sprung up all over the web, and everybody knows Amazon.com is going to get a boot up the ass by the media companies, and fix this "security" issue any second now.
DRM is utterly redundant. They just need someone with 3-digit IQ in the company to teach them how to make a 2 minute excerpt clip that is free and publicly accessible, while keeping the full video password-protected.
This is about on-par with an Apache "security announcement" that even if you don't make a link to a document on your HTTP server, it's still accessible! The horror!
The same feature that Gov. Palin has...
The same feature that Wikipedia has...
The same feature that Paris Hilton has...
Linux is famous because it makes for a story dynamic that the press likes... A story about a bunch of young geeky kids writing code and trying to take over the world from their basement just makes for a more interesting read than a bunch of boring, pragmatic, 40 year-old professional tech veterans (with a life) quietly working hard, donating their work to make a reliable system that the world has been quietly making use of for 30 years.
Then, it becomes a self-sustaining cycle... Companies want some of that press, so they get in on "Linux" (not BSD, not open source, not Free Software, but LINUX) development. In the process they generate more interest in Linux, and so on.
The license is only incidentally involved in any of this. A great many companies can and do contribute to BSD projects, without going out of business. "Competitive advantage" is a red herring... Binaries can be reverse engineered fairly easily, and having code available to the public under ANY license other than NDA gives away all of your secrets, which can then be used (clean-room) by anyone that wants to, they just have to find them valuable enough to put a bit of effort into in ANY case.
The tragedy of the commons requires YOU to take something away from the rest of us. Copying my code without contributing back doesn't stop me or anyone else from using it.
In fact there is a software analogy to the tragedy of the commons, however... It's the that when you require everyone else to play by your rules, or else you'll take your ball and go home, people decide to ignore you all together... BSD-licensed code becomes a world-wide standard: BSD TCP/IP stack, BIND, Sendmail, NFS, OpenSSH, etc. GPL-licensed code does not, ever. GPL code ends up always being a reimplementation of established protocols, while BSD code often ends up becoming the established protocol that everyone else uses and reimplements.
That's the relevant "tragedy" that applies to the software world. Good luck getting your audio format, with only a GPL-licensed decoder, included in hardware MP3 players and DVD players.
That's a bit like saying Nokia (or ARM) is going to take over the supercomputer market, because they're so dominant in the low-end.
It's also the low end of expensive. Not expensive in an absolute sense, but expensive compared to many other highly capable graphics cards out there.
Err, umm, not so much.
Sure, they weren't too far behind, but being first was NEVER the motivation behind /. I can recall numerous times they waited for DAYS after some major event before picking the best of 100,000 submissions to finally post.
The internet has bigger pipes, as do providers.
There are now numerous large 3rd parties that are happy to offer central hosting services of large images, videos, and the like, each with more bandwidth than god (Youtube, Blogger, Flickr, etc.).
And yes, it does seem like even fewer /.ers RTFA.
There have always been other sites out there that would get the stories first. That's not what blogs have made possible. Now that EVERYONE has their own blog, it's fairly easy to find one that EXACTLY matches the category of content YOU want. However, /. allows customization so that you can stay here and still only get the stories you want... or at least it would work that way if someone would teach Samzenpus to properly categorize stories, esp. "Ask Slashdot" (yes, I know it's ironic that this is one of the few he properly categorized) so I don't have to read half the mindless crap that is going up on the front page these days.
Quite true. For some reason, the most moronic tripe that has been covered in the first line of TFA, and other idiocy, is constantly getting modded up. Ditto for mindless memes. I guess there's next to no-one offering insight anymore, or at least the vast majority are more interesting in mindless ranting about how much they hate Blu-ray, that only jokes get points, and this place slowly turns into Fark.
No. Stories like this, and all the others, are an attempt to bring in more eyeballs and page loads. /. has been drastically dumbed down over the past year +, so it's all become scare-tactic political stories, software release announcements, and non-technical stories about what product has the best market share this week.
As it always was. But even when some story is ideal for technical discussion, such as wireless internet access over unused TV spectrum, Dirac 1.0 being released, etc. the summary most of the time gets twisted every which way to make it all about politics/patents/etc., and trying to push the buttons of the readers, rather than promting technical discussions. THAT is what's been killing this site and keeping the old "community" on the sidelines.
But enjoy drinking from that firehose. Maybe /. can pull a few more eyeballs away from digg.
Well, that was supposed to be "at least a thousand miles", referring to MEO. But it's probably true that the vast majority of people are only familiar with geosynch. orbit satellites.
That's a strange distinction to make... Terrestrial frequencies are reused as well, and as much as possible.
And depending on the location of the respective transmitters, and the gain of your antenna, it's quite likely you're required to aim at each individual broadcaster, and are only receiving a single (coherent) broadcaster's frequency at any time.
- I don't see ANY signal degradation AT ALL, even with extremely heavy cloud cover, and pouring rain. It sounds like your dish isn't pointed very well, and/or isn't mounted firmly enough (moving in the wind).
- Ku-Band satellite signals are at FAR higher frequencies than are used for terrestrial TV, which makes them far more susceptible to interference, like moisture.
- The modulation, error correction, polarization, antennas, etc. used to broadcast/receive satellite signals are completely and totally different than those for terrestrial broadcasts.
- Satellites are broadcasting about a thousand miles further away than terrestrial antennas will be, and at FAR, FAR lower power.
- All these issues have next to nothing to do with "digital" versus "analog".
I'm utterly confused. There are multiple broadcasting antennas, just as there are multiple satellites. In both cases, you're only "obtaining" a signal from one at a time.
Meanwhile, a company that IS expanding themselves into new areas that they don't have as much expertise (as opposed to focusing on their core competency) clearly has no desire to improve their business/products, and would rather use all their spare cash to become a holding company... That is, until the next economic downturn, when they're forced to sell most of their holdings back (at a loss) to companies who actually have the core competency to run those OTHER types of businesses.
And my scenario has TONS of real life examples...
Do you see that smoking crater over there?
Here's the keys... Enjoy!
Wow. I have NO IDEA what you were reading.
So, is this just Sony-branded products? If so, there's PLENTY of Blu-Ray players (and movies) from firms with no association with Sony.
Or is this also about Sony's patents on the Blu-ray disc tech? If so, you also have to stop using CDs & DVDs, since they (and Phillips) played a major part in developing both.
Enjoy your VHS tapes. They make 1080i upscaling VHS players, right?
Sears was on a severe decline long before the Discover card was even introduced.
And "the end"? Sears stores around here are doing quite well. It's certainly not the behemoth it was in the 1970s, but it's a long way from "the end".
In fact I'd put Sears as the only brick and mortar retailer I actually trust today... I'd be perfectly happy buying some no-name appliance from Sears, while I wouldn't even think about touching some no-name appliance in a Wal-Mart.
My mistake. It is rather simplistic, but it is in fact an in-loop deblocking filter.
Interesting you should say that, because I just looked through the specs and I see NO indication at all that Theora can use "adaptive block sizes" as claimed in the parent post. In fact it repeatedly says Theora uses fixed 8x8 blocks, just like MPEG-1/2/4ASP.
*Ahem*. I did not claim it was significantly improved, or theoretically revolutionary.
The point I was making are that previous codecs have done just fine without dynamic block sizes, multiple reference frames, deblocking, etc. And that encoding improvements happen not from new features, but from newer/better encoders.
Yes, I know the licensing terms in-detail, since I do quite a bit of work in the industry.
There is never any guarantee that you won't be sued by anyone in the world, for some ridiculous reason. That's the nature of the legal system. Using Theora isn't going to prevent you from being sued, either, so claiming that as a benefit is a red herring.
We have them. H.261 and MPEG-1 are patent-free. MPEG-1 is rather efficient at low-bitrate encoding (on par with MPEG-4 ASP) and likely the most widely supported video format in the world, by both hardware and software. I'd put it up against Theora any day, as well.
So why don't you use it? Why wait for Dirac or Theora?
In fact you're wrong.
MP3 was never designed to be indistinguishable from CD-audio. It was designed to sound GOOD at even lower bitrates (64kbps mono). MP3 has several limitations that prevent it from doing so. It's immensely ironic that people are now cranking up the bitrates on MP3s to try and get it to do so.
In fact it's possible to get far superior sound, that next to nobody can distinguish from the original, at lower bitrates, using better audio codecs, like MUSEPACK, or the even older MPEG-1 Layer II (yes, MP3's "little brother").
Now, the models of the human auditory system AREN'T theoretically perfect by any stretch of the imagination. They are defined through practical testing rather than some proven law of perception. However, it is exhaustively testing, and very well defined, thanks in large part to Bell Labs' work back in the 80s. You can find ou all the details you could possibly want about this by looking through the old 1980s research papers by J. D. Johnston about "Perceptual Entropy".
In fact you do design for the 0.5%. Testing of codecs specifically uses expert listeners, with an in-depth double-blind testing setup, hidden anchors, and the like. Of course you aren't going to please everyone, all the time, but codec developers certainly do try their best to do so.
AFAIK, the deblocker in VP3/Theora is NOT an in-loop filter, but just a simple post-processor, with just a little more smarts due to being codec-specific.
VP3/Theora also has some significant inherent DISADVANTAGES over MPEG-4 ASP, such as lacking B-frames (which Xvid uses to great effect). And yet, while VP3/Theora isn't competitive with H.264 or MPEG-4 ASP, it is a monster on CPU usage (worse than H.264 in most cases), which makes playback on modest hardware impossible (where the likes of Divx have no problems).
But, IMHO, codec design issues are relatively minor where quality is concerned. H.264/AVC is the first significant change to video coding since MPEG-1. MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 ASP merely change coding around slightly, and offer nominal inherent improvements, yet most people don't believe that MPEG-1/MPEG-2 is competitive with Divx/Xvid/FMP4 (though they technically are). And all the neat tricks that the likes of H.264 do still can only help on low-bitrate material, as there are inherent limitations at high bitrates that even the ancient MPEG-2 can approach. Yet, VP3/Theora do quite poorly at high bitrates as well, encoding tricks or no,
Theora could have been a very good video codec, but some 6 years of development time have been completely squandered, with no design nor quality improvements to speak of. Honestly, developers would do just as well to work on tweaking the VP3.2 codec as Theora's code base, and get a somewhat larger installed base of decoders that will be able to play the video (Theora offers backwards compatibility).
All the features you have described are present in On2's VP3.2 code base, which they donated to the public. Xiph.org didn't have anything to do with developing them.
Why do these have to be proprietary? The open source equivalents are far and away better, and you don't have to pay to reimplement them, and increase the price for the users.
There's nothing illegal about libavcodec, used by MPlayer, VLC, Xine, etc. The only issue is whether you've paid your patent license fees. Just nearly all popular codecs are licensed on RAND terms, so anybody can send in a check to make themselves legal, no matter what software they use.
So why isn't someone just selling a copy of Xine, with only a few of the most popular audio and video codecs enabled, and setting the price just above the price of license fees?
Yes, because Windows supports Divx and H.264 out of the box, right?
You don't have to go find, download, and install free codecs, on the most popular OS out there.
Lenses of all types are nothing new, and any solar cell can use concentrated light, provided they are actively cooled.
So, he invented nothing. And "3D"?
Yes, this story sets off ALL the bullshit sensors from the very start.
Yes. Particularly because NOBODY WOULD CARE if it went offline for any length of time, since it's just about the furthest distance it could be away from people that might want to USE IT. With hundreds and hundreds of miles of cabling to connect it to the nearest population centers, you're looking at an awfully expensive link, and plenty of lag.
If you want cold air, just go find the nearest mountain, and build your data center as near to the top as possible.
And why you raise the humidity, you significantly lower air temperatures, too...
I don't know why swamp coolers aren't utilized in data centers in the deserts. Very, very cheap cooling.
That's nonsense. Anybody who was remotely paying attention would have been able to find out quite easily, and so should have known. Hell, the US news media was reporting about it (and how risky it all was) over and over for months before it all crashed.
And no, you (every country in the world) weren't forced to buy American debt (whatever the rating) in the first place... You could have put that money elsewhere, and not been hit. That's doubly true if you were suspicious of the US leadership, and believed the economy was going to have trouble... If everyone had pulled their portfolios out of the US 8 years ago, the world wouldn't have been hit remotely so hard.
Yes, and I'm sure YOU would be oh-so-receptive to those in the US trying to influence British politics... after all, your economy has an effect on our wallets as well.
Your government, and private company had a lot more power than you give them credit for. You didn't have to keep your stocks in US banks while all this was going on. Your banks didn't have to go and buy up sub-prime debt. etc., etc. Of course they couldn't have stopped the problem, but it wouldn't have been nearly so significant.
I'm not speaking just of the UK, though. The world economy wouldn't have been hit so hard if the entire world hadn't done the same thing, to varying extents.
The world also wouldn't have been hit so hard if the trade imbalance between them and the US hadn't been so large (in their favor)... but it was, and they were quite happy to keep it that way. Those who import lots of US manufactured products are getting a steep discount now that the economy is in a slump... and are incidentally helpful in keeping the US economy stable and reasonably strong.
Well, if nothing else, title collisions would be pretty serious.
When you're looking for information about "video", and hit search, a list of every single one-man company with "video" in the name, that existed for all of a week, 15 years ago, would be a bitch and a half to wade through... Throw in every single bit of software ever created with "video" in it's name, and you're in for trouble.
Looking up information on Pocahontas and John Smith? Good luck. Everybody on the planet named "John Smith" thinks they deserve their own WP article.
"Notability" is important for verifiability, as well. Hey, if you've got a product no-one has ever heard of before, you can put up whatever far fetched bullshit you want on your website, and use yourself as the citation... Bingo, WP says my company makes "the best product, EVER.[1] It will make your life better. You should really go and buy one.[2]". Until something has become "notable", the sole source of info can say any nonsense they want, for inclusion into WP. WP is suddenly an endless source of BS.