This is the same ancient idea, with the same ancient problems...
It allows for extortion and buying of votes (others can verify who you really voted for).
There's no guarantee that the machine verifying your reciept, is acurately reflecting how your vote was really counted, as opposed to counting all votes in reverse.
It does nothing to stop dead (or phantom) people from voting. They aren't going to complain...
Then start up your own project... When they're docking 3/4ths of your pay for the rest of your life, you can tell me how the judge was supposed to throw it out, because it was non-commercial...
Patents cover commercial applications, not open source libraries.
I have NO idea how you made that up.
And, of course, the case I linked to was a completely and totally non-commercial, open source library, that was shut-down by the patent holder (Dolby) who was demanding license fees for every copy of the source downloaded.
as if the presence of cameras somehow stops them from going about their lawful business.
Absolutely right. No law abiding individual has SECRETS... NONE.
Surely law-abiding people don't mind that they're being videotaped by the government as they meet up with their homosexual lover, go get an abortion or visit the child they put up for adoption years ago. etc. After all, it's perfectly legal, why should you care there's videotape of it all?
One section of the video has some excellent pictures of the camera systems in use in Britain. On a more general note about the video, it is an excellent documentary about the rise in state sponsored terrorism.
NOTHING Alex Jones has ever done can possibly be called "excellent".
His format is taking select comments out of context, relying on typos, using unverified statements from completely random/anonymous individuals, etc.
But if you want to hear some baseless bullshit evidence about how HAARP is a weather machine designed to cause hurricanes and lightning... Alex Jones is your man.
That regulation is not even close to the claims being made about it:
The primary purpose of this proposed rule is to prevent passengers that have been identified as high-risk on government watchlists from boarding aircraft bound for or departing from the United States and to prevent passengers and crew so identified from departing on vessels leaving the Unites States.
An unnamed DHS proposal will do this unspeakable thing? Right...
It's sad how many people are just sucking this up as if it's true, despite the source, and despite the utter lack of any evidence, or even references that could be verified.
This article is pure fud. You can tell from the COMPLETE LACK of any SPECIFIC examples. Vague generalizations lacking evidence aren't news...
WHY does the author think HARDWARE EXPERTS are required to install Linux? What makes that necessary? How does he define an "expert"? Are we talking someone who knows that a videocard is responsible for video display, or someone who can build a PC from scratch?
Linux has improved greatly. I'd say the BSDs' autodetection of hardware is still more accurate/reliable, but not by too much anymore. Though the BSDs unfortunately don't include any automatic X11 config tool.
IMHO, Windows is far worse, if you have to download and install drivers yourself...
With Linux/BSD, you only have to know the make or family of the device... All ATI videocards work with one videocard driver... All AC97 cards work with one soundcard driver... etc. And 99% of that info is shown in the normal output during boot-up.
With Windows, you have to know exact model numbers, and you can't determine those without opening things up and looking at the card (unless you just bought it and have the box nearby). And even that can be tricky. I know ATI and Creative are an absolute nightmare, because they use almost identical names between revisions. With Creative, you've got two completely different and incompatible lines of Ensoniq soundcards (Ensoniq branded, and Creative Ensoniq), with extremely similar numbering, and each in vastly different areas, so you won't see the alternative nearby...
I better end it here, before this devolves into a rant on how much I hated my years of managing Windows systems...
Go to Microsoft.com/mac, try to get Windows Media Player for OS X on that Intel based mac,
This is a complete red herring, having NOTHING to do with the subject at hand.
WMV 9 is open because DVD Jon has cracked it big time,
That is ridiculously stupid. Jon wrote a bit of code to make VLC work with the (painfully slow) VC-1 reference decoder Microsoft released for the SMTPE standardization process. Nothing more. Others (Multimedia Mike) have done the same with ffmpeg as well. And, in the past few months, Kostya (http://codecs.multimedia.cx/) wrote a real, workable WMV3/9/VC-1 codec (for libavcodec) from scratch.
Ranting is something like bitching about Xiph.org just because your mail didn't work which you sent from a DYNAMIC IP. (Checked your Journal)
No, what I was "ranting" about was the fact that the contact info for the Xiph.org domain-name is an @XIPH.ORG email address, which is monumentally stupid, no matter how you look at it.
why Macromedia Flash 6+ (VPC 6) became de-facto standard for Web video. Because it works?
Because the use of the Flash plugin was more widespread than the use of any video format (Quicktime, WMP, Real, etc). So many companies are going for the lowest-common-denominator option. Though, I seriously doubt FLV is actually the most common type of video on the web.
Why did AVID Tech. choose Quicktime framework ignoring every kind of offer from MS?
Because the Quicktime container was made specifically for video editing, at the expense of all other uses. Microsoft's ASF has the exact opposite purpose, and isn't suitable for AVID.
Industry has chosen the standards already: H264, VP6 (codec in use via Flash) and MPEG-4 AVC along with Quicktime based container.
H.264 and "MPEG-4 AVC" are different names for exactly the same thing.
The industry has done anything but standardize on those codecs. HD-DVDs and Blu-Ray discs are both comming encoded with Microsoft's VC-1 codec. Internet video is still a hot competition, with WMV9 probably still the most popular codec. SWF/FLV is ONLY for webpages, as they don't even have a basic (RTSP/RTP/etc) streaming solution, unlike WMV, Real, and Quicktime, which dominate that area.
True enough. Microsoft enables encryption with the WMV/WMA encoder by default, to prevent sharing files. It's quite annoying for regular users.
b) a moving target, with new versions every year or so.
No, Microsoft doesn't want to spend all their time writing new, incompatible video codecs...
WMV9 (aka. WMV3) was released Sept 4th, 2002, and to this day, there is still no sign of any possible replacement on the horizon. It's just that nobody was willing to put the effort into reverse-engineering it until just recently.
OSS apps like vlc can and do work with older WMV files, just not the latest
Native WMV7/8 has been available for a long time, that's true, but 4 years+ is plenty of time if anyone really wanted to reverse engineer it.
MS has probably already added two or three new revs that your codec doesn't cover.
Microsoft may do that with other things, but with their codecs, things are pretty stable. I'd say Apple is a bigger offender in that department, with really odd usage of the mov container...
Since 2003, MPlayer has had NATIVE codecs for Quicktime. That's when SVQ3 was added, and ever since, Quicktime has stuck to open codecs (MPEG-4, H.264) that were included in MPlayer before respective Quicktime versions were released.
The latest "windows" WMV3/WMV9/VC-1 video codec was added in just the past few months, so it's native now as well.
The point still stands.
Thankfully, it doesn't.
Plus I don't think I can play every quicktime trailer, though windows no prob.
There's the occasional video/audio/container bug, unknown quicktime ATOM, etc., but the large majority play perfectly, and most of the rest are quickly fixed when reported.
You don't know much about the subject, and you don't seem to care that you don't know much... You just keep spouting off, as if you're some kind of instant expert.
How do they get away with releasing them for free on windows then?
Well, first off, redistributing freely downloadable DLLs is, at worst, legally grey area... They aren't writing their own implimentations of patented codecs, they're just downloading those codecs from Apple, Microsoft, etc., etc., then packing them together and redistributing them.
Second, it's because many countries don't allow patents on software. In the US, though, it would be completely illegal to write and distribute your own codec, without paying patent licenses on the format.
It also validates people's claims that Microsoft does use WMV Technology to drive people to their OS.
Microsoft has made the WMV9 video codec public in the form of the VC-1 standard.
The only thing Quicktime has over WMV is an open audio codec, and time (h.264 has been open much longer)....the rest of your post is rather ranting and incomprehensible, so I'll have to leave it at that.
The Gimp has no problem opening and saving JPEGs but every day I hear another excuse why Totem can't play WMV / Quicktime files. I guess the difference is that someone, who didn't give a shit about patents, actually bothered to make a JPEG library..
This is pure troll. libJPEG was made LONG before anyone claimed to hold any patents on the format (as was Lame, as was libGIF, as were many others).
Video codecs are entirely different. It wasn't an open standard comittee that created WMV, it was Microsoft, and it's known full well they have patents on it, and are licensing them for a fee.
but no-one has sat down and done the same for WMV or Quicktime or the dozen other "proprietary codecs".
This is also completely wrong. The whole purpose of ffmpeg/libavcodec is to reverse-engineer audio and video codecs. It's used by MPlayer, Xine, and many other video programs. The difference is, the programmers in question are outside the US, in countries where software patents don't (yet!) exist.
Wouldn't it be better to take the JPEG/GIF approach: write our own library and just ignore these people who claim we must license their patent?
Be my guest. You can do it yourself, and foot the (multi-million dollar) bill, when Microsoft's lawyers come knocking.
Walmart's service is better than K-mart and others,
I've been through many stores, both in my area, and around the country when I travel. The Walmarts never have better service than ANY of the stores I've mentioned.
With Walmart, you have ridiculously long lines, both for returns, and just for normal checkout. At Walmart, it's not unusual for items to be on the floor, while I've never seen that anywhere else.
If that's not a complete lack of service, I don't know what is.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the same ancient idea, with the same ancient problems...
It allows for extortion and buying of votes (others can verify who you really voted for).
There's no guarantee that the machine verifying your reciept, is acurately reflecting how your vote was really counted, as opposed to counting all votes in reverse.
It does nothing to stop dead (or phantom) people from voting. They aren't going to complain...
Then start up your own project... When they're docking 3/4ths of your pay for the rest of your life, you can tell me how the judge was supposed to throw it out, because it was non-commercial...
Your imaginary world is a strange place.
I have NO idea how you made that up.
And, of course, the case I linked to was a completely and totally non-commercial, open source library, that was shut-down by the patent holder (Dolby) who was demanding license fees for every copy of the source downloaded.
Absolutely right. No law abiding individual has SECRETS... NONE.
Surely law-abiding people don't mind that they're being videotaped by the government as they meet up with their homosexual lover, go get an abortion or visit the child they put up for adoption years ago. etc. After all, it's perfectly legal, why should you care there's videotape of it all?
NOTHING Alex Jones has ever done can possibly be called "excellent".
His format is taking select comments out of context, relying on typos, using unverified statements from completely random/anonymous individuals, etc.
But if you want to hear some baseless bullshit evidence about how HAARP is a weather machine designed to cause hurricanes and lightning... Alex Jones is your man.
That regulation is not even close to the claims being made about it:
The primary purpose of this proposed rule is to prevent passengers that have been identified as high-risk on government watchlists from boarding aircraft bound for or departing from the United States and to prevent passengers and crew so identified from departing on vessels leaving the Unites States.
As a fellow member:
Don't make me laugh, or I'll pass out...
An unnamed DHS proposal will do this unspeakable thing? Right...
It's sad how many people are just sucking this up as if it's true, despite the source, and despite the utter lack of any evidence, or even references that could be verified.
Not at all. Yours contradicts hundreds of years of patent law, claiming that source somehow has an exception.
You could spend 2 minutes searching google...
For example, you'd find:http://swpat.ffii.org/pikta/xrani/dolby/inde
Touché
This article is pure fud. You can tell from the COMPLETE LACK of any SPECIFIC examples. Vague generalizations lacking evidence aren't news...
WHY does the author think HARDWARE EXPERTS are required to install Linux? What makes that necessary? How does he define an "expert"? Are we talking someone who knows that a videocard is responsible for video display, or someone who can build a PC from scratch?
Linux has improved greatly. I'd say the BSDs' autodetection of hardware is still more accurate/reliable, but not by too much anymore. Though the BSDs unfortunately don't include any automatic X11 config tool.
IMHO, Windows is far worse, if you have to download and install drivers yourself...
With Linux/BSD, you only have to know the make or family of the device... All ATI videocards work with one videocard driver... All AC97 cards work with one soundcard driver... etc. And 99% of that info is shown in the normal output during boot-up.
With Windows, you have to know exact model numbers, and you can't determine those without opening things up and looking at the card (unless you just bought it and have the box nearby). And even that can be tricky. I know ATI and Creative are an absolute nightmare, because they use almost identical names between revisions. With Creative, you've got two completely different and incompatible lines of Ensoniq soundcards (Ensoniq branded, and Creative Ensoniq), with extremely similar numbering, and each in vastly different areas, so you won't see the alternative nearby...
I better end it here, before this devolves into a rant on how much I hated my years of managing Windows systems...
This is a complete red herring, having NOTHING to do with the subject at hand.
That is ridiculously stupid. Jon wrote a bit of code to make VLC work with the (painfully slow) VC-1 reference decoder Microsoft released for the SMTPE standardization process. Nothing more. Others (Multimedia Mike) have done the same with ffmpeg as well. And, in the past few months, Kostya (http://codecs.multimedia.cx/) wrote a real, workable WMV3/9/VC-1 codec (for libavcodec) from scratch.
No, what I was "ranting" about was the fact that the contact info for the Xiph.org domain-name is an @XIPH.ORG email address, which is monumentally stupid, no matter how you look at it.
Because the use of the Flash plugin was more widespread than the use of any video format (Quicktime, WMP, Real, etc). So many companies are going for the lowest-common-denominator option. Though, I seriously doubt FLV is actually the most common type of video on the web.
Because the Quicktime container was made specifically for video editing, at the expense of all other uses. Microsoft's ASF has the exact opposite purpose, and isn't suitable for AVID.
H.264 and "MPEG-4 AVC" are different names for exactly the same thing.
The industry has done anything but standardize on those codecs. HD-DVDs and Blu-Ray discs are both comming encoded with Microsoft's VC-1 codec. Internet video is still a hot competition, with WMV9 probably still the most popular codec. SWF/FLV is ONLY for webpages, as they don't even have a basic (RTSP/RTP/etc) streaming solution, unlike WMV, Real, and Quicktime, which dominate that area.
What you like, does not dictate reality.
True enough. Microsoft enables encryption with the WMV/WMA encoder by default, to prevent sharing files. It's quite annoying for regular users.
No, Microsoft doesn't want to spend all their time writing new, incompatible video codecs...
WMV9 (aka. WMV3) was released Sept 4th, 2002, and to this day, there is still no sign of any possible replacement on the horizon. It's just that nobody was willing to put the effort into reverse-engineering it until just recently.
Native WMV7/8 has been available for a long time, that's true, but 4 years+ is plenty of time if anyone really wanted to reverse engineer it.
Microsoft may do that with other things, but with their codecs, things are pretty stable. I'd say Apple is a bigger offender in that department, with really odd usage of the mov container...
The VC-1 (almost identical to WMV3, aka.WMV9) reference implimentation has been available for over a year now, IIRC.
It's been done since a few months ago.
Since 2003, MPlayer has had NATIVE codecs for Quicktime. That's when SVQ3 was added, and ever since, Quicktime has stuck to open codecs (MPEG-4, H.264) that were included in MPlayer before respective Quicktime versions were released.
The latest "windows" WMV3/WMV9/VC-1 video codec was added in just the past few months, so it's native now as well.
Thankfully, it doesn't.
There's the occasional video/audio/container bug, unknown quicktime ATOM, etc., but the large majority play perfectly, and most of the rest are quickly fixed when reported.
No, you're certainly NOT free to distribute patented technology, without securing the appropriate licenses. It makes no difference who wrote it.
You don't know much about the subject, and you don't seem to care that you don't know much... You just keep spouting off, as if you're some kind of instant expert.
In other words: You're wrong an awful lot.
Well, first off, redistributing freely downloadable DLLs is, at worst, legally grey area... They aren't writing their own implimentations of patented codecs, they're just downloading those codecs from Apple, Microsoft, etc., etc., then packing them together and redistributing them.
Second, it's because many countries don't allow patents on software. In the US, though, it would be completely illegal to write and distribute your own codec, without paying patent licenses on the format.
Microsoft has made the WMV9 video codec public in the form of the VC-1 standard.
The only thing Quicktime has over WMV is an open audio codec, and time (h.264 has been open much longer).
This is pure troll. libJPEG was made LONG before anyone claimed to hold any patents on the format (as was Lame, as was libGIF, as were many others).
Video codecs are entirely different. It wasn't an open standard comittee that created WMV, it was Microsoft, and it's known full well they have patents on it, and are licensing them for a fee.
This is also completely wrong. The whole purpose of ffmpeg/libavcodec is to reverse-engineer audio and video codecs. It's used by MPlayer, Xine, and many other video programs. The difference is, the programmers in question are outside the US, in countries where software patents don't (yet!) exist.
Be my guest. You can do it yourself, and foot the (multi-million dollar) bill, when Microsoft's lawyers come knocking.
I've been through many stores, both in my area, and around the country when I travel. The Walmarts never have better service than ANY of the stores I've mentioned.
With Walmart, you have ridiculously long lines, both for returns, and just for normal checkout. At Walmart, it's not unusual for items to be on the floor, while I've never seen that anywhere else.
If that's not a complete lack of service, I don't know what is.
Well, there's certainly no better router/firewall software. Great failover software...
And really, any server you need highly secured (ProPolice, W^X, Systrace, etc.).
Good tip!
Guys, next time wait until late morning, when the management will all be there...