Most major codecs charge you by the ammount of content you distribute, encoded in their format. Non-profit, private home files are usually explicitly allowed without fee by the patent-holders, but not commercial content... It's pretty much standard.
Why can't they also make it work with something like Helix player?
The Helix player is an empty framework. To make it do much of anything useful, you have to add propritary audio/video codecs.
Audio is a straight forward, as Vorbis isn't bad, but Video is tough.
Theora is perpetually unfinished, and it's no better than the decade-old VP3 codec. VP3 is extremely CPU-intensive (think: H.264) if you use resolutions that (uncompressed) are larger than your CPU cache... That means VCD resolution MAX for any decent performance. VP3 is also not great quality. It's sub-par at low (500-1000K) bitrates compared with MPEG-4, at higher bitrates needs perhaps double the bitrate of MPEG-4 to be artifact-free. And, again, MPEG-4 has FAR lower CPU requirements. MPEG-1 is free, but it's limitations are known well. It doesn't do well at high bitrates/high quality, and is much more artifact-ridden than MPEG-4 at low bitrates.
So which patent-free codec are you going to try?
If you want to try patented codecs: MPEG-4 is much more expensive to license than Microsoft's VC-1, and VC-1 is also somewhat better quality. MPEG-4 is a bit better for end-users on non-Windows systems, as licensed codecs (Divx) are available ($0, free) for Mac and Linux-compatible systems as well.
So, knowing those options... Which video codec would you select for BBC's videos?
For me to upgrade to the next level, it's not only a new CPU but new motherboard and new RAM too
The transition from DDR to DDR2 had to happen sometime, and when it does, there's nothing AMD (or Intel, or VIA) can do to spare you the realities of the situation.
the chipsets are more than up to running new sockets
Well good, then it should be fairly cheap for companies to produce new motherboards.
Slot A, Socket A, Socket 754, Socket 939, AM2 in less than 6 years with the last three having no real benefit over each other..WE'VE HAD ENOUGH.
You should look at Intel's history before criticizing AMD. AMD, at least, stuck with Socket A for YEARS and YEARS before switching. Intel had no such stable standard, and just kept changing everything.
The only one I agree with you on is Socket 754, but it wasn't really ever popular with the public for normal Desktops, and it'll probably live on for a LONG time in notebooks.
The performance bottleneck is the disk and it has been forever.
No, it's the network... No, it's the ammount of RAM... No, it's the CPU cache... No, it's the bus speed... No, it's the CPU speed... No, it's the...
You can't make any stupid-simple assertions about performance. With something like crypto, video encoding (or decoding), compression, etc., the bottleneck *is* the CPU, and it's a HUGE one.
With other tasks, there are different bottlenecks...
The Pentium Pro was the last good processor they made.
Umm, what?
Are you restricting this to consumer-level CPUs? I ask because the PPro basically turned into the Xeon, and continued to be a very good processor, until just recently, when they added P4 Netburst crap features, and make it a ridiculously hot piece of junk. Of course that doesn't add-up either, because PPro wasn't exactly a consumer-level CPU either..
Maybe if they can kill off the old sockets so that they're not for sale anymore (so that Socket AM2 becomes the new low-end) then Socket AM2 will have its day.
They can't kill off the low-end, as that is socket 754, which is the ONLY socket in-use for notebooks, and will likely live a long life.
Maybe if they can kill off the old sockets so that they're not for sale anymore (so that Socket AM2 becomes the new low-end) then Socket AM2 will have its day.
If socket 939 is the one you mean: It will die off soon enough. It's getting an artifical EOL boost, because everyone drops prices to clear out their inventory.
If anything, people with less to spend should WANT AM2, because they'll save on the price of (DDR2) RAM. RAM is often more significant of an expense than the motherboard and CPU. I'm using a couple years-old system with a 1.2GHz CPU and 1GB of PC-133 RAM to prove it.
True, do that, but this time maybe people will think of Intel with a little more credibility? But then again, this is slashdot!
Oh yeah, a real hotbed of hate for Intel, this is...
Give me a break. AMD, to this day, gets unfairly poor treatment on/. with myths of chip shortages, poor performance, heat problems, crappy motherboards, etc. These myths have been in decline in recent years, but they still persist, even though AMD has been slaughtering Intel until VERY recently.
And your post is even a good example of the anti-AMD sentiment still prevalent. As if the instant Intel FINALLY comes out with something competitive, their reputation should be wiped clean, even though it took AMD years of utterly beating Intel to establish such a position.
I'm not clear as to whether anyone is actually being sued over this, but apparently it's the reason why a lot of Linux distros don't ship with MP3 support included (e.g. Fedora).
I don't know if any cases have gone to court, but MANY free (both freeware and open source) MP3 players and encoders have been threatened, and consquently opted to shut-down immediately.
I know that nobody is going to sue me for using an MP3 encoder I didn't pay for, but is there some way in which it's technically illegal?
Yes. And if you start distributing MP3s without paying licensing, you're sure to be sued for that.
Do these distros really need to pay a license or not?
Yes.
And even if you pay the one company who is trying to enforce their patent, what about all the other companies?
No guarantees they won't decide to sue later. However, some may be too afraid of their patents being overturned, or may be nonesential to MP3 encoding, and can be left out of an MP3 encoder/decoder without significant harm.
If someone can't come out and say very clearly what's legal and fine, and what isn't, then it seems to me that there's something wrong with the law.
It's clear what is legal. It's just that you won't like it... And free software has real difficulty paying license fees.
Is your concern or concerns the definition of fossil fuel, the definition of carbon content (seems pretty easy science to me), or at what stage the tax is charged?
Both the definition, and the stage.
Why do hybrids get a tax break at all, when a Volkswagen TDI diesel gets basically the same mileage?
I'm tired of hearing this one. Gasoline and diesel are significantly different fuels. Comparing the two based on gallons is patently ridiculous. You might as well compare how far you can go on a gallon of hydrogen, to a gallon of diesel.
If you're going to make a comparison, stuck to gasoline cars. There are some, like the Geo Metro, which get very close to hybrid EPA fuel effeciency ratings.
Out in my area there is NO xDSL, NO Cable Internet, NO Clearwire only dial up and over priced satellite Internet service.
Start up your own wireless broadband service. Maybe $1000 in equipment, and a plot of land on top of the nearest mountain, and start signing-up your neighbors.
My original posting could be interpreted otherwise, but given my clarification, why are you going on about it?
*sigh*
You've said who you want to tax, and who you don't want to, but you've utterly failed to make up ANY metric for how this is going to be accomplished. You can't base it on the carbon content of the fuels, and you certainly can't have one guy going around saying "tax this company 5%, and this company 1%, and this company 25%". You have to make a rule as to how this is going to work. "I know it when I see it" doesn't make for sane tax laws.
You've also completely failed to explain how this ANY DIFFERENT than every other fuel tax ever enacted. How yours is somehow different, and possibly better.
Argue against *that* plan, not some incorrect inferrence of what I meant.
Mac Mini is a great design for 80% of computer users.
80% of computer users want 3.5" hard drives, that can store FAR more, transfer much faster, and aren't ridiculously expensive.
A good number of computer users will eventually use their expansion slots. TV-tuner cards are popular. Upgrading videocards isn't uncommon. USB2.0 PCI cards were common because people didn't want to buy a new computer for that improvement.
Mac Mini is fine for a good percentage of computer users UNTIL something significant comes around that the Mac Mini doesn't have. And it *will* happen in the near future.
Cables snaking and twisting everywhere, sharp metal edges and plastic tabs, screws...
If so, it's just because the assembler didn't know what he was doing... Tucking IDE cables out of the way is pretty easy, and with SATA, it's now trivial.
Just route the cables in sane ways. If they're too long to fit neatly, loosly knot them, or tuck the excess in spare bays, around bars, or any other cavities.
but if you open it, you will immediately notice that they REALLY spent some time designing the layout of the interior parts.
You think that having metal pieces blocking everything you'd want to get to, is a good design?
There are many problems, and many good things they could do, but you haven't listed either.
How about being able to remove the motherboard without pulling out every individual (PCI/AGP/PCIe) card? How about standard CPU locations on motherboards, to make fan-ducting practical? etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Most major codecs charge you by the ammount of content you distribute, encoded in their format. Non-profit, private home files are usually explicitly allowed without fee by the patent-holders, but not commercial content... It's pretty much standard.
http://slashdot.org/yro/01/06/09/1728234.shtml
There's nothing illegal about it. The BBC just has to pay applicable fees.
Bandwidth and CPU-time isn't free, either.
The Helix player is an empty framework. To make it do much of anything useful, you have to add propritary audio/video codecs.
Audio is a straight forward, as Vorbis isn't bad, but Video is tough.
Theora is perpetually unfinished, and it's no better than the decade-old VP3 codec.
VP3 is extremely CPU-intensive (think: H.264) if you use resolutions that (uncompressed) are larger than your CPU cache... That means VCD resolution MAX for any decent performance.
VP3 is also not great quality. It's sub-par at low (500-1000K) bitrates compared with MPEG-4, at higher bitrates needs perhaps double the bitrate of MPEG-4 to be artifact-free. And, again, MPEG-4 has FAR lower CPU requirements.
MPEG-1 is free, but it's limitations are known well. It doesn't do well at high bitrates/high quality, and is much more artifact-ridden than MPEG-4 at low bitrates.
So which patent-free codec are you going to try?
If you want to try patented codecs: MPEG-4 is much more expensive to license than Microsoft's VC-1, and VC-1 is also somewhat better quality. MPEG-4 is a bit better for end-users on non-Windows systems, as licensed codecs (Divx) are available ($0, free) for Mac and Linux-compatible systems as well.
So, knowing those options... Which video codec would you select for BBC's videos?
The transition from DDR to DDR2 had to happen sometime, and when it does, there's nothing AMD (or Intel, or VIA) can do to spare you the realities of the situation.
Well good, then it should be fairly cheap for companies to produce new motherboards.
You should look at Intel's history before criticizing AMD. AMD, at least, stuck with Socket A for YEARS and YEARS before switching. Intel had no such stable standard, and just kept changing everything.
The only one I agree with you on is Socket 754, but it wasn't really ever popular with the public for normal Desktops, and it'll probably live on for a LONG time in notebooks.
No, it's the network...
No, it's the ammount of RAM...
No, it's the CPU cache...
No, it's the bus speed...
No, it's the CPU speed...
No, it's the...
You can't make any stupid-simple assertions about performance. With something like crypto, video encoding (or decoding), compression, etc., the bottleneck *is* the CPU, and it's a HUGE one.
With other tasks, there are different bottlenecks...
What gives? Socket 754 CPUs are just as "64-bit" as their big brothers.
Umm, what?
Are you restricting this to consumer-level CPUs? I ask because the PPro basically turned into the Xeon, and continued to be a very good processor, until just recently, when they added P4 Netburst crap features, and make it a ridiculously hot piece of junk. Of course that doesn't add-up either, because PPro wasn't exactly a consumer-level CPU either..
They can't kill off the low-end, as that is socket 754, which is the ONLY socket in-use for notebooks, and will likely live a long life.
If socket 939 is the one you mean: It will die off soon enough. It's getting an artifical EOL boost, because everyone drops prices to clear out their inventory.
If anything, people with less to spend should WANT AM2, because they'll save on the price of (DDR2) RAM. RAM is often more significant of an expense than the motherboard and CPU. I'm using a couple years-old system with a 1.2GHz CPU and 1GB of PC-133 RAM to prove it.
Oh yeah, a real hotbed of hate for Intel, this is...
Give me a break. AMD, to this day, gets unfairly poor treatment on
And your post is even a good example of the anti-AMD sentiment still prevalent. As if the instant Intel FINALLY comes out with something competitive, their reputation should be wiped clean, even though it took AMD years of utterly beating Intel to establish such a position.
YES Dammit!
I don't know if any cases have gone to court, but MANY free (both freeware and open source) MP3 players and encoders have been threatened, and consquently opted to shut-down immediately.
Yes. And if you start distributing MP3s without paying licensing, you're sure to be sued for that.
Yes.
No guarantees they won't decide to sue later. However, some may be too afraid of their patents being overturned, or may be nonesential to MP3 encoding, and can be left out of an MP3 encoder/decoder without significant harm.
It's clear what is legal. It's just that you won't like it... And free software has real difficulty paying license fees.
The point remains. It's not a trivial issue, as you make it out to be.
You could argue that... You'd be so wrong it's not funny and showing your complete ignorance of 20th century history... but you could argue that.
Both the definition, and the stage.
I'm tired of hearing this one. Gasoline and diesel are significantly different fuels. Comparing the two based on gallons is patently ridiculous. You might as well compare how far you can go on a gallon of hydrogen, to a gallon of diesel.
If you're going to make a comparison, stuck to gasoline cars. There are some, like the Geo Metro, which get very close to hybrid EPA fuel effeciency ratings.
Let me know when the they've mastered invisibility.
What? There's no "shutdown" involved. It's just a case of blinding them, by shining a bright light at them.
More likely they'd have burned the scientist at the state for heresy.
It's not some trivial "bragging rights" move. Brain drain is REAL, and very important for the economies of nations.
WWII pushing so many scientists to move out of Europe, is one of the main reasons the US became the top superpower in the world.
And I don't consider 256k "purple", or "sharp", or "elastic"...
broadband/brdbænd/
-adjective Telecommunications.
of, pertaining to, or responsive to a continuous, wide range of frequencies.
Start up your own wireless broadband service. Maybe $1000 in equipment, and a plot of land on top of the nearest mountain, and start signing-up your neighbors.
I'd prefer:
"I just got Played... For Sure."
*sigh*
You've said who you want to tax, and who you don't want to, but you've utterly failed to make up ANY metric for how this is going to be accomplished. You can't base it on the carbon content of the fuels, and you certainly can't have one guy going around saying "tax this company 5%, and this company 1%, and this company 25%". You have to make a rule as to how this is going to work. "I know it when I see it" doesn't make for sane tax laws.
You've also completely failed to explain how this ANY DIFFERENT than every other fuel tax ever enacted. How yours is somehow different, and possibly better.
You have no plan.
No, but they quickly find-out, after purchase, that normal drives are cheaper, faster, and store more.
You need to get out and meet people.
I hate to tell you, but the tower didn't have anything to do with it. It was all the large CRT wasting space.
Put the tower it on the floor, under or beside the desk, and nobody will ever notice it (unless we're talking ultra-cramped New York apartments).
80% of computer users want 3.5" hard drives, that can store FAR more, transfer much faster, and aren't ridiculously expensive.
A good number of computer users will eventually use their expansion slots. TV-tuner cards are popular. Upgrading videocards isn't uncommon. USB2.0 PCI cards were common because people didn't want to buy a new computer for that improvement.
Mac Mini is fine for a good percentage of computer users UNTIL something significant comes around that the Mac Mini doesn't have. And it *will* happen in the near future.
If so, it's just because the assembler didn't know what he was doing... Tucking IDE cables out of the way is pretty easy, and with SATA, it's now trivial.
Just route the cables in sane ways. If they're too long to fit neatly, loosly knot them, or tuck the excess in spare bays, around bars, or any other cavities.
You think that having metal pieces blocking everything you'd want to get to, is a good design?
There are many problems, and many good things they could do, but you haven't listed either.
How about being able to remove the motherboard without pulling out every individual (PCI/AGP/PCIe) card? How about standard CPU locations on motherboards, to make fan-ducting practical? etc.