"If you don't give in to our demands...we'll give up & stop existing?"
It's not like they can really threaten Oracle into submission. Sometimes, you just have to roll over and ask, "Honey, are you really in this for the long run, or are you just screwing me?" If you don't like the answer, you just pack up and leave. No need to go all psycho.
What were we talking about again? Oh yeah. If the organization disbands, Solaris loses some of its credibility as an open platform with a healthy, involved community. Not a death blow, but better than prolonging a charade.
Perhaps a better question is why does almost every other first world country have a longer life expectancy than the US? (not a huge margin, but there is some). How does Cuba have a longer life expectancy? Why do the majority of first world nations, and again, Cuba, have lower infant mortality than the US?
What is something most all of those countries have, and yet spend less (per capita) on than the US. hrm...
A lack of subsidized corn.
Subsidized corn means the USA has lots of cheap, shitty food sweetened with high fructose corn syrup and fried in corn oil. In other words, lots of Calories. Lots of Calories means lots of obesity (borne out by statistics.) Lots of obesity means earlier death and higher infant mortality.
In fact, it's a wonder we live as long as we do. Americans are the most overweight people on the planet. Keeping lardasses like us alive so long demonstrates that we have a fantastic health care system...and really fucked up national priorities.
If someone says something, and you remove it, that's censorship.
No, it's not.
Censorship is:
: to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable ; also : to suppress or delete as objectionable
There are plenty of discussions about this issue on the Apple support boards which are not being removed.
The multiple posts about an external magazine review have been removed because discussing magazine articles is offtopic for a tech support board, just as discussing the latest Huffington Post article on Angelina Jolie is offtopic.
Remember back when you had to physically visit a police station to get help?
Now we're up in arms because an electro-magnetic device device is not 100% reliable and it became very clear in an emergency situation.
Does the public really expect their telephones to flawlessly[sic] or have I been using landlines so long that I just accept electrical devices suck still?
Cell phones are mature technology. They're no longer rocket surgery. We expect consumer wireless phones to offer basic connectivity 99+% of the time, because this is well within the realm of feasibility.
The GGP clearly stated that the graphic artist zoomed into the pixel level. That won't be helped by increased resolution.
This was Photoshop, not MS Paint. Photoshop can resample images to just about any resolution.
In terms you might understand, it breaks the big blocky pixels into smaller pixels.
Up to a point (around 2x) a serious graphics program like Photoshop will do a decent job of interpolating smaller pixels out of bigger ones. Even above that point, it may be useful, depending on what the artist has in mind.
Okay. Minus five points from the "graphic artist" for not knowing how to resample the image. Plus one point for trying to improve her knowledge instead of suffering in silence.
Minus one point from you for not knowing something that's not directly in your field. Minus ten points from you for not even trying to help. Minus fifteen more points from you for being a jerkass about it on Slashdot.
But, if the original poster's speculation were true, it would put Google in the traditional role of a technology patent holder who holds a defensive arsenal of patents: if MPEG-LA makes a fuss about aspects of VP8 which they claim infringe MPEG-LA patents, then Google can threaten to retaliate by suing everyone in the world who is currently shipping an implementation of H.264 for infringement of the On2/VP8 patents (and so publicly demonstrate the fact that being an licensee of the MPEG-LA H.264 pool doesn't protect one from all patent claims, and provides no insurance or indemnity).
MPEG-LA itself admits this. The licensors' lawyers know that paying protection to MPEG-LA doesn't indemnify them.
The licensees have no choice. They're like a shopkeeper in a town full of corrupt cops. Paying bribes to one cop doesn't mean they don't have to pay another bribe to a different cop next week, but you'd better believe they're going to pay the bribe each time anyway.
Stalemate. Mutually-assured-destruction stand-off. Result: VP8 available for royalty-free for use, without MPEG-LA interference.
That's absurd. Mutually assured destruction? It's more like Russia saying to the USA, "Disarm all of your ICBMs, or we'll nuke...Nigeria!"
The MPEG-LA doesn't care what happens to its licensees
So... IE9 will support WebM if it's installed, but not Theora.
While this is not supported out of the box, this could actually be a tipping point for WebM.
Without IE9's WebM support, things looked like this:
H.264 support: IE, Safari, Chrome WebM support: FireFox, Chrome, Opera
In that case, H.264 looked like the winner. But if you add IE9 to the WebM column, you suddenly have support for WebM from everyone but Apple.
Apple/Safari will support Theora if the Xiph quicktime component is installed, too. So Apple already offers the same level of "support" for Theora that Microsoft is promising.
Requiring users to download and install some codec is probably a non-starter in both cases, though.
The Valdez incident was in a fairly unpopulated part of a state with a very small population. Union Carbide was in India, and thus not only a long way off, but impacting foreigners.
This is literally happening in a very populated, economically important region of the Continental United States. I mean, these people still talk about Hurricane Andrew, so no, I don't think they'll be forgetting how BP poisoned the Gulf Coast.
This. Also, the fact that Bhopal and Exxon Valdez were one-shot accidents that were over by the time the camera crews got there (or didn't, in Bhopal's case.) The BP spew has live streaming video of the situation getting worse by the minute.
Re:Apparently it's even faster than Chrome 5
on
Safari 5 Released
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Don't be crazy, man cannot live at that speed!
Actually, that's not a problem. You just need a Guild Navigator to navigate your heighliner safely.
On this page, there are duplicates that are not UA restricted, which you can test with whatever browser you like, and download the implementation code.
User agent detection is appropriate on the consumer (www.apple) page, since that's an executive summary. Most people on that page are not going to understand why it isn't working, since they don't even know what browser they're using, unless Apple actually bars the door.
The demos themselves are restricted, but the sample code is not.
On this page, there are duplicates that are not UA restricted, which you can test with whatever browser you like, and download the implementation code.
User agent detection is appropriate on the consumer (www.apple) page, since that's an executive summary. Most people on that page are not going to understand why it isn't working, since they don't even know what browser they're using, unless Apple actually bars the door.
Being an empathetic emo doesn't do that, and never did. Some of us are ancient enough to remember times before universal emophilia (hey, I coined a word!) and aren't nostalgic FOR emophilia. In tough times, get tough.
Umm...the point of the survey was empathy vs narcissism. You don't get much more narcissistic than emos.
Of the UK entries in this list, the first few are Hector (the national supercomputing facility), ECMWF, Universities, financial institutions etc. But there are also some labelled "Food industry". I wonder what I am eating that requires a supercomputer?
Weather simulation, perhaps? Weather has a huge impact on crop yields.
. Look at dietary and nutritional science. If you're a baby boomer, you've heard scientists say umpteen different things over the last 40 years.
Not really. You've heard the popular media, and to a lesser degree, government policies, say umpteen different things. Scientists have been fairly consistent in what they said, with a few refinements and tweaks over the years.
That's one of the biggest issues holding back the public acceptance of science. Most people only get the Cliff's Notes version. It's hard to challenge your belief systems when you never get the full story.
If they really want IE6 usage to reach zero, the people at MS will have to swallow some pride and realize that there are some of us who refuse to 'upgrade" like little sheep.
Refuse is absolutely the right word. Win 2K? Seriously? An eleven-year-old OS? You're not being sensible, you're being ornery.
But hey, if that's what floats your boat, go ahead. I mean, there are still people running vintage Amigas and crap ("Way ahead of its time!", yeah, we can hear you.) But realize that you are a dwindling minority. You guys are outnumbered by Android and iPhone users these days. It's time to embrace your minority status.
It would be nice if we could run javascript/html5/css3 code on Apple products (plus minor extensions for accessing local stuff etc), via Mozilla. Then we could finally write useful platform-independent apps that also run on Apple products.
Why not just build javascript + html5 + css3 web apps? You get full platform independence and no app store hassles.
The iPhone supports HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. As for "local stuff," HTML 5 already has features that allows persistent local database storage. If your app need location awareness, the iPhone supports the W3C Geolocation API.
You may not remember, but originally, Apple's official stance was that the only third-party iPhone apps would be web apps. Lots of people bitched and moaned about how Apple was not allowing developers onto its device, so Apple eventually caved and released its SDK. But there's no reason you can't still build web apps for the iPhone.
The real question is, will they Kill Switch the app for those who have already downloaded it?
That'd be a woefully ironic way of responding to the FSF's concerns about user's rights. "Oh, sorry, FSF. Just to show you how sorry we are, we'll remotely disable all copies of that app. That way, nobody will be left with a copy of the app that doesn't fully comply with the GPL terms. All better?"
In any event, the iPad proves there's a market for
I guess I'm still surprised that here on Slashdot that there are people who form their preferences for technologies based on how well "they're doing in the market". Maybe it would be different if I ran an electronics store or an advertising agency. The fact that a lot of people are buying iPads might persuade me to buy Apple stock, but it's not going to persuade me to buy an iPad.
Honestly, the fact that people are lining up to buy something has never been a strong recommendation for me, any more than having a lot of advertisements for a particular technology indicates superiority. If it was, I'd be getting my technology news from Wired Magazine.
OP didn't say that the iPad was the greatest thing ever, or that you, as Joe Average Slashdotter, should immediately buy one. OP just said that it was successful and that there were lessons to be learned from its success.
Slashdotters focus on the iPad's limitations and the restrictions Apple places on it. Fair enough. But when a limited, restricted devices like the iPad succeed, you have to wonder, what does it have that makes people buy it anyway? The popular response from Slashdot is: well, the people who buy it are either brainwashed fanboys, fashion-conscious posers, or idiots with more money than brains.
The really smart people are taking notes on how marketing, product positioning, user experience, and industrial design wins out over limitations and restrictions in the mind of the body public. You can bet that Steve Ballmer and Microsoft are watching and learning from the iPad's success very carefully, even if they don't plan to buy iPads for their children this Christmas.
Come on. H264 fan boys use such a low bitrate for shootouts that you are often comparing crap with shit. I don't care how good that shit looks compared to crap. Its still crap and shit.
The whole point of a codec is to reproduce video at maximal resolution with minimal bitrate. Thus minimizing bitrate is a valid test; it exaggerates quality differences. Minimizing resolution tells us nothing; it obscures quality differences.
All it takes is for h.264 to infringe one patent that Goggle holds and they are stuffed. Google could then simply require for licensing their patent that any patents held by MPEG-LA against VP8 to not be enforced against any implementation of VP8.
If they don't agree then Google can file for an injunction to stop any infringing product from shipping, and collect large damages in the meantime.
MPEG-LA is not a company or a patent holder. MPEG-LA is just a clearinghouse for the companies that do own the patents, including Fraunhofer, Microsoft, Panasonic, and Sony . (Full list here WARNING: PDF)
The various companies that MPEG-LA represents don't necessarily implement h.264 or sell any products based around it. MPEG-LA itself does not own anything or sell anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhhh.. that will show them?
"If you don't give in to our demands...we'll give up & stop existing?"
It's not like they can really threaten Oracle into submission. Sometimes, you just have to roll over and ask, "Honey, are you really in this for the long run, or are you just screwing me?" If you don't like the answer, you just pack up and leave. No need to go all psycho.
What were we talking about again? Oh yeah. If the organization disbands, Solaris loses some of its credibility as an open platform with a healthy, involved community. Not a death blow, but better than prolonging a charade.
Perhaps a better question is why does almost every other first world country have a longer life expectancy than the US? (not a huge margin, but there is some).
How does Cuba have a longer life expectancy? Why do the majority of first world nations, and again, Cuba, have lower infant mortality than the US?
What is something most all of those countries have, and yet spend less (per capita) on than the US. hrm...
A lack of subsidized corn.
Subsidized corn means the USA has lots of cheap, shitty food sweetened with high fructose corn syrup and fried in corn oil. In other words, lots of Calories. Lots of Calories means lots of obesity (borne out by statistics.) Lots of obesity means earlier death and higher infant mortality.
In fact, it's a wonder we live as long as we do. Americans are the most overweight people on the planet. Keeping lardasses like us alive so long demonstrates that we have a fantastic health care system...and really fucked up national priorities.
If someone says something, and you remove it, that's censorship.
No, it's not.
Censorship is:
: to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable ; also : to suppress or delete as objectionable
There are plenty of discussions about this issue on the Apple support boards which are not being removed.
The multiple posts about an external magazine review have been removed because discussing magazine articles is offtopic for a tech support board, just as discussing the latest Huffington Post article on Angelina Jolie is offtopic.
Remember back when you had to physically visit a police station to get help?
Now we're up in arms because an electro-magnetic device device is not 100% reliable and it became very clear in an emergency situation.
Does the public really expect their telephones to flawlessly[sic] or have I been using landlines so long that I just accept electrical devices suck still?
Cell phones are mature technology. They're no longer rocket surgery. We expect consumer wireless phones to offer basic connectivity 99+% of the time, because this is well within the realm of feasibility.
The GGP clearly stated that the graphic artist zoomed into the pixel level. That won't be helped by increased resolution.
This was Photoshop, not MS Paint. Photoshop can resample images to just about any resolution.
In terms you might understand, it breaks the big blocky pixels into smaller pixels.
Up to a point (around 2x) a serious graphics program like Photoshop will do a decent job of interpolating smaller pixels out of bigger ones. Even above that point, it may be useful, depending on what the artist has in mind.
Okay. Minus five points from the "graphic artist" for not knowing how to resample the image. Plus one point for trying to improve her knowledge instead of suffering in silence.
Minus one point from you for not knowing something that's not directly in your field.
Minus ten points from you for not even trying to help.
Minus fifteen more points from you for being a jerkass about it on Slashdot.
So she's down four, and you're down twenty-six.
But, if the original poster's speculation were true, it would put Google in the traditional role of a technology patent holder who holds a defensive arsenal of patents: if MPEG-LA makes a fuss about aspects of VP8 which they claim infringe MPEG-LA patents, then Google can threaten to retaliate by suing everyone in the world who is currently shipping an implementation of H.264 for infringement of the On2/VP8 patents (and so publicly demonstrate the fact that being an licensee of the MPEG-LA H.264 pool doesn't protect one from all patent claims, and provides no insurance or indemnity).
MPEG-LA itself admits this. The licensors' lawyers know that paying protection to MPEG-LA doesn't indemnify them.
The licensees have no choice. They're like a shopkeeper in a town full of corrupt cops. Paying bribes to one cop doesn't mean they don't have to pay another bribe to a different cop next week, but you'd better believe they're going to pay the bribe each time anyway.
Stalemate. Mutually-assured-destruction stand-off. Result: VP8 available for royalty-free for use, without MPEG-LA interference.
That's absurd. Mutually assured destruction? It's more like Russia saying to the USA, "Disarm all of your ICBMs, or we'll nuke...Nigeria!"
The MPEG-LA doesn't care what happens to its licensees
So... IE9 will support WebM if it's installed, but not Theora.
While this is not supported out of the box, this could actually be a tipping point for WebM.
Without IE9's WebM support, things looked like this:
H.264 support: IE, Safari, Chrome
WebM support: FireFox, Chrome, Opera
In that case, H.264 looked like the winner. But if you add IE9 to the WebM column, you suddenly have support for WebM from everyone but Apple.
Apple/Safari will support Theora if the Xiph quicktime component is installed, too. So Apple already offers the same level of "support" for Theora that Microsoft is promising.
Requiring users to download and install some codec is probably a non-starter in both cases, though.
The Valdez incident was in a fairly unpopulated part of a state with a very small population. Union Carbide was in India, and thus not only a long way off, but impacting foreigners.
This is literally happening in a very populated, economically important region of the Continental United States. I mean, these people still talk about Hurricane Andrew, so no, I don't think they'll be forgetting how BP poisoned the Gulf Coast.
This. Also, the fact that Bhopal and Exxon Valdez were one-shot accidents that were over by the time the camera crews got there (or didn't, in Bhopal's case.) The BP spew has live streaming video of the situation getting worse by the minute.
Don't be crazy, man cannot live at that speed!
Actually, that's not a problem. You just need a Guild Navigator to navigate your heighliner safely.
At the bottom of every page, there is a link to
http://developer.apple.com/safaridemos/
On this page, there are duplicates that are not UA restricted, which you can test with whatever browser you like, and download the implementation code.
User agent detection is appropriate on the consumer (www.apple) page, since that's an executive summary. Most people on that page are not going to understand why it isn't working, since they don't even know what browser they're using, unless Apple actually bars the door.
The demos themselves are restricted, but the sample code is not.
At the bottom of every page, there is a link to
http://developer.apple.com/safaridemos/
On this page, there are duplicates that are not UA restricted, which you can test with whatever browser you like, and download the implementation code.
User agent detection is appropriate on the consumer (www.apple) page, since that's an executive summary. Most people on that page are not going to understand why it isn't working, since they don't even know what browser they're using, unless Apple actually bars the door.
So, you're saying we're going to brick the planet?
Being an empathetic emo doesn't do that, and never did. Some of us are ancient enough to remember times before universal emophilia (hey, I coined a word!) and aren't nostalgic FOR emophilia. In tough times, get tough.
Umm...the point of the survey was empathy vs narcissism. You don't get much more narcissistic than emos.
Of the UK entries in this list, the first few are Hector (the national supercomputing facility), ECMWF, Universities, financial institutions etc. But there are also some labelled "Food industry". I wonder what I am eating that requires a supercomputer?
Weather simulation, perhaps? Weather has a huge impact on crop yields.
Or perhaps bioinformatics for genetic tinkering.
"HP *WILL NOT* come out of this unscathed,"
Exxon did. Their fine was a drop in the bucket.
Exxon's fuckup was in a remote area (Alaska) and Exxon's fuckup only lasted a few days (no live video.)
The boy is 14. Let him goof off for a summer; it may well be the last summer he has to do nothing at all until he retires fifty years from now.
. Look at dietary and nutritional science. If you're a baby boomer, you've heard scientists say umpteen different things over the last 40 years.
Not really. You've heard the popular media, and to a lesser degree, government policies, say umpteen different things. Scientists have been fairly consistent in what they said, with a few refinements and tweaks over the years.
That's one of the biggest issues holding back the public acceptance of science. Most people only get the Cliff's Notes version. It's hard to challenge your belief systems when you never get the full story.
If they really want IE6 usage to reach zero, the people at MS will have to swallow some pride and realize that there are some of us who refuse to 'upgrade" like little sheep.
Refuse is absolutely the right word. Win 2K? Seriously? An eleven-year-old OS? You're not being sensible, you're being ornery.
But hey, if that's what floats your boat, go ahead. I mean, there are still people running vintage Amigas and crap ("Way ahead of its time!", yeah, we can hear you.) But realize that you are a dwindling minority. You guys are outnumbered by Android and iPhone users these days. It's time to embrace your minority status.
It would be nice if we could run javascript/html5/css3 code on Apple products (plus minor extensions for accessing local stuff etc), via Mozilla. Then we could finally write useful platform-independent apps that also run on Apple products.
Why not just build javascript + html5 + css3 web apps? You get full platform independence and no app store hassles.
The iPhone supports HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. As for "local stuff," HTML 5 already has features that allows persistent local database storage. If your app need location awareness, the iPhone supports the W3C Geolocation API.
You may not remember, but originally, Apple's official stance was that the only third-party iPhone apps would be web apps. Lots of people bitched and moaned about how Apple was not allowing developers onto its device, so Apple eventually caved and released its SDK. But there's no reason you can't still build web apps for the iPhone.
awesome, you could do that in Flash 5 years ago.
awesome, you could do that in a Win32 app 15 years ago.
The real question is, will they Kill Switch the app for those who have already downloaded it?
That'd be a woefully ironic way of responding to the FSF's concerns about user's rights. "Oh, sorry, FSF. Just to show you how sorry we are, we'll remotely disable all copies of that app. That way, nobody will be left with a copy of the app that doesn't fully comply with the GPL terms. All better?"
I guess I'm still surprised that here on Slashdot that there are people who form their preferences for technologies based on how well "they're doing in the market". Maybe it would be different if I ran an electronics store or an advertising agency. The fact that a lot of people are buying iPads might persuade me to buy Apple stock, but it's not going to persuade me to buy an iPad.
Honestly, the fact that people are lining up to buy something has never been a strong recommendation for me, any more than having a lot of advertisements for a particular technology indicates superiority. If it was, I'd be getting my technology news from Wired Magazine.
OP didn't say that the iPad was the greatest thing ever, or that you, as Joe Average Slashdotter, should immediately buy one. OP just said that it was successful and that there were lessons to be learned from its success.
Slashdotters focus on the iPad's limitations and the restrictions Apple places on it. Fair enough. But when a limited, restricted devices like the iPad succeed, you have to wonder, what does it have that makes people buy it anyway? The popular response from Slashdot is: well, the people who buy it are either brainwashed fanboys, fashion-conscious posers, or idiots with more money than brains.
The really smart people are taking notes on how marketing, product positioning, user experience, and industrial design wins out over limitations and restrictions in the mind of the body public. You can bet that Steve Ballmer and Microsoft are watching and learning from the iPad's success very carefully, even if they don't plan to buy iPads for their children this Christmas.
Come on. H264 fan boys use such a low bitrate for shootouts that you are often comparing crap with shit. I don't care how good that shit looks compared to crap. Its still crap and shit.
The whole point of a codec is to reproduce video at maximal resolution with minimal bitrate. Thus minimizing bitrate is a valid test; it exaggerates quality differences. Minimizing resolution tells us nothing; it obscures quality differences.
All it takes is for h.264 to infringe one patent that Goggle holds and they are stuffed. Google could then simply require for licensing their patent that any patents held by MPEG-LA against VP8 to not be enforced against any implementation of VP8.
If they don't agree then Google can file for an injunction to stop any infringing product from shipping, and collect large damages in the meantime.
MPEG-LA is not a company or a patent holder. MPEG-LA is just a clearinghouse for the companies that do own the patents, including Fraunhofer, Microsoft, Panasonic, and Sony . (Full list here WARNING: PDF)
The various companies that MPEG-LA represents don't necessarily implement h.264 or sell any products based around it. MPEG-LA itself does not own anything or sell anything.