The kernel needs to be an amd64 one for x32 to work, at least as things stand now. The most common situation would _probably_ be an amd64 system with some specialist x32 software doing performance intensive stuff. (Or possibly a hobbyist system running an all-x32 userspace for the hack value.)
Yeah, working with big data is unlikely to benefit, and data _is_ generally getting bigger.
I could get into specifics but I shan't, because what you're blathering about has zero relevance for x32. It's not a replacement-to-be for the usual amd64 ABI, nobody is going to break amd64 to make x32 run. It's mostly a specialist tool for specific workloads (aside from being a hacker's playground, as are many things). Whether thinking it's useful as such is misguided or not, you're more so.
You misunderstand the desired impact. "Loads a little faster" doesn't really enter into it. It's rather that system memory is _slow_, and you have to cram a lot of stuff into CPU cache for things to work quickly. That's were the smaller pointers help, with some workloads. Especially if you're doing a lot of pointery data structure heavy computing where you often compile your own stuff to run anyway.
Still not saying it's necessarily worth the maintenance hassle, but let's understand the issues first.
x32 at least has some merit, unlike your grasp of the history of computing. (Just not very much and probably not worth the trouble; you can probably relate.)
It has been pointed out that due to the Pirate Bay page being under Kopimism, there is no infringement. This turns out not to be quite true.
Ville Oksanen, cofounder of EFFI (the Finnish version of EFF) and a lawyer specializing in technology and media law, comments as follows: "In Finland you cannot give up your moral rights and Matti Nikki's parody-judgement was based specifically on violaiton of moral rights. I think that TPB just issues a sarcastic reaction but technically TTVK ry is indeed likely to break law here."
Moral rights can come into play when material is used in opposition to the moral standards of the original authors. Parody is not at all protected under the strict reading of the law, though in practice there is some (yet weak) protection under a supreme court ruling.
So yeah, there is every reason, even with a recent similar case with a guilty verdict, to think that the Finnish version of copyright law was indeed broken by the good antipiracy folks. At the very least they're operating on extremely gray area, which is not very flattering for their ilk either.
Given kopimism, it doesn't seem to be copyright piracy - though what with Kotilainen dodging like hell in the interview, the antipiracy folks might not actually realize that;)
What it is, however, is defrauding the visitor into entering search terms under the pretense that it's the actual Pirate Bay. Could be worse, at least it's not phishing for personal information, but they do get a list of IPs with entered search terms (often for something you'd rather the antipiracy folks wouldn't know).
It has both, and yes you can run 1080p over VGA, albeit poorly.
You can actually run it quite well, though the quality of both the signal source and the display's A/D conversion have to be good. When I ran two identical 1920x1200 Samsung 244T LCDs from a Radeon x800xl, one over DVI, one over VGA, I couldn't tell the difference at all.
Wouldn't count on a random cheap ARM box's VGA output to be top-notch, of course, especially these days when the VGA output is just mostly for legacy support. Digital is the more sensible option, with its consistent quality.
Except, of course, it isn't, the implications are completely different, and even the law thinks they're completely separate issues. Just like with copyright infringement. The only difference is that people take "rape" already seriously as is, so it doesn't have to try to _co-opt_ the term for another, separate crime. 'cause that's what the whole business with conflating copyright infringement with theft is _all about_. Nobody gives a shit about copyright infringement, so they try to leech off the badwill for the word "theft". Hell, maybe they should just say that copyright infringement is raping the artist. It's just as true, and there's even more badwill to be gathered.
Only reason they don't is that it'd take an even bigger moron to buy it.
So fuck this douche with his support for the copyright newspeak.
1) The main point really is that you can now relatively easily deploy Web video in Theora without sacrificing much potential user base. (Cortado can fill in some gaps in native browser support already, but Java applet support is dwindling.) 1a) It might not yet be default(?), but MS is actively pushing Silverlight for Windows users, so the installed base is already fairly large and growing. 1b) Apple I hear has some at least semi-official Moonlight-based support, but this I know less of. Comments? 1c) Though not the best in quality per bit, you can make the quality of any codec better with more bits. Bits are only going to get cheaper. H.264 can potentially get much more expensive.
2) No, H.264 won't die a gruesome death now. 2a) Yes yes, we all know it's better technically, it doesn't matter, it still can't be a baseline Web codec. 2b) Yes, some players, especially those with vested interest in the MPEG-LA racket and excluding smaller competitors, will almost certainly use H.264 on the web for a long time to come. 2c) Isn't it nice though that a widely deployable option exists that probably has already played a hand in how much money the MPEG-LA can squeeze from you if you _do_ decide to go with H.264 anyway?
3) Using H.264 for everything won't be as unified as you think. 3a) Much of the material on the web incidentally doesn't use the very advanced features of H.264, because many decoders are limited in what profile or subset of H.264 they support (thus also reducing the quality advantage to Theora, but I make no claim of its elimination) 3b) Some material (like pirated stuff that doesn't care for copyrights or patents alike) will use all the bells and whistles, but then you may well still be stuck with having to transcode for different devices even if everything does "H.264". 3c) Such conversions can be relatively well automated when needed while keeping the original not to incur generation loss; I don't really see some need for transcoding persisting as a huge deal, except of course to the extent that anything you do with a patented format might be illegal depending on jurisdiction and circumstance.
4) Yep, no "hardware" (DSP) decoders for Theora abound. 4a) Mobile devices have enough oomph to decode it anyway in relevant resolutions (Theora is lighter than H.264, too) 4b) Yes, battery life will probably suffer somewhat, doesn't make it useless. 4c) Some DSP work has already been done on Theora decoding as already previously commented, though even when ready, deploying it would probably require user intervention and sufficient access unless shipped by the OS itself. ("Install this to improve your battery life with this site.")
Now, I'm among the first to go "meh" about their use of Flash. But.
This SVG kludge certainly improves the chances of web sites deploying, where applicable, SVG solutions instead of going directly for Flash (which is SVG's main proprietary vector graphics competitor on the web). After all, if your SVG/SMIL etc will play in Flash, suddenly your installed base of capable viewers is at least that of Flash.
'course, more quality SVG tools are needed also but this is an important step towards more openness on the web.
While not being a fan (or a user) of Spotify for their DRM stuff (I'm sure it's all mandated by the media lobby, but regardless) and the opaque pricing which the boss of a large (by Finnish standards) local media company Poptori suspected doesn't really get distributed all that well to artists.
However, fact is that it's gotten pretty popular in pretty short time at least in some circles, and guess what: Vorbis. Presumably for royalty and quality per bandwidth reasons (over MP3, in any case).
Nnoo, that's not what that little comparison says. It only compares different Theora versions, and not very rigorously at that. Still, for a small casual comparison it's a okay. As the comments say, the sky isn't as good with the new encoder output, but in this comparison that output also happens to use 20% less bandwidth...
You might want to be less offensive when you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
I wasn't replying to you, and neither was xiphmonth, as you might notice from the subject line "Re: Use your peepers" (and the fact that our comments aren't nested into your comment's box). The comment we _did_ reply to was merely modded down after we did so. Push the "parent" button of my comment to view it.
I'll grant you though that the slashdot UI is slightly confusing in this. I was also confused for a second or two when the original post disappeared and thought our replies had been reparented to yours (I wouldn't put such things past slashdot;] ). Still, be more careful when frothing.
Yeaaah. First of all, let me just say that I'm not claiming Theora is better than H.264, or even on quite equal footing (as gmaxwell said, that isn't really even the point). So there, that's out of the way.
In any case, your suggestion to eyeball these comparisons that are just insanely old considering the improvements Theora has gone through is pretty clueless, more so with you even admitting to their datedness. (Sure, x264 has improved as well, but Theora has had the *cough* benefit of rather much more low-hanging fruit due to the not very high quality of the original encoder inherited from VP3.)
So I'm gonna ask _you_ to use your eyeballs and follow the link in this very article, 'cause there are before/after shots there of old and new Theora encoder output. Then come back saying that these ancient comparisons are representative of the performance of the current code. That is, after all, what this article is about.
Therefore, every time a major pro-software patent lobbier gets significantly bitten by them, it's good, because it deincentivizes said lobbying.
There may be an uncomfortable PR side effect, though, in that the lobbier can then say "look, we're on the giving end also". However, as the patent system slowly makes things more and more difficult even to the pro-patent lobby, I believe this slight PR effect is outweighed by said disincentive.
(Of course, the disincentive doesn't apply to lawyers, who are a major driving force of the lobbying in many a company too, but at least it'll make the lawyers' job of convincing the rest of the company that swpats are a good thing a bit harder, with the ship sinking from the weight of all the unproductive lawsuits.)
Besides your astonishing lack of perspective, putting Qt under the LGPL was not a contribution to the free software community at all, hence not a consideration. It was already free software.
They just want proprietary companies to develop for their toolkit, presumably in great part because of their plans to leverage it on the Symbian platform as well.
Don't get me wrong, the LGPLing is all fine and okay, it's just not very consequential as far as liberty goes, and that is the axis which we're talking about with this law.
...this year's CS freshmen of the University of Helsinki got their hands on EeePC 900s with eeebuntu GNU/Linux.
They're "just" on loan, though, and recoverable if the students don't progress in their studies, but there's also the detail about Finnish university education being tax-funded anyway, so there's no tuition to hide the cost in...
Slashdot Mirror
The kernel needs to be an amd64 one for x32 to work, at least as things stand now. The most common situation would _probably_ be an amd64 system with some specialist x32 software doing performance intensive stuff. (Or possibly a hobbyist system running an all-x32 userspace for the hack value.)
Yeah, working with big data is unlikely to benefit, and data _is_ generally getting bigger.
Yes it would. That's among the nontrivial maintenance costs.
I could get into specifics but I shan't, because what you're blathering about has zero relevance for x32. It's not a replacement-to-be for the usual amd64 ABI, nobody is going to break amd64 to make x32 run. It's mostly a specialist tool for specific workloads (aside from being a hacker's playground, as are many things). Whether thinking it's useful as such is misguided or not, you're more so.
You misunderstand the desired impact. "Loads a little faster" doesn't really enter into it. It's rather that system memory is _slow_, and you have to cram a lot of stuff into CPU cache for things to work quickly. That's were the smaller pointers help, with some workloads. Especially if you're doing a lot of pointery data structure heavy computing where you often compile your own stuff to run anyway.
Still not saying it's necessarily worth the maintenance hassle, but let's understand the issues first.
x32 at least has some merit, unlike your grasp of the history of computing. (Just not very much and probably not worth the trouble; you can probably relate.)
It has been pointed out that due to the Pirate Bay page being under Kopimism, there is no infringement. This turns out not to be quite true.
Ville Oksanen, cofounder of EFFI (the Finnish version of EFF) and a lawyer specializing in technology and media law, comments as follows: "In Finland you cannot give up your moral rights and Matti Nikki's parody-judgement was based specifically on violaiton of moral rights. I think that TPB just issues a sarcastic reaction but technically TTVK ry is indeed likely to break law here."
Moral rights can come into play when material is used in opposition to the moral standards of the original authors. Parody is not at all protected under the strict reading of the law, though in practice there is some (yet weak) protection under a supreme court ruling.
So yeah, there is every reason, even with a recent similar case with a guilty verdict, to think that the Finnish version of copyright law was indeed broken by the good antipiracy folks. At the very least they're operating on extremely gray area, which is not very flattering for their ilk either.
Ville's Google Plus post: https://plus.google.com/u/0/103784989123292634015/posts/XeLSWAjcCLw
Given kopimism, it doesn't seem to be copyright piracy - though what with Kotilainen dodging like hell in the interview, the antipiracy folks might not actually realize that ;)
What it is, however, is defrauding the visitor into entering search terms under the pretense that it's the actual Pirate Bay. Could be worse, at least it's not phishing for personal information, but they do get a list of IPs with entered search terms (often for something you'd rather the antipiracy folks wouldn't know).
It has both, and yes you can run 1080p over VGA, albeit poorly.
You can actually run it quite well, though the quality of both the signal source and the display's A/D conversion have to be good. When I ran two identical 1920x1200 Samsung 244T LCDs from a Radeon x800xl, one over DVI, one over VGA, I couldn't tell the difference at all.
Wouldn't count on a random cheap ARM box's VGA output to be top-notch, of course, especially these days when the VGA output is just mostly for legacy support. Digital is the more sensible option, with its consistent quality.
The difference is that only one has VGA, the other does not. Both have HDMI. Get a clue before spouting nonsense.
"Yeah, why not? He deserved it, burning his dog like that. Let's go to KFC to eat some of the most mistreated production animals ever."
Except, of course, it isn't, the implications are completely different, and even the law thinks they're completely separate issues. Just like with copyright infringement. The only difference is that people take "rape" already seriously as is, so it doesn't have to try to _co-opt_ the term for another, separate crime. 'cause that's what the whole business with conflating copyright infringement with theft is _all about_. Nobody gives a shit about copyright infringement, so they try to leech off the badwill for the word "theft". Hell, maybe they should just say that copyright infringement is raping the artist. It's just as true, and there's even more badwill to be gathered.
Only reason they don't is that it'd take an even bigger moron to buy it.
So fuck this douche with his support for the copyright newspeak.
Tau is twice the constant Pi ever was!
The people of a nation with a history of blatant human rights violations are taking to the streets in joy of their armed forces killing a man.
You meant "legislatively monopolized market", hope this helps.
1) The main point really is that you can now relatively easily deploy Web video in Theora without sacrificing much potential user base. (Cortado can fill in some gaps in native browser support already, but Java applet support is dwindling.)
1a) It might not yet be default(?), but MS is actively pushing Silverlight for Windows users, so the installed base is already fairly large and growing.
1b) Apple I hear has some at least semi-official Moonlight-based support, but this I know less of. Comments?
1c) Though not the best in quality per bit, you can make the quality of any codec better with more bits. Bits are only going to get cheaper. H.264 can potentially get much more expensive.
2) No, H.264 won't die a gruesome death now.
2a) Yes yes, we all know it's better technically, it doesn't matter, it still can't be a baseline Web codec.
2b) Yes, some players, especially those with vested interest in the MPEG-LA racket and excluding smaller competitors, will almost certainly use H.264 on the web for a long time to come.
2c) Isn't it nice though that a widely deployable option exists that probably has already played a hand in how much money the MPEG-LA can squeeze from you if you _do_ decide to go with H.264 anyway?
3) Using H.264 for everything won't be as unified as you think.
3a) Much of the material on the web incidentally doesn't use the very advanced features of H.264, because many decoders are limited in what profile or subset of H.264 they support (thus also reducing the quality advantage to Theora, but I make no claim of its elimination)
3b) Some material (like pirated stuff that doesn't care for copyrights or patents alike) will use all the bells and whistles, but then you may well still be stuck with having to transcode for different devices even if everything does "H.264".
3c) Such conversions can be relatively well automated when needed while keeping the original not to incur generation loss; I don't really see some need for transcoding persisting as a huge deal, except of course to the extent that anything you do with a patented format might be illegal depending on jurisdiction and circumstance.
4) Yep, no "hardware" (DSP) decoders for Theora abound.
4a) Mobile devices have enough oomph to decode it anyway in relevant resolutions (Theora is lighter than H.264, too)
4b) Yes, battery life will probably suffer somewhat, doesn't make it useless.
4c) Some DSP work has already been done on Theora decoding as already previously commented, though even when ready, deploying it would probably require user intervention and sufficient access unless shipped by the OS itself. ("Install this to improve your battery life with this site.")
Hope this summary will clarify things somewhat.
Now, I'm among the first to go "meh" about their use of Flash. But.
This SVG kludge certainly improves the chances of web sites deploying, where applicable, SVG solutions instead of going directly for Flash (which is SVG's main proprietary vector graphics competitor on the web). After all, if your SVG/SMIL etc will play in Flash, suddenly your installed base of capable viewers is at least that of Flash.
'course, more quality SVG tools are needed also but this is an important step towards more openness on the web.
While not being a fan (or a user) of Spotify for their DRM stuff (I'm sure it's all mandated by the media lobby, but regardless) and the opaque pricing which the boss of a large (by Finnish standards) local media company Poptori suspected doesn't really get distributed all that well to artists.
However, fact is that it's gotten pretty popular in pretty short time at least in some circles, and guess what: Vorbis. Presumably for royalty and quality per bandwidth reasons (over MP3, in any case).
Nnoo, that's not what that little comparison says. It only compares different Theora versions, and not very rigorously at that. Still, for a small casual comparison it's a okay. As the comments say, the sky isn't as good with the new encoder output, but in this comparison that output also happens to use 20% less bandwidth...
You might want to be less offensive when you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
I wasn't replying to you, and neither was xiphmonth, as you might notice from the subject line "Re: Use your peepers" (and the fact that our comments aren't nested into your comment's box). The comment we _did_ reply to was merely modded down after we did so. Push the "parent" button of my comment to view it.
I'll grant you though that the slashdot UI is slightly confusing in this. I was also confused for a second or two when the original post disappeared and thought our replies had been reparented to yours (I wouldn't put such things past slashdot ;] ). Still, be more careful when frothing.
Yeaaah. First of all, let me just say that I'm not claiming Theora is better than H.264, or even on quite equal footing (as gmaxwell said, that isn't really even the point). So there, that's out of the way.
In any case, your suggestion to eyeball these comparisons that are just insanely old considering the improvements Theora has gone through is pretty clueless, more so with you even admitting to their datedness. (Sure, x264 has improved as well, but Theora has had the *cough* benefit of rather much more low-hanging fruit due to the not very high quality of the original encoder inherited from VP3.)
So I'm gonna ask _you_ to use your eyeballs and follow the link in this very article, 'cause there are before/after shots there of old and new Theora encoder output. Then come back saying that these ancient comparisons are representative of the performance of the current code. That is, after all, what this article is about.
Electronic Frontier Finland (Effi) has an English article on this matter as well.
Exactly, software patents are bad, period.
Therefore, every time a major pro-software patent lobbier gets significantly bitten by them, it's good, because it deincentivizes said lobbying.
There may be an uncomfortable PR side effect, though, in that the lobbier can then say "look, we're on the giving end also". However, as the patent system slowly makes things more and more difficult even to the pro-patent lobby, I believe this slight PR effect is outweighed by said disincentive.
(Of course, the disincentive doesn't apply to lawyers, who are a major driving force of the lobbying in many a company too, but at least it'll make the lawyers' job of convincing the rest of the company that swpats are a good thing a bit harder, with the ship sinking from the weight of all the unproductive lawsuits.)
The Finnish police have already censored the Wikileaks page on Finnish internet censorship; see my comment at the appropriate talk page.
Besides your astonishing lack of perspective, putting Qt under the LGPL was not a contribution to the free software community at all, hence not a consideration. It was already free software.
They just want proprietary companies to develop for their toolkit, presumably in great part because of their plans to leverage it on the Symbian platform as well.
Don't get me wrong, the LGPLing is all fine and okay, it's just not very consequential as far as liberty goes, and that is the axis which we're talking about with this law.
...this year's CS freshmen of the University of Helsinki got their hands on EeePC 900s with eeebuntu GNU/Linux.
They're "just" on loan, though, and recoverable if the students don't progress in their studies, but there's also the detail about Finnish university education being tax-funded anyway, so there's no tuition to hide the cost in...