Well I rather see some fancy things in movies. Movies generally never show exact true life anyway in any area. Why should they in computer.
Life isn't a soap opera. Life isn't a love story. Life isn't about looking like Brad Pitt. Life isn't an action movie. You aren't Vin Diesel.
But movies are entertainment. I rather see some fancy looking computer interface in a movie than watch gentoo compiling nano for 50 mins and then crashing to an unresolvable state that requires complete reinstall of the system.
Firefox is licensed under many licenses, main one being Mozilla Public License, not GPL. They can leave the proprietary parts out of redistribution, if they want to.
Unlike strong copyleft licenses, the code under the MPL may be combined with proprietary files in one program ("Larger Work"). For example, Netscape 6 and later releases were proprietary versions of the Mozilla Application Suite, by adding the proprietary AIM and other parts. The MPL treats the source code file as the boundary between MPL code and proprietary parts, meaning that a certain source file (e.g., C++, JavaScript or XUL file) is either fully MPL or fully proprietary. The GPL, in contrast, uses the process boundary of the executable as the license boundary (for details, see GPL).
No, I do not fear the command line, and I use Linux daily. And I DO agree with that, but lets face it, we're minority. 99% of users don't want to dick around with all the technical sides of computers, they just want something that works and does what they want to do.
Just using whatever codecs are on any given machine leads down exactly the same path.
I didn't object to the parent's comment. In fact I agreed to it and there should be a single codec that would be used. That is the whole point of this story too.
Frankly, H.264 is the best one there is and companies have already licensed it and are willing to do so. In fact, Windows 7 has H.264 and any program can use it.
What was my point is that this is only a problem for Firefox (and somewhat Opera, but not as much). Since Firefox users already have to install lots of addons to use their browser, how bad would be to have one extra one?
As for Canonical, or anyone else, who might fear liability for distributing a binary, they can run a simple script to do the compiling on the end user's machine.
No. No they cannot. Legally that would be viewed exactly the same way.
Also isn't Linux trying to gain marketshare on desktop? Saying things like compiling things is easy and one shouldn't fear command line just doesn't do that. With comments and assumptions like this I doubt we will ever see larger marketshare of Linux on Desktop.
Visual quality for web video only need to be "good enough".
I disagree, I think that's something to say only because the technology is so new. It wasn't many years ago that YouTube came out but it used to be really shitty quality. It was remarkable when they introduced 720p videos.
Why should web video only be "good enough"? Why not same as on desktop? Even more so because streaming from web is becoming commonplace now. The bandwidth is already there (even in US, and you can easy scale this to support all kinds of bandwidth)
Since we are introducing major standards here that will show the route for years, why not do it the best way we can now?
Just see what IE's "good enough" standard handling has done to web standards. Let's not take that route again, please.
This is a fine example of legal Bullshit getting in the way of technology.
In a way, but not completely. You can blame software patents about it, but the fact is that if those weren't available, MPEG-LA would just use a different method to generate revenue back on their technology. Now they could open up their technology, because they can still ask for licensing costs because they hold the patent. If they couldn't, they wouldn't have opened it up and would use some other way.
That is a fine example of how capitalism works and why changing one thing doesn't always work out as you would expect.
It is open. Just because theres licensing costs it doesn't mean the underlying technology isn't open. Free != Open, even if open usually goes along with free. But it's not necessary.
If US government want and have these, why wouldn't China? It's not that far fetched, and it's probably better for Google to say it was some virus planted on their system rather than have news all over the internet that China has such in place too. And it could be that US operations didn't know about it, Google China is its independent operation after all and why they're maybe pulling off.
I think it was AT&T or Verizon that we had/. article recently about how US government used their backdoor tons of times to gather info and that it would had been impossible to handle manually. Why wouldn't Google, one of the largest US companies, have similar system?
it's simply impossible for Mozilla to use it without dealing with the licensing issue.
That is completely true, they have no way to extend their license to all of the different distro versions (iceweasel and so on). Or they need major changes in their own licensing.
Google also cannot give it forward in Chrome's open source version, but they have licensed and use it with the closed source binaries. And if the other browsers will go forward and license H.264 anyway, Firefox has a serious problem to solve. Actually this would be a perfect opportunity for the other browsers to gain marketshare from Firefox and kill off its mainstream use (especially for Google, which has its hand over Firefox already by providing almost all of its income)
Ogg/Vorbis/Theora are unencumbered and free. No "deals" need to be worked out. Ogg/Vorbis/Theora has reasonable quality and compression. It can be placed into a MKV container http://matroska.org/, also unencumbered and free.
You are kind of comparing wrong things here. Both MKV and Ogg are merely containers (and H.264 can be placed inside MKV container too, and is usually done so).
Also, Theora and H.264 aren't technically equivalent. Theora is kinda there, but it misses many features, is more heavy on hardware and requires a larger bitrate to get the same results. It also completely misses support for B-frames, variable frame rates, interlacing, and larger than 8-bits bit-depths. It also loses out because the creators have chosen to maintain backwards compatibility in cost of being technically superior.
Another thing that manages to create more support for H.264 is that blu-ray, PS3, DVB (digital television in europe, including cable) and several other services and devices already support it.
I was going to comment on this if you really want to bring the codec hell to web too, but you are actually after something if they use XviD or other widely available codecs.
But nevertheless, linux zealots coming in 3.. 2.. 1..
At least other browsers would have a standard and didn't need to rely on flash. Firefox already kind of is addon hell, where you have to try to find all the plugins you would want from a browser and some of them aren't really that up to par with quality.
- Microsoft can probably work out a pretty good deal with MPEG-LA, and licensing technology is no problem for MS. - Google aswell and they have to support it on YouTube anyway. - Opera is a commercial product and they do a lot of business in embedded devices, mobile phones, wii and tv's and so on. They probably want to get a tech to play video for devices without new Flash versions (especially since it's 100% Adobe's responsibility to update Flash on those devices and Opera can't do much about it) - Apple definitely needs to support it in MAC OSX and maybe iPhone too, so WebKit and Safari will most likely support it.
Like with the previous case about Firefox's funding, Mozilla is alone with this. All of the other browser makers have created themself larger reasons to license it.
Since Firefox already has it's Gecko engine and wide range of plugins, why don't they make themself more reasons to forget about Flash and start using open standards? There is a huge market in mobile phone browsers which IE mobile and Opera currently dominate (safari is pretty much just used on iPhone). There's definitely a need for HTML 5 video on those devices and it would create more marketshare and support for Firefox, and HTML 5 Video is something that would actually push HTML5 forwards. Otherwise web developers don't have any reason to move forward from old standards.
While definitely cool, don't you need some kind of tactile feedback from the guitar strings to play it better? The same reason why there will always be use for mouse and keyboard too, to provide better control.
But since I'm not a real guitar player, this could be a fun thing to have (and probably easier to play than a real guitar)
If your idea of "fun" is spending thousands of dollars on a useless box and hoping that you'll make your money back in a few weeks...
Are you talking about my latest gaming pc?
On a more serious note, no, I wouldn't spend that kind of money on such stupid thing. But that doesn't mean someone with the money doesn't find it interesting and fun concept.
Now a days "artwork" seem to be mostly about doing weird things and calling that art. An artist in Finland was awarded tens of thousands euros of government art aid for walking this piece around a city.
Uh, do you even understand what a scam is? The seller isn't scamming anyone here. I think even the slashdot summary is (for once!) pretty clear about the item.
This isn't some kind of mad marketing scheme trying to make millions. It's a funny concept playing with technology and might interest some people for its novelty. Cry me a river.
I actually didn't know there was such you controlled with two knobs too. Sounds a bit hard and limiting. Magna Doodle is probably a little bit closer with its pen and free drawing.
The Etch A Sketch toy was invented in the late 1950s by a man by the name of Arthur Granjean invented something he called ``L'Ecran Magique", the magic screen, in his garage. The inside surface of the glass screen is coated with aluminum powder which is then scraped off by a movable stylus, leaving a dark line on the light gray screen.
and Magna Doodle
The key element of the Magna Doodle is the magnetophoretic display panel, filled with a thick, opaque white liquid containing tiny dark magnetic particles. These particles can be drawn to the surface by the stylus or the shapes, or to the hidden back side by a sliding eraser bar. The middle layer is divided into a honeycomb of cells, keeping the liquid static and the particles evenly distributed across the panel. The liquid is formulated so that the particles can be pulled through it in response to the magnetic forces, but not due to gravity.
Interesting concept though. I always wanted to know how it worked:)
To be fair though, he didn't link to the companies in submission, only the video and merely mentioned what he used. I guess kdawson added the links. While certainly promoting their own software, the bitching about it has been taken to quite irrelevant levels in this story. Instead of bitching about that, we could had have much more interesting discussion about what it actually is or did anyone else see such spikes on the same days. Personally I think it might be some botnet scanning either for exploits or to find each other (this might be extremely relevant if some botnet was taken down on the same day and P2P scanning to find other nodes kicked in). Port numbers and a little more info would had been helpful, though.
Eh what? There's several GeoIP databases that you can install locally. In fact it seems like Quova is the only database you have to query remotely, which is somewhat crazy if you ask me. Or buy a server from them.
MaxMind is the best known one. Installing it on Linux server using yum merely takes "yum install GeoIP*"
While I do generally agree with your statement, this is something that really caught my eye
is remarkable proof that good people who think and act like Westerners still live in Russia.
possible eventual escape from Russia to the West. For the sake of humanity, we must not allow the Kremlin to kill him. The Kremlin has already killed too many innocent people.
Can I borrow your time machine back to cold war? Being someone who has actually lived in Russia and some time in the neighboring countries too, I don't see this "Western vs Russia" thing or rant about 'Kremlin'. People in Russia are extremely good people and friendly towards another human being. Even more than in western countries or my own country, where people usually are careless about each other. There is corruptness (sometimes bad too), but you do not change everything in a few days after fallen communism. It is getting there and this is another example about it.
But should you think "Westerners" as better persons for some reason? No. In fact, they're losing on that regard.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I rather see some fancy things in movies. Movies generally never show exact true life anyway in any area. Why should they in computer.
Life isn't a soap opera. Life isn't a love story. Life isn't about looking like Brad Pitt. Life isn't an action movie. You aren't Vin Diesel.
But movies are entertainment. I rather see some fancy looking computer interface in a movie than watch gentoo compiling nano for 50 mins and then crashing to an unresolvable state that requires complete reinstall of the system.
mozilla doesn't like being linked from slashdot.
thats quite interesting. why not?
Firefox is licensed under many licenses, main one being Mozilla Public License, not GPL. They can leave the proprietary parts out of redistribution, if they want to.
Unlike strong copyleft licenses, the code under the MPL may be combined with proprietary files in one program ("Larger Work"). For example, Netscape 6 and later releases were proprietary versions of the Mozilla Application Suite, by adding the proprietary AIM and other parts. The MPL treats the source code file as the boundary between MPL code and proprietary parts, meaning that a certain source file (e.g., C++, JavaScript or XUL file) is either fully MPL or fully proprietary. The GPL, in contrast, uses the process boundary of the executable as the license boundary (for details, see GPL).
No, I do not fear the command line, and I use Linux daily. And I DO agree with that, but lets face it, we're minority. 99% of users don't want to dick around with all the technical sides of computers, they just want something that works and does what they want to do.
Just using whatever codecs are on any given machine leads down exactly the same path.
I didn't object to the parent's comment. In fact I agreed to it and there should be a single codec that would be used. That is the whole point of this story too.
Frankly, H.264 is the best one there is and companies have already licensed it and are willing to do so. In fact, Windows 7 has H.264 and any program can use it.
What was my point is that this is only a problem for Firefox (and somewhat Opera, but not as much). Since Firefox users already have to install lots of addons to use their browser, how bad would be to have one extra one?
As for Canonical, or anyone else, who might fear liability for distributing a binary, they can run a simple script to do the compiling on the end user's machine.
No. No they cannot. Legally that would be viewed exactly the same way.
Also isn't Linux trying to gain marketshare on desktop? Saying things like compiling things is easy and one shouldn't fear command line just doesn't do that. With comments and assumptions like this I doubt we will ever see larger marketshare of Linux on Desktop.
Visual quality for web video only need to be "good enough".
I disagree, I think that's something to say only because the technology is so new. It wasn't many years ago that YouTube came out but it used to be really shitty quality. It was remarkable when they introduced 720p videos.
Why should web video only be "good enough"? Why not same as on desktop? Even more so because streaming from web is becoming commonplace now. The bandwidth is already there (even in US, and you can easy scale this to support all kinds of bandwidth)
Since we are introducing major standards here that will show the route for years, why not do it the best way we can now?
Just see what IE's "good enough" standard handling has done to web standards. Let's not take that route again, please.
This is a fine example of legal Bullshit getting in the way of technology.
In a way, but not completely. You can blame software patents about it, but the fact is that if those weren't available, MPEG-LA would just use a different method to generate revenue back on their technology. Now they could open up their technology, because they can still ask for licensing costs because they hold the patent. If they couldn't, they wouldn't have opened it up and would use some other way.
That is a fine example of how capitalism works and why changing one thing doesn't always work out as you would expect.
It is open. Just because theres licensing costs it doesn't mean the underlying technology isn't open. Free != Open, even if open usually goes along with free. But it's not necessary.
If US government want and have these, why wouldn't China? It's not that far fetched, and it's probably better for Google to say it was some virus planted on their system rather than have news all over the internet that China has such in place too. And it could be that US operations didn't know about it, Google China is its independent operation after all and why they're maybe pulling off.
I think it was AT&T or Verizon that we had /. article recently about how US government used their backdoor tons of times to gather info and that it would had been impossible to handle manually. Why wouldn't Google, one of the largest US companies, have similar system?
it's simply impossible for Mozilla to use it without dealing with the licensing issue.
That is completely true, they have no way to extend their license to all of the different distro versions (iceweasel and so on). Or they need major changes in their own licensing.
Google also cannot give it forward in Chrome's open source version, but they have licensed and use it with the closed source binaries. And if the other browsers will go forward and license H.264 anyway, Firefox has a serious problem to solve. Actually this would be a perfect opportunity for the other browsers to gain marketshare from Firefox and kill off its mainstream use (especially for Google, which has its hand over Firefox already by providing almost all of its income)
Ogg/Vorbis/Theora are unencumbered and free. No "deals" need to be worked out.
Ogg/Vorbis/Theora has reasonable quality and compression.
It can be placed into a MKV container http://matroska.org/, also unencumbered and free.
You are kind of comparing wrong things here. Both MKV and Ogg are merely containers (and H.264 can be placed inside MKV container too, and is usually done so).
Also, Theora and H.264 aren't technically equivalent. Theora is kinda there, but it misses many features, is more heavy on hardware and requires a larger bitrate to get the same results. It also completely misses support for B-frames, variable frame rates, interlacing, and larger than 8-bits bit-depths. It also loses out because the creators have chosen to maintain backwards compatibility in cost of being technically superior.
Another thing that manages to create more support for H.264 is that blu-ray, PS3, DVB (digital television in europe, including cable) and several other services and devices already support it.
I was going to comment on this if you really want to bring the codec hell to web too, but you are actually after something if they use XviD or other widely available codecs.
But nevertheless, linux zealots coming in 3.. 2.. 1..
At least other browsers would have a standard and didn't need to rely on flash. Firefox already kind of is addon hell, where you have to try to find all the plugins you would want from a browser and some of them aren't really that up to par with quality.
It's mostly just problem for Mozilla
- Microsoft can probably work out a pretty good deal with MPEG-LA, and licensing technology is no problem for MS.
- Google aswell and they have to support it on YouTube anyway.
- Opera is a commercial product and they do a lot of business in embedded devices, mobile phones, wii and tv's and so on. They probably want to get a tech to play video for devices without new Flash versions (especially since it's 100% Adobe's responsibility to update Flash on those devices and Opera can't do much about it)
- Apple definitely needs to support it in MAC OSX and maybe iPhone too, so WebKit and Safari will most likely support it.
Like with the previous case about Firefox's funding, Mozilla is alone with this. All of the other browser makers have created themself larger reasons to license it.
Since Firefox already has it's Gecko engine and wide range of plugins, why don't they make themself more reasons to forget about Flash and start using open standards? There is a huge market in mobile phone browsers which IE mobile and Opera currently dominate (safari is pretty much just used on iPhone). There's definitely a need for HTML 5 video on those devices and it would create more marketshare and support for Firefox, and HTML 5 Video is something that would actually push HTML5 forwards. Otherwise web developers don't have any reason to move forward from old standards.
While definitely cool, don't you need some kind of tactile feedback from the guitar strings to play it better? The same reason why there will always be use for mouse and keyboard too, to provide better control.
But since I'm not a real guitar player, this could be a fun thing to have (and probably easier to play than a real guitar)
So what you are saying is that merely because something can go wrong, it makes it a scam to begin with?
Scamming is intentional. It tricks people to lose their money. There is no trickery here and the buyer knows what he is buying.
If your idea of "fun" is spending thousands of dollars on a useless box and hoping that you'll make your money back in a few weeks ...
Are you talking about my latest gaming pc?
On a more serious note, no, I wouldn't spend that kind of money on such stupid thing. But that doesn't mean someone with the money doesn't find it interesting and fun concept.
Now a days "artwork" seem to be mostly about doing weird things and calling that art. An artist in Finland was awarded tens of thousands euros of government art aid for walking this piece around a city.
That's exactly what it is. Foolish fun. You should try it some time, it lightens up the day.
Not everything in life is about calculating that "you need to sell it at 118% profit to break even".
IMHO, scam it is. Listing reported to Ebay.
Uh, do you even understand what a scam is? The seller isn't scamming anyone here. I think even the slashdot summary is (for once!) pretty clear about the item.
This isn't some kind of mad marketing scheme trying to make millions. It's a funny concept playing with technology and might interest some people for its novelty. Cry me a river.
I actually didn't know there was such you controlled with two knobs too. Sounds a bit hard and limiting. Magna Doodle is probably a little bit closer with its pen and free drawing.
The Etch A Sketch toy was invented in the late 1950s by a man by the name of Arthur Granjean invented something he called ``L'Ecran Magique", the magic screen, in his garage. The inside surface of the glass screen is coated with aluminum powder which is then scraped off by a movable stylus, leaving a dark line on the light gray screen.
and Magna Doodle
The key element of the Magna Doodle is the magnetophoretic display panel, filled with a thick, opaque white liquid containing tiny dark magnetic particles. These particles can be drawn to the surface by the stylus or the shapes, or to the hidden back side by a sliding eraser bar. The middle layer is divided into a honeycomb of cells, keeping the liquid static and the particles evenly distributed across the panel. The liquid is formulated so that the particles can be pulled through it in response to the magnetic forces, but not due to gravity.
Interesting concept though. I always wanted to know how it worked :)
To be fair though, he didn't link to the companies in submission, only the video and merely mentioned what he used. I guess kdawson added the links. While certainly promoting their own software, the bitching about it has been taken to quite irrelevant levels in this story. Instead of bitching about that, we could had have much more interesting discussion about what it actually is or did anyone else see such spikes on the same days. Personally I think it might be some botnet scanning either for exploits or to find each other (this might be extremely relevant if some botnet was taken down on the same day and P2P scanning to find other nodes kicked in). Port numbers and a little more info would had been helpful, though.
Eh what? There's several GeoIP databases that you can install locally. In fact it seems like Quova is the only database you have to query remotely, which is somewhat crazy if you ask me. Or buy a server from them.
MaxMind is the best known one. Installing it on Linux server using yum merely takes "yum install GeoIP*"
While I do generally agree with your statement, this is something that really caught my eye
is remarkable proof that good people who think and act like Westerners still live in Russia.
possible eventual escape from Russia to the West. For the sake of humanity, we must not allow the Kremlin to kill him. The Kremlin has already killed too many innocent people.
Can I borrow your time machine back to cold war? Being someone who has actually lived in Russia and some time in the neighboring countries too, I don't see this "Western vs Russia" thing or rant about 'Kremlin'. People in Russia are extremely good people and friendly towards another human being. Even more than in western countries or my own country, where people usually are careless about each other. There is corruptness (sometimes bad too), but you do not change everything in a few days after fallen communism. It is getting there and this is another example about it.
But should you think "Westerners" as better persons for some reason? No. In fact, they're losing on that regard.