a/ costs time to code b/ will probably be buggy c/ will require user interaction to update d/ will be another security problem
Please let us get rid of the whole notion of plugins to view free content. The web should just work without installing tons of crap just to watch a video.
I doubt it, as the license cap is around 6 million $ which they would have passed a long time ago for all the youtube videos they convert to.mp4.
There is really no reason but political. Software apparently isn't just supposed to work, it also has to be a political statement of some kind.
I begin to wonder if GNU is more a religion than a philosophy [http://stallman.org/saint.html]
Reducing functionality is more the hallmark of a political move than an engineering decision, especially since the alternative is not even proven to work.
From their own website [http://www.webmproject.org/about/]
"The initial developer preview releases of browsers supporting WebM are not yet fully optimized and therefore have a higher computational footprint for screen rendering than we expect for the general releases."
In other words it's still in beta. It is not a finished project. It might even be vaporware or abandonware in the near future. If Google hadn't bought the company it would have no clout whatsoever.
Working means "I can write my software now and expect it to work on a variety of devices". Even better would be "I can expect the implementation to be consistent on all devices adopting the standard". WebM is not an open standard only an open implementation of a supposedly open codec. Note that many of the developers of x264 question the fact that WebM doesn't violate the patents on h264.
Video encoding is not something that is all that easy, and there are many smart people that have worked many hours to come up with the algorithms, and this work is protected. One of the successes of h264 was to group all these patents into one pool making it much easier to access this work.
h264 is owned by a standards committee, not a single company. There is no way to enforce compliance to WebM as a standard, and this will inevitably turn into the mess like with HTML, where everyone will start to introduce their special 'features' that only a few video players will support and we will end up with the anarchy that the web developers have suffered for so long.
"You can't use H.264 without paying licensing fees, and they don't talk to small potatoes."
This simply isn't true. People make h264 movies (your phone uses this format) and upload them to youtube and have been doing so for at least 6 years.
You only need a license fee if you are produce content to sell, and usually it only concerns units of 10,000 or more.
In any case the idea that WebM is free of patents is also questionable.
It's not innovation because it isn't doing anything better, nor improving anything in any measurable way. Rather it is destroying what progress had been made in unifying video formats.
If "Freedom" means surfing to 15 different websites to download and install yet another plugin then that is an enormous step backwards. The web should just work without these hassels - go to an address and get your content. The plug-in installing is also a big step backwards as far as the security of the net is - you have more and more users using outdated and insecure software, installing stuff they don't necessarily understand except to see something and I think we can see that this is just a disaster ready to blow up.
What this is doing is simply fragmenting the video codec space for absolutely no positive gain. No developer is going to waste time coding for another codec when flash already supports all their needs and it is more ubiquitous than WebM will ever be. So in the end everyone just codes it in flash like before as getting another tool to make video just isn't worth the effort, especially since it is technically inferior.
Also WebM is a completely closed standard which means you depend entirely on the good will of Google. They could very well decide tomorrow that your video streams now have to support an advertisement stream or be prepadded with extraneous "enhancements for the user experience" like we have seen happen with flash.
Plus the odds of hardware support for a closed standard is pretty close to nil. This is why we don't see video cards with hardware support for flash, but plenty with hardware h264 decoding. This means that thanks to this your computer will now be dog-slow like with flash.
"should come near to the quality" is fundamentally a step backward as it is not superior.
The only thing this has done for me is to remove Chrome from my computer. The information gathering tactics of Google and now this shows that they only have the intention of dominating the internet, firstly by data mining and now by controlling even the codec video is placed in.
Completely nasty move on their part. They claim they want freedom - but only if it is theirs.
A more reasonable approach would simply open the video tag api to allow for the OS to render the video portions, and then the whole licence problems would devolve to the OS and not to the browser itself. All major OS's have support for h264 out of the box - even Linux via x264.
Proprietary means that it is the property of a single individual. No one owns the spec to h264 except the standards body, WebM is entirely in the hands of Google. IT is just as proprietary, if not more so. The only difference is you don't pay for the tech unless Google should decide someday to force an <ad> tag in your video stream.
Quote from article: The reaction in Zimbabwe was swift. Zimbabwe's Mugabe-appointed attorney general announced he was investigating the Prime Minister on treason charges based exclusively on the contents of the leaked cable. While it's unlikely Tsvangirai could be convicted on the contents of the cable alone, the political damage has already been done. The cable provides Mugabe the opportunity to portray Tsvangirai as an agent of foreign governments working against the people of Zimbabwe. Furthermore, it could provide Mugabe with the pretense to abandon the coalition government that allowed Tsvangirai to become prime minister in 2009.
Just a reminder that the usual punishment for treason is death.
So here is a particular case where the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe will probably lose his life because of wikileaks.
Even his credibility is only relevant in so far as you think he is making shit up -- which, by all accounts, he (or rather, Wikileaks, which is far more than just JA) isn't. Think he's on a crusade and hates the West? Doesn't matter!
The editing of sources to support one's own views (as in the helocopter video of which already many have commented) destroys any credibility as a reputable source. Though he may be using material from others, it is doctored and edited according to his own measures. It is no longer a 'leak' but rather an instrument of propaganda.
As for the 'ad hominem' argument, the whole question of wikileaks is whether one can trust the organization or not. The allegations of wrong doing naturally cast doubt on the trustworthiness of his character, and the motivations behind his actions. In these things we are not able to make scientific judgements (as we ourselves have not seen the original documents but only what is presented), but only have a moral certainty. For this reason his personal integrity is important to the authority of the organization as a whole.
Since he is holding government entities up to a higher standard, and thereby implying a criticism of their actions, there is nothing preventing us from applying the same criticizm to wikileaks itself.
The fact that the common interests of millions of people are directly influenced by the publications on wikileaks (not to mention involving ongoing conflicts), one could argue that as an organization they represent a body as important as a state or any other policy influencing body.
Ironic that they themselves are more secret than many governments.
If you have ever worked in diplomatic circles, you would also know that they often have to protect the sources of their information. They receive information from many sources, many of them unofficial and it would be ludicrous to treat it in a careless manner.
Perhaps wikileaks should openly publish who is funding them, and who is giving them information ? After all they should just be telling the truth and talking straight.
This is one reason why democracy as a system of government doesn't function. It necessarily decays into anarchy or tyranny, as many ancient Greeks said long time ago.
<quote><p>Their leader is currently under investigation for breaking the law.</p></quote>
<p>How on Earth is that relevant?</p></quote>
People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
Also, his interview with CNN destroyed any credibility he had for me. He refused to talk about the investigation (as it was a private matter) and yet at the same time is trying to air the dirty laundry of other countries.
If he really is for open access and information, he should start with his own organization.
Diplomats often have to protect the sources of their information, something he might understand.
[quote] It is universally true by observation, even if we can't figure out how to prove it empirically[/quote]
I don't know if you are serious or joking, but it's funny in any case:
<citation = "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirically">The word empirical denotes information gained by means of observation, experience, or experiment.</citation>
Any project with more than a few files is often painfully slow in Eclipse. Especially if you are editing the gui classes. Startup is better now but it can be painfully slow. Eclipse might be convenient, but it has never been fast.
Even Java apps like JEdit take an enormous time to launch with comparison to a "native" application such as TextMate.
Java is more than a bit of an abstraction, it is truly a virtual machine, a sort of emulator that will always be slower.
Well actually the whole purpose of law is to regulate unwanted behavior, for instance murder and other anti-social behavior that damages the community who formulates laws to protect itself.
Thus it really depends on the threshold of "being a dick" for a law to be established. In my opinion this kind of behavior of the man in the story is atrocious and no one should be allowed to behave in such a manner without some punishment.
[quote]Because utlimately making a less than adequate support for stuff like this is not a good idea.[/quote]
Well, everything in life and business is often about choices, and not all choices will end up being successful. Java made a lot of promises in the age when developing software was largely fragmented and appeals to a certain language standard were often bound to the largest marketshare. That situation has changed dramatically, and the establishment of open protocols and standards has made even the JVM a certain relic of the past. In some ways one can easier emulate a whole machine rather than port a JVM to another architecture.
Of course Java will never be obsolete, it will have it's place just like everything else that corresponds to a certain need. Yet the need for Java is less and less evident as time goes on.
As for deprecating gcc, LLVM is already on the horizon as a modern replacement for Apple's developer tools. It was introduced in 2008 already.
Toolsets change even more quickly than human languages do, as they often fall short of what is needed, and can't be improved beyond a certain limit where it is simply easier to get a different tool. One of the great things of the technology industry is the rapidity of change.
So if Java continues to perform well, respond to the growing needs of developers and continue to get the job done, it will still be around. If one thing ever stays the same, is that progress stops for noone.
It won't just vanish, but Java will become less and less relevant to the industry. COBOL is still out there, but it's not directing the industry nor is anything new being developed with it. If Oracle doesn't work at it, Java will also fall by the wayside of those tools now neglected by the next generation.
Oracle might be good at making money, but they do not really understand the mentality which fostered SUN and the many interesting technologies produced by them.
Just my simple opinion, but Oracle only sees Java as a cow to be milked, not one to be nourished.
Slashdot Mirror
Great, another plugin to install that :
a/ costs time to code
b/ will probably be buggy
c/ will require user interaction to update
d/ will be another security problem
Please let us get rid of the whole notion of plugins to view free content. The web should just work without installing tons of crap just to watch a video.
I doubt it, as the license cap is around 6 million $ which they would have passed a long time ago for all the youtube videos they convert to .mp4.
There is really no reason but political. Software apparently isn't just supposed to work, it also has to be a political statement of some kind.
I begin to wonder if GNU is more a religion than a philosophy [http://stallman.org/saint.html]
Reducing functionality is more the hallmark of a political move than an engineering decision, especially since the alternative is not even proven to work.
It still takes time and energy to learn English, as it does for any language.
Time is money.
Q.E.D. (you had to pay).
Yes you did. Every English textbook that you learned English grammar from was the "fee". As was the twelve years of schooling.
But of course some didn't pay the fee, which is why Slashdot has many "licence violations".
The first hit is always free.
After that you are stuck with one company who owns the specs to your codec.
MPEG is at least independent from any one company.
Format is open and free .....
Well let me see, how many programmers to implement WebM in your browser....
How many cycles to convert current videos and data to new codec....
How many tech support calls because plug-in is buggy, not up to date or another security problem....
It turns out that this format is
a/ expensive to implement
b/ expensive to convert existing content
c/ expensive to support
I don't care if it is open (which it isn't, it belongs to Google; it is NOT an open standard), it is not going to be free.
Actually Apple and Cisco came to an agreement over the trademark.
http://blogs.cisco.com/news/cisco_and_apple_agreement_on_ios_trademark/
From their own website [http://www.webmproject.org/about/]
"The initial developer preview releases of browsers supporting WebM are not yet fully optimized and therefore have a higher computational footprint for screen rendering than we expect for the general releases."
In other words it's still in beta. It is not a finished project. It might even be vaporware or abandonware in the near future. If Google hadn't bought the company it would have no clout whatsoever.
Working means "I can write my software now and expect it to work on a variety of devices". Even better would be "I can expect the implementation to be consistent on all devices adopting the standard". WebM is not an open standard only an open implementation of a supposedly open codec. Note that many of the developers of x264 question the fact that WebM doesn't violate the patents on h264.
Video encoding is not something that is all that easy, and there are many smart people that have worked many hours to come up with the algorithms, and this work is protected. One of the successes of h264 was to group all these patents into one pool making it much easier to access this work.
h264 is owned by a standards committee, not a single company. There is no way to enforce compliance to WebM as a standard, and this will inevitably turn into the mess like with HTML, where everyone will start to introduce their special 'features' that only a few video players will support and we will end up with the anarchy that the web developers have suffered for so long.
lol
"You can't use H.264 without paying licensing fees, and they don't talk to small potatoes."
This simply isn't true. People make h264 movies (your phone uses this format) and upload them to youtube and have been doing so for at least 6 years.
You only need a license fee if you are produce content to sell, and usually it only concerns units of 10,000 or more.
In any case the idea that WebM is free of patents is also questionable.
It's not innovation because it isn't doing anything better, nor improving anything in any measurable way. Rather it is destroying what progress had been made in unifying video formats.
If "Freedom" means surfing to 15 different websites to download and install yet another plugin then that is an enormous step backwards. The web should just work without these hassels - go to an address and get your content. The plug-in installing is also a big step backwards as far as the security of the net is - you have more and more users using outdated and insecure software, installing stuff they don't necessarily understand except to see something and I think we can see that this is just a disaster ready to blow up.
What this is doing is simply fragmenting the video codec space for absolutely no positive gain. No developer is going to waste time coding for another codec when flash already supports all their needs and it is more ubiquitous than WebM will ever be. So in the end everyone just codes it in flash like before as getting another tool to make video just isn't worth the effort, especially since it is technically inferior.
Also WebM is a completely closed standard which means you depend entirely on the good will of Google. They could very well decide tomorrow that your video streams now have to support an advertisement stream or be prepadded with extraneous "enhancements for the user experience" like we have seen happen with flash.
Plus the odds of hardware support for a closed standard is pretty close to nil. This is why we don't see video cards with hardware support for flash, but plenty with hardware h264 decoding. This means that thanks to this your computer will now be dog-slow like with flash.
"should come near to the quality" is fundamentally a step backward as it is not superior.
The only thing this has done for me is to remove Chrome from my computer. The information gathering tactics of Google and now this shows that they only have the intention of dominating the internet, firstly by data mining and now by controlling even the codec video is placed in.
Completely nasty move on their part. They claim they want freedom - but only if it is theirs.
A more reasonable approach would simply open the video tag api to allow for the OS to render the video portions, and then the whole licence problems would devolve to the OS and not to the browser itself. All major OS's have support for h264 out of the box - even Linux via x264.
WebM is controlled by one company.
H.264 is a standards body.
Proprietary means that it is the property of a single individual. No one owns the spec to h264 except the standards body, WebM is entirely in the hands of Google. IT is just as proprietary, if not more so. The only difference is you don't pay for the tech unless Google should decide someday to force an <ad> tag in your video stream.
Going back to flash good for the web?
Making all sites return to a proprietary solution when there is an open standard already existing ?
BTW H.264 is run by a standards comittee, not just one company. WebM is owned entirely by Google.
Google wants to be the new flash.
Just curious, what is your program and how did you reinvent the wheel ?
Having done some programing in video, encoding is not all that evident. I would be interested in seeing the source code.
Free as in controlled by one company ?
264 is actually run by a standards commitee.
WebM is from a company recently bought by Google.
Also WebM just doesn't work yet, and patent issues
An article already cited before :
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/print/2010/12/how-wikileaks-just-set-back-democracy-in-zimbabwe/68598/
Quote from article:
The reaction in Zimbabwe was swift. Zimbabwe's Mugabe-appointed attorney general announced he was investigating the Prime Minister on treason charges based exclusively on the contents of the leaked cable. While it's unlikely Tsvangirai could be convicted on the contents of the cable alone, the political damage has already been done. The cable provides Mugabe the opportunity to portray Tsvangirai as an agent of foreign governments working against the people of Zimbabwe. Furthermore, it could provide Mugabe with the pretense to abandon the coalition government that allowed Tsvangirai to become prime minister in 2009.
Just a reminder that the usual punishment for treason is death.
So here is a particular case where the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe will probably lose his life because of wikileaks.
Even his credibility is only relevant in so far as you think he is making shit up -- which, by all accounts, he (or rather, Wikileaks, which is far more than just JA) isn't. Think he's on a crusade and hates the West? Doesn't matter!
The editing of sources to support one's own views (as in the helocopter video of which already many have commented) destroys any credibility as a reputable source. Though he may be using material from others, it is doctored and edited according to his own measures. It is no longer a 'leak' but rather an instrument of propaganda.
As for the 'ad hominem' argument, the whole question of wikileaks is whether one can trust the organization or not. The allegations of wrong doing naturally cast doubt on the trustworthiness of his character, and the motivations behind his actions. In these things we are not able to make scientific judgements (as we ourselves have not seen the original documents but only what is presented), but only have a moral certainty. For this reason his personal integrity is important to the authority of the organization as a whole.
Since he is holding government entities up to a higher standard, and thereby implying a criticism of their actions, there is nothing preventing us from applying the same criticizm to wikileaks itself.
The fact that the common interests of millions of people are directly influenced by the publications on wikileaks (not to mention involving ongoing conflicts), one could argue that as an organization they represent a body as important as a state or any other policy influencing body.
Ironic that they themselves are more secret than many governments.
If you have ever worked in diplomatic circles, you would also know that they often have to protect the sources of their information. They receive information from many sources, many of them unofficial and it would be ludicrous to treat it in a careless manner.
Perhaps wikileaks should openly publish who is funding them, and who is giving them information ? After all they should just be telling the truth and talking straight.
This is one reason why democracy as a system of government doesn't function. It necessarily decays into anarchy or tyranny, as many ancient Greeks said long time ago.
<quote><p>Their leader is currently under investigation for breaking the law.</p></quote>
<p>How on Earth is that relevant?</p></quote>
People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
Also, his interview with CNN destroyed any credibility he had for me. He refused to talk about the investigation (as it was a private matter) and yet at the same time is trying to air the dirty laundry of other countries.
If he really is for open access and information, he should start with his own organization.
Diplomats often have to protect the sources of their information, something he might understand.
[quote] It is universally true by observation, even if we can't figure out how to prove it empirically[/quote]
I don't know if you are serious or joking, but it's funny in any case:
<citation = "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirically">The word empirical denotes information gained by means of observation, experience, or experiment.</citation>
Any project with more than a few files is often painfully slow in Eclipse. Especially if you are editing the gui classes. Startup is better now but it can be painfully slow. Eclipse might be convenient, but it has never been fast.
Even Java apps like JEdit take an enormous time to launch with comparison to a "native" application such as TextMate.
Java is more than a bit of an abstraction, it is truly a virtual machine, a sort of emulator that will always be slower.
Well actually the whole purpose of law is to regulate unwanted behavior, for instance murder and other anti-social behavior that damages the community who formulates laws to protect itself.
Thus it really depends on the threshold of "being a dick" for a law to be established. In my opinion this kind of behavior of the man in the story is atrocious and no one should be allowed to behave in such a manner without some punishment.
[quote]Because utlimately making a less than adequate support for stuff like this is not a good idea.[/quote]
Well, everything in life and business is often about choices, and not all choices will end up being successful. Java made a lot of promises in the age when developing software was largely fragmented and appeals to a certain language standard were often bound to the largest marketshare. That situation has changed dramatically, and the establishment of open protocols and standards has made even the JVM a certain relic of the past. In some ways one can easier emulate a whole machine rather than port a JVM to another architecture.
Of course Java will never be obsolete, it will have it's place just like everything else that corresponds to a certain need. Yet the need for Java is less and less evident as time goes on.
As for deprecating gcc, LLVM is already on the horizon as a modern replacement for Apple's developer tools. It was introduced in 2008 already.
Toolsets change even more quickly than human languages do, as they often fall short of what is needed, and can't be improved beyond a certain limit where it is simply easier to get a different tool. One of the great things of the technology industry is the rapidity of change.
So if Java continues to perform well, respond to the growing needs of developers and continue to get the job done, it will still be around. If one thing ever stays the same, is that progress stops for noone.
It won't just vanish, but Java will become less and less relevant to the industry. COBOL is still out there, but it's not directing the industry nor is anything new being developed with it. If Oracle doesn't work at it, Java will also fall by the wayside of those tools now neglected by the next generation.
Oracle might be good at making money, but they do not really understand the mentality which fostered SUN and the many interesting technologies produced by them.
Just my simple opinion, but Oracle only sees Java as a cow to be milked, not one to be nourished.
Time will tell of course.