Except that, in Windows land at least, many applications seem to be designed to be run maximised. So we alt-tab between them. Office, Photoshop, Eclipse, they all do it.
When windowing was starting to mature, we had some nice desktop environments that encouraged cooperation between applications that shared a screen. For example, in Sun's OpenView, to load a file into their TextEditor, you'd drag from a file window onto "document" hotspot. To save you'd drag from the hotspot into the file window.
Acorn's RiscOS was really big on drag & drop between windows.
We see a lot less of that now. When you do drag and drop, you usually drop onto an application, rather than a specific part of its window. It's a mechanism for doing less precise things. And it's usually acheived by dragging to the MacOS Dock, or in Windows by doing the tedious "drag to the task bar, hover til your app comes to the front, drag back up, drop" routine.
Is VLC legal in all countries? Probably not. Specially DeCSS module might violate DMCA (and similar laws) and some codecs would require licenses for personal/commercial use. There haven't been any court cases related to VLC but specially companies should make sure they pay license fees to license holders if they use VLC commercially and use patented formats or codecs.
Essentially the licence is not for implementing the codec, but for using it. If you use VLC to encode video, then broadcast that video (including on the Web), then at least in some countries, you have to pay the patent holders.
1 - you say "triple" then you say its in fact only double
He means, triple the storage, and double the bandwidth.
That is, they'd store both versions, one of size x, one of size 2x. x + 2x = 3x.
When a H.264 version is viewed, they'd transmit x bytes. When a Theora version is viewed, they'd transmit 2x bytes.
This assumes the GP's assertion that for the same quality, Theora is twice as big. I can't speak to that.
I would say though; Google doesn't seem to consider storage to be expensive. At some point Google might decided that on the fly transcoding isn't expensive. It all depends on what technology is cheapest at the time.
Good to see Firefox not opting into a system that pushes us towards a non-free de-facto standard.
We don't want to sleep walk into a situation where anyone who wants to encode video that they expect to be widely usable, must pay for a non-free license.
True, Firefox walks a fine line, because it could lose market share, in which case it will all be in vain. We need ubiquitous, cheap chipsets that support Theora - or something else free. That won't happen if everyone just rolls over and pays for H.264.
The industry has been lying transparently about piracy for at least 20 years.
In the 80s, the news frequently trotted out the claim that profits from selling pirate videos were used to fund drug dealers. It only takes a tiny bit of analysis to realise that drug dealing is a profitable activity in itself.
Just like the war on drugs, the war on piracy might be a bit more successful if it refrained from telling lies.
I said it before a million times (even to the IFPI and other organisations, but they refuse to listen): Legal merchandise has to have a higher customer value than counterfeit or stolen goods.
But they do. Pirated movies are all fuzzy and unclear, have bad sound, and frequently include footage of someone a few rows in front getting up to go to the toilet.
I know this is true, because they told me in the unskippable advert at the start of the last DVD I rented. Why would they lie?
Actually, here in the UK that's not generally the case, unless you include the "10% off on collection" and similar offers you sometimes get - but then of course you can't use any other offer at the same time.
What you do tend to get is a minimum order price for delivery, but with the prices of the pizzas that's never been an issue for me.
I've never seen (in the UK) the "10% off for collection" negated by other deals, because it's not a "deal" as such, in the way that "Thursdays: 2 pizzas for the price of one". They knock 10% off because not delivering is a genuine saving for them.
What Americans don't understand is that for food delivery, the closest we'd typically come to tipping in Britain would be "keep the change" if the total was just below a round number.
Radiohead were an established name. A huge established name.
They'd already done the whole thing of spending 6 months in a country house studio, spending record company money on the best producer, the best session musicians, equipment, acoustics, instruments, catering, etc. OK Computer was the epitome old school music industry album production.
4 albums later, they were still a huge name; of course they could get 1.2 million paid downloads for their new album. The same logic goes for Nine Inch Nails. Promotion is easy if you've already got millions of fans. Just blog what you've done and let the fans and the media spread the word.
Let's say I was able to make music as good as Radiohead's. If I just stuck it on the net and waited for the downloads, I'd be waiting forever. Radiohead wouldn't.
In Rainbows got all those downloads because of promotion a record company had done 10 years earlier. Without that, they'd still be playing Oxford pubs.
A common enough suggestion. But there are genres of music that are not amenable to concert performance. And there are genres of music whose fans aren't the types to clamour after T-shirts proclaiming their musical taste.
Are we saying that those kinds of music don't deserve to get made? (Or don't deserve to be self-financing, at least).
Why? The song sounds the same whether it is being played from a physical CD or a rip stored on your hard drive. Nobody really cares that you own the CD case with its cheap artwork.
I think this is a generational thing. People who grew up with vinyl, where some releases would come in very ornate packaging - gatefolds, embossing, inserts, tracing paper layers, etc. miss all that. Those artefacts were a complete package -- you'd listen to the music, and spend a lot of time looking at and experiencing the packaging.
Think of those fetishistic Apple unboxing videos.
Even when we were giving mixtapes to our friends, we'd make box art, to turn them into artefacts.
With CDs, some of that continued. But more and more, CD packaging is cheap and uninspiring -- a jewel case with a cheaply printed insert, or even a cardboard case.
With downloads, of course you get none of that. Some Radiohead downloads include PDFs you're encouraged to print out and play with. But mostly, you just get the music. Us old guard feel something is missing. Younger people are used to it, and see nothing wrong with it.
But without EMI, would you even have been exposed to that video?
Yes... I've only every seen this video on YouTube and not because of any advertzing from EMI.
How did you find it on YouTube? Follow the chain of cause and effect, and I bet you find real marketing effort from EMI's promotion people is at base of it.
If the label is keeping most of the money to themselves via Hollywood accounting or what not then what's the benefit again? That more people will buy albums and merch that goes in to the label's coffers that you still won't get a decent piece of?
All of your 'point' seems to come down to "the label will make you a hit faster so you can retire early without needing a standard 30-40 year career like everyone else".
To an extent that's right. As much as super-rich bands like U2 etc. are the exception when it comes to major label acts, I can't think of a single indie act that's raked in megabucks.
Becoming a hit faster sounds like a facile aim - but pop music is an ephemeral thing. A certain kind of act - and acts I personally value - are all about the performers' youth and vigour. If you give them 5 years to build up a grassroots fanbase, they'll have faded out before anyone's heard of them.
Classy of you do demean my 'point' by putting quotes around it.
When my beloved Decemberists moved from Kill Rock Stars to Capitol Records, I wondered what the reason was.
Whatever their reasons, the result was hugely more ambitious records - in terms of production values and sheer number of instruments - and more ambitious live shows. I suspect that with all the extra gear, these were expensive shows to put on. Kill Rock Stars probably couldn't have handled that much cashflow.
But, they left it late. Colin Meloy of the band said:
We felt that in some ways, if we continued putting out records on [Kill Rock Stars], we'd totally be fine. But we also felt like we needed to kind of up the ante a little bit. One should only move to a major label when one can pretty much call the shots.
It seems as if being handled by a major before you've hit success, is bad news all round.
I also don't understand why he thinks that artists 'need' record labels. What they 'need' is to grow organically to the point of extreme popularity and along the way you are the one deciding the terms of contracts and you are 'the boss' whose accountant and manager work for you and pay everyone up the chain. If you need an advance, you go to a real bank and get an advancement.
Meanwhile, the band across the road gets a record deal, grows faster than organically, and is playing stadiums while you're still growing a fanbase into your 30s.
The difference between a bank loan and a record company advance is that the record label is taking some of the risk. They can do it because they aggregate it across many acts, most of whom will fail, a few of whom will succeed well enough to fund the rest. Unfortunately we see that bands typically build up a debt to their record company, and that's a shame.
I personally think that Ok Go are talented enough to sit down in a barn somewhere with basic recording equipment and I'd buy it. Their music video with them on treadmills fly them to success, not EMI.
But without EMI, would you even have been exposed to that video? There's hundreds of thousands of bands out there that are good enough for you buy their output. It's record companies' promotional efforts that typically make some of them more commercially successful than others.
I guess there are some organic successes out there (Jonathan Coulter?) - but they'll remain the exception rather than the rule.
Those in the UK can listen to the lovely Richard Jacques - the man behind lots of classic Sega soundtracks and Video Games Live concerts - on Simon Mayo's BBC Radio 2 programme earlier today.
Snooper uses DNS poisoning to misdirect you to the wrong server. Snooper presents you with a self-signed certificate, which you accept. Snooper decrypts your requests, records/rewrites/generally-mucks-around, then forwards it to the real server on a separate SSL session.
With a self-signed certificate, you'll at least be warned that the certificate has changed, if you've previously used the kosher certificate. But you're training users to just accept self-signed certificates.
Do I have to manually ask them to send me or so? It seems so. I am not aware of any automated method to get their public key.
This is the purpose of X.509 and LDAP. It requires trusting a central authority (or several), but if you're willing to do this, it works.
PGP's "Web of Trust" is another solution to this problem, in which your client can make decisions such as "Five of my friends trust this public key, so I will too".
One recommended practice is to keep the CA off the network under lock and key and use sneakernet to get the certificate requests in and the signed certificates out.
So now that's somebody's job - being that sneakernet. Someone trustworthy. Maybe you should require two keyholders present in order to issue a certificate. And they should keep records, for auditability. Then you'll need some sort of process for if a keyholder falls ill.
Think all this expensive process is overkill? Then you don't actually want a secure CA. You just want the warm and fuzzy of seeing the padlock icon in Firefox. I agree that's cheap and easy to achieve.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that, in Windows land at least, many applications seem to be designed to be run maximised. So we alt-tab between them. Office, Photoshop, Eclipse, they all do it.
When windowing was starting to mature, we had some nice desktop environments that encouraged cooperation between applications that shared a screen. For example, in Sun's OpenView, to load a file into their TextEditor, you'd drag from a file window onto "document" hotspot. To save you'd drag from the hotspot into the file window.
Acorn's RiscOS was really big on drag & drop between windows.
We see a lot less of that now. When you do drag and drop, you usually drop onto an application, rather than a specific part of its window. It's a mechanism for doing less precise things. And it's usually acheived by dragging to the MacOS Dock, or in Windows by doing the tedious "drag to the task bar, hover til your app comes to the front, drag back up, drop" routine.
From the VLC FAQ:
Is VLC legal in all countries?
Probably not. Specially DeCSS module might violate DMCA (and similar laws) and some codecs would require licenses for personal/commercial use. There haven't been any court cases related to VLC but specially companies should make sure they pay license fees to license holders if they use VLC commercially and use patented formats or codecs.
Essentially the licence is not for implementing the codec, but for using it. If you use VLC to encode video, then broadcast that video (including on the Web), then at least in some countries, you have to pay the patent holders.
Indeed. And if a third party hosts and encodes your video (e.g. YouTube) that side of it's hidden too.
If you wanted to put H.264 video on your own site, you'd have to pay too.
http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html#licensing
1 - you say "triple" then you say its in fact only double
He means, triple the storage, and double the bandwidth.
That is, they'd store both versions, one of size x, one of size 2x. x + 2x = 3x.
When a H.264 version is viewed, they'd transmit x bytes.
When a Theora version is viewed, they'd transmit 2x bytes.
This assumes the GP's assertion that for the same quality, Theora is twice as big. I can't speak to that.
I would say though; Google doesn't seem to consider storage to be expensive. At some point Google might decided that on the fly transcoding isn't expensive. It all depends on what technology is cheapest at the time.
Good to see Firefox not opting into a system that pushes us towards a non-free de-facto standard.
We don't want to sleep walk into a situation where anyone who wants to encode video that they expect to be widely usable, must pay for a non-free license.
True, Firefox walks a fine line, because it could lose market share, in which case it will all be in vain. We need ubiquitous, cheap chipsets that support Theora - or something else free. That won't happen if everyone just rolls over and pays for H.264.
I've never paid for delivery.
Delivery is included in the standard price.
I get the impression that in the US, collection is very much the exception.
The industry has been lying transparently about piracy for at least 20 years.
In the 80s, the news frequently trotted out the claim that profits from selling pirate videos were used to fund drug dealers. It only takes a tiny bit of analysis to realise that drug dealing is a profitable activity in itself.
Just like the war on drugs, the war on piracy might be a bit more successful if it refrained from telling lies.
I said it before a million times (even to the IFPI and other organisations, but they refuse to listen): Legal merchandise has to have a higher customer value than counterfeit or stolen goods.
But they do. Pirated movies are all fuzzy and unclear, have bad sound, and frequently include footage of someone a few rows in front getting up to go to the toilet.
I know this is true, because they told me in the unskippable advert at the start of the last DVD I rented. Why would they lie?
Actually, here in the UK that's not generally the case, unless you include the "10% off on collection" and similar offers you sometimes get - but then of course you can't use any other offer at the same time.
What you do tend to get is a minimum order price for delivery, but with the prices of the pizzas that's never been an issue for me.
I've never seen (in the UK) the "10% off for collection" negated by other deals, because it's not a "deal" as such, in the way that "Thursdays: 2 pizzas for the price of one". They knock 10% off because not delivering is a genuine saving for them.
What Americans don't understand is that for food delivery, the closest we'd typically come to tipping in Britain would be "keep the change" if the total was just below a round number.
Radiohead were an established name. A huge established name.
They'd already done the whole thing of spending 6 months in a country house studio, spending record company money on the best producer, the best session musicians, equipment, acoustics, instruments, catering, etc. OK Computer was the epitome old school music industry album production.
4 albums later, they were still a huge name; of course they could get 1.2 million paid downloads for their new album. The same logic goes for Nine Inch Nails. Promotion is easy if you've already got millions of fans. Just blog what you've done and let the fans and the media spread the word.
Let's say I was able to make music as good as Radiohead's. If I just stuck it on the net and waited for the downloads, I'd be waiting forever. Radiohead wouldn't.
In Rainbows got all those downloads because of promotion a record company had done 10 years earlier. Without that, they'd still be playing Oxford pubs.
Cue lots of people claiming you could get the same standard of recording/production/mastering in a bedroom studio for $1000.
Let's pre-empt them. If the band thought they could do it that cheaply, they'd do it. They don't think they can.
Concert tickets and T-Shirts
A common enough suggestion. But there are genres of music that are not amenable to concert performance. And there are genres of music whose fans aren't the types to clamour after T-shirts proclaiming their musical taste.
Are we saying that those kinds of music don't deserve to get made? (Or don't deserve to be self-financing, at least).
Expect when artists lose money through concerts.
It used to be - and may still be - quite common for venues to charge acts for the opportunity to play in front of an audience.
Fine, I guess, if you're performing for the fun of it.
Why? The song sounds the same whether it is being played from a physical CD or a rip stored on your hard drive. Nobody really cares that you own the CD case with its cheap artwork.
I think this is a generational thing. People who grew up with vinyl, where some releases would come in very ornate packaging - gatefolds, embossing, inserts, tracing paper layers, etc. miss all that. Those artefacts were a complete package -- you'd listen to the music, and spend a lot of time looking at and experiencing the packaging.
Think of those fetishistic Apple unboxing videos.
Even when we were giving mixtapes to our friends, we'd make box art, to turn them into artefacts.
With CDs, some of that continued. But more and more, CD packaging is cheap and uninspiring -- a jewel case with a cheaply printed insert, or even a cardboard case.
With downloads, of course you get none of that. Some Radiohead downloads include PDFs you're encouraged to print out and play with. But mostly, you just get the music. Us old guard feel something is missing. Younger people are used to it, and see nothing wrong with it.
But without EMI, would you even have been exposed to that video?
Yes... I've only every seen this video on YouTube and not because of any advertzing from EMI.
How did you find it on YouTube? Follow the chain of cause and effect, and I bet you find real marketing effort from EMI's promotion people is at base of it.
If the label is keeping most of the money to themselves via Hollywood accounting or what not then what's the benefit again? That more people will buy albums and merch that goes in to the label's coffers that you still won't get a decent piece of?
All of your 'point' seems to come down to "the label will make you a hit faster so you can retire early without needing a standard 30-40 year career like everyone else".
To an extent that's right. As much as super-rich bands like U2 etc. are the exception when it comes to major label acts, I can't think of a single indie act that's raked in megabucks.
Becoming a hit faster sounds like a facile aim - but pop music is an ephemeral thing. A certain kind of act - and acts I personally value - are all about the performers' youth and vigour. If you give them 5 years to build up a grassroots fanbase, they'll have faded out before anyone's heard of them.
Classy of you do demean my 'point' by putting quotes around it.
When my beloved Decemberists moved from Kill Rock Stars to Capitol Records, I wondered what the reason was.
Whatever their reasons, the result was hugely more ambitious records - in terms of production values and sheer number of instruments - and more ambitious live shows. I suspect that with all the extra gear, these were expensive shows to put on. Kill Rock Stars probably couldn't have handled that much cashflow.
But, they left it late. Colin Meloy of the band said:
We felt that in some ways, if we continued putting out records on [Kill Rock Stars], we'd totally be fine. But we also felt like we needed to kind of up the ante a little bit. One should only move to a major label when one can pretty much call the shots.
It seems as if being handled by a major before you've hit success, is bad news all round.
I also don't understand why he thinks that artists 'need' record labels. What they 'need' is to grow organically to the point of extreme popularity and along the way you are the one deciding the terms of contracts and you are 'the boss' whose accountant and manager work for you and pay everyone up the chain. If you need an advance, you go to a real bank and get an advancement.
Meanwhile, the band across the road gets a record deal, grows faster than organically, and is playing stadiums while you're still growing a fanbase into your 30s.
The difference between a bank loan and a record company advance is that the record label is taking some of the risk. They can do it because they aggregate it across many acts, most of whom will fail, a few of whom will succeed well enough to fund the rest. Unfortunately we see that bands typically build up a debt to their record company, and that's a shame.
I personally think that Ok Go are talented enough to sit down in a barn somewhere with basic recording equipment and I'd buy it. Their music video with them on treadmills fly them to success, not EMI.
But without EMI, would you even have been exposed to that video? There's hundreds of thousands of bands out there that are good enough for you buy their output. It's record companies' promotional efforts that typically make some of them more commercially successful than others.
I guess there are some organic successes out there (Jonathan Coulter?) - but they'll remain the exception rather than the rule.
I thought it was useful. I had assumed it was Canvas.
The language needs better ways of manipulating bits and bytes.
A hidden canvas element?
(I feel dirty now)
Those in the UK can listen to the lovely Richard Jacques - the man behind lots of classic Sega soundtracks and Video Games Live concerts - on Simon Mayo's BBC Radio 2 programme earlier today.
I guess it'll be up for another week or so:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pyqx5#synopsis
A Man in the Middle attack:
Snooper uses DNS poisoning to misdirect you to the wrong server. Snooper presents you with a self-signed certificate, which you accept. Snooper decrypts your requests, records/rewrites/generally-mucks-around, then forwards it to the real server on a separate SSL session.
With a self-signed certificate, you'll at least be warned that the certificate has changed, if you've previously used the kosher certificate. But you're training users to just accept self-signed certificates.
Do I have to manually ask them to send me or so? It seems so. I am not aware of any automated method to get their public key.
This is the purpose of X.509 and LDAP. It requires trusting a central authority (or several), but if you're willing to do this, it works.
PGP's "Web of Trust" is another solution to this problem, in which your client can make decisions such as "Five of my friends trust this public key, so I will too".
How are you protecting your CA root private key?
One recommended practice is to keep the CA off the network under lock and key and use sneakernet to get the certificate requests in and the signed certificates out.
So now that's somebody's job - being that sneakernet. Someone trustworthy. Maybe you should require two keyholders present in order to issue a certificate. And they should keep records, for auditability. Then you'll need some sort of process for if a keyholder falls ill.
Think all this expensive process is overkill? Then you don't actually want a secure CA. You just want the warm and fuzzy of seeing the padlock icon in Firefox. I agree that's cheap and easy to achieve.
You think setting up a CA is cheap?
Software is cheap. Hardware is cheap. Process is expensive.
Any cheap CA would only provide the dangerous illusion of security.