Re:OSI is getting exactly what they pushed
on
Why We Still Need OSI
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The most popular desktop Unix variant in the world? Oh the horrors!
Let me put this as politely as I manage: If all you care about is having your code used by as many as possible, I'm sure Microsoft would take on another unpaid intern. If you know that 99.8% of the people use your code as OS X and 0.2% use it as any of the *BSDs (given desktop market shares of 5% and 0.01% respectively), who are you really working for? Libraries and applications are a bit different, a BSD tool can run alongside a commercial one but you normally just run the one OS.
I think there's a huge perception gap between the BSD crowd and Apple. The BSD crowd see it like "Oh yeah, we're the CORE. The engine of the car. We're like the most important part of OS X". Apple is in my impression more like "The BSDs? Yeah we got like the concrete foundation from them, the bricks and the I-beams and whatnot. But we did all the design and layout and architecture and decorating to build the things that makes people go wow. The rest is commodities and it made no sense for us to reinvent the wheel."
That last bit I've heard as an explanation quite often. but to me that's a rather dismal prospect. Products that aren't ever going to make it on their own, that exist only deep down within some other products and that rarely get you the gratitude of anyone. Coders aren't given tasks that are already done, if there's already code to do something they'll get a different task - they don't get slack because of BSD. Customers are so detached from this process they probably don't even know OS X is based on BSD and Apple isn't going to make any PR effort to inform them. Nor would it help them since they can't change OS X anyway. Steve Jobs is probably happy for the lower way costs improve his profit margins though, so he can buy more turtlenecks.
Yes of course it is open source, the code doesn't go away. But if it hardly sees any use in any other product but OS X, what's the point of it all? Why not just be an employee and get paid to write OS X code? Granted, there are many issues with the GPL but for better and worse it's 100% used in open source software. It's not hiding deep ine bowels of the "About" page and some innards noone will ever see.
Which makes this whole story sensationalist. It's not like "make a drug joke, get fired", it's "be on the verge of being fired and pile on the straw that broke the camel's back". Nobody really wants to have people in that position for long, either you want the employee to really straighten themselves out or you want them out, no in betweens. There's no goodwill at that point.
This: "I ended up standardizing on Debian for all my machines.", because Linux distros are almost the same except for all the tiny little ways they aren't. Particularly if your own desktop doubles as the development/experimental box, it makes perfect sense to run your server distro on your desktop. Of course you can complicate it by running Slackware on your desktop and either work remotely on a Debian machine or deal with any distro variations later in the process, but it's not the KISS solution.
Ok, I just found a page with waaaaaaaaay too much information, but I'll give you the short brief. First by the lower pressure at the poles and higher elevation of the coldest measurement stations, you might not pass the freezing point at all, it seems right on the border. Secondly, because there's so little CO2 in our athmosphere the sublimation effect is much stronger than the freezing effect, dry ice won't last even if held below the freezing point.
For example in the processing industry it makes perfect sense to clone your competitor's production method and only "use" a patented invention. For the same reason it does make sense to grant conditional or limited licenses so say Microsoft can't pretend it'll be used in a tiny niche application and instead make it a Windows core technology at almost no cost. None of this should ideally screw the end users though, but finding the right legalese to avoid that will be difficult while retaining anything like a patent system.
and either way, at 1 bar it doesn't freeze until about -78C. I don't think there are any natural places on Earth that cold.
Actually it's been down to -89C in Antarctica, so -78C is well within the extreme. But you go find it first, I'll stay inside by the fire long before that...
I did read TFA, and I have no clue how they reached that conclusion. Yes, it significantly improved on regular laptop HDDs but it didn't come close to touching the real SSD. In the IOPS test it was always behind by a 40:1 margin. If you look at the throughput benchmarks the Momentum XT usually outdid the regular HDDs with 3-4x, but the SSD outdid the momentum again with 3x. To take one example with the application loading: Fastest non-flash drive: 5 MB/s, Momentum XT: 20 MB/s, Patriot SSD: 60 MB/s.
That and in this case they clearly maxed the performance running the one application (well, test) over and over again. What happens if I go play a game, open my mail, write a document and open my browser again? Will it again be dog slow filled up by all this other junk? What happens if I delete a much used application, will the movie I download to that spot keep taking up cache? I mean if they start with a fully pristine disk where all usage counters are at zero and they started running this one application, of course it'll all be cached very quickly because nothing else is in use. But that is like the ultimate ideal case, and not even that one is very impressive...
If you mean that applications or the OS should be able to give cache hints, then I agree. If you want essentially two drives and a million manually managed symlinks I don't want that, it'll be a 10% overhead managing to save 1% on performance. And if you're only doing coarse level like installing one app here and saving files there then get two disks (there are dual bay laptops too).
That produces not only MUCH more work for the company (build enviroments are not something that can be trivially packaged up if they are not designed to be), but also produces a horrible PR situation since, no matter how much tinkerers claim otherwise, the original company still ends up getting the blame when user modifications break the product. I got really, really sick of dealing with those support issues over time.
Wow, that changed midstride from a pretty reasonable argument to "Well, I don't LIKE them modifying the product so I'll just ignoring following my legal obligations". Can I get one of those too, like "Yeah well, I don't LIKE the company so I'll just ignore the legal obligation to pay them." to justify a piracy habit?
And outside the world of ABX testing, "soul" is also the human need to anthropomorphize the musician. You could have a perfect CD or a "soulified" CD made by computers and it'd never provoke the same feelings as live music does. You can gather 10000 people to listen to a band but just to play the songs from CD and watch a video of the stage show? If you asked a robot he'd tell you the sensory input was 99.9% the same, if you ask people they'd tell you it was 1% of the experience. Sure, right now it got a little bit of novelty but going to a robot concert will be exactly like listening to a CD, the robot doesn't know you're there, doesn't care and doesn't feel the music even if plays (im)perfectly like a human.
Well it's hardly the first time that bodies of e.g. saints have been moved and reburied, often to build a church on top of them. Does it have any real meaning where the bones lie and how they got buried if at all? Well, it's a bit like questioning if offside is real in soccer because within the rites and ceremonies of the Church it certainly matters. For example, even if it doesn't apply to Copernicus, being denied a Christian burial was a grave punishment. Of course an atheist can just shrug at that and go "So?" because it doesn't matter but for someone who believes it does. Likewise, being buried a hero is a great recognition by the Church, which presumably has meaning to Christians. Just because we find it an odd way to honor the dead, doesn't make it wrong in any way.
So..... a more accurate headline would be "First Pandora Console Reaches Developer"? Time to market is the time until there's an offering in the market a normal customer would buy, which is why every other console bothers so much with launch day games. In a few months it's called summer and console sales are at their lowest, so in practice nobody will look at this before the autumn.
The summary doesn't effectively explain when this would be useful. At most lights, it won't matter. The example the patent gives is a 2 minute light, for which it is inefficient to restart the engine state. It suggests "waiting for 10 minutes for a railway to clear" as a case where this would be useful.
I don't know how smart you can make the cars, but I imagine this could be used to implement several "sleep stages" of an engine not unlike a CPU. I mean cars are at idle even when you're waiting to for a gap in traffic to make a turn, it has to be quite responsive. If you know there's a full minute until you will move again, can you do better? It might not be huge but across millions of cars and millions of traffic lights I can at least see some potential.
But most of the paying business customers out there don't care about that.. They want solid product for a good price, with decent support, from a stable company. Few really care about the open source politics.
This is both true and not true. When you are planning for your server infrastructure for years to come, you don't just look at the here and now and the offer on the table. You also tend to ask some of your tech gurus whether this company is reputable, if it has the right technologies, if this is a product they'd like to work with, if this is just some desperate money grab to stay afloat and so on. A lot of these are only educated guesses, but if the offerings seems otherwise fairly competitive and your techs go "Novell? Urghhhh they're doing stupid deals with Microsoft and heading into a blind alley, can't we please go with Red Hat?" then at least sometimes it gets listened to. Don't underestimate the power of reputation, it's what companies spend tons of money trying to improve through marketing.
Well I can't speak for every private equity company, but most of them are in there for a time frame of no more than 2-4 years. The normal idea with such buyouts and restructuring is that Novell is like an odd piece of animal that is underpriced and the private equity firm thinks it can do better by selling a fillet mignon here, a rump steak there and maybe some parts just go into the grinder to become cat food. So it's not a train wreck but it's also not a particular sign of strength, the outcome largely depends on what part you're looking at. If it's a good part of the company being held back it can be a release from the chains and a chance to flourish, some parts are just chopped off and sold but if the business area you liked had its head on the block already, it's a sure sign the axe is about to fall. In short, YMMV.
Most of those "1000+ patents" are likely to be junk. The rest? We'll see.
The courts seem awfully happy to recognize junk patents. And either way all it takes is the court case to hold VP8 in patent uncertainty limbo for years. But even if that's true, what if 99% are junk and 1% are legitimate, at least legitimate enough a pro-patent court in Texas will rule in their favor? It still won't be the patent free codec people are hoping for, it'll just be a different pool with different licensing terms. Whether it's 100 or 25 or 5 patents left doesn't make much difference, only 0 left (plus whatever Google already have released royalty free) will make it a patent free codec.
Well, you've identified the problem but not really the solution. With cheap Chinese labor and a bulk cargo container I could have a ton of rubber seals for sale at much lower prices than your US company. One possibility is of course to match China on factor costs, but no country wants that because it's a race to the bottom. Another is to start with protectionism, but that's a two way street where other countries would put retaliatory taxes on your goods as well. While there's many reasons why the US took the lead over Europe in the early 20th century, the single US market was no doubt a huge boon compared to the fractured Europe and I think an isolated US would lose big in today's world economy. Not to mention go against some very core beliefs about the market economy.
Another alternative would be to get Americans to buy products made in the US of their own choosing. First, most people will think of themselves first and the country a distant second. Second, many people will see this as some form of corporate welfare, protecting companies that can't survive in the marketplace. Third, with today's complex corporate structures it will be easy to confuse people as to the real extent of US production, for example that "Made in the US" really means "Assembled in the US" and "Assembled in the US" means "We got two pieces from China and had a robot put them together". Or that they're an all American company, when you ignored all the parts they outsourced.
I'm not saying the US is alone in this, many western countries are now thinking they should all live off strong education and high-tech but the numbers just don't make sense, it's not big enough to support everyone. Not to mention that the rest of the world isn't that low tech. Like for example both China and India has sent probes to the Moon, the expression "it's not rocket science" is losing power because rocket science isn't all that hard anymore. It's not like the rest of the world was ever stupid, but before many didn't get the chance for education. With better education we see brilliant minds popping up all over the world, and the brain drain they had is diminishing. Today there are wage differences far, far greater than the difference in productivity. Whether that is sustainable in the long run given the way the world is melting together is a very good question.
Re:For the patent FUDsters sure to follow....
on
H.264 and VP8 Compared
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Um what part of the obvious here did you miss? The MPEG LA is forming a patent pool because there's tons of other companies who think they have a patent claim against VP8. There's absolutely nothing Google can do about that or grant you any form of license for or immunity against. That's how patents work, doesn't matter if Google can prove it's independently developed by On2 because it's still infringing. When even the x264 developers comment that it's very similar to H.264 you can bet that some of the 1000+ patents on H.264 apply.
Tasting good is probably a step up from the usual long distance food. I remember a few lines from a nature show I watched about a guy who spent 365 days traveling the arctic cap. It was something like "For every day I get a northern pike so I don't have to eat porridge, I thank the lord. But every time I get a trout, I thank the lord it's not a northern pike." Oddly enough I've found some extremely good camping food produced by DryTech, apparently they also deliver the Norwegian field rations. Freeze dried, just add fresh water and boil for a few minutes on a gas burner and you have a really good hot meal. They're hardly cheap though, but extremely practical at 150 grams/package.
I get that often, but that's for when I just chow something down at a cheap place or at home or a fastfood joint. If I go to an expensive restaurant, I don't go there that hungry. For one the portions are rarely that big, secondly what's the point of blowing the cash if it'll barely touch your taste buds on the way down? Had to do that recently because of a misunderstanding so we had to leave early, what a waste of delicious beef when I barely got more enjoyment out of it than a trip to Burger King. At least I wasn't the one paying or I'd be really annoyed...
Why is any such celebration noteworthy? Is it anything different if something is 19,99 years or 20,01 years? No, but it's an excuse to look back and either reminisce to talk about how long/short/whatever we've come in the last 20 years. Or maybe just get the feeling you're getting old... I can't say 3.0 was a very memorable release for me but 3.11 was, just makes me realize how much of the stone age of the home computer I caught - granted, I was in diapers when the PC was invented but the first PCs were priced beyond fooling around at home. "C:\>", what a friendly way to greet your users DOS was. For all the flaws, Windows 3 was still a huge game changer in computers.
I guess it depends on what you would see in the crystal ball, if they'd be the hot big name in CMS or they would be slowly bled to death as their big names left them one by one draining their margins until they're without the financial muscle to reinvent themselves before finally making their exit as an outdated and insignificant solution. Yes, there's a few that have managed to ride the wave from crap to dominance but plenty that have sunk as well.
I've worked with many large companies and they will use software that are way below state of the art simply because of all the costs involved in installation, administration, user training and not least of which the productivity lost getting back up to speed, cost of errors they will inevitably do with new software and so on. Every piece of software has its own idiosyncrasies, things that aren't logical but that you just *do* because you've learned that's how it is done. Or because there are customizations or configurations or integrations and all of these are sunk costs that essentially have to be redone with new software. What does that mean? Well it means that you'll have a long tail but you won't be getting any more new business unless you can improve. When you finally get the boot, you aren't just slightly behind the competition you are way behind. So it might be comfortable for a while, but it's not like it'll just last...
When is anything open source dead? I mean it takes only the minimum of fans to keep making "new" releases and it's still technically alive, even if the market share is practically gone. Closed source projects are easy to see, it's when it stops being sold, the developers are fired and that's the end of it. Open source projects just slowly turn into a ghost town where the dust balls roam but where it really only takes one person to resettle to revive it.
Are you claiming that private citizens play police when they enforce defamation law? or other delicts (torts in Common Law traditions)? No.
The point is that ordinary citizens don't have police powers. Oh, you can think that IP 1.2.3.4 defamed you and go to the civil courts and maybe they'll subpoena the ISP but you can't demand that subscription information yourself. Unless you are in Sweden and the accusation is copyright violation, then IPRED says the ISP just have to hand it over to whoever asks with no oversight. There is in fact less requirements for the MAFIAA private police than it is for the real police, they actually have to have a reasonable suspicion and get a court warrant.
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The most popular desktop Unix variant in the world? Oh the horrors!
Let me put this as politely as I manage: If all you care about is having your code used by as many as possible, I'm sure Microsoft would take on another unpaid intern. If you know that 99.8% of the people use your code as OS X and 0.2% use it as any of the *BSDs (given desktop market shares of 5% and 0.01% respectively), who are you really working for? Libraries and applications are a bit different, a BSD tool can run alongside a commercial one but you normally just run the one OS.
I think there's a huge perception gap between the BSD crowd and Apple. The BSD crowd see it like "Oh yeah, we're the CORE. The engine of the car. We're like the most important part of OS X". Apple is in my impression more like "The BSDs? Yeah we got like the concrete foundation from them, the bricks and the I-beams and whatnot. But we did all the design and layout and architecture and decorating to build the things that makes people go wow. The rest is commodities and it made no sense for us to reinvent the wheel."
That last bit I've heard as an explanation quite often. but to me that's a rather dismal prospect. Products that aren't ever going to make it on their own, that exist only deep down within some other products and that rarely get you the gratitude of anyone. Coders aren't given tasks that are already done, if there's already code to do something they'll get a different task - they don't get slack because of BSD. Customers are so detached from this process they probably don't even know OS X is based on BSD and Apple isn't going to make any PR effort to inform them. Nor would it help them since they can't change OS X anyway. Steve Jobs is probably happy for the lower way costs improve his profit margins though, so he can buy more turtlenecks.
Yes of course it is open source, the code doesn't go away. But if it hardly sees any use in any other product but OS X, what's the point of it all? Why not just be an employee and get paid to write OS X code? Granted, there are many issues with the GPL but for better and worse it's 100% used in open source software. It's not hiding deep ine bowels of the "About" page and some innards noone will ever see.
Which makes this whole story sensationalist. It's not like "make a drug joke, get fired", it's "be on the verge of being fired and pile on the straw that broke the camel's back". Nobody really wants to have people in that position for long, either you want the employee to really straighten themselves out or you want them out, no in betweens. There's no goodwill at that point.
What am I missing here?
This: "I ended up standardizing on Debian for all my machines.", because Linux distros are almost the same except for all the tiny little ways they aren't. Particularly if your own desktop doubles as the development/experimental box, it makes perfect sense to run your server distro on your desktop. Of course you can complicate it by running Slackware on your desktop and either work remotely on a Debian machine or deal with any distro variations later in the process, but it's not the KISS solution.
Ok, I just found a page with waaaaaaaaay too much information, but I'll give you the short brief. First by the lower pressure at the poles and higher elevation of the coldest measurement stations, you might not pass the freezing point at all, it seems right on the border. Secondly, because there's so little CO2 in our athmosphere the sublimation effect is much stronger than the freezing effect, dry ice won't last even if held below the freezing point.
For example in the processing industry it makes perfect sense to clone your competitor's production method and only "use" a patented invention. For the same reason it does make sense to grant conditional or limited licenses so say Microsoft can't pretend it'll be used in a tiny niche application and instead make it a Windows core technology at almost no cost. None of this should ideally screw the end users though, but finding the right legalese to avoid that will be difficult while retaining anything like a patent system.
and either way, at 1 bar it doesn't freeze until about -78C. I don't think there are any natural places on Earth that cold.
Actually it's been down to -89C in Antarctica, so -78C is well within the extreme. But you go find it first, I'll stay inside by the fire long before that...
I did read TFA, and I have no clue how they reached that conclusion. Yes, it significantly improved on regular laptop HDDs but it didn't come close to touching the real SSD. In the IOPS test it was always behind by a 40:1 margin. If you look at the throughput benchmarks the Momentum XT usually outdid the regular HDDs with 3-4x, but the SSD outdid the momentum again with 3x. To take one example with the application loading: Fastest non-flash drive: 5 MB/s, Momentum XT: 20 MB/s, Patriot SSD: 60 MB/s.
That and in this case they clearly maxed the performance running the one application (well, test) over and over again. What happens if I go play a game, open my mail, write a document and open my browser again? Will it again be dog slow filled up by all this other junk? What happens if I delete a much used application, will the movie I download to that spot keep taking up cache? I mean if they start with a fully pristine disk where all usage counters are at zero and they started running this one application, of course it'll all be cached very quickly because nothing else is in use. But that is like the ultimate ideal case, and not even that one is very impressive...
If you mean that applications or the OS should be able to give cache hints, then I agree. If you want essentially two drives and a million manually managed symlinks I don't want that, it'll be a 10% overhead managing to save 1% on performance. And if you're only doing coarse level like installing one app here and saving files there then get two disks (there are dual bay laptops too).
That produces not only MUCH more work for the company (build enviroments are not something that can be trivially packaged up if they are not designed to be), but also produces a horrible PR situation since, no matter how much tinkerers claim otherwise, the original company still ends up getting the blame when user modifications break the product. I got really, really sick of dealing with those support issues over time.
Wow, that changed midstride from a pretty reasonable argument to "Well, I don't LIKE them modifying the product so I'll just ignoring following my legal obligations". Can I get one of those too, like "Yeah well, I don't LIKE the company so I'll just ignore the legal obligation to pay them." to justify a piracy habit?
And outside the world of ABX testing, "soul" is also the human need to anthropomorphize the musician. You could have a perfect CD or a "soulified" CD made by computers and it'd never provoke the same feelings as live music does. You can gather 10000 people to listen to a band but just to play the songs from CD and watch a video of the stage show? If you asked a robot he'd tell you the sensory input was 99.9% the same, if you ask people they'd tell you it was 1% of the experience. Sure, right now it got a little bit of novelty but going to a robot concert will be exactly like listening to a CD, the robot doesn't know you're there, doesn't care and doesn't feel the music even if plays (im)perfectly like a human.
Well it's hardly the first time that bodies of e.g. saints have been moved and reburied, often to build a church on top of them. Does it have any real meaning where the bones lie and how they got buried if at all? Well, it's a bit like questioning if offside is real in soccer because within the rites and ceremonies of the Church it certainly matters. For example, even if it doesn't apply to Copernicus, being denied a Christian burial was a grave punishment. Of course an atheist can just shrug at that and go "So?" because it doesn't matter but for someone who believes it does. Likewise, being buried a hero is a great recognition by the Church, which presumably has meaning to Christians. Just because we find it an odd way to honor the dead, doesn't make it wrong in any way.
So..... a more accurate headline would be "First Pandora Console Reaches Developer"? Time to market is the time until there's an offering in the market a normal customer would buy, which is why every other console bothers so much with launch day games. In a few months it's called summer and console sales are at their lowest, so in practice nobody will look at this before the autumn.
The summary doesn't effectively explain when this would be useful. At most lights, it won't matter. The example the patent gives is a 2 minute light, for which it is inefficient to restart the engine state. It suggests "waiting for 10 minutes for a railway to clear" as a case where this would be useful.
I don't know how smart you can make the cars, but I imagine this could be used to implement several "sleep stages" of an engine not unlike a CPU. I mean cars are at idle even when you're waiting to for a gap in traffic to make a turn, it has to be quite responsive. If you know there's a full minute until you will move again, can you do better? It might not be huge but across millions of cars and millions of traffic lights I can at least see some potential.
But most of the paying business customers out there don't care about that.. They want solid product for a good price, with decent support, from a stable company. Few really care about the open source politics.
This is both true and not true. When you are planning for your server infrastructure for years to come, you don't just look at the here and now and the offer on the table. You also tend to ask some of your tech gurus whether this company is reputable, if it has the right technologies, if this is a product they'd like to work with, if this is just some desperate money grab to stay afloat and so on. A lot of these are only educated guesses, but if the offerings seems otherwise fairly competitive and your techs go "Novell? Urghhhh they're doing stupid deals with Microsoft and heading into a blind alley, can't we please go with Red Hat?" then at least sometimes it gets listened to. Don't underestimate the power of reputation, it's what companies spend tons of money trying to improve through marketing.
Well I can't speak for every private equity company, but most of them are in there for a time frame of no more than 2-4 years. The normal idea with such buyouts and restructuring is that Novell is like an odd piece of animal that is underpriced and the private equity firm thinks it can do better by selling a fillet mignon here, a rump steak there and maybe some parts just go into the grinder to become cat food. So it's not a train wreck but it's also not a particular sign of strength, the outcome largely depends on what part you're looking at. If it's a good part of the company being held back it can be a release from the chains and a chance to flourish, some parts are just chopped off and sold but if the business area you liked had its head on the block already, it's a sure sign the axe is about to fall. In short, YMMV.
Most of those "1000+ patents" are likely to be junk. The rest? We'll see.
The courts seem awfully happy to recognize junk patents. And either way all it takes is the court case to hold VP8 in patent uncertainty limbo for years. But even if that's true, what if 99% are junk and 1% are legitimate, at least legitimate enough a pro-patent court in Texas will rule in their favor? It still won't be the patent free codec people are hoping for, it'll just be a different pool with different licensing terms. Whether it's 100 or 25 or 5 patents left doesn't make much difference, only 0 left (plus whatever Google already have released royalty free) will make it a patent free codec.
Well, you've identified the problem but not really the solution. With cheap Chinese labor and a bulk cargo container I could have a ton of rubber seals for sale at much lower prices than your US company. One possibility is of course to match China on factor costs, but no country wants that because it's a race to the bottom. Another is to start with protectionism, but that's a two way street where other countries would put retaliatory taxes on your goods as well. While there's many reasons why the US took the lead over Europe in the early 20th century, the single US market was no doubt a huge boon compared to the fractured Europe and I think an isolated US would lose big in today's world economy. Not to mention go against some very core beliefs about the market economy.
Another alternative would be to get Americans to buy products made in the US of their own choosing. First, most people will think of themselves first and the country a distant second. Second, many people will see this as some form of corporate welfare, protecting companies that can't survive in the marketplace. Third, with today's complex corporate structures it will be easy to confuse people as to the real extent of US production, for example that "Made in the US" really means "Assembled in the US" and "Assembled in the US" means "We got two pieces from China and had a robot put them together". Or that they're an all American company, when you ignored all the parts they outsourced.
I'm not saying the US is alone in this, many western countries are now thinking they should all live off strong education and high-tech but the numbers just don't make sense, it's not big enough to support everyone. Not to mention that the rest of the world isn't that low tech. Like for example both China and India has sent probes to the Moon, the expression "it's not rocket science" is losing power because rocket science isn't all that hard anymore. It's not like the rest of the world was ever stupid, but before many didn't get the chance for education. With better education we see brilliant minds popping up all over the world, and the brain drain they had is diminishing. Today there are wage differences far, far greater than the difference in productivity. Whether that is sustainable in the long run given the way the world is melting together is a very good question.
Um what part of the obvious here did you miss? The MPEG LA is forming a patent pool because there's tons of other companies who think they have a patent claim against VP8. There's absolutely nothing Google can do about that or grant you any form of license for or immunity against. That's how patents work, doesn't matter if Google can prove it's independently developed by On2 because it's still infringing. When even the x264 developers comment that it's very similar to H.264 you can bet that some of the 1000+ patents on H.264 apply.
Tasting good is probably a step up from the usual long distance food. I remember a few lines from a nature show I watched about a guy who spent 365 days traveling the arctic cap. It was something like "For every day I get a northern pike so I don't have to eat porridge, I thank the lord. But every time I get a trout, I thank the lord it's not a northern pike." Oddly enough I've found some extremely good camping food produced by DryTech, apparently they also deliver the Norwegian field rations. Freeze dried, just add fresh water and boil for a few minutes on a gas burner and you have a really good hot meal. They're hardly cheap though, but extremely practical at 150 grams/package.
I get that often, but that's for when I just chow something down at a cheap place or at home or a fastfood joint. If I go to an expensive restaurant, I don't go there that hungry. For one the portions are rarely that big, secondly what's the point of blowing the cash if it'll barely touch your taste buds on the way down? Had to do that recently because of a misunderstanding so we had to leave early, what a waste of delicious beef when I barely got more enjoyment out of it than a trip to Burger King. At least I wasn't the one paying or I'd be really annoyed...
Why is any such celebration noteworthy? Is it anything different if something is 19,99 years or 20,01 years? No, but it's an excuse to look back and either reminisce to talk about how long/short/whatever we've come in the last 20 years. Or maybe just get the feeling you're getting old... I can't say 3.0 was a very memorable release for me but 3.11 was, just makes me realize how much of the stone age of the home computer I caught - granted, I was in diapers when the PC was invented but the first PCs were priced beyond fooling around at home. "C:\>", what a friendly way to greet your users DOS was. For all the flaws, Windows 3 was still a huge game changer in computers.
You led me down this path to the cubical I now live in!
Well, I suppose cubicle is derived from cubical but I don't think you can live in an adjective.
I guess it depends on what you would see in the crystal ball, if they'd be the hot big name in CMS or they would be slowly bled to death as their big names left them one by one draining their margins until they're without the financial muscle to reinvent themselves before finally making their exit as an outdated and insignificant solution. Yes, there's a few that have managed to ride the wave from crap to dominance but plenty that have sunk as well.
I've worked with many large companies and they will use software that are way below state of the art simply because of all the costs involved in installation, administration, user training and not least of which the productivity lost getting back up to speed, cost of errors they will inevitably do with new software and so on. Every piece of software has its own idiosyncrasies, things that aren't logical but that you just *do* because you've learned that's how it is done. Or because there are customizations or configurations or integrations and all of these are sunk costs that essentially have to be redone with new software. What does that mean? Well it means that you'll have a long tail but you won't be getting any more new business unless you can improve. When you finally get the boot, you aren't just slightly behind the competition you are way behind. So it might be comfortable for a while, but it's not like it'll just last...
<MonthyPython>I'm not dead yet.</MonthyPython>
When is anything open source dead? I mean it takes only the minimum of fans to keep making "new" releases and it's still technically alive, even if the market share is practically gone. Closed source projects are easy to see, it's when it stops being sold, the developers are fired and that's the end of it. Open source projects just slowly turn into a ghost town where the dust balls roam but where it really only takes one person to resettle to revive it.
Are you claiming that private citizens play police when they enforce defamation law? or other delicts (torts in Common Law traditions)? No.
The point is that ordinary citizens don't have police powers. Oh, you can think that IP 1.2.3.4 defamed you and go to the civil courts and maybe they'll subpoena the ISP but you can't demand that subscription information yourself. Unless you are in Sweden and the accusation is copyright violation, then IPRED says the ISP just have to hand it over to whoever asks with no oversight. There is in fact less requirements for the MAFIAA private police than it is for the real police, they actually have to have a reasonable suspicion and get a court warrant.