I've got to believe that the lack of hardware supporting Vorbis is the number one reason for its modest adoption rate.
I believe it's because the name "Ogg Vorbis" makes me think of hard-boiled eggs.
You know how it seems ridiculous that some companies pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to consultants to think up names for their products? The excessive goofiness of the name "Ogg Vorbis" makes me think it might be worth it.
(...besides the question mark at the end of my sentence, which Netscape 4.x's crappy form handler lops off if you don't send a newline at the end of a textarea form submission?)\n
Anyone who's dealt with memory or disk allocation knows that performance suffers when a resource (file, data string, etc.) is fragmented over several locations on the same physical unit. This is why smart Oracle DBAs define storage parameters when they create objects, why smart Windows users run "Defrag" on their FAT volumes periodically, etc.
If I understand the (altogether too brief) article correctly, the "secure net" will work by fragmenting a file across multiple servers, in multiple locations. To get the most recent copy of a file, any given node will have to go out onto the network and retrieve all the pieces that aren't stored locally. This is sure to yield much poorer performance than a purely-local retrieval (not to mention the inherent security risk of transferring data over the network...)
Wah! wah! wah! call it by my name or I'm taking my toys and going home.
Preposterous. The FSF is not threatening to rescind the rights granted to you by the GPL if you don't write and say "GNU/Linux" all the time from now on.
All they're saying is, "We think GNU/Linux would be a more appropriate term for the product commonly referred to as Linux, and here's the reasons why." You're free to disagree if you want.
Since you agree that the GNU tools are valuable, why not give credit where credit is due?
RISC vs CISC stopped being an issue when Intel chips became RISC chips pretending to be x86's
If Apple moved the Mac platform to Intel processors, then they will need to have a PowerPC emulation layer so that all the code written for existing Mac hardware will continue to work (mostly, hopefully).
Does this mean that Intel chips would be RISC chips pretending to be CISC pretending to be RISC?
Huh? In each of the lawsuits intitiated by Nintendo on that list, Nintendo was simply acting to preserve its own intellectual property rights. I don't see anything here that could classify them as "evil".
(Whether 'intellectual property rights' should exist is another debate entirely, please don't bring it up here.)
Paying the fines can only become an 'acceptable cost of business' if the spammers are pulling in enough money to be able to afford a $25,000 in fines every day, plus legal costs... I'm sure there are some spamhauses that are big, but not THAT big.
They don't want you to buy an Xbox if you're going to turn it into a 'general purpose entertainment device' by yourself.
'Increasing market share' doesn't just mean selling as many units as possible; it means selling as many units as possible TO THE TARGET MARKET. Which, for the Xbox, is gamers.
Microsoft is happier not to have your type as a customer; you're a pain in their ass.
I agree with this bozo, the DOI should have put Solaris on every office schlep's desktop!
Homogenous systems are easier to maintain than diverse ones. If they determined that Microsoft solutions best met their needs, then the Unix community still has a lot of work to do -- either in implementation, or in public opinion, or both.
If you're a fan of Elvis Costello, and you're offended by this, let him (by way of his management) know.
Don't try to debate him about the advantages and disadvantages of copy prevention mechanisms. Your words will probably never reach him directly.
Hit him in the wallet instead. Let him know that you would rather not listen to his music at all, than use a system that forces rights management devices on you.
A more accurate analogy would have them slapping "edited to remove socio-political expose" stickers on the side (since Cleanflicks seems to be honest about what they're doing.)
Given that the company doing the editing in this hypothetical situation is Microsoft, the label would more likely say "New and Improved Microsoft Movie XP Special Edition".
This is not intended as cheap MS-bashing -- it's intended to point out that the labeling will, in every case, use wording that puts a positive spin on the modifications which were made.
Oh, and also "they" are the tiny shoestring operation (Cleanflicks), and "you" are Microsoft (Hollywood) -- your entire analogy hinges on the editing people being powerful enough to displace the "untainted" copies in the marketplace
That was the entire point of the analogy. What's good for the goose is good for the gander -- if you support the small guy's ability to edit the big guy's movies and redistribute them, you must also support the big guy's ability to edit the small guy's movies.
If you don't want someone cutting up your movie, and possibly reselling it, don't sell them a copy.
I have a movie, and Persons A and B are interested in buying it. Person A wants to watch it they way I released it, so I sell a copy to him. Person B intends to cut out all the objectionable content, and since that goes against my wishes, I refuse to sell to Person B.
However, Person B can easily persuade Person A to sell his copy to him.
I am not arguing agaist the doctrine of resale, but you can see from my example that the net effect of it is that as a seller, I have NO control over who I sell it to.
What duplication? You seem to be talking about situations that do not exist.
So Cleanflicks unspools the original VHS tape and makes its edits with a razor blade and splicing tape? They've found some way to write new data to read-only DVD media?
Making a censored copy of a movie entails, by definition, making a copy of it.
"Critiquing" a product is not necessarily equivalent to "dissing" it or "bashing" it. Please be aware of the connotations each of these words has, and use the one that's most appropriate.
Also, can we please not bring up PostgreSQL and the inevitable Postgres/MySQL pissing match this time? This article is about MySQL. It is not about PostgreSQL. You can post about how great that product is some other time.
If people aren't buying broadband where it IS currently available, what makes you think anyone but you would buy it in places where it's NOT currently available?
It's not hard to see that the communications companies would be foolish to install $millions in infrastructure just for your $49.95 a month.
The difference is, the TV network paid thousands or possibly millions of dollars to the movie's copyright holders for a license to modify and republish their work (and it's a fair assumption that the contract stipulates what kinds of modifications are allowed).
Cleanflicks paid the copyright holders approximately jack squat.
If I buy a book and I want to tear out pages or cross through the boring bits or color in the pictures or fold over the corners where the dirty bits are, or write in the margin why the author was wrong... yes, I can do all that because it's my book.
Granted. But what if you want to sell that book later? Is it still the same book you bought?
Used college textbooks sell for 1/2 to 2/3 of the price of new texts, even if they're the same edition and only a single semester old, for this reason: by applying your edits to the book, you're decreasing its value to anyone but yourself.
That's right, just like I can buy a car, respray it, replace the seats and resell it. Oh no, profiting without respecting a 'specific vision' how terrible. If you don't want me to modify a car don't sell it to me, clear?
A car is not a copyrighted work. Your analogy is poor and misleading.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 (and, presumably, similar "reworkings" of films such as What's Up, Tiger Lily and Steve Oedekerk's horrid Kung Pow) exist because the producers of them got permission from and/or paid a license fee to the original copyright owners.
I have no objection to people creating their own derivative works based on movies they have bought. But I don't see how a for-profit company can justify doing that without the permission of the original copyright holders. The "we don't actually OWN the movies, we just perform the service of editing them" defense seems pretty flimsy to me and I wouldn't expect it to hold up in court.
A recent example is how a woman could report three medical students as suspected terrorists, have them locked up, their possessions molested, and their jobs lost... simply because they looked like Muslims, Arabs, Pakastanis, Iranians, or in many people's minds "like them terrorists".
THIS IS NOT WHAT HAPPENED.
1. She believed she heard them talking about something that could be construed as terrorist activity. 2. All she did was notify the proper authorities. After that, she had no involvement -- it was the police, not her, that chose to pull the men over, handcuff them, shut down a huge stretch of the highway, etc.
You're speaking as if the woman personally authorized military action against them solely because of their ethnicity... preposterous.
Did the police overreact? Did the media pick up on the story and blow it way out of proportion with speculation and erroneous facts? Sure. But the woman herself DID NOTHING WRONG.
That would be like having two Popes trying to excommunicate each other. That could never happen...;)
I assume that the winky-face indicates "Yes, I know it has happened about 40 times in the history of the Catholic Church, as recently as the 15th century," but other/. readers might not be aware of that.
And in each of those cases, the disputes were settled (sometimes with bloodshed) and the Church lived on. Which is exactly what will happen -- the Supreme Court will offer its interpretation of the balance to be struck between promoting expression and protecting copyright. And the Constitution will live on.
This case is about the limits on Congress' Copyright Clause power.
Limit on Congress' POWER is a different argument than limit on the lifespan of copyright itself.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got to believe that the lack of hardware supporting Vorbis is the number one reason for its modest adoption rate.
I believe it's because the name "Ogg Vorbis" makes me think of hard-boiled eggs.
You know how it seems ridiculous that some companies pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to consultants to think up names for their products? The excessive goofiness of the name "Ogg Vorbis" makes me think it might be worth it.
(...besides the question mark at the end of my sentence, which Netscape 4.x's crappy form handler lops off if you don't send a newline at the end of a textarea form submission?)\n
Anyone who's dealt with memory or disk allocation knows that performance suffers when a resource (file, data string, etc.) is fragmented over several locations on the same physical unit. This is why smart Oracle DBAs define storage parameters when they create objects, why smart Windows users run "Defrag" on their FAT volumes periodically, etc.
If I understand the (altogether too brief) article correctly, the "secure net" will work by fragmenting a file across multiple servers, in multiple locations. To get the most recent copy of a file, any given node will have to go out onto the network and retrieve all the pieces that aren't stored locally. This is sure to yield much poorer performance than a purely-local retrieval (not to mention the inherent security risk of transferring data over the network...)
What am I missing here
1. large numbers of MS coders != an enthusiastic development community
2. ASP page development != programming
Wah! wah! wah! call it by my name or I'm taking my toys and going home.
Preposterous. The FSF is not threatening to rescind the rights granted to you by the GPL if you don't write and say "GNU/Linux" all the time from now on.
All they're saying is, "We think GNU/Linux would be a more appropriate term for the product commonly referred to as Linux, and here's the reasons why." You're free to disagree if you want.
Since you agree that the GNU tools are valuable, why not give credit where credit is due?
RISC vs CISC stopped being an issue when Intel chips became RISC chips pretending to be x86's
If Apple moved the Mac platform to Intel processors, then they will need to have a PowerPC emulation layer so that all the code written for existing Mac hardware will continue to work (mostly, hopefully).
Does this mean that Intel chips would be RISC chips pretending to be CISC pretending to be RISC?
This sounds an awful lot like Anne Elk's theory about the Brontosaurus, if you ask me.
Huh? In each of the lawsuits intitiated by Nintendo on that list, Nintendo was simply acting to preserve its own intellectual property rights. I don't see anything here that could classify them as "evil".
(Whether 'intellectual property rights' should exist is another debate entirely, please don't bring it up here.)
Paying the fines can only become an 'acceptable cost of business' if the spammers are pulling in enough money to be able to afford a $25,000 in fines every day, plus legal costs... I'm sure there are some spamhauses that are big, but not THAT big.
They don't want you to buy an Xbox if you're going to turn it into a 'general purpose entertainment device' by yourself.
'Increasing market share' doesn't just mean selling as many units as possible; it means selling as many units as possible TO THE TARGET MARKET. Which, for the Xbox, is gamers.
Microsoft is happier not to have your type as a customer; you're a pain in their ass.
I agree with this bozo, the DOI should have put Solaris on every office schlep's desktop!
Homogenous systems are easier to maintain than diverse ones. If they determined that Microsoft solutions best met their needs, then the Unix community still has a lot of work to do -- either in implementation, or in public opinion, or both.
If you're a fan of Elvis Costello, and you're offended by this, let him (by way of his management) know.
Don't try to debate him about the advantages and disadvantages of copy prevention mechanisms. Your words will probably never reach him directly.
Hit him in the wallet instead. Let him know that you would rather not listen to his music at all, than use a system that forces rights management devices on you.
Movies or photography? Oh come on nothing has been origional for 100 years.
Yeah, every movie ever made is pretty much a remake of that thing Edison filmed at the Black Mariah...
Moving images? Blah. 'Sbeen done, man...
A more accurate analogy would have them slapping "edited to remove socio-political expose"
stickers on the side (since Cleanflicks seems to be honest about what they're doing.)
Given that the company doing the editing in this hypothetical situation is Microsoft, the label would more likely say "New and Improved Microsoft Movie XP Special Edition".
This is not intended as cheap MS-bashing -- it's intended to point out that the labeling will, in every case, use wording that puts a positive spin on the modifications which were made.
Oh, and also "they" are the tiny shoestring operation (Cleanflicks), and "you" are Microsoft (Hollywood) -- your entire analogy hinges on the editing people being powerful enough to displace the "untainted" copies in the marketplace
That was the entire point of the analogy. What's good for the goose is good for the gander -- if you support the small guy's ability to edit the big guy's movies and redistribute them, you must also support the big guy's ability to edit the small guy's movies.
If you don't want someone cutting up your movie, and possibly reselling it, don't sell them a copy.
I have a movie, and Persons A and B are interested in buying it. Person A wants to watch it they way I released it, so I sell a copy to him. Person B intends to cut out all the objectionable content, and since that goes against my wishes, I refuse to sell to Person B.
However, Person B can easily persuade Person A to sell his copy to him.
I am not arguing agaist the doctrine of resale, but you can see from my example that the net effect of it is that as a seller, I have NO control over who I sell it to.
What duplication? You seem to be talking about situations that do not exist.
So Cleanflicks unspools the original VHS tape and makes its edits with a razor blade and splicing tape? They've found some way to write new data to read-only DVD media?
Making a censored copy of a movie entails, by definition, making a copy of it.
"Critiquing" a product is not necessarily equivalent to "dissing" it or "bashing" it. Please be aware of the connotations each of these words has, and use the one that's most appropriate.
Also, can we please not bring up PostgreSQL and the inevitable Postgres/MySQL pissing match this time? This article is about MySQL. It is not about PostgreSQL. You can post about how great that product is some other time.
I think you're still a paranoid, tin-hat wearing idiot.
I don't give a damn if the government knows that my dad went to a meeting about eggs. So what? They're never going to use that information against me.
NEVER.
'This gives legitimacy to KaZaA' means the same things as 'This paints a big bulls-eye on KaZaA's back for Rosen & Valenti to shoot at.'
If people aren't buying broadband where it IS currently available, what makes you think anyone but you would buy it in places where it's NOT currently available?
It's not hard to see that the communications companies would be foolish to install $millions in infrastructure just for your $49.95 a month.
The difference is, the TV network paid thousands or possibly millions of dollars to the movie's copyright holders for a license to modify and republish their work (and it's a fair assumption that the contract stipulates what kinds of modifications are allowed).
Cleanflicks paid the copyright holders approximately jack squat.
If I buy a book and I want to tear out pages or cross through the boring bits or color in the pictures or fold over the corners where the dirty bits are, or write in the margin why the author was wrong... yes, I can do all that because it's my book.
Granted. But what if you want to sell that book later? Is it still the same book you bought?
Used college textbooks sell for 1/2 to 2/3 of the price of new texts, even if they're the same edition and only a single semester old, for this reason: by applying your edits to the book, you're decreasing its value to anyone but yourself.
That's right, just like I can buy a car, respray it, replace the seats and resell it. Oh no, profiting without respecting a 'specific vision' how terrible. If you don't want me to modify a car don't sell it to me, clear?
A car is not a copyrighted work. Your analogy is poor and misleading.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 (and, presumably, similar "reworkings" of films such as What's Up, Tiger Lily and Steve Oedekerk's horrid Kung Pow) exist because the producers of them got permission from and/or paid a license fee to the original copyright owners.
I have no objection to people creating their own derivative works based on movies they have bought. But I don't see how a for-profit company can justify doing that without the permission of the original copyright holders. The "we don't actually OWN the movies, we just perform the service of editing them" defense seems pretty flimsy to me and I wouldn't expect it to hold up in court.
A recent example is how a woman could report three medical students as suspected terrorists, have them locked up, their possessions molested, and their jobs lost... simply because they looked like Muslims, Arabs, Pakastanis, Iranians, or in many people's minds "like them terrorists".
THIS IS NOT WHAT HAPPENED.
1. She believed she heard them talking about something that could be construed as terrorist activity.
2. All she did was notify the proper authorities. After that, she had no involvement -- it was the police, not her, that chose to pull the men over, handcuff them, shut down a huge stretch of the highway, etc.
You're speaking as if the woman personally authorized military action against them solely because of their ethnicity... preposterous.
Did the police overreact? Did the media pick up on the story and blow it way out of proportion with speculation and erroneous facts? Sure. But the woman herself DID NOTHING WRONG.
But what do we do when a fundamental flaw is found in the one single standard? Then EVERYONE is fucked.
"yes,
-10% for impr0pzor CaPiTaLiZaTioN!
you can do so badly on a essay
-10% for uS0ring the WRONG INDEFIN-@ ARTAKLE ph0RM!
that I will take points off of your previous essays."
D33R T33CH, YUO = TEH SUK!!! -20!
That would be like having two Popes trying to excommunicate each other. That could never happen... ;)
/. readers might not be aware of that.
I assume that the winky-face indicates "Yes, I know it has happened about 40 times in the history of the Catholic Church, as recently as the 15th century," but other
And in each of those cases, the disputes were settled (sometimes with bloodshed) and the Church lived on. Which is exactly what will happen -- the Supreme Court will offer its interpretation of the balance to be struck between promoting expression and protecting copyright. And the Constitution will live on.
This case is about the limits on Congress' Copyright Clause power.
Limit on Congress' POWER is a different argument than limit on the lifespan of copyright itself.