If Google provided an add-on for IE9 to support WebM as MS has done for MPEG-4 and other browsers, would that mean MS is providing support for WebM? Now that I think about it, Google is quite likely to do this, probably as part of its existing Google Toolbar. BTW, thanks for making the link easy to follow. From the linked blog article:
2. We will provide support for IE9 users who install third-party WebM video support on Windows and they will be able to play WebM video in IE9.
This means absolutely nothing. Of course IE9 should be able to play video objects in any format that DirectShow can. Any DirectShow program can currently play Ogg Theora and a wide variety of other formats if someone installs ffdshow on their Windows machine. That doesn't mean Microsoft supports Ogg Theora.
Also, you conveniently ignore the next line:
3. Many parties have raised legitimate questions about liability, risks, and support for WebM and the proponents of WebM should answer them.
This clearly means "We have no intention of supporting WebM."
I still believe that every browser should rely on the codecs installed on the OS. Every platform (and optionally the user) can then choose what they want.
That would work great if every platform Chrome ran on supported all of the codecs people want. Do you like having to choose your OS on a web page to be able to watch a video? That's how it worked before the vast majority of web video switched to Flash players. Sites switched to Flash because it supported the same codecs on all platforms, not because it used those provided by the platform.
Adding support for H.264 is actually useful, unlike Theora support. Also, it's largely a game of upsmanship, basically saying, "here Google, we fixed your browser for you".
It's useful for those wanting MPEG-LA and its member corporations to dominate all media on the web. It's not useful for those who want it to be un-encumbered. While I don't care much that IE doesn't support Ogg Theora, I do care that it doesn't support WebM as the latter is actually starting to be popular and has a much better chance of becoming a useful standard format (even if it's only a de facto standard).
Yes, their priority is clear in this case: to keep Google, Mozilla, Opera, and anyone else supporting WebM from gaining influence over web video. It's bad enough for MS that they've conceded their attempts to control it with their own formats are failing and they've backed MPEG-4. This is part of the same strategy that motivated them to make DotNet and MPEG-4 AVC add-ons for Firefox.
Immersion in a game is completely in the mind of the player. I think what's required to become immersed in a game varies a lot with the type of game and attitude of the player. I've gotten immersed in text adventure games because of the good writing and interesting locations, graphical adventure games because of the visuals and sound, first-person shooters because of the fluid feel of the control of my character and weapons, and Nethack because of the level of detail and ever-present risk of permanent death.
It's not that surprising if China copied foreign military technology, as they've often done before. However, the F-117 is old US technology. It's not even in service any more, so I doubt this means the Chinese will soon have aircraft in service comparable with current US designs.
If someone at Wal*Mart headquarters knew every time I entered or exited a Wal*Mart anywhere in the world regardless of whether I bought anything and how I paid for it, that would freak me out. They do not have the technology and/or manpower to do that. Even if they have centralized access to all security camera footage from every store in the world (which is extremely unlikely), software cannot easily tell when the same person appears on different cameras.
Though a retail store or chain can certainly track my identity via a credit card number, I can also use cash to pay for things in any physical retail store, which leaves no record of my identity.
The ignorant gp poster probably thought "boolean entropy coder" was just a synonym for "lossy encoder." I didn't know what it meant and didn't hastily jump to that conclusion.
Hardware acceleration is essential for wide adoption, but in mobile devices to a far greater extent than desktops. If Android devices can be targeted by OpenCL, then Google should definitely put a lot of effort into that. It would also be very interesting if there were a good OpenCL implementation of VP8 and iOS supported OpenCL, since that would hurt Apple's position that H.264 must be used for all the devices that have hardware support for it.
I completely agree that "intellectual property" is a false and dangerous concept promoted by lawyers and other who seek to increase their own power, not innovation. Also, the US patent system is corrupt and in need of great reforms, including eliminating patents on on software and limiting the terms of other types. However, that doesn't mean that patents are always harmful to society. I think a patent system closer to how it was originally envisioned might still be helpful.
Many public offices are appointed in the US, not elected. For example, all Federal judges and most at other levels are appointed. Within the executive branch, there are many appointed positions, many of which are considered non-political.
I think there's a difference between sharing binary copies of an old proprietary game that nobody's making money from just to be able to play it and infringing on the copyrights of someone who released copyleft Free Software to make money selling copies of a current proprietary program. In the first case, the source is not publicly available and not of potential benefit to anyone. In the second, any enhancements made to the copyleft code could be of benefit to lots of people, but are kept private.
Note also that at the other end (the DNS servers for the web site's domain) there should also be filtering in place: AAAA records shouldn't be being returned in queries that came in via IPv4. But not all sites do that filtering, so clients have to be prepared to get IPv6-only data back in IPv4 responses and filter it out.
There should be no need for DNS servers to do any filtering. The DNS server only answers with an IPv6 address when it's explicitly asked (for AAAA records instead of A records). There's no reason a name look-up for an IPv6 address can't be done via IPv4 or vice-versa. In fact, since the vast majority of hosts are not currently accessible via IPv6, there are lots of lookups done via IPv6 that return only IPv4 addresses. The filtering is only an attempt to work around the broken client configurations.
IPv6 experts say some Internet users will experience slowdowns or have trouble connecting to IPv6-enabled Web sites because they have misconfigured or misbehaving network equipment, primarily in their home networks.
Yahoo is proposing that ISPs do an ugly hack to work around buggy home network configurations, not ISP network configurations.
So I should blame the water company if I install my plumbing wrong?
No, but if they changed their infrastructure to no longer be compatible with your existing (and working) plumbing and expected you to pay to upgrade, you'd be mad, right?
Neither Yahoo nor any other major web site is talking about changing the existing IPv4 infrastructure. They are talking about adding IPv6 infrastructure, which was designed to coexist with IPv4. Anybody with a pure IPv4 configuration will see no difference. The vast majority of web sites will remain accessible via IPv4 for a very long time.
The problem is only with the systems that think they have IPv6 connectivity, though they never have. Yahoo should not have to worry about that, but apparently there are a huge number of IPv6 configurations so stupid that they're worse than no IPv6 at all.
In the short term, IPv6 doesn't do anything great for you. However, as IPv4 addresses become more scarce, more and more new ISP accounts and sites will only have IPv6 addresses and will be difficult or impossible for you to access with only an IPv4 address. Not caring about IPv6 is like not wanting to pay taxes for road maintenance because they're in great shape right now.
So I should blame the water company if I install my plumbing wrong?
Obviously, we all know that one shouldn't blame either a web site or the ISP for misconfiguration of a home router or operating system, but most users don't know anything about protocols and won't be able to make the distinction. What's less clear to me is who should be taking most of the blame? Is it Microsoft, router manufacturers or OEMs? In any of those cases, the company should be providing upgrades to fix the problem.
Of course you can use a GPL program with data under other licenses. Do you think all data stored in MySQL databases has to be released under the GPL or all code compiled with GCC must be GPL? The fact that game data (not source code) is not released under a Free Software license doesn't even bother RMS, who considers that data in a separate category.
GPL-licensed game engines that require some game data to be useful (which is often copied from an existing game installation) are common. For example, Id has released the source for all of their major games starting with Wolfenstein 3D under the GPL some years after releasing the game itself. The Doom 3 source will soon be released under the GPL. There have also been a number of projects to write Free Software game engines to clone proprietary ones used for popular games, such as ScummVM.
Actually, neither Firefox nor Chrome is completely Free Software. However, both are based on a majority of Free code, so you can use a build of Chromium or IceCat if you want to use 100% Free Software. I mostly use Firefox, but I'm not opposed to using Chromium or Chrome. While choice among standards is not always a good thing, choice among implementations of standards is.
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If Google provided an add-on for IE9 to support WebM as MS has done for MPEG-4 and other browsers, would that mean MS is providing support for WebM? Now that I think about it, Google is quite likely to do this, probably as part of its existing Google Toolbar. BTW, thanks for making the link easy to follow. From the linked blog article:
2. We will provide support for IE9 users who install third-party WebM video support on Windows and they will be able to play WebM video in IE9.
This means absolutely nothing. Of course IE9 should be able to play video objects in any format that DirectShow can. Any DirectShow program can currently play Ogg Theora and a wide variety of other formats if someone installs ffdshow on their Windows machine. That doesn't mean Microsoft supports Ogg Theora.
Also, you conveniently ignore the next line:
3. Many parties have raised legitimate questions about liability, risks, and support for WebM and the proponents of WebM should answer them.
This clearly means "We have no intention of supporting WebM."
H.264 is the standard. Browsers should play it.
Yeah, you're right: the W3C says video elements should be H.264. Oh, wait, no it doesn't.
I still believe that every browser should rely on the codecs installed on the OS. Every platform (and optionally the user) can then choose what they want.
That would work great if every platform Chrome ran on supported all of the codecs people want. Do you like having to choose your OS on a web page to be able to watch a video? That's how it worked before the vast majority of web video switched to Flash players. Sites switched to Flash because it supported the same codecs on all platforms, not because it used those provided by the platform.
Adding support for H.264 is actually useful, unlike Theora support. Also, it's largely a game of upsmanship, basically saying, "here Google, we fixed your browser for you".
It's useful for those wanting MPEG-LA and its member corporations to dominate all media on the web. It's not useful for those who want it to be un-encumbered. While I don't care much that IE doesn't support Ogg Theora, I do care that it doesn't support WebM as the latter is actually starting to be popular and has a much better chance of becoming a useful standard format (even if it's only a de facto standard).
Yes, their priority is clear in this case: to keep Google, Mozilla, Opera, and anyone else supporting WebM from gaining influence over web video. It's bad enough for MS that they've conceded their attempts to control it with their own formats are failing and they've backed MPEG-4. This is part of the same strategy that motivated them to make DotNet and MPEG-4 AVC add-ons for Firefox.
I wondered if it could be a bot, but it did make mistakes and correct them. I could certainly write a more effective bot.
Immersion in a game is completely in the mind of the player. I think what's required to become immersed in a game varies a lot with the type of game and attitude of the player. I've gotten immersed in text adventure games because of the good writing and interesting locations, graphical adventure games because of the visuals and sound, first-person shooters because of the fluid feel of the control of my character and weapons, and Nethack because of the level of detail and ever-present risk of permanent death.
That would be pretty scary if the ADA reached that far. It would also be illogical since the "disability" in this case is actually great ability.
??AA attack dogs may be many things, but seldom are they calm.
It's not that surprising if China copied foreign military technology, as they've often done before. However, the F-117 is old US technology. It's not even in service any more, so I doubt this means the Chinese will soon have aircraft in service comparable with current US designs.
If someone at Wal*Mart headquarters knew every time I entered or exited a Wal*Mart anywhere in the world regardless of whether I bought anything and how I paid for it, that would freak me out. They do not have the technology and/or manpower to do that. Even if they have centralized access to all security camera footage from every store in the world (which is extremely unlikely), software cannot easily tell when the same person appears on different cameras.
Though a retail store or chain can certainly track my identity via a credit card number, I can also use cash to pay for things in any physical retail store, which leaves no record of my identity.
How could something that creates a point be pointless?
The ignorant gp poster probably thought "boolean entropy coder" was just a synonym for "lossy encoder." I didn't know what it meant and didn't hastily jump to that conclusion.
Hardware acceleration is essential for wide adoption, but in mobile devices to a far greater extent than desktops. If Android devices can be targeted by OpenCL, then Google should definitely put a lot of effort into that. It would also be very interesting if there were a good OpenCL implementation of VP8 and iOS supported OpenCL, since that would hurt Apple's position that H.264 must be used for all the devices that have hardware support for it.
I completely agree that "intellectual property" is a false and dangerous concept promoted by lawyers and other who seek to increase their own power, not innovation. Also, the US patent system is corrupt and in need of great reforms, including eliminating patents on on software and limiting the terms of other types. However, that doesn't mean that patents are always harmful to society. I think a patent system closer to how it was originally envisioned might still be helpful.
Many public offices are appointed in the US, not elected. For example, all Federal judges and most at other levels are appointed. Within the executive branch, there are many appointed positions, many of which are considered non-political.
I think there's a difference between sharing binary copies of an old proprietary game that nobody's making money from just to be able to play it and infringing on the copyrights of someone who released copyleft Free Software to make money selling copies of a current proprietary program. In the first case, the source is not publicly available and not of potential benefit to anyone. In the second, any enhancements made to the copyleft code could be of benefit to lots of people, but are kept private.
Yeah, it really sucks here in North Carolina where we have the right to work. Oh wait...
Note also that at the other end (the DNS servers for the web site's domain) there should also be filtering in place: AAAA records shouldn't be being returned in queries that came in via IPv4. But not all sites do that filtering, so clients have to be prepared to get IPv6-only data back in IPv4 responses and filter it out.
There should be no need for DNS servers to do any filtering. The DNS server only answers with an IPv6 address when it's explicitly asked (for AAAA records instead of A records). There's no reason a name look-up for an IPv6 address can't be done via IPv4 or vice-versa. In fact, since the vast majority of hosts are not currently accessible via IPv6, there are lots of lookups done via IPv6 that return only IPv4 addresses. The filtering is only an attempt to work around the broken client configurations.
If you'd read TFA, you'd know that
IPv6 experts say some Internet users will experience slowdowns or have trouble connecting to IPv6-enabled Web sites because they have misconfigured or misbehaving network equipment, primarily in their home networks.
Yahoo is proposing that ISPs do an ugly hack to work around buggy home network configurations, not ISP network configurations.
No, but if they changed their infrastructure to no longer be compatible with your existing (and working) plumbing and expected you to pay to upgrade, you'd be mad, right?
Neither Yahoo nor any other major web site is talking about changing the existing IPv4 infrastructure. They are talking about adding IPv6 infrastructure, which was designed to coexist with IPv4. Anybody with a pure IPv4 configuration will see no difference. The vast majority of web sites will remain accessible via IPv4 for a very long time.
The problem is only with the systems that think they have IPv6 connectivity, though they never have. Yahoo should not have to worry about that, but apparently there are a huge number of IPv6 configurations so stupid that they're worse than no IPv6 at all.
In the short term, IPv6 doesn't do anything great for you. However, as IPv4 addresses become more scarce, more and more new ISP accounts and sites will only have IPv6 addresses and will be difficult or impossible for you to access with only an IPv4 address. Not caring about IPv6 is like not wanting to pay taxes for road maintenance because they're in great shape right now.
So I should blame the water company if I install my plumbing wrong?
Obviously, we all know that one shouldn't blame either a web site or the ISP for misconfiguration of a home router or operating system, but most users don't know anything about protocols and won't be able to make the distinction. What's less clear to me is who should be taking most of the blame? Is it Microsoft, router manufacturers or OEMs? In any of those cases, the company should be providing upgrades to fix the problem.
Of course you can use a GPL program with data under other licenses. Do you think all data stored in MySQL databases has to be released under the GPL or all code compiled with GCC must be GPL? The fact that game data (not source code) is not released under a Free Software license doesn't even bother RMS, who considers that data in a separate category.
GPL-licensed game engines that require some game data to be useful (which is often copied from an existing game installation) are common. For example, Id has released the source for all of their major games starting with Wolfenstein 3D under the GPL some years after releasing the game itself. The Doom 3 source will soon be released under the GPL. There have also been a number of projects to write Free Software game engines to clone proprietary ones used for popular games, such as ScummVM.
Actually, neither Firefox nor Chrome is completely Free Software. However, both are based on a majority of Free code, so you can use a build of Chromium or IceCat if you want to use 100% Free Software. I mostly use Firefox, but I'm not opposed to using Chromium or Chrome. While choice among standards is not always a good thing, choice among implementations of standards is.
This is exactly right: choice is not always a good thing when it comes to standards.