I too did a bit of looking and I can't find anything more concrete than opinions, on either side of the debate.
I have no idea how animation would work either way, for lack of motion-blur and all, but if it were me, I'd do it at 24fps (or less) just so I didn't have to take so many pictures!:)
I am actually a Red Dwarf fan, but I can't say that 7th season looked that different, or for reasons other than progressively better costumes, plots, acting, anyway. I haven't seen all of 7th season though. (I don't have a TV.)
I've seen trailers for Babylon 5 that didn't have much drama, and they were camcordered off of a big screen presentation, but I just assumed it was the lousy sound and the flicker. There could be something to the framerate, but it just seems wrong. It's a hunch though, no real evidence.
TV isn't really 60fps though, and I wonder if part of what makes TV feel less dramatic (if it does...) is the interlaced video.
As to why professional cameras run at 24fps, and nobody had done things in a better way, it could easily be interia. There are a lot of tech decisions that were made because things had always been done that way instead of on the merits of the tech. Especially because it'd be hard for a camera company to change the whole film industry.
I'm not boycotting Blizzard because of bnet.d, though that's not a bad reason.
I'm simply never buying another thing from a company who puts the burden of supporting their cd-check on the customer. I bought Diablo 2 from them and the cd-check always failed. Turned out it didn't like my burner (my only cd drive). I emailed Blizzard and their response was "Buy a new CD drive". Fuckers. Of course the store I bought the game at wouldn't take it back.
Later I found all this was for naught, D2 sucked ass anyways. Well, it's an expensive lesson, but I'll never buy anything they do again, and I'll tell people my story so they know what sort of treatment they'll get if they have a problem.
There are times that adding noise, to hide compression artifacts for instance works, but a good technician won't do it in the superstitious way you advocate, just because "white noise makes it sound better."
It's similar to lowering the absolute quality of video by smoothing, to hide distinctive blockiness.
Grain on the other hand is random crap that gets thrown in, want it or not. Digital cameras do have noise, but medium to high-end ones tend to produce less noise than film at the same ASA produces in grain. And digital cameras are getting better every year.
As for "being there", you may go to pretentious art films, but everyone else goes to a movie to see what the camera was pointed at, not obnoxious artifacts of the film process. What's next? In twenty years are film snobs going to wax poetic about old MPEG2 and its "warmth"?
I've seen a ton of talk about slow framerates and none of it has said anything about inate psychological reasons. People talk as if they exist, but they get quiet when asked to provide evidence.
Even you are just providing anecdotal evidence. Lexx is shot in 50fps, Lexx looks cheap... Lexx looks cheap, imho, because it's done on a standard BBC budget.
Then, you say that every TV drama today is shot in 24fps, but this could easily be for either of the reasons I mentioned: 1) peer pressure, 2) better cameras and tools.
Sure, it could be that 24fps is more dramatic than 30i, but the only thing you've suggested to support that is motion blur. Motion blur is caused by the shutter speed, not the framerate the shots are displayed at. Even assuming though that 24fps video is shot with a 1/24th second shutter, you'd do the same for 60fps video, shooting with a 1/60th shutter. There'd be less motion blur, but it'd be displayed for less time, so it'd blend between the frames just as well.
You really need to look at how ridiculous the argument is. Video just isn't as dramatic at 24 frames per second, a speed which was chosen not by monitoring people's emotional state in a proper blind test, but was chosen as the slowest speed that people didn't hurl from watching a movie. But that just happened to be the best speed possible.
Don't mind the double quote, you're arguments are worth reading and I won't pick nits as long as you don't start complaining about my spelling.
They lost at least as many from my circle of friends over the cd check in Diablo 2 and their reply to me when I couldn't get it working. "Get a new CD drive."
If two people who have both vowed to never buy from them again, and who influence their friends, have seen this and posted on Slashdot, how many more people do you think have done the same and not bothered to tell anyone?
You're saying that because heroin has less effects as time goes on, and because desperately hooked druggies will do anything to replay the only good feelings they've had, that you don't think declining stimulus ever functions to discourage use?
One thing about MDMA and LSD that would make this more pronounced is that overdoses tend to not be more intense. You burn all your serotonin and it's over, even if you took three times the required dose. There's no gain to be had from increasing the dose. These drugs also aren't euphoric so people tend to not get addicted to them in the same way.
At this level, it's about like doing anything non-drug related. Watch a good TV show, get hooked. The quality on the later episodes drops and you go off to do something else. You can't just watch two back-to-back to get the old feelings back, so there's no incentive to over-indulge. It was never "better than sex" so you may miss it, but not in a gut-wrenching way.
That sums up what my friends who took acid say. They never made a decision to quit, but they just started doing it less and less and then it had been years since they had used it. Compare to marijuana which doesn't work like this. The effect doesn't decrease so people who liked it keep using it. But, it's not euphoric so people don't get hooked like they would with heroin.
Slow motion is different that normal motion displayed on 24hz flash-cards.
And yes *know* that there's a difference in how people perceive things based on cues like framerate and widescreen, etc. Much the same as how some people are nostalgic for crappy theatre seats and the sounds of people nibbling popcorn. Hey, I have happy memories myself from going to the theatre when I was young, but I'm not willing to drag all new movies down to 70s tech just to feed my nostalgia.
I haven't seen any studies that suggest there's any reason, other than familiarity and nostalgia for the differing feeling people get when they watch the same video at slower framerates. (Well, and motion sickness from the crappy way motion appears on the big-screen.) Shouldn't people get over it and experience new media for itself?
It's like people who don't like e-books because they don't have the smell and texture of paper!?! I can see not liking the look of the screen as much, or the larger form factor, etc, but to dislike it simply because it doesn't have a side-effect of the old media is ridiculous. What's important to these people, the story or the smell of paper? Might I suggest that they relax at night with a ream of paper instead of a book, the story certainly seems unrelated to their enjoyment.
Adding grain to a digital image is good for one thing only. It makes the image look like it came from film. That's good if you're doing special effects for a film movie and want them to blend in, but it's a stupid idea to just add grain because movies always had it and thus should always have it.
What if film hadn't been grainy, would we have had to invent photoshop grain filters just to be able to produce an artistic film?
Should we run around adding an unpleasant hiss to all our music too, just so vinyl fans are happy? Or, should we use improved technology that takes us one step closer to being there and not handicap it?
Obviously because the universe functions in such a way that dramatic motion pictures lose all impact when displayed at any framerate other than 24fps. Has to do with the resonance of cesium atoms I think.
Or, it could simply be that enough people are sentimental about movies and have had a lifetime of conditioning by crappy TV shows that they equate jerky framerates with impressive production values.
I've also heard that movie cameras are much nicer to work with, for doing anything beyond well lit studio work. A wider variety of lenses, better controls, etc. So anyone trying to do a dark moody show like X-Files will find movie gear better suited, and with movie gear comes movie framerates.
I've seen 48fps movies, and 24fps movies. I'm not attached to either one for old sentimental reasons, so I pick the one that produced the best picture. But people are getting into fuzzy intangibles to try to explain their reluctance to switch to something better.
"You can't do that, I'm used to the flicker because I've been watching them that way since the 50s."
Do you think it's supposed to be an integral part of the experience, or can you realize that it only "helps" because some people are stuck in the past. It's like vinyl, some people have trouble enjoying music without a background hiss because all the music they listened to for twenty years had the hiss. Doesn't mean the hiss is good though.
You calculation ignores that you essentially get a 16mp b&w image, then you use the color data to interpolate the color across the image, getting much more quality than 4 million RGB sample.
The 16 million single samples record much more spatial detail, making the picture much sharper, at a cost of slightly less accurate color reproduction. It's the same tradeoff that JPEG/MPEG compression makes; the human eye is less sensitive to slight color differences than to brightness differences and spatial detail.
Dividing by two is a more accurate rule of thumb for comparing between the sensor types. An 16mp regular (bayer pattern) sensor is roughly equivalent to a 8mp stacked sensor, assuming you weight the factors about evenly (bit lower resolution, bit better color, etc).
Already 11mp bayer sensors are putting all but the most expensive film (and expensive processing/scanning) to shame. The Canon EOS-1Ds produces incredibly detailed pictures. Sure, it's not 24fps (it's 4 I think) but I don't think it'll be long before this quality is available at higher speeds. Digital tech can already replace film, but it'll be perhaps five years before everyone except the luddites has switched.
I've seen the 48fps test video, right after the 24fps normal sample. The 48fps was clear, following motion was easy, there wasn't the eyestrain associated with normal movies. You can talk all day about how it's proved, but when it directly contradicts evidence I see for myself, you're not very credible.
Everything is being starting to be done in 24fps widescreen because people have been trained to accept it as higher quality just because it's more like a movie. And it's not like regular TV quality is anything exceptional, NTSC has lousy color, interlaced video blurs everything, and so on.
As for color, film's dead baby. Check out the film/digital comparison on Luminous Landscape, or just sample pictures from a high end digital camera on dpreview.com. Some film manages to beat digital in some areas, but only if you use a high end scanner for every frame ($$) and then only in one area. Digitals are very grain (noise) free, film on the other hand can be either smooth, but have no detail, or sharp, but have grain, or have great color, but have grain, or be incredibly slow (needs a lot of light) and be only somewhat grainy, but impossible to use for anything moving unless you're in the desert sun.
If 60fps (really, 30i) feels like a sitcom, I suggest that you watch too much TV and are easily conditioned. There's *NO* way that frame rate equates to drama in some fundamental way. You're simply used to 24 in movies and 30i in TV.
You simply need to get over it. Drama isn't a number, drama isn't crappy grainy film, drama is plot and character and acting.
I don't want luddites dictating the limits of technology, simply because they're used to the old way.
They understood that it was dead stupid, yet they allowed 1.1 devices (a device that is fully 1.1 compliant, but has no support for anything added in 2.0) to be called USB2.0 so they deserve what they get.
If they aren't out on the front lines, trying to clean the mess up, offering ways for consumers to differentiate, they obviously don't care much.
> No 1.1 devices can do 480 Mbps.
Well duh, of course not. But if a device can't do 480mbps it's not *fully* compliant with the 2.0 spec. Get it? FULLY COMPLIANT! USB2.0 is advertised as 480mbps, NOT as 1.5, 12, and 480mbps with no way to determine the speed (in a useful way, "high/full speed" does not count). Consumers are told that 2.0 is 480mbps, if a device isn't 480mbps it's either not fully compliant, or the consortium lied to customers.
If something doesn't support ATA100 transfer speeds, it's not ATA100, even if you can plug it into the ATA100 controller. The ATA100 spec may describe how to build a slower device, but while that device does not deviate from the spec at all, does not support all of the spec.
Finally, nobody gives a damn, not even a tiny little bit, about what the USB group does. They can refer to USB1.1 as USB2.0 but that merely means that the official body is wrong, not that black is white.
You're trying to say that market speak is correct, because the marketers are defining the terms. I'm saying that whatever they want USB2.0 to cover, they can't make a subset of that (what used to be called USB1.1) equivalent to full USB2.0, it's like trying to say that a cat is the same as the cardboard box, merely because the cat can be fully contained by a cardboard box. You might find it meaningfull, even insightful, but you're still wrong and the rest of the world will mock you.
If everyone is doing something, society obviously doesn't see it as wrong.
In other words, if strict application of your laws would make criminals of 90% of your citizens, it's a bad law.
Note, that asking "But, without a law to prevent X, how would the Y industry survive?" is missing the point. If the majority of people are doing something that would kill an industry, the questions should be, "what does the Y industry do that warrants preventing the people from X?"
Does a USB 1.1 device communicate at 480mbps? If not it's not fully compliant.
But, you USB people seem to have a problem with full. Full means maximum, the most, as much as it could be, and so forth. Making "Full Speed" slower than "Hi Speed" is remarkably stupid. It's only reasonable in the USB1.1 context, where 12mbps is full USB1.1 speed. Thus further destroys your position.
If you have two standards, one a subset of the other, it's incorrect to call the subset by the name of the full spec. The USB consortium may do so, but they're not using the same language that the rest of the planet uses.
It's like saying that because IP is covered by a TCP/IP spec, that IP is really TCP/IP.
In reality, these are USB1.1 devices that are no more now than when 1.1 was written. Calling them 2.0 devices, which a qualifier, implies that they support the whole spec.
What I am opposed to is the phrase "Intellectual Property" and the assumptions people make based on the work "Property".
Knowledge isn't property, all the bad MP3->Car Theft analogies won't make it so. Knowledge is something that can be copied for free. Watching someone do something teaches you how to do it.
I think monopoly grants should be used to encourage sharing of what would otherwise be hoarded. We don't need to encourage sharing of that which can't be hoarded, so we shouldn't grant monopoly rights on it, it'll take care of itself if we simply sit back and watch.
I like your first-post analogy. It's really quite appropriate, easy things that nobody else has gotten around to yet aren't worthy of a patent. They should enforce the "advances the state of the art" section. And, as you say, creating any easy system to challenge these bogus patents would help a lot.
So you rip the 'load' code from the application and use it in a file translator. It may be a real pain, but you (or you consultant) only have to do it once.
If it was proprietary software you'd have to reverse engineer that format, then write both halves of the translator. Much more work.
And sure, people are still using Oracle 6 years later. But just try to use Windows XP years later, Microsoft won't be helping you active it, but you can bet they'll still be suing anyone who write a crack for it. And they're planning on writing forced expiry code into their later OSes, for your protection!
The trick is that very rarely is 100% of what you do required for your overall job.
If document layout can't be as complex in one language as another, it probably doesn't impact your job or building widgets, or even documenting the build process for widgets. You simply have less styles of bullets to select from.
If a tool doesn't do something you *need*, don't use it. But be fair in evaluation. What really needs to be done, and what is just being done because those particular bells and whistles came for free with the old software?
Nobody is going to code up company-specific code just for the fun of it. If you business wants an ordering system, or a web application to do pricing calculations for their specific product, they're going to require a programmer to do it.
Even if the free applications do everything, someone will want a skin/theme for one that makes it easier to do the things their company does.
It won't be a huge software project like working on MS Office now, but it'll still pay a wage, probably a fairly good one. While the barriers to entry are dropping, programming still takes a certain mindset that most people don't have.
Nah. There's no need. The goal of most open source supporters seems to be weakening Microsoft's (and Oracle's in its area, etc) strangehold on the industry. When there are viable alternatives to Microsoft's products, when Microsoft can't lock you in anymore, the job is done.
At that point, the playing field has been levelled and you can't force users to upgrade by obsoleting the file formats their application produces, or demand unreasonable terms in an EULA. Microsoft office is actually quite nice (mainly Excel) and if it wasn't for the proprietary file formats (and the fact they change them to force "upgrades") it would be a perfectly reasonable choice. Let MS charge what a free market will bear.
Once this is accomplished, and it's not far away, Microsoft becomes a bit player, a 800-pound gorilla of a bit player, but still without any ability to dictate to the industry. There's no reason to make the libraries GPL at this point.
There's also the issue that libraries would be hard to enforce the GPL on, if they're a critical piece of a system copyright and trademark law take a back-seat to allowing inter-operability. (You can't put a trademarked string "Linux(tm) Rocks!" and make it a required signature in a binary, without making it generic (in that context it's just a file signature, not a trademark) so everyone is free to include it in their binaries.) Similarly, the strength of the GPL is that it derivative works are forbidden by copyright law. I think it's likely that a court would rule that you couldn't copyright an API description (it's not creative, it's the underlying code that's creative, the description is just factual) and as you code your program you use an API description, not the code underneath, so you probably don't create a derivative work.
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I too did a bit of looking and I can't find anything more concrete than opinions, on either side of the debate.
:)
I have no idea how animation would work either way, for lack of motion-blur and all, but if it were me, I'd do it at 24fps (or less) just so I didn't have to take so many pictures!
I am actually a Red Dwarf fan, but I can't say that 7th season looked that different, or for reasons other than progressively better costumes, plots, acting, anyway. I haven't seen all of 7th season though. (I don't have a TV.)
I've seen trailers for Babylon 5 that didn't have much drama, and they were camcordered off of a big screen presentation, but I just assumed it was the lousy sound and the flicker. There could be something to the framerate, but it just seems wrong. It's a hunch though, no real evidence.
TV isn't really 60fps though, and I wonder if part of what makes TV feel less dramatic (if it does...) is the interlaced video.
As to why professional cameras run at 24fps, and nobody had done things in a better way, it could easily be interia. There are a lot of tech decisions that were made because things had always been done that way instead of on the merits of the tech. Especially because it'd be hard for a camera company to change the whole film industry.
I'm not boycotting Blizzard because of bnet.d, though that's not a bad reason.
I'm simply never buying another thing from a company who puts the burden of supporting their cd-check on the customer. I bought Diablo 2 from them and the cd-check always failed. Turned out it didn't like my burner (my only cd drive). I emailed Blizzard and their response was "Buy a new CD drive". Fuckers. Of course the store I bought the game at wouldn't take it back.
Later I found all this was for naught, D2 sucked ass anyways. Well, it's an expensive lesson, but I'll never buy anything they do again, and I'll tell people my story so they know what sort of treatment they'll get if they have a problem.
What a cop-out. I can't research your lies. Take a hike troll.
There are times that adding noise, to hide compression artifacts for instance works, but a good technician won't do it in the superstitious way you advocate, just because "white noise makes it sound better."
It's similar to lowering the absolute quality of video by smoothing, to hide distinctive blockiness.
Grain on the other hand is random crap that gets thrown in, want it or not. Digital cameras do have noise, but medium to high-end ones tend to produce less noise than film at the same ASA produces in grain. And digital cameras are getting better every year.
As for "being there", you may go to pretentious art films, but everyone else goes to a movie to see what the camera was pointed at, not obnoxious artifacts of the film process. What's next? In twenty years are film snobs going to wax poetic about old MPEG2 and its "warmth"?
I've seen a ton of talk about slow framerates and none of it has said anything about inate psychological reasons. People talk as if they exist, but they get quiet when asked to provide evidence.
Even you are just providing anecdotal evidence. Lexx is shot in 50fps, Lexx looks cheap... Lexx looks cheap, imho, because it's done on a standard BBC budget.
Then, you say that every TV drama today is shot in 24fps, but this could easily be for either of the reasons I mentioned: 1) peer pressure, 2) better cameras and tools.
Sure, it could be that 24fps is more dramatic than 30i, but the only thing you've suggested to support that is motion blur. Motion blur is caused by the shutter speed, not the framerate the shots are displayed at. Even assuming though that 24fps video is shot with a 1/24th second shutter, you'd do the same for 60fps video, shooting with a 1/60th shutter. There'd be less motion blur, but it'd be displayed for less time, so it'd blend between the frames just as well.
You really need to look at how ridiculous the argument is. Video just isn't as dramatic at 24 frames per second, a speed which was chosen not by monitoring people's emotional state in a proper blind test, but was chosen as the slowest speed that people didn't hurl from watching a movie. But that just happened to be the best speed possible.
Don't mind the double quote, you're arguments are worth reading and I won't pick nits as long as you don't start complaining about my spelling.
They lost at least as many from my circle of friends over the cd check in Diablo 2 and their reply to me when I couldn't get it working. "Get a new CD drive."
If two people who have both vowed to never buy from them again, and who influence their friends, have seen this and posted on Slashdot, how many more people do you think have done the same and not bothered to tell anyone?
You're saying that because heroin has less effects as time goes on, and because desperately hooked druggies will do anything to replay the only good feelings they've had, that you don't think declining stimulus ever functions to discourage use?
One thing about MDMA and LSD that would make this more pronounced is that overdoses tend to not be more intense. You burn all your serotonin and it's over, even if you took three times the required dose. There's no gain to be had from increasing the dose. These drugs also aren't euphoric so people tend to not get addicted to them in the same way.
At this level, it's about like doing anything non-drug related. Watch a good TV show, get hooked. The quality on the later episodes drops and you go off to do something else. You can't just watch two back-to-back to get the old feelings back, so there's no incentive to over-indulge. It was never "better than sex" so you may miss it, but not in a gut-wrenching way.
That sums up what my friends who took acid say. They never made a decision to quit, but they just started doing it less and less and then it had been years since they had used it. Compare to marijuana which doesn't work like this. The effect doesn't decrease so people who liked it keep using it. But, it's not euphoric so people don't get hooked like they would with heroin.
Slow motion is different that normal motion displayed on 24hz flash-cards.
And yes *know* that there's a difference in how people perceive things based on cues like framerate and widescreen, etc. Much the same as how some people are nostalgic for crappy theatre seats and the sounds of people nibbling popcorn. Hey, I have happy memories myself from going to the theatre when I was young, but I'm not willing to drag all new movies down to 70s tech just to feed my nostalgia.
I haven't seen any studies that suggest there's any reason, other than familiarity and nostalgia for the differing feeling people get when they watch the same video at slower framerates. (Well, and motion sickness from the crappy way motion appears on the big-screen.) Shouldn't people get over it and experience new media for itself?
It's like people who don't like e-books because they don't have the smell and texture of paper!?! I can see not liking the look of the screen as much, or the larger form factor, etc, but to dislike it simply because it doesn't have a side-effect of the old media is ridiculous. What's important to these people, the story or the smell of paper? Might I suggest that they relax at night with a ream of paper instead of a book, the story certainly seems unrelated to their enjoyment.
Adding grain to a digital image is good for one thing only. It makes the image look like it came from film. That's good if you're doing special effects for a film movie and want them to blend in, but it's a stupid idea to just add grain because movies always had it and thus should always have it.
What if film hadn't been grainy, would we have had to invent photoshop grain filters just to be able to produce an artistic film?
Should we run around adding an unpleasant hiss to all our music too, just so vinyl fans are happy? Or, should we use improved technology that takes us one step closer to being there and not handicap it?
Obviously because the universe functions in such a way that dramatic motion pictures lose all impact when displayed at any framerate other than 24fps. Has to do with the resonance of cesium atoms I think.
Or, it could simply be that enough people are sentimental about movies and have had a lifetime of conditioning by crappy TV shows that they equate jerky framerates with impressive production values.
I've also heard that movie cameras are much nicer to work with, for doing anything beyond well lit studio work. A wider variety of lenses, better controls, etc. So anyone trying to do a dark moody show like X-Files will find movie gear better suited, and with movie gear comes movie framerates.
I've seen 48fps movies, and 24fps movies. I'm not attached to either one for old sentimental reasons, so I pick the one that produced the best picture. But people are getting into fuzzy intangibles to try to explain their reluctance to switch to something better.
"You can't do that, I'm used to the flicker because I've been watching them that way since the 50s."
Adding grain to an image is the silliest thing.
Do you think it's supposed to be an integral part of the experience, or can you realize that it only "helps" because some people are stuck in the past. It's like vinyl, some people have trouble enjoying music without a background hiss because all the music they listened to for twenty years had the hiss. Doesn't mean the hiss is good though.
You calculation ignores that you essentially get a 16mp b&w image, then you use the color data to interpolate the color across the image, getting much more quality than 4 million RGB sample.
The 16 million single samples record much more spatial detail, making the picture much sharper, at a cost of slightly less accurate color reproduction. It's the same tradeoff that JPEG/MPEG compression makes; the human eye is less sensitive to slight color differences than to brightness differences and spatial detail.
Dividing by two is a more accurate rule of thumb for comparing between the sensor types. An 16mp regular (bayer pattern) sensor is roughly equivalent to a 8mp stacked sensor, assuming you weight the factors about evenly (bit lower resolution, bit better color, etc).
Already 11mp bayer sensors are putting all but the most expensive film (and expensive processing/scanning) to shame. The Canon EOS-1Ds produces incredibly detailed pictures. Sure, it's not 24fps (it's 4 I think) but I don't think it'll be long before this quality is available at higher speeds. Digital tech can already replace film, but it'll be perhaps five years before everyone except the luddites has switched.
I've seen the 48fps test video, right after the 24fps normal sample. The 48fps was clear, following motion was easy, there wasn't the eyestrain associated with normal movies. You can talk all day about how it's proved, but when it directly contradicts evidence I see for myself, you're not very credible.
Everything is being starting to be done in 24fps widescreen because people have been trained to accept it as higher quality just because it's more like a movie. And it's not like regular TV quality is anything exceptional, NTSC has lousy color, interlaced video blurs everything, and so on.
As for color, film's dead baby. Check out the film/digital comparison on Luminous Landscape, or just sample pictures from a high end digital camera on dpreview.com. Some film manages to beat digital in some areas, but only if you use a high end scanner for every frame ($$) and then only in one area. Digitals are very grain (noise) free, film on the other hand can be either smooth, but have no detail, or sharp, but have grain, or have great color, but have grain, or be incredibly slow (needs a lot of light) and be only somewhat grainy, but impossible to use for anything moving unless you're in the desert sun.
If 60fps (really, 30i) feels like a sitcom, I suggest that you watch too much TV and are easily conditioned. There's *NO* way that frame rate equates to drama in some fundamental way. You're simply used to 24 in movies and 30i in TV.
You simply need to get over it. Drama isn't a number, drama isn't crappy grainy film, drama is plot and character and acting.
I don't want luddites dictating the limits of technology, simply because they're used to the old way.
They understood that it was dead stupid, yet they allowed 1.1 devices (a device that is fully 1.1 compliant, but has no support for anything added in 2.0) to be called USB2.0 so they deserve what they get.
If they aren't out on the front lines, trying to clean the mess up, offering ways for consumers to differentiate, they obviously don't care much.
> No 1.1 devices can do 480 Mbps.
Well duh, of course not. But if a device can't do 480mbps it's not *fully* compliant with the 2.0 spec. Get it? FULLY COMPLIANT! USB2.0 is advertised as 480mbps, NOT as 1.5, 12, and 480mbps with no way to determine the speed (in a useful way, "high/full speed" does not count). Consumers are told that 2.0 is 480mbps, if a device isn't 480mbps it's either not fully compliant, or the consortium lied to customers.
If something doesn't support ATA100 transfer speeds, it's not ATA100, even if you can plug it into the ATA100 controller. The ATA100 spec may describe how to build a slower device, but while that device does not deviate from the spec at all, does not support all of the spec.
Finally, nobody gives a damn, not even a tiny little bit, about what the USB group does. They can refer to USB1.1 as USB2.0 but that merely means that the official body is wrong, not that black is white.
You're trying to say that market speak is correct, because the marketers are defining the terms. I'm saying that whatever they want USB2.0 to cover, they can't make a subset of that (what used to be called USB1.1) equivalent to full USB2.0, it's like trying to say that a cat is the same as the cardboard box, merely because the cat can be fully contained by a cardboard box. You might find it meaningfull, even insightful, but you're still wrong and the rest of the world will mock you.
If everyone is doing something, society obviously doesn't see it as wrong.
In other words, if strict application of your laws would make criminals of 90% of your citizens, it's a bad law.
Note, that asking "But, without a law to prevent X, how would the Y industry survive?" is missing the point. If the majority of people are doing something that would kill an industry, the questions should be, "what does the Y industry do that warrants preventing the people from X?"
Does a USB 1.1 device communicate at 480mbps? If not it's not fully compliant.
But, you USB people seem to have a problem with full. Full means maximum, the most, as much as it could be, and so forth. Making "Full Speed" slower than "Hi Speed" is remarkably stupid. It's only reasonable in the USB1.1 context, where 12mbps is full USB1.1 speed. Thus further destroys your position.
Shill.
Wronger.
If you have two standards, one a subset of the other, it's incorrect to call the subset by the name of the full spec. The USB consortium may do so, but they're not using the same language that the rest of the planet uses.
It's like saying that because IP is covered by a TCP/IP spec, that IP is really TCP/IP.
In reality, these are USB1.1 devices that are no more now than when 1.1 was written. Calling them 2.0 devices, which a qualifier, implies that they support the whole spec.
What I am opposed to is the phrase "Intellectual Property" and the assumptions people make based on the work "Property".
Knowledge isn't property, all the bad MP3->Car Theft analogies won't make it so. Knowledge is something that can be copied for free. Watching someone do something teaches you how to do it.
I think monopoly grants should be used to encourage sharing of what would otherwise be hoarded. We don't need to encourage sharing of that which can't be hoarded, so we shouldn't grant monopoly rights on it, it'll take care of itself if we simply sit back and watch.
I like your first-post analogy. It's really quite appropriate, easy things that nobody else has gotten around to yet aren't worthy of a patent. They should enforce the "advances the state of the art" section. And, as you say, creating any easy system to challenge these bogus patents would help a lot.
So you rip the 'load' code from the application and use it in a file translator. It may be a real pain, but you (or you consultant) only have to do it once.
If it was proprietary software you'd have to reverse engineer that format, then write both halves of the translator. Much more work.
And sure, people are still using Oracle 6 years later. But just try to use Windows XP years later, Microsoft won't be helping you active it, but you can bet they'll still be suing anyone who write a crack for it. And they're planning on writing forced expiry code into their later OSes, for your protection!
The trick is that very rarely is 100% of what you do required for your overall job.
If document layout can't be as complex in one language as another, it probably doesn't impact your job or building widgets, or even documenting the build process for widgets. You simply have less styles of bullets to select from.
If a tool doesn't do something you *need*, don't use it. But be fair in evaluation. What really needs to be done, and what is just being done because those particular bells and whistles came for free with the old software?
Nobody will want new software in 100 years?
Nobody is going to code up company-specific code just for the fun of it. If you business wants an ordering system, or a web application to do pricing calculations for their specific product, they're going to require a programmer to do it.
Even if the free applications do everything, someone will want a skin/theme for one that makes it easier to do the things their company does.
It won't be a huge software project like working on MS Office now, but it'll still pay a wage, probably a fairly good one. While the barriers to entry are dropping, programming still takes a certain mindset that most people don't have.
Nah. There's no need. The goal of most open source supporters seems to be weakening Microsoft's (and Oracle's in its area, etc) strangehold on the industry. When there are viable alternatives to Microsoft's products, when Microsoft can't lock you in anymore, the job is done.
At that point, the playing field has been levelled and you can't force users to upgrade by obsoleting the file formats their application produces, or demand unreasonable terms in an EULA. Microsoft office is actually quite nice (mainly Excel) and if it wasn't for the proprietary file formats (and the fact they change them to force "upgrades") it would be a perfectly reasonable choice. Let MS charge what a free market will bear.
Once this is accomplished, and it's not far away, Microsoft becomes a bit player, a 800-pound gorilla of a bit player, but still without any ability to dictate to the industry. There's no reason to make the libraries GPL at this point.
There's also the issue that libraries would be hard to enforce the GPL on, if they're a critical piece of a system copyright and trademark law take a back-seat to allowing inter-operability. (You can't put a trademarked string "Linux(tm) Rocks!" and make it a required signature in a binary, without making it generic (in that context it's just a file signature, not a trademark) so everyone is free to include it in their binaries.) Similarly, the strength of the GPL is that it derivative works are forbidden by copyright law. I think it's likely that a court would rule that you couldn't copyright an API description (it's not creative, it's the underlying code that's creative, the description is just factual) and as you code your program you use an API description, not the code underneath, so you probably don't create a derivative work.