The UK iPod owner was not forced to sign the NDA, he made the choice to do so in exchange for a new iPod. If anything, he whored himself out for new gizmo.
Soooooo.... in other words, Apple thinks that human rights and consumer rights are somehow mutually exclusive, and you can not have one while having the other?
And demanding a replacement for a defective product still within warranty is called "whoring out" these days?
If you have to give up your human rights to have your basic consumer rights upheld... that, if anything, shows that the company has a problem.
In a reasonable world, people should the right to get the replacement for a clearly defective product if it's still within warranty - and have the right to speak their mind about that matter.
Doom failed because they chose to use horrible Wrestlers that turned into really bad actors...
I don't usually go for spelling nitpicks, but why capitalise "wrestlers"? Is that some sort of high-fantasy reference? "And lo, it came to pass that Orcs marched against the combined might of Men, Elves, Dwarves, and Wrestlers..."
That would have been a lot more impressive if it was a real quote, and not just a quote from a video game.
Yeah, I bet you say the same thing when people quote Nineteen Eighty-Four. I mean, it's just a novel. Fiction can't produce words to live by, right? Right?
In that case, use DVI for binaries and LaTeX2e for raw ASCII.
There's a reason why TeX variants produce PDF files now: PDF has specific advantages over DVI. Namely, other apps besides TeX are using it, the files are readable outside your particular system far more reliably (ever tried to share DVI files that have any fonts that are not Computer Modern? Expect fun.) The reader software is everywhere, and you can do far more interesting things with PDF.
DVI isn't analogous to ePub. It's analogous to, say, the Plucker format: a program-specific format that was adequate at the time, but the standardised variants have now surpassed it in other areas.
The problem in this case is that the license allows conversion of the font to any other license or public domain once it is embedded in a document. The license explicitly says that it no longer applies once the font's embedded. And the authors didn't realize that if you extract the font from the document, the license doesn't come back!
I thought that was a feature.
Fonts are very funny in that they're a form of art that is meant to be used by people to create more art. It starts off as the typographer's amazing work of art... but once it's on the page, it's no longer just the typographer's work of art: it's part of another work of art. And no one pays attention to the poor typographer after that point... apart of typography geeks, of course.
Aside of the fact that you can recover the original font data easily through embedding and you don't need to trace outlines or anything, how is embedding any different from actual use of the font in typesetting?
Wouldn't it be awesome if there was a license that only covered the distribution of font files, but that would also guarantee the users that the fonts can be used for any purpose and if you're just an user of the font, you don't have to worry about legal aspects... the kind of a basic freedom the open source licenses are supposed to guarantee, right?
Here in Finland, an outside support organisation bought a bunch of Wii consoles and Wii Fit games for various army garrisons. This was met with some initial scepticism, of course, but apparently the thing has turned out to be a success.
In recent years, the army has been forced to figure out how to give the new conscripts who are in really bad shape (blah blah blah, moral and physical decay in youth today, yadda yadda yadda) a bit softer landing so they don't completely break themselves apart during the basic training, and this has played toward that goal too. The worst couch potatoes get Nordic walking instead of morning sprints.
Actually, using the MPAA's example, wouldn't it be more like $100k per person per viewing?
No, ??AA math would say $100k per theater PLUS $100k per viewer... and additional $100k per every viewer who walked out during the movie, because they watched the movie fast! (It's valid.)
google already does that on youtube and google docs
As do a lot of other sites. Tons of sites have put out user warnings about IE 6.
I keep running into IE 6 warnings when I browse the web with the original Nintendo DS browser (which puts IE 6 in user-agent, because Opera guys were a little bit crazy in the head that way).
Welcome to 2010, if it's not encoded at 1080p nobody cares.
I'd say: Welcome to 2010, can I please get some content already? I don't care if it's blurry YouTube 360p mush or what, I'd appreciate something. Anything. It's not like Chris-chan needs a goddamn top-of-the-line HD stuff to express his powerful rhetoric.
The whole quality issue is pointless politicking that's costing us time. They're all video formats that are basically adequate for time being. Just stick to some format that can be implemented and be done with it. If MPEG-LA's greed will always keep H.264 from being a web standard, that's their headache.
(Warning: Contains far more than usual amount of fuming.)
There's only one chance to make a first impression. MPEG-LA just used theirs, in relation to the WebM. And good grief, what did that reveal.
The MPEG-LA wants patent-encumbered video format as a web standard. That'd allow them to rake in the money. The whole "H.264 is free of charge for time being" thing is a giant big smokescreen. Google is already allowing VP8 to be freely used in perpetuity; in light of that, what other purpose than long-term plan to start charging for the whole thing would MPEG-LA's patent pool have than to start charging for the stuff after all? If they really wanted a free standard, they'd just leave Google alone.
This attitude alone, in my opinion, weighs far more than any technological merit H.264 has. MPEG-LA not in to produce any sort of amicable, altruistic solution to the whole thing. They're not interested in creating a standard that could be used royalty-free. Take any further tokens of niceness with a grain of salt.
Pardon me for getting a little bit cynical here: Part of me wants to say "December 31, 2015 is the day people will start paying for H.264 Internet production and streaming", but since the chance that we'll ever see a HTML5 video standard due to bullshit just like this is close to zero, it's all academic anyway and nothing remarkable will ever happen.
The OS community wishes to show off what blender and other OS tools are capable of creating
There's another point too: push the envelope. Part of the budget goes to the manhours needed to develop new features in Blender. Sintel will be followed up by a boatload of awesome stuff in Blender 2.5 branch.
Why would anyone purchase a creative commons movie?
Because they liked it? Because they want to support the creators in a direct way?
There's also always the fact that you get a physical artefact. For example, I have the DVDs from the Star Wreck folks. Yeah, I could have just downloaded the Star Wreck 6 when it was out, but heck, if you've waited the film to come out for years, getting a physical DVD from the creators before the thing officially hits the net is still as awesome as ever.
I mean, I have the original Star Wreck videos as crappy home-burned VCDs from years gone by. Extremely smudgy inkjet covers and marker labelling looks a little bit corny when compared to the actual printed DVD covers and factory-made DVDs. =)
* No matter how much you wish to use them, Battlesmasher Alliance, Fightmace Alliance, and Pewpewbangbang Friends are registered trademark copyright properties of Games Workshop and may not be used for any reason whatsoever in any third party materials.
Didn't TSR try to pull something like this back in the day? They went on registering trademarks for a bunch of stuff that had "Dragon" in the title and even produced some lame products that used those trademarks, just to fend off all people who were trying to ride on the D&D's publicity.
Did anyone else read this as comparing Cassandra from King's Quest and Voldemort from Harry Potter?
I was expecting something about Cassandra producing a bunch of warnings in log files that no one ever bothers to read, and Voldemort having various problems managing the child processes in the cluster (mostly being unable to kill or reap them).
What does that even mean? So you host porn. And you admit some of it is unnecessary. And the ratio of unnecessary porn to necessary porn is too high? WTF?! Just stop hosting porn, or STFU.
Now, imagine what the situation was if the user community would not discourage such activity. Every picture should be accurately categorised, be of sensible quality, have accurate license data, and so on and so forth. And, of course, because of the nature of the images, there should also be a reasonable expectation that the images should be coming from copyright holders and that they're under proper licenses. You know, bog-ordinary routine things that have to be done.
Your job, should you accept it, should be to tend to hundreds of pictures of dongolongos every. blessed. day.
There's got to be some point where you start asking "you know, this is a whole lot of dongolongos. I sure hope we can find proper encyclopedic usage for all this high-quality, well-documented image material."
If you can find a proper, systematic, encyclopedic use for thousands of cockpics, sure, go right ahead and apply that knowledge for best interests to further human knowledge. Folks at Wikimedia Commons, however, appear to have found enough of those pictures for proper encyclopedic use.
First and most important, we think it is the best available video codec today for HTML5 for our customers.
That's what Microsoft said about their brand of JavaScript. And, of course, ActiveX. Those things fared really well... for certain definitions of "well" that have absolutely nothing to do with open Web standards.
H.264 also provides the best certainty and clarity with respect to legal rights from the many companies that have patents in this area.
In other words "Theora could be patented, you just don't know that." FUDdy rubbish. You want the best certainty and clarity with respect to legal rights? Don't implement any goddamn video playback in the browser at all. Hell, since something as innocuous as object embedding bit Microsoft in the rump a while ago, maybe you should refrain from implementing any HTML features at all, if you want absolute best certainty and clarity in this matter!
Plus, since most H.264 licenses I've seen lately all demand that the software should be used for "personal and non-commercial" uses only, how the hell does this convenient, clear and certain license purchase serve Microsoft's customers? Did the IE9 developers buy the proverbial pig in a sack (They wanted "H.264 for everyone for realz" and got "no, not for profit")? Will Microsoft hand free industrial H.264 licenses to all customers, or does IE9's EULA prohibit the video playback in corporate setting?
(...don't mind me, I'm just explaining the other extreme of the FUD-filled video debate.)
The video codec issue would be a simple matter if there were no giant piles of patents to deal with.
Illustrator vs Inkscape = Maybe passable alternative
*sigh* Inkscape is not trying to ape Illustrator. Inkscape is a clone of Xara. And that's the way I like it. The sooner the world can forget an over-complicated monstrosity like Illustrator ever existed, the better. =)
(...Still sort of bitter that the Xara open source project went nowhere, but hey, Inkscape keeps getting more awesome with every release...)
The Adobe suite is a whole, integrated polished set of products.
We don't need a "whole integrated set of products". We don't need a walled-garden comfort zone where we have a set of "working" applications, and when you step outside of that boundary, you start griping about everything.
You're looking for one application that does everything you need. I'm looking for applications that do everything I need. We need to accept the fact that programs may have deficiencies that they make up with extra features. I don't need one application that does everything; I just need applications that do what I need with minimum hassle. If I need to save a file in one program and open it in another, that's generally not slowing me down too much.
I love the GIMP, but I recently really, really started to love MyPaint. MyPaint doesn't do everything The GIMP does. It doesn't claim to do that. It makes it up by focusing on the infinite-canvas/natural-paint-tools features. I need to use both programs, and I accept this isn't a bad thing. I draw sketches on paper, scan in GIMP/XSane, ink and colour in MyPaint and give final touches in GIMP again. No problems.
Yet, I've seen a lot of Photoshop zealots who just can't accept the fact that there's programs out there that might complement their existing set of tools. No infinite canvas in Photoshop? Tough cookies, you're not allowed to leave the comfort zone. Because once you do, you start craving for the missing features in the other programs. Missing features are evil... unless they're missing from Photoshop, in which case you can't mention them. Because the Suite is perfect.
So, we don't want integrated suites. We want an universally implemented set of file formats. This works to some extent; if I want to feed in text data, OpenDocument or HTML copy/paste usually works. Vector images? Just use SVG or export to PDF. Plain old bitmaps? PNG or JPEG. What we really need right now is a commonly agreed multi-layer image format; PSD is generally considered too difficult to implement. GIMP's.xcf isn't implemented any-frigging-where, and no one cares about the formats other OSS apps have for this purpose. I'm hoping OpenRaster will be an interesting direction.
Yeah. People in the tech community have different definitions of the word "open".
It's like saying you have an "open decision-making process" and putting a sound-and-bullet-proof glass in front of the seats for the public (and a microphone in the room and a speaker in the other). Sure, everyone can see and read about the decisions, and that fulfils one definition of "openness" and, if you're in mood for hideous puns, "transparency"... it's just that the outsiders can't take part in the decision-making process itself, which would be what everyone else thinks "open decision-making processes" should be about.
These days, when people hear "open" they expect "compatible with the other 'open' thing we love so much." People have this crazy notion that open standards should be available free-of-charge and everyone should be free to implement them without paying anyone anything.
Oh, hey, Win32 API is an open standard too! You can get a compiler and a dev environment and a reference manual from Microsoft!
Right, young gentlemen, show of hands: how many of you have made... certain object shapes in Super Smash Bros. Brawl's level editor?... Quit blushing now, young lads, this is a serious issue! Surely Nintendo is more conservative about these issues than Microsoft! Out with it!
In other words, I think such fears are sort of justified, but *ahem* sufficiently motivated people can, and will, find ways around the limitations, so I think Microsoft is being more than a little bit too strict here.
Microsoft seems to be the antithesis of free especially when you look at their Xbox network. They don't allow user-generated content at all.
Halo 3? Trials HD? And that's just a few on top of my head, from Microsoft-published games. Granted, more than slightly lame compared to mods in PC games, but still, some user-generated content is better than no content at all...
This is news because by submitting the file format to a standards body, Microsoft promised interoperability to everyone. No one is getting the interoperability. The news isn't that it's business as usual in Microsoft: it's news that now they've clearly and demonstrably screwed things up for everyone, big time. They promised to the developers we'd get an interoperable standard - we didn't get one. They promised to the governments that their software would implement an international standard - and it doesn't.
In other words: "Microsoft implements a horrible file format" isn't news. "Microsoft promised everybody not to implement a horrible file format and implemented it anyway" isn't news either, but it's not something that can be easily shrugged away either.
Quick recap of the situation so far:
Geeks: "We want everybody in the governments to use interoperable software."
Government: "Good idea! What do you suggest?"
Geeks: "Well, OpenDocument is an ISO standard..."
Government: "Sounds good! And looks like the most complete suite to implement OpenDocument is free of charge. Thanks, geeks! We'll save a ton of money!"
Microsoft: "Er... damn it! Why does this always happen when we're asleep for a while. Ahem! Hold your horses! We want the Government to use our software!"
Government: "Does your application implement an ISO standard? We already fell in love with this idea."
Microsoft: "Uh... no! But you just wait a while, we'll standardize our file formats! To the ISO!"
Geeks: "Gee, I wonder how this works out."
Microsoft: "We're standardizing this stuff! Woo-hoo!"
Geeks: "God damn it, this standard of yours is a steaming pile of horse crap."
Government: "Can someone explain to me what's going on? Because we're clueless."
ISO: "This standard is a steaming pile of horse crap. We'll need to fix this thing."
Microsoft: "Whatever! We're getting standardized! Woo-hoo!"
Geeks: "Sure, you theoretically can polish a turd, but..."
Government: "Ah! How are you people doing? Standardization going fine, I hope? Good good! Carry on!"
Microsoft: "The standard process is over! Time to make it official!"
Geeks: "WTF? This standard is still a gigantic pile of horse crap."
Government: "Oooooooh, look at the weight of this thing. Lots of paper and lots of words. Let's make this an official ISO standard!"
Geeks: "But we already had a perfectly acceptable office document ISO standard! You know, OpenDocument! *sigh* Never mind, you'll never listen anyway."
Geeks: "We tried to implement this bitch, but Microsoft's software keeps using the pre-standard version of the documents."
Microsoft: "Wha? Whuh? We sent our document format to the ISO! Honest!"
Geeks: "You had no idea what that whole process meant, right?"
Microsoft: *blushes* "...Sorry."
Geeks: "We can't build interoperable software if the only major software package to implement implements it completely frigging wrong! You idiots!"
Government: "Hey, guys! What's going on?"
Geeks: "Okay, let's try this again: *ahem* We want everybody in the governments to use interoperable software..."
"...if they could break into the USB drive within two hours. They failed."
Am I completely deluded if I think that if crackers have a physical access to a USB drive, they just may be able to withhold it for more than two hours? Maybe I'm proposing a completely implausible scenario here, but suppose the USB drive has been "stolen" (a term which means "physically removed from the possession of the legitimate owner" for those who don't grok this high-tech security lingo) - in such case, the legitimate owner may, theoretically, need more than 2 hours to recover the USB drive, and the attacker can use a longer period of time to their advantage. I remember reading in the literature that "stolen" USB drives may, in some cases, be recovered days, weeks, months later - and in many cases, they may never be recovered. Whether that qualifies as significantly longer than 2 hours, I don't know. I'm not an expert.
In case you're wondering, no, I don't put much faith in hacking contests, especially if the scenarios they test have small obvious flaws like this. =)
"Hmm. I browse to $cool_new_video_site and it doesn't work. It does work in IE and Chrome. Firefox must be broken, so I'll use IE instead."
How is driving people away a win? The scope here is greater than a video codec.
Yeah! And let's implement ActiveX too! That thing has been driving people to IE for so long, under this exact same line of thought! This is vital for interoperability and future of the Web! Microsoft is behind it, so it's bound to become the new standard any day now!
the so-called Free solution is the wrong choice to make. H.264 has won, and it won years ago.
All right, all right, H.264 won the war.
Now that there's a winner, it's extremely important that everyone implements it. That's the bad side of the having a standard. It's not worth anything until everyone implements it.
So, now, oh victorious winner, please answer this question: How the hell can open source browsers implement H.264?
You see, this debate is not about who "won" the war. It's about which standard can be implemented.
Yes, we know H.264 is superior. Thank you for telling us that over and over. But H.264 proponents have so far failed to explain how the hell can we implement H.264 in any shape or form without requiring weird legal trickery and mysterious booby traps from MPEG-LA's direction.
So quit harping about better quality and hardware support. We already know those things are true. Tell us how we can implement it so we can get over this ridiculous debate already.
Mozilla folks aren't "making a stand". They're just puzzled by the H.264 requirements and can't proceed until they have a clear and unambiguous solution. So please, tell them how they can implement H.264 while complying with both their own license terms and H.264's license terms. Surely now that you have the technical superiority issue settled, you can devote energy on this little legal matter, right?
taking a moral stand with Theora will damage other things, namely HTML5 and potentially Firefox itself.
And taking a pragmatic stance with H.264 will damage the ability of people who are unable to take the same pragmatic stance to implement the standard. Hence, HTML5 will not be implementable uniformly, so the standard suffers. Firefox will be damaged by not being able to implement H.264 anyway, because it's incompatible with their licensing.
PNG won out in the end over GIF, mostly, because it had better features. But what enabled that win was that they could both be used at the same time. If early Mozilla branches simply removed GIF support, the browser would have been dead in the water.
Because the GIF license allowed it to be implemented if you only decode images. Had they not allowed it to be used anyway, as is the case with H.264, well...
The battle over codes needs to be left for another day.
"Let's just use what works now, and spend next 20 years living with that mistake. Everyone else is doing it, why not we?"
As for how to actually implement it, Mozilla et al needs to take a cue from how distros handle MP3 and other patented codecs - foreign "non-free" repositories.
Also known as "swept under the carpet" repositories. Also known as "download it here and we pretend we look away" repositories. Also known as "this code is for research purposes only, wink wink, nudge nudge, if you know what I mean" repositories. Also known as "we pretend that the license problem doesn't exist and sincerely hope MPEG-LA won't get greedy" repositories. Also known as "servers which cannot be hosted in some countries, thus very much building user confidence" repositories. Also known as "the user gets a big ugly disclaimer upon installation and is told that they're using these components under THEIR financial and legal risk" repositories.
So your solution is to just treat this whole thing as a skunkworks problem. "This problem cannot be solved legally, so we have to solve it illegally and let the users take the risk." This is hardly an optimal solution, and will likely blow up in someone's face - be it users, developers or the Mozilla Foundation. Anything better in mind?
"Unlike the Java world that is blossoming with dozens of vibrant Java Virtual Machine implementations, the.NET world has suffered by this meme spread by [Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer] that they would come after people that do not license patents from them."
In practice, the Java community only uses two or three JVMs (IBM's, JRockit, and OpenJDK from Sun), while others are research efforts or smaller-scale open-source projects, said author and consultant Ted Neward. "Virtual machines are not something the open-source community seems to want to experiment with."
::Incredibly slow facepalm::
What the hell kind of rhetorical diversion that was?
"I love air", de Icaza was quoted as saying. "Breathing oxygen is a wonderful thing. I couldn't get through a single day without oxygen."
In practice, oxygen only accounts for about 20% of Earth's atmosphere, said author and consultant Ted Neward. "O2 just isn't something that the open source community wants to inhale frequently."
Tip: Java isn't popular because people work on multiple JVMs (however small in their number they might be). The point de Icaza was making is that Java is popular because there can be multiple JVMs.
Slashdot Mirror
The UK iPod owner was not forced to sign the NDA, he made the choice to do so in exchange for a new iPod. If anything, he whored himself out for new gizmo.
Soooooo.... in other words, Apple thinks that human rights and consumer rights are somehow mutually exclusive, and you can not have one while having the other?
And demanding a replacement for a defective product still within warranty is called "whoring out" these days?
If you have to give up your human rights to have your basic consumer rights upheld... that, if anything, shows that the company has a problem.
In a reasonable world, people should the right to get the replacement for a clearly defective product if it's still within warranty - and have the right to speak their mind about that matter.
Doom failed because they chose to use horrible Wrestlers that turned into really bad actors...
I don't usually go for spelling nitpicks, but why capitalise "wrestlers"? Is that some sort of high-fantasy reference? "And lo, it came to pass that Orcs marched against the combined might of Men, Elves, Dwarves, and Wrestlers..."
That would have been a lot more impressive if it was a real quote, and not just a quote from a video game.
Yeah, I bet you say the same thing when people quote Nineteen Eighty-Four. I mean, it's just a novel. Fiction can't produce words to live by, right? Right?
In that case, use DVI for binaries and LaTeX2e for raw ASCII.
There's a reason why TeX variants produce PDF files now: PDF has specific advantages over DVI. Namely, other apps besides TeX are using it, the files are readable outside your particular system far more reliably (ever tried to share DVI files that have any fonts that are not Computer Modern? Expect fun.) The reader software is everywhere, and you can do far more interesting things with PDF.
DVI isn't analogous to ePub. It's analogous to, say, the Plucker format: a program-specific format that was adequate at the time, but the standardised variants have now surpassed it in other areas.
The problem in this case is that the license allows conversion of the font to any other license or public domain once it is embedded in a document. The license explicitly says that it no longer applies once the font's embedded. And the authors didn't realize that if you extract the font from the document, the license doesn't come back!
I thought that was a feature.
Fonts are very funny in that they're a form of art that is meant to be used by people to create more art. It starts off as the typographer's amazing work of art... but once it's on the page, it's no longer just the typographer's work of art: it's part of another work of art. And no one pays attention to the poor typographer after that point... apart of typography geeks, of course.
Aside of the fact that you can recover the original font data easily through embedding and you don't need to trace outlines or anything, how is embedding any different from actual use of the font in typesetting?
Wouldn't it be awesome if there was a license that only covered the distribution of font files, but that would also guarantee the users that the fonts can be used for any purpose and if you're just an user of the font, you don't have to worry about legal aspects... the kind of a basic freedom the open source licenses are supposed to guarantee, right?
Here in Finland, an outside support organisation bought a bunch of Wii consoles and Wii Fit games for various army garrisons. This was met with some initial scepticism, of course, but apparently the thing has turned out to be a success.
In recent years, the army has been forced to figure out how to give the new conscripts who are in really bad shape (blah blah blah, moral and physical decay in youth today, yadda yadda yadda) a bit softer landing so they don't completely break themselves apart during the basic training, and this has played toward that goal too. The worst couch potatoes get Nordic walking instead of morning sprints.
Actually, using the MPAA's example, wouldn't it be more like $100k per person per viewing?
No, ??AA math would say $100k per theater PLUS $100k per viewer... and additional $100k per every viewer who walked out during the movie, because they watched the movie fast! (It's valid.)
google already does that on youtube and google docs
As do a lot of other sites. Tons of sites have put out user warnings about IE 6.
I keep running into IE 6 warnings when I browse the web with the original Nintendo DS browser (which puts IE 6 in user-agent, because Opera guys were a little bit crazy in the head that way).
Welcome to 2010, if it's not encoded at 1080p nobody cares.
I'd say: Welcome to 2010, can I please get some content already? I don't care if it's blurry YouTube 360p mush or what, I'd appreciate something. Anything. It's not like Chris-chan needs a goddamn top-of-the-line HD stuff to express his powerful rhetoric.
The whole quality issue is pointless politicking that's costing us time. They're all video formats that are basically adequate for time being. Just stick to some format that can be implemented and be done with it. If MPEG-LA's greed will always keep H.264 from being a web standard, that's their headache.
(Warning: Contains far more than usual amount of fuming.)
There's only one chance to make a first impression. MPEG-LA just used theirs, in relation to the WebM. And good grief, what did that reveal.
The MPEG-LA wants patent-encumbered video format as a web standard. That'd allow them to rake in the money. The whole "H.264 is free of charge for time being" thing is a giant big smokescreen. Google is already allowing VP8 to be freely used in perpetuity; in light of that, what other purpose than long-term plan to start charging for the whole thing would MPEG-LA's patent pool have than to start charging for the stuff after all? If they really wanted a free standard, they'd just leave Google alone.
This attitude alone, in my opinion, weighs far more than any technological merit H.264 has. MPEG-LA not in to produce any sort of amicable, altruistic solution to the whole thing. They're not interested in creating a standard that could be used royalty-free. Take any further tokens of niceness with a grain of salt.
Pardon me for getting a little bit cynical here: Part of me wants to say "December 31, 2015 is the day people will start paying for H.264 Internet production and streaming", but since the chance that we'll ever see a HTML5 video standard due to bullshit just like this is close to zero, it's all academic anyway and nothing remarkable will ever happen.
The OS community wishes to show off what blender and other OS tools are capable of creating
There's another point too: push the envelope. Part of the budget goes to the manhours needed to develop new features in Blender. Sintel will be followed up by a boatload of awesome stuff in Blender 2.5 branch.
Why would anyone purchase a creative commons movie?
Because they liked it? Because they want to support the creators in a direct way?
There's also always the fact that you get a physical artefact. For example, I have the DVDs from the Star Wreck folks. Yeah, I could have just downloaded the Star Wreck 6 when it was out, but heck, if you've waited the film to come out for years, getting a physical DVD from the creators before the thing officially hits the net is still as awesome as ever.
I mean, I have the original Star Wreck videos as crappy home-burned VCDs from years gone by. Extremely smudgy inkjet covers and marker labelling looks a little bit corny when compared to the actual printed DVD covers and factory-made DVDs. =)
* No matter how much you wish to use them, Battlesmasher Alliance, Fightmace Alliance, and Pewpewbangbang Friends are registered trademark copyright properties of Games Workshop and may not be used for any reason whatsoever in any third party materials.
Didn't TSR try to pull something like this back in the day? They went on registering trademarks for a bunch of stuff that had "Dragon" in the title and even produced some lame products that used those trademarks, just to fend off all people who were trying to ride on the D&D's publicity.
Did anyone else read this as comparing Cassandra from King's Quest and Voldemort from Harry Potter?
I was expecting something about Cassandra producing a bunch of warnings in log files that no one ever bothers to read, and Voldemort having various problems managing the child processes in the cluster (mostly being unable to kill or reap them).
What does that even mean? So you host porn. And you admit some of it is unnecessary. And the ratio of unnecessary porn to necessary porn is too high? WTF?! Just stop hosting porn, or STFU.
Well, the situation is like this: They've had, for a good while now, a canned warning message for people who upload certain sort of pictures.
Now, imagine what the situation was if the user community would not discourage such activity. Every picture should be accurately categorised, be of sensible quality, have accurate license data, and so on and so forth. And, of course, because of the nature of the images, there should also be a reasonable expectation that the images should be coming from copyright holders and that they're under proper licenses. You know, bog-ordinary routine things that have to be done.
Your job, should you accept it, should be to tend to hundreds of pictures of dongolongos every. blessed. day.
There's got to be some point where you start asking "you know, this is a whole lot of dongolongos. I sure hope we can find proper encyclopedic usage for all this high-quality, well-documented image material."
If you can find a proper, systematic, encyclopedic use for thousands of cockpics, sure, go right ahead and apply that knowledge for best interests to further human knowledge. Folks at Wikimedia Commons, however, appear to have found enough of those pictures for proper encyclopedic use.
First and most important, we think it is the best available video codec today for HTML5 for our customers.
That's what Microsoft said about their brand of JavaScript. And, of course, ActiveX. Those things fared really well... for certain definitions of "well" that have absolutely nothing to do with open Web standards.
H.264 also provides the best certainty and clarity with respect to legal rights from the many companies that have patents in this area.
In other words "Theora could be patented, you just don't know that." FUDdy rubbish. You want the best certainty and clarity with respect to legal rights? Don't implement any goddamn video playback in the browser at all. Hell, since something as innocuous as object embedding bit Microsoft in the rump a while ago, maybe you should refrain from implementing any HTML features at all, if you want absolute best certainty and clarity in this matter!
Plus, since most H.264 licenses I've seen lately all demand that the software should be used for "personal and non-commercial" uses only, how the hell does this convenient, clear and certain license purchase serve Microsoft's customers? Did the IE9 developers buy the proverbial pig in a sack (They wanted "H.264 for everyone for realz" and got "no, not for profit")? Will Microsoft hand free industrial H.264 licenses to all customers, or does IE9's EULA prohibit the video playback in corporate setting?
(...don't mind me, I'm just explaining the other extreme of the FUD-filled video debate.)
The video codec issue would be a simple matter if there were no giant piles of patents to deal with.
Illustrator vs Inkscape = Maybe passable alternative
*sigh* Inkscape is not trying to ape Illustrator. Inkscape is a clone of Xara. And that's the way I like it. The sooner the world can forget an over-complicated monstrosity like Illustrator ever existed, the better. =)
(...Still sort of bitter that the Xara open source project went nowhere, but hey, Inkscape keeps getting more awesome with every release...)
The Adobe suite is a whole, integrated polished set of products.
We don't need a "whole integrated set of products". We don't need a walled-garden comfort zone where we have a set of "working" applications, and when you step outside of that boundary, you start griping about everything.
You're looking for one application that does everything you need. I'm looking for applications that do everything I need. We need to accept the fact that programs may have deficiencies that they make up with extra features. I don't need one application that does everything; I just need applications that do what I need with minimum hassle. If I need to save a file in one program and open it in another, that's generally not slowing me down too much.
I love the GIMP, but I recently really, really started to love MyPaint. MyPaint doesn't do everything The GIMP does. It doesn't claim to do that. It makes it up by focusing on the infinite-canvas/natural-paint-tools features. I need to use both programs, and I accept this isn't a bad thing. I draw sketches on paper, scan in GIMP/XSane, ink and colour in MyPaint and give final touches in GIMP again. No problems.
Yet, I've seen a lot of Photoshop zealots who just can't accept the fact that there's programs out there that might complement their existing set of tools. No infinite canvas in Photoshop? Tough cookies, you're not allowed to leave the comfort zone. Because once you do, you start craving for the missing features in the other programs. Missing features are evil... unless they're missing from Photoshop, in which case you can't mention them. Because the Suite is perfect.
So, we don't want integrated suites. We want an universally implemented set of file formats. This works to some extent; if I want to feed in text data, OpenDocument or HTML copy/paste usually works. Vector images? Just use SVG or export to PDF. Plain old bitmaps? PNG or JPEG. What we really need right now is a commonly agreed multi-layer image format; PSD is generally considered too difficult to implement. GIMP's .xcf isn't implemented any-frigging-where, and no one cares about the formats other OSS apps have for this purpose. I'm hoping OpenRaster will be an interesting direction.
It's an open standard.
Yeah. People in the tech community have different definitions of the word "open".
It's like saying you have an "open decision-making process" and putting a sound-and-bullet-proof glass in front of the seats for the public (and a microphone in the room and a speaker in the other). Sure, everyone can see and read about the decisions, and that fulfils one definition of "openness" and, if you're in mood for hideous puns, "transparency"... it's just that the outsiders can't take part in the decision-making process itself, which would be what everyone else thinks "open decision-making processes" should be about.
These days, when people hear "open" they expect "compatible with the other 'open' thing we love so much." People have this crazy notion that open standards should be available free-of-charge and everyone should be free to implement them without paying anyone anything.
Oh, hey, Win32 API is an open standard too! You can get a compiler and a dev environment and a reference manual from Microsoft!
Microsoft is afraid someone will draw a penis.
Right, young gentlemen, show of hands: how many of you have made... certain object shapes in Super Smash Bros. Brawl's level editor? ... Quit blushing now, young lads, this is a serious issue! Surely Nintendo is more conservative about these issues than Microsoft! Out with it!
In other words, I think such fears are sort of justified, but *ahem* sufficiently motivated people can, and will, find ways around the limitations, so I think Microsoft is being more than a little bit too strict here.
Microsoft seems to be the antithesis of free especially when you look at their Xbox network. They don't allow user-generated content at all.
Halo 3? Trials HD? And that's just a few on top of my head, from Microsoft-published games. Granted, more than slightly lame compared to mods in PC games, but still, some user-generated content is better than no content at all...
This is news because by submitting the file format to a standards body, Microsoft promised interoperability to everyone. No one is getting the interoperability. The news isn't that it's business as usual in Microsoft: it's news that now they've clearly and demonstrably screwed things up for everyone, big time. They promised to the developers we'd get an interoperable standard - we didn't get one. They promised to the governments that their software would implement an international standard - and it doesn't.
In other words: "Microsoft implements a horrible file format" isn't news. "Microsoft promised everybody not to implement a horrible file format and implemented it anyway" isn't news either, but it's not something that can be easily shrugged away either.
Quick recap of the situation so far:
Geeks: "We want everybody in the governments to use interoperable software."
Government: "Good idea! What do you suggest?"
Geeks: "Well, OpenDocument is an ISO standard..."
Government: "Sounds good! And looks like the most complete suite to implement OpenDocument is free of charge. Thanks, geeks! We'll save a ton of money!"
Microsoft: "Er... damn it! Why does this always happen when we're asleep for a while. Ahem! Hold your horses! We want the Government to use our software!"
Government: "Does your application implement an ISO standard? We already fell in love with this idea."
Microsoft: "Uh... no! But you just wait a while, we'll standardize our file formats! To the ISO!"
Geeks: "Gee, I wonder how this works out."
Microsoft: "We're standardizing this stuff! Woo-hoo!"
Geeks: "God damn it, this standard of yours is a steaming pile of horse crap."
Government: "Can someone explain to me what's going on? Because we're clueless."
ISO: "This standard is a steaming pile of horse crap. We'll need to fix this thing."
Microsoft: "Whatever! We're getting standardized! Woo-hoo!"
Geeks: "Sure, you theoretically can polish a turd, but..."
Government: "Ah! How are you people doing? Standardization going fine, I hope? Good good! Carry on!"
Microsoft: "The standard process is over! Time to make it official!"
Geeks: "WTF? This standard is still a gigantic pile of horse crap."
Government: "Oooooooh, look at the weight of this thing. Lots of paper and lots of words. Let's make this an official ISO standard!"
Geeks: "But we already had a perfectly acceptable office document ISO standard! You know, OpenDocument! *sigh* Never mind, you'll never listen anyway."
Geeks: "We tried to implement this bitch, but Microsoft's software keeps using the pre-standard version of the documents."
Microsoft: "Wha? Whuh? We sent our document format to the ISO! Honest!"
Geeks: "You had no idea what that whole process meant, right?"
Microsoft: *blushes* "...Sorry."
Geeks: "We can't build interoperable software if the only major software package to implement implements it completely frigging wrong! You idiots!"
Government: "Hey, guys! What's going on?"
Geeks: "Okay, let's try this again: *ahem* We want everybody in the governments to use interoperable software..."
"...if they could break into the USB drive within two hours. They failed."
Am I completely deluded if I think that if crackers have a physical access to a USB drive, they just may be able to withhold it for more than two hours? Maybe I'm proposing a completely implausible scenario here, but suppose the USB drive has been "stolen" (a term which means "physically removed from the possession of the legitimate owner" for those who don't grok this high-tech security lingo) - in such case, the legitimate owner may, theoretically, need more than 2 hours to recover the USB drive, and the attacker can use a longer period of time to their advantage. I remember reading in the literature that "stolen" USB drives may, in some cases, be recovered days, weeks, months later - and in many cases, they may never be recovered. Whether that qualifies as significantly longer than 2 hours, I don't know. I'm not an expert.
In case you're wondering, no, I don't put much faith in hacking contests, especially if the scenarios they test have small obvious flaws like this. =)
"Hmm. I browse to $cool_new_video_site and it doesn't work. It does work in IE and Chrome. Firefox must be broken, so I'll use IE instead."
How is driving people away a win? The scope here is greater than a video codec.
Yeah! And let's implement ActiveX too! That thing has been driving people to IE for so long, under this exact same line of thought! This is vital for interoperability and future of the Web! Microsoft is behind it, so it's bound to become the new standard any day now!
the so-called Free solution is the wrong choice to make. H.264 has won, and it won years ago.
All right, all right, H.264 won the war.
Now that there's a winner, it's extremely important that everyone implements it. That's the bad side of the having a standard. It's not worth anything until everyone implements it.
So, now, oh victorious winner, please answer this question: How the hell can open source browsers implement H.264?
You see, this debate is not about who "won" the war. It's about which standard can be implemented.
Yes, we know H.264 is superior. Thank you for telling us that over and over. But H.264 proponents have so far failed to explain how the hell can we implement H.264 in any shape or form without requiring weird legal trickery and mysterious booby traps from MPEG-LA's direction.
So quit harping about better quality and hardware support. We already know those things are true. Tell us how we can implement it so we can get over this ridiculous debate already.
Mozilla folks aren't "making a stand". They're just puzzled by the H.264 requirements and can't proceed until they have a clear and unambiguous solution. So please, tell them how they can implement H.264 while complying with both their own license terms and H.264's license terms. Surely now that you have the technical superiority issue settled, you can devote energy on this little legal matter, right?
taking a moral stand with Theora will damage other things, namely HTML5 and potentially Firefox itself.
And taking a pragmatic stance with H.264 will damage the ability of people who are unable to take the same pragmatic stance to implement the standard. Hence, HTML5 will not be implementable uniformly, so the standard suffers. Firefox will be damaged by not being able to implement H.264 anyway, because it's incompatible with their licensing.
PNG won out in the end over GIF, mostly, because it had better features. But what enabled that win was that they could both be used at the same time. If early Mozilla branches simply removed GIF support, the browser would have been dead in the water.
Because the GIF license allowed it to be implemented if you only decode images. Had they not allowed it to be used anyway, as is the case with H.264, well...
The battle over codes needs to be left for another day.
"Let's just use what works now, and spend next 20 years living with that mistake. Everyone else is doing it, why not we?"
As for how to actually implement it, Mozilla et al needs to take a cue from how distros handle MP3 and other patented codecs - foreign "non-free" repositories.
Also known as "swept under the carpet" repositories. Also known as "download it here and we pretend we look away" repositories. Also known as "this code is for research purposes only, wink wink, nudge nudge, if you know what I mean" repositories. Also known as "we pretend that the license problem doesn't exist and sincerely hope MPEG-LA won't get greedy" repositories. Also known as "servers which cannot be hosted in some countries, thus very much building user confidence" repositories. Also known as "the user gets a big ugly disclaimer upon installation and is told that they're using these components under THEIR financial and legal risk" repositories.
So your solution is to just treat this whole thing as a skunkworks problem. "This problem cannot be solved legally, so we have to solve it illegally and let the users take the risk." This is hardly an optimal solution, and will likely blow up in someone's face - be it users, developers or the Mozilla Foundation. Anything better in mind?
"Unlike the Java world that is blossoming with dozens of vibrant Java Virtual Machine implementations, the .NET world has suffered by this meme spread by [Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer] that they would come after people that do not license patents from them."
In practice, the Java community only uses two or three JVMs (IBM's, JRockit, and OpenJDK from Sun), while others are research efforts or smaller-scale open-source projects, said author and consultant Ted Neward. "Virtual machines are not something the open-source community seems to want to experiment with."
What the hell kind of rhetorical diversion that was?
"I love air", de Icaza was quoted as saying. "Breathing oxygen is a wonderful thing. I couldn't get through a single day without oxygen."
In practice, oxygen only accounts for about 20% of Earth's atmosphere, said author and consultant Ted Neward. "O2 just isn't something that the open source community wants to inhale frequently."
Tip: Java isn't popular because people work on multiple JVMs (however small in their number they might be). The point de Icaza was making is that Java is popular because there can be multiple JVMs.