MP4 audio is...AAC. We have ogg support. FLAC support would be easy, but it's of limited use since it's a small market codec still (primarily live shows). We do have a lossless codec though for people who want all the bits.
Here's a question for you: how many codecs do you actually use? Personally i use mp3...And i have a few songs in wma. That's it, end of story. If you are concerned about compressed audio quality, chances are you use LAME (or you should be using LAME), since that will always be the absolute best audio compressing tool. If you want lossless, all tools are relatively equal - shorten, flac, even real's lossless format get within 5% of each other in terms of file size.
This is the point where all open source arguments break down: revenue. You cannot sustain a company by simply releasing all your source and getting contracts for maintenance work. It does not work that way (unless you are cygnus).
The only difference is real is actually releasing products, whereas netscape completely stopped. Mozilla != netscape, and they took years to make anything anyways
Great idea, buy used hardware and hope whoever built it knew what they were doing. Also hope the power supply is stable, and the box itself can handle switching millions of packets and multi-month uptimes.
Back to reality, buying a dedicated box makes more sense. A friend of mine runs this company, where all they do is build 802.11x routers, access points, and mesh networks. Instead of getting some random PC and a questionable quality non-upgradeable 802.11b ap, he'd end up with a (linux based) ap/router with authentication, quotas, etc. There are other companies out there that do this same work, i just dont have URLs off hand.
You cannot compete dollar for dollar on a product that has been commoditized. This is exactly what happened with the browser: it became a zero value item, because people started giving them away.
Netscape was doomed to fail because they built their business around being a software middleman. This is the same deal as realnetworks - they have a built a company around having a media player, and that didn't work because their entire market became zero profit. You can download high quality audio jukeboxes on the internet for free now; they dont even have custom codecs anymore.
Real has even recognized the lack of value of their media player; hence helix, where they just give it away. This is also evident in their pickup of listen and the shift to the services model.
This is incorrect. Microsoft released IE as a download. They also made it available on all their platforms, and they made future versions available on all their platforms. There was never a charge to get IE, and if (somehow) you got an OS copy that didn't come with it, you could easily go download it for free, which you cannot do with "win.exe" or "command.exe"
Please mod parent down; this is not insightful, it's inaccurate.
No, that is incorrect. Go read a dictionary. No definition of viral will make any reference to choice or consent.
By your definition, AIDS, herpes, and genital warts are not rightly called "viral", since you have the option of not sleeping with or coming into blood/bodily fluid contact with people who have these diseases.
The GPL is viral because it contaminates; because any object it touches (via linking, or shared source, or even included kernel headers) becomes infected, forcing all code in that object to become GPL'd. Yes, you have the option of not including kernel headers, not linking, and not using source from GPL'd code, but that does not change the fundamental properties of the GPL; it just presents a method for you to avoid it (like abstinence to avoid herpes).
If you choose to comply with the GPL, you'd have to distribute the source in such a way that the exact image you released could be regenerated, whether the image was your kernel driver or the firmware for your MP3 player.
The second paragraph you have is exactly correct; it makes it very easy for someone to inspect your hardware design and make a cheap knockoff in korea, thus costing you money.
Lastly, i am not certain if it is possible to do this anymore. Linus' recent comments on kernel modules made me a bit wary of my previous solution for this problem.
You didn't read his statement. He is entirely correct; for him to sell his work, he would have to release the source. Otherwise he would be violating the law. Sure, a judge wont force you to release your source, but they will stop you from selling your work, which invalidates the condition in his statement.
What's funny is he said "If I tried to then sell my work," then you present 3 options; one involves selling the work and including his source, the other 2 involve not selling his work.
You therefore have a choice. You can use works distributed under the GPL to create your own software and license that under the GPL, or you can NOT USE the GPL software and use any license you want. If the GPL were infectious, then you would have no such choice; since you do have a choice it is clearly not infectious in this regard.
This is abusing the terminology here. You are basically saying that the GPL lacks the viral properties because you can elect to not use it.
This is like me running an amusement park, and having a roller coaster that kills everyone who rides on it, but telling people it's not fatal because you have the option to not ride it.
The option to use the GPL does not negate it's properties; for companies who actually use GPL'd code under the GPL property, it IS viral. The real core of the article here is that the viral aspect of the GPL is not enforceable under copyright law - no judge can force you to follow the license - but it could potentially be under contract law, where a judge can force compliance.
It's not so much a misconception, as a statement about how unappealing the GPL makes it. Sure, you can sell products that have GPL'd code in them, but you have to redistribute the code. In the case of a company making embedded products, you have to redistribute source for everything linked to the GPL code; it has to be possible for the end user to recreate the entire firmware image for your product. This isn't really appealing to most companies.
You are correct; gandalf and gimli wanted to go through moria, but aragorn did not; this change was part of a general trim down of aragorn's intelligence through the first two films. I think the goal here was to make his character shine more in the third, but i'm not totally sure.
Bingo. This is why all the embedded projects i've worked on have used BSD licensed code, or the redhat modified GPL for embedded products instead of the stock GPL.
Considering how much time is spent on software vs. hardware in products like these, it's absurd to expect companies to distribute _all_ their source.
Definitely agreed regarding security as an afterthought. MS was doing their "security sweep" crap a year and a half ago as a publicity move - sure, they did make a lot of changes and do an internal sweep, but the fact is that you're still not going to catch everything in that sort of process, since you're working from a flawed starting point.
I dont think you can actually get perfect software. Sure, you can spend more time and get significantly less bugs and security holes, but in the end the quality of the product is limited by the quality of the developers, testers, and tools that you use. DRM schemes are a great example of this, where significant amounts of money are poured into research and development on them, and NONE of the available DRM schemes survive in practice.
I'm curious how much of longhorn will be a rewrite. It seems like a 5 year timeline would allow for some of that.
I dont even see why this is news. No code is perfect, especially at the OS level. If you think about it abstractly, what gates is saying is that security should be layered, so you have multiple filters protecting you.
The part about it "being a complement", which i dont really agree with, is based on the fact that windows is high visibility, so it gets the most attention from virus writers.
The whole argument is silly though - windows is what happens when you have a desktop only operating system and transition it into a network enabled system. You end up with design flaws (everyone runs as "root") and security holes.
It's one of two things - either it's the preliminary HL2 SDK which some mod teams currently have access to, or it's some internal dump. I'm guessing it's the former.
If that's the case, it exposes enough for someone to see how the DLLs link in. All the traditional HL hacks have used this DLL proxy technique to intercept calls made from the engine to the game DLL and modify the data. So in that sense, it would be enough for people to start working on cheats.
There is also, presumably, some code that could be used to test framerates and other such stuff, maybe a demo map. Like you said though, it's doubtful there is any content from the actual game in there.
Did you read the article? This was only in the context of EMBEDDED devices, and there are MANY Intel x86 embedded boards. These are very different from desktop linux, with the myriad of devices your standard PC has.
All you long haired hippy open source zealots want all your programs and all the source code in the world to be free, but you spend exactly 0 time thinking about how companies can survive on this model. How can a company pay for 650 employees if they give 100% of their IP away? Answer: they can't.
Real has to sell _something_. If they open source everything then their subscription model would likely die, since people could find a way to circumvent it given all the source code. Additionally, if they give away the source to their DRM strategy, they basically dont have DRM anymore.
Everyone seems upset that the RealAudio/Video whatever codecs aren't open source, but the fact is that the core codecs dont need to be modified - you risk breaking compatability with all the existing content out there anyways. And what do you gain from reading the code to the codecs? This is their IP, and releasing it to the masses would have very little purpose beyond appeasing your "Free" needs.
The truth is, what you can download from helix is 1) a complete client and server framework for content streaming and 2) binary versions of all the codecs. Now if you people were smart, you'd take the framework, build out a generalized codec structure (think windows ACM) for linux, start porting codecs to it, and start modifying apps to utilize it so i can listen to WMA/Real/Shorten/Flac in whatever player i want, with the same sound quality, because it's all coming from the same libraries.
And DO NOT reply to me with "but you dont get the codecs" - you can get a binary only license for the codec, you just need to know how to read, point, and click.
Err, that chart has very little to do with reality. Comparing the total debt (cumulative) to the annual GDP doesn't tell you anything useful - if the debt goes up, but the economy grows faster, then the chart you presented shows a decrease.
What you really need to look at is absolute values for the national debt by year. Republicans dont like these numbers because they show how reagan and bush senior racked up a huge debt over their 12 year reign (they were responsible for roughly $3 trillion), clinton actually balanced the budget and generated budget surpluses, then bush junior came into office again and fucked it all up.
Nope, republicans dont like hearing that truth one bit.
Slashdot Mirror
MP4 audio is...AAC. We have ogg support. FLAC support would be easy, but it's of limited use since it's a small market codec still (primarily live shows). We do have a lossless codec though for people who want all the bits.
Here's a question for you: how many codecs do you actually use? Personally i use mp3...And i have a few songs in wma. That's it, end of story. If you are concerned about compressed audio quality, chances are you use LAME (or you should be using LAME), since that will always be the absolute best audio compressing tool. If you want lossless, all tools are relatively equal - shorten, flac, even real's lossless format get within 5% of each other in terms of file size.
This is the point where all open source arguments break down: revenue. You cannot sustain a company by simply releasing all your source and getting contracts for maintenance work. It does not work that way (unless you are cygnus).
The only difference is real is actually releasing products, whereas netscape completely stopped. Mozilla != netscape, and they took years to make anything anyways
Great idea, buy used hardware and hope whoever built it knew what they were doing. Also hope the power supply is stable, and the box itself can handle switching millions of packets and multi-month uptimes.
Back to reality, buying a dedicated box makes more sense. A friend of mine runs this company, where all they do is build 802.11x routers, access points, and mesh networks. Instead of getting some random PC and a questionable quality non-upgradeable 802.11b ap, he'd end up with a (linux based) ap/router with authentication, quotas, etc. There are other companies out there that do this same work, i just dont have URLs off hand.
But that's just my opinion.
Except in the IE case they had IE for mac.
You cannot compete dollar for dollar on a product that has been commoditized. This is exactly what happened with the browser: it became a zero value item, because people started giving them away.
Netscape was doomed to fail because they built their business around being a software middleman. This is the same deal as realnetworks - they have a built a company around having a media player, and that didn't work because their entire market became zero profit. You can download high quality audio jukeboxes on the internet for free now; they dont even have custom codecs anymore.
Real has even recognized the lack of value of their media player; hence helix, where they just give it away. This is also evident in their pickup of listen and the shift to the services model.
This is incorrect. Microsoft released IE as a download. They also made it available on all their platforms, and they made future versions available on all their platforms. There was never a charge to get IE, and if (somehow) you got an OS copy that didn't come with it, you could easily go download it for free, which you cannot do with "win.exe" or "command.exe"
Please mod parent down; this is not insightful, it's inaccurate.
"Viral" means without a choice.
No, that is incorrect. Go read a dictionary. No definition of viral will make any reference to choice or consent.
By your definition, AIDS, herpes, and genital warts are not rightly called "viral", since you have the option of not sleeping with or coming into blood/bodily fluid contact with people who have these diseases.
The GPL is viral because it contaminates; because any object it touches (via linking, or shared source, or even included kernel headers) becomes infected, forcing all code in that object to become GPL'd. Yes, you have the option of not including kernel headers, not linking, and not using source from GPL'd code, but that does not change the fundamental properties of the GPL; it just presents a method for you to avoid it (like abstinence to avoid herpes).
If you choose to comply with the GPL, you'd have to distribute the source in such a way that the exact image you released could be regenerated, whether the image was your kernel driver or the firmware for your MP3 player.
The second paragraph you have is exactly correct; it makes it very easy for someone to inspect your hardware design and make a cheap knockoff in korea, thus costing you money.
Lastly, i am not certain if it is possible to do this anymore. Linus' recent comments on kernel modules made me a bit wary of my previous solution for this problem.
Isn't it ironic that your page lacks a copyright?
You didn't read his statement. He is entirely correct; for him to sell his work, he would have to release the source. Otherwise he would be violating the law. Sure, a judge wont force you to release your source, but they will stop you from selling your work, which invalidates the condition in his statement.
What's funny is he said "If I tried to then sell my work," then you present 3 options; one involves selling the work and including his source, the other 2 involve not selling his work.
I.e. his original statement was correct.
My apologies; paragraph 3, following the semicolon, should read as follows:
"for companies who actually use GPL'd code and comply with the GPL, it IS viral."
You therefore have a choice. You can use works distributed under the GPL to create your own software and license that under the GPL, or you can NOT USE the GPL software and use any license you want. If the GPL were infectious, then you would have no such choice; since you do have a choice it is clearly not infectious in this regard.
This is abusing the terminology here. You are basically saying that the GPL lacks the viral properties because you can elect to not use it.
This is like me running an amusement park, and having a roller coaster that kills everyone who rides on it, but telling people it's not fatal because you have the option to not ride it.
The option to use the GPL does not negate it's properties; for companies who actually use GPL'd code under the GPL property, it IS viral. The real core of the article here is that the viral aspect of the GPL is not enforceable under copyright law - no judge can force you to follow the license - but it could potentially be under contract law, where a judge can force compliance.
It's not so much a misconception, as a statement about how unappealing the GPL makes it. Sure, you can sell products that have GPL'd code in them, but you have to redistribute the code. In the case of a company making embedded products, you have to redistribute source for everything linked to the GPL code; it has to be possible for the end user to recreate the entire firmware image for your product. This isn't really appealing to most companies.
You are correct; gandalf and gimli wanted to go through moria, but aragorn did not; this change was part of a general trim down of aragorn's intelligence through the first two films. I think the goal here was to make his character shine more in the third, but i'm not totally sure.
Bingo. This is why all the embedded projects i've worked on have used BSD licensed code, or the redhat modified GPL for embedded products instead of the stock GPL.
Considering how much time is spent on software vs. hardware in products like these, it's absurd to expect companies to distribute _all_ their source.
Definitely agreed regarding security as an afterthought. MS was doing their "security sweep" crap a year and a half ago as a publicity move - sure, they did make a lot of changes and do an internal sweep, but the fact is that you're still not going to catch everything in that sort of process, since you're working from a flawed starting point.
I dont think you can actually get perfect software. Sure, you can spend more time and get significantly less bugs and security holes, but in the end the quality of the product is limited by the quality of the developers, testers, and tools that you use. DRM schemes are a great example of this, where significant amounts of money are poured into research and development on them, and NONE of the available DRM schemes survive in practice.
I'm curious how much of longhorn will be a rewrite. It seems like a 5 year timeline would allow for some of that.
I dont even see why this is news. No code is perfect, especially at the OS level. If you think about it abstractly, what gates is saying is that security should be layered, so you have multiple filters protecting you.
The part about it "being a complement", which i dont really agree with, is based on the fact that windows is high visibility, so it gets the most attention from virus writers.
The whole argument is silly though - windows is what happens when you have a desktop only operating system and transition it into a network enabled system. You end up with design flaws (everyone runs as "root") and security holes.
It's one of two things - either it's the preliminary HL2 SDK which some mod teams currently have access to, or it's some internal dump. I'm guessing it's the former.
If that's the case, it exposes enough for someone to see how the DLLs link in. All the traditional HL hacks have used this DLL proxy technique to intercept calls made from the engine to the game DLL and modify the data. So in that sense, it would be enough for people to start working on cheats.
There is also, presumably, some code that could be used to test framerates and other such stuff, maybe a demo map. Like you said though, it's doubtful there is any content from the actual game in there.
Did you read the article? This was only in the context of EMBEDDED devices, and there are MANY Intel x86 embedded boards. These are very different from desktop linux, with the myriad of devices your standard PC has.
Look, let me clear this up once and for all.
All you long haired hippy open source zealots want all your programs and all the source code in the world to be free, but you spend exactly 0 time thinking about how companies can survive on this model. How can a company pay for 650 employees if they give 100% of their IP away? Answer: they can't.
Real has to sell _something_. If they open source everything then their subscription model would likely die, since people could find a way to circumvent it given all the source code. Additionally, if they give away the source to their DRM strategy, they basically dont have DRM anymore.
Everyone seems upset that the RealAudio/Video whatever codecs aren't open source, but the fact is that the core codecs dont need to be modified - you risk breaking compatability with all the existing content out there anyways. And what do you gain from reading the code to the codecs? This is their IP, and releasing it to the masses would have very little purpose beyond appeasing your "Free" needs.
The truth is, what you can download from helix is 1) a complete client and server framework for content streaming and 2) binary versions of all the codecs. Now if you people were smart, you'd take the framework, build out a generalized codec structure (think windows ACM) for linux, start porting codecs to it, and start modifying apps to utilize it so i can listen to WMA/Real/Shorten/Flac in whatever player i want, with the same sound quality, because it's all coming from the same libraries.
And DO NOT reply to me with "but you dont get the codecs" - you can get a binary only license for the codec, you just need to know how to read, point, and click.
Funny, but wrong. Real has about $40mil/quarter in revenue.
Err, that chart has very little to do with reality. Comparing the total debt (cumulative) to the annual GDP doesn't tell you anything useful - if the debt goes up, but the economy grows faster, then the chart you presented shows a decrease.
What you really need to look at is absolute values for the national debt by year. Republicans dont like these numbers because they show how reagan and bush senior racked up a huge debt over their 12 year reign (they were responsible for roughly $3 trillion), clinton actually balanced the budget and generated budget surpluses, then bush junior came into office again and fucked it all up.
Nope, republicans dont like hearing that truth one bit.
It tells time synchronized from an atomic clock. Also you dont have to patch it, it automatically downloads updates from the network.