Used to be at least. It's in the wikipedia article:
In 1998 Schmitz was sentenced to a probationary sentence of two years for computer fraud and handling with stolen goods. According to a report by News & Record he had traded with stolen calling card numbers he bought from hackers in the United States.
Of course that's only what he got sentenced for. You can never know what else he might had done back in time.
And he does have love for geeky devices and other such stuff. Hell, he started those mega* sites too.
The Pirate Bay has advertisements and they generally make better money with them. Especially that large Download-button on their torrent page that is really a toolbar. They get paid for every unsuspecting user who installs it, and it's advertised and worded in a way that less known users will think it's the torrent download.
There's a brief article about him on Wikipedia. He's an old hacker who made money by inside trading and later set up the Mega* sites brand with Megaupload, Megavideo and Megaporn along others. On Google Video there's 6 years old video when he goes to Monaco grand prix and spends $10 million over the weekend for all kinds of parties.
Looks like they contracted the producing of that song to Printz Board. Wonder how much he paid for that. And you say sites like The Pirate Bay and Megaupload "barely get income to pay for hosting":-)
The risk from submarine patents for H.264 is exactly the same as VP8.
No it's not. There are huge amount of companies, both big and small, using H.264. If there ever comes a problem with non-MPEG-LA member, I have a much smaller change of being directed alone. And even if I am, there are so much at play with H.264 that I'm sure to get help with it. You can't say the same for VP8. Hell, even Google isn't trusting VP8 enough to put it in HTML5 video draft.
As far as "subjective" quality issues go, this article sums it up good:
VP8, as a spec, should be a bit better than H.264 Baseline Profile and VC-1. It's not even close to competitive with H.264 Main or High Profile. If Google is willing to revise the spec, this can probably be improved.
VP8, as an encoder, is somewhere between Xvid and Microsoft's VC-1 in terms of visual quality. This can definitely be improved a lot.
VP8, as a decoder, decodes even slower than ffmpeg's H.264. This probably can't be improved that much; VP8 as a whole is similar in complexity to H.264.
With regard to patents, VP8 copies too much from H.264 for comfort, no matter whose word is behind the claim of being patent-free. This doesn't mean that it's sure to be covered by patents, but until Google can give us evidence as to why it isn't, I would be cautious.
VP8 is definitely better compression-wise than Theora and Dirac, so if its claim to being patent-free does stand up, it's a big upgrade with regard to patent-free video formats.
VP8 is not ready for prime-time; the spec is a pile of copy-pasted C code and the encoder's interface is lacking in features and buggy. They aren't even ready to finalize the bitstream format, let alone switch the world over to VP8.
With the lack of a real spec, the VP8 software basically is the specâ"and with the spec being âoefinalâ, any bugs are now set in stone. Such bugs have already been found and Google has rejected fixes.
Google made the right decision to pick Matroska and Vorbis for its HTML5 video proposal.
On August 26, 2010 MPEG LA announced that H.264 encoded internet video that is free to end users will never be charged for royalties.[10] All other royalties will remain in place such as the royalties for products that decode and encode H.264 video.[11]
It maybe supported by more browsers, but in terms of market share of said browsers, H.264 leads. The native browsers of two largest OS, IE and Safari, only support H.264. That's what counts. And frankly, H.264 support is included in both OS and is technically better. It would be stupid to choose lesser solution only because authoring tools don't need to pay small licensing costs. I'm glad they haven't done that decision either. at least once better technology wons over idealistic views.
Language changes over time. It always has, it always will. Of course the old people will always be grumpy how current generation of kids can't behave or talk correctly. They always have, they always will.
And use inferior technology that is a patent minefield? At least with H.264 I can be certain that my business isn't going to be taken to court one day and I lose it all. With H.264 I don't need to worry about such, and I get better technology (and hardware decoders on almost every kind of device on planet that can show video).
Frankly, I don't really see any problems with H.264 licensing either. There isn't any costs involved in streaming, playing or showing H.264 content. The only cost is with authoring tools which are sold for a good amount of money anyway, and there is nothing wrong with charging some small percentage of the sales income from them. It's very telling that no one else has managed to come up with technology as good as H.264 - not even Google - because it is really good codec. Those who made it deserve to be paid for its usage too, because developing such isn't cheap. It's not your usual geek just working out in parents basement, it needs lots of people working on salary. Those programmers need to be paid too.
They're really good as OS drives or your most commonly used programs, but not for storage. That's why I have both SSD and normal drive on my laptop too.
Natural disasters can happen anywhere in the world, it's just a matter of which kind. This is one of the largest floods Thailand has had within 100 years. You really can't plan for such, or otherwise you can't really do anything if you're constantly afraid of something happening. These factories aren't cheap either. Of course, you're always free to start your own factory and "care" more.
In fact world would be much happier place if people did actually stop complaining about unimportant things. Indeed, about an year ago I got seriously ill and doctors were sure I wasn't going to wake up and that I was going to die. I didn't, but after that it's hard to bitch and complain about little things.
Yep, it's also why companies rather choose Microsoft. They know they will have long support dates and MS won't just suddenly pull the plug. Unlike for example Google, which announces end of life cycle on products like two weeks before.
Why are you showing Windows 8 to your everyday shopping customers when it hasn't been even released yet? The only version out currently is a developers preview which intention is to let software developers to get to know the new system. It's far from finished and is going to dramatically change before release date.
SilverLight is open. All the specs are out there and you're free to make your own implementation. There would be better Linux version too if someone would just actually maintain it. Microsoft isn't trying to stop anyone from doing so, in fact they have helped the project too.
I never understood why someone would use Gnome over KDE anyway. Gnome always felt kind of a toy or candy interface. All the windows were full of useless spacing and the style just gave it sort of a broken feeling. Like the apps would be incomplete or in debug state when programmers just throw controls and finish the interface later. I always liked KDE much more, it was way more professional. Still, both suffered (and still do) from crappy and blurry font rendering and kind of slow interface. Linux interfaces have never felt exactly as quick as Windows. I don't know if its some driver issue or something, but Firefox and XUL suffer from the same issue even on Windows.
In Europe health care is usually paid by everyone in form of taxes, and if you have to go to hospital, government pays large amount of price. This is especially true for costly operations, ICU (where one night costs something like 1000e) or if you have to spend long times in hospital. It does have its own problems (everyone must pay for the health care no matter if they used the services or not), but if something happens then it really is affordable to everyone.
Yep, the idea behind "punch the monkey" and similar ads is to catch users attention first, and get him to the advertisers site. At that point the advertiser has the attention and maybe even curiosity, and user is likely to read more or follow through more steps. It works much better than if the original banner would had shown all the details to begin with, for certain products anyway.
No, even email advertisers have moved to new models after laws and spam detection became better. Now spam is disguised as opt-in lists, or offering user something in return for it. GroupOn is probably the best example of this. And it's highly profitable too. Spam evolved into that.
There's already PPC and CPA models and they don't care about impressions. Advertisers only pay when someone clicks, or better yet, when someone does certain action like buys product. Such schemes will only make sure that more and more advertisers move to such models.
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No, unless the contract artists signed explicitly states so.
Musicians will of course do anything when the right sum of money is offered. It was contracted work.
In 1998 Schmitz was sentenced to a probationary sentence of two years for computer fraud and handling with stolen goods. According to a report by News & Record he had traded with stolen calling card numbers he bought from hackers in the United States.
Of course that's only what he got sentenced for. You can never know what else he might had done back in time.
And he does have love for geeky devices and other such stuff. Hell, he started those mega* sites too.
The Pirate Bay has advertisements and they generally make better money with them. Especially that large Download-button on their torrent page that is really a toolbar. They get paid for every unsuspecting user who installs it, and it's advertised and worded in a way that less known users will think it's the torrent download.
There's a brief article about him on Wikipedia. He's an old hacker who made money by inside trading and later set up the Mega* sites brand with Megaupload, Megavideo and Megaporn along others. On Google Video there's 6 years old video when he goes to Monaco grand prix and spends $10 million over the weekend for all kinds of parties.
:-)
He's been awfully silent lately, but lately he bought NZ$30 million mansion from New Zealand and got residency there. After that he sponsored $500,000 fireworks for capital of NZ in celebration of residency.
Looks like they contracted the producing of that song to Printz Board. Wonder how much he paid for that. And you say sites like The Pirate Bay and Megaupload "barely get income to pay for hosting"
The risk from submarine patents for H.264 is exactly the same as VP8.
No it's not. There are huge amount of companies, both big and small, using H.264. If there ever comes a problem with non-MPEG-LA member, I have a much smaller change of being directed alone. And even if I am, there are so much at play with H.264 that I'm sure to get help with it. You can't say the same for VP8. Hell, even Google isn't trusting VP8 enough to put it in HTML5 video draft.
As far as "subjective" quality issues go, this article sums it up good:
VP8, as a spec, should be a bit better than H.264 Baseline Profile and VC-1. It's not even close to competitive with H.264 Main or High Profile. If Google is willing to revise the spec, this can probably be improved.
VP8, as an encoder, is somewhere between Xvid and Microsoft's VC-1 in terms of visual quality. This can definitely be improved a lot.
VP8, as a decoder, decodes even slower than ffmpeg's H.264. This probably can't be improved that much; VP8 as a whole is similar in complexity to H.264.
With regard to patents, VP8 copies too much from H.264 for comfort, no matter whose word is behind the claim of being patent-free. This doesn't mean that it's sure to be covered by patents, but until Google can give us evidence as to why it isn't, I would be cautious.
VP8 is definitely better compression-wise than Theora and Dirac, so if its claim to being patent-free does stand up, it's a big upgrade with regard to patent-free video formats.
VP8 is not ready for prime-time; the spec is a pile of copy-pasted C code and the encoder's interface is lacking in features and buggy. They aren't even ready to finalize the bitstream format, let alone switch the world over to VP8.
With the lack of a real spec, the VP8 software basically is the specâ"and with the spec being âoefinalâ, any bugs are now set in stone. Such bugs have already been found and Google has rejected fixes.
Google made the right decision to pick Matroska and Vorbis for its HTML5 video proposal.
On August 26, 2010 MPEG LA announced that H.264 encoded internet video that is free to end users will never be charged for royalties.[10] All other royalties will remain in place such as the royalties for products that decode and encode H.264 video.[11]
It maybe supported by more browsers, but in terms of market share of said browsers, H.264 leads. The native browsers of two largest OS, IE and Safari, only support H.264. That's what counts. And frankly, H.264 support is included in both OS and is technically better. It would be stupid to choose lesser solution only because authoring tools don't need to pay small licensing costs. I'm glad they haven't done that decision either. at least once better technology wons over idealistic views.
Language changes over time. It always has, it always will. Of course the old people will always be grumpy how current generation of kids can't behave or talk correctly. They always have, they always will.
And use inferior technology that is a patent minefield? At least with H.264 I can be certain that my business isn't going to be taken to court one day and I lose it all. With H.264 I don't need to worry about such, and I get better technology (and hardware decoders on almost every kind of device on planet that can show video).
Frankly, I don't really see any problems with H.264 licensing either. There isn't any costs involved in streaming, playing or showing H.264 content. The only cost is with authoring tools which are sold for a good amount of money anyway, and there is nothing wrong with charging some small percentage of the sales income from them. It's very telling that no one else has managed to come up with technology as good as H.264 - not even Google - because it is really good codec. Those who made it deserve to be paid for its usage too, because developing such isn't cheap. It's not your usual geek just working out in parents basement, it needs lots of people working on salary. Those programmers need to be paid too.
They can still get new hard drives, it just costs a little more.
They're really good as OS drives or your most commonly used programs, but not for storage. That's why I have both SSD and normal drive on my laptop too.
And considering Thailand is a Buddhist country (the good Theravada kind), it doesn't really fit either.
Natural disasters can happen anywhere in the world, it's just a matter of which kind. This is one of the largest floods Thailand has had within 100 years. You really can't plan for such, or otherwise you can't really do anything if you're constantly afraid of something happening. These factories aren't cheap either. Of course, you're always free to start your own factory and "care" more.
In fact world would be much happier place if people did actually stop complaining about unimportant things. Indeed, about an year ago I got seriously ill and doctors were sure I wasn't going to wake up and that I was going to die. I didn't, but after that it's hard to bitch and complain about little things.
Not only that, but many people have died too. It's currently over 600 deaths.
Yep, it's also why companies rather choose Microsoft. They know they will have long support dates and MS won't just suddenly pull the plug. Unlike for example Google, which announces end of life cycle on products like two weeks before.
Why are you showing Windows 8 to your everyday shopping customers when it hasn't been even released yet? The only version out currently is a developers preview which intention is to let software developers to get to know the new system. It's far from finished and is going to dramatically change before release date.
SilverLight is open. All the specs are out there and you're free to make your own implementation. There would be better Linux version too if someone would just actually maintain it. Microsoft isn't trying to stop anyone from doing so, in fact they have helped the project too.
I never understood why someone would use Gnome over KDE anyway. Gnome always felt kind of a toy or candy interface. All the windows were full of useless spacing and the style just gave it sort of a broken feeling. Like the apps would be incomplete or in debug state when programmers just throw controls and finish the interface later. I always liked KDE much more, it was way more professional. Still, both suffered (and still do) from crappy and blurry font rendering and kind of slow interface. Linux interfaces have never felt exactly as quick as Windows. I don't know if its some driver issue or something, but Firefox and XUL suffer from the same issue even on Windows.
In Europe health care is usually paid by everyone in form of taxes, and if you have to go to hospital, government pays large amount of price. This is especially true for costly operations, ICU (where one night costs something like 1000e) or if you have to spend long times in hospital. It does have its own problems (everyone must pay for the health care no matter if they used the services or not), but if something happens then it really is affordable to everyone.
Yep, the idea behind "punch the monkey" and similar ads is to catch users attention first, and get him to the advertisers site. At that point the advertiser has the attention and maybe even curiosity, and user is likely to read more or follow through more steps. It works much better than if the original banner would had shown all the details to begin with, for certain products anyway.
No, even email advertisers have moved to new models after laws and spam detection became better. Now spam is disguised as opt-in lists, or offering user something in return for it. GroupOn is probably the best example of this. And it's highly profitable too. Spam evolved into that.
There's already PPC and CPA models and they don't care about impressions. Advertisers only pay when someone clicks, or better yet, when someone does certain action like buys product. Such schemes will only make sure that more and more advertisers move to such models.