If the choices are between Google having the power, and MPEG-LA having the power, I know which I would rather have - Google, in a heartbeat. Their track record in openness in their software and standards has been amazingly refreshing from a large company.
It might be creating a bit of a false dichotomy to think those are our only two options. But at the moment that looks like the war to me - noone else will go up against MPEG-LA patent pool.
Microsoft are betting their chips on h264. They know VC1 is almost useless going forward (largely because of Apple). They're a licensor of h264, so it's pretty much a win-win scenario for them. This move is clearly a calculated move to chip away at Google and nothing more, and the benefits to Windows/Chrome users is completely incidental.
I am surprised that the Slashdot Linux users haven't pointed out how bad this is simply because it extends h264 in a way that makes it even worse for Linux media playing - Chrome won't get this plugin under Linux, and without a properly licensed h264 player then it'll be the DVD playing days all over again.
What I would like is a VLC plugin that opens VLC in the browser window (instead of Flash, or whatever). But yep, this would be awesome. From a client side I think it would really go a long way to solving the html5 video tag issue, because (generally) it would take a lot of the pain out of the browser side of the equation.
If you/can/ watch h264 on your Linux box, chances are you're doing it "wrong", at least from the perspective of the software patent holders that want to charge you for the privilege to do so. This is what the h264/vp8 fight is about.
This move from Microsoft is super-clever - it looks like they're bringing more choice to the table. But the reality is they're just further entrenching h264, because it's in their interests to do so - they can happily afford any patent licensing costs (oh, and they're one of the h264 licensors, of course).
My brother is a psychology PhD student - he's had TMI on a couple of occasions and has described it as a generally interesting experience. So far he's shown no ill effects other than a tendency to talk about it a lot.
Yep, transcripts are great - I always prefer reading because I can absorb information so much faster than video. Generally, any video I want to watch now I try to download locally and play back in VLC at 1.2-1.5x faster - highly recommended.
But I understand why they don't do transcripts - because it takes a lot of effort. We do transcripts for all videos that we produce on our website (blatant example plug) and doing it properly takes a surprising amount of effort. It's really easy to make mistakes, it's really time consuming to type it all up, etc. I believe there's some software which purports to automatically generate transcriptions - I haven't used it, but have seen the results - terribad.
We've tried various options - like having juniors do it or volunteers - but usually the only way we can consistently get good quality transcriptions is to have them done by the person who actually did the video.
Next step is actually doing it as closed captioning but that's another whole area of effort!
I would rather airdrop them the tools with a view to giving them an education that is focused on critical thinking, and then let the chips fall where they may.
The spread of "American ideals" is probably scary to a lot of people (like me) that live outside of the USA, because to us all we get to see is unjust wars, your politicians and laws being bought and sold while your citizenry ignores it, attempts by the religious right to cloud your educational system, and so forth. I know that's (probably) not what you mean, but... here we are.
I think Nokia got into this weird habit of just building a whole bunch of handsets and spraying them out randomly hoping that there'll be someone out there that the design appeals to. I think that strategy worked well for them back in the pre-smartphone days when physical design and feature sets was more important than now, where it's all about software, but I think it's totally biting them in the ass now - they're still churning out different units and just losing ground left right and centre because their software is suffering.
I have an N900 but I abandoned it pretty soon after I got an Android. I keep the N900 around because holy shit it's handy having a full Linux box that I can carry around in my pocket, but in terms of general usability as a phone/portable email/social/browser device it is simply smashed by Android in just about every respect.
I was thoroughly disappointed when they announced Meego - not because I thought it was a bad idea, but because it was instantly apparent that - after all the touting of Maemo and its virtues, it was going to get dropped by the side of the road. It was especially vexing for us here in Australia because the N900 took sooooo much longer to come out - so it seemed the platform was dead shortly after it was released here.
I still like to think Nokia have a lot of potential though - there's so much awesomeness in some of the things they do.
That's pretty funny for me to read because I was in the exact same boat back then (though I was 18-19), and I was in the Doom/Quake camp. You're totally right re: the character stuff, but we only ever played multiplayer - we were doing LANs from the Doom age so migrating over to Quake was easy for us.
That said I am looking forward to DNF! It has been a long time coming and I really hope that it keeps the spirit of the original and still manages to be a fun game to play.
I have 35GB of photos. I keep my "master" copy on my main HDD on my computer at home. I have a USB HDD plugged into it which is a generic backup device; I use pathsync to back up my photos there.
I can use my work hard drive for storage, so I also keep a copy on my work HDD as one off-site backup - I can connect to the office network via VPN, mount my work drive on my home PC and I can also use pathsync - though if I have many gigs of new photos I'll just copy them on my phone and bring them.
I also have a simple personal web hosting account at GoDaddy with some stupid amount of storage, so I just randomly FTP up copies of images when I remember.
One big concern I have is making sure the images aren't getting corrupted in transit or by disk failure, so I'm thinking about putting together a simple system to regularly verify them all via md5 to ensure there's not any changes that I'm not expecting. A side effect of this system is it would easily help me figure out exactly how many copies I have of all these images and where they are.
Well, that obviously ultimately depends on what definition of the word "engineer" you are using, at which point this gets into even more a semantics debate than it is already:)
But, to answer your question, within our company I refer to people that are writing code as "programmers" (or "developers") (not software engineers), and I refer to our network/operations guys as "system/network admins" (not network engineers), and the guys that write for us as "writers/editors", not "content engineers".
It's the same thing with the title 'doctor' (again, here in Australia). It's even stricter here about when you can use the term 'Doctor' (and I suspect these rules will become tightened even more in the wake of the gradual destruction of pseudo-medicines like homeopathy and chiropractic).
(I enjoy the debate about the appropriateness of using the 'doctor' word regularly with my siblings: one is an actual medical doctor, and the other a PhD student.:)
The title "Engineer" is a actually an accredited title here in Australia - you have to do an actual engineering degree to go around and call yourself an engineer and there are strict rules about it.
So I sort of agree with the GP, in that the title 'engineer' has been somewhat usurped by programmers that call themselves 'software engineers' and the various other things that get prepended to it - there's a qualitative difference here between a "software engineer" - that is, someone who went to university and did an engineering degree and studied software within that degree - and someone who either went to uni and did an IT degree, even if they studied something called "software engineering" as a subject/discipline.
(The mate that told me about all this did electrical engineering at uni, and is now a software engineer at a railway company - it is policy at his company to only hire actual engineers for programming positions as they feel the processes behind non-engineering software development education are not sufficient to ensure trains are not whapping into each other all the time.)
I'm not interested in reading that whole thing. I would happily give them some money to get a "correctly" licensed ffmpeg thing for commercial use.
Could MPEG-LA package up a version of ffpmeg/x264 and sell it off their site or would that violate the license of those software packages, I wonder...?
Everything you say or do can and will be used against you in a court of law.
I would say, "does anyone need more reason to quit doing anything that is hosted on a service in the US where their personal information can seemingly be requested or taken at any time by the US government"?
I think this is less of a case about it being 'social media' and more of a case about being careful in what jurisdiction you're hosting potentially sensitive stuff. If Twitter was a service hosted in a country with a little more of a grasp on reality you'd probably be less concerned about it - same if you were just hosting a blog, or a website that mirrored the wikileaks cables, or whatever.... as long as your target country wasn't on that growing list of ones that would just do what the US government told them to do anyway, of course
My understanding is that one of the original limitations of the OtherOS setup was that you couldn't run hardware-accelerated video. Was that an enforced limitation of the OtherOS environment and does your new research allow this (maybe under AsbestOS)?
We are married to a mainstream codec really - we're stuck using h264 as we need to encode for the web and mobile devices.
One of the big reasons for going with Flix Encoder was that it also supported WebM, with the (now reduced) hope that Google would get behind WebM in a major way and it would get everyone off h264.
Their support for Flix Engine was limited to FAQs, documentation, and a couple of their developers working on the project (possibly former On2 employees?) on the mailing list. I am on the mailing list and the developers are very quick to respond; it is usually pretty low volume so I don't think the support burden was a really big deal for them considering what it gave them.
(Disclaimer: I'm the submitter. I've used the Flix Engine and other On2 products as part of our video encoding pipeline; I have been encoding videos as a part of my job ~6 years so have some experience with the range of software available.)
Flix Engine was for me a necessity, basically because it let me build command-line encoding tools that I could use reliably in automation, with the following benefits:
- On2/Google are MPEG-LA licensees, so I could use it without having to worry (too much, anyway) about patent issues. - It is one of the few products I've used that can handle a wide range of input formats (with appropriate codecs) and deal with them internally in a useful manner (largely because it uses a lot of open source components). - I found it very flexible in terms of the API so it was very easy to customise our encoder - I was just using PHP so it was trivial to make small changes to the encoding process. The documentation is great too.
There are a lot of open source encoding alternatives - mencoder/ffmpeg - but our encoding pipeline is going to a client and patent/licensing issues are a concern for me. I inquired about licensing the MPEG-LA portfolio and they sent me a beautifully printed and bound 60 page contract that is still sitting on my desk, unopened - it is just a stupid thing for a small software developer to have to deal with to add video encoding into their system.
Google getting behind On2 and getting the Engine out and cheaper (they changed the price from $4000/year or something to $200 flat rate) and their development of WebM gave me a lot of hope that they were going to be the ones that were going to fight the battle to free video. While it might seem like codecs are a flooded market, the reality seems to be that everyone in the market (commercially - not open source) is too scared to do anything at the moment in case they get sued.
I hope Google do something with the Flix Engine and this is just a part of their overall strategy to release an even more awesome, comprehensive video encoding system for the world.
I had to go back to Firefox because I found the Omnibox utterly useless for how I use an address bar. After getting used to the Awesomebar I have no idea how anyone could use the Chrome one and think it was better.
If Omnibox gave higher priority to keywords in my history like Awesomebar does it would be great, but at the moment if you're used to Awesomebar its almost impossible to adapt.
Banks could do a lot more to prevent fraud, but they don't have really strong financial incentives to, because most of the banking laws are designed to push the risk from them to you. Why should they care when they aren't the ones losing the money?
Maybe some sort of global financial meltdown will wake consumers up to that fact and they'll start voting cleverly for reform!
(I've never tried it and it hasn't been updated for a while but it's always sounded cool to me as an anonymous method of filesharing, even though there's obvious issues)
I sort of find it entertaining that the US government appears to be happy for Microsoft to export Windows to Iran so that it can be used in their nuclear industry.
But at the same time companies like Amazon, Mastercard, Visa and PayPal are so scared of Wikileaks (and/or the US government's reaction to their commercial relation to Wikileaks) that they're pulling their commercial ties as soon as possible.
Of course, as soon as they switch to Linux, I assume it (and open source) will painted as the evil, terrorist supporting operating system that it truly must be!
I pretty much expect to see that sort of thing now, so I bounced through a US web proxy so I could check it out - interestingly, I still got the same message. I checked and saw I was still logged into Google/Gmail, so logged out. Still got the same message. Deleted all my google.com cookies - still got the same message.
I gave up at this point, but I thought it was interesting that they really go out of their way to enforce region restrictions!
Slashdot Mirror
If the choices are between Google having the power, and MPEG-LA having the power, I know which I would rather have - Google, in a heartbeat. Their track record in openness in their software and standards has been amazingly refreshing from a large company.
It might be creating a bit of a false dichotomy to think those are our only two options. But at the moment that looks like the war to me - noone else will go up against MPEG-LA patent pool.
Microsoft are betting their chips on h264. They know VC1 is almost useless going forward (largely because of Apple). They're a licensor of h264, so it's pretty much a win-win scenario for them. This move is clearly a calculated move to chip away at Google and nothing more, and the benefits to Windows/Chrome users is completely incidental.
I am surprised that the Slashdot Linux users haven't pointed out how bad this is simply because it extends h264 in a way that makes it even worse for Linux media playing - Chrome won't get this plugin under Linux, and without a properly licensed h264 player then it'll be the DVD playing days all over again.
What I would like is a VLC plugin that opens VLC in the browser window (instead of Flash, or whatever). But yep, this would be awesome. From a client side I think it would really go a long way to solving the html5 video tag issue, because (generally) it would take a lot of the pain out of the browser side of the equation.
If you /can/ watch h264 on your Linux box, chances are you're doing it "wrong", at least from the perspective of the software patent holders that want to charge you for the privilege to do so. This is what the h264/vp8 fight is about.
This move from Microsoft is super-clever - it looks like they're bringing more choice to the table. But the reality is they're just further entrenching h264, because it's in their interests to do so - they can happily afford any patent licensing costs (oh, and they're one of the h264 licensors, of course).
My brother is a psychology PhD student - he's had TMI on a couple of occasions and has described it as a generally interesting experience. So far he's shown no ill effects other than a tendency to talk about it a lot.
Yep, transcripts are great - I always prefer reading because I can absorb information so much faster than video. Generally, any video I want to watch now I try to download locally and play back in VLC at 1.2-1.5x faster - highly recommended.
But I understand why they don't do transcripts - because it takes a lot of effort. We do transcripts for all videos that we produce on our website (blatant example plug) and doing it properly takes a surprising amount of effort. It's really easy to make mistakes, it's really time consuming to type it all up, etc. I believe there's some software which purports to automatically generate transcriptions - I haven't used it, but have seen the results - terribad.
We've tried various options - like having juniors do it or volunteers - but usually the only way we can consistently get good quality transcriptions is to have them done by the person who actually did the video.
Next step is actually doing it as closed captioning but that's another whole area of effort!
I would rather airdrop them the tools with a view to giving them an education that is focused on critical thinking, and then let the chips fall where they may.
The spread of "American ideals" is probably scary to a lot of people (like me) that live outside of the USA, because to us all we get to see is unjust wars, your politicians and laws being bought and sold while your citizenry ignores it, attempts by the religious right to cloud your educational system, and so forth. I know that's (probably) not what you mean, but ... here we are.
I think Nokia got into this weird habit of just building a whole bunch of handsets and spraying them out randomly hoping that there'll be someone out there that the design appeals to. I think that strategy worked well for them back in the pre-smartphone days when physical design and feature sets was more important than now, where it's all about software, but I think it's totally biting them in the ass now - they're still churning out different units and just losing ground left right and centre because their software is suffering.
I have an N900 but I abandoned it pretty soon after I got an Android. I keep the N900 around because holy shit it's handy having a full Linux box that I can carry around in my pocket, but in terms of general usability as a phone/portable email/social/browser device it is simply smashed by Android in just about every respect.
I was thoroughly disappointed when they announced Meego - not because I thought it was a bad idea, but because it was instantly apparent that - after all the touting of Maemo and its virtues, it was going to get dropped by the side of the road. It was especially vexing for us here in Australia because the N900 took sooooo much longer to come out - so it seemed the platform was dead shortly after it was released here.
I still like to think Nokia have a lot of potential though - there's so much awesomeness in some of the things they do.
That's pretty funny for me to read because I was in the exact same boat back then (though I was 18-19), and I was in the Doom/Quake camp. You're totally right re: the character stuff, but we only ever played multiplayer - we were doing LANs from the Doom age so migrating over to Quake was easy for us.
That said I am looking forward to DNF! It has been a long time coming and I really hope that it keeps the spirit of the original and still manages to be a fun game to play.
Wow! I knew you could do site:example.com but didn't realise you could use it as an exclusion modifier as well. Thanks!
I have 35GB of photos. I keep my "master" copy on my main HDD on my computer at home. I have a USB HDD plugged into it which is a generic backup device; I use pathsync to back up my photos there.
I can use my work hard drive for storage, so I also keep a copy on my work HDD as one off-site backup - I can connect to the office network via VPN, mount my work drive on my home PC and I can also use pathsync - though if I have many gigs of new photos I'll just copy them on my phone and bring them.
I also have a simple personal web hosting account at GoDaddy with some stupid amount of storage, so I just randomly FTP up copies of images when I remember.
One big concern I have is making sure the images aren't getting corrupted in transit or by disk failure, so I'm thinking about putting together a simple system to regularly verify them all via md5 to ensure there's not any changes that I'm not expecting. A side effect of this system is it would easily help me figure out exactly how many copies I have of all these images and where they are.
Well, that obviously ultimately depends on what definition of the word "engineer" you are using, at which point this gets into even more a semantics debate than it is already :)
But, to answer your question, within our company I refer to people that are writing code as "programmers" (or "developers") (not software engineers), and I refer to our network/operations guys as "system/network admins" (not network engineers), and the guys that write for us as "writers/editors", not "content engineers".
It's the same thing with the title 'doctor' (again, here in Australia). It's even stricter here about when you can use the term 'Doctor' (and I suspect these rules will become tightened even more in the wake of the gradual destruction of pseudo-medicines like homeopathy and chiropractic).
(I enjoy the debate about the appropriateness of using the 'doctor' word regularly with my siblings: one is an actual medical doctor, and the other a PhD student. :)
The title "Engineer" is a actually an accredited title here in Australia - you have to do an actual engineering degree to go around and call yourself an engineer and there are strict rules about it.
http://www.engineersaustralia.org.au/about-us/program-accreditation/program-accreditation_home.cfm
So I sort of agree with the GP, in that the title 'engineer' has been somewhat usurped by programmers that call themselves 'software engineers' and the various other things that get prepended to it - there's a qualitative difference here between a "software engineer" - that is, someone who went to university and did an engineering degree and studied software within that degree - and someone who either went to uni and did an IT degree, even if they studied something called "software engineering" as a subject/discipline.
(The mate that told me about all this did electrical engineering at uni, and is now a software engineer at a railway company - it is policy at his company to only hire actual engineers for programming positions as they feel the processes behind non-engineering software development education are not sufficient to ensure trains are not whapping into each other all the time.)
I asked MPEG-LA what I would need to do to correctly license an open source h264 implementation. They fedexed me a massive contract:
http://trog.qgl.org/20110114/the-mpeg-la-license-agreement/
I'm not interested in reading that whole thing. I would happily give them some money to get a "correctly" licensed ffmpeg thing for commercial use.
Could MPEG-LA package up a version of ffpmeg/x264 and sell it off their site or would that violate the license of those software packages, I wonder...?
Everything you say or do can and will be used against you in a court of law.
I would say, "does anyone need more reason to quit doing anything that is hosted on a service in the US where their personal information can seemingly be requested or taken at any time by the US government"?
I think this is less of a case about it being 'social media' and more of a case about being careful in what jurisdiction you're hosting potentially sensitive stuff. If Twitter was a service hosted in a country with a little more of a grasp on reality you'd probably be less concerned about it - same if you were just hosting a blog, or a website that mirrored the wikileaks cables, or whatever. ... as long as your target country wasn't on that growing list of ones that would just do what the US government told them to do anyway, of course
My understanding is that one of the original limitations of the OtherOS setup was that you couldn't run hardware-accelerated video. Was that an enforced limitation of the OtherOS environment and does your new research allow this (maybe under AsbestOS)?
We are married to a mainstream codec really - we're stuck using h264 as we need to encode for the web and mobile devices.
One of the big reasons for going with Flix Encoder was that it also supported WebM, with the (now reduced) hope that Google would get behind WebM in a major way and it would get everyone off h264.
Their support for Flix Engine was limited to FAQs, documentation, and a couple of their developers working on the project (possibly former On2 employees?) on the mailing list. I am on the mailing list and the developers are very quick to respond; it is usually pretty low volume so I don't think the support burden was a really big deal for them considering what it gave them.
(Disclaimer: I'm the submitter. I've used the Flix Engine and other On2 products as part of our video encoding pipeline; I have been encoding videos as a part of my job ~6 years so have some experience with the range of software available.)
Flix Engine was for me a necessity, basically because it let me build command-line encoding tools that I could use reliably in automation, with the following benefits:
- On2/Google are MPEG-LA licensees, so I could use it without having to worry (too much, anyway) about patent issues.
- It is one of the few products I've used that can handle a wide range of input formats (with appropriate codecs) and deal with them internally in a useful manner (largely because it uses a lot of open source components).
- I found it very flexible in terms of the API so it was very easy to customise our encoder - I was just using PHP so it was trivial to make small changes to the encoding process. The documentation is great too.
There are a lot of open source encoding alternatives - mencoder/ffmpeg - but our encoding pipeline is going to a client and patent/licensing issues are a concern for me. I inquired about licensing the MPEG-LA portfolio and they sent me a beautifully printed and bound 60 page contract that is still sitting on my desk, unopened - it is just a stupid thing for a small software developer to have to deal with to add video encoding into their system.
Google getting behind On2 and getting the Engine out and cheaper (they changed the price from $4000/year or something to $200 flat rate) and their development of WebM gave me a lot of hope that they were going to be the ones that were going to fight the battle to free video. While it might seem like codecs are a flooded market, the reality seems to be that everyone in the market (commercially - not open source) is too scared to do anything at the moment in case they get sued.
I hope Google do something with the Flix Engine and this is just a part of their overall strategy to release an even more awesome, comprehensive video encoding system for the world.
I had to go back to Firefox because I found the Omnibox utterly useless for how I use an address bar. After getting used to the Awesomebar I have no idea how anyone could use the Chrome one and think it was better.
If Omnibox gave higher priority to keywords in my history like Awesomebar does it would be great, but at the moment if you're used to Awesomebar its almost impossible to adapt.
....like letting more people have access to it
Banks could do a lot more to prevent fraud, but they don't have really strong financial incentives to, because most of the banking laws are designed to push the risk from them to you. Why should they care when they aren't the ones losing the money?
Maybe some sort of global financial meltdown will wake consumers up to that fact and they'll start voting cleverly for reform!
Haven't RTFA'd, but I've always been interested in the MUTE project ), which is a truly anonymous p2p filesharing system which is based on how ants find food: http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/howAnts.shtml
(I've never tried it and it hasn't been updated for a while but it's always sounded cool to me as an anonymous method of filesharing, even though there's obvious issues)
Lucky you've got those guns then, I guess
I sort of find it entertaining that the US government appears to be happy for Microsoft to export Windows to Iran so that it can be used in their nuclear industry.
But at the same time companies like Amazon, Mastercard, Visa and PayPal are so scared of Wikileaks (and/or the US government's reaction to their commercial relation to Wikileaks) that they're pulling their commercial ties as soon as possible.
Of course, as soon as they switch to Linux, I assume it (and open source) will painted as the evil, terrorist supporting operating system that it truly must be!
That was my experience too (in Australia).
I pretty much expect to see that sort of thing now, so I bounced through a US web proxy so I could check it out - interestingly, I still got the same message. I checked and saw I was still logged into Google/Gmail, so logged out. Still got the same message. Deleted all my google.com cookies - still got the same message.
I gave up at this point, but I thought it was interesting that they really go out of their way to enforce region restrictions!