With KDE & QT, your application will only be GPL, unless you cough up the money for QT license *before* you start developing your app.
Why would that be? As the copyright holder, you can change the license any time you want. You can start it as GPL when it's in-house, and change the license later if you want to sell it outside of your company.
QT is GPLed. TrollTech has no control over that. They have distributed versions of QT that have the GPL license attatched, therefore these versions can legally be distributed, modified, and everything else the GPL allows. There are no "extra restrictions". Furthermore, there is an agreement signed by TrollTech and KDE community members that states if QT development ever stops for any reason, including buyout/takeover, the latest version of the GPL'd QT will be released under the BSD license. Check it out.
It is true that TrollTech controls who can write closed-source applications for KDE, but they have no control over open-source applications for KDE, or KDE itself. In addition, AFAIK they have never prevented anyone from buying a QT license that wanted one. That would be stupid of them, since they would only be denying themselves revenue. It is not true that SCO controls TrollTech. TrollTech is its own company, not controlled by anyone, and it is fully committed to supporting open-source software.
You can't tell me that taking a well-known technology involving a database and moving the database from the client to a server is worthy of a patent! It's totally obvious to do that. I hate these people who take a well-known technology, change a small aspect, and patent it. Just because nobody has changed that exact aspect of the technology before doesn't mean it's not obvious. It could even be that hundreds of people have thought of it before, and decided it was impractical or didn't decide to implement it for other reasons.
If Amazon had single-handedly invented autocompletion, that would be innovation. Even so, allowing a patent on it would stifle further innovation. Imagine Amazon or somebody else had patented autocompletion when it was first invented. Then instead of it being used all over the place, it might be used in a few places in commercial software that could afford a patent license, and open-source software would be left out in the cold. The rate of innovations in autocompletion technology itself, such as weighting the results by popularity (which amazon did NOT invent) would be much lower due to the small number of people using it. And if any new innovations were made, they would probably require yet another patent license. We would basically be locked out of using a very helpful user-interface technique, and computer users everywhere would suffer.
Software and business method patents in general serve to stifle innovation, not foster it. Something needs to be done.
URL bar autocompletion in many browsers tries to take into account the "most popular" URLs that you visit. For example, if you often type "penny-arcade.com" into your address bar, when you type "p" it will appear in the autocompletion list before "party.com" even though party comes before penny in the dictionary. The idea isn't new, the only thing that is new is the connection to online purchases. Unfortunately, the patent system seems to be set up so that that difference alone makes it worthy of a patent, which is one of the big problems with the patent system. The idea is obvious and well-known, so applying it in a slightly different way is also obvious, but it can be patented anyway.
You only think you're joking. The Internet is putting the knitting/sewing pattern industry at the mercy of grandmas armed with scanners. Rampant Pattern Swapping. When will the madness end?
Using kio_fish or kio_sftp along with Konqueror gives exactly the same functionality as WinSCP, only better since fish:// and sftp:// URLs work in any KDE application, not just Konqueror, and KDE can also handle ftp, http, webdav, and a number of other protocols at the same time.
Simple drag and drop, mouse selected, secure transfers. Is this too much to ask?
Not at all, it's a reality with KDE 3.1. I use it almost every day. Why are you using a pre-3.1 KDE anyway?
I realize that there are keyframe issues, but there is no doubt in my mind that players can do a LOT better than they do currently. Just adding some caching and maybe some pre-emptive frame decoding would allow responsive single-frame seeking. Besides, how common is a 10 minute keyframe interval? 10 seconds seems more realistic. There's nothing you can do about a 10 minute keyframe interval, but that's no excuse for handling a 10 second keyframe interval poorly.
Also, while the mouse is being dragged around wildly, displaying only keyframes might be necessary. But when the user is moving the seek bar only slightly, trying to get to a particular spot, there is plenty of time for the decoder to catch up and start displaying the right frames.
Every current media player out there has a UI that is really unresponsive. Some have buttons that often take half a second or more to do anything when they're pressed. Most have seek bars that move smoothly under the mouse but aren't connected to the video while moving, or only seek to discrete points that are quite far apart. Most lack small-step seeking controls. I often find myself wanting to take a closer look at a part of a video or wanting to position a video at a particular point before playing, but finding the point is nearly impossible due to the horrible seek controls, button delays, and lack of small-step seeking both forward and back. VCRs have an excuse for being unresponsive, they are based on physical tape that must move. Software video players have no such excuse. I think once you used a player with an extremely responsive UI, you would wonder how you ever used any other player.
How about this: why doesn't somebody make a movie player browser plugin that, instead of playing the movie in the browser window, which is just about the second stupidest thing I've ever seen, pops up a dialog box with the options "save to disk" and "play in fullscreen mode", which are the only two things I ever want to do with a movie I find on the web.
Looks like KXine hasn't been touched in over half a year. KPlayer and KMplayer, on the other hand, seem to be progressing nicely. I won't be happy until some backend issues are fixed, though, like smooth seeking/rewind/fastforward and single frame advance/rewind. Seems like no linux media player is interested in tackling these issues. Quicktime is the only player that gets it right. But it is windows/macos only and has annoying advertisements and Flash-like "features". I want my movie player to just play movies, not be a "media center" where "media" is defined as "whatever stuff AOL/Time Warner/Disney/Sony/etc. want you to be paying for today".
um... use mplayer instead? It plays things just as well as xine, and the interface is heavily keyboard-oriented. I imagine if it doesn't have this SVQ3 support already, it will soon (as in days). MPlayer's GUI is actually better than Xine's (IMHO, at least the configuration dialog is miles better), but it still sucks (why oh why can nobody come up with a decent media player GUI!?!?). The keyboard-only interface is much nicer. The anti-aliased, shadowed overlays are nice too:-) Honestly, I don't know why anyone uses Xine when MPlayer has a better GUI and a better keyboard interface. Maybe I'm just missing something.
Lastly, this is a nitpick I know, but bullets travel at well over the speed of sound. I don't care how fast you pull the trigger, with the action of a semi-automatic, the bullets will likely be 100 feet apart between shots.
How is this a problem? Obviously the bullets are being slowed down. The first one may be traveling at the speed of sound when it first leaves the gun but it is suddenly going a lot slower, allowing the rest to catch up. Neo didn't just dodge the bullets, he slowed them, both times he was being shot at. The first time he lost his concentration and got hit by one that he didn't slow down.
No, that's totally wrong. BitTorrent is a file distribution tool, not a file sharing network. Every posted BitTorrent link is totally independent, and forms its own independent network which does not benefit any other BitTorrent users. So slashdot posting a BitTorrent link of the animatrix doesn't help anyone download Red Hat ISOs. And BitTorrent certainly doesn't give any cash to Slashdot. Have you even seen the BitTorrent website?
Try again a couple of times. AOL's servers seem to be having a bit of trouble under the load. They are using some weird load-balancing thing. Once you get through, though, it's nice and fast.
Why are we using BitTorrent to spare AOL's bandwidth?!?!?!? We never use BitTorrent to spare the poor guy who builds a lego robot or whatever and hosts his site on his DSL and then gets slashdotted. Sometimes Slashdot editors can just be so dumb...
That would require that the ISPs have a "big picture" view of how they can grow their business. Instead they have a selfish, short-sighted, penny-pinching view of how they can increase profits. They all believe that the money is in providing fat outbound pipes to content "providers" and fat inbound pipes to content "consumers". They believe in regulation of the types of traffic, so that they can sell "value added" service by application (like internet telephony or VPNs or running servers of any type). They certainly don't believe in providing a service that might cost them money in order to improve the Internet as a whole so they get more subscribers. Replicating doesn't just mean that the ISP's subscribers get more inbound traffic, it means that the ISP gets more traffic outbound to other ISPs, which it has to pay for, and the other ISPs customers get more inbound traffic too.
If the ISPs can charge extra for multicasting, they will. It's hard to blame them either. The Internet is best served by ISPs selling bandwidth as a true economic commodity, and companies selling a commodity in a competitive market get profit driven down to 0 by the laws of economics. Nobody wants to sell a commodity. They want to differentiate their product.
Isn't there really cool, configurable dhcp-like stuff built in? Real 'plug it in and it works' networking isn't a reason to switch? To me, IPv6's automation is it's killer app. Once it is deployed in a LAN, it has the potential to make the job of the LAN admin easier.
The problem I see with multicasting is, you'll probably still have to pay for the bandwidth, because at some point the data still has to be replicated. Do you think that your ISP is going to sit and watch as you multicast through their network, causing them to send out many times more data than is coming in? Not if they can help it. They will charge for every multicasted bit. Maybe it's more efficient sometimes, but it will still cost lots of money, most likely. It's not going to help you host linux isos on your DSL line for your regular flat rate service. At least, not if your ISP can help it.
It may be open source, but it's not free (as in beer). There are patents on mpeg4, so no implementation can be fully legal without paying royalties. I'm not even sure it's completely legal to even have a GPL mpeg4 codec. It's the same situation as with mp3 and Lame, and it has the same solution: Ogg. Ogg Theora, in particular (and perhaps Ogg Tarkin in the far future). I was really hoping the next doom9 codec comparison would include Ogg Theora, so everyone could see how it stacked up to the likes of Xvid. Doom9 is the only place I know of that really compares video codecs in a halfway impartial way. I guess we have to wait even longer now to find out if VP3 is any good.
Yeah, well tell your professor that the reason he likes to belittle computer "nerds" is to make himself feel powerful and cover up his own feelings of inadequacy and helplessness with the complex technology (created by these "nerds") that makes today's modern world go round.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would that be? As the copyright holder, you can change the license any time you want. You can start it as GPL when it's in-house, and change the license later if you want to sell it outside of your company.
This is not intended to help rental stores. This is intended to kill them. That way the studios get all the profit from "rentals" as well as sales.
It is true that TrollTech controls who can write closed-source applications for KDE, but they have no control over open-source applications for KDE, or KDE itself. In addition, AFAIK they have never prevented anyone from buying a QT license that wanted one. That would be stupid of them, since they would only be denying themselves revenue. It is not true that SCO controls TrollTech. TrollTech is its own company, not controlled by anyone, and it is fully committed to supporting open-source software.
If Amazon had single-handedly invented autocompletion, that would be innovation. Even so, allowing a patent on it would stifle further innovation. Imagine Amazon or somebody else had patented autocompletion when it was first invented. Then instead of it being used all over the place, it might be used in a few places in commercial software that could afford a patent license, and open-source software would be left out in the cold. The rate of innovations in autocompletion technology itself, such as weighting the results by popularity (which amazon did NOT invent) would be much lower due to the small number of people using it. And if any new innovations were made, they would probably require yet another patent license. We would basically be locked out of using a very helpful user-interface technique, and computer users everywhere would suffer.
Software and business method patents in general serve to stifle innovation, not foster it. Something needs to be done.
URL bar autocompletion in many browsers tries to take into account the "most popular" URLs that you visit. For example, if you often type "penny-arcade.com" into your address bar, when you type "p" it will appear in the autocompletion list before "party.com" even though party comes before penny in the dictionary. The idea isn't new, the only thing that is new is the connection to online purchases. Unfortunately, the patent system seems to be set up so that that difference alone makes it worthy of a patent, which is one of the big problems with the patent system. The idea is obvious and well-known, so applying it in a slightly different way is also obvious, but it can be patented anyway.
You only think you're joking. The Internet is putting the knitting/sewing pattern industry at the mercy of grandmas armed with scanners. Rampant Pattern Swapping. When will the madness end?
Simple drag and drop, mouse selected, secure transfers. Is this too much to ask?
Not at all, it's a reality with KDE 3.1. I use it almost every day. Why are you using a pre-3.1 KDE anyway?
I realize that there are keyframe issues, but there is no doubt in my mind that players can do a LOT better than they do currently. Just adding some caching and maybe some pre-emptive frame decoding would allow responsive single-frame seeking. Besides, how common is a 10 minute keyframe interval? 10 seconds seems more realistic. There's nothing you can do about a 10 minute keyframe interval, but that's no excuse for handling a 10 second keyframe interval poorly. Also, while the mouse is being dragged around wildly, displaying only keyframes might be necessary. But when the user is moving the seek bar only slightly, trying to get to a particular spot, there is plenty of time for the decoder to catch up and start displaying the right frames.
Every current media player out there has a UI that is really unresponsive. Some have buttons that often take half a second or more to do anything when they're pressed. Most have seek bars that move smoothly under the mouse but aren't connected to the video while moving, or only seek to discrete points that are quite far apart. Most lack small-step seeking controls. I often find myself wanting to take a closer look at a part of a video or wanting to position a video at a particular point before playing, but finding the point is nearly impossible due to the horrible seek controls, button delays, and lack of small-step seeking both forward and back. VCRs have an excuse for being unresponsive, they are based on physical tape that must move. Software video players have no such excuse. I think once you used a player with an extremely responsive UI, you would wonder how you ever used any other player.
How about this: why doesn't somebody make a movie player browser plugin that, instead of playing the movie in the browser window, which is just about the second stupidest thing I've ever seen, pops up a dialog box with the options "save to disk" and "play in fullscreen mode", which are the only two things I ever want to do with a movie I find on the web.
Looks like KXine hasn't been touched in over half a year. KPlayer and KMplayer, on the other hand, seem to be progressing nicely. I won't be happy until some backend issues are fixed, though, like smooth seeking/rewind/fastforward and single frame advance/rewind. Seems like no linux media player is interested in tackling these issues. Quicktime is the only player that gets it right. But it is windows/macos only and has annoying advertisements and Flash-like "features". I want my movie player to just play movies, not be a "media center" where "media" is defined as "whatever stuff AOL/Time Warner/Disney/Sony/etc. want you to be paying for today".
um... use mplayer instead? It plays things just as well as xine, and the interface is heavily keyboard-oriented. I imagine if it doesn't have this SVQ3 support already, it will soon (as in days). MPlayer's GUI is actually better than Xine's (IMHO, at least the configuration dialog is miles better), but it still sucks (why oh why can nobody come up with a decent media player GUI!?!?). The keyboard-only interface is much nicer. The anti-aliased, shadowed overlays are nice too :-) Honestly, I don't know why anyone uses Xine when MPlayer has a better GUI and a better keyboard interface. Maybe I'm just missing something.
Great! Now all it needs is an interface that doesn't suck majorly. Have you tried to use their configuration dialog? What were they thinking?
gcc: warning: suggest parentheses around assignment used as truth value
That warning has saved me from potentially hours of pointless debugging, on more than one occasion.
Man, when someone mentions having an "old" laptop that's twice as fast as your current desktop, you know it's time to upgrade ;-)
How is this a problem? Obviously the bullets are being slowed down. The first one may be traveling at the speed of sound when it first leaves the gun but it is suddenly going a lot slower, allowing the rest to catch up. Neo didn't just dodge the bullets, he slowed them, both times he was being shot at. The first time he lost his concentration and got hit by one that he didn't slow down.
No, that's totally wrong. BitTorrent is a file distribution tool, not a file sharing network. Every posted BitTorrent link is totally independent, and forms its own independent network which does not benefit any other BitTorrent users. So slashdot posting a BitTorrent link of the animatrix doesn't help anyone download Red Hat ISOs. And BitTorrent certainly doesn't give any cash to Slashdot. Have you even seen the BitTorrent website?
Try again a couple of times. AOL's servers seem to be having a bit of trouble under the load. They are using some weird load-balancing thing. Once you get through, though, it's nice and fast.
Oh, and here are the REAL links to the second episode (as I post this, the links in the article still point to the first episode).
Medium version (recommended for people with non-godly computers, the large version starts skipping frames)
Large version
Why are we using BitTorrent to spare AOL's bandwidth?!?!?!? We never use BitTorrent to spare the poor guy who builds a lego robot or whatever and hosts his site on his DSL and then gets slashdotted. Sometimes Slashdot editors can just be so dumb...
If the ISPs can charge extra for multicasting, they will. It's hard to blame them either. The Internet is best served by ISPs selling bandwidth as a true economic commodity, and companies selling a commodity in a competitive market get profit driven down to 0 by the laws of economics. Nobody wants to sell a commodity. They want to differentiate their product.
Isn't there really cool, configurable dhcp-like stuff built in? Real 'plug it in and it works' networking isn't a reason to switch? To me, IPv6's automation is it's killer app. Once it is deployed in a LAN, it has the potential to make the job of the LAN admin easier.
The problem I see with multicasting is, you'll probably still have to pay for the bandwidth, because at some point the data still has to be replicated. Do you think that your ISP is going to sit and watch as you multicast through their network, causing them to send out many times more data than is coming in? Not if they can help it. They will charge for every multicasted bit. Maybe it's more efficient sometimes, but it will still cost lots of money, most likely. It's not going to help you host linux isos on your DSL line for your regular flat rate service. At least, not if your ISP can help it.
It may be open source, but it's not free (as in beer). There are patents on mpeg4, so no implementation can be fully legal without paying royalties. I'm not even sure it's completely legal to even have a GPL mpeg4 codec. It's the same situation as with mp3 and Lame, and it has the same solution: Ogg. Ogg Theora, in particular (and perhaps Ogg Tarkin in the far future). I was really hoping the next doom9 codec comparison would include Ogg Theora, so everyone could see how it stacked up to the likes of Xvid. Doom9 is the only place I know of that really compares video codecs in a halfway impartial way. I guess we have to wait even longer now to find out if VP3 is any good.
That ought to get you an A ;-)