No kidding - you described it perfectly. The sysadmins had to sign off on a box to run it on. Another group had to create a login account. Security had to allow SSH access. Networking had to allocate an IP and provide DNS. Finally, enter the BDBAFH and his ilk.
As much as I hated it, I don't envy your position one bit. You and I both understand why you can't fulfill that request, but you had to explain it to my VP (who wouldn't have listened to me anyway).
Know-It-Alls often insist on doing things their own way. They change options and settings on their computers just because they can, and they have a tendency to connect devices and download software to their computers that IT does not support.
Even worse are sysadmins who think that every other tech in the company are Know-It-Alls that must be contained at all costs. At a previous job, I was tasked with installing a rather expensive server application. It was one of those nightmare jobs with a huge spaghetti-coded shell script installer. You know the kind: works great once it's running, but you better have things exactly right before running./install.sh.
Anyway, one of its requirements was an empty Oracle database and an account with permissions to create the tables it would be using. Now, I'm sure our DBA was a pretty clever guy, and I understand that he had an important job, but he was a complete ass about giving me that empty database. After all, only a Trained DBA is qualified to know how your schema should be designed; never mind that we were buying the app and didn't have a lot of say over how it was set up. Since he and I reported to different bosses, it finally took a request travelling up to the VP level and back down (plus some not so veiled threats of a beating) to finally get the ability to install the application we'd paid about $50K for. Oh, and the installer ran perfectly the first time. You could actually hear his teeth grind as it completed without so much as a warning.
I'm sure in his mind I was a pesky Know-It-All who wanted nothing more than to make his life difficult. He probably complained to his friends about the thorn in his side at the office who wanted - can you believe it! - free reign over a corner of his beloved Oracle.
The moral is that sometimes the people "beneath" you really do know what they're doing if you can bring yourself to give them a chance.
You don't send a GIF with a graph. You send raw data, and let the client side software to generate captions, calculate scale, find top value and trend lines, then feed the result to a flash library that will create a pretty graph from it.
Ah, gotcha. That makes sense. Done anything with SVG?
Web sites need to enable HTTPS properly over their entire site. Then your ISP can do nothing more than just prevent the secure connection from being established.
...and all forms of proxying.
Right now, many ISPs use transparent Squid proxies or the like to cache incoming pages. This is enormously beneficial because if someone requests the non-authenticated front page of CNN.com that says it's cacheable for 30 minutes, for example, then there's no reason to make 10,000 other customers to fetch an identical copy from CNN's servers. Note: HTTP headers can include rules like "don't cache this page", or "only give this copy of this page to the customer who presents a certain session cookie" so that even authenticated users can benefit from the caching.
Anyway, HTTPS breaks that. Now you have to let those 10,000 customers request their own identical copy from CNN. This means you have to pay for much more bandwidth and that site will "feel" slower to your customers who will blame you for it. I use HTTPS lots for my own site (I never check my webmail without it), but there are definite technical advantages to good ol' cleartext port 80.
Hi. I'm the 'inventor' (not really, On2 originally wrote vp3 and we're riffing from there. I'm the hacker working on it now).
Thanks for replying!
And I call it 'embarrassing' because Theora *could* easily be just as good, but it isn't right now.
That didn't come across so well in the presentation. That is the qualification wasn't apparent - it sounded like you were saying it was bad, period.
Bullshit. MPEG is simultaneously inefficient and narrow in their focus.
But the legal teams of every major corporation that wants to use it? I imagine Sony's given it a look or two along the way. Just as an example.
Irrelevant. This is an argument against Google (Altavista dwarfed them), Microsoft (IBM and even Apple dwarfed them), Toyota (GM dwarfed them), etc.
I don't think it's irrelevant. There's a while lot to be said for mindshare, and right now Theora has roughly zero outside our circles. Honestly, I wish you well - we're on the same side! - but I respectfully disagree that Theora's ready to be standardized right now today.
porting large parts of business logic to JS to offload your application servers,
Whoa, hey, full stop. I was with you until then, but... You're really trusting your business logic to the least controlled (both in the "security" and "standardized" sense) part of the stack? Ouch. Good luck, man.
You presume that the existence of x264 means that there's no patents on it!?
No. But you're assuming that the existence of libtheora means that the only patents on it are the ones that On2 licensed to the project. My point here is that it's not known that Theora is legally clear, although it's generally presumed to be. Companies have a pretty good idea what's involved in using H.264 because Sorenson has made that abundantly clear. Is there an NTP, Inc. just waiting for Theora to get popular so they can sink us?
OK, I know that sounds suspiciously close to FUD, but it's true: we can't just say that Theora is perfectly legal simply because we really, really want it to be.
Also, Youtube has to stream H.264 with MP3 audio because that's the way FLV works. The container doesn't support anything else.
That doesn't make it any less popular.
Oh, and Theora does have one massive advantages over H.264: It requires significantly less CPU time to decode.
OK, now, that's not really an accurate comparison because it's not available at the same quality levels. Furthermore, since libtheora is still in beta, we don't know what the release version will be like. For instance, if they find a showstopper bug that requires 50% more processing to detect and avoid, then it might not end up being so well-behaved. While that probably won't happen, there's plenty of precedent to go around.
Again, I don't dislike Theora and I'm totally for what it represents. I just don't think it's workable right now, and I don't think we can justify including it in a standard right now (especially since there's no release version of its reference implementation). It's too early to call it good, and by the time it's polished and ready to go it will likely be even further behind.
with "supporters" like you, FOSS does not need enemies.
Listen, kid, I've probably been using and writing FOSS since before you were born. My name's in NetBSD's source tree and the OpenBSD donations page, and I've argued pro-freedom on Slashdot more times than you've posted total. You're barking up the wrong tree on this one so give it up.
And yet I still don't think that Theora's inherently better than newer codecs for all the reasons I mentioned, including freedom. You can spend your time futilely attacking me or you can read what I wrote and see why not everyone agrees with you.
Posted from Konqueror on Kubuntu/Gutsy. I practice what I preach.
Life isn't about taking your ball and going home. It's about doing deals to gently move the status quo over to your side. Taking your ball and going home isn't going to actually SOLVE anything.
You've been beaten silly by the school bully every day for 4 years. The principal knows what's happening - he even issued a formal statement that the bully was using his size to illegally control every kind on the playground - but no one does anything about it.
Your options are:
Take your ball and go home,
Organize the other kids to whoop the crap out of the bully once and for all, or
Be extra-nice to the bully and hope that next time he'll pick on someone else.
Your way just gets you another beating. After a while you have to say that enough's enough.
Unlike Vorbis and Speex, legitimate best-in-class codecs, Theora's coding quality is obviously poor relative to contemporary competition. This poor performance stems both from implementation and design deficiencies. As a seperate problem, Theora is also poorly integrated with Ogg due to incomplete multiplexing software and documentation on the Ogg side. Without guidance from Xiph.Org, outside development and implementation of Theora-in-Ogg has been chaotic and of low quality.
It's safe to say that MPEG4 and it's codecs have been more thoroughly researched than Theora. Remember the FOSS mantra: "many eyes make all bugs shallow"? That applies to lots of things, such as many video producers' legal teams checking this stuff out.
I absolutely, positively promise you that Youtube serves more video than Wikipedia, and they don't stream Theora.
You're imagining that Theora is equivalent to H.264, etc. It's not. There's no first-mover advantage to it because it's already been overtaken by, well, pretty much everything.
There's no standard web image format. By convention, most people use GIF and JPG (with a few PNGs sprinkled about for good measure), but that's just the way it happened to work out. I'm not sure why people have this wrong impression, but it's simply not true. Don't believe me? Read the spec yourself. If that isn't clear enough, W3 explicitly states that
The HTML specification does not prescribe or limit which graphics format you can use.
I'm a huge FOSS buff, but that doesn't mean I have to blindly love everything pushed out the door as "freedom friendly". I don't have anything against Theora except that it's just not very competitive. I wouldn't want to see it as the official video file format any more than I'd want to see ASCII text as the official document file format; both have clear limitations when compared to their competitors.
The W3 made the right choice. As much as I like the idea of Theora, I'm glad we don't have to be saddled with the reality of it.
Warning: Emacs perspective (although I imagine the same applies for Vim by now).
You're editing a file in a directory full of source and want to see if your changes work. Run the "compile" command by typing "-x compile" or selecting the "Tools -> Compile" menu. It runs "make" in a new shell buffer inside your Emacs session. If there are any errors in any of the files being built, "-x " loads that file and puts the cursor at the point of the error.
It's hard to imagine how incredibly useful features like that are until you've tried them. There's nothing you can't do with Vim or Emacs that you can't do by hand, but the idea is to let the computer handle all the boring and repetitive parts for you.
I thought I was the only one who, since the Internet made finding independent artists easier, actually enjoyed finding such hidden gems of music. After discovering indie bands, I learned it was cool to listen to something that most others don't know about.
Obligatory CDBaby.com link. I love that store! I was browsing through the "mood" section the other day and discovered some great new music that I ended up buying.
Having said that, there's a certain amount of risk to buying indie: they may not make any more. It's a safe bet that there will be future Timbaland and Britney and Justin Timberlake albums, so if you get into their stuff there's a strong chance you'll get more stuff you like next year. With indie bands, there's a pretty high probability that you're listening to the only album your new favorite group will ever record. There are one-hit pop wonders and long-lived indie bands, of course, but I think it's true in general. Even if it's not, I think it's the common perception that it's true.
Beyond that, there are social reasons that press people to listen to whatever's on Clearchannel Genre #23 this month. If you're up on the latest Britney, there are a lot of people you can talk to about it. If you're up on the latest indie, your best hope is that the other person is open-minded enough to consider something non-mainstream (and if many people were that open-minded, there wouldn't be a difference between indie and mainstream in the first place).
Neither of those reasons mean much to me and I'll keep buying stuff from CDBaby. I don't really blame people who are afraid to try it, though, especially those people who care a little more than you do about not sticking out from the crowd.
the "on" button was always slightly recessed, while the "off" button always projected slightly, so that any one accidentally bumping against the machine would be turning it off rather than on...
I can now buy ~16TB of storage like this setup in my office.
Most of the time, I like you. Today, right now, I hate you.
*looks at his CRT eMac and sighs*
Re:coders vs. sysadmins
on
Hacking VIM
·
· Score: 1
Whether VI is good at handling 2MB files is generally irrelevant when you need to correct a typo in/etc/vfstab that's keeping one of your systems from booting. It may not be prefect, but it's better than ed.
...until that error is keeping you from mounting/usr or/usr/share, thus make termcaps unavailable, thus keeping you from running anything curses-like.
The good news is that if you can use vi, you can probably get around OK in ed (just pretend you're typing everything at a ":" prompt and you're 90% of the way there). The bad news is that when you need it, you'll be in the worst possible mood to want to learn it.
Not that I'm defending ed particularly! I'd personally rather use sed and hope for the best. Just saying that vi isn't always better than the standard Unix EDitor.
Re:the dependcies for vim are out of control
on
Hacking VIM
·
· Score: 1
feature creep and bloat with dependencies on things like vim-common, vim-enhanced, x11 and athena have made it useless for anything lightweight.
So don't install those dependencies, genius.
I don't mean to be a jerk, but honestly, you're complaining about the mere existence of optional files?
Re:As a linux neophyte...
on
Hacking VIM
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I use nano. It's enough for my basic needs, and doesn't depend on cryptic key sequences:)
I used to use pico until my mentor saw it open in my terminal one day. He uninstalled it and gave me a Vim cheatsheet. I cursed his name for about a week, then grudgingly committed myself to learning Vim for a few weeks, then eventually came to thank him.
Then he introduced me to Emacs, and I'm still cursing his name.
Slashdot Mirror
No kidding - you described it perfectly. The sysadmins had to sign off on a box to run it on. Another group had to create a login account. Security had to allow SSH access. Networking had to allocate an IP and provide DNS. Finally, enter the BDBAFH and his ilk.
As much as I hated it, I don't envy your position one bit. You and I both understand why you can't fulfill that request, but you had to explain it to my VP (who wouldn't have listened to me anyway).
Even worse are sysadmins who think that every other tech in the company are Know-It-Alls that must be contained at all costs. At a previous job, I was tasked with installing a rather expensive server application. It was one of those nightmare jobs with a huge spaghetti-coded shell script installer. You know the kind: works great once it's running, but you better have things exactly right before running ./install.sh.
Anyway, one of its requirements was an empty Oracle database and an account with permissions to create the tables it would be using. Now, I'm sure our DBA was a pretty clever guy, and I understand that he had an important job, but he was a complete ass about giving me that empty database. After all, only a Trained DBA is qualified to know how your schema should be designed; never mind that we were buying the app and didn't have a lot of say over how it was set up. Since he and I reported to different bosses, it finally took a request travelling up to the VP level and back down (plus some not so veiled threats of a beating) to finally get the ability to install the application we'd paid about $50K for. Oh, and the installer ran perfectly the first time. You could actually hear his teeth grind as it completed without so much as a warning.
I'm sure in his mind I was a pesky Know-It-All who wanted nothing more than to make his life difficult. He probably complained to his friends about the thorn in his side at the office who wanted - can you believe it! - free reign over a corner of his beloved Oracle.
The moral is that sometimes the people "beneath" you really do know what they're doing if you can bring yourself to give them a chance.
Ah, gotcha. That makes sense. Done anything with SVG?
...and all forms of proxying.
Right now, many ISPs use transparent Squid proxies or the like to cache incoming pages. This is enormously beneficial because if someone requests the non-authenticated front page of CNN.com that says it's cacheable for 30 minutes, for example, then there's no reason to make 10,000 other customers to fetch an identical copy from CNN's servers. Note: HTTP headers can include rules like "don't cache this page", or "only give this copy of this page to the customer who presents a certain session cookie" so that even authenticated users can benefit from the caching.
Anyway, HTTPS breaks that. Now you have to let those 10,000 customers request their own identical copy from CNN. This means you have to pay for much more bandwidth and that site will "feel" slower to your customers who will blame you for it. I use HTTPS lots for my own site (I never check my webmail without it), but there are definite technical advantages to good ol' cleartext port 80.
Thanks for replying!
And I call it 'embarrassing' because Theora *could* easily be just as good, but it isn't right now.That didn't come across so well in the presentation. That is the qualification wasn't apparent - it sounded like you were saying it was bad, period.
Bullshit. MPEG is simultaneously inefficient and narrow in their focus.But the legal teams of every major corporation that wants to use it? I imagine Sony's given it a look or two along the way. Just as an example.
Irrelevant. This is an argument against Google (Altavista dwarfed them), Microsoft (IBM and even Apple dwarfed them), Toyota (GM dwarfed them), etc.I don't think it's irrelevant. There's a while lot to be said for mindshare, and right now Theora has roughly zero outside our circles. Honestly, I wish you well - we're on the same side! - but I respectfully disagree that Theora's ready to be standardized right now today.
Or you could try Mozilla's XULRunner:
Whoa, hey, full stop. I was with you until then, but... You're really trusting your business logic to the least controlled (both in the "security" and "standardized" sense) part of the stack? Ouch. Good luck, man.
It happens.
It was meant as a compliment. I started to write "a little more than I do" but it sounded pretentious.
Anyhow. Thanks for the link. There's some really good Prog Rock there.Oh, scads of it. And lots of stuff that I never would have stumbled across on my own that I ended up loving.
No. But you're assuming that the existence of libtheora means that the only patents on it are the ones that On2 licensed to the project. My point here is that it's not known that Theora is legally clear, although it's generally presumed to be. Companies have a pretty good idea what's involved in using H.264 because Sorenson has made that abundantly clear. Is there an NTP, Inc. just waiting for Theora to get popular so they can sink us?
OK, I know that sounds suspiciously close to FUD, but it's true: we can't just say that Theora is perfectly legal simply because we really, really want it to be.
Also, Youtube has to stream H.264 with MP3 audio because that's the way FLV works. The container doesn't support anything else.That doesn't make it any less popular.
Oh, and Theora does have one massive advantages over H.264: It requires significantly less CPU time to decode.OK, now, that's not really an accurate comparison because it's not available at the same quality levels. Furthermore, since libtheora is still in beta, we don't know what the release version will be like. For instance, if they find a showstopper bug that requires 50% more processing to detect and avoid, then it might not end up being so well-behaved. While that probably won't happen, there's plenty of precedent to go around.
Again, I don't dislike Theora and I'm totally for what it represents. I just don't think it's workable right now, and I don't think we can justify including it in a standard right now (especially since there's no release version of its reference implementation). It's too early to call it good, and by the time it's polished and ready to go it will likely be even further behind.
Listen, kid, I've probably been using and writing FOSS since before you were born. My name's in NetBSD's source tree and the OpenBSD donations page, and I've argued pro-freedom on Slashdot more times than you've posted total. You're barking up the wrong tree on this one so give it up.
And yet I still don't think that Theora's inherently better than newer codecs for all the reasons I mentioned, including freedom. You can spend your time futilely attacking me or you can read what I wrote and see why not everyone agrees with you.
Posted from Konqueror on Kubuntu/Gutsy. I practice what I preach.
You've been beaten silly by the school bully every day for 4 years. The principal knows what's happening - he even issued a formal statement that the bully was using his size to illegally control every kind on the playground - but no one does anything about it.
Your options are:
Your way just gets you another beating. After a while you have to say that enough's enough.
And countering yours:
I'm a huge FOSS buff, but that doesn't mean I have to blindly love everything pushed out the door as "freedom friendly". I don't have anything against Theora except that it's just not very competitive. I wouldn't want to see it as the official video file format any more than I'd want to see ASCII text as the official document file format; both have clear limitations when compared to their competitors.
The W3 made the right choice. As much as I like the idea of Theora, I'm glad we don't have to be saddled with the reality of it.
Warning: Emacs perspective (although I imagine the same applies for Vim by now).
You're editing a file in a directory full of source and want to see if your changes work. Run the "compile" command by typing "-x compile" or selecting the "Tools -> Compile" menu. It runs "make" in a new shell buffer inside your Emacs session. If there are any errors in any of the files being built, "-x " loads that file and puts the cursor at the point of the error.
It's hard to imagine how incredibly useful features like that are until you've tried them. There's nothing you can't do with Vim or Emacs that you can't do by hand, but the idea is to let the computer handle all the boring and repetitive parts for you.
Don't forget about Tramp. If you can reach a machine by pretty much any means, then Emacs can edit files on it.
Obligatory CDBaby.com link. I love that store! I was browsing through the "mood" section the other day and discovered some great new music that I ended up buying.
Having said that, there's a certain amount of risk to buying indie: they may not make any more. It's a safe bet that there will be future Timbaland and Britney and Justin Timberlake albums, so if you get into their stuff there's a strong chance you'll get more stuff you like next year. With indie bands, there's a pretty high probability that you're listening to the only album your new favorite group will ever record. There are one-hit pop wonders and long-lived indie bands, of course, but I think it's true in general. Even if it's not, I think it's the common perception that it's true.
Beyond that, there are social reasons that press people to listen to whatever's on Clearchannel Genre #23 this month. If you're up on the latest Britney, there are a lot of people you can talk to about it. If you're up on the latest indie, your best hope is that the other person is open-minded enough to consider something non-mainstream (and if many people were that open-minded, there wouldn't be a difference between indie and mainstream in the first place).
Neither of those reasons mean much to me and I'll keep buying stuff from CDBaby. I don't really blame people who are afraid to try it, though, especially those people who care a little more than you do about not sticking out from the crowd.
Excellent point and I'd like to hear more of your informed opinions! Which peer-reviewed journal is your related work published in?
But how many are spinning if it's unplugged?
Did they have their own coal burning power plant or some other monster UPS that couldn't be unplugged?
Why's that? Was it risky to turn one on?
Most of the time, I like you. Today, right now, I hate you.
*looks at his CRT eMac and sighs*
...until that error is keeping you from mounting /usr or /usr/share, thus make termcaps unavailable, thus keeping you from running anything curses-like.
The good news is that if you can use vi, you can probably get around OK in ed (just pretend you're typing everything at a ":" prompt and you're 90% of the way there). The bad news is that when you need it, you'll be in the worst possible mood to want to learn it.
Not that I'm defending ed particularly! I'd personally rather use sed and hope for the best. Just saying that vi isn't always better than the standard Unix EDitor.
So don't install those dependencies, genius.
I don't mean to be a jerk, but honestly, you're complaining about the mere existence of optional files?
I used to use pico until my mentor saw it open in my terminal one day. He uninstalled it and gave me a Vim cheatsheet. I cursed his name for about a week, then grudgingly committed myself to learning Vim for a few weeks, then eventually came to thank him.
Then he introduced me to Emacs, and I'm still cursing his name.
C-x C-s
My friend: are you high? The first time that didn't work, the jury rules for the plaintiff for $23.8 million dollars.