There is a different license that gives you access to all Google patents necessary for implementing WebM, whether you use their implementation or not. It's here: http://www.webmproject.org/license/bitstream/
Note, fixing those bugs requires a fundamentally more powerful analysis framework, or the introduction of dynamic guards, both of which would slow down the JS engine.
Summary: The Chakra DCE "optimization" handles ++ but not --, > but not >. In short, it handles exactly the set of operators found in math-cordic, and not others. This makes no sense if it's intended to be a general-purpose optimization.
Furthermore, Sayre also points out that the optimization makes assumptions that aren't true for JS, leading to bugs where it incorrectly eliminates code that is not, in fact, dead.
Good comment, but data alignment has nothing to do with dead code elimination. The "true;" example is pretty much a dead giveaway that the optimization is strongly tuned to math-cordic and nothing much else.
I would dispute most of those assertions, but even if they were all true, it doesn't necessarily mean Mozilla is badly run. Web browsers are an incredibly competitive environment, there is massive investment from many competitors, and it is very hard to be successful. I mean, I think Apple and Opera are well-run companies but their browsers are basically going nowhere in market share. Safari gets a bump every time Apple releases a device where Safari is the only browser you're allowed to run.
There is no Flash involved here, you read wrong. I wonder why you got modded up.
Re:For the patent FUDsters sure to follow....
on
H.264 and VP8 Compared
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
No, the MPEG-LA is forming a patent pool because they want to scare people away from VP8 or at least into paying protection money to the MPEG-LA "just in case".
Try asking the MPEG-LA what specific patents they think you need to license to use VP8. They won't tell you. This is somewhere between FUD and extortion.
And BTW "the x264 developers" are one guy who doesn't know much about patents because his project ignores them. Ask yourself whether he knows more than the people at Google who approved spending $120M on On2, which will be almost entirely wasted if it turns out VP8 requires MPEG-LA licensing.
> If Google really believed that WebM/VP8 was safe from a patent perspective, then why in the world don't its > WebM license terms contain a hold-harmless clause or at least some basic indemnification (less value than > holding harmless but better than nothing) in favor of developers adopting it?
Because they don't want to expose themselves to unlimited liability in the event they turn out to be wrong.
If Google really *didn't* believe that WebM/VP8 was safe from a patent perspective, then why in the world would they drop $120M to buy On2?
That author doesn't seem to understand that merely being similar to patented methods does not constitute patent infringement. You have to read the patent claims, and if what you're doing is different from what's claimed --- in any detail whatsoever --- you don't infringe.
The MPEG-LA pool has many H.264 "method" patents in Europe and other countries. Many European companies pay royalties to license those patents. You can argue that all those patents are invalid, but you'd probably have to fight a very large lawsuit to prove it.
"Implemented in hardware" is a loose concept. In many cases "implemented in hardware" just means there's a DSP with some firmware that implements H.264 decoding. Such DSPs can be reprogrammed to decode other formats. For example http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/04/theora-on-n900/
Regardless of what the majority of the aliens do, surely at least some subset would transition to intelligent machines that can and wish to reproduce, travel interstellar and colonize the galaxy.
If it's a nonpracticing entity, then you *can't* sue them for infringements of other patents. That's exactly the point of being a non-practicing entity (i.e., a patent troll).
Re:a game that tells the truth about religion
on
Religion in Video Games
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
> Skepticism, rationality, or reason! The three cornerstones of atheism.
The cornerstone of atheism is what the word means --- to believe in no god. Mao and Stalin may not have been the sort of atheists you like, but they were certainly keen on spreading their brand of atheism.
You should wait for a minute or so after closing tabs before checking for reduced memory usage --- we cache a lot of stuff for a short time in case you reopen the page again or navigate to a similar page.
But you're never going to get back all the way to where you were by closing tabs, because stuff gets loaded and cached etc. A real memory leak is when you keep doing the same things and over time memory usage keeps increasing. So to check for a real memory leak, try this: -- open N tabs, measure memory usage. -- close the tabs. -- open the same N tabs again, remeasure memory usage. -- do that all again, say, 10 times.
Then graph the measurements of memory usage. If they keep going up, you're seeing a real memory leak. Only these leaks are really important, because they'll mean the browser becomes unusable over time.
Comparing downloads with market share is bogus; for many reasons there have been FAR more Firefox downloads than current daily users. Why don't you tell us the actual market share of Silverlight-enabled browsers?
You lost MLB and NYT after pouring resources into them. I'm less worried about Silverlight than I used to be.
Where's your evidence? Why is Greg's example odd? Have you done a comparable experiment with a different video clip to justify your 2x claim, or more importantly, show that at the same bitrate Theora looks much worse on your clip?
>>> If they compared a good H.264 encode to Theora at the 327 Kbps bitrate, H.264 would turn Theora into a thin red paste.
Why would it, since it didn't at 499Kbps? Or are you claiming that Youtube uses a bad H.264 encoder? Or do you think that example is rigged?
Slashdot Mirror
There is a different license that gives you access to all Google patents necessary for implementing WebM, whether you use their implementation or not. It's here:
http://www.webmproject.org/license/bitstream/
Er, please excuse the quoting errors there.
Note, fixing those bugs requires a fundamentally more powerful analysis framework, or the introduction of dynamic guards, both of which would slow down the JS engine.
http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2010/11/17/dead-code-elimination-for-beginners/
Summary: The Chakra DCE "optimization" handles ++ but not --, > but not >. In short, it handles exactly the set of operators found in math-cordic, and not others. This makes no sense if it's intended to be a general-purpose optimization.
Furthermore, Sayre also points out that the optimization makes assumptions that aren't true for JS, leading to bugs where it incorrectly eliminates code that is not, in fact, dead.
Good comment, but data alignment has nothing to do with dead code elimination. The "true;" example is pretty much a dead giveaway that the optimization is strongly tuned to math-cordic and nothing much else.
One particular group of nutcases (who may or may not even actually exist) != "the evangelical Christians in Brazil".
> Bugzilla seems to be totally ignored by the Firefox programmers.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Firefox developers live in Bugzilla, all day every day.
I would dispute most of those assertions, but even if they were all true, it doesn't necessarily mean Mozilla is badly run. Web browsers are an incredibly competitive environment, there is massive investment from many competitors, and it is very hard to be successful. I mean, I think Apple and Opera are well-run companies but their browsers are basically going nowhere in market share. Safari gets a bump every time Apple releases a device where Safari is the only browser you're allowed to run.
There is no Flash involved here, you read wrong. I wonder why you got modded up.
No, the MPEG-LA is forming a patent pool because they want to scare people away from VP8 or at least into paying protection money to the MPEG-LA "just in case".
Try asking the MPEG-LA what specific patents they think you need to license to use VP8. They won't tell you. This is somewhere between FUD and extortion.
And BTW "the x264 developers" are one guy who doesn't know much about patents because his project ignores them. Ask yourself whether he knows more than the people at Google who approved spending $120M on On2, which will be almost entirely wasted if it turns out VP8 requires MPEG-LA licensing.
> If Google really believed that WebM/VP8 was safe from a patent perspective, then why in the world don't its
> WebM license terms contain a hold-harmless clause or at least some basic indemnification (less value than
> holding harmless but better than nothing) in favor of developers adopting it?
Because they don't want to expose themselves to unlimited liability in the event they turn out to be wrong.
If Google really *didn't* believe that WebM/VP8 was safe from a patent perspective, then why in the world would they drop $120M to buy On2?
That author doesn't seem to understand that merely being similar to patented methods does not constitute patent infringement. You have to read the patent claims, and if what you're doing is different from what's claimed --- in any detail whatsoever --- you don't infringe.
Many phones can in fact "hardware accelerate" Theora and other codecs. See for example http://blog.mjg.im/2010/04/16/theora-on-n900.html
The MPEG-LA pool has many H.264 "method" patents in Europe and other countries. Many European companies pay royalties to license those patents. You can argue that all those patents are invalid, but you'd probably have to fight a very large lawsuit to prove it.
Sure: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/04/theora-on-n900/
That C64x+ DSP is present in the Droid, N900, Palm Pre, and iPhone 3GS, among others.
http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensees.aspx
Canonical's currently at number 95.
"Implemented in hardware" is a loose concept. In many cases "implemented in hardware" just means there's a DSP with some firmware that implements H.264 decoding. Such DSPs can be reprogrammed to decode other formats. For example
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/04/theora-on-n900/
Turns out that Canonical is an H.264 licensee. They don't care much more about free video formats than Steve Jobs does.
Regardless of what the majority of the aliens do, surely at least some subset would transition to intelligent machines that can and wish to reproduce, travel interstellar and colonize the galaxy.
If it's a nonpracticing entity, then you *can't* sue them for infringements of other patents. That's exactly the point of being a non-practicing entity (i.e., a patent troll).
> Skepticism, rationality, or reason! The three cornerstones of atheism.
The cornerstone of atheism is what the word means --- to believe in no god. Mao and Stalin may not have been the sort of atheists you like, but they were certainly keen on spreading their brand of atheism.
You are committing the "no true Scotsman" fallacy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
> Hitler claimed to be a christian.
Yeah right.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10616778&pnum=0
Anyway, lots of Nazis claimed to be scientists. Does that make science responsible for Nazi crimes? Of course not.
> Even the Nazis had Christianity as their state religion.
Not really.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10616778&pnum=0
You should wait for a minute or so after closing tabs before checking for reduced memory usage --- we cache a lot of stuff for a short time in case you reopen the page again or navigate to a similar page.
But you're never going to get back all the way to where you were by closing tabs, because stuff gets loaded and cached etc. A real memory leak is when you keep doing the same things and over time memory usage keeps increasing. So to check for a real memory leak, try this:
-- open N tabs, measure memory usage.
-- close the tabs.
-- open the same N tabs again, remeasure memory usage.
-- do that all again, say, 10 times.
Then graph the measurements of memory usage. If they keep going up, you're seeing a real memory leak. Only these leaks are really important, because they'll mean the browser becomes unusable over time.
Comparing downloads with market share is bogus; for many reasons there have been FAR more Firefox downloads than current daily users. Why don't you tell us the actual market share of Silverlight-enabled browsers?
You lost MLB and NYT after pouring resources into them. I'm less worried about Silverlight than I used to be.
Where's your evidence? Why is Greg's example odd? Have you done a comparable experiment with a different video clip to justify your 2x claim, or more importantly, show that at the same bitrate Theora looks much worse on your clip?
>>> If they compared a good H.264 encode to Theora at the 327 Kbps bitrate, H.264 would turn Theora into a thin red paste.
Why would it, since it didn't at 499Kbps? Or are you claiming that Youtube uses a bad H.264 encoder? Or do you think that example is rigged?