No, it's not. Macs are big-endian, x86 is little-endian. Most PC cards will not work on Macs. And I'm not blaming it on anyone. I'm simply stating a fact. In fact, the PowerPC can run in little-endian mode, so Apple could have made the Mac's PCI perfectly compatible with PC PCI. It was a conscious decision to make it different. Not better, not worse. Just different.
You keep using that word [monopoly]. I do not think it means what you think it means.
It means exclusive control (of the means of producing or selling a commodity or service). Apple is the only supplier of Mac computers, and effectively controls who can and who can't make hardware for the Mac. They also control the software their clients use (in the same way that Microsoft does).
Which wouldn't be such a big probem, if it wasn't for the ludicrous prices they charge. I work regularly with some old Mac-based Avid editing workstations, and the SCSI AV drives they use cost 4 times as much as the PC models. The drives are exactly the same; the difference is they're not oficially 'certified'. It's not just Apple / Avid doing this, some PC manufacturers do (or are planning to do) the same. I find it very hard to understand why some people scream bloody murder when Microsoft does something, but then applaud when someone else does exactly the same. It's not who, it's what.
As to DVD authoring, I was lucky enough to buy Spruce's DVD Maestro. It does everything that DVD Studio Pro or Scenarist do, and comes with much better documentation (IMO). Plus I get to pick my own MPEG-2 and AC3 encoders and my own DVD recorder, not to mention the rest of the system: Dual Athlon XP 1800+ with 1 GB DDR ECC RAM, 160 GB RAID, real-time Canopus DV editing card, a Pioneer DVR-A03 recorder and a dual-monitor card with fast OpenGL (Radeon 8500). It's about 50% faster than a Dual G4 (depending on the task - for 3D rendering and MPEG encoding it's nearly twice as fast) and cost about the same (but I get faster drives, real-time DV editing, better graphics, a much broader choice of software and the ability to upgrade each component independently). Oh, and I have a floppy drive, too.;-)
I think Apple makes some nice products, but they are overpriced and bind the consumers to Apple's decisions. When I buy a PC I can select each component independently and I don't have to pay for "features" that I don't really need or want. It's kind of like Windows brought to the hardware level. The reason why I would like Windows to come without IExplorer (for example) isn't to "give other companies a chance". It's because I'm not planning to use IE, so I shouldn't be forced to pay for it.
This is the kind of move that will leave Eyeon and Discreet very, very happy.
Apple did the same with Spruce Tech. They had the best DVD authoring software for the PC, so Apple bought them and... killed their products. Result: did people with PCs start buying Macs to author their DVDs? No, they simply started buying Sonic's and Pinnacle's authoring programs instead.
Apple is trying to act like Microsoft (killing the competition) but they lack the intelligence (they 'think different'). Microsoft only kills competition that is still worse than their products. If they find something that's objectively better, they simply buy them, re-brand it as 'Microsoft', and sell it instead (at a higher price, possibly). And they don't just sell Windows versions. They sell to whoever is willing to buy. If it wasn't for the GPL, Microsoft would port all their software to Linux.
I really don't see how people who bash Microsoft can like Apple. They have the same kind of software monopoly that Microsoft does (so they don't bundle their browser, but they bundle video editing software, MP3 software, Quicktime, DVD authoring software, CD burning software, etc.), plus a hardware monopoly (even Mac's PCI 'thinks different' from PC PCI, so you can't use PC cards on a Mac and instead must pay three times as much for a card that's five times slower), plus a serious lack of braincells.
Judging from how often it shoots itself in the foot, Apple should change it's name to Limping Centipede.
I've seen the current generation of High end cards from 3DLabs, and if this new generation is anything like the current, it's worth the $900 for gamers.
The Wildcats deliver a whooping 9 fps in Quake. That's nine frames per second. I work in 3D animation and I'd love to have a Wildcat, but to play games, no thanks. Let's hope the new processor is a bit more gamer-friendly (like nVidia's Quadro4, for example).
And personally I'd never spend more than 300 on a gaming card (I would - and in fact have - on a professional card if I thought it was a good investment).
Cable modems usually have (very) different upstream and downstream speeds. You can download quickly, but people can't download quickly from you.
RMN
~~~
"School Agreement requires an institution-wide commitment. To that end, you must include all of the eligible PCs in the participating school(s) or district. Eligible PCs include all of the Pentium machines, Power Macs, iMacs or better. You must also include any number of 486 machines or below and any Apple, UNIX, or Windows Terminals on which any of the software will be run."
Ah, but we only use Celerons, Durons and Athlons, see...?:-]
Just say Microsoft is evil and CowboyNeal rules. That gets you two points minimum (usually for "Informative" and "Insightful", although it should actually be for "Redundant" and "Funny").
If you want more, just add a signature that says "I'll probably be modded down as a Troll, but who cares?".
And don't feel bad; no-one got my joke about recursive algorithms, either. There should be a way to add canned laughs to the posts.
I'm guessing you don't know what ROT13 is. ROT13 is an "encrypting" algorithm used in e-mail and newsgroups that simply adds 13 to each letter (ie, it "rotates the alphabet by 180 degrees"). Most e-mail clients and news readers still have an "apply ROT13" option. I meant it as a joke, of course.
How exactly do you reduce something by 40% by moving from 6-bit to 8-bit encoding? I'm not a mathematician, but I believe 2 bits is 25% of 8, so Base64 / UUE has an overhead of 25% over the original data (plus carriage returns that add up to 2 bytes per each line of 60-80 characters, but those are also necessary in yEnc, so no change there). Add the fact that a couple of values need to be escaped and you end up with an overhead of about 1-3% in yEnc
That's at best 22-24% less than UUE / Base64. Definitely not 40%.
That means that instead of taking one hour to download a large file, you take about 50 minutes. Does that difference in time justify having to change every program out there that's designed to handle usenet messages? I'm not just talking about the news readers and browsers, I'm talking about indexers, search engines, on-line news services, etc.?
I don't think so.
The people posting in yEnc may think this is a great improvement, but 80 or 90% of the people downloading binaries simply ignore yEncoded messages. I think you will find yEnc actually was responsible for a decrease in usenet traffic, but it's not because of the reduced overhead; it's because a lot of people simply won't download something that's encoded with yEnc.
Usenet does need to be "upgraded", and that will inevitably cause some problems, but there's no point in going through it twice (once with a "hack" and then a few months later with the real thing).
A new standard should include at least:
Error-checking.
The ability to post multiple files, text blocks, etc. per message.
The ability to identify which part of the original file a specific message corresponds to (for multi-part posts). This should be independent of the size of each chunk, so that the original file can be rebuilt from different-sized chunks as long as they cover all the original bytes. It should also be based on a CRC of the original file, to enable you to rebuild a file from chunks posted with different names (but made from the same original file). This information should be available without having to download the entire message.
Support for filenames with spaces, any characters and any length.
Support for 8-bit encoding (or as close to it as possible).
Redundancy information to enable a file to be rebuilt even if not all parts are available (this would increase the overhead, so it should be optional).
Plus a couple of other things, but these are, IMO, the most important. There are already some standards (MD5, MIME, Unicode) in place that can be used for these things, although some of them would need some tweaking.
The new standard should be tested to make sure it does not create any major problems with existing software. If any relevant problems are found, the standard should not be made public until these problems are fixed (by releasing new versions of the problematic software, that are able to at least coexist with the new standard, even if not fully support it).
Just my 0.2...
P.S. - I'm not a programmer. I used to be, but I had some treatment and managed to recover (or so I thought, anyway)...
So to fight Microsoft's "hacked" design, Mozilla should... add hacked features...? I really don't judge paintings by their authors. Poor design is poor design, I don't care if it comes from Microsoft or from Mozilla.
"Usenet? Yeah, I use the net. But I have no idea why Hank did what you say he did. Mimes always make me laugh."
Level 2: [watches movies but doesn't read books]
"Oh, newsgroup binaries, yeah, a friend of mine showed me one time. On my screen it just shows up a lot of gibberish. Must be because I don't have the right driver installed or something. I prefer ZIP files. Mimes? I just feel like punching them, don't you?"
Level 3: [pr0n addict]
"This yEnc thing sucks man, nowadays I can only download about 150 pictures of shaved lesbian asian schoolgirls a day. It's hardly worth unzipping my fly for. I wish they went back to the old format, whatever it was called. Oh, and I hate mimes."
Level 4: [pr0n and w4r3z addict]
"I can use yEnc fine so I think it's a great standard. I think the guy who released it is a hero (I bet ISPs hate him) and the people complaining that it breaks the standards and screws up some servers are just whiners. They can just change to a different server or a different ISP, or move to a different country or something. Also, I like posting in yEnc because it makes me look l33t and it impresses the girls. I don't care if 90% of people can't open the attachments and half the files get corrupted and have to be downloaded again and again; yEnc is 17 times faster that Base64 anyway. As to mimes, well, if I move my hand like this and use my tongue to push my cheek like this, what does it look like I'm doing? Eh-eh..."
Level 5: [programmer or some other kind of loon]
"It breaks existing transfer standards, it repeats all the mistakes of the previous methods, half the files being posted are corrupted and the actual gain in speed is less than 25% (do the maths for heaven's sake!). Let's do this right: create a proper MIME standard, add support for checksums and proper multi-part handling, automated processing, etc. Don't waste time implementing something that is broken from the start. I agree about the mimes, though; they should be shot."
Level 6: [Microsoft manager]
"It's the first public-domain standard that truly meets Microsoft's quality and reliability criteria. The fact that it breaks existing standards is irrelevant. Nothing can stand in the way of innovation. By the way, I'l like to take this opportunity to say a few words about our new product. It's called Microsoft Mime and it's a gesture recognition system for Windows XP. In two years we expect keyboards to be completely replaced by it."
Yes, that's precisely why I mentioned it. When a real standard comes out, Agent will have to add support for it and keep supporting the current (poor) implementation. All it means is more work for them. But I can understand it (after all, they depend on sales, and having extra "features" increases sales, no matter how poorly designed they are - again, just look at Microsoft).
What I definitely can't understand is why there's talk of including support for yEnc in Mozilla. Some people are using the argument "we could pull the carpet from under MS Outlook's feet if we implement it quickly enough". What for? Mozilla is free. It's not about how many people use it, it's about how well it works. Who cares if some stupid people prefer slow, crappy software? Now we need to make a program worse so it can compete with other bad programs? I think some of the people creating alternatives to Microsoft worry too much about Microsoft to actually go anywhere...
BTW, yEnc saves about 21-23% of space compared to traditional encoding (UUE, etc.), not 30% or more like some people are claiming.
In fact that's what he did (yEnc is based on that code). But the point is, you can't just "get the code out there" and pretend that creates a standard. When you create a new kind of aircraft, you need to make sure it can land and operate in existing airports; you shouldn't just force all airports to change to accomodate your new design, even if it is 20% or 25% faster.
Besides, size isn't the only problem with the current method for posting binaries in Usenet. If we are going to change, might as well spend a couple of months discussing the issues and come up with a real standard that solves as many problems as possible. Instead of a hack that creates more problems than it solves. And note that standard does not mean the same as common. It's like the difference between science and common sense.
Would you rebuild your entire system and re-install all your software just for a 20% increase in CPU speed? I wouldn't.
They could have made it cheaper to the consumer, it would have made no difference. The problem was Sony charged a license to whoever wanted to make Betamax equipment, so other companies simply decided to support VHS instead. In the professional world, quality is more important, so Sony managed to get Betacam (which is actually very similar to Betamax) accepted by the broadcast industry. Since this industry has a lot of money, other companies were able to license the format from Sony and still make a profit.
IDE and SCSI are two different markets. Most (all) companies making SCSI drives also make IDE drives. IDE is perfect for single users. It's not so good when you need to read and write 20 things to the same disk simultaneously. And it only supports drives (no scanners, etc.). End-user pricing rarely "kills" a standard; if sales are low, they will simply lower the price (unless it really isn't cost-effective). But (lack of) industry support will kill a standard, and that's what happened with Betamax.
> It *WIILL* decrease the amount of data downloaded > on a per message basis. Of course, this means the > customer will simply download more messages... > good for the customer, bad for the service provider.
Why is it bad for the service provider...? Do you think they care how many messages you download? The only thing that matters to the provider is the volume. Doesn't matter if it's 10 big messages or 15 slightly smaller ones.
It's bad enough that the big companies ignore the standards and keep showering us with "brilliant innovations" that last one year and then need to be replaced (after everyone wasted time adding support for them). Now we have to deal with public domain hacks, too?
I guess this shows how Microsft got to where it is. Given the choice between a good thing and a bad thing, people will pick whichever one they can get their hands on sooner.
yEnc reminds me of the Morse code. It worked, it was crap, and some people are still having to put up with it today.
A "standard" is not the same as "a common thing", or even "something that most programs can read". For example, most programs can't read YCrCb TIFF files (Photoshop included), but these files do follow the TIFF specification, hence they are standard.
When you create an encoding method that is going to be used to transfer data across a network, you need to ensure that this method is compatible with everything along the way. When you send an e-mail with an Ogg file attached, this file is encoded in a way that enables the servers and the client at the other end to identify it, check its integrity, reconstruct it, process it, delete it independently from the rest of the message, etc. It doesn't matter what the file itself is (Ogg, MP3, TIFF, Doc, XYZ, etc.); these methods work with any file, regarldess of its type or contents.
8 bits can be sent over the wire, and in fact are sent over the wire. But to make sure the servers (and the clients) can tell where one file (or part of the file) ends and the next one begins, you need to "wrap" the data in a package that programs can understand. That's what MIME does. It says "this part is the message text in HTML", "this part is the message text in plain text", "that part is an image", "that part is an executable file".
Instead of using this "universal" packaging system, yEnc forces programs to look for specific strings and try to guess where things begin and end. And it has no mechanism for identifying individual parts in a multi-part post (again, programs must look at the text or message subject and try to guess).
Doing something right is usually not much harder than doing something wrong. And when people get used to something that's broken, they won't want it fixed.
Betamax failed because it was a proprietary format. If Sony had allowed other companies to make it (like JVC did with VHS) it would still be around (20 years ago it was better than VHS is today). Betacam still dominates the broadcast world.
Now, yEnc looks like it was created by Microsoft. It's not a standard, it's a hack. The only way it can become a standard is by pushing it down people's throats and then using "public pressure" to force applications to support it.
To use a videotape analogy, it's like releasing magnetic tape reels after people had been using cassettes for years, just because the reels use slighlty lighter tape.
I hope yEnc in its current form is *not* supported by the industry. I think a company such as Forté could create a real standard using an encoding method similar to yEnc (it wasn't "invented" by yEnc's author, anyway). I think Agent's programmers, of all people, should know how hard it is to deal with these (non)standards, and could save themselves a lof of work in the future by making sure it's done right.
As it stands, yEnc is the same as UUEncode, only in smaller portions (actually it's worse, because you can sort of wrap UUE in MIME; you can't with yEnc).
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's not. Macs are big-endian, x86 is little-endian. Most PC cards will not work on Macs. And I'm not blaming it on anyone. I'm simply stating a fact. In fact, the PowerPC can run in little-endian mode, so Apple could have made the Mac's PCI perfectly compatible with PC PCI. It was a conscious decision to make it different. Not better, not worse. Just different.
RMN
~~~
You keep using that word [monopoly].
;-)
I do not think it means what you think it means.
It means exclusive control (of the means of producing or selling a commodity or service). Apple is the only supplier of Mac computers, and effectively controls who can and who can't make hardware for the Mac. They also control the software their clients use (in the same way that Microsoft does).
Which wouldn't be such a big probem, if it wasn't for the ludicrous prices they charge. I work regularly with some old Mac-based Avid editing workstations, and the SCSI AV drives they use cost 4 times as much as the PC models. The drives are exactly the same; the difference is they're not oficially 'certified'. It's not just Apple / Avid doing this, some PC manufacturers do (or are planning to do) the same. I find it very hard to understand why some people scream bloody murder when Microsoft does something, but then applaud when someone else does exactly the same. It's not who, it's what.
As to DVD authoring, I was lucky enough to buy Spruce's DVD Maestro. It does everything that DVD Studio Pro or Scenarist do, and comes with much better documentation (IMO). Plus I get to pick my own MPEG-2 and AC3 encoders and my own DVD recorder, not to mention the rest of the system: Dual Athlon XP 1800+ with 1 GB DDR ECC RAM, 160 GB RAID, real-time Canopus DV editing card, a Pioneer DVR-A03 recorder and a dual-monitor card with fast OpenGL (Radeon 8500). It's about 50% faster than a Dual G4 (depending on the task - for 3D rendering and MPEG encoding it's nearly twice as fast) and cost about the same (but I get faster drives, real-time DV editing, better graphics, a much broader choice of software and the ability to upgrade each component independently). Oh, and I have a floppy drive, too.
I think Apple makes some nice products, but they are overpriced and bind the consumers to Apple's decisions. When I buy a PC I can select each component independently and I don't have to pay for "features" that I don't really need or want. It's kind of like Windows brought to the hardware level. The reason why I would like Windows to come without IExplorer (for example) isn't to "give other companies a chance". It's because I'm not planning to use IE, so I shouldn't be forced to pay for it.
RMN
~~~
Linux, I can understand. But Mac? Why? So you're stuck with their hardware, as well as their OS?
RMN
~~~
This is the kind of move that will leave Eyeon and Discreet very, very happy.
Apple did the same with Spruce Tech. They had the best DVD authoring software for the PC, so Apple bought them and... killed their products. Result: did people with PCs start buying Macs to author their DVDs? No, they simply started buying Sonic's and Pinnacle's authoring programs instead.
Apple is trying to act like Microsoft (killing the competition) but they lack the intelligence (they 'think different'). Microsoft only kills competition that is still worse than their products. If they find something that's objectively better, they simply buy them, re-brand it as 'Microsoft', and sell it instead (at a higher price, possibly). And they don't just sell Windows versions. They sell to whoever is willing to buy. If it wasn't for the GPL, Microsoft would port all their software to Linux.
I really don't see how people who bash Microsoft can like Apple. They have the same kind of software monopoly that Microsoft does (so they don't bundle their browser, but they bundle video editing software, MP3 software, Quicktime, DVD authoring software, CD burning software, etc.), plus a hardware monopoly (even Mac's PCI 'thinks different' from PC PCI, so you can't use PC cards on a Mac and instead must pay three times as much for a card that's five times slower), plus a serious lack of braincells.
Judging from how often it shoots itself in the foot, Apple should change it's name to Limping Centipede.
RMN
~~~
I've seen the current generation of High end cards from 3DLabs, and if this
new generation is anything like the current, it's worth the $900 for gamers.
The Wildcats deliver a whooping 9 fps in Quake. That's nine frames per second. I work in 3D animation and I'd love to have a Wildcat, but to play games, no thanks. Let's hope the new processor is a bit more gamer-friendly (like nVidia's Quadro4, for example).
And personally I'd never spend more than 300 on a gaming card (I would - and in fact have - on a professional card if I thought it was a good investment).
RMN
~~~
Cable modems usually have (very) different upstream and downstream speeds. You can download quickly, but people can't download quickly from you. RMN ~~~
"School Agreement requires an institution-wide commitment. To that end, you must include all of the eligible PCs in the participating school(s) or district. Eligible PCs include all of the Pentium machines, Power Macs, iMacs or better. You must also include any number of 486 machines or below and any Apple, UNIX, or Windows Terminals on which any of the software will be run."
:-]
Ah, but we only use Celerons, Durons and Athlons, see...?
RMN
~~~
According to some scholars, we all descend from Ron Perlman.
RMN
~~~
Apple iSub. Sink different.
This was the only way a Celine Dion record could get free publicity on Slashdot.
Just say Microsoft is evil and CowboyNeal rules. That gets you two points minimum (usually for "Informative" and "Insightful", although it should actually be for "Redundant" and "Funny").
If you want more, just add a signature that says "I'll probably be modded down as a Troll, but who cares?".
And don't feel bad; no-one got my joke about recursive algorithms, either. There should be a way to add canned laughs to the posts.
I'm guessing you don't know what ROT13 is. ROT13 is an "encrypting" algorithm used in e-mail and newsgroups that simply adds 13 to each letter (ie, it "rotates the alphabet by 180 degrees"). Most e-mail clients and news readers still have an "apply ROT13" option. I meant it as a joke, of course.
CSS is just a bad imitation of the ROT13 algorithm.
recursive (ri kur'siv), adj. see 'recursive'.
That's at best 22-24% less than UUE / Base64. Definitely not 40%.
That means that instead of taking one hour to download a large file, you take about 50 minutes. Does that difference in time justify having to change every program out there that's designed to handle usenet messages? I'm not just talking about the news readers and browsers, I'm talking about indexers, search engines, on-line news services, etc.?
I don't think so.
The people posting in yEnc may think this is a great improvement, but 80 or 90% of the people downloading binaries simply ignore yEncoded messages. I think you will find yEnc actually was responsible for a decrease in usenet traffic, but it's not because of the reduced overhead; it's because a lot of people simply won't download something that's encoded with yEnc.
Usenet does need to be "upgraded", and that will inevitably cause some problems, but there's no point in going through it twice (once with a "hack" and then a few months later with the real thing).
A new standard should include at least:
Plus a couple of other things, but these are, IMO, the most important. There are already some standards (MD5, MIME, Unicode) in place that can be used for these things, although some of them would need some tweaking.
The new standard should be tested to make sure it does not create any major problems with existing software. If any relevant problems are found, the standard should not be made public until these problems are fixed (by releasing new versions of the problematic software, that are able to at least coexist with the new standard, even if not fully support it).
Just my 0.2...
P.S. - I'm not a programmer. I used to be, but I had some treatment and managed to recover (or so I thought, anyway)...
So to fight Microsoft's "hacked" design, Mozilla should... add hacked features...? I really don't judge paintings by their authors. Poor design is poor design, I don't care if it comes from Microsoft or from Mozilla.
:^)
And anyway, I use Opera.
That's why I bought a bit cleaner. Later I found out I can also use it to rewind my CDs.
Level 1: [completely ignorant]
"Usenet? Yeah, I use the net. But I have no idea why Hank did what you say he did. Mimes always make me laugh."
Level 2: [watches movies but doesn't read books]
"Oh, newsgroup binaries, yeah, a friend of mine showed me one time. On my screen it just shows up a lot of gibberish. Must be because I don't have the right driver installed or something. I prefer ZIP files. Mimes? I just feel like punching them, don't you?"
Level 3: [pr0n addict]
"This yEnc thing sucks man, nowadays I can only download about 150 pictures of shaved lesbian asian schoolgirls a day. It's hardly worth unzipping my fly for. I wish they went back to the old format, whatever it was called. Oh, and I hate mimes."
Level 4: [pr0n and w4r3z addict]
"I can use yEnc fine so I think it's a great standard. I think the guy who released it is a hero (I bet ISPs hate him) and the people complaining that it breaks the standards and screws up some servers are just whiners. They can just change to a different server or a different ISP, or move to a different country or something. Also, I like posting in yEnc because it makes me look l33t and it impresses the girls. I don't care if 90% of people can't open the attachments and half the files get corrupted and have to be downloaded again and again; yEnc is 17 times faster that Base64 anyway. As to mimes, well, if I move my hand like this and use my tongue to push my cheek like this, what does it look like I'm doing? Eh-eh..."
Level 5: [programmer or some other kind of loon]
"It breaks existing transfer standards, it repeats all the mistakes of the previous methods, half the files being posted are corrupted and the actual gain in speed is less than 25% (do the maths for heaven's sake!). Let's do this right: create a proper MIME standard, add support for checksums and proper multi-part handling, automated processing, etc. Don't waste time implementing something that is broken from the start. I agree about the mimes, though; they should be shot."
Level 6: [Microsoft manager]
"It's the first public-domain standard that truly meets Microsoft's quality and reliability criteria. The fact that it breaks existing standards is irrelevant. Nothing can stand in the way of innovation. By the way, I'l like to take this opportunity to say a few words about our new product. It's called Microsoft Mime and it's a gesture recognition system for Windows XP. In two years we expect keyboards to be completely replaced by it."
Yes, that's precisely why I mentioned it. When a real standard comes out, Agent will have to add support for it and keep supporting the current (poor) implementation. All it means is more work for them. But I can understand it (after all, they depend on sales, and having extra "features" increases sales, no matter how poorly designed they are - again, just look at Microsoft).
What I definitely can't understand is why there's talk of including support for yEnc in Mozilla. Some people are using the argument "we could pull the carpet from under MS Outlook's feet if we implement it quickly enough". What for? Mozilla is free. It's not about how many people use it, it's about how well it works. Who cares if some stupid people prefer slow, crappy software? Now we need to make a program worse so it can compete with other bad programs? I think some of the people creating alternatives to Microsoft worry too much about Microsoft to actually go anywhere...
BTW, yEnc saves about 21-23% of space compared to traditional encoding (UUE, etc.), not 30% or more like some people are claiming.
In fact that's what he did (yEnc is based on that code). But the point is, you can't just "get the code out there" and pretend that creates a standard. When you create a new kind of aircraft, you need to make sure it can land and operate in existing airports; you shouldn't just force all airports to change to accomodate your new design, even if it is 20% or 25% faster.
Besides, size isn't the only problem with the current method for posting binaries in Usenet. If we are going to change, might as well spend a couple of months discussing the issues and come up with a real standard that solves as many problems as possible. Instead of a hack that creates more problems than it solves. And note that standard does not mean the same as common. It's like the difference between science and common sense.
Would you rebuild your entire system and re-install all your software just for a 20% increase in CPU speed? I wouldn't.
They could have made it cheaper to the consumer, it would have made no difference. The problem was Sony charged a license to whoever wanted to make Betamax equipment, so other companies simply decided to support VHS instead. In the professional world, quality is more important, so Sony managed to get Betacam (which is actually very similar to Betamax) accepted by the broadcast industry. Since this industry has a lot of money, other companies were able to license the format from Sony and still make a profit.
IDE and SCSI are two different markets. Most (all) companies making SCSI drives also make IDE drives. IDE is perfect for single users. It's not so good when you need to read and write 20 things to the same disk simultaneously. And it only supports drives (no scanners, etc.). End-user pricing rarely "kills" a standard; if sales are low, they will simply lower the price (unless it really isn't cost-effective). But (lack of) industry support will kill a standard, and that's what happened with Betamax.
> It *WIILL* decrease the amount of data downloaded
> on a per message basis. Of course, this means the
> customer will simply download more messages...
> good for the customer, bad for the service provider.
Why is it bad for the service provider...? Do you think they care how many messages you download? The only thing that matters to the provider is the volume. Doesn't matter if it's 10 big messages or 15 slightly smaller ones.
It's bad enough that the big companies ignore the standards and keep showering us with "brilliant innovations" that last one year and then need to be replaced (after everyone wasted time adding support for them). Now we have to deal with public domain hacks, too?
I guess this shows how Microsft got to where it is. Given the choice between a good thing and a bad thing, people will pick whichever one they can get their hands on sooner.
yEnc reminds me of the Morse code. It worked, it was crap, and some people are still having to put up with it today.
A "standard" is not the same as "a common thing", or even "something that most programs can read". For example, most programs can't read YCrCb TIFF files (Photoshop included), but these files do follow the TIFF specification, hence they are standard.
When you create an encoding method that is going to be used to transfer data across a network, you need to ensure that this method is compatible with everything along the way. When you send an e-mail with an Ogg file attached, this file is encoded in a way that enables the servers and the client at the other end to identify it, check its integrity, reconstruct it, process it, delete it independently from the rest of the message, etc. It doesn't matter what the file itself is (Ogg, MP3, TIFF, Doc, XYZ, etc.); these methods work with any file, regarldess of its type or contents.
8 bits can be sent over the wire, and in fact are sent over the wire. But to make sure the servers (and the clients) can tell where one file (or part of the file) ends and the next one begins, you need to "wrap" the data in a package that programs can understand. That's what MIME does. It says "this part is the message text in HTML", "this part is the message text in plain text", "that part is an image", "that part is an executable file".
Instead of using this "universal" packaging system, yEnc forces programs to look for specific strings and try to guess where things begin and end. And it has no mechanism for identifying individual parts in a multi-part post (again, programs must look at the text or message subject and try to guess).
Doing something right is usually not much harder than doing something wrong. And when people get used to something that's broken, they won't want it fixed.
Betamax failed because it was a proprietary format. If Sony had allowed other companies to make it (like JVC did with VHS) it would still be around (20 years ago it was better than VHS is today). Betacam still dominates the broadcast world.
Now, yEnc looks like it was created by Microsoft. It's not a standard, it's a hack. The only way it can become a standard is by pushing it down people's throats and then using "public pressure" to force applications to support it.
To use a videotape analogy, it's like releasing magnetic tape reels after people had been using cassettes for years, just because the reels use slighlty lighter tape.
I hope yEnc in its current form is *not* supported by the industry. I think a company such as Forté could create a real standard using an encoding method similar to yEnc (it wasn't "invented" by yEnc's author, anyway). I think Agent's programmers, of all people, should know how hard it is to deal with these (non)standards, and could save themselves a lof of work in the future by making sure it's done right.
As it stands, yEnc is the same as UUEncode, only in smaller portions (actually it's worse, because you can sort of wrap UUE in MIME; you can't with yEnc).
You mean you don't have to pick the names for your servers from the Lord of the Rings...??
RMN
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