The article is confusing, but it seems like the fine is actually $16.03 million. What is infuriating is this is a settlement agreement so that the state will not release the names of the donors. It looks as if they are basically paying off the state so they don't have the deal with the public fallout.
There is a lot of tax payer funded research that is inaccessible to the public despite their hand in its creation. I think that this aspect needs to be discussed, as well.
I don't even see anything to discuss. Seriously, how the hell is this acceptable?
And Swartz's super serious multi-felony crime was trying to fix this situation? Every time I look back at this case, it befuddles me. The only insane people here are the prosecution, and they need to be called out on it and punished along with everyone involved in this travesty of justice.
Producing and documenting open technical and process standards is one exception where corporate collusion is not only acceptable, it is often encouraged.
Am I reading this wrong? It seems that the cost of a print subscription is $3.85 a week but INCLUDES the $35/mo (holy crap that's expensive) digital subscription.
It kind of baffles me 500,000 people paying as much as ISP service for access to a single newpaper? Are they including print subscriptions in that number
You are seriously using the GPL in an argument on why copyright is a good idea? The GPL is designed to use to use copyright to subvert its fundamental purpose! Instead of saying "you can not sure", GPL says "you MUST share". It goes against every argument the copyright minimalists make the purpose for copyright is. That's why it's called a "copyleft license", it turns copyright on its head.
Efficency is were wealth comes from. If everyone is breaking windows the economy will grid to a standstill, there has to people doing actual productive work and software is an important foundation to modern world and shouldn't be squandered or guildified in the name of jobs. I appricate that you don't BS about your motives though.
Anyway as long as there is people still working there will be work for software engineers, actually our job is to put other people out of jobs (regardless of license of the software). I really think "software engineer" will be the last job in existence once we have automated everything else.
Anytime you write software that makes people more productive or automate business processes, you are taking a step down that road.
Per TFA: "FairPlay is cracked by Jon Lech Johansen ("DVD Jon"), previously known for his part in the DeCSS software, which was released four years earlier for decrypting DVDs."
I assure you the system administrator teams running those 21 other e-mail systems will not let you touch it with a 500 foot poll, and no strong leadership compels them otherwise.
The problem is this is exactly how those 21 e-mail systems came to be. I bet they all had the idea of becoming the "one corporate e-mail system", but got mired in politics and insanity along the way.
You can implement reliable transmission over UDP. And you have more options as well: you can do it with error correction algorithms for latency intorelent applications, something TCP can't provide with it's ARQ design.
TCP is simple to use (from the view of someone doing network programming), but under the scenes it is crazy complicated to implement properly.
Fortunately you really only need someone to implement a TCP stack once (in open source) and it can be reused in a multitude of operating systems. BSD pretty much set the standard for a TCP/IP stack (TCP Reno) and everyone went from there.
Stream protocols that offer error, flow and congestion control over heterogeneous datagram networks are NOT trivial.
TCP is not trivial at all. In fact & efficient algorithms to implement features of TCP is still an area of active research. IETF RFCs in various stages of standardization related to TCP probably amount to thousands of pages at this point, and it's still growing. Linux recently got a new algorithm for congestion control for instance: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~rhee/export/bitcp/cubic-paper.pdf
Don't forget Google owns a lot of patents on video compression since they bought On2, and they have no intention of licensing them out for H.264. If MPEG LA wants to start a patent war with Google, they might find themselves counter-sued with the potential of their H.264 format getting recalled off the market.
We "fanatical FOSSies" are pushing towards a world where people are free to do interesting things with technology without needing permission or excessive upfront money. H.264 is not one of those technologies.
With regard to software specifically, this movement to strip an entire category of inventions of protection lacks nuance. What I find most interesting is that its biggest proponents are people within the software industry itself, but usually not the real innovators. Are you saying software simply can't be inventive? That you can't possibly think of something in software that anyone else couldn't have thought of, even given the exact same problem set? Because boy oh boy, if that's true, we're really overpaying software "engineers" then, aren't we?
What I find interesting is the biggest proponents of software patents are the patent lawyers themselves, and usually not software engineers. Well that that all interesting, because lawyers with their $10k filing fees and multimillion dollar lawsuit fees (usually by suing software companies) seem to benefit the most from their existence.
Understand, when a lawyer tells you what is good for your industry, run the other way. RUN FAST.
The "average Joe" doesn't give a dime to Oracle. It's the IT/software professionals that give millions of dollars of their departmental budgets to Oracle. The kind with an anti-Microsoft slant are even more likely to be doing this.
Ergo, Oracle should be VERY concerned of the opinion on Slashdot.
That's really not true. Blu-ray uses VC-1 also. VC-1 is the SMPTE (TV broadcast) standard, not H.264. The H.264 codec is far from being an total industry standard at this point. The real "industry standard" is MPEG-2, since all DVD movies (much popular then Bluray anyway) are all MPEG-2 movies. That's why an MPEG-2 codec costs $2.00 per unit with no upper cap, while H.264 is only 20 cents per unit, despite being a far better technology.
Thoera already has larger browser penetration then H.264:
- Firefox supports Theora, no support for H.264 - Opera supports Theora, no support for H.264 - Chrome supports Theora and H.264 (Chromium only supports Theora) - Safari only supports H.264 by default
So the odd one out here is 3-4% marketshare Safari with it's lack of Theora.
Basically you are talking about, at best, 10% market penetration for HTML5 H.264, compared to 36% with Theora.
Slashdot Mirror
"No proprietary firmware". This is a direct quote from where? RTFA. The FSF never claimed that...
The article is confusing, but it seems like the fine is actually $16.03 million. What is infuriating is this is a settlement agreement so that the state will not release the names of the donors. It looks as if they are basically paying off the state so they don't have the deal with the public fallout.
So about $2 million dollars per employee? I doubt it's the people making the software making the majority of that money...
There is a lot of tax payer funded research that is inaccessible to the public despite their hand in its creation. I think that this aspect needs to be discussed, as well.
I don't even see anything to discuss. Seriously, how the hell is this acceptable?
And Swartz's super serious multi-felony crime was trying to fix this situation? Every time I look back at this case, it befuddles me. The only insane people here are the prosecution, and they need to be called out on it and punished along with everyone involved in this travesty of justice.
Producing and documenting open technical and process standards is one exception where corporate collusion is not only acceptable, it is often encouraged.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Pirate_Party
Am I reading this wrong? It seems that the cost of a print subscription is $3.85 a week but INCLUDES the $35/mo (holy crap that's expensive) digital subscription.
It kind of baffles me 500,000 people paying as much as ISP service for access to a single newpaper? Are they including print subscriptions in that number
You are seriously using the GPL in an argument on why copyright is a good idea? The GPL is designed to use to use copyright to subvert its fundamental purpose! Instead of saying "you can not sure", GPL says "you MUST share". It goes against every argument the copyright minimalists make the purpose for copyright is. That's why it's called a "copyleft license", it turns copyright on its head.
Efficency is were wealth comes from. If everyone is breaking windows the economy will grid to a standstill, there has to people doing actual productive work and software is an important foundation to modern world and shouldn't be squandered or guildified in the name of jobs. I appricate that you don't BS about your motives though.
Anyway as long as there is people still working there will be work for software engineers, actually our job is to put other people out of jobs (regardless of license of the software). I really think "software engineer" will be the last job in existence once we have automated everything else.
Anytime you write software that makes people more productive or automate business processes, you are taking a step down that road.
Per TFA:
"FairPlay is cracked by Jon Lech Johansen ("DVD Jon"), previously known for his part in the DeCSS software, which was released four years earlier for decrypting DVDs."
You are talking about a man who is fundamentally against the way the world works and made it his life mission to change it.
"Migrate folks to it" with what authority?
I assure you the system administrator teams running those 21 other e-mail systems will not let you touch it with a 500 foot poll, and no strong leadership compels them otherwise.
The problem is this is exactly how those 21 e-mail systems came to be. I bet they all had the idea of becoming the "one corporate e-mail system", but got mired in politics and insanity along the way.
You can implement reliable transmission over UDP. And you have more options as well: you can do it with error correction algorithms for latency intorelent applications, something TCP can't provide with it's ARQ design.
TCP is simple to use (from the view of someone doing network programming), but under the scenes it is crazy complicated to implement properly.
Fortunately you really only need someone to implement a TCP stack once (in open source) and it can be reused in a multitude of operating systems. BSD pretty much set the standard for a TCP/IP stack (TCP Reno) and everyone went from there.
Stream protocols that offer error, flow and congestion control over heterogeneous datagram networks are NOT trivial.
TCP is not trivial at all. In fact & efficient algorithms to implement features of TCP is still an area of active research. IETF RFCs in various stages of standardization related to TCP probably amount to thousands of pages at this point, and it's still growing. Linux recently got a new algorithm for congestion control for instance: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~rhee/export/bitcp/cubic-paper.pdf
So all Israeli Jews are European? Really? Really?
Arab-Islamic terrorists like Hamas want the total extermination of the Jewish people and conquest of the world. Israel has every right to defend themselves from such psychopaths.
I remember On2 used to say VP8 (WebM) had far better quality than H.264.
Don't forget Google owns a lot of patents on video compression since they bought On2, and they have no intention of licensing them out for H.264. If MPEG LA wants to start a patent war with Google, they might find themselves counter-sued with the potential of their H.264 format getting recalled off the market.
We "fanatical FOSSies" are pushing towards a world where people are free to do interesting things with technology without needing permission or excessive upfront money. H.264 is not one of those technologies.
With regard to software specifically, this movement to strip an entire category of inventions of protection lacks nuance. What I find most interesting is that its biggest proponents are people within the software industry itself, but usually not the real innovators. Are you saying software simply can't be inventive? That you can't possibly think of something in software that anyone else couldn't have thought of, even given the exact same problem set? Because boy oh boy, if that's true, we're really overpaying software "engineers" then, aren't we?
What I find interesting is the biggest proponents of software patents are the patent lawyers themselves, and usually not software engineers. Well that that all interesting, because lawyers with their $10k filing fees and multimillion dollar lawsuit fees (usually by suing software companies) seem to benefit the most from their existence.
Understand, when a lawyer tells you what is good for your industry, run the other way. RUN FAST.
The "average Joe" doesn't give a dime to Oracle. It's the IT/software professionals that give millions of dollars of their departmental budgets to Oracle. The kind with an anti-Microsoft slant are even more likely to be doing this.
Ergo, Oracle should be VERY concerned of the opinion on Slashdot.
That's really not true. Blu-ray uses VC-1 also. VC-1 is the SMPTE (TV broadcast) standard, not H.264. The H.264 codec is far from being an total industry standard at this point. The real "industry standard" is MPEG-2, since all DVD movies (much popular then Bluray anyway) are all MPEG-2 movies. That's why an MPEG-2 codec costs $2.00 per unit with no upper cap, while H.264 is only 20 cents per unit, despite being a far better technology.
Yes, the vast majority of GPUs (even in embedded devices) can accelerate any kind of IDCT codec (VC-1 and Theora included).
VP-8 is a far better codec in just about every way (compression ratio, computational complexity, etc.). I just wonder what Google plans to do with it.
Thoera already has larger browser penetration then H.264:
- Firefox supports Theora, no support for H.264
- Opera supports Theora, no support for H.264
- Chrome supports Theora and H.264 (Chromium only supports Theora)
- Safari only supports H.264 by default
So the odd one out here is 3-4% marketshare Safari with it's lack of Theora.
Basically you are talking about, at best, 10% market penetration for HTML5 H.264, compared to 36% with Theora.