It's true (and I've worked on one of the hardware players linked from that page), but until *Apple* puts FLAC support on the iPod (sorry, as cool as Rockbox is, it doesn't count), it's not going to get wide use. As much as I hate Apple's domination of the hardware music player market, that's the reality.
Yeah, unfortunately that's been my feelings about Theora as well for some time. It seems like a great project, and the alleged freeness of the codec is a big plus to me as an OSS advocate... but no mainstream hardware device supports it, and no major content provider uses it. Most companies are used to paying royalties for these sorts of things, so H.264 adoption isn't really slowed down by the cost.
Vorbis has been around for over 10 years, stable for 7 or so, but mainstream use just isn't there yet. Theora has been considered stable for barely 6 months, the bitstream having been frozen less than 5 years ago. H.264 has been in wide use for at least a few years now; Theora's facing an uphill battle.
Ogg is a container format. Theora is a video codec. Theora is not Ogg.
Of course, the full name of the codec is actually "Ogg Vorbis," (though it looks like Xiph is trying to move away from that name) so the OP may technically be correct, even though it's less confusing to refer to the audio codec as Vorbis and the container format as Ogg.
How many artists do you know that distribute in Apple Lossless?
Annoyingly, because the only compressed lossless format the iPod supports is Apple Lossless, a lot of people prefer it over FLAC, even though FLAC is technically superior and more freely available. But yeah, haven't heard of any artists releasing in it...
once it more widely adopted and all your infrastructure is organized around using it you have to start paying in 2010. Which is not exactly heavily publicized.
How does being in the license agreement itself count as "not heavily publicized?" C'mon, people... anyone who signs a legal agreement like a patent license without having a lawyer look over it is a moron.
It's not bait and switch if they tell you about the switch up front.
How are they pretending? The linked license agreement explicitly states the term of the agreement, and even notes that some activites are royalty-free until then *for the express purpose of increasing market share*. It's not a bait-and-switch if they inform you about the switch ahead of time.
How is that any different than a company selling a physical product deeply discounted or below cost for an initial period of time in order to gain market share?
Yeah. By not subjecting them to mental abuse, physical abuse, and the roundabout torture by the sons and daughters of shithead breeders who've had 12 kids on a 40 IQ and government handouts, you're doing "immense harm" to your kids.
Well, yeah, pretty much. The world is full of all kinds of people. There are nice, friendly people who go out of their way to help you out. There are also assholes who will try to use you for their own gain. Isn't it better to learn about these people and how to deal with them when you're a kid and essentially it "doesn't matter?"
Public schools do not do ANY lab experiments any more. Most of them don't even have a gas hookup at the teacher's desk in a science classroom.
If that's true, that's very sad. My public school experience isn't exactly fresh (I graduated from high school 10 years ago), but we at least did all these things then.
Every homeschooling parent I have known has gone FAR above and beyond the "minimums" of what they need to do, and their kids have benefited greatly as a result.
Well, your anecdote against the parent poster's anecdote. Based on post content, I'd believe the parent over you, but really, either of you could be wrong or right (or you're both wrong AND both right).
Dude, fuck you.... Again, fuck you for being a retard.
Dial down the douchebag attitude a bit. Might get a more useful response.
I'm already sitting on a small mountain of cheaply-obtained networking gear which will keep me set for life.
That's assuming state-of-the-art doesn't vastly outstrip the performance of your "set for life" equipment in the next 20 years.
As someone who works for a company that sells wired and wireless networking equipment, I've come to realise just how unreliable WLAN equipment is. I have three computers at my desk right now, two of them laptops. Everything is wired.
On the other hand, at home, I'm always wireless. Go figure.
Remember that on Linux the graphics drivers are also in userspace, in X11, on top of the shell that is on top of the Linux kernel.
The Linux Direct Rendering Manager has a chipset-specific kernel module that does a lot of the heavy lifting for the graphics drivers. Of course, if you use an older video chipset that doesn't support DRM, then yes, the X11 graphics driver is in userspace. But if you use a video chipset from AMD/ATI or Intel, or use nvidia's proprietary driver (or the reverse engineered 'nouveau' driver), then your graphics driver has large bits of itself in the kernel.
Maybe the parent meant that Hitler painted vegetarians...
Re:Nope, it's the putative new users problem
on
Linux Needs Critics
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· Score: 1
If they're quality open source drivers licensed acceptably, yeah, I probably would be equally happy. But personally I don't care either way. I'm not a driver developer. I'm content to limit my purchases to hardware with good Linux support (and suffer through trouble when I just "have" to have something that's poorly supported) while others work out the driver mess.
I think that's the main problem with these arguments: you're lumping me in with all other OSS developers and are assuming that we all have the same goals and care about working on the same things. I work on GUIs and desktop plumbing. While better hardware support would be nice in some cases, it really doesn't trouble me all that much.
I just don't have much of an opinion. If Linux gets large enough market share that manufacturers write good drivers and open source them, great! If not, well, that's a shame, but it doesn't really matter to me all that much.
Please. Pointing to Launchpad as representative of the OSS developer community is pretty weak. Launchpad is, with some exceptions, Canonical. They have a vested interest (potential profit) in pushing Linux. Sure, they employ a bunch of OSS developers, but they're hardly a representative sample of all of us out there.
And that's just the thing: you *can't* take a group of people from one or multiple organisations and say they're representative of OSS evangelism (or whatever). OSS developers are a pretty diverse bunch, some employed to work on OSS, many more not. Has anyone actually done a "random" sampling of OSS developers to poll attitudes on their goals (if any) with regard to the free software movement? I don't think so, but it would be interesting is someone did.
In the end, you're inventing a false dichotomy here. Linux doesn't need to have the same support that Windows has, but it also doesn't have to be your "collection of head-in-the-sand developers" and "deluded evangelists." It can be something in the middle.
Let's imagine for a minute that the status quo was totally fine. If that's the case, I don't need to care if your random weird piece of hardware that works fine on Windows doesn't work on Linux. "Losing" you isn't going to make Linux irrelevant, and "gaining" you isn't going to magically make every hardware vendor support Linux. If working on your pet problem isn't interesting to *me*, and I don't get anything out of it, why should I work on it? And that's even assuming I was a Linux-adoption evangelist, which I'm not. Given that I'm not, I just don't see my motivation to work on something that doesn't interest me just because some random end-user wants it done.
The thing I find interesting about that article is that it notes that the IEEE will not ratify a standard until all orgs with patents relating to the standard commit to not suing people who implement the standard.
So apparently the fault here can be shared: CSIRO hasn't been playing ball with the normal IEEE standardisation process.
Having said that, it still seems pretty risky for the named companies to implement the standard, knowing that they weren't immune from patent suits.
The Wikipedia article on the standard notes that the validity of the patent itself is a bit uncertain.
Frankly this is just a bit ridiculous. This standard has been under development since 2004, and it hasn't been ratified yet, and isn't expected to be for another year (at least?). We should have moved on to the next new thing by now.
Nope, responsibility for paying royalties usually falls with the last link in the chain before the customer. It's not unheard of for the chip manufacturers to pay for licensing and then include the cost of that licensing in their chip cost to the OEM, but in my experience the OEM usually handles royalty payments.
No wonder there's a problem with criticism for Linux and FOSS: those involved are too busy being right and making statements that make sense to themselves to take time to listen to what most users can actually use or would need.
I don't necessarily see that as a problem. If that same person is telling you "you should use Linux anyway and deal with the shortcomings," or "your problems aren't real," then sure, that's a problem. But most actual OSS developers (who I know, anyway; and yes, I'm one of them) don't really care all that much if you use Linux or not. If it works for you, great! If not, well, it's a shame that you'll have to be stuck with Windows (or whatever), but that's just how it works sometimes.
Multihead still sucks on Linux. I've worked with it, and I've written code to try to deal with it. It's hard. It's getting better, but it's still not easy. This is one of the things the X community has been working on for at least a year or two, and I'd say it won't be seamless on all hardware for at least another year or two. At this point, at least, I can plug a second monitor into my laptop and have it recognised automatically without having to deal with any config files. But it took a bit of work to get to that point, and configuration beyond that (via a GUI) is spotty at best.
The stated goal - at least from a large portion of the linux community - is to see as many people using Linux as possible.
No, no, no, no, no! Where are you getting this crap? What is this "large portion of the Linux community?" Did it ever occur to you that these people might be a vocal minority? Or that they aren't representative of the community? Or, more importantly, that they aren't representative of the Linux *developer* community?
From everything I see, the loudest people talking about getting Linux on the desktop haven't written a line of code in years, if ever.
Most of us are somewhere in between. We'd love to see more people using our software because we get a warm fuzzy feeling knowing something we wrote made someone's day easier. And some people are going to try out our stuff and find out it doesn't work for them, or that it's lacking in some way. And that's fine! They can report the problem, but that's where they need to understand that the developer may not care about their problem. If that's the case, they'll have to go find some other way of getting what they want... and maybe that means going back to Windows. Being whiny and acting all entitled isn't going to help. Just move on, grow up, and accept that people aren't going to do things for you just because you want them to.
You don't care if Linux works right for someone else. However, if Linux proponents want people to adopt their OS of choice, they have to deal with the fact that they have to do more than provide their part of the bargain. They have to go the extra mile to make it work for *the other person*.
You seem to have this misconception that the person who doesn't care if Linux works right for someone else is ALSO the same person as the Linux evangelist/proponent who want people to convert.
Very often that's not the case. Many of us just want to hack on and use our platform of choice and be left alone.
Interestingly, many of the evangelists aren't coders, or at least aren't active developers. These are the people who need to figure out how to solve end users' problems. If that means they need to pay developers to get them to work on these types of issues, so be it. But often when push comes to shove, nobody wants to put their money where their mouth is.
Re:Nope, it's the putative new users problem
on
Linux Needs Critics
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· Score: 1
A vocal minority of Linux guys tend to go with #3
There, fixed that for you.
Sorry, but most of us just want to quietly hack on our platform, have a good time, enjoy the fruits of our labor, and be left alone. If we can come up with something that others find useful, that's great. If not, well, as long as it's fun to hack on and we find it useful for ourselves, that's fine too.
I'll be frank: dealing with users is the biggest time-sink in any open source project. I can't think of anything else that takes more time away from actual coding than dealing with users. Don't get me wrong: I do value interaction with users of my software. I value it quite a lot. But it takes time, and it's totally understandable (to me at least) that some developers (myself included, sometimes) get hostile when confronted with someone who just seems to be whining with a sense of entitlement.
And in the end, yes, the user is at "fault" if they say "I want to build a Linux DVR" and then go and buy hardware without first doing research to make sure it's compatible. I have no sympathy for people like that who have problems, and I refuse to make their problem my problem. If that drives them away from Linux, that's fine by me.
Now, the user who is currently running (for example) a WinXP-based DVR... there might be some group of people who woke up one day thinking "well, I want to figure out how to get these WinXP DVR guys to switch their *existing* hardware over to Linux." And sure, those people have a problem: they need to make sure the typical kinds of hardware people have in their WinXP DVR will work with Linux as well. But that's not my problem, and it may not even be the Linux DVR application writer's problem. It's the we-want-you-to-convert evangelist's problem.
Please don't confuse specific evangelists with the general OSS developer community. There is some overlap, but very often they are distinct groups of people.
Re:Nope, it's the putative new users problem
on
Linux Needs Critics
·
· Score: 1
It's only the developers' problem if they care. If they don't -- and many don't -- then it's the user's problem. Or, I guess, more accurately, the Linux evangelist's problem. Note that many Linux developers are not also Linux evangelists. A lot of us are happy to hack on and run our own stuff and be left alone. If other people want to use it, great. If not, well, that's fine too.
Well, except that, below around 40mph (slightly different fro every car), rolling the windows down causes less drag than the load the a/c causes on your engine. So below 40 you'll get better fuel efficiency rolling your windows down and a/c off, and above 40 you're better off with the windows closed and the a/c on.
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It's true (and I've worked on one of the hardware players linked from that page), but until *Apple* puts FLAC support on the iPod (sorry, as cool as Rockbox is, it doesn't count), it's not going to get wide use. As much as I hate Apple's domination of the hardware music player market, that's the reality.
Yeah, unfortunately that's been my feelings about Theora as well for some time. It seems like a great project, and the alleged freeness of the codec is a big plus to me as an OSS advocate... but no mainstream hardware device supports it, and no major content provider uses it. Most companies are used to paying royalties for these sorts of things, so H.264 adoption isn't really slowed down by the cost.
Vorbis has been around for over 10 years, stable for 7 or so, but mainstream use just isn't there yet. Theora has been considered stable for barely 6 months, the bitstream having been frozen less than 5 years ago. H.264 has been in wide use for at least a few years now; Theora's facing an uphill battle.
Theora is OGG. Perhaps you meant "Vorbis"?
Ogg is a container format. Theora is a video codec. Theora is not Ogg.
Of course, the full name of the codec is actually "Ogg Vorbis," (though it looks like Xiph is trying to move away from that name) so the OP may technically be correct, even though it's less confusing to refer to the audio codec as Vorbis and the container format as Ogg.
How many artists do you know that distribute in Apple Lossless?
Annoyingly, because the only compressed lossless format the iPod supports is Apple Lossless, a lot of people prefer it over FLAC, even though FLAC is technically superior and more freely available. But yeah, haven't heard of any artists releasing in it...
once it more widely adopted and all your infrastructure is organized around using it you have to start paying in 2010. Which is not exactly heavily publicized.
How does being in the license agreement itself count as "not heavily publicized?" C'mon, people... anyone who signs a legal agreement like a patent license without having a lawyer look over it is a moron.
It's not bait and switch if they tell you about the switch up front.
How are they pretending? The linked license agreement explicitly states the term of the agreement, and even notes that some activites are royalty-free until then *for the express purpose of increasing market share*. It's not a bait-and-switch if they inform you about the switch ahead of time.
How is that any different than a company selling a physical product deeply discounted or below cost for an initial period of time in order to gain market share?
know that it's fashionable to hate the liberals here on Slashdot
Really? Shit, I thought we were still hating the conservatives. I'd better update my groupthink platform...
Yeah. By not subjecting them to mental abuse, physical abuse, and the roundabout torture by the sons and daughters of shithead breeders who've had 12 kids on a 40 IQ and government handouts, you're doing "immense harm" to your kids.
Well, yeah, pretty much. The world is full of all kinds of people. There are nice, friendly people who go out of their way to help you out. There are also assholes who will try to use you for their own gain. Isn't it better to learn about these people and how to deal with them when you're a kid and essentially it "doesn't matter?"
Public schools do not do ANY lab experiments any more. Most of them don't even have a gas hookup at the teacher's desk in a science classroom.
If that's true, that's very sad. My public school experience isn't exactly fresh (I graduated from high school 10 years ago), but we at least did all these things then.
Every homeschooling parent I have known has gone FAR above and beyond the "minimums" of what they need to do, and their kids have benefited greatly as a result.
Well, your anecdote against the parent poster's anecdote. Based on post content, I'd believe the parent over you, but really, either of you could be wrong or right (or you're both wrong AND both right).
Dude, fuck you. ... Again, fuck you for being a retard.
Dial down the douchebag attitude a bit. Might get a more useful response.
Three?
I'm already sitting on a small mountain of cheaply-obtained networking gear which will keep me set for life.
That's assuming state-of-the-art doesn't vastly outstrip the performance of your "set for life" equipment in the next 20 years.
As someone who works for a company that sells wired and wireless networking equipment, I've come to realise just how unreliable WLAN equipment is. I have three computers at my desk right now, two of them laptops. Everything is wired.
On the other hand, at home, I'm always wireless. Go figure.
Remember that on Linux the graphics drivers are also in userspace, in X11, on top of the shell that is on top of the Linux kernel.
The Linux Direct Rendering Manager has a chipset-specific kernel module that does a lot of the heavy lifting for the graphics drivers. Of course, if you use an older video chipset that doesn't support DRM, then yes, the X11 graphics driver is in userspace. But if you use a video chipset from AMD/ATI or Intel, or use nvidia's proprietary driver (or the reverse engineered 'nouveau' driver), then your graphics driver has large bits of itself in the kernel.
Maybe the parent meant that Hitler painted vegetarians...
If they're quality open source drivers licensed acceptably, yeah, I probably would be equally happy. But personally I don't care either way. I'm not a driver developer. I'm content to limit my purchases to hardware with good Linux support (and suffer through trouble when I just "have" to have something that's poorly supported) while others work out the driver mess.
I think that's the main problem with these arguments: you're lumping me in with all other OSS developers and are assuming that we all have the same goals and care about working on the same things. I work on GUIs and desktop plumbing. While better hardware support would be nice in some cases, it really doesn't trouble me all that much.
I just don't have much of an opinion. If Linux gets large enough market share that manufacturers write good drivers and open source them, great! If not, well, that's a shame, but it doesn't really matter to me all that much.
Please. Pointing to Launchpad as representative of the OSS developer community is pretty weak. Launchpad is, with some exceptions, Canonical. They have a vested interest (potential profit) in pushing Linux. Sure, they employ a bunch of OSS developers, but they're hardly a representative sample of all of us out there.
And that's just the thing: you *can't* take a group of people from one or multiple organisations and say they're representative of OSS evangelism (or whatever). OSS developers are a pretty diverse bunch, some employed to work on OSS, many more not. Has anyone actually done a "random" sampling of OSS developers to poll attitudes on their goals (if any) with regard to the free software movement? I don't think so, but it would be interesting is someone did.
In the end, you're inventing a false dichotomy here. Linux doesn't need to have the same support that Windows has, but it also doesn't have to be your "collection of head-in-the-sand developers" and "deluded evangelists." It can be something in the middle.
Let's imagine for a minute that the status quo was totally fine. If that's the case, I don't need to care if your random weird piece of hardware that works fine on Windows doesn't work on Linux. "Losing" you isn't going to make Linux irrelevant, and "gaining" you isn't going to magically make every hardware vendor support Linux. If working on your pet problem isn't interesting to *me*, and I don't get anything out of it, why should I work on it? And that's even assuming I was a Linux-adoption evangelist, which I'm not. Given that I'm not, I just don't see my motivation to work on something that doesn't interest me just because some random end-user wants it done.
The thing I find interesting about that article is that it notes that the IEEE will not ratify a standard until all orgs with patents relating to the standard commit to not suing people who implement the standard.
So apparently the fault here can be shared: CSIRO hasn't been playing ball with the normal IEEE standardisation process.
Having said that, it still seems pretty risky for the named companies to implement the standard, knowing that they weren't immune from patent suits.
The Wikipedia article on the standard notes that the validity of the patent itself is a bit uncertain.
Frankly this is just a bit ridiculous. This standard has been under development since 2004, and it hasn't been ratified yet, and isn't expected to be for another year (at least?). We should have moved on to the next new thing by now.
Nope, responsibility for paying royalties usually falls with the last link in the chain before the customer. It's not unheard of for the chip manufacturers to pay for licensing and then include the cost of that licensing in their chip cost to the OEM, but in my experience the OEM usually handles royalty payments.
No wonder there's a problem with criticism for Linux and FOSS: those involved are too busy being right and making statements that make sense to themselves to take time to listen to what most users can actually use or would need.
I don't necessarily see that as a problem. If that same person is telling you "you should use Linux anyway and deal with the shortcomings," or "your problems aren't real," then sure, that's a problem. But most actual OSS developers (who I know, anyway; and yes, I'm one of them) don't really care all that much if you use Linux or not. If it works for you, great! If not, well, it's a shame that you'll have to be stuck with Windows (or whatever), but that's just how it works sometimes.
Multihead still sucks on Linux. I've worked with it, and I've written code to try to deal with it. It's hard. It's getting better, but it's still not easy. This is one of the things the X community has been working on for at least a year or two, and I'd say it won't be seamless on all hardware for at least another year or two. At this point, at least, I can plug a second monitor into my laptop and have it recognised automatically without having to deal with any config files. But it took a bit of work to get to that point, and configuration beyond that (via a GUI) is spotty at best.
Happy now?
The stated goal - at least from a large portion of the linux community - is to see as many people using Linux as possible.
No, no, no, no, no! Where are you getting this crap? What is this "large portion of the Linux community?" Did it ever occur to you that these people might be a vocal minority? Or that they aren't representative of the community? Or, more importantly, that they aren't representative of the Linux *developer* community?
From everything I see, the loudest people talking about getting Linux on the desktop haven't written a line of code in years, if ever.
Most of us are somewhere in between. We'd love to see more people using our software because we get a warm fuzzy feeling knowing something we wrote made someone's day easier. And some people are going to try out our stuff and find out it doesn't work for them, or that it's lacking in some way. And that's fine! They can report the problem, but that's where they need to understand that the developer may not care about their problem. If that's the case, they'll have to go find some other way of getting what they want... and maybe that means going back to Windows. Being whiny and acting all entitled isn't going to help. Just move on, grow up, and accept that people aren't going to do things for you just because you want them to.
You don't care if Linux works right for someone else. However, if Linux proponents want people to adopt their OS of choice, they have to deal with the fact that they have to do more than provide their part of the bargain. They have to go the extra mile to make it work for *the other person*.
You seem to have this misconception that the person who doesn't care if Linux works right for someone else is ALSO the same person as the Linux evangelist/proponent who want people to convert.
Very often that's not the case. Many of us just want to hack on and use our platform of choice and be left alone.
Interestingly, many of the evangelists aren't coders, or at least aren't active developers. These are the people who need to figure out how to solve end users' problems. If that means they need to pay developers to get them to work on these types of issues, so be it. But often when push comes to shove, nobody wants to put their money where their mouth is.
A vocal minority of Linux guys tend to go with #3
There, fixed that for you.
Sorry, but most of us just want to quietly hack on our platform, have a good time, enjoy the fruits of our labor, and be left alone. If we can come up with something that others find useful, that's great. If not, well, as long as it's fun to hack on and we find it useful for ourselves, that's fine too.
I'll be frank: dealing with users is the biggest time-sink in any open source project. I can't think of anything else that takes more time away from actual coding than dealing with users. Don't get me wrong: I do value interaction with users of my software. I value it quite a lot. But it takes time, and it's totally understandable (to me at least) that some developers (myself included, sometimes) get hostile when confronted with someone who just seems to be whining with a sense of entitlement.
And in the end, yes, the user is at "fault" if they say "I want to build a Linux DVR" and then go and buy hardware without first doing research to make sure it's compatible. I have no sympathy for people like that who have problems, and I refuse to make their problem my problem. If that drives them away from Linux, that's fine by me.
Now, the user who is currently running (for example) a WinXP-based DVR... there might be some group of people who woke up one day thinking "well, I want to figure out how to get these WinXP DVR guys to switch their *existing* hardware over to Linux." And sure, those people have a problem: they need to make sure the typical kinds of hardware people have in their WinXP DVR will work with Linux as well. But that's not my problem, and it may not even be the Linux DVR application writer's problem. It's the we-want-you-to-convert evangelist's problem.
Please don't confuse specific evangelists with the general OSS developer community. There is some overlap, but very often they are distinct groups of people.
It's only the developers' problem if they care. If they don't -- and many don't -- then it's the user's problem. Or, I guess, more accurately, the Linux evangelist's problem. Note that many Linux developers are not also Linux evangelists. A lot of us are happy to hack on and run our own stuff and be left alone. If other people want to use it, great. If not, well, that's fine too.
Poppycock!
Is that a recent law, then? My friend's brother's car in CA used to have tinted windows; this was about 3 years ago.
Well, except that, below around 40mph (slightly different fro every car), rolling the windows down causes less drag than the load the a/c causes on your engine. So below 40 you'll get better fuel efficiency rolling your windows down and a/c off, and above 40 you're better off with the windows closed and the a/c on.
Two millibits per second? And that's an upgrade? Ouch.