That would be cool.. instead of having to keep tons of vobs on my hard drive because the movies are due back, I could just leisurely rip n crunch em one at a time.
Nice to see they're making things easier for the little guy for a change.
If you want higher quality of service, you don't nationalize telcos. You just make the government pay for it. Then they have the massive economic clout to ensure that you don't get screwed by the big corporates.
Joe Smith can't negotiate with a telco if he's getting screwed, but the government of Canada can sure as hell negotiate a good deal on his behalf, and if the telco does a poor job, they're out.
It's kept our drug costs a hell of a lot cheaper than most countries for a long time....
Don't expect to enjoy it for long... the gov't is about to sell us out again in another round of free-trade agreements with the fuckin americans.
Before you know it, quality of service requirements will be illegal in health care and utilities, because it prevents American companies from competing.
Despite their scaled-back features, these computers run on AMD Duron 1.0- or 1.1GHz processors, making them speedy enough for word processing, Internet access, working with digital pictures and playing some games.
Um... isn't the ENTIRE point of this desktop to make it easy to use for people who don't understand what compile means? Matter of fact, they likely wouldn't understand source, comment out, recompile or dependency either.
Do not make the assumption that the user is intelligent... he will hate you for imposing your unrealistic expectations upon him.
Individuals, with no wires or terribly sophisticated equipment, have been able to broadcast voice across the world for decades using ham radio, and digital has proven to be a hell of a lot more efficient than voice. Look at what has been achieved in the way of wireless just using scraps of some of the worst spectrum, the unregulated dregs. Given the right protocols to avoid saturation, along with deregulation of the airwaves, there should be no problem implementing such a system with minimal hops.
The areas Iâ(TM)d say were most relevant to the problem would be first, achieving enough processing power in the devices to deal with the fact that they would be basically analysing the entire spectrum all the time looking for relevant broadcasts. Secondly, achieving enough power storage efficiency to run the thing portably, and third, more precise emitters and sensitive receivers to allow increased signal granularity and give the protocols something to work with.
We could probably make a pretty good go at such a setup now, if the airwaves werenâ(TM)t so thoroughly regulated. But don't expect it to come from any of the existing commercial entities.... they'd probably have you shot if they thought you could make it work.
<rant>
Oh, and a big fuck you to the multitude of rabid capitalists who think thereâ(TM)s something inherently wrong with not wanting to pay for stuff. You can take your American Dream, consumer culture, built-in obsolescence, slave to the machine, bleached pop culture ideas and go fucking rot. Itâ(TM)s idiots with a attitudes like yours that make it possible for someone to sell boxes of fucking diapers to clean your floor with when a fucking mop will do. You are the modern day serf... go back to your damned cubicle and shut up.</rant>
Napster was centralized... they had one point where every client connected and told the hub what was up for share. Napster then propagated that information through the clients.
This means 1) they were aware of every thing that is shared though their network and 2) they had complete control over what they allowed to be shared, and could filter it if they wished. This was judged to make them liable for the infringements.
All the "clones" that have popped up are decentralized, which means that the creators have no more awareness of what is shared than the users do, and have no power to stop it. If they can't stop it, they're not liable for not stopping it.
You aren't interested in reality here, you're interested in justifying your position.
Anyone can clearly see that when a customers money is split between more middle men, the customer pays more. There may be more layers of misdirection for you to play out bullshit with, but the money comes from somewhere, and that somewhere is the pocket of the person that pays.
And if you're a manufacturer, licensing fees are part of your manufacturing costs. If you can make a good and useful product and make a profit at the $1 price point, but not at the $1.20 price point, and the licensing body charges.20 a unit, the public doesn't see the product, even though it may have been useful and successful at the $1 price point. THAT's where you see increasing costs of goods and decreasing availability of innovation.
And that bullshit about self-rectifying is just that: bullshit. If the licensing is extremely expensive, the owner of the IP doesn't drop it through the floor, they drop it just enough to maximise profit. This means the loss of low-margin high-volume product innovations that might have been brought to market. The only rectifying that occurs is in the profit of the owner of the standard.
Now, if there is something created that is truly remarkable and deserving of profit, that's all well and good. But if, as in the case of currently existing codecs, some organization is scraping money off the top when there are equal or superior options available, that is damn well not in the interests of anyone except the entity cashing the cheques. Anyone can plainly see that. If you have some vested interest and want to protect your piece of the pie, by all means do so... but lets not pretend that it's in our collective interests help you.
Prices for commodity goods aren't set by the cost of manufacturing those goods. Prices for commodity goods are set by what the market will bear.
Sorry, but you're wrong. In a great many cases, competition drives the price down to cost+1, or even below cost, if there's another means to recoup losses... for example, phones are a loss leader, and it's easier to add features to a loss leader if the loss is less. If the cost of adding the feature is too high, it just doesn't happen at all.
It's free now. You need a license only to make and distribute an encoding or decoding device.
Wrong again. MP4 is NOT free. You pay to encode, you pay to decode, you pay for devices, you pay to distribute content. Read the docs over at MPEG-LA.
Where a profit is available to be made, somebody will go out and make it.
Exactly. Requiring payment of licenses to outside parties raises costs, and reduces profit. The profit line hit's zero, the device is never made.
Prices for these things are completely disconnected from video format patents.
So, you're saying that increasing the cost of the product for the manufacturer does not increase the cost of the product for the consumer. Care to substantiate that?
You've typed a great deal, but you don't seem to have any intelligent arguments (no offense). Perhaps you should think of some before you reply next time?
I would say that it's pretty much guaranteed that companies will pick this up if it works. Money saved is profit made...
Software companies in particular are likely to be early adopters... there is already substantial use of Vorbis for sound bites in games, I expect to see lots of cinematic cuts done in Theora.
Oh, and if big business loves big business, why do they they try and cut each others throats?
That's all well and good... until your app grows to the point that you DO need a feature, something really sophisticated like, oh, subselects.
At this point, you can choose between using middle-tier code to fudge it (bye bye speed) or switching your whole app to a different db (what fun!) or using more than one db in the same app (smart move!)
Sorry, but it's just crap. Get a real DB
Slashdot Mirror
That would be cool.. instead of having to keep tons of vobs on my hard drive because the movies are due back, I could just leisurely rip n crunch em one at a time.
Nice to see they're making things easier for the little guy for a change.
Time for some Terminator Ice Cream!
Don't forget the warts
This is about that new AOL 8.0 software, right?
If you want higher quality of service, you don't nationalize telcos. You just make the government pay for it. Then they have the massive economic clout to ensure that you don't get screwed by the big corporates.
Joe Smith can't negotiate with a telco if he's getting screwed, but the government of Canada can sure as hell negotiate a good deal on his behalf, and if the telco does a poor job, they're out.
It's kept our drug costs a hell of a lot cheaper than most countries for a long time....
Don't expect to enjoy it for long... the gov't is about to sell us out again in another round of free-trade agreements with the fuckin americans. Before you know it, quality of service requirements will be illegal in health care and utilities, because it prevents American companies from competing.
Dude, word processing, Internet access, working with digital pictures and playing some games. P233s are fast enough for these things.
Dude, wasn't long ago, I was playing Quake III while reading that the GHz barrier had been broken.
Dude, do you understand sarcasm?
Dude, I'm typing this on my D600 @ 987 right now! Maybe I'll do some word processing after I play some games!
Dude, don't call me dude!
Despite their scaled-back features, these computers run on AMD Duron 1.0- or 1.1GHz processors, making them speedy enough for word processing, Internet access, working with digital pictures and playing some games.
Making them similar to a P233?
1) Hello, who sends uncompressed digital?
2) Read article postes shortly after this one where my laymans deduction is proven accurate.
3) Marx was an idiot.
4) Get fucked, filthy American
Um... isn't the ENTIRE point of this desktop to make it easy to use for people who don't understand what compile means? Matter of fact, they likely wouldn't understand source, comment out, recompile or dependency either.
Do not make the assumption that the user is intelligent... he will hate you for imposing your unrealistic expectations upon him.
Well, we are talking about the United States, right?
I mean, it ain't exactly "The Land Of The Free", now is it?
Guess not for much longer...
Individuals, with no wires or terribly sophisticated equipment, have been able to broadcast voice across the world for decades using ham radio, and digital has proven to be a hell of a lot more efficient than voice. Look at what has been achieved in the way of wireless just using scraps of some of the worst spectrum, the unregulated dregs. Given the right protocols to avoid saturation, along with deregulation of the airwaves, there should be no problem implementing such a system with minimal hops.
The areas Iâ(TM)d say were most relevant to the problem would be first, achieving enough processing power in the devices to deal with the fact that they would be basically analysing the entire spectrum all the time looking for relevant broadcasts. Secondly, achieving enough power storage efficiency to run the thing portably, and third, more precise emitters and sensitive receivers to allow increased signal granularity and give the protocols something to work with.
We could probably make a pretty good go at such a setup now, if the airwaves werenâ(TM)t so thoroughly regulated. But don't expect it to come from any of the existing commercial entities.... they'd probably have you shot if they thought you could make it work.
<rant> Oh, and a big fuck you to the multitude of rabid capitalists who think thereâ(TM)s something inherently wrong with not wanting to pay for stuff. You can take your American Dream, consumer culture, built-in obsolescence, slave to the machine, bleached pop culture ideas and go fucking rot. Itâ(TM)s idiots with a attitudes like yours that make it possible for someone to sell boxes of fucking diapers to clean your floor with when a fucking mop will do. You are the modern day serf... go back to your damned cubicle and shut up.</rant>
Wine
Is
Not an
Emulator
Napster was centralized... they had one point where every client connected and told the hub what was up for share. Napster then propagated that information through the clients.
This means 1) they were aware of every thing that is shared though their network and 2) they had complete control over what they allowed to be shared, and could filter it if they wished. This was judged to make them liable for the infringements.
All the "clones" that have popped up are decentralized, which means that the creators have no more awareness of what is shared than the users do, and have no power to stop it. If they can't stop it, they're not liable for not stopping it.
Before you can say if capitalism works, you need to say what you think it's supposed to be achieving.
Unless, of course, you think simply existing and smashing alternatives means it's working.
Sorry, mod me down if you will.... but that wasn't funny. Not even a little bit funny.
It's not survival that's relevant now... it's quantity.
You know those deadbeats? The slut with 4 kids, and the guy with 7 by 3 different women?
He's your replacement.
You aren't interested in reality here, you're interested in justifying your position.
.20 a unit, the public doesn't see the product, even though it may have been useful and successful at the $1 price point. THAT's where you see increasing costs of goods and decreasing availability of innovation.
Anyone can clearly see that when a customers money is split between more middle men, the customer pays more. There may be more layers of misdirection for you to play out bullshit with, but the money comes from somewhere, and that somewhere is the pocket of the person that pays.
And if you're a manufacturer, licensing fees are part of your manufacturing costs. If you can make a good and useful product and make a profit at the $1 price point, but not at the $1.20 price point, and the licensing body charges
And that bullshit about self-rectifying is just that: bullshit. If the licensing is extremely expensive, the owner of the IP doesn't drop it through the floor, they drop it just enough to maximise profit. This means the loss of low-margin high-volume product innovations that might have been brought to market. The only rectifying that occurs is in the profit of the owner of the standard.
Now, if there is something created that is truly remarkable and deserving of profit, that's all well and good. But if, as in the case of currently existing codecs, some organization is scraping money off the top when there are equal or superior options available, that is damn well not in the interests of anyone except the entity cashing the cheques. Anyone can plainly see that. If you have some vested interest and want to protect your piece of the pie, by all means do so... but lets not pretend that it's in our collective interests help you.
Prices for commodity goods aren't set by the cost of manufacturing those goods. Prices for commodity goods are set by what the market will bear.
Sorry, but you're wrong. In a great many cases, competition drives the price down to cost+1, or even below cost, if there's another means to recoup losses... for example, phones are a loss leader, and it's easier to add features to a loss leader if the loss is less. If the cost of adding the feature is too high, it just doesn't happen at all.
It's free now. You need a license only to make and distribute an encoding or decoding device.
Wrong again. MP4 is NOT free. You pay to encode, you pay to decode, you pay for devices, you pay to distribute content. Read the docs over at MPEG-LA.
Where a profit is available to be made, somebody will go out and make it.
Exactly. Requiring payment of licenses to outside parties raises costs, and reduces profit. The profit line hit's zero, the device is never made.
Prices for these things are completely disconnected from video format patents.
So, you're saying that increasing the cost of the product for the manufacturer does not increase the cost of the product for the consumer. Care to substantiate that?
You've typed a great deal, but you don't seem to have any intelligent arguments (no offense). Perhaps you should think of some before you reply next time?
If patent encumbered tech becomes standard, electronics become more expensive. If patent-issue-free tech becomes standard, electronics become cheaper.
If patent-issue-free tech becomes standard, legally distributing media can become absolutely free.
If patents are too expensive, some cool tech just never comes to light.
Besides all this, which people like paying more for their electronics, movies and music?
If patent encumbered tech becomes standard, electronics become more expensive. If patent-issue-free tech becomes standard, electronics become cheaper.
Go sell a set-top-box that uses XviD. Then you can tell us all how insignificant the difference is... from your cell.
I would say that it's pretty much guaranteed that companies will pick this up if it works. Money saved is profit made...
Software companies in particular are likely to be early adopters... there is already substantial use of Vorbis for sound bites in games, I expect to see lots of cinematic cuts done in Theora.
Oh, and if big business loves big business, why do they they try and cut each others throats?
If you're using Office to handle videos, I'd say you're already using the wrong tool for the job...
That's all well and good... until your app grows to the point that you DO need a feature, something really sophisticated like, oh, subselects. At this point, you can choose between using middle-tier code to fudge it (bye bye speed) or switching your whole app to a different db (what fun!) or using more than one db in the same app (smart move!) Sorry, but it's just crap. Get a real DB