Everyone? FireFox can't use it, because it requires a "paid" license and they're a "free" browser.
Their only substantial source of funding, AdSense.
Canonical found a way to get H.264 support into its OEM distribution - because Canonical knows that Linux is in desperate need of OEM support. Chrome supports Flash - because Google is also interested in market share this morning - and not in the nebulous WebM future.
Ok so just another format right? Well sort of. You have to pay per decoder (up to a maximum) for AVC and VC-1 and so on. You don't for WebM. So a company is developing really cheap devices, they don't want to pay that royalty. It adds unit cost.
Of the 27 H.264 licensors, at least half half are global giants in manufacturing:
Apple, Cisco, JVC, Mitsubishi, LG, NTT, Philips, Samsung, Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba and so on.
The 901 H.264 licensees reads, for all practical purposes, like the Fortune 500 and Asian Fortune 500 lists in global tech. H.264 licensing for the mega-corp counts for less than your own pocket change. It's the price of a diet Cola from the vending machine downstairs.
H.264 is a professional/theatrical production standard. It is a distribution standard. It is Blu-Ray. It is important in broadcast, cable and sattelite distribution. It is deeply entrenched in security and industrial video. In mobile devices. In home video. From the $150 HD Flip pocket camcorder to the $5000 pro-sumer market.
WebM is - just WebM. The transcode from other formats you play in YouTube.
Even if this looks like it all it'll do is deprive users of useful programs, it's still the good fight.
The user doesn't see the program, he doesn't see the fight, and he wouldn't be able to make any sense of it if he did.
The rule the FSF wants to apply would seem to apply to any of hundreds - or thousands? - of "app stores" like Steam and Download.com.
The best-known and most eaily accessible - Sourceforge, are you listening? - "repositories" for the Mac and Windows PC. The smartphone, the tablet, the next-generation HDTV.
This would be death of FOSS - or at least of GPLv3 - on every platform that has greater mind-and-market share than Linux.
It's the old story of proprietary vs open source... do you really want the food sources of humanities future controlled by corporations with only a profit motive and no humanitarian concerns?
The pragmatic - profit-oriented - corporation I can live with.
The government or NGO which lacks staff or funding or whose policies change with every shift in the politcal winds, every notion of ideogical purity or political correctness, I am not so sure of.
Not to sound cruel, but at 87 years old she was expected to die any day any minute.
False.
In 2006 the life expectancy of an 87 year old female was 5.78 years. Actuarial Life Table
The issue in a case like this is financial responsibilty. Fundamentally, it shouldn't matter whether it is your four year old kid who puts a woman in the hospital or your three year old German Shepherd.
You were the one who thought they were ready to be let loose on the sidewalks.
The average cost of an assisted living facility is $38,000 a year. The nursing home bed starts at about $72,000 a year and rises dramatically with the level of care required. The Average Cost of a Private Nursing Home Bed
Back when IBM made the PC, they insisted on a second source for every single component, with two exceptions. The BIOS, they wrote in house. The operating system, they regarded as a commodity, which therefore didn't need a second source. You'd think that other companies might learn from this mistake.
IBM had a second source in Digital Research and CP/M-86.
But CP/M-86 cost $240. $560, adjusted for inflation. PC-DOS cost $40. $93, adjusted for inflation.
There was never the slightest chance that the operating system for this new business-oriented PC would be anything other than a 16 bit CP/M clone.
The CP/M port to the PC would be trivial - and the eight bit PC for business use as good as dead in a year or two.
Mozilla didn't get Firefox where it is by being morons. Just the fact that it's Mozilla tells me that if this is ever an official release, it's going to have some kind of user confirmation before allowing access to these things (if it doesn't already).
If it does, I see no evidence for it.
The potential for abuse here is enormous.
The user confirmation had damn well better be solid. Particularly when a minor is likely to be at the keyboard.
It is not necessarilly a good idea to do everything in the browser.
The added step of opening an external app - particularly an app which enforces explict restrictions on access - is, I think, often the better solution.
There is no possible way that you could honestly have thought that the suggestion was for one school to make furniture for an entire district.
In our state, programs like this are often consolidated in a regional vocational school.
That is the only way trade-school students can get the training and equipment required to undertake large scale, long term, projects. Projects with significant legal and financial exposure - like assembling a gazebo for a public park.
The problem isn't file-sharing, obviously, but an outdated business model and a resistance to change.
Tell that to a judge and he'll tell you that for twenty five years he has heard the same argument from every petty thief caught scarfing a tray of doughnuts from the neighborhood mini-mart.
It's a Gnutella client! That's it! Limewire is responsible for nothing; it's the illegal distributors of copyrighted works which LimeWire isn't, that are legally responsible for any of this.
It is fair game for a court to ask why an infringer chooses to distribute content through a service like Limewire - and it is fair game to ask how a service like Limewire invites, promotes, and profits from the infringement.
The advantage of P2P's like Limewire was that it did not share crappy_commercial_music.mp3 while you were downloading crappy_commercial_music.mp3, and as such you could not be fingered for the crime of distributing crappy_commercial_music.mp3 since you were in fact not distributing it.
False.
The LimeWire client had a tray icon and instantly accessible animated bar graphs displaying traffic to and from your shared files folder.
You could view the shared files folders of other users and link to them directly.
Comments and ratings could be attached to files.
The ego of the uploader who was a primary source of a file could be as visible as a billboard on the I-90.
LimeWire had its own built-in chat client.
The workings of the system were fully exposed to even the most naive user.
Red Dead Redemption? GTA 4? Really? Sorry, but I gave up on GTA and GTA-clones YEARS ago. There's no "story" there either, and the "sandbox" just consists of, again, doing the same crap over and over till you get bored with it.
How do you earn the right to criticize a game without playing it?
Hunting a group of deer, I heard coyotes approaching from a distance. I shot the deer quickly, only to have the coyotes turn on me and my steed instead. Later, hunting beaver in the mountains, I found myself more afraid of wolves and bears than any human threat. "Westerns are about place," [Dan Houser] said. "They're not called outlaw films. They're not even called cowboys-and-Indians films. They're called westerns. They're about geography." "We're talking about a format that is inherently geographical," Mr. Houser added, "and you're talking about a medium, video games, the one thing they do unquestionably better than other mediums is represent geography."
No amount of math and analysis will change the fact that baseball is a pretty poor excuse for a "sport"
Baseball is the only game left for people.
To play basketball, you have to be 7 feet 6 inches. To play football, you have to be the same width. ~Bill Veeck, 1975
Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very unorderly world.
If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can't get you off. ~Bill Veeck
More than any other American sport, baseball creates the magnetic, addictive illusion that it can almost be understood. ~Thomas Boswell, in Inside Sports
Ninety feet between home plate and first base may be the closest man has ever come to perfection. ~Red Smith
That was a joke, right? You don't really think that all the millions of desktop Linux users just up and vanished because some idiot at PCWorld wanted a catchy headline?
StatCounter provides a global breakdown of OS market share by region and country.
It is something of a wake-up call when you look at these numbers and compare them to the endless stream of Linux success stories posted to Slashdot.
I agree that most Mac users aren't exactly the brightest computer users, but get real, most Windows users don't even know other OS's exist, let alone what an OS is. Mindless flock of sheep, really.
VHS was an inferior format anyways. BetaMax ftw (unfortunately it lost the format wars).
Betamax was introduced in 1975.
The color TV with RF input only - essentially every color set built since the introduction of color in 1954 - would have had a resolution no better than about 300 lines.
The ability to record a movie or a football game on a single cassette was of more immediate value than video enhancements to be seen only on a static Indian Head test pattern.
VHS manufacturers found a better solution to the drum miniaturization issue. (It involved four heads doing the work of two.) Because it used standard video signals, VHS camcorders could review footage in the camcorder and copy to another VCR for editing. (Two Beta decks and a Betamovie were required for similar functionality, and this still did not allow a videographer to review footage in the field.) This shifted the home movie advantage dramatically away from BetaBetamax
That part of the process -- synchronizing the shots -- was what made it difficult for amateurs to make a good movie.
I think that goes a little too far.
It will never be easy to bridge the gap between your basement production of Lego Star Wars and the sophisticated puppetry of Corpse Bride and Coraline.
For the character of Coraline, there were 28 different puppets of varying sizes; the main Coraline puppet stands 9.5 inches high.
At one point in the movie, Coraline shows 16 different expressions in a span of 35 seconds.
Coraline's facial combinations consist of 3D printed prototypes. New technology enabled a prototype to be molded by a computer, which was then hand-painted by the modeling department. Each jaw replacement was clipped between Coraline's eyes, resulting in a visible line which was later digitally removed frame-by-frame. There were at total of 207,336 possible face combinations for the character.Trivia for Coraline
The real question is what could "Rudolph the Rednose Reindeer" have looked like if it had the time, modern benefits and budget you mentioned. Not to say it'd look as nice, but I'm sure it'd be better (assuming they don't stay with the kiddie looking format
The "look" persists because Rudolph" has always been a story for kids.
"Rudolph" began as a 1939 coloring book distributed freely to children by Montgomery Ward. Gene Autry recorded the Johnny Marks song in 1949. The Rankin/Bass special for NBC was broadcast in 1964.
Even better would be pure-animation Robots vs. Corpse Bride, made same year with $75M vs. $40M budgets.
Robots: Run time 91 minutes
Corpse Bride: Run time 77 minutes
55 week shoot.
Corpse Bride was the first stop-motion feature to be edited in Apple's Final Cut Pro.
The puppets used neither of the industry standards of replaceable heads (like those used on The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)) or replaceable mouths (like those used by Aardman Studios in Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)) but instead used precision crafted clockwork heads, adjusted by hidden keys. This allowed for unprecedented subtlety, but was apparently even more painstaking than the already notoriously arduous animation. One animator even reported having recurring nightmares of adjusting his own facial expression in this fashion.Corpse Bride
Those Mozart pieces of music are in the public domain. If someone performs a musical piece from that era that works then automatically becomes copyrighted--only that performance and not the actual work that it was based on.
The score you are using is probably not a facsimile in Mozart's own hand.
If it was, you might not be able to read it correctly.
You might not have the period instruments needed to play it correctly.
What you are more likely to have is a scholarly edition for the professional musician or a fairly modern transcription or arrangement for the amateur - both still under copyright.
How is this Sun's achievement, then? Serious question; I don't get it.
I would suspect they licensed a modern Garamond font appropriate for casual printing and the PC monitor - and maybe the type foundry design for production use.
I had the idea of building our own PCs for considerably less.
Dell in its prime was absorbing the entire annual output of its Asian OEMs. When there was a dock strike in L.A. it hired fleets of air cargo planes to maintain just-in-time production lines.
Parts are cheap when you purchase them in the millions.
If you assemble and maintain your PCs in-house, you will have to pay US wages and benefits. You will need to maintain parts in inventory. You will need to hire someone to keep your home-brewed systems in repair. All of this costs money.
The workarounds include higher efficiency devices (e.g. iPad/Mac Mini/laptop instead of a massive gaming desktop)
The iPad is a mobile device - the user is on the move.
The mobile gadget or mini HTPC doesn't replace the more capable full size laptop or desktop. It is your second or third, fourth, fifth or sixth purchase of an Internet enabled appliance - which include all your e-book readers, smartphones, video game consoles, HDTVs and so on.
The infrastructure needed to suppport all this is not trivial.
The gamer's desktop doesn't have to be winterized. It doesn't have to survive the four foot drop to the pavement. It can be enjoyed off-line.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone? FireFox can't use it, because it requires a "paid" license and they're a "free" browser.
Their only substantial source of funding, AdSense.
Canonical found a way to get H.264 support into its OEM distribution - because Canonical knows that Linux is in desperate need of OEM support. Chrome supports Flash - because Google is also interested in market share this morning - and not in the nebulous WebM future.
Of the 27 H.264 licensors, at least half half are global giants in manufacturing:
Apple, Cisco, JVC, Mitsubishi, LG, NTT, Philips, Samsung, Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba and so on.
The 901 H.264 licensees reads, for all practical purposes, like the Fortune 500 and Asian Fortune 500 lists in global tech. H.264 licensing for the mega-corp counts for less than your own pocket change. It's the price of a diet Cola from the vending machine downstairs.
H.264 is a professional/theatrical production standard. It is a distribution standard. It is Blu-Ray. It is important in broadcast, cable and sattelite distribution. It is deeply entrenched in security and industrial video. In mobile devices. In home video. From the $150 HD Flip pocket camcorder to the $5000 pro-sumer market.
WebM is - just WebM. The transcode from other formats you play in YouTube.
Even if this looks like it all it'll do is deprive users of useful programs, it's still the good fight.
The user doesn't see the program, he doesn't see the fight, and he wouldn't be able to make any sense of it if he did.
The rule the FSF wants to apply would seem to apply to any of hundreds - or thousands? - of "app stores" like Steam and Download.com.
The best-known and most eaily accessible - Sourceforge, are you listening? - "repositories" for the Mac and Windows PC. The smartphone, the tablet, the next-generation HDTV.
This would be death of FOSS - or at least of GPLv3 - on every platform that has greater mind-and-market share than Linux.
It's the old story of proprietary vs open source... do you really want the food sources of humanities future controlled by corporations with only a profit motive and no humanitarian concerns?
The pragmatic - profit-oriented - corporation I can live with.
The government or NGO which lacks staff or funding or whose policies change with every shift in the politcal winds, every notion of ideogical purity or political correctness, I am not so sure of.
Not to sound cruel, but at 87 years old she was expected to die any day any minute.
False.
In 2006 the life expectancy of an 87 year old female was 5.78 years. Actuarial Life Table
The issue in a case like this is financial responsibilty. Fundamentally, it shouldn't matter whether it is your four year old kid who puts a woman in the hospital or your three year old German Shepherd.
You were the one who thought they were ready to be let loose on the sidewalks.
The average cost of an assisted living facility is $38,000 a year. The nursing home bed starts at about $72,000 a year and rises dramatically with the level of care required. The Average Cost of a Private Nursing Home Bed
So why should customers suffer for the retailers mistake?
We are well into a long weekend of Halloween partying. What makes you think this was a mistake - and not another run for the gold?
Production is based in California because talent, production facilities and resources of every kind are to be found in California.
Back when IBM made the PC, they insisted on a second source for every single component, with two exceptions. The BIOS, they wrote in house. The operating system, they regarded as a commodity, which therefore didn't need a second source. You'd think that other companies might learn from this mistake.
IBM had a second source in Digital Research and CP/M-86.
But CP/M-86 cost $240. $560, adjusted for inflation. PC-DOS cost $40. $93, adjusted for inflation.
There was never the slightest chance that the operating system for this new business-oriented PC would be anything other than a 16 bit CP/M clone.
The CP/M port to the PC would be trivial - and the eight bit PC for business use as good as dead in a year or two.
Still, I wonder where we'd be now if we'd started with electric instead of gas.
We began with the electric.
Lead-acid batteries. Speed five miles an hour. Range about 25 miles.
Serviceable specs for a mid-town home delivery service. The ice man or the milk truck.
But rural electric service and paved roads outside the city limits were uncommon before World War I.
Mozilla didn't get Firefox where it is by being morons. Just the fact that it's Mozilla tells me that if this is ever an official release, it's going to have some kind of user confirmation before allowing access to these things (if it doesn't already).
If it does, I see no evidence for it.
The potential for abuse here is enormous.
The user confirmation had damn well better be solid. Particularly when a minor is likely to be at the keyboard.
It is not necessarilly a good idea to do everything in the browser.
The added step of opening an external app - particularly an app which enforces explict restrictions on access - is, I think, often the better solution.
There is no possible way that you could honestly have thought that the suggestion was for one school to make furniture for an entire district.
In our state, programs like this are often consolidated in a regional vocational school.
That is the only way trade-school students can get the training and equipment required to undertake large scale, long term, projects. Projects with significant legal and financial exposure - like assembling a gazebo for a public park.
The problem isn't file-sharing, obviously, but an outdated business model and a resistance to change.
Tell that to a judge and he'll tell you that for twenty five years he has heard the same argument from every petty thief caught scarfing a tray of doughnuts from the neighborhood mini-mart.
It's a Gnutella client! That's it! Limewire is responsible for nothing; it's the illegal distributors of copyrighted works which LimeWire isn't, that are legally responsible for any of this.
It is fair game for a court to ask why an infringer chooses to distribute content through a service like Limewire - and it is fair game to ask how a service like Limewire invites, promotes, and profits from the infringement.
The advantage of P2P's like Limewire was that it did not share crappy_commercial_music.mp3 while you were downloading crappy_commercial_music.mp3, and as such you could not be fingered for the crime of distributing crappy_commercial_music.mp3 since you were in fact not distributing it.
False.
The LimeWire client had a tray icon and instantly accessible animated bar graphs displaying traffic to and from your shared files folder.
You could view the shared files folders of other users and link to them directly.
Comments and ratings could be attached to files.
The ego of the uploader who was a primary source of a file could be as visible as a billboard on the I-90.
LimeWire had its own built-in chat client.
The workings of the system were fully exposed to even the most naive user.
Red Dead Redemption? GTA 4? Really? Sorry, but I gave up on GTA and GTA-clones YEARS ago. There's no "story" there either, and the "sandbox" just consists of, again, doing the same crap over and over till you get bored with it.
How do you earn the right to criticize a game without playing it?
Hunting a group of deer, I heard coyotes approaching from a distance. I shot the deer quickly, only to have the coyotes turn on me and my steed instead. Later, hunting beaver in the mountains, I found myself more afraid of wolves and bears than any human threat.
"Westerns are about place," [Dan Houser] said. "They're not called outlaw films. They're not even called cowboys-and-Indians films. They're called westerns. They're about geography."
"We're talking about a format that is inherently geographical," Mr. Houser added, "and you're talking about a medium, video games, the one thing they do unquestionably better than other mediums is represent geography."
Way Down Deep in the Wild, Wild West
No amount of math and analysis will change the fact that baseball is a pretty poor excuse for a "sport"
Baseball is the only game left for people.
To play basketball, you have to be 7 feet 6 inches. To play football, you have to be the same width. ~Bill Veeck, 1975
Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very unorderly world.
If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can't get you off. ~Bill Veeck
More than any other American sport, baseball creates the magnetic, addictive illusion that it can almost be understood. ~Thomas Boswell, in Inside Sports
Ninety feet between home plate and first base may be the closest man has ever come to perfection. ~Red Smith
Baseball
That was a joke, right? You don't really think that all the millions of desktop Linux users just up and vanished because some idiot at PCWorld wanted a catchy headline?
StatCounter provides a global breakdown of OS market share by region and country.
It is something of a wake-up call when you look at these numbers and compare them to the endless stream of Linux success stories posted to Slashdot.
I agree that most Mac users aren't exactly the brightest computer users, but get real, most Windows users don't even know other OS's exist, let alone what an OS is. Mindless flock of sheep, really.
And there you have it.
The attitude that guarantees a declining 0.85% market share for Linux as a client OS. Top Operating System Share Trend, StatCounter Global Stats
The masses may not know Linux, but they have come to know the geek all to well - and they do not like what they see in him.
VHS was an inferior format anyways. BetaMax ftw (unfortunately it lost the format wars).
Betamax was introduced in 1975.
The color TV with RF input only - essentially every color set built since the introduction of color in 1954 - would have had a resolution no better than about 300 lines.
The ability to record a movie or a football game on a single cassette was of more immediate value than video enhancements to be seen only on a static Indian Head test pattern.
VHS manufacturers found a better solution to the drum miniaturization issue. (It involved four heads doing the work of two.) Because it used standard video signals, VHS camcorders could review footage in the camcorder and copy to another VCR for editing. (Two Beta decks and a Betamovie were required for similar functionality, and this still did not allow a videographer to review footage in the field.) This shifted the home movie advantage dramatically away from Beta Betamax
That part of the process -- synchronizing the shots -- was what made it difficult for amateurs to make a good movie.
I think that goes a little too far.
It will never be easy to bridge the gap between your basement production of Lego Star Wars and the sophisticated puppetry of Corpse Bride and Coraline.
For the character of Coraline, there were 28 different puppets of varying sizes; the main Coraline puppet stands 9.5 inches high.
At one point in the movie, Coraline shows 16 different expressions in a span of 35 seconds.
Coraline's facial combinations consist of 3D printed prototypes. New technology enabled a prototype to be molded by a computer, which was then hand-painted by the modeling department. Each jaw replacement was clipped between Coraline's eyes, resulting in a visible line which was later digitally removed frame-by-frame. There were at total of 207,336 possible face combinations for the character. Trivia for Coraline
The real question is what could "Rudolph the Rednose Reindeer" have looked like if it had the time, modern benefits and budget you mentioned. Not to say it'd look as nice, but I'm sure it'd be better (assuming they don't stay with the kiddie looking format
The "look" persists because Rudolph" has always been a story for kids.
"Rudolph" began as a 1939 coloring book distributed freely to children by Montgomery Ward. Gene Autry recorded the Johnny Marks song in 1949. The Rankin/Bass special for NBC was broadcast in 1964.
Even better would be pure-animation Robots vs. Corpse Bride, made same year with $75M vs. $40M budgets.
Robots:
Run time 91 minutes
Corpse Bride:
Run time 77 minutes
55 week shoot.
Corpse Bride was the first stop-motion feature to be edited in Apple's Final Cut Pro.
The puppets used neither of the industry standards of replaceable heads (like those used on The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)) or replaceable mouths (like those used by Aardman Studios in Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)) but instead used precision crafted clockwork heads, adjusted by hidden keys. This allowed for unprecedented subtlety, but was apparently even more painstaking than the already notoriously arduous animation. One animator even reported having recurring nightmares of adjusting his own facial expression in this fashion. Corpse Bride
Those Mozart pieces of music are in the public domain. If someone performs a musical piece from that era that works then automatically becomes copyrighted--only that performance and not the actual work that it was based on.
The score you are using is probably not a facsimile in Mozart's own hand.
If it was, you might not be able to read it correctly.
You might not have the period instruments needed to play it correctly.
What you are more likely to have is a scholarly edition for the professional musician or a fairly modern transcription or arrangement for the amateur - both still under copyright.
How is this Sun's achievement, then? Serious question; I don't get it.
I would suspect they licensed a modern Garamond font appropriate for casual printing and the PC monitor - and maybe the type foundry design for production use.
I had the idea of building our own PCs for considerably less.
Dell in its prime was absorbing the entire annual output of its Asian OEMs. When there was a dock strike in L.A. it hired fleets of air cargo planes to maintain just-in-time production lines.
Parts are cheap when you purchase them in the millions.
If you assemble and maintain your PCs in-house, you will have to pay US wages and benefits. You will need to maintain parts in inventory. You will need to hire someone to keep your home-brewed systems in repair. All of this costs money.
The workarounds include higher efficiency devices (e.g. iPad/Mac Mini/laptop instead of a massive gaming desktop)
The iPad is a mobile device - the user is on the move.
The mobile gadget or mini HTPC doesn't replace the more capable full size laptop or desktop. It is your second or third, fourth, fifth or sixth purchase of an Internet enabled appliance - which include all your e-book readers, smartphones, video game consoles, HDTVs and so on.
The infrastructure needed to suppport all this is not trivial.
The gamer's desktop doesn't have to be winterized. It doesn't have to survive the four foot drop to the pavement. It can be enjoyed off-line.