It depends how you update the files. Many systems, when updating a file, will write the entire new file to a temporary location, then atomically rename it on top of the old location, which would kill any hardlinks, but symlinks would still work.
I have to agree with the database suggestions, though something NoSQL-ish may work better.
And who actually consented to a massive, collusive information gathering program?
You did, with every website you visited -- though I have to wonder where you get "collusive" from.
People are just browsing normally for other reasons, not to be spied on.
And people are just typing into Facebook for other reasons, not to be spied on. It's still entirely your choice to play or not to play.
They have to go out of their way to avoid this spying.
Connecting to any given website is already your action -- you're already going "out of your way".
Very well, but they could always lose in such a suit.
Yes, they could, but I think it kills your "They are evil" argument. It certainly kills any comparison with Big Brother, when they actively fight the government.
Whatever procedures they have in place, the possibility is there.
In the same way that, say, the possibility is there for employees of a major CA to forge the certificates they'd need for massive MITM attacks. It might be worth investigating what's been put into place to ensure this doesn't happen.
How many years was Facebook around before you heard about data breaches?
Facebook was just some random website, without a particularly good "privacy policy", or particularly good security. I wouldn't need to hear about a data breach to know not to trust them with anything I care about.
You're asking for trust against governments, employees, hackers, and future business decisions.
And again... Trust with what?
For one thing, does Google know more about you than your ISP? Who do you trust more with that data? I've never seen my ISP fight a court battle on my behalf -- indeed, their policies say specifically that they will do nothing to protect me, that they will cooperate with law enforcement, etc.
Why don't you quote the rest of the paragraph?
Let's see...
However, the difference is not especially great.
So what? YouTube should deliberately drop quality? Or they should pay, again, large amounts more money on bandwidth, storage, transcoding, and CDN storage/bandwidth?
I expect that most casual users would be unlikely to express a preference or complain about quality if one was substituted for another...
And this was taken from an uncompressed, rendered source. As I said:
They also have a huge library of h.264 videos which would suffer a drop in quality at re-encoding, and, again, cameras encode h.264 in hardware, so they'd have brand-new h.264 videos for which the quality would instantly drop.
Do you have a comparison of H.264 videos re-encoded in Theora?
And that's assuming that they were actually equal, actually comparable. This is probably the most favorable comparison I've seen of Theora to H.264, and H.264 still comes out ahead.
I'm saying...
I asked a yes or no question. Whatever you're saying, it isn't yes or no, and I can't derive a yes or no from it. The critical point:
Are you suggesting that Theora and HTML5 should be the only option at whatever "lower quality" level they're used?
If so, that's a lot of browsers (new and old) which can't play them, and you can't wrap them in Flash to help those browsers out.
If not, you're suggesting that there be two completely separate encodings at a given resolution/quality, just so one of them can be Theora. That's a lot of money.
"willingly" would be opt-in, instead of having to opt-out.
Which is precisely how this functions.
How many web sites use Google Analytics?
How many of those websites jumped out of the Internet, grabbed your browser, and forced you to visit them? If you don't trust a website to not use Google, why would you trust that website with the same information?
If they get a National Security Letter they will have to comply with it.
They have publicly fought government requests for information.
If a rogue employee decides to misuse the data, it's done.
And how do you know what procedures they have in place to prevent this situation? This isn't Facebook, where that sort of thing actually happens.
It's completely Google's fault for requiring H.264. They could always fall back to another format.
At what cost? Either massive amounts of CPU to transcode on the fly, or massive amounts more storage to store yet another encoding.
That said, they do have a few videos in WebM format.
If you want to talk about FUD, then H.264 is where it's at, straight from Google...
I'm not an encoding expert, but the comparison you link to actually favors H.264:
In the case of the 499kbit/sec H.264 I believe that under careful comparison many people would prefer the H.264 video.
And that's a single clip. Google has the resources to actually test this on a large scale. They also have a huge library of h.264 videos which would suffer a drop in quality at re-encoding, and, again, cameras encode h.264 in hardware, so they'd have brand-new h.264 videos for which the quality would instantly drop.
I also wouldn't be terribly surprised if H.264 deals with re-encoding H.264 videos better than Theora does.
At the worst, they can offer a lower-quality version, they way they do now with Flash Video.
Is that really what you're suggesting -- that we should use Theora and HTML5 only for lower-quality versions? I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here.
It's GIF all over again
Regarding that article, why compare Vorbis to MP3? There's AAC -- compare those. There's also the mention of On2, which has now become WebM, which was my point in saying that only Theora might be open -- WebM is patented, and may be infringing patents.
A few things to remember about GIF:
First, PNG still hasn't replaced it. You still can't do animated PNG -- there are two competing proposals for how to do it, neither of which have universal browser support. Hell, it's only recently that transparent PNG was properly supported in IE.
Second, there hasn't really been anything that's replaced gif, png, or jpeg in each of their respective areas. The relevant GIF patents have expired, and if jpeg hasn't, it will soon. The problem is that video is a lot more bandwidth, and is still an area of active research. Any codec we choose today is likely to be obsolete eventually, so we should be looking at what the next codecs are. If they don't become obsolete, the patents will expire, and when that happens, I'd be much happier with higher quality from h.264.
Finally, aside from animations, PNG actually did beat GIF. It was better at absolutely everything else than GIF was. The same is true of gzip vs compress, and seems to be true today with lzma (or 7zip) vs rar, at least for files which need to be compressed at all. Theora is worse than H.264 -- the anti-FUD article you linked to says so. I'm not sure how vorbis compares to AAC, but AAC isn't even the latest and greatest -- I just use FLAC.
I don't have a solution. What I would like to see is a genuinely better codec emerge, which is actually free -- and I suspect Google would support such a format. But Theora isn't it.
Microsoft's evil tends to revolve around vendor lock-in and unfairly stomping on their competitors. Google's evil revolves around Big Brother type information gathering.
Microsoft's evil also involves outright lies, and the concept of "FUD" was pretty much invented, I suspect, to describe Microsoft.
Google, by contrast... "Big Brother"? Have you read 1984? Google likes to gather information, yes -- and like Facebook and everyone else, they only gather information from people who willingly donate said information, or from information already in public spaces.
Unlike Facebook and everyone else, they have a track record of, in the very worst example I'm aware of (wireless snooping), gathering more information than people think they should -- by accident. By contrast, Facebook employees have been known to casually browse people's private information, and otherwise abuse user data.
What are you proposing? To do a binary diff between the compiled open source version and Google version? Followed by disassembling and analyzing the diff, probably without debugging symbols?
Actually, I was proposing to wait and see, or to observe the behavior of the browser itself, and then disassemble and otherwise reverse engineer the parts that look suspicious.
Firefox seems to manage.
By having, say, youtube.com/html5 not work at all. Yeah -- they "manage" by not supporting, either directly or through any sort of extension framework, the most popular video site on the planet. Surprisingly, Safari seems to be the only browser taking a sane approach -- they delegate to QuickTime, which is essentially the OS X media framework, and support any codecs they find, so there's nothing stopping users from installing theora codecs if they like.
Of course, one of the results of this is that YouTube has further incentive to continue to use Flash, because Flash works in Firefox, but HTML5 with h.264 doesn't. Which do you think is the lesser of two evils?
Perhaps Google could help by using non-patented formats on YouTube.
There are several problems with this.
First, most video is, unfortunately, shot in h.264. Since I don't particularly care about obeying software patents covering codecs and file formats, I prefer to keep media in as close to the target format as I can, and only re-encode when I have to. You can do that with YouTube -- you can upload the video that your camera encoded to h.264 (in hardware!) and it's quite possible YouTube won't re-encode it for the high quality version.
So, this not only applies to their entire library that they'd have to re-encode, it also applies to pretty much all new video.
Second, only Theora might be open. Google does have WebM, and they have (hopefully) released it, but it's too close to h.264, and still manages to be inferior in many ways. You just get worse quality for the same amount of bandwidth, and that likely means millions of dollars of bandwidth for YouTube to maintain the same quality.
I'm not saying I have a solution to this, and I certainly don't like it. But refusing to play is not a solution.
Besides, I'd prefer people actually be informed of the patent bullshit they're paying for, in one way or another.
I'd prefer people be informed, but "This doesn't work, let's go back to IE and Flash" isn't the way to inform people. Realistically, it seems like this goes only a few ways:
HTML5 Video never takes off, partly because of Firefox.
HTML5 Video is a hit, but Firefox users can't view it. Users switch to other browsers.
HTML5 Video is a hit, and someone forks Firefox.
Sadly, Safari has had the way out the entire time -- delegate this stuff to the OS. Windows has DirectShow, OS X has QuickTime, Linux has GStreamer. Use those, and you get both licensing and hardware acceleration for free.
sandboxing should be delegated from the application to the OS.
Ideally, yes, but modern OSes (excluding Chromium OS, maybe) don't always provide sufficient sandboxing, and they do it in different ways. This would be both additional security where it's needed (as well as ways for communicating in and out of the sandbox), and, hopefully, support for whatever native sandboxing options are available (it kind of needs those anyway -- Chrome already uses a chroot jail, I think).
But what does any of that have to do with what I wrote?
Chrome doesn't support the hooks that NoScript needs to work,
Which hooks would those be? In particular, if Adblock Plus can work, why can't NoScript?
NoScript is required(imho) for any power user(which everyone on Slashdot should be, or used to be).
No thanks, I'd much rather have a blacklist than a whitelist, for several reasons. One is that I like to be aware of the kind of crap each website is offering to the layman -- for example, I try to avoid websites that use Kontera and the like, rather than trying to make them tolerable.
Another is that when scripting is enabled, a site can progressively enhance itself to actually improve the experience. As I understand it, the NoScript theory is that I can selectively enable scripting on sites that need it to work -- but how would I know a site would work better with scripting enabled, if I don't first view it with scripting enabled? If the scripts are a problem, that's what Adblock is for.
As for my power user credentials, when I first set up Gentoo, it took at least a week, likely longer, until I had a working GUI. During this time, I used GPM and Lynx. I'm still generally not happy if a website doesn't work with Lynx, and I have used Lynx occasionally since.
But that doesn't mean I'm going to, say, surf with images off until I think I need them. I'd much rather give the website the benefit of the doubt.
Why does it bother you that it's there, although you can turn it off? That's a bit like complaining that it has a back button, even if you never use back buttons -- do you actually need it to not be compiled in?
I mean, if you do, that's one of the perks of a source distro like Gentoo, but it seems like a waste to me.
no better than any excuses Microsoft might put forth
"Excuses" Microsoft has used in the past include "Open source is less secure because people can see the source."
If you care about open source, then you should know that Chrome is not open source.
Caring about open source doesn't mean I demand it for absolutely everything. The fact that Chrome is almost entirely based on Chromium tells me two things: First, that Chromium is there waiting for me if Chrome ever becomes a problem, and second, Chrome isn't likely to have anything particularly evil attached to it.
If Microsoft released a hypothetical browser based on Chromium, let's call it Crummium, it would be exactly the same thing, but without the Googly-woogly "trust us, we're not evil" claim attached.
Given that Microsoft has a long track record of evil, and Google has a stated goal to not be evil, trusting them carries a bit more weight. And again, most of the browser is open -- how difficult is it to analyze what the rest is doing?
Now, consider the unfortunate alternative -- if Chromium was the only version, there'd be a scary process -- no matter how streamlined, it'd still have to present the user with scary legal warnings -- to get h.264 working, which, unfortunately, is needed for good HTML5 video support.
Chromium is the open source version that Chrome, the proprietary browser, is built on. (Basically, they take Chromium, add codecs they can't legally include in Chromium, maybe a little branding, and release it as Chrome.)
The same is true of the OS -- the only reason it's "Chromium OS" is that the actual "Chrome OS" hasn't been released yet, because the community version isn't done yet.
You mean, the usage tracking which can be turned off with a single checkbox? And that's somehow harder than, say, installing ffmpeg and friends to get video working in Chromium?
100meg would most likely be an artificial limit anyway.
Most people don't have gigabit network cards, switches, routers, etc. In fact, most routers aren't prepared to handle people actually using 100 megs.
Beyond gigabit, the price of all of these things goes up exponentially -- so about the only way an ISP could handle this is to assume multiple computers in the house, and actually run a different cable to each.
All of this is hampered by the fact that most people seem to prefer wireless anyway, and 802.11a is, what, 160 mbits?
Well, that would be one reason -- the shotgun doesn't have a flashlight. In fact, the machine gun is about the only weapon in Doom 3 that has a flashlight attached to it.
It's not a particularly good one -- much narrower radius than the actual flashlight -- but a quick image search is a trivial way to verify it without firing up the game itself.
With wired connections, people can and have argued that we should wait till there's actual abuse. The wireless networks have been far more tightly controlled than the wired networks, with actual tiered pricing schemes, and as Google says, with that limited spectrum, there's that much more incentive to control them -- so it seems like there's already abuse (so forget wait-and-see) and potential for more abuse.
TFS includes a "MYTH" which is directly confirmed by the quoted "FACT", which is misleading at best. It certainly doesn't seem honest -- honest would've been to come out and say, "Yes, this proposal would eliminate net neutrality over wireless."
The machine gun (forget if there was another name for it) did indeed have a flashlight on it.
Earlier on, I liked that as a gameplay mechanic -- even the duct tape mod doesn't allow it for the pistol alone for that reason. Later on, there's better lighting in general, so it's not as much of an issue.
When did Comcast throttle traffic? The only article I ever saw for that was the AP article that referenced throttling torrent
Hey, you answered your own question! Good job!
we'd all jump on our holier than thou bandwagan saying bittorrent is legit when I would challnge folks to prove that more than 3% of bittorrent is not piracy
If even 1% were legitimate, that would be enough. What ever happened to "Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"?
And throttling, by the way, is not how we deal with piracy. We deal with it by suing, remember? It shouldn't be the job of the ISP to decide whether what you're doing is legitimate.
Net Neutrality is govt attempting to control of it's people, it's that simple.
Really? That must be why it took massive lobbying by the people in order to get the government to take it seriously!
Why should we empower our govt.? They work for us, not the other way around!
Precisely because they work for us. The media companies don't. Given that, would you rather empower the government, or Comcast?
I should apologize -- I may have missed some sarcasm on your part, and I may also have missed (thanks, Slashdot) who you were replying to. Never mind, then.
But, wait, just how did Comcast, Verizon, etc. string all those cables and associated network detritus across people's property?
Partly, with government money and permission.
How about this: Acme, Inc., can play with its network however it wants, but it also can't tresspass on any homeowner's property. Does that sound OK?
As long as they're not then trying to sell access to their network as Internet access, because it isn't. It's access to some pale mockery of the Internet.
Or how about this: Stop trying to double-dip,
Funny you should mention that -- deals have actually been placed on the table where an ISP attempts to charge twice for their bandwidth -- once to the consumer, and once to the website for "priority" traffic (read: not throttled to oblivion), where said website already has their own ISP with their own bills.
Uhm, do you have any idea what that "anarchy" word in your handle means?
I created my handle when I was 15, probably younger. It was taken from the slogan of warez.com -- if you're familiar with the concept of warez, you can see why I wouldn't be concerned about stealing an idea from them.
Your comment basically reinforces his critique exactly: you clearly support mob rule.
What about my comment gave you that impression?
If "most people" don't like what a "few individuals" are doing, fuck 'em! We'll just confiscate their crap!
I see the slippery slope you're presenting, but this isn't about what those few individuals are doing, or what they have. This isn't about "spreading the wealth".
This particular discussion was about net neutrality -- in particular, what those few individuals are doing to the rest of us.
Do you feel the same way about non-economic issues of personal freedom, or is it just in the realm of money?
Pretty much, though this particular case wasn't much in the realm of money.
If "most people" don't like the fact that I'm gay, can they just put us "few individual" gay people in the gas chamber for violating the social contract?
You seem to have confused what most people "don't like" with what actually causes real harm to most people.
Your being gay does nothing to my sexuality. If you were married to someone of the same gender, that would do nothing to my ability to marry. The worst I would have to endure is the knowledge of your existence, which, even if it bothered me, wouldn't be sufficient cause to kill you.
Why is this so hard to get? I want to use the government to prevent others from infringing on my own liberties. Not to prevent others from exercising their own.
Look, the examples you are talking about are only even arguably "at the expense of everyone else" because of government mandated restrictions.
Then let's talk about them, rather than all these roundabout and frankly bizarre examples you keep coming up with.
He's every bit as rich as any of those evil large mega telecommunications corporation executives. Actually, much, much richer than most of them.
And how did he get that way? Oh, by...
His ethics are certainly much more questionable than Comcast. After all, Comcast doesn't ambush people and attempt to humiliate them on a worldwide stage for profit.
However, Comcast did and does attempt to stop the free flow of information, which is exactly what we would use to discuss Michael Moore and what to do about him.
You can't really say he was unethical in making a cute little movie. He got stinking rich off of a whole bunch of people plunking down five bucks to see his little cartoon. Exactly how did he violate the social contract at the expense of everyone else?
I wasn't. Read what you quoted -- where in there am I picking on them simply because they're rich? It's not that they're wealthy that bothers me. Granted, the absurd gap between what they make and what their employees make bothers me, but more than that is the lengths to which they're willing to go to make obscenely more money.
But if you're reading this, then you're richer than about 80% of the people in the world.
What wealth I have is either wealth I have worked for, or wealth my parents have worked for. Their inheritance was fairly small, and I expect mine to be similarly small, so this is far from an aristocracy -- I work, and then I get paid.
And my work? I write software eight hours a day. The software I write actually provides a valid service to its customers -- or will, once it enters production. It certainly won't prevent people from communicating with each other in order to drive them to other products of mine.
Do you feel like giving it all away to the poor and living in a shack like the rest of the world?
That's a false dichotomy. I can do far more to help both by using it to attain more money myself, and by doing microloans instead of handouts.
So you want to legislate morality. We must all believe in your ethics,
So first off, there's a difference between morality and ethics.
anyone who doesn't follow your ethical code must be punished,
And what's the alternative to following an "ethical code"? Is rape and murder OK?
Funny how similar the views of the right-wingers and left-wingers are when you reduce them to their cores.
When you create a mocking, oversimplified caricature of a position, sure. In fact, you can also reduce nearly every human endeavor to an attempt to get enough food and sex, or to compensate for not having enough sex.
It's just that such reductions, even if they were accurate, don't add much to the conversation.
So let's consider: The extreme right-wing would like to, among other things, make it illegal to create or distribute certain works, including violent video games, among other things. Many of them would like their own creation myth taught in a science class, given equal weight to real science, and excluding all other creation myths. They'd like to prevent other people from marrying each other, and many would like to outlaw certain sexual acts.
Are you seeing a pattern here? Everything I just mentioned is an attempt to impose their own morality on a behavior which harms no one.
By contrast, I am wanting to legislate against behavior which actually harms people. Again, there's a reason rape and murder are illegal -- is it that much of a leap to also outlaw fraud and attempt to restrain anticompetitive, predatory business practices?
If you wanted to say that the purpose of government is to prevent people from unjustly enriching themselves to the detriment of others, then perhaps we could agree. Then it would just be a matter of determining what is "just".
What's unclear about it? When a business takes advantage of a physical monopoly to censor communication in order to make a quick buck, that's unjust -- never mind the absurd pricing scheme.
But you seem to believe that some people are intrinsically entitled be enriched at the expense of others who intrinsically deserve to be punished,
I'm sorry, you seem to have spun that entirely around to mean just the opposite of what I said. You also haven't even set up a clear strawman.
What do you mean by intrinsically? There's nothing intrinsic to the person, it's the position they're in, and more importantly, what they've done with that position. And I am not trying to enrich some at the expense of others, I am trying to stop a small number from enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else.
are willing to use government powers to forcibly do so
Government intervention is one way to deal with a market failure, yes. Do you admit that market failures exist? If so, how would you solve them without the government?
government powers derive entirely from the fact that the government has a monopoly on force.
Patently false -- private security groups (rent-a-cops) exist.
The government should no more be benefitting the CEO of the company than the janitor.
Unfortunately, the practical reality is that corporations become little fiefdoms -- pretty much all of them, so switching companies helps very little -- which creates an imbalance of power such that if the government does nothing, they are benefiting the CEO far more than the janitor.
Other approaches, such as unions, have been tried, without much more success.
And your solution to Comcast being crap is... to legislate them into not being crap?
Do you have a better one?
In particular, the issue is that nearly every ISP is crap, and has a local monopoly, or severely limited competition with other ISPs who are also crap. The issue is that the fastest residential Internet in the US is barely faster than the average in Japan, and the average in the US is a tenth of that.
Even worse, the ISPs have already taken government money to build out their infrastructure, and clearly haven't done so. If they didn't want regulation, they shouldn't have taken the money.
So you think that if you agree when you sign up that you won't use more than a certain amount of bandwidth, and you end up using more than that, Comcast should just have to suck it up?
No, as Klinky says, I think that Comcast is entirely free to sell me a certain amount of bandwidth. But they've also done several other things:
They've limited bandwidth for specific applications (BitTorrent), and expressed a desire to charge websites extra for priority traffic -- charge you once for the bandwidth, charge them again for the same bandwidth, just so YouTube doesn't get throttled to oblivion behind comcast.net.
They've set caps, yes, but only recently have put actual numbers on them. For quite awhile, the caps were measured in things like "songs" or "pictures" -- yes, really -- essentially giving them the freedom to fine and ban whoever they wanted, entirely at will, by deciding that they're over cap. They did this by, whenever they needed more bandwidth, deciding that a certain portion of the top users were over cap.
They've tried DNS hijacking, which tends to break all applications except web browsing.
If they want to tell me that I only get 20 gigs of bandwidth per month, and if they're up front about it, that's at least honest. It may still be a problem if they're the only game in town, and it's still embarrassing when you look at Japan, but that is effectively what network neutrality is trying to do -- get them back to being a dumb pipe, where if they say 20 gigs, it's actually 20 gigs of unmolested bandwidth -- rather than, as they have been doing, saying "unlimited" (but capped at some imaginary point) with the connection until then being raped at pretty much every level -- DNS, protocol filtering, destination filtering, etc.
The goal of society and government is to benefit certain people to the detriment of other people, based on who is part of the largest group and hence has the most votes.
That's a cynical analysis, not a goal. Let's try again:
The goal of government and society is to benefit most people most of the time, to the detriment of the few individuals who violate the social contract -- in this case, those who have enriched themselves massively at the expense of everyone else, using ethics which are questionable at best.
Who do you think runs the "large mega telecommunications companies"?
If you're referring to all the employees, certainly, we should benefit them. As it is, government and society tends to benefit the board of directors and a few top executives, to the detriment of everyone else.
It said "data disasters", not specifically hard drive failures. I was thinking of the kid who gets root on someone else's machine and runs 'rm -rf/', or whatever the equivalent on Windows is.
Slashdot Mirror
It depends how you update the files. Many systems, when updating a file, will write the entire new file to a temporary location, then atomically rename it on top of the old location, which would kill any hardlinks, but symlinks would still work.
I have to agree with the database suggestions, though something NoSQL-ish may work better.
And who actually consented to a massive, collusive information gathering program?
You did, with every website you visited -- though I have to wonder where you get "collusive" from.
People are just browsing normally for other reasons, not to be spied on.
And people are just typing into Facebook for other reasons, not to be spied on. It's still entirely your choice to play or not to play.
They have to go out of their way to avoid this spying.
Connecting to any given website is already your action -- you're already going "out of your way".
Very well, but they could always lose in such a suit.
Yes, they could, but I think it kills your "They are evil" argument. It certainly kills any comparison with Big Brother, when they actively fight the government.
Whatever procedures they have in place, the possibility is there.
In the same way that, say, the possibility is there for employees of a major CA to forge the certificates they'd need for massive MITM attacks. It might be worth investigating what's been put into place to ensure this doesn't happen.
How many years was Facebook around before you heard about data breaches?
Facebook was just some random website, without a particularly good "privacy policy", or particularly good security. I wouldn't need to hear about a data breach to know not to trust them with anything I care about.
You're asking for trust against governments, employees, hackers, and future business decisions.
And again... Trust with what?
For one thing, does Google know more about you than your ISP? Who do you trust more with that data? I've never seen my ISP fight a court battle on my behalf -- indeed, their policies say specifically that they will do nothing to protect me, that they will cooperate with law enforcement, etc.
Why don't you quote the rest of the paragraph?
Let's see...
However, the difference is not especially great.
So what? YouTube should deliberately drop quality? Or they should pay, again, large amounts more money on bandwidth, storage, transcoding, and CDN storage/bandwidth?
I expect that most casual users would be unlikely to express a preference or complain about quality if one was substituted for another...
And this was taken from an uncompressed, rendered source. As I said:
They also have a huge library of h.264 videos which would suffer a drop in quality at re-encoding, and, again, cameras encode h.264 in hardware, so they'd have brand-new h.264 videos for which the quality would instantly drop.
Do you have a comparison of H.264 videos re-encoded in Theora?
And that's assuming that they were actually equal, actually comparable. This is probably the most favorable comparison I've seen of Theora to H.264, and H.264 still comes out ahead.
I'm saying...
I asked a yes or no question. Whatever you're saying, it isn't yes or no, and I can't derive a yes or no from it. The critical point:
Are you suggesting that Theora and HTML5 should be the only option at whatever "lower quality" level they're used?
If so, that's a lot of browsers (new and old) which can't play them, and you can't wrap them in Flash to help those browsers out.
If not, you're suggesting that there be two completely separate encodings at a given resolution/quality, just so one of them can be Theora. That's a lot of money.
"willingly" would be opt-in, instead of having to opt-out.
Which is precisely how this functions.
How many web sites use Google Analytics?
How many of those websites jumped out of the Internet, grabbed your browser, and forced you to visit them? If you don't trust a website to not use Google, why would you trust that website with the same information?
If they get a National Security Letter they will have to comply with it.
They have publicly fought government requests for information.
If a rogue employee decides to misuse the data, it's done.
And how do you know what procedures they have in place to prevent this situation? This isn't Facebook, where that sort of thing actually happens.
It's completely Google's fault for requiring H.264. They could always fall back to another format.
At what cost? Either massive amounts of CPU to transcode on the fly, or massive amounts more storage to store yet another encoding.
That said, they do have a few videos in WebM format.
If you want to talk about FUD, then H.264 is where it's at, straight from Google...
I'm not an encoding expert, but the comparison you link to actually favors H.264:
In the case of the 499kbit/sec H.264 I believe that under careful comparison many people would prefer the H.264 video.
And that's a single clip. Google has the resources to actually test this on a large scale. They also have a huge library of h.264 videos which would suffer a drop in quality at re-encoding, and, again, cameras encode h.264 in hardware, so they'd have brand-new h.264 videos for which the quality would instantly drop.
I also wouldn't be terribly surprised if H.264 deals with re-encoding H.264 videos better than Theora does.
At the worst, they can offer a lower-quality version, they way they do now with Flash Video.
Is that really what you're suggesting -- that we should use Theora and HTML5 only for lower-quality versions? I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here.
It's GIF all over again
Regarding that article, why compare Vorbis to MP3? There's AAC -- compare those. There's also the mention of On2, which has now become WebM, which was my point in saying that only Theora might be open -- WebM is patented, and may be infringing patents.
A few things to remember about GIF:
First, PNG still hasn't replaced it. You still can't do animated PNG -- there are two competing proposals for how to do it, neither of which have universal browser support. Hell, it's only recently that transparent PNG was properly supported in IE.
Second, there hasn't really been anything that's replaced gif, png, or jpeg in each of their respective areas. The relevant GIF patents have expired, and if jpeg hasn't, it will soon. The problem is that video is a lot more bandwidth, and is still an area of active research. Any codec we choose today is likely to be obsolete eventually, so we should be looking at what the next codecs are. If they don't become obsolete, the patents will expire, and when that happens, I'd be much happier with higher quality from h.264.
Finally, aside from animations, PNG actually did beat GIF. It was better at absolutely everything else than GIF was. The same is true of gzip vs compress, and seems to be true today with lzma (or 7zip) vs rar, at least for files which need to be compressed at all. Theora is worse than H.264 -- the anti-FUD article you linked to says so. I'm not sure how vorbis compares to AAC, but AAC isn't even the latest and greatest -- I just use FLAC.
I don't have a solution. What I would like to see is a genuinely better codec emerge, which is actually free -- and I suspect Google would support such a format. But Theora isn't it.
Microsoft's evil tends to revolve around vendor lock-in and unfairly stomping on their competitors. Google's evil revolves around Big Brother type information gathering.
Microsoft's evil also involves outright lies, and the concept of "FUD" was pretty much invented, I suspect, to describe Microsoft.
Google, by contrast... "Big Brother"? Have you read 1984? Google likes to gather information, yes -- and like Facebook and everyone else, they only gather information from people who willingly donate said information, or from information already in public spaces.
Unlike Facebook and everyone else, they have a track record of, in the very worst example I'm aware of (wireless snooping), gathering more information than people think they should -- by accident. By contrast, Facebook employees have been known to casually browse people's private information, and otherwise abuse user data.
What are you proposing? To do a binary diff between the compiled open source version and Google version? Followed by disassembling and analyzing the diff, probably without debugging symbols?
Actually, I was proposing to wait and see, or to observe the behavior of the browser itself, and then disassemble and otherwise reverse engineer the parts that look suspicious.
Firefox seems to manage.
By having, say, youtube.com/html5 not work at all. Yeah -- they "manage" by not supporting, either directly or through any sort of extension framework, the most popular video site on the planet. Surprisingly, Safari seems to be the only browser taking a sane approach -- they delegate to QuickTime, which is essentially the OS X media framework, and support any codecs they find, so there's nothing stopping users from installing theora codecs if they like.
Of course, one of the results of this is that YouTube has further incentive to continue to use Flash, because Flash works in Firefox, but HTML5 with h.264 doesn't. Which do you think is the lesser of two evils?
Perhaps Google could help by using non-patented formats on YouTube.
There are several problems with this.
First, most video is, unfortunately, shot in h.264. Since I don't particularly care about obeying software patents covering codecs and file formats, I prefer to keep media in as close to the target format as I can, and only re-encode when I have to. You can do that with YouTube -- you can upload the video that your camera encoded to h.264 (in hardware!) and it's quite possible YouTube won't re-encode it for the high quality version.
So, this not only applies to their entire library that they'd have to re-encode, it also applies to pretty much all new video.
Second, only Theora might be open. Google does have WebM, and they have (hopefully) released it, but it's too close to h.264, and still manages to be inferior in many ways. You just get worse quality for the same amount of bandwidth, and that likely means millions of dollars of bandwidth for YouTube to maintain the same quality.
I'm not saying I have a solution to this, and I certainly don't like it. But refusing to play is not a solution.
Besides, I'd prefer people actually be informed of the patent bullshit they're paying for, in one way or another.
I'd prefer people be informed, but "This doesn't work, let's go back to IE and Flash" isn't the way to inform people. Realistically, it seems like this goes only a few ways:
Sadly, Safari has had the way out the entire time -- delegate this stuff to the OS. Windows has DirectShow, OS X has QuickTime, Linux has GStreamer. Use those, and you get both licensing and hardware acceleration for free.
In fact, I've
sandboxing should be delegated from the application to the OS.
Ideally, yes, but modern OSes (excluding Chromium OS, maybe) don't always provide sufficient sandboxing, and they do it in different ways. This would be both additional security where it's needed (as well as ways for communicating in and out of the sandbox), and, hopefully, support for whatever native sandboxing options are available (it kind of needs those anyway -- Chrome already uses a chroot jail, I think).
But what does any of that have to do with what I wrote?
Chrome doesn't support the hooks that NoScript needs to work,
Which hooks would those be? In particular, if Adblock Plus can work, why can't NoScript?
NoScript is required(imho) for any power user(which everyone on Slashdot should be, or used to be).
No thanks, I'd much rather have a blacklist than a whitelist, for several reasons. One is that I like to be aware of the kind of crap each website is offering to the layman -- for example, I try to avoid websites that use Kontera and the like, rather than trying to make them tolerable.
Another is that when scripting is enabled, a site can progressively enhance itself to actually improve the experience. As I understand it, the NoScript theory is that I can selectively enable scripting on sites that need it to work -- but how would I know a site would work better with scripting enabled, if I don't first view it with scripting enabled? If the scripts are a problem, that's what Adblock is for.
As for my power user credentials, when I first set up Gentoo, it took at least a week, likely longer, until I had a working GUI. During this time, I used GPM and Lynx. I'm still generally not happy if a website doesn't work with Lynx, and I have used Lynx occasionally since.
But that doesn't mean I'm going to, say, surf with images off until I think I need them. I'd much rather give the website the benefit of the doubt.
Why does it bother you that it's there, although you can turn it off? That's a bit like complaining that it has a back button, even if you never use back buttons -- do you actually need it to not be compiled in?
I mean, if you do, that's one of the perks of a source distro like Gentoo, but it seems like a waste to me.
Whatever excuses Google might have for that
You mean, actual legal reasons?
no better than any excuses Microsoft might put forth
"Excuses" Microsoft has used in the past include "Open source is less secure because people can see the source."
If you care about open source, then you should know that Chrome is not open source.
Caring about open source doesn't mean I demand it for absolutely everything. The fact that Chrome is almost entirely based on Chromium tells me two things: First, that Chromium is there waiting for me if Chrome ever becomes a problem, and second, Chrome isn't likely to have anything particularly evil attached to it.
If Microsoft released a hypothetical browser based on Chromium, let's call it Crummium, it would be exactly the same thing, but without the Googly-woogly "trust us, we're not evil" claim attached.
Given that Microsoft has a long track record of evil, and Google has a stated goal to not be evil, trusting them carries a bit more weight. And again, most of the browser is open -- how difficult is it to analyze what the rest is doing?
Now, consider the unfortunate alternative -- if Chromium was the only version, there'd be a scary process -- no matter how streamlined, it'd still have to present the user with scary legal warnings -- to get h.264 working, which, unfortunately, is needed for good HTML5 video support.
Chromium is the open source version that Chrome, the proprietary browser, is built on. (Basically, they take Chromium, add codecs they can't legally include in Chromium, maybe a little branding, and release it as Chrome.)
The same is true of the OS -- the only reason it's "Chromium OS" is that the actual "Chrome OS" hasn't been released yet, because the community version isn't done yet.
You mean, the usage tracking which can be turned off with a single checkbox? And that's somehow harder than, say, installing ffmpeg and friends to get video working in Chromium?
100meg would most likely be an artificial limit anyway.
Most people don't have gigabit network cards, switches, routers, etc. In fact, most routers aren't prepared to handle people actually using 100 megs.
Beyond gigabit, the price of all of these things goes up exponentially -- so about the only way an ISP could handle this is to assume multiple computers in the house, and actually run a different cable to each.
All of this is hampered by the fact that most people seem to prefer wireless anyway, and 802.11a is, what, 160 mbits?
...I have to vote,
Why?
Well, that would be one reason -- the shotgun doesn't have a flashlight. In fact, the machine gun is about the only weapon in Doom 3 that has a flashlight attached to it.
It's not a particularly good one -- much narrower radius than the actual flashlight -- but a quick image search is a trivial way to verify it without firing up the game itself.
With wired connections, people can and have argued that we should wait till there's actual abuse. The wireless networks have been far more tightly controlled than the wired networks, with actual tiered pricing schemes, and as Google says, with that limited spectrum, there's that much more incentive to control them -- so it seems like there's already abuse (so forget wait-and-see) and potential for more abuse.
what seems like an honest and open way
TFS includes a "MYTH" which is directly confirmed by the quoted "FACT", which is misleading at best. It certainly doesn't seem honest -- honest would've been to come out and say, "Yes, this proposal would eliminate net neutrality over wireless."
The machine gun (forget if there was another name for it) did indeed have a flashlight on it.
Earlier on, I liked that as a gameplay mechanic -- even the duct tape mod doesn't allow it for the pistol alone for that reason. Later on, there's better lighting in general, so it's not as much of an issue.
When did Comcast throttle traffic? The only article I ever saw for that was the AP article that referenced throttling torrent
Hey, you answered your own question! Good job!
we'd all jump on our holier than thou bandwagan saying bittorrent is legit when I would challnge folks to prove that more than 3% of bittorrent is not piracy
If even 1% were legitimate, that would be enough. What ever happened to "Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"?
And throttling, by the way, is not how we deal with piracy. We deal with it by suing, remember? It shouldn't be the job of the ISP to decide whether what you're doing is legitimate.
Net Neutrality is govt attempting to control of it's people, it's that simple.
Really? That must be why it took massive lobbying by the people in order to get the government to take it seriously!
Why should we empower our govt.? They work for us, not the other way around!
Precisely because they work for us. The media companies don't. Given that, would you rather empower the government, or Comcast?
I should apologize -- I may have missed some sarcasm on your part, and I may also have missed (thanks, Slashdot) who you were replying to. Never mind, then.
But, wait, just how did Comcast, Verizon, etc. string all those cables and associated network detritus across people's property?
Partly, with government money and permission.
How about this: Acme, Inc., can play with its network however it wants, but it also can't tresspass on any homeowner's property. Does that sound OK?
As long as they're not then trying to sell access to their network as Internet access, because it isn't. It's access to some pale mockery of the Internet.
Or how about this: Stop trying to double-dip,
Funny you should mention that -- deals have actually been placed on the table where an ISP attempts to charge twice for their bandwidth -- once to the consumer, and once to the website for "priority" traffic (read: not throttled to oblivion), where said website already has their own ISP with their own bills.
You sure you want to talk about double-dipping?
Uhm, do you have any idea what that "anarchy" word in your handle means?
I created my handle when I was 15, probably younger. It was taken from the slogan of warez.com -- if you're familiar with the concept of warez, you can see why I wouldn't be concerned about stealing an idea from them.
Your comment basically reinforces his critique exactly: you clearly support mob rule.
What about my comment gave you that impression?
If "most people" don't like what a "few individuals" are doing, fuck 'em! We'll just confiscate their crap!
I see the slippery slope you're presenting, but this isn't about what those few individuals are doing, or what they have. This isn't about "spreading the wealth".
This particular discussion was about net neutrality -- in particular, what those few individuals are doing to the rest of us.
Do you feel the same way about non-economic issues of personal freedom, or is it just in the realm of money?
Pretty much, though this particular case wasn't much in the realm of money.
If "most people" don't like the fact that I'm gay, can they just put us "few individual" gay people in the gas chamber for violating the social contract?
You seem to have confused what most people "don't like" with what actually causes real harm to most people.
Your being gay does nothing to my sexuality. If you were married to someone of the same gender, that would do nothing to my ability to marry. The worst I would have to endure is the knowledge of your existence, which, even if it bothered me, wouldn't be sufficient cause to kill you.
Why is this so hard to get? I want to use the government to prevent others from infringing on my own liberties. Not to prevent others from exercising their own.
Look, the examples you are talking about are only even arguably "at the expense of everyone else" because of government mandated restrictions.
Then let's talk about them, rather than all these roundabout and frankly bizarre examples you keep coming up with.
He's every bit as rich as any of those evil large mega telecommunications corporation executives. Actually, much, much richer than most of them.
And how did he get that way? Oh, by...
His ethics are certainly much more questionable than Comcast. After all, Comcast doesn't ambush people and attempt to humiliate them on a worldwide stage for profit.
However, Comcast did and does attempt to stop the free flow of information, which is exactly what we would use to discuss Michael Moore and what to do about him.
You can't really say he was unethical in making a cute little movie. He got stinking rich off of a whole bunch of people plunking down five bucks to see his little cartoon. Exactly how did he violate the social contract at the expense of everyone else?
I didn't say he did.
It's easy to pick on rich people.
I wasn't. Read what you quoted -- where in there am I picking on them simply because they're rich? It's not that they're wealthy that bothers me. Granted, the absurd gap between what they make and what their employees make bothers me, but more than that is the lengths to which they're willing to go to make obscenely more money.
But if you're reading this, then you're richer than about 80% of the people in the world.
What wealth I have is either wealth I have worked for, or wealth my parents have worked for. Their inheritance was fairly small, and I expect mine to be similarly small, so this is far from an aristocracy -- I work, and then I get paid.
And my work? I write software eight hours a day. The software I write actually provides a valid service to its customers -- or will, once it enters production. It certainly won't prevent people from communicating with each other in order to drive them to other products of mine.
Do you feel like giving it all away to the poor and living in a shack like the rest of the world?
That's a false dichotomy. I can do far more to help both by using it to attain more money myself, and by doing microloans instead of handouts.
So you want to legislate morality. We must all believe in your ethics,
So first off, there's a difference between morality and ethics.
anyone who doesn't follow your ethical code must be punished,
And what's the alternative to following an "ethical code"? Is rape and murder OK?
Funny how similar the views of the right-wingers and left-wingers are when you reduce them to their cores.
When you create a mocking, oversimplified caricature of a position, sure. In fact, you can also reduce nearly every human endeavor to an attempt to get enough food and sex, or to compensate for not having enough sex.
It's just that such reductions, even if they were accurate, don't add much to the conversation.
So let's consider: The extreme right-wing would like to, among other things, make it illegal to create or distribute certain works, including violent video games, among other things. Many of them would like their own creation myth taught in a science class, given equal weight to real science, and excluding all other creation myths. They'd like to prevent other people from marrying each other, and many would like to outlaw certain sexual acts.
Are you seeing a pattern here? Everything I just mentioned is an attempt to impose their own morality on a behavior which harms no one.
By contrast, I am wanting to legislate against behavior which actually harms people. Again, there's a reason rape and murder are illegal -- is it that much of a leap to also outlaw fraud and attempt to restrain anticompetitive, predatory business practices?
If you wanted to say that the purpose of government is to prevent people from unjustly enriching themselves to the detriment of others, then perhaps we could agree. Then it would just be a matter of determining what is "just".
What's unclear about it? When a business takes advantage of a physical monopoly to censor communication in order to make a quick buck, that's unjust -- never mind the absurd pricing scheme.
But you seem to believe that some people are intrinsically entitled be enriched at the expense of others who intrinsically deserve to be punished,
I'm sorry, you seem to have spun that entirely around to mean just the opposite of what I said. You also haven't even set up a clear strawman.
What do you mean by intrinsically? There's nothing intrinsic to the person, it's the position they're in, and more importantly, what they've done with that position. And I am not trying to enrich some at the expense of others, I am trying to stop a small number from enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else.
are willing to use government powers to forcibly do so
Government intervention is one way to deal with a market failure, yes. Do you admit that market failures exist? If so, how would you solve them without the government?
government powers derive entirely from the fact that the government has a monopoly on force.
Patently false -- private security groups (rent-a-cops) exist.
The government should no more be benefitting the CEO of the company than the janitor.
Unfortunately, the practical reality is that corporations become little fiefdoms -- pretty much all of them, so switching companies helps very little -- which creates an imbalance of power such that if the government does nothing, they are benefiting the CEO far more than the janitor.
Other approaches, such as unions, have been tried, without much more success.
And your solution to Comcast being crap is... to legislate them into not being crap?
Do you have a better one?
In particular, the issue is that nearly every ISP is crap, and has a local monopoly, or severely limited competition with other ISPs who are also crap. The issue is that the fastest residential Internet in the US is barely faster than the average in Japan, and the average in the US is a tenth of that.
Even worse, the ISPs have already taken government money to build out their infrastructure, and clearly haven't done so. If they didn't want regulation, they shouldn't have taken the money.
So you think that if you agree when you sign up that you won't use more than a certain amount of bandwidth, and you end up using more than that, Comcast should just have to suck it up?
No, as Klinky says, I think that Comcast is entirely free to sell me a certain amount of bandwidth. But they've also done several other things:
If they want to tell me that I only get 20 gigs of bandwidth per month, and if they're up front about it, that's at least honest. It may still be a problem if they're the only game in town, and it's still embarrassing when you look at Japan, but that is effectively what network neutrality is trying to do -- get them back to being a dumb pipe, where if they say 20 gigs, it's actually 20 gigs of unmolested bandwidth -- rather than, as they have been doing, saying "unlimited" (but capped at some imaginary point) with the connection until then being raped at pretty much every level -- DNS, protocol filtering, destination filtering, etc.
The goal of society and government is to benefit certain people to the detriment of other people, based on who is part of the largest group and hence has the most votes.
That's a cynical analysis, not a goal. Let's try again:
The goal of government and society is to benefit most people most of the time, to the detriment of the few individuals who violate the social contract -- in this case, those who have enriched themselves massively at the expense of everyone else, using ethics which are questionable at best.
Who do you think runs the "large mega telecommunications companies"?
If you're referring to all the employees, certainly, we should benefit them. As it is, government and society tends to benefit the board of directors and a few top executives, to the detriment of everyone else.
It said "data disasters", not specifically hard drive failures. I was thinking of the kid who gets root on someone else's machine and runs 'rm -rf /', or whatever the equivalent on Windows is.