PDF itself is an open format, perfectly capable of being displayed efficiently and safely. What's the problem with putting it in a browser Window?
Remember, GP was talking about Linux. While we could use acroread, there's also things like Okular, which opens nearly instantaneously to display PDFs. On OS X, there's Preview -- same situation. Both display PDFs at least as accurately as Acrobat.
would it be possible for Flash to instead use Chromes V8 engine [google.com]?
Most likely not. It would be possible for Chrome to instead use Tamarin, if it really wanted, but v8 itself is very Javascript-specific at the moment. ActionScript is a superset of that, so it might be possible, but it'd take a lot of work.
what excuse could they give not to allow Chrome+Flash on iPhone|iPad|iPod?
Whatever excuse they want.
This is what people don't understand about iPhone/iPad/iPod -- it's not up to you. It's entirely up to Apple whether or not they're consistent or fair, and so far, they've been neither.
And yet, people keep simultaneously buying these things and whining that they can't do stuff. It's like buying fertilizer and complaining that it's shit.
Since Google is doing all the leg-work to make Flash fast and stable,
What? No, Google is doing the leg-work to make Flash contained. It's still going to be dog-slow, unstable, and evil, but at least it'll be more secure and won't lock up or crash your browser, just itself.
If you want a fast, stable Flash, petition Adobe to open it up. That, or accept that the fastest, stablest Flash ever is not Flash, but HTML5.
Is informing Google of my private, internal staging server at some random IP address really infringing on my privacy?
Moreover, if you really don't like it, you can disable suggestions. If you then want suggestions, you can simply go to Google and start typing there. I think the point is that as you start typing, it is genuinely helpful to have relevant stuff randomly pop up, even if you are just typing into the URL bar.
Your overclocking examples pushed the core 50% and 33% above spec. - it's hardly a surprise that you had issues!
I don't remember if I went directly from 2.4 back to 1.8, or if I tried some steps in between. I do remember that, again, it was mostly stable, survived every actual test I threw at it, and yet still had subtle issues that I only discovered through real use.
It just wasn't worth it, especially when it wasn't particularly long before I replaced that single-core 1.8 with a cheap dual-core 2.4.
YMMV, but when I have a job, my time is worth more than the small amount of money it might cost me to buy more hardware, or upgrade more often. When I don't have a job, I can't afford to risk damaging my hardware and having to spend even more.
At the time I made the purchase the Core 2 Extreme x6800 cost $999. My e2180 cost $108.... Feel free to blow $900.
Yes and no.
Yes, I would much rather "blow" $900 than wonder WTF is wrong with my computer after I thought I'd figured this out:
We find the maximum frequency we can run at acceptable voltage and heat.
I value my data much more than that $900. It can also be worked out in terms of real effort -- last time I was working, I made $20/hour, so that $900 works out to about 45 hours. I easily spent more time than that building my own computer and trying to overclock it properly. I understand that it's enjoyable, but not nearly as much as my real job was.
However, in the real world, I doubt I'd spend more than $100 or $200 on a CPU, partly because I have some patience. Where's the appeal in spending all that time and money, not to mention the risk, when that "extreme" whatever will be a commodity in another year or two?
I never said he wasn't a genius. I'm merely questioning the claim that all this stuff he was doing that "we still don't understand" is actual genius that us puny non-geniuses have no hope of grasping, or whether it was failure.
In other words, I was attacking those specific things, not the man as a whole.
As I said, I like Tesla. I think what was done to him was criminal. I also think he was likely wrong on a number of things -- that's all.
...or are you also skeptical of evolution? Then you're just as gullible; you've likely been fooled by your church, or by the Discovery Institute's media machine.
Perhaps you're skeptical of gravity, also? That might be easy to disprove -- just fly.
Yes, scientists are asked to be skeptical of everything, and never claim to have proven anything. If you're skeptical in the scientific sense, of theories in the scientific sense, that's a good thing. If you're skeptical in the philosophical sense, that's some deep thought. But in a practical sense, if you're skeptical of one theory and not another simply because of personal preference, you're a moron.
You call "arriving at correct results" "Shoddy and careless"?
What? No, that's not how it works.
Let's say I look into a crystal ball and say, "My crystal ball is round, therefore the Earth is round." Have I done anything even remotely scientific? Should anyone assign any credibility to my results?
No, of course not. By sheer luck, I happened to get the right answer. My friend who used tea leaves might have decided the Earth is flat, like a tea leaf.
Does it make much difference if I have data? Not really, my results are still just as worthless. The only difference is, the data was still there for others to analyze, but that doesn't make my own conclusion any less shoddy and careless. Think about it -- I could look at the collected data and start performing numerology, deciding that the number of happy primes, when converted into characters, spells out "AL GORE WAS RIGHT!" Again, just because I happened to get the right answer doesn't make my methods any less vulnerable to criticism.
The only thing that saves them is that their data was still available for someone else to analyze properly. So yes, the results are correct. Yes, "climategate" was a storm in a teapot. Yes, climate change is a real thing, backed up (now) by real science. But these guys were still shoddy and careless, and some heads should probably roll.
Predictable power-drain, you mean, and a predictable shortening of the life of your hardware -- assuming it doesn't just overheat and underclock itself, which I've seen happen a few times.
CPU scaling has been mature for awhile now, and it's implemented in hardware. Can you give me any real examples of it causing a problem? The instant I need that speed (for gaming, etc), it's there. The rest of the time, I'd much rather it coast at 800 mhz all around, especially on a laptop.
with no temperature or stability issues. YMMV.
Understatement of the year.
Overclocking is a bit of a black art, for a number of reasons. First problem: How do you know it's stable? Or rather, when things start to go wrong, how do you know if it's a software or a hardware issue? The last time I did this was a 1.8 ghz machine to 2.7. I ran superpi, 3dmark, and a number of other things, and it seemed stable, but occasionally crashed. Clocked it back to 2.4, it crashed less often, but there were occasionally subtle filesystem corruption issues -- which was much worse, because I had absolutely no indication anything was wrong (over months of use) until I found my data corrupted for no apparent reason. Finally set it back to the factory default (and turned on the scaling) and it's been solid ever since.
Second problem: Even with the same chip, it varies a lot. All that testing I did is nothing compared to how the manufacturer actually tests the chip -- but they only test what they're actually selling. That means if they're selling you a dual-core chip that's really a quad-core chip with two cores disabled, it might just be surplus, the extra cores might be fine, but they haven't tested them. Or maybe they have, and that's why they sold it as a dual-core instead of quad-core.
So even if you follow a guide to the letter, it's not guaranteed.
I'm sure you already know all of the above, but I'm at the point in my life where, even as a starving college student, even as a Linux user on a Dvorak keyboard, it's much saner for me to simply buy a faster CPU, rather than trying to overclock it myself.
Hell, theres STILL stuff he came up with that we have no understanding of. Yet.
That stuff is either genius or failed experiments. How would you know the difference?
Note that this article predicts both the Internet and wireless technology, but with no mention of the digital aspects. It also predicts wireless power, such that a ship could be sent across the Atlantic, powered by a single wireless power station on one side. It predicted all of this would happen in something like 5 years.
So he was wrong about how long it would take, and he threw out at least one other idea in that article that we haven't seen happen, and have no evidence can happen.
I like Tesla as much as anyone else, but I'm not sure how to call this one. Fuzzy, at best. I think Orwell had it closer.
The problem is that it's been mutated and corrupted into something businesses use to fight one another in endless litigation,
The thing is, this isn't new. The steam engine is a perfect example -- two competing inventors form corporations, and each independently develops their own unique significant improvement to the steam engine, but as they aren't willing to cross-license, the industry is held back until one of the patents expires, at which point both improvements can finally be combined into the same engine.
This still happens today. Why can't I have a laptop with a magnetic power cord and an upgradeable video card in the same machine? Or a magnetic power cord on a netbook? Because Apple doesn't want to make upgradeable video cards or netbooks (they think the iPad fills that niche), and I'm sure they've patented the magnetic power cord, which means I have to wait at least 10-15 years, even though the technology exists today to do what I want.
And we need reasonable time limits -- and if you want to eliminate anything, start with that mother fucker Mickey Mouse and the corporation that owns it, because that's what started this whole trend towards a billion years plus the life of the author bullshit.
While I agree, I have a much bigger problem with patents than copyright. It's not difficult to come up with a story which doesn't violate copyright (even with the obscene length of copyright), and it's not difficult to license something creative-commons or public-domain. Yes, it's our culture, and we want it back, but we can always simply create new culture outside their control.
It is insanely difficult to come up with an invention of any sort, including (especially!) software, which doesn't infringe on current patents, even with their relatively short span compared to copyright.
Github is a useful thing to "learn" anyway. It's trivially easy if you already know Git, which is also a useful thing to learn. Even without knowing Git, it's not difficult to send a message.
Also, I'd argue the use of an actual if/else in this situation is much more helpful than your use of parentheses.
Also, presumably this is JavaScript. If so, I find your lack of var disturbing -- does 'epsilon' really need to be a global variable? Even if it does, shouldn't it at least be named such that this is obvious?
We need a codec that everybody can use without having a legal relationship (directly or indirectly) with anybody, just like everybody can write on paper and publish HTML.
It seems like we have that, to the extent we do with HTML -- not every device can produce or consume HTML, but if you want to restrict yourself to only open standards, you can do so.
The one blocker to this has nothing to do with apple -- video recorders currently record to MP4, so re-encoding is already a loss in quality, and it doesn't save you from certain legal obligations. As far as I know, Apple doesn't make a camcorder, so I don't see how they're to blame here.
It's a hard sell to the companies which produce those devices, though. Either they need two separate encoders (more money), or they need to choose one which is arguably going to be less quality or more space, resulting in an inferior product. So again, like it or not, quality matters. Again, the only way out I can see is for Google to open VP8 and push it hard.
I accept that your intellectual problem is evidently worse.
I didn't realize that a considered opinion which disagrees with yours is worse than being a blind follower.
Actually, sarcasm aside, I can't see why you would ever suggest that.
That's not civil disobedience. Civil disobendience means taking a public stance and a public risk in order to cause positive change.
For that matter, I'm about as public about it as she was. I certainly don't make a secret out of it, and nearly everyone who knows me, online or offline, will hear me rant about how stupid it is that so much of what I do is illegal -- that I can't even watch a rented DVD without breaking the law.
About the only difference is that I tend not to leave evidence of the more direct copyright infringement that I do. Whether or not it's worth going to jail for (and I'm not sure it is), I feel I can do much more good out here.
And the HTML5/h.264 debate isn't about whether patents are good or bad.
No, it's just about whether they're appropriate in a given situation. But notice, without software patents, this problem would go away.
In typical Steve Jobs fashion, he has misdirected the debate by turning into the question of which codec is better and uses less power...
These are, again, not irrelevant concerns.
In fact, let's talk about this part:
The debate is about creating a free, unencumbered standard that people can fall back to.
Just how are you suggesting this works?
When creating and uploading content to a website, should I encode it twice, once in h.264, and once in Theora for people to fall back on? And should iPhones and iPads contain a software Theora decoder, so that people who don't want to create h.264 can simply upload Theora, so that their videos will look worse and burn much more battery on the iPhone/iPad?
I mean, I'm having a hard time seeing the practical use for this fallback. It seems like the actual result would be second-class media in the fallback, and the necessity to implement Theora decoders in every browser which will never get used, given h.264 would still become the de-facto standard, regardless of whatever minimum real standard is there?
After all, getting Theora explicitly mentioned in the HTML5 standard really wouldn't do much, considering neither Apple nor Microsoft look particularly interested in implementing it. They'd just be nonstandard in that way. It would be a bit like trying to declare Java to be the fiat standard for application development -- most of the world would shrug and continue producing.exe files and App Store apps.
Well, I'm glad you're paying attention, Mr. Nitpick. Now what about paying attention to what actually matters?
If you can't even keep a codec and a container straight, it makes me wonder whether you have any credibility on the subject at all. It would be like confusing megahertz with RAM in a debate about CPUs. It's a bit like when former Senator Ted "Series of Tubes" Stevens confused the Internet with e-mail -- "My staff sent me an Internet the other day..."
It's especially bad, because you look like a moron at the same time as, in almost every post in this debate (responding to me or others), you are calling the opposition names -- anyone who disagrees with you is "incompetent", "a fanboy", or "not smart". Not that namecalling is ever a good idea, but if you're going to do it, it would help if the same labels couldn't as easily be applied to you.
It's not a GPL vs the rest of the world issue.
No, it's a Free Software (TM) vs the rest of the world issue.
Mozilla is not a GPL project, yet they have been pushing hard for an open, unencumbered codec.
Pushing for an unencumbered codec is a good thing.
What they're doing is refusing to implement codec support in a sane way, particularly a way which is obviously the right technical choice, for political reasons. This is a bad thing.
Well, then you better hope that other people are smarter about licenses and open systems because than you if people had your kind of attitude, Linux wouldn't exist.
If people actually took your kind of attitude to its logical conclusion, a practical Linux wouldn't exist. Or are you running GNewSense?
Well, so they are not particularly innovative, but it only takes one to be part of the club.
It does, however, suggest that patent royalties is probably not what's on their mind.
it's also the fact that they have no expertise implementing other codecs
Demonstrably wrong. Have you seen QuickTime lately?
Solution to what? Apple isn't going to give in.
Doesn't matter. Google owns VP8 and YouTube, and is likely in a position where they could actually push a codec which is both open and technically better.
The argument that h.264 is better is a red herring
Doesn't matter, unless it's also wrong. I realize Apple may have other motives, but let me put it this way: When I want to re-encode something for my own purposes (a DVD, say), what codec will I use? Probably h.264 -- ripping a DVD is actually a criminal act in this country anyway, so why do I care about the civil infraction of violating a patent also? I'd much rather have higher quality and fewer bits.
Similarly, when I'm going to download or stream something, even legally, I've got a perfectly functional h.264 decoder -- so again, technologically, it's a no-brainer. Higher quality, less bandwidth.
I tend to store audio in FLAC or Vorbis, when I have access to an uncompressed source (like a CD), but if I get it in MP3, what's the point in re-encoding?
Do you see how this works?
I like the idea of open codecs. I want them to win. But the way to win is to develop one which is actually better, thus forcing Apple to either adapt, or reveal their true motives and simultaneously appear behind the times.
So in other words, this:
VP8 may be a "solution" in the sense that Google has enough of the mobile market that they can simply switch over YouTube and tell Apple to get lost.
But even if they don't tell Apple to get lost, they can simply inform everyone that VP8 is the native codec, and any devices (Apple's included) which use h.264 are getting a quality hit from re-encoding.
I could add to that, actually: I own two Apple products currently. One is this keyboard. The other is an old Powerbook G4 which currently doesn't work, but which I haven't thrown out.
In fact, my posting history here will demonstrate that I'm the first to speak out against Apple -- in particular, I despise the App Store concept and how they are creating what could be very cool, general-purpose computers, and castrating them into appliances.
Note that I mentioned DirectShow and GStreamer, but not QuickTime -- or is it CoreVideo now? Hadn't occurred to me, honestly.
But don't let facts get in the way of your prejudice. Clearly, because I agree with Apple on one issue, I must be an Apple fanboi and absolutely love everything Steve Jobs says. Obviously, because I enjoy H.264 (available on all modern desktop OSes), I must be running a Mac, because H.264 somehow equals Apple.
Faster? Video always plays at the same frame rate,
More efficiently, is what I meant -- the difference between less than 1% CPU usage with hardware acceleration, less than 10% with efficient software decoding, and more than 50% with Flash. Even so, it may be accurate after all:
modern machines are fast enough for real-time decoding.
Maybe the situation is different elsewhere, but on Linux, Flash drops lots of frames at 1080p. The UI becomes unresponsive. It actually slows down to where it's out of sync.
When I download the same video and play it with mplayer, it plays flawlessly. It's an h.264 video in an mp4 container.
In different words, Steve Jobs is telling open source developers to go fuck themselves.
Nope, he's telling GNU people to go fuck themselves. There's a difference.
Basically, GNewSense might have a problem, but most modern OSes, including most Linuxes on modern hardware, will have access to an h.264 decoder, and probably a hardware one.
That doesn't make sense. Ogg was merely proposed as a universal baseline codec,
Ogg isn't a codec. Ogg is a container. Theora is a codec.
something one can count on in any browser,
That would be nice, but it's also not the way most Mozilla people talked about it.
VP8 might be a solution.
If Ogg were as bad as you say and h.264 were as universal as you say, then Apple would have had nothing to fear from it,
They certainly don't seem to be quaking in their boots.
It works because Apple is evil and you are too much of a fanboy to see it.
An otherwise interesting post, and then this...
I haven't bought an Apple product in years, and I don't plan to. I haven't booted Windows in six months. I'm typing this on an apple keyboard -- I've also got a Microsoft mouse, and they're both plugged into a Dell, running Linux.
Who, exactly, am I supposed to be a fanboy of?
I agree that Apple is evil, I just didn't see a motive that made any sense at all. To be honest, I still don't:
Apple could kiss their investment (including hardware) and patents in h.264 goodbye.
As others have mentioned when I tried to make a similar argument, Apple owns exactly one patent on h.264. The hardware might be a factor, but why would apple pass up an opportunity to sell an expensive upgrade to their users?
And how does that help users whose OS doesn't have h.264?
It gives them the option to either break the law (because they don't agree with patent law), or find a vendor to take care of it.
Besides, which OS would that be? It's a vastly shrinking demographic that doesn't have access to a native h.264 decoder. On nVidia, Linux can legally, natively play hardware-accelerated h.264.
It's also the right thing to do, technologically -- see above about native playback. Do you really expect every browser to have to natively support every piece of hardware that could conceivably help with video playback?
Apple is pushing h.264 because it hurts Linux and they are afraid of Linux.
Apple is afraid of Linux? Really?
I mean, they couldn't be pushing h.264 because they feel it's better than Theora, with a proven track record. They couldn't be pushing it because they have a stake in the patents involved. No, it has to be that they hate Linux?
Slashdot Mirror
PDF itself is an open format, perfectly capable of being displayed efficiently and safely. What's the problem with putting it in a browser Window?
Remember, GP was talking about Linux. While we could use acroread, there's also things like Okular, which opens nearly instantaneously to display PDFs. On OS X, there's Preview -- same situation. Both display PDFs at least as accurately as Acrobat.
would it be possible for Flash to instead use Chromes V8 engine [google.com]?
Most likely not. It would be possible for Chrome to instead use Tamarin, if it really wanted, but v8 itself is very Javascript-specific at the moment. ActionScript is a superset of that, so it might be possible, but it'd take a lot of work.
what excuse could they give not to allow Chrome+Flash on iPhone|iPad|iPod?
Whatever excuse they want.
This is what people don't understand about iPhone/iPad/iPod -- it's not up to you. It's entirely up to Apple whether or not they're consistent or fair, and so far, they've been neither.
And yet, people keep simultaneously buying these things and whining that they can't do stuff. It's like buying fertilizer and complaining that it's shit.
Since Google is doing all the leg-work to make Flash fast and stable,
What? No, Google is doing the leg-work to make Flash contained. It's still going to be dog-slow, unstable, and evil, but at least it'll be more secure and won't lock up or crash your browser, just itself.
If you want a fast, stable Flash, petition Adobe to open it up. That, or accept that the fastest, stablest Flash ever is not Flash, but HTML5.
Well, it's more like installing an app to /home on *nix. Rare and wrong, but not unheard of.
Interestingly, Chrome gets this right on Linux.
Is informing Google of my private, internal staging server at some random IP address really infringing on my privacy?
Moreover, if you really don't like it, you can disable suggestions. If you then want suggestions, you can simply go to Google and start typing there. I think the point is that as you start typing, it is genuinely helpful to have relevant stuff randomly pop up, even if you are just typing into the URL bar.
Well, you could turn on HTML5 for YouTube. I think Vimeo might have an HTML5 player also. That would give you your keyboard focus back.
ps axu | grep libflashplayer | grep $LOGNAME | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill
For those who don't want to do that -- or a saner option involving killall or pkill, or some Windows port -- there's a much simpler solution:
Shift+escape inside Chrome, or page -> Developer -> Task Manager. Now you can kill individual tabs, extensions, or plugins at will.
Seems noscript is actually built-in, now.
Are you sure? Keep in mind that it shares a lot of that memory between processes.
Either measure the total amount of RAM your system is using, or maybe try Chrome's own about:memory.
Your overclocking examples pushed the core 50% and 33% above spec. - it's hardly a surprise that you had issues!
I don't remember if I went directly from 2.4 back to 1.8, or if I tried some steps in between. I do remember that, again, it was mostly stable, survived every actual test I threw at it, and yet still had subtle issues that I only discovered through real use.
It just wasn't worth it, especially when it wasn't particularly long before I replaced that single-core 1.8 with a cheap dual-core 2.4.
YMMV, but when I have a job, my time is worth more than the small amount of money it might cost me to buy more hardware, or upgrade more often. When I don't have a job, I can't afford to risk damaging my hardware and having to spend even more.
At the time I made the purchase the Core 2 Extreme x6800 cost $999. My e2180 cost $108.... Feel free to blow $900.
Yes and no.
Yes, I would much rather "blow" $900 than wonder WTF is wrong with my computer after I thought I'd figured this out:
We find the maximum frequency we can run at acceptable voltage and heat.
I value my data much more than that $900. It can also be worked out in terms of real effort -- last time I was working, I made $20/hour, so that $900 works out to about 45 hours. I easily spent more time than that building my own computer and trying to overclock it properly. I understand that it's enjoyable, but not nearly as much as my real job was.
However, in the real world, I doubt I'd spend more than $100 or $200 on a CPU, partly because I have some patience. Where's the appeal in spending all that time and money, not to mention the risk, when that "extreme" whatever will be a commodity in another year or two?
Show me one genius that does not fail.
I never said he wasn't a genius. I'm merely questioning the claim that all this stuff he was doing that "we still don't understand" is actual genius that us puny non-geniuses have no hope of grasping, or whether it was failure.
In other words, I was attacking those specific things, not the man as a whole.
As I said, I like Tesla. I think what was done to him was criminal. I also think he was likely wrong on a number of things -- that's all.
...or are you also skeptical of evolution? Then you're just as gullible; you've likely been fooled by your church, or by the Discovery Institute's media machine.
Perhaps you're skeptical of gravity, also? That might be easy to disprove -- just fly.
Yes, scientists are asked to be skeptical of everything, and never claim to have proven anything. If you're skeptical in the scientific sense, of theories in the scientific sense, that's a good thing. If you're skeptical in the philosophical sense, that's some deep thought. But in a practical sense, if you're skeptical of one theory and not another simply because of personal preference, you're a moron.
You call "arriving at correct results" "Shoddy and careless"?
What? No, that's not how it works.
Let's say I look into a crystal ball and say, "My crystal ball is round, therefore the Earth is round." Have I done anything even remotely scientific? Should anyone assign any credibility to my results?
No, of course not. By sheer luck, I happened to get the right answer. My friend who used tea leaves might have decided the Earth is flat, like a tea leaf.
Does it make much difference if I have data? Not really, my results are still just as worthless. The only difference is, the data was still there for others to analyze, but that doesn't make my own conclusion any less shoddy and careless. Think about it -- I could look at the collected data and start performing numerology, deciding that the number of happy primes, when converted into characters, spells out "AL GORE WAS RIGHT!" Again, just because I happened to get the right answer doesn't make my methods any less vulnerable to criticism.
The only thing that saves them is that their data was still available for someone else to analyze properly. So yes, the results are correct. Yes, "climategate" was a storm in a teapot. Yes, climate change is a real thing, backed up (now) by real science. But these guys were still shoddy and careless, and some heads should probably roll.
I was pretty stoked about KDE4. But I tried it. Still just not there.
It does seem to get closer all the time. But yeah, if you tried it around the actual v4.0 release, it was a clusterfuck.
add a full featured stable DAW, and video editor to that as well.
Ardour is getting better, and I remember Film Gimp being used by ILM.
Mod parent up!
What? No, 6to4 has been part of ipv6 for awhile. It's not an OSX-only thing by a long shot.
predictable performance
Predictable power-drain, you mean, and a predictable shortening of the life of your hardware -- assuming it doesn't just overheat and underclock itself, which I've seen happen a few times.
CPU scaling has been mature for awhile now, and it's implemented in hardware. Can you give me any real examples of it causing a problem? The instant I need that speed (for gaming, etc), it's there. The rest of the time, I'd much rather it coast at 800 mhz all around, especially on a laptop.
with no temperature or stability issues. YMMV.
Understatement of the year.
Overclocking is a bit of a black art, for a number of reasons. First problem: How do you know it's stable? Or rather, when things start to go wrong, how do you know if it's a software or a hardware issue? The last time I did this was a 1.8 ghz machine to 2.7. I ran superpi, 3dmark, and a number of other things, and it seemed stable, but occasionally crashed. Clocked it back to 2.4, it crashed less often, but there were occasionally subtle filesystem corruption issues -- which was much worse, because I had absolutely no indication anything was wrong (over months of use) until I found my data corrupted for no apparent reason. Finally set it back to the factory default (and turned on the scaling) and it's been solid ever since.
Second problem: Even with the same chip, it varies a lot. All that testing I did is nothing compared to how the manufacturer actually tests the chip -- but they only test what they're actually selling. That means if they're selling you a dual-core chip that's really a quad-core chip with two cores disabled, it might just be surplus, the extra cores might be fine, but they haven't tested them. Or maybe they have, and that's why they sold it as a dual-core instead of quad-core.
So even if you follow a guide to the letter, it's not guaranteed.
I'm sure you already know all of the above, but I'm at the point in my life where, even as a starving college student, even as a Linux user on a Dvorak keyboard, it's much saner for me to simply buy a faster CPU, rather than trying to overclock it myself.
Hell, theres STILL stuff he came up with that we have no understanding of. Yet.
That stuff is either genius or failed experiments. How would you know the difference?
Note that this article predicts both the Internet and wireless technology, but with no mention of the digital aspects. It also predicts wireless power, such that a ship could be sent across the Atlantic, powered by a single wireless power station on one side. It predicted all of this would happen in something like 5 years.
So he was wrong about how long it would take, and he threw out at least one other idea in that article that we haven't seen happen, and have no evidence can happen.
I like Tesla as much as anyone else, but I'm not sure how to call this one. Fuzzy, at best. I think Orwell had it closer.
The problem is that it's been mutated and corrupted into something businesses use to fight one another in endless litigation,
The thing is, this isn't new. The steam engine is a perfect example -- two competing inventors form corporations, and each independently develops their own unique significant improvement to the steam engine, but as they aren't willing to cross-license, the industry is held back until one of the patents expires, at which point both improvements can finally be combined into the same engine.
This still happens today. Why can't I have a laptop with a magnetic power cord and an upgradeable video card in the same machine? Or a magnetic power cord on a netbook? Because Apple doesn't want to make upgradeable video cards or netbooks (they think the iPad fills that niche), and I'm sure they've patented the magnetic power cord, which means I have to wait at least 10-15 years, even though the technology exists today to do what I want.
And we need reasonable time limits -- and if you want to eliminate anything, start with that mother fucker Mickey Mouse and the corporation that owns it, because that's what started this whole trend towards a billion years plus the life of the author bullshit.
While I agree, I have a much bigger problem with patents than copyright. It's not difficult to come up with a story which doesn't violate copyright (even with the obscene length of copyright), and it's not difficult to license something creative-commons or public-domain. Yes, it's our culture, and we want it back, but we can always simply create new culture outside their control.
It is insanely difficult to come up with an invention of any sort, including (especially!) software, which doesn't infringe on current patents, even with their relatively short span compared to copyright.
Github is a useful thing to "learn" anyway. It's trivially easy if you already know Git, which is also a useful thing to learn. Even without knowing Git, it's not difficult to send a message.
Also, I'd argue the use of an actual if/else in this situation is much more helpful than your use of parentheses.
Also, presumably this is JavaScript. If so, I find your lack of var disturbing -- does 'epsilon' really need to be a global variable? Even if it does, shouldn't it at least be named such that this is obvious?
We need a codec that everybody can use without having a legal relationship (directly or indirectly) with anybody, just like everybody can write on paper and publish HTML.
It seems like we have that, to the extent we do with HTML -- not every device can produce or consume HTML, but if you want to restrict yourself to only open standards, you can do so.
The one blocker to this has nothing to do with apple -- video recorders currently record to MP4, so re-encoding is already a loss in quality, and it doesn't save you from certain legal obligations. As far as I know, Apple doesn't make a camcorder, so I don't see how they're to blame here.
It's a hard sell to the companies which produce those devices, though. Either they need two separate encoders (more money), or they need to choose one which is arguably going to be less quality or more space, resulting in an inferior product. So again, like it or not, quality matters. Again, the only way out I can see is for Google to open VP8 and push it hard.
I accept that your intellectual problem is evidently worse.
I didn't realize that a considered opinion which disagrees with yours is worse than being a blind follower.
Actually, sarcasm aside, I can't see why you would ever suggest that.
That's not civil disobedience. Civil disobendience means taking a public stance and a public risk in order to cause positive change.
No it doesn't.
You're just being lazy.
So was Rosa Parks. What kind of argument is that?
For that matter, I'm about as public about it as she was. I certainly don't make a secret out of it, and nearly everyone who knows me, online or offline, will hear me rant about how stupid it is that so much of what I do is illegal -- that I can't even watch a rented DVD without breaking the law.
About the only difference is that I tend not to leave evidence of the more direct copyright infringement that I do. Whether or not it's worth going to jail for (and I'm not sure it is), I feel I can do much more good out here.
And the HTML5/h.264 debate isn't about whether patents are good or bad.
No, it's just about whether they're appropriate in a given situation. But notice, without software patents, this problem would go away.
In typical Steve Jobs fashion, he has misdirected the debate by turning into the question of which codec is better and uses less power...
These are, again, not irrelevant concerns.
In fact, let's talk about this part:
The debate is about creating a free, unencumbered standard that people can fall back to.
Just how are you suggesting this works?
When creating and uploading content to a website, should I encode it twice, once in h.264, and once in Theora for people to fall back on? And should iPhones and iPads contain a software Theora decoder, so that people who don't want to create h.264 can simply upload Theora, so that their videos will look worse and burn much more battery on the iPhone/iPad?
I mean, I'm having a hard time seeing the practical use for this fallback. It seems like the actual result would be second-class media in the fallback, and the necessity to implement Theora decoders in every browser which will never get used, given h.264 would still become the de-facto standard, regardless of whatever minimum real standard is there?
After all, getting Theora explicitly mentioned in the HTML5 standard really wouldn't do much, considering neither Apple nor Microsoft look particularly interested in implementing it. They'd just be nonstandard in that way. It would be a bit like trying to declare Java to be the fiat standard for application development -- most of the world would shrug and continue producing .exe files and App Store apps.
It s
Well, I'm glad you're paying attention, Mr. Nitpick. Now what about paying attention to what actually matters?
If you can't even keep a codec and a container straight, it makes me wonder whether you have any credibility on the subject at all. It would be like confusing megahertz with RAM in a debate about CPUs. It's a bit like when former Senator Ted "Series of Tubes" Stevens confused the Internet with e-mail -- "My staff sent me an Internet the other day..."
It's especially bad, because you look like a moron at the same time as, in almost every post in this debate (responding to me or others), you are calling the opposition names -- anyone who disagrees with you is "incompetent", "a fanboy", or "not smart". Not that namecalling is ever a good idea, but if you're going to do it, it would help if the same labels couldn't as easily be applied to you.
It's not a GPL vs the rest of the world issue.
No, it's a Free Software (TM) vs the rest of the world issue.
Mozilla is not a GPL project, yet they have been pushing hard for an open, unencumbered codec.
Pushing for an unencumbered codec is a good thing.
What they're doing is refusing to implement codec support in a sane way, particularly a way which is obviously the right technical choice, for political reasons. This is a bad thing.
Well, then you better hope that other people are smarter about licenses and open systems because than you if people had your kind of attitude, Linux wouldn't exist.
If people actually took your kind of attitude to its logical conclusion, a practical Linux wouldn't exist. Or are you running GNewSense?
Well, so they are not particularly innovative, but it only takes one to be part of the club.
It does, however, suggest that patent royalties is probably not what's on their mind.
it's also the fact that they have no expertise implementing other codecs
Demonstrably wrong. Have you seen QuickTime lately?
Solution to what? Apple isn't going to give in.
Doesn't matter. Google owns VP8 and YouTube, and is likely in a position where they could actually push a codec which is both open and technically better.
The argument that h.264 is better is a red herring
Doesn't matter, unless it's also wrong. I realize Apple may have other motives, but let me put it this way: When I want to re-encode something for my own purposes (a DVD, say), what codec will I use? Probably h.264 -- ripping a DVD is actually a criminal act in this country anyway, so why do I care about the civil infraction of violating a patent also? I'd much rather have higher quality and fewer bits.
Similarly, when I'm going to download or stream something, even legally, I've got a perfectly functional h.264 decoder -- so again, technologically, it's a no-brainer. Higher quality, less bandwidth.
I tend to store audio in FLAC or Vorbis, when I have access to an uncompressed source (like a CD), but if I get it in MP3, what's the point in re-encoding?
Do you see how this works?
I like the idea of open codecs. I want them to win. But the way to win is to develop one which is actually better, thus forcing Apple to either adapt, or reveal their true motives and simultaneously appear behind the times.
So in other words, this:
VP8 may be a "solution" in the sense that Google has enough of the mobile market that they can simply switch over YouTube and tell Apple to get lost.
But even if they don't tell Apple to get lost, they can simply inform everyone that VP8 is the native codec, and any devices (Apple's included) which use h.264 are getting a quality hit from re-encoding.
Many machines don't have nVidia cards.
That much is true. Another avenue might be buying a machine from Dell, or buying the Fluendo codec pack, which is surprisingly affordable.
Another avenue would be either civil disobedience, or moving to countries which don't have patent laws.
The nVidia drivers themselves are closed source and proprietary.
Irrelevant. Open drivers are being developed, but that's also irrelevant. What's relevant is that this is not an effective attack on Linux.
I doubt you understand any of that, coming from an Apple mindset.
Sorry, what? You accused me of being a fanboy before, and it's just as ludicrous now as it was then. On top of that, it's an ad-hominem and a troll.
I could add to that, actually: I own two Apple products currently. One is this keyboard. The other is an old Powerbook G4 which currently doesn't work, but which I haven't thrown out.
In fact, my posting history here will demonstrate that I'm the first to speak out against Apple -- in particular, I despise the App Store concept and how they are creating what could be very cool, general-purpose computers, and castrating them into appliances.
Note that I mentioned DirectShow and GStreamer, but not QuickTime -- or is it CoreVideo now? Hadn't occurred to me, honestly.
But don't let facts get in the way of your prejudice. Clearly, because I agree with Apple on one issue, I must be an Apple fanboi and absolutely love everything Steve Jobs says. Obviously, because I enjoy H.264 (available on all modern desktop OSes), I must be running a Mac, because H.264 somehow equals Apple.
Faster? Video always plays at the same frame rate,
More efficiently, is what I meant -- the difference between less than 1% CPU usage with hardware acceleration, less than 10% with efficient software decoding, and more than 50% with Flash. Even so, it may be accurate after all:
modern machines are fast enough for real-time decoding.
Maybe the situation is different elsewhere, but on Linux, Flash drops lots of frames at 1080p. The UI becomes unresponsive. It actually slows down to where it's out of sync.
When I download the same video and play it with mplayer, it plays flawlessly. It's an h.264 video in an mp4 container.
In different words, Steve Jobs is telling open source developers to go fuck themselves.
Nope, he's telling GNU people to go fuck themselves. There's a difference.
Basically, GNewSense might have a problem, but most modern OSes, including most Linuxes on modern hardware, will have access to an h.264 decoder, and probably a hardware one.
That doesn't make sense. Ogg was merely proposed as a universal baseline codec,
Ogg isn't a codec. Ogg is a container. Theora is a codec.
something one can count on in any browser,
That would be nice, but it's also not the way most Mozilla people talked about it.
VP8 might be a solution.
If Ogg were as bad as you say and h.264 were as universal as you say, then Apple would have had nothing to fear from it,
They certainly don't seem to be quaking in their boots.
It works because Apple is evil and you are too much of a fanboy to see it.
An otherwise interesting post, and then this...
I haven't bought an Apple product in years, and I don't plan to. I haven't booted Windows in six months. I'm typing this on an apple keyboard -- I've also got a Microsoft mouse, and they're both plugged into a Dell, running Linux.
Who, exactly, am I supposed to be a fanboy of?
I agree that Apple is evil, I just didn't see a motive that made any sense at all. To be honest, I still don't:
Apple could kiss their investment (including hardware) and patents in h.264 goodbye.
As others have mentioned when I tried to make a similar argument, Apple owns exactly one patent on h.264. The hardware might be a factor, but why would apple pass up an opportunity to sell an expensive upgrade to their users?
And how does that help users whose OS doesn't have h.264?
It gives them the option to either break the law (because they don't agree with patent law), or find a vendor to take care of it.
Besides, which OS would that be? It's a vastly shrinking demographic that doesn't have access to a native h.264 decoder. On nVidia, Linux can legally, natively play hardware-accelerated h.264.
It's also the right thing to do, technologically -- see above about native playback. Do you really expect every browser to have to natively support every piece of hardware that could conceivably help with video playback?
Apple is pushing h.264 because it hurts Linux and they are afraid of Linux.
Apple is afraid of Linux? Really?
I mean, they couldn't be pushing h.264 because they feel it's better than Theora, with a proven track record. They couldn't be pushing it because they have a stake in the patents involved. No, it has to be that they hate Linux?
Please, explain how that works.