Wow thanks brainiac! If you weren't so quick 'n eager to try say something intelligent, you would have noticed that I even mentioned as such in my post, but thanks anyway for clarifying that completely useless and redundant information that happens to in absolutely no way refute my use of the GIF patent as a valid counter-example to the GP's point.
GP is trying to 'get off on a technicality', clearly.
I must say I didn't believe you until I looked it up myself - indeed, "gift" is a verb. But I am a mother-tongue speaker, and a well-educated one at that, with a well above average grasp of English, and I do not recall ever actually hearing (or reading) anyone use "gifts" in this way. If it ever was common, it isn't now. It 'sounds wrong' to me. But I have to accept what the dictionary says:)
Based on historical evidence (e.g. looking at the GIF debacle) I take a less optimistic view.
- Most big companies (e.g. MS, Adobe) find it simpler to just pay the patent fees and pass the costs on to their customers, than adopt free formats.
- Most end-users don't even realise they're paying more because of patents. The average purchaser of Photoshop, for example, never stops to think that they are paying GIF royalties in the purchase price.
In the case of GIF, the existence of an open, free (and even superior) alternative to GIF barely dented GIF's popularity. Even today only around 6% of websites use PNGs, while over 60% use GIFs. The main thing holding back PNG was, in fact, Microsoft's absolutely terrible support for it in Internet Explorer etc., and even Adobe Photoshop's PNG support sucked for many years (generating oversized PNGs), only since around v7 did they get OK PNG support. (By that time the GIF patent had nearly expired.) (PNG also unfairly got a bad rep amongst web devs as being worse than GIF because Photoshop's PNG compression algorithm was so bad it generated PNGs that were often much bigger than the equivalent GIFs, and people blamed the file format.)
Fact is big companies seldom fight patents, they just license them. Guys like us simply pay more without realising it anyway. And companies like MS still wield a lot of power over what formats succeed - e.g. Internet Explorer not supporting PNG has ensured PNG remains a fringe format.
Have you tried Total Commander? (It's nifty, you can send the results of a file/foldername search into the the file manager window. You can also do more advanced searches like 'older than X' or 'filesize larger than Y'. Or use regular expressions.)
GP is wrong, Windows search really is slow, even for something that searches the whole hard disk. It doesn't "really take that long". If you Start/Run/"cmd", cd\ then 'dir foo*/a/s/b' it is much faster than Windows search.
Yeah and the majority of Americans better get their violent, ignorant trash in line too.
If they are burning down buildings and attempting to kill people, then yes, they should. I don't see that happening.
If you weren't so busy constructing straw men you'd notice that I wasn't advocating action against anyone for simply being 'trash'. The acts of violence and vandalism we're talking about are not some abstract potential concern, they're very real acts. If you don't believe so, go hang around in a Danish embassy in an Arabic country for a while.
If that were true you would be defacing muslim websites right now.
That's such a dumb response. Defacing websites is not exercise one's right to freedom of speech. Setting up your own websites is. Access to media is not zero-sum.
Are you Danish? No? Then it's not your culture.
That's such a dumb response too. (a) The cartoons were published in newspapers all over the world, including my country. (b) Muslims protested violently and burned embassies etc. all over the world, including my country.
Funnily enough, I even know that, realise it, am 100% aware of it. I even know (and this is not very well publicised in the media coverage) that the very creation of these cartoons was a deliberate "social experiment" by a right-wing Danish publication designed to show that "western ideals" are at odds with the ideals of the Muslim immigrant populations and to polarise people on the issue. From http://www.afrol.com/articles/17949:
"The editor of the conservative daily had asked Danish cartoonist to draw Mohammed with the intention of "testing" what kind of reactions this would provoke. He wanted to find out whether the rather large number of Muslim immigrants to Denmark were influencing the limits of freedom of expression in the Nordic kingdom.
This "test" caused immediate reactions, with Danish Muslims demonstrating in front of the daily. The editor even received several death threats. 'Jyllands-Posten had achieved what it seemingly wanted - to demonstrate that there exists a conflict between liberal Danish cultural values and the values of the immigrant society."
But my own "ideology" (if you will, although putting it that way reeks of moral relativism) is an incredibly strong belief in the importance of freedom of speech in maintaining a healthy society. I didn't even know I felt so strongly about it until this incident. Here in South Africa we watched thousands of people suffer and die even very recently to give us this freedom. And we need to keep it or our society will slip back into a state of horror. Yet now I watch some of those very same people who fought for it already ready to give it up just to placate some violent killers. If (and I mean if) it really is the case that freedom of speech is at odds with a certain group of people, and there is no peaceful middle ground, then I find I have no choice but to fight it. The inevitable consequences of allowing free speech to be given up will be too horrible to even contemplate.
Here I am, my view polarised by a group of people I know was trying to manipulate and polarise my view. And yet my reasoning stands, my feelings on the issue stand, I can't ignore it.
the old party line of "Oh, those are just a small number of extremists"
It may be that it is just a "small number of extremists". But they exist, they are a problem, and I don't see any Islamic nation doing anything to stop them. In a country like the US, if you burn down embassies, you'll get riot police rubber bullets and jail, no matter what your reasons. It seems however, from the outside at least, that violent extremism is tolerated by the rulers of some of the Arab countries.
Note to these billions of peaceful Muslims: Somebody has to crack down on these extremists, regardless of how tiny a minority they are, and if you don't, we'll have to. I'm not giving up 'freedom of speech'. People died so that we could have this crucial foundation of our society. The kind of politically correct apologetic placating of murderers going on sickens me. We're voluntary self-censoring and giving up of freedom of speech in order not to offend killers.
Ayn Rand said: "The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles."
It's a little strange to me, but before this Danish cartoon incident I was siding with the 'doves', yet now I find myself siding with the hawks. Freedom of speech is at least as sacred to me as the prophet is to a muslim person. It's such a crucial part of the very foundation of our culture. People died for it. There can be no compromise on this issue. No apologetic placating. Particularly not for the type of murderous trash who are willing to violently burn/kill/vandalise/hack/destroy etc. for some cartoons. I realise that (a) it is a minority of Muslims and (b) they are actually behaving against the very teachings of the Prophet and Islam, but dammit, the rest of the Islamic people better get these violent ones in line or we are rightfully headed for a clash of ideals here.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say, are you suggesting that Chimeras don't exist? That the situation depicted is impossible? Simply because of the mainstream nature of the sources used?
Indeed. A person moving about can also cause subtle changes in the ambient lighting of parts of the room. And also cause relatively notable shifting of the air. Plus possible subtle changes in smells and even temperature. A combination of some or all of these may be detectable to our finely tuned 'neural networks'.
Let the profiteering gluttons overmarket useless shit like viagra
Apart from the obvious fact that Viagra actually dramatically improves the quality of life for tens of millions of men (if you think impotence isn't a serious problem then imagine for a moment that you could never have sex at all and never really have a proper relationship with a woman as a result), Viagra was actually an "accidental discovery" while trying to find heart disease medication. The R&D money poured into it wasn't intended for "useless shit". Viagra was just a totally free 'bonus', they spent virtually zero R&D money on it specifically.
Oh, riiiight, as if you weren't extremely heavily implying a causation. Now you try to get off on a 'technicality' that you didn't explicitly state it. Whatever. We both know you were implying it, and that the purpose was to impress upon the audience a causal relationship.
Those nations that have strong copyright and patent laws have developed far beyond those that make at most a token effort
Uh, could you perhaps control for the several billion other variables defining the differences between countries before jumping to such ridiculously specious conclusions on causation?
I signed up last month and made about $16. My site has about 1000 visitors per day. It's not much but it's higher than I expected. Of course given some of the discussions on this story it remains to be seen whether or not I actually get paid out.
There are also plenty of Microsoft stories on slashdot. And plenty of Apple stories on slashdot. (Funny, that there should be a lot of stories on a *tech* news discussion site about some of the biggest and/or most interesting *tech* companies.)
Hmm.. well, I actually recently signed up for AdSense. So I'll see what happens when I hit $100. Admittedly this thread has made me a little 'nervous' now, although I realise
Either way, it would be good if AdSense had some competition. If affiliates get better returns from e.g. Amazon, they'll move over.
We don't love Google "unconditionally" - there just happens to be absolutely no real evidence that Google's business ethics are "questionable", as you put it.
i doubt there is anything i can say
Actually, you'd be surprised how easy it is to convince me, simply by using "evidence" rather than "ideology" and "hearsay". So please do go ahead and post some actual evidence that Google's business ethics are questionable. (Unless you think I'm supposed to take the word of one or two anonymous users posting on an online forum who got ripped off (or claimed to have been ripped off) 100 measly bucks by Google. I can honestly think of far worse things that corporations have done.)
Do you really think Google is intentionally scamming people at $100 a shot with false claims of click fraud? Why would they do this, have you checked their financial results? They're making billions in revenues and hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, so your measly $100 is nothing --- in order for such a scam to be financially worthwhile to them, they would literally have to be scamming millions of users $100 each. Somehow I doubt that's the case, as there would have been a huge uproar by now and the whole AdSense program would have collapsed.
Swahili is not really a "nation", it's a language. Mostly a lingua franca. With hundreds of different languages/'nations'/peoples in East Africa, they needed a common language, and Swahili is that. There are over 50,000,000 speakers but almost all of them are second language speakers - the actual number of people who speak Kiswahili as a first language are probably less than 2,000,000. (Also there are a number of different Swahili dialects and regional variations.)
I don't see how it would be feasible to write a game that is truly representative of Africa, as Africa is extremely diverse, with dozens of countries and literally thousands of different languages and ethnic groups (over 3000 languages and possibly as many as 8000 dialects). Also what about the parts of Africa that are modernised and 'first world', like many parts of South Africa... will those be left out? Wouldn't that simply then continue to give a "skewed" stereotypical depiction of Africa as an undeveloped and simple place?
(Just an interesting side note: the name of Apple's web browser, Safari, is actually a Swahili word meaning "journey" or "travels". It itself comes from an Arabic word 'safar' for journey.)
Funnily enough I didn't use wxMozilla, as I had some problems getting that to work or I think to compile - I can't remember exactly why as it was quite long ago, but I vaguely recall it had something to do with (lack of) Unicode support at the time, and I needed to build in Unicode mode. I decided to rather use wxActiveX and wxIE and use the ActiveX Gecko wrapper that emulates the IE API, so that I would have the option of easily choosing between IE and Gecko if one or the other gave too many problems (as the app was a Windows-only app I could do this). Both IE and Gecko were basically 'equally easy' to embed using this strategy - basically just one line of code change and a recompile to switch between the two. The actual process of embedding was also quite easy. But I found both though to be quite buggy or problematic --- just in different ways. The IE component is extremely buggy indeed and I've spent probably two weeks in total now just finding workarounds for the various bugs and "annoying retarded behaviour" aspects of it (and some of the workarounds created new problems). But the Gecko component had problems too --- particularly using in-memory streams was not properly supported and I needed that. (At least I thought I needed that, but ironically I ended up not using them anyway and having to find a crappy workaround because as it turned out IE also has other (different and random) problems with in-memory streams.. *sigh*.) But at the time, on weighing the pros/cons of each I ended up choosing to go with IE. The whole 'having to have that mozilla base directory installed' was definitely a factor, that sucks.
Embedding browser components was certainly a more horrible experience than I felt it should be. (But seemingly this is not unique to Gecko. Embedding IE is one of the most painful and annoying programming experiences I've ever had.)
I don't recall having any stability problems with Gecko, or having any crashes when using it or anything like that.
P.S.: This discussion has get way far from the original post =)
Slashdot Mirror
How do you know that?
The saddest part is the post got a +5 (at least that's where it's standing right now).
Wow thanks brainiac! If you weren't so quick 'n eager to try say something intelligent, you would have noticed that I even mentioned as such in my post, but thanks anyway for clarifying that completely useless and redundant information that happens to in absolutely no way refute my use of the GIF patent as a valid counter-example to the GP's point.
GP is trying to 'get off on a technicality', clearly.
I must say I didn't believe you until I looked it up myself - indeed, "gift" is a verb. But I am a mother-tongue speaker, and a well-educated one at that, with a well above average grasp of English, and I do not recall ever actually hearing (or reading) anyone use "gifts" in this way. If it ever was common, it isn't now. It 'sounds wrong' to me. But I have to accept what the dictionary says :)
Based on historical evidence (e.g. looking at the GIF debacle) I take a less optimistic view.
- Most big companies (e.g. MS, Adobe) find it simpler to just pay the patent fees and pass the costs on to their customers, than adopt free formats.
- Most end-users don't even realise they're paying more because of patents. The average purchaser of Photoshop, for example, never stops to think that they are paying GIF royalties in the purchase price.
In the case of GIF, the existence of an open, free (and even superior) alternative to GIF barely dented GIF's popularity. Even today only around 6% of websites use PNGs, while over 60% use GIFs. The main thing holding back PNG was, in fact, Microsoft's absolutely terrible support for it in Internet Explorer etc., and even Adobe Photoshop's PNG support sucked for many years (generating oversized PNGs), only since around v7 did they get OK PNG support. (By that time the GIF patent had nearly expired.) (PNG also unfairly got a bad rep amongst web devs as being worse than GIF because Photoshop's PNG compression algorithm was so bad it generated PNGs that were often much bigger than the equivalent GIFs, and people blamed the file format.)
Fact is big companies seldom fight patents, they just license them. Guys like us simply pay more without realising it anyway. And companies like MS still wield a lot of power over what formats succeed - e.g. Internet Explorer not supporting PNG has ensured PNG remains a fringe format.
soon enough, we'll simply have our key that we'll use to access our information anywhere, anytime
Actually that's where we came from. I was doing that on UNIX over ten years ago already. UNIX was like that, by design, twenty years ago already.
Have you tried Total Commander? (It's nifty, you can send the results of a file/foldername search into the the file manager window. You can also do more advanced searches like 'older than X' or 'filesize larger than Y'. Or use regular expressions.)
GP is wrong, Windows search really is slow, even for something that searches the whole hard disk. It doesn't "really take that long". If you Start/Run/"cmd", cd\ then 'dir foo* /a/s/b' it is much faster than Windows search.
Yeah and the majority of Americans better get their violent, ignorant trash in line too.
If they are burning down buildings and attempting to kill people, then yes, they should. I don't see that happening.
If you weren't so busy constructing straw men you'd notice that I wasn't advocating action against anyone for simply being 'trash'. The acts of violence and vandalism we're talking about are not some abstract potential concern, they're very real acts. If you don't believe so, go hang around in a Danish embassy in an Arabic country for a while.
Oh, and I'm not American.
If that were true you would be defacing muslim websites right now.
That's such a dumb response. Defacing websites is not exercise one's right to freedom of speech. Setting up your own websites is. Access to media is not zero-sum.
Are you Danish? No? Then it's not your culture.
That's such a dumb response too. (a) The cartoons were published in newspapers all over the world, including my country. (b) Muslims protested violently and burned embassies etc. all over the world, including my country.
You are being gamed to support endless war.
Funnily enough, I even know that, realise it, am 100% aware of it. I even know (and this is not very well publicised in the media coverage) that the very creation of these cartoons was a deliberate "social experiment" by a right-wing Danish publication designed to show that "western ideals" are at odds with the ideals of the Muslim immigrant populations and to polarise people on the issue. From http://www.afrol.com/articles/17949:
"The editor of the conservative daily had asked Danish cartoonist to draw Mohammed with the intention of "testing" what kind of reactions this would provoke. He wanted to find out whether the rather large number of Muslim immigrants to Denmark were influencing the limits of freedom of expression in the Nordic kingdom.
This "test" caused immediate reactions, with Danish Muslims demonstrating in front of the daily. The editor even received several death threats. 'Jyllands-Posten had achieved what it seemingly wanted - to demonstrate that there exists a conflict between liberal Danish cultural values and the values of the immigrant society."
But my own "ideology" (if you will, although putting it that way reeks of moral relativism) is an incredibly strong belief in the importance of freedom of speech in maintaining a healthy society. I didn't even know I felt so strongly about it until this incident. Here in South Africa we watched thousands of people suffer and die even very recently to give us this freedom. And we need to keep it or our society will slip back into a state of horror. Yet now I watch some of those very same people who fought for it already ready to give it up just to placate some violent killers. If (and I mean if) it really is the case that freedom of speech is at odds with a certain group of people, and there is no peaceful middle ground, then I find I have no choice but to fight it. The inevitable consequences of allowing free speech to be given up will be too horrible to even contemplate.
Here I am, my view polarised by a group of people I know was trying to manipulate and polarise my view. And yet my reasoning stands, my feelings on the issue stand, I can't ignore it.
the old party line of "Oh, those are just a small number of extremists"
It may be that it is just a "small number of extremists". But they exist, they are a problem, and I don't see any Islamic nation doing anything to stop them. In a country like the US, if you burn down embassies, you'll get riot police rubber bullets and jail, no matter what your reasons. It seems however, from the outside at least, that violent extremism is tolerated by the rulers of some of the Arab countries.
Note to these billions of peaceful Muslims: Somebody has to crack down on these extremists, regardless of how tiny a minority they are, and if you don't, we'll have to. I'm not giving up 'freedom of speech'. People died so that we could have this crucial foundation of our society. The kind of politically correct apologetic placating of murderers going on sickens me. We're voluntary self-censoring and giving up of freedom of speech in order not to offend killers.
Ayn Rand said: "The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles."
It's a little strange to me, but before this Danish cartoon incident I was siding with the 'doves', yet now I find myself siding with the hawks. Freedom of speech is at least as sacred to me as the prophet is to a muslim person. It's such a crucial part of the very foundation of our culture. People died for it. There can be no compromise on this issue. No apologetic placating. Particularly not for the type of murderous trash who are willing to violently burn/kill/vandalise/hack/destroy etc. for some cartoons. I realise that (a) it is a minority of Muslims and (b) they are actually behaving against the very teachings of the Prophet and Islam, but dammit, the rest of the Islamic people better get these violent ones in line or we are rightfully headed for a clash of ideals here.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say, are you suggesting that Chimeras don't exist? That the situation depicted is impossible? Simply because of the mainstream nature of the sources used?
Indeed. A person moving about can also cause subtle changes in the ambient lighting of parts of the room. And also cause relatively notable shifting of the air. Plus possible subtle changes in smells and even temperature. A combination of some or all of these may be detectable to our finely tuned 'neural networks'.
Let the profiteering gluttons overmarket useless shit like viagra
Apart from the obvious fact that Viagra actually dramatically improves the quality of life for tens of millions of men (if you think impotence isn't a serious problem then imagine for a moment that you could never have sex at all and never really have a proper relationship with a woman as a result), Viagra was actually an "accidental discovery" while trying to find heart disease medication. The R&D money poured into it wasn't intended for "useless shit". Viagra was just a totally free 'bonus', they spent virtually zero R&D money on it specifically.
Oh, riiiight, as if you weren't extremely heavily implying a causation. Now you try to get off on a 'technicality' that you didn't explicitly state it. Whatever. We both know you were implying it, and that the purpose was to impress upon the audience a causal relationship.
Those nations that have strong copyright and patent laws have developed far beyond those that make at most a token effort
Uh, could you perhaps control for the several billion other variables defining the differences between countries before jumping to such ridiculously specious conclusions on causation?
I signed up last month and made about $16. My site has about 1000 visitors per day. It's not much but it's higher than I expected. Of course given some of the discussions on this story it remains to be seen whether or not I actually get paid out.
There are also plenty of Microsoft stories on slashdot. And plenty of Apple stories on slashdot. (Funny, that there should be a lot of stories on a *tech* news discussion site about some of the biggest and/or most interesting *tech* companies.)
Hmm .. well, I actually recently signed up for AdSense. So I'll see what happens when I hit $100. Admittedly this thread has made me a little 'nervous' now, although I realise
Either way, it would be good if AdSense had some competition. If affiliates get better returns from e.g. Amazon, they'll move over.
We don't love Google "unconditionally" - there just happens to be absolutely no real evidence that Google's business ethics are "questionable", as you put it.
i doubt there is anything i can say
Actually, you'd be surprised how easy it is to convince me, simply by using "evidence" rather than "ideology" and "hearsay". So please do go ahead and post some actual evidence that Google's business ethics are questionable. (Unless you think I'm supposed to take the word of one or two anonymous users posting on an online forum who got ripped off (or claimed to have been ripped off) 100 measly bucks by Google. I can honestly think of far worse things that corporations have done.)
Do you really think Google is intentionally scamming people at $100 a shot with false claims of click fraud? Why would they do this, have you checked their financial results? They're making billions in revenues and hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, so your measly $100 is nothing --- in order for such a scam to be financially worthwhile to them, they would literally have to be scamming millions of users $100 each. Somehow I doubt that's the case, as there would have been a huge uproar by now and the whole AdSense program would have collapsed.
Haven't you heard? Mindless and unsubstantiated Google-bashing is currently "in".
Gotta love mob mentality. It's fine and well when the mob's in your favour, but better hope they never turn on you.
Swahili is not really a "nation", it's a language. Mostly a lingua franca. With hundreds of different languages/'nations'/peoples in East Africa, they needed a common language, and Swahili is that. There are over 50,000,000 speakers but almost all of them are second language speakers - the actual number of people who speak Kiswahili as a first language are probably less than 2,000,000. (Also there are a number of different Swahili dialects and regional variations.)
I don't see how it would be feasible to write a game that is truly representative of Africa, as Africa is extremely diverse, with dozens of countries and literally thousands of different languages and ethnic groups (over 3000 languages and possibly as many as 8000 dialects). Also what about the parts of Africa that are modernised and 'first world', like many parts of South Africa ... will those be left out? Wouldn't that simply then continue to give a "skewed" stereotypical depiction of Africa as an undeveloped and simple place?
(Just an interesting side note: the name of Apple's web browser, Safari, is actually a Swahili word meaning "journey" or "travels". It itself comes from an Arabic word 'safar' for journey.)
Funnily enough I didn't use wxMozilla, as I had some problems getting that to work or I think to compile - I can't remember exactly why as it was quite long ago, but I vaguely recall it had something to do with (lack of) Unicode support at the time, and I needed to build in Unicode mode. I decided to rather use wxActiveX and wxIE and use the ActiveX Gecko wrapper that emulates the IE API, so that I would have the option of easily choosing between IE and Gecko if one or the other gave too many problems (as the app was a Windows-only app I could do this). Both IE and Gecko were basically 'equally easy' to embed using this strategy - basically just one line of code change and a recompile to switch between the two. The actual process of embedding was also quite easy. But I found both though to be quite buggy or problematic --- just in different ways. The IE component is extremely buggy indeed and I've spent probably two weeks in total now just finding workarounds for the various bugs and "annoying retarded behaviour" aspects of it (and some of the workarounds created new problems). But the Gecko component had problems too --- particularly using in-memory streams was not properly supported and I needed that. (At least I thought I needed that, but ironically I ended up not using them anyway and having to find a crappy workaround because as it turned out IE also has other (different and random) problems with in-memory streams .. *sigh*.) But at the time, on weighing the pros/cons of each I ended up choosing to go with IE. The whole 'having to have that mozilla base directory installed' was definitely a factor, that sucks.
Embedding browser components was certainly a more horrible experience than I felt it should be. (But seemingly this is not unique to Gecko. Embedding IE is one of the most painful and annoying programming experiences I've ever had.)
I don't recall having any stability problems with Gecko, or having any crashes when using it or anything like that.
P.S.: This discussion has get way far from the original post =)
Yup :)