You're mixing copyright with patent law. Derived work is a copyright term. Patents prohibits you from implementing an idea (in software, possibly only in a certain way).
Another commenter remarked on what might be the issue here. And that is the exact terms of the patent licenses used by MPEG-LA. Being a contract agreement, it might stipulate any terms really. And it seems they are frequently limited not just to specific patents, but also to detailed purposes (i.e. decode or encode H264.1 video streams, broadcast said streams, etc).
So, my bad for not realizing the detailed scope of the patent licensed used here. The situation might indeed be similar to the Oracle case, although those patent licenses are specific in a very different way.
It's the same patents as far as MPEG LA is concerned. Google already licenses these (via YouTube at least), so can't be sued over that it seems. I find it hard to believe that they'd sue over statements Google has made regarding WebM.
Opera and Mozilla on the other hand, have no license. And now distribute WebM codecs. Hence a better target.
The natural party to sue would be Mozilla or Opera here, not Google I think. Google already pay the appropriate license fees for YouTube, so there seems to be very little of a legal case there.
As long as developers keep rewriting apps from scratch every 2-3 years, they'll never become truly stable or usable. And they won't progress much beyond tech demos or the basic feature checklists.
When will we see true progress in integration, usability or features?
Worth noting is that Apple has invested rather heavily in technology to allow programmer use of the GPU in MacOS X. And were recently rumored to have met with high ranking persons from AMD. Seems only logical that this type of chip could find its way into some of the Apple gear.
Question is of course if it would be powerefficient enough for laptops, where space is an issue...
In theory 'nice' or 'renice' would do the right thing. But in most OS:es it seems to only affect the CPU scheduling. The IO scheduling is often left unmodified, meaning that a single IO-bound application may effectively block the harddrive from access by other applications.
These days, the relatively lower memory and IO speeds are often the real performance bottlenecks for ordinary applications. So improved IO scheduling might do more than multiple cores for the perceived performance of a specific system or workload.
Since everyone is always referring to BeOS in these types of discussions, I guess the CPU and IO scheduling must have been one of the things that they got right.
Hmm... Didn't Transmeta go with VLIW too? Maybe Intel should just buy them and implement their on-the-fly instruction translation software (code morphing) for the Itanium?
But it's probably too late to save it now, anyway...
Re:No moral values ever stood a thousand years
on
Colin Powell Resigns
·
· Score: 1
You basically don't know what you are talking about. First you say "God's laws" (whatever that is) are "eternal and unchanging". Then a couple of posts down you start interpreting, bending and excusing the very same "laws". Oh the joy of revisionism!
No moral values ever stood a thousand years
on
Colin Powell Resigns
·
· Score: 1
It is a common human error to believe ones current moral or political views to be "eternal" or "unchanging". It can easily be shown that this is not the case. There are no non-trivial "moral values that have served civilization for thousands of years". That is a delusion.
What you end up with are pointless statements like "killing is bad (in most cases)". Noone but/. readers argue about that. And such basic moral values don't really guide on issues of a modern society, now do they?
Exactly! Flash works fine for ads and some special case stuff, but not really for normal webapps. It is sooo 2000 to build a web site with Flash...
Just to add to the points, I tried their "Windows" user interface demo. Looks like Win2k windows inside the browser... Double-click and open a dialog... Now drag it around and try to move it outside of the browser window...
Right. It will clip to the Flash plugin boundaries inside the browser. So it isn't really a window at all, just some silly window-looking graphics. Stupid idea!
Puh... It sure gets tiresome reading all these I-love-nuclear-power posts in this discussion. Seems lots of people are such technophilias that they completely ignore the issues at hand:
So, this type of reactor address #2 above. Big deal. Unless you're living in Russia, Ukraine or so, the main issues are normally #1 and #3.
Then there are all these deus ex machina arguments that seem to pop up all the time - transmutation, sending stuff to space, etc. All fine sci-fi suggestions, but mostly completely unviable for economical, environmental or political reasons. Not to mention that most suggestions have not been tested or are not yet practical on a large scale.
So the myth of cheap nuclear energy still prevails.
Ok, maybe my criticism sounded a bit harsh. Didn't mean to say that I hate these apps, rather that I see some annoying issues with them. I'll keep using them until something better comes along (and it looks like it will).
What baffles me is that the developers don't seem to realize that they are having serious UI issues. But then again, maybe they like the idea of being special and extraordinary (in whatever way). Makes people spend more time with their app (although some of it might be cursing).
For a music player with a good GUI and lots of functionality XMMS...
Good GUI? What do you mean? You can't be serious...
1. Very small controls, some which are hardly possible to see or click. Take the small "O A I D V":s for instance. And don't say that the "DoubleSize" option is anything but a hack...
2. How about keyboard navigation?
3. Where are the darned settings? There is no menu bar and it is hard to guess which of the "O A I D V" does what. (Yeah, the window title is clickable, but how are you supposed to know that?)
4. No tool-tips when hoovering with the mouse.
5. Everything is clickable, although nothing appears to be. A mistake of a millimeter cause whatever undesired effect. (And how do you figure out how to undo that?)
6. Window decorations are not consistent with the rest of the world. Same thing with all other widgets.
Etc, etc. I could go on and on about such things. Yes, you can learn it and live with it, but should you have to? Some people might just want to listen their mp3:s or ogg:s and be done with it. I just don't understand why apps such as XMMS, WinAmp, xine, mplayer, etc can't provide a sensible default UI (skin or whatever) that looks and works like other applications.
And please, tell me again what skins are good for...
The real problem is not that the legal system is slow, but rather that it does not protect the market from inproper manipulation. SCO is forbidden to make these kind of ridiculous claims in Germany, as they have a law system that forbids lying, making statements about competitors without proof, and similar. The way SCO is currently behaving, it is clear that the corresponding U.S. regulations are not working satisfactory.
What is really needed is a change in U.S. trade law to make it illegal to claim things such as these without also presenting proof.
It is streching things quite far to name pre-1990 Scandinavia and pre-Thatcher Britain "democratic socialism". Some industries have indeed been state monopolies (as in most European countries), but the vast majority have always been in private hands. Indeed, these societies had (and still have) a free market, concentration of ownership and wealth to a few, and other typical traits of normal capitalism.
Indeed, some people have referred to the former "socialist" and "communist" countries with the term "state capitalism", as that is closer to what it was in practice. Compare to a war economy.
By the way, the bell tolls. It tolls ominously for Sun Microsystems.
Except for the fact that Sun isn't profiting much from workstations anymore. The real money is in the servers. That's where they face a competitive threat (and it ain't from Apple).
Re:I Have To Agree With Some Points Made Here
on
Settling SCOres
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
2) He says some of the comments are identical but the code next to them ISN'T. This makes no sense unless SCO manipulated the comments.
Well it actually makes sense if the code has a common ancestor. Remember that he also said that the functions had the same name and performed the same task.
It is then to be expected that the Linux code gets modified (scrutinized) over time, whereas the SCO code would either stay more close to the original or get modified in other ways. Either way, most programmers wouldn't change the old comments out of courtesy (if they are funny) or lack of interest.
Usually these slave-labour countries are run by a military dictatorship, much like the one the multinational corporations would like to have everywhere.
I thought India was the worlds biggest democracy (population-wise).
Look at the number of people running "tweaked" Linux kernels, instead of the "vanilla" version from Linus. The same thing applies to Wine.
People have special needs, and it is a good thing that software can be adapted for that. Now, as Wine is a compability layer, it is even more sensible than most other software to special needs in different environments. So don't expect the specialized variations to go away anytime soon.
Also, it is not necessarily a bad thing that there are many variations out there. As long as the improvements all trickle back to the common source everyone will reap the benefits eventually. (Now, older versions of Wine are not LGPL, but whatever.)
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You're mixing copyright with patent law. Derived work is a copyright term. Patents prohibits you from implementing an idea (in software, possibly only in a certain way).
Another commenter remarked on what might be the issue here. And that is the exact terms of the patent licenses used by MPEG-LA. Being a contract agreement, it might stipulate any terms really. And it seems they are frequently limited not just to specific patents, but also to detailed purposes (i.e. decode or encode H264.1 video streams, broadcast said streams, etc).
So, my bad for not realizing the detailed scope of the patent licensed used here. The situation might indeed be similar to the Oracle case, although those patent licenses are specific in a very different way.
It's the same patents as far as MPEG LA is concerned. Google already licenses these (via YouTube at least), so can't be sued over that it seems. I find it hard to believe that they'd sue over statements Google has made regarding WebM.
Opera and Mozilla on the other hand, have no license. And now distribute WebM codecs. Hence a better target.
The natural party to sue would be Mozilla or Opera here, not Google I think. Google already pay the appropriate license fees for YouTube, so there seems to be very little of a legal case there.
As long as developers keep rewriting apps from scratch every 2-3 years, they'll never become truly stable or usable. And they won't progress much beyond tech demos or the basic feature checklists.
When will we see true progress in integration, usability or features?
Worth noting is that Apple has invested rather heavily in technology to allow programmer use of the GPU in MacOS X. And were recently rumored to have met with high ranking persons from AMD. Seems only logical that this type of chip could find its way into some of the Apple gear.
Question is of course if it would be powerefficient enough for laptops, where space is an issue...
In theory 'nice' or 'renice' would do the right thing. But in most OS:es it seems to only affect the CPU scheduling. The IO scheduling is often left unmodified, meaning that a single IO-bound application may effectively block the harddrive from access by other applications.
These days, the relatively lower memory and IO speeds are often the real performance bottlenecks for ordinary applications. So improved IO scheduling might do more than multiple cores for the perceived performance of a specific system or workload.
Since everyone is always referring to BeOS in these types of discussions, I guess the CPU and IO scheduling must have been one of the things that they got right.
Isn't NeoOffice written in Cocoa/Java? Quite an important application for Mac OS X for some...
Hmm... Didn't Transmeta go with VLIW too? Maybe Intel should just buy them and implement their on-the-fly instruction translation software (code morphing) for the Itanium?
But it's probably too late to save it now, anyway...
You basically don't know what you are talking about. First you say "God's laws" (whatever that is) are "eternal and unchanging". Then a couple of posts down you start interpreting, bending and excusing the very same "laws". Oh the joy of revisionism!
It is a common human error to believe ones current moral or political views to be "eternal" or "unchanging". It can easily be shown that this is not the case. There are no non-trivial "moral values that have served civilization for thousands of years". That is a delusion.
/. readers argue about that. And such basic moral values don't really guide on issues of a modern society, now do they?
What you end up with are pointless statements like "killing is bad (in most cases)". Noone but
Exactly! Flash works fine for ads and some special case stuff, but not really for normal webapps. It is sooo 2000 to build a web site with Flash...
Just to add to the points, I tried their "Windows" user interface demo. Looks like Win2k windows inside the browser... Double-click and open a dialog... Now drag it around and try to move it outside of the browser window...
Right. It will clip to the Flash plugin boundaries inside the browser. So it isn't really a window at all, just some silly window-looking graphics. Stupid idea!
Puh... It sure gets tiresome reading all these I-love-nuclear-power posts in this discussion. Seems lots of people are such technophilias that they completely ignore the issues at hand:
1. Nuclear fuel extraction
2. Nuclear power plant running
3. Nuclear waste storing/processing/whatever
So, this type of reactor address #2 above. Big deal. Unless you're living in Russia, Ukraine or so, the main issues are normally #1 and #3.
Then there are all these deus ex machina arguments that seem to pop up all the time - transmutation, sending stuff to space, etc. All fine sci-fi suggestions, but mostly completely unviable for economical, environmental or political reasons. Not to mention that most suggestions have not been tested or are not yet practical on a large scale.
So the myth of cheap nuclear energy still prevails.
This I agree with, in fact it should be pointed out that the compiler is available now as a beta on IBM's web site.
Got a link?
<paranoia>I'm wondering if this means that Apple will stop working on improving the gcc compiler...</paranoia>
Who does Microsoft want SCO to sue today?
Whoever they are, they'll be next...
Interesting you should mention GStreamer... It's just a multimedia framework, but there are already some interesting apps using it.
Funny thing is, one of them seems to be JuK... But it looks like Rythmbox is more for me (as I'm kind of into Gnome).
Ok, maybe my criticism sounded a bit harsh. Didn't mean to say that I hate these apps, rather that I see some annoying issues with them. I'll keep using them until something better comes along (and it looks like it will).
What baffles me is that the developers don't seem to realize that they are having serious UI issues. But then again, maybe they like the idea of being special and extraordinary (in whatever way). Makes people spend more time with their app (although some of it might be cursing).
Many thanks for the splay tip!
For a music player with a good GUI and lots of functionality XMMS...
Good GUI? What do you mean? You can't be serious...
1. Very small controls, some which are hardly possible to see or click. Take the small "O A I D V":s for instance. And don't say that the "DoubleSize" option is anything but a hack...
2. How about keyboard navigation?
3. Where are the darned settings? There is no menu bar and it is hard to guess which of the "O A I D V" does what. (Yeah, the window title is clickable, but how are you supposed to know that?)
4. No tool-tips when hoovering with the mouse.
5. Everything is clickable, although nothing appears to be. A mistake of a millimeter cause whatever undesired effect. (And how do you figure out how to undo that?)
6. Window decorations are not consistent with the rest of the world. Same thing with all other widgets.
Etc, etc. I could go on and on about such things. Yes, you can learn it and live with it, but should you have to? Some people might just want to listen their mp3:s or ogg:s and be done with it. I just don't understand why apps such as XMMS, WinAmp, xine, mplayer, etc can't provide a sensible default UI (skin or whatever) that looks and works like other applications.
And please, tell me again what skins are good for...
The real problem is not that the legal system is slow, but rather that it does not protect the market from inproper manipulation. SCO is forbidden to make these kind of ridiculous claims in Germany, as they have a law system that forbids lying, making statements about competitors without proof, and similar. The way SCO is currently behaving, it is clear that the corresponding U.S. regulations are not working satisfactory.
What is really needed is a change in U.S. trade law to make it illegal to claim things such as these without also presenting proof.
It is streching things quite far to name pre-1990 Scandinavia and pre-Thatcher Britain "democratic socialism". Some industries have indeed been state monopolies (as in most European countries), but the vast majority have always been in private hands. Indeed, these societies had (and still have) a free market, concentration of ownership and wealth to a few, and other typical traits of normal capitalism.
Indeed, some people have referred to the former "socialist" and "communist" countries with the term "state capitalism", as that is closer to what it was in practice. Compare to a war economy.
Well it actually makes sense if the code has a common ancestor. Remember that he also said that the functions had the same name and performed the same task.
It is then to be expected that the Linux code gets modified (scrutinized) over time, whereas the SCO code would either stay more close to the original or get modified in other ways. Either way, most programmers wouldn't change the old comments out of courtesy (if they are funny) or lack of interest.
Continuing development of IE? Well, sort of. Every four or five years there will be a new release...
Look at the number of people running "tweaked" Linux kernels, instead of the "vanilla" version from Linus. The same thing applies to Wine.
People have special needs, and it is a good thing that software can be adapted for that. Now, as Wine is a compability layer, it is even more sensible than most other software to special needs in different environments. So don't expect the specialized variations to go away anytime soon.
Also, it is not necessarily a bad thing that there are many variations out there. As long as the improvements all trickle back to the common source everyone will reap the benefits eventually. (Now, older versions of Wine are not LGPL, but whatever.)