I'm very surprised that apparently no-one has 'leaked' a Linux PC Netflix player that has been reverse-engineered from an embedded Linux platform that does support Netflix (e.g. Roku).
While I agree DRM is bad in the worst possible way, lets be pragmatic for a second:
Not including DRM in HTML5 isn't going to cause any change in Hollywood's persistent wrong-thinking about forcing DRM down everyones throats. They aren't simply going to give up on using DRM because HTML doesn't support it. Thats already the case and look what we have: a nightmare hodge-podge of multiple different platform-specific and badly written vendor-specific DRM plug-ins and other implementations all assuming you must be running Windows or Apple and all fighting to fill your memory and crash your CPU.
At least by including DRM in HTML5 we can eliminate the need to install all the buggy bloatware like Adobe flash etc. because the DRM implementation will be right in the browser.
Apart from a more lightweight system, it should also be more stable and also consistent across multiple platforms, thus forever putting an end to artificial platform-specific barriers such as those preventing Netflix on Linux.
That in turn would also mean one less artificial monopolistic advantage Microsoft have, so one less reason to be buying or running Windows, and one more reason to migrate to Linux instead, which I consider can only be a good thing.
No you're putting words in my mouth. I'm claiming that nature produced us as something natural however we later made ourselves unnatural by circumventing evolution. Its a simple concept why are you continuing to struggle with understanding it?
>> In my opinion, an engineered reef is better than a dead one
Perhaps but as you correctly identified, there are serious risks. History has proven time and again that whenever humans mess with a natural environment (even with the best intentions) we often if not usually end up making a worse mess.
That is only one reason why I'd MUCH rather prevent further destruction directly rather than adopt the bizarrely popular psuedo-pragmatic approach that its OK to continue destruction in the name of 'progress' (translation: greed) then just make some ill-conceived effort to band-aid over the collateral damage later. For example how can you later fix the extinction of a species?.
Nope, I'm claiming that at some earlier point man may have had legitimate claim to being considered natural but we have changed/developed/controlled our species and its environment far beyond that point. Basically, we as a species have consciously chosen a path that irrevocably removes ourselves from ever being classified as ''natural' by explicitly taking control of most aspects of our progenisis, surivival and death away from mother nature, and instead making them our own responsibility.
To my knowledge no other species is even capable of the thought processes necessary to have done anything even remotely similar.
>> I am having a difficult time understanding whether you are part of the intelligent design or God created it mindset or have some twisted sense of evolution.
None of the above, and that's irrelevant to the argument anyway.
>> You say humans are not naturally produced but you aren't offering any evidence that new humans are being produced other than via genetic combination after sexual pairing (or laboratory reproductions thereof).
Part of natural production is evolution, and an important part of that is natural selection. We have nearly eliminated natural selection in humans by a process that began centuries ago, eliminating all our predators, significantly minimizing most other natural risks to ourselves and artifically controlling fertility, and making food (at least in the 1st world) artificially cheap and abundant. Consequently (at least 1st world) humanity is no longer developing under the same rules as every other living organism (i.e. mother nature) so therefore we are no longer 'natural'. Actually by getting rid of natural selection, and therefore allowing bad genes to be artifically succesful in proflagation, many would argue humanity as a species is no longer physically evolving, rather we are devolving as a direct result. So In short, no we aren't natural and haven't been for a long time.
>> how do I make sure my children get my iTunes, and amazon movies?
Actually I don't believe they legally can. My understanding is that as far as the law goes you dont technically own that stuff anyway and certainly cant legally transfer copies of it, you just bought a non-transferrable licence to play it thats all.
Apple and Amazon can arbitrarily stop providing access to any streamed media anytime they feel like it, even if you bought a licence to play it, so its still not technically yours. Read the licence agreement.
Trust me there's FAR more to it than that. Not only would your solution have passengers throwing up, spilling drinks etc, but it would fly the aircraft into mountains, the ground, other aircraft, and also be clueless about air spaces, air law, weather, speed, flight phases, controlled ascent, descent, merging and spacing, optimal flight paths for fuel saving and many other real-world issues that actual autopilots deal with.
You have to be joking. Speech recognition is FAR from a solved problem. Our current systems suck ass compared to the ability of a human to understand speech. OK you want more of a challenge? try natural language processing or software that can do cognitive language reasoning.
>> When your life is measured in decades, I'm afraid that short term is the only way to go if you want to accomplish anything at all.
Not true at all. There are many individuals who have gone from 0 to changing the world in less than 1 decade. Also you're confusing cause and effect. Throwing somethnig together in a quick and hacky way is a great way to ensure it really wont be around for long.
Sounds to me this cycle he describes is mostly because he's yet another developer who only does web-based stuff to get rich quick and thinks the minimal requirement to run any software includes a browser and a backend server. The internet is a short-term fickle place so isn't going to be a good environment for building something satisfying.
Believe it or not there are still jobs developing software that has nothing to do with the internet. These usually are more intrinsically deep and longer-term tasks so often more deeply satisfying. I mean find a job developing a new way to do a speech recognition engine or an autopilot or something. I find that type of work much more personally meaningful than just continually trying to develop the next faddy website in the naive pursuit of getting rich quick.
DirectX is not going away, Microsoft are just moving it into Windows and no longer supplying updates separately. This is just a dirty marketing strategy to force gamers and other users to now have to buy/downgrade to the latest Windows OS (which to many of the more consumer-minded, translates into buying a whole new PC) if they want the latest graphics API.
I guess this really just translates into yet another reason/opportunity for Linux to take over the PC gaming market from Windows.
You seem to be incorrectly crediting Microsoft for the games available for their platform, when that is a decision made by the games developers.
>> and the OS is pretty damn user friendly compared to linux.
Not in my opinion. Its usually damned hard to make Windows behave and do exactly what I ask, both because it keeps trying to second-guess and overrule what I'm telling it to do, and also because the user-interface completely hides the systems internals. In the rare cases where it doesn't, it just uses at best vague, wooly or otherwise non-standard terminology. e.g. "A system error has occurred".
Its nearly always far more trivial to do stuff with Linux. IMHO Windows is (still) a toy OS by comparison to Linux.
I think you totally missed his point. He's not even slightly arguing that Linux isn't ubiquitous. He's saying that the only remaining legitimate excuse to have a Windows partition at all is gaming.
A point I for one very much agree with. I can't wait for the day when its the norm for premium games to be available as native Linux versions.
Also.. as for running in a brower, its another layer of abstraction that can be avoided by running a local app.
Compared to running a native binary, running through a browser can't help but to cost something extra in terms of computer resources, so ultimately cant help but to impact gaming performance at some level.
The inconvenience of having to go through a browser (a window in a window, browser toolbar etc ) is also enough to put me off.
Slashdot Mirror
One big potential problem is that in the US at least, sci-fi now means horror, ghost hunting, dungeons and dragons and stupid reality shows.
So whats stopping someone doing that under windows? (other than a more painful API).
I'm very surprised that apparently no-one has 'leaked' a Linux PC Netflix player that has been reverse-engineered from an embedded Linux platform that does support Netflix (e.g. Roku).
While I agree DRM is bad in the worst possible way, lets be pragmatic for a second:
Not including DRM in HTML5 isn't going to cause any change in Hollywood's persistent wrong-thinking about forcing DRM down everyones throats. They aren't simply going to give up on using DRM because HTML doesn't support it. Thats already the case and look what we have: a nightmare hodge-podge of multiple different platform-specific and badly written vendor-specific DRM plug-ins and other implementations all assuming you must be running Windows or Apple and all fighting to fill your memory and crash your CPU.
At least by including DRM in HTML5 we can eliminate the need to install all the buggy bloatware like Adobe flash etc. because the DRM implementation will be right in the browser.
Apart from a more lightweight system, it should also be more stable and also consistent across multiple platforms, thus forever putting an end to artificial platform-specific barriers such as those preventing Netflix on Linux.
That in turn would also mean one less artificial monopolistic advantage Microsoft have, so one less reason to be buying or running Windows, and one more reason to migrate to Linux instead, which I consider can only be a good thing.
>> many expecting Microsoft's upcoming end-of-support for XP to cause a security nightmare of unsupported Windows devices in the wild,
Microsoft no longer supporting XP will hardly change anything. Their support is most usually crap and behind the curve anyway.
No you're putting words in my mouth.
I'm claiming that nature produced us as something natural however we later made ourselves unnatural by circumventing evolution. Its a simple concept why are you continuing to struggle with understanding it?
>> In my opinion, an engineered reef is better than a dead one
Perhaps but as you correctly identified, there are serious risks. History has proven time and again that whenever humans mess with a natural environment (even with the best intentions) we often if not usually end up making a worse mess.
That is only one reason why I'd MUCH rather prevent further destruction directly rather than adopt the bizarrely popular psuedo-pragmatic approach that its OK to continue destruction in the name of 'progress' (translation: greed) then just make some ill-conceived effort to band-aid over the collateral damage later. For example how can you later fix the extinction of a species?.
Nope, I'm claiming that at some earlier point man may have had legitimate claim to being considered natural but we have changed/developed/controlled our species and its environment far beyond that point. Basically, we as a species have consciously chosen a path that irrevocably removes ourselves from ever being classified as ''natural' by explicitly taking control of most aspects of our progenisis, surivival and death away from mother nature, and instead making them our own responsibility.
To my knowledge no other species is even capable of the thought processes necessary to have done anything even remotely similar.
>> The goal of human existence as a whole should not be to leave no trace, but to improve the world and universe.
You speak as if this is self-evident but really the basis of your argument is just your own opinion.
>> I am having a difficult time understanding whether you are part of the intelligent design or God created it mindset or have some twisted sense of evolution.
None of the above, and that's irrelevant to the argument anyway.
>> You say humans are not naturally produced but you aren't offering any evidence that new humans are being produced other than via genetic combination after sexual pairing (or laboratory reproductions thereof).
Part of natural production is evolution, and an important part of that is natural selection. We have nearly eliminated natural selection in humans by a process that began centuries ago, eliminating all our predators, significantly minimizing most other natural risks to ourselves and artifically controlling fertility, and making food (at least in the 1st world) artificially cheap and abundant. Consequently (at least 1st world) humanity is no longer developing under the same rules as every other living organism (i.e. mother nature) so therefore we are no longer 'natural'. Actually by getting rid of natural selection, and therefore allowing bad genes to be artifically succesful in proflagation, many would argue humanity as a species is no longer physically evolving, rather we are devolving as a direct result. So In short, no we aren't natural and haven't been for a long time.
No.
a) Humans are not naturally produced. We've got rid of natual selection centuries ago.
b) What we're doing to the environment is distinctly unnatural.
Finding/engineering a replacement is not even close to the same as protecting what nature put there, so isn't a solution.
I agree with everything you wrote except for the "time-limited" part.
Diabetic rats everywhere are now rushing for kidney transplants.
>> how do I make sure my children get my iTunes, and amazon movies?
Actually I don't believe they legally can. My understanding is that as far as the law goes you dont technically own that stuff anyway and certainly cant legally transfer copies of it, you just bought a non-transferrable licence to play it thats all.
Apple and Amazon can arbitrarily stop providing access to any streamed media anytime they feel like it, even if you bought a licence to play it, so its still not technically yours. Read the licence agreement.
Trust me there's FAR more to it than that. Not only would your solution have passengers throwing up, spilling drinks etc, but it would fly the aircraft into mountains, the ground, other aircraft, and also be clueless about air spaces, air law, weather, speed, flight phases, controlled ascent, descent, merging and spacing, optimal flight paths for fuel saving and many other real-world issues that actual autopilots deal with.
You have to be joking. Speech recognition is FAR from a solved problem. Our current systems suck ass compared to the ability of a human to understand speech. OK you want more of a challenge? try natural language processing or software that can do cognitive language reasoning.
>> When your life is measured in decades, I'm afraid that short term is the only way to go if you want to accomplish anything at all.
Not true at all. There are many individuals who have gone from 0 to changing the world in less than 1 decade. Also you're confusing cause and effect. Throwing somethnig together in a quick and hacky way is a great way to ensure it really wont be around for long.
Sounds to me this cycle he describes is mostly because he's yet another developer who only does web-based stuff to get rich quick and thinks the minimal requirement to run any software includes a browser and a backend server. The internet is a short-term fickle place so isn't going to be a good environment for building something satisfying.
Believe it or not there are still jobs developing software that has nothing to do with the internet. These usually are more intrinsically deep and longer-term tasks so often more deeply satisfying. I mean find a job developing a new way to do a speech recognition engine or an autopilot or something. I find that type of work much more personally meaningful than just continually trying to develop the next faddy website in the naive pursuit of getting rich quick.
DirectX is not going away, Microsoft are just moving it into Windows and no longer supplying updates separately. This is just a dirty marketing strategy to force gamers and other users to now have to buy/downgrade to the latest Windows OS (which to many of the more consumer-minded, translates into buying a whole new PC) if they want the latest graphics API.
I guess this really just translates into yet another reason/opportunity for Linux to take over the PC gaming market from Windows.
>> Sounds like a sensible response from the judge
Nope. He could and should have just thrown out all claims from both sides.
>> Windows on the other hand offers everything
You seem to be incorrectly crediting Microsoft for the games available for their platform, when that is a decision made by the games developers.
>> and the OS is pretty damn user friendly compared to linux.
Not in my opinion. Its usually damned hard to make Windows behave and do exactly what I ask, both because it keeps trying to second-guess and overrule what I'm telling it to do, and also because the user-interface completely hides the systems internals. In the rare cases where it doesn't, it just uses at best vague, wooly or otherwise non-standard terminology. e.g. "A system error has occurred".
Its nearly always far more trivial to do stuff with Linux. IMHO Windows is (still) a toy OS by comparison to Linux.
Please ignore my earlier response. my browser seemed to have f*'d up making me think you were responding to another thread.
I think you totally missed his point.
He's not even slightly arguing that Linux isn't ubiquitous.
He's saying that the only remaining legitimate excuse to have a Windows partition at all is gaming.
A point I for one very much agree with.
I can't wait for the day when its the norm for premium games to be available as native Linux versions.
Also.. as for running in a brower, its another layer of abstraction that can be avoided by running a local app.
Compared to running a native binary, running through a browser can't help but to cost something extra in terms of computer resources, so ultimately cant help but to impact gaming performance at some level.
The inconvenience of having to go through a browser (a window in a window, browser toolbar etc ) is also enough to put me off.
wow you being a dick was totally uncalled for.