to get all this free publicity? The ffmpeg and xvid people do all the hard codec work and the mplayer people support every codec, container format and play even severely broken files, setting new records for tweakability to get it to excel even in really bad circumstances (it can play DVD in real-time on my EPIA-M 9000, using software AC-3 with stereo downmix; go ahead and read all the reviews that say it can't be done even under Windows where they have hardware MPEG-2 acceleration and use an external S/PDIF decoder).
xine is always lagging behind. Their main "innovation" is that unintuitive and ugly GUI. WTF were they thinking when they created a GUI that is unusable without all those tool-tips?
I have no idea whom the xine people had to bribe to get all this slashdot exposure, because it sure as hell didn't earn it on technical merit.
I can only tell you why I personally am not interested in WebDAV: too much hype.
Basically, if a technology did not catch my interest on technical grounds before people like Microsoft and Macromedia implement and push it, I'm not interested. That is my personal self protection mechanism that keeps all the bullshit away that is not driven by the market but by the PR people.
About WebDAV: I have no problem editing and managing my web pages without WebDAV. Frankly, I don't see its benefit. With LDAP you can do stuff that you can't do without it. Same with FTP and WWW. I consider DELETE part of HTTP. If they invent a new standard for it to be able to create a brand on the market place, it already feels too fishy for me.
But then, I also boycott the "design patterns" books because I consider that stuff common sense. No need to blow it up into a "paradigm". In general, the more big words and hot air there is, the less like I as a technical person am to even look at it.
BTW: I implemented HTTP upload and delete a few years ago. I believe it was not called WebDAV then. I don't see why it should be now.
...for a standard body that is so obviously full of shit, you can hardly bear the pain when reading their web page: www.omg.org/mda/. Please read this and then try to state coherently what these people are doing.
Here are my favourite quotes:
The MDA defines an approach to IT system specification that separates the specification of system functionality from the specification of the implementation of that functionality on a specific technology platform.
WTF?! It's like Homer Simpson on acid!;) Here's another one:
To this end, the MDA defines an architecture for models that provides a set of guidelines for structuring specifications expressed as models.
These guys are absolutely hilarious! I sure hope it's actually a Monty Python type thing going on there, or else I feel really pityful for them. Just imagine what their standard documents will look like if they can't even state what they are doing on their web page coherently!
Hehe, "their level of technical sophistication", very nice! It's syntactically and semantically ambiguous whether "their" means the standards or the people, yet both would be correct;)
The main reason standards are not or only poorly supported are:
the standard is not freely available (MPEG, all IEEE and ISO standards)
the standard encompasses every other standard under the sun, and nobody can possibly support it all without licensing all the crap from everyone (this is actually quite typical these days. 100 companies come together and define all their combined "intellectual property" as an "industry standard" and thus force everyone else to license their crap from them. This is what happened to MPEG-4, and to an even greater extent, MHP (set top box standard, includes DVD, MPEG-2, Java, and much more))
the standard sucks because it leaves ambiguities or simply assumes a lot of stuff that is not stated clearly. This is most often a problem of incompetence, because almost nobody is good in writing standards. You have either technical people who know what they are talking about but assume too much to write a good standard, or you have the technical writers who don't assume anything but don't understand what they are writing and thus produce absolutely unusable documents. This is an increasingly bad trend in RFCs, unfortunately.
The standard is bad because it was written by an utter moron. This happens if marketing companies are trying to participate in a standards process because they think it will give them more credibility. The results are desastrous.
Almost nobody is trying to implement standards badly. But some standards are so bad that you can't implement them without getting a brain tumor. Just have a look at tmpfile() in POSIX, for example, whose semantics make it impossible to use it without creating a race condition. Or look at DVD, which references a hidden trade secret called CSS, which is not part of the standard, but you can't be standard compliant without CSS, which forces you to sign sinister contracts with the content industry cabal.
Reiser has already lost countless users for his software because he started polluting the kernel messages with "a message from his sponsors".
He should be more concerned with the quality of his software, not with his ego problems. Personally, I find this disgusting. If someone wants to know who wrote the software, he can read the README or ask google.
I don't even have the slightest reference in my free software source code that point back to me, I don't even use huge copyright comments in my software like the GNU project generally does, and yet people have offered me jobs and asked me about my software many times. In general, the people who want to know who wrote the software, do.
Those who try to rub it in their face all the time will cheapen free software for everyone. It's like the "I'm so important!1!!" freeware movement from MS-DOS, and I barely remember a single author from all the software that rubbed their copyright messages it in my face all the time. In contrast, I even learned to know several free software authors personally!
Hans, people are losing data with your file system. I know because I did. Twice. Then I looked at your fsck code and it stunk to the high heavens. You should be concerned with that, not with putting your name in the face of more people. And what would be the next step? To insert a few seconds delay so people have a chance to see your messages better? Puleeze!
Man, it doesn't matter whether it's the Itanic or Hammer that is public. If it's public, you won't be alone on it, which will make proper benchmarking impossible.
Yeah, right, like you log in to a public free Itanic server to run some benchmark and expect to be a) the only user of that machine and b) that nobody logs in and skews your numbers while the benchmark runs.
Besides, Itanic is a horrible performer in day to day tasks. I compiled my libc project on a 900 MHz Itanic II and it was outperformed by a factor of four by my 900 MHz Pentium 2 notebook.
I'm talking about the compilation speed here. Transcoding MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 is also a lot slower, a German university group did some Itanic assembly optimizations to learn about the architecture, and their code was still much slower than an Athlon XP+ 2000.
In short: forget about Itanic. The architecture is doomed.
They chose AAC because it's already in QuickTime
on
AAC vs. OGG vs. MP3
·
· Score: 4, Informative
And it's more efficient than MP3.
Their encoder is not particularly good, and AAC is covered by a ton of patents, so there probably are other reasons why they chose it.
For anyone else but Apple I see no reason to use AAC when you can have Ogg Vorbis.
PS: Shameless plug: I wrote a vorbis patch to add SSE support for enhanced encoder and decoder speed. It also contains some 3dnow! optimization for you K6 users, decoder only.
The major innovation that sets the Internet apart from other networks is that it is a peer to peer network! Every IP is equally important, and everyone is client and server.
NAT and proxy-only access are already threatening that. Don't give up the non-centralized nature advantage of IP or the future looks bleak!
Sending email through my ISPs relay has several important disadvantages. First and foremost, I cannot see whether the mail was already delivered to the recipient's SMTP server or whether it still is rotting in my ISP's queue. Also, my ISP might have a disk crash and lose my mail in his queue. This danger is completely eliminated if I send my emails directly. And why wouldn't I? It is faster and my ISP has less cost to burden and consequently less money to charge me.
In the grand tradition of Slashdot, also consider the "free speech" aspects of this;-)
In fact, the Camp is one of the way in which they try to get in enough money to finance their activities. So please attend and consider donating as well if you liked it.
Spam sucks, targeted marketing about things I'M interested in is welcome
Speak for yourself. I am not interested in any ads. If I want information about a product, I will ask for it directly. I do not buy from companies that send me ads, however "targeted" they may be.
What kind of life is that where you don't want ideals, morals and ethics to get in the way of your goals?
Luckily, you are completely irrational and also completely removed from reality. People want to make a lot of money, yet very few people won't get ideals, morals and ethics in their way and proceed to sell crack cocain or child pornography.
Goals are what keeps us running. They are an end, not the means to an end. Those have to be chosen in the context of moral, ethics and ideals. If you can't reach your goal under these constraints, your goal was bad.
I personally think Linux is wrong. You can't just put your head in the sand and hope nothing will happen. The least you have to do is be outspoken, and he does not do that enough. There are millions of people who would love to tell the world about the dangers of DRM and other mostly evil technologies. Linus is one of the very few people who also has the leverage, whose word counts enough to be heard. I find it repulsive that he does not use his power to promote his morals and ethics.
If he does not have any morals and ideals, I can live with that. In that case I would feel sorry for him. But having the ideals and not doing something to move the world closer to one's ideals, I find that unexcusable.
Actually, there is a great reason not to open source drivers: the fact that you can't write a graphics driver today without infringing on a top of phony US patents.
Both Nvidia and Ati can't open source their drivers because they would open themselves up to countless frivolous lawsuits. Heck, even trivial stuff like drawing a b&w mouse cursor by XORing is patented! Do you have any idea how much of the rest of obvious ideas relevant to graphics programming are patented?
As long as the preposterous US patent system is not abolished, I see no way for them to open source their drivers.
Slashdot Mirror
to get all this free publicity? The ffmpeg and xvid people do all the hard codec work and the mplayer people support every codec, container format and play even severely broken files, setting new records for tweakability to get it to excel even in really bad circumstances (it can play DVD in real-time on my EPIA-M 9000, using software AC-3 with stereo downmix; go ahead and read all the reviews that say it can't be done even under Windows where they have hardware MPEG-2 acceleration and use an external S/PDIF decoder).
xine is always lagging behind. Their main "innovation" is that unintuitive and ugly GUI. WTF were they thinking when they created a GUI that is unusable without all those tool-tips?
I have no idea whom the xine people had to bribe to get all this slashdot exposure, because it sure as hell didn't earn it on technical merit.
I think it rather proves that they are really bad at generating random numbers.
I can only tell you why I personally am not interested in WebDAV: too much hype.
Basically, if a technology did not catch my interest on technical grounds before people like Microsoft and Macromedia implement and push it, I'm not interested. That is my personal self protection mechanism that keeps all the bullshit away that is not driven by the market but by the PR people.
About WebDAV: I have no problem editing and managing my web pages without WebDAV. Frankly, I don't see its benefit. With LDAP you can do stuff that you can't do without it. Same with FTP and WWW. I consider DELETE part of HTTP. If they invent a new standard for it to be able to create a brand on the market place, it already feels too fishy for me.
But then, I also boycott the "design patterns" books because I consider that stuff common sense. No need to blow it up into a "paradigm". In general, the more big words and hot air there is, the less like I as a technical person am to even look at it.
BTW: I implemented HTTP upload and delete a few years ago. I believe it was not called WebDAV then. I don't see why it should be now.
Here are my favourite quotes:
WTF?! It's like Homer Simpson on acid!
These guys are absolutely hilarious! I sure hope it's actually a Monty Python type thing going on there, or else I feel really pityful for them. Just imagine what their standard documents will look like if they can't even state what they are doing on their web page coherently!
Hehe, "their level of technical sophistication", very nice! It's syntactically and semantically ambiguous whether "their" means the standards or the people, yet both would be correct ;)
Almost nobody is trying to implement standards badly. But some standards are so bad that you can't implement them without getting a brain tumor. Just have a look at tmpfile() in POSIX, for example, whose semantics make it impossible to use it without creating a race condition. Or look at DVD, which references a hidden trade secret called CSS, which is not part of the standard, but you can't be standard compliant without CSS, which forces you to sign sinister contracts with the content industry cabal.
The page says they are mapping all the code in the lower 16 MB of the address space. And they keep the first MB unmapped for NULL pointer protection.
;) They are emulating Windoze, you can't be serious about those 15 MB! That'll hardly contain GDI.DLL!
That leaves us with only 15 MB of space for code!
Are they really trying to say that they have not hit that limit yet? No program on earth has more than 15 MB code?! I can hardly believe that.
I was going to cite Emacs on this one, but Emacs is an interpreter, so the actual interpreter code might be small enough. Mhh. What about Mozilla?
Heck, what about WINE?!
Reiser has already lost countless users for his software because he started polluting the kernel messages with "a message from his sponsors".
He should be more concerned with the quality of his software, not with his ego problems. Personally, I find this disgusting. If someone wants to know who wrote the software, he can read the README or ask google.
I don't even have the slightest reference in my free software source code that point back to me, I don't even use huge copyright comments in my software like the GNU project generally does, and yet people have offered me jobs and asked me about my software many times. In general, the people who want to know who wrote the software, do.
Those who try to rub it in their face all the time will cheapen free software for everyone. It's like the "I'm so important!1!!" freeware movement from MS-DOS, and I barely remember a single author from all the software that rubbed their copyright messages it in my face all the time. In contrast, I even learned to know several free software authors personally!
Hans, people are losing data with your file system. I know because I did. Twice. Then I looked at your fsck code and it stunk to the high heavens. You should be concerned with that, not with putting your name in the face of more people.
And what would be the next step? To insert a few seconds delay so people have a chance to see your messages better? Puleeze!
I typed "make" ;-)
Man, it doesn't matter whether it's the Itanic or Hammer that is public. If it's public, you won't be alone on it, which will make proper benchmarking impossible.
No font anti-aliasing?! Are these people for real?
And they have the nerve to say it's a desktop distribution?
Also, KDE 3.1.1 was replaced by 3.1.1a because of security problems. Are they shipping known insecure software?
Wasn't Opera 7 the current version for Linux?
Come one, people. This has to be a joke!
It actually has less instructions than, say, PowerPC with Altivec.
(Hint: first think, then research, then optionally post)
Why in heaven's name would you COME HERE and ASK US instead of go the Red Hat and ask them?!
My God, is there no limit to stupidity? Sheesh.
Yeah, right, like you log in to a public free Itanic server to run some benchmark and expect to be a) the only user of that machine and b) that nobody logs in and skews your numbers while the benchmark runs.
Besides, Itanic is a horrible performer in day to day tasks. I compiled my libc project on a 900 MHz Itanic II and it was outperformed by a factor of four by my 900 MHz Pentium 2 notebook.
I'm talking about the compilation speed here. Transcoding MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 is also a lot slower, a German university group did some Itanic assembly optimizations to learn about the architecture, and their code was still much slower than an Athlon XP+ 2000.
In short: forget about Itanic. The architecture is doomed.
What boxes? ;)
And it's more efficient than MP3.
Their encoder is not particularly good, and AAC is covered by a ton of patents, so there probably are other reasons why they chose it.
For anyone else but Apple I see no reason to use AAC when you can have Ogg Vorbis.
PS: Shameless plug: I wrote a vorbis patch to add SSE support for enhanced encoder and decoder speed. It also contains some 3dnow! optimization for you K6 users, decoder only.
The major innovation that sets the Internet apart from other networks is that it is a peer to peer network! Every IP is equally important, and everyone is client and server.
;-)
NAT and proxy-only access are already threatening that. Don't give up the non-centralized nature advantage of IP or the future looks bleak!
Sending email through my ISPs relay has several important disadvantages. First and foremost, I cannot see whether the mail was already delivered to the recipient's SMTP server or whether it still is rotting in my ISP's queue. Also, my ISP might have a disk crash and lose my mail in his queue. This danger is completely eliminated if I send my emails directly. And why wouldn't I? It is faster and my ISP has less cost to burden and consequently less money to charge me.
In the grand tradition of Slashdot, also consider the "free speech" aspects of this
Actually, CCC was founded in the 80ies.
But yes, the guys from the 80ies and 90ies are mostly still there.
No, CCC is not government funded.
In fact, the Camp is one of the way in which they try to get in enough money to finance their activities. So please attend and consider donating as well if you liked it.
Speak for yourself. I am not interested in any ads. If I want information about a product, I will ask for it directly. I do not buy from companies that send me ads, however "targeted" they may be.
What kind of life is that where you don't want ideals, morals and ethics to get in the way of your goals?
Luckily, you are completely irrational and also completely removed from reality. People want to make a lot of money, yet very few people won't get ideals, morals and ethics in their way and proceed to sell crack cocain or child pornography.
Goals are what keeps us running. They are an end, not the means to an end. Those have to be chosen in the context of moral, ethics and ideals. If you can't reach your goal under these constraints, your goal was bad.
I personally think Linux is wrong. You can't just put your head in the sand and hope nothing will happen. The least you have to do is be outspoken, and he does not do that enough. There are millions of people who would love to tell the world about the dangers of DRM and other mostly evil technologies. Linus is one of the very few people who also has the leverage, whose word counts enough to be heard. I find it repulsive that he does not use his power to promote his morals and ethics.
If he does not have any morals and ideals, I can live with that. In that case I would feel sorry for him. But having the ideals and not doing something to move the world closer to one's ideals, I find that unexcusable.
Well, what did you expect?
That the junta^Wgovernment repeals a stupid law? Has that ever happened in the recorded history?
Govermnent does not kill stupid laws, judges do.
That't why the Bush clan made sure that judges sympathetic to their cause have the majority in the important courts.
This is how a dictatorship works, you know? The government makes stupid laws, and there are no independent judges to declare it unconstitutional.
The CEU or press guy of a company that makes X tells us that in future, there will be a H U G E market for X, and X will be ubiquitous.
My my, we would be utter fools not to invest all our spare money in his dot-bomb, wouldn't we?
Sheesh.
Jeez. I thought the /. crowd was supposed to be a bit intellectual
You're new here, right? Welcome!
Actually, there is a great reason not to open source drivers: the fact that you can't write a graphics driver today without infringing on a top of phony US patents.
Both Nvidia and Ati can't open source their drivers because they would open themselves up to countless frivolous lawsuits. Heck, even trivial stuff like drawing a b&w mouse cursor by XORing is patented! Do you have any idea how much of the rest of obvious ideas relevant to graphics programming are patented?
As long as the preposterous US patent system is not abolished, I see no way for them to open source their drivers.