Would you claim that your doctor had lost his right to advise you on your health, because he himself is an overweight alcoholic smoker? No. Because through his medical training, he still has an inherent understanding of the issues that is greater than yours.
What she is actually claiming is akin to saying that because SOME doctors are smoking drinking fatties, that NO doctors are eligible to advise you about your health. This is another logical fallacy.
Her assertion that all UK politicians are guilty of causing human rights abuses is actually MORE offensive than the "stoning" joke - because it's clear that she is very serious. I'd be enormously offended if someone accused me of a crime that I abhorred, with no grounds.
<from her subsequent BBC News interview> "Do you think stoning women is ever a joke?"
Someone should send her a copy of "Life of Brian". There are lots of stoning women in that.
The trial shows that our judiciary are a bit out of touch. And that our institutional sense of political correctness has gone a bit too far.
But expressing solidarity through protest, by repeating the same "crime" - admittedly with a very minor risk of prosecution? That nobility. That's the British spirit. There's a reason that the colloquial phrase for contravention of fair play is "not cricket". It isn't "not baseball", is it?
I view the whole sorry affair as the result of over-exposure to American culture, a culture of flying off the handle, an overinflated sense of entitlement, and above all, an almost complete lack of understanding of the concept of irony. We've lost our ability to cope with the ambiguity and the grey areas in life, instead taking the simpletons viewpoint that right and wrong are black and white, that there is a sharply defined line you must not cross. Deary me. Life is complicated. For those of us who can't cope without a truly rigid set of rules, might I suggest that you go back to kindergarten.
The value added is for the publisher ; by locking your game to a Steam account, it's now not resaleable. Which is what this fuss is all about - most of the revenue in these stores comes from second-hand games trading.
I suppose you do also get some other benefits - if you lose the media, you'll still be able to reinstall the game from the content network.
I'd suggest it's mostly to do with the move to compositing window managers, which X was not designed for.
The most specifically obvious example - video.
Video is these days presented by slapping a video texture on a window. If the render of the video frames to the texture isn't done simultaneously with the render of the video frames to the screen, you see "tearing", or a line where one frame ends and another frame begins, something you shouldn't see at all.
The same phenomena happens with composited windows, which are also rendered textures ; drag a window around at speed on a poorly configured X / Compiz desktop and you will see the tearing where two frames of the desktop texture are being rendered out of sync with the screen.
Many users now have more than one screen. X cannot render a single desktop to two screens and keep both synced. While it's possible to get one screen synced, it's not always easy, and getting both screens synced seems to be impossible.
Now, this clearly isn't a hardware limitation, because Windows can and does do this right - I have never seen application windows or video tear on the Aero desktop. This is on the same nVidia card, both operating systems running the official nVidia drivers.
This is one of the few things about Linux that annoys me when I compare it to Windows. The other is PulseAudio - but I have workarounds for my PulseAudio problems. It just looks sloppy to have great big tears in your otherwise very pretty composite display, and if you want to enjoy a movie, you are either stuck with using only one of your screens.
My ISP makes a point of saying it - "Streaming movies and TV shows". Right there in it's spiel. All the networks are rigged to favour it - our Last Mile is asynchronous, giving us more downstream than upstream, because they want us to be good little consumers and download content, not upload it.
And now people are making scared noises because it finally worked and people started doing it? And not just scared noises, deploying technical measures to counteract it? My ISP will throttle your connection if you download more than 750MB during "peak" hours ; exactly the time you'd want to be watching a movie. Good luck with that if the stream bandwidth exceeds your new bandwidth limit, which is very likely if it's an HD stream.
While I'm glad they are taking measures to prevent my connection grinding to a halt, I'm rather disappointed that they aren't upgrading their Last Mile enough to support it - especially as they make such a fuss about being "fibre optic" (to the cabinet, not the home, shame).
It's not an RFQ if it states that only one party can fulfill the requirements. It's a public rubberstamp.
There are reasons the rules say you have to put things out to tender - to prevent corruption, to get the best value for public money. To subvert that process by putting out a tender that states that only one party will be considered is to openly laugh in the face of those reasons.
Of course Google was trying to push their system. This is how sales works. Microsoft was no doubt pushing just as hard, but the suspicion is obviously that they were pushing dirty too.
It may well be that the MS system can meet the requirements better - especially when the requirements probably include "compatibility with MS Office". But you win the contract by meeting the requirements, not having the requirements written to meet you.
In addition to the sibling posts - you're assuming that the kind of person who blocks advertisements, responds positively to advertisements. In my experience it's quite the opposite.
There are companies who I dislike just on the basis that I think their product or service is harmful (like the guys who exploit the poor by offering household appliances and furniture on hire purchase at 29% APR). Their advertising cannot do anything but hurt my opinion of them because it draws them to my attention.
There are companies who have a product or service I might be inclined to consume. But if their advertising is overly annoying I will feel bad about their product. I feel like this about Disney - I enjoy their movies. I hate the fact that they made viewing trailers on their DVDs compulsory. And then they made it optional - and pretended that was a feature (FastPlay) thus being assholes while drawing attention to the fact they were no longer being assholes. My prejudice against them is low enough that I'll buy their movies when they are a 2-for-1 special - but I flat-out refuse to take my family to Disney World.
People blocking ads are probably doing the companies concerned a favour - if they were being served the ads, they'd probably just be annoyed with them, and by extension, the product being advertised. And they are not consuming limited server resources being used to serve up the ads (which are probably heavier than the page they are embedded in). So they remain neutral, instead of costing the company money to have them get annoyed.
The remaining surfers who don't block them almost certainly have a higher click-through and conversion rate.
The gap between A and GCSE has widened over the years. I took GCSE maths in the first year it was available, and their difficulty was easier than the exam they replaced - the O level, but not that much easier. We trained up on past O level papers.
My father was a maths teacher ; I looked at some of his GCSE examination papers five years later and howled with laughter, because if I hadn't, I would have cried.
Question 3 on my GCSE paper was a reasonably complex trigonometry question involving the area of grass a goat could consume if it was tied to a square post at a particular location in a right-angled triangular field. It had a schematic of the field.
Question 3 on the GCSE paper from five years later had a picture of a calculator, and explained which buttons you needed to push to perform a simple piece of arithmetic, and you got the marks if you got the answer right. I kid you not.
I've not looked at the A-level papers, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were degrading in difficulty the same way.
That and eventually you'll run into the statistical phenomenon of Gamblers Ruin - you'll run into the limit of the capital you have to play, or more likely, the table stake limit.
The developer in question is not the VLC team but a third-party company (Applidium) who have presumably chosen to upload VLC to the app store, partly for the kudos, partly for the click-through to their paid applications.
They are not even complying with the terms themselves by offering their sources (which presumably include iOS specific tweaks), they are linking back to the official VideoLAN git repository.
So please don't accuse the VideoLAN team of instigating this.
This is precisely the provision that he's discussing - GPLv2 terms are all about distribution, not development.
If they were about development, you could just stomp into someones office and demand their changes to a GPL licensed piece of code.
Since it's about distribution, it's quite possible to implement super-secret changes to a given piece of GPL code and distribute it freely within your company without having to distribute it to the community (because they didn't receive a copy of the software).
Since the Apple appstore is the distributor, they are responsible for meeting the license terms. It may be that the third party developer, Applidium, isn't meeting their requirements either by not distributing the sources to Apple. They link back to the videolan.org git repository, so they are not even distributing their sources publicly (by themselves - they may have commits in the git repository, but they are not telling which revisions represent the state of their app either).
GPLv2 (the version VLC is under) doesn't forbid DRM. GPLv3 (which GNU Go is under) does that.
It forbids DRM on the application (or TiVo-ization) - measures that prevent modified versions of the code from running. These measures remove the freedom to modify the software to suit your needs, which is what the GPL intends to preserve.
It does NOT prevent you from implementing DRM systems using the code.
As the FAQ points out, DRM systems in GPL code are a little silly, because you must give the sources to application recipients, which means that cracked versions will emerge pretty quickly (and legally), but you can still do it, just like you can use GPL code to create baby-killing robot monsters or benevolent AIs that rule the planet with a fair and even hand.
It's not about DRM on videos. It's about DRM on the app.
Developers may personally have a problem with DRM on content but the license does not - or it wouldn't be usable on projects like GPG.
The problem is that the terms of the GPL are not being met - the application cannot be redistributed by the recipients, and they are not receiving the sources for the application, or an offer to receive them from Apple. The distributor of software must meet these responsibilities - it's not sufficient to point to the original distributor of the sources and suggest that you get them from there (as the third party company who uploaded this app does).
It didn't have to be the VLC developers - it could have been anyone who posted it to the app store, because the GPL permits you to redistribute the software. It looks like it was a French company "Applidium" that posted it.
Alas, the restrictions placed on app store content by Apple are not compatible with the GPL ; those receiving the app cannot redistribute it and do not receive sources or an offer of sources (from Apple, who are the distributor - Applidium link to the the videolan.org git repository, which isn't necessarily where they host their source - presumably they tweak the sources for iOS but there's no sign of them offering those tweaks, even if that would satisfy the license which it doesn't - the distributor has to offer the sources).
Applidium have almost certainly benefited from getting their app store category link in front of the eyes of a lot more people who wanted VLC for their device.
Applidium may well be adhering to the license - you only have to distribute the changes you make to people receiving the software, so they may have sent the source for their iOS specific tweaks to VLC to Apple along with the binaries. But Apple are most certainly not adhering to the license, and Applidium shouldn't be blameless as they were almost certainly aware that Apple would breach the license as a result of them submitting the app.
We observed that IE6 would really bog down actual native code - to whit, ActiveX controls.
Sick of the horrible sloth of our ActiveX application, for testing purposes I wrote a VB container application for it. It immediately cut all operation times in half.
Disclaimer : Yes, ActiveX is evil. This was quite some time ago.
When we were growing crystals from saturated salt solutions, in high school science classes, we always got MUCH better results from solutions we'd cooked off in the microwave - bigger and clearer crystals.
I think the point may be that because an eBook by definition has no competition from the used eBook market, it doesn't have to be priced to compete. If the eBook is the only book out there, you can charge more for it than you would for paper.
McDonalds based their success on de-skilling the burger kitchen, carefully making sure that they had a rigidly defined process for each menu item, removing any trace of individuality or freedom from their employees so that they would efficiently produce a consistent product anywhere you walk into a McDonalds.
The current fashion for programming systems that guide people through a set workflow like sheep is McDonalds programming.
It's because Aero uses composited textures to draw the screen, so it's reliant on GPU performance. Compiz does much the same thing, so Linux can do a similar resource-eating trick.
Turn off the pretty and Win7 will look a little plainer but run a little snappier. I still do this with WinXP, just because the Fischer-Price theme has really chunky title bars that take up extra screen estate.
I remember when graphics cards sold on their ability to accelerate 2D drawing operations to make Windows go faster...
I can appreciate the engineering, even be interested in test driving one, but OWNING one? Too much extra cost for too little extra value.
The same goes for graphics cards ; I have an nVidia GTS8800, which is getting pretty long in the tooth, but it plays most of the games I own pretty reasonably (could be a bit faster on Crysis, I suppose;-) ), largely because I haven't been buying new games with heavy 3D needs recently.
Why not? Well, partly because I'm less interested in playing games as I age ; playing with ideas seems to be more interesting. Partly because the games that do appeal to me are increasingly indie titles that don't need much in the way of graphical grunt. And partly because most of the big titles that do need a powerful GPU are marred by either being a total pile of arse, an MMO game for which I don't have the time, or encumbered with such offensive DRM that I'd rather not let the box near my computer.
A platform only has value so long as it has a killer app - in the case of new GPUs, I don't have a game that I want to play, or a large set of numbers I need to crunch. I'm guessing that some time next year when Deus Ex : Human Revolution comes out, I might feel a small urge to upgrade.
I'm guessing that Slashdot attracts a substantial proportion of engineers who also see no practical reason for getting a new GPU beyond the "OOh, shiny!" factor, so I'm not surprised to see so many "Meh." responses to this article.
Slashdot Mirror
But that's total horseshit.
Would you claim that your doctor had lost his right to advise you on your health, because he himself is an overweight alcoholic smoker? No. Because through his medical training, he still has an inherent understanding of the issues that is greater than yours.
What she is actually claiming is akin to saying that because SOME doctors are smoking drinking fatties, that NO doctors are eligible to advise you about your health. This is another logical fallacy.
Her assertion that all UK politicians are guilty of causing human rights abuses is actually MORE offensive than the "stoning" joke - because it's clear that she is very serious. I'd be enormously offended if someone accused me of a crime that I abhorred, with no grounds.
<from her subsequent BBC News interview>
"Do you think stoning women is ever a joke?"
Someone should send her a copy of "Life of Brian". There are lots of stoning women in that.
The trial shows that our judiciary are a bit out of touch. And that our institutional sense of political correctness has gone a bit too far.
But expressing solidarity through protest, by repeating the same "crime" - admittedly with a very minor risk of prosecution? That nobility. That's the British spirit. There's a reason that the colloquial phrase for contravention of fair play is "not cricket". It isn't "not baseball", is it?
I view the whole sorry affair as the result of over-exposure to American culture, a culture of flying off the handle, an overinflated sense of entitlement, and above all, an almost complete lack of understanding of the concept of irony. We've lost our ability to cope with the ambiguity and the grey areas in life, instead taking the simpletons viewpoint that right and wrong are black and white, that there is a sharply defined line you must not cross. Deary me. Life is complicated. For those of us who can't cope without a truly rigid set of rules, might I suggest that you go back to kindergarten.
The value added is for the publisher ; by locking your game to a Steam account, it's now not resaleable. Which is what this fuss is all about - most of the revenue in these stores comes from second-hand games trading.
I suppose you do also get some other benefits - if you lose the media, you'll still be able to reinstall the game from the content network.
... dey gwow in de dark! Hehehehehe!
A decreasing resource in the hands of a few large corporations? The price will go up.
I'd suggest it's mostly to do with the move to compositing window managers, which X was not designed for.
The most specifically obvious example - video.
Video is these days presented by slapping a video texture on a window. If the render of the video frames to the texture isn't done simultaneously with the render of the video frames to the screen, you see "tearing", or a line where one frame ends and another frame begins, something you shouldn't see at all.
The same phenomena happens with composited windows, which are also rendered textures ; drag a window around at speed on a poorly configured X / Compiz desktop and you will see the tearing where two frames of the desktop texture are being rendered out of sync with the screen.
Many users now have more than one screen. X cannot render a single desktop to two screens and keep both synced. While it's possible to get one screen synced, it's not always easy, and getting both screens synced seems to be impossible.
Now, this clearly isn't a hardware limitation, because Windows can and does do this right - I have never seen application windows or video tear on the Aero desktop. This is on the same nVidia card, both operating systems running the official nVidia drivers.
This is one of the few things about Linux that annoys me when I compare it to Windows. The other is PulseAudio - but I have workarounds for my PulseAudio problems. It just looks sloppy to have great big tears in your otherwise very pretty composite display, and if you want to enjoy a movie, you are either stuck with using only one of your screens.
The military regularly issues CNS stimulants to serving personnel, especially pilots.
My ISP makes a point of saying it - "Streaming movies and TV shows". Right there in it's spiel. All the networks are rigged to favour it - our Last Mile is asynchronous, giving us more downstream than upstream, because they want us to be good little consumers and download content, not upload it.
And now people are making scared noises because it finally worked and people started doing it? And not just scared noises, deploying technical measures to counteract it? My ISP will throttle your connection if you download more than 750MB during "peak" hours ; exactly the time you'd want to be watching a movie. Good luck with that if the stream bandwidth exceeds your new bandwidth limit, which is very likely if it's an HD stream.
While I'm glad they are taking measures to prevent my connection grinding to a halt, I'm rather disappointed that they aren't upgrading their Last Mile enough to support it - especially as they make such a fuss about being "fibre optic" (to the cabinet, not the home, shame).
It's not an RFQ if it states that only one party can fulfill the requirements. It's a public rubberstamp.
There are reasons the rules say you have to put things out to tender - to prevent corruption, to get the best value for public money. To subvert that process by putting out a tender that states that only one party will be considered is to openly laugh in the face of those reasons.
Of course Google was trying to push their system. This is how sales works. Microsoft was no doubt pushing just as hard, but the suspicion is obviously that they were pushing dirty too.
It may well be that the MS system can meet the requirements better - especially when the requirements probably include "compatibility with MS Office". But you win the contract by meeting the requirements, not having the requirements written to meet you.
In addition to the sibling posts - you're assuming that the kind of person who blocks advertisements, responds positively to advertisements. In my experience it's quite the opposite.
There are companies who I dislike just on the basis that I think their product or service is harmful (like the guys who exploit the poor by offering household appliances and furniture on hire purchase at 29% APR). Their advertising cannot do anything but hurt my opinion of them because it draws them to my attention.
There are companies who have a product or service I might be inclined to consume. But if their advertising is overly annoying I will feel bad about their product. I feel like this about Disney - I enjoy their movies. I hate the fact that they made viewing trailers on their DVDs compulsory. And then they made it optional - and pretended that was a feature (FastPlay) thus being assholes while drawing attention to the fact they were no longer being assholes. My prejudice against them is low enough that I'll buy their movies when they are a 2-for-1 special - but I flat-out refuse to take my family to Disney World.
People blocking ads are probably doing the companies concerned a favour - if they were being served the ads, they'd probably just be annoyed with them, and by extension, the product being advertised. And they are not consuming limited server resources being used to serve up the ads (which are probably heavier than the page they are embedded in). So they remain neutral, instead of costing the company money to have them get annoyed.
The remaining surfers who don't block them almost certainly have a higher click-through and conversion rate.
The gap between A and GCSE has widened over the years. I took GCSE maths in the first year it was available, and their difficulty was easier than the exam they replaced - the O level, but not that much easier. We trained up on past O level papers.
My father was a maths teacher ; I looked at some of his GCSE examination papers five years later and howled with laughter, because if I hadn't, I would have cried.
Question 3 on my GCSE paper was a reasonably complex trigonometry question involving the area of grass a goat could consume if it was tied to a square post at a particular location in a right-angled triangular field. It had a schematic of the field.
Question 3 on the GCSE paper from five years later had a picture of a calculator, and explained which buttons you needed to push to perform a simple piece of arithmetic, and you got the marks if you got the answer right. I kid you not.
I've not looked at the A-level papers, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were degrading in difficulty the same way.
That and eventually you'll run into the statistical phenomenon of Gamblers Ruin - you'll run into the limit of the capital you have to play, or more likely, the table stake limit.
Yup, agreed that the developer is at fault.
The developer in question is not the VLC team but a third-party company (Applidium) who have presumably chosen to upload VLC to the app store, partly for the kudos, partly for the click-through to their paid applications.
They are not even complying with the terms themselves by offering their sources (which presumably include iOS specific tweaks), they are linking back to the official VideoLAN git repository.
So please don't accuse the VideoLAN team of instigating this.
This is precisely the provision that he's discussing - GPLv2 terms are all about distribution, not development.
If they were about development, you could just stomp into someones office and demand their changes to a GPL licensed piece of code.
Since it's about distribution, it's quite possible to implement super-secret changes to a given piece of GPL code and distribute it freely within your company without having to distribute it to the community (because they didn't receive a copy of the software).
Since the Apple appstore is the distributor, they are responsible for meeting the license terms. It may be that the third party developer, Applidium, isn't meeting their requirements either by not distributing the sources to Apple. They link back to the videolan.org git repository, so they are not even distributing their sources publicly (by themselves - they may have commits in the git repository, but they are not telling which revisions represent the state of their app either).
GPLv2 (the version VLC is under) doesn't forbid DRM. GPLv3 (which GNU Go is under) does that.
It forbids DRM on the application (or TiVo-ization) - measures that prevent modified versions of the code from running. These measures remove the freedom to modify the software to suit your needs, which is what the GPL intends to preserve.
It does NOT prevent you from implementing DRM systems using the code.
As the FAQ points out, DRM systems in GPL code are a little silly, because you must give the sources to application recipients, which means that cracked versions will emerge pretty quickly (and legally), but you can still do it, just like you can use GPL code to create baby-killing robot monsters or benevolent AIs that rule the planet with a fair and even hand.
It's not about DRM on videos. It's about DRM on the app.
Developers may personally have a problem with DRM on content but the license does not - or it wouldn't be usable on projects like GPG.
The problem is that the terms of the GPL are not being met - the application cannot be redistributed by the recipients, and they are not receiving the sources for the application, or an offer to receive them from Apple. The distributor of software must meet these responsibilities - it's not sufficient to point to the original distributor of the sources and suggest that you get them from there (as the third party company who uploaded this app does).
It didn't have to be the VLC developers - it could have been anyone who posted it to the app store, because the GPL permits you to redistribute the software. It looks like it was a French company "Applidium" that posted it.
Alas, the restrictions placed on app store content by Apple are not compatible with the GPL ; those receiving the app cannot redistribute it and do not receive sources or an offer of sources (from Apple, who are the distributor - Applidium link to the the videolan.org git repository, which isn't necessarily where they host their source - presumably they tweak the sources for iOS but there's no sign of them offering those tweaks, even if that would satisfy the license which it doesn't - the distributor has to offer the sources).
Applidium have almost certainly benefited from getting their app store category link in front of the eyes of a lot more people who wanted VLC for their device.
Applidium may well be adhering to the license - you only have to distribute the changes you make to people receiving the software, so they may have sent the source for their iOS specific tweaks to VLC to Apple along with the binaries. But Apple are most certainly not adhering to the license, and Applidium shouldn't be blameless as they were almost certainly aware that Apple would breach the license as a result of them submitting the app.
We observed that IE6 would really bog down actual native code - to whit, ActiveX controls.
Sick of the horrible sloth of our ActiveX application, for testing purposes I wrote a VB container application for it. It immediately cut all operation times in half.
Disclaimer : Yes, ActiveX is evil. This was quite some time ago.
There are pilot projects of Personal Rapid Transit systems going on.
When we were growing crystals from saturated salt solutions, in high school science classes, we always got MUCH better results from solutions we'd cooked off in the microwave - bigger and clearer crystals.
We never really followed it up much though.
Book prices will still remain close to $100
With no used paper book market to compete with new copies? Book prices will go up.
I think the point may be that because an eBook by definition has no competition from the used eBook market, it doesn't have to be priced to compete. If the eBook is the only book out there, you can charge more for it than you would for paper.
Workflows.
McDonalds based their success on de-skilling the burger kitchen, carefully making sure that they had a rigidly defined process for each menu item, removing any trace of individuality or freedom from their employees so that they would efficiently produce a consistent product anywhere you walk into a McDonalds.
The current fashion for programming systems that guide people through a set workflow like sheep is McDonalds programming.
It's because Aero uses composited textures to draw the screen, so it's reliant on GPU performance. Compiz does much the same thing, so Linux can do a similar resource-eating trick.
Turn off the pretty and Win7 will look a little plainer but run a little snappier. I still do this with WinXP, just because the Fischer-Price theme has really chunky title bars that take up extra screen estate.
I remember when graphics cards sold on their ability to accelerate 2D drawing operations to make Windows go faster...
Meh a Ferrari
Well... yes.
I can appreciate the engineering, even be interested in test driving one, but OWNING one? Too much extra cost for too little extra value.
The same goes for graphics cards ; I have an nVidia GTS8800, which is getting pretty long in the tooth, but it plays most of the games I own pretty reasonably (could be a bit faster on Crysis, I suppose ;-) ), largely because I haven't been buying new games with heavy 3D needs recently.
Why not? Well, partly because I'm less interested in playing games as I age ; playing with ideas seems to be more interesting. Partly because the games that do appeal to me are increasingly indie titles that don't need much in the way of graphical grunt. And partly because most of the big titles that do need a powerful GPU are marred by either being a total pile of arse, an MMO game for which I don't have the time, or encumbered with such offensive DRM that I'd rather not let the box near my computer.
A platform only has value so long as it has a killer app - in the case of new GPUs, I don't have a game that I want to play, or a large set of numbers I need to crunch. I'm guessing that some time next year when Deus Ex : Human Revolution comes out, I might feel a small urge to upgrade.
I'm guessing that Slashdot attracts a substantial proportion of engineers who also see no practical reason for getting a new GPU beyond the "OOh, shiny!" factor, so I'm not surprised to see so many "Meh." responses to this article.