I don't have any kids. This world is already way too overpopulated, I don't need to help make it worse.
"Are you going to tell her "tough shit, your time has come, death is a natural and necessary part of living"?"
Ya know it sounds bad and it wont win me any karma for saying it but.... yea. Where is it written we have to spend infinite sums of money to keep everyone alive at all costs? Where do you draw the line $800K, $8M, $80M. It appears our medical system is going to keep escalating the price tag to try to cure incurable diseases until something gives.
My line is clear. If I can't afford it I suffer the consequences. Where your line is is not so clear. You seem to be insisting society spend as much as possible to attempt to keep everyone alive. One outcome of that is our economy will collapse and then a lot worse things will happen than a 3 year old dieing of Leukemia.
When a new born infant has fatal birth defects do we REALLY have to spend a million dollars in an often futile effort to keep the infant alive. Not really, its tough luck but the rational solution is to let nature take its course and the parents have another kid. But we are no longer a rational culture, we are obsessive. It seems we have to have our Sarah Palin's who insist its somehow a good thing to knowingly give birth to a child with Down's Syndrome who will never have a life worth living and to divert society's resources to supporting him his entire life when those resources could be better spent elsewhere.
Life just really isn't as precious and sacred as we are trying to make it. Maybe its because I was raised on a farm instead of in suburbia. I seem to have a much keener appreciation for the fact that death is just part of the cycle that is life.
If you have the most basic understanding of Malthus it should be obvious that we either have to have to let population control mechanisms function or adopt draconian birth control. If we keep using technology to short circuit population controls, and let birth rates continue unchecked, this planet is going to buckle and billions of otherwise healthy people are going to die when we exhaust this planet's resources or push our climate in to no man's land.
It may sound cruel but apparently China provides next to no health care to its hundreds of millions of rural peasants. They no doubt know if they tried their economy would be the same basket case the U.S. economy is.
"So the idea of not having insurance and investing the money is silly. "
No.... no, its not, I just didn't expand on a key point.
If I have a disease that costs $800K to fix the solution is simple, I say my time has come, I blow some of my savings having as much fun as I can in the time I have left, give away the rest to people who need it, and find a quick way to end it once the pain starts getting out of control and the quality of life is gone.
I say no thanks to staggeringly expensive chemo, radiation, surgery, transplants, etc. My life isn't so sacred to me that I need to take a million bucks from someone else to keep me alive at all costs. If a simple and affordable procedure will improve my quality of life or save my life I will pay for it out of my own pocket. Its a basic personal responsibility issue to me. If I can't pay for it why should someone else have to.
You are just one of those people on the "huge benificiary" side of the insurance equation who are starting to outnumber the premium payers in our system which is why premiums keep going up. It wasn't so bad when medicine was primitive and not very expensive. But as of today its simply too expensive to support multimillion dollar treatments to keep EVERYONE alive which is where universal health care is trying to go. If our system continues down this road its going to end in one of four places:
- Eventually only the rich get the treatments because we wont be able to afford them for everyone. This is one of the more likely outcomes. - We try to give everyone expensive treatments and end up in either national or global bankruptcy as health care drains every spare cent out of the economy, and once we get there we wont be able to treat anyone again. This is the next most likely outcome and seems to be where the U.S. is heading right now - We bring down the cost of the treatments, manage to give them to everyone, assorted religions continue to spurn birth control and we end up with a world so completely overpopulated and resource starved life isn't worth living. - Soylent Green
I'm pretty sure Utopia and Shangri-la where everyone lives for ever and life is always wonderful aren't viable options.
Death is a natural and very necessary part of biology and living. Either we have it or we have to stop procreating. We continue to use technology to prevent it at all costs without also preventing births this planet is doomed......
The religious right in particular, across a number of faiths are DEMANDING, under the guise of sanctity of life, we keep people alive at all costs, and also demand we continue to procreate with no birth control. This will almost certainly doom this planet. They are a testimony for the need to give everyone a heavier dose of Thomas Malthus in biology class.
How exactly is a library better than the Internet if Google digitizes all the books, the same ones that are in the library, and puts them online so everyone can access them from everywhere AND electronically search them.
The only real filter in here libraries have and most of the Internet doesn't are the editors at publishing companies who decide which books make it to print and which don't. If Google digitizes the same books the library has and puts them online then as long as you don't stray out of that repository the part of the Internet is vastly superior to any library you can name. You might argue that the librarian is an additional quality filter in picking a subset of books but I would argue they aren't always good filters, because libraries are often full of shelves of Harlequin romances, total garbage but people like reading them. As I recall when Sarah Palin became mayor one of her first acts was to try to censor all the objectionable books out of the town library. Librarian fought it for a while but eventually quit. Here's hoping that Google will refrain from book burning controversial books out of an online library though it appears they will eagerly filter anything out of the Chinese government demands.
Only thing a dead tree library has over a Google online library is that somehow they can get away with letting people read NEW books for free while Google and Amazon can't. Libraries are in fact the first instance and test case for people sharing copyrighted content and using it without paying for it.
If you listen to what Bradbury is saying he was more or less advocating now and doing in the Depression what the RIAA is suiting people for doing now with MP3's through the internet. He was reading copyrighted books for free at the library without paying the copyright holder.
My prediction is when this finally makes it to the President's desk, and the lobbyists get done, it will be the worst of all worlds like just about every bill out of Congress in the last 20 years:
A. Everyone will be forced to buy insurance and if they don't they will get fined and get no insurance. B. There will be no government insurance plan, it will be the one thing Republicans kill to protect their friends in the private insurance business. So insurance companies will still have no real competition and they will have a 100% captive market, everyone will be forced to buy their insurance no matter how much they jack up rates and they WILL jack up their rates just like the drug companies are doing on Medicare-D. C. Medical costs will continue to spiral out of control because the private sector will have NO incentive to rein in out of control fraud, waste and abuse D. Malpractice lawyers and ambulance chasers will continue to extort a massive toll out of the system because lawyers have a powerful lobby especially with Dems. E. Health care, drug and insurance companies will rake in record profits F. If you are middle income you will be forced to both buy your own policy, premiums will continue to spiral out of control, and you will get to pay new higher taxes to pay for insurance for the poor and bail out Medicare.
They try to force me to pay for insurance I will fight it all the way to the Supreme court. The precedent exist for them to tax me to pay for it but I can see no way in hell they can force me to spend money out of my pocket by dictate to buy health insurance. You might cite no fault car insurance as precedent but that can be justified as a prerequisite for using highways built by the government and if I opt out of driving I don't have to buy the damn insurance. This is MUCH more intrusive to my liberties than that. Only honest and probably constitutional way for government to do this is to jack up taxes and do socialized medicine and hear everyone howl.
Everything the Democrats are saying lately is you can't opt out and if you do they will make you pay fines AND not have insurance, which is EXACTLY what Obama said he wouldn't do, he explicitly said "NO MANDATE" when he was pandering for my vote and its the only reason he got it and he has since done a 180.... liar. He is just as bad as every other politician in existence. I didn't vote for Clinton because she was openly for the mandate. I wouldn't have voted for Obama if he'd say then what he is saying now.
I long ago figured out self insuring myself is a dramatically better way, especially when you are relatively young and healthy. Insurance is not a free ride, all it does is average out the total cost over a large pool, so it takes money from healthy people and gives it to the very sick who get way more treatment than they paid for, meanwhile private insurance companies skim a big profit off the top investing all the money you give them. INVESTING YOUR MONEY YOURSELF FOR YOURSELF IS SMART, INSURANCE ISN'T. If you take the same money you would otherwise spend on health insurance when you are young and healthy and just invest it you will eventually have enough money set aside to pay for your own health needs as you get older and are more likely to need major health care. If you stay healthy the money is there to use for other pressing needs as they arise or to retire on when you reach Medicare.
If you buy insurance and stay healthy your money is pretty much being stolen and transferred from you to:
A. Insurance company execs and share holders B. People who made bad life style choices leading to bad health or accidental injury, obesity, smoking, diabetes, heart disease due to lack of exercise and poor eating habits, alcoholism, being just some of the self induced epidemics causing our medical costs to sky rocket. C. Hypochondriacs and abusers of the system, like people who run to the emergency room at the drop of a hat and run up huge bills getting treatment through emergency rooms they sho
The problem with libraries is a basic efficiency one. It costs a LOT of money to build and maintain the buildings, stock a good library with books, and keep librarians employed and you have to do it in every town in on the planet. They aren't free, they cost a lot of tax dollars usually and a lot of tax payers probably don't appreciate their valie.
Also if you are in a big city or an affluent area which is ready to sink a lot of money in to its libraries they are quite good. As soon as you get to rural or less affluent areas the chances are the books available in the library are going to get sparse, low quality and provide books on a limited range of subjects, especially likely to appeal to the majority of the people in the area and leave others with different tastes out in the cold.
Google is really on the right track, if they can digitize all older books, avoid the copyright issues and put them ALL on the internet it wins hands down over dead tree libraries. Everyone, everywhere can access them and not be at the mercy of whether they live close to a big library, or have to get books through inter library loan which kind of really sucks as far as efficiency goes.
Assuming you do have such a digitized online repository of books libraries need to morph in the direction they are already going which is to provide free internet access to people who need it, and a haven to people to use computers away from home, school and work. Executed well it would save tons of money and provide people a much broader range of reading material especially outside of big cities. The one intractable problem is making new works, still under copyright available on line for free. Libraries can get away with making books freely available but I doubt Google can do it online.
There is some question about how well the cloud will do in preserving books over a long, long interval but we can hope if Google or someone else does manage to digitize all the world's book that they will figure out a way to insure its backed up to multiple independent sites where it will survive major calamities, and will be available in perpetuity.
When it came to mob rule I was mostly referring to:
A. the submission which was designed to pander to the/. crowds lust to hate Adobe and defend Linux even in areas where its not particularly defensible like audio
B. the previous times I've said pretty much the same thing here on/. about audio and been flamed and modded in to trolldom.
It actually took me by surprise this time how overwhelming the agreement was that audio does in fact suck on Linux. There finally seems to be a ground swell of people fed up with it. I just hope Linus reads it.....
I love Linux, I've started hating it on the desktop and I explained exactly why, ten years of bullshit with audio support is the leading reason. Didn't say it here but have said it on/. before the bullshit competition between GNOME and KDE is the other reason. GTK just isn't a good basis for a desktop and it shows in GNOME. KDE I can live with but KDE 4.0 was a disaster and I'm starting to doubt Qt is a viable toolkit for Linux on the desktop too, because it appears you can't count on Trolltech, if they are going to completely wreck all existing code that uses Qt when they do a new major version as they did with 4.x. I really just want one good desktop standard all applications use and where all applications behave with reasonable predictability and consistency. If Linux can't do it... well Apple already has. It kinds of sucks paying Apple's price tag and getting locked in, but it some respects than it better than dealing with a bunch of haphazard GUI's in applications.
I can't fix audio on Linux, not sure who can other than Linus leading the effort, I'm not a leader on the kernel lists, I'm just a frustrated Linux desktop user and I write application code on Linux sometimes. I don't have the cred to say throw out a major part of the Linux kernel and start over. Pulse audio isn't a solution, its just perpetuating the same cluster fuck that was esd and arts.
Others on here have suggested a fix that sounds pretty reasonable, return to OSS using the newest version which seems to be working great on BSD. I can't say since I haven't tried OSS since the days when it completely sucked. If you want an example of an OS with a really great media framework.... look at BeOS. It had head and shoulders better multimedia support ten years ago than Linux has now.
The one and only thing I can say is Linus or whomever made a SERIOUS mistake when they accepted ALSA as the new audio API. All he had to do was look at the convoluted mess of an API, and the horrible documentation, and he should have immediately nixed it. For whatever reason he didn't and he set back Linux on the desktop by years.
"but carriers do dictate and direct a lot of handset development"
The only problem with your assertion is that, at least in the U.S. all of their dictates and direction tend to be bad and devoid of innovation.
I think all of the innovative handsets listed in one of the articles were developed by tech companies not carriers, Apple's iPhone was almost certainly developed with no input from ATT, I doubt Sprint had much input to the Palm Pre, maybe Verizon had a little input to Blackberry Storm, not sure.
Everyone who HAS a cell phone in the U.S. knows U.S. cell phone carriers are pretty much the worst carriers on the planet. EVERY other country in the world seems to have better handsets, lower rates, less lock in, better networks and better service plans.
U.S. cell phone companies remind me a lot of U.S. car companies. They seem have some kind of an under the table agreement to all suck equally bad and screw their customers to the same level. They can then all provide bad service, at high prices, with abusive contacts and get away with it because all a customer can do is switch from one bad carrier to another bad carrier. This strategy worked great for U.S. car companies until the Japanese, who had signed on to their collusion, ate their lunch building better products cheaper, now two out of three have ended in bankruptcy. The only problem with the same thing happening to phone companies is the U.S. is a big place and its expensive and hard for a new competitor to come in and build a network from scratch so its unlikely any foreign competitor will seriously compete with them, T-Mobile tries but...
It sure would be interesting if DoCoMo moved in to the U.S. and did to the phone companies what Japanese cars did to the car companies. There sure is a lot of room for improvement.
As much as the U.S. and U.S. companies spout off about free markets, the invisible hand, competition, etc. the U.S. has deteriorated in to having a disturbing lack of competition. Cell phone companies are pretty much down to ATT and Verizon with Sprint on life support. Microsoft's only serious competitor in PC's is Apple which came back from the dead or there would be no competition at all, Intel's only serious competitor is a very weak AMD, Boeing's only commercial competitor is in Europe, the number of defense contractors is a tiny fraction of what it once was. Walmart, given time, may destroy all competition in the retail sector. The number of major banks is half what it was a couple years ago. Oil companies have merged to the point we are almost back the Standard Oil monopoly. Cable companies there is usually only one option in an area, and only two satellite services, all grossly overpriced. When the banks nearly failed, the government had to step in to rescue them in contravention of all free market principles because they were "too big to fail", what did we do, merge them in to an even smaller number of even bigger banks that were too big to fail.
The U.S. is turning in to a poster child for Capitalism's end game where one giant company dominates each market segment, and all competition disappears while they yammer about the importance of free markets and competition.
"Explain to me again how Flash was an improvement in usability?"
How would you run Windows Media Player on... Linux. Don't think Linux supported Quicktime for a long time and when it did it was a big download. Real went through an extended period where their software was totally hated by nearly every one for their sleezy business tactics.
If Flash did nothing else right they made it possible for just about everyone on Windows, Mac and Linux to have seamlessly integrated video in their browser without even having to think about it. My mom wanted to play some streaming audio the other day and was presented with a list of proprietary players similar to yours and she had no clue what to do. I think we opted for Windows Media Player since she is on XP and when it came up SHE STILL had no clue what to do with it. If it had been Flash she would have pressed a play button on the browser page and it would have just worked. Flash audio and video is a BIG win for the little old ladies in the world. Flash eliminated the NEED for anyone to even worry about what kind of video player it was, the video was just there, it played, it always worked. The technically literate here don't get it, but you have to make media players that the technically illiterate can use, Flash does, the others on your list mostly failed. With the help of YouTube it also became trivial to embed video in any web page. If you didn't have the plugin it was a tiny download, and just about everyone had Flash anyway.
I just wish Adobe didn't suck so much in providing Flash players for devices. Their complete failure to provide good players or a good SDK for cell phones, settop boxes, etc. is destroying everything they had in web video dominance.
Look on the Google developer forums every time a developer has asked about direct access to the Surface API from native code. Google consistently tells you to not use the API, its going to change, your app will break... If you want to do an application that needs to do fast, efficient blits, like media players its relatively hard to do in Android unless they've fixed it recently.
In fact you can't access it without modifying the mydroid source, your C++ class has to be friend class to the isurface class. The only two classes and apps that are friended to it are Androids own media player and camera apps.
Its nice Google is supporting native code browser plugins but they pretty much have to do that to support things like Flash plugins but they still aren't as friendly to native mode apps as Apple is.
Re:Hipocrisy or something near that.
on
Wikipedia To Add Video
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm all for driving Flash out of existence, since Macromedia/Adobe should have never been allowed to acquire the near monopoly on web video they have. Adobe has also been a horrible steward of their responsibility especially when its come to Flash player support for devices like smart phones.
But the flip side is you might recall back to what video was like before Flash. Every freaking web site you went to had a different video standard, video player, and you were usually forced to launch a video player which either wasn't integrated in the browser or was integrated badly. Flash only succeeded because it fixed a completely broken thing on the web where Apple, Real and Microsoft in particular were trying to acquire their own monopolies on web video.
For this to succeed Wikipedia needs to compel a new video player standard other than Flash and proprietary codecs like H.264, and insure near universal availability of the solution they create as an integrated browser component, either built in to the browser or as a plugin.
I'm kind of curious if HTML/5 is going to be able to achieve that lofty goal across all the warring browser factions in the world, especially IE and Microsoft. Not sure JavaFX counts as open. What other standard is their other than HTML/5.
You also have the little problem that all existing video is going to have to be transcoded if you reject H.264, VP6, MPEG, WMV, AVI and Flash H.263 as acceptable formats. It sure isn't going to be easy to add video to Wikipedia if Joe and Jane user have to transcode the video to add it, or is Wikipedia going to automatically transcode video as they get it to their open standard.
The Linux and Slashdot communities are certainly not police states but sometimes they do degenerate in to "mob rule". In "mob rule" the people who excel at shouting others down and pandering to what the mob wants to hear often win even if they are wrong. I've excelled at it myself here sometimes:)
I'm not sure if the problem is even in any of the the actual fracking articles no one reads, but more the trollish way things were worded in the submission to Slashdot, which seems designed to provoke a fight. The submission seems crafted to make Adobe look evil and bad, Linux look good, for no actual reason other than its certain to be red meat to the slashdot mob and sure to win acceptance with the/. editors. I hate Adobe and Flash as much as the next guy, maybe more, but from what I read in the blog of the Adobe Linux guy he seems to be a pretty decent guy trying to make good on a tough situation.
IMHO, and it appears in the opinion of many others posting tonight, audio on Linux is deeply messed up, and its a leading factor in killing Linux acceptance on the desktop. Linus or other Linux kernel leaders seriously need to step up, lead a rational discussion of the problem, throw out all the old biases and misconceptions and come up with a rational fix. Audio on Linux has been bad for 10 years, its not getting any better and ALSA is more the problem than the solution, as are all the hacks like pulse, esd, arts, gstreamer, etc.
Audio more than any other issue turned me and several others I've read tonight from Linux to Mac for our desktop, and I've been a Linux fan and desktop user for a long time as you can tell from my 5 digit/. user ID so it wasn't a switch I made lightly.
The original submission makes it sound like audio on Linux is great and its only a bunch of whiners and evil corporations spreading FUD about Linux saying otherwise, which is pure mob rule pandering.
"...current democratical movement with Mousavi..."
It should be taken with a grain of salt that Mousavi is leading a "democratic" movement in Iran. Mousavi was a former Iranian Prime Minister during the early years of the Iranin revolution which brought down the Shah and began the current regime of the Ayatollahs. At least in the 80's he was very much a part of the Iranian establishment. The Ayatollahs don't usually let just anyone run for office in Iran unless they are acceptable to the Ayatollahs.
Unfortunately its a little hard to get much unbiased information on Mousavi in the West at this point. The Wikipedia article on him has gone to complete hell as both sides fight to introduce biased edits. The Wikipedia talk section about it is a pretty good insight in to the politics of Wikipedia when information warfare over a Wikipedia article spikes.
It may be true that Mousavi is a lesser of the two evils compared to Ahmadinejad, but unless you really know the history and players and understand what is really going on in Iran, and I'm not sure anyone really does, it would be safer to just adopt the position that there is just a major, multisided, power struggle going on between Mousavi, Ahmadinejad, Khamenei, Rafsanjani, various clerics, the Revolutionary Guard, Basij, and urban, liberal young people. As is often the case with revolutions, the outcome and the unintended consequences are not always as utopian as the revolutionaries think when they are in the throes.
It is almost certainly simplistic to portray Mousavi as an unabashed champion of democracy, freedom and pure as driven snow, who, if he comes to power will undo the last 30 years of animosity to the West. He certainly may have mellowed during his 20 years out of Iranian politics and maybe he really is a champion of freedom and liberalization but I wouldn't take it as a certainty.
... when application developers or users express concern about a problem in your OS is to attack them, call them liars and FUD rakers, accuse them of being stooges for Microsoft or whatever.
I'm pretty sure the engineer who develops the Flash Linux player is probably on your side, and he was expressing a legitimate concern about a problem with Linux. As best I remember Adobe hired him out of the open source, Linux world. It would probably be more productive to listen to his concerns, and see if maybe, just maybe, there is a problem with audio on Linux. Having tried to write simple audio apps myself using OSS and ALSA I can assure you they have issues, OSS having no mixer at all was a nightmare to make play with more than one audio stream or more than one app at a time, that's why ESD, arts and pulse were created to hide these mixer deficiencies.
ALSA is a ridiculously overdone, convoluted audio API which makes it very painful for audio driver writers and application developers alike. It simply has too many knobs that can be tweaked and turned most of which never get implemented properly by driver writers and can't be trusted.
The simple fact that there must be a dozen different audio API's on Linux many of which exist solely to hide applications and users from the deficiencies in OSS and ALSA tells you something right there.
Rather than attacking this guy maybe you should have the empathy for the guy, he has to deploy an application that is used by probably millions of Linux users, most of whom are ticked off its not open source in the first place and then when it doesn't work perfectly they scream bloody murder. He has to try to make audio work in the face of the fact there are countless barely working or at least buggy ALSA drivers in the world, and there must be about a HUNDRED different ways to configure audio when you count OSS, ALSA, gstreamer, pulse, esd, arts, jack, OpenAL, and a MILLION different configurations when you count all the obscure options you can or in some cases HAVE to set on audio drivers.
As an end user I've suffered through painful, hard to fix audio bugs, in just about every PC I've owned over the last ten years due to audio driver bugs. Sure I could sift through "supported" hardware lists and try to find that rare new PC or laptop where everything is guaranteed to work on Linux, but I would actually prefer to just buy the hardware I want at the price I want. Of course in all fairness to the Linux developer community it is a total bitch to get working drivers on all the PC hardware being put out especially when the vast majority of hardware developers either just don't support Linux, support Linux badly, or actively obstruct Linux support.
You all seriously need to realize that if you want broader acceptance of your wonderful operating system:
A. You need applications and application developers to develop for your system, and not attack them if they point out problems deploying apps on your system. In a perfect world every app would be open source, but there may be some apps which aren't Linux would be better off having as closed source than not having at all.
B. it will have to actually work for ordinary people who aren't going to spend days/weeks/years fiddling with things to try to make it work right.
One of the beauties of the Mac is the hardware is tightly controlled. You may view that as confining and depriving you of your freedom, but it also helps insure the damn thing works out of the box, and most of the applications on it work pretty damn well. After years of fighting nagging bugs on Linux I decided it was in my own best interest to just switch to a Mac for my desktop system and I use my Linux box solely to develop code on. Linux on the desktop is a lot better than it was but unfortunately its just not a very good desktop experience by comparison.
Unless there is a major attitude adjustment in the Linux community that is unlikely to change. Either:
A. Be content that Linux is a niche OS for hardcore fans a
"Newsflash: not all open srouce stuff is any good, and while open source may be a good religion, to follow it blindly in defiance to facts doesn't do anybody any good."
Newsflash: WebKit is the basis for the browser in the iPhone and for Safari among others, the iPhone and its browser are quite successful so all indications are it is a first rate, competitive application. It just happens to be free and open source too which serves to make it even more compelling versus competing closed source, proprietary solutions. Opera seems to be doing fine with its browser in the smart phone with a 25% share and iPhone with 22%, but those stats don't count iTouch, and if you addin in the other new smart phones using WebKit now I'm guessing it is the #1 mobile browser now. I think Nokia, Apple, Palm and Google are opting for WebKit and that is a big chunk of the leading edge smart phone market. Blackberry seems to be one of the few laggards switching to WebKit though I see a few hits in Google suggesting they are adopting it in at least some instances too? Apple, Google and Nokia also contribute pretty substantial resources, and presumably professional engineers, to developing WebKit.
"It's probably cheaper to just license Opera than to assemble your own browser team and make your own browser. It's extremely time-consuming and expensive to make a browser."
WebKit is already a fully functional browser. "Making" it is only slightly more involved than typing "make". You only need to integrate it with your graphics API if you are using one it doesn't already support. Its not trivial to integrate WebKit but its something most companies with the resources to develop a mobile phone can easily handle.
I'm pretty sure mobile phone makers like Nokia, Apple and now Google would almost certainly rather develop their own WebKit browsers at this point than get locked in to one from a third party like Opera. Any company adopting Android gets an integrated WebKit browser for free, with source, thanks to Google. Not saying some companies wont still opt for Opera but with WebKit in Android for free it certainly creates a head wind against Opera continuing to make money in this area.
You do know Oregon has, I think the second highest unemployment rate in the country after Michigan. NY time had a fluff piece on Bend, Oregon yesterday. Short story, large numbers of Californians feeling rich due to their hyperinflated real estate, and bubble inflated stock portfolio's move to Oregon to lead the good life, excepting now their stock portfolios collapsed as did their remaining real estate holdings in California. They are no looking for jobs and there are basically no jobs to be had in Oregon... and its starting to turn a little ugly.
What exactly does Oregon do for jobs? It was very dependent on lumber and logging but that industry collapsed years ago due to environmental backlash and competition from Canadian imports. Not sure the Salmon fisheries are still in tact. Lot of agriculture, one of the worlds major producers of... hazelnuts. Intel and HP have operations there so there is some tech but I doubt it compares to Seattle or California for tech. There is Nike of course. From Wikipedia I see "Portland reportedly has more strip clubs per capita than Las Vegas or San Francisco." so there is that going for it.
"You do know that you can use C/C++ code right? JNI is fully supported you know."
You do know Google doesn't really officially support native code apps and there are no defined native mode API's to access the things you might want to access in native mode like graphics and audio. There are interfaces there but they are internal, not published and are "use at your own risk". If you use them chances are relatively high your native code will break the first time Google puts out a new version of Android.
I think the grandparent meant to say iPhone supports native code as a first class citizen while Google doesn't. You certainly can do some kinds of native mode apps that don't interact much with the hardware and OS, or do so only through clunky JNI.
Java is great for a lot of things, for ease of development, portability and improved security, but it is something of a limiting factor for applications that need maximum performance or to get closer to the metal.
Not sure if its intentional or not but in areas like media players it gives Google a degree of exclusivity in app development since they can use native code and their internal API's whenever they want, while that is a relatively dangerous thing to do for third party app developers.
"As for the mobile market, it is being surpassed by iPhone."
Opera is being challenged by WebKit, not exactly the iPhone. WebKit is the browser in iPhone, Android and a number of other embedded platforms. WebKit was spun off Konquerer and is also the engined under Apple's Safari browser.
WebKit is open source and free which is a key reason its a serious challenge to Opera in the embedded space. Opera browsers are free on the desktop but Opera in embedded applications is relatively expensive to license and closed source so its days are probably numbered in the one place it makes money. Maybe Opera can compete against it by offering better value in some areas to justify the price tag and the head aches of dealing with a proprietary closed source browser.... but in the long run.... I doubt it. Dealing with Opera in the embedded space has all the negatives you would expect from dealing with a closed source, proprietary, software company.
"see for example the 224 co-sponsors (over half the House) of The Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009"
That is a pretty easy bill to garner widespread support. After the last year of shenanigans out of the Fed and Treasury I think just about everyone is realizing fiat currencies are bad, as is letting a hand full of people who don't really answer to anyone control it.
A week or so ago a couple Japanese nationals were caught in Italy trying to smuggle what appear to be $135 billion in U.S. Treasury bearer bonds in to Switzerland, in $500 million and $1 billion denominations. Either Japan was trying to quietly dump their vast T-bill holdings in Switzerland because they don't trust the U.S any more and didn't want to be too conspicuous about it, or there are some other shenanigans going on. If they are genuine Italy may have erased a big bunch of their deficit thanks to a customs checkpoint who found the false bottom in a suitcase.
There are strong suspicions Bernanke and Paulson intentionally froze up the credit markets to coerce $700 billion out of Congress and transfer to Wall Street. The hundred plus billion that went to AIG went in one door and out the other to a number of large firms who desperately needed payoffs on their credit default swaps that AIG couldn't pay. Paulson's old firm Goldman Sachs got billions of dollars with no strings attached from U.S. tax payers through AIG, and chances of AIG paying it back are slim. The firms who had credit default swaps through AIG on their toxic mortgages came out smelling like a rose thanks to the U.S. tax payers and Paulson pulling strings to protect his old firm.
There are also rumors the Fed has been using their printing press to intervene in the stock market at the end of the day to manufacture the unusual rally of recent months. One sure way to break the psychology of a depression is to make the stock market always go up. Unfortunately doing it by printing funny money makes the entire U.S. economy a sham.
Its not even a rumor, its a fact Bernanke has been using the Fed to print money to buy U.S. treasury bills to prop up the massive U.S. government debt and to try to keep treasury and mortgage rates down. That stinks no matter how you look at it, the U.S. fed printing money to bankroll U.S. government debt, and since T-bill rates are spiking lately it doesn't seem to have even worked.
Everyone thinks its a wacko's rant but fiat currencies really are inherently dangerous. They are fine when responsibly managed and there is no stress, but as soon as a crisis develops and irresponsible managers start printing money to get out of it, they can wipe out people's life savings in no time through hyperinflation.
The question is if the U.S. will even have any green IP to protect. After the last eight years of denying there was a problem, and a proreligion, anti science and technology administration I'm wondering if the U.S. is so far behind Japan, Germany, China etc. that the U.S. is going to have to license technology from them instead of the other way around. The Japanese seem substantially ahead in hybrid vehicles. Not sure who is leading in battery technology but I'm skeptical its the U.S. There are some interesting things happening in the U.S. in low cost solar panels but Germany and China seem to have much higher existing production capacity.
Anyone have anecdotes for green technology IP that originates in the U.S.?
You hit the nail on the head. If you were to shut down government spending, military, health care/drug dispensing and prisons in the U.S. you would discover we have virtually no economy left. I yearn for an end to the pork barrel spending at the state and local level and a big cut in taxes to go with it, but then you realize that the government has taken over such a big percentage of our economy you would have an instant depression were it not for the government squandering tax dollars and printed or borrowed money.
Better hope the dollar stays the world's reserve currency because if the U.S. can't keep borrowing and printing trillions of dollars every year this country is in deep, deep trouble. For example it wont be able to buy all the oil it needs to keep all its cars on the road. When Iceland and Ireland's economies tanked last year they were screwed, while the U.S. can just print and borrow money even though it caused the collapse in the first place.
An interesting aside, it sure didn't get much main stream press, but Italian customs apparently caught a couple Japanese nationals trying to smuggle $135 billion, that's right BILLION, in what are apparently $500 million and $1 billion U.S. treasury bearer bonds in to Switzerland last week in a suitcase with a fake bottom. Conspiracy theorists are having a field day debating if Japan is trying to clandestinely dump some of its huge investment in treasuries before the dollar craters or if someone in the Fed/U.S. government is doing something very fishy.
As best I recall the airplane that crashed in Buffalo was stalling and the proper response was to put the nose down, dive and gain airspeed. The autopilot started shaking the stick to warn of a stall and nosed the plane down. The pilot did exactly the wrong thing grabbed the stick and pulled the nose up which is probably an instinctive reaction but exactly the wrong thing to do in a stall. I think pilot error finished putting the plane in to a stall and it dropped like a rock. The pilot apparently had inadequate training and didn't fair well on his exams. Considering the incredibly low wages, poor working conditions and not so great pilots many U.S. airlines have now I'm not entirely sure you really want to place that much trust the pilot in all cases either.
The interesting thing here is this instantly elevated the fame of rtmpdump and the tools to rip Flash streams. Many more people will now have increased awareness of there existence, go out of there way to cache copies of them, distribute it all over the planet, etc. This is the forbidden fruit dilemma. By trying to stamp out the fire Adobe just turned it in to a wild fire. It also just highlights how completely not open "Open" Screen is.
The/. community really needs to band together and push harder with the help of Apple and Google hopefully to eliminate Adobe's near monopoly on web video. It is totally wrong for one company to have a monopoly on this now critical web infrastructure. I could care less about Flash doing ads and stupid 2D games, but it absolutely needs to be wiped off the face of the earth as the defacto web video player, because Adobe is going to A) abuse their increasing monopoly in web video B) totally fail in providing Flash plugins for embedded devices that have browser plugins now, netbooks, phones, TV's etc. FlashLite is just a joke and Open Screen is no where to be seen a full year after they announced it, it was pure vaporware.
Slashdot Mirror
"But what about when your 3-year-old daughter"
I don't have any kids. This world is already way too overpopulated, I don't need to help make it worse.
"Are you going to tell her "tough shit, your time has come, death is a natural and necessary part of living"?"
Ya know it sounds bad and it wont win me any karma for saying it but.... yea. Where is it written we have to spend infinite sums of money to keep everyone alive at all costs? Where do you draw the line $800K, $8M, $80M. It appears our medical system is going to keep escalating the price tag to try to cure incurable diseases until something gives.
My line is clear. If I can't afford it I suffer the consequences. Where your line is is not so clear. You seem to be insisting society spend as much as possible to attempt to keep everyone alive. One outcome of that is our economy will collapse and then a lot worse things will happen than a 3 year old dieing of Leukemia.
When a new born infant has fatal birth defects do we REALLY have to spend a million dollars in an often futile effort to keep the infant alive. Not really, its tough luck but the rational solution is to let nature take its course and the parents have another kid. But we are no longer a rational culture, we are obsessive. It seems we have to have our Sarah Palin's who insist its somehow a good thing to knowingly give birth to a child with Down's Syndrome who will never have a life worth living and to divert society's resources to supporting him his entire life when those resources could be better spent elsewhere.
Life just really isn't as precious and sacred as we are trying to make it. Maybe its because I was raised on a farm instead of in suburbia. I seem to have a much keener appreciation for the fact that death is just part of the cycle that is life.
If you have the most basic understanding of Malthus it should be obvious that we either have to have to let population control mechanisms function or adopt draconian birth control. If we keep using technology to short circuit population controls, and let birth rates continue unchecked, this planet is going to buckle and billions of otherwise healthy people are going to die when we exhaust this planet's resources or push our climate in to no man's land.
It may sound cruel but apparently China provides next to no health care to its hundreds of millions of rural peasants. They no doubt know if they tried their economy would be the same basket case the U.S. economy is.
"So the idea of not having insurance and investing the money is silly. "
No.... no, its not, I just didn't expand on a key point.
If I have a disease that costs $800K to fix the solution is simple, I say my time has come, I blow some of my savings having as much fun as I can in the time I have left, give away the rest to people who need it, and find a quick way to end it once the pain starts getting out of control and the quality of life is gone.
I say no thanks to staggeringly expensive chemo, radiation, surgery, transplants, etc. My life isn't so sacred to me that I need to take a million bucks from someone else to keep me alive at all costs. If a simple and affordable procedure will improve my quality of life or save my life I will pay for it out of my own pocket. Its a basic personal responsibility issue to me. If I can't pay for it why should someone else have to.
You are just one of those people on the "huge benificiary" side of the insurance equation who are starting to outnumber the premium payers in our system which is why premiums keep going up. It wasn't so bad when medicine was primitive and not very expensive. But as of today its simply too expensive to support multimillion dollar treatments to keep EVERYONE alive which is where universal health care is trying to go. If our system continues down this road its going to end in one of four places:
- Eventually only the rich get the treatments because we wont be able to afford them for everyone. This is one of the more likely outcomes.
- We try to give everyone expensive treatments and end up in either national or global bankruptcy as health care drains every spare cent out of the economy, and once we get there we wont be able to treat anyone again. This is the next most likely outcome and seems to be where the U.S. is heading right now
- We bring down the cost of the treatments, manage to give them to everyone, assorted religions continue to spurn birth control and we end up with a world so completely overpopulated and resource starved life isn't worth living.
- Soylent Green
I'm pretty sure Utopia and Shangri-la where everyone lives for ever and life is always wonderful aren't viable options.
Death is a natural and very necessary part of biology and living. Either we have it or we have to stop procreating. We continue to use technology to prevent it at all costs without also preventing births this planet is doomed......
The religious right in particular, across a number of faiths are DEMANDING, under the guise of sanctity of life, we keep people alive at all costs, and also demand we continue to procreate with no birth control. This will almost certainly doom this planet. They are a testimony for the need to give everyone a heavier dose of Thomas Malthus in biology class.
How exactly is a library better than the Internet if Google digitizes all the books, the same ones that are in the library, and puts them online so everyone can access them from everywhere AND electronically search them.
The only real filter in here libraries have and most of the Internet doesn't are the editors at publishing companies who decide which books make it to print and which don't. If Google digitizes the same books the library has and puts them online then as long as you don't stray out of that repository the part of the Internet is vastly superior to any library you can name. You might argue that the librarian is an additional quality filter in picking a subset of books but I would argue they aren't always good filters, because libraries are often full of shelves of Harlequin romances, total garbage but people like reading them. As I recall when Sarah Palin became mayor one of her first acts was to try to censor all the objectionable books out of the town library. Librarian fought it for a while but eventually quit. Here's hoping that Google will refrain from book burning controversial books out of an online library though it appears they will eagerly filter anything out of the Chinese government demands.
Only thing a dead tree library has over a Google online library is that somehow they can get away with letting people read NEW books for free while Google and Amazon can't. Libraries are in fact the first instance and test case for people sharing copyrighted content and using it without paying for it.
If you listen to what Bradbury is saying he was more or less advocating now and doing in the Depression what the RIAA is suiting people for doing now with MP3's through the internet. He was reading copyrighted books for free at the library without paying the copyright holder.
My prediction is when this finally makes it to the President's desk, and the lobbyists get done, it will be the worst of all worlds like just about every bill out of Congress in the last 20 years:
A. Everyone will be forced to buy insurance and if they don't they will get fined and get no insurance.
B. There will be no government insurance plan, it will be the one thing Republicans kill to protect their friends in the private insurance business. So insurance companies will still have no real competition and they will have a 100% captive market, everyone will be forced to buy their insurance no matter how much they jack up rates and they WILL jack up their rates just like the drug companies are doing on Medicare-D.
C. Medical costs will continue to spiral out of control because the private sector will have NO incentive to rein in out of control fraud, waste and abuse
D. Malpractice lawyers and ambulance chasers will continue to extort a massive toll out of the system because lawyers have a powerful lobby especially with Dems.
E. Health care, drug and insurance companies will rake in record profits
F. If you are middle income you will be forced to both buy your own policy, premiums will continue to spiral out of control, and you will get to pay new higher taxes to pay for insurance for the poor and bail out Medicare.
They try to force me to pay for insurance I will fight it all the way to the Supreme court. The precedent exist for them to tax me to pay for it but I can see no way in hell they can force me to spend money out of my pocket by dictate to buy health insurance. You might cite no fault car insurance as precedent but that can be justified as a prerequisite for using highways built by the government and if I opt out of driving I don't have to buy the damn insurance. This is MUCH more intrusive to my liberties than that. Only honest and probably constitutional way for government to do this is to jack up taxes and do socialized medicine and hear everyone howl.
Everything the Democrats are saying lately is you can't opt out and if you do they will make you pay fines AND not have insurance, which is EXACTLY what Obama said he wouldn't do, he explicitly said "NO MANDATE" when he was pandering for my vote and its the only reason he got it and he has since done a 180.... liar. He is just as bad as every other politician in existence. I didn't vote for Clinton because she was openly for the mandate. I wouldn't have voted for Obama if he'd say then what he is saying now.
I long ago figured out self insuring myself is a dramatically better way, especially when you are relatively young and healthy. Insurance is not a free ride, all it does is average out the total cost over a large pool, so it takes money from healthy people and gives it to the very sick who get way more treatment than they paid for, meanwhile private insurance companies skim a big profit off the top investing all the money you give them. INVESTING YOUR MONEY YOURSELF FOR YOURSELF IS SMART, INSURANCE ISN'T. If you take the same money you would otherwise spend on health insurance when you are young and healthy and just invest it you will eventually have enough money set aside to pay for your own health needs as you get older and are more likely to need major health care. If you stay healthy the money is there to use for other pressing needs as they arise or to retire on when you reach Medicare.
If you buy insurance and stay healthy your money is pretty much being stolen and transferred from you to:
A. Insurance company execs and share holders
B. People who made bad life style choices leading to bad health or accidental injury, obesity, smoking, diabetes, heart disease due to lack of exercise and poor eating habits, alcoholism, being just some of the self induced epidemics causing our medical costs to sky rocket.
C. Hypochondriacs and abusers of the system, like people who run to the emergency room at the drop of a hat and run up huge bills getting treatment through emergency rooms they sho
The problem with libraries is a basic efficiency one. It costs a LOT of money to build and maintain the buildings, stock a good library with books, and keep librarians employed and you have to do it in every town in on the planet. They aren't free, they cost a lot of tax dollars usually and a lot of tax payers probably don't appreciate their valie.
Also if you are in a big city or an affluent area which is ready to sink a lot of money in to its libraries they are quite good. As soon as you get to rural or less affluent areas the chances are the books available in the library are going to get sparse, low quality and provide books on a limited range of subjects, especially likely to appeal to the majority of the people in the area and leave others with different tastes out in the cold.
Google is really on the right track, if they can digitize all older books, avoid the copyright issues and put them ALL on the internet it wins hands down over dead tree libraries. Everyone, everywhere can access them and not be at the mercy of whether they live close to a big library, or have to get books through inter library loan which kind of really sucks as far as efficiency goes.
Assuming you do have such a digitized online repository of books libraries need to morph in the direction they are already going which is to provide free internet access to people who need it, and a haven to people to use computers away from home, school and work. Executed well it would save tons of money and provide people a much broader range of reading material especially outside of big cities. The one intractable problem is making new works, still under copyright available on line for free. Libraries can get away with making books freely available but I doubt Google can do it online.
There is some question about how well the cloud will do in preserving books over a long, long interval but we can hope if Google or someone else does manage to digitize all the world's book that they will figure out a way to insure its backed up to multiple independent sites where it will survive major calamities, and will be available in perpetuity.
When it came to mob rule I was mostly referring to:
A. the submission which was designed to pander to the /. crowds lust to hate Adobe and defend Linux even in areas where its not particularly defensible like audio
B. the previous times I've said pretty much the same thing here on /. about audio and been flamed and modded in to trolldom.
It actually took me by surprise this time how overwhelming the agreement was that audio does in fact suck on Linux. There finally seems to be a ground swell of people fed up with it. I just hope Linus reads it.....
I love Linux, I've started hating it on the desktop and I explained exactly why, ten years of bullshit with audio support is the leading reason. Didn't say it here but have said it on /. before the bullshit competition between GNOME and KDE is the other reason. GTK just isn't a good basis for a desktop and it shows in GNOME. KDE I can live with but KDE 4.0 was a disaster and I'm starting to doubt Qt is a viable toolkit for Linux on the desktop too, because it appears you can't count on Trolltech, if they are going to completely wreck all existing code that uses Qt when they do a new major version as they did with 4.x. I really just want one good desktop standard all applications use and where all applications behave with reasonable predictability and consistency. If Linux can't do it... well Apple already has. It kinds of sucks paying Apple's price tag and getting locked in, but it some respects than it better than dealing with a bunch of haphazard GUI's in applications.
I can't fix audio on Linux, not sure who can other than Linus leading the effort, I'm not a leader on the kernel lists, I'm just a frustrated Linux desktop user and I write application code on Linux sometimes. I don't have the cred to say throw out a major part of the Linux kernel and start over. Pulse audio isn't a solution, its just perpetuating the same cluster fuck that was esd and arts.
Others on here have suggested a fix that sounds pretty reasonable, return to OSS using the newest version which seems to be working great on BSD. I can't say since I haven't tried OSS since the days when it completely sucked. If you want an example of an OS with a really great media framework.... look at BeOS. It had head and shoulders better multimedia support ten years ago than Linux has now.
The one and only thing I can say is Linus or whomever made a SERIOUS mistake when they accepted ALSA as the new audio API. All he had to do was look at the convoluted mess of an API, and the horrible documentation, and he should have immediately nixed it. For whatever reason he didn't and he set back Linux on the desktop by years.
"but carriers do dictate and direct a lot of handset development"
The only problem with your assertion is that, at least in the U.S. all of their dictates and direction tend to be bad and devoid of innovation.
I think all of the innovative handsets listed in one of the articles were developed by tech companies not carriers, Apple's iPhone was almost certainly developed with no input from ATT, I doubt Sprint had much input to the Palm Pre, maybe Verizon had a little input to Blackberry Storm, not sure.
Everyone who HAS a cell phone in the U.S. knows U.S. cell phone carriers are pretty much the worst carriers on the planet. EVERY other country in the world seems to have better handsets, lower rates, less lock in, better networks and better service plans.
U.S. cell phone companies remind me a lot of U.S. car companies. They seem have some kind of an under the table agreement to all suck equally bad and screw their customers to the same level. They can then all provide bad service, at high prices, with abusive contacts and get away with it because all a customer can do is switch from one bad carrier to another bad carrier. This strategy worked great for U.S. car companies until the Japanese, who had signed on to their collusion, ate their lunch building better products cheaper, now two out of three have ended in bankruptcy. The only problem with the same thing happening to phone companies is the U.S. is a big place and its expensive and hard for a new competitor to come in and build a network from scratch so its unlikely any foreign competitor will seriously compete with them, T-Mobile tries but...
It sure would be interesting if DoCoMo moved in to the U.S. and did to the phone companies what Japanese cars did to the car companies. There sure is a lot of room for improvement.
As much as the U.S. and U.S. companies spout off about free markets, the invisible hand, competition, etc. the U.S. has deteriorated in to having a disturbing lack of competition. Cell phone companies are pretty much down to ATT and Verizon with Sprint on life support. Microsoft's only serious competitor in PC's is Apple which came back from the dead or there would be no competition at all, Intel's only serious competitor is a very weak AMD, Boeing's only commercial competitor is in Europe, the number of defense contractors is a tiny fraction of what it once was. Walmart, given time, may destroy all competition in the retail sector. The number of major banks is half what it was a couple years ago. Oil companies have merged to the point we are almost back the Standard Oil monopoly. Cable companies there is usually only one option in an area, and only two satellite services, all grossly overpriced. When the banks nearly failed, the government had to step in to rescue them in contravention of all free market principles because they were "too big to fail", what did we do, merge them in to an even smaller number of even bigger banks that were too big to fail.
The U.S. is turning in to a poster child for Capitalism's end game where one giant company dominates each market segment, and all competition disappears while they yammer about the importance of free markets and competition.
"Explain to me again how Flash was an improvement in usability?"
How would you run Windows Media Player on ... Linux. Don't think Linux supported Quicktime for a long time and when it did it was a big download. Real went through an extended period where their software was totally hated by nearly every one for their sleezy business tactics.
If Flash did nothing else right they made it possible for just about everyone on Windows, Mac and Linux to have seamlessly integrated video in their browser without even having to think about it. My mom wanted to play some streaming audio the other day and was presented with a list of proprietary players similar to yours and she had no clue what to do. I think we opted for Windows Media Player since she is on XP and when it came up SHE STILL had no clue what to do with it. If it had been Flash she would have pressed a play button on the browser page and it would have just worked. Flash audio and video is a BIG win for the little old ladies in the world. Flash eliminated the NEED for anyone to even worry about what kind of video player it was, the video was just there, it played, it always worked. The technically literate here don't get it, but you have to make media players that the technically illiterate can use, Flash does, the others on your list mostly failed. With the help of YouTube it also became trivial to embed video in any web page. If you didn't have the plugin it was a tiny download, and just about everyone had Flash anyway.
I just wish Adobe didn't suck so much in providing Flash players for devices. Their complete failure to provide good players or a good SDK for cell phones, settop boxes, etc. is destroying everything they had in web video dominance.
Look on the Google developer forums every time a developer has asked about direct access to the Surface API from native code. Google consistently tells you to not use the API, its going to change, your app will break... If you want to do an application that needs to do fast, efficient blits, like media players its relatively hard to do in Android unless they've fixed it recently.
In fact you can't access it without modifying the mydroid source, your C++ class has to be friend class to the isurface class. The only two classes and apps that are friended to it are Androids own media player and camera apps.
Its nice Google is supporting native code browser plugins but they pretty much have to do that to support things like Flash plugins but they still aren't as friendly to native mode apps as Apple is.
I'm all for driving Flash out of existence, since Macromedia/Adobe should have never been allowed to acquire the near monopoly on web video they have. Adobe has also been a horrible steward of their responsibility especially when its come to Flash player support for devices like smart phones.
But the flip side is you might recall back to what video was like before Flash. Every freaking web site you went to had a different video standard, video player, and you were usually forced to launch a video player which either wasn't integrated in the browser or was integrated badly. Flash only succeeded because it fixed a completely broken thing on the web where Apple, Real and Microsoft in particular were trying to acquire their own monopolies on web video.
For this to succeed Wikipedia needs to compel a new video player standard other than Flash and proprietary codecs like H.264, and insure near universal availability of the solution they create as an integrated browser component, either built in to the browser or as a plugin.
I'm kind of curious if HTML/5 is going to be able to achieve that lofty goal across all the warring browser factions in the world, especially IE and Microsoft. Not sure JavaFX counts as open. What other standard is their other than HTML/5.
You also have the little problem that all existing video is going to have to be transcoded if you reject H.264, VP6, MPEG, WMV, AVI and Flash H.263 as acceptable formats. It sure isn't going to be easy to add video to Wikipedia if Joe and Jane user have to transcode the video to add it, or is Wikipedia going to automatically transcode video as they get it to their open standard.
"This is not a police state"
The Linux and Slashdot communities are certainly not police states but sometimes they do degenerate in to "mob rule". In "mob rule" the people who excel at shouting others down and pandering to what the mob wants to hear often win even if they are wrong. I've excelled at it myself here sometimes :)
I'm not sure if the problem is even in any of the the actual fracking articles no one reads, but more the trollish way things were worded in the submission to Slashdot, which seems designed to provoke a fight. The submission seems crafted to make Adobe look evil and bad, Linux look good, for no actual reason other than its certain to be red meat to the slashdot mob and sure to win acceptance with the /. editors. I hate Adobe and Flash as much as the next guy, maybe more, but from what I read in the blog of the Adobe Linux guy he seems to be a pretty decent guy trying to make good on a tough situation.
IMHO, and it appears in the opinion of many others posting tonight, audio on Linux is deeply messed up, and its a leading factor in killing Linux acceptance on the desktop. Linus or other Linux kernel leaders seriously need to step up, lead a rational discussion of the problem, throw out all the old biases and misconceptions and come up with a rational fix. Audio on Linux has been bad for 10 years, its not getting any better and ALSA is more the problem than the solution, as are all the hacks like pulse, esd, arts, gstreamer, etc.
Audio more than any other issue turned me and several others I've read tonight from Linux to Mac for our desktop, and I've been a Linux fan and desktop user for a long time as you can tell from my 5 digit /. user ID so it wasn't a switch I made lightly.
The original submission makes it sound like audio on Linux is great and its only a bunch of whiners and evil corporations spreading FUD about Linux saying otherwise, which is pure mob rule pandering.
"...current democratical movement with Mousavi..."
It should be taken with a grain of salt that Mousavi is leading a "democratic" movement in Iran. Mousavi was a former Iranian Prime Minister during the early years of the Iranin revolution which brought down the Shah and began the current regime of the Ayatollahs. At least in the 80's he was very much a part of the Iranian establishment. The Ayatollahs don't usually let just anyone run for office in Iran unless they are acceptable to the Ayatollahs.
Unfortunately its a little hard to get much unbiased information on Mousavi in the West at this point. The Wikipedia article on him has gone to complete hell as both sides fight to introduce biased edits. The Wikipedia talk section about it is a pretty good insight in to the politics of Wikipedia when information warfare over a Wikipedia article spikes.
It may be true that Mousavi is a lesser of the two evils compared to Ahmadinejad, but unless you really know the history and players and understand what is really going on in Iran, and I'm not sure anyone really does, it would be safer to just adopt the position that there is just a major, multisided, power struggle going on between Mousavi, Ahmadinejad, Khamenei, Rafsanjani, various clerics, the Revolutionary Guard, Basij, and urban, liberal young people. As is often the case with revolutions, the outcome and the unintended consequences are not always as utopian as the revolutionaries think when they are in the throes.
It is almost certainly simplistic to portray Mousavi as an unabashed champion of democracy, freedom and pure as driven snow, who, if he comes to power will undo the last 30 years of animosity to the West. He certainly may have mellowed during his 20 years out of Iranian politics and maybe he really is a champion of freedom and liberalization but I wouldn't take it as a certainty.
... when application developers or users express concern about a problem in your OS is to attack them, call them liars and FUD rakers, accuse them of being stooges for Microsoft or whatever.
I'm pretty sure the engineer who develops the Flash Linux player is probably on your side, and he was expressing a legitimate concern about a problem with Linux. As best I remember Adobe hired him out of the open source, Linux world. It would probably be more productive to listen to his concerns, and see if maybe, just maybe, there is a problem with audio on Linux. Having tried to write simple audio apps myself using OSS and ALSA I can assure you they have issues, OSS having no mixer at all was a nightmare to make play with more than one audio stream or more than one app at a time, that's why ESD, arts and pulse were created to hide these mixer deficiencies.
ALSA is a ridiculously overdone, convoluted audio API which makes it very painful for audio driver writers and application developers alike. It simply has too many knobs that can be tweaked and turned most of which never get implemented properly by driver writers and can't be trusted.
The simple fact that there must be a dozen different audio API's on Linux many of which exist solely to hide applications and users from the deficiencies in OSS and ALSA tells you something right there.
Rather than attacking this guy maybe you should have the empathy for the guy, he has to deploy an application that is used by probably millions of Linux users, most of whom are ticked off its not open source in the first place and then when it doesn't work perfectly they scream bloody murder. He has to try to make audio work in the face of the fact there are countless barely working or at least buggy ALSA drivers in the world, and there must be about a HUNDRED different ways to configure audio when you count OSS, ALSA, gstreamer, pulse, esd, arts, jack, OpenAL, and a MILLION different configurations when you count all the obscure options you can or in some cases HAVE to set on audio drivers.
As an end user I've suffered through painful, hard to fix audio bugs, in just about every PC I've owned over the last ten years due to audio driver bugs. Sure I could sift through "supported" hardware lists and try to find that rare new PC or laptop where everything is guaranteed to work on Linux, but I would actually prefer to just buy the hardware I want at the price I want. Of course in all fairness to the Linux developer community it is a total bitch to get working drivers on all the PC hardware being put out especially when the vast majority of hardware developers either just don't support Linux, support Linux badly, or actively obstruct Linux support.
You all seriously need to realize that if you want broader acceptance of your wonderful operating system:
A. You need applications and application developers to develop for your system, and not attack them if they point out problems deploying apps on your system. In a perfect world every app would be open source, but there may be some apps which aren't Linux would be better off having as closed source than not having at all.
B. it will have to actually work for ordinary people who aren't going to spend days/weeks/years fiddling with things to try to make it work right.
One of the beauties of the Mac is the hardware is tightly controlled. You may view that as confining and depriving you of your freedom, but it also helps insure the damn thing works out of the box, and most of the applications on it work pretty damn well. After years of fighting nagging bugs on Linux I decided it was in my own best interest to just switch to a Mac for my desktop system and I use my Linux box solely to develop code on. Linux on the desktop is a lot better than it was but unfortunately its just not a very good desktop experience by comparison.
Unless there is a major attitude adjustment in the Linux community that is unlikely to change. Either:
A. Be content that Linux is a niche OS for hardcore fans a
"Newsflash: not all open srouce stuff is any good, and while open source may be a good religion, to follow it blindly in defiance to facts doesn't do anybody any good."
Newsflash: WebKit is the basis for the browser in the iPhone and for Safari among others, the iPhone and its browser are quite successful so all indications are it is a first rate, competitive application. It just happens to be free and open source too which serves to make it even more compelling versus competing closed source, proprietary solutions. Opera seems to be doing fine with its browser in the smart phone with a 25% share and iPhone with 22%, but those stats don't count iTouch, and if you addin in the other new smart phones using WebKit now I'm guessing it is the #1 mobile browser now. I think Nokia, Apple, Palm and Google are opting for WebKit and that is a big chunk of the leading edge smart phone market. Blackberry seems to be one of the few laggards switching to WebKit though I see a few hits in Google suggesting they are adopting it in at least some instances too? Apple, Google and Nokia also contribute pretty substantial resources, and presumably professional engineers, to developing WebKit.
"It's probably cheaper to just license Opera than to assemble your own browser team and make your own browser. It's extremely time-consuming and expensive to make a browser."
WebKit is already a fully functional browser. "Making" it is only slightly more involved than typing "make". You only need to integrate it with your graphics API if you are using one it doesn't already support. Its not trivial to integrate WebKit but its something most companies with the resources to develop a mobile phone can easily handle.
I'm pretty sure mobile phone makers like Nokia, Apple and now Google would almost certainly rather develop their own WebKit browsers at this point than get locked in to one from a third party like Opera. Any company adopting Android gets an integrated WebKit browser for free, with source, thanks to Google. Not saying some companies wont still opt for Opera but with WebKit in Android for free it certainly creates a head wind against Opera continuing to make money in this area.
You do know Oregon has, I think the second highest unemployment rate in the country after Michigan. NY time had a fluff piece on Bend, Oregon yesterday. Short story, large numbers of Californians feeling rich due to their hyperinflated real estate, and bubble inflated stock portfolio's move to Oregon to lead the good life, excepting now their stock portfolios collapsed as did their remaining real estate holdings in California. They are no looking for jobs and there are basically no jobs to be had in Oregon... and its starting to turn a little ugly.
What exactly does Oregon do for jobs? It was very dependent on lumber and logging but that industry collapsed years ago due to environmental backlash and competition from Canadian imports. Not sure the Salmon fisheries are still in tact. Lot of agriculture, one of the worlds major producers of ... hazelnuts. Intel and HP have operations there so there is some tech but I doubt it compares to Seattle or California for tech. There is Nike of course. From Wikipedia I see "Portland reportedly has more strip clubs per capita than Las Vegas or San Francisco." so there is that going for it.
"You do know that you can use C/C++ code right? JNI is fully supported you know."
You do know Google doesn't really officially support native code apps and there are no defined native mode API's to access the things you might want to access in native mode like graphics and audio. There are interfaces there but they are internal, not published and are "use at your own risk". If you use them chances are relatively high your native code will break the first time Google puts out a new version of Android.
I think the grandparent meant to say iPhone supports native code as a first class citizen while Google doesn't. You certainly can do some kinds of native mode apps that don't interact much with the hardware and OS, or do so only through clunky JNI.
Java is great for a lot of things, for ease of development, portability and improved security, but it is something of a limiting factor for applications that need maximum performance or to get closer to the metal.
Not sure if its intentional or not but in areas like media players it gives Google a degree of exclusivity in app development since they can use native code and their internal API's whenever they want, while that is a relatively dangerous thing to do for third party app developers.
"As for the mobile market, it is being surpassed by iPhone."
Opera is being challenged by WebKit, not exactly the iPhone. WebKit is the browser in iPhone, Android and a number of other embedded platforms. WebKit was spun off Konquerer and is also the engined under Apple's Safari browser.
WebKit is open source and free which is a key reason its a serious challenge to Opera in the embedded space. Opera browsers are free on the desktop but Opera in embedded applications is relatively expensive to license and closed source so its days are probably numbered in the one place it makes money. Maybe Opera can compete against it by offering better value in some areas to justify the price tag and the head aches of dealing with a proprietary closed source browser.... but in the long run.... I doubt it. Dealing with Opera in the embedded space has all the negatives you would expect from dealing with a closed source, proprietary, software company.
"see for example the 224 co-sponsors (over half the House) of The Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009"
That is a pretty easy bill to garner widespread support. After the last year of shenanigans out of the Fed and Treasury I think just about everyone is realizing fiat currencies are bad, as is letting a hand full of people who don't really answer to anyone control it.
A week or so ago a couple Japanese nationals were caught in Italy trying to smuggle what appear to be $135 billion in U.S. Treasury bearer bonds in to Switzerland, in $500 million and $1 billion denominations. Either Japan was trying to quietly dump their vast T-bill holdings in Switzerland because they don't trust the U.S any more and didn't want to be too conspicuous about it, or there are some other shenanigans going on. If they are genuine Italy may have erased a big bunch of their deficit thanks to a customs checkpoint who found the false bottom in a suitcase.
There are strong suspicions Bernanke and Paulson intentionally froze up the credit markets to coerce $700 billion out of Congress and transfer to Wall Street. The hundred plus billion that went to AIG went in one door and out the other to a number of large firms who desperately needed payoffs on their credit default swaps that AIG couldn't pay. Paulson's old firm Goldman Sachs got billions of dollars with no strings attached from U.S. tax payers through AIG, and chances of AIG paying it back are slim. The firms who had credit default swaps through AIG on their toxic mortgages came out smelling like a rose thanks to the U.S. tax payers and Paulson pulling strings to protect his old firm.
There are also rumors the Fed has been using their printing press to intervene in the stock market at the end of the day to manufacture the unusual rally of recent months. One sure way to break the psychology of a depression is to make the stock market always go up. Unfortunately doing it by printing funny money makes the entire U.S. economy a sham.
Its not even a rumor, its a fact Bernanke has been using the Fed to print money to buy U.S. treasury bills to prop up the massive U.S. government debt and to try to keep treasury and mortgage rates down. That stinks no matter how you look at it, the U.S. fed printing money to bankroll U.S. government debt, and since T-bill rates are spiking lately it doesn't seem to have even worked.
Everyone thinks its a wacko's rant but fiat currencies really are inherently dangerous. They are fine when responsibly managed and there is no stress, but as soon as a crisis develops and irresponsible managers start printing money to get out of it, they can wipe out people's life savings in no time through hyperinflation.
"... than give up their IP."
The question is if the U.S. will even have any green IP to protect. After the last eight years of denying there was a problem, and a proreligion, anti science and technology administration I'm wondering if the U.S. is so far behind Japan, Germany, China etc. that the U.S. is going to have to license technology from them instead of the other way around. The Japanese seem substantially ahead in hybrid vehicles. Not sure who is leading in battery technology but I'm skeptical its the U.S. There are some interesting things happening in the U.S. in low cost solar panels but Germany and China seem to have much higher existing production capacity.
Anyone have anecdotes for green technology IP that originates in the U.S.?
You hit the nail on the head. If you were to shut down government spending, military, health care/drug dispensing and prisons in the U.S. you would discover we have virtually no economy left. I yearn for an end to the pork barrel spending at the state and local level and a big cut in taxes to go with it, but then you realize that the government has taken over such a big percentage of our economy you would have an instant depression were it not for the government squandering tax dollars and printed or borrowed money.
Better hope the dollar stays the world's reserve currency because if the U.S. can't keep borrowing and printing trillions of dollars every year this country is in deep, deep trouble. For example it wont be able to buy all the oil it needs to keep all its cars on the road. When Iceland and Ireland's economies tanked last year they were screwed, while the U.S. can just print and borrow money even though it caused the collapse in the first place.
An interesting aside, it sure didn't get much main stream press, but Italian customs apparently caught a couple Japanese nationals trying to smuggle $135 billion, that's right BILLION, in what are apparently $500 million and $1 billion U.S. treasury bearer bonds in to Switzerland last week in a suitcase with a fake bottom. Conspiracy theorists are having a field day debating if Japan is trying to clandestinely dump some of its huge investment in treasuries before the dollar craters or if someone in the Fed/U.S. government is doing something very fishy.
As best I recall the airplane that crashed in Buffalo was stalling and the proper response was to put the nose down, dive and gain airspeed. The autopilot started shaking the stick to warn of a stall and nosed the plane down. The pilot did exactly the wrong thing grabbed the stick and pulled the nose up which is probably an instinctive reaction but exactly the wrong thing to do in a stall. I think pilot error finished putting the plane in to a stall and it dropped like a rock. The pilot apparently had inadequate training and didn't fair well on his exams. Considering the incredibly low wages, poor working conditions and not so great pilots many U.S. airlines have now I'm not entirely sure you really want to place that much trust the pilot in all cases either.
"Anarchy (and violent revolution[1]) in most cases ends up creating dictatorships."
Reference American revolution..... 1776.......
The interesting thing here is this instantly elevated the fame of rtmpdump and the tools to rip Flash streams. Many more people will now have increased awareness of there existence, go out of there way to cache copies of them, distribute it all over the planet, etc. This is the forbidden fruit dilemma. By trying to stamp out the fire Adobe just turned it in to a wild fire. It also just highlights how completely not open "Open" Screen is.
The /. community really needs to band together and push harder with the help of Apple and Google hopefully to eliminate Adobe's near monopoly on web video. It is totally wrong for one company to have a monopoly on this now critical web infrastructure. I could care less about Flash doing ads and stupid 2D games, but it absolutely needs to be wiped off the face of the earth as the defacto web video player, because Adobe is going to A) abuse their increasing monopoly in web video B) totally fail in providing Flash plugins for embedded devices that have browser plugins now, netbooks, phones, TV's etc. FlashLite is just a joke and Open Screen is no where to be seen a full year after they announced it, it was pure vaporware.