> That alone should be enough of a red flag. In case it's not, I'll point it out to you... companies that try and maintain sole control of a format, are not doing it with your best interest in mind.
Red flag? Again, we are talking about one company showing good faith efforts and a consortium actively exploiting their anti-trust exemption.
...of this guy, living in the USA of course, who is a convicted felon for underage sex with a 16(?) year old girl. Her dad objected and went to the police. They have been married for about a decade now, with three kids. And his status makes sure that he can not get proper jobs to support the woman who was "protected" by all this.
> MPEG is not to be trusted? Are you kidding? [...] You simply can't do better than MPEG!
You are conveniently forgetting how they are strong-arming society at large. Oh, and please tell me why the W3C has stated time and time again that H.264 will never ever be an official part of HTML5. You can thank Apple & MS for the fact that Ogg Theora is not, by the way. What's that? Both have insane stakes in an closed system and both fear truly open environments? Coincidence.
> What's the alternative? Some two-bit company that Google bought and realised they couldn't make money off, so they dumped the code on a website and said "this is the future of Internet video!". What a joke. No thought went into that.
You're aware of who owns YouTube? VP8 is useless for Google unless it's widely deployed everywhere. Giving it away freely and with strong protection of openness is in their best interest.
How much thought went into your rebuttal?
> You do realise you're now defending vapourware.
You do realize you're now down to making stuff up? A broad consensus across the entire industry, barring the players who thrive on closed systems, is not vapourware.
> There's no downside to using a well-supported, well-implemented, cross-platform, industry-accepted, multi-vendor, open-standard, that is already built into every smartphone and computer and software worth considering.
Unless you count market entry barriers, the need to pay license fees once you cross a magic threshold, the fact that I can not buy any digital video camera that does not use H.264, meaning that even if I transcode into truly open formats first thing and never touch H.264 again, I will still be forced to pay license fees once I cross 100,000 viewers per year, you mean? And don't tell me the 100,000 limit, the upping of the ten minute barrier or the extension to 2015 were not, at least in part, motivated by Ogg Theora and VP8.
> It's more important for my DATA to be in a format that outlives my software.
Your data survives in a format onto which a third party may impose arbitrary restrictions. Way to go.
> That's why I use POSIX and HTML and MPEG.
Comparing POSIX & HTML to MPEG is a joke. Tell me, which of these puts arbitrary restrictions onto you? Oh, right...
> I have no time for VP8 or WebM or ViVO or Flash or RealVideo or whatever proprietary technology-of-the-week is in fashion.
You actually made me laugh.
PS: Any interest to go down the anti-trust road? Read up on MPEG LA and antitrust exemption. Nero AG did a pretty good job of summarizing why they are breaking any and all prerequisites for this exemption so I will not repeat it here.
> The "free [from] fear of legal action" remains to be seen.
That much is true. But I can't imagine MPEG LA would still sit tight if they had something up their sleeves. And you _always_ have a certain risk of dormant patents in the drawer of someone who is waiting for a certain amount of adoption or just anything.
> You don't know what "open standard" even means.
Do you? The problem is that there is no single definition of it. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard for a mere fifteen different approaches. Yes, it was developed behind closed doors. And yes, open doors would have been better. That still does not change the fact that VP8 is an open standard, today. Maybe WebM 2.0's VP9 will be evil, closed and chomp down puppies. So yes, making the whole thing even more open would be better. But VP8 is open, both in the standard and the implementation way.
> Even worse, an open-source project with no industry support
Every chip-maker other than Intel committed to supporting VP8 in hardware. Every browser other than IE and Safari supports it or will (yah, lynx, elinks etc don't count). Every major platform has a FLOSS implementation available. Adobe committed to supporting VP8.
> managed by a single company. Blind faith in OSS won't solve that intractable problem.
True. But one side proved again and again that they must not be trusted and the other has a pretty decent offer.
I note that you did not address any of my points about the various downsides of H.264 and the MPEG LA, by the way.
> What we actually have here is a single vendor (Google) trying to achieve market dominance in one technology by leveraging existing market share in another technology.
An open technology which anyone can use, free of charge or fear of legal action.
> Even worse Google is doing all this to destroy an actual open standard (H.264).
open != open. Yes, the specs of H.264 are open. But so are VP8's. There is a reason why the name of truly free and open software changed from OSS to FOSS to FLOSS. H.264 is a perfect example of this (and why GPLv3 was needed).
> The underlying issue is Google wants to dictate the video format for the Internet at the expense of open standards.
As above, both specs are open. The difference is that one group, which had to apply for anti-trust exemptions and has been violating all three requirements imposed ever since, can draw an arbitrary line deciding who has to pay what. And the other one bought a whole company, poured more development time into it and _then_ put the results in the public domain.
Yes, Google wants to make money, same as MPEG LA. But Google relies on an open Internet to make money. MPEG LA relies on a closed system. Which do you prefer?
>> Anyone who does not approve of what they are doing right now either has a hidden agenda or did not understand the underlying issues. > Oh the irony.
I know Google-bashing is cool, and I don't condone their every action either, but really... They are providing a FLOSS codec, free of charge. Its predecessors predate H.264 and have patents of their own which is probably why MPEG LA did not move yet. They are most likely afraid of getting counter-sued. And Google extra went the extra mile of putting a major barb into the license of the WebM codec for anyone planning to do patent litigation. And don't get me started on how the MPEG LA barbed _their_ licenses...
Anyone who does not approve of what they are doing right now either has a hidden agenda or did not understand the underlying issues. Sorry if this sounds confrontational, but...
Also, what could possibly go wrong with genetically modifying organisms which will then interact with a human body? Yes, tech fear etc. But I am not sure I want to be a testing bed for the stuff that will inevitably survive.
You are mostly correct, but these days, Free Libre Open Source Software is the correct term. Yes, it's a pity that we needed to refine the name as much as we did, but hey. It works; for now.
> He isnt being informative. He is being dishonest.
He is informative. It's just that you did not realize that Google is granting third parties a licence. Google is not granting itself a licence. And why should they? They own the copyright. And even if they did, I am not sure it's legally possible for Google to revoke a licence to itself. And even if it could, Google would need to take someone else to court, claiming VP8 violates, to quote, "direct or contributory patent infringement, or inducement of patent infringement."
Yes, now. But once WebM is in silicon, and all chip vendors other than Intel committed to that, you have all smartphones hardware-enabled to play WebM (as with H.264 today, granted). Maybe Apple will disable that on purpose, maybe they won't.
Anyway, you are left with a situation where only MS IE and possibly Safari & the iPhone can not play WebM. Everyone else can. And you don't have to pay for one of the options. So people will shift to WebM (hopefully) as it saves costs in the long run.
And Adobe Flash will support WebM. So IE & Safari get to play WebM via Flash. Everyone else will use the video tag. iPhone & iPad users are already used to not having an open platform so they should be fine;)
So, I could not have done the same. You probably can't do it while on the road.
The beauty of using a cloud service is that, given the proper tools, your local complexity is down to having said tool sniff data, you enter EC2 credentials & maximum cost and off you go.
Android is far from truly Open and I hope that Meego will be able to deliver.
That being said, I own a HTC Desire. It was branded. Debranding is a no-brainer; rooting, too. HTC has delivered timely updates in the past and I expect them to continue this tradition. And if they don't, I will simply go to CyanogenMod.
As always when there's choice, people need to make informed decisions. Not buying from vendors that are still thinking you release software for a given model exactly once (yes, I am looking at you, SE) or from ones that are pulling funny stunts (Motorola) should be a given. That Samsung might be on that list now, as well.. Well, meh. But then, I would only buy stuff that is reasonably close to the dev phones or a flagship product to ensure that the community will be all over it.
> but why the confrontational tone? I'm not "spreading FUD", I'm putting forward my concerns in the hope that someone can address them, and that's pretty clear from my wording.
True. I can't offer much in ways of explanation other than "you get tired hearing the same 'issues' again and again" and that you caught me in a grumpy mood. That, and the level of people spouting nonsense seems to be high even for/., lately. None of this concerns you, so: Apologies; I should have re-read what I wrote and edited it.
In either case, I hope I could get you going in the right direction. If you need more details, poke me on freenode, OFTC or IRCnet or reply here.
> It starts with the fact that your internal IP addresses will be determined by what your ISP gives you. What if you change ISPs? This means renumbering everything. Changing ISPs didn't used to mean that. What's the solution
> All well and good, but acquiring PI addresses still requires you to become a member of your local RIR
Bullshit. PI was invented precisely to avoid having everyone and their mom who needed their own address space join the RIRs.
If you are within the EU, I can send you a contract with _us_, not RIPE, that fits on a beer coaster. You send me proof that your company exists and, as the policy wrt IPv6 is pretty much "HERE! TAKE IT!", not even a real numbering plan. Also, you will need to tell me, and thus RIPE, why you need multi-homing. I will give you an IPv6 PI prefix in return. No hassle, no need to join a RIR, no nothing.
> With IPv6, medium and small companies will also have an urgent requirement for PI space.
No, they think they need it as they are as misinformed as you are.
> Now, of course, once so many more organisations are using PI addresses, what does this mean for the size of the global routing table?
Not very much, assuming they don't go announcing every/48 they have. But without a real need for multi-homing, you will not get PI space either way. Matter of fact, IPv4 is a lot more fragmented than IPv6 because there are so few addresses. Some companies announce every/24 from different locations because they allocated in an agressively-address-saving manner.
With IPv6, I have a/32. I announce a/40 per POP, in the/36 per city. That means almost zero fragmentation. And if I ever need another/32, thanks to sparse allocation, I can simply go to RIPE and the/32 right above mine will still be free. So I will then end up with a/31. A continuous/31. No (forced) fragmentation. Customers get/56, i.e. 256/64, and, thanks to sparse allocation, I can easily up them to/55,/54, etc. 65k customers in one POP is a limit I will not reach any time soon. And if I do, I can just use one of the other 15/40 in the same city. Yay for planning.
> Can anyone more experienced in IPv6 than me refute these points?
Seriously, you should have put that first, not last.
By the way, you are totally ignoring that changing ISPs with IPv4 PA space today means total renumbering whereas with IPv6 PA, you merely need to switch out the prefix.
They wanted to, but 6.6.2011 is a holiday, somewhere, iirc. It's on the ipv6-ops mailing list where they, rightfully so, state that this date is _way_ too late. IANA will run out of IPv4 in a few weeks, the RIRs will be able to hold up up to a year longer.
If anything, they should do every 6th of every month starting February. And _that_ would still be too late, imo.
Slashdot Mirror
Depending on what app you're pushing and how successful Amazon's market becomes, that may not matter in all cases.
That would open up the child to massive repression by any and all rapists. It's not an easy-to-fix problem.
> That alone should be enough of a red flag. In case it's not, I'll point it out to you... companies that try and maintain sole control of a format, are not doing it with your best interest in mind.
Red flag? Again, we are talking about one company showing good faith efforts and a consortium actively exploiting their anti-trust exemption.
Anyway, we will not agree. Let's stop.
...of this guy, living in the USA of course, who is a convicted felon for underage sex with a 16(?) year old girl. Her dad objected and went to the police.
They have been married for about a decade now, with three kids. And his status makes sure that he can not get proper jobs to support the woman who was "protected" by all this.
Fascinating.
> MPEG is not to be trusted? Are you kidding? [...] You simply can't do better than MPEG!
You are conveniently forgetting how they are strong-arming society at large.
Oh, and please tell me why the W3C has stated time and time again that H.264 will never ever be an official part of HTML5. You can thank Apple & MS for the fact that Ogg Theora is not, by the way. What's that? Both have insane stakes in an closed system and both fear truly open environments? Coincidence.
> What's the alternative? Some two-bit company that Google bought and realised they couldn't make money off, so they dumped the code on a website and said "this is the future of Internet video!". What a joke. No thought went into that.
You're aware of who owns YouTube? VP8 is useless for Google unless it's widely deployed everywhere. Giving it away freely and with strong protection of openness is in their best interest.
How much thought went into your rebuttal?
> You do realise you're now defending vapourware.
You do realize you're now down to making stuff up? A broad consensus across the entire industry, barring the players who thrive on closed systems, is not vapourware.
> There's no downside to using a well-supported, well-implemented, cross-platform, industry-accepted, multi-vendor, open-standard, that is already built into every smartphone and computer and software worth considering.
Unless you count market entry barriers, the need to pay license fees once you cross a magic threshold, the fact that I can not buy any digital video camera that does not use H.264, meaning that even if I transcode into truly open formats first thing and never touch H.264 again, I will still be forced to pay license fees once I cross 100,000 viewers per year, you mean?
And don't tell me the 100,000 limit, the upping of the ten minute barrier or the extension to 2015 were not, at least in part, motivated by Ogg Theora and VP8.
> It's more important for my DATA to be in a format that outlives my software.
Your data survives in a format onto which a third party may impose arbitrary restrictions. Way to go.
> That's why I use POSIX and HTML and MPEG.
Comparing POSIX & HTML to MPEG is a joke. Tell me, which of these puts arbitrary restrictions onto you? Oh, right...
> I have no time for VP8 or WebM or ViVO or Flash or RealVideo or whatever proprietary technology-of-the-week is in fashion.
You actually made me laugh.
PS: Any interest to go down the anti-trust road? Read up on MPEG LA and antitrust exemption. Nero AG did a pretty good job of summarizing why they are breaking any and all prerequisites for this exemption so I will not repeat it here.
> The "free [from] fear of legal action" remains to be seen.
That much is true. But I can't imagine MPEG LA would still sit tight if they had something up their sleeves. And you _always_ have a certain risk of dormant patents in the drawer of someone who is waiting for a certain amount of adoption or just anything.
> You don't know what "open standard" even means.
Do you? The problem is that there is no single definition of it. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard for a mere fifteen different approaches. Yes, it was developed behind closed doors. And yes, open doors would have been better. That still does not change the fact that VP8 is an open standard, today. Maybe WebM 2.0's VP9 will be evil, closed and chomp down puppies. So yes, making the whole thing even more open would be better. But VP8 is open, both in the standard and the implementation way.
> Even worse, an open-source project with no industry support
Every chip-maker other than Intel committed to supporting VP8 in hardware. Every browser other than IE and Safari supports it or will (yah, lynx, elinks etc don't count). Every major platform has a FLOSS implementation available. Adobe committed to supporting VP8.
> managed by a single company. Blind faith in OSS won't solve that intractable problem.
True. But one side proved again and again that they must not be trusted and the other has a pretty decent offer.
I note that you did not address any of my points about the various downsides of H.264 and the MPEG LA, by the way.
> What we actually have here is a single vendor (Google) trying to achieve market dominance in one technology by leveraging existing market share in another technology.
An open technology which anyone can use, free of charge or fear of legal action.
> Even worse Google is doing all this to destroy an actual open standard (H.264).
open != open.
Yes, the specs of H.264 are open. But so are VP8's.
There is a reason why the name of truly free and open software changed from OSS to FOSS to FLOSS. H.264 is a perfect example of this (and why GPLv3 was needed).
> The underlying issue is Google wants to dictate the video format for the Internet at the expense of open standards.
As above, both specs are open. The difference is that one group, which had to apply for anti-trust exemptions and has been violating all three requirements imposed ever since, can draw an arbitrary line deciding who has to pay what. And the other one bought a whole company, poured more development time into it and _then_ put the results in the public domain.
Yes, Google wants to make money, same as MPEG LA. But Google relies on an open Internet to make money. MPEG LA relies on a closed system. Which do you prefer?
>> Anyone who does not approve of what they are doing right now either has a hidden agenda or did not understand the underlying issues.
> Oh the irony.
So very true.
So, everyone will set the price to either free or $1000?
Other than you asking the question?
I know Google-bashing is cool, and I don't condone their every action either, but really... They are providing a FLOSS codec, free of charge. Its predecessors predate H.264 and have patents of their own which is probably why MPEG LA did not move yet. They are most likely afraid of getting counter-sued. And Google extra went the extra mile of putting a major barb into the license of the WebM codec for anyone planning to do patent litigation. And don't get me started on how the MPEG LA barbed _their_ licenses...
Anyone who does not approve of what they are doing right now either has a hidden agenda or did not understand the underlying issues. Sorry if this sounds confrontational, but...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy
Also, what could possibly go wrong with genetically modifying organisms which will then interact with a human body? Yes, tech fear etc. But I am not sure I want to be a testing bed for the stuff that will inevitably survive.
> They did control the debate. Their emails proved it.
Yah, you might want to use that "Google" thing to get up to date. Your FUD has been debunked a few times, already.
> Not as impressive as 6 minutes, but one should wary of breathless enthusiasm here.
That is a given. A proper WPA2 password is still way beyond the scope of pretty much anybody, anyway.
> Ever used a volume knob before?
Yes. Turning clockwise makes it louder, i.e. make volume go _up_. But it scrolls _down_ on an iPod.
You are mostly correct, but these days, Free Libre Open Source Software is the correct term. Yes, it's a pity that we needed to refine the name as much as we did, but hey. It works; for now.
open standard != FLOSS
> He isnt being informative. He is being dishonest.
He is informative. It's just that you did not realize that Google is granting third parties a licence. Google is not granting itself a licence. And why should they? They own the copyright.
And even if they did, I am not sure it's legally possible for Google to revoke a licence to itself.
And even if it could, Google would need to take someone else to court, claiming VP8 violates, to quote, "direct or contributory patent infringement, or inducement of patent infringement."
None of this makes sense. Not in the least.
> every single protocol and format standardized for its use on online communication has been free since the inception of the Internet
GIF.
Other than that, I agree.
Yes, now. But once WebM is in silicon, and all chip vendors other than Intel committed to that, you have all smartphones hardware-enabled to play WebM (as with H.264 today, granted). Maybe Apple will disable that on purpose, maybe they won't.
Anyway, you are left with a situation where only MS IE and possibly Safari & the iPhone can not play WebM. Everyone else can. And you don't have to pay for one of the options. So people will shift to WebM (hopefully) as it saves costs in the long run.
And Adobe Flash will support WebM. So IE & Safari get to play WebM via Flash. Everyone else will use the video tag. iPhone & iPad users are already used to not having an open platform so they should be fine ;)
So, I could not have done the same. You probably can't do it while on the road.
The beauty of using a cloud service is that, given the proper tools, your local complexity is down to having said tool sniff data, you enter EC2 credentials & maximum cost and off you go.
Android is far from truly Open and I hope that Meego will be able to deliver.
That being said, I own a HTC Desire. It was branded. Debranding is a no-brainer; rooting, too. HTC has delivered timely updates in the past and I expect them to continue this tradition. And if they don't, I will simply go to CyanogenMod.
As always when there's choice, people need to make informed decisions. Not buying from vendors that are still thinking you release software for a given model exactly once (yes, I am looking at you, SE) or from ones that are pulling funny stunts (Motorola) should be a given. That Samsung might be on that list now, as well.. Well, meh. But then, I would only buy stuff that is reasonably close to the dev phones or a flagship product to ensure that the community will be all over it.
> That's pretty much the info I was looking for
Great :)
> but why the confrontational tone? I'm not "spreading FUD", I'm putting forward my concerns in the hope that someone can address them, and that's pretty clear from my wording.
True. I can't offer much in ways of explanation other than "you get tired hearing the same 'issues' again and again" and that you caught me in a grumpy mood. That, and the level of people spouting nonsense seems to be high even for /., lately. None of this concerns you, so: Apologies; I should have re-read what I wrote and edited it.
In either case, I hope I could get you going in the right direction. If you need more details, poke me on freenode, OFTC or IRCnet or reply here.
> Dead Space is a good game for this kind of experience.
I don't own a PS3, but I played a bit at a friend's. It was nice, but not too great. Might have been the limited time, though.
> it would be nice to see this kind of behaviour rewarded
YES!
> more in games.
"more"? Itym "at all" ;)
> Halo Reach was the latest that bugged me with this
Don't own a XBOX/XBOX 360, either.
The classic Halo on hard and in co-op mode was gobs of fun, though.
IANA will run out within less than a month: http://www.ipv4depletion.com/?p=557
You not informing yourself does not mean it's not happening :)
> It starts with the fact that your internal IP addresses will be determined by what your ISP gives you. What if you change ISPs? This means renumbering everything. Changing ISPs didn't used to mean that. What's the solution
The solution is to use FC00::/7 like you are supposed to: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4193
That, or use the prefix mechanisms of IPv6.
> All well and good, but acquiring PI addresses still requires you to become a member of your local RIR
Bullshit. PI was invented precisely to avoid having everyone and their mom who needed their own address space join the RIRs.
If you are within the EU, I can send you a contract with _us_, not RIPE, that fits on a beer coaster. You send me proof that your company exists and, as the policy wrt IPv6 is pretty much "HERE! TAKE IT!", not even a real numbering plan. Also, you will need to tell me, and thus RIPE, why you need multi-homing. I will give you an IPv6 PI prefix in return. No hassle, no need to join a RIR, no nothing.
> With IPv6, medium and small companies will also have an urgent requirement for PI space.
No, they think they need it as they are as misinformed as you are.
> Now, of course, once so many more organisations are using PI addresses, what does this mean for the size of the global routing table?
Not very much, assuming they don't go announcing every /48 they have. But without a real need for multi-homing, you will not get PI space either way. Matter of fact, IPv4 is a lot more fragmented than IPv6 because there are so few addresses. /24 from different locations because they allocated in an agressively-address-saving manner.
Some companies announce every
With IPv6, I have a /32. I announce a /40 per POP, in the /36 per city. That means almost zero fragmentation. And if I ever need another /32, thanks to sparse allocation, I can simply go to RIPE and the /32 right above mine will still be free. So I will then end up with a /31. A continuous /31. No (forced) fragmentation. /56, i.e. 256 /64, and, thanks to sparse allocation, I can easily up them to /55, /54, etc. 65k customers in one POP is a limit I will not reach any time soon. And if I do, I can just use one of the other 15 /40 in the same city. Yay for planning.
Customers get
> Can anyone more experienced in IPv6 than me refute these points?
Seriously, you should have put that first, not last.
By the way, you are totally ignoring that changing ISPs with IPv4 PA space today means total renumbering whereas with IPv6 PA, you merely need to switch out the prefix.
They wanted to, but 6.6.2011 is a holiday, somewhere, iirc. It's on the ipv6-ops mailing list where they, rightfully so, state that this date is _way_ too late. IANA will run out of IPv4 in a few weeks, the RIRs will be able to hold up up to a year longer.
If anything, they should do every 6th of every month starting February. And _that_ would still be too late, imo.