Ah this is where you're wrong. It's all about controlling the streaming from large providers to set-top boxes, Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu to AppleTVs, Rokus, and the (basically moribund, due to Google's incompetence) GoogleTV platform. The companies in the MPEG-LA and Google both see that streaming distribution will be the future, and that no one will rip movies in the future, because it won't be sold. Physical media's days are numbered. I will be extremely happy if hardware supports both formats, and more, but people up the thread are arguing for MPEG eliminationism, and that would be bad for competition and consumers.
The only question is, do you stand with the monopoly that sells you to advertisers, or with the cartel that sells hardware to you? I'll always vote for the people I buy things from directly over a advertising company.
Even when the "BDFL" basically puts it into the open and goes hands-off?
Is there some sort of covenant and indemnification to that effect? Is there a Community Process? Is there a way for people to work within the process and still compete on quality and have a practical way of delivering a better experience outside of it?
I mean, like Android, this is really the most bullshit kind of open sourcing. None of the benefits accrue to the end users, because almost none of the end users know how to code. All of benefits go to the releaser and its cadre, like the OHA; the open sourcing isn't done to foster innovation, it's done to burn the crops of the competitors. Apple open-sourced Darwin and Clang; they did it so no one could ever compete with them on a FreeBSD platform or low-level compiler again, allowing them a free hand to compete on the playing field they chose. Google's no different.
I see this sort of sentiment leveled against open source software all the time, what makes it more true now than before?
No other open source vendors have a monopoly. Web video is Youtube and a minuscule fraction is everything else. Vendors only care about supporting YouTube. If Google is able to dictate the hardware codec your equipment is built with, by setting the codec of YouTube, then they can effectively force everyone else to use their format. People might invent better codecs than YouTube's, but it'll be impossible to bring them to market because the barrier to entry created by the "free" Google codec will make it too expensive for manufacturers to put on the hardware, or too cumbersome for average users to install.
The MPEG-LA actually has companies that sell real video gear, and they compete to make good video gear. Google doesn't give a fuck about how good video looks, they just want to know where the ads go. YouTube's monopoly insulates Google from competition from other players in the video market.
Like h.264, who have a whole schedule of royalties based upon your business model?
A consortium of 20 companies is far preferable to a single BDFL who effectively decides what will run on the web and what won't. A schedule of royalties is far preferable to the alternative, which is "I want to sell a better codec, but it's impossible because Google gives away mediocre ones."
Well, pushing software that has no hardware support and provides no clear advantage to the end-user over H.264 is.. something. Pushing it only because it'll allow your corporation to dictate by fiat the possible business models for web video, that's something too. OTOH, acting like something that is "inherently unfree" is worse, regardless of useful it is, is pretty childish.
This thread is like the blind men and the elephant, but this line sorta rankles me:
The constitution grants democratic rights to the people. It's not really a stretch to call it a democracy.
The constitution of the United States does not grant rights, it formally recognizes and protects them. The Bill of Rights takes the Enlightenment Liberal attitude that rights are "endowed by our creator" and are innate to the human condition and are irrepressible in a non-tyrannical system. (I kind of disagree with the Enlightenment Liberal position, but it's where we are.)
The United States is Republic, this is true, but it's very broad. A Republic is any form of state where sovereignty is assigned to the people, and not to a king or dictator. The key factors in the Republic that Plato described was a system wherein the people themselves took on the responsibility for maintaining the state, without necessarily demanding a say in the policies or actions of the state. There is no King to embody the state and hold ultimate responsibility for preserving it, either from outside aggression or internal strife. Saying a state is a Republic is to make no claims about how it operates, how fair or just it is, how liberated its people are, or how equitably it divides its wealth.
A Democracy is a form of government where the actions of the state reflect the will of the people. You can have the direct democracy thing, where everyone votes on every action, or representative systems where people vote for people who take the actions for them. Saying a state is a Democracy makes no claims about how sovereign the organization is -- your book club can be a Democracy. It could never be a Republic.
I think the strongest claim that can be made for the idea that the US is a democracy is based on the direct popular election of all of the national legislators, and (for the most part) the President. All of these people are held to strict account for all of their votes and actions, there is (purportedly) a critical press and political estate that is always examining the actions of the politicians, and people here tend to vote based on what kind of laws they expect their man will pass. On the other hand, in our system, unlike most real democracies on Earth, we vote for the person, not the policy -- in most proportional-representation parliamentary democracies, people vote for a list of candidates under one platform or party, or for individuals that are pledged and bound through party institutions to do what they're told, and the only controlling factor is who holds enough votes in the parliament to elect the Prime Minister. Also in our system, votes are distributed very disproportionately, such that someone in Wyoming has something like 100 times the say in electing a president as a Californian, and his two Senators can effectively hold any action of the federal government, wether that action is a war or cutting grain subsidies. Democracies can hold constitutional safeguards for minorities or not, the protections Americans enjoy aren't really a defining characteristic. And even if countries do have constitutional safeguards, what really counts is the practice -- the 1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union holds voluminous liberal safeguards, but they were unenforceable given the institutional power of the Communist Party.
Our system was originally formulated as a firm Republic, where only white male landowners could vote for congressmen (a House of Commons), only state congressmen (our Peerage) could vote for Senators (a House of Lords), and only Electors (modeled on the Holy Roman Empire) could vote for our President. Provisions were made to allocate representation in the federal government based on population, not voting population, thus rich landowners (and slaveholders) wielded the voting authority of not just themselves but their entire community. Most Americans in the generations after the f
Uh, citizens vote directly for congressmen and senators -- they have as much say or legislation as they do on the state level. Citizens of the United States of subject to both sovereignties of their state and the federal government,
How many of you were aware there was such a thing AS the "Free Speeg Flag"? I wasn't (I was half expecting to see an article about a bitfield struct.). How many of us have actually seen one, and not some SVG but an actual cloth banner on a pole, in an actual context in the RL? Does the Important Movement of Our Time, AKA ripping movies and posting them on a torrent, really need a flag?
This thing looks like it was invented by some self-aggrandizing dweeb who is now trying to get a slashdot flash mob to save his "original research."
Every single Democrat and some of the garbage science behind Global Warming.
"Some of" the garbage science -- I suppose this is in contravention to the "good" AGW science that everyone accepts for the purpose of your argument. Nice way of embedding the walk-back into the assertion, there.
Give it a break, the Republicans are the same people that have now re-established styrofoam in the congress cafeteria because that's just how passionate they are about denying that anything is wrong with the environment. Biodegradable containers and utensils were just too hippie-dippie. The article's exactly right, the science is irrelevant, it's become a cultural issue. Libertarians decided that the government taxing your carbon was an encroachment on their freedom, and social conservatives hate how the french fry boxes aren't as stiff as the old ones, therefore pollution doesn't exist. QED.
Every single Democrat and every single fact that they deem offensive(Any race/gender based statistic that doesn't show complete equality or blame white people for the problems).
That's not really a scientific position, it's a social one, even if your characterization were fair. Neither blaming white people nor blaming black people is a testable hypothesis, both embed a belief in certain kinds of social justice.
Almost every single Democrat and any garbage Science which at the moment is popular (eugenics before WW2, vaccines and autism today).
I could probably find a list of Republicans a mile long that drank Thorium water for their health, practiced Fletcherism, and murdered indians. I could probably also generate a long list of Democrats that were neither eugenicist, nor today accept the Jim Carrey line on vaccines. You really can't hold people responsible for things their great-grandparent's generation believed, and even if you examine them at the time, there's very little ideologically that binds people back then -- usually they believed in whatever (1) allowed them to make the most money, and (2) allowed their town to stay the same. Same applies now; the ideology and rationale are just a tool used to produce outcomes (1) and (2), by both sides.
Do you want Youtube, Facebook etc. to be forced to pay your ISP for allowing access to a paying subscriber like you?
The price they pay should reasonably map to the costs of carriage. The idea that an ISP must provide connectivity of arbitrary quality over arbitrary distance and across any arbitrary network for a flat fee or per gigabyte is ludicrous YouTube and Facebook get rich by taking people's content and renting it back to them without regard for distance or service; they'd stop at nothing to stick the ISPs with the bill for making the entire process seamless over the distances and networks involved.
They're providing a needed service and enabling micropayments from people who don't want to see ads but don't want content producers to die due to lack of revenue.
70% of the micropayments, that is. In order to put your content on a device which already allows you to sell your content for the same split, let alone other storefronts and platforms which offer different more-or-less favorable terms -- you can sell on the Kindle store, for example, which gives you a better share and more audience but doesn't let you set the price. And that for just a cut of a flat subscription fee and not per-article or author. These people are just chiselers who are selling a bill of goods to writers who don't know all of the options available to them.
It is Apple that doesn't do anything for subscriptions except payment processing for which 30% is just BS.
If they aren't "doing anything" then why don't you do it? Oh yeah, that's right, you didn't invent, market and distribute a mobile device platform and ecosystem, thus creating the market of customers for electronic written works.
I don't have an ipad. Not having the option to install the software I want to install at will, including flash is one of the reasons.
And yet here we are, arguing about what other people buy. My contention is that it's profitable and successful, I'm not clear what yours is, aside from that people who buy Apple are morons and suckers.
False dichotomy. It doesn't have to be nothing or everything-under-the-sun.
Yeah but it usually does though. There seems to be no end to the parade vendors willing to break their products in order to make some crank with a USB mouse happy.
I mean like, before iPhones I owned all manner of phones with SD slots and batteries and it was all shit. My old Treo 650, you'd loose the little fake plastic SD card that you were supposed to keep in their at all times, or the door broke, and dust would get in there and it would crash. My old Nokia had to go back to service twice because of bad battery contacts. I've been over on that side of it and it's worthless. Just so some 5% of the customers who bought a second battery or an SD card can change it, my phone has to be flimsy. Never doing that again.
"People don't want automobiles, they want faster horses." Use Dataviz for graphs, or one of the several vector-based drawing apps on the store, or one of the several iPhone painting apps to render basically anything. To be honest, it sounds like what you really want is an iPhone app that makes keeps your writing illegible ad gives you wrist pain.
"Higher" is relative, but "standard definition" is absolute. SD is 480i/60.
Re:Your needs/desires aren't everyone's needs/desi
on
Hands On With Apple IPad 2
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Wow. That's some arrogance. Did you really mean to say: "Either you agree with apple, or you are wrong."
It's more like "Either you agree with Apple, or you are not their customer." That Apple has so many customers despite declining to accept the dogma of MOAR CUSTOMISE FOREVAH! is the fundamental conflict here. If Apple was losing customers to this you wouldn't be posting.
Can you actually name any [advantages to having sealed, fixed memory] that are relevant?
It makes the product smaller and lighter, with fewer moving parts and structural compromises.
For the sort of engineering inspiration that keeps Jobs going, I would look at rifles. If the sort of mentality that invented the Motorola Zoom invented a rifle, it would have interchangeable bolts and barrels for different gauge ammunition, six different selectable firing rates and patterns (with a pluggable architecture to create others), would be 25 pounds, have a USB port, and be controlled by an I2C network of Arduinos and require three 9-volt batteries. It would only be accurate to a hundred yards, but we would be constantly reminded that it's only a "1.0" product and that it's really meant for the "power gun user" market instead of for the Joe Sixpack "just-wants-to-shoot" crowd.
Why not provide a stylus and an app that would make the iPad behave like electronic paper.
You know the real revolution of the Sholes and Glidden was that you could type on it faster than you could write. If something has a keyboard, and you can take for granted that the user population has keyboarding skills, handwriting recognition is useless baggage.
Readability doesn't charge publishers. How ignorant or desperate are you?
No, but they collect membership fees and revert 70% of these to the writers. 30% agency fees, for doing exactly squat besides rebranding and reformatting the content, would be considered exorbitant and unconscionable in just about any other business.
I work with a lot of independent filmmakers and the "Readability" model has been with them for the last 10 years or so -- small fly-by-night "distributors" who take a huge cut of revenue and fees in exchange for making your movie available on their shitty burn-on-demand DVD website and offering it, with zero promotion and for bargain-basement prices on iTunes and Movielink and iFilm and all the other crap distribution channels that have come and gone the last decade. They're slimeballs and all they care about is putting themselves in-between artists and eyeballs, and doing as little as possible for their fees.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah this is where you're wrong. It's all about controlling the streaming from large providers to set-top boxes, Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu to AppleTVs, Rokus, and the (basically moribund, due to Google's incompetence) GoogleTV platform. The companies in the MPEG-LA and Google both see that streaming distribution will be the future, and that no one will rip movies in the future, because it won't be sold. Physical media's days are numbered. I will be extremely happy if hardware supports both formats, and more, but people up the thread are arguing for MPEG eliminationism, and that would be bad for competition and consumers.
The only question is, do you stand with the monopoly that sells you to advertisers, or with the cartel that sells hardware to you? I'll always vote for the people I buy things from directly over a advertising company.
Nothing you say here contradicts what I said.
Is there some sort of covenant and indemnification to that effect? Is there a Community Process? Is there a way for people to work within the process and still compete on quality and have a practical way of delivering a better experience outside of it?
I mean, like Android, this is really the most bullshit kind of open sourcing. None of the benefits accrue to the end users, because almost none of the end users know how to code. All of benefits go to the releaser and its cadre, like the OHA; the open sourcing isn't done to foster innovation, it's done to burn the crops of the competitors. Apple open-sourced Darwin and Clang; they did it so no one could ever compete with them on a FreeBSD platform or low-level compiler again, allowing them a free hand to compete on the playing field they chose. Google's no different.
No other open source vendors have a monopoly. Web video is Youtube and a minuscule fraction is everything else. Vendors only care about supporting YouTube. If Google is able to dictate the hardware codec your equipment is built with, by setting the codec of YouTube, then they can effectively force everyone else to use their format. People might invent better codecs than YouTube's, but it'll be impossible to bring them to market because the barrier to entry created by the "free" Google codec will make it too expensive for manufacturers to put on the hardware, or too cumbersome for average users to install.
The MPEG-LA actually has companies that sell real video gear, and they compete to make good video gear. Google doesn't give a fuck about how good video looks, they just want to know where the ads go. YouTube's monopoly insulates Google from competition from other players in the video market.
A consortium of 20 companies is far preferable to a single BDFL who effectively decides what will run on the web and what won't. A schedule of royalties is far preferable to the alternative, which is "I want to sell a better codec, but it's impossible because Google gives away mediocre ones."
Well, pushing software that has no hardware support and provides no clear advantage to the end-user over H.264 is.. something. Pushing it only because it'll allow your corporation to dictate by fiat the possible business models for web video, that's something too. OTOH, acting like something that is "inherently unfree" is worse, regardless of useful it is, is pretty childish.
This thread is like the blind men and the elephant, but this line sorta rankles me:
The constitution of the United States does not grant rights, it formally recognizes and protects them. The Bill of Rights takes the Enlightenment Liberal attitude that rights are "endowed by our creator" and are innate to the human condition and are irrepressible in a non-tyrannical system. (I kind of disagree with the Enlightenment Liberal position, but it's where we are.)
The United States is Republic, this is true, but it's very broad. A Republic is any form of state where sovereignty is assigned to the people, and not to a king or dictator. The key factors in the Republic that Plato described was a system wherein the people themselves took on the responsibility for maintaining the state, without necessarily demanding a say in the policies or actions of the state. There is no King to embody the state and hold ultimate responsibility for preserving it, either from outside aggression or internal strife. Saying a state is a Republic is to make no claims about how it operates, how fair or just it is, how liberated its people are, or how equitably it divides its wealth.
A Democracy is a form of government where the actions of the state reflect the will of the people. You can have the direct democracy thing, where everyone votes on every action, or representative systems where people vote for people who take the actions for them. Saying a state is a Democracy makes no claims about how sovereign the organization is -- your book club can be a Democracy. It could never be a Republic.
I think the strongest claim that can be made for the idea that the US is a democracy is based on the direct popular election of all of the national legislators, and (for the most part) the President. All of these people are held to strict account for all of their votes and actions, there is (purportedly) a critical press and political estate that is always examining the actions of the politicians, and people here tend to vote based on what kind of laws they expect their man will pass. On the other hand, in our system, unlike most real democracies on Earth, we vote for the person, not the policy -- in most proportional-representation parliamentary democracies, people vote for a list of candidates under one platform or party, or for individuals that are pledged and bound through party institutions to do what they're told, and the only controlling factor is who holds enough votes in the parliament to elect the Prime Minister. Also in our system, votes are distributed very disproportionately, such that someone in Wyoming has something like 100 times the say in electing a president as a Californian, and his two Senators can effectively hold any action of the federal government, wether that action is a war or cutting grain subsidies. Democracies can hold constitutional safeguards for minorities or not, the protections Americans enjoy aren't really a defining characteristic. And even if countries do have constitutional safeguards, what really counts is the practice -- the 1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union holds voluminous liberal safeguards, but they were unenforceable given the institutional power of the Communist Party.
Our system was originally formulated as a firm Republic, where only white male landowners could vote for congressmen (a House of Commons), only state congressmen (our Peerage) could vote for Senators (a House of Lords), and only Electors (modeled on the Holy Roman Empire) could vote for our President. Provisions were made to allocate representation in the federal government based on population, not voting population, thus rich landowners (and slaveholders) wielded the voting authority of not just themselves but their entire community. Most Americans in the generations after the f
Uh, citizens vote directly for congressmen and senators -- they have as much say or legislation as they do on the state level. Citizens of the United States of subject to both sovereignties of their state and the federal government,
Only if the printer can produce enough pot to keep your Clone-ovich in the house.
This thing looks like it was invented by some self-aggrandizing dweeb who is now trying to get a slashdot flash mob to save his "original research."
"Some of" the garbage science -- I suppose this is in contravention to the "good" AGW science that everyone accepts for the purpose of your argument. Nice way of embedding the walk-back into the assertion, there.
Give it a break, the Republicans are the same people that have now re-established styrofoam in the congress cafeteria because that's just how passionate they are about denying that anything is wrong with the environment. Biodegradable containers and utensils were just too hippie-dippie. The article's exactly right, the science is irrelevant, it's become a cultural issue. Libertarians decided that the government taxing your carbon was an encroachment on their freedom, and social conservatives hate how the french fry boxes aren't as stiff as the old ones, therefore pollution doesn't exist. QED.
That's not really a scientific position, it's a social one, even if your characterization were fair. Neither blaming white people nor blaming black people is a testable hypothesis, both embed a belief in certain kinds of social justice.
I could probably find a list of Republicans a mile long that drank Thorium water for their health, practiced Fletcherism, and murdered indians. I could probably also generate a long list of Democrats that were neither eugenicist, nor today accept the Jim Carrey line on vaccines. You really can't hold people responsible for things their great-grandparent's generation believed, and even if you examine them at the time, there's very little ideologically that binds people back then -- usually they believed in whatever (1) allowed them to make the most money, and (2) allowed their town to stay the same. Same applies now; the ideology and rationale are just a tool used to produce outcomes (1) and (2), by both sides.
But Republicans more :) .
If you divorced your wife you wouldn't need a mistress.
Here you go, in all its Mike Post-rendered glory. One of the lesser Steven J. Cannell products, but still worthy of some recognition.
Hardcastle and McCormick. Well played, sir. Well played.
The price they pay should reasonably map to the costs of carriage. The idea that an ISP must provide connectivity of arbitrary quality over arbitrary distance and across any arbitrary network for a flat fee or per gigabyte is ludicrous YouTube and Facebook get rich by taking people's content and renting it back to them without regard for distance or service; they'd stop at nothing to stick the ISPs with the bill for making the entire process seamless over the distances and networks involved.
70% of the micropayments, that is. In order to put your content on a device which already allows you to sell your content for the same split, let alone other storefronts and platforms which offer different more-or-less favorable terms -- you can sell on the Kindle store, for example, which gives you a better share and more audience but doesn't let you set the price. And that for just a cut of a flat subscription fee and not per-article or author. These people are just chiselers who are selling a bill of goods to writers who don't know all of the options available to them.
If they aren't "doing anything" then why don't you do it? Oh yeah, that's right, you didn't invent, market and distribute a mobile device platform and ecosystem, thus creating the market of customers for electronic written works.
Go nuts
And yet here we are, arguing about what other people buy. My contention is that it's profitable and successful, I'm not clear what yours is, aside from that people who buy Apple are morons and suckers.
Yeah but it usually does though. There seems to be no end to the parade vendors willing to break their products in order to make some crank with a USB mouse happy.
I mean like, before iPhones I owned all manner of phones with SD slots and batteries and it was all shit. My old Treo 650, you'd loose the little fake plastic SD card that you were supposed to keep in their at all times, or the door broke, and dust would get in there and it would crash. My old Nokia had to go back to service twice because of bad battery contacts. I've been over on that side of it and it's worthless. Just so some 5% of the customers who bought a second battery or an SD card can change it, my phone has to be flimsy. Never doing that again.
Nice placement there, but not nearly google-friendly enough.
"People don't want automobiles, they want faster horses." Use Dataviz for graphs, or one of the several vector-based drawing apps on the store, or one of the several iPhone painting apps to render basically anything. To be honest, it sounds like what you really want is an iPhone app that makes keeps your writing illegible ad gives you wrist pain.
"Higher" is relative, but "standard definition" is absolute. SD is 480i/60.
It's more like "Either you agree with Apple, or you are not their customer." That Apple has so many customers despite declining to accept the dogma of MOAR CUSTOMISE FOREVAH! is the fundamental conflict here. If Apple was losing customers to this you wouldn't be posting.
It makes the product smaller and lighter, with fewer moving parts and structural compromises.
For the sort of engineering inspiration that keeps Jobs going, I would look at rifles. If the sort of mentality that invented the Motorola Zoom invented a rifle, it would have interchangeable bolts and barrels for different gauge ammunition, six different selectable firing rates and patterns (with a pluggable architecture to create others), would be 25 pounds, have a USB port, and be controlled by an I2C network of Arduinos and require three 9-volt batteries. It would only be accurate to a hundred yards, but we would be constantly reminded that it's only a "1.0" product and that it's really meant for the "power gun user" market instead of for the Joe Sixpack "just-wants-to-shoot" crowd.
You know the real revolution of the Sholes and Glidden was that you could type on it faster than you could write. If something has a keyboard, and you can take for granted that the user population has keyboarding skills, handwriting recognition is useless baggage.
Then what's this all about then, if Readability got rejected a week and a half ago under the same rule?
No, but they collect membership fees and revert 70% of these to the writers. 30% agency fees, for doing exactly squat besides rebranding and reformatting the content, would be considered exorbitant and unconscionable in just about any other business.
I work with a lot of independent filmmakers and the "Readability" model has been with them for the last 10 years or so -- small fly-by-night "distributors" who take a huge cut of revenue and fees in exchange for making your movie available on their shitty burn-on-demand DVD website and offering it, with zero promotion and for bargain-basement prices on iTunes and Movielink and iFilm and all the other crap distribution channels that have come and gone the last decade. They're slimeballs and all they care about is putting themselves in-between artists and eyeballs, and doing as little as possible for their fees.