"So Microsoft's official position is that a format for public documents that is readable for everyone without exceptions is a bad thing?" (my emphasis)
They are not saying it's a bad thing. They are saying it is less important than some other things, yes, and that's something you can criticise them for, but it's entirely different from saying it's a bad thing.
Could be. AIUI it's a lot easier to sort if you have a card that does hardware mixing, unlike my onboard via82cxxx which is basically the cheapest sound chip ever.
No, their official position is that while an XML format is desirable, the functionality is more important, so until opendoc supports embedding multimedia into it states are better off sticking with doc. Criticise all you want, but misrepresenting them helps nobody.
Whilst openness is always good, the release notes for koffice 1.4 seemed to say "this release supports opendoc as best as we can, but much of the specification is unclear, we'll simply have to wait and see what OOo 2.0 does before we can say we have full support". Meanwhile abiword decided not to implement it, IIRC citing similar concerns I wonder just how well-specified this "open format" really is, and how easy it actually is to add support to applications other than OOo.
Yes, but you can't have multiple universes in the same 4-D spacetime. If they're in the same spacetime they're the same universe. There could be regions of the universe with different values of fundamental constants, or even completely different physics, but the multiple universes of M-theory are separated in a different dimension.
And if a pirate publishing studio releases large scale copies of a work for substantial profit, all the author gets is this puny little revised fine?
If the author wants more then he can go for it but he has to prove beyond all reasonable doubt rather than just on the balance of probabilities. But maybe make it a per-person limit.
As I said, the official client only supports OSS for output. I have an alsa system so I have to mess around with unreliable wrappers (presumably it does mmaped I/O or something. Either way the net result is it's a nightmare to get working without OSS)
Other codecs like H.264 are much better, and can be played NATIVELY on absolutely any system (no need for propritary DLLs that only work on x86).
I haven't seen a streaming solution for anything other than wmv, real and quicktime.
VP3 (upon which Theora is based) was ready about 6 years ago. Mature, open source, patent free, etc.
I haven't heard it mentioned. All the attention seems to go to theora, which last I knew had only just stabilised the file format and was a fair way from a 1.0 release, and dirac which isn't even that far along.
This is completely ridiculous. The WMV DLLs don't work any better than the Real DLLs, or the Quicktime libs. I can't even guess where you got some crazy idea like this.
Simple experience, that's all it is. Maybe it's the streaming format that works better than real's, also the way real streams can be made unsaveable is a real pain. As for quicktime, it/is/ harder to get the dlls working - there are different, incompatible versions - and I have been simply unable to play quicktime streams on linux, at all. I think this is due to problems with their playlist format
No you aren't. MPlayer and Xine aren't Windows Media Player, so you obviously don't want WMP to be required, even though you say so.
No, but I don't mind websites "requiring" it. (i.e. it being their only officially supported player) because it's better than requiring real (which sucks on linux and the streams are troublesome playing in an unofficial client) or quicktime, which I have found no way to play on linux at all.
MPlayer and Xine can't handle these obfusticated playlist files yet, nor the DRM, or many of the other idiotic things Microsoft does.
None of these have affected me. I have been affected by inability to play quicktime streams, which I suspect is an identical obfusticated playlist issue, inability to save real streams to play in my car, which is a DRM problem and more than I've ever seen MS do, and difficulty setting both of those up to play on linux.
I know legally it's only "tools of trade", the idea is you keep anything you need to work so that you can work, but anything else is theirs because you owe them more than you have. But I've been lucky enough never to experience it in practice.
Lol, no, nothing of the sort. Kiss Me by Sharp (kpop, please don't tell anyone I have it). The video is grayscale maybe half the time, but it's still pretty impressive.
Microsoft figured out a way to claim "POSIX compatability" without actually making it work, because the interoperability was ZERO with all the Windows applications.
Plenty of applications are standalone. I can see it being a handicap, but the posix interface would be far from useless even then.
Rather than bragging about working on it, you should be ashamed of yourself.
WT**F**??? I never worked on it and certainly never bragged about it.
Isn't science about experimentation and testing hypothesises in a laboratory instead of endless mathematical tricks to get theories to fit observations?
Science is about explaining the observations by whatever means necessary. Occam's Razor means yes, we assume space doesn't have 6 dimensions as long as that has equal explanatory power to assuming it does. When we come across something that can't be explained by "normal" theories, at least without making them more complex than assuming 6 dimensions, we assume 6 dimensions as the simplest theory which explains the observed results.
If you have a way to explain these observations which is much simpler, like gravity being 1/r^2 and planets orbiting stars, then by all means, go ahead and publish it and if it's simpler it should be accepted. But the scientific establishment is trying its best, and there doesn't seem to be a simpler way to explain the observed results.
If we are inside it, what happens when you get to the edge? Is it like a fly bumping into glass? Or more like just passing through it, like Earth's atmosphere? Either case, what's on the other side?
There couldn't be anything on the other side, so we tend to assume the universe has no boundary, of either kind. Interestingly, however, some recent results suggest our universe may be ever so slighly hyperbolic. If so, it could be a sphere, and everything shrinks the closer you go to the boundary. So you can never reach the boundary, you can get arbitrarily close but you shrink more and more, so you'd have to travel an infinite distance in your terms to reach the edge. At that point it becomes meaningless to ask what's beyond it since there's no way for anything to travel beyond the boundary - or for anything outside to get in.
So if we are on the surface, like a planet. Does that mean there are multiple spherical universes grouped together, like a solar system? Maybe orbiting something else, like a sun universe or something.
Possibly, though there would need to be some force that affects universes. It's pretty meaningless to speculate though - we have no way of contacting such universes or even determining whether they exist, so it makes as much sense to assume we don't. Anyway, those same results suggest the curvature of space is not like the surface of a "hypersphere", so this is a pretty unlikely scenario at the moment.
An amoeba under a slide has a pretty much two-dimensional existence - it can't sense anything above or below, and won't interact with the glass on either side. They seem to live well enough, as far as we can tell. You can't get complex lifeforms in just one or two dimensions because there's not enough "room" - e.g. a complete intestine would make a 2-d animal fall apart. With 4 complete spatial dimensions, however, you run into other difficulties. For one thing, there would be no stable solar systems, because gravity would be an inverse cube law rather than an inverse square law, so there is no stable orbit around a star.
The WMAP results suggest the curvature runs the other way - the geometry of our universe is slightly hyperbolic. There's enough margin for error that a "flat" spacetime is just about possible (and preferred for simplicity) but a "positively" curved universe (i.e. 4-dimensional sphere or similar) seems pretty unlikely.
I installed WMV, Real, and QuickTime codecs all at the same time, and they all work, just by throwing some DLLs around. I haven't tested streaming all that much, but I honestly don't care since streamed stuff is not worth the hassle.
I was thinking purely of streaming. Being able to view streaming wmv took no effort at all for me - it was just a case of (in my particular distro) USE=win32codecs emerge kaffeine and I can see it fine in konqueror, doing the same with gxine would allow you to see streamed wmv in netscape/mozilla and derivatives. Real was a bit more troublesome (I resorted to manually downloading the codecs in the end) and quicktime I still haven't got working. (It's fine for local content but won't stream). When it's just files on your system, yes, divx is easier, but I have yet to see a complete setup for streaming it, and the bandwidth required would probably be prohibitive.
It might be supported in ffmpeg, but my personal experience is that there is no way to play a quicktime video embedded in a web page on linux, a feat that's relatively easy with wmv.
This is one of the big problems with DVD movies - what is legal in the US is not legal in the UK. Stuff that is legal in Japan would get you arrested for distributing child porn in the US. Every country wants to control what their people can view and movies have to meet their standards. While you can probably get away with carring one DVD into such countries, you cannot import movies in bulk quantities without getting it licensed and approved.
The countries seemed to handle it fine when there were VHS tapes with no region coding.
Did you think MPAA just decided to make six or seven different versions of each movie for laughs or because it kept the editors working overtime?
No, I haven't seen much (any) difference in the imported DVDs I've watched. Of course I wouldn't, but when I've seen the film in the cinema I didn't notice anything missing on the foreign DVD version. I think it's just a moneymaking measure.
What was the change from 2.5 to 2.6 about then? I thought that was the 2.5 tree being declared stable, and it was only after that that it was decided development would take place within the 2.6 tree.
Slashdot Mirror
They are not saying it's a bad thing. They are saying it is less important than some other things, yes, and that's something you can criticise them for, but it's entirely different from saying it's a bad thing.
Could be. AIUI it's a lot easier to sort if you have a card that does hardware mixing, unlike my onboard via82cxxx which is basically the cheapest sound chip ever.
If you have to ask if someone's joking you already know the answer.
This place gets dumber every time I visit
No, their official position is that while an XML format is desirable, the functionality is more important, so until opendoc supports embedding multimedia into it states are better off sticking with doc. Criticise all you want, but misrepresenting them helps nobody.
AIUI it's about embedding things in documents, e.g. word documents can have videos embedded in them if you really want to.
Whilst openness is always good, the release notes for koffice 1.4 seemed to say "this release supports opendoc as best as we can, but much of the specification is unclear, we'll simply have to wait and see what OOo 2.0 does before we can say we have full support". Meanwhile abiword decided not to implement it, IIRC citing similar concerns I wonder just how well-specified this "open format" really is, and how easy it actually is to add support to applications other than OOo.
Yes, but you can't have multiple universes in the same 4-D spacetime. If they're in the same spacetime they're the same universe. There could be regions of the universe with different values of fundamental constants, or even completely different physics, but the multiple universes of M-theory are separated in a different dimension.
If the author wants more then he can go for it but he has to prove beyond all reasonable doubt rather than just on the balance of probabilities. But maybe make it a per-person limit.
As I said, the official client only supports OSS for output. I have an alsa system so I have to mess around with unreliable wrappers (presumably it does mmaped I/O or something. Either way the net result is it's a nightmare to get working without OSS)
Can't you embed a netmeeting file that will launch and try and connect to a specified server?
I haven't seen a streaming solution for anything other than wmv, real and quicktime.
VP3 (upon which Theora is based) was ready about 6 years ago. Mature, open source, patent free, etc.
I haven't heard it mentioned. All the attention seems to go to theora, which last I knew had only just stabilised the file format and was a fair way from a 1.0 release, and dirac which isn't even that far along.
This is completely ridiculous. The WMV DLLs don't work any better than the Real DLLs, or the Quicktime libs. I can't even guess where you got some crazy idea like this.
Simple experience, that's all it is. Maybe it's the streaming format that works better than real's, also the way real streams can be made unsaveable is a real pain. As for quicktime, it /is/ harder to get the dlls working - there are different, incompatible versions - and I have been simply unable to play quicktime streams on linux, at all. I think this is due to problems with their playlist format
No you aren't. MPlayer and Xine aren't Windows Media Player, so you obviously don't want WMP to be required, even though you say so.
No, but I don't mind websites "requiring" it. (i.e. it being their only officially supported player) because it's better than requiring real (which sucks on linux and the streams are troublesome playing in an unofficial client) or quicktime, which I have found no way to play on linux at all.
MPlayer and Xine can't handle these obfusticated playlist files yet, nor the DRM, or many of the other idiotic things Microsoft does.
None of these have affected me. I have been affected by inability to play quicktime streams, which I suspect is an identical obfusticated playlist issue, inability to save real streams to play in my car, which is a DRM problem and more than I've ever seen MS do, and difficulty setting both of those up to play on linux.
I know legally it's only "tools of trade", the idea is you keep anything you need to work so that you can work, but anything else is theirs because you owe them more than you have. But I've been lucky enough never to experience it in practice.
Lol, no, nothing of the sort. Kiss Me by Sharp (kpop, please don't tell anyone I have it). The video is grayscale maybe half the time, but it's still pretty impressive.
Plenty of applications are standalone. I can see it being a handicap, but the posix interface would be far from useless even then.
Rather than bragging about working on it, you should be ashamed of yourself.
WT**F**??? I never worked on it and certainly never bragged about it.
The 11th dimension is the one M-theory membranes oscillate in. If you aren't assuming their existence you don't need it.
Science is about explaining the observations by whatever means necessary. Occam's Razor means yes, we assume space doesn't have 6 dimensions as long as that has equal explanatory power to assuming it does. When we come across something that can't be explained by "normal" theories, at least without making them more complex than assuming 6 dimensions, we assume 6 dimensions as the simplest theory which explains the observed results.
If you have a way to explain these observations which is much simpler, like gravity being 1/r^2 and planets orbiting stars, then by all means, go ahead and publish it and if it's simpler it should be accepted. But the scientific establishment is trying its best, and there doesn't seem to be a simpler way to explain the observed results.
There couldn't be anything on the other side, so we tend to assume the universe has no boundary, of either kind. Interestingly, however, some recent results suggest our universe may be ever so slighly hyperbolic. If so, it could be a sphere, and everything shrinks the closer you go to the boundary. So you can never reach the boundary, you can get arbitrarily close but you shrink more and more, so you'd have to travel an infinite distance in your terms to reach the edge. At that point it becomes meaningless to ask what's beyond it since there's no way for anything to travel beyond the boundary - or for anything outside to get in.
So if we are on the surface, like a planet. Does that mean there are multiple spherical universes grouped together, like a solar system? Maybe orbiting something else, like a sun universe or something.
Possibly, though there would need to be some force that affects universes. It's pretty meaningless to speculate though - we have no way of contacting such universes or even determining whether they exist, so it makes as much sense to assume we don't. Anyway, those same results suggest the curvature of space is not like the surface of a "hypersphere", so this is a pretty unlikely scenario at the moment.
An amoeba under a slide has a pretty much two-dimensional existence - it can't sense anything above or below, and won't interact with the glass on either side. They seem to live well enough, as far as we can tell. You can't get complex lifeforms in just one or two dimensions because there's not enough "room" - e.g. a complete intestine would make a 2-d animal fall apart. With 4 complete spatial dimensions, however, you run into other difficulties. For one thing, there would be no stable solar systems, because gravity would be an inverse cube law rather than an inverse square law, so there is no stable orbit around a star.
The WMAP results suggest the curvature runs the other way - the geometry of our universe is slightly hyperbolic. There's enough margin for error that a "flat" spacetime is just about possible (and preferred for simplicity) but a "positively" curved universe (i.e. 4-dimensional sphere or similar) seems pretty unlikely.
I was thinking streaming. Few places seem to offer video for download (of course kaffeine makes it very easy to save the stream they're sending you)
I was thinking purely of streaming. Being able to view streaming wmv took no effort at all for me - it was just a case of (in my particular distro) USE=win32codecs emerge kaffeine and I can see it fine in konqueror, doing the same with gxine would allow you to see streamed wmv in netscape/mozilla and derivatives. Real was a bit more troublesome (I resorted to manually downloading the codecs in the end) and quicktime I still haven't got working. (It's fine for local content but won't stream). When it's just files on your system, yes, divx is easier, but I have yet to see a complete setup for streaming it, and the bandwidth required would probably be prohibitive.
It might be supported in ffmpeg, but my personal experience is that there is no way to play a quicktime video embedded in a web page on linux, a feat that's relatively easy with wmv.
The countries seemed to handle it fine when there were VHS tapes with no region coding.
Did you think MPAA just decided to make six or seven different versions of each movie for laughs or because it kept the editors working overtime?
No, I haven't seen much (any) difference in the imported DVDs I've watched. Of course I wouldn't, but when I've seen the film in the cinema I didn't notice anything missing on the foreign DVD version. I think it's just a moneymaking measure.
By your apparent line of thinking anyone who complains about anything is a crybaby. Gandhi, Lincoln, Mandella...
What was the change from 2.5 to 2.6 about then? I thought that was the 2.5 tree being declared stable, and it was only after that that it was decided development would take place within the 2.6 tree.