No one forces you to listen to my opinion, but if you don't want to hear any comments, don't post your creations on the internet.
You don't need to contribute code to have an opinion, any more than you need to pick up a musical instrument and hop on stage to say when a band sucks.
For the same reason that you do not take a buggy, unfinished mess and call it "v4.0."
When you write software for free, you cannot be held responsible for your code's quality, or your manners, or anything. No one can whine to you that you did not do enough for them for free. There is really only one thing you can do wrong.
And this is set the wrong expectations.
When you see people with their app v0.23beta (that everyone's been using in production for 4 years) - that's setting expectations conservatively. That's saying: "guys, I am not bringing a corporate QA department to test this. It may be awesome, but caveat emptor." This is How It Is Done. I mean, it's very easy. No one's saying you have to do big amounts of work and make something done. Just don't make big claims that it's done either. Or imply it. Or do things that other people could believe are implying it. In fact, if in doubt, just put a warning label.:)
When you say "New! Improved! Awesome! v4.0!!!" and then it fucking sucks, you are committing the only real sin in free software/open source: tricking people.
And even that's OK in the scheme of things. You're only ruining your own reputation. You just shouldn't expect people to keep coming back and wanting to use your code, or work with you, if you do that.
Hence, "lay low." KDE4 was a development branch. It should have been labeled as such, instead of "KDE4." With tiny fine print after you wasted your time and had a horrible experience saying "yeah we know it sucks, wait for 4.1." And with 4.1, rinse, and repeat.
I used to love KDE. I turned a lot of other people onto it.
After 4.0, 4.1, 4.2... After what they did to Amarok... After the pathetic state of the last several Kubuntu releases... The question is, should we even bother to look at this release? Or are they still digging their hole deeper?
Yes, I am aware of the fascinating debate about who is responsible for these disasters. From 10,000 feet above it, it looks like the KDE leadership went to the dogs after v3. But I don't know, and what's more, I just don't care. The point is, the KDE brand is ruined right now. I know I am not alone in thinking this. Remember Linus? This Linus?
He switched to Gnome too. I held out a lot longer before I gave up. I loved KDE3 so much. And I really hated Gnome. Look at Mono for fuck's sake. But you know what? The KDE team beat all that loyalty out of me, crash by crash, regression by regression, blog post by blog post.
And you know what else? Somewhere a long the way they cleaned Gnome up, sanded down the worst rough edges, made it launch fast, and look pretty. It works. My Mom could use it. Unlike KDE4+, last time I looked. Which was months ago, because it was so bad I didn't even want to look anymore.
If I were the "KDE Team," I would lay very low, clean house, and labor until I had something amazing - something that would wow people again. Something original. Something worthy of their legacy.
Is this that release?
Or is it just another bandaid on the broken mess I've been watching unfold?
If you want to know what the cost is for buying games from companies that control their platform this tightly, now you get to see it.
If it bothers you, you have one option. Cancel your xbox live subs. Ebay your xbox. Buy your games on a different platform.
They didn't even set out to screw you over and make the games you (thought you) paid for (largely) worthless. You just gave them so much power that they practically did it by accident.
The answer is the PC games model we already had, where the platform is open and the infrastructure isn't something you are forced to buy from a single seller you are locked to for life (xbox live).
Yeah, I know - what is one slashdot post going to do to stop the console juggernaut? Answer: nothing. But don't say I didn't warn you. Give a thought at least to patronizing developers who make and sell their games the old-fashioned way. Especially the ones who support open standards and open platforms like opengl and linux - there are a few.
Other distros are closer to mainline and this is really all I'm saying. Redhat may claim their code is more appropriate for the enterprise - and maybe it is. But any guise of maturity is an illusion. They run 2.6.18 with almost 4000 patches consisting of almost 4 million lines, that they've been developing in parallel with mainline for almost 4 years. If their patches are pulled from mainline, or are similar, or different, or one day get merged, or not, the bottom line is this is a monumental effort, their kernel is different and diverging, and it is not more "mature" than mainline - it's just coming from a different team with different processes, priorities, and people.
By comaprison Ubuntu 9.10 has divergence too, from 2.6.31. Their patch - in a single file - is about 308k lines - or less than 10% of Redhat's effort in terms of volume. Their 8.04 LTS release (which is more like RHEL in conservative approach) is based on 2.6.24, and that patch runs ~551k lines since Spring 2008, as it nears the end of its support life in a couple of months.
If you want to argue semantics, it is pretty fun, I won't stop you. Just don't fool yourself that you're doing anything more, or that you really sound more convincing giving a definition than, say...
"As Linus Torvalds has pointed out, in the Open Source world, there always are forks; whenever someone creates a patch and submits it for inclusion, a fork is temporarily created." -tytso
Does Redhat get a lot of its patches merged, ultimately? Why yes they do. So it's an amicable fork not so different from the old AC kernels - in fact, that has its roots in them.
"And certainly "code forks" in the form of the Alan Cox, David Jones, Andrea VM trees, et. al, have certainly not hurt the Linux kernel development community; in fact, they are an important and invaluable part of the Linux development process." --ibid
Look, you are better off arguing that Redhat is a fork and it is more relevant than mainline, since more people use it. Or maybe you are actually arguing that, I'm not sure.
But you can read what I wrote - I don't make any claims about reliability. I only tell my story and raise the question. It's about mindshare, and often when companies try to go it alone on this stuff, they get in over their heads. In a way, every old unix variant tells this story...
"Redhat Enterprise Linux 5" is essentially a massive kernel fork at 2.6.18. Redhat is the most plausible contender for doing this, since they employ a really significant number of the world's kernel devs, including Alan Cox (until last year). That split was even acrimonious at times IIRC. But then again, you can just call it similar to Canonical's LTS - people choose whether to go with a version of something that's more or less mature - and most distros going with the "more mature" option frequently cheat and backport all kinds of things in the meantime (with greater and lesser success).
Depending on who you ask, RHEL can be more risky than mainline. I've definitely had RHEL panics take down production, only to later discover linux kernel bugs that had been fixed in mainline for a while, but that redhat hadn't backported to their ancient linux fork. But then again, people get burned going the other way all the time too. I don't know if anyone's really independently studied what's ultimately safest. My guess is that you are usually safest inside the biggest crowd - i.e. closer to mainline - but not too near the very latest version.
I can't find anything yet that actually gives N900 or Maemo sales figures. Your link does not - I am all ears if you have something. Something tells me that Nokia isn't anywhere remotely near selling 21 million devices truly comparable to iphone or android in Q4. "Converged mobile device volumes" is very carefully worded and my guess, careful weasel wording is the only way the can come up with a number so impressive-sounding.
Apple has only shipped 75 million iphone and ipod touch devices combined worldwide, and something like 8.7 million iphones in Q4. So if Nokia "true" smartphones were outselling Apple smartphones by such a margin, in any way shape or form, I think that would be bigger news, no?
I think this confusion comes from Nokia labelling any $50 gadet of theirs with a dime-store web browser and a music player as a "converged mobile device." But even in this case I should have qualified my remarks as referring to smartphones, rather than just "mobile."
Somehow I managed to forget Nokia for being more open than Apple - and arguably - Google. I guess because so few people use, or will likely ever use, their smartphones.:)
Google has frankly set a new standard as far as how companies can become very successful by embracing the open and free software communities. I honestly don't think you can point to many other companies that are doing better, nor could you realistically expect to. In the mobile space, pretty much the next nearest competitor in terms of openness is Apple (Darwin, et al) - in other words, a joke. Meanwhile Google not only has a wonderfully organized system for playing with all the Android code, but a broad commitment across products. Look at Wave, for instance - wide, wide open, and very deliberately (because they know it cannot succeed any other way). Google has probably done more for Linux and its credibility than most other companies in the world.
I think this is something totally different - a disagreement about direction between the mainline maintainers and Google's Android team. Corporate developers, even well-intentioned ones, have a conceptual hurdle to get over when someone Not Their Manager is telling them "you must spend x man-months refactoring your code thusly."
Many, many companies have run into this issue with Linux (and other projects) before, and many will again. It usually goes something like this:
Step 1: Whatever. We're Google. Am I going to rearrange my whole development roadmap to follow the directions of some whiny nerd in his mom's basement? LOL. Step 2: Oh. Crap. Wow it is kind of a lot work maintaining my own entire fork of the Linux kernel/KHTML/etc. all by myself. Step 3: Either A) capitulation - the last guy is fired or smacked with the clue stick, and the cooperation restarts, or B) a true fork. These usually stagnate and die, and are also riddled with bugs and security holes btw... unless, the fork is really more interesting than what it forked from, in which case, the community switches to the fork and justice is served.
Often between Step 1 and 2, the maintainer will attempt to play a little corporate politics by embarrassing said middle manager in the media. By the way, this is pretty smart and it often works - especially with companies as large but otherwise savvy as Google, a slashdot story can jumpstart efforts to mend the rift by bringing more senior eyes on the problem. Cooperating is in everyone's interest, and they will realize it.
I'll take this out of order, because it's so interesting.
Unfortunately, not everyone came along for the ride from the start and we now see a greater difference in living standards between the poorest and the richest than at just about any other time in human history. Does this explain everything? No, but IMHO it is a key insight.
I found this to be a very lucid and interesting perspective on the situation. And I would argue nothing from those foregoing two paragraphs. Very well put, sir.
The key question is, how should we view our current policies, in light of all this? What's wrong, and what could we do better?
The antebellum south decided that it was actually acceptable to leverage this massive difference in living standards to foster human slavery.
We did not simply realize our mistake and "get it right" after this period in history. We are doing things today that will be seen as similarly barbaric (if not worse) in a century's time.
There is an issue here of tribalism and human social instinct. We can dehumanize and victimize those of far shores who don't have the means to resist. We will do it for profit, or potentially even for sport. I would say, we are on a trajectory of moderating and increasing the sophistication of this exploitation. I dare you to suggest it has somehow ended.
A southern plantation owner's arguments against treatment of African and North American natives as equals of Europeans sound different from your arguments only in degree.
You don't seem willing to commit that a genetic difference exists - instead what I understand so far (and I continue to look forward to your clarifications on this) - only that the momentum of culture and education is so great that we lack the resources to overcome it and treat Chinese laborers as equals to American laborers.
it is neither practical nor possible to do this for every young person presently living in poverty in Africa, never mind the older people. There are simply too many of them and they would require too much education and training to advance all of them so quickly in less than a single generation.
Neither practical nor possible?:)
Sorry, nitpicking is unbecoming. In any case I prefer to have a little more imagination than that. People thought the American civil rights movement equally impractical and impossible, until it largely succeeded. Whether you consider that success to be the work of a generation or the culmination of 10,000 years (or 1,000,000 years) of human history, the question is, do you want to be headed in the right direction, or the wrong one?
Is free trade with border fences the right direction? Really?
Or is the better answer found elsewhere? Please forgive me for being melodramatic, but:
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
This always worked for us before. Why abandon it?:)
Oh, it's certainly possible.
No, it is not.
Impossible to pass a law liberalizing immigration with any "free trade" partner? Really?
I say again: "Racism and xenophobia and a terrible fear of losing one's material advantages make it unlikely today." Unlikely, that's very different from impossible. We could do it tomorrow if we wanted.
If you fear the results - imagine how many denizens of the so-called 3rd world fear the status quo?
You could go so far as to say, the reason we would resist such a law is that we know, quite specifically, that we want to actively profit from the squalor and depravity of a foreign trading partner. If not their people, why their toasters?
Please don't suggest that it benefits the slaves when their masters sell their labors cheap. I can more easily argue
You won't change anything by letting "everyone move to wherever they want", even if that were possible. You would simply have the sort of problems that we currently see in the third world transplanted to the United States and Europe (i.e. poverty, slums, crime, etc).
Oh, it's certainly possible.
Racism and xenophobia and a terrible fear of losing one's material advantages make it unlikely today.
I'm not sure I follow you on the causes of poverty, slums and crime, there and here. But leaving that aside for the moment, I like that you raise the issue of responsibility for one's own government. I take your thesis to be that people from the third world have created their own mess, and would recreate it in the first world if they were given the opportunity.
I think you are also saying that an ignorant, uneducated third-worlder could not become a productive citizen of i.e. the United States, and it seems as if you've illustrated the point by saying an attempt would only end up as a Potemkin Village of welfare and services provided by educated, hard-working Americans.
People always lump in users with sellers that are "thrown in jail" and I just don't believe it. I haven't heard of a person in the US going to Jail for just having a small amount of pot or smoking a joint. Unless you are a dealer, the cops and the feds don't even bother.
First google result:
"BJS officials also estimated that 42% of state "marijuana only" prisoners and 23% of federal "marijuana only" prisoners were incarcerated for possession, not "trafficking."[7] ("Trafficking" includes "possession with intent to distribute.") Applied to the previously calculated estimates, as adjusted for the June 1998 prisoner counts, there would be 7,400 state prisoners and 2,300 federal prisoners incarcerated for marijuana possession only, for a total of 9,700 prisoners."
BJS is "Bureau of Justice Statistics." I found this at the first link in a Google search, something I presume you are capable of doing yourself.
I'll skip the rest... unless you'd rather we go on?
When it comes down to it, the slaves have a choice - revolt, or continue being a slave.
You make it sound so easy.:) If it were, there would be no tyranny. BTW, enriching the tyrants makes it even harder.
I guess all I'm saying is, slave owners, and their trading partners, are the ones who have an easy choice. The slaves themselves can only chose violence and, very likely, futility, death.
Social change won't be inspired by over-compensating a few people.
It's funny you put it that way.
Let's take an example from real life.
If you have a country that allows slavery in some industry (I won't name any names, but you know who you are), and you have free trade, what does that do to the labor market in other countries where free men try to earn a living in that same industry?
"Oh, well, it benefits the slaves to be able to work harder so their owners can sell more goods to foreign markets. And one day, after a ton of bullshit and a lot of faith and a lot of petty details that aren't that important, they can arrive at the same place as American workers!"
But sadly, no. All this really does is over-compensate the foreign and domestic slave owners. And it can only be accomplished by preventing people from crossing borders - just as we do today, with immigration policies. The slaves desperately want to be up and out of the plantation, shopping for working and living conditions the same way that we, as consumers, shop for the cheapest labor and goods. As soon as they actually can, you have an actual "free" market - in labor as well as goods. Under this regime, the "benefits" to the slaves happen so fast your head spins.:) But I guess we, as Americans, need something that's not quite so fast as that.:)
Hey, I'm in the US, and it's obviously true. It's just inconveniently true.
Our anti-pot drug policies eliminate any possibility of salutary tax revenue from an industry that's worth billions even as a black market. In addition to that, we have to catch, try and incarcerate pot growers, sellers, and users at staggering expense (also billions, when all is said and done).
Pot is basically as harmless as alcohol, but since we force our educators and police to demonize it even while half of them use it themselves, we undercut the entire credibility of our anti-drug programs (which are important for helping kids avoid drugs that are actually dangerous). So not only do we get no tax on billions, but we spend billions, and we contribute to actual drug problems (at what additional cost I hesitate to guess).
We could still try the tired argument that pot really is dangerous. We have to hope not, since a huge portion of the population admits to using it in studies. The Netherlands notwithstanding, three of our last three presidents have admitted to using various illegal drugs and got elected anyway.
The open government brainstorming application worked perfectly. It distilled a set of great ideas directly from citizen activists with less lobbying, filtering and political BS.
Legalizing pot would be a great idea. It would cut waste, generate revenue, empty prisons, improve the health and safety of the nation's youth. It's too bad Obama absolutely cannot and will not do it. It would be political suicide. And that gets us into analyzing the particular hues that the fascinating kaleidoscope of American politics puts over reality...
Either way, you can't blame the app, or the app's developer for doing an unusually good job, just because the truth is embarrassing for the "national psyche."
We have a marvellous system called Free Trade. You can tell it's good just from it's name. It promotes Freedom! All the nations of the world are joining together as one to allow free movement in goods across borders.
Unfortunately, they are all also being very careful to make sure that their citizens don't have the same freedom of movement as a toaster.
What must it be like, to work all day on an assembly line as a child, producing shoes that have more freedom than you do - they can go to America!!
We can whine for tariffs, and try to tax and regulate foreign trade. This sucks for the economy - incidentally, protectionist policies are said to have contributed to the Great Depression. Double good luck stopping trade in something like software, which can cross a border without even needing to be smuggled in a gas tank.
So many factors go into currency and cost of living differences of the kind between the US, and say, India. So, that's not changing any time soon. Unless the dollar crashes.:)
In fact, the only hope an American laborer really has in the mean time is to open their borders. Allow free movement in people. And hope that people from around the world will want to come to the US to work. While it's cheaper to make things in the 3rd world, no one really wants to live there. It kind of sucks to save money by eliminating working police, courts, fire exits, scholarships, clean streets, environmental regulations, safety rules, torts, and so forth. The current system only soldiers on because, workers just have no choice. If they had one, labor might elect to find a more favorable set of laws to live under, which would somewhat mitigate management's ability to shop for the most cheap-but-labor-unfriendly shit-where-you-sleep laws they can find.
Hardly anything could be a bigger screw than what we have now, which involves H1B programs that bring foreign skilled labor into the US to learn, get experience, and then forces them to take it back home to India, Asia, etc. But this is probably exactly why IBM, Sun, Microsoft, etc. all support H1B programs.
Yes, you are obviously just guessing, and you're dead wrong.
OK, that's cool.
The codec doesn't do the reporting, that's true. Neither does h.264. It's the Flash that does the reporting.
Duh.
HTML5 has fairly sophisticated Javascript integration. There's absolutely nothing stopping client-side Javascript from reporting exactly the same statistics back to Google.
Well OK then.
What makes you think Google just picked up a Flash video widget off the shelf?
Nothing.
There's really no reason to think they'd get less by sticking Vorbis in a tag.
Certainly not if there's feature parity with the existing solution.
They already have [youtube.com] an HTML5 player. Not a very good one, but it exists.
Given what you describe of HTML5's APIs, then we might see more of it after all.
Every single one of the features you mentioned, yes, it does. Combine it with SVG, and the differences become even smaller and more boring.
Actually this sounds quite nice; you've got me interested to the point where I'll be giving HTML5 a much closer look. I hope you can forgive me for being shocked that the standards bodies had anything so substantial or useful up their sleeves. If the browser itself can finally out-Flash Flash, and we can finally kick that buggy pile of crap to the curb, then the next round of drinks is on me.
Then again, even if MS can't think of a good reason not to implement the standard, won't they still make IE incompatible just out of spite?
Words in boxes can be laid over the video for periods of time that the user selects.
Presumably there are current and future advertising possibilities to this, beyond just allowing users to scribble on their content.
Sure, they assume most people will be watching it through a YouTube page
I'm sure they can live without that
I'm not.
Youtube currently provides detailed data about the behavior of viewers within the video - including their main interactions with the player. I'm just guessing here, but an open source codec playing a naked video seems highly unlikely to report back to somewhere about how many seconds the viewer watched, or where they hit pause, or what they rewound and watched again.
Flash will happily do it, and whatever else it's programmed to do. More to the point, virtually every flash player in wide use does do this.
Advertisers are accustomed to having this information - and they care about it, because they get little other equivalent, fine-grained feedback about how viewers like the content.
You can already avoid all of the above by using a video downloader.
Right, but users of those are like linux users - a minority. Small enough to be a rounding error, frankly.
Google may be wise enough to know that they can't force savvy users to do anything, there is no point in trying, and it doesn't matter anyway.
Why does Google offer many entirely ad-free services?
You're saying that google cares so little about ad revenue on what they do that they may ditch flash anyway.
You may be right. They certainly offer an extraordinary amount of "pro bono" web services.
Let's make a bet. I think they disappoint everyone on HTML5, and on top of that, you will see them finding more ways to monetize what they currently give away for free.
The only way I see it going the other way is if HTML5 video had feature parity with Flash. Or Google made it so. Then you might see it adopted on Youtube.
It would also get us the ability to use purely open source software for our web browsing again, or at least for our YouTube -- no need for Flash. It'd also give us the ability to right-click and do something like "save video as", or click+drag a video to our desktop, or email. It'd also greatly simplify anything else which just wants the video -- for example, any sort of set-top box, etc, now only needs a web browser, or even just something that can scrape the YouTube HTML, instead of a web browser and a Flash port.
Is there a solution for all of Google's overlay features and customer spying- i mean, statistics and market intelligence capabilities, in this scenario you envision?
I'm assuming anything that prevents i.e. second by second reporting of how much of the video you watch, or current and future in-frame advertising capabilities, is pretty much a non-starter.
They may not be "evil," but they are in the ad business.
Contrary to increasingly popular belief, the time when we have no recourse against China has not yet come. Yes, they have sizeable American bond and dollar holdings; that's not exactly a one-sided power relationship. Yes, they're a superpower with a growing economy, beyond the grasp of the kind of "military and aid" diplomacy we exercise in the undeveloped world. That hardly closes down the strategic problem space.
I'm sure China hopes that we will sweep this under the rug, do nothing, and say nothing. But just for a start, going public and forcing China's (and the Fed's) hand at this point starts a discussion about what can be done. It spurs everyone to take security more seriously and think differently about their relationship with China. It aids, in sometimes complex and inscrutable ways, in the difficult negotiations with China that many businesses and parts of the government must engage in regularly. It reframes discussions about political, defense, and economic issues.
To put it in perspective, and maybe make yourself feel a bit better, you can crack open the news archives and history books for a look back at American espionage, dirty tricks, corporate/3-letter government agency joint ventures and international "development" over the these many years. We generally give as good as we get.
Domestic business is governed by laws (in the developed world, at least). International business is often governed by politics at best, and by the law of the jungle at worst.
Of course, stripping a few layers off, there is no market without rules, government, agencies, courts, police, oversight.
In many cases it is not possible to make a market at all - in police, and courts, and electricity, for instance. In other cases, you might have effortless and fruitful competition where only the normal anticompetitive scams - monopoly growth, and price-fixing, for instance. That's like the market for food or computers. There are also many in-betweens, where markets can arguably be created at great expense and with enormous effort - among cell phone providers, for instance. Maybe. But in all cases, the discussion is about exactly what rules you would like in your free market.
Hence my joke. The antebellum south had a free market too. Just with rules that included human slavery. Our free market in cell service involves such intellectual low points as Michael Powell lecturing on market economics while simultaneously giving Ivan Seidenberg a hand job.
Well, in this country, we have a bunch of besotted couch-potatoes whose idea of fixing this problem is to Wait For the Free Market Fairy to Come Solve It For Them.
Meanwhile the Free Market Fairy is alive and well and giving oral service in the Verizon executive washroom. One of the funniest parts of being alive in 2010 is listening to people talk about free markets who wouldn't know one if they were clapped in stocks and sold at auction in one.
The FCC could solve all of this with a few modest policy changes. Transparent billing, disclosure rules, contract practices. All that would help the economy and would be universally popular except among a tiny group of startlingly well-paid bribery facilitators ("lobbyists"). Regulating this industry is not rocket science; you could imitate virtually any other country's approach to cell phones and do better. Too bad I don't hear much of anything coming out of this FCC besides occasional bold statements. I expect better from Democrats, especially since their brand could use the popularity more than the bribes right now. Cest la vie.
I'm trying to understand how you can justify this.
We don't need to make excuses for the military. They don't need that kind of "support." They need a clear-eyed assessment of the consequences of our aerial surveillance videos falling into the hands of the enemy. They need accountability and better decision-making in the future.
If I could watch these videos, shot from drones over the terrain I lived and grew up in, I could avoid rocket attacks; eventually, with enough study, even predict the habits and patterns of drone deployment altogether.
If you think this is not a big deal, imagine if our enemies had unencrypted video broadcasting from their planes (if they had any), or their trucks, or their persons. Could we find no way to exploit this? Really?
From an engineering perspective, this is unquestionably a massive embarrassment for the US military. If you had come on slashdot yesterday and argued that any part of the data stream from these drones was unencrypted, you would have been laughed out of the metaphorical room. Even with the WSJ covering the story, it is hard to believe. Then again, they're a Murdoch paper now. Who knows.
If this story is true, it's a mistake so severe that it hurts our credibility and stature and emboldens our enemies. If our (very expensive) drone effort was comrpomised, there were very likely missed opportunities to hit targets, and an indirect cost in the lives of American troops. That's not complicated reasoning. It's obvious.
The justification is if it was a net win - in other words, the compromised drones were all we could field in time, and they were more effective than no drones. But the article rules that out. No one here will believe that with 10+ years and the world's largest budgets, America really lacked the ability to encrypt this video stream.
MS likes software patents because it keeps competitors from entering the market.
Yup. That's right. It was supposed to keep barriers to entry nice and high. Only rich established players with the money and time to develop patent portfolios would be safe, since they could just countersue whenever anyone comes after them.
The problem here is the emergence of patent trolls
You could say problem; I rather refer to it as the solution.:) The people who've been championing this stupid system didn't even think it through properly, and now get their asses handed to them by companies like Eolas.
It's rare that a greedy power play like this blows back on its creators so thoroughly. Most of the time, when rich people make bullshit rules to keep themselves rich, it just works. So, enjoy the show while it lasts.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, OK! Mercy! :)
Victory to the little girls. :)
Which version do you all use? If they like it, maybe it's worth another look.
Cheese with your whine?
No one forces you to listen to my opinion, but if you don't want to hear any comments, don't post your creations on the internet.
You don't need to contribute code to have an opinion, any more than you need to pick up a musical instrument and hop on stage to say when a band sucks.
For the same reason that you do not take a buggy, unfinished mess and call it "v4.0."
When you write software for free, you cannot be held responsible for your code's quality, or your manners, or anything. No one can whine to you that you did not do enough for them for free. There is really only one thing you can do wrong.
And this is set the wrong expectations.
When you see people with their app v0.23beta (that everyone's been using in production for 4 years) - that's setting expectations conservatively. That's saying: "guys, I am not bringing a corporate QA department to test this. It may be awesome, but caveat emptor." This is How It Is Done. I mean, it's very easy. No one's saying you have to do big amounts of work and make something done. Just don't make big claims that it's done either. Or imply it. Or do things that other people could believe are implying it. In fact, if in doubt, just put a warning label. :)
When you say "New! Improved! Awesome! v4.0!!!" and then it fucking sucks, you are committing the only real sin in free software/open source: tricking people.
And even that's OK in the scheme of things. You're only ruining your own reputation. You just shouldn't expect people to keep coming back and wanting to use your code, or work with you, if you do that.
Hence, "lay low." KDE4 was a development branch. It should have been labeled as such, instead of "KDE4." With tiny fine print after you wasted your time and had a horrible experience saying "yeah we know it sucks, wait for 4.1." And with 4.1, rinse, and repeat.
I used to love KDE. I turned a lot of other people onto it.
After 4.0, 4.1, 4.2... After what they did to Amarok... After the pathetic state of the last several Kubuntu releases... The question is, should we even bother to look at this release? Or are they still digging their hole deeper?
Yes, I am aware of the fascinating debate about who is responsible for these disasters. From 10,000 feet above it, it looks like the KDE leadership went to the dogs after v3. But I don't know, and what's more, I just don't care. The point is, the KDE brand is ruined right now. I know I am not alone in thinking this. Remember Linus? This Linus?
He switched to Gnome too. I held out a lot longer before I gave up. I loved KDE3 so much. And I really hated Gnome. Look at Mono for fuck's sake. But you know what? The KDE team beat all that loyalty out of me, crash by crash, regression by regression, blog post by blog post.
And you know what else? Somewhere a long the way they cleaned Gnome up, sanded down the worst rough edges, made it launch fast, and look pretty. It works. My Mom could use it. Unlike KDE4+, last time I looked. Which was months ago, because it was so bad I didn't even want to look anymore.
If I were the "KDE Team," I would lay very low, clean house, and labor until I had something amazing - something that would wow people again. Something original. Something worthy of their legacy.
Is this that release?
Or is it just another bandaid on the broken mess I've been watching unfold?
If you want to know what the cost is for buying games from companies that control their platform this tightly, now you get to see it.
If it bothers you, you have one option. Cancel your xbox live subs. Ebay your xbox. Buy your games on a different platform.
They didn't even set out to screw you over and make the games you (thought you) paid for (largely) worthless. You just gave them so much power that they practically did it by accident.
The answer is the PC games model we already had, where the platform is open and the infrastructure isn't something you are forced to buy from a single seller you are locked to for life (xbox live).
Yeah, I know - what is one slashdot post going to do to stop the console juggernaut? Answer: nothing. But don't say I didn't warn you. Give a thought at least to patronizing developers who make and sell their games the old-fashioned way. Especially the ones who support open standards and open platforms like opengl and linux - there are a few.
Wow, work for Redhat? Stockholder? :)
Other distros are closer to mainline and this is really all I'm saying. Redhat may claim their code is more appropriate for the enterprise - and maybe it is. But any guise of maturity is an illusion. They run 2.6.18 with almost 4000 patches consisting of almost 4 million lines, that they've been developing in parallel with mainline for almost 4 years. If their patches are pulled from mainline, or are similar, or different, or one day get merged, or not, the bottom line is this is a monumental effort, their kernel is different and diverging, and it is not more "mature" than mainline - it's just coming from a different team with different processes, priorities, and people.
By comaprison Ubuntu 9.10 has divergence too, from 2.6.31. Their patch - in a single file - is about 308k lines - or less than 10% of Redhat's effort in terms of volume. Their 8.04 LTS release (which is more like RHEL in conservative approach) is based on 2.6.24, and that patch runs ~551k lines since Spring 2008, as it nears the end of its support life in a couple of months.
If you want to argue semantics, it is pretty fun, I won't stop you. Just don't fool yourself that you're doing anything more, or that you really sound more convincing giving a definition than, say...
"As Linus Torvalds has pointed out, in the Open Source world, there always are forks; whenever someone creates a patch and submits it for inclusion, a fork is temporarily created." -tytso
Does Redhat get a lot of its patches merged, ultimately? Why yes they do. So it's an amicable fork not so different from the old AC kernels - in fact, that has its roots in them.
"And certainly "code forks" in the form of the Alan Cox, David Jones, Andrea VM trees, et. al, have certainly not hurt the Linux kernel development community; in fact, they are an important and invaluable part of the Linux development process." --ibid
Look, you are better off arguing that Redhat is a fork and it is more relevant than mainline, since more people use it. Or maybe you are actually arguing that, I'm not sure.
But you can read what I wrote - I don't make any claims about reliability. I only tell my story and raise the question. It's about mindshare, and often when companies try to go it alone on this stuff, they get in over their heads. In a way, every old unix variant tells this story...
"Redhat Enterprise Linux 5" is essentially a massive kernel fork at 2.6.18. Redhat is the most plausible contender for doing this, since they employ a really significant number of the world's kernel devs, including Alan Cox (until last year). That split was even acrimonious at times IIRC. But then again, you can just call it similar to Canonical's LTS - people choose whether to go with a version of something that's more or less mature - and most distros going with the "more mature" option frequently cheat and backport all kinds of things in the meantime (with greater and lesser success).
Depending on who you ask, RHEL can be more risky than mainline. I've definitely had RHEL panics take down production, only to later discover linux kernel bugs that had been fixed in mainline for a while, but that redhat hadn't backported to their ancient linux fork. But then again, people get burned going the other way all the time too. I don't know if anyone's really independently studied what's ultimately safest. My guess is that you are usually safest inside the biggest crowd - i.e. closer to mainline - but not too near the very latest version.
I can't find anything yet that actually gives N900 or Maemo sales figures. Your link does not - I am all ears if you have something. Something tells me that Nokia isn't anywhere remotely near selling 21 million devices truly comparable to iphone or android in Q4. "Converged mobile device volumes" is very carefully worded and my guess, careful weasel wording is the only way the can come up with a number so impressive-sounding.
Apple has only shipped 75 million iphone and ipod touch devices combined worldwide, and something like 8.7 million iphones in Q4. So if Nokia "true" smartphones were outselling Apple smartphones by such a margin, in any way shape or form, I think that would be bigger news, no?
I think this confusion comes from Nokia labelling any $50 gadet of theirs with a dime-store web browser and a music player as a "converged mobile device." But even in this case I should have qualified my remarks as referring to smartphones, rather than just "mobile."
Somehow I managed to forget Nokia for being more open than Apple - and arguably - Google. I guess because so few people use, or will likely ever use, their smartphones. :)
Google has frankly set a new standard as far as how companies can become very successful by embracing the open and free software communities. I honestly don't think you can point to many other companies that are doing better, nor could you realistically expect to. In the mobile space, pretty much the next nearest competitor in terms of openness is Apple (Darwin, et al) - in other words, a joke. Meanwhile Google not only has a wonderfully organized system for playing with all the Android code, but a broad commitment across products. Look at Wave, for instance - wide, wide open, and very deliberately (because they know it cannot succeed any other way). Google has probably done more for Linux and its credibility than most other companies in the world.
I think this is something totally different - a disagreement about direction between the mainline maintainers and Google's Android team. Corporate developers, even well-intentioned ones, have a conceptual hurdle to get over when someone Not Their Manager is telling them "you must spend x man-months refactoring your code thusly."
Many, many companies have run into this issue with Linux (and other projects) before, and many will again. It usually goes something like this:
Step 1: Whatever. We're Google. Am I going to rearrange my whole development roadmap to follow the directions of some whiny nerd in his mom's basement? LOL.
Step 2: Oh. Crap. Wow it is kind of a lot work maintaining my own entire fork of the Linux kernel/KHTML/etc. all by myself.
Step 3: Either A) capitulation - the last guy is fired or smacked with the clue stick, and the cooperation restarts, or B) a true fork. These usually stagnate and die, and are also riddled with bugs and security holes btw... unless, the fork is really more interesting than what it forked from, in which case, the community switches to the fork and justice is served.
Often between Step 1 and 2, the maintainer will attempt to play a little corporate politics by embarrassing said middle manager in the media. By the way, this is pretty smart and it often works - especially with companies as large but otherwise savvy as Google, a slashdot story can jumpstart efforts to mend the rift by bringing more senior eyes on the problem. Cooperating is in everyone's interest, and they will realize it.
I'll take this out of order, because it's so interesting.
Unfortunately, not everyone came along for the ride from the start and we now see a greater difference in living standards between the poorest and the richest than at just about any other time in human history. Does this explain everything? No, but IMHO it is a key insight.
I found this to be a very lucid and interesting perspective on the situation. And I would argue nothing from those foregoing two paragraphs. Very well put, sir.
The key question is, how should we view our current policies, in light of all this? What's wrong, and what could we do better?
The antebellum south decided that it was actually acceptable to leverage this massive difference in living standards to foster human slavery.
We did not simply realize our mistake and "get it right" after this period in history. We are doing things today that will be seen as similarly barbaric (if not worse) in a century's time.
There is an issue here of tribalism and human social instinct. We can dehumanize and victimize those of far shores who don't have the means to resist. We will do it for profit, or potentially even for sport. I would say, we are on a trajectory of moderating and increasing the sophistication of this exploitation. I dare you to suggest it has somehow ended.
A southern plantation owner's arguments against treatment of African and North American natives as equals of Europeans sound different from your arguments only in degree.
You don't seem willing to commit that a genetic difference exists - instead what I understand so far (and I continue to look forward to your clarifications on this) - only that the momentum of culture and education is so great that we lack the resources to overcome it and treat Chinese laborers as equals to American laborers.
it is neither practical nor possible to do this for every young person presently living in poverty in Africa, never mind the older people. There are simply too many of them and they would require too much education and training to advance all of them so quickly in less than a single generation.
Neither practical nor possible? :)
Sorry, nitpicking is unbecoming. In any case I prefer to have a little more imagination than that. People thought the American civil rights movement equally impractical and impossible, until it largely succeeded. Whether you consider that success to be the work of a generation or the culmination of 10,000 years (or 1,000,000 years) of human history, the question is, do you want to be headed in the right direction, or the wrong one?
Is free trade with border fences the right direction? Really?
Or is the better answer found elsewhere? Please forgive me for being melodramatic, but:
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
This always worked for us before. Why abandon it? :)
Oh, it's certainly possible.
No, it is not.
Impossible to pass a law liberalizing immigration with any "free trade" partner? Really?
I say again: "Racism and xenophobia and a terrible fear of losing one's material advantages make it unlikely today." Unlikely, that's very different from impossible. We could do it tomorrow if we wanted.
If you fear the results - imagine how many denizens of the so-called 3rd world fear the status quo?
You could go so far as to say, the reason we would resist such a law is that we know, quite specifically, that we want to actively profit from the squalor and depravity of a foreign trading partner. If not their people, why their toasters?
Please don't suggest that it benefits the slaves when their masters sell their labors cheap. I can more easily argue
You won't change anything by letting "everyone move to wherever they want", even if that were possible. You would simply have the sort of problems that we currently see in the third world transplanted to the United States and Europe (i.e. poverty, slums, crime, etc).
Oh, it's certainly possible.
Racism and xenophobia and a terrible fear of losing one's material advantages make it unlikely today.
I'm not sure I follow you on the causes of poverty, slums and crime, there and here. But leaving that aside for the moment, I like that you raise the issue of responsibility for one's own government. I take your thesis to be that people from the third world have created their own mess, and would recreate it in the first world if they were given the opportunity.
I think you are also saying that an ignorant, uneducated third-worlder could not become a productive citizen of i.e. the United States, and it seems as if you've illustrated the point by saying an attempt would only end up as a Potemkin Village of welfare and services provided by educated, hard-working Americans.
Do I have it right?
People always lump in users with sellers that are "thrown in jail" and I just don't believe it. I haven't heard of a person in the US going to Jail for just having a small amount of pot or smoking a joint. Unless you are a dealer, the cops and the feds don't even bother.
First google result:
"BJS officials also estimated that 42% of state "marijuana only" prisoners and 23% of federal "marijuana only" prisoners were incarcerated for possession, not "trafficking."[7] ("Trafficking" includes "possession with intent to distribute.") Applied to the previously calculated estimates, as adjusted for the June 1998 prisoner counts, there would be 7,400 state prisoners and 2,300 federal prisoners incarcerated for marijuana possession only, for a total of 9,700 prisoners."
BJS is "Bureau of Justice Statistics." I found this at the first link in a Google search, something I presume you are capable of doing yourself.
I'll skip the rest... unless you'd rather we go on?
Try harder next time.
When it comes down to it, the slaves have a choice - revolt, or continue being a slave.
You make it sound so easy. :) If it were, there would be no tyranny. BTW, enriching the tyrants makes it even harder.
I guess all I'm saying is, slave owners, and their trading partners, are the ones who have an easy choice. The slaves themselves can only chose violence and, very likely, futility, death.
Social change won't be inspired by over-compensating a few people.
It's funny you put it that way.
Let's take an example from real life.
If you have a country that allows slavery in some industry (I won't name any names, but you know who you are), and you have free trade, what does that do to the labor market in other countries where free men try to earn a living in that same industry?
"Oh, well, it benefits the slaves to be able to work harder so their owners can sell more goods to foreign markets. And one day, after a ton of bullshit and a lot of faith and a lot of petty details that aren't that important, they can arrive at the same place as American workers!"
But sadly, no. All this really does is over-compensate the foreign and domestic slave owners. And it can only be accomplished by preventing people from crossing borders - just as we do today, with immigration policies. The slaves desperately want to be up and out of the plantation, shopping for working and living conditions the same way that we, as consumers, shop for the cheapest labor and goods. As soon as they actually can, you have an actual "free" market - in labor as well as goods. Under this regime, the "benefits" to the slaves happen so fast your head spins. :) But I guess we, as Americans, need something that's not quite so fast as that. :)
Hey, I'm in the US, and it's obviously true. It's just inconveniently true.
Our anti-pot drug policies eliminate any possibility of salutary tax revenue from an industry that's worth billions even as a black market. In addition to that, we have to catch, try and incarcerate pot growers, sellers, and users at staggering expense (also billions, when all is said and done).
Pot is basically as harmless as alcohol, but since we force our educators and police to demonize it even while half of them use it themselves, we undercut the entire credibility of our anti-drug programs (which are important for helping kids avoid drugs that are actually dangerous). So not only do we get no tax on billions, but we spend billions, and we contribute to actual drug problems (at what additional cost I hesitate to guess).
We could still try the tired argument that pot really is dangerous. We have to hope not, since a huge portion of the population admits to using it in studies. The Netherlands notwithstanding, three of our last three presidents have admitted to using various illegal drugs and got elected anyway.
The open government brainstorming application worked perfectly. It distilled a set of great ideas directly from citizen activists with less lobbying, filtering and political BS.
Legalizing pot would be a great idea. It would cut waste, generate revenue, empty prisons, improve the health and safety of the nation's youth. It's too bad Obama absolutely cannot and will not do it. It would be political suicide. And that gets us into analyzing the particular hues that the fascinating kaleidoscope of American politics puts over reality...
Either way, you can't blame the app, or the app's developer for doing an unusually good job, just because the truth is embarrassing for the "national psyche."
We have a marvellous system called Free Trade. You can tell it's good just from it's name. It promotes Freedom! All the nations of the world are joining together as one to allow free movement in goods across borders.
Unfortunately, they are all also being very careful to make sure that their citizens don't have the same freedom of movement as a toaster.
What must it be like, to work all day on an assembly line as a child, producing shoes that have more freedom than you do - they can go to America!!
We can whine for tariffs, and try to tax and regulate foreign trade. This sucks for the economy - incidentally, protectionist policies are said to have contributed to the Great Depression. Double good luck stopping trade in something like software, which can cross a border without even needing to be smuggled in a gas tank.
So many factors go into currency and cost of living differences of the kind between the US, and say, India. So, that's not changing any time soon. Unless the dollar crashes. :)
In fact, the only hope an American laborer really has in the mean time is to open their borders. Allow free movement in people. And hope that people from around the world will want to come to the US to work. While it's cheaper to make things in the 3rd world, no one really wants to live there. It kind of sucks to save money by eliminating working police, courts, fire exits, scholarships, clean streets, environmental regulations, safety rules, torts, and so forth. The current system only soldiers on because, workers just have no choice. If they had one, labor might elect to find a more favorable set of laws to live under, which would somewhat mitigate management's ability to shop for the most cheap-but-labor-unfriendly shit-where-you-sleep laws they can find.
Hardly anything could be a bigger screw than what we have now, which involves H1B programs that bring foreign skilled labor into the US to learn, get experience, and then forces them to take it back home to India, Asia, etc. But this is probably exactly why IBM, Sun, Microsoft, etc. all support H1B programs.
Ah, the annotations. Trivial to do in HTML5.
Good to know.
Yes, you are obviously just guessing, and you're dead wrong.
OK, that's cool.
The codec doesn't do the reporting, that's true. Neither does h.264. It's the Flash that does the reporting.
Duh.
HTML5 has fairly sophisticated Javascript integration. There's absolutely nothing stopping client-side Javascript from reporting exactly the same statistics back to Google.
Well OK then.
What makes you think Google just picked up a Flash video widget off the shelf?
Nothing.
There's really no reason to think they'd get less by sticking Vorbis in a tag.
Certainly not if there's feature parity with the existing solution.
They already have [youtube.com] an HTML5 player. Not a very good one, but it exists.
Given what you describe of HTML5's APIs, then we might see more of it after all.
Every single one of the features you mentioned, yes, it does. Combine it with SVG, and the differences become even smaller and more boring.
Actually this sounds quite nice; you've got me interested to the point where I'll be giving HTML5 a much closer look. I hope you can forgive me for being shocked that the standards bodies had anything so substantial or useful up their sleeves. If the browser itself can finally out-Flash Flash, and we can finally kick that buggy pile of crap to the curb, then the next round of drinks is on me.
Then again, even if MS can't think of a good reason not to implement the standard, won't they still make IE incompatible just out of spite?
What do you mean by this?
Words in boxes can be laid over the video for periods of time that the user selects.
Presumably there are current and future advertising possibilities to this, beyond just allowing users to scribble on their content.
Sure, they assume most people will be watching it through a YouTube page
I'm sure they can live without that
I'm not.
Youtube currently provides detailed data about the behavior of viewers within the video - including their main interactions with the player. I'm just guessing here, but an open source codec playing a naked video seems highly unlikely to report back to somewhere about how many seconds the viewer watched, or where they hit pause, or what they rewound and watched again.
Flash will happily do it, and whatever else it's programmed to do. More to the point, virtually every flash player in wide use does do this.
Advertisers are accustomed to having this information - and they care about it, because they get little other equivalent, fine-grained feedback about how viewers like the content.
You can already avoid all of the above by using a video downloader.
Right, but users of those are like linux users - a minority. Small enough to be a rounding error, frankly.
Google may be wise enough to know that they can't force savvy users to do anything, there is no point in trying, and it doesn't matter anyway.
Why does Google offer many entirely ad-free services?
You're saying that google cares so little about ad revenue on what they do that they may ditch flash anyway.
You may be right. They certainly offer an extraordinary amount of "pro bono" web services.
Let's make a bet. I think they disappoint everyone on HTML5, and on top of that, you will see them finding more ways to monetize what they currently give away for free.
The only way I see it going the other way is if HTML5 video had feature parity with Flash. Or Google made it so. Then you might see it adopted on Youtube.
It would also get us the ability to use purely open source software for our web browsing again, or at least for our YouTube -- no need for Flash. It'd also give us the ability to right-click and do something like "save video as", or click+drag a video to our desktop, or email. It'd also greatly simplify anything else which just wants the video -- for example, any sort of set-top box, etc, now only needs a web browser, or even just something that can scrape the YouTube HTML, instead of a web browser and a Flash port.
Is there a solution for all of Google's overlay features and customer spying- i mean, statistics and market intelligence capabilities, in this scenario you envision?
I'm assuming anything that prevents i.e. second by second reporting of how much of the video you watch, or current and future in-frame advertising capabilities, is pretty much a non-starter.
They may not be "evil," but they are in the ad business.
Contrary to increasingly popular belief, the time when we have no recourse against China has not yet come. Yes, they have sizeable American bond and dollar holdings; that's not exactly a one-sided power relationship. Yes, they're a superpower with a growing economy, beyond the grasp of the kind of "military and aid" diplomacy we exercise in the undeveloped world. That hardly closes down the strategic problem space.
I'm sure China hopes that we will sweep this under the rug, do nothing, and say nothing. But just for a start, going public and forcing China's (and the Fed's) hand at this point starts a discussion about what can be done. It spurs everyone to take security more seriously and think differently about their relationship with China. It aids, in sometimes complex and inscrutable ways, in the difficult negotiations with China that many businesses and parts of the government must engage in regularly. It reframes discussions about political, defense, and economic issues.
To put it in perspective, and maybe make yourself feel a bit better, you can crack open the news archives and history books for a look back at American espionage, dirty tricks, corporate/3-letter government agency joint ventures and international "development" over the these many years. We generally give as good as we get.
Domestic business is governed by laws (in the developed world, at least). International business is often governed by politics at best, and by the law of the jungle at worst.
It's a great story and very true.
Of course, stripping a few layers off, there is no market without rules, government, agencies, courts, police, oversight.
In many cases it is not possible to make a market at all - in police, and courts, and electricity, for instance. In other cases, you might have effortless and fruitful competition where only the normal anticompetitive scams - monopoly growth, and price-fixing, for instance. That's like the market for food or computers. There are also many in-betweens, where markets can arguably be created at great expense and with enormous effort - among cell phone providers, for instance. Maybe. But in all cases, the discussion is about exactly what rules you would like in your free market.
Hence my joke. The antebellum south had a free market too. Just with rules that included human slavery. Our free market in cell service involves such intellectual low points as Michael Powell lecturing on market economics while simultaneously giving Ivan Seidenberg a hand job.
Well, in this country, we have a bunch of besotted couch-potatoes whose idea of fixing this problem is to Wait For the Free Market Fairy to Come Solve It For Them.
Meanwhile the Free Market Fairy is alive and well and giving oral service in the Verizon executive washroom. One of the funniest parts of being alive in 2010 is listening to people talk about free markets who wouldn't know one if they were clapped in stocks and sold at auction in one.
The FCC could solve all of this with a few modest policy changes. Transparent billing, disclosure rules, contract practices. All that would help the economy and would be universally popular except among a tiny group of startlingly well-paid bribery facilitators ("lobbyists"). Regulating this industry is not rocket science; you could imitate virtually any other country's approach to cell phones and do better. Too bad I don't hear much of anything coming out of this FCC besides occasional bold statements. I expect better from Democrats, especially since their brand could use the popularity more than the bribes right now. Cest la vie.
I'm trying to understand how you can justify this.
We don't need to make excuses for the military. They don't need that kind of "support." They need a clear-eyed assessment of the consequences of our aerial surveillance videos falling into the hands of the enemy. They need accountability and better decision-making in the future.
If I could watch these videos, shot from drones over the terrain I lived and grew up in, I could avoid rocket attacks; eventually, with enough study, even predict the habits and patterns of drone deployment altogether.
If you think this is not a big deal, imagine if our enemies had unencrypted video broadcasting from their planes (if they had any), or their trucks, or their persons. Could we find no way to exploit this? Really?
From an engineering perspective, this is unquestionably a massive embarrassment for the US military. If you had come on slashdot yesterday and argued that any part of the data stream from these drones was unencrypted, you would have been laughed out of the metaphorical room. Even with the WSJ covering the story, it is hard to believe. Then again, they're a Murdoch paper now. Who knows.
If this story is true, it's a mistake so severe that it hurts our credibility and stature and emboldens our enemies. If our (very expensive) drone effort was comrpomised, there were very likely missed opportunities to hit targets, and an indirect cost in the lives of American troops. That's not complicated reasoning. It's obvious.
The justification is if it was a net win - in other words, the compromised drones were all we could field in time, and they were more effective than no drones. But the article rules that out. No one here will believe that with 10+ years and the world's largest budgets, America really lacked the ability to encrypt this video stream.
MS likes software patents because it keeps competitors from entering the market.
Yup. That's right. It was supposed to keep barriers to entry nice and high. Only rich established players with the money and time to develop patent portfolios would be safe, since they could just countersue whenever anyone comes after them.
The problem here is the emergence of patent trolls
You could say problem; I rather refer to it as the solution. :) The people who've been championing this stupid system didn't even think it through properly, and now get their asses handed to them by companies like Eolas.
It's rare that a greedy power play like this blows back on its creators so thoroughly. Most of the time, when rich people make bullshit rules to keep themselves rich, it just works. So, enjoy the show while it lasts.