Most of the early results show that, while VP9 isn't better than h265, it's within a percentage point or two. That's not its problem. Rather, there are two big issues towards VP9 adoption.
First, there is no hardware support for it at all so far, where as the next generation of mobile and desktop chips already have h265 support announced. And since both VP9 and h265 have order-of-magnitude higher processing power requirements then their predecessors. If you're software processing it will be noticeable even on a decent desktop. So a year from now all the latest phones will already support h265. And since any site serving to them will already encode for that, why would they double up for a codec that does not perform any better?
Second, Google may be selling this as a fully free and open codec, but that's what they said about VP8. And as soon as that was announced everyone yawned and bet that it walked all over h264 licensing. And a few months ago Google finally admitted it and paid out a big settlement to license h264 for their VP8 codec.
So when Google says 'you don't have to pay a license fee' what it has meant in the past is 'we haven't done our due diligence to see what licenses you need'. And anyone who cares about paying or avoiding licensing costs would rather pay up a small known fee than worry about massive liabilities from trusting Google's word. Again.
And it's an interesting fight for the 'free as in freedom' crowd, because while h264/5 are not 'free as in beer' they are entirely open specs and many of the best h264 tools have been open source right from the start. The professional tools don't care about the minor licensing costs and the hobbyist tools don't bother paying.
Part of this might be that the terminology hasn't really kept up with the realities of the situation. Initially an Operating System was literately just the software layer that operated the hardware. But right from the very start there were useful apps and commands baked in that were not strictly required for interfacing with the hardware. And as more and more things got taken for granted as part of the basic computing experience, they got added to the basic level of computer installation, which is the OS.
If you have an operating system, and you add one useful feature to it, you still refer to it as an operating system. And then you add one feature after that but still call it an OS. Then you include a couple useful applications that everyone is installing anyways. And this keeps going for decades. At what point does the collection as a whole no longer count as an 'Operating System'? And what then do we call a complete and useful computer installation that includes a wide range of basic functionality, including applications?
Why pay hardcover price for an ebook? Because you get it same day the hardcover comes out. If you want to pay paperback prices, wait a couple years for the paperback to come out and the ebook prices typically drop at the same time.
How much of a hardcover price do you really think is physical costs? A 400 page hardcover is equivalent to 100 pages of double side letter paper. I can print that for 5c a page (or less) on a decent laser printer. So as a guy with basic consumer equipment my costs for for printing a hardcover book are $5 or less. Of course, a publishing house can do it for less. On a big run, I suspect their costs for printing, binding and shipping combined probably don't top that same $5.
The rest of the hardcover costs? Pays for things like editing and typesetting (which is more work for a ebook than a traditional one) and keeps the author fed so they can write more books. You don't see paperback editions of anything until all the above costs have long been paid off. And if you feel that feeding authors and their editors is unreasonable, then fuck off.
Being first to market can have advantages. Coming later to the market with an improved product can have advantages. Coming later to the market with a product that is no better than what is already out there has no advantages at all.
The cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been roughly 1.4 trillion dollars. Yes, with a T. That completely ignores the lives lost on all sides and the ongoing social effects, also on all sides. When it comes to propping up the middle east to prevent a complete systemic and hostile collapse, which is exactly what would happen if the region was just left to its own internal feuding devices, there is almost no amount of money that is a bad investment. At 1 billion a year of aid/support money it would take 140 years to equal the cost of two screwed up and limited wars. That's a damn fine investment.
If America pulled all support from the Middle East/Africa so you think it would even be five years before the region had reached the point where enough American interests were threatened that stepping in would no longer be voluntary? Way to save 1.25 Billion in Egypt aid in exchange for conflicts that would make Iraq look like a kid's piggy bank.
'Unsavvy' users can re-install the OS that came with the computer just as easily (or not) as they can right now. And, almost by definition, people who are installing their own alternate OSs are not unsavvy.
Nobody is going to invest Billions in a company only to see it dismantled
That's exactly what they do. Buy it up, run up a massive debt which is used to pay out the equity firm and shareholders and then leave the smoking corpse massively in the hole while they walk away with the profits. And once it's a private company again the books are no longer public so its easy to hide the financial situation until they have finished sucking it dry.
On top of that, format support has traditionally been inconsistent
I think this is going to be a major one. You can't aim at mass support and then ignore camera and format compatibility. And there is an absolute mess of formats.
It's among the major reasons (and there are a few) that I've seen people ditching Avid over the years. Now there's a software package as uptight and rigid over ideological design decisions as any OSS project you can find. Very different ideological hangups, but just as strictly enforced on the users, like it or not.
You say Micro-ATX, but that just means you have more looked at SFF builds in the last couple years. Check out the Mini-ITX spec and some of the stuff available.
Yeah, but charging stations are effectively unnecessary in the city. The car holds enough charge for any amount of city driving and then gets plugged in at night.
Charging stations are only a factor on long trips. Purely urban use will rarely see any charging while on the go.
Calling it a lock-is a bit strong. Cameras from different manufacturers gave different dimensions and specs. Something sized for one will not fit another. But the specs are well documented and widely used. For example, many professional video cameras from many manufacturers are compatible with Canon lenses.
There can be a significant amount of markup work involved. Also many books include pictures or diagrams or chapter headers if some sort that need to be displayed properly. And many devices don't render quite the same.
Basically, it is significantly more work than just typesetting for print because it also has to be widely checked and modified for cross compatibility.
Publishers can whine all they want about how little the physical book costs and how much of the publication cost is really all the other things, but all that does is inform consumers that publishers have been ripping them off for years.
Ripping them off? By not working for free? Or by paying authors? Basically no one gets rich in the publishing industry. The JK rowlings and Steven Kings are such statistical anomalies that it makes 'Hollywood star' look like a practical career path.
And things like editing are not particularly hard to quantify. A manuscript of a particular length will require a general amount of hours put into it. Those costs need to be accounted for in the final sale price. If they are not editors (and everone else that make books) will stop working for the excelent reason of not being paid. At which point you will complain that there are no good quality books being made anymore.
Seriously, how much do do think materials and production add to the cost of a book? Look, you can get a good laser printer that will do a double sided page for $.05 and one double sided 8.5x11 is roughly equal to 4 pages of a hard cover book. So with consumer equipment you can print the equivalent of a 400 page book for about $5.
I'm not a publisher, but I've got to believe that they can do it cheaper than I can with a printer from Staples.
So ever with a nice hard cover and shipping and handling and everything the entire physical costs of a book are under $10. Probably under $5. And that's roughly in line with how much cheaper e-books are than new hardcovers.
The rest is profit, aka how the writer and publisher feed themselves. And publishing is an industry that is famous for how much money everyone doesn't make on average, so don't whine about them ripping you off.
The publishers need to do a better job of lowering prices as time passes and on older books. But this "digital should be basically free" meme is bullshit.
Not that long ago an exploit that only targeted 5% of smart phones would have a return so small it would not possibly be worth it. Now an exploit that targets 5% of smart phones represents millions of phones.
You are saying the same thing. Think about what "become cost-effective to extract large amounts of oil from currently known locations that are simply not cost-effective to extract at today's prices" really means. It means that the cost of oil has become so high that even silly sources are profitable. The kind where you spend 19 barrels of oil worth of energy to extract 20 barrels of oil. We are rapidly approaching the really crappy end of that bell curve.
So if the cost of oil keeps going up, at some point it exceeds the costs of the alternatives. And if the price of oil goes high enough even 'expensive' alternatives become reasonable.
I could have every app I'm ever likely to use _and_ their developer libraries
I don't think it's an issue of Linux vs. Windows. I think it's a case of you vs other people's use cases. For example, the Adobe suite clocks in pretty close to 10 gb all by itself. There are plenty of games that are bigger than 10 gb.
These are not unusual things to install on a computer.
Thorium's not particularly rare either. And like most radioactive material it's far too big a pain-in-the-ass to bother with actually stockpiling it long term. The long term costs of string it will almost always exceed the cost of just refining it when needed.
You are radically over estimating consumer awareness of anything that is not an iPhone. Most of the people who bought Nokia's Windows Phone did so because they walked into the store and a salesperson recommended it.
As a Canadian who has ordered beer in most of the provinces, I can confirm that we order it in pints.
And that's OK. because it's a set size and it's not something that further conversion is going to be done on. You are never going to have to know how many mL of beer you just received.
Depends on the move. I may not be the GP, but I've had five moves that included three cities in the last ten years. And if I kept my media (books/music/video) as physical copies it would certainly constitute the single largest and heaviest aspect of any move, easily outweighing any piece of furniture.
For that matter, one of my moves was far enough that it was cheaper to just sell/give away all the furniture and buy it again at the other end. Shipping hard copy of all my media might have approached the replacement value of it at that point.
Among friends of my generation, there is a clear dividing line. There are those who own houses and are happy to assume the logistics of bulk. Then there is everyone else, including those who own condos, who could literately move everything they need in the back of a couple trucks. It's a mental dividing line that seems to ignore almost everything else. Kids, marital status, etc. The more urban and compact the less interest and patience for bulky things.
I find it odd as well. Maybe it is the social network generation
No, it's the physically mobile generation. Everyone moves on a regular basis for school and then work. The third time in five years you pack up everything all those books and disc cases look far less meaningful.
The American highway system is the explicit result of the US government. Not in the sense that the government standardized or regulated existing infrastructure, but that the highways projects post WWII brought the whole damn thing into existence.
The bottom line is that every centrally planned economy will fail, every time. And not just fail but fail spectacularly, as in cannot feed its population without outside help, as Cuba received for decades from USSR which paid for it's oh so wonderful (actually crumbling since the end of free money from Russians) medical system.
Um, Russia (aka the former USSR) hasn't been subsidizing Cuba for something like two decades now. Cuba imports a smaller percentage of its food than the USA does. And as far as healthcare goes, current WHO numbers put Cuba roughly on par with the USA for the standard measurements like life expectancy and infant mortality. So when you talk about a crumbling medical system, make sure you specify which country you are referring to.
Every single socialist country has failed... Preemptive statement for idiots: "Socialist" actually means state owned and centrally planned economy. Yes, it really does, look it up in a dictionary if you must. No, Sweden does not have state owned, centrally planned economy, it has a capitalist, free market economy
Typically referred to as 'Social Democracy' or a 'Mixed Market Economy'. And framing that last bit as a "Preemptive statement for idiots" is disingenuous as best. Yes, in a strictly original poli-sci definition sense 'socialism' is what you say. But then again 'Liberalism' by the strict definition more closely resembles current free-market conservatism and so on for most of the political terms in common use. And by randomly declaring that for this discussion only academic understandings of the words will be accepted you basically admit that you are deliberately using these terms not to illustrate or educate but to muddle the discussion and give you an easy alternative to having to discus the actual ideas.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the early results show that, while VP9 isn't better than h265, it's within a percentage point or two. That's not its problem.
Rather, there are two big issues towards VP9 adoption.
First, there is no hardware support for it at all so far, where as the next generation of mobile and desktop chips already have h265 support announced. And since both VP9 and h265 have order-of-magnitude higher processing power requirements then their predecessors. If you're software processing it will be noticeable even on a decent desktop. So a year from now all the latest phones will already support h265. And since any site serving to them will already encode for that, why would they double up for a codec that does not perform any better?
Second, Google may be selling this as a fully free and open codec, but that's what they said about VP8. And as soon as that was announced everyone yawned and bet that it walked all over h264 licensing. And a few months ago Google finally admitted it and paid out a big settlement to license h264 for their VP8 codec.
So when Google says 'you don't have to pay a license fee' what it has meant in the past is 'we haven't done our due diligence to see what licenses you need'. And anyone who cares about paying or avoiding licensing costs would rather pay up a small known fee than worry about massive liabilities from trusting Google's word. Again.
And it's an interesting fight for the 'free as in freedom' crowd, because while h264/5 are not 'free as in beer' they are entirely open specs and many of the best h264 tools have been open source right from the start. The professional tools don't care about the minor licensing costs and the hobbyist tools don't bother paying.
Part of this might be that the terminology hasn't really kept up with the realities of the situation. Initially an Operating System was literately just the software layer that operated the hardware. But right from the very start there were useful apps and commands baked in that were not strictly required for interfacing with the hardware. And as more and more things got taken for granted as part of the basic computing experience, they got added to the basic level of computer installation, which is the OS.
If you have an operating system, and you add one useful feature to it, you still refer to it as an operating system. And then you add one feature after that but still call it an OS. Then you include a couple useful applications that everyone is installing anyways. And this keeps going for decades. At what point does the collection as a whole no longer count as an 'Operating System'? And what then do we call a complete and useful computer installation that includes a wide range of basic functionality, including applications?
Why pay hardcover price for an ebook? Because you get it same day the hardcover comes out. If you want to pay paperback prices, wait a couple years for the paperback to come out and the ebook prices typically drop at the same time.
How much of a hardcover price do you really think is physical costs? A 400 page hardcover is equivalent to 100 pages of double side letter paper. I can print that for 5c a page (or less) on a decent laser printer. So as a guy with basic consumer equipment my costs for for printing a hardcover book are $5 or less. Of course, a publishing house can do it for less. On a big run, I suspect their costs for printing, binding and shipping combined probably don't top that same $5.
The rest of the hardcover costs? Pays for things like editing and typesetting (which is more work for a ebook than a traditional one) and keeps the author fed so they can write more books. You don't see paperback editions of anything until all the above costs have long been paid off. And if you feel that feeding authors and their editors is unreasonable, then fuck off.
Being first to market can have advantages. Coming later to the market with an improved product can have advantages. Coming later to the market with a product that is no better than what is already out there has no advantages at all.
The cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been roughly 1.4 trillion dollars. Yes, with a T. That completely ignores the lives lost on all sides and the ongoing social effects, also on all sides. When it comes to propping up the middle east to prevent a complete systemic and hostile collapse, which is exactly what would happen if the region was just left to its own internal feuding devices, there is almost no amount of money that is a bad investment. At 1 billion a year of aid/support money it would take 140 years to equal the cost of two screwed up and limited wars. That's a damn fine investment.
If America pulled all support from the Middle East/Africa so you think it would even be five years before the region had reached the point where enough American interests were threatened that stepping in would no longer be voluntary? Way to save 1.25 Billion in Egypt aid in exchange for conflicts that would make Iraq look like a kid's piggy bank.
Moron.
'Unsavvy' users can re-install the OS that came with the computer just as easily (or not) as they can right now. And, almost by definition, people who are installing their own alternate OSs are not unsavvy.
Nobody is going to invest Billions in a company only to see it dismantled
That's exactly what they do. Buy it up, run up a massive debt which is used to pay out the equity firm and shareholders and then leave the smoking corpse massively in the hole while they walk away with the profits. And once it's a private company again the books are no longer public so its easy to hide the financial situation until they have finished sucking it dry.
On top of that, format support has traditionally been inconsistent
I think this is going to be a major one. You can't aim at mass support and then ignore camera and format compatibility. And there is an absolute mess of formats.
It's among the major reasons (and there are a few) that I've seen people ditching Avid over the years. Now there's a software package as uptight and rigid over ideological design decisions as any OSS project you can find. Very different ideological hangups, but just as strictly enforced on the users, like it or not.
You say Micro-ATX, but that just means you have more looked at SFF builds in the last couple years. Check out the Mini-ITX spec and some of the stuff available.
Yeah, but charging stations are effectively unnecessary in the city. The car holds enough charge for any amount of city driving and then gets plugged in at night.
Charging stations are only a factor on long trips. Purely urban use will rarely see any charging while on the go.
Calling it a lock-is a bit strong. Cameras from different manufacturers gave different dimensions and specs. Something sized for one will not fit another. But the specs are well documented and widely used. For example, many professional video cameras from many manufacturers are compatible with Canon lenses.
There can be a significant amount of markup work involved. Also many books include pictures or diagrams or chapter headers if some sort that need to be displayed properly. And many devices don't render quite the same.
Basically, it is significantly more work than just typesetting for print because it also has to be widely checked and modified for cross compatibility.
Publishers can whine all they want about how little the physical book costs and how much of the publication cost is really all the other things, but all that does is inform consumers that publishers have been ripping them off for years.
Ripping them off? By not working for free? Or by paying authors? Basically no one gets rich in the publishing industry. The JK rowlings and Steven Kings are such statistical anomalies that it makes 'Hollywood star' look like a practical career path.
And things like editing are not particularly hard to quantify. A manuscript of a particular length will require a general amount of hours put into it. Those costs need to be accounted for in the final sale price. If they are not editors (and everone else that make books) will stop working for the excelent reason of not being paid. At which point you will complain that there are no good quality books being made anymore.
Seriously, how much do do think materials and production add to the cost of a book? Look, you can get a good laser printer that will do a double sided page for $.05 and one double sided 8.5x11 is roughly equal to 4 pages of a hard cover book. So with consumer equipment you can print the equivalent of a 400 page book for about $5.
I'm not a publisher, but I've got to believe that they can do it cheaper than I can with a printer from Staples.
So ever with a nice hard cover and shipping and handling and everything the entire physical costs of a book are under $10. Probably under $5. And that's roughly in line with how much cheaper e-books are than new hardcovers.
The rest is profit, aka how the writer and publisher feed themselves. And publishing is an industry that is famous for how much money everyone doesn't make on average, so don't whine about them ripping you off.
The publishers need to do a better job of lowering prices as time passes and on older books. But this "digital should be basically free" meme is bullshit.
Not that long ago an exploit that only targeted 5% of smart phones would have a return so small it would not possibly be worth it. Now an exploit that targets 5% of smart phones represents millions of phones.
You are saying the same thing. Think about what "become cost-effective to extract large amounts of oil from currently known locations that are simply not cost-effective to extract at today's prices" really means. It means that the cost of oil has become so high that even silly sources are profitable. The kind where you spend 19 barrels of oil worth of energy to extract 20 barrels of oil. We are rapidly approaching the really crappy end of that bell curve.
So if the cost of oil keeps going up, at some point it exceeds the costs of the alternatives. And if the price of oil goes high enough even 'expensive' alternatives become reasonable.
I could have every app I'm ever likely to use _and_ their developer libraries
I don't think it's an issue of Linux vs. Windows. I think it's a case of you vs other people's use cases. For example, the Adobe suite clocks in pretty close to 10 gb all by itself. There are plenty of games that are bigger than 10 gb.
These are not unusual things to install on a computer.
Google is not a business that is built around distributing FOSS. It is simply a business that makes heavy use of FOSS to support their needs.
No one would think of describing Amazon as a FOSS business, despite their heavy use of it. Same with Google.
Thorium's not particularly rare either. And like most radioactive material it's far too big a pain-in-the-ass to bother with actually stockpiling it long term. The long term costs of string it will almost always exceed the cost of just refining it when needed.
You are radically over estimating consumer awareness of anything that is not an iPhone. Most of the people who bought Nokia's Windows Phone did so because they walked into the store and a salesperson recommended it.
As a Canadian who has ordered beer in most of the provinces, I can confirm that we order it in pints.
And that's OK. because it's a set size and it's not something that further conversion is going to be done on. You are never going to have to know how many mL of beer you just received.
Depends on the move. I may not be the GP, but I've had five moves that included three cities in the last ten years. And if I kept my media (books/music/video) as physical copies it would certainly constitute the single largest and heaviest aspect of any move, easily outweighing any piece of furniture.
For that matter, one of my moves was far enough that it was cheaper to just sell/give away all the furniture and buy it again at the other end. Shipping hard copy of all my media might have approached the replacement value of it at that point.
Among friends of my generation, there is a clear dividing line. There are those who own houses and are happy to assume the logistics of bulk. Then there is everyone else, including those who own condos, who could literately move everything they need in the back of a couple trucks. It's a mental dividing line that seems to ignore almost everything else. Kids, marital status, etc. The more urban and compact the less interest and patience for bulky things.
I find it odd as well. Maybe it is the social network generation
No, it's the physically mobile generation. Everyone moves on a regular basis for school and then work. The third time in five years you pack up everything all those books and disc cases look far less meaningful.
The American highway system is the explicit result of the US government. Not in the sense that the government standardized or regulated existing infrastructure, but that the highways projects post WWII brought the whole damn thing into existence.
The bottom line is that every centrally planned economy will fail, every time. And not just fail but fail spectacularly, as in cannot feed its population without outside help, as Cuba received for decades from USSR which paid for it's oh so wonderful (actually crumbling since the end of free money from Russians) medical system.
Um, Russia (aka the former USSR) hasn't been subsidizing Cuba for something like two decades now. Cuba imports a smaller percentage of its food than the USA does. And as far as healthcare goes, current WHO numbers put Cuba roughly on par with the USA for the standard measurements like life expectancy and infant mortality. So when you talk about a crumbling medical system, make sure you specify which country you are referring to.
Every single socialist country has failed... Preemptive statement for idiots: "Socialist" actually means state owned and centrally planned economy. Yes, it really does, look it up in a dictionary if you must. No, Sweden does not have state owned, centrally planned economy, it has a capitalist, free market economy
Typically referred to as 'Social Democracy' or a 'Mixed Market Economy'. And framing that last bit as a "Preemptive statement for idiots" is disingenuous as best. Yes, in a strictly original poli-sci definition sense 'socialism' is what you say. But then again 'Liberalism' by the strict definition more closely resembles current free-market conservatism and so on for most of the political terms in common use. And by randomly declaring that for this discussion only academic understandings of the words will be accepted you basically admit that you are deliberately using these terms not to illustrate or educate but to muddle the discussion and give you an easy alternative to having to discus the actual ideas.