Do not confuse a feature of interest only to a tiny proportion of people as "honestly, essential".
It's not a small group: many people have MPEG4 players (including iPods). I expect to see MPEG4 and xiph codecs to become the mp3 of video. It already has a huge following among early adopters; rippers, pirates, etc. These are the same groups that were early adopters of mp3.
The article is utter rubbish. The "detailed comparison table" in the conclusion is largely incorrect when applied to modern versions of MCE (hey, why don't we compare to a version of MythTV release in 2004 - that would at least start to approach a fair comparison) and is both worded and defined in a way to obviously favour MythTV.
I don't think the article was excellent, but it was a reasonable attempt to examine the features of MythTV. I think it was mis-advertised in the slashdot summary as a comparision. Seeing as the title was "MythTV Unifies Personal Video Recording And Home Theatre Technology", personally, I don't see how the mistake occured. It was never much of a comparison.
It is quite easy to transcode MCE recordings into whatever type of file takes your fancy. People have even written plugins so you can do it completely from within the MCE interface using the remote.
Transcode is the key word here. Transcoding from vastly different, high compression codecs yields poor results. It's not the freedom you get with MythTV.
Responses like yours are part of the reason that many people (outside the slashdot crowd) don't like, trust, or care about "open" software. They see the people pushing open source as snobby, pushy fanboys who look down on everyone they don't see as an "equal". Until the open source community is more welcoming to noobs, and drop the damned holier-than-thou attitudes, you're not going to make much progress.
Responses like mine? I was responding to a poorly informed, idiotic statement by someone who didn't actually know what he was talking about. As soon as people in the Free Software movement stand up and say You're wrong, and have no idea what you're talking about closed software apologists quickly jump in and say that With that attitude, you'll always be alienating users like drsquare.
Well, boy, if I'm ever cut up about that.
If people want to spout wrong infomation and mistaken viewpoints on issues they obviously know little to nothing about, then any community (be it football, or literature) will treat them with unpleasantness. We're not "elite" or "snobby", we just have a certain preference for the facts.
With these definitions, I consider video games to be art. I always have considered them art. They are simply an expression of human creativity. Being on an interactive medium only adds to the art.
Mankind has been try to define art for thousands of years, and, you know, I'm not sure you quite solved it with three links and a few sentences.
Please figure out what you're talking about before you go ahead a speak on the matter.
Only a benefit if you're cheap or poor, or a programmer.
Not at all. Open Source benefits the users directly. Case in point: MCE can't write to MPEG4, because MS will never care about writing the feature. Obviously, someone around MythTV wanted this (honestly, essential) feature and wrote it in. MCE only has support for DRM formats. Open Source in this instance basically means you can play the movie you recorded on any computer. Obviously a benefit. A big one.
That just sounds like buzzwords.
Well, they aren't. Hardware encoding requires a powerful capture card that outputs in a compressed format (normally, either MPEG2 or MPEG4). Software uses the CPU to do the encode with something like transcode on mencoder. This is important because encoding hardware is expensive, and, if use of the machine in intended to be light, then money can be saved by doing the encode via the cpu and buying an el cheapo brand capture card.
If you use Windows (where your hardware actually works)
The linux and *BSD kernels have excellent support for hardware (as tend to support old and exotic hardware far better than windows), and are far more reliable than a windows machine. Some capture cards actually are linux/*BSD only (a good example is the one on the systm mythtv episode). Linux, I would say, has support for most of the best capture cards, and both Linux and *BSD have much better drivers than windows (meaning decreased load on the machine, which is useful when you want to do more than one thing at once).
I don't know what that means. Is it relevent to anyone other than hardcore nerds?
Well, until you do know what it means, maybe it's best you reserve judgement? You're obviously poorly informed about this subject. (For the record, it's a feature which lets you play your recorded tv, on, you know, more than one machine. Kinda useful.)
The biggest difference between using the Mac and Linux with open source software is that the X-Windows implementation is ugly
If that's the biggest difference, then I think most *nix users are fine in not caring. But obviously, the fact that OSX looks marginally prettier than Ubuntu really is the make-or-break of the fact.
Maybe, but I get the impression that LAME has a good enough size team at the moment. I'm not an expert, but is there really that much that can be done with mp3? I mean, if you wanted to change it drastically, why not define a totally new spec?
just wait until then and MP3 will be just as or more "free" than OGG (public domain is "more free" than GPL, sort of).
"Ogg" is public domain. All the specifications are in the public domain. libogg is BSD licenced, but anyone who wants to write an EULA ogg decoder can do. The GPL stuff is just the end user tools.
Either way; there are advantages of the xiph stuff over and above quality. There are issues with the small little weird things mp3 does. Gapless playback. Limited bitrates. Sometimes it looks like we're moving away from the offical specification and towards a specification denoted by the LAME implementation. Also, as quality of audio improves, I'm not sure that mp3 scales well. With very high quality sound I find (anecdotally, I admit) that vorbis does better.
You use Red Hat as the company here, but it can pretty much be replaced with any other binary distributionl. Ubuntu and Debian are the ones I know that don't do mp3's out of the box, and I'm very sure that almost every other distro is the same.
Errr, what would keep Ubuntu from continuing if Debian simply and abruptly came to an end?
Nothing. But bear in mind that Ubuntu really don't do the same kind of development that Debian devs' do.
If Debian disappeared tomorrow, Ubuntu would have to seriously increase the man hours it does on the core of the distro, or switch to a different base. When people say that "Ubuntu is Debian with a nice UI", please bear in mind that that means that the Ubuntu developers' aren't involved much outside of that. I don't think that as current, the Ubuntu guys could handle all the work of maintaining what Debian is. The don't have nearly the manpower of the Debian developers.
Here in the US we have Apple commercials featuring a patronising hipster making all sorts of vacuous claims about how Windows computers can't do anything besides produce black and white pie charts, whereas Macs are fun.
Well, at least if he's wrong on the latter, he's right on the former. Gotta give him credit for that.
Now ask me if I think Apple did an ethical thing by flying into Creative's camp, pissing on their tent, and taking Creative's fair? share of Rio's MP3 player market. Hmm?
Well, if MS has half a brain, they'll send the email from Microsoft's servers, and digitally sign it. So at least the police will know it came from Micrsoft's servers. This is not foolproof and won't prevent silly kids / stray cats / malicious worms from clicking the "Report Abuse" icon. Actually, TFA says nothing about the delivery mechanism: could be email, SOAP requests, snail mail, or a fax machine, for all we now.
Sorry, dashed off that reply - should've made it clearer. I wasn't worried about the delivery mechanism. Signing up to MSN is as simple as having an email account registered with MS - passport. It's not going to be possible to trace the people who create the passport accounts.
Therefore it's going to be very easy for people to create accounts and sign into MSN in order to fire of "pedo alerts". In fact, it would be relatively simple to create a program with something like libgaim that would do exactly that. Couple it with a proxy and the whole system is pissed up the wall - most likely to the detriment of some poor sods who get picked up at random.
Some people here have been saying "what about the abuse" well seeing as they will know who is reporting the abuse then if you are just pratting about then those same police who are looking for predators can also send a threating response for wasting police time (a punishable offence). Unlike making crank calls from a telephone box this is very traceable.
Except that emails aren't traceable. At all. Especially the throwaway ones on things like dodgeit.com. You should be concerned about the abuse.
You'd give up the information age to stop soemone from spanking their kid?
Spanking a child is not quite what he means by child abuse. The phrase "child abuse" encompasses a far, far wider range of criminal activity than corporal punishment.
Also, how would Google giving up the information stop child abuse? If it is for a criminal investigation then the abuse has already occured. Thus, Google giving up the information in no way would reduce child abuse.
Not entirely. If the data is new evidence, or details offences not yet tried in a court of law, then they can be very useful. It's also useful for an understanding of the crimes and how they can be further prevented. This is one of those cases where any extra data that can be provided is helpful. I don't want to speculate on whether the data google has is relevant, but if it is, it could definatley be of some use the the police.
I find that alot of the more advanced features are spread between elinks and links2. CSS, javascript, encryption etc. Even more frustratingly is that lynx seems to have better defaults etc than either.
Not to talk down lynx/links/elinks - even as they are, they're usable in ways that firefox and konqueror aren't.
Small businesses are much much much better served by Free Software.
Free Software takes away the up-front licence payments. This is a big deal. I'm not saying there aren't costs with Free Software, but in general, it is far more the case that costs scale up and down with increases size and complexity. If the IT use is small, then, in almost all cases, the costs are small too.
And since when did individual small businesses have an effect on what big proprietary programs feature-sets are? It's not like Mom and Pop Brand Foo Co. had any input in the features of Microsoft products.
But even companies like Red Hat depend on the volunteer aspect of OSS, and trying to herd volunteers is like herding cats.
Not when you do as RH does, and pay them for their time spent on your projects. It's often not that expensive at a small level. A $200 bounty for a particular feature you're interested in is often a good use of money, especially if it's the kind of small, make-or-break feature request that's common with small businesses.
And no offense intended, but that analogy is a case-in point for why using analogies is bad practice. Bringing up political references (in particular Iraq) is sure to be inflamatory, and is almost certain to get us off the main points of debate. Nevermind that I'm not an American, and previously had no knowledge of the arguements for/against political term limits.
Not everyone either a) is a programmer that knows what to do with the code or b) has the money to hire a programmer who knows what to do with the code.
Doesn't matter. Free Software often works so that it serves the needs of the community it supports. We needed MSN clients to interact with the MS servers - gaim, kopete etc arose. Even things that many companies would find unprofitable get produced with Free Software. Support lasts as long as there is demand for it (often much, much longer - I'm using a 10 year old soundcard on my 64bit machine - will Vista support the Creative SB Live?). The final word, essentially, it that is doesn't matter if you're able to personally program anything - as long as someone is, that chances are that someone will do it. That doesn't happen with proprietary software.
Furthermore, being a purchaser of software gives the non-coder some pull that they wouldn't have with an open source product.
Since when did people not purchase Free Software? Red Hat seems to make a pretty good living doing exactly this. You buy a licence from them, they work hard to fix your problems. Their customers do get listened to - Red Hat pays for a lot of original code creation (not to mention paying for buyouts of other companies - such as JBoss). They spend quite a lot of money paying for people to make contributions to the kernel source (they employed/employ Alan Cox - a massive contributor to the kernel).
The user can say "I need feature X, and if you don't provide it, I'm going to your compeditor." Contrast that with trying the same thing with say, the Apache team.
Not applicable. Normally if the customer wants a feature, and it's profitable enough, they pay for the development in a certain area. IBM, Red Hat, Novell etc have done this many times. If they want feature X, they don't have to change vendor - they simply fund the development of feature X for what's essentially a one-time cost. It's a far better system.
I very much meant to use the word "particular". I wasn't addressing "particularly inept people", I was addressing a particular inept person. A person who is particularly inept, if you will (my then parent).
Slashdot Mirror
Do not confuse a feature of interest only to a tiny proportion of people as "honestly, essential".
It's not a small group: many people have MPEG4 players (including iPods). I expect to see MPEG4 and xiph codecs to become the mp3 of video. It already has a huge following among early adopters; rippers, pirates, etc. These are the same groups that were early adopters of mp3.
The article is utter rubbish. The "detailed comparison table" in the conclusion is largely incorrect when applied to modern versions of MCE (hey, why don't we compare to a version of MythTV release in 2004 - that would at least start to approach a fair comparison) and is both worded and defined in a way to obviously favour MythTV.
I don't think the article was excellent, but it was a reasonable attempt to examine the features of MythTV. I think it was mis-advertised in the slashdot summary as a comparision. Seeing as the title was "MythTV Unifies Personal Video Recording And Home Theatre Technology", personally, I don't see how the mistake occured. It was never much of a comparison.
It is quite easy to transcode MCE recordings into whatever type of file takes your fancy. People have even written plugins so you can do it completely from within the MCE interface using the remote.
Transcode is the key word here. Transcoding from vastly different, high compression codecs yields poor results. It's not the freedom you get with MythTV.
Limited transcoding from DRM isn't the same as total freedom to do whatever you want, which is what MythTV offers.
Responses like yours are part of the reason that many people (outside the slashdot crowd) don't like, trust, or care about "open" software. They see the people pushing open source as snobby, pushy fanboys who look down on everyone they don't see as an "equal". Until the open source community is more welcoming to noobs, and drop the damned holier-than-thou attitudes, you're not going to make much progress.
Responses like mine? I was responding to a poorly informed, idiotic statement by someone who didn't actually know what he was talking about. As soon as people in the Free Software movement stand up and say You're wrong, and have no idea what you're talking about closed software apologists quickly jump in and say that With that attitude, you'll always be alienating users like drsquare.
Well, boy, if I'm ever cut up about that.
If people want to spout wrong infomation and mistaken viewpoints on issues they obviously know little to nothing about, then any community (be it football, or literature) will treat them with unpleasantness. We're not "elite" or "snobby", we just have a certain preference for the facts.
With these definitions, I consider video games to be art. I always have considered them art. They are simply an expression of human creativity. Being on an interactive medium only adds to the art.
Mankind has been try to define art for thousands of years, and, you know, I'm not sure you quite solved it with three links and a few sentences.
Please figure out what you're talking about before you go ahead a speak on the matter.
Only a benefit if you're cheap or poor, or a programmer.
Not at all. Open Source benefits the users directly. Case in point: MCE can't write to MPEG4, because MS will never care about writing the feature. Obviously, someone around MythTV wanted this (honestly, essential) feature and wrote it in. MCE only has support for DRM formats. Open Source in this instance basically means you can play the movie you recorded on any computer. Obviously a benefit. A big one.
That just sounds like buzzwords.
Well, they aren't. Hardware encoding requires a powerful capture card that outputs in a compressed format (normally, either MPEG2 or MPEG4). Software uses the CPU to do the encode with something like transcode on mencoder. This is important because encoding hardware is expensive, and, if use of the machine in intended to be light, then money can be saved by doing the encode via the cpu and buying an el cheapo brand capture card.
If you use Windows (where your hardware actually works)
The linux and *BSD kernels have excellent support for hardware (as tend to support old and exotic hardware far better than windows), and are far more reliable than a windows machine. Some capture cards actually are linux/*BSD only (a good example is the one on the systm mythtv episode). Linux, I would say, has support for most of the best capture cards, and both Linux and *BSD have much better drivers than windows (meaning decreased load on the machine, which is useful when you want to do more than one thing at once).
I don't know what that means. Is it relevent to anyone other than hardcore nerds?
Well, until you do know what it means, maybe it's best you reserve judgement? You're obviously poorly informed about this subject. (For the record, it's a feature which lets you play your recorded tv, on, you know, more than one machine. Kinda useful.)
The biggest difference between using the Mac and Linux with open source software is that the X-Windows implementation is ugly
If that's the biggest difference, then I think most *nix users are fine in not caring. But obviously, the fact that OSX looks marginally prettier than Ubuntu really is the make-or-break of the fact.
Out of the box X11 isn't ugly compared to OSX - you're just a fanboy.
I don't know, but certainly not you.
Well, I never really used that. I like Debians and BSDes. :)
Maybe, but I get the impression that LAME has a good enough size team at the moment. I'm not an expert, but is there really that much that can be done with mp3? I mean, if you wanted to change it drastically, why not define a totally new spec?
just wait until then and MP3 will be just as or more "free" than OGG (public domain is "more free" than GPL, sort of).
"Ogg" is public domain. All the specifications are in the public domain. libogg is BSD licenced, but anyone who wants to write an EULA ogg decoder can do. The GPL stuff is just the end user tools.
Either way; there are advantages of the xiph stuff over and above quality. There are issues with the small little weird things mp3 does. Gapless playback. Limited bitrates. Sometimes it looks like we're moving away from the offical specification and towards a specification denoted by the LAME implementation. Also, as quality of audio improves, I'm not sure that mp3 scales well. With very high quality sound I find (anecdotally, I admit) that vorbis does better.
You use Red Hat as the company here, but it can pretty much be replaced with any other binary distributionl. Ubuntu and Debian are the ones I know that don't do mp3's out of the box, and I'm very sure that almost every other distro is the same.
Games?
It was something of a sarcastic joke. Next time I make a joke at your expense, I'll sound the joke alarm, ok?
Errr, what would keep Ubuntu from continuing if Debian simply and abruptly came to an end?
Nothing. But bear in mind that Ubuntu really don't do the same kind of development that Debian devs' do.
If Debian disappeared tomorrow, Ubuntu would have to seriously increase the man hours it does on the core of the distro, or switch to a different base. When people say that "Ubuntu is Debian with a nice UI", please bear in mind that that means that the Ubuntu developers' aren't involved much outside of that. I don't think that as current, the Ubuntu guys could handle all the work of maintaining what Debian is. The don't have nearly the manpower of the Debian developers.
Here in the US we have Apple commercials featuring a patronising hipster making all sorts of vacuous claims about how Windows computers can't do anything besides produce black and white pie charts, whereas Macs are fun.
Well, at least if he's wrong on the latter, he's right on the former. Gotta give him credit for that.
Sounds like what happened to Xerox.
Well, if MS has half a brain, they'll send the email from Microsoft's servers, and digitally sign it. So at least the police will know it came from Micrsoft's servers. This is not foolproof and won't prevent silly kids / stray cats / malicious worms from clicking the "Report Abuse" icon. Actually, TFA says nothing about the delivery mechanism: could be email, SOAP requests, snail mail, or a fax machine, for all we now.
Sorry, dashed off that reply - should've made it clearer. I wasn't worried about the delivery mechanism. Signing up to MSN is as simple as having an email account registered with MS - passport. It's not going to be possible to trace the people who create the passport accounts.
Therefore it's going to be very easy for people to create accounts and sign into MSN in order to fire of "pedo alerts". In fact, it would be relatively simple to create a program with something like libgaim that would do exactly that. Couple it with a proxy and the whole system is pissed up the wall - most likely to the detriment of some poor sods who get picked up at random.
Some people here have been saying "what about the abuse" well seeing as they will know who is reporting the abuse then if you are just pratting about then those same police who are looking for predators can also send a threating response for wasting police time (a punishable offence). Unlike making crank calls from a telephone box this is very traceable.
Except that emails aren't traceable. At all. Especially the throwaway ones on things like dodgeit.com. You should be concerned about the abuse.
I've always thought that "to slashdot" something meant to break it, or cause it to stop functioning through large ammounts of http traffic.
You'd give up the information age to stop soemone from spanking their kid?
Spanking a child is not quite what he means by child abuse. The phrase "child abuse" encompasses a far, far wider range of criminal activity than corporal punishment.
Also, how would Google giving up the information stop child abuse? If it is for a criminal investigation then the abuse has already occured. Thus, Google giving up the information in no way would reduce child abuse.
Not entirely. If the data is new evidence, or details offences not yet tried in a court of law, then they can be very useful. It's also useful for an understanding of the crimes and how they can be further prevented. This is one of those cases where any extra data that can be provided is helpful. I don't want to speculate on whether the data google has is relevant, but if it is, it could definatley be of some use the the police.
It's annoying isn't it?
I find that alot of the more advanced features are spread between elinks and links2. CSS, javascript, encryption etc. Even more frustratingly is that lynx seems to have better defaults etc than either.
Not to talk down lynx/links/elinks - even as they are, they're usable in ways that firefox and konqueror aren't.
I totally, and completely agree.
And I probably couldn't have said it better either.
Small businesses are much much much better served by Free Software.
Free Software takes away the up-front licence payments. This is a big deal. I'm not saying there aren't costs with Free Software, but in general, it is far more the case that costs scale up and down with increases size and complexity. If the IT use is small, then, in almost all cases, the costs are small too.
And since when did individual small businesses have an effect on what big proprietary programs feature-sets are? It's not like Mom and Pop Brand Foo Co. had any input in the features of Microsoft products.
But even companies like Red Hat depend on the volunteer aspect of OSS, and trying to herd volunteers is like herding cats.
Not when you do as RH does, and pay them for their time spent on your projects. It's often not that expensive at a small level. A $200 bounty for a particular feature you're interested in is often a good use of money, especially if it's the kind of small, make-or-break feature request that's common with small businesses.
And no offense intended, but that analogy is a case-in point for why using analogies is bad practice. Bringing up political references (in particular Iraq) is sure to be inflamatory, and is almost certain to get us off the main points of debate. Nevermind that I'm not an American, and previously had no knowledge of the arguements for/against political term limits.
Not everyone either a) is a programmer that knows what to do with the code or b) has the money to hire a programmer who knows what to do with the code.
Doesn't matter. Free Software often works so that it serves the needs of the community it supports. We needed MSN clients to interact with the MS servers - gaim, kopete etc arose. Even things that many companies would find unprofitable get produced with Free Software. Support lasts as long as there is demand for it (often much, much longer - I'm using a 10 year old soundcard on my 64bit machine - will Vista support the Creative SB Live?). The final word, essentially, it that is doesn't matter if you're able to personally program anything - as long as someone is, that chances are that someone will do it. That doesn't happen with proprietary software.
Furthermore, being a purchaser of software gives the non-coder some pull that they wouldn't have with an open source product.
Since when did people not purchase Free Software? Red Hat seems to make a pretty good living doing exactly this. You buy a licence from them, they work hard to fix your problems. Their customers do get listened to - Red Hat pays for a lot of original code creation (not to mention paying for buyouts of other companies - such as JBoss). They spend quite a lot of money paying for people to make contributions to the kernel source (they employed/employ Alan Cox - a massive contributor to the kernel).
The user can say "I need feature X, and if you don't provide it, I'm going to your compeditor." Contrast that with trying the same thing with say, the Apache team.
Not applicable. Normally if the customer wants a feature, and it's profitable enough, they pay for the development in a certain area. IBM, Red Hat, Novell etc have done this many times. If they want feature X, they don't have to change vendor - they simply fund the development of feature X for what's essentially a one-time cost. It's a far better system.
No. Read what a wrote again. It's correct.
I very much meant to use the word "particular". I wasn't addressing "particularly inept people", I was addressing a particular inept person. A person who is particularly inept, if you will (my then parent).
Isn't the definition of "freedom" choice?
Indeed, and what choice do you have when you're forced to use proprietary drivers because the companies won't share code.
Freedom means freedom, and binary blobs ain't it.