By actively targeting a specific competing codec and requesting any patents that may be relevant they are undermining the attempts of a competing format to organize and establish itself. Of course, in the eyes of MPEG-LA there's nothing wrong with that, but that's really not the way patents are supposed to work. It's really up to the companies using WebM themselves to sort out the legal issues.
Umm, it was nuclear, and it was a blast. Of course, it wasn't optimized in the same way you would optimize a bomb. But the radiation release (or rather the release of radioactivity was worse than a bomb due to the accumulated radioactive materials.
The first thing that happened, or rather didn't happen, is that British companies didn't invest a dime, and so by the 70s they were hopelessly outdone by German and Japanese car makers. Then came nationalization. Bear in mind that this was all occurring under fierce protectionism. There were no British car makers manufacturing overseas. Especially not to re-import them.
Unsurprisingly the government was unable to save the wreck and the industry rapidly collapsed. This was when the plants closed and the skilled workers had no job. But this was 25-30 years ago. The experienced people have long since retired, and the last generation of qualified people have moved on.
During this time the British made partnerships with foreign companies which essentially resulted in the UK becoming an outsourcing destination for the a limited production of specific cars. A small number of workers were able to keep their jobs, but the bulk of R&D and manufacturing were gone.
Only if you don't understand the meaning of Quotient. It's inherently a relative score based on the general population. It would be impossible for such a statistic to apply to populations with totally different backgrounds and ways of life. It goes against our basic understanding or neural development.
I really don't get this puritan "oh you're so selfish for supporting public funding" attitude. I suppose it's easy for the naive majority to identify with comments like this but you must be woefully ignorant about the history of the sciences and who has funded them. It doesn't even make sense when you consider how utterly dependent the modern economy is on governmental policies and investment initiatives.
Providing for a healthy and sustainable academic environment is one of the most important and rewarding responsibilities of government. And the reason why is because people like you are unaware of the value it provides.
I see this notion being repeated again and again, but is there any actual basis for this? It seems to me that this was just a popular myth spread aging industrial economies. It's quite telling that Japanese cars and electronics targeted the premium market. It wasn't that they were making simpler, lower quality goods than the Europeans and Americans. It was because they were making newer, more advanced and higher quality products that they were able to make headway on the international market.
Well... no. You see the RealD system needs twice the information rate as a 2D film. The 2D projectors may flicker the frames at the same rate, but they do it twice or thrice for the exact same frame. This means that you can't use the projector which can only handle the single framerate, you need one which can process double the framerate.
Basically, you made it sound like RealD doesn't need a higher subframe rate because it uses polarized light, whereas in actual fact it does.
Problem with the broadcast industry is that they use electronic cameras which
need
to be shown at a high frequency to not look like shit. This problem can be alleviated with postprocessing, but it plagues many an independent film who use electronic cameras on a tight budget.
Actually the RealD system relies on alternating frames from one projector, with a polarizing filter flickering at 144Hz. Films are distributed in 48 fps, 24fps for each eye. So the framerate is indeed decreased, but it still works out the same as traditional film
So, you bought the hardware, but your OS of choice doesn't suffice, which leads to:
The OS is certainly sufficient, it's just that the movie distributors seem to be going out of their way to break it, and want to dictate to you how to use your media.
Because you believe you're entitled to be entertained?
No entitlement, it's just a missed opportunity for them. If they make me jump through hoops to get there, I think it's perfectly reasonable to want to avoid it.
And, believe that you're entitled to be entertained on the OS platform of your choice?
Again, entitlement has nothing to do with it. It's just a missed opportunity for them. They seem to be chasing after semi-mythical "audiophiles" with uncompressed streams of hundreds of audio channels at a sample rate of a bajillion kHz (yes, I know, exaggeration), but somehow they think that people who simply want to watch a movie on Linux or copy it on to their hard drive to stream over their network are being completely unreasonable. In case they haven't noticed, these users are much more important nowadays than those willing to spend $10000 on a speaker.
not about pissing and moaning about how "The Man" was preventing us from being entertained by things that that others had created to which we felt we were entitled to
What, do you think we'd have mp3 players, TV-integrated network media players and YouTube if we'd have simply asked and waited? Certainly not, it was up to hackers to break the css, ignore the mpeg license and make decoders and encoders for Linux (when was the last time you saw a TV with Windows installed?)
The real problem is that developers and publishers are having real trouble making money from PC games more than for any other platform, and part of the problem is undoubtedly piracy. What they need to do is attract more paying customers. Ineffective DRM certainly isn't the best method for doing that, but not including DRM isn't going to work magic either.
For the paying customers it doesn't seem that DRM is a real turn-off. It's rather telling that the most successful games in recent years have had the most restrictive DRM. The relatively safe DRM on consoles seems to be attracting big bucks. And the anti-consumer DRM-encumbered iPhone has been a surprising success for game developers.
Flamewars aside, GPL advocates will certainly have an opinion on the issue, but I don't think very many of them wouldn't give credit to people willing to release their code as BSD or Public Domain. As you say, it is their choice.
On the other hand you do indeed have people who criticize GPL developers and the like for not giving away more, instead of being thankful for the gifts they do receive. Along the lines of "this is great, but it would be great if you could release it under BSD".
It's always been more about practicality than logic. Thanks to the wonders of positional notation we're able to increment arbitrarily until we decide it's time to go for a new number.
That might be true for a majority, but there are an awful lot of people out there who use computers all the time for many productive and creative things, but have never had the chance to learn a powerful CLI.
That works for a strictly repetitive task, but that requires knowing exactly where to find the functions, sorting out all the quirks and if you want something more intricate you will probably have to learn a specific scripting language. Somebody who uses the program all day might be willing to do that, but if you only use it infrequently it may be better to just sacrifice the time to do it manually. A bash script for the CLI is universally applicable and can access all functions of the program.
Sensors, cameras, gps, servo motors, switches, wires, PCBs and only lastly the main CPU. The fact it runs in testing is great, but these systems have to last 10+ years of abuse WITHOUT FAILURE.
So what do you do when a current car's CPU fails? Cars have relied completely on microprocessors to do all the complicated engine stuff for 20 years now, and semiconductor electronics have much lower failure rates than any mechanical component.
Because if you believe computer driven cars will remove ALL collisions, you're deluded. All it takes if for a child to run out between two parked cars in the path of another car, and all the computer systems in the world will not counter its kinetic energy.
A computer is much more capable to respond than a human. Ideally of course the computer will have the sense not to drive too fast when the view is restricted, and stick to speed limits.
I would apply the same logic as with speed limits: If you don't want to stick with public rules, you can go to a race track (or driving track). Public roads are payed by and benefit the public. If manual drivers are a minority and a threat to public safety, then their pleasure-rides shouldn't be subsidized.
Cars are huge, sharp, heavy, auto-mobile (just think about that last adjective) lumps of metal. And that's what makes them inherently dangerous in the hands of the public. Marble statue? Huge and heavy, but not very mobile. Marble statue with a jetpack that flies around town? Shit scary!
It's like giving katanas to a kindergarten class. Sure, only the stupid ones will cause any damage, but from a statistical standpoint it's an immediate danger to safety.
While it is possible to operate even dangerous machines safely, the capacity of the general population to do so remains fairly constant. If we expect all but lowest of social rejects to be allowed to drive a car, then we'll have to live with the fact that there will be an awful lot of morons (who make up the majority of the population) on the road. The only other option is to take all the stupid people off the road and make driving a real privilege, like flying.
It's no recent development, it's always been like that in the UK going back to the days of cassette tapes. On the up-side you don't have a stupid blank media levy like most other European countries.
The comparison makes sense whenever image quality is not limited by pixel count. If an iPhone still only barely achieves the image quality of a point and shoot with 3MP from 8 years ago, we can safely assume that the iPhone's bigger problem is the optics and not the sensor.
They haven't bounced at all. Most new customers to a platform are probably from growth in the smartphone market.
To put it in anecdotal terms: I only knew a handful of people with Nokia and blackberry smartphones. When the iPhone came out people who I wouldn't have considered likely smartphone customers became interested, and similarly the Andoid phone from HTC and Samsung seem to have convinced a few more people. I've never met anyone who gave up their business smartphone for an iPhone, and the people with iPhones haven't switched that easily either.
That's all right if your only intention is selling lots of iDevices. But we're not talking about throw-away phones, we're talking about the long-term viability of a software platform. The more ubiquitous your platform is, the more attention it will grab from developers and consumers. If your customers OTOH get the feeling of being treated second-class they will opt for the more relevant platform, leading to smaller market share and further obscurity, thus setting a positive feedback in motion.
Sort of, but MS-DOS was proprietary and ran on relatively open hardware, while Android is the other way around. I would say the license of the OS is pretty irrelevant (which I suppose is what you mean with "open" hardware and software), the point is that MS-DOS and Android allow you to utilize the system's hardware whereas iOS doesn't (and thus isn't really worthy of the term "operating system". "App platform" would be more fitting). That's from the consumer perspective.
Android's hardware isn't in any way closed either. Sure, PC hardware is much easier to come by and much more customizable than phones are, but that's essentially a market situation. There's nothing stopping anyone with the engineering expertise from making their very own Android computer, and indeed there are many no-name tablets and phones from china doing just that.
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By actively targeting a specific competing codec and requesting any patents that may be relevant they are undermining the attempts of a competing format to organize and establish itself. Of course, in the eyes of MPEG-LA there's nothing wrong with that, but that's really not the way patents are supposed to work. It's really up to the companies using WebM themselves to sort out the legal issues.
Umm, it was nuclear, and it was a blast. Of course, it wasn't optimized in the same way you would optimize a bomb. But the radiation release (or rather the release of radioactivity was worse than a bomb due to the accumulated radioactive materials.
What the hell? That's not at all what happened.
The first thing that happened, or rather didn't happen, is that British companies didn't invest a dime, and so by the 70s they were hopelessly outdone by German and Japanese car makers. Then came nationalization. Bear in mind that this was all occurring under fierce protectionism. There were no British car makers manufacturing overseas. Especially not to re-import them.
Unsurprisingly the government was unable to save the wreck and the industry rapidly collapsed. This was when the plants closed and the skilled workers had no job. But this was 25-30 years ago. The experienced people have long since retired, and the last generation of qualified people have moved on.
During this time the British made partnerships with foreign companies which essentially resulted in the UK becoming an outsourcing destination for the a limited production of specific cars. A small number of workers were able to keep their jobs, but the bulk of R&D and manufacturing were gone.
Only if you don't understand the meaning of Quotient. It's inherently a relative score based on the general population. It would be impossible for such a statistic to apply to populations with totally different backgrounds and ways of life. It goes against our basic understanding or neural development.
I really don't get this puritan "oh you're so selfish for supporting public funding" attitude.
I suppose it's easy for the naive majority to identify with comments like this but you must be woefully ignorant about the history of the sciences and who has funded them. It doesn't even make sense when you consider how utterly dependent the modern economy is on governmental policies and investment initiatives.
Providing for a healthy and sustainable academic environment is one of the most important and rewarding responsibilities of government. And the reason why is because people like you are unaware of the value it provides.
As Japan did before and rose to great heights.
I see this notion being repeated again and again, but is there any actual basis for this? It seems to me that this was just a popular myth spread aging industrial economies. It's quite telling that Japanese cars and electronics targeted the premium market. It wasn't that they were making simpler, lower quality goods than the Europeans and Americans. It was because they were making newer, more advanced and higher quality products that they were able to make headway on the international market.
And thus it leads to a decrease in frame-rate.
I fail to see your point.
Well... no. You see the RealD system needs twice the information rate as a 2D film. The 2D projectors may flicker the frames at the same rate, but they do it twice or thrice for the exact same frame. This means that you can't use the projector which can only handle the single framerate, you need one which can process double the framerate.
Basically, you made it sound like RealD doesn't need a higher subframe rate because it uses polarized light, whereas in actual fact it does.
I can imagine that Imax screens would cause a lot of flickering in the peripheral vision, much like large Plasma screens do.
Problem with the broadcast industry is that they use electronic cameras which
need
to be shown at a high frequency to not look like shit. This problem can be alleviated with postprocessing, but it plagues many an independent film who use electronic cameras on a tight budget.
Actually the RealD system relies on alternating frames from one projector, with a polarizing filter flickering at 144Hz. Films are distributed in 48 fps, 24fps for each eye. So the framerate is indeed decreased, but it still works out the same as traditional film
So, you bought the hardware, but your OS of choice doesn't suffice, which leads to:
The OS is certainly sufficient, it's just that the movie distributors seem to be going out of their way to break it, and want to dictate to you how to use your media.
Because you believe you're entitled to be entertained?
No entitlement, it's just a missed opportunity for them. If they make me jump through hoops to get there, I think it's perfectly reasonable to want to avoid it.
And, believe that you're entitled to be entertained on the OS platform of your choice?
Again, entitlement has nothing to do with it. It's just a missed opportunity for them. They seem to be chasing after semi-mythical "audiophiles" with uncompressed streams of hundreds of audio channels at a sample rate of a bajillion kHz (yes, I know, exaggeration), but somehow they think that people who simply want to watch a movie on Linux or copy it on to their hard drive to stream over their network are being completely unreasonable.
In case they haven't noticed, these users are much more important nowadays than those willing to spend $10000 on a speaker.
not about pissing and moaning about how "The Man" was preventing us from being entertained by things that that others had created to which we felt we were entitled to
What, do you think we'd have mp3 players, TV-integrated network media players and YouTube if we'd have simply asked and waited? Certainly not, it was up to hackers to break the css, ignore the mpeg license and make decoders and encoders for Linux (when was the last time you saw a TV with Windows installed?)
The real problem is that developers and publishers are having real trouble making money from PC games more than for any other platform, and part of the problem is undoubtedly piracy. What they need to do is attract more paying customers. Ineffective DRM certainly isn't the best method for doing that, but not including DRM isn't going to work magic either.
For the paying customers it doesn't seem that DRM is a real turn-off. It's rather telling that the most successful games in recent years have had the most restrictive DRM. The relatively safe DRM on consoles seems to be attracting big bucks. And the anti-consumer DRM-encumbered iPhone has been a surprising success for game developers.
Flamewars aside, GPL advocates will certainly have an opinion on the issue, but I don't think very many of them wouldn't give credit to people willing to release their code as BSD or Public Domain. As you say, it is their choice.
On the other hand you do indeed have people who criticize GPL developers and the like for not giving away more, instead of being thankful for the gifts they do receive. Along the lines of "this is great, but it would be great if you could release it under BSD".
It's always been more about practicality than logic. Thanks to the wonders of positional notation we're able to increment arbitrarily until we decide it's time to go for a new number.
That might be true for a majority, but there are an awful lot of people out there who use computers all the time for many productive and creative things, but have never had the chance to learn a powerful CLI.
That works for a strictly repetitive task, but that requires knowing exactly where to find the functions, sorting out all the quirks and if you want something more intricate you will probably have to learn a specific scripting language. Somebody who uses the program all day might be willing to do that, but if you only use it infrequently it may be better to just sacrifice the time to do it manually. A bash script for the CLI is universally applicable and can access all functions of the program.
Sensors, cameras, gps, servo motors, switches, wires, PCBs and only lastly the main CPU. The fact it runs in testing is great, but these systems have to last 10+ years of abuse WITHOUT FAILURE.
So what do you do when a current car's CPU fails? Cars have relied completely on microprocessors to do all the complicated engine stuff for 20 years now, and semiconductor electronics have much lower failure rates than any mechanical component.
Because if you believe computer driven cars will remove ALL collisions, you're deluded. All it takes if for a child to run out between two parked cars in the path of another car, and all the computer systems in the world will not counter its kinetic energy.
A computer is much more capable to respond than a human. Ideally of course the computer will have the sense not to drive too fast when the view is restricted, and stick to speed limits.
I would apply the same logic as with speed limits: If you don't want to stick with public rules, you can go to a race track (or driving track). Public roads are payed by and benefit the public. If manual drivers are a minority and a threat to public safety, then their pleasure-rides shouldn't be subsidized.
Cars are huge, sharp, heavy, auto-mobile (just think about that last adjective) lumps of metal. And that's what makes them inherently dangerous in the hands of the public.
Marble statue? Huge and heavy, but not very mobile. Marble statue with a jetpack that flies around town? Shit scary!
It's like giving katanas to a kindergarten class. Sure, only the stupid ones will cause any damage, but from a statistical standpoint it's an immediate danger to safety.
While it is possible to operate even dangerous machines safely, the capacity of the general population to do so remains fairly constant. If we expect all but lowest of social rejects to be allowed to drive a car, then we'll have to live with the fact that there will be an awful lot of morons (who make up the majority of the population) on the road.
The only other option is to take all the stupid people off the road and make driving a real privilege, like flying.
It's no recent development, it's always been like that in the UK going back to the days of cassette tapes. On the up-side you don't have a stupid blank media levy like most other European countries.
The comparison makes sense whenever image quality is not limited by pixel count. If an iPhone still only barely achieves the image quality of a point and shoot with 3MP from 8 years ago, we can safely assume that the iPhone's bigger problem is the optics and not the sensor.
They haven't bounced at all. Most new customers to a platform are probably from growth in the smartphone market.
To put it in anecdotal terms: I only knew a handful of people with Nokia and blackberry smartphones. When the iPhone came out people who I wouldn't have considered likely smartphone customers became interested, and similarly the Andoid phone from HTC and Samsung seem to have convinced a few more people. I've never met anyone who gave up their business smartphone for an iPhone, and the people with iPhones haven't switched that easily either.
That's all right if your only intention is selling lots of iDevices. But we're not talking about throw-away phones, we're talking about the long-term viability of a software platform. The more ubiquitous your platform is, the more attention it will grab from developers and consumers. If your customers OTOH get the feeling of being treated second-class they will opt for the more relevant platform, leading to smaller market share and further obscurity, thus setting a positive feedback in motion.
Sort of, but MS-DOS was proprietary and ran on relatively open hardware, while Android is the other way around.
I would say the license of the OS is pretty irrelevant (which I suppose is what you mean with "open" hardware and software), the point is that MS-DOS and Android allow you to utilize the system's hardware whereas iOS doesn't (and thus isn't really worthy of the term "operating system". "App platform" would be more fitting). That's from the consumer perspective.
Android's hardware isn't in any way closed either. Sure, PC hardware is much easier to come by and much more customizable than phones are, but that's essentially a market situation. There's nothing stopping anyone with the engineering expertise from making their very own Android computer, and indeed there are many no-name tablets and phones from china doing just that.