You seem to have completely missed the next sentence, which states that:
65,000 e-books were sold in Germany in the first 6 months of 2009, vs. almost ten times that number bought per week in the US, in what is still a small niche of the overall book business.
Sorry, but your gut is pretty severely contradicted by the actual facts. And "I hear that all the time" is not a reasonable basis for making conclusions, as people tend to surround themselves with similar people. About half the people I know use Linux, but it'd be absurd for me to thus conclude that Linux's marketshare in the general population is anywhere near that high.
Wow, just wow. I'm not even going to try to reply properly to this nonsense. You've ignored half my post, taken the rest out of context to grossly misrepresent what I've said, and then dared to say that *I* am the one attacking straw man arguments and not addressing things. I'm not sure if it's stupidity or malice but either way it's not worth the effort.
The joke was not about religion, but about having sex with women who have not used his favourite text editor - he's comparing initiation into the rites of EMACS to having sex;
The whole "St. IGNUcius"/"Church of Emacs" thing is a giant joke about religion. Either this little bit is about religion like all of the rest of it, or it's rape humor. And don't try to say "nobody brought up rape". If you're reading it as actually about sex, then there's no way you can interpret 'sacred duty to "relieve them of their virginity"' as being about anything but rape.
RMS is simply trying to misdirect talking about religion because he's embarrassed about what he said.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha oh that's a good one. Stallman? Embarrased? The claim is ridiculous even at a glance, and it's even more ridiculous when you take into account that he has been doing the St. IGNUcius skit pretty much exactly the same, including the "Emacs virgins" thing for decades now (as the wiki you yourself linked to notes). And now he's supposed to be embarrassed about what he said like it's some new material he just worked in and he's secretly ashamed at all the people he's offended? Your lack of knowledge about a man you claim to know the secret true opinion of is rather impressive.
It was a silly sexist remark, but apparently he can't find it in himself to admit fault.
Oh drop the Internet psychologist bullshit. And "silly sexist remark"? Discrimination against half of humanity is hardly "silly". You seem to think "sexist" means "offends women with thin skin". It doesn't. Actual sexism is hardly something "silly", and lumping un-PC jokes into the same category as things like a business that makes it far harder for its female employees to advance than male ones, or a person who thinks contraception is a sin because the only reason women exist is to be good wives and mothers, is quite frankly disgusting. The continued devaluing of the word "sexism" by people who claim to be fighting it is baffling.
It's not big deal really, but I'd find it annoying if it was directed at me, and understand why others would too.
If you told these people they were just "annoyed" and that it's "not a big deal really", I think you'd find they're not so much in agreement with you as you think.
You're wrong with your idea of the facts about, well, everything here, and thus so are all of the conclusions you've made. Next time don't talk about things you're ignorant of like you're not.
Hate to reply to my own post, but the last bit is a bit unclear. I don't mean to imply that the apathetic masses are full of hatred and disgust, as they are the apathetic masses, I just meant the second group.
I really would like to see less sexism, less racism, and so on, but sadly most efforts against them are little more than political correctness, good old fashioned overly restrictive moralism in a snazzy new suit, and the people who might genuinely help are largely pushed aside as not 'progressive' enough.
Ah, that incident. I love that, because it clearly shows exactly which side the problem is on. See this for the finer details. Most importantly is this part, from from Stallman himself:
The cult of the Virgin of Emacs is simply intended as a joke about the cult of the Virgin Mary. I assure anyone who perceived derogatory meanings in it that I did not intend them.
So what really happened is Stallman made a (admittedly unfunny) joke about religion, and even after he calmly and maturely explained their error to them, whiny 'feminist' idiots continued to take it out of context and act like it was evidence that the leader of the free software movement is some evil rape advocate, when he is, at most, sorely lacking in social skills.
The problem with feminism these days is that it is far too much like a religion. There's the vast majority who are just in it to fit in with other people like them or because that's how they've been raised, who will put up a bit of obligatory moral outrage when they have to but not really do anything of note. There's the minority that's absolutely fucking batshit insane who are worked into a righteous fury over most of modern society, and will do things of note, but you'll certainly wish they didn't. And the crumbs that are left over constitute the bit that are actually good people and have taken from their belief system more than just hatred and disgust at the world.
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They're clearly talking about semantics, not syntax,
They're complaining about syntax impairing semantics, or perhaps feigning so to complain about the syntax instead. I'm assuming the former out of my faith in the good will of humanity though.
so using grammar definitions to argue away the triple-negative is missing the point entirely,
In case you didn't notice, the comment about it not being a proper triple negative was a side note at the end of the reply to the reply to my first post. It's well divorced from my main point, which simply was that the OP seems to be barely literate. Talk about missing the point.
and breaking up the one-sentence triple-negative into a three-sentence one isn't going to aid anyone's understanding.
Their complaint was that there's three negatives all in one sentence. Explain how breaking it up into three sentences with a single negative each, which can each be consumed independently, directly addressing this complaint, "isn't going to aid anyone's understanding".
No. People grammar naziing over perfectly valid constructions is a most serious matter. If I refuse to stand up against people who whine about others' use of the English language like they themselves have any actual knowledge and are in a position to make such complaints, the word terrorists win.
Nice little abomination you've constructed there, but if you're trying to prove a point, you've failed. That's distinctly different from what's in the summary, which is a plain negative sentence which has a relative clause with a negated verb, which also has such a relative clause. It's not even a proper double/triple/whatever negative. As Wikipedia states, "A double negative occurs when two forms of negation are used in the same clause."
If you spent your spare time with English instead of Haskell, you'd probably be able to understand that. But I'll break it down for you. There are people who don't code in their spare time. There are companies that don't hire these people. The guy in the summary doesn't want to work for these companies. That wasn't so hard, was it?
How did this manage to get modded up? Is it "give mod points out to people who failed English classes" day?
Most FOSS is written by its author to scratch an itch. And if you're not planning to make any money off of it, why not release it for free? And if you're releasing it for free, why not open source it? Maybe other people will find use for it, and maybe some of them will submit patches. And thus an open source project is born. And if you were never intending to make money off of it in the first place, there's no reason or solid ground to complain about someone else using it just because they're a big company instead of a single person. The "I must get paid for every last usage of what I made no matter what" mentality is more suited for the music industry.
What's with all the ridiculous units of measurement? Can someone give me it in something people *actually use*, like c-fortnights per orbit of Pluto around the Sun?
Which, like it or not, is still not a terribly inaccurate way of describing what's going on here. You could say "illegal unlicensed format", if you like, but I don't think it changes the tone significantly.
Violating IP laws is not the same as theft. Not even close. Were it merely claimed to be illegal, I never would've had a problem with its wording. Let us look up the definition of "misappropriate", shall we? "to appropriate wrongly (as by theft or embezzlement)" Saying merely that it's "illegal" is a neutral statement of fact. Using the word "misappropriate" expresses an opinion of the author that it is against morals or ethics, which goes a fair bit beyond that, and unless the author thinks doing things that they believe to be wrong is good (a rather safe assumption), one can thus conclude that they disapprove of it. This changes the tone very significantly.
Are you going to argue that patent infringement is a positive thing? I'm not necessarily saying I disagree, but let's be clear, because it sounds like that's what you're advocating.
I'd say members of a society have no obligation to follow laws that harm society, or perhaps even that they have an obligation to expressly ignore such laws. Software patents are certainly such a case (and the patent system overall needs a pretty huge overhaul). So I suppose the answer is "very yes".
It's "better" even if it's impossible? In that case, might I suggest a codec that assumes we've solved the halting problem?
The qualifier "given current hardware" is pretty important there. A codec that requires solving the halting problem isn't simply "impossible on current hardware", but just plain "impossible". Though I would say it's better, even if a bit less than useful.
[snip lots of stuff about Crysis and Pong]
You seem to have grossly misinterpreted my intent with that comparison (and also completely ignored the other), rephrased it to more directly represent this (incorrectly) perceived intent, and then argued against that. Let me reword it in a way that more unambiguously represents the intent of my analogy: Most people would agree that Crysis's graphics engine is better than Pong's.
The fact that you don't consider a concern to be important doesn't make the concern go away, because like it or not, Virak on Slashdot is not the arbitrator of What's Best for Everyone.
Given the fact that pretty much every comparison of video codecs ranks them by better-as-in-more-quality-per-bit, and all progress in lossy compression has been driven by the quest for better-as-in-more-quality-per-bit, and all the video compression experts I've talked to use better-as-in-more-quality-per-bit, and all the non-experts I've talked to use better-as-in-more-quality-per-bit, I feel safe to say that except for a specific, tiny minority, most people would agree with me that "more quality per bit" is, in fact, what makes one compression method "better" than another.
focusing on users and ignoring commercial usage is distorting the picture, even if you only care from a user's perspective.
Again, putting words in my mouth. I never ignored commercial usage. You completely ignored personal usage; your wording was "anywhere other than the pirate community", and that's an exact quote. I pointed out that the only place patents matter is commercial usage and there is a large amount of usage of video codecs that is neither piracy nor commercial, and thus that your assertion that only pirates don't need to worry about the patents was blatantly false.
[stuff about Firefox]
Yes, it's the fault of all these big bad encoder meanies who refuse to make it easier for the developers of a specific program to implement a si
Oh? I don't think so, but I'm not the one who phrased it that way. You have to read it with quite a lot of prejudice to come up with "damn filthy fucking pirates".
Yes, I must admit I'm terribly prejudiced in favor of modern codecs that allow me to encode stuff at a reasonably bitrate without it looking terrible, and against people attempting to support their ideologies with blatant lies. However, "misappropriated unpaid-for format" is about a hair's width away from "stolen" and most certainly is not a favorable or even indifferent way to describe something. Unless you can provide evidence of widespread usage of "misappropriated" in anything but a negative way (which is going to be difficult considering it's part of the definition of the word), my complaint stands.
Really? You wouldn't at least consider performance?
No, a better codec is better even if it's impractical or even impossible to use it given current hardware. Most people would agree that Crysis has better graphics than Pong even if their computer isn't powerful enough to run it.
And I do think patents are a valid consideration here -- that is, price.
A better codec is better even if you can't afford it. For example, not being able to afford anything other than a thoroughly-used car that was likely made before the invention of the wheel and looks like it would explode given a particularly strong breeze does not make it better than other cars.
I'm surprised you don't consider "commercial uses" to be significant,
I'm surprised you consider shoving words in my mouth a reasonable thing to do. I was objecting to you greatly exaggerating how important patents are to users of video codecs. I never said anything about commerical usage being significant or not significant.
especially when "ripping for personal use" often involves some sort of commercial software which had to pay that fee.
No it doesn't. The most popular ripping tools are open source and use open source codecs and nobody gets paid a cent over patents. Even in the case of people who use commercial software for it, it's not like they'd care. The fee is so low that the price wouldn't be any different if they didn't have to pay it, and unless the user had to manually pay the fee themselves, they'd never even know it existed, price drop or not. For personal usage, few know about the patents, and nobody really cares about them except for the microscopically tiny minority who take the purity of the "freedom" of their software to near-religious levels.
No, but if they don't particularly care about violating copyright, they won't care much about violating patents, either.
Phrasing it as them using "a misappropriated unpaid-for format" is not saying they merely don't care. You really have to read that line very loosely and optimistically to interpret it in a way that doesn't make it seem like the author was thinking "damn filthy fucking pirates" when he wrote it.
Because it's better, or because it's perceived as better -- in terms of quality per bit.
I don't see how "in terms of quality per bit" changes anything, as that's the regular definition of "better" when it comes to lossy compression. If merely quality is all you take into account, then uncompressed video wins easily. If merely size is all you take into account, then some hypothetical codec that just compresses anything to an empty file wins easily.
But again, anywhere other than the pirate community, patents are likely to be an issue, and an open-but-worse format may be preferred over a closed-but-better format, especially if it's not that much worse.
No, anywhere other than commercial uses nobody cares about patents. Unless you're saying ripping for personal use is piracy, there's an enormous amount of usage where patents simply don't matter.
In other words, yes, Theora is inferior, but probably not by enough to care
Saying "it's worse but not worse enough for anyone to notice" is not admitting it's inferior, it's saying it's just as good.
just as better-than-h.264 formats aren't better enough to care.
Better-than-H.264 formats arern't "not better enough for anyone to care", they're not existing. There's codecs on roughly the same level as H.264 and which use very similar technology (e.g. VC-1), and there's a few codecs in development that may turn out to be better (e.g. Dirac) but aren't yet mature enough for usage, but at the moment there's not really anything better than H.264, not even better enough to not care.
Where in my post did I say that you can't choose inferior codecs for other reasons? All I did was respond to the absurd assertion that Theora is better than H.264. If you think using outdated technology is an acceptable price to pay to avoid patent issues, go right ahead.
A moot point, given that people who are misappropriating unpaid-for content choosing to use a misappropriated unpaid-for format is hardly surprising.
Seriously? Do you work for the MPAA or some other group like that? People who pirate stuff aren't comic book villains who break laws just for the sake of breaking laws. They don't think "oh hey while I'm violating copyright I'll violate patents too, just because I can!" H.264 is more popular because it is better, not because the people who encode stuff get hard at the thought of breaking laws in a way nobody particularly cares about and they're never ever going to get in trouble for.
The AC above me covers the rest of your points quite nicely, so I'm not going to write something that would be much the same as his. Your post is utter nonsense, and you and the people who actually looked at your post and not only managed to not laugh, but modded you up need to pull your heads out of the GNU/sand and admit that Theora is simply inferior. If you think not having any patent problems is a big enough issue to prefer a technologically inferior codec, that's fine. But don't twist the facts and outright lie just so you can try to pretend Theora is otherwise a match for modern codecs, because it is not.
It just suffered from needing a higher powered processor to decode video for play back.
Also hilariously wrong. Hell, one of the advantages (what few there are) of Theora its proponents like to bring up is that it takes less resources to decode than H.264. I have no fucking clue where you got this idea from.
See www.xiph.org. I believe there is a link on there comparing H.264 and Theora. Theora is noticeably better
Wrong again. There have been several comparisons between H.264 and Theora by the Xiph folks and they've all come out in favor of H.264. They've only tried to argue that Theora isn't really that bad. The problem is it is, and the only reason Theora didn't get utterly murdered in their comparisons is they've compared default Theora to default x264 and YouTube's H.264.
Default Theora is pretty much as good as it gets unless you want to set custom quantization/Huffman tables. Default x264 falls far short of x264 with its settings set for maximum quality, mainly because when you set them like that it's slow as fuck and most people will take worse quality over sub-1 FPS encoding. I don't know what YouTube uses or how they set it, but I seriously doubt a site that huge goes for the maximum possible quality.
Furthermore, Theora is simply inferior technology-wise to H.264. Theora-the-specification is far behind H.264 and it makes it pretty much impossible for Theora-the-software to ever be better than a decent H.264 encoder, as any improvements could simply be copied by the H.264 encoder (though it's more likely it'd be the other way around).
My guess is Theora 1.1 should be noticeably better.
It is noticeably better than Theora 1.0, but remains noticeably worse than H.264 and will continue to be so.
TechDirt is running a piece on Microsoft's next-gen operating system projects Midori and Singularity, where officials are considering researchers released a prototype for another OS, code-named Barrelfish -- cutting the state and the county out of their portion of the take -- in order to increase an OS written specifically for multicore environments. The story was first reported a week ago. The majority of tickets are being (automatically) issued to improve the performance of boxes with such chips by creating a network bus, if you will, between cores, which studies have shown rarely contribute to an accident. TechDirt notes such systems tend to share resources like apparent unconstitutionality:
"The problem here is that as demand increases, performance of shredding the Sixth Amendment of the US Constitution decreases as shared resources don't scale well. By reclassifying a moving violation... to an administrative violation... Barrelfish instead is doing something really nefarious between cores on its bus, and reportedly uses a database-like approach to simply deny all hearings for administrative violations or schedule them far out in advance knowing full well that they have your hardware available."
In my feed reader at the moment is a story titled 'Microsoft Releases Prototype of Research OS "Barrelfish"'. Following the link leads here, which is very noticeably not that story, which appears to be this instead. Presumably somewhere along the way that story got replaced with this story and the comments were kept (also the tags too it seems). As for exactly how this happened, I don't have a clue, but perhaps it has something to do with the aforementioned downtime (Slashdot was 503ing for a significant amount of time last night).
I know this is a joke, but it should really be modded insightful instead. This just reveals the already-existing incredible insecurity of their setup. If they were doing it right, the file would only have hashes, or preferably, hashes and salts. It would certainly still not be good to have it leaked, but the results of that happening would be significantly less serious. Instead, we have this.
I see the delusional Mac fanboys have crawled out of the woodwork in great numbers today, and they're even wielding mod points.
Why is it so fucking hard for you assholes to understand that Apple is NOT taking a legal stance on this issue?
He never said such a thing, and saying "fuck" and calling him an asshole doesn't make you any more right.
Apple doesn't want devices to lie. Palm wants to lie. This is fairly simple.
Sure, it sounds like Palm is being a big meanie:((((( if you phrase it that way. That's because you're horribly over simplifying the situation to make Apple look better. Here, let me fix that for you:
Apple doesn't want devices to lie to their software for the sake of interoperability. Palm wants their devices to lie to Apple's software for the sake of interoperability. This is fairly simple.
That's a bit more accurate, and unsurprisingly doesn't paint Apple as the perfect divine goddeveloper handed down authority from the heavens themselves like you'd like them to be.
It's so discouraging to see that it's OK to lie as long as your lying to a company that you don't like.
Palm isn't "lying" to Apple, they're lying to Apple's software. Don't worry, I don't think its feelings will be hurt. And the point the GP was making and all you iDroids seem to be missing is that yes, it is very okay to lie to get your stuff to work with their stuff. I don't think most people here approve of printer makers preventing your from using whatever cartridges you want with your hardware, music companies preventing you from using whatever software or hardware you want to play your music, or so on, but in spite of that they're gladly bending over for Apple because OMG SO SHINY!
You say "How dare Palm! What right do they have to so brazenly lie to Apple's glorious software!", but I ask, why not? Though Palm complaining to the USB-IF was kinda stupid (did they seriously think this wouldn't happen?), if Microsoft or anyone else tried to pull this sort of shit, the comments would be in the hundreds within seconds and you people would be eating them alive, and don't try to pretend you wouldn't.
Python is easily the language I use the most, so I'm quite familiar with it. The big difference is that Python merely uses English keywords in place of a few symbols. This isn't a particularly radical difference, most languages already make extensive usage of keywords, and using "and" instead of "&&" doesn't significantly bloat your source code (and e.g., "||" and "or" have the same length). COBOL, however, tries to be like English and not just something that uses English words here and there.
If a manager can quickly learn to read the notation without it impeding other desirable features, that's a plus (or should I say a +).
And the entire point of that little note at the end of my post was that it does impede other desirable features, far more important ones. It's also a fine case of premature optimization. Designing or even understanding a large system is far more difficult of a task than just learning the notation (learning the notation is also only a one-time cost). While it may make it easier to understand a hello world program, a manager who has no programming experience will be just as lost with anything decently-sized no matter how close the language is to English. I've come across more than a few math or physics papers where while I know what all the fancy symbols mean, the actual content is just completely over my head, and writing it out in English wouldn't have improved matters at all.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to have completely missed the next sentence, which states that:
Sorry, but your gut is pretty severely contradicted by the actual facts. And "I hear that all the time" is not a reasonable basis for making conclusions, as people tend to surround themselves with similar people. About half the people I know use Linux, but it'd be absurd for me to thus conclude that Linux's marketshare in the general population is anywhere near that high.
Wow, just wow. I'm not even going to try to reply properly to this nonsense. You've ignored half my post, taken the rest out of context to grossly misrepresent what I've said, and then dared to say that *I* am the one attacking straw man arguments and not addressing things. I'm not sure if it's stupidity or malice but either way it's not worth the effort.
Maybe you didn't pay attention to the drama around this when it first happened, but I did, and there were references to rape. Here's one, for example: "talking about relieving women of their virginity casts women in a submissive role, with men in a dominant role, and brings up thoughts of oppression and (indirectly) rape." Also see the comments of the blog post I linked to for a couple more rape mentions.
The whole "St. IGNUcius"/"Church of Emacs" thing is a giant joke about religion. Either this little bit is about religion like all of the rest of it, or it's rape humor. And don't try to say "nobody brought up rape". If you're reading it as actually about sex, then there's no way you can interpret 'sacred duty to "relieve them of their virginity"' as being about anything but rape.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha oh that's a good one. Stallman? Embarrased? The claim is ridiculous even at a glance, and it's even more ridiculous when you take into account that he has been doing the St. IGNUcius skit pretty much exactly the same, including the "Emacs virgins" thing for decades now (as the wiki you yourself linked to notes). And now he's supposed to be embarrassed about what he said like it's some new material he just worked in and he's secretly ashamed at all the people he's offended? Your lack of knowledge about a man you claim to know the secret true opinion of is rather impressive.
Oh drop the Internet psychologist bullshit. And "silly sexist remark"? Discrimination against half of humanity is hardly "silly". You seem to think "sexist" means "offends women with thin skin". It doesn't. Actual sexism is hardly something "silly", and lumping un-PC jokes into the same category as things like a business that makes it far harder for its female employees to advance than male ones, or a person who thinks contraception is a sin because the only reason women exist is to be good wives and mothers, is quite frankly disgusting. The continued devaluing of the word "sexism" by people who claim to be fighting it is baffling.
If you told these people they were just "annoyed" and that it's "not a big deal really", I think you'd find they're not so much in agreement with you as you think.
You're wrong with your idea of the facts about, well, everything here, and thus so are all of the conclusions you've made. Next time don't talk about things you're ignorant of like you're not.
Hate to reply to my own post, but the last bit is a bit unclear. I don't mean to imply that the apathetic masses are full of hatred and disgust, as they are the apathetic masses, I just meant the second group.
I really would like to see less sexism, less racism, and so on, but sadly most efforts against them are little more than political correctness, good old fashioned overly restrictive moralism in a snazzy new suit, and the people who might genuinely help are largely pushed aside as not 'progressive' enough.
Ah, that incident. I love that, because it clearly shows exactly which side the problem is on. See this for the finer details. Most importantly is this part, from from Stallman himself:
So what really happened is Stallman made a (admittedly unfunny) joke about religion, and even after he calmly and maturely explained their error to them, whiny 'feminist' idiots continued to take it out of context and act like it was evidence that the leader of the free software movement is some evil rape advocate, when he is, at most, sorely lacking in social skills.
The problem with feminism these days is that it is far too much like a religion. There's the vast majority who are just in it to fit in with other people like them or because that's how they've been raised, who will put up a bit of obligatory moral outrage when they have to but not really do anything of note. There's the minority that's absolutely fucking batshit insane who are worked into a righteous fury over most of modern society, and will do things of note, but you'll certainly wish they didn't. And the crumbs that are left over constitute the bit that are actually good people and have taken from their belief system more than just hatred and disgust at the world.
Everyone knows BSD is dying, Netcraft confirmed it. Your foolish actions may have won you the battle, but they have lost you the war.
From the makers of the widely-acclaimed, award-winning hit Unix, comes Linux, an exciting game of patience and frustration!
Risk your life to perform the sacred ritual of Installation to gain entry to the land of Linux, with the Dark Lord's minions Grub and Fdisk trying their hardest to stop you! /etc in an attempt to find the ancient lost artifact, A Fucking Working Configuration!
Explore the fearsome depths of the labyrinthine cursed dungeon
Engage in challenging battle with dozens of the Dark Lord's vile Sound Systems to free the people of the land of Linux from their oppressive tyranny and bring the joy of music to them!
Uncover the true name of Linux itself through harrowing inane ideological debate, and use the vast trolling power of this to cause a major rift in the land over a fucking name!
Face off against the Dark Lord Xorg himself in exciting one-on-one battle, and pry the holy twin swords of Multi-Monitor Support and Working 3D Acceleration from his cold, dead hands and bring peace to Linux at last--if you can!
Linux promises upwards of 60 hours of unique and difficult gameplay, each moment full of exciting new threats and challenges in your attempt to free the land of Linux from the Dark Lord and his underlings at last and bring usability to all!
(Warning: Linux should not be played by people with photosensitive epilepsy, pregnant woman, smokers, children shorter than this tall, BSD zealots, and anyone who doesn't actually want to fight Xorg and just wants their fucking computer to fucking work already)
They're complaining about syntax impairing semantics, or perhaps feigning so to complain about the syntax instead. I'm assuming the former out of my faith in the good will of humanity though.
In case you didn't notice, the comment about it not being a proper triple negative was a side note at the end of the reply to the reply to my first post. It's well divorced from my main point, which simply was that the OP seems to be barely literate. Talk about missing the point.
Their complaint was that there's three negatives all in one sentence. Explain how breaking it up into three sentences with a single negative each, which can each be consumed independently, directly addressing this complaint, "isn't going to aid anyone's understanding".
No. People grammar naziing over perfectly valid constructions is a most serious matter. If I refuse to stand up against people who whine about others' use of the English language like they themselves have any actual knowledge and are in a position to make such complaints, the word terrorists win.
Nice little abomination you've constructed there, but if you're trying to prove a point, you've failed. That's distinctly different from what's in the summary, which is a plain negative sentence which has a relative clause with a negated verb, which also has such a relative clause. It's not even a proper double/triple/whatever negative. As Wikipedia states, "A double negative occurs when two forms of negation are used in the same clause."
If you spent your spare time with English instead of Haskell, you'd probably be able to understand that. But I'll break it down for you. There are people who don't code in their spare time. There are companies that don't hire these people. The guy in the summary doesn't want to work for these companies. That wasn't so hard, was it?
How did this manage to get modded up? Is it "give mod points out to people who failed English classes" day?
Most FOSS is written by its author to scratch an itch. And if you're not planning to make any money off of it, why not release it for free? And if you're releasing it for free, why not open source it? Maybe other people will find use for it, and maybe some of them will submit patches. And thus an open source project is born. And if you were never intending to make money off of it in the first place, there's no reason or solid ground to complain about someone else using it just because they're a big company instead of a single person. The "I must get paid for every last usage of what I made no matter what" mentality is more suited for the music industry.
What's with all the ridiculous units of measurement? Can someone give me it in something people *actually use*, like c-fortnights per orbit of Pluto around the Sun?
Violating IP laws is not the same as theft. Not even close. Were it merely claimed to be illegal, I never would've had a problem with its wording. Let us look up the definition of "misappropriate", shall we? "to appropriate wrongly (as by theft or embezzlement)" Saying merely that it's "illegal" is a neutral statement of fact. Using the word "misappropriate" expresses an opinion of the author that it is against morals or ethics, which goes a fair bit beyond that, and unless the author thinks doing things that they believe to be wrong is good (a rather safe assumption), one can thus conclude that they disapprove of it. This changes the tone very significantly.
I'd say members of a society have no obligation to follow laws that harm society, or perhaps even that they have an obligation to expressly ignore such laws. Software patents are certainly such a case (and the patent system overall needs a pretty huge overhaul). So I suppose the answer is "very yes".
The qualifier "given current hardware" is pretty important there. A codec that requires solving the halting problem isn't simply "impossible on current hardware", but just plain "impossible". Though I would say it's better, even if a bit less than useful.
You seem to have grossly misinterpreted my intent with that comparison (and also completely ignored the other), rephrased it to more directly represent this (incorrectly) perceived intent, and then argued against that. Let me reword it in a way that more unambiguously represents the intent of my analogy: Most people would agree that Crysis's graphics engine is better than Pong's.
Given the fact that pretty much every comparison of video codecs ranks them by better-as-in-more-quality-per-bit, and all progress in lossy compression has been driven by the quest for better-as-in-more-quality-per-bit, and all the video compression experts I've talked to use better-as-in-more-quality-per-bit, and all the non-experts I've talked to use better-as-in-more-quality-per-bit, I feel safe to say that except for a specific, tiny minority, most people would agree with me that "more quality per bit" is, in fact, what makes one compression method "better" than another.
Again, putting words in my mouth. I never ignored commercial usage. You completely ignored personal usage; your wording was "anywhere other than the pirate community", and that's an exact quote. I pointed out that the only place patents matter is commercial usage and there is a large amount of usage of video codecs that is neither piracy nor commercial, and thus that your assertion that only pirates don't need to worry about the patents was blatantly false.
Yes, it's the fault of all these big bad encoder meanies who refuse to make it easier for the developers of a specific program to implement a si
Yes, I must admit I'm terribly prejudiced in favor of modern codecs that allow me to encode stuff at a reasonably bitrate without it looking terrible, and against people attempting to support their ideologies with blatant lies. However, "misappropriated unpaid-for format" is about a hair's width away from "stolen" and most certainly is not a favorable or even indifferent way to describe something. Unless you can provide evidence of widespread usage of "misappropriated" in anything but a negative way (which is going to be difficult considering it's part of the definition of the word), my complaint stands.
No, a better codec is better even if it's impractical or even impossible to use it given current hardware. Most people would agree that Crysis has better graphics than Pong even if their computer isn't powerful enough to run it.
A better codec is better even if you can't afford it. For example, not being able to afford anything other than a thoroughly-used car that was likely made before the invention of the wheel and looks like it would explode given a particularly strong breeze does not make it better than other cars.
I'm surprised you consider shoving words in my mouth a reasonable thing to do. I was objecting to you greatly exaggerating how important patents are to users of video codecs. I never said anything about commerical usage being significant or not significant.
No it doesn't. The most popular ripping tools are open source and use open source codecs and nobody gets paid a cent over patents. Even in the case of people who use commercial software for it, it's not like they'd care. The fee is so low that the price wouldn't be any different if they didn't have to pay it, and unless the user had to manually pay the fee themselves, they'd never even know it existed, price drop or not. For personal usage, few know about the patents, and nobody really cares about them except for the microscopically tiny minority who take the purity of the "freedom" of their software to near-religious levels.
Phrasing it as them using "a misappropriated unpaid-for format" is not saying they merely don't care. You really have to read that line very loosely and optimistically to interpret it in a way
that doesn't make it seem like the author was thinking "damn filthy fucking pirates" when he wrote it.
I don't see how "in terms of quality per bit" changes anything, as that's the regular definition of "better" when it comes to lossy compression. If merely quality is all you take into account, then uncompressed video wins easily. If merely size is all you take into account, then some hypothetical codec that just compresses anything to an empty file wins easily.
No, anywhere other than commercial uses nobody cares about patents. Unless you're saying ripping for personal use is piracy, there's an enormous amount of usage where patents simply don't matter.
Saying "it's worse but not worse enough for anyone to notice" is not admitting it's inferior, it's saying it's just as good.
Better-than-H.264 formats arern't "not better enough for anyone to care", they're not existing. There's codecs on roughly the same level as H.264 and which use very similar technology (e.g. VC-1), and there's a few codecs in development that may turn out to be better (e.g. Dirac) but aren't yet mature enough for usage, but at the moment there's not really anything better than H.264, not even better enough to not care.
Where in my post did I say that you can't choose inferior codecs for other reasons? All I did was respond to the absurd assertion that Theora is better than H.264. If you think using outdated technology is an acceptable price to pay to avoid patent issues, go right ahead.
Seriously? Do you work for the MPAA or some other group like that? People who pirate stuff aren't comic book villains who break laws just for the sake of breaking laws. They don't think "oh hey while I'm violating copyright I'll violate patents too, just because I can!" H.264 is more popular because it is better, not because the people who encode stuff get hard at the thought of breaking laws in a way nobody particularly cares about and they're never ever going to get in trouble for.
The AC above me covers the rest of your points quite nicely, so I'm not going to write something that would be much the same as his. Your post is utter nonsense, and you and the people who actually looked at your post and not only managed to not laugh, but modded you up need to pull your heads out of the GNU/sand and admit that Theora is simply inferior. If you think not having any patent problems is a big enough issue to prefer a technologically inferior codec, that's fine. But don't twist the facts and outright lie just so you can try to pretend Theora is otherwise a match for modern codecs, because it is not.
Hahaha, no. Just no.
Also hilariously wrong. Hell, one of the advantages (what few there are) of Theora its proponents like to bring up is that it takes less resources to decode than H.264. I have no fucking clue where you got this idea from.
Wrong again. There have been several comparisons between H.264 and Theora by the Xiph folks and they've all come out in favor of H.264. They've only tried to argue that Theora isn't really that bad. The problem is it is, and the only reason Theora didn't get utterly murdered in their comparisons is they've compared default Theora to default x264 and YouTube's H.264.
Default Theora is pretty much as good as it gets unless you want to set custom quantization/Huffman tables. Default x264 falls far short of x264 with its settings set for maximum quality, mainly because when you set them like that it's slow as fuck and most people will take worse quality over sub-1 FPS encoding. I don't know what YouTube uses or how they set it, but I seriously doubt a site that huge goes for the maximum possible quality.
Furthermore, Theora is simply inferior technology-wise to H.264. Theora-the-specification is far behind H.264 and it makes it pretty much impossible for Theora-the-software to ever be better than a decent H.264 encoder, as any improvements could simply be copied by the H.264 encoder (though it's more likely it'd be the other way around).
It is noticeably better than Theora 1.0, but remains noticeably worse than H.264 and will continue to be so.
TechDirt is running a piece on Microsoft's next-gen operating system projects Midori and Singularity, where officials are considering researchers released a prototype for another OS, code-named Barrelfish -- cutting the state and the county out of their portion of the take -- in order to increase an OS written specifically for multicore environments. The story was first reported a week ago. The majority of tickets are being (automatically) issued to improve the performance of boxes with such chips by creating a network bus, if you will, between cores, which studies have shown rarely contribute to an accident. TechDirt notes such systems tend to share resources like apparent unconstitutionality:
In my feed reader at the moment is a story titled 'Microsoft Releases Prototype of Research OS "Barrelfish"'. Following the link leads here, which is very noticeably not that story, which appears to be this instead. Presumably somewhere along the way that story got replaced with this story and the comments were kept (also the tags too it seems). As for exactly how this happened, I don't have a clue, but perhaps it has something to do with the aforementioned downtime (Slashdot was 503ing for a significant amount of time last night).
I know this is a joke, but it should really be modded insightful instead. This just reveals the already-existing incredible insecurity of their setup. If they were doing it right, the file would only have hashes, or preferably, hashes and salts. It would certainly still not be good to have it leaked, but the results of that happening would be significantly less serious. Instead, we have this.
Wait, Samba and Linux are unstable now? That's news to me. I can't remember the last time either crashed for me ever.
I see the delusional Mac fanboys have crawled out of the woodwork in great numbers today, and they're even wielding mod points.
He never said such a thing, and saying "fuck" and calling him an asshole doesn't make you any more right.
Sure, it sounds like Palm is being a big meanie :((((( if you phrase it that way. That's because you're horribly over simplifying the situation to make Apple look better. Here, let me fix that for you:
That's a bit more accurate, and unsurprisingly doesn't paint Apple as the perfect divine goddeveloper handed down authority from the heavens themselves like you'd like them to be.
Palm isn't "lying" to Apple, they're lying to Apple's software. Don't worry, I don't think its feelings will be hurt. And the point the GP was making and all you iDroids seem to be missing is that yes, it is very okay to lie to get your stuff to work with their stuff. I don't think most people here approve of printer makers preventing your from using whatever cartridges you want with your hardware, music companies preventing you from using whatever software or hardware you want to play your music, or so on, but in spite of that they're gladly bending over for Apple because OMG SO SHINY!
You say "How dare Palm! What right do they have to so brazenly lie to Apple's glorious software!", but I ask, why not? Though Palm complaining to the USB-IF was kinda stupid (did they seriously think this wouldn't happen?), if Microsoft or anyone else tried to pull this sort of shit, the comments would be in the hundreds within seconds and you people would be eating them alive, and don't try to pretend you wouldn't.
Python is easily the language I use the most, so I'm quite familiar with it. The big difference is that Python merely uses English keywords in place of a few symbols. This isn't a particularly radical difference, most languages already make extensive usage of keywords, and using "and" instead of "&&" doesn't significantly bloat your source code (and e.g., "||" and "or" have the same length). COBOL, however, tries to be like English and not just something that uses English words here and there.
And the entire point of that little note at the end of my post was that it does impede other desirable features, far more important ones. It's also a fine case of premature optimization. Designing or even understanding a large system is far more difficult of a task than just learning the notation (learning the notation is also only a one-time cost). While it may make it easier to understand a hello world program, a manager who has no programming experience will be just as lost with anything decently-sized no matter how close the language is to English. I've come across more than a few math or physics papers where while I know what all the fancy symbols mean, the actual content is just completely over my head, and writing it out in English wouldn't have improved matters at all.