- Open source: Nobody restricts where you can install the application, and you get the source code too -- the best situation.
You either need a new level of "open source" here or some RMS style ranting to really understand what I assume you mean when you say "open source." A lot of this is specific to the license, of course, but just to scratch the surface of what some people expect:
You are free to fork the code at anytime and run with it so long as it remains open source.
The direction of the code and feature set has at least some amount of community influence. I'm not saying you're required to implement it but if someone hacks together a new encoding for Flash video and everyone in the community is using it, it's your responsibility to at least investigate merging the decoder into the trunk. This is regulated by the function of my first point.
Whatever open source code you release cannot ever be proprietary. No backsies.
Again, these are just a few caveats to consider. If you don't consider the above then (by your definition) the Flex SDK is actually open source and Steve Jobs would be wrong in saying that Flash isn't open source. Of course, Job's veil of concern is that the standards are not community driven and Adobe holds that in a tight grip. A valid concern but when something is truly "open" (like in my second point) then you can either try to convince Adobe or (as in my first point) just say "screw 'em" and run with your own implementation of the standard and ask the members of the community to come with you.
First off, the original press release is strangely hidden behind a div below the paraphrase of the press release -- why not press release and then commentary? A minor gripe but reading them in the order they presented them, I got the feeling I was being told what to think about what Jobs said prior to reading what it actually was that he said. Then there's always the fear that the reader doesn't bother with the actual press release.
Tacky that his first point is that Flash is proprietary, when Apple restricts the apps that can be installed on the phone. Pot, meet kettle.
And of course, he knows this. Which is why he spends one paragraph railing against Adobe and the next paragraph justifying Apple as distinctively different products and then even another paragraph praising Apple for their WebKit work. From the original press release:
Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. Apple's mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.
Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser used in all our products. WebKit has been widely adopted. Google uses it for Android's browser, Palm uses it, Nokia uses it, and RIM (Blackberry) has announced they will use it too. Almost every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft's uses WebKit. By making its WebKit technology open, Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers.
Of course, he spends more time and words making sure that Apple's version of proprietary is justified while they have even been a leader in open web standards.
My opinion, if you care to hear it, is that it's really easy to jump on someone for not being open when it's not your bread and butter that's at stake. I don't like Adobe and I don't like Apple but what I see here is Adobe scrambling to maintain control and authority over Flash because they perceive (possibly correctly) that to be their lifeline in a turbulent marketplace. Essentially I feel like Jobs said "Adobe's not open and we're not open in our core business but there are auxiliary/complimentary efforts we've been instrumental with that are actually open." While he completely overlooks similar "good will" efforts by Adobe to release the source code of the Flex 3 SDK (I don't find it to be truly open source like they market it though). And he's being disingenuous towards his users in order to make more money which requires reduced functionality of his device. He's a businessman. They are known to not only make decisions like this but their stockholders often require it with threat of litigation.
Not really. Nowhere in TFA does it mention these records being available to the general public, let alone free to download over the net. Just because they are digitizing the archives for some safety/redundancy does NOT mean that the church is suddenly backtracking and opening the archives up to everyone.
We must have read different articles, the second link to the British Library is confusing if what you say is true:
I am particularly interested in the business model that the Vatican Library will adopt in making these manuscripts digitally accessible. In particular, I am thinking of the manuscripts that are held across institutions and the potential for aggregating them (or even 'virtually re-uniting' them) in Virtual Research Environments.
While not free it sounds like they want to make them more available and make a little cash on the side too to me. Nevertheless they will use the internet to not only spread these articles but also make money. Still a bit two faced, wouldn't you say? Although it's not the utmost in transparency it's still more so than locked underneath the Vatican where only the most holy scholars on site can read them.
"May the devil take the internet and transparency. They are tools of evil. *clears throat* I have decided to go with the open and transparent format of FITS when we transition our most sacred documents so that they are stored... digitally... online... on the... internet... for easier access. Hmmmmm."
It's nice to see that at least someone has adhered to a cogent message dating back to such honored traditions as "eye for an eye *cough* turn the other cheek" as well as "love thy neighbors *ahem*kill the Native Americans/witches/heathens."
No, he is not. The whole point of an analogy is to highlight some part of an argument by exaggerating its implication in another scenario.
Oh, I understand now. So you're saying an analogy is sort of like when I'm being chased by a Tyrannosaurus Rex and it doesn't matter what I do because he's going to bite my head off and defecate in my neck stump?
I guess I need to stop trying to rationalize things that by design are broken. His entire argument against me was hinging on the comparison of Apple (a company looking to turn a profit in the past three decades) to Albert Mother Fucking Einstein. I'm sorry if that didn't sit well with me. It's pretty obvious now why the world is awash with bad analogies. It's like a balloon... with too much hot air... and then something bad happens.
And whether or not Leibniz and Post deserve any credit or not has no bearing on the fact that Newton and Turing do.
Right. Except for when that credit is "Man who first invented X." Which is usually where their names come up in the history books and from whence credit and fame is derived, is it not?
One cannot rule out that possibility, but you seem to imply that innovators don't deserve some modicum of respect.
I guess Newton wasn't all that cool since "someone else would have discovered gravity," and Einstein is a yawner because "the theory of General Relativity would have eventually been worked out."
Um, well, I didn't say "no modicum of respect"... I said they should be given credit for specific products at specific times.
I guess Newton wasn't all that cool since "someone else would have discovered gravity,"
So you're comparing the iPad and Apple products with the "discovery" of gravity or the theory of general relativity? I recognize innovation and I recognize science... while there's some crossover there, I fail to see you analogy but let's run with it. Something about Newton really annoys me and that's the crediting of solely him with infinitesimal calculus. Why am I annoyed? No one ever talks about Leibniz who, by most accounts, deserves at least partial credits for this work. Why, just last night I read of Emil Post's slightly earlier paper on what are essentially Turing Machines than Turing's own 1936 paper (although Turing's was peer reviewed before Post's). Should not Post deserve some credit or recognition? Could there have been Posts during Apple's UI revolution?
That's all I'm asking. Your analogy falls apart, of course, when we consider that Apple was the first to proliferate such a UI (not necessarily invent it) at which point we move further apart from science and into the denigrating worlds of marketing and business.
Congratulations on pushing my point to the extreme though so it was easily defeated, especially when I called for respect of Apple's specific products at the time of their release.
Facebook may very well already be encoding its videos in H.264 (which is supported by Flash). In this case, all they need to do is to wrap the files into an MP4 container, with no transcoding necessary.
YouTube already supports this, and I imagine, will begin to do it by default in the near future.
Thanks for straightening me out. Well, I suppose that's what I get for reading the article:
So rather than using HTML5, Facebook is actually detecting that the iPad's Safari browser is in the mix, and is transcoding the original video format to MP4 on the fly.
I constantly forget about the container when dealing with video and audio file formats... you would think I would have learned by now after using VLC so much to stream internet radio stations to both MP3 and Ogg formats for replay later with no internet connection. Could somebody explain to me what the container brings? I understand we gain compression and save space with the encoding of the material but why are there so many containers that describe how that encoding is stored? What trade offs do these containers bring and why are they so goddamn proprietary when they seem to provide little real value for the actual data being stored? It's simply some meta data about the actual data so why is it such a thorn in everyone's side? I don't develop in this realm so please tolerate my ineptitude and help me out here. It often confusese merelentlessly and I am dumbfounded at how these two things are mired in litigation.
I'll give Apple credit for bringing GUIs to the home user in 1984, and a user-friendly alternative to the MS-DOS/windows from 1984 to 95, plus making MP3 players "cool" with the iPod, but that's about it. They don't deserve credit for killing floppies or parallel ports.
Even if you give Apple credit for any of the above, how does one rule out the possibility that soon after another player wouldn't have stepped up to fill the vacuum with another tool or technology that would better suit us today in openness, quality or usability? I will gladly give them credit for better user interfaces in 1984 and in regards to specific products at specific times. But to claim that today we would still be stuck using floppy disks and parallel ports just because Apple aided in the successors to those many years ago is really quite laughable. In computers, everything transitions forward at some point. You'll need a lot of proof for me to agree that no one would have moved us to a better home computing UI at some point between 1984 and today had Apple not given the home user what it did.
You can argue they've done specific things net positively but there are flaws in most of what they've done -- as with any solution.
"Death gong?" "No sign of Flash in sight?" I don't quite see how this news equates to any such hyperbole.
I just checked videos my friend put of me drunk out of my mind "singing" karaoke Killers songs (no, I will not provide a link) and sure enough they're in Flash player 10 through my Firefox browser. Since it's allegedly transcoding this real time from Flash to MP4 when it detects the mobile Safari browser, I would claim that Flash is not only very much in sight but it is the default encoding on Facebook -- keeping it very much alive. At least that's what I gather from my experience in my browser.
The decision to keep Flash off of some Apple mobile products was Apple's decision and Apple's alone. Do you think Facebook enjoys this overhead transcoding cost of its videos? I highly doubt it. I think this is a case of Facebook trying to building a unified cross platform experience for users (and I don't often speak kindly of Facebook) not their agreement to obsolete Flash video. I impatiently await HTML5 and more open video and audio codecs in all senses of the word 'open.'
As shown by the recent Comcast - FCC ruling, ISPs can barely be regulated at all (and therefore can do anything they want).
Well, as someone else pointed out, this is an ISP in Honk Kong, not the US. While most of the "harmonizing" efforts of the Chinese government have been passive toward the consumer of the "non-harmonious" content, I would fear that this is a sort of precursor towards ISPs in China being required to pass search terms linked to individuals/accounts/addresses to the government for non-harmonious search terms indicating a level of dissent associated with that individual. Call me a tin foil hat but I haven't been too impressed with what's going on out in China. While you might claim it's overhead and too expensive, I guess we might start talking about https (port 443 secure) traffic even for search terms to avoid this inspection? Even that's naive though as the government could just ask the inside search provider for the data... or failing that block the that port on that provider.
But what about all the second-hand computers that are donated to the developing world? Could they be even partly responsible for the thousands of disks still sold?
Anja Ffrench of Computer Aid International - the largest charity working to distribute recycled IT to Africa and South America - says that they only deal in computers from 2002 and later, meaning that they'll have the USB connection that obviates the need for floppies.
Instead the article argues that some people are satisfied with using 1.44 MB of storage since they don't do music and photography. They also point out the long life high quality machines like oscilloscopes and data-loggers that use these diskettes. As well as the theater industry and musicians that use them for synths and timing MIDI events. That's their explanation but I doubt that people accepting second hand computers are going to be paying money for obsolete diskettes in third world countries. More likely they're looking for someone giving away old stores of the diskettes with drivers on them and reformatting those.
Personally, half a year ago I wanted to add my own hard drive to my XBox 360 Arcade and discovered that no matter how I tried to make a DOS boot compact disc it would not work exactly like a 3.5" floppy DOS boot diskette. I luckily had an old keyboard driver on a floppy that I was able to format and use although I may have had to purchase one if I didn't. Although with the increasing ability of flashing my system's BIOS from the OS, my needs for 3.5" floppies are dwindling.
the reasonable fair use of content needs to be preserved
Would you care to define the boundaries of fair use for me? How much a song can I use non-commercially in one instance (not like a repeated sample) without fear of repercussion or litigation from the copyright holder? Because even though some people have established "safe harbor" and guidelines, they don't seem to be officially codified yet. I uploaded some song samples on Wikipedia for my favorite albums and the rules were 10% of the length of a song or 30 seconds, whichever is shorter. And, honestly, there's no law that completely and irrefutably protects this as fair use. Then there are the people that claim a full album is a "work" and therefore 10% of that (which could be a whole song) is fair use. I don't know where it starts and stops... with movies it seems like nothing goes while with songs it seems you can get away with a little more. So hazy and ill defined, how can you rely on something like that for income when every step is potential litigation?
I'm all for preserving it so long as you can define what exactly it is that you are preserving.
Companies that rely on fair use generate $4.7 trillion in revenue, according to a study released today by the Computer & Communications Industry Association.
See the difference? Fair use generates a third of our GDP? Please, I'm not stupid.
This news makes me want to use Handbrake to edit a few minutes from The Downfall where it shows Hitler planning his movements and attacks on a map and replace the captions with English describing 35 new positions in California, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington (while he's moving the markers across the maps of Europe).
Unfortunately that's no longer possible as Youtube/Google seems to have outlawed parodies and freedom of expression/dissent in favor of draconian law.
I knew that gang violence had gotten bad in some parts of the world but now even Google vans have become roving death squads spewing bullets. What? Was there a Bing van behind her or something? Forty three shots! How many clips is that and will they be holding Brin and Page accountable?
Aside from your post being grossly offtopic, I have several questions for you.
a) Instead of showing ANY fiscal restraint, the governments kept expanding to take advantage of the property tax bubble.
Tell me, when was the last time our government showed fiscal restraint and how did that help us? Any times when we had two ongoing wars?
b) low interest rates pushed forward a lot of activity in the home building market, creating a lot of jobs which will not be replaced.
At least where I live this is no longer an issue. The home market is repairing itself. While it might not be permanent, home builders are hardly something to worry about. It'd be equivalent to worrying about the all the poor software developers that lost their jobs during the dot com bust. This is simply a piece of unemployment and when it's restructural unemployment, it's a necessary thing for the market. Can construction workers bail hay? Pick rock? Drive truck? Take up a crappier job when times are tough? You bet they can and will. They're manual laborers but they aren't stupid.
c) the executive class, whose pay has increased from 50x average to 450x average is actively shipping jobs overseas (to the tune of thousands).
[citation desperately needed]
d) the long term trend is wages will stagnate or drop towards those in BRIC. (brazil, russia, india, china). This means the value of houses, etc. will drop because people will have a smaller amount of money for paying for property. Smaller incomes also mean smaller taxes for the governments.
Again, any evidence at all that wages are dropping towards (I laugh at the idea) those in BRIC would be very helpful for your argument here. I also find it funny how point c seems to be presented with no clue that the money will be taxed resulting in 450x taxes for the government (or more with capital gains tax). Instead you focus on the class that we are working to build tax breaks for? Laughable.
And that's ignoring the scarily fast advances in robotics lately. An entire swath of basic manual jobs are on the verge of going away in a few years.
No matter how many robots we make, there's always better jobs for humans. Yes, there may be restructuralizing and yes some people may be able to scream "DEY TUK UR JOBSSS" but trust me, you are far from having to worry about that. Where I come from, the magical thing about farm work is that there's always more of it. Give a farmer a cheaper way to do something and he'll always find more work for you to do or simply acquire more land next year and have the work ready for you. That's why so many seasonal laborers travel as far up as Minnesota from Mexico in the summer. And if you live there, you shouldn't be complaining about that.
Your ridiculous selection of variables and borderline questionable knowledge of economics almost makes me smile but instead this is a harsh reminder that people will twist anything to make it look bad or good... whatever suits their desires. Reality: the situation is not as bleak as you paint it.
But but when I registered for a hosting service on GoDaddy, their commercial lead me to believe that even stripping sexy models use GoDaddy so how could something like this happen to such a reputable and honest company?!
If someone wants to take something classified out of a top secret military compound, he might have to secrete it on his person and deliberately sneak it past a guard who searches briefcases and purses. He might be committing a crime by doing so...
Are you joking? Try losing their security clearance, being court marshaled and a probable investigation into 1) what motive you had removing classified material 2) where it was going and 3) how many other violations you knowingly committed.
... the corporate rules might have required him to pay attention to it at all times...
I've gotten a corporate laptop with semi-sensitive material on it about the company I work for. I was given it when I traveled to various states. The guidelines were very clear. From locking it in the safe when I left the hotel room to not leaving it in my car. While it's less likely that someone would show up at a bar with a laptop, this is outright out of the question. Regardless of how lax their security measures are you might misplace a phone while drinking so don't bring it drinking! If you want to or accidentally take it drinking, you're accepting the risks.
It'd be hard for me to imagine that Apple -- the pseudosecretive company that it is -- wouldn't have stringent policies in place. Still, firing Powell would look less than heartless. I'd be shocked if any company as big as Apple didn't have such policies explicitly spelled out.
I caught a an article on NY Times that outlines the San Mateo police's options for prosecuting Gizmodo for purchasing the leaked iPhone. From the article:
California law prohibits the sale of stolen goods and states that a person who uses someone else’s lost property without permission may be guilty of theft.
And since it's over $950, it's a felony. Even if they didn't know it was stolen, they could face a lesser charge of "misappropriation of lost property" which is a crime but not theft. Charges haven't been pressed yet but the police say they're investigating the options.
I don't know how useful this is but I joined a community on Ning that focused on independent rock. These communities are much smaller and it's going to be pointless to ask all your friends to join it. But if you're looking for something more tightly knit surrounding a topic you passionately love then these networks are more specific and probably more helpful.
Unfortunately they don't satisfy what you liked about Facebook but... I mean, you're never going to find that large of a user base or platform usage. For example, I love getting Onion updates on Facebook but you won't find that on a Ning community. I also have no clue how robust Ning's privacy policy is. I'm content with just putting things on social networks that I'm comfortable showing to everyone. You might do well to just simply adjust what you put up and share and not worry about the potential repercussions. Sure it means less pictures and less bonding via Facebook but I've got real life to do that stuff.
Methane is present on our life-bearing planet, manufactured primarily by microbes living in cows, and all of the giant planets in our solar system have methane too, despite their lack of cows.
Why are cows focused on so much when it comes to methane? The only study I can find lists livestock making up only 19% as a source of atmospheric methane. That's little more than our industrial energy sector production and about half as much as our wetlands produce. From NOAA:
Rapidly growing industrialization in Asia and rising wetland emissions in the Arctic and tropics are the most likely causes of the recent methane increase, said scientist Ed Dlugokencky from NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory.
Why assume that they either have a concept of ethics, that their ethics might apply to us, or that taking resources would be unethical in their view?
They don't need a "concept of ethics." But there's the basic problem that if they have no problem with taking resources from another civilization, what problem do they have with taking resources from each other? Unless they are invincible they will almost certainly begin by taking resources from each other. If both you and I need a resource and one of us becomes short on it, we engage in conflict unless there is a sense of "ethics" or some basic moral guidelines. They can call it whatever they want but it's just a basic beginning to conflict... in the wrong places of our world, you can get yourself killed for an iPhone or wallet. Those are resources.
They may simply be looking for more resources to exploit.
So tell me, when you're "simply looking for more resources to exploit" where do you start? Looking at those around you who have the resources you need or building a spaceship capable of intergalactic travel and also locating out of the universe a planet that might have the same resources you need? If you find it hard answering that question, read up on resource consumption and distribution in ancient Rome.
And what makes Earth so automatically special about our resources? I mean, for carbon based life, maybe. But you have to assume if they've been going for that long then they are probably capable of turning worthless planets into gold. A lot of sci-fi novels posit that stars and black holes are going to be the harvested resource for "the down streamers" or any advanced alien race looking for resources to exploit.
Slashdot Mirror
- Open source: Nobody restricts where you can install the application, and you get the source code too -- the best situation.
You either need a new level of "open source" here or some RMS style ranting to really understand what I assume you mean when you say "open source." A lot of this is specific to the license, of course, but just to scratch the surface of what some people expect:
Again, these are just a few caveats to consider. If you don't consider the above then (by your definition) the Flex SDK is actually open source and Steve Jobs would be wrong in saying that Flash isn't open source. Of course, Job's veil of concern is that the standards are not community driven and Adobe holds that in a tight grip. A valid concern but when something is truly "open" (like in my second point) then you can either try to convince Adobe or (as in my first point) just say "screw 'em" and run with your own implementation of the standard and ask the members of the community to come with you.
Tacky that his first point is that Flash is proprietary, when Apple restricts the apps that can be installed on the phone. Pot, meet kettle.
And of course, he knows this. Which is why he spends one paragraph railing against Adobe and the next paragraph justifying Apple as distinctively different products and then even another paragraph praising Apple for their WebKit work. From the original press release:
Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. Apple's mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.
Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser used in all our products. WebKit has been widely adopted. Google uses it for Android's browser, Palm uses it, Nokia uses it, and RIM (Blackberry) has announced they will use it too. Almost every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft's uses WebKit. By making its WebKit technology open, Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers.
Of course, he spends more time and words making sure that Apple's version of proprietary is justified while they have even been a leader in open web standards.
My opinion, if you care to hear it, is that it's really easy to jump on someone for not being open when it's not your bread and butter that's at stake. I don't like Adobe and I don't like Apple but what I see here is Adobe scrambling to maintain control and authority over Flash because they perceive (possibly correctly) that to be their lifeline in a turbulent marketplace. Essentially I feel like Jobs said "Adobe's not open and we're not open in our core business but there are auxiliary/complimentary efforts we've been instrumental with that are actually open." While he completely overlooks similar "good will" efforts by Adobe to release the source code of the Flex 3 SDK (I don't find it to be truly open source like they market it though). And he's being disingenuous towards his users in order to make more money which requires reduced functionality of his device. He's a businessman. They are known to not only make decisions like this but their stockholders often require it with threat of litigation.
Not really. Nowhere in TFA does it mention these records being available to the general public, let alone free to download over the net. Just because they are digitizing the archives for some safety/redundancy does NOT mean that the church is suddenly backtracking and opening the archives up to everyone.
We must have read different articles, the second link to the British Library is confusing if what you say is true:
I am particularly interested in the business model that the Vatican Library will adopt in making these manuscripts digitally accessible. In particular, I am thinking of the manuscripts that are held across institutions and the potential for aggregating them (or even 'virtually re-uniting' them) in Virtual Research Environments.
While not free it sounds like they want to make them more available and make a little cash on the side too to me. Nevertheless they will use the internet to not only spread these articles but also make money. Still a bit two faced, wouldn't you say? Although it's not the utmost in transparency it's still more so than locked underneath the Vatican where only the most holy scholars on site can read them.
"May the devil take the internet and transparency. They are tools of evil. *clears throat* I have decided to go with the open and transparent format of FITS when we transition our most sacred documents so that they are stored ... digitally ... online ... on the ... internet ... for easier access. Hmmmmm."
It's nice to see that at least someone has adhered to a cogent message dating back to such honored traditions as "eye for an eye *cough* turn the other cheek" as well as "love thy neighbors *ahem* kill the Native Americans/witches/heathens."
No, he is not. The whole point of an analogy is to highlight some part of an argument by exaggerating its implication in another scenario.
Oh, I understand now. So you're saying an analogy is sort of like when I'm being chased by a Tyrannosaurus Rex and it doesn't matter what I do because he's going to bite my head off and defecate in my neck stump?
... with too much hot air ... and then something bad happens.
I guess I need to stop trying to rationalize things that by design are broken. His entire argument against me was hinging on the comparison of Apple (a company looking to turn a profit in the past three decades) to Albert Mother Fucking Einstein. I'm sorry if that didn't sit well with me. It's pretty obvious now why the world is awash with bad analogies. It's like a balloon
And whether or not Leibniz and Post deserve any credit or not has no bearing on the fact that Newton and Turing do.
Right. Except for when that credit is "Man who first invented X." Which is usually where their names come up in the history books and from whence credit and fame is derived, is it not?
One cannot rule out that possibility, but you seem to imply that innovators don't deserve some modicum of respect.
I guess Newton wasn't all that cool since "someone else would have discovered gravity," and Einstein is a yawner because "the theory of General Relativity would have eventually been worked out."
Um, well, I didn't say "no modicum of respect" ... I said they should be given credit for specific products at specific times.
I guess Newton wasn't all that cool since "someone else would have discovered gravity,"
So you're comparing the iPad and Apple products with the "discovery" of gravity or the theory of general relativity? I recognize innovation and I recognize science ... while there's some crossover there, I fail to see you analogy but let's run with it. Something about Newton really annoys me and that's the crediting of solely him with infinitesimal calculus. Why am I annoyed? No one ever talks about Leibniz who, by most accounts, deserves at least partial credits for this work. Why, just last night I read of Emil Post's slightly earlier paper on what are essentially Turing Machines than Turing's own 1936 paper (although Turing's was peer reviewed before Post's). Should not Post deserve some credit or recognition? Could there have been Posts during Apple's UI revolution?
That's all I'm asking. Your analogy falls apart, of course, when we consider that Apple was the first to proliferate such a UI (not necessarily invent it) at which point we move further apart from science and into the denigrating worlds of marketing and business.
Congratulations on pushing my point to the extreme though so it was easily defeated, especially when I called for respect of Apple's specific products at the time of their release.
Facebook may very well already be encoding its videos in H.264 (which is supported by Flash). In this case, all they need to do is to wrap the files into an MP4 container, with no transcoding necessary.
YouTube already supports this, and I imagine, will begin to do it by default in the near future.
Thanks for straightening me out. Well, I suppose that's what I get for reading the article:
So rather than using HTML5, Facebook is actually detecting that the iPad's Safari browser is in the mix, and is transcoding the original video format to MP4 on the fly.
I constantly forget about the container when dealing with video and audio file formats ... you would think I would have learned by now after using VLC so much to stream internet radio stations to both MP3 and Ogg formats for replay later with no internet connection. Could somebody explain to me what the container brings? I understand we gain compression and save space with the encoding of the material but why are there so many containers that describe how that encoding is stored? What trade offs do these containers bring and why are they so goddamn proprietary when they seem to provide little real value for the actual data being stored? It's simply some meta data about the actual data so why is it such a thorn in everyone's side? I don't develop in this realm so please tolerate my ineptitude and help me out here. It often confusese me relentlessly and I am dumbfounded at how these two things are mired in litigation.
I'll give Apple credit for bringing GUIs to the home user in 1984, and a user-friendly alternative to the MS-DOS/windows from 1984 to 95, plus making MP3 players "cool" with the iPod, but that's about it. They don't deserve credit for killing floppies or parallel ports.
Even if you give Apple credit for any of the above, how does one rule out the possibility that soon after another player wouldn't have stepped up to fill the vacuum with another tool or technology that would better suit us today in openness, quality or usability? I will gladly give them credit for better user interfaces in 1984 and in regards to specific products at specific times. But to claim that today we would still be stuck using floppy disks and parallel ports just because Apple aided in the successors to those many years ago is really quite laughable. In computers, everything transitions forward at some point. You'll need a lot of proof for me to agree that no one would have moved us to a better home computing UI at some point between 1984 and today had Apple not given the home user what it did.
You can argue they've done specific things net positively but there are flaws in most of what they've done -- as with any solution.
"Death gong?" "No sign of Flash in sight?" I don't quite see how this news equates to any such hyperbole.
I just checked videos my friend put of me drunk out of my mind "singing" karaoke Killers songs (no, I will not provide a link) and sure enough they're in Flash player 10 through my Firefox browser. Since it's allegedly transcoding this real time from Flash to MP4 when it detects the mobile Safari browser, I would claim that Flash is not only very much in sight but it is the default encoding on Facebook -- keeping it very much alive. At least that's what I gather from my experience in my browser.
The decision to keep Flash off of some Apple mobile products was Apple's decision and Apple's alone. Do you think Facebook enjoys this overhead transcoding cost of its videos? I highly doubt it. I think this is a case of Facebook trying to building a unified cross platform experience for users (and I don't often speak kindly of Facebook) not their agreement to obsolete Flash video. I impatiently await HTML5 and more open video and audio codecs in all senses of the word 'open.'
As shown by the recent Comcast - FCC ruling, ISPs can barely be regulated at all (and therefore can do anything they want).
Well, as someone else pointed out, this is an ISP in Honk Kong, not the US. While most of the "harmonizing" efforts of the Chinese government have been passive toward the consumer of the "non-harmonious" content, I would fear that this is a sort of precursor towards ISPs in China being required to pass search terms linked to individuals/accounts/addresses to the government for non-harmonious search terms indicating a level of dissent associated with that individual. Call me a tin foil hat but I haven't been too impressed with what's going on out in China. While you might claim it's overhead and too expensive, I guess we might start talking about https (port 443 secure) traffic even for search terms to avoid this inspection? Even that's naive though as the government could just ask the inside search provider for the data ... or failing that block the that port on that provider.
People in 3rd world countries, I'd imagine.
If you read the article:
But what about all the second-hand computers that are donated to the developing world? Could they be even partly responsible for the thousands of disks still sold? Anja Ffrench of Computer Aid International - the largest charity working to distribute recycled IT to Africa and South America - says that they only deal in computers from 2002 and later, meaning that they'll have the USB connection that obviates the need for floppies.
Instead the article argues that some people are satisfied with using 1.44 MB of storage since they don't do music and photography. They also point out the long life high quality machines like oscilloscopes and data-loggers that use these diskettes. As well as the theater industry and musicians that use them for synths and timing MIDI events. That's their explanation but I doubt that people accepting second hand computers are going to be paying money for obsolete diskettes in third world countries. More likely they're looking for someone giving away old stores of the diskettes with drivers on them and reformatting those.
Personally, half a year ago I wanted to add my own hard drive to my XBox 360 Arcade and discovered that no matter how I tried to make a DOS boot compact disc it would not work exactly like a 3.5" floppy DOS boot diskette. I luckily had an old keyboard driver on a floppy that I was able to format and use although I may have had to purchase one if I didn't. Although with the increasing ability of flashing my system's BIOS from the OS, my needs for 3.5" floppies are dwindling.
the reasonable fair use of content needs to be preserved
Would you care to define the boundaries of fair use for me? How much a song can I use non-commercially in one instance (not like a repeated sample) without fear of repercussion or litigation from the copyright holder? Because even though some people have established "safe harbor" and guidelines, they don't seem to be officially codified yet. I uploaded some song samples on Wikipedia for my favorite albums and the rules were 10% of the length of a song or 30 seconds, whichever is shorter. And, honestly, there's no law that completely and irrefutably protects this as fair use. Then there are the people that claim a full album is a "work" and therefore 10% of that (which could be a whole song) is fair use. I don't know where it starts and stops ... with movies it seems like nothing goes while with songs it seems you can get away with a little more. So hazy and ill defined, how can you rely on something like that for income when every step is potential litigation?
I'm all for preserving it so long as you can define what exactly it is that you are preserving.
Fair Use Generates $4.7 Trillion For US Economy
Wrong, from the article
Companies that rely on fair use generate $4.7 trillion in revenue, according to a study released today by the Computer & Communications Industry Association.
See the difference? Fair use generates a third of our GDP? Please, I'm not stupid.
This news makes me want to use Handbrake to edit a few minutes from The Downfall where it shows Hitler planning his movements and attacks on a map and replace the captions with English describing 35 new positions in California, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington (while he's moving the markers across the maps of Europe).
Unfortunately that's no longer possible as Youtube/Google seems to have outlawed parodies and freedom of expression/dissent in favor of draconian law.
How appropriate.
Shut up and die.
TrisexualPuppy suffers three times the amount of normal puberty angst!
It's alright, TP, I still love you.
Google Street View Shoots the Same Woman 43 Times
I knew that gang violence had gotten bad in some parts of the world but now even Google vans have become roving death squads spewing bullets. What? Was there a Bing van behind her or something? Forty three shots! How many clips is that and will they be holding Brin and Page accountable?
a) Instead of showing ANY fiscal restraint, the governments kept expanding to take advantage of the property tax bubble.
Tell me, when was the last time our government showed fiscal restraint and how did that help us? Any times when we had two ongoing wars?
b) low interest rates pushed forward a lot of activity in the home building market, creating a lot of jobs which will not be replaced.
At least where I live this is no longer an issue. The home market is repairing itself. While it might not be permanent, home builders are hardly something to worry about. It'd be equivalent to worrying about the all the poor software developers that lost their jobs during the dot com bust. This is simply a piece of unemployment and when it's restructural unemployment, it's a necessary thing for the market. Can construction workers bail hay? Pick rock? Drive truck? Take up a crappier job when times are tough? You bet they can and will. They're manual laborers but they aren't stupid.
c) the executive class, whose pay has increased from 50x average to 450x average is actively shipping jobs overseas (to the tune of thousands).
[citation desperately needed]
d) the long term trend is wages will stagnate or drop towards those in BRIC. (brazil, russia, india, china). This means the value of houses, etc. will drop because people will have a smaller amount of money for paying for property. Smaller incomes also mean smaller taxes for the governments.
Again, any evidence at all that wages are dropping towards (I laugh at the idea) those in BRIC would be very helpful for your argument here. I also find it funny how point c seems to be presented with no clue that the money will be taxed resulting in 450x taxes for the government (or more with capital gains tax). Instead you focus on the class that we are working to build tax breaks for? Laughable.
And that's ignoring the scarily fast advances in robotics lately. An entire swath of basic manual jobs are on the verge of going away in a few years.
No matter how many robots we make, there's always better jobs for humans. Yes, there may be restructuralizing and yes some people may be able to scream "DEY TUK UR JOBSSS" but trust me, you are far from having to worry about that. Where I come from, the magical thing about farm work is that there's always more of it. Give a farmer a cheaper way to do something and he'll always find more work for you to do or simply acquire more land next year and have the work ready for you. That's why so many seasonal laborers travel as far up as Minnesota from Mexico in the summer. And if you live there, you shouldn't be complaining about that.
... whatever suits their desires. Reality: the situation is not as bleak as you paint it.
Your ridiculous selection of variables and borderline questionable knowledge of economics almost makes me smile but instead this is a harsh reminder that people will twist anything to make it look bad or good
But but when I registered for a hosting service on GoDaddy, their commercial lead me to believe that even stripping sexy models use GoDaddy so how could something like this happen to such a reputable and honest company?!
If someone wants to take something classified out of a top secret military compound, he might have to secrete it on his person and deliberately sneak it past a guard who searches briefcases and purses. He might be committing a crime by doing so ...
Are you joking? Try losing their security clearance, being court marshaled and a probable investigation into 1) what motive you had removing classified material 2) where it was going and 3) how many other violations you knowingly committed.
I've gotten a corporate laptop with semi-sensitive material on it about the company I work for. I was given it when I traveled to various states. The guidelines were very clear. From locking it in the safe when I left the hotel room to not leaving it in my car. While it's less likely that someone would show up at a bar with a laptop, this is outright out of the question. Regardless of how lax their security measures are you might misplace a phone while drinking so don't bring it drinking! If you want to or accidentally take it drinking, you're accepting the risks.
It'd be hard for me to imagine that Apple -- the pseudosecretive company that it is -- wouldn't have stringent policies in place. Still, firing Powell would look less than heartless. I'd be shocked if any company as big as Apple didn't have such policies explicitly spelled out.
California law prohibits the sale of stolen goods and states that a person who uses someone else’s lost property without permission may be guilty of theft.
And since it's over $950, it's a felony. Even if they didn't know it was stolen, they could face a lesser charge of "misappropriation of lost property" which is a crime but not theft. Charges haven't been pressed yet but the police say they're investigating the options.
Everyone was in favor of growing Hitler's head. But the when you grow it on the body of a great white shark -- ooh, suddenly you've gone too far!
(side note if you recognize that paraphrase: mark your calendars/DVRs for June 24th!)
I don't know how useful this is but I joined a community on Ning that focused on independent rock. These communities are much smaller and it's going to be pointless to ask all your friends to join it. But if you're looking for something more tightly knit surrounding a topic you passionately love then these networks are more specific and probably more helpful.
... I mean, you're never going to find that large of a user base or platform usage. For example, I love getting Onion updates on Facebook but you won't find that on a Ning community. I also have no clue how robust Ning's privacy policy is. I'm content with just putting things on social networks that I'm comfortable showing to everyone. You might do well to just simply adjust what you put up and share and not worry about the potential repercussions. Sure it means less pictures and less bonding via Facebook but I've got real life to do that stuff.
Unfortunately they don't satisfy what you liked about Facebook but
Methane is present on our life-bearing planet, manufactured primarily by microbes living in cows, and all of the giant planets in our solar system have methane too, despite their lack of cows.
Why are cows focused on so much when it comes to methane? The only study I can find lists livestock making up only 19% as a source of atmospheric methane. That's little more than our industrial energy sector production and about half as much as our wetlands produce. From NOAA:
Rapidly growing industrialization in Asia and rising wetland emissions in the Arctic and tropics are the most likely causes of the recent methane increase, said scientist Ed Dlugokencky from NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory.
Looking at the numbers, Kirllos has stolen the IDs of one out of every 300 Facebook users.
Translation: it might not be a bad time to change your password if you use Facebook.
Why assume that they either have a concept of ethics, that their ethics might apply to us, or that taking resources would be unethical in their view?
They don't need a "concept of ethics." But there's the basic problem that if they have no problem with taking resources from another civilization, what problem do they have with taking resources from each other? Unless they are invincible they will almost certainly begin by taking resources from each other. If both you and I need a resource and one of us becomes short on it, we engage in conflict unless there is a sense of "ethics" or some basic moral guidelines. They can call it whatever they want but it's just a basic beginning to conflict ... in the wrong places of our world, you can get yourself killed for an iPhone or wallet. Those are resources.
They may simply be looking for more resources to exploit.
So tell me, when you're "simply looking for more resources to exploit" where do you start? Looking at those around you who have the resources you need or building a spaceship capable of intergalactic travel and also locating out of the universe a planet that might have the same resources you need? If you find it hard answering that question, read up on resource consumption and distribution in ancient Rome.
And what makes Earth so automatically special about our resources? I mean, for carbon based life, maybe. But you have to assume if they've been going for that long then they are probably capable of turning worthless planets into gold. A lot of sci-fi novels posit that stars and black holes are going to be the harvested resource for "the down streamers" or any advanced alien race looking for resources to exploit.