everyone should obviously support both if they can and Theora if they can't, unless legal issues materialize.
That was what the spec was gonna say, more or less, until Steve Jobs threw a tantrum over it and said they weren't gonna support Theora no matter what. The ensuing war has been for the most part to decide just how much of an asshole he was for doing so, as there was a fat chance of getting Microsoft to support a Free format exclusively (and as this story shows, a good chance of them doing the exact opposite), and without them the rest of the industry didn't have enough of a pull to force Apple to change their ways.
I think this video hysteria will probably blow over, and Theora will be widely available, if not installed by default, available as a plugin.
Let us hope you're right. Sadly, I believe Theora will follow in Vorbis' footsteps in being used in a few specialized niches, but being pushed largely out of the dumb, mainstream market by an alternative that's a legal minefield to the detriment of us all.
Outside the US there are no software patents, therefore h.264 can't have any patent over it, therefore MPEG-LA can't threaten anybody for anything.
The issue with h.264 has always been the US, and while I'd personally be happy to lock them out of the entire internet just for being a bunch of morons with an ass-backward legal system, companies would never stop trading with them so it'll never happen, and the more we interact with them the more we get screwed by their goddamned idiotic laws (in most of the world copyright lasts for 50 years, for instance, but try finding a book online before its US life+90 copyright expiration date).
IANAL, but I believe you can use the actual, physical device to record any kind of movie but then if you distribute it commercially you become liable for patent infringement, as the camera maker only paid for a non-commercial h.264 license rather than the 'full' one.
If that's the case, then in theory it'd be possible to record the movie, transcode it to a Free format such as Theora or a closed one you *do* own a commercial license for, redistribute *that* file instead, and be legally in the clear. But as I said, IANAL, this is not legal advice and all that crap.
And I'm also pretty sure the MPEG-LA doesn't want to see the issue end up in court, because they'd probably lose.
Unless you're a lawyer, I don't think you're qualified to make that kind of comment. Actually, I believe even if you *are* a lawyer you aren't qualified to make that kind of comment, the laws that could potentially come into effect are many and fairly complex so I don't think it's as clear-cut as you make it out to be, at least not for the infringing side.
This may just be semantics, but it is an 'open standard' what it is not is 'open source'. There is a difference.
Wrong and wrong. It is "open source" as there exist an open source implementation of it, what its not is an "open standard", as it requires royalties to be implemented legally (the open source implementation is illegal in any country that recognizes software patents).
Sure, the specification itself is available to be read, but that applies to *all* standards, otherwise they couldn't be called as such. What differentiates an open standard from a closed one is the aspect of the latter of having one entity controlling who gets to implement it and who doesn't, and in h.264's case that's MPEG-LA through its patent portfolio.
How much more performance do we need before we all say: "enough."?
We already did, that's how netbooks gained such a following in the first place.
This drive towards bigger drives and more processing power is driven not by consumer demands, but simply due to a marketing need: after all, given the same price most people would opt for a dual-core over a single-core computer, even if they need only one.
Give it another year or two and I'm sure I won't even look at the spec for what processor is in a machine I buy: of course it will be fine.
I already am at that point. My current notebook is horribly underpowered compared even to the cheapest netbook out there, yet if it weren't for its deader-than-dead battery it'd still suit me perfectly.
Though, given the same price, I'd still probably go for this new dual-core CPU over the older, single-core one, in spite of having ample proof of being satisfied with either.
Do you think that the world would be a better place if the only thing we valued was manual labor? If any public knowledge was worthless (in a financial sense) knowledge?
Yeah, I do.
The world already experimented with the idea that "knowledge is free to all". We ended up with opaque guilds that fiercely protected their trade secrets./quote>
In an age where dissemination of knowledge was incredibly expensive and relatively easy to trace and the average layman had even less education than a modern 4-years-old kid does. Do you really, honestly believe that 'trade secrets' could ever remain so in a world where WikiLeaks exists and thrives? that mere corporate associations would succeed where entire governments have not?
If secrecy is the worst thing you can think of then fucking bring it, go ahead and throw all this copyright crap out of the window.
How would Google "leave them hanging" by releasing a video CODEC as Open Source?
It doesn't. It does, however, allow a small team of motivated developers to build an entirely new platform based on it only worrying about their own personal costs in implementing it, ie: with no royalties to anybody else whatsoever, and use it to take over a whole new market as it happened with Google and web search/advertising, Youtube and web video or Facebook and social media.
With royalties however it's far less likely that small teams will be able to compete with large corporations, or even try to at all. The less competition they have, the easier it is for them to ensure that they'll remain profitable in the future.
But being a "patent pool" composed of the major players in the industry means that you'd have to be pretty wealthy or ballsy to go up against them.
Or simply don't produce any product of your own that could be patented, ie: a patent troll. As, again, it has happened with plenty of Microsoft and Apple products over the last few decades.
I don't think that Apple and Microsoft have any particular interest in "pushing" H.264 simply because it is proprietary.
Yes, they do. The higher they raise the barrier to entry of the particular market, the lower the chances of having a new Google leaving them hanging as it happened with the web market.
It also benefits from being pretty clear from a legal perspective with respect to patents.
Not really. That Apple et al own patents over h.264 doesn't mean there's nobody *else* owning patents over it, as so many Microsoft and Apple products have shown these past couple decades.
The only container that works with most devices and software on the market is AVI, which is pretty much to modern containers what FAT16 is to modern filesystems.
It's the same age as Half-Life 2 and World of Warcraft, and half a year more recent than The Sims 2. It may not be "cutting-edge", but it's certainly not "old" either.
Whoever needs the music composed, and out of whatever revenue they plan on getting from that music. McD needs new jingle for their ads, they pay me and I make them one, they use it to sell more burgers and therefore recoup the money, we all win.
Sure, it only applies to a few cases, but the reality is that, in a world post-internet most musicians will be of the "love for the arts" variety rather than the "I couldn't get into law school and wanna make money fast" one regardless.
While copyright is bad for engineers, it is a 300 year old legal framework designed to compensate artists. Discarding it for nothing is short sighted at best, and at worst exploitive of artists.
Only if a) your primary aim is to compensate artists, and b) copyright succeeded in doing so relative to nothing at all.
The first one is a matter of opinion, and most legal frameworks around the globe are in fact aimed at maximizing the number of works, using compensation only as a means to that end, and the second one would require a scientific study on the matter to decide.
There have, however, been a couple aimed at comparing length vs number of works and while they've all determined that the optimum is around 15 years, IIRC they also determined that the current life+90 was inferior to no copyright at all so if for any reason (such as the US' rent-a-politician model of lawmaking) it becomes an "all or nothing" situation then nothing would be the rational choice.
Look at how much safer we are thanks to the war on drugs, compared to say Holland or Canada.
Honestly, I don't think you can blame that on the war on drugs. You guys simply love to shoot each other for whatever reason you can find, always have, and likely always will.
As humans have "advanced" over the past two thousand years, it is apparent that killing each other is simply not productive.
But it is also apparent that killing cows *is*. And relative to a civilization capable of travelling the stars, that's roughly what we'll be.
why is it that we assume an "advanced" civilization means that it is militarily advanced and not ethically advanced?
You're assuming that as ethics advance they tend towards pacifism. They don't, because absolute pacifism is unfeasible without restricting your domain only to a very tiny subset of lifeforms to the detriment of all others, and if they do that you can see the 'cow' argument above.
In the ensuing years, I've viewed a lot of games. And the one truism I've always found is that the length of the game and the amount of enjoyment I get out of it is directly related to the amount of information content the developers put into the game.
Maybe for you. But I found both Diablo II and Torchlight to be far, *FAR* better with its randomized dungeons than Titan Quest and given their relative sales it appears most gamers agree with me.
Some degree of randomization is also vital for games like Civilizations, you may not like it but I guarantee you there'd be a *lot* less Civ players if the game proceeded in typical jRPG fashion, with only a handful of pre-determined scenarios playing out depending on the amount of hidden 'points' you've gotten during your current playthrough.
No, it wasn't, and no it wasn't. The best of the series was either MW2:Merc or MW4:Merc, depending on who you ask and how successful you were at trying to run a late-DOS game on Win9x and above, and MW4 was quite good actually, though like MW2 its "Mercenaries" expansion overshadowed it in all aspects.
They did, then they forgot it. TFA mentions the possibility of making multiple games on the Dragon Age engine, which is exactly what happened with its spiritual predecessors Baldur's Gate and, to a point, Neverwinter Nights.
Still, that's a recipe on making the largest number of quality videogames for the least expenditure of money. What studios are interested in, however, is making the most *money* for least investment, and there's plenty of proof already that making something shiny-but-stupid will net you a lot more money than the opposite.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't we have this very same debate about a week ago, except with pilots and videogames?
Just because he's a politician doesn't make what he did automatically wrong.
If that were true then Windows Vista would've been a smashing success and Windows 7 would've been a complete and utter failure of an OS.
Not saying that this Ubuntu release is bad, mind you (haven't tried it yet so I can't comment), but sometimes Slashdot's opinion *is* correct, y'know.
everyone should obviously support both if they can and Theora if they can't, unless legal issues materialize.
That was what the spec was gonna say, more or less, until Steve Jobs threw a tantrum over it and said they weren't gonna support Theora no matter what. The ensuing war has been for the most part to decide just how much of an asshole he was for doing so, as there was a fat chance of getting Microsoft to support a Free format exclusively (and as this story shows, a good chance of them doing the exact opposite), and without them the rest of the industry didn't have enough of a pull to force Apple to change their ways.
I think this video hysteria will probably blow over, and Theora will be widely available, if not installed by default, available as a plugin.
Let us hope you're right. Sadly, I believe Theora will follow in Vorbis' footsteps in being used in a few specialized niches, but being pushed largely out of the dumb, mainstream market by an alternative that's a legal minefield to the detriment of us all.
And Bill Gates, too. Except he was more successful than Jobs will ever be ;)
Outside the US there are no software patents, therefore h.264 can't have any patent over it, therefore MPEG-LA can't threaten anybody for anything.
The issue with h.264 has always been the US, and while I'd personally be happy to lock them out of the entire internet just for being a bunch of morons with an ass-backward legal system, companies would never stop trading with them so it'll never happen, and the more we interact with them the more we get screwed by their goddamned idiotic laws (in most of the world copyright lasts for 50 years, for instance, but try finding a book online before its US life+90 copyright expiration date).
IANAL, but I believe you can use the actual, physical device to record any kind of movie but then if you distribute it commercially you become liable for patent infringement, as the camera maker only paid for a non-commercial h.264 license rather than the 'full' one.
If that's the case, then in theory it'd be possible to record the movie, transcode it to a Free format such as Theora or a closed one you *do* own a commercial license for, redistribute *that* file instead, and be legally in the clear. But as I said, IANAL, this is not legal advice and all that crap.
And I'm also pretty sure the MPEG-LA doesn't want to see the issue end up in court, because they'd probably lose.
Unless you're a lawyer, I don't think you're qualified to make that kind of comment. Actually, I believe even if you *are* a lawyer you aren't qualified to make that kind of comment, the laws that could potentially come into effect are many and fairly complex so I don't think it's as clear-cut as you make it out to be, at least not for the infringing side.
Err...
This may just be semantics, but it is an 'open standard' what it is not is 'open source'. There is a difference.
Wrong and wrong. It is "open source" as there exist an open source implementation of it, what its not is an "open standard", as it requires royalties to be implemented legally (the open source implementation is illegal in any country that recognizes software patents).
Sure, the specification itself is available to be read, but that applies to *all* standards, otherwise they couldn't be called as such. What differentiates an open standard from a closed one is the aspect of the latter of having one entity controlling who gets to implement it and who doesn't, and in h.264's case that's MPEG-LA through its patent portfolio.
How much more performance do we need before we all say: "enough."?
We already did, that's how netbooks gained such a following in the first place.
This drive towards bigger drives and more processing power is driven not by consumer demands, but simply due to a marketing need: after all, given the same price most people would opt for a dual-core over a single-core computer, even if they need only one.
Give it another year or two and I'm sure I won't even look at the spec for what processor is in a machine I buy: of course it will be fine.
I already am at that point. My current notebook is horribly underpowered compared even to the cheapest netbook out there, yet if it weren't for its deader-than-dead battery it'd still suit me perfectly.
Though, given the same price, I'd still probably go for this new dual-core CPU over the older, single-core one, in spite of having ample proof of being satisfied with either.
Do you think that the world would be a better place if the only thing we valued was manual labor? If any public knowledge was worthless (in a financial sense) knowledge?
Yeah, I do.
The world already experimented with the idea that "knowledge is free to all". We ended up with opaque guilds that fiercely protected their trade secrets./quote>
In an age where dissemination of knowledge was incredibly expensive and relatively easy to trace and the average layman had even less education than a modern 4-years-old kid does. Do you really, honestly believe that 'trade secrets' could ever remain so in a world where WikiLeaks exists and thrives? that mere corporate associations would succeed where entire governments have not?
If secrecy is the worst thing you can think of then fucking bring it, go ahead and throw all this copyright crap out of the window.
How would Google "leave them hanging" by releasing a video CODEC as Open Source?
It doesn't. It does, however, allow a small team of motivated developers to build an entirely new platform based on it only worrying about their own personal costs in implementing it, ie: with no royalties to anybody else whatsoever, and use it to take over a whole new market as it happened with Google and web search/advertising, Youtube and web video or Facebook and social media.
With royalties however it's far less likely that small teams will be able to compete with large corporations, or even try to at all. The less competition they have, the easier it is for them to ensure that they'll remain profitable in the future.
But being a "patent pool" composed of the major players in the industry means that you'd have to be pretty wealthy or ballsy to go up against them.
Or simply don't produce any product of your own that could be patented, ie: a patent troll. As, again, it has happened with plenty of Microsoft and Apple products over the last few decades.
I don't think that Apple and Microsoft have any particular interest in "pushing" H.264 simply because it is proprietary.
Yes, they do. The higher they raise the barrier to entry of the particular market, the lower the chances of having a new Google leaving them hanging as it happened with the web market.
It also benefits from being pretty clear from a legal perspective with respect to patents.
Not really. That Apple et al own patents over h.264 doesn't mean there's nobody *else* owning patents over it, as so many Microsoft and Apple products have shown these past couple decades.
The only container that works with most devices and software on the market is AVI, which is pretty much to modern containers what FAT16 is to modern filesystems.
But even so, MKV is still second-best ;)
Spoken in the finest tradition of totalitarian dictators everywhere.
You know what else totalitarian dictators everywhere do? breathe!
But all those extra details can be extrapolated in software anyways, didn't you ever watch CSI?
It's the same age as Half-Life 2 and World of Warcraft, and half a year more recent than The Sims 2. It may not be "cutting-edge", but it's certainly not "old" either.
Hell, it's even younger than Facebook, go figure.
Whoever needs the music composed, and out of whatever revenue they plan on getting from that music. McD needs new jingle for their ads, they pay me and I make them one, they use it to sell more burgers and therefore recoup the money, we all win.
Sure, it only applies to a few cases, but the reality is that, in a world post-internet most musicians will be of the "love for the arts" variety rather than the "I couldn't get into law school and wanna make money fast" one regardless.
While copyright is bad for engineers, it is a 300 year old legal framework designed to compensate artists. Discarding it for nothing is short sighted at best, and at worst exploitive of artists.
Only if a) your primary aim is to compensate artists, and b) copyright succeeded in doing so relative to nothing at all.
The first one is a matter of opinion, and most legal frameworks around the globe are in fact aimed at maximizing the number of works, using compensation only as a means to that end, and the second one would require a scientific study on the matter to decide.
There have, however, been a couple aimed at comparing length vs number of works and while they've all determined that the optimum is around 15 years, IIRC they also determined that the current life+90 was inferior to no copyright at all so if for any reason (such as the US' rent-a-politician model of lawmaking) it becomes an "all or nothing" situation then nothing would be the rational choice.
If you can't think of a lie that was less harmful than the truth, you're only lying to yourself.
Or can think more than 5 minutes ahead.
Look at how much safer we are thanks to the war on drugs, compared to say Holland or Canada.
Honestly, I don't think you can blame that on the war on drugs. You guys simply love to shoot each other for whatever reason you can find, always have, and likely always will.
And both involve stealing from someone else
No, as a matter of fact neither of them do.
As humans have "advanced" over the past two thousand years, it is apparent that killing each other is simply not productive.
But it is also apparent that killing cows *is*. And relative to a civilization capable of travelling the stars, that's roughly what we'll be.
why is it that we assume an "advanced" civilization means that it is militarily advanced and not ethically advanced?
You're assuming that as ethics advance they tend towards pacifism. They don't, because absolute pacifism is unfeasible without restricting your domain only to a very tiny subset of lifeforms to the detriment of all others, and if they do that you can see the 'cow' argument above.
In the ensuing years, I've viewed a lot of games. And the one truism I've always found is that the length of the game and the amount of enjoyment I get out of it is directly related to the amount of information content the developers put into the game.
Maybe for you. But I found both Diablo II and Torchlight to be far, *FAR* better with its randomized dungeons than Titan Quest and given their relative sales it appears most gamers agree with me.
Some degree of randomization is also vital for games like Civilizations, you may not like it but I guarantee you there'd be a *lot* less Civ players if the game proceeded in typical jRPG fashion, with only a handful of pre-determined scenarios playing out depending on the amount of hidden 'points' you've gotten during your current playthrough.
No, it wasn't, and no it wasn't. The best of the series was either MW2:Merc or MW4:Merc, depending on who you ask and how successful you were at trying to run a late-DOS game on Win9x and above, and MW4 was quite good actually, though like MW2 its "Mercenaries" expansion overshadowed it in all aspects.
They did, then they forgot it. TFA mentions the possibility of making multiple games on the Dragon Age engine, which is exactly what happened with its spiritual predecessors Baldur's Gate and, to a point, Neverwinter Nights.
Still, that's a recipe on making the largest number of quality videogames for the least expenditure of money. What studios are interested in, however, is making the most *money* for least investment, and there's plenty of proof already that making something shiny-but-stupid will net you a lot more money than the opposite.