So? the beauty of C# is having a great language available for Linux, for running Windows apps we already have Wine, which doesn't restrict itself to just.NET apps.
"You can't predict the future" is a lousy excuse for anything. Hey, I should have sex with that drunken, 17-years-old idiot, maybe I'll die tomorrow and if I get her pregnant now my genes will live on! or maybe I'll catch AIDS, but hey! you can't predict the future.
For those of us whose brains aren't dominated by greed, yeah, there is such thing as "enough money". Sure, if I were offered a million bucks right now I'd take it, but only because I could invest it, live off the profits, leave my job and spend the rest of my life studying mathematics and examining the world's toughest problems. This guy managed to do that *before* being offered the million bucks, so what would he need it for?
Really? why is it "he's a genius, but he's got some mental disorders" instead of "he's a genius, therefore maybe they aren't really mental disorders after all"?
I don't think *you* know what "evil" means. "Evil" is a moral qualifier, and morality being entirely subjective, you *cannot* state "this practice is not evil" without suffixing it with an "in my opinion".
Apple's control-obsessed tendencies may not be evil for *you*, but that does not mean they aren't for anybody else. Stop trying to push your own opinion onto everybody else.
How much software do you have on your computer right now? how many times have you wrote to a project maintainer to say "hey, I tried your project and it works fine, keep up the good work!"?
And that is why people do not, and *should* not, put much weight behind the complainers.
Building your own netbook is impractical to most people. Building your own space station is, similarly, impractical for both people. But if you believe both are equally impractical, your brain is more impractical than both of them combined.
You simply can't compare paying a programmer to work for you, something that many companies both large and small do everyday, with purchasing one of the biggest companies on the planet just to get them to switch an element in its interface.
When was the last time you had the opportunity to add new features to your alarm clock by purchasing them from the manufacturer's special store? right.
Crippled as they may be, the iPad, iPod et al are computers, regardless of what the apologists may claim. They aren't marketed as appliances, they don't work as appliances, and they don't compete against appliances, therefore there are *no* reasons to consider them as such other than the fact that it makes Apple sound slightly less evil.
Pity they went to the opposite extreme and put an OS far too limited for it to be useful. I mean, sure I can live without Windows, but I do expect at least Android.
The difference is that our 'loyalty', so to speak, isn't to the GPL per se but rather the rights contained within. It's not GPLv2 clause 3a we care about, it's the right to possess the source-code of the programs that run on our machines, the outcry over GPL violations is less because they violated the text of the license and more because we feel they infringed on our rights as users, and would do so even if the entirety of copyright law was abolished tomorrow.
Imagine how many more there would be if creative people could infuse their ideas with things that inspired them as a child, things that have been around for longer than half a century before they were born, without worrying about getting sued for an absolutely ridiculous sum of money.
You don't have to imagine, it's called "Youtube". The fact that so few of its users care about copyrights is precisely the reason for this story, and I love them all the more for it.
Of course over 90% of it is complete and utter crap, but that goes for everything else as well and if you don't believe me you can always turn the radio on.
Because they can be sure the open standard will be supported *everywhere*, whereas the closed ones may or may not be present depending on the particular manufacturer, model, time of release, and perhaps even the carrier it is connected to.
Well, or it would be so if Apple hadn't thrown a tantrum when the W3C wanted to declare Theora the baseline standard. As it stands, now *all* codecs are in that situation and the only thing you can rely on is that the parser won't throw a fit over the tag itself, for all the good that does to you.
Linux has gained momentum in its areas by being superior for developers and sysadmins who know what they're doing. Firefox gained momentum the same way. I can't think of an open source product that gained mainstream popularity without being technically superior.
It depends on how you define "popularity" and "superior", but FreeBSD vs Linux (the BSD lawsuit was a factor, but that became moot before Linux hit even 1.0), KHTML vs Gecko, OpenOffice vs LaTeX (or Abiword/Gnumeric). Some would also argue for Bash vs $FAVORITE_SHELL_HERE as well but I haven't tried any of them to judge personally.
So, only people who spend their valuable time and money getting an open phone instead of the iPhone are worthy of consideration in this debate? Like it or not, the iPhone's dominance isn't because of any media blitz or cult of Apple, it's because it came out in a market where it was by far the best choice and is still superior to any other smartphone I've seen.
Really? if it can't support Wikipedia, then I guess it wasn't the best choice after all. All devices have problems, it just so happens that you chose one that had "closedness" and "dominated by a NIH-riddled corporation" as theirs.
So, if you want to prioritize openness in your purchasing, that's fine. But this is about Wikipedia trying to influence the culture as a whole and the emerging standard, and to suggest that this process ignore the vast majority of people is at best naive and at worst extremely damaging to your own position.
What the *fuck* are youn talking about? if this is "trying to influence the culture as a whole", then what is Apple's refusal to support Theora in Safari, outright rape of the pillars of our society? don't be so melodramatic, this is simply the logical consequence of Wikipedia's policies regarding free access to its information. Requiring payment of royalties to a third-party corporation for each uploaded video (as h.264 will become once the "free" period expires) would be very much a 180 degree turn from that. Audio in Wikipedia is already in Ogg Vorbis instead of the more popular-among-the-masses MP3 or the more popular-among-the-nerds AAC, requiring Theora was only expected.
In fact, you may notice that this project isn't about making Wikipedia require Theora, they already do, all this projects aims at is to upload *more* videos, to make Wikipedia's video content more pervasive and, as such, regular people would be more likely to complain when their phone manufacturer refuses to support it and they're suddenly left with a text-only website.
Case in point, JPEG. There's been a plethora of better formats for all intents and purposes throughout the years, yet the only one that has managed to get a foothold in the web market is PNG, and more as a replacement for the patent-riddled GIF instead.
Standards have never been about "the best", they've always been about what's "good enough" and easy enough to implement everywhere, h.264 fails horribly at the latter by requiring royalties from both decoders and encoders, and necessitating the use of dedicated hardware decoders to achieve acceptable performance under any device smaller than a typical desktop.
If you and a thousand idiots want to run their lolcat websites with h.264 videos, be my guest. Just keep your own goddamned patented technology *off* the official standard.
There's a much simpler explanation out there, however: they simply haven't sued them yet. Intel didn't magically become an abusive monopolist when they were sued by the EU, they were sued by the EU *because* they had behaved like abusive monopolists for years before then.
But of course, we had Intel fanboys claiming up and down that Intel was merely a normal business player and that AMD was just a sore loser until the last minute before the lawsuit. Actually, scratch that, we still had them months *after* that. Some people just can't ever stop looking at their favorite corp through rose-tinted glasses.
Well it was lack of standardization of video formats and lack of standardization of presentation, lack of control of presentation, etc. The HTML video tag takes care of most of it; standardizing on MPEG4 w/H264 takes care of most of the rest. Flash shouldn't be necessary.
Yeah, unless we don't want people be forced to pay to upload videos online. Or we want browsers from other than big multinationals. Or we want to avoid any of the other myriad problems standardizing on a patented format brings.
Au contraire, I think the fact that you're downloading pirated movies in DivX format and burning them to DVDs, playing them in your player is an indication that you're the technophile. A non-technophile wouldn't bother with something even that complicated.
I don't, I'm merely exposing the failure of backing up h.264 because of its widespread support, when there are multiple formats with *much* wider support that you happen to ignore.
Well first, you'd need an upgrade path one way or the other unless you want to stick with old technology forever.
You mean, like HTTP or JPG? or perhaps POSIX? "old technology" is what standards are all about, they're not about giving us the shiniest and newest, they're about setting *one* format, *one* specification as the standard and sticking with it so anybody building upon them (be it hardware or software) can be certain that it'll work with it. You have completely and utterly missed the entire point of having standards in the first place.
Meh. Sort of. In another sense, it's not patent infringement so long as the patent holder isn't going to ask you to stop.
Never in my post did I suggest that having a high UID means your opinions and comments are invalid, particularily because mine isn't what one would consider 'low' to begin with. All I said is that it's best if it's yesterday's newcomers who take the responsability to educate today's new users instead of always demanding the creators to do it while the rest of us sit back and watch.
Perhaps it's just you women who need to stop being so paranoid and see discrimination everywhere they look.
Oh, right. So you're saying, "back before the HTML5 and the 'video' tag, Flash was better than other methods of embedding videos"? Yeah, that's why there's the new tag.
So? it wasn't the lack of tags that drove us to the codec hell of old, it was the lack of an official standard required to be implemented on any and all platforms. Same here.
You implied that I was assuming everyone had iPods. The point is, a wide variety of vendors and manufacturers support H264.
No, I implied that you were assuming everyone had expensive, brand-name players. Most people don't, and what most people have does not support h.264.
Ok... but what format do you put on your portable music player? You might use ogg, and you'd kind of have me there, but really... come on... most people use patent-encumbered formats. If you're going to say that we can't realistically put video into H264, then how is it that we've put almost all audio into MP3?
Blantant patent infringement, as I said. By having h.264 in the HTML5 standard you're forcing anybody who wants to implement an HTML5-compliant device/application (and, in the future, for *using* said devices/applications) to pay for the priviledge or commit an illegal act to do so. That requirement is not only unprecedented in the history of the web, but detrimental to its very objective of allowing anyone and everyone to communicate in it freely.
Even ignoring examples like the PS3, XBox360, and other set-top boxes which include DVD drives, I don't know for sure that there aren't DVD players that have support for H264. I see lots of DVD players saying they support MPEG-4, and I don't know which, if any, support H264 as a subset of that. They might for all I know.
They don't, h.264 requires far more processing power than DVDs and DivX so it's simply not cost-effective. And you're vastly overestimating the penetration rates of the PS360.
But the reason I don't know that is because I'm not silly enough to go burning each of my movies to DVD so I can play them in a DVD player. Next you'll be complaining that your VHS player doesn't support H264.
That's because you're a technophile, which is precisely why you're unsuited to comment on such matters. That you're happy to spend hundreds of dollars getting the latest shiny doesn't mean everybody else does, and that fact makes you blind to the simple, obvious fact that h.264 is *NOT* the most widely supported format out there, and if that were truly your reason for standing behind it you'd be backing up DivX instead.
Rather, you're backing it up because in your mind it's the 'best' we have, and while that'd normally be a valid reason to support it, such thinking is what led us to the codec hell of the pre-Flash days in the first place. Tell me, when h.265 comes around in a couple years, are *you* willing to stand up and say "no, we must stay with h.264 as it's what has the widest support in spite of its marked inferiority"? no, you'll say "ahh well, support will come eventually, go h.265!" along with every other technophile, unable to comprehend why people would settle with what they have just to save a couple hundreds of dollars when there's something *BETTER* out there.
Not necessarily "we", though, slightly more knowledgeable newbies work just as well. In fact that's how large communities tend to operate in the long run, CmdrTaco doesn't go on spreading Slashdot's standards of netiquette to the ~1.5m UID newbies, it's the ~1m UIDs who do so who were in turn trained by us 900k'ers, which we learnt from the 700k'ers and so on.
Slashdot Mirror
So? the beauty of C# is having a great language available for Linux, for running Windows apps we already have Wine, which doesn't restrict itself to just .NET apps.
"You can't predict the future" is a lousy excuse for anything. Hey, I should have sex with that drunken, 17-years-old idiot, maybe I'll die tomorrow and if I get her pregnant now my genes will live on! or maybe I'll catch AIDS, but hey! you can't predict the future.
For those of us whose brains aren't dominated by greed, yeah, there is such thing as "enough money". Sure, if I were offered a million bucks right now I'd take it, but only because I could invest it, live off the profits, leave my job and spend the rest of my life studying mathematics and examining the world's toughest problems. This guy managed to do that *before* being offered the million bucks, so what would he need it for?
Really? why is it "he's a genius, but he's got some mental disorders" instead of "he's a genius, therefore maybe they aren't really mental disorders after all"?
Just wondering.
Opera can't spy on *everything* you do, only on the stuff you see through their browser. Apple, on the other hand, can.
Keep that in mind next time you turn your iPhone on, 'kay?
I don't think *you* know what "evil" means. "Evil" is a moral qualifier, and morality being entirely subjective, you *cannot* state "this practice is not evil" without suffixing it with an "in my opinion".
Apple's control-obsessed tendencies may not be evil for *you*, but that does not mean they aren't for anybody else. Stop trying to push your own opinion onto everybody else.
Any and all definitions of "freedom" come with restrictions.
How much software do you have on your computer right now? how many times have you wrote to a project maintainer to say "hey, I tried your project and it works fine, keep up the good work!"?
And that is why people do not, and *should* not, put much weight behind the complainers.
With apologies to Asimov:
Building your own netbook is impractical to most people. Building your own space station is, similarly, impractical for both people. But if you believe both are equally impractical, your brain is more impractical than both of them combined.
You simply can't compare paying a programmer to work for you, something that many companies both large and small do everyday, with purchasing one of the biggest companies on the planet just to get them to switch an element in its interface.
When was the last time you had the opportunity to add new features to your alarm clock by purchasing them from the manufacturer's special store? right.
Crippled as they may be, the iPad, iPod et al are computers, regardless of what the apologists may claim. They aren't marketed as appliances, they don't work as appliances, and they don't compete against appliances, therefore there are *no* reasons to consider them as such other than the fact that it makes Apple sound slightly less evil.
Pity they went to the opposite extreme and put an OS far too limited for it to be useful. I mean, sure I can live without Windows, but I do expect at least Android.
Which is particularly sad as many actual pedophiles fail at the first one.
I would say that an algorithm is in every sense an invention just as much as a drug or a machine.
And I would say an algorithm is very much the same as a mathematical expression instead.
Petty piracy and real 'dollar bills' piracy are two completely different acts deserving of their own consideration, don't you think?
No.
The difference is that our 'loyalty', so to speak, isn't to the GPL per se but rather the rights contained within. It's not GPLv2 clause 3a we care about, it's the right to possess the source-code of the programs that run on our machines, the outcry over GPL violations is less because they violated the text of the license and more because we feel they infringed on our rights as users, and would do so even if the entirety of copyright law was abolished tomorrow.
Imagine how many more there would be if creative people could infuse their ideas with things that inspired them as a child, things that have been around for longer than half a century before they were born, without worrying about getting sued for an absolutely ridiculous sum of money.
You don't have to imagine, it's called "Youtube". The fact that so few of its users care about copyrights is precisely the reason for this story, and I love them all the more for it.
Of course over 90% of it is complete and utter crap, but that goes for everything else as well and if you don't believe me you can always turn the radio on.
Because they can be sure the open standard will be supported *everywhere*, whereas the closed ones may or may not be present depending on the particular manufacturer, model, time of release, and perhaps even the carrier it is connected to.
Well, or it would be so if Apple hadn't thrown a tantrum when the W3C wanted to declare Theora the baseline standard. As it stands, now *all* codecs are in that situation and the only thing you can rely on is that the parser won't throw a fit over the tag itself, for all the good that does to you.
Linux has gained momentum in its areas by being superior for developers and sysadmins who know what they're doing. Firefox gained momentum the same way. I can't think of an open source product that gained mainstream popularity without being technically superior.
It depends on how you define "popularity" and "superior", but FreeBSD vs Linux (the BSD lawsuit was a factor, but that became moot before Linux hit even 1.0), KHTML vs Gecko, OpenOffice vs LaTeX (or Abiword/Gnumeric). Some would also argue for Bash vs $FAVORITE_SHELL_HERE as well but I haven't tried any of them to judge personally.
So, only people who spend their valuable time and money getting an open phone instead of the iPhone are worthy of consideration in this debate? Like it or not, the iPhone's dominance isn't because of any media blitz or cult of Apple, it's because it came out in a market where it was by far the best choice and is still superior to any other smartphone I've seen.
Really? if it can't support Wikipedia, then I guess it wasn't the best choice after all. All devices have problems, it just so happens that you chose one that had "closedness" and "dominated by a NIH-riddled corporation" as theirs.
So, if you want to prioritize openness in your purchasing, that's fine. But this is about Wikipedia trying to influence the culture as a whole and the emerging standard, and to suggest that this process ignore the vast majority of people is at best naive and at worst extremely damaging to your own position.
What the *fuck* are youn talking about? if this is "trying to influence the culture as a whole", then what is Apple's refusal to support Theora in Safari, outright rape of the pillars of our society? don't be so melodramatic, this is simply the logical consequence of Wikipedia's policies regarding free access to its information. Requiring payment of royalties to a third-party corporation for each uploaded video (as h.264 will become once the "free" period expires) would be very much a 180 degree turn from that. Audio in Wikipedia is already in Ogg Vorbis instead of the more popular-among-the-masses MP3 or the more popular-among-the-nerds AAC, requiring Theora was only expected.
In fact, you may notice that this project isn't about making Wikipedia require Theora, they already do, all this projects aims at is to upload *more* videos, to make Wikipedia's video content more pervasive and, as such, regular people would be more likely to complain when their phone manufacturer refuses to support it and they're suddenly left with a text-only website.
Case in point, JPEG. There's been a plethora of better formats for all intents and purposes throughout the years, yet the only one that has managed to get a foothold in the web market is PNG, and more as a replacement for the patent-riddled GIF instead.
Standards have never been about "the best", they've always been about what's "good enough" and easy enough to implement everywhere, h.264 fails horribly at the latter by requiring royalties from both decoders and encoders, and necessitating the use of dedicated hardware decoders to achieve acceptable performance under any device smaller than a typical desktop.
Once free and open Internet? What is Flash then?
Not part of the official standard.
If you and a thousand idiots want to run their lolcat websites with h.264 videos, be my guest. Just keep your own goddamned patented technology *off* the official standard.
There's a much simpler explanation out there, however: they simply haven't sued them yet. Intel didn't magically become an abusive monopolist when they were sued by the EU, they were sued by the EU *because* they had behaved like abusive monopolists for years before then.
But of course, we had Intel fanboys claiming up and down that Intel was merely a normal business player and that AMD was just a sore loser until the last minute before the lawsuit. Actually, scratch that, we still had them months *after* that. Some people just can't ever stop looking at their favorite corp through rose-tinted glasses.
Well it was lack of standardization of video formats and lack of standardization of presentation, lack of control of presentation, etc. The HTML video tag takes care of most of it; standardizing on MPEG4 w/H264 takes care of most of the rest. Flash shouldn't be necessary.
Yeah, unless we don't want people be forced to pay to upload videos online. Or we want browsers from other than big multinationals. Or we want to avoid any of the other myriad problems standardizing on a patented format brings.
Au contraire, I think the fact that you're downloading pirated movies in DivX format and burning them to DVDs, playing them in your player is an indication that you're the technophile. A non-technophile wouldn't bother with something even that complicated.
I don't, I'm merely exposing the failure of backing up h.264 because of its widespread support, when there are multiple formats with *much* wider support that you happen to ignore.
Well first, you'd need an upgrade path one way or the other unless you want to stick with old technology forever.
You mean, like HTTP or JPG? or perhaps POSIX? "old technology" is what standards are all about, they're not about giving us the shiniest and newest, they're about setting *one* format, *one* specification as the standard and sticking with it so anybody building upon them (be it hardware or software) can be certain that it'll work with it. You have completely and utterly missed the entire point of having standards in the first place.
Meh. Sort of. In another sense, it's not patent infringement so long as the patent holder isn't going to ask you to stop.
You just keep on believing that, boy.
Never in my post did I suggest that having a high UID means your opinions and comments are invalid, particularily because mine isn't what one would consider 'low' to begin with. All I said is that it's best if it's yesterday's newcomers who take the responsability to educate today's new users instead of always demanding the creators to do it while the rest of us sit back and watch.
Perhaps it's just you women who need to stop being so paranoid and see discrimination everywhere they look.
Oh, right. So you're saying, "back before the HTML5 and the 'video' tag, Flash was better than other methods of embedding videos"? Yeah, that's why there's the new tag.
So? it wasn't the lack of tags that drove us to the codec hell of old, it was the lack of an official standard required to be implemented on any and all platforms. Same here.
You implied that I was assuming everyone had iPods. The point is, a wide variety of vendors and manufacturers support H264.
No, I implied that you were assuming everyone had expensive, brand-name players. Most people don't, and what most people have does not support h.264.
Ok... but what format do you put on your portable music player? You might use ogg, and you'd kind of have me there, but really... come on... most people use patent-encumbered formats. If you're going to say that we can't realistically put video into H264, then how is it that we've put almost all audio into MP3?
Blantant patent infringement, as I said. By having h.264 in the HTML5 standard you're forcing anybody who wants to implement an HTML5-compliant device/application (and, in the future, for *using* said devices/applications) to pay for the priviledge or commit an illegal act to do so. That requirement is not only unprecedented in the history of the web, but detrimental to its very objective of allowing anyone and everyone to communicate in it freely.
Even ignoring examples like the PS3, XBox360, and other set-top boxes which include DVD drives, I don't know for sure that there aren't DVD players that have support for H264. I see lots of DVD players saying they support MPEG-4, and I don't know which, if any, support H264 as a subset of that. They might for all I know.
They don't, h.264 requires far more processing power than DVDs and DivX so it's simply not cost-effective. And you're vastly overestimating the penetration rates of the PS360.
But the reason I don't know that is because I'm not silly enough to go burning each of my movies to DVD so I can play them in a DVD player. Next you'll be complaining that your VHS player doesn't support H264.
That's because you're a technophile, which is precisely why you're unsuited to comment on such matters. That you're happy to spend hundreds of dollars getting the latest shiny doesn't mean everybody else does, and that fact makes you blind to the simple, obvious fact that h.264 is *NOT* the most widely supported format out there, and if that were truly your reason for standing behind it you'd be backing up DivX instead.
Rather, you're backing it up because in your mind it's the 'best' we have, and while that'd normally be a valid reason to support it, such thinking is what led us to the codec hell of the pre-Flash days in the first place. Tell me, when h.265 comes around in a couple years, are *you* willing to stand up and say "no, we must stay with h.264 as it's what has the widest support in spite of its marked inferiority"? no, you'll say "ahh well, support will come eventually, go h.265!" along with every other technophile, unable to comprehend why people would settle with what they have just to save a couple hundreds of dollars when there's something *BETTER* out there.
If you want true freedom of code, you need to accept using code in a way you don't accept with. Otherwise it's not really freedom, is it?
Ways like putting your own name on it instead of the original developer's. The BSD license doesn't allow that, therefore it's not free either.
Ahh, absolute statements, aren't they a blast?
Not necessarily "we", though, slightly more knowledgeable newbies work just as well. In fact that's how large communities tend to operate in the long run, CmdrTaco doesn't go on spreading Slashdot's standards of netiquette to the ~1.5m UID newbies, it's the ~1m UIDs who do so who were in turn trained by us 900k'ers, which we learnt from the 700k'ers and so on.