So is it a true statement that all one really needs is a compression tool to make the video file a reasonable size for transmission, yes?
No. A mere compression tool gets you a lossless codec, and even the best one we have in audio (FLAC) still produces files that are far, *far* bigger than the 'lossy' codecs we all know and love. For video, the storage needs of a lossless codec would be so obscenely large I know of no device that produces them.
The biggest problem of creating a codec is the step where you remove (yes, permanently) the biggest amount of data with the least subjective loss of quality before sending the rest to be compressed, and while there are a few scientific papers on the matter (more for audio than for video, from what I've seen), it's still mostly a trial & error affair.
They can, by abusing certain loopholes of the GPL. And loopholes *they* believe they exist, if Richard M. Stallman and the FSF believe differently (and you can bet they will), Mozilla may have to prove it in courts. Not to mention the *huge* PR loss that'd result from betraying the F/OSS community in such a way, and the brain drain that's sure to follow.
By then I'm sure that even outright patent infringement would've been less damaging.
Let me ask you: what use does a NETbook have for a dual-core CPU, 1 GB of RAM and a 160 GB hard-drive?
Your point would've been valid when netbooks first appeared, but these days they're really rather just tiny notebooks. And if you've got all that power, you may as well use it for something productive don't you think?
Yeah, except with MPEG-LA charging website owners a per-video fee (ensuring most webmasters avoid it) and with both Firefox and Opera refusing to implement it, h.264 already lost the battle as well. It's not about user's devices, it's about websites and no website will pay MPEG-LA's extortion fees and exclude over a fourth of desktop users and a significant part of mobile ones in the process.
It's been Theora or nothing from the very beginning. You argue that it's nothing, then, and I'd be inclined to agree with you, but the idea of h.264 becoming a web standard was dead on arrival. Which is, I suspect, exactly what Microsoft and Adobe wanted from the beginning as the status quo is what benefits them the most.
Ogg Theora won't become relevant until there are hardware decode chips available.
Much like it happened with MP3 and DivX, right? oh, wait, the hardware decoders appeared *after* they became popular. Funny, that.
Why would I install Silverlight to play Ogg when I can use HTML5 and H.264 instead?
Because the owner of the website you're visiting decided he didn't have the money to pay to MPEG-LA for the license, and therefore encoded his videos in Theora only. Remember, the standard doesn't specify both, it specifies *neither*. Some will support both, some will be h.264-only (read: Apple's iTMS), but many others will be Theora-only, and they'll still be HTML5-compliant so you'll have no room to bitch if they decide not to support your iPhone.
Installs in Silverlight but doesn't require additional software?
Huh? That's full-on doublespeak.
No, that's merely assuming Microsoft will start bundling Silverlight with all new versions of Windows/IE sometime in the future. And given their history, particularly that of the.NET framework itself, that's a very reasonable assumption.
Just like Adobe, MS wants Silverlight as THE web platform of the future too. And while some folks might deride Apple for lacking plug-in support of any kind on the iPhone/iPad, it's achieved more in the uptick of standards-compliant sites in the last few years than all the other guys combined.
Source for that? because I've yet to see a website that formerly used flash before the iPhone but now is 100% HTML. As opposed to Firefox, which *did* drive a significant switch from IE-only websites to W3C-compliant HTML code.
H264's patent encumbered, but is a supported, documented standard.
When the organization owning most of the patents over said 'standard' plans on charging per file, the idea of sending the standard to go screw itself is quite tempting. Isn't that what we did with OOXML? oh yes, that's exactly what we did when they tried to pull the same "patented standard" bullshit on us. Except they actually had the decency not to charge per document.
MKV files don't work on bloody anything reliably except VLC, even though they're theoretically an h264 variant.
Err... what? MKV is a container, and one which has nothing to do with h.264 other than the fact that most h.264-encoded stuff on the 'net has decided to use it. Also, they work quite well in all the video players I've tried so far. Though still, I can't understand why you'd bring it up as its completely irrelevant.
We've been using wrapper plug-ins as a dirty, hacky path to web video since the launch of the web proper. Enough's enough.
Sure, but then Apple decided to shot down the actual, working standard to solve that because they couldn't be arsed to update their iPod's firmware, hence our current situation. No, h.264 isn't an option, *YOU* may be alright with submitting the entirety of the world wide web to the whims of a litigious corporation in hopes of having your HD porn streamed directly onto your iPod, but the rest of us aren't. And "the rest of us" includes the second most popular desktop browser and the most popular mobile browser respectively, while the most popular desktop browser doesn't seem to give a crap either way so good luck getting support for your idea.
How is saying an app won an Android Developer Contest not irrelevant to the iPhone platform? That strikes me as the very definition of irrelevancy, because it's not the same platform.
Err, what? as the name says it's not a platform, it's a *contest*. Contests which your product has won are relevant for selling said product, that's Marketing 101. C'mon, I know the RDF is strong and all but it's not rocket science.
Should Direct2Drive remove Rome: Total Waras well for mentioning they got a Best Strategy Game 2004 award from Gamespot, and Crysis Warhead for using the GOTY award Crysis got from PC Gamer as well?
Furthermore, the original poster is pointing out that many apps in the app store today mention Android. Well you just totally blew by that one, didn't you? How do you mesh you assertion that Android is verboten when plainly it's not by the presence of counter-examples?
By asserting that the Apple censors are on crack and may reject you once then accept you once you resubmit the exact same app, simply because you got a different result on the Rejection Roulette. There's enough precedent for that, and it's also the easiest way to explain *your* assertion that mentioning a competing platform is enough grounds to reject an app, given the very same counter-examples.
Watching ladies making out with each other is manly, but the womenfolk tend to complain when you do it in front of them for some reason.
Anyways, I hope you enjoy Dragon Age, I know I did:) though I'm of the kind that's easily obsessed, I spent about four hours on the Character Creator alone before playing, so my experience may not necessarily relate to that of anybody else in this thread.
Not that I support piracy, but pirates often follow the GPL's ideology anyways: they're happy to share what they've just acquired, and plenty of them improve what they get, then share it in the same manner (hence the hundreds upon hundreds of WinXP torrents on TPB et al, seems everybody and their dog has their own 'mix' of the thing). And they generally dismiss anybody who tries to prevent said sharing as a poor idiot trying to block the sun with a finger.
Besides, I'd say the pro-piracy group here at Slashdot is one of the most vocal *anti*-GPL people we have around here. Or what, did you think that the hundreds of "OMG Gimp sux Photoshop rulezzz!!!!" trolls *bought* the goddamned thing!? (and btw no, that doesn't contradict the above paragraph, we get the *stupid* pirates here at Slashdot, the smarter ones are too busy sharing stuff to care).
Why are we holding "mathematics" (whatever that is in this case; the definition is pretty fluid, and I say that as someone with a good bit of experience with the subject) to be unpatentable?
First off, because it's the underlying assumption I made. It also works the other way, if you prefer it: if software can be patentable then so is mathematics and, therefore, any judgement as to the validity of software patents should be made under that assumption. Secondly, because it makes sense, polluting mathematics in particular and science in general with patents goes against the whole concept of collaboration and open share of knowledge.
But most importantly, because that's the law in a huge part of the world, the US included. It's not a radical change as far as legalities are concerned, it's merely reinforcing old ideas already put in practice.
As far as I can tell, either you're saying we should have no patents at all (why or why not?) or you're applying a double standard based on some criteria you haven't bothered to define.
Again, wrong. I'm merely stating "this is the criteria we should use to define whether something is unpatentable, and if we assume it then at least this entire field would be unpatentable, including the patent in question on this thread". I believe my criteria to be reasonable and well within both the letter and the spirit of current laws on the matter (as per above), and it's a fact that if my criteria were applied, software patents in general and the h.264 ones in particular would have to be thrown out.
If patents in general are affected or not simply isn't my concern, nor relevant for the matter at hand.
It's not clear to me why you think building a clever mechanical device to carry out a simple mathematical operation should be patentable
I don't. I specifically said that a physicist should answer that question, as I don't know enough about the subject matter to provide something more than an uninformed opinion. I do know, however, enough about mathematics and software to state that if we hold mathematics to be unpatentable, then it logically follows that software should be equally so. Whether things that can't be described by math should be patentable or not, or whether they exist at all simply isn't my business, nor does it matter as far as the h.264 codec is concerned.
The H.264 parents are not on basic building blocks like FFTs; they're either on clever modifications to these building blocks (think "lighter but just as strong wheel") or on specific ways of combining these blocks.
Let me restate my position a bit simpler and more strongly: if a piece of software, *ANY* piece of software, can theoretically infringe on your patents, your whole patent should be thrown out as far as I'm concerned. How it affects patents on lighter wheels or stronger gears I don't know nor particularly care. I do know, however, that it specifically means goodbye for anything covering h.264.
Well, hold on. How is performing a method using wires carrying electrons to carry a digital signal different from performing a method using wires carrying electrons to carry an analogue signal (e.g. an FM radio receiver)?
Because the method for using wires carrying electrons to carry a digital signal can be accurately described as a Turing Machine (given that it has a software implementation) and therefore, per the Church-Turing thesis, also as a lambda function and a recursive function as well. And some of us feel particularly strongly about bringing patent bullshit to the realm of Mathematics, which the latter two models are a part of.
To put it in layman's terms, anything written for a computer can be described in math, and I (well, and many others) believe anything that can be described in math shouldn't get a fucking patent in the first place.
I'll leave to the physicists in the crowd the matter of seeing whether a similar argument can be made for other kinds of patents as well, though I'd initially say 'no' as I'd say assuming otherwise would imply the universe is deterministic, which is still an open question. But dunno really, I'm no physicist.
One assumes, however, that for such things you'd be better off downloading the damn thing instead of watching it inside your browser, as per the HTML5 video tag is meant to be used.
But by amount of time spent watching, I'd say "no quality at all" ought to be a strong contender. Most of the people I know who use Youtube regularly do so to listen to music videos on demand, and couldn't care less about how the thing looked, which is why so many of said music videos on Youtube are nothing more than a static image with the music playing on the background. And last time I checked Ogg Vorbis was fairly comparable with AAC on low-bitrate audio quality, if not outright superior.
You can say anything you want about the internet as a marketing channel and cheap personal computers being capable of producing albums, but they really aren't. You need a good studio.
Not really, you don't. Specially to compete against the horribly mutilated shit the RIAA puts out.
Best-sounding non-classical album I've ever heard? Jade Leary's Fossildawn, courtesy of Magnatune. Of course, given that the artist in question is a pro musician his 'home studio' is far better than what you'd find at your average 17-years-old's bedroom, but it does show you don't necessarily need RIAA-levels of spending to make a good album either.
They also filter out the crap.
Ohh, yeah. They do *such* a good job at it... I mean, where would the world *be* without Lady GaGa and My Chemical Romance!
No, the RIAA filters out anything that's not easily marketable and sold to the masses. Unfortunately, the masses' tastes *SUCK* which is why there's so many "idiot bimbo singing about sex to electro-pop" and so very little creativity coming from them.
For varying definitions of "working". As an ATI user I must say, the propietary driver is the single worst piece of software I've ever had the displeasure to run on my Linux system, and the only thing besides faulty RAM and a dying HDD to ever cause Linux (yes, the kernel, not just X) lock up on me. It sucks so badly that ArchLinux even removed it from their repositories, prefering to not give it as even an option rather than deal with the support nightmares it causes.
The Open Source driver on the other hand is excellent, stable and completely hassle-free (something I can't quite say of NVidia's propietary driver, though it wasn't nearly as bad as ATI's), and even supports 3D acceleration on older chipsets. My guess is that it won't be long until 3D is also supported on the HD5x00 series as well, development is quite fast on it.
Not just "one day", Microsoft explicitly described everything, from the warnings to the automatic shutdown complete with dates for each, on the website you needed to access to register for the RC. And even for the idiots who click OK before reading, they would've known that it was gonna happen based on the same process the Beta went through late last year and all the reports about it.
There are exactly two kinds of people who will be affected by this: first-year engineering students in the southern hemisphere who are waiting to start classes in March to get their free license through MSDNAA, and illiterate morons.
Gameplay-wise you shouldn't have a problem, specially if you've played any shooter with a cover system. Story-wise, however... I'm not that far into it but from what I've seen, while knowledge of the story of the first game isn't necessary, it does increase your enjoyment of it greatly.
Can't see why you wouldn't pick up ME1 but be interested in ME2 though, care to elaborate on that one?
The simple fact is that 98% of people out there just want their computer to work. They don't care about getting under the hood. If it plays their youtube videos, netflix streaming content, and lets them send some emails and play the latest game they bought from Steam or Best Buy, they're happy. That's all that's needed. So a company catering to that market instead of the 1 or 2 percent who want to tinker under the hood is just good business.
Not really. Today's tinkerer is tomorrow's programmer, and as Monkey Boy so cleverly put it, it's all about "developers, developers, developers!". Microsoft doesn't hold over 90% of the world's desktop marketshare because their OS is a marvel of engineering and their farts smell of sunflowers, they do it because for whatever crap you may think of, somebody, *somewhere* wrote an app to make your life easier at it, and he did it for Microsoft's platform, using Microsoft's tools that were likely given to him for free by Microsoft themselves.
Screw too much with tinkerers, and you run out of developers. Run out of developers, and your shiny platform with all its usability wonders gets bought only by a few idiots with more money than common sense, while everybody else dismisses it as an useless toy. I'm sure you can think of a couple examples of those on your own.
You can change the battery in every iPod, it just takes a little effort rather than a trip to walmart for a new 'pack'. Same for the iPhone. Its certainly possible for anyone who wants to put some effort into it
And by that logic, my cellphone's screen is replaceable as well. Hell, my notebook comes with a Dvorak keyboard too! all I need to do is take out the letters then rearrange them by hand, fun times!
Whine whine, moan moan, bitch bitch, nothing to see here, move along. Don't like Apple, don't buy one. Do you bitch about not being able to modify the ECU in your car? Do you bitch about not being able to change the picture tube/lcd/plasma screen in your TV? Are you mad that you can't upgrade the firmware in your digital thermostat in your home or office?
I can do all those, by your logic above. You just... need to put some effort into it.
Grow the fuck up and get out of Jobs' RDF, it's impairing your ability to think.
It's not stealing. It may or may not be economically harmful but there's no question it's not stealing, much like there's no question your post isn't rape.
Yes, "semantics", sayeth the geek derisively. Semantics do matter in the real world, get used to it.
Because it's a phone. People are used to downloading specialized, overpriced, horrible 'ports' of games for their phones already. Netbooks, however, are a whole different experience with whole different (and higher) expectations.
it's an open question whether it's important to have multiple applications open at the same time in the market netbooks are filling into right now.
Two words: music listening. If you had to close down your browser to listen to music on your netbook, the entire market would likely dissapear overnight.
And then there's the whole issue with pricing, which was the whole reason the netbook movement caught on in the first place. $500 may be cheap for a tablet PC, but it's certainly not for a netbook replacement.
Slashdot Mirror
So is it a true statement that all one really needs is a compression tool to make the video file a reasonable size for transmission, yes?
No. A mere compression tool gets you a lossless codec, and even the best one we have in audio (FLAC) still produces files that are far, *far* bigger than the 'lossy' codecs we all know and love. For video, the storage needs of a lossless codec would be so obscenely large I know of no device that produces them.
The biggest problem of creating a codec is the step where you remove (yes, permanently) the biggest amount of data with the least subjective loss of quality before sending the rest to be compressed, and while there are a few scientific papers on the matter (more for audio than for video, from what I've seen), it's still mostly a trial & error affair.
They can, by abusing certain loopholes of the GPL. And loopholes *they* believe they exist, if Richard M. Stallman and the FSF believe differently (and you can bet they will), Mozilla may have to prove it in courts. Not to mention the *huge* PR loss that'd result from betraying the F/OSS community in such a way, and the brain drain that's sure to follow.
By then I'm sure that even outright patent infringement would've been less damaging.
Let me ask you: what use does a NETbook have for a dual-core CPU, 1 GB of RAM and a 160 GB hard-drive?
Your point would've been valid when netbooks first appeared, but these days they're really rather just tiny notebooks. And if you've got all that power, you may as well use it for something productive don't you think?
Yeah, except with MPEG-LA charging website owners a per-video fee (ensuring most webmasters avoid it) and with both Firefox and Opera refusing to implement it, h.264 already lost the battle as well. It's not about user's devices, it's about websites and no website will pay MPEG-LA's extortion fees and exclude over a fourth of desktop users and a significant part of mobile ones in the process.
It's been Theora or nothing from the very beginning. You argue that it's nothing, then, and I'd be inclined to agree with you, but the idea of h.264 becoming a web standard was dead on arrival. Which is, I suspect, exactly what Microsoft and Adobe wanted from the beginning as the status quo is what benefits them the most.
Ogg Theora won't become relevant until there are hardware decode chips available.
Much like it happened with MP3 and DivX, right? oh, wait, the hardware decoders appeared *after* they became popular. Funny, that.
Why would I install Silverlight to play Ogg when I can use HTML5 and H.264 instead?
Because the owner of the website you're visiting decided he didn't have the money to pay to MPEG-LA for the license, and therefore encoded his videos in Theora only. Remember, the standard doesn't specify both, it specifies *neither*. Some will support both, some will be h.264-only (read: Apple's iTMS), but many others will be Theora-only, and they'll still be HTML5-compliant so you'll have no room to bitch if they decide not to support your iPhone.
Installs in Silverlight but doesn't require additional software?
Huh? That's full-on doublespeak.
No, that's merely assuming Microsoft will start bundling Silverlight with all new versions of Windows/IE sometime in the future. And given their history, particularly that of the .NET framework itself, that's a very reasonable assumption.
Just like Adobe, MS wants Silverlight as THE web platform of the future too. And while some folks might deride Apple for lacking plug-in support of any kind on the iPhone/iPad, it's achieved more in the uptick of standards-compliant sites in the last few years than all the other guys combined.
Source for that? because I've yet to see a website that formerly used flash before the iPhone but now is 100% HTML. As opposed to Firefox, which *did* drive a significant switch from IE-only websites to W3C-compliant HTML code.
H264's patent encumbered, but is a supported, documented standard.
When the organization owning most of the patents over said 'standard' plans on charging per file, the idea of sending the standard to go screw itself is quite tempting. Isn't that what we did with OOXML? oh yes, that's exactly what we did when they tried to pull the same "patented standard" bullshit on us. Except they actually had the decency not to charge per document.
MKV files don't work on bloody anything reliably except VLC, even though they're theoretically an h264 variant.
Err... what? MKV is a container, and one which has nothing to do with h.264 other than the fact that most h.264-encoded stuff on the 'net has decided to use it. Also, they work quite well in all the video players I've tried so far. Though still, I can't understand why you'd bring it up as its completely irrelevant.
We've been using wrapper plug-ins as a dirty, hacky path to web video since the launch of the web proper. Enough's enough.
Sure, but then Apple decided to shot down the actual, working standard to solve that because they couldn't be arsed to update their iPod's firmware, hence our current situation. No, h.264 isn't an option, *YOU* may be alright with submitting the entirety of the world wide web to the whims of a litigious corporation in hopes of having your HD porn streamed directly onto your iPod, but the rest of us aren't. And "the rest of us" includes the second most popular desktop browser and the most popular mobile browser respectively, while the most popular desktop browser doesn't seem to give a crap either way so good luck getting support for your idea.
How is saying an app won an Android Developer Contest not irrelevant to the iPhone platform? That strikes me as the very definition of irrelevancy, because it's not the same platform.
Err, what? as the name says it's not a platform, it's a *contest*. Contests which your product has won are relevant for selling said product, that's Marketing 101. C'mon, I know the RDF is strong and all but it's not rocket science.
Should Direct2Drive remove Rome: Total Waras well for mentioning they got a Best Strategy Game 2004 award from Gamespot, and Crysis Warhead for using the GOTY award Crysis got from PC Gamer as well?
Furthermore, the original poster is pointing out that many apps in the app store today mention Android. Well you just totally blew by that one, didn't you? How do you mesh you assertion that Android is verboten when plainly it's not by the presence of counter-examples?
By asserting that the Apple censors are on crack and may reject you once then accept you once you resubmit the exact same app, simply because you got a different result on the Rejection Roulette. There's enough precedent for that, and it's also the easiest way to explain *your* assertion that mentioning a competing platform is enough grounds to reject an app, given the very same counter-examples.
Watching ladies making out with each other is manly, but the womenfolk tend to complain when you do it in front of them for some reason.
Anyways, I hope you enjoy Dragon Age, I know I did :) though I'm of the kind that's easily obsessed, I spent about four hours on the Character Creator alone before playing, so my experience may not necessarily relate to that of anybody else in this thread.
Not that I support piracy, but pirates often follow the GPL's ideology anyways: they're happy to share what they've just acquired, and plenty of them improve what they get, then share it in the same manner (hence the hundreds upon hundreds of WinXP torrents on TPB et al, seems everybody and their dog has their own 'mix' of the thing). And they generally dismiss anybody who tries to prevent said sharing as a poor idiot trying to block the sun with a finger.
Besides, I'd say the pro-piracy group here at Slashdot is one of the most vocal *anti*-GPL people we have around here. Or what, did you think that the hundreds of "OMG Gimp sux Photoshop rulezzz!!!!" trolls *bought* the goddamned thing!? (and btw no, that doesn't contradict the above paragraph, we get the *stupid* pirates here at Slashdot, the smarter ones are too busy sharing stuff to care).
Why are we holding "mathematics" (whatever that is in this case; the definition is pretty fluid, and I say that as someone with a good bit of experience with the subject) to be unpatentable?
First off, because it's the underlying assumption I made. It also works the other way, if you prefer it: if software can be patentable then so is mathematics and, therefore, any judgement as to the validity of software patents should be made under that assumption. Secondly, because it makes sense, polluting mathematics in particular and science in general with patents goes against the whole concept of collaboration and open share of knowledge.
But most importantly, because that's the law in a huge part of the world, the US included. It's not a radical change as far as legalities are concerned, it's merely reinforcing old ideas already put in practice.
As far as I can tell, either you're saying we should have no patents at all (why or why not?) or you're applying a double standard based on some criteria you haven't bothered to define.
Again, wrong. I'm merely stating "this is the criteria we should use to define whether something is unpatentable, and if we assume it then at least this entire field would be unpatentable, including the patent in question on this thread". I believe my criteria to be reasonable and well within both the letter and the spirit of current laws on the matter (as per above), and it's a fact that if my criteria were applied, software patents in general and the h.264 ones in particular would have to be thrown out.
If patents in general are affected or not simply isn't my concern, nor relevant for the matter at hand.
It's not clear to me why you think building a clever mechanical device to carry out a simple mathematical operation should be patentable
I don't. I specifically said that a physicist should answer that question, as I don't know enough about the subject matter to provide something more than an uninformed opinion. I do know, however, enough about mathematics and software to state that if we hold mathematics to be unpatentable, then it logically follows that software should be equally so. Whether things that can't be described by math should be patentable or not, or whether they exist at all simply isn't my business, nor does it matter as far as the h.264 codec is concerned.
The H.264 parents are not on basic building blocks like FFTs; they're either on clever modifications to these building blocks (think "lighter but just as strong wheel") or on specific ways of combining these blocks.
Let me restate my position a bit simpler and more strongly: if a piece of software, *ANY* piece of software, can theoretically infringe on your patents, your whole patent should be thrown out as far as I'm concerned. How it affects patents on lighter wheels or stronger gears I don't know nor particularly care. I do know, however, that it specifically means goodbye for anything covering h.264.
Well, hold on. How is performing a method using wires carrying electrons to carry a digital signal different from performing a method using wires carrying electrons to carry an analogue signal (e.g. an FM radio receiver)?
Because the method for using wires carrying electrons to carry a digital signal can be accurately described as a Turing Machine (given that it has a software implementation) and therefore, per the Church-Turing thesis, also as a lambda function and a recursive function as well. And some of us feel particularly strongly about bringing patent bullshit to the realm of Mathematics, which the latter two models are a part of.
To put it in layman's terms, anything written for a computer can be described in math, and I (well, and many others) believe anything that can be described in math shouldn't get a fucking patent in the first place.
I'll leave to the physicists in the crowd the matter of seeing whether a similar argument can be made for other kinds of patents as well, though I'd initially say 'no' as I'd say assuming otherwise would imply the universe is deterministic, which is still an open question. But dunno really, I'm no physicist.
One assumes, however, that for such things you'd be better off downloading the damn thing instead of watching it inside your browser, as per the HTML5 video tag is meant to be used.
But by amount of time spent watching, I'd say "no quality at all" ought to be a strong contender. Most of the people I know who use Youtube regularly do so to listen to music videos on demand, and couldn't care less about how the thing looked, which is why so many of said music videos on Youtube are nothing more than a static image with the music playing on the background. And last time I checked Ogg Vorbis was fairly comparable with AAC on low-bitrate audio quality, if not outright superior.
As soon as you find what? a german, a home, a work, or a life?
You can say anything you want about the internet as a marketing channel and cheap personal computers being capable of producing albums, but they really aren't. You need a good studio.
Not really, you don't. Specially to compete against the horribly mutilated shit the RIAA puts out.
Best-sounding non-classical album I've ever heard? Jade Leary's Fossildawn, courtesy of Magnatune. Of course, given that the artist in question is a pro musician his 'home studio' is far better than what you'd find at your average 17-years-old's bedroom, but it does show you don't necessarily need RIAA-levels of spending to make a good album either.
They also filter out the crap.
Ohh, yeah. They do *such* a good job at it... I mean, where would the world *be* without Lady GaGa and My Chemical Romance!
No, the RIAA filters out anything that's not easily marketable and sold to the masses. Unfortunately, the masses' tastes *SUCK* which is why there's so many "idiot bimbo singing about sex to electro-pop" and so very little creativity coming from them.
Well they have a working proprietary driver.
For varying definitions of "working". As an ATI user I must say, the propietary driver is the single worst piece of software I've ever had the displeasure to run on my Linux system, and the only thing besides faulty RAM and a dying HDD to ever cause Linux (yes, the kernel, not just X) lock up on me. It sucks so badly that ArchLinux even removed it from their repositories, prefering to not give it as even an option rather than deal with the support nightmares it causes.
The Open Source driver on the other hand is excellent, stable and completely hassle-free (something I can't quite say of NVidia's propietary driver, though it wasn't nearly as bad as ATI's), and even supports 3D acceleration on older chipsets. My guess is that it won't be long until 3D is also supported on the HD5x00 series as well, development is quite fast on it.
Not just "one day", Microsoft explicitly described everything, from the warnings to the automatic shutdown complete with dates for each, on the website you needed to access to register for the RC. And even for the idiots who click OK before reading, they would've known that it was gonna happen based on the same process the Beta went through late last year and all the reports about it.
There are exactly two kinds of people who will be affected by this: first-year engineering students in the southern hemisphere who are waiting to start classes in March to get their free license through MSDNAA, and illiterate morons.
Gameplay-wise you shouldn't have a problem, specially if you've played any shooter with a cover system. Story-wise, however... I'm not that far into it but from what I've seen, while knowledge of the story of the first game isn't necessary, it does increase your enjoyment of it greatly.
Can't see why you wouldn't pick up ME1 but be interested in ME2 though, care to elaborate on that one?
Yeah. Then we realized how idiotic is the concept of a language that's understood only by a single individual, and promptly discarded it.
The simple fact is that 98% of people out there just want their computer to work. They don't care about getting under the hood. If it plays their youtube videos, netflix streaming content, and lets them send some emails and play the latest game they bought from Steam or Best Buy, they're happy. That's all that's needed. So a company catering to that market instead of the 1 or 2 percent who want to tinker under the hood is just good business.
Not really. Today's tinkerer is tomorrow's programmer, and as Monkey Boy so cleverly put it, it's all about "developers, developers, developers!". Microsoft doesn't hold over 90% of the world's desktop marketshare because their OS is a marvel of engineering and their farts smell of sunflowers, they do it because for whatever crap you may think of, somebody, *somewhere* wrote an app to make your life easier at it, and he did it for Microsoft's platform, using Microsoft's tools that were likely given to him for free by Microsoft themselves.
Screw too much with tinkerers, and you run out of developers. Run out of developers, and your shiny platform with all its usability wonders gets bought only by a few idiots with more money than common sense, while everybody else dismisses it as an useless toy. I'm sure you can think of a couple examples of those on your own.
You can change the battery in every iPod, it just takes a little effort rather than a trip to walmart for a new 'pack'. Same for the iPhone. Its certainly possible for anyone who wants to put some effort into it
And by that logic, my cellphone's screen is replaceable as well. Hell, my notebook comes with a Dvorak keyboard too! all I need to do is take out the letters then rearrange them by hand, fun times!
Whine whine, moan moan, bitch bitch, nothing to see here, move along. Don't like Apple, don't buy one. Do you bitch about not being able to modify the ECU in your car? Do you bitch about not being able to change the picture tube/lcd/plasma screen in your TV? Are you mad that you can't upgrade the firmware in your digital thermostat in your home or office?
I can do all those, by your logic above. You just... need to put some effort into it.
Grow the fuck up and get out of Jobs' RDF, it's impairing your ability to think.
It's not stealing. It may or may not be economically harmful but there's no question it's not stealing, much like there's no question your post isn't rape.
Yes, "semantics", sayeth the geek derisively. Semantics do matter in the real world, get used to it.
Missing Flash hasn't killed the iPhone
Because it's a phone. People are used to downloading specialized, overpriced, horrible 'ports' of games for their phones already. Netbooks, however, are a whole different experience with whole different (and higher) expectations.
it's an open question whether it's important to have multiple applications open at the same time in the market netbooks are filling into right now.
Two words: music listening. If you had to close down your browser to listen to music on your netbook, the entire market would likely dissapear overnight.
And then there's the whole issue with pricing, which was the whole reason the netbook movement caught on in the first place. $500 may be cheap for a tablet PC, but it's certainly not for a netbook replacement.
Like TeX? though Knuth, being the badass that he is, did it with an exponential curve rather than a logarithmic one.