Yes, it is. And still there's a difference between a GUI that was well-designed by people who know something about HCI and... well, to be polite, one that wasn't.
Yeah. Which makes one think that, if the best HCI experts could come up with was the OSX GUI, perhaps they should be ranked below telephone sanitizers in terms of usefulness to the world.
Don't try to pass off your personal preference as some sort of objectively superior choice, it only serves to promote the impression that Apple users are nothing but a bunch of elitist morons.
True. Thing is, however, that we've been screwed for so long by copyright laws that to many of us, this Google deal is a perfect opportunity to shout "fuck you!" to those scumbags in return, even if it's not the best way to go about it (mostly because only Google gets the benefits, the "opt-out" can stay as far as I'm concerned).
If it were so she'd have been murdered already, given that the copyright expiration clock doesn't start ticking as long as she breathes.
Though given that corporations can't generally think 5 minutes ahead of them, let alone 50 years, it may just be that I'm giving corps far more credit than they deserve.
"Somewhat" popular, yeah. I still remember web developers going to hell and back for IE4 back when it had less than half of Firefox's current marketshare. They still do for IE6 despite being barely a tenth of the web's population.
Don't delude yourself, H.264 was already dead as a standard the moment MPEG-LA decided to license it under terms unacceptable to the Mozilla Foundation. The only question is whether Google and Apple will go to Theora or the video tag will die and we'll all go back to Flash, most likely the latter.
There's also the issue of merely having two hours to introduce a story with all those involved in it, and then bring it to conclusion.
But yeah, for the most part it is Hollywood writers just being ignorant. As the saying goes, "never watch movies about your own profession", it's just a pity that computers are so fucking prevalent in today's age:(
That's still more realistic than paying MPEG-LA, given that pushing additional burdens onto their users goes against the GPL. Still, the final choice is likely gonna be "ship Theora and to hell with MPEG-4". Which, in turn, will make the situation a "Theora or continue with Flash" for everybody else, as Firefox's marketshare is one that website owners cannot afford to ignore, so it's up to Google and Apple to see if they can swallow up their ego and implement a Free standard or not.
That forcing website devs to choose between Silverlight/Flash and inconveniencing the user to install some illegal plugin on their browsers is similarly unproductive.
Time for Mozilla to face reality and pay up the license as Apple and Google have done.
Or simply throw a decoder in, and block the Mozilla website to any IP originating from the US. We get shiny new codec, Mozilla doesn't violate the GPL by throwing in additional demands upon their users, and the US goes further down the drain for being the legislative hell-hole that it is, win for all.
Welcome to the wonderful, wonderful world of Software Patents. Or well, patents in general, they're all about taking control of the work somebody else did with his own two hands merely because it's in some way similar to what you thought of a decade ago.
They've had no problem using patented technology in the past (such as GIF)
As far as I can remember, any and all patents covering *viewing* GIFs were long expired, and the only ones that remained were a bunch covering *creating* GIFs and, therefore, Mozilla was in the clear. Not so here, where even decoding h.264 is illegal without the appropiate, oh-so-bloody-expensive license.
- Opera is a commercial product and they do a lot of business in embedded devices, mobile phones, wii and tv's and so on. They probably want to get a tech to play video for devices without new Flash versions (especially since it's 100% Adobe's responsibility to update Flash on those devices and Opera can't do much about it)
They do, but an open one. I'd say Opera has been even more vocal about their distaste for MPEG4's patents than Firefox has, likely because, being the little guy in most of the world, they're painfully aware as to how such mandatory licenses increase the barrier to entry and exclude anybody who's not already a large corporation from entering the market.
Since Firefox already has it's Gecko engine and wide range of plugins, why don't they make themself more reasons to forget about Flash and start using open standards?
Sure, as soon as MPEG-4 is an open standard and all patents covering it are released into the Public Domain.
Than which OS? because WinXP, Win7, OSX, Linux/GNOME and Linux/KDE all look different from each other, so obviously they can't design for all of them at the same time.
I believe the submitter got confused between Cecil and Kain (y'know, the good/bad/good/whatever guy from FFIV), and further confused the Dragoon in the screenshot with him, leading to his statement in TFS.
The first Resident Evil movie, Final Fantasy: Advent Children, the first two anime Street Fighter movies, and the upcoming movies for both the Assassin's Creed and Prince of Persia franchises look pretty good so far as well.
And then there's the unparalled genius of comedy called "Super Mario Bros. The Movie".
And on the same vein, Quantum of Solace which I'm playing right now. It may not be as good as the legendary Goldeneye, but it's certainly above average.
In the '60s, the NRA spent ten years and $12 million developing a bullet able to be fired by blind people. It's a relatively light powder charge in a large caliber cartdrige with a reliably-expanding jacketed hollowpoint, designed so it can injure attackers at contact distance while being relatively harmless to people at range. Russians, however, just used a knife.
And 3) Mods raise customers' expectations for future products. Most Morrowind players were dissapointed with Oblivion despite it being (other than the "level up with you" issue) a far superior product in nearly every aspect, simply because it couldn't compete with a modded version of the same. Same with STALKER: Clear Sky with respect to Shadow of Chernobyl, and there's probably other examples I'm forgetting right now.
What did you expect? creating anything worthy of being compared to Beethoven's Eroica would be an *extremely* expensive endeavor (far above the budget of an indie dev studio) and, given the sales of Classical music today, not a particularly profitable one either.
Hell, I'm surprised the average ~15 years old tolerates purely instrumental music in games such as MGS3 rather than demanding Guns 'n Roses or some shit like that. Anything beyond that would be asking far too much from the ignorant masses.
Then taken over by graphic designers and, later, Adobe's marketing department. In fact, they screwed it up so badly Adobe started *ANOTHER* app by-photographers-for-photographers just to keep them happy, Lightroom, because they were already running away from its bloated and nightmarish interface to Apple Aperture and similar programs.
Photoshop is the only piece of software that makes Vista look lean by comparison.
No they didn't. They explained why AVI doesn't support most of the features they do, but that doesn't mean they can't support it nor why they'd refuse to support DivX in the future as well (they can't do it now since the code is lacking a maintainer, so that is understandable, but refusing under any circumstance to add support for it again is mere arrogance).
And yes, if somebody refused to support Windows XP for being "obsolete", I'd call him an arrogant prick as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Except most "ordinary" people are using Windows, not OSX. Just thought it needed to be mentioned.
Yes, it is. And still there's a difference between a GUI that was well-designed by people who know something about HCI and... well, to be polite, one that wasn't.
Yeah. Which makes one think that, if the best HCI experts could come up with was the OSX GUI, perhaps they should be ranked below telephone sanitizers in terms of usefulness to the world.
Don't try to pass off your personal preference as some sort of objectively superior choice, it only serves to promote the impression that Apple users are nothing but a bunch of elitist morons.
I love how all the people proposing these theories here have never published a book that actually could be sold for real money.
No, we for the most part create far more useful works. You may know them as "software" and "mathematics".
True. Thing is, however, that we've been screwed for so long by copyright laws that to many of us, this Google deal is a perfect opportunity to shout "fuck you!" to those scumbags in return, even if it's not the best way to go about it (mostly because only Google gets the benefits, the "opt-out" can stay as far as I'm concerned).
If it were so she'd have been murdered already, given that the copyright expiration clock doesn't start ticking as long as she breathes.
Though given that corporations can't generally think 5 minutes ahead of them, let alone 50 years, it may just be that I'm giving corps far more credit than they deserve.
"Somewhat" popular, yeah. I still remember web developers going to hell and back for IE4 back when it had less than half of Firefox's current marketshare. They still do for IE6 despite being barely a tenth of the web's population.
Don't delude yourself, H.264 was already dead as a standard the moment MPEG-LA decided to license it under terms unacceptable to the Mozilla Foundation. The only question is whether Google and Apple will go to Theora or the video tag will die and we'll all go back to Flash, most likely the latter.
There's also the issue of merely having two hours to introduce a story with all those involved in it, and then bring it to conclusion.
But yeah, for the most part it is Hollywood writers just being ignorant. As the saying goes, "never watch movies about your own profession", it's just a pity that computers are so fucking prevalent in today's age :(
That's still more realistic than paying MPEG-LA, given that pushing additional burdens onto their users goes against the GPL. Still, the final choice is likely gonna be "ship Theora and to hell with MPEG-4". Which, in turn, will make the situation a "Theora or continue with Flash" for everybody else, as Firefox's marketshare is one that website owners cannot afford to ignore, so it's up to Google and Apple to see if they can swallow up their ego and implement a Free standard or not.
H.264 is as open as Microsoft Shared Source or OOXML. Forgive me, then, if I don't really consider it "open".
That forcing website devs to choose between Silverlight/Flash and inconveniencing the user to install some illegal plugin on their browsers is similarly unproductive.
Time for Mozilla to face reality and pay up the license as Apple and Google have done.
Or simply throw a decoder in, and block the Mozilla website to any IP originating from the US. We get shiny new codec, Mozilla doesn't violate the GPL by throwing in additional demands upon their users, and the US goes further down the drain for being the legislative hell-hole that it is, win for all.
Welcome to the wonderful, wonderful world of Software Patents. Or well, patents in general, they're all about taking control of the work somebody else did with his own two hands merely because it's in some way similar to what you thought of a decade ago.
They've had no problem using patented technology in the past (such as GIF)
As far as I can remember, any and all patents covering *viewing* GIFs were long expired, and the only ones that remained were a bunch covering *creating* GIFs and, therefore, Mozilla was in the clear. Not so here, where even decoding h.264 is illegal without the appropiate, oh-so-bloody-expensive license.
- Opera is a commercial product and they do a lot of business in embedded devices, mobile phones, wii and tv's and so on. They probably want to get a tech to play video for devices without new Flash versions (especially since it's 100% Adobe's responsibility to update Flash on those devices and Opera can't do much about it)
They do, but an open one. I'd say Opera has been even more vocal about their distaste for MPEG4's patents than Firefox has, likely because, being the little guy in most of the world, they're painfully aware as to how such mandatory licenses increase the barrier to entry and exclude anybody who's not already a large corporation from entering the market.
Since Firefox already has it's Gecko engine and wide range of plugins, why don't they make themself more reasons to forget about Flash and start using open standards?
Sure, as soon as MPEG-4 is an open standard and all patents covering it are released into the Public Domain.
Than which OS? because WinXP, Win7, OSX, Linux/GNOME and Linux/KDE all look different from each other, so obviously they can't design for all of them at the same time.
I believe the submitter got confused between Cecil and Kain (y'know, the good/bad/good/whatever guy from FFIV), and further confused the Dragoon in the screenshot with him, leading to his statement in TFS.
Well, if I wanted power I wouldn't be looking at either of them to begin with.
Care to tell us manufacturer and model? I'd like to make sure not to purchase from them ever again.
The first Resident Evil movie, Final Fantasy: Advent Children, the first two anime Street Fighter movies, and the upcoming movies for both the Assassin's Creed and Prince of Persia franchises look pretty good so far as well.
And then there's the unparalled genius of comedy called "Super Mario Bros. The Movie".
And on the same vein, Quantum of Solace which I'm playing right now. It may not be as good as the legendary Goldeneye, but it's certainly above average.
In the '60s, the NRA spent ten years and $12 million developing a bullet able to be fired by blind people. It's a relatively light powder charge in a large caliber cartdrige with a reliably-expanding jacketed hollowpoint, designed so it can injure attackers at contact distance while being relatively harmless to people at range. Russians, however, just used a knife.
And 3) Mods raise customers' expectations for future products. Most Morrowind players were dissapointed with Oblivion despite it being (other than the "level up with you" issue) a far superior product in nearly every aspect, simply because it couldn't compete with a modded version of the same. Same with STALKER: Clear Sky with respect to Shadow of Chernobyl, and there's probably other examples I'm forgetting right now.
What did you expect? creating anything worthy of being compared to Beethoven's Eroica would be an *extremely* expensive endeavor (far above the budget of an indie dev studio) and, given the sales of Classical music today, not a particularly profitable one either.
Hell, I'm surprised the average ~15 years old tolerates purely instrumental music in games such as MGS3 rather than demanding Guns 'n Roses or some shit like that. Anything beyond that would be asking far too much from the ignorant masses.
Photoshop was started by photographers.
Then taken over by graphic designers and, later, Adobe's marketing department. In fact, they screwed it up so badly Adobe started *ANOTHER* app by-photographers-for-photographers just to keep them happy, Lightroom, because they were already running away from its bloated and nightmarish interface to Apple Aperture and similar programs.
Photoshop is the only piece of software that makes Vista look lean by comparison.
No they didn't. They explained why AVI doesn't support most of the features they do, but that doesn't mean they can't support it nor why they'd refuse to support DivX in the future as well (they can't do it now since the code is lacking a maintainer, so that is understandable, but refusing under any circumstance to add support for it again is mere arrogance).
And yes, if somebody refused to support Windows XP for being "obsolete", I'd call him an arrogant prick as well.