Yes, I did read them, I was merely commenting that the viewpoint of calling a format still in widespread use such as AVI and DivX "obsolete" and using it as one of the reasons for not supporting it is more typical among Mac developers than OSS ones, which is a fact.
Their announcement would've been taken far nicer had they simply said "the code is stagnant and there's nobody left to maintain it, so we're dropping it" rather than trying to justify themselves with their "obsolete" BS.
The most ubiquitous and popular portable video format is still AVI/DivX, sorry. H.264 is the AAC to DivX's MP3, it may be technically better and many of the mega-hyped products may support it, but by and large the rest of the world doesn't give a damn about it or even know its existence.
We have availability of fast and reliable open source x264 H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC encoder and the wide spread usage of Matroska (MKV) container files and MPEG 4 (MP4) container files. Even some set-top boxes support playback of video and audio from both containers now and more are announced for this year.
All of which are priced so insanely high as to make the prospect of buying a PS3 just to watch movies a reasonable proposition. Whereas my DivX-compatible DVD player cost me what? $60? and that was about 4 years ago, I'm guessing they're even cheaper now.
Until you fix *THAT* little problem and lower prices to a reasonable level, no, it won't be time to move anywhere else yet.
Actually, I'd say it's more of a typical Mac developer mindset: "what!? you haven't upgraded your hardware in over 6 months? don't even ASK me to give you support, you penniless peasant". Multiplatform OSS apps like VLC and MEncoder even let you encode to MPEG-2 if that's what you want.
Given how 'cooperative' his parents were with the authorities, most likely. Pity, though, few have such enthusiasm so young.
If such a thing had happened to me, my parents would've been in school the next morning to demand a public apology from both the school and the vice-principal himself, as well as any required paperwork necessary to transfer me to another school.
Just like Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory's campaign did?
No, if anything is going to suck, my money is on the multiplayer mode. But seeing what they did with the SC series, even that is a bit doubtful for me.
"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult." -- C. A. R. Hoare
Arguing whether Forza or Gran Turismo is better is like asking whether horseshit or bullshit tastes better: sad, stupid, and irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
Just get a PC and a proper driving sim, like Race '07 or Live for Speed. Then you'll see what *real* racing feels like.
It's like the difference between a guy trying to hit on every girl he meets, and a rapist. Both try to maximize the amount of sex they have, but they both go through *very* different paths to do so.
They put out cool tech, and (usually) they don't try to cripple them for their own benefit, as they realize there's more money to be had in having more users and a bigger market than in providing an "unified" experience or whatever's the newest excuse Microsoft and Apple throw at us whenever they play the lock-in game. And they most certainly haven't thrown anybody in prison for putting their business model in danger, ala Adobe.
Are they perfect? no, they aren't. Neither are RedHat or Sun. But as far as big business goes, they ain't that bad either.
There are far more dead-tree booksellers out there besides Amazon than there are for eBooks, therefore one would imagine Amazon represents a far bigger percentage of total eBook sales than of regulra ones, therefore one would assume that, among Amazon customers, the ratio of eBook/dead-tree sales would be significantly higher than the global average, therefore making any extrapolation from Amazon's sales to the industry at large dubious at best.
Problem is, you're only considering the artists we wouldn't have had without copyright, while neglecting to pay any mind to those we've lost because of it.
As enticing as the monetary aspects of copyrights are to a lot of people, the possibility of being sued to death by established corporations for making something that (accidentally or otherwise) resembles in any way one of their own products feels like a giant Sword of Damocles hanging over their proverbial artist head.
I'm sure somebody would reply with "then create something completely new!" so I'll preempt it by saying that *all* art is derivative in one way or another, even Disney, one of the biggest proponents of copyrights ever lives and dies by copying other people's work and making it prettier.
Says who? it could be argued that there was nothing *illegal* in what they did (though to state that as certain would require a judge and a court), but there are plenty of good reasons to argue that what they did was, in fact, wrong.
There's no such thing as an isolated morality. I.e., there is no personal morality. We might believe that our personal sense of right and wrong exists apart from society, but this is false.
Wrong. All morality is personal, there's no such thing as group morality, most certainly not of a whole society.
When the fuck are people gonna stop posting about topics they know nothing about? go take a couple classes on Ethics then come back.
In a nutshell, "what he did was illegal so anything the police and Blizzard did to catch him is fair deal". The problems with that ideology are obvious.
It is perfectly consistent to believe that drugs should be illegal, yet Blizzard should've kept his information private until a judge forced them otherwise.
So, let's say you do away with that. You say "Information scarcity is artificial, from now on, all information can be copied freely." Ok, how then do the creators of it eat? What do they do to make money?
It depends on the product they make. What kind of moron would try to apply the same model to banking software as they do to rap music?
I've always wondered why so many people on slashdot find the right to profit of your creation to be such a bad thing. (I.e. artificial scarcity).
"The right to profit of your creation" doesn't necessarily imply "artificial scarcity", that's just one of the (many) models we've found for it.
It's especially odd for a site full of software engineers.etc. whose livelihood often depends on artificial scarcity.
Not really. Most of the world's code never sees the light outside the company that wrote it, so even if the whole model of "artificial scarcity" were to be outlawed tomorrow, the software engineering field wouldn't be affected much in terms of employement.
And yes, all the examples you mention are bad. There are ways to finance innovation without restricting others' rights, they may not work for everybody, but neither does the "artificial scarcity" model and we at least are fed up with its restrictions already.
If you can tell the two apart with 100% accuracy, then you can skip writing comments.
Unfortunately, I've never met a developer that could.
I can. To my own standards.
The thing that everybody always misses, is that the difference between a "good" and a "bad" comment is entirely subjective. Sure, most people would agree that a "returns X" comment for a get_x() method is useless, and most would say that your average Perl one-liner must always be accompained by a suitable comment, but its in that nebulous middle ground where opinions are split, depending on the programmer, his team, their respective abilities and experience, the time-frames involved and myriad other factors.
So most people try to guesstimate conservatively, and comment more than they feel they should. But even then, it only takes one unusual programmer or a stupid manager with the idea that "everything should be commented" no matter how trivial, and we get yet another "proof" of the average programmer's supposed arrogance and disdain for commenting their code.
For somebody with a background in Philosophy it ought to have been obvious: either you allow people to "oppress" others verbally, or you "oppress" those who would "oppress" others verbally. Either way, there's no escaping the "oppression" (if it really can be called as such).
We, as a Western society, have decided to go for the former and allow all speech to be made, even when it's unpleasant. We call it "Freedom of Speech", and its one right we, Slashdotters in general, are very proud of.
Furthermore, we mock everybody and everything. Rape victims, murderers, suicidal people, terrorists attacks, child pornographers, think of any subject and there's at least one or two +5, Funny posts regarding it in Slashdot's ample archive. So yeah, grow the fuck up and stop playing the victim here just because your grandpa was Chinese.
However, is this not exactly the type of unfair treatment that a considerable section of the/. population professes against?
Not really. Most of Slashdot, regardless of political leanings, maintains a healthy policy of making fun of everybody and everything, favoring Free Speech and to hell with political correctness.
If Michael Jackson didn't get a free pass by virtue of being dead, you ain't getting any simply by being Chinese.
Then why can't we grant a different copyright to the new adaptation?
We do. That's why classical CDs are still under copyright, despite them being interpretations of works hundreds of years old. Doesn't quite solve the adaptation problem, however, as the copyright falls under the one who did the adaptation rather than the original creator.
Perhaps a better solution would be extending the "moral rights" concept that's been floating around, where artists maintain the right to determine how their work is used even on already licensed copies, and making it outlive copyright itself as well. Though I'm not convinced it's a problem that needs to be solved in the first place, honestly.
People lived an average of 35 years because for every guy who lived to be 70 there was a baby who died at childbirth. In truth, life expectancy for those who manage to reach adulthood hasn't changed much for the last thousand years.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I did read them, I was merely commenting that the viewpoint of calling a format still in widespread use such as AVI and DivX "obsolete" and using it as one of the reasons for not supporting it is more typical among Mac developers than OSS ones, which is a fact.
Their announcement would've been taken far nicer had they simply said "the code is stagnant and there's nobody left to maintain it, so we're dropping it" rather than trying to justify themselves with their "obsolete" BS.
The most ubiquitous and popular portable video format is still AVI/DivX, sorry. H.264 is the AAC to DivX's MP3, it may be technically better and many of the mega-hyped products may support it, but by and large the rest of the world doesn't give a damn about it or even know its existence.
We have availability of fast and reliable open source x264 H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC encoder and the wide spread usage of Matroska (MKV) container files and MPEG 4 (MP4) container files. Even some set-top boxes support playback of video and audio from both containers now and more are announced for this year.
All of which are priced so insanely high as to make the prospect of buying a PS3 just to watch movies a reasonable proposition. Whereas my DivX-compatible DVD player cost me what? $60? and that was about 4 years ago, I'm guessing they're even cheaper now.
Until you fix *THAT* little problem and lower prices to a reasonable level, no, it won't be time to move anywhere else yet.
Actually, I'd say it's more of a typical Mac developer mindset: "what!? you haven't upgraded your hardware in over 6 months? don't even ASK me to give you support, you penniless peasant". Multiplatform OSS apps like VLC and MEncoder even let you encode to MPEG-2 if that's what you want.
Given how 'cooperative' his parents were with the authorities, most likely. Pity, though, few have such enthusiasm so young.
If such a thing had happened to me, my parents would've been in school the next morning to demand a public apology from both the school and the vice-principal himself, as well as any required paperwork necessary to transfer me to another school.
The FCC wasn't created to do TCPIP.
IT WAS CREATED TO DEAL WITH POWER AND FREQUENCY!
Err, yeah. And the British Army was created to deal with swords and pikes, not assault rifles.
I agree that these kinds of legislations should be kept out of the internet at large, not just the web, but your argument just plain sucks.
Just like Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory's campaign did?
No, if anything is going to suck, my money is on the multiplayer mode. But seeing what they did with the SC series, even that is a bit doubtful for me.
If you think patents from other companies aren't as trivial as those, you haven't looked hard enough. Or read Slashdot for long.
"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult." -- C. A. R. Hoare
Arguing whether Forza or Gran Turismo is better is like asking whether horseshit or bullshit tastes better: sad, stupid, and irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
Just get a PC and a proper driving sim, like Race '07 or Live for Speed. Then you'll see what *real* racing feels like.
No, you just suck at finding good games. Try the Total War series or Red Orchestra, then name me a game from the NES/SNES era that compares to them.
So is the entirety of this thread, in case you hadn't noticed.
It's like the difference between a guy trying to hit on every girl he meets, and a rapist. Both try to maximize the amount of sex they have, but they both go through *very* different paths to do so.
They put out cool tech, and (usually) they don't try to cripple them for their own benefit, as they realize there's more money to be had in having more users and a bigger market than in providing an "unified" experience or whatever's the newest excuse Microsoft and Apple throw at us whenever they play the lock-in game. And they most certainly haven't thrown anybody in prison for putting their business model in danger, ala Adobe.
Are they perfect? no, they aren't. Neither are RedHat or Sun. But as far as big business goes, they ain't that bad either.
There are far more dead-tree booksellers out there besides Amazon than there are for eBooks, therefore one would imagine Amazon represents a far bigger percentage of total eBook sales than of regulra ones, therefore one would assume that, among Amazon customers, the ratio of eBook/dead-tree sales would be significantly higher than the global average, therefore making any extrapolation from Amazon's sales to the industry at large dubious at best.
Problem is, you're only considering the artists we wouldn't have had without copyright, while neglecting to pay any mind to those we've lost because of it.
As enticing as the monetary aspects of copyrights are to a lot of people, the possibility of being sued to death by established corporations for making something that (accidentally or otherwise) resembles in any way one of their own products feels like a giant Sword of Damocles hanging over their proverbial artist head.
I'm sure somebody would reply with "then create something completely new!" so I'll preempt it by saying that *all* art is derivative in one way or another, even Disney, one of the biggest proponents of copyrights ever lives and dies by copying other people's work and making it prettier.
Says who? it could be argued that there was nothing *illegal* in what they did (though to state that as certain would require a judge and a court), but there are plenty of good reasons to argue that what they did was, in fact, wrong.
There's no such thing as an isolated morality. I.e., there is no personal morality. We might believe that our personal sense of right and wrong exists apart from society, but this is false.
Wrong. All morality is personal, there's no such thing as group morality, most certainly not of a whole society.
When the fuck are people gonna stop posting about topics they know nothing about? go take a couple classes on Ethics then come back.
In a nutshell, "what he did was illegal so anything the police and Blizzard did to catch him is fair deal". The problems with that ideology are obvious.
It is perfectly consistent to believe that drugs should be illegal, yet Blizzard should've kept his information private until a judge forced them otherwise.
So, let's say you do away with that. You say "Information scarcity is artificial, from now on, all information can be copied freely." Ok, how then do the creators of it eat? What do they do to make money?
It depends on the product they make. What kind of moron would try to apply the same model to banking software as they do to rap music?
Ohh, the creators of copyright, that's who.
I've always wondered why so many people on slashdot find the right to profit of your creation to be such a bad thing. (I.e. artificial scarcity).
"The right to profit of your creation" doesn't necessarily imply "artificial scarcity", that's just one of the (many) models we've found for it.
It's especially odd for a site full of software engineers .etc. whose livelihood often depends on artificial scarcity.
Not really. Most of the world's code never sees the light outside the company that wrote it, so even if the whole model of "artificial scarcity" were to be outlawed tomorrow, the software engineering field wouldn't be affected much in terms of employement.
And yes, all the examples you mention are bad. There are ways to finance innovation without restricting others' rights, they may not work for everybody, but neither does the "artificial scarcity" model and we at least are fed up with its restrictions already.
If you can tell the two apart with 100% accuracy, then you can skip writing comments.
Unfortunately, I've never met a developer that could.
I can. To my own standards.
The thing that everybody always misses, is that the difference between a "good" and a "bad" comment is entirely subjective. Sure, most people would agree that a "returns X" comment for a get_x() method is useless, and most would say that your average Perl one-liner must always be accompained by a suitable comment, but its in that nebulous middle ground where opinions are split, depending on the programmer, his team, their respective abilities and experience, the time-frames involved and myriad other factors.
So most people try to guesstimate conservatively, and comment more than they feel they should. But even then, it only takes one unusual programmer or a stupid manager with the idea that "everything should be commented" no matter how trivial, and we get yet another "proof" of the average programmer's supposed arrogance and disdain for commenting their code.
For somebody with a background in Philosophy it ought to have been obvious: either you allow people to "oppress" others verbally, or you "oppress" those who would "oppress" others verbally. Either way, there's no escaping the "oppression" (if it really can be called as such).
We, as a Western society, have decided to go for the former and allow all speech to be made, even when it's unpleasant. We call it "Freedom of Speech", and its one right we, Slashdotters in general, are very proud of.
Furthermore, we mock everybody and everything. Rape victims, murderers, suicidal people, terrorists attacks, child pornographers, think of any subject and there's at least one or two +5, Funny posts regarding it in Slashdot's ample archive. So yeah, grow the fuck up and stop playing the victim here just because your grandpa was Chinese.
However, is this not exactly the type of unfair treatment that a considerable section of the /. population professes against?
Not really. Most of Slashdot, regardless of political leanings, maintains a healthy policy of making fun of everybody and everything, favoring Free Speech and to hell with political correctness.
If Michael Jackson didn't get a free pass by virtue of being dead, you ain't getting any simply by being Chinese.
Then why can't we grant a different copyright to the new adaptation?
We do. That's why classical CDs are still under copyright, despite them being interpretations of works hundreds of years old. Doesn't quite solve the adaptation problem, however, as the copyright falls under the one who did the adaptation rather than the original creator.
Perhaps a better solution would be extending the "moral rights" concept that's been floating around, where artists maintain the right to determine how their work is used even on already licensed copies, and making it outlive copyright itself as well. Though I'm not convinced it's a problem that needs to be solved in the first place, honestly.
People lived an average of 35 years because for every guy who lived to be 70 there was a baby who died at childbirth. In truth, life expectancy for those who manage to reach adulthood hasn't changed much for the last thousand years.