I don't see why video will be any different once there is actually an accepted standard for it.
XviD isn't even a candidate in this, even though it has far wider support in both hardware and software than h.264. Why? "ohh, h.264 is much better". What makes you think the same won't happen with h.264 itself?
I've got no concerns over h.264 patents. The only people are those who have an agenda to push.
Wrong. Either you live outside the US, or you *should* worry about h.264 because MPEG certainly cares about you or anyone else who uses their patent without the requisite license.
Other than 'I can't just use their code without paying for it', I've yet to see any other reason not to use h264, please enlighten me, without resorting to FUD (i.e. copyright/patent bullshit).
Per-user licensing schemes are incompatible with most Free Software licenses. If you want to know more, ask a lawyer, I'm not one. Opera could, of course, pay for them but they oppose it on philosophical grounds since that automatically raises the barrier of entry on the browser market which only benefits currently-established companies.
If these browsers get to the point where they're all offering a clearly superior experience on the web, and Microsoft is still dragging their feet, they will eventually become irrelevant themselves.
Exactly. Which is precisely why Microsoft isn't doing anything, and probably won't. Apple's NIH syndrome and Google's bandwidth interests will prevent them from accepting Theora, Mozilla's legal and Opera's monetary problems with H.264 prevent them from accepting it in turn, and neither faction holds enough leverage over the web to 'win' here without Microsoft's support.
End result? no single codec is picked as the standard, web developers ignore the video tag and continue relying on Flash, the status quo is maintained, Microsoft's position isn't in danger, all without them having to do a single thing. Exactly the best possible scenario for them.
Anyone looking for Microsoft to settle this matter should, IMHO, start looking elsewhere.
No standard is, arguably, better than H.264 since this way at least Firefox and Opera can claim to be standards-compliant without paying any kind of fee.
Inferior standard. Judging from HTML4, by the time we could safely drop HTML5 support from our web browsers there'll be at least a dozen codecs that perform far, *far* better than H.264 does today so alleged superiority buys us very little, there'll still be a time where people interested in performance ignore the standard altogether. On the other hand, H.264's patent concerns will be with us for the next ~20 years, so Theora's advantage in ease of implementation will likely hold up for a much longer time.
Yeah, so? the question isn't whether somebody somewhere is listening to Paul McCartney's songs for free, the question is whether the guy who decided his song *was* worth $1 to him should be inconvenienced by DRM.
Don't use DRM, and I'll support you against the infringer. Use it, and I won't give a crap about you. Defend it, and I'll go out of my way to aid the infringement.
Of course. What better way for people to be robbed of their intellectual property and the fruits of their hard work than to find that they cannot patent it, so it will be ripped off by the nearest corporation with the deepest pockets.
They already are being ripped off so, at worst, nothing would change. Being able to crush any independant inventor is one of the (many) perks you get when you have a portfolio of thousands of patents and the best legal teams money can buy.
But perhaps you could point me to a couple examples where the little guy was able to *successfully* prevent a large corporation from ripping off his inventions without him being destroyed in the following countersuit, I know of none such example and I'm not aware of any story like that being posted here at Slashdot.
Aye, my memory failed me a little, it was regarding 386BSD, FreeBSD's progenitor, rather than FreeBSD itself (see here). But my point still stands: Linus' original reason for creating Linux is no longer valid, does that mean we need to kill Linux or that it serves no useful purpose anymore?
And you still haven't answered why are you posting your rant on a discussion about mobile platforms, which doesn't concern either Gnome or KDE in the slightest.
Fact is, the Qt bindings for those languages are more comprehensive and more up to date than the GTK counterparts.
Do you have a source for that statement? because I've just tried PyQt again and, while its very nice and a far cry from the mess I tried ~3 years ago, so is PyGTK and I can't find any difference between either that doesn't come from the toolkits themselves rather than the bindings. And while I haven't tried Qt# yet, I have a hard time believing it could be better than Gtk# which is maintained by some of the people behind Gtk and Gnome themselves.
Without, and from reading a few Qt tutorials it seems that as long as you stay within it, it does make C++ programming much nicer and easier than 'pure' C++, so I'm gonna try writing a 'real' app in it now, thanks!
That time originated there as well is just a theory, nothing definitional about it as far as I know.
This may be an interesting read and likely what the GP meant, but in short: you can't say what's going "back" and what's going "forwards" in time without measuring entropy, and you can't do that without an universe. Though IANAP so perhaps I'm not understanding the page right, so dunno.
My main issue is that Qt is pretty strongly tied to C++, and I *despise* that language. Whereas GTK in C may be horrible, but the bindings to Python, Ruby and C# are all excellent and a newbie dev could easily believe they were designed for them from day one.
However, all the other advantages you mention are still valid, plus Nokia controls Qt so overall I support this move, it was the most logical thing they could do. They've lost me as a developer, but I don't think anyone's gonna cry over that;)
Its not all that fun to *you*, but I can perfectly see how a young economist or a math undergrad studying game theory may find it fascinating.
Personally, if it didn't have monthly fees I'd probably be playing it now, the concept sounds interesting to witness at the very least, if not to experience it by oneself. Though I hate scamming and PKing so I'd probably be nothing but a bum in there.
I believe that's what it does on Win7 but, not being very familiar with either the antivirus nor the OS I can't confirm it. It did make the whole screen go dark just like your average UAC prompt at least.
Kinda funny how that works. I mean, how many people are going to watch a completely obvious Starwars ripoff that contributes little or nothing to the storyline of the universe? It would be a total financial loss for the idiot who tried it.
Last I heard, Eragon was even getting a sequel. It certainly did for the books, at least.
Which is why I hate it when people like me suggest laxer copyright laws, and somebody replies "but you can already give up some of your rights in the license itself, don't force others to give up theirs". Yeah, you can act nice all you want but inevitably some idiot will come, take advantage of you and your work and all with the law on his side.
What should've happened is that a law should've been passed stating that only actual text can be copyrighted, not character names or plot ideas, thereby removing any teeth the nutcase's lawsuit would've had.
I'm sure my scenario has more than a few flaws, I haven't thought of it hard enough and I'm not a writer in any case, but it seems at first glance much more logical. As the saying goes, ideas are cheap, its the execution that matters and, as bad as they are, I believe people should have the right to write fanfiction for anything they care about without asking anyone for permission.
Unless, of course, you make the antivirus itself pop up a simple "Yes/No" dialog when its attempted to be uninstalled, warning that malware could be the one behind it. That's what Avast! did last time I uninstalled it, its simple, efficient, and the antivirus app doesn't get classified by *me* as malware unlike dear old Norton.
If I want to lend someone an ebook I simply email it to them. This means I can lend any book to anyone I know, anywhere in the world within seconds.
Unless you bought it from Amazon. And almost all of your advantages are also met by my aging Palm T3, its only missing the e-Ink display but is, nevertheless, quite comfortable for reading long books. Plus its much cheaper and does a lot more stuff, like playing chess or listening to music;)
In the ideal world, software would *do what I mean*, not *do what I say*.
No it shouldn't, and the reason is quite simple. And no, it's not 'elitism' or any of those red herrings you're throwing.
Lack of formalized languages has done enough harm elsewhere, you can take a relatively complex phrase in English and two people will come up with two different meanings for it. Perhaps they'll only differ sightly, perhaps not, but chances are they won't be perfectly interchangeable. Extrapolate that to software, and you have pretty much the same situation as today only worse: IE interprets your mistakes one way, Firefox another, Opera yet another one and suddenly the stuff that was supposed to be "standardized", ain't.
Take your example of the strong and em tags, but lets extend it a bit further and say you've defined (for some unknown reason) to define in CSS that 'strong' displays in Arial and 'em' in Times. You write <strong><em>hi</strong></em>, simple enough right? yeah, except that which font should it use? assume the standard specifies that inner tags overwrite the style of outer ones. IE decides that, since you wrote <strong> first, thats the outer one and so uses Times. But Firefox sees that <strong> was *closed* first and so is the inner one, therefore it should go with Arial.
Both are valid interpretations for such a simple mistake, yet both produce drastically different results. Make a not-so-trivial example, and the number of possible interpretations increases exponentially.
Computers are designed to be deterministic and therefore so must be the languages that it must speak. And having "intelligent" computers that "guess" what you meant instead of following a predetermined, standardized pattern and complaining loudly if they can't (another very important rule of programming, btw) is not only incredibly more difficult to write, but also to *use*. HTML5 is a step in the right direction since it tries to standardize the ways browsers must deal with faulty input, but had the web be stricter from day one this problem wouldn't have arisen in the first place.
Angry much? I understand perfectly well your point, which is why I can say with full confidence that its stupid.
To put it simply, you don't know what free speech is. Its not meant to protect our ability to say crap like "I love this country!", that's allowed *everywhere*, even in China or Korea. What's meant to protect is our ability to say *unpleasant* things, things you, I or our government may not want to hear, may not want it get said at all. So to state that we wouldn't have the government meddling with our free speech rights if we didn't say "wrong" things is stupid, if they're throwing us in jail for saying the "wrong" thing we didn't have any right to begin with.
Our right is the ability to enjoy our free speech rights, to say whatever we want. Our responsability, the one that comes with it, is to respect other people's free speech rights when *they* say something we don't want to hear. You don't like that, fine, I do, and that's not "avoiding responsability". It is, in fact, living up to the very responsabilities that come with free speech, I don't like what she did, I don't like what she said, but I'm willing to protect it as much as I want my own words to be. If you're not it's your right, but don't pretend you care about free speech.
Seriously, if you are not checking html code coming in from users, something is not right. They could destroy your page with some of those unclosed tags.
Do you even know what free speech is? its the ability to say whatever you want without fearing the government coming down on you for it. It doesn't matter *what* kind of speech it is, the government itself can't define manners of "unacceptable" speech to censor without infringing on it regardless of motives.
The responsabilities that comes with free speech are that, for instance, if I tell my girlfriend that she's a fat cow and she decides to dump me the government *also* won't do a thing at her since dumping someone isn't illegal by itself, and that I cannot try to prevent her from calling me a stupid jerk in return either, since its my responsability to protect free speech.
And you know what? I'm planning on exercising my rights to free speech right here and now: FUCK YOU, and please go shove your anti-freedom ideals up your own arse. If people want to (deservedly) mod me down -1, Flamebait for that comment I'm prepared for it, *THAT* is my responsability, not wait until you throw the government at me for offending you and just take it without complains.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, he played the game (actually fighting villains) and was hated for it.
So? if he cares about being "hated" by random people off the 'net he's nothing more than a crybaby if you ask me.
It all depends on your particular level of cynism, you see.
I don't see why video will be any different once there is actually an accepted standard for it.
XviD isn't even a candidate in this, even though it has far wider support in both hardware and software than h.264. Why? "ohh, h.264 is much better". What makes you think the same won't happen with h.264 itself?
I've got no concerns over h.264 patents. The only people are those who have an agenda to push.
Wrong. Either you live outside the US, or you *should* worry about h.264 because MPEG certainly cares about you or anyone else who uses their patent without the requisite license.
Other than 'I can't just use their code without paying for it', I've yet to see any other reason not to use h264, please enlighten me, without resorting to FUD (i.e. copyright/patent bullshit).
Per-user licensing schemes are incompatible with most Free Software licenses. If you want to know more, ask a lawyer, I'm not one. Opera could, of course, pay for them but they oppose it on philosophical grounds since that automatically raises the barrier of entry on the browser market which only benefits currently-established companies.
If these browsers get to the point where they're all offering a clearly superior experience on the web, and Microsoft is still dragging their feet, they will eventually become irrelevant themselves.
Exactly. Which is precisely why Microsoft isn't doing anything, and probably won't. Apple's NIH syndrome and Google's bandwidth interests will prevent them from accepting Theora, Mozilla's legal and Opera's monetary problems with H.264 prevent them from accepting it in turn, and neither faction holds enough leverage over the web to 'win' here without Microsoft's support.
End result? no single codec is picked as the standard, web developers ignore the video tag and continue relying on Flash, the status quo is maintained, Microsoft's position isn't in danger, all without them having to do a single thing. Exactly the best possible scenario for them.
Anyone looking for Microsoft to settle this matter should, IMHO, start looking elsewhere.
No standard is, arguably, better than H.264 since this way at least Firefox and Opera can claim to be standards-compliant without paying any kind of fee.
Inferior standard. Judging from HTML4, by the time we could safely drop HTML5 support from our web browsers there'll be at least a dozen codecs that perform far, *far* better than H.264 does today so alleged superiority buys us very little, there'll still be a time where people interested in performance ignore the standard altogether. On the other hand, H.264's patent concerns will be with us for the next ~20 years, so Theora's advantage in ease of implementation will likely hold up for a much longer time.
Yeah, so? the question isn't whether somebody somewhere is listening to Paul McCartney's songs for free, the question is whether the guy who decided his song *was* worth $1 to him should be inconvenienced by DRM.
Don't use DRM, and I'll support you against the infringer. Use it, and I won't give a crap about you. Defend it, and I'll go out of my way to aid the infringement.
Of course. What better way for people to be robbed of their intellectual property and the fruits of their hard work than to find that they cannot patent it, so it will be ripped off by the nearest corporation with the deepest pockets.
They already are being ripped off so, at worst, nothing would change. Being able to crush any independant inventor is one of the (many) perks you get when you have a portfolio of thousands of patents and the best legal teams money can buy.
But perhaps you could point me to a couple examples where the little guy was able to *successfully* prevent a large corporation from ripping off his inventions without him being destroyed in the following countersuit, I know of none such example and I'm not aware of any story like that being posted here at Slashdot.
Aye, my memory failed me a little, it was regarding 386BSD, FreeBSD's progenitor, rather than FreeBSD itself (see here). But my point still stands: Linus' original reason for creating Linux is no longer valid, does that mean we need to kill Linux or that it serves no useful purpose anymore?
And you still haven't answered why are you posting your rant on a discussion about mobile platforms, which doesn't concern either Gnome or KDE in the slightest.
And Linus began Linux because he didn't know FreeBSD existed. Now he does.
Your point? and while we're at it, you could explain why you're posting this on a discussion about mobile frameworks.
Fact is, the Qt bindings for those languages are more comprehensive and more up to date than the GTK counterparts.
Do you have a source for that statement? because I've just tried PyQt again and, while its very nice and a far cry from the mess I tried ~3 years ago, so is PyGTK and I can't find any difference between either that doesn't come from the toolkits themselves rather than the bindings. And while I haven't tried Qt# yet, I have a hard time believing it could be better than Gtk# which is maintained by some of the people behind Gtk and Gnome themselves.
Without, and from reading a few Qt tutorials it seems that as long as you stay within it, it does make C++ programming much nicer and easier than 'pure' C++, so I'm gonna try writing a 'real' app in it now, thanks!
That time originated there as well is just a theory, nothing definitional about it as far as I know.
This may be an interesting read and likely what the GP meant, but in short: you can't say what's going "back" and what's going "forwards" in time without measuring entropy, and you can't do that without an universe. Though IANAP so perhaps I'm not understanding the page right, so dunno.
My main issue is that Qt is pretty strongly tied to C++, and I *despise* that language. Whereas GTK in C may be horrible, but the bindings to Python, Ruby and C# are all excellent and a newbie dev could easily believe they were designed for them from day one.
However, all the other advantages you mention are still valid, plus Nokia controls Qt so overall I support this move, it was the most logical thing they could do. They've lost me as a developer, but I don't think anyone's gonna cry over that ;)
Its not all that fun to *you*, but I can perfectly see how a young economist or a math undergrad studying game theory may find it fascinating.
Personally, if it didn't have monthly fees I'd probably be playing it now, the concept sounds interesting to witness at the very least, if not to experience it by oneself. Though I hate scamming and PKing so I'd probably be nothing but a bum in there.
I believe that's what it does on Win7 but, not being very familiar with either the antivirus nor the OS I can't confirm it. It did make the whole screen go dark just like your average UAC prompt at least.
Kinda funny how that works. I mean, how many people are going to watch a completely obvious Starwars ripoff that contributes little or nothing to the storyline of the universe? It would be a total financial loss for the idiot who tried it.
Last I heard, Eragon was even getting a sequel. It certainly did for the books, at least.
Which is why I hate it when people like me suggest laxer copyright laws, and somebody replies "but you can already give up some of your rights in the license itself, don't force others to give up theirs". Yeah, you can act nice all you want but inevitably some idiot will come, take advantage of you and your work and all with the law on his side.
What should've happened is that a law should've been passed stating that only actual text can be copyrighted, not character names or plot ideas, thereby removing any teeth the nutcase's lawsuit would've had.
I'm sure my scenario has more than a few flaws, I haven't thought of it hard enough and I'm not a writer in any case, but it seems at first glance much more logical. As the saying goes, ideas are cheap, its the execution that matters and, as bad as they are, I believe people should have the right to write fanfiction for anything they care about without asking anyone for permission.
And in academia, the general rule isn't "keep it all to yourself".
Unless, of course, you make the antivirus itself pop up a simple "Yes/No" dialog when its attempted to be uninstalled, warning that malware could be the one behind it. That's what Avast! did last time I uninstalled it, its simple, efficient, and the antivirus app doesn't get classified by *me* as malware unlike dear old Norton.
If I want to lend someone an ebook I simply email it to them. This means I can lend any book to anyone I know, anywhere in the world within seconds.
Unless you bought it from Amazon. And almost all of your advantages are also met by my aging Palm T3, its only missing the e-Ink display but is, nevertheless, quite comfortable for reading long books. Plus its much cheaper and does a lot more stuff, like playing chess or listening to music ;)
In the ideal world, software would *do what I mean*, not *do what I say*.
No it shouldn't, and the reason is quite simple. And no, it's not 'elitism' or any of those red herrings you're throwing.
Lack of formalized languages has done enough harm elsewhere, you can take a relatively complex phrase in English and two people will come up with two different meanings for it. Perhaps they'll only differ sightly, perhaps not, but chances are they won't be perfectly interchangeable. Extrapolate that to software, and you have pretty much the same situation as today only worse: IE interprets your mistakes one way, Firefox another, Opera yet another one and suddenly the stuff that was supposed to be "standardized", ain't.
Take your example of the strong and em tags, but lets extend it a bit further and say you've defined (for some unknown reason) to define in CSS that 'strong' displays in Arial and 'em' in Times. You write <strong><em>hi</strong></em>, simple enough right? yeah, except that which font should it use? assume the standard specifies that inner tags overwrite the style of outer ones. IE decides that, since you wrote <strong> first, thats the outer one and so uses Times. But Firefox sees that <strong> was *closed* first and so is the inner one, therefore it should go with Arial.
Both are valid interpretations for such a simple mistake, yet both produce drastically different results. Make a not-so-trivial example, and the number of possible interpretations increases exponentially.
Computers are designed to be deterministic and therefore so must be the languages that it must speak. And having "intelligent" computers that "guess" what you meant instead of following a predetermined, standardized pattern and complaining loudly if they can't (another very important rule of programming, btw) is not only incredibly more difficult to write, but also to *use*. HTML5 is a step in the right direction since it tries to standardize the ways browsers must deal with faulty input, but had the web be stricter from day one this problem wouldn't have arisen in the first place.
Angry much? I understand perfectly well your point, which is why I can say with full confidence that its stupid.
To put it simply, you don't know what free speech is. Its not meant to protect our ability to say crap like "I love this country!", that's allowed *everywhere*, even in China or Korea. What's meant to protect is our ability to say *unpleasant* things, things you, I or our government may not want to hear, may not want it get said at all. So to state that we wouldn't have the government meddling with our free speech rights if we didn't say "wrong" things is stupid, if they're throwing us in jail for saying the "wrong" thing we didn't have any right to begin with.
Our right is the ability to enjoy our free speech rights, to say whatever we want. Our responsability, the one that comes with it, is to respect other people's free speech rights when *they* say something we don't want to hear. You don't like that, fine, I do, and that's not "avoiding responsability". It is, in fact, living up to the very responsabilities that come with free speech, I don't like what she did, I don't like what she said, but I'm willing to protect it as much as I want my own words to be. If you're not it's your right, but don't pretend you care about free speech.
Seriously, if you are not checking html code coming in from users, something is not right. They could destroy your page with some of those unclosed tags.
Obligatory XKCD.
No, what he's saying is that the computer is telling people what they want instead of the other way around.
Do you even know what free speech is? its the ability to say whatever you want without fearing the government coming down on you for it. It doesn't matter *what* kind of speech it is, the government itself can't define manners of "unacceptable" speech to censor without infringing on it regardless of motives.
The responsabilities that comes with free speech are that, for instance, if I tell my girlfriend that she's a fat cow and she decides to dump me the government *also* won't do a thing at her since dumping someone isn't illegal by itself, and that I cannot try to prevent her from calling me a stupid jerk in return either, since its my responsability to protect free speech.
And you know what? I'm planning on exercising my rights to free speech right here and now: FUCK YOU, and please go shove your anti-freedom ideals up your own arse. If people want to (deservedly) mod me down -1, Flamebait for that comment I'm prepared for it, *THAT* is my responsability, not wait until you throw the government at me for offending you and just take it without complains.