You're walking down the street, and somebody walks up with a knife and demands your wallet. In the ensuing scuffle, you end up stabbed 3 times in the chest. Nothing instantly fatal, but your lungs are now filling with blood.
A passer-by calls an ambulance for you, and once you're loaded in and ready to go, the EMT pulls out a list of all the people who practice medicine in the area and says, "which doctor do you want to have care for you?"
You weakly point at one of the names on the list, J. R. McAllister III, and say "That guy has a reputable-sounding name, and he has a 4 star rating."
The ambulance delivers you to Mr. McAllister's door. Mr. McAllister looks at your wounds, shrugs, and says, "I just have no idea what to do here. I just deal in herbal remedies and acupuncture most of the time."
You die.
Still think that professional licensing is completely stupid, and a "traditional reputation system" is better? Or is there some room for professional licensing that guarantees a minimum standard of competency and training before someone can call themselves a "doctor" or an "engineer"?
"Pretty much common sense" means that a lot of it is a vague set of "principles" that members of the ACM are expected to abide by, and which many of them ignore when it doesn't match their interpretation of "common sense." And let's be quite honest - there's probably about... five... people on Slashdot who feel themselves bound by section 1.5 of the ACM COE:
1.5 Honor property rights, including copyrights and patent. Violation of copyrights, patents, trade secrets and the terms of license agreements is prohibited by law in most circumstances. Even when software is not so protected, such violations are contrary to professional behavior. Copies of software should be made only with proper authorization. Unauthorized duplication of materials must not be condoned.
How seriously can you take a Code of Ethics when one of it's "General Moral Imperatives" is something that is laughingly ignored by huge portions of the "Software Engineering" profession? You chortle at the NAR code of ethics, but it's a very specific, very clear listing of standards and practices expected of a Realtor, and the penalty for violating them is the loss of your license to practice as a Realtor. If they stripped every programmer who ever violated the clause above of his ability to write code, there'd be very few programmers left in existence.
Patents are an orthogonal issue to whether or not the standard is open - patents are related to whether the standard can be considered "free".
If Google wants to create a free, open standard that competes with H.264, then they should submit their WebM / VP8 standards to a standards body. If they're not willing to do that, then why should anybody be willing to pretend that it's a widely reviewed industry standard that has a large amount of support?
Their approval says volumes about the standardization of the format.
That's why they're called "standards bodies," not "openness bodies."
What the standards body adds to the process is the inclusion of numerous parties across numerous industries and areas of expertise who all contribute requirements and feedback into the standard, thus reaching a stable format that they ALL can then agree to implement.
Right now, we have Google telling the rest of the world, "Tough shit, do it the way we say. We're Google, and we know better than all of you."
Google also says "don't be evil." Look how that's turning out.
So WebM is final, until Google decides that it doesn't suit their purposes, and they change it again? Boy, that sounds like a great way to manage a standard!
I'm so glad you're okay with tying your data up in a format that can be changed on a whim by the sole owner of that format's specification. Freedom for everybody to do things the way Google demands!
But OOXML *is* an "open standard" because it was accepted and released by a standards body - NOT because it was unceremoniously dumped into the public domain by its corporate owners.
And if you look at all of the nastiness here regarding OOXML's rapid acceptance and ratification, I'm left wondering why an unsubmitted "standard" owned by a single corporation is being viewed with any more excitement and friendliness, other than the obvious "double standard" explanation.
We can debate the technical merits of H.264 vs. WebM, and we can debate the merits of royalty-free vs. royalty-encumbered standards, but the fact remains that WebM is *not* an "open standard" as yet, and insisting that it is does not make it so.
And could you expand on what "hacks to get crap to work on your Linux distros again" you need to download? Honest question. In my experience the x264 libraries handle H.264 playback quite well on Linux... and if I'm not mistaken, x264 is released under the GPL.
The fact that it has not gone through an "open" standardization process does mean that it is not an "OPEN" standard.
Google bought it, and dumped it into the public domain.
By this measure, anything written by anybody and dumped into the public domain is then an "open standard," which dilutes the meaning of "open standard" to the point of meaninglessness.
Is it a standard? Sure, one which google controls, one which google owns, and one which google can change on a whim. Is it an open standard? Not until it is ratified as such by the members of a standards body.
But we're not being asked to assume that H.264 is "free", are we? We know exactly how much it costs, and have contractual guarantees in the forms of royalty agreements, which also guarantee limits on future royalty increases, as well.
No, they are not both "open standards". That term means something. H.264 is an open standard - it went through the standardization process, with all the feedback solicitation and ratification that that implies. VP8 is a "proprietary standard" that was developed by one company, and then dumped into the public domain by another.
I would think that readers of a site that roundly derided Microsoft's OOXML "standard" would understand the difference between an "open standard" and a "proprietary standard that's been dropped into the public domain but which has seen no significant attempts at standardization," but then, I guess when Google gets involved, all logic goes out the window.
H.264 is an open standard, governed by standards bodies (ISO & ITU). It is not, however, a 'free' standard, in either the "beer" or "freedom" sense.
VP8 is a proprietary standard, governed by Google, and developed by a single company. It is, allegedly, a 'free' standard in both the beer and freedom sense - and it's worth noting that there are some concerns as to whether or not this standard would survive an IP infringement claim, making it less "free" than we're asked to assume.
You're right, the definitions are quite clear. I'm just not sure why you seem to think it's opposite day when labelling H.264 as closed and VP8 as open. Until Google submits VP8 to ISO or some other standards body, it's not an "open" standard, it's a "Google says it's cool so I guess that's what we should do," standard. It would seem that you're conflating "royalty-free" with "open."
If you can't find your way around the system, and you don't know how to edit anything, and don't even know what possible commands you can run... how does any of that warm-fuzzy language turn into anything more than rote indoctrination?
We're talking about an intro computer lab for freshman, and we're talking about people who may not have any linux or command line experience. If you want to show them the power, you have to teach them how to tap into it themselves.
I'd say that ctrl-t, regex-based find and replace, and other editor power-tools that are just a couple keystrokes away are a great way to demonstrate the openness and flexibility in a concrete way. "Now that you've learned the basic editor commands... look how flexible the Linux shell is: you can use those same commands to edit your command lines on the fly."
So... your beef is that Apple's design teams understand what constitutes a compelling experience for users, and deliver something that makes people want to upgrade to the newer version?
You're right - just imagine the horror if every business did that.
His money had nothing to do with the fact that he was one of the "lucky" few whose pancreatic cancer was an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, which is one of the rare (~1% of cases) "treatable" kinds of pancreatic cancers, and generally far less aggressive than the adenocarcinomas that make up the bulk (~95%) of pancreatic cancers.
One the one hand, you issue the statement that "If Apple fucks up one upgrade cycle on one of their products, people will leave in droves" - to the point that the company could not recover from ONE bad upgrade.
And then you go on to tell us that they have "done well in continually making a product that's clearly superior to the last, and maintaining a pretty fierce brand loyalty." About which you then assert that, "most of that loyalty isn't based on product quality, but image."
So which is it - they make good products that people like and want to buy? Or they produce crap that they trick people into buying with their devious manipulation of people's tastes via their "image"? If it's the former, they could easily withstand one bad product cycle, though it seems you'd agree that they're unlikely to HAVE one, since they have a track record of continually improving on their last one. If it's the latter, then your statements about the continual improvement in their products is nonsensical, as it's clear you believe they produce nothing but crap.
Not to mention an "MS Fanboy" calling himself a "proponent of choice and freedom in use of hardware I've purchased."
Do you ever take a consistent, logical position that isn't self-contradictory? Or is that your schtick?
Sorry, but "a few percent" is hardly statistically significant, and sure isn't enough to bring Apple's P/E ration down significantly.
A P/E ratio of 23 is above average (S&P 500 has averaged, over its lifetime, a P/E ratio of about 15-16), but given what GP said about new product pipeline, I don't think it's astronomically overvalued, unless that pipeline suddenly dries up.
It's entirely possible the pipeline stops where Steve Jobs' vision & guidance end, but even still, Apple probably has a good 3-5 years of new products on the calendar already. Given his past health scares, I doubt they're leaving much to chance with succession planning.
Yes, the fact that Apple is making ludicrous amounts of money is all based on their cool image. It has nothing to do with them selling a decent product that people want to buy. I mean, I write monthly checks to Apple just so Steve doesn't ever have to wear the same black turtleneck twice. Virgin organic cotton everday, that's what my hero deserves.
Because people have bought into the ridiculous notion that "Jobs IS Apple" and thus when he gets a sniffle, the stock market catches a cold.
The stock market is prone to irrational fluctuations like this anyway - look at any company's stock when some sort of surprise "bad news" comes out. It's magnified with Apple because of the tight coupling of Apple's brand with Jobs as spokesman. "In financial news, Apple is trading down 4.5% this morning, after rumors that Steve Jobs couldn't get his favorite blend of coffee at Starbucks, and walked out with what one witness described as, 'a worried look on his face.'"
It's stupid, but then there's no law that you have to be smart to own stock.
I see. And will the fairies deliver this amazing new functionality using magical pixie dust?
Please name five "widely-used" video editing applications which you expect will have full support for WebM by sometime between March and June of this year. Where possible, provide references documenting their announced commitment to provide this critical functionality within the next 2.5-5.5 months.
Or, you can admit that you're pulling these statements out of your ass and have no idea what you're talking about.
A mouse works almost everywhere you would expect too. Why not just teach them to use Windows then?
If the point is "show them how easy it is," then don't bother teaching Linux.
If the point is "show how powerful it is," then a day or two spent on command line editing modes in your favorite shell, and thus touching on vi & emacs usage, isn't a bad intro.
Given that most command shells have a Vi and an Emacs command-line editing mode, I'd say that a day or two spent reviewing some of the easy ways of getting things done in vi/vim or emacs would be time well spent.
Yes, they *can* learn it on their own. Just like you can toss somebody into the deep end of the pool and say "Thrash around for a bit while I go have a sandwich, when I get back, we'll see if you've learned to swim!"
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, thought exercise:
You're walking down the street, and somebody walks up with a knife and demands your wallet. In the ensuing scuffle, you end up stabbed 3 times in the chest. Nothing instantly fatal, but your lungs are now filling with blood.
A passer-by calls an ambulance for you, and once you're loaded in and ready to go, the EMT pulls out a list of all the people who practice medicine in the area and says, "which doctor do you want to have care for you?"
You weakly point at one of the names on the list, J. R. McAllister III, and say "That guy has a reputable-sounding name, and he has a 4 star rating."
The ambulance delivers you to Mr. McAllister's door. Mr. McAllister looks at your wounds, shrugs, and says, "I just have no idea what to do here. I just deal in herbal remedies and acupuncture most of the time."
You die.
Still think that professional licensing is completely stupid, and a "traditional reputation system" is better? Or is there some room for professional licensing that guarantees a minimum standard of competency and training before someone can call themselves a "doctor" or an "engineer"?
"Pretty much common sense" means that a lot of it is a vague set of "principles" that members of the ACM are expected to abide by, and which many of them ignore when it doesn't match their interpretation of "common sense." And let's be quite honest - there's probably about... five... people on Slashdot who feel themselves bound by section 1.5 of the ACM COE:
How seriously can you take a Code of Ethics when one of it's "General Moral Imperatives" is something that is laughingly ignored by huge portions of the "Software Engineering" profession? You chortle at the NAR code of ethics, but it's a very specific, very clear listing of standards and practices expected of a Realtor, and the penalty for violating them is the loss of your license to practice as a Realtor. If they stripped every programmer who ever violated the clause above of his ability to write code, there'd be very few programmers left in existence.
Wait, the language you write code in dictates whether or not you're an engineer?
And here I thought that engineering was the application of science and math to the creation of practical solutions for societal problems and needs.
But I guess what I learned is wrong, and "engineer" comes from the Latin root word that means "knows how to program in C++".
Patents are an orthogonal issue to whether or not the standard is open - patents are related to whether the standard can be considered "free".
If Google wants to create a free, open standard that competes with H.264, then they should submit their WebM / VP8 standards to a standards body. If they're not willing to do that, then why should anybody be willing to pretend that it's a widely reviewed industry standard that has a large amount of support?
Their approval says volumes about the standardization of the format.
That's why they're called "standards bodies," not "openness bodies."
What the standards body adds to the process is the inclusion of numerous parties across numerous industries and areas of expertise who all contribute requirements and feedback into the standard, thus reaching a stable format that they ALL can then agree to implement.
Right now, we have Google telling the rest of the world, "Tough shit, do it the way we say. We're Google, and we know better than all of you."
Google also says "don't be evil." Look how that's turning out.
So WebM is final, until Google decides that it doesn't suit their purposes, and they change it again? Boy, that sounds like a great way to manage a standard!
I'm so glad you're okay with tying your data up in a format that can be changed on a whim by the sole owner of that format's specification. Freedom for everybody to do things the way Google demands!
But OOXML *is* an "open standard" because it was accepted and released by a standards body - NOT because it was unceremoniously dumped into the public domain by its corporate owners.
And if you look at all of the nastiness here regarding OOXML's rapid acceptance and ratification, I'm left wondering why an unsubmitted "standard" owned by a single corporation is being viewed with any more excitement and friendliness, other than the obvious "double standard" explanation.
We can debate the technical merits of H.264 vs. WebM, and we can debate the merits of royalty-free vs. royalty-encumbered standards, but the fact remains that WebM is *not* an "open standard" as yet, and insisting that it is does not make it so.
And could you expand on what "hacks to get crap to work on your Linux distros again" you need to download? Honest question. In my experience the x264 libraries handle H.264 playback quite well on Linux... and if I'm not mistaken, x264 is released under the GPL.
The fact that it has not gone through an "open" standardization process does mean that it is not an "OPEN" standard.
Google bought it, and dumped it into the public domain.
By this measure, anything written by anybody and dumped into the public domain is then an "open standard," which dilutes the meaning of "open standard" to the point of meaninglessness.
Is it a standard? Sure, one which google controls, one which google owns, and one which google can change on a whim. Is it an open standard? Not until it is ratified as such by the members of a standards body.
But we're not being asked to assume that H.264 is "free", are we? We know exactly how much it costs, and have contractual guarantees in the forms of royalty agreements, which also guarantee limits on future royalty increases, as well.
No, they are not both "open standards". That term means something. H.264 is an open standard - it went through the standardization process, with all the feedback solicitation and ratification that that implies. VP8 is a "proprietary standard" that was developed by one company, and then dumped into the public domain by another.
I would think that readers of a site that roundly derided Microsoft's OOXML "standard" would understand the difference between an "open standard" and a "proprietary standard that's been dropped into the public domain but which has seen no significant attempts at standardization," but then, I guess when Google gets involved, all logic goes out the window.
If you want to call yourself an "open standard," you might want to, you know, standardize.
H.264 is an open standard, governed by standards bodies (ISO & ITU). It is not, however, a 'free' standard, in either the "beer" or "freedom" sense.
VP8 is a proprietary standard, governed by Google, and developed by a single company. It is, allegedly, a 'free' standard in both the beer and freedom sense - and it's worth noting that there are some concerns as to whether or not this standard would survive an IP infringement claim, making it less "free" than we're asked to assume.
You're right, the definitions are quite clear. I'm just not sure why you seem to think it's opposite day when labelling H.264 as closed and VP8 as open. Until Google submits VP8 to ISO or some other standards body, it's not an "open" standard, it's a "Google says it's cool so I guess that's what we should do," standard. It would seem that you're conflating "royalty-free" with "open."
The flexibility? The openness?
If you can't find your way around the system, and you don't know how to edit anything, and don't even know what possible commands you can run... how does any of that warm-fuzzy language turn into anything more than rote indoctrination?
We're talking about an intro computer lab for freshman, and we're talking about people who may not have any linux or command line experience. If you want to show them the power, you have to teach them how to tap into it themselves.
I'd say that ctrl-t, regex-based find and replace, and other editor power-tools that are just a couple keystrokes away are a great way to demonstrate the openness and flexibility in a concrete way. "Now that you've learned the basic editor commands... look how flexible the Linux shell is: you can use those same commands to edit your command lines on the fly."
So... your beef is that Apple's design teams understand what constitutes a compelling experience for users, and deliver something that makes people want to upgrade to the newer version?
You're right - just imagine the horror if every business did that.
His money had nothing to do with the fact that he was one of the "lucky" few whose pancreatic cancer was an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, which is one of the rare (~1% of cases) "treatable" kinds of pancreatic cancers, and generally far less aggressive than the adenocarcinomas that make up the bulk (~95%) of pancreatic cancers.
Your entire post is one giant contradiction.
One the one hand, you issue the statement that "If Apple fucks up one upgrade cycle on one of their products, people will leave in droves" - to the point that the company could not recover from ONE bad upgrade.
And then you go on to tell us that they have "done well in continually making a product that's clearly superior to the last, and maintaining a pretty fierce brand loyalty." About which you then assert that, "most of that loyalty isn't based on product quality, but image."
So which is it - they make good products that people like and want to buy? Or they produce crap that they trick people into buying with their devious manipulation of people's tastes via their "image"? If it's the former, they could easily withstand one bad product cycle, though it seems you'd agree that they're unlikely to HAVE one, since they have a track record of continually improving on their last one. If it's the latter, then your statements about the continual improvement in their products is nonsensical, as it's clear you believe they produce nothing but crap.
Not to mention an "MS Fanboy" calling himself a "proponent of choice and freedom in use of hardware I've purchased."
Do you ever take a consistent, logical position that isn't self-contradictory? Or is that your schtick?
One man, making an impact on 700 million people, and their culture? And you call that minor?
Jesus, is that you?!
"Too little? You said it was a good size!"
"tank a few percent"?
Sorry, but "a few percent" is hardly statistically significant, and sure isn't enough to bring Apple's P/E ration down significantly.
A P/E ratio of 23 is above average (S&P 500 has averaged, over its lifetime, a P/E ratio of about 15-16), but given what GP said about new product pipeline, I don't think it's astronomically overvalued, unless that pipeline suddenly dries up.
It's entirely possible the pipeline stops where Steve Jobs' vision & guidance end, but even still, Apple probably has a good 3-5 years of new products on the calendar already. Given his past health scares, I doubt they're leaving much to chance with succession planning.
Yes, the fact that Apple is making ludicrous amounts of money is all based on their cool image. It has nothing to do with them selling a decent product that people want to buy. I mean, I write monthly checks to Apple just so Steve doesn't ever have to wear the same black turtleneck twice. Virgin organic cotton everday, that's what my hero deserves.
Because people have bought into the ridiculous notion that "Jobs IS Apple" and thus when he gets a sniffle, the stock market catches a cold.
The stock market is prone to irrational fluctuations like this anyway - look at any company's stock when some sort of surprise "bad news" comes out. It's magnified with Apple because of the tight coupling of Apple's brand with Jobs as spokesman. "In financial news, Apple is trading down 4.5% this morning, after rumors that Steve Jobs couldn't get his favorite blend of coffee at Starbucks, and walked out with what one witness described as, 'a worried look on his face.'"
It's stupid, but then there's no law that you have to be smart to own stock.
I see. And will the fairies deliver this amazing new functionality using magical pixie dust?
Please name five "widely-used" video editing applications which you expect will have full support for WebM by sometime between March and June of this year. Where possible, provide references documenting their announced commitment to provide this critical functionality within the next 2.5-5.5 months.
Or, you can admit that you're pulling these statements out of your ass and have no idea what you're talking about.
A mouse works almost everywhere you would expect too. Why not just teach them to use Windows then?
If the point is "show them how easy it is," then don't bother teaching Linux.
If the point is "show how powerful it is," then a day or two spent on command line editing modes in your favorite shell, and thus touching on vi & emacs usage, isn't a bad intro.
Given that most command shells have a Vi and an Emacs command-line editing mode, I'd say that a day or two spent reviewing some of the easy ways of getting things done in vi/vim or emacs would be time well spent.
Yes, they *can* learn it on their own. Just like you can toss somebody into the deep end of the pool and say "Thrash around for a bit while I go have a sandwich, when I get back, we'll see if you've learned to swim!"
Define "important" & "near".