Certainly we are allowed some leeway for hyperbole here on/.!
No, Theora isn't dead yet. But with no true proactive strategy to switch users away from other codecs, Theora must rely on users switching away on their own. Given that Theora is, technically, inferior in many ways to other popular codecs and has no clear industry support to improve the codec, it's not clear to me why they would expect users to accept it on a technical level.
Yes, it has the benefit of being patent-unencumbered. However, this isn't as big a deal to users seeking higher quality with better compression, better streaming ability, and wide end-user support.
Please note that "user" encompasses anyone who would use the codec, including companies like Youtube as well as end users.
I have worked at various companies, from small ventures up to well-known large corporations and have found the same thing at each. Employees think that their company is pretty well-known in their respective fields. While it may be true of some companies (IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Johnson & Johnson, just to name a few), most third party vendors are mere gnats on the backs of those wildebeests.
This is myopia caused by too much focus on a specialized area. Yes, maybe within a very limited sector your technology may be making inroads, in general you are nothing more than a butterfly flapping its wings. Theora is not becoming a big deal. It is just another codec, and one that isn't particularly popular.
There are technical issues that need to be addressed technically, not simply (as the author of the article does) waved away as a future feature to be implemented when the codec becomes more popular. It will never become more popular until it can offer sufficient reason to switch. Relying on the negative influence of patent encumbrance to drive people towards the codec is a losing proposition. It is a reactive strategy that cannot eventually win.
What struck me most about this article was how even the FSF is not particularly behind Theora, per se. They are for "patent unencumbered" codecs, so they have no real inclination to push Theora in the marketplace. Without a proactive strategy to push Theora both in a business sense as well as technically, it will flounder.
Clearly intuitiveness is a subjective concept, but I don't think that it can't be objectively measured.
The first and most key aspect of an intuitive interface is how readily it is grasped by the user. A chair, for example, is an incredibly intuitive interface. The form of an intuitive interface matches the function it exports. The degree to which a user can be introduced to an interface concept and understand it is something that can be measured. The utilization of focused user trials can help discover the problem areas of an interface and that information can be used to improve intuitiveness.
The second aspect of intuitive interfaces is how quickly a user can learn to use the interface. There are two points to make here.
The first is the degree to which the interface conforms to the user's preconceived concept of the function. The closer the interface matches the user's expectations, the faster he will learn to use it. If a user conceptualizes a function in a certain manner, a user interface's intuitiveness is determined by how close the operation matches that concept. A good example of this would be a menu touchscreen. Real world interaction with objects requires direct manipulation, so a user's first inclination when using a device would be to touch the menu items on the screen. It's probably through the constant retrograde training of using a mouse to abstractly control a pointer to make selections that many people don't take to such touchpanels naturally, but a baby or an older person with no computer experience typically finds touchpanels easier to use than alternative input devices. On the other hand, a bad example would be a car with a manual transmission. There are few analogues to such a device outside of motor vehicles. The first time user cannot sit down and effectively use such a car immediately because there is no link between making a car go and using the clutch to manipulate the transmission. Such an interface is so unintuitive that many people never learn to effectively use it. Since the length of time from introduction to effective usage (defining effective usage as the point at which a user no longer needs handholding from a teacher or user manual) can be measured, it too can be judged objectively.
The second point is that this can only be measured in relation to an interface with a similar function. Your Windows CE vs iPhone comparison is particularly apt. There is some operation that you would like to perform (say, magnifying the screen). On one platform it requires a set of menu selections, but on another it only requires a brief 'pinch' of the screen. A user given these two platforms would likely find one operation style easier to learn than the other. This difference is measurable and therefore can be judged objectively (given proper study).
blah blah blah. Forgot what I was saying. There were at least 3 more aspects I wanted to cover, but what's the point in a thread this deep in a story this old?
While it may be true that a company can't legally prevent you from moving over to a competitor of your own free will, there are clauses in employment contracts that seek to prevent an ex-employee from poaching current employees away.
What's interesting is how the word 'poaching' has gone from the illegal murder of animals while trespassing to stealing away of top talent. The evolution of this word as well as 'hunting' and other terms typically associated with big game hunting have become part of our employment lexicon.
I bring this up because the analogy holds to some extent. Top level developers are, in a sense, hunted for their skills. While the bullet isn't what they get, they do get offers ranging from the low 6 figures to the slightly higher than that 6 figures. On the other hand, designers are paid much more than that. Take any marketing company as an example of top designers making money hand over fist. OSS could never compete with that, since there isn't that kind of money in this industry to pay for top developers. So you get the kind of brain-dead design as we see here on the/. front page. Seriously, why is there a bar with a tiny +- character there? Why is it separating the summary from the tags and comments links?
One of the problems I have with the Roomba is how it only operates in a pattern and uses sensors to adjust its path. However, if it were able to map the floor, it could more efficiently cover the entire area without having to retread its steps all the time. Naturally, it would need to test the boundaries every once in a while to see if the boundaries are still valid, but that wouldn't have to be done every single time it swept back and forth.
I wonder if such mapping technology could be used to automatically surf websites in the manner of actual users (as opposed to text spiders which just scan the text for interesting tags). The use of visually mapping the screen would be to simulate actual user interaction with the page. Is the user skipping over large parts of the page. Is the user confused by the weird +- bar in the middle of the story? Wouldn't a couple buttons on the upper right side of the story be preferable to a bar cutting right between the story and the comments link.
Robots are never affected by having a bad night with the baby and falling asleep at the wheel.
I'm not trying to be misogynist here, but should women with very small kids be working? Isn't this exactly the type of thing we should expect the government to try to protect through programs designed to give women time off that they need after having a baby?
Replacing women with robots isn't helping women. It's reducing the number of jobs that are available to them. We should be striving to have a market of productive jobs for every person who wants and is qualified for one.
The real key to the whole touchscreen interface is multitouch and dynamic dragging.
iPhone really took off because it offered an interface that few had ever experienced. The interface is natural, easy to master, and effective. All truly revolutionary technologies have these aspects.
Second, if touch is natural, then wanting to move things around the screen is too. There should be support for this built into the OS. Unfortunately, it is limited to only a few specialized programs (photo viewers, for example) at this time. Full OS support would allow me to do things like move the stupid +- bar that separates the story from the comments link here up to the title area and turn it into a couple of buttons. But neither the engineers at Microsoft nor the engineers who build OSS software interfaces have the first clue as to how to design for usability, so I hold very little hope.
If you can create a better wheel, sometimes it makes sense to reinvent the wheel.
But if all you're doing is reinventing Perl with C-like syntax, it's not really a step forward.
A Perl Server Pages technology that was scalable and didn't require the interpreter to load on every access would make Scala obsolete in a New York minute.
Software has an intrinsic value. To a business, the return on investment from a piece of software is something that can be measured. Spreadsheet software, for example, makes accounting many times easier and cheaper than trying to keep the books in books.
But music (and to a lesser degree video) has no intrinsic value. It is something enjoyed passing time. Like a frisbee at the park or a cup holder in a car. It's something that is nice to have but ultimately unnecessary.
If anti-copyright proponents would be unhypocritical, they would demand that software be downloadable for "sharing" among friends. That they only make this claim for music shows and video shows that there is a fundamental difference between software and music in their minds. I attribute this to the ephemeral nature of music, something which can be enjoyed but in the end has no real value.
"...most of the central elements of the alien abduction account are present, including sexually obsessive non-humans who live in the sky, walk through walls, communicate telepathically, and perform breeding experiments on the human species. Unless we believe that demons really exist, how can we understand so strange a belief system, embraced by the whole Western world (including those considered the wisest among us), reinforced by personal experience in every generation, and taught by Church and State? Is there any real alternative besides a shared delusion based on common brain wiring and chemistry?"
Yes, there is a real alternative. One that has a purely physical basis. Alien encounters.
It's cute how Sagan compares alien abductions to demonic abductions then claims to debunk both by showing how they both somehow rely on the belief in supernatural demons.
The more that alien life is covered in films or television documentaries, the more people look up at the sky and don't look down at their feet,' said an expert on UFO sightings based at Sheffield Hallam University.
Which means that they are seeing something.
UFOs have been observed since ancient times. The apostle John saw one. The Egyptians inscribed a UFO in their hieroglyphics. And the ancient Hebrews recorded the interactions of aliens and humans as the Nephilim.
I think there's more than the authorities are willing to divulge. It's interesting to see leaks like the quote above confirm what some of us have believed for a long time.
I'm not going to say that God created the world in 6 days or any crap like that. Anyone who thinks that Creationism has any validity at all is seriously deluded and should probably be kept away from sharp objects and steep dropoffs.
But they do have a point when it comes to abiogenesis. It's fine and dandy to push the building blocks of life off-planet, but how can those blocks then be explained? A large planet with all sorts of chemical and physical processes seems like a much better place for life to arise than on some desolate block of ice flying around the universe. What caused the life to form way out there?
It's all about the quality of the technology. Compare the 3G to the 3GS. ARM11 vs Cortex-A8. Spotty coverage vs solid coverage. Dropped calls vs clear calls. The 3GS is a way better phone all around than the 3G was.
And the Japanese are the ultimate technology connoisseurs. They knew, unlike the dopes who lick Steve Jobs' nutsack here in the US, that it was crap the moment they laid hands on it. The Japanese aren't brand-motivated. They are quality-motivated. That's why Japanese cars are boring but last forever. Americans look for cool things, which is why American cars are flashy and muscular but also break down constantly and have terribly assembled trim.
So the reports that the iPhone was selling terribly.. Yeah, that was true. But Apple has done a good job this time with a phone that finally appeals to the Japanese consumer. Sure, it may be the same old Corolla on the outside, but on the inside it's running a VTEC with DOHC.
Not only do I not understand the reasoning behind paying for upgrades, bugfixes, and patches, in this day and age of instantaneous distribution, I don't see why I should have to pay the same price for a game that I download over the internet vs one that comes on a DVD. Once the game publisher has recouped the cost of development and marketing, every penny after that is pure profit which, given today's copyright laws, means that these leeches will continue to profit of the backs of gamers for decades.
Since I am downloading the game, why shouldn't I get a discounted price? And if the game has already recouped costs, why shouldn't game companies be forced to lower the price subsequently? The value of the game at some point must reach zero, and I should at that point be allowed to download it for free.
As consoles become more PC-like, they too will need to re-evaluate the payment schemes for these bugfixes. And once the floodgates are opened, gamers will demand software freedom for the entire games, not just the patches and upgrades.
The only one hurt in this operation was the American government who didn't get their cut.
The internet exposes many holes in the law, the most obvious one being locality in this case. What's the difference between driving to the nearby rez for some Pai Gow and going online to bet on the ponies?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh god I'm so lonely!
Certainly we are allowed some leeway for hyperbole here on /.!
No, Theora isn't dead yet. But with no true proactive strategy to switch users away from other codecs, Theora must rely on users switching away on their own. Given that Theora is, technically, inferior in many ways to other popular codecs and has no clear industry support to improve the codec, it's not clear to me why they would expect users to accept it on a technical level.
Yes, it has the benefit of being patent-unencumbered. However, this isn't as big a deal to users seeking higher quality with better compression, better streaming ability, and wide end-user support.
Please note that "user" encompasses anyone who would use the codec, including companies like Youtube as well as end users.
FTFA: Ogg Theora is becoming a big deal
I have worked at various companies, from small ventures up to well-known large corporations and have found the same thing at each. Employees think that their company is pretty well-known in their respective fields. While it may be true of some companies (IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Johnson & Johnson, just to name a few), most third party vendors are mere gnats on the backs of those wildebeests.
This is myopia caused by too much focus on a specialized area. Yes, maybe within a very limited sector your technology may be making inroads, in general you are nothing more than a butterfly flapping its wings. Theora is not becoming a big deal. It is just another codec, and one that isn't particularly popular.
There are technical issues that need to be addressed technically, not simply (as the author of the article does) waved away as a future feature to be implemented when the codec becomes more popular. It will never become more popular until it can offer sufficient reason to switch. Relying on the negative influence of patent encumbrance to drive people towards the codec is a losing proposition. It is a reactive strategy that cannot eventually win.
What struck me most about this article was how even the FSF is not particularly behind Theora, per se. They are for "patent unencumbered" codecs, so they have no real inclination to push Theora in the marketplace. Without a proactive strategy to push Theora both in a business sense as well as technically, it will flounder.
Another codec bites the dust. Big deal.
Clearly intuitiveness is a subjective concept, but I don't think that it can't be objectively measured.
The first and most key aspect of an intuitive interface is how readily it is grasped by the user. A chair, for example, is an incredibly intuitive interface. The form of an intuitive interface matches the function it exports. The degree to which a user can be introduced to an interface concept and understand it is something that can be measured. The utilization of focused user trials can help discover the problem areas of an interface and that information can be used to improve intuitiveness.
The second aspect of intuitive interfaces is how quickly a user can learn to use the interface. There are two points to make here.
The first is the degree to which the interface conforms to the user's preconceived concept of the function. The closer the interface matches the user's expectations, the faster he will learn to use it. If a user conceptualizes a function in a certain manner, a user interface's intuitiveness is determined by how close the operation matches that concept. A good example of this would be a menu touchscreen. Real world interaction with objects requires direct manipulation, so a user's first inclination when using a device would be to touch the menu items on the screen. It's probably through the constant retrograde training of using a mouse to abstractly control a pointer to make selections that many people don't take to such touchpanels naturally, but a baby or an older person with no computer experience typically finds touchpanels easier to use than alternative input devices. On the other hand, a bad example would be a car with a manual transmission. There are few analogues to such a device outside of motor vehicles. The first time user cannot sit down and effectively use such a car immediately because there is no link between making a car go and using the clutch to manipulate the transmission. Such an interface is so unintuitive that many people never learn to effectively use it. Since the length of time from introduction to effective usage (defining effective usage as the point at which a user no longer needs handholding from a teacher or user manual) can be measured, it too can be judged objectively.
The second point is that this can only be measured in relation to an interface with a similar function. Your Windows CE vs iPhone comparison is particularly apt. There is some operation that you would like to perform (say, magnifying the screen). On one platform it requires a set of menu selections, but on another it only requires a brief 'pinch' of the screen. A user given these two platforms would likely find one operation style easier to learn than the other. This difference is measurable and therefore can be judged objectively (given proper study).
blah blah blah. Forgot what I was saying. There were at least 3 more aspects I wanted to cover, but what's the point in a thread this deep in a story this old?
While it may be true that a company can't legally prevent you from moving over to a competitor of your own free will, there are clauses in employment contracts that seek to prevent an ex-employee from poaching current employees away.
What's interesting is how the word 'poaching' has gone from the illegal murder of animals while trespassing to stealing away of top talent. The evolution of this word as well as 'hunting' and other terms typically associated with big game hunting have become part of our employment lexicon.
I bring this up because the analogy holds to some extent. Top level developers are, in a sense, hunted for their skills. While the bullet isn't what they get, they do get offers ranging from the low 6 figures to the slightly higher than that 6 figures. On the other hand, designers are paid much more than that. Take any marketing company as an example of top designers making money hand over fist. OSS could never compete with that, since there isn't that kind of money in this industry to pay for top developers. So you get the kind of brain-dead design as we see here on the /. front page. Seriously, why is there a bar with a tiny +- character there? Why is it separating the summary from the tags and comments links?
One of the problems I have with the Roomba is how it only operates in a pattern and uses sensors to adjust its path. However, if it were able to map the floor, it could more efficiently cover the entire area without having to retread its steps all the time. Naturally, it would need to test the boundaries every once in a while to see if the boundaries are still valid, but that wouldn't have to be done every single time it swept back and forth.
I wonder if such mapping technology could be used to automatically surf websites in the manner of actual users (as opposed to text spiders which just scan the text for interesting tags). The use of visually mapping the screen would be to simulate actual user interaction with the page. Is the user skipping over large parts of the page. Is the user confused by the weird +- bar in the middle of the story? Wouldn't a couple buttons on the upper right side of the story be preferable to a bar cutting right between the story and the comments link.
I wonder what the name means in Chinese.
Robots are never affected by having a bad night with the baby and falling asleep at the wheel.
I'm not trying to be misogynist here, but should women with very small kids be working? Isn't this exactly the type of thing we should expect the government to try to protect through programs designed to give women time off that they need after having a baby?
Replacing women with robots isn't helping women. It's reducing the number of jobs that are available to them. We should be striving to have a market of productive jobs for every person who wants and is qualified for one.
The real key to the whole touchscreen interface is multitouch and dynamic dragging.
iPhone really took off because it offered an interface that few had ever experienced. The interface is natural, easy to master, and effective. All truly revolutionary technologies have these aspects.
Second, if touch is natural, then wanting to move things around the screen is too. There should be support for this built into the OS. Unfortunately, it is limited to only a few specialized programs (photo viewers, for example) at this time. Full OS support would allow me to do things like move the stupid +- bar that separates the story from the comments link here up to the title area and turn it into a couple of buttons. But neither the engineers at Microsoft nor the engineers who build OSS software interfaces have the first clue as to how to design for usability, so I hold very little hope.
I always found humor in literature overrated.
Just because everyone praises the Emporer's new clothes, it doesn't mean he's wearing any.
Also, the new /. appearance is very confusing. Why would you put a separation line *before* the link to the comments?
Hey, have you tried EVONY? Your queen awaits!
If you can create a better wheel, sometimes it makes sense to reinvent the wheel.
But if all you're doing is reinventing Perl with C-like syntax, it's not really a step forward.
A Perl Server Pages technology that was scalable and didn't require the interpreter to load on every access would make Scala obsolete in a New York minute.
Software has an intrinsic value. To a business, the return on investment from a piece of software is something that can be measured. Spreadsheet software, for example, makes accounting many times easier and cheaper than trying to keep the books in books.
But music (and to a lesser degree video) has no intrinsic value. It is something enjoyed passing time. Like a frisbee at the park or a cup holder in a car. It's something that is nice to have but ultimately unnecessary.
If anti-copyright proponents would be unhypocritical, they would demand that software be downloadable for "sharing" among friends. That they only make this claim for music shows and video shows that there is a fundamental difference between software and music in their minds. I attribute this to the ephemeral nature of music, something which can be enjoyed but in the end has no real value.
"...most of the central elements of the alien abduction account are present, including sexually obsessive non-humans who live in the sky, walk through walls, communicate telepathically, and perform breeding experiments on the human species. Unless we believe that demons really exist, how can we understand so strange a belief system, embraced by the whole Western world (including those considered the wisest among us), reinforced by personal experience in every generation, and taught by Church and State? Is there any real alternative besides a shared delusion based on common brain wiring and chemistry?"
Yes, there is a real alternative. One that has a purely physical basis. Alien encounters.
It's cute how Sagan compares alien abductions to demonic abductions then claims to debunk both by showing how they both somehow rely on the belief in supernatural demons.
The more that alien life is covered in films or television documentaries, the more people look up at the sky and don't look down at their feet,' said an expert on UFO sightings based at Sheffield Hallam University.
Which means that they are seeing something.
UFOs have been observed since ancient times. The apostle John saw one. The Egyptians inscribed a UFO in their hieroglyphics. And the ancient Hebrews recorded the interactions of aliens and humans as the Nephilim.
I think there's more than the authorities are willing to divulge. It's interesting to see leaks like the quote above confirm what some of us have believed for a long time.
I'm not going to say that God created the world in 6 days or any crap like that. Anyone who thinks that Creationism has any validity at all is seriously deluded and should probably be kept away from sharp objects and steep dropoffs.
But they do have a point when it comes to abiogenesis. It's fine and dandy to push the building blocks of life off-planet, but how can those blocks then be explained? A large planet with all sorts of chemical and physical processes seems like a much better place for life to arise than on some desolate block of ice flying around the universe. What caused the life to form way out there?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_Field_Communication
4u
Actually, those several sources you claim all point back to one article on Apple Insider which never actually disproved the sales numbers.
iPods sold badly. Get over it. Jeez, it's like a religion with you guys.
It's all about the quality of the technology. Compare the 3G to the 3GS. ARM11 vs Cortex-A8. Spotty coverage vs solid coverage. Dropped calls vs clear calls. The 3GS is a way better phone all around than the 3G was.
And the Japanese are the ultimate technology connoisseurs. They knew, unlike the dopes who lick Steve Jobs' nutsack here in the US, that it was crap the moment they laid hands on it. The Japanese aren't brand-motivated. They are quality-motivated. That's why Japanese cars are boring but last forever. Americans look for cool things, which is why American cars are flashy and muscular but also break down constantly and have terribly assembled trim.
So the reports that the iPhone was selling terribly.. Yeah, that was true. But Apple has done a good job this time with a phone that finally appeals to the Japanese consumer. Sure, it may be the same old Corolla on the outside, but on the inside it's running a VTEC with DOHC.
Not only do I not understand the reasoning behind paying for upgrades, bugfixes, and patches, in this day and age of instantaneous distribution, I don't see why I should have to pay the same price for a game that I download over the internet vs one that comes on a DVD. Once the game publisher has recouped the cost of development and marketing, every penny after that is pure profit which, given today's copyright laws, means that these leeches will continue to profit of the backs of gamers for decades.
Since I am downloading the game, why shouldn't I get a discounted price? And if the game has already recouped costs, why shouldn't game companies be forced to lower the price subsequently? The value of the game at some point must reach zero, and I should at that point be allowed to download it for free.
As consoles become more PC-like, they too will need to re-evaluate the payment schemes for these bugfixes. And once the floodgates are opened, gamers will demand software freedom for the entire games, not just the patches and upgrades.
So, if I read some public list of people working at, say, DMV, and find public records of their adresses online, and post this, I'm a terrorist?
There's a difference, though.
Not all police deserve death.
And I'm spent.
First reply!
Endorphins looping!
First Post!
What he gets is the night rider. The vigilante.
Isn't that what you need in a world of criminals who operate above the law?
The only one hurt in this operation was the American government who didn't get their cut.
The internet exposes many holes in the law, the most obvious one being locality in this case. What's the difference between driving to the nearby rez for some Pai Gow and going online to bet on the ponies?