Sorry my bad, my other points stand though (and the spec is always months late, you don't believe they really have no spec beforehand to coordinate the work I hope, the "technical time required to prepare the spec", it's just a facade for their strategy).
I want to note above. I'm a.NET and Flash developer, I have no band sentiments against Adobe, nor Microsoft, at least not more than usual.
You gotta be a bit less idealistic and a tiny bit more cynical when dealing with big commercial companies though. A bit of cynicism is healthy, because it's how the world operates. I still find Flash and.NET mighty useful in a range of applications, even if they're OMG 3V1L!11 ideology-wise.
Plus we all know if those were fully open they'd be even worse. Like HTML/CSS/JS and the support for it is.
I'm so sorry but real-world companies can't survive on misguided idealism, and if you haven't noticed, we need some money to pay the salaries of our employees. This means we'll not just open source our player, which is already a de facto standard, and s result for which we paid millions upon millions and years of hard work to build.
In fact we've still not released the Flash 9 spec out there, and when we release it, it'll be full of errors and incomplete, just like the previous flash specs were.
We open sourced parts of our platforms strategically, but only enough to appeal to the OSS crowds, and ensure our platform is seen as a standard, and not enough so we lose control. As you know The Flash scripting engine will be part of Firefox 4. We also open sources the Flex framework and soon the compiler an Eclipse plugin. It didn't sell well anyway, so what else could we do.
Recently we announced that we'll embrace open standards like MPEG4 for our video codec, but what we forgot to mention is we'll still require that you buy our owns streaming servers for live streaming, since we intentionally don't support the standard streaming protocol all other MPEG4 videos stream in.
It's also possible we'll sue the authors of Gnash, if they ever start to matter (they don't now), since our specification of the Flash format specifically says you're not allowed to build players with it, just Flash file exporters.
Basically, it's business like any business for us and Microsoft. Drop the idealism and get on with your life.
It makes me wonder what the value of having so many standards is. Isn't a standard supposed to be a single authoritative source / guideline on how to do something? If you have 500 competing standards or an organization whose sole purpose is to churn out standards then that dilutes the standards that come out of the organization, doesn't it?
Where did I hint any of those standards *compete* with each other. Go out, look around. There's more than document formats out there. And all of this needs a standard. ISO provides it.
I've put up a little website with some initial thoughts
Your cause is interesting, but I'm afraid there's a lot more to do than a barebones 'vision' page, so to create a standards body able of replacing ISO.
ISO has created over 16500 standards, and publishes ~1250 new ones each year. Yes, that means several new ones each day. Those include food safety, environmental protection, oil and gas, ship and automobile building, basically everything.
Computer formats comprises but a minuscule fraction of ISO's work.
OOXML was overthrown at ISO, isn't this what you wanted after all. So the system works, no need for anti-establishment rebellion for anti-establishment's sake.
Ok, call me ignorant, stupid, dumb, whatever. But why, whenever someone makes a mistake or fucks up is the very first thought (or post in this matter) always down the line of lawsuits, cash, court, lawyers etc? [...] Whatever happend to "sorry man, I fucked up, my mistake"
Right, he didn't get a sorry though, he got arrested and charged with obstructing a law officer. He can file counterclaim or just watch himself getting sued for something he didn't do.
Also, the fact that someone will try to "obliterate" you if you make a mistake, is the very thing that is designed to limit the number of mistakes you make, versus do shit non-stop and apologize to everyone.
That said, I have a 3rd gen iPod, and it's getting close to the time to replace it, I have hopes for a widescreen color iPod in the 100 gb range, So if it's avaiable soon, I may very well bee the 19 million and first sale this year.
You can reject the possibility of a full-screen iPod ("ala iPhone" as the summary says) right now: because well, it's expensive.
iPhone costs $600 with 2 year AT&T contract. A $600 iPod wouldn't sell well.
And as much as people bitch about the terms of the agreement with AT&T, imagine what additional terms Verizon wanted made in its favor to seal the deal. I can only imagine they were as consumer-friendly as those made by UMG and NBC-Universal in recent months.
I have nothing against huge monopolies like AT&T or Microsoft (sometimes). My point was it's funny how Apple fans in denial are trying to shape the iPhone hacks as if Steve Jobs secretly wanted this to happen since he's so smart and cool.
My actual opinion on AT&T is that it offers decent coverage and service, and that iPhone will push the industry where they were too afraid to experiment before in the consumer segment (expensive touch-screen only devices for the masses).
That said, iPhone G1 is only hinting at how this should be done, and I'd rather wait for Apple's next generation, or Nokia/Sony E. having their go at it, versus be a guinea pig, hacking my own device in attempt to make it do what I need it to do.
To all those who bought their iPhone, best of luck, hope you enjoy your purchase.
I used to laugh at people who kept saying Linux for desktop is coming, and I'm not that big of a fan of the Linux desktop as well (I'm a fan of the Linux servers).
But what I kept saying is they need vendor support. No support, no lunch.
Now HP and Dell, the hardware vendors, offer desktop support. Those are big players, we know the smaller players will follow though quickly.
Something's definitely going on, I remember the same excitement as Firefox was making its first steps eating at IE's market share.
It made me realise what is in retrospect a fairly obvious statement. The cost of the operating system on your hardware is an effect that should be minizimed. The operating system exists as a framework for runs tasks and applications, not for being a self-serving execuse to munch resources.
Here's the thing: at Microsoft they know that. But a mix of poor vision, planning, poor communications and management, what they ended up is a frankenstein of technologies picking code and features randomly from a range of previous Windows systems, adding some new code in the mix, and borrowing features that eerely resemble that of certain competing OS-es.
Let's take a look at the interface rendering system alone. Ranging from Windows 9x/NT GDI code bits, to.NET WinForms through to DCE DirectX 9.0L layer on top of which runs Avalon, and DX10 layer running concurrently to it. This is how Vista looks.
Windows is far due to be rewritten, and Vista is the Ultimate example giving us the "Why". Let's hope Microsoft's management gets back to its senses and do Windows 7 right, since no one in their right mind would use Vista to do business with, never mind how many nice things are hinted in its bulky mix of old-and-new technologies.
This is actually good for Apple because more people will buy an iPhone now that they know they will be able to use a less evil carrier.
You may well replace "less evil" with "smaller" carrier, because this is what it boils down to. A corporation is only as bad as it's big (as big corporations get away with more).
It's funny I see Apple fans virtually patting Steve Jobs on his back, saying "the iPhone hack is good for you, you'll see!", while forgetting it's Apple who sought AT&T partnership in the first place.
To prove my point, after reading the answer(if you could), the solution becomes far more obvious then it was from the offset.
The big problem is sometimes the average shmuck thinks of himself too highly to probe deeper then a superficial holier then thou, self gratifying way a la Simpsons ComicBookGuy.
Thanks for the tirade, but still how do you explain that there was a ton of fan fiction about the Matrix sequels BEFORE the sequels were filmed, and many of the fan work was better than the actual Matrix movie script (no it's not that it required billions of dollar budget either).
average schmuck, like you right? thanks for playing. gg.
I said: "At the same time any average schmuck like me"
Are you trying to confirm what I wrote or? If I said "I'm the Mozart of movie-making" would this make you attack me less? Hmm wait, there's nothing I would say that would make you attack me less right. Unless I praised the overlords of all-in-focus moviemaking for their incredible and soon forgotten gimmicks.
So if I take a photo at, say, f/10 instead of my usual f/1.8, resulting in greater depth-of-field, this is revolutionary? How can I patent this?
What's revolutionary is they shoot every scene with several cameras at the same time (or several times with the same camera), using different focus planes each time to cover the entire depth range.
Then they assemble them post-production and boost the saturation, for that very special cartoony-colors, always-in-focus look... otherwise known as how the photos of throw-away consumer cameras look like.
Yea, all the wasted effort... keep in mind the movie took at least twice longer to shoot because they had to use blue screens even for a scene with nothing special in it (only to assist the post-production assembling of the planes).
Focussing on an object draws the people attention to it. It's used as an artistic tool. If everything is in focus, then the public will most likely not even notice (unless they specifically check for this).
I hope they don't spend a lot of money/effort on this "feature", the way they did on the game-quality 3D graphics of the Burly Brawl (ref: Matrix 2).
You should never be able to pay a customer to specifically exclude a competitor. For example.. If you're paying a company a sum amounting to $10 to go with your product Y that costs $100 and exclude product X, it would mean your competitor would have to sell at $90 in order to compete - assuming both products essentially do the same thing. It artifically lowers the competitor's price... kind of like what has happened with AMD and Intel.
You're right, but Sony does basically the same with Blu-Ray. Just not so directly.
Why do you think people buy more non-PS3 Blu-Ray players? Since there are more Blu-Ray movies out there and studios behind Blu-Ray. Why are there more studios behind Blu-Ray? Since PS3 is a Blu-Ray player, and even before non-PS3 Blu-Ray players, PS3 made the Blu-Ray capable consumers the larger mass. What is PS3? It's a loss leader, Sony basically puts cash out of their own pocket to sell it at major, major loss. Who pays for that loss? Gamers, when they buy games in the future (eventually).
So what do we have here, which is worse: Microsoft paying two studios to support HD DVD, or gamers unwillingly paying Sony extra fees on their games to push Blu-Ray?
Sorry, but an anti-circumvention argument is a stretch. Now, is a technological measure that can be defeated by merely deleting files or removing registry keys "effective"?
Imagine you sit on a platform. That's legal. I have scissors, of the paper kind, not with sharp edges. That's legal. I've placed the scissors around the rope that holds the platform, I'm trying to measure something. That's legal.
Now an accidental twitch, I close the scissors and cut the rope. You tell, how could possibly an involuntary twitch end up as me being a murderer?
Shit, I'll need a really good lawyer on this one...
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry my bad, my other points stand though (and the spec is always months late, you don't believe they really have no spec beforehand to coordinate the work I hope, the "technical time required to prepare the spec", it's just a facade for their strategy).
.NET and Flash developer, I have no band sentiments against Adobe, nor Microsoft, at least not more than usual.
.NET mighty useful in a range of applications, even if they're OMG 3V1L!11 ideology-wise.
I want to note above. I'm a
You gotta be a bit less idealistic and a tiny bit more cynical when dealing with big commercial companies though. A bit of cynicism is healthy, because it's how the world operates. I still find Flash and
Plus we all know if those were fully open they'd be even worse. Like HTML/CSS/JS and the support for it is.
Open letter from Adobe to Matt
Dear Matt,
I'm so sorry but real-world companies can't survive on misguided idealism, and if you haven't noticed, we need some money to pay the salaries of our employees. This means we'll not just open source our player, which is already a de facto standard, and s result for which we paid millions upon millions and years of hard work to build.
In fact we've still not released the Flash 9 spec out there, and when we release it, it'll be full of errors and incomplete, just like the previous flash specs were.
We open sourced parts of our platforms strategically, but only enough to appeal to the OSS crowds, and ensure our platform is seen as a standard, and not enough so we lose control. As you know The Flash scripting engine will be part of Firefox 4. We also open sources the Flex framework and soon the compiler an Eclipse plugin. It didn't sell well anyway, so what else could we do.
Recently we announced that we'll embrace open standards like MPEG4 for our video codec, but what we forgot to mention is we'll still require that you buy our owns streaming servers for live streaming, since we intentionally don't support the standard streaming protocol all other MPEG4 videos stream in.
It's also possible we'll sue the authors of Gnash, if they ever start to matter (they don't now), since our specification of the Flash format specifically says you're not allowed to build players with it, just Flash file exporters.
Basically, it's business like any business for us and Microsoft. Drop the idealism and get on with your life.
Sincerely, Adobe.
It makes me wonder what the value of having so many standards is. Isn't a standard supposed to be a single authoritative source / guideline on how to do something? If you have 500 competing standards or an organization whose sole purpose is to churn out standards then that dilutes the standards that come out of the organization, doesn't it?
Where did I hint any of those standards *compete* with each other. Go out, look around. There's more than document formats out there. And all of this needs a standard. ISO provides it.
I've put up a little website with some initial thoughts
Your cause is interesting, but I'm afraid there's a lot more to do than a barebones 'vision' page, so to create a standards body able of replacing ISO.
ISO has created over 16500 standards, and publishes ~1250 new ones each year. Yes, that means several new ones each day. Those include food safety, environmental protection, oil and gas, ship and automobile building, basically everything.
Computer formats comprises but a minuscule fraction of ISO's work.
OOXML was overthrown at ISO, isn't this what you wanted after all.
So the system works, no need for anti-establishment rebellion for anti-establishment's sake.
That you can get good study write-up on some weblog. I liked the "why girls like pink" one better.
Yeah, but I remember this excitement last year...
I don't. And my excitement is more accurate meter, so there we go.
Aside from the obvious concerns; this sounds like a great tech that could allow ....
shit everything I can think of is evil..
BTW name one "evil" thing this technology allows, which isn't allowed in theory by the 3G phones.
This reminds me of the old tech-support urban legend of the user holding a page up to the screen and hitting "Print".
...
;)
Yup. Another joke I knew was about paper-thin flexible displays, and then what do you know, LCD-s happened, then e-ink, then OLED and organic LCD
And it's not that funny anymore
Aside from the obvious concerns; this sounds like a great tech that could allow ....
shit everything I can think of is evil..
sorry. =)
Right, just like your keyboard allows you to share your most personal and private info to the world. But you just won't, how about that.
Also: it works as a scanner, not a camera. It sees in focus only what's directly placed on top of the screen.
Good for barcode scanning, touchscreens, or portable scanner. As well as a bunch of other quite cool and "non-evil" uses.
Ok, call me ignorant, stupid, dumb, whatever. But why, whenever someone makes a mistake or fucks up is the very first thought (or post in this matter) always down the line of lawsuits, cash, court, lawyers etc? [...] Whatever happend to "sorry man, I fucked up, my mistake"
Right, he didn't get a sorry though, he got arrested and charged with obstructing a law officer. He can file counterclaim or just watch himself getting sued for something he didn't do.
Also, the fact that someone will try to "obliterate" you if you make a mistake, is the very thing that is designed to limit the number of mistakes you make, versus do shit non-stop and apologize to everyone.
That said, I have a 3rd gen iPod, and it's getting close to the time to replace it, I have hopes for a widescreen color iPod in the 100 gb range, So if it's avaiable soon, I may very well bee the 19 million and first sale this year.
You can reject the possibility of a full-screen iPod ("ala iPhone" as the summary says) right now: because well, it's expensive.
iPhone costs $600 with 2 year AT&T contract. A $600 iPod wouldn't sell well.
And as much as people bitch about the terms of the agreement with AT&T, imagine what additional terms Verizon wanted made in its favor to seal the deal. I can only imagine they were as consumer-friendly as those made by UMG and NBC-Universal in recent months.
I have nothing against huge monopolies like AT&T or Microsoft (sometimes). My point was it's funny how Apple fans in denial are trying to shape the iPhone hacks as if Steve Jobs secretly wanted this to happen since he's so smart and cool.
My actual opinion on AT&T is that it offers decent coverage and service, and that iPhone will push the industry where they were too afraid to experiment before in the consumer segment (expensive touch-screen only devices for the masses).
That said, iPhone G1 is only hinting at how this should be done, and I'd rather wait for Apple's next generation, or Nokia/Sony E. having their go at it, versus be a guinea pig, hacking my own device in attempt to make it do what I need it to do.
To all those who bought their iPhone, best of luck, hope you enjoy your purchase.
I used to laugh at people who kept saying Linux for desktop is coming, and I'm not that big of a fan of the Linux desktop as well (I'm a fan of the Linux servers).
But what I kept saying is they need vendor support. No support, no lunch.
Now HP and Dell, the hardware vendors, offer desktop support. Those are big players, we know the smaller players will follow though quickly.
Something's definitely going on, I remember the same excitement as Firefox was making its first steps eating at IE's market share.
It made me realise what is in retrospect a fairly obvious statement. The cost of the operating system on your hardware is an effect that should be minizimed. The operating system exists as a framework for runs tasks and applications, not for being a self-serving execuse to munch resources.
.NET WinForms through to DCE DirectX 9.0L layer on top of which runs Avalon, and DX10 layer running concurrently to it. This is how Vista looks.
Here's the thing: at Microsoft they know that. But a mix of poor vision, planning, poor communications and management, what they ended up is a frankenstein of technologies picking code and features randomly from a range of previous Windows systems, adding some new code in the mix, and borrowing features that eerely resemble that of certain competing OS-es.
Let's take a look at the interface rendering system alone. Ranging from Windows 9x/NT GDI code bits, to
Windows is far due to be rewritten, and Vista is the Ultimate example giving us the "Why". Let's hope Microsoft's management gets back to its senses and do Windows 7 right, since no one in their right mind would use Vista to do business with, never mind how many nice things are hinted in its bulky mix of old-and-new technologies.
This is actually good for Apple because more people will buy an iPhone now that they know they will be able to use a less evil carrier.
You may well replace "less evil" with "smaller" carrier, because this is what it boils down to. A corporation is only as bad as it's big (as big corporations get away with more).
It's funny I see Apple fans virtually patting Steve Jobs on his back, saying "the iPhone hack is good for you, you'll see!", while forgetting it's Apple who sought AT&T partnership in the first place.
Microsoft is blaming human error and swears it won't happen again.
Self-contradictory: of all things that could happen out there, one thing will keep happening, and that's human errors.
Realistically, it's just another fail point on your OS that will blow up from time to time.
personally, I think she misunderstood the technology they're shooting for; I think what they're probably doing is HDR cinema
Hmm... that would produce some kick ass painted-like imagery indeed. If it's the case I'll have to stand corrected.
To prove my point, after reading the answer(if you could), the solution becomes far more obvious then it was from the offset.
The big problem is sometimes the average shmuck thinks of himself too highly to probe deeper then a superficial holier then thou, self gratifying way a la Simpsons ComicBookGuy.
Thanks for the tirade, but still how do you explain that there was a ton of fan fiction about the Matrix sequels BEFORE the sequels were filmed, and many of the fan work was better than the actual Matrix movie script (no it's not that it required billions of dollar budget either).
average schmuck, like you right? thanks for playing. gg.
I said: "At the same time any average schmuck like me"
Are you trying to confirm what I wrote or? If I said "I'm the Mozart of movie-making" would this make you attack me less? Hmm wait, there's nothing I would say that would make you attack me less right. Unless I praised the overlords of all-in-focus moviemaking for their incredible and soon forgotten gimmicks.
So if I take a photo at, say, f/10 instead of my usual f/1.8, resulting in greater depth-of-field, this is revolutionary?
How can I patent this?
What's revolutionary is they shoot every scene with several cameras at the same time (or several times with the same camera), using different focus planes each time to cover the entire depth range.
Then they assemble them post-production and boost the saturation, for that very special cartoony-colors, always-in-focus look... otherwise known as how the photos of throw-away consumer cameras look like.
Yea, all the wasted effort... keep in mind the movie took at least twice longer to shoot because they had to use blue screens even for a scene with nothing special in it (only to assist the post-production assembling of the planes).
Maybe, just maybe they're a bit more imaginative than you
Right....:
Wachovsky: "the whole frame will be in focus".
Public: "woaaa, so imaginative, shit!"
At the same time any average schmuck like me could give them 10 better ways they could've handled the Matrix sequels & V-for-Vendetta than they did.
Focussing on an object draws the people attention to it. It's used as an artistic tool. If everything is in focus, then the public will most likely not even notice (unless they specifically check for this).
I hope they don't spend a lot of money/effort on this "feature", the way they did on the game-quality 3D graphics of the Burly Brawl (ref: Matrix 2).
Unless it turns out that there is some sort of mass in the medium, in which case the relativity is still fine.
Well, there's some mass in the medium: the vacuum in the outer space isn't perfect. In fact no perfect vacuum exists.
Relativists could argue this is enough for an effect of 4 min slowdown over 500 million years long travel.
This is unfair competition, imo. Here's why...
You should never be able to pay a customer to specifically exclude a competitor. For example.. If you're paying a company a sum amounting to $10 to go with your product Y that costs $100 and exclude product X, it would mean your competitor would have to sell at $90 in order to compete - assuming both products essentially do the same thing. It artifically lowers the competitor's price... kind of like what has happened with AMD and Intel.
You're right, but Sony does basically the same with Blu-Ray. Just not so directly.
Why do you think people buy more non-PS3 Blu-Ray players?
Since there are more Blu-Ray movies out there and studios behind Blu-Ray.
Why are there more studios behind Blu-Ray? Since PS3 is a Blu-Ray player, and even before non-PS3 Blu-Ray players, PS3 made the Blu-Ray capable consumers the larger mass.
What is PS3? It's a loss leader, Sony basically puts cash out of their own pocket to sell it at major, major loss.
Who pays for that loss? Gamers, when they buy games in the future (eventually).
So what do we have here, which is worse: Microsoft paying two studios to support HD DVD, or gamers unwillingly paying Sony extra fees on their games to push Blu-Ray?
Sorry, but an anti-circumvention argument is a stretch. Now, is a technological measure that can be defeated by merely deleting files or removing registry keys "effective"?
Imagine you sit on a platform. That's legal. I have scissors, of the paper kind, not with sharp edges. That's legal. I've placed the scissors around the rope that holds the platform, I'm trying to measure something. That's legal.
Now an accidental twitch, I close the scissors and cut the rope. You tell, how could possibly an involuntary twitch end up as me being a murderer?
Shit, I'll need a really good lawyer on this one...