Sorry, my comment was in reply to your post in which you made the statement:
Yes they are and no they don't
Science says there is no god. Religion says there is a god. How can there be a more opposite point of view?
Again, science says nothing of the kind. Athiests, on the other hand often use science to attack religious dogma. Clearly you hold the the athiestic viewpoint, which is why you've completely missed mine, and assumed that since I don't agree with you I must have religious beliefs. Nothing could be further from the truth.
So my point, since you missed it, is that question of God or no God is completely irrelevant. Believe in one or the other if you must, but honestly, you'll be better off if you simply dismiss the question and rid yourself of belief entirely.
Like everyone else who holds this view, you're confused.
Science doesn't say there is no God, it says that the existance of a God is not necessary to explain the universe, at least for now. Accordingly, science is nontheistic, not atheistic.
It is important to understand this distinction. In doing so you will be able to see the futility and redundancy of this 'debate'.
They can't sir, without reverse engineering Apple's file format. Taking your viewpoint makes it sound like Microsoft Office documents are not proprietary, since there are open applications that can read them.
There's only one open format for perceptual audio encoding - Ogg Vorbis.
Not so, since the data file format isn't standardized. Yes, other vendors could reverse engineer it, but there is no standard data file format for AAC, only the raw stream, and the license forbids distributing content as a raw stream.
Actually, the requirement that AAC streams be shipped in a proprietary container makes it more proprietary, since interoperability will only occur through vendor cooperation.
mp3's can be played by any mp3 player. Apple's AAC? Only playable by Apple software and hardware. I seriously doubt that the potential lack of DRM will have any effect on that.
While it's often said that AAC is not a proprietary format, this is untrue. Like other proprietary formats AAC requires agreeing to the patent license which among other things requires licensees to distribute their AAC content in a proprietary container.
As the parent poster mentions, patent royalties are not required to distribute content, but patent royalties are required to encode/decode content so the format is as proprietary as any other.
The points you raise are only valid for entry level database requirements. As somebody who has spent many years with both SQL Server and Oracle, I can tell you that as your demands increase the tool support provided by SQL Server, and indeed the database engine itself become critical scalability issues.
For example, the provided tools such as Enterprise Manager and DTS make routine data management simple - provided you have modest enough requirements that having a human berform the work is acceptable. Additionally, the data import/export facilities are terribly inefficient unless you run them on the database server (involving either remote desktop or scheduling the package). For large quantities of data import/export you simply must use the bcp command line tool, which has an interface so arcane it makes the Oracle command line tools look advanced.
Once you've either developed or purchased enough add-on scripting functionality to automate such tasks, you'll find that once your data volume reaches a certain point that the pessimistic fine-grained locking model, plus the naive query optimiser will have incredible impact on both your query performance and your concurrency. You'll find that many data management jobs will require 'staging' intermediate data transformation in temporary tables to work around the inefficiencies of the engine. Then, you'll realise that time is money and invest in a much more capable product.
Don't get me wrong, SQL Server is a nice product as long as your requirements are modest enough, and in a primarily Windows based shop it's often the most sensible choice. However the points you raise about Oracle (or any other enterprise level solution for that matter) are only relevant because your using a sledgehammer to squash a fly. When you're dealing with large scale data management situations, SQL Server is a toy.
I'd imagine that Novell were coerced into this agreement by Microsoft, who adopted a strategy of "Agree to this, or we go after you". They know full well that such an agreement will have massive effect on Novell's reputation within the Open Source community, and $300 million for a big dent in the commercial reputation of Linux is from Microsoft's perspective a good deal.
Matt
Surely you jest? C certainly consists only of constucts that exist in (most) machine instuction sets but it hardly allows you to do anything you could do in assembly language. Want to try doing some vector manipulation ala MMX/SSE ?
C allows you to do anything you can do in C, no more, no less.
The examples cited by the parent are legitimate cases of erroneous code which can be detected by a compiler. Sure, there are (rare) cases when accessing an arbitrary memory location is needed, but think about it: Such code will contain an explicit reference to the memory location in question.
I personally find it a bit disturbing that programmers still believe that in order to get an efficient language you must do away with safety, and still believe that optimal code is only produced by a human, when in 99% of cases hand optimisation is achieved by exploiting a boundary condition that's known to the programmer but not to the compiler, due primarily to the inability of unsophisticated languages (like C) to express such conditions.
Anyway, REAL C programmers write your example as if (!p)
When oh when will the industry wake up and realise the fallacy of reports like these. Equating lost revenue, even on some supposedly research determined ratio, to piracy is simply not a valid metric.
The only valid observation from examining piracy, is that people as a result are watching more films. If people want to watch a film in a cinema, they will. If they want to own the DVD, they will. How is it that they come to the conclusion that 'we aren't doing enough to enforce protection of our material' ?
Surely, after 30 years of sophisticated reproduction technology, it must have occured to them that preventing people making duplicates of media is impossible. can't be done. Any mechanism they can devise, a million people can circumvent.
The only rational thing they can do to appease their supposedly ailing wallets is adapt, and provide the consumer with the product they want at a price the consumer is willing to pay.
As much as I detest the iTunes music store and the associated DRM technology, I have to agree with Steve Jobs. You wanna make money? Give people what they want.
Slashdot Mirror
You can see a man eating fish at McDonalds. Even when it's closed.
This whole story vanishes next week when some genius realises Phobos was between the Sun and orbital module...
Sorry, my comment was in reply to your post in which you made the statement:
Yes they are and no they don't
Science says there is no god. Religion says there is a god. How can there be a more opposite point of view?
Again, science says nothing of the kind. Athiests, on the other hand often use science to attack religious dogma. Clearly you hold the the athiestic viewpoint, which is why you've completely missed mine, and assumed that since I don't agree with you I must have religious beliefs. Nothing could be further from the truth.
So my point, since you missed it, is that question of God or no God is completely irrelevant. Believe in one or the other if you must, but honestly, you'll be better off if you simply dismiss the question and rid yourself of belief entirely.
Like everyone else who holds this view, you're confused.
Science doesn't say there is no God, it says that the existance of a God is not necessary to explain the universe, at least for now. Accordingly, science is nontheistic, not atheistic.
It is important to understand this distinction. In doing so you will be able to see the futility and redundancy of this 'debate'.
:-)
Did you actually bother to read the license document I linked? The facts of the matter are very simple:
AAC is proprietary
Apples implementation of AAC is proprietary
My (or your) political views on the subject aren't really relevant here, just the facts.
They can't sir, without reverse engineering Apple's file format. Taking your viewpoint makes it sound like Microsoft Office documents are not proprietary, since there are open applications that can read them.
There's only one open format for perceptual audio encoding - Ogg Vorbis.
Not so, since the data file format isn't standardized. Yes, other vendors could reverse engineer it, but there is no standard data file format for AAC, only the raw stream, and the license forbids distributing content as a raw stream.
Actually, the requirement that AAC streams be shipped in a proprietary container makes it more proprietary, since interoperability will only occur through vendor cooperation.
mp3's can be played by any mp3 player. Apple's AAC? Only playable by Apple software and hardware. I seriously doubt that the potential lack of DRM will have any effect on that.
While it's often said that AAC is not a proprietary format, this is untrue. Like other proprietary formats AAC requires agreeing to the patent license which among other things requires licensees to distribute their AAC content in a proprietary container.
As the parent poster mentions, patent royalties are not required to distribute content, but patent royalties are required to encode/decode content so the format is as proprietary as any other.
The points you raise are only valid for entry level database requirements. As somebody who has spent many years with both SQL Server and Oracle, I can tell you that as your demands increase the tool support provided by SQL Server, and indeed the database engine itself become critical scalability issues.
For example, the provided tools such as Enterprise Manager and DTS make routine data management simple - provided you have modest enough requirements that having a human berform the work is acceptable. Additionally, the data import/export facilities are terribly inefficient unless you run them on the database server (involving either remote desktop or scheduling the package). For large quantities of data import/export you simply must use the bcp command line tool, which has an interface so arcane it makes the Oracle command line tools look advanced.
Once you've either developed or purchased enough add-on scripting functionality to automate such tasks, you'll find that once your data volume reaches a certain point that the pessimistic fine-grained locking model, plus the naive query optimiser will have incredible impact on both your query performance and your concurrency. You'll find that many data management jobs will require 'staging' intermediate data transformation in temporary tables to work around the inefficiencies of the engine. Then, you'll realise that time is money and invest in a much more capable product.
Don't get me wrong, SQL Server is a nice product as long as your requirements are modest enough, and in a primarily Windows based shop it's often the most sensible choice. However the points you raise about Oracle (or any other enterprise level solution for that matter) are only relevant because your using a sledgehammer to squash a fly. When you're dealing with large scale data management situations, SQL Server is a toy.
I'd imagine that Novell were coerced into this agreement by Microsoft, who adopted a strategy of "Agree to this, or we go after you". They know full well that such an agreement will have massive effect on Novell's reputation within the Open Source community, and $300 million for a big dent in the commercial reputation of Linux is from Microsoft's perspective a good deal. Matt
Surely you jest? C certainly consists only of constucts that exist in (most) machine instuction sets but it hardly allows you to do anything you could do in assembly language. Want to try doing some vector manipulation ala MMX/SSE ? C allows you to do anything you can do in C, no more, no less. The examples cited by the parent are legitimate cases of erroneous code which can be detected by a compiler. Sure, there are (rare) cases when accessing an arbitrary memory location is needed, but think about it: Such code will contain an explicit reference to the memory location in question. I personally find it a bit disturbing that programmers still believe that in order to get an efficient language you must do away with safety, and still believe that optimal code is only produced by a human, when in 99% of cases hand optimisation is achieved by exploiting a boundary condition that's known to the programmer but not to the compiler, due primarily to the inability of unsophisticated languages (like C) to express such conditions. Anyway, REAL C programmers write your example as if (!p)
When oh when will the industry wake up and realise the fallacy of reports like these. Equating lost revenue, even on some supposedly research determined ratio, to piracy is simply not a valid metric.
The only valid observation from examining piracy, is that people as a result are watching more films. If people want to watch a film in a cinema, they will. If they want to own the DVD, they will. How is it that they come to the conclusion that 'we aren't doing enough to enforce protection of our material' ?
Surely, after 30 years of sophisticated reproduction technology, it must have occured to them that preventing people making duplicates of media is impossible. can't be done. Any mechanism they can devise, a million people can circumvent. The only rational thing they can do to appease their supposedly ailing wallets is adapt, and provide the consumer with the product they want at a price the consumer is willing to pay. As much as I detest the iTunes music store and the associated DRM technology, I have to agree with Steve Jobs. You wanna make money? Give people what they want.