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Linux and flash
As part of your editor's moral duty to be a torment to his children, he
requires them to use Linux whenever possible. They have come to realize
that Linux works well for almost anything required by their school, but
that it is not up to their requirements for fun. The lack of a World of
Warcraft client is a big problem, but the lack of solid Flash support seems
to be an even bigger one. The YouTube/MySpace lifestyle remains hard to
support on Linux; children are unimpressed by our high-quality Theora
implementation.
One of the things your editor heard Lawrence Lessig say at Wizards of OS 4 was that video is the communication medium of our time. The free software world needs to better support this channel. In support of this argument, consider that those of us interested in the next U.S. presidential election (a mere year and a half away) may have to resort increasingly to anonymously-posted videos to get our full share of attack advertisements. The best mudslinging will be unavailable to those of us stuck in the text world. While there are a number of video formats out there, what all of this really comes down to is that we need decent support for Flash. For better or for worse, Flash dominates in a number of areas, including network video and a number of interactive site features. It's not just for really obnoxious advertisements anymore. We do not have decent support for Flash now; that proprietary plugin just does not cut it in the free software world. The good news is that we're getting closer to the level of support we need. In particular, Benjamin Otte has recently announced that the swfdec Flash player is now able to work with video from YouTube. In general, swfdec has some ground to cover yet; to answer the question of whether swfdec can replace proprietary Flash Benjamin writes:
That really depends on your definition of close. For the definition
"implements all of Flash's features" it'll probably not hit 5%. For
the definition of "plays all the Flash files on the Web" I think
it's 80/20 right now. Swfdec plays 80% of the ads and 20% of the
real content.
What's important here is that swfdec has hit a point where it will start to be truly useful; that, in turn, may help to attract more developers to the project. A program which almost works is often more attractive to hack on than something which is just a promise for the future. Swfdec is not the only Flash-related project out there; Gnash is also working toward a solution to this problem. Gnash would also appear to be at a similar point in development; the project is not quite ready to proclaim YouTube support, but, according to Gnash hacker Rob Savoye, that's a result of different objectives:
I don't want to sound like I'm insulting swfdec, I think it's good
there are multiple open source flash players. But swfdec is tweaked
to handle primarily YouTube, Gnash handles many more Flash movies
correctly. It's a difference in focus.
Given that what we need is one truly good Flash player, one might well wonder what the point of two competing projects is. That is the same question people asked about desktops in the past; at this point it seems clear (to your editor, at least) that the competition between GNOME and KDE has helped to increase the pace of free desktop development and to explore different approaches to the graphical Linux experience. The important thing is to focus on the development and stay away from silly flame wars. To that end, Rob's message contains some good news:
We all spend alot of time talking about Flash
internals. [Benjamin's] very happy. We're happy too, because of the
discussions of how swfdec and Gnash are implemented, we're learning
things from each other's experiences.
If the projects can continue to cooperate and learn from each other, Linux should have a high-quality Flash implementation in short order. If some of the more desktop-oriented distributions were to realize that supporting these projects is very much in their own interest, it could happen even sooner. There are few limits to what a free software project can do once it gets rolling. A good Flash player is just the beginning, however. If we want free software to have a significant role in the creation of all this content, we need good authoring tools - and those are rather further behind. Another thing Lawrence Lessig urged was the creation of a free software culture for Flash developers, almost all of whom are, for all practical purposes, shipping binaries at this point. Some good free Flash tools, along with increased support for sharing source, could transform the Flash development world - for video and more. We could help to bring freedom to an important communication medium; that would be even better than creating the ability to watch silly videos with free software tools. (Log in to post comments)
Linux and flash Posted Mar 22, 2007 9:05 UTC (Thu) by Uraeus (subscriber, #33755) [Link] Another important difference between swfdec and Gansh is the licensing. Swfdec choose to be LGPL from the start due to realizing that being GPL would kill any chance of it being shipable with audio and video support by any of the major distributions as it would constitute a GPL violation.
Play WoW using Wine, silly! Posted Mar 22, 2007 9:19 UTC (Thu) by rankincj (subscriber, #4865) [Link] Recent versions of Wine play WoW just fine in OpenGL mode... provided you can enable DRI for your video card.
Play WoW using Wine, silly! Posted Mar 27, 2007 15:51 UTC (Tue) by aigarius (subscriber, #7329) [Link] I can confirm that, WoW works prefectly fine with Wine. You just need to follow a couple step manual that can easily be found on the web.
competition is good? Posted Mar 22, 2007 10:19 UTC (Thu) by dion (subscriber, #2764) [Link] I guess I'm the only one who thinks that competition isn't always a good thing.
For some things a standard is better than competition.
Just look at the mobile phone system in Europe, there is only GSM (ignore 3G for the moment), all providers compete to provide the best GSM coverage and all manufacturers compete to provide the best GSM phones.
The result is both lower prices and more freedom as phones aren't tied to any single operator.
I think that it would have been nice if people who start competing Free software projects take a good hard look at what they are doing and think about simply trying to improve the existing project in stead of going off on their own hunt for glory.
It makes me so sad to think of the all the effort that has been wasted in these situations, whether it's KDE vs. Gnome, swdec vs. gnash or Tomcat vs. Geronimo, there is a ton of work that could have been leveraged by the newcomers if only they would jump on the existing project and help drive it in the right direction in stead of disregarding it and starting over.
Don't get me wrong, some times the existing project is so broken and unmaintainable that you have to start over, but when you do you also need to realize that you have just told the world that you think that the existing project is crap or that you are really doing your own project for some other reason than to get the best product in the shortest amount of time.
Competition between companies is fine because it only hurts the companies that compete and benefits the customers, but all competition between OSS projects does is to fragment the user and developer base and that leads to lots of duplicated effort.
competition is good? Posted Mar 22, 2007 11:44 UTC (Thu) by nedrichards (guest, #23295) [Link] If in this case the Standard is Flash then surely swfdec and Gnash are the Orange and Vodafone or Nokia and Sony-Ericsson of the analogy?
competition is good? Posted Mar 22, 2007 17:58 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] The question is whether you're trying to standardize the file format (in which case you are correct) or standardize the programmatic interface (as POSIX does). I'd be inclined to suggest that competition in interfaces is a good thing until one emerges as definitively better, in which case a back-compatibility layer can be implemented so that programs using the worse interface can still be used.
This is sort of like what WINE does (worse interface: Win32 API: better one: POSIX ;} )
competition is good? Posted Mar 24, 2007 8:58 UTC (Sat) by dion (subscriber, #2764) [Link] Well, I think the situation of two different OSS projects trying to implement the same standard is much more like Nokia having two different groups compete to create the same kind of phone.
The result being that you split up your resources and produce two inferior products instead of one great product.
competition is good? Posted Apr 5, 2007 16:24 UTC (Thu) by hazelsct (guest, #3659) [Link] Here's another analogy as a counterargument to your Nokia groups. IBM created three teams to work on copper metallization. One tried chemical vapor deposition, another physical vapor deposition, and the third electrochemistry. They all did great work, but electrochemistry was able to do things the others couldn't (like superconformal filling), and won out in the end. The result is an enormous win for IBM: now *everybody* has to license their patents in this area.
The moral: internal competition within a company, or community, can be a good thing, even when it divides resources. It's hard to tell early on which project's approach is better, or they both may have merits which will appeal to different end users or applications (like GNOME/KDE).
competition is good? Posted Mar 22, 2007 13:07 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link] short answer: YES.long answer: HELL YES. Different people have different needs. The fragmentation is not in the "F/OSS community", it's in the user base, in the human nature. Classic example: some people need a desktop environment that allows the use of proprietary software, others want/need a desktop environment that helps forcing the development of free software. There is no effort wasted, one is written in C++ (and possibly the people writing it don't know how/don't want to/think it would be a waste to implement it in C or whatever). OTOH, other people think they are better off (and they have the correct expertise for) implementing it in C, and making a meta-object protocol managing lib in C, and, you know what? Good for them. There is no waste of effort, because there is really few overlap between the people that would work on each of the projects. But when there is overlap, then F/OSS excels: KHTML/WebKit and Gecko are examples of components that are widely reused -- when the person that need a HTML-drawing component has the correct expertise to use one or the other. There is no "right answer" to the great flamewar-generating questions (vi/emacs? gnome/kde/xfce? konqi/iceweasel/seamonkey? amarok/...?): there _may_ be _one_ right answer to _one_ specific person/enterprise, but one size does not fit all. If you eliminate competition, you are back to Windows: everyone using size 8 Mao-styled gray suits.
competition is good? Posted Mar 24, 2007 9:54 UTC (Sat) by dion (subscriber, #2764) [Link] I realize that different people have different needs.
Wrt. Flash implementations there is only one need: To have the best possible implementation.
Wrt. Desktops there are many users with different needs, but that's something that should be handled by adding configuration options, not by creating a separate project for each user.
I may be treading in flamewar territory here, but bear with me for a paragraph or two.
The GNOME project has done more to hurt Free software on the desktop than MS could ever hope for, not because they produce horrendous software, much of it is very nice, in fact, but because all GNOME does is to provide a second modern+bloated desktop to choose from, leading to more confusion for users and less developers on both GNOME and KDE.
Even though the technical reason for starting GNOME is gone (non-Free Qt), there are many people still working on that project for somewhat vague reasons like having a preference for C over C++.
To me that says one thing: Duplicated effort.
There is no danger in having one really good implementation that everybody uses, just look at samba, gcc, Linux and openssl*, those projects and their users do very good without any direct competition.
* Well maybe the openssl mono culture is a bit dangerous, from a security standpoint.
I guess my point is that the danger of lock in and mismanagement isn't that big of a deal with OSS projects, because if a project goes astray you can always fork it and keep going, so keeping the developers and users consolidated around that one project only has benefits for both.
competition is good? Posted Mar 25, 2007 1:09 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link] you say we should have one desktop with config options for every possible user
but you have honest disagreement between different people about how much configurability there should be (and not just the gnome folks)
haveing underlying mechanisms that can be re-used by different projects to implement the same functionality is good, but if you make absolutly everything configurable you just create the need for multiple configuration mangement tools to implement sane configuration.
as an example X is fully configurable, but X by itself doesn't make a useable desktop, as a result there are a LOT of projects out there to implement the management of windows (not just gnome and kde, but also windowmaker, fvwm, icewindows, etc)
the other thing to remember is that there are a LOT of reasons why someone may not want to work on one project, there can be personal and technical disagreemnts with how something is done. if competition is bad then they have to either work with the existing project, or not work in that space at all. competition is good becouse it allows someone who disagrees to go off elsewhere and implement it their own way.
getting back to the issue at hand (a flash player), while the end goal is the same (the ability to play flash), there is still a lot of room for disagreement on how to get there. Even if both teams decide to use the same language for programming the project (I don't know if these two do or not), there's still a lot of room for disagreemnt on how the code and project should be orginized. even seemingly simple things like what codeing style a project requires could be enough justification for someone to not want to work on it.
Opensource programming isn't a zero-sum game. if someone works on project A it doesn't mean that they would work on project B if A went away (and it also doesn't mean that they would reduce the amount of effort that they choose to put into project C by working on A)
competition is good? Posted Mar 25, 2007 14:27 UTC (Sun) by dion (subscriber, #2764) [Link] I completely get your point that there are good reasons for not wanting to work on a project and of course it's good that people can go off and do their own thing.
I don't buy the argument that gnome is needed because it's better to have less configurability than what KDE offers, if that was a valid reason then gnome would consist of a very limited configuration tool for KDE.
While I think it's good for the individual to be able to choose what project they work on, I still don't think that it's better for users to have several competing implementations of the same solution, unless the point of those different projects is to figure out what the best solution is before EOLing the others.
Your example with the flash players is a good one, clearly it would suck to have to work on a project that has horrendous code, so you might be happier to just work on your own project in stead, but that doesn't mean that you will make progress any faster than the first project or that the resulting product will be any better, it just means that you will be happier.
I think it would have been better if the first project didn't have horrendous code and if you had chosen to work on the first project in stead.
I'm not saying that a hacker should be banned from starting on a competing project, just that it would be better if he chose to help the first one.
competition is good? Posted Mar 29, 2007 18:05 UTC (Thu) by TRauMa (guest, #16483) [Link] You're a fan of intelligent design? Cause that's not how evolution works. You just can't tell which approach to solving a problem is better at any point in time. The first mammals were a failure, yet no one decided to scrap the duplicated effort and just go with the dinosaur design.
And what gives you the idea we should just scrap GNOME? Why not KDE? Because KDE was there first? What kind of reason is that?
competition is good? Posted Mar 30, 2007 8:26 UTC (Fri) by dion (subscriber, #2764) [Link] I take your "intelligent design" suggestion as the strongest possible insult, but we're talking about software development, not a biological process.
Evolution is not a good development method for software, except for some very specialized areas where you can run thousands of generations pr. second.
Sure it's nice to think of the plethora of OSS projects as evolution in action, but behind every single one of those projects is at least one designer,
Natural selection doesn't really work with software either, the only thing an OSS project needs to live is to attract developers, that's why you have ridiculous things like desktop applications written in C that just refuse to go away or evolve into using a higher level language.
To get back to your question; yes, I think that GNOME should have been scrapped around the time when Qt was released under GPL or maybe even before that, even RMS conceded that the QPL was a Free license.
The reason to start GNOME in the first place was that Qt wasn't Free, so once that reason went away so should GNOME.
That being said, GNOME has improved and is a useful desktop now, the only thing lacking is a proper high level language, but I guess the up coming C# rewrite will take care of that.
Once GNOME has been rewritten in C# it will be an ideal desktop for former windows developers to get started on, so there is merit in that approach.
competition is good? Posted Mar 29, 2007 19:24 UTC (Thu) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link] > you say we should have one desktop with> config options for every possible user > > but you have honest disagreement between > different people about how much configurability > there should be (and not just the gnome folks)
As a KDE user that appreciates the level of configurability it offers,
Additionally, the point made that FLOSS isn't a zero-sum game definitely
The same of course applies to all the other "wars", vi/emacs, etc.
The first point doesn't so much apply in the flash case, due to the spec
Meanwhile, I have gnash merged here, but haven't found it all that
Duncan
competition is good? Posted Mar 29, 2007 14:29 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link] > Wrt. Flash implementations there is only one need: To have the best> possible implementation. The definition of "best" is multiple: 1. the fastest implementation; or 2. the smallest implementation; or 3,4,5. the implementation best-integrated with my KDE/GNOME/XFCE desktop; ... > Wrt. Desktops there are many users with different needs, but that's > something that should be handled by adding configuration options, not by > creating a separate project for each user. Configuration option: do you want all the DE's software to be developed using C++, C, or C#, using GTK, Tk, LessTif, or Qt (so you can extend it with your own knowledge)? I don't think it's possible... > Even though the technical reason for starting GNOME is gone (non-Free > Qt), there are many people still working on that project for somewhat > vague reasons like having a preference for C over C++. Even if I agreed that GNOMErs are evil (and I don't), some people just don't have the ability to program in C++ over C. > There is no danger in having one really good implementation that > everybody uses, just look at samba, gcc, Linux and openssl*, those > projects and their users do very good without any direct competition. Without competition like MS-CIFS, lcc and lots of proprietary compilers, *BSDs, and GNUTLS? > I guess my point is that the danger of lock in and mismanagement isn't > that big of a deal with OSS projects, because if a project goes astray > you can always fork it and keep going, so keeping the developers and > users consolidated around that one project only has benefits for both. That is your error IMHO: if a project goes astray you can always fork it and keep going IFF you have the necessary skills to make it keep going the way it is. Anyway, "keeping developers and users consolidated around one project" is a pipe dream... people disagree all the time, that is why we do have thousands of different legal systems in the world.
competition is good? Posted Mar 30, 2007 10:16 UTC (Fri) by dion (subscriber, #2764) [Link] Best wrt flash should be something like: Correct, fast, integrated in that order.
WRT GNOME choosing C, that is widely regarded as a mistake or at least widely enough that Miguel shares that point of view.
Choosing C over C++ is really not a forgivable offense when talking about desktop applications IMHO.
I guess I should specify what I meant by "direct competition", MS-CIFS doesn't compete directly with SAMBA as it's not Open Source and thus not available to everyone that SAMBA is available to.
The same is true with GCC, lcc is not Free software and doesn't come close to GCCs abilities.
gnutls does seem to try to compete with openssl and there are certain smaller Free ssh implementations (dropbear for one), but they do not have nearly as wide a deployment (I certainly had never heard of gnutls before) so both openssl and openssh can be said to have a monopoly.
The BSD kernels could be seen as competitors to Linux, but again there is no direct competition, as BSD is a whole other OS, when was the last time you swapped out Linux with the BSD kernel on your system?
That being said I don't think forcing anyone to do anything is ever a good idea, so I fully respect peoples rights to choose what projects to work on.
All I'm saying is that the situation is much better when a single good project dominates without any competition than when there are n+1 crappy competing projects.
Having a single good project might not always be possible, but when it is it can be very, very good in deed.
competition is good? Posted Apr 5, 2007 16:48 UTC (Thu) by hazelsct (guest, #3659) [Link] Whence the "C is a bad desktop programming language" tirade? Have you learned nothing in the past decade?
GNOME has had five years of API and ABI stability. The C++ language has had about five ABI changes in the same timeframe. So even if we don't count the changes in KDE and Qt libraries, 3rd party software OEMs have had to re-build everything from scratch for each of the numerous KDE/QT interface and C++ ABI combinations shipped with various versions of various distributions, which is an outrageous amount of effort. Or they've shipped everything statically linked, resulting in extreme bloat in both disk space and memory usage. The GTK+/GNOME apps have just worked, and will continue to just work for the foreseeable future.
There you have it. C is superior to C++.
And for the record, read Miguel's rants again: he is not tired of C, but of languages which aren't garbage collected or JIT compiled. Neither C nor C++ has this, so they're both obsolete!
There, now aren't you glad we have desktop competition? :-)
competition is good? Posted Mar 22, 2007 13:55 UTC (Thu) by JamesErik (subscriber, #17417) [Link] Your reference to GSM in regard to competition is interesting.
I have more than once read analyses that GSM is a technically inferior protocol to CDMA. The technology licensing for CDMA is expensive (Qualcomm) and hindered its uptake, from what I understand, so GSM won out in Europe. GSM may also have benefited from some European NIH syndrome, too. If these assertions are correct, then GSM users will never have as good a cellular experience as they could have had with a (well-deployed) CDMA system. Of course, they flat-out don't have an option in Europe, AFAIK.
I've not worked in the cellular industry, so doubtless other subscribers will have better information than I do, but I thought this observation would be interesting fodder for discussion.
competition is good? Posted Mar 22, 2007 16:05 UTC (Thu) by kamil (subscriber, #3802) [Link] Let me take a guess: you are writing this from the U.S., aren't you? Let me share with you my perspective -- that of a European currently living in the U.S.
There is no such thing as a "European NIH syndrome", at least not as far as modern technologies are concerned. Most people are realists and they recognize American dominance in these areas, even if in some cases they don't like it. On the other hand, "NIH syndrome" is very much visible in the U.S. In fact, I strongly suspect that that phenomenon, and not just the licensing issues, was behind the creation of Gnome in opposition to KDE, which was viewed as "German". Could that also be the reason why SuSE was always doing rather poorly in the U.S.?
With respect to GSM, I'll take your word that CDMA is a superior technology. However, the fact is that in Europe, the public sees GSM as good enough. It "just works" -- pretty much everywhere. I remember an ad of one of the Dutch GSM networks from a few years ago, that they had a coverage of 99.7% of the country. Contrast that with the pathetic coverage of GSM networks in the U.S. -- my T-Mobile phone loses signal if I put it too far from a window in my apartment -- in downtown Chicago!
competition is good? Posted Mar 22, 2007 16:24 UTC (Thu) by Uraeus (subscriber, #33755) [Link] Considering that the founders of GNOME where Mexican (Miguel and Federico) and the majority of developers in the early years where European (and still is) I think your theory about an US NIH applying to GNOME is rather far fetched.
competition is good? Posted Mar 22, 2007 17:54 UTC (Thu) by kamil (subscriber, #3802) [Link] Well, you know, Mexico is on the same continent as the U.S. :-). Plus, Gnome, being a GNU project, could be seen as U.S.-controlled.
But you are right, I didn't have enough information about Gnome to make that statement. I still do believe though that the NIH syndrome applies more to Americans than Europeans. I'm a computer scientist and I see a lot of it when it comes to, e.g., referencing other people's work.
Anyway, we are awfully off-topic here :-).
competition is good? Posted Mar 29, 2007 18:07 UTC (Thu) by TRauMa (guest, #16483) [Link] The whole Airbus effort smells like "Look, we too" to me. What about Galileo?
competition is good? Posted Mar 22, 2007 18:11 UTC (Thu) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link] There is no such thing as a "European NIH syndrome" Right. That's why they're putting up their own GPS-compatible system. "Galileo is made in Europe by Europeans," Bonacina said. I'm not saying it doesn't go both ways, but your claim that NIH doesn't exist in Europe is absurd.
competition is good? Posted Mar 22, 2007 19:26 UTC (Thu) by gravious (subscriber, #7662) [Link] Not valid.
China is a partner in Galileo too you know. I would say that it would be brain-damaged _not_ to construct a commercial, public non-military GPS that was not beholden to the .mil of the US of A. Of course if you like having your live run by people with an agenda antithetical to your existence then by all means do not use Galileo when it launches.
Every time I think of life post-Galileo I get the warm fuzzies. From Wikipedia "Galileo is tasked with multiple objectives including; to provide a higher precision to all users than is currently available through GPS or GLONASS, to improve availability of positioning services at higher latitudes, and to provide an independent positioning system upon which European nations can rely even in times of war or political disagreement."
Granted, original claim about NIH is prolly off-mark, humans being humans. I don't see why Europeans would be resistant to this affliction.
competition is good? Posted Mar 22, 2007 20:04 UTC (Thu) by kamil (subscriber, #3802) [Link] You are right, my statement regarding a lack of NIH in Europe was rather silly, and your counterexample spot-on. Galileo always seemed like a waste of money to me, as it is extremely unlikely that GPS would ever become unavailable or go back to lower resolution (too many U.S. companies depend on it, and in the U.S. "it's the economy, stupid"). Then again, I don't know the full story; maybe there are better reasons for Galileo than "because we can" or "because we don't trust Yankees".
Going back to where it all started ("competition is good?"), how to define competition? Is a market more competitive if there are multiple technologies competing (cellular phone market in the U.S.) or multiple providers using the same technology (mobile phone market in Europe)? I think any European visiting the U.S. who had to experience its pathetic cellular networks knows the answer already.
So the way I see it, it is probably OK that, e.g., there is "digikam", "kphotoalbum", and all the other photo archiving programs, but not that there is Gnome and KDE, as users tend to limit themselves to apps developed specifically for their preferred desktop, so with multiple desktop environments, the competition where it really matters (apps) actually becomes smaller.
competition is good? Posted Mar 22, 2007 20:32 UTC (Thu) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link] Well, I disagree (surprise!). I'm glad there is both GNOME and KDE; or rather, I suspect my preference[1] of the two would not meet your desires, given your example applications: I find KDE, and KDE apps in general, aesthetically unappealing. None the less, I use digikam, because it simply provides more of the features I want/need. (But if the f-spot people ever figures out how to write an import dialog, I'm may change...). And while there is certainly an memory incentive to stick with apps that use the same library as your desktop system, I know a lot of people who use at least a few apps from "the other system" whichever that might be. [1] Actually, I'm using XFCE now, which is a lot snappier than GNOME on my hardware.
competition is good? Posted Apr 1, 2007 21:25 UTC (Sun) by emj (guest, #14307) [Link] The big issue with KDE vs. GNome was GTK/C vs. KDE/C++. There was alot of tention when KDE came about, mostly because of KDE but also because many thought C was a better choice.
I was very relieved when they released GNOME, since KDE at its first versions looked like a Win 3.11 port.
GSM vs CDMA Posted Mar 22, 2007 16:44 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] I've worked in the telecom industry and the really big difference between GSM and CDMA is the signal encoding. CDMA has a significantly more advanced signal encoding that allows the tower to transmit many signals to many phones without anything getting confused. It removed many of the frequency and distance limitations of GSM.
On the other hand, the protocol stack for GSM is significantly better than CDMA. The way I heard it they took the protocol stack from GSM and the signal encoding from CDMA and created 3G.
However, that wasn't what made GSM great. What made GSM great is that the handsets are not tied to a provider, just the SIM cards are. So you could buy a phone and it would work on any provider, no worries. A GSM phone in Australia would work in Europe without any hassles whatsoever. Even now, you can buy a CDMA phone is Australia and guess what, you can never switch provider. Which is why people don't do it...
competition is good? Posted Mar 22, 2007 17:51 UTC (Thu) by job (guest, #670) [Link] According to Wikipedia, the CDMA standard dates back to 1995. The GSM network in my country was operational in 1991. I can't find the standard, but the licenses were handed out in 1988, so the standard must be older than that. So what was that about NIH?
At first, CDMA actually had lower data performance per cell than GSM had, but since then the standards have both been updated and I believe they are pretty much equals today from a technical perspective. Of course, today the US uses WCDMA and we use UMTS.
But some American protectionism borders to being funny. A couple of years ago (ten, perhaps) all my American friends explained to me how unbelievably stupid it was to communicate with short text messages on your mobile phone. It was hard to type and hard to read and in general very useless. But now they are happily texting just like the rest of us, so I guess it wasn't very stupid as soon as it had caught on over there.
texting Posted Mar 22, 2007 21:47 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] Ummm, no. Texting is still stupid.
texting Posted Mar 22, 2007 23:33 UTC (Thu) by BackSeat (subscriber, #1886) [Link] Ummm, no. Texting is still stupid.Tell that to my wife. As a deaf person, SMS has given her the ability to communicate in a way not previously possible. Indeed, the Internet and related technologies have changed her life completely - but not in a way that justifies you calling her 'stupid'.
texting Posted Mar 26, 2007 1:33 UTC (Mon) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link] What's stupid about texting in the US is it's priced as a "premium" feature instead of an economy feature, as it should be, since it costs the network far less in overhead, facilities, etc, as compared to a phonecall.
Oh well.
competition is good? Posted Mar 22, 2007 15:42 UTC (Thu) by marduk (subscriber, #3831) [Link] Competition between companies is fine because it only hurts the companies that compete and benefits the customers, but all competition between OSS projects does is to fragment the user and developer base and that leads to lots of duplicated effort. What, competition between companies fragments the user base as well. If I go out and by a PS3 I know that there are some Xbox 360 games that I won't be able to play, so that does hurt me. And what about competition between OSS projects that are also maintained by companies (e.g. RedHat/GFS vs. Oracle/OCFS)? Were RedHat and Oracle to only work on one filesystem together, we may not be able to reap the benifits of one company trying to out-do the other. So the way I see it is it goes both ways. OSS or not, the "user" suffers a bit from competition with the hopes that, in the long run, the user will benefit Also note that, while they are one project now, both gcc and GNU libc have greatly benefited from competing forks. .
there's a difference Posted Mar 22, 2007 18:03 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] GCC uses forks all the time for experimental development, and egcs itself could be seen as this kind of fork. But the forks used the same license, with copyright assignments, to make it easy to re-merge later, or to throw away any experiments that didn't work.I'm more troubled when license barriers prevent re-merging, because it makes it harder to benefit from the competition. Branch B can't decide that Branch A has a better solution and import their code. ESR's bazaar cannot function. That's why I regret that Gnash and swfdec have chosen different licenses.
there's a difference Posted Mar 25, 2007 1:18 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link] so go to the project that you think picked the 'wrong' license and explain to them that their carefully considered choice is wrong and they need to change it.
I'll bet that you won't get very far with this argument (although you may cause enough anger and distraction to reduce the effectivness of the peope actually doing the work there, causing the project with your favored license to 'win' becouse it's not suffereing from people like you)
takeing this a step farther, you are effectively saying that there should only be one license, and that everyone had better pick that license, even if they disagree with it.
do you start to see why this is a bad attitude yet?
there's a difference Posted Mar 25, 2007 14:42 UTC (Sun) by dion (subscriber, #2764) [Link] No.
I don't think people should be forced to do anything, ever.
I don't think that sabotaging a competing project does anyone any good either.
I do think that it's better when everybody can agree to pull in the same direction, that's all.
there's a difference Posted Mar 29, 2007 18:13 UTC (Thu) by TRauMa (guest, #16483) [Link] <diabolical>If it's the right direction, that is...</diabolical>
my license is better than your license Posted Mar 25, 2007 14:55 UTC (Sun) by marduk (subscriber, #3831) [Link] I was going to comment about the licensing comment before but decided it was irrelevant, but since the discussion seems to have turned toward that:
OSS licensing has long been an issue, and it's a much broader issue. It is probably something that will never go away as there is no "perfect" OSS license. Even with the same license, two people will agree to that license but for entirely different reasons. It affects many more things than forks or competeting software. It's a shame, but it's just one of those things that we as a community have to deal with.
competition is good? Posted Mar 29, 2007 6:37 UTC (Thu) by eduperez (guest, #11232) [Link] What, competition between companies fragments the user base as well. If I go out and by a PS3 I know that there are some Xbox 360 games that I won't be able to play, so that does hurt me.Whitout competition, we would still be playing games on an Atari 2600.
competition is good? Posted Mar 30, 2007 3:31 UTC (Fri) by Sutoka (guest, #43890) [Link] If you finished reading his comment he went on to say that compition hurtsin the short term, but in the long run it has the possibility of making things better.
youtube-dl and playing with ffmpeg Posted Mar 23, 2007 14:55 UTC (Fri) by ber (subscriber, #2142) [Link] Recently I wanted to watch a video from youtube for the first time and I have a ppc with GNU/Linux.On Debian I found youtube-dl and could download and watch the video in question with mplayer. I do not know for how many videos this will actually work. The website of youtube-dl says: As YouTube.com videos are in Flash Video format, their extension should be flv. In Linux and other unices, video players using a recent version of ffmpeg can play them. That includes MPlayer, VLC, etc. Those two work under Windows and other platforms, but you could also get a specific FLV player of your taste. This seems to suggest that we already have all the tools available to watch .flv as Free Software.
youtube-dl and playing with ffmpeg Posted Mar 26, 2007 1:37 UTC (Mon) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link] That is true, but playing them in the browser is different from downloading them. (I usually prefer downloading!)
An aside: A recent roblimo article points out that flash8/9 however support VP6 which is not open and not yet implemented in ffmpeg. So there is the danger that youtube could start using this alternate format. Certainly some other video hosting sites already do. This is a bit unrelated to the swfdec vs ffmpeg discussion though, since neither can decode vp6, and if one gains the ability probably both will.
youtube-dl and playing with ffmpeg Posted Mar 29, 2007 12:57 UTC (Thu) by markhb (guest, #1003) [Link] Two questions about the FLOSS clients: can either of them handle MLB Gameday (see mlb.com once baseball season starts)? And, can they handle the videos on NBC.com where my current system (using the Macromedia/Adobe client) cannot flip from the advertisement to the content?
youtube-dl and playing with ffmpeg Posted Mar 29, 2007 18:57 UTC (Thu) by leadfoot (guest, #39493) [Link] FFmpeg definitely does play VP6, and probably every variation in the VP6 family.Check the changelog on the website for more details.
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