... And now that I think about it, that makes sense. Three years...

I think they spent the first year trying to determine if they could sue FFmpeg.

Then they spent the second year trying to determine if they could change the codec to make it stop working in FFmpeg.

And they spent the last year while techies tried to convince marketing and legal people that since their code was now worthless, they could release it and take what little publicity they still could.

FFmpeg has had support for ALAC, both encoding and decoding, thanks to a GSoC student, for more than three years. Just saying...

"a techie's skill set from a marketability perspective has a two year half-life"

Well, a marketie's skill set from a technical perspective has a zero year half-life.

They can not be forced to disclose the source code. This is a common misconception about the GPL.

If a GPL violation goes to court, the judge can order the infringing party to stop the distribution and pay damages to the copyright owner, but he will not order the disclosure of the source code. The disclosure of the source code is only a gesture that most FOSS developers will accept to drop the charges.

Of course, if the software is only a thin layer of sugar around a core of GPL code, stopping the distribution means closing the business.

On the other hand, the situation can be reverted: the GPL code may be just a small, non-essential part of the software. Think readline, for example: a software is more comfortable with line editing, but it is in no way necessary. In such situation, the violator may decide to pay the damages and remove the GPLed code from its software, to keep in business with its proprietary model.

FFmpeg's AAC encoder is not finished (yet?), and flagged as experimental. Including it in such a test is rather a dubious idea: it is likely to give a bad impression of the whole project.

Having the new vo-aacenc as contender for the Free Software community would IMHO have been more relevant.

Considering that most accelerated 3D drivers for video controllers are utter crap full security flaws, or “optimizations“, as some call them, and that a video controller has full access to the system bus, and therefore to the RAM, drives, etc., I tend to agree that letting anyone on the web transparently send possibly crafted data to the 3D driver is, from a security point of view, a rather dubious idea.

It can't. But it can remember people who opted in for cookies with a cookie.

In fact, they really thought it trough.

I concur. When I read the title of this article, I thought that maybe it was a fork of Chromium that dropped the idiotic policy "we know better than the user what he wants" and restored such useful functions as find-links-as-you-type, middle-click URL paste, open frame in new tab, GUI style customization and so on.

1: I know, there is an extension; but it works badly.

I completely second this.

What people forget here is that the GPL is not just an open source license, not even just the most popular open source license. It has specifically been conceived as a “weapon” to wage “war” against proprietary software. That is the whole point of the “copyleft” idea: give Free software an advantage it does not normally have by locking out proprietary editors.

Closed embedded devices is now mostly the realm of proprietary software. If their users are denied the benefit of all the GPL software around, maybe they will migrate to a less closed platform.

The changes from GPLv2 to GPLv3 already went in that direction, but they rather focused on software that was embedded in hardware without possibility of control, not individual applications that can be installed separately on a closed and locked-down operating system. I would not be surprised if we heard soon about a future GPLv4 that focuses specifically on that.

Amusing Zahir effect: just today, Userfriendly republished the "metric to standard calculator: $15, telescope: $270, mars lander: $135 million, the look on the scientists' faces: pricess" strip.

At least, reboots are something Microsoft are very good at.

Speed? Is speed the only criterion to judge an ISP? I do not think so. Provided the speed is reasonable, with regards to the price and other similar offers, there are a lot more things that matter for an ISP. A few at random:
- How often do their systems break down and leave you without network access?
- If a router breaks down at 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning, do you have to wait until 9 a.m. on Monday to hope someone will fix it?
- And do you have any information during or after the breakdown, or are you left wondering it it will happen again any moment?
- If you call the hotline, do you get a nice music and an incompetent droid reading a checklist, or a competent technician?
- Do they offer cool services, like native IPv6 or reverse-DNS customization (and IPv6 reverse-DNS delegation)?
- Can you get someone's attention for unusual problems, like your IP range getting into a spam blacklist?

As for me, I am happy to pay a little more and have a little less max bandwidth to be on the good side for most of these points.

What about Dirac, the HD codec developed by the BBC? It has at least two Free implementations, and there are probably no patents?
Does anyone here have a pointer to a comparison taking Dirac into account, both for low and high bitrates?

That completely depends on the mathematicians, and the kind of mathematics they do. For proofs that rely only on calculations, you do not need even to understand the low dimension case, just do the computations right.

But proofs with computations are rarely elegant. Some mathematicians prefer a more geometric approach, and for that, they need to see, un to a certain level, the objects in higher dimensions.

Furthermore, the 2D or 3D spaces we have direct access to are really limited. There are lots of phenomenas that only happen starting with dimension 4 or 5. For example, think of this 2D property: "two lines perpendicular to a common third line are parallel"; if you try to take it as is in higher dimensions, you get something false; fortunately, you can think in 3D and see that it is false. There are similar examples in higher dimensions. Curvature, for example: curvature of 2D surfaces in 3D spaces is misleadingly simple, compared to curvature of higher dimensional spaces.

Sometimes, there just is not space enough to build the objects you need in 3D space. For example, if you want to study circles drawn on a sphere, the object you need to make the properties apparent is a 3D hyperboloid in a 4D space. If you settle for a 2D hyperboloid in a 3D space, you end up studying pairs of points on a circle, which is rather boring.