Lord Palmerston (1784-1865): "Nations have no permanent friends and no permanent enemies. Only permanent interests."

I've not seen any ads that advertise unlimited gigabytes.

Verizon has/had a plan simply called "Unlimited Access" that they sold in New York State. They didn't specifically use any terms denoting quantity ("gigabytes") or any other usage restrictions in their plan name or advertising; they left it wide open to the customer's imagination, in their advertising/marketing (although not in the actual contract), as to what "Unlimited" implied. And, they got spanked for it by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo back in 2007 for "deceptive marketing." Verizon agreed to stop the "deceptive marketing" and reimburse Verizon customers in New York State $1 million.

http://riskman.typepad.com/peerflow/2007/10/cuomo-to-verizo.html

Cuomo's action was most likely brought on by vocal consumer backlash in various forums:

http://consumerist.com/2007/04/verizon-unlimited-access-plan-is-extremely-limited.html

Apparently, at least in New York State, the contract doesn't mean much if you are judged to have engaged in deceptive advertising while trying to sell that contract.

* * * * *

All my life, I always wanted to be somebody. Now I see that I should have been more specific.
—Jane Wagner

"Vast sets of libraries..."

Seriously, stop and listen to yourself.

Funny, but my backup workstation, an elderly AMD Thunderbird (32-bit, dog-ass slow) with a crappily small hard drive and 1gig of RAM, can handle both Gnome and KDE libraries and not skip a beat, or beg me to run down to NewEgg for a new hard drive.

May I quote your post here on my website as an entry in the '100 Stupidest Comments of 2010'?

All of the desktops in use at my local Chamber of Commerce (WinXP) can't show/mount a thumbdrive, apparently related to this issue:

www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows/find-your-missing-usb-drive-on-windows-xp

I pointed them to a Microsoft knowledgebase entry which supposedly fixes it, but they reported that it didn't work for them. I don't use Windows much so the issue is puzzling to me; the Chamber has a system builder on retainer but apparently nobody there has seen fit to rectify the problem (or just can't).

* * * * *

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
—Mark Twain

OK, you make good points. Although I'm not sure that the x264 library qualifies as a complete "encoder" (stream output functions?) but it's close enough.

But this gets back to the whole point of the thread. In fact, the x264 team does not have a license (from MPEG-LA) to the h264 IP according to all accounts that I can find. They released under their own, separate (GPL) license. And, according to posts on the x264 developer's list, a practical, real-world usage in patent-honoring jurisdictions would require adherence to both licenses, according to Alex Izvorski:

Doesn't make an iota of difference what decodes your video, if you're not legally allowed to encode it in your jurisdiction using a patent-encumbered codec in the first place.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1500342/h264-decoder-source-code

The specs for FAT32 are available, too. Didn't seem to do TomTom much good, did it?

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/firmware/fatgen.mspx

Can't, sorry:

It appears you're using Microsoft's flavor of Javascript, which has notorious issues with my brower/platform of choice (Firefox/Linux).

There might be an apt analogy here to the situation between x264 and h264, but I'm too tired right now to explore the idea further.

By the way, I'm a professional videographer/photographer/editor/graphic designer. I personally have made use of x264 (in VLC), but I would be extremely hesitant to use it on a professional project, where I was prominent as the author, due to it's extremely shaky legal foundation in the US. I'm not a lawyer, but I have three decades of experience plowing through IP/copyright law (with the help of lawyers) as practiced in the US. Frankly speaking, I feel that the x264 implementation doesn't have a legal leg to stand on in the US and the EU, and if you'll do some basic research you'll find that there are many IP lawyers on both continents who concur with my view. You're exposing yourself to huge risks by using the x264 libraries, and distributing the works thereof...at least where I live.

The recent FAT32 fiasco where Microsoft lowered the boom on TomTom is a direct compare. TomTom assumed they were in the clear since an open source reverse-engineer (dosftools) had been in use for quite a while by many vendors, until Microsoft's legal team educated them otherwise.

http://mailman.videolan.org/pipermail/x264-devel/2006-August/002052.html

Pretty strong evidence here that this assertion is incorrect in real-world tests:

http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html

I disagree. Discussions about a "standard" are moot if legal, non-encumbered implementations are unavailable for a considerable subset of users. Which seems to be the Mozilla team's stance.

A quote from the Xiph paper referenced:

Apparently, even though x264 is GPL'd, it violates MPEG-LA's patents in jurisdictions that recognize software patents:

http://www.unmediated.org/archives/2005/05/videolan_x264_e.php

I don't know about MPC-HC, but x264 (which is the h264-compatible codec used in VLC) is a cleanroom reverse-engineering job. So, it's technically not h264. Just very compatible. And it's GPL'd. However, we now have the question of why the Mozilla folks aren't supporting a GPL'd codec. I'm guessing because there are possible legal patent-related issues surrounding a reverse-engineered codec like x264.

Doing a bit more searching, we find this:

http://www.unmediated.org/archives/2005/05/videolan_x264_e.php

* * * * *

Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect. —Stephen Wright