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A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux

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Re: A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux

#181

Post by WalterBright »

robocat wrote: post #170
WalterBright wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free markets are based on voluntary cooperation. Socialism is coercive cooperation.

Ideal socialism is voluntary, just like ideal free markets. I wonder whether your axiomatic belief is that we should all have freedom? Therefore you love the idea of free markets? I wonder if some of your "free market" comments would be better written in terms of freedom rather than economics. Game theory and evolutionary stable strategies show the issues of cooperation versus defection. Voluntary cooperation fails b…

> Ideal socialism is voluntary

There have been 20,000+ voluntary socialist communes set up in the US. They all failed. Socialism requires forcible coercion.

Re: A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux

#182

Post by nrr »

WalterBright wrote: post #181
robocat wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideal socialism is voluntary, just like ideal free markets. I wonder whether your axiomatic belief is that we should all have freedom? Therefore you love the idea of free markets? I wonder if some of your "free market" comments would be better written in terms of freedom rather than economics. Game theory and evolutionary stable strategies show the issues of cooperation versus defection. Voluntary cooperation fails b…

> Ideal socialism is voluntary There have been 20,000+ voluntary socialist communes set up in the US. They all failed. Socialism requires forcible coercion.

Wait, we had socialism in the US?

Re: A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux

#183

Post by mulmen »

WalterBright wrote: post #181
robocat wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideal socialism is voluntary, just like ideal free markets. I wonder whether your axiomatic belief is that we should all have freedom? Therefore you love the idea of free markets? I wonder if some of your "free market" comments would be better written in terms of freedom rather than economics. Game theory and evolutionary stable strategies show the issues of cooperation versus defection. Voluntary cooperation fails b…

> Ideal socialism is voluntary There have been 20,000+ voluntary socialist communes set up in the US. They all failed. Socialism requires forcible coercion.

Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?

Re: A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux

#184

Post by daneel_w »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #173
daneel_w wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah sure, a few example that spring to mind would be... Poor encoder: FAAC/FAAC2, the first open-source encoder for AAC audio, produce terrible audio no matter how much bitrate you let it work with. The AAC standard itself facilitates crisp audio quality at low bitrates, as heard with e.g. Apple's Core Audio AAC encoder or Nero AAC. Poor encoder: Xing, a popular MP3 encoder of the early 2000s, was similarly infamous…

Oh I didn't mean to waste your time on poor encoders. I'm sure there's many of those. I mean actual codecs that have a problem, that make it impossible to do good quality. > Vorbis is a good example of a spec whose limits/mistakes make it impossible to preserve certain combinations of frequencies, resulting in brief passages where parts of the reproduced spectrum deflates, making some music sound as if it lost its br…

> So the people that talk about bitrates where it's transparent are basically delusional?

In my opinion they are not. A lot of people won't pick up on differences unless something is pretty off, even if they were intimately familiar with the audio beforehand. Some people are barely able to tell the difference between one and the same piece of music being played to them first in stereo and then in mono. A fundamental problem with blind listening tests, such as those often cited from the venerable Hydrogen Audio forums, is that they provide subjective instead of objective truths - besides everyone's hearing being different, an individual's perception of music also changes by the day as it's affected by their current mood, state of health, emotional state, whether they are rested or not, and so on. Applying a scientific method (e.g. PSNR or spectral analysis) reveals an objective truth of how close a lossy product is to the original, which is where Vorbis has been shown to fall short. But subjectively a lot of users may never notice, nor even care.

Re: A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux

#185

Post by letmehelpyou »

benj111 wrote: post #89
WalterBright wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The incentive to create and invent is often largely financial, however that incentive need not be constructed as “winner takes all” rather we should lift each other up in our mutual accomplishments. The Wrights definitely were in it for the money. The government project was the Langley Prototype, which cost 20 times more than what the Wrights spent, and fell into the Potomac like a sack of wet cement. > the scary b…

>For good reason. Socialism's track record is pretty bad. They're always running out of other peoples' money. Define socialism. Isn't the collectively owned road outside your property essentially socialism? Would that work better if it were privately owned?

[dead]

Re: A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux

#186

Post by Dylan16807 »

daneel_w wrote: post #184
Dylan16807 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I didn't mean to waste your time on poor encoders. I'm sure there's many of those. I mean actual codecs that have a problem, that make it impossible to do good quality. > Vorbis is a good example of a spec whose limits/mistakes make it impossible to preserve certain combinations of frequencies, resulting in brief passages where parts of the reproduced spectrum deflates, making some music sound as if it lost its br…

> So the people that talk about bitrates where it's transparent are basically delusional? In my opinion they are not. A lot of people won't pick up on differences unless something is pretty off, even if they were intimately familiar with the audio beforehand. Some people are barely able to tell the difference between one and the same piece of music being played to them first in stereo and then in mono. A fundamental…

> A lot of people won't pick up on differences unless something is pretty off, even if they were intimately familiar with the audio beforehand. Some people are barely able to tell the difference between one and the same piece of music being played to them first in stereo and then in mono.

Well anyone that declares something is transparent without "to me" attached, based on only their own testing, is in the flippant "delusional" category.

I'm talking about people that get the best listeners they can find to seek out differences, and combine their knowledge together while hunting for flaws. If they can't even find one or two people that can pick out a distortion, then that's a pretty trustworthy standard, even if that only gives you a 99.9th or 99.99th percentile listener. Are these people aware of the specific problem you're stating? Do they agree or disagree?

> Applying a scientific method (e.g. PSNR or spectral analysis)

But that kind of truth is far from what you actually want, a measurement of how imperfect the compression is to human ears. You can use a complicated mathematical model for how listening works, but you're stuck calibrating that model with humans, punting the problem up a level. Bulk semi-subjective data is the best foundation we can get our hands on.

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