Yeah, iPhone is totally going to flop on Verizon...
Who said anything about the iPhone flopping? Are you dense? Need help grasping analogies? There's no guarantee it's going to double games sales either though.
Um, this was your entire post that I was replying to:
Nobody claims Apple did it first, but that Apple was the first to do it right. In every example you cited, Apple can claim to have created the first consumer-compatible version of those products. In each of those categories, there's a notable change throughout the entire industry where Apple releases a product that is strikingly different from what was already extant, and shortly thereafter everything changes to match Apple's product.
Apple invented none of those, but they revolutionized every single one.
The point is still very valid however that there will be plenty of software written for the iPhone 4 that will not run on the older phones because of hardware incompatibility. Older phones don't have forward facing cameras or the ability to record movies or fast enough processors to handle software written for newer iPhones.
"Plenty of" is overstating it much, but...
That is reality.
It's reality, but nowhere near the fragmentation like it is with Android. Specifically, I was replying to this part of your post "creating the same hardware incompatible environment (old vs new) that IOS fan boys complain about when talking about android phones." It's not the same, and in two very important ways.
First off, iPhones simply upgrade each year. There aren't multiple current iPhones in terms of supported features, just one (although Apple does tend to keep the previous model for sale at a lower price, so you can count it as two if you want, but only one current-gen model). And with the iPhone, each year they simply add more features in a progression. With Android, you have at least half a dozen of reasonably advanced "current gen" models, all staggered in their releases, all with similar but different feature sets.
The second is that if you expand it to include either all devices that can run the current OS (a very simple matrix on the iOS side, and very complex on the Android side), or just all devices ever, Android is far, far more fragmented. I don't think it's fair to expect Android or iOS to support devices from two or three generations back, but whichever way you want to look at it, the situation is far better on iOS than on Android.
And yes I admit I do not have any more statistical data than you do however I still don't believe that anyone who is about to plop down $100 on a new. phone and a two year contract won't shop around for their phone.
For the most part, they won't. If they want an iPhone, there's no shopping around, you just buy the iPhone. For non-iPhones, "shopping around" means looking at what phones your carrier currently has on their website or in their store. I highly doubt the average Android user could name three different current Android models, even five minutes after leaving the Verizon store and having looked at the different phones there. In fact, most people don't even know the difference between "Droid" and "Android".
On the other hand, the stereotypical Slashdot Android user will know not only the different models, and which manufacturer makes which model, but also the relative strengths and weaknesses between many of them, as well as which can run which version of Android, and which can't be easily rooted, etc.
This is what has so severely warped Slashdot's view of the mobile landscape.
Also given the fact that the initial iPhones will be 3g only is not going to go over as well as you think when 4g will be available on android phones thus year.
4G is of very limited usefulness right now. It's definitely something people will make hay over, but it's not something which is going to have much of an effect on iPhone sales.
Having said that I think the iPhone is a well designed peice of hardware its just not the universe that apple followers seem to think it is.
Fair enough. That's definitely not the prevailing view of the vocal minority here, which is the context in which my posts are born. I think Android is an interesting system, hackable and probably quite fun, but it's definitely not eating Apple's lunch, like so many Android followers seem to think it is.
I knew exactly 1 person in college with a Mac (circa 1990ish). Everyone else had PCs. Common use? Only for people who had extra money to throw at computers.
What does "1990ish" have to do with the early 1980s?
And your claim above is extremely disingenuous. In 1990, "everyone else" most certainly did not have PCs. Few people had computers back then.
Quoted from somewhere else: the iPad is just a big iPhone the same way a swimming pool is just a big bathtub.
If you prefer a netbook because it has a keyboard (iPads support both bluetooth and USB keyboards), then you won't want an iPad, but to understand the appeal, there's a *huge* appeal in interacting with the device by directly touching the interface elements. Touch vs keyboard/mouse is a lot like GUI vs CLI. Also, as a form-factor, a tablet is much more natural in most every situation that isn't "device sitting directly on a desk" (and in that situation, you can get a dock and a keyboard for the iPad, but that doesn't really appeal to me much).
It's also interesting that you think it's "/headdesk worthy" for someone to use the internet on their larger-screened iPad, then pick up their iPhone to make a call. The iPhone is sized perfectly to be used as a phone, the iPad is not. On the other hand, the iPad has a much larger screen, which is better for viewing the Internet. Best of both worlds. "/headdesk" would be browsing the web on the iPhone, then making a call on the iPad.
On of the best parts of any Apple product "spy shots/leaked cases" are all the posts that say things like this. The previous model of Mac mini was a sure fake because of the dual video ports and it had too many USB ports that weren't aligned in an "Apple-like" way. But it was real. iPhone 4 was fake because the band around the sides had little "un-Apple like" breaks.
The installed base is pushing 100 million devices.
Four months ago.
I guess we are also supposed to forget about the even larger number of Android devices out there, and the even larger number of new Android devices being sold each quarter when we think about the mobile gaming market..
There are more iOS devices than Android devices. Android has been growing faster over the past year, but iOS market share has been growing too, and with more carrier choices, iOS is going to grow even faster than before.
On to the specific topic at hand, the iOS apps business dwarfs the Android apps business. An increase in iOS devices will drive the "mobile games biz" far more than an equivalent Android device increase would.
I've been hearing more from people who own Iphone 3g's and 3gs's that want to switch to Verizon from AT&T then I have heard from android users who want to switch to Iphone.
That's exactly why the iPhone will do so well on Verizon. People aren't dissatisfied with the iPhone, just with AT&T.
A lot of Android users like me have picked out the phone they wanted within the android ecosphere and are very happy with their decision.
Not relatively speaking. Most Android users did not specifically want an Android phone nor did they weigh all the different models. Why do I say this? Because most consumers don't do this, and Android is the best, most prolific and most interesting system on all carriers in the US that aren't AT&T. If you're on Verizon, until now/next month, the choice was between a bunch of uninteresting non-Android phones and a bunch of more interesting Android phones. Now, it's a choice of a bunch of uninteresting phones and the iPhone, at least as far as the normal consumer is concerned. Geeks (such as yourself, presumably) see it differently, and find Android quite interesting. Fair enough, just not representative of the market as a whole.
That said, this years Iphone will most definitely have a dual core cpu and some kind of advanced graphics processor, leaving all the other Iphones in the dust, and creating the same hardware incompatible environment (old vs new) that IOS fan boys complain about when talking about android phones.
Not even close. Why is it, do you suppose, that you call people with a valid point of view that is verified by how reality has actually played out as "fan boys"? Given that "fanboy" is supposed to carry with it connotations of irrationality and ignoring reality, it seems Android proponents are more fanboys than iOS users are.
Defending the merit of an iPhone is not the same thing as criticising an Android phone.
This is Slashdot. Anything not in praise of Android is an indictment against it and all those who use it. Saying something nice about the iPhone is doubly so.
Java is slower than native, but not obnoxiously so. - Maybe. except during GC, and things like lack of GPU acceleration of the UI.
Android is more secure than iOS - Really, you're going to go with this?
Architecture independence - Right, because POWER 7 is destined for handsets any day now, it's totally worth the downsides...
All of your claims are about theoretical benefits, as opposed to reality in which every single thing listed is either completely irrelevant or outright worse for Android than for iOS.
Um, no. They kept saying that the Amiga had a superior processor to PCs (Motorola 68k series) and had coppers (co-processors) for sound and video which were superior to anything either PCs or Macs came with. If anything, Android fanboys are like the Amiga fans in that they are generally a geekier crowd who are completely flummoxed as to why their preferred system isn't as highly coveted by less-geeky consumers as it is with them.
Slashdot is such an isolated echo-chamber, you actually get absurd posts getting +5 for saying things like iPhone is going the way of the Amiga, or that people aren't going to buy a half-year old phone because it doesn't have some specific CPU/GPU.
Anyone who thinks a Verizon iPhone is not going to be a huge success is a fool. People who buy an iPhone buy it because they specifically want an iPhone far more than those that they buy an Android phone do so because they specifically want an Android phone. Or put differently, you never see lines for an Android phone like you do for an iPhone.
Put yet another way, iOS on only two distinct models of one distinct phone line on one (often derided) carrier has held its own against a whole armada of manufacturers and lines on multiple carriers. There is huge pent up demand for the iPhone on America's largest carrier. Sticking your fingers in your ears and crying, "lalalala fanboyfanboyfanboy" is not going to change anything.
That's not how genericity of a trademark works. If Microsoft were in the business of selling large crystal panes that you can attach to walls to see through them, then yes, it couldn't call them "windows", because you're using the generic word for that product.
They don't sell "Windows: n. 1. transparent glass panes", but "Windows: n. 2. Primary graphical representations in a windowed GUI system".
"Windows" refers to the most generic thing in a GUI, the window. Also, "app" isn't the primary generic term for programs. "Programs" and "applications" are. In fact, a lot of geeks got tweaked by the cutesy shortening of the word "applications" into "apps", as popularized by Apple.
Actually.. when I think of "App Store", the first thing that comes to mind for most people is the Android App Store.
More people run iOS than run Android. Why would iOS users think about Android's store? I'd bet most iOS users don't even know there *is* an Android app store (called the Android Marketplace, btw).
If anything, I'd wager more Android users think of "App Store" as referring to Apple's store than there are iOS users that even know what Android's primary store is called.
Yes. The chief of those meta issues being that distributing any Free Software implementation of H.264 in the United States of America is illegal due to software patent law.
Nobody gives a shit. Not even MPEG-LA.
I don't know about you, but where I come from, not getting arrested is a pretty good driver of technology choices, and yes, does tend to trump 'quality' issues.
Who has gone to jail, or has been threatened with jail? Certainly, jail time is not likely to be preferable just for a higher quality video format, but your argument is a bullshit, imaginary strawman.
I admit I find it rather strange that you consider legality to be a mere 'meta' issue. Do you regularly break the law in your daily business life, and expect others to?
The "meta" part of your particular argument is the open source caveat. Nobody (relatively speaking) gives a shit if their media player is open source.
Every human on Earth can use H.264 legally. Every human on Earth can even use H.264 in conjunction with open source software legally. Every human on Earth can even tightly integrate H.264 with open source software.
The only thing that can't be done is tightly integrating H.264 with *some* open source licenses (primarily, GPLv3).
Your argument is not relevant to most people, however video quality, battery life, and performance are universally relevant to everyone who desires viewing video.
Sites are not going to require users to install yet another plugin just to watch video when there are already pre-installed solutions to this.
They won't have to. Why would Google want to encode to both H.264 and WebM on YouTube? They'll transition YouTube to WebM just as they're now transitioning Chrome to WebM. As part of that transition, they will doubtless work with Adobe to add WebM support to Flash.
Google is not going to drop support for H.264 unless they've completely lost their marbles. They will not lock YouTube out of the over 100 million iOS devices, or at best create a battery-draining, performance dropping alternative.
Game, set, and match. I do believe they've sunk your battleship.
The only battleship that would sink in such a scenario is YouTube.
Not. Gonna. Happen.
This is just open source fanboys promoting an inferior solution to solve a problem that is far more imaginary than real.
Given the choice between H.264 fanboys and open source fanboys, I'll choose the open source fanboys every time. But thanks for playing.
I'll take quality over ideology every time, myself. It's silly to play a game, but back the inferior side.
How unexpected. The usual AC with the usual ad hominem.
H.264 is superior to WebM, it's already licensed to 99+% of computer and similar device users, costs nothing to stream your home movies, nothing extra to encode or decode your home movies, costs nothing to stream online for free, costs a little bit to stream if you sell the streams.
The *only* things WebM has are that it's open source and is slightly cheaper in *some* circumstances, and absolutely nothing else of note.
Slashdot is full of people, like yourself, who promote the inferior solution for nothing more than ideological reasons, yet somehow *I'm* the fanboy. Astounding.
What you see as me defending Apple (I'm defending H.264, btw, not Apple. You're the one tying it to Apple, betraying your bias), is me actually opposing idiocy. Were you to read through my comment history, you'd also know that I post on other topics as well. That a large amount of them regard Apple is due to the fact that Apple is a large technology company, and there's a lot of idiocy about them here on Slashdot.
Except H.264 is the best codec. Google didn't choose WebM because it's better, they chose it because they own it and (purportedly) because it's open. They did not choose it for being a high-quality codec, they chose it for entirely meta and political/ideological reasons.
The web need to operate on free and open standards, period, end of story. Anything else is asking for a lot of trouble, trouble which is avoided relatively easily, trouble for which there is well-established precedent.
That's a nice theory, but how is H.264 "a lot of trouble"? There is no trouble here. It's free or cheap to license, pretty much every computer and device user received an H.264 license with their computer/smartphone/tablet. Content distributers don't have to pay if they don't charge for the video, and if they do, the price is small enough as to be a small operating cost. Content producers can either use the built-in H.264 support they got with their OS for consumer-grade solutions, or receive their non-consumer licenses as a few cents portion of their many hundred, if not many thousand, dollar production software.
This is a non-issue. It's just a theory, and that theory is 100% contradicted by reality. Why do people here seem so prone to promote theory over reality, simply because the words "open source" are involved? And how do you maintain in your mind a cogent theory that is so completely contradicted by a simple observation of the outside world?
Sites are not going to require users to install yet another plugin just to watch video when there are already pre-installed solutions to this. Also, sites are not going to give up on H.264 because H.264 is vastly superior for mobile devices. At the most, they will add WebM in order to provide options for those so inclined, and really, I don't expect much more than YouTube and Wikipedia/Wikimedia to do this.
After all, why support WebM (or Theora, for that matter) when you can cover the vast majority of users with H.264 and Flash?
This is just open source fanboys promoting an inferior solution to solve a problem that is far more imaginary than real.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, iPhone is totally going to flop on Verizon...
Who said anything about the iPhone flopping? Are you dense? Need help grasping analogies? There's no guarantee it's going to double games sales either though.
Um, this was your entire post that I was replying to:
Jackass.
Nobody claims Apple did it first, but that Apple was the first to do it right. In every example you cited, Apple can claim to have created the first consumer-compatible version of those products. In each of those categories, there's a notable change throughout the entire industry where Apple releases a product that is strikingly different from what was already extant, and shortly thereafter everything changes to match Apple's product.
Apple invented none of those, but they revolutionized every single one.
The point is still very valid however that there will be plenty of software written for the iPhone 4 that will not run on the older phones because of hardware incompatibility. Older phones don't have forward facing cameras or the ability to record movies or fast enough processors to handle software written for newer iPhones.
"Plenty of" is overstating it much, but...
That is reality.
It's reality, but nowhere near the fragmentation like it is with Android. Specifically, I was replying to this part of your post "creating the same hardware incompatible environment (old vs new) that IOS fan boys complain about when talking about android phones." It's not the same, and in two very important ways.
First off, iPhones simply upgrade each year. There aren't multiple current iPhones in terms of supported features, just one (although Apple does tend to keep the previous model for sale at a lower price, so you can count it as two if you want, but only one current-gen model). And with the iPhone, each year they simply add more features in a progression. With Android, you have at least half a dozen of reasonably advanced "current gen" models, all staggered in their releases, all with similar but different feature sets.
The second is that if you expand it to include either all devices that can run the current OS (a very simple matrix on the iOS side, and very complex on the Android side), or just all devices ever, Android is far, far more fragmented. I don't think it's fair to expect Android or iOS to support devices from two or three generations back, but whichever way you want to look at it, the situation is far better on iOS than on Android.
And yes I admit I do not have any more statistical data than you do however I still don't believe that anyone who is about to plop down $100 on a new. phone and a two year contract won't shop around for their phone.
For the most part, they won't. If they want an iPhone, there's no shopping around, you just buy the iPhone. For non-iPhones, "shopping around" means looking at what phones your carrier currently has on their website or in their store. I highly doubt the average Android user could name three different current Android models, even five minutes after leaving the Verizon store and having looked at the different phones there. In fact, most people don't even know the difference between "Droid" and "Android".
On the other hand, the stereotypical Slashdot Android user will know not only the different models, and which manufacturer makes which model, but also the relative strengths and weaknesses between many of them, as well as which can run which version of Android, and which can't be easily rooted, etc.
This is what has so severely warped Slashdot's view of the mobile landscape.
Also given the fact that the initial iPhones will be 3g only is not going to go over as well as you think when 4g will be available on android phones thus year.
4G is of very limited usefulness right now. It's definitely something people will make hay over, but it's not something which is going to have much of an effect on iPhone sales.
Having said that I think the iPhone is a well designed peice of hardware its just not the universe that apple followers seem to think it is.
Fair enough. That's definitely not the prevailing view of the vocal minority here, which is the context in which my posts are born. I think Android is an interesting system, hackable and probably quite fun, but it's definitely not eating Apple's lunch, like so many Android followers seem to think it is.
There's a difference between naming a product after a definition in common use, and a definition becoming common use because of a product name.
The UI element called "windows" were called windows many years (perhaps even decades) before MS named their product Windows.
Of course, you know that, you just have a hard-on for hating Microsoft.
Says the silly AC with the hard on for making stupid replies to my posts.
I knew exactly 1 person in college with a Mac (circa 1990ish). Everyone else had PCs. Common use? Only for people who had extra money to throw at computers.
What does "1990ish" have to do with the early 1980s?
And your claim above is extremely disingenuous. In 1990, "everyone else" most certainly did not have PCs. Few people had computers back then.
Except he didn't say Mac was first, he said that's what MS copied, which it is.
And using terms like "CoA" is a form of fanboyism.
Quoted from somewhere else: the iPad is just a big iPhone the same way a swimming pool is just a big bathtub.
If you prefer a netbook because it has a keyboard (iPads support both bluetooth and USB keyboards), then you won't want an iPad, but to understand the appeal, there's a *huge* appeal in interacting with the device by directly touching the interface elements. Touch vs keyboard/mouse is a lot like GUI vs CLI. Also, as a form-factor, a tablet is much more natural in most every situation that isn't "device sitting directly on a desk" (and in that situation, you can get a dock and a keyboard for the iPad, but that doesn't really appeal to me much).
It's also interesting that you think it's "/headdesk worthy" for someone to use the internet on their larger-screened iPad, then pick up their iPhone to make a call. The iPhone is sized perfectly to be used as a phone, the iPad is not. On the other hand, the iPad has a much larger screen, which is better for viewing the Internet. Best of both worlds. "/headdesk" would be browsing the web on the iPhone, then making a call on the iPad.
On of the best parts of any Apple product "spy shots/leaked cases" are all the posts that say things like this. The previous model of Mac mini was a sure fake because of the dual video ports and it had too many USB ports that weren't aligned in an "Apple-like" way. But it was real. iPhone 4 was fake because the band around the sides had little "un-Apple like" breaks.
The installed base is pushing 100 million devices.
Four months ago.
I guess we are also supposed to forget about the even larger number of Android devices out there, and the even larger number of new Android devices being sold each quarter when we think about the mobile gaming market..
There are more iOS devices than Android devices. Android has been growing faster over the past year, but iOS market share has been growing too, and with more carrier choices, iOS is going to grow even faster than before.
On to the specific topic at hand, the iOS apps business dwarfs the Android apps business. An increase in iOS devices will drive the "mobile games biz" far more than an equivalent Android device increase would.
Yeah, iPhone is totally going to flop on Verizon...
I've been hearing more from people who own Iphone 3g's and 3gs's that want to switch to Verizon from AT&T then I have heard from android users who want to switch to Iphone.
That's exactly why the iPhone will do so well on Verizon. People aren't dissatisfied with the iPhone, just with AT&T.
A lot of Android users like me have picked out the phone they wanted within the android ecosphere and are very happy with their decision.
Not relatively speaking. Most Android users did not specifically want an Android phone nor did they weigh all the different models. Why do I say this? Because most consumers don't do this, and Android is the best, most prolific and most interesting system on all carriers in the US that aren't AT&T. If you're on Verizon, until now/next month, the choice was between a bunch of uninteresting non-Android phones and a bunch of more interesting Android phones. Now, it's a choice of a bunch of uninteresting phones and the iPhone, at least as far as the normal consumer is concerned. Geeks (such as yourself, presumably) see it differently, and find Android quite interesting. Fair enough, just not representative of the market as a whole.
That said, this years Iphone will most definitely have a dual core cpu and some kind of advanced graphics processor, leaving all the other Iphones in the dust, and creating the same hardware incompatible environment (old vs new) that IOS fan boys complain about when talking about android phones.
Not even close. Why is it, do you suppose, that you call people with a valid point of view that is verified by how reality has actually played out as "fan boys"? Given that "fanboy" is supposed to carry with it connotations of irrationality and ignoring reality, it seems Android proponents are more fanboys than iOS users are.
Defending the merit of an iPhone is not the same thing as criticising an Android phone.
This is Slashdot. Anything not in praise of Android is an indictment against it and all those who use it. Saying something nice about the iPhone is doubly so.
Your claims are that:
All of your claims are about theoretical benefits, as opposed to reality in which every single thing listed is either completely irrelevant or outright worse for Android than for iOS.
Um, no. They kept saying that the Amiga had a superior processor to PCs (Motorola 68k series) and had coppers (co-processors) for sound and video which were superior to anything either PCs or Macs came with. If anything, Android fanboys are like the Amiga fans in that they are generally a geekier crowd who are completely flummoxed as to why their preferred system isn't as highly coveted by less-geeky consumers as it is with them.
Slashdot is such an isolated echo-chamber, you actually get absurd posts getting +5 for saying things like iPhone is going the way of the Amiga, or that people aren't going to buy a half-year old phone because it doesn't have some specific CPU/GPU.
Anyone who thinks a Verizon iPhone is not going to be a huge success is a fool. People who buy an iPhone buy it because they specifically want an iPhone far more than those that they buy an Android phone do so because they specifically want an Android phone. Or put differently, you never see lines for an Android phone like you do for an iPhone.
Put yet another way, iOS on only two distinct models of one distinct phone line on one (often derided) carrier has held its own against a whole armada of manufacturers and lines on multiple carriers. There is huge pent up demand for the iPhone on America's largest carrier. Sticking your fingers in your ears and crying, "lalalala fanboyfanboyfanboy" is not going to change anything.
That's not how genericity of a trademark works. If Microsoft were in the business of selling large crystal panes that you can attach to walls to see through them, then yes, it couldn't call them "windows", because you're using the generic word for that product.
They don't sell "Windows: n. 1. transparent glass panes", but "Windows: n. 2. Primary graphical representations in a windowed GUI system".
"Windows" refers to the most generic thing in a GUI, the window. Also, "app" isn't the primary generic term for programs. "Programs" and "applications" are. In fact, a lot of geeks got tweaked by the cutesy shortening of the word "applications" into "apps", as popularized by Apple.
Actually.. when I think of "App Store", the first thing that comes to mind for most people is the Android App Store.
More people run iOS than run Android. Why would iOS users think about Android's store? I'd bet most iOS users don't even know there *is* an Android app store (called the Android Marketplace, btw).
If anything, I'd wager more Android users think of "App Store" as referring to Apple's store than there are iOS users that even know what Android's primary store is called.
The press release cited "AppStore" and is not an example of "many organization's [sic]", just one.
Funny thing is it's never Apple or Apple fans that make this claim, just Apple detractors.
Yes. The chief of those meta issues being that distributing any Free Software implementation of H.264 in the United States of America is illegal due to software patent law.
Nobody gives a shit. Not even MPEG-LA.
I don't know about you, but where I come from, not getting arrested is a pretty good driver of technology choices, and yes, does tend to trump 'quality' issues.
Who has gone to jail, or has been threatened with jail? Certainly, jail time is not likely to be preferable just for a higher quality video format, but your argument is a bullshit, imaginary strawman.
I admit I find it rather strange that you consider legality to be a mere 'meta' issue. Do you regularly break the law in your daily business life, and expect others to?
The "meta" part of your particular argument is the open source caveat. Nobody (relatively speaking) gives a shit if their media player is open source.
Every human on Earth can use H.264 legally. Every human on Earth can even use H.264 in conjunction with open source software legally. Every human on Earth can even tightly integrate H.264 with open source software.
The only thing that can't be done is tightly integrating H.264 with *some* open source licenses (primarily, GPLv3).
Your argument is not relevant to most people, however video quality, battery life, and performance are universally relevant to everyone who desires viewing video.
Sites are not going to require users to install yet another plugin just to watch video when there are already pre-installed solutions to this.
They won't have to. Why would Google want to encode to both H.264 and WebM on YouTube? They'll transition YouTube to WebM just as they're now transitioning Chrome to WebM. As part of that transition, they will doubtless work with Adobe to add WebM support to Flash.
Google is not going to drop support for H.264 unless they've completely lost their marbles. They will not lock YouTube out of the over 100 million iOS devices, or at best create a battery-draining, performance dropping alternative.
Game, set, and match. I do believe they've sunk your battleship.
The only battleship that would sink in such a scenario is YouTube.
Not. Gonna. Happen.
This is just open source fanboys promoting an inferior solution to solve a problem that is far more imaginary than real.
Given the choice between H.264 fanboys and open source fanboys, I'll choose the open source fanboys every time. But thanks for playing.
I'll take quality over ideology every time, myself. It's silly to play a game, but back the inferior side.
How unexpected. The usual AC with the usual ad hominem.
H.264 is superior to WebM, it's already licensed to 99+% of computer and similar device users, costs nothing to stream your home movies, nothing extra to encode or decode your home movies, costs nothing to stream online for free, costs a little bit to stream if you sell the streams.
The *only* things WebM has are that it's open source and is slightly cheaper in *some* circumstances, and absolutely nothing else of note.
Slashdot is full of people, like yourself, who promote the inferior solution for nothing more than ideological reasons, yet somehow *I'm* the fanboy. Astounding.
What you see as me defending Apple (I'm defending H.264, btw, not Apple. You're the one tying it to Apple, betraying your bias), is me actually opposing idiocy. Were you to read through my comment history, you'd also know that I post on other topics as well. That a large amount of them regard Apple is due to the fact that Apple is a large technology company, and there's a lot of idiocy about them here on Slashdot.
Except H.264 is the best codec. Google didn't choose WebM because it's better, they chose it because they own it and (purportedly) because it's open. They did not choose it for being a high-quality codec, they chose it for entirely meta and political/ideological reasons.
The web need to operate on free and open standards, period, end of story. Anything else is asking for a lot of trouble, trouble which is avoided relatively easily, trouble for which there is well-established precedent.
That's a nice theory, but how is H.264 "a lot of trouble"? There is no trouble here. It's free or cheap to license, pretty much every computer and device user received an H.264 license with their computer/smartphone/tablet. Content distributers don't have to pay if they don't charge for the video, and if they do, the price is small enough as to be a small operating cost. Content producers can either use the built-in H.264 support they got with their OS for consumer-grade solutions, or receive their non-consumer licenses as a few cents portion of their many hundred, if not many thousand, dollar production software.
This is a non-issue. It's just a theory, and that theory is 100% contradicted by reality. Why do people here seem so prone to promote theory over reality, simply because the words "open source" are involved? And how do you maintain in your mind a cogent theory that is so completely contradicted by a simple observation of the outside world?
Sites are not going to require users to install yet another plugin just to watch video when there are already pre-installed solutions to this. Also, sites are not going to give up on H.264 because H.264 is vastly superior for mobile devices. At the most, they will add WebM in order to provide options for those so inclined, and really, I don't expect much more than YouTube and Wikipedia/Wikimedia to do this.
After all, why support WebM (or Theora, for that matter) when you can cover the vast majority of users with H.264 and Flash?
This is just open source fanboys promoting an inferior solution to solve a problem that is far more imaginary than real.