Isn't that their job anyway, though? Estimating the costs this way sounds a bit like Apple saying that Google cost them millions of dollars because they had to have meetings about competing with Android (for example).
Vorbis is also the audio codec for Google's legally-free "webm" video format, which is vp8 video and vorbis audio in a specific form of Matroska container (instead of Ogg, which seems to invoke hatred among some programmers where Matroska apparently doesn't). Hypothetically, you can make a standards-complaint audio-only webm file to use in place of Ogg Vorbis for anything that supports webm and get the superior-to-mp3 Vorbis quality sound in anything that supports webm - mostly web browsers and at least some Android devices.
(ALL android-based devices support Ogg Vorbis audio, including the ones that don't mention it in the marketing materials, as do a lot of other handheld music players that aren't iGadgets or Zunes. I can't decide if audio-only-webm is likely to displace Ogg Vorbis at some point or not. The good news is that you can take Ogg Vorbis audio and move it to a webm format without losing any quality.)
tl;dr: Vorbis audio and support for it seems to be a lot more widespread than people usually realize.
Given Sony's past habits, does this mean a rapid spin away from unlocked bootloaders on their phones (unless perhaps someone gets their hands on the key for some Sony-installed rootkit that might be installed in the factory?)
"a linux backend with an interpreted front-end. It mentions HTML5 as the primary API"
I haven't looked at the announcement itself yet, but that right there makes it sound like WebOS, or "PhoneGap, The Operating System"...and I'm okay with that.
If they can manage to get devices out and price them substantially lower than the premium iPod Mega (or 'iPad' if you prefer) or Xoom sorts of gadgets I'd love to have something like that.
I don't know if that's the reason, but Firefox 7 is noticeably more responsive on my system than 6 was.
If I were appointed Supreme Overlord of Mozilla, I'd have them continue the rapid-fire releases for at least two more cycles, by which time they ought to be caught back up with Chrome et al on features and performance, and have most of the new things in the pipeline implemented finally (or at least that's my impression).
After that, slowing back down to 1-2 major releases per year, but keep up "minor update" cycles every month or two. (In practice, this might just mean continuing their current development model, but going back to numbering the new releases with ".1,.2", etc rather than jumping whole-numbers at that point, since I'm guessing there won't be too many major changes left to implement at that point anyway.)
If someone can get Mozilla to appoint me Supreme Overlord, I promise I'll get right on that...
Getting important fixes and new features in place in less that a year or two, particularly while those features are needed to keep up with (or possibly surpass) Chrome.
Previously, every time they needed to add a major new feature or fix (like replacing the javascript engine for better performance, making major improvement to the memory usage, HTML5 media features, etc.) they seemed to be just adding it to the massive stack of stuff they were working on, and it would take them an eternity in internet time to finally get it out, and I got the impression (as a casual observer) that each new version as a result was turning into a massive, inefficient project.
I think the faster release cycle was intended to make it so they could add one or two genuinely new features at a time on a more reasonable schedule so they could finally get caught back up to Chrome's feature-set and performance, as well as potentially adapt quickly to new developments on the web that might come up.
I still think that once they've gone through another stable release or two this year, they may be able to slow back down, having worked their way through the backlog of major new features and improvements they want to implement. From my experimentation, I get the impression that somewhere around version 7 (due next week, I think...) and version 8 the perfomance will improve substantially due to some of the changes they've made to Firefox since starting the faster release cycle.
Also don't forget that Mozilla isn't focussed on the "consume-only" market - part of their explicit goal as an organization is to encourage participation on the web. From Mozilla's perspective, the purpose of (for example) HTML5 support is NOT specifically to make it easy for you to "consume" a stream of Justin Bieber from Disney corp., so much as it is to make it easy for you to produce your own audio and more easily share it online. In that perspective, I got the impression that they realized their slower development pace wasn't making new functionality available quickly enough to keep up with the pace of participant innovation.
(Dangit, I sound like some kind of marketing buzzword guy, but I promise I'm not...now if you'll excuse me, I need to go utilize some synergy.)
Absolutely, I've used ddrescue for exactly (well, ALMOST exactly, I don't think the floppies in question were *20* years old yet) this purpose.
I vaguely recall needing to adjust the default blocksize or cluster size to get it to perform properly, but it worked beautifully and recovered everything that wasn't completely unreadable otherwise.
Or even just a.dex converter so that that Android applications can be written in Go instead of Java...
(Since hypothetically any language ought to be convertible to dalvik bytecode and not just Java, I'm surprised Google hasn't put any apparent effort into making that happen so that people don't NEED to program Android applications in Java if they don't want to for some reason.)
(If they came up with a converter that worked from Python code, I don't see how Android application availability wouldn't just plain explode...)
Not to mention that there's nothing stopping Apple (except for perhaps corporate arrogance and "not invented here" syndrome) from negotiating a different license just as they would with any other company's code that they want to avoid passing along rights for. "Hey, Samba, we'd like to use your software, but this patent clause kind of worries us - how about we negotiate different terms for Apple corporation?" Not really any different from "Hey, Microsoft, we're getting out of the server market, so we'd like to use Microsoft Azure for our new Apple iCloud, how about we negotiate terms for Apple Corporation?"
This whole weird "permissive" spin has been getting pushed in the media lately. The GPL's "you can't add further restrictions when redistributing" clauses make the GPL "less free" only in the same way that the US Constitution is now "less free" because it now forbids me from becoming a slave (even if I want to).
I still advocate "trespassing" over "stealing". Infringement of Intellectual Property(tm) is still illegal and even arguably (in general) immoral...but it's nothing like "stealing". It IS like "trespassing", however - it's a usurpation of a right to control access from someone else, without "robbing" the victim of the actual "intellectual thing" in question.
I would guess that instead of using PDO or similar abstraction layer, their PHP code is littered with "mysql_*" function calls, so they'll necessarily need to modify everything to handle any other database.
Or just wait for enough people to move to Google+ instead so that their database load is reduced...
"With the speed webmasters are adopting new technology, a one version every year would be fine."
I think Mozilla would argue you've got cause and effect backwards here. How about "With the glacial pace that new technologies are becoming available in web browsers, webmasters don't bother with new technology".
I don't think this is as big of a deal as it sounds - my impression is that there has been a backlog of "new web technologies" waiting to be implemented in browsers (legally-free media formats for <audio> and <video> tags, css3 animations, websockets, webGL, etc.) but I suspect with a more rapid development pace for Firefox and Chrom(e|ium), the backlog will get cleared out fairly quickly and the pace of development will settle back down.
Otherwise, people seem to be throwing a fit mostly over the fact that Mozilla decided to stop using decimal points for version updates.
Well, if that's the case it can be interpreted as "even with Linux marketshare undercounted by Net Applications, they STILL show Microsoft's browser is still losing market share!"
No doubt common "screw with Apple cameras" IR patterns will be added to a future iteration of the TV-B-Gone device...
I haven't read the application, but if the pattern somehow encodes the "watermark" (as opposed to just signalling one of a set of pre-installed watermarks on the camera) pranksters could have all KINDS of fun adding watermarks of ASCII-art porn, Blu-Ray decryption keys, profane graffiti, etc. to photos taken by people in an area.
Isn't the author here one of the hardcore "WE HATE KDE!"/"Choice is confusing!"/"Why can't Linux just be a version of Mac OSX that we don't have to pay for?" people on the "TuxRadar" podcast?
That would explain the apparent overexcitement about the imagined doom of Qt. Premature Schadenfreud.
(Try thinking about baseball next time,...uh, or cricket, I guess.)
If they SERIOUSLY commit to disowning their current "We're just for consumers, not developers" and "We'll just keep doing what's working for US" policies, I might actually consider a Motorola product again someday. It'd take more than some vaguely appeasing mumblings from their PR departments to convince me, though.
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Isn't that their job anyway, though? Estimating the costs this way sounds a bit like Apple saying that Google cost them millions of dollars because they had to have meetings about competing with Android (for example).
Vorbis is also the audio codec for Google's legally-free "webm" video format, which is vp8 video and vorbis audio in a specific form of Matroska container (instead of Ogg, which seems to invoke hatred among some programmers where Matroska apparently doesn't). Hypothetically, you can make a standards-complaint audio-only webm file to use in place of Ogg Vorbis for anything that supports webm and get the superior-to-mp3 Vorbis quality sound in anything that supports webm - mostly web browsers and at least some Android devices.
(ALL android-based devices support Ogg Vorbis audio, including the ones that don't mention it in the marketing materials, as do a lot of other handheld music players that aren't iGadgets or Zunes. I can't decide if audio-only-webm is likely to displace Ogg Vorbis at some point or not. The good news is that you can take Ogg Vorbis audio and move it to a webm format without losing any quality.)
tl;dr: Vorbis audio and support for it seems to be a lot more widespread than people usually realize.
Given Sony's past habits, does this mean a rapid spin away from unlocked bootloaders on their phones (unless perhaps someone gets their hands on the key for some Sony-installed rootkit that might be installed in the factory?)
Actually I think it was "Happy Birthday To You", but otherwise, yes.
I haven't looked at the announcement itself yet, but that right there makes it sound like WebOS, or "PhoneGap, The Operating System"...and I'm okay with that.
If they can manage to get devices out and price them substantially lower than the premium iPod Mega (or 'iPad' if you prefer) or Xoom sorts of gadgets I'd love to have something like that.
I don't know if that's the reason, but Firefox 7 is noticeably more responsive on my system than 6 was.
If I were appointed Supreme Overlord of Mozilla, I'd have them continue the rapid-fire releases for at least two more cycles, by which time they ought to be caught back up with Chrome et al on features and performance, and have most of the new things in the pipeline implemented finally (or at least that's my impression).
After that, slowing back down to 1-2 major releases per year, but keep up "minor update" cycles every month or two. (In practice, this might just mean continuing their current development model, but going back to numbering the new releases with ".1, .2", etc rather than jumping whole-numbers at that point, since I'm guessing there won't be too many major changes left to implement at that point anyway.)
If someone can get Mozilla to appoint me Supreme Overlord, I promise I'll get right on that...
Getting important fixes and new features in place in less that a year or two, particularly while those features are needed to keep up with (or possibly surpass) Chrome.
Previously, every time they needed to add a major new feature or fix (like replacing the javascript engine for better performance, making major improvement to the memory usage, HTML5 media features, etc.) they seemed to be just adding it to the massive stack of stuff they were working on, and it would take them an eternity in internet time to finally get it out, and I got the impression (as a casual observer) that each new version as a result was turning into a massive, inefficient project.
I think the faster release cycle was intended to make it so they could add one or two genuinely new features at a time on a more reasonable schedule so they could finally get caught back up to Chrome's feature-set and performance, as well as potentially adapt quickly to new developments on the web that might come up.
I still think that once they've gone through another stable release or two this year, they may be able to slow back down, having worked their way through the backlog of major new features and improvements they want to implement. From my experimentation, I get the impression that somewhere around version 7 (due next week, I think...) and version 8 the perfomance will improve substantially due to some of the changes they've made to Firefox since starting the faster release cycle.
Also don't forget that Mozilla isn't focussed on the "consume-only" market - part of their explicit goal as an organization is to encourage participation on the web. From Mozilla's perspective, the purpose of (for example) HTML5 support is NOT specifically to make it easy for you to "consume" a stream of Justin Bieber from Disney corp., so much as it is to make it easy for you to produce your own audio and more easily share it online. In that perspective, I got the impression that they realized their slower development pace wasn't making new functionality available quickly enough to keep up with the pace of participant innovation.
(Dangit, I sound like some kind of marketing buzzword guy, but I promise I'm not...now if you'll excuse me, I need to go utilize some synergy.)
Absolutely, I've used ddrescue for exactly (well, ALMOST exactly, I don't think the floppies in question were *20* years old yet) this purpose.
I vaguely recall needing to adjust the default blocksize or cluster size to get it to perform properly, but it worked beautifully and recovered everything that wasn't completely unreadable otherwise.
Or even just a .dex converter so that that Android applications can be written in Go instead of Java...
(Since hypothetically any language ought to be convertible to dalvik bytecode and not just Java, I'm surprised Google hasn't put any apparent effort into making that happen so that people don't NEED to program Android applications in Java if they don't want to for some reason.)
(If they came up with a converter that worked from Python code, I don't see how Android application availability wouldn't just plain explode...)
Take it easy, a simple typo is not reason to loose you're mind!
(Actually, those persistent creeping mispellings annoy the heck out of me, too, but I couldn't resist.)
Not to mention that there's nothing stopping Apple (except for perhaps corporate arrogance and "not invented here" syndrome) from negotiating a different license just as they would with any other company's code that they want to avoid passing along rights for. "Hey, Samba, we'd like to use your software, but this patent clause kind of worries us - how about we negotiate different terms for Apple corporation?" Not really any different from "Hey, Microsoft, we're getting out of the server market, so we'd like to use Microsoft Azure for our new Apple iCloud, how about we negotiate terms for Apple Corporation?"
This whole weird "permissive" spin has been getting pushed in the media lately. The GPL's "you can't add further restrictions when redistributing" clauses make the GPL "less free" only in the same way that the US Constitution is now "less free" because it now forbids me from becoming a slave (even if I want to).
I actually first THOUGHT they were referring to the Pirate Party when the headline said "Internet-Based Political Party".
So, let's see, candidates chosen by the internet?..."Steve Wozniak/Ron Paul 2012!"
"Linux 3.11 for Workgroups" is going to be AWESOME!
I still advocate "trespassing" over "stealing". Infringement of Intellectual Property(tm) is still illegal and even arguably (in general) immoral...but it's nothing like "stealing". It IS like "trespassing", however - it's a usurpation of a right to control access from someone else, without "robbing" the victim of the actual "intellectual thing" in question.
I'm still wondering why Microsoft named their "Cloud" platform after the color of a cloudless sky...
("The emperor has no clouds"?)
I would guess that instead of using PDO or similar abstraction layer, their PHP code is littered with "mysql_*" function calls, so they'll necessarily need to modify everything to handle any other database.
Or just wait for enough people to move to Google+ instead so that their database load is reduced...
123 years? Oh, so THAT'S why the software is called "mpg123"
I think Mozilla would argue you've got cause and effect backwards here. How about "With the glacial pace that new technologies are becoming available in web browsers, webmasters don't bother with new technology".
I don't think this is as big of a deal as it sounds - my impression is that there has been a backlog of "new web technologies" waiting to be implemented in browsers (legally-free media formats for <audio> and <video> tags, css3 animations, websockets, webGL, etc.) but I suspect with a more rapid development pace for Firefox and Chrom(e|ium), the backlog will get cleared out fairly quickly and the pace of development will settle back down.
Otherwise, people seem to be throwing a fit mostly over the fact that Mozilla decided to stop using decimal points for version updates.
That's pretty much what I was thinking. "Oh, darn, now Firefox 4 will NEVER become the new IE6!"
Not "torture", silly person. It was merely "enhanced interrogation".
Similarly, Libya isn't "war", it's "enhanced peacekeeping".
(Now bend over for you "enhanced screening", citizen...)
Not (necessarily) hypocritical.
No doubt common "screw with Apple cameras" IR patterns will be added to a future iteration of the TV-B-Gone device...
I haven't read the application, but if the pattern somehow encodes the "watermark" (as opposed to just signalling one of a set of pre-installed watermarks on the camera) pranksters could have all KINDS of fun adding watermarks of ASCII-art porn, Blu-Ray decryption keys, profane graffiti, etc. to photos taken by people in an area.
Isn't the author here one of the hardcore "WE HATE KDE!"/"Choice is confusing!"/"Why can't Linux just be a version of Mac OSX that we don't have to pay for?" people on the "TuxRadar" podcast?
That would explain the apparent overexcitement about the imagined doom of Qt. Premature Schadenfreud.
(Try thinking about baseball next time, ...uh, or cricket, I guess.)
A company that did that would probably turn me into an almost Apple-level rabidly loyal fanatic...
If they SERIOUSLY commit to disowning their current "We're just for consumers, not developers" and "We'll just keep doing what's working for US" policies, I might actually consider a Motorola product again someday. It'd take more than some vaguely appeasing mumblings from their PR departments to convince me, though.