USB 3.0 is about to make it into mainstream this year and it has a 4.8Gbit per second speed. It seems to me that since USB 3.0 is now golden and read to go, then it should be supported as opposed to the measly 720Mbps provided by this spec.
Let's face it, display port is about video. It should be possible to transmit high definition video to the PC over the USB port. High definition video as defined by SMTPE requires 3.0Gbps, USB overhead will easily add an additional 25% on top of that. So, USB 3.0 is a requirement for something interesting.
If it requires a different cable to do it, oh well, get it over with already. After all, you still have to special order display port cables most of the time anyway.
Bottlenext isn't the Javascript. It's the DOM model. Javascript compilers and interpreters in modern browsers (and Flash) are truly special. They are JIT compilers which very quickly are offering some of the best compiled code available. In addition, given that the code is compiled locally, they will soon start producing better code than even the Intel compiler on x86 since the code would be native to the local architecture accounting for everything from available instructions to the pipeline distance between cache misses to cache coherency mechanisms.
With all that, it won't make a hill of beans of difference since for EcmaScript to do anything of interest, it has to interact with the browser's internal representation of the web standards. Since branches of the DOM tree aren't directly addressable in that way and even simple changes to the tree can require reparsing a million objects or more to rerender the page in the browser, performance bottlenecks are now in the DOM model and not the language runtime.
If the DOM model of the browser itself were implemented in EcmaScript and the layout engine were as well, then it would theoretically be possible to remove all these bottlenecks. To do this, it would be necessary to do something like adopt ActionScript as opposed to EcmaScript across the browsers (for object orientation), port the entire engine of the browser to ActionScript and make a call interface for timing, graphics, fonts, windowing etc.. available as objects to the ActionScript engine.
It can be done and if nothing else, the project mentioned in this article show that there are people deranged enough to do this like that.
What makes browser companies so interesting (me being alumni of one of them) is that they are full of REALLY smart guys who have spent years making their browsers faster and faster and having had "cross-browser-maker barbeques" I've learned there's never any shortage of ideas to make them even faster.
5 years down the road, people will be talking about the performance of their H.265 CODECs written in EcmaScript 7 on different browsers.
That's right. Governments are letting people freely access bodies of water and are even delivering via pipes, for a nominal charge water to consumers around the world.
This is seriously impacting the business of companies such a Perrier, Evian, Imsdal, Peligrino and others who charge $5-$6 per half liter of this refreshing liquid. Companies like Coca-Cola are getting all the water they need to produce billions of liters of their drugs without paying these water sellers a single bloody red cent.
I've calculated and if every human on the planet (6 billion or so) consumes an average of 2 liters of water per day, then each would have had to pay $20-$24 per day to these firms for a total of $120,000,000,000 per day in lost revenues for these water vendors. That's $432 trillion of lost revenues for these firms over the same period these book sellers are claiming.
The catch is, people have been using this liquid without license or royalties for 10,000 years (if we believe the christians or figure that due to population growth, the previous X number of years of water consumption by the smaller population would pad out the lower number of people over the following 10,000 years). So, we'd have to figure that it's $4.320 quintillion is lost revenues for these firms all because water bodies are available to everyone free of charge.
Additionally, there's a direct theft issue to consider. The bodies of water owned by the bottled water vendors suffer from theft by evaporation all day, nearly every day. Their premium water is stolen from them and there's nothing they can do about it. The water is then distributed (via rain) across "lesser" water bodies which are freely available to everyone. The only compensation they get in return is to have their superior water stock diluted by the rain generated by evaporation of lesser water sources around the world which they would have access to free of charge anyway (if they wanted it).
THIS HAS TO END.
I recommend we, as supporters of these companies that have been so clearly robbed of sales opportunities unite and lobby our governments to close off all free or unlicensed access to all water sources, fresh or desalinizable to the general public and we formulate a compensation plan which would guarantee these water companies 25% of each countries GDP until this debt is resolved.
Personally, I love spouting statistics, but those are the one based on logic such as "this won't matter in 99% of all circumstances". I admit that mathematical statistics just don't interest me as the stats I use don't need to be all that accurate. I do use them for real time protocol development, but for those, a cook book is good enough. No point learning the math on them. Takes too long and I don't gain enough from the effort to justify it. My math learning brain capacity is better spent focusing on differential equations and linear algebra. I don't have the brain cells left for a 3rd discipline:)
I love programming, but I despise trying to implement algorithms written by math geeks. They're typically sloppy and depend heavily on background information that I just don't care about. Write some pseudo code instead of using 30 pages describing the variables in an equation. When I had to start working with wavelet transforms, I had to learn some weird french notation for math I've never seen before that looked like Polish not Greek. (and I mean polish the language, not making polish jokes)
I'm a strong believer that programmers should have at least better than generalized math skills, but I also believe that stats geeks and math geeks should be at least able to write in Matcad or R or something. Then at least a programmer can do something with it.
If a stat geek and a code geek are expected to work with one another, they should at least have some way of speaking with one another and I genuinely believe that the stat geek can learn to program enough to make an example a lot easier than a code geek can learn to read their math.
I work in a company made up entirely of developers who have learned that instead of saying "Hmm... nope, that's not my thing, cya!" they instead say "It's not my thing, let's see if we can sort it out though." we help each other out and we solve problems. If you happen to be a math or a stats geek, we'll work with you to try and understand the garble that you're attempting to communicate, but it'll take far more than just "here's the math, cya" because then we'll just interpret it however it seems to make sense to us. And I promise you, it'll be wrong:)
Sadly it sounds like the boss is trying to make excuses for lack of productivity and figured that music is the most likely thing to target which seems like an "obvious" solution to the problem.
Personally, I'd continue listening to my music and if he doesn't like it, then I'd start working more from the house. In fact, I'd convince as many people as possible to work more from the house claiming "without my music to listen to, I can't hear myself think in this place, so to get anything done, I have to do it from the house".
Or else, you can walk around wearing ear phones and if the boss asks why you're listening to music, explain that you're "Listening to the news, not music", "Not listening to music, just using them as ear plugs to block out the noise around me", "Listening to ambient sounds like ocean waves and birds chirping", "Joan Collins last novel", "Learning to speak swahili", "listening to a motivational speaker to improve my self confidence since I'm feeling as if my boss treats me as a child".
We give our boys legos, blocks, erector/mechano, tinker toys, electronics kits, microscopes, telescopes, child size carpenters tools.
We give our girls Barbies, Littlest Pet Shop, Disney Princesses, CD Players, Bratz, hair brushes, make up, etc...
Girls have a higher "social intelligence" in most cases as spend their youth pretending to be mommies or party girls. So they learn their social skills early and attempt to mature to womanhood early.
Almost all boy toys are puzzles of some type or another. The "intelligent ones" spend their entire youths puzzling things out or attempting to figure out how to do things.
There are exceptions to both, I see it all the time at my kids' school. But on average, when you get to the school, of the children doing productive things (as opposed to kicking a ball around). Girls are coloring or making bead pictures. Boys are building and playing with mechanical or otherwise educational toys.
We categorize our children from birth and raise them differently. Women don't lack the intelligence that men do, men simply excel at the types of tasks found on IQ tests since they spend their entire childhood indirectly training for them.
It's often why in a typical middle class relationship (excluding couples with lawyers, marketing drones, pointed haired bosses etc...) that men are expected to devise solutions to complex problems. It's also why children tend to think "pappa's smarter than momma". It isn't that the women can't do it, in fact, single mothers have to solve all the same problems as the pappa does in a family. It's the fact that pappa's get more satisfaction from solving problems of those types and if women couldn't get us to do that stuff, they would probably have to do all the work in the house.
As for people talking about George W. Bush's IQ, it was Sr. that was reported to have 120, the reports I've read on Jr. had him closer to 100. Either way, on the IQ scale, they're both pretty much next to vegetables.
It's a catch 22, the paper costs more because they can't demand the advertising prices. They can't demand the advertising prices because there aren't enough readers anymore.
Fact is, specially formatted news papers that can be viewed with news paper style type setting on a device like a Kindle as well as allow printing of sections to Letter/A4 pages would be the way I would buy a subscription.
Last night I spent the better half of the evening replacing the busted shell of my daughter's Nintendo DS Lite which took a hard fall and the hinges busted leaving the screen dangling by the wires. For the $12 for a new shell, it is well worth it to repair the unit.
The DS is an excellent piece of equipment. It's small, but not too small. It's light, but heavy enough to be comfortable. It has great battery life and even my original Nintendo DS (pre-lite) still functions for hours on a single charge.
If I were to make any improvements to the DS, I would make the charger USB based and make it so that save games and such could be backed up similar to the iPhone.
There is a fantastic software library for the DS with hundreds if not thousands of titles. The unit still plays Gameboy Advance games and was even quite entertaining to play guitar hero on.
In fact, game play on the DS is wonderful. I've never stopped enjoying playing on the unit. From Mario to Final Fantasy it's an awesome unit. What I'm most surprised about is that no one has developed a gyro/motion sensor that would fit into the advance cartridge slot to make games more Wii like.
The only thing that a "Revolutionary New Design" would bring would be the need to buy higher resolution versions of the same titles. Fact is, for the screen size, the games are more than good enough already. Using classic address hacking methods (similar to the original 8086 LIM/EMS extensions) it's possible to make games bigger and bigger.
I haven't felt an urge to buy a DSi since it doesn't appear to offer anything over what I already have. It might be different if the game store were more like Apple's so that I could install the same game on both of my kids' devices, but for now, switching game cards between devices is good enough.
The Playstation Portable is a much more advanced device and still to this day, I've yet to see any games for it that make me say "Wow I need that". I'm sure that Nintendo could probably build a market for new games on a new device, but really, what's the point? Nintendo makes far more money off of licensing than off of the console. The more games that get sold, the more they make. The console can actually be sold at a loss (like they would actually need to hehe) and they'd still get rich.
I hope that if they ever do come out with a successor to the DS, they make it so that DS games play without any problems. I think if it came down to choosing a new Nintendo device which couldn't play the old games, I'd just get the kids iPod Touches instead.
Symbian has a clear market domination in this chart, but it is important to also point out that of those 50%, the percentage of people who ever even heard of Symbian is small, the percentage of those people who know what Symbian is, is even smaller. The percentage of people who feel comfortable purchasing anything through Ovi is tiny. The percentage of people who would buy a Symbian app vs. a Java one is minuscule.
On the other hand, Maemo suffers an entirely different problem and much of that is that the users are more likely to try to get their hands on open source or free apps made for the devices.
iPhone is the market most dominated by people willing to spend money on apps since Apple has done a fantastic job convincing everyone that everyone else is doing it and loving it.
Here's the BIGGEST reason by Symbian app development is nearly a waste of time. Too many phone models. Too many processors that may or may not be fast enough. Too many RAM configurations, Symbian phones often come with 4 megs or less RAM. Too many screen sizes. Too many input methods. Too many windowing toolkits that are incompatible since Symbian never really solidified the GUI ABI.
In short, iPhone which is one model a year and is more or less backwards compatible is a MUCH better solutions for app developers. Palm is likely to be the same. Don't know much about Blackberry. Don't think I've ever seen one. But I don't recall seeing too many different models.
Android on the other hand is an enigma since it suffers many of the same problems as Symbian and Windows Mobile, but there's hacker momentum behind it.
Nokia is a telephone platform for old ladies, and yes, Series 60 has pretty much replaced everything else at Nokia, so the old ladies are in fact buying "Smart Phones" without even knowing it.
I seems to me that by waiting until this late in the game, to the point which nearly the entire world's Internet and telecommunications infrastructure is based on Ethernet in on incarnation or another is just plain sleezy.
The fact that 3Com, once a reputable company of top notch networking technology appears to be trying make money by exercising their patent pool through a 3rd party to raise much needed money. This is sad.
There was a point when the 3Com 3c509 and 3c905 ethernet adapters dominated the Ethernet world. In fact, while their cards were more expensive and more complex than nearly any other on the market, they were likely to be found in nearly every PC that was built of quality parts (meaning machines that chose ASUS motherboards over some fly by night).
The integration of Ethernet logic within chipsets pretty much destroyed the 3Com business model, after all, 3Com made more off the adapters than anything else. Today however nearly every high end motherboard I encounter implements a Marvell Ethernet PHY. Intel is selling tons of Ethernet PHY's to embedded vendors that implement their designs on FPGAs (meaning most high end rack based devices). 3Com is nowhere to be seen.
I have been patiently waiting for 3Com to come back and start taking the high end workstation and the server market seriously. I've been waiting for them to make great products again. Instead, they keep shoveling out lower and lower interest items. The trust the world once associated with their quality is decreasing so rapidly, soon people will see them as no better than Linksys or D-Link.
If I were 3Com, I'd seriously consider taking a project like Vyatta or the likes, start developing it into a high end system capable of managing switching (Layer-2 to Layer-4) and then build every product starting with their cheapest routers based on it. I'd start producing new silicon with high end features like TCP and UDP offloading and trying to get into the mass market PHY business. Most importantly, I'd start selling trust.
The problem is, by exercising these patents which people knew about but trusted 3Com to never exercise since it would just force all the other vendors on the market to lash back at them with their huge patent pools, they're destroying the last remaining bit of trust which was for a long time the only the 3Com had left.
Rest In Peace 3Com, it's unfortunate that everything I ever loved about you is gone. Another great innovator has died. Now you can sleep eternally in a grave dug next to SCOs
I can't say Vista was the best OS I ever ran, but I ran it at least on my main system for 2 years and I never found myself hating it. Hell, I even did real-time software development on it. Couldn't have been that bad.
Many people in HR positions are still actually religious. Many people in policy positions are also religious. There are many religions that look at gambling or contributing to gambling as being a sin.
While they won't pro-actively think "Hmm... he's been involved in gambling and therefore he's a bastard from the deepest pits of hell", instead it will make at least a subconscious impact on them to see you as an immoral person.
I would recommend that you avoid the position if possible. I've had friends that have struggled finding work after having been employed by gambling companies that started off legitimate enough, but through changes of management and misappropriation of company resources ended badly.
the right tool for the job?.NET is fantastic for many different things. In fact, I have written high end video encoder systems in.NET that performed all real time and file based management for multiple 1.5gbps streams in.NET. However for the high demand code, I used C++ and even a few lines of assembly (I can't resist it, just have to write them, helps me sleep at night).
Developing high performance systems using.NET is ENTIRELY! possible and even practical. Unfortunately, in a company like Microsoft, the developer with the skill set for such a job will almost always end up on development teams for Windows,.Net itself, Visual Studio, even Office. The developers left over to write database programs for customers will be of a much lower grade. Besides, there are very few good real-time systems developers that would choose to work on a database program rather than on something more interesting, like... I don't know... shaving toe nails for old ladies. Really, database programming is what people do when they can't do anything else, it's the data-entry job of programmers.
Sometimes Java is still a modern VM environment. CLR generally IS NOT. It has some features you would consider a VM runtime system, but if anything, those features improve performance over straight out compiling the MSIL code. Ideally, it would allow trace metrics to be calculated and where branches can be predicted, long traces can be compiled without cache-misses and penalties... creating MUCH higher performance code.
As for GC. Well, unless you can develop a system that eliminates memory allocation altogether and uses no threading while doing it. Good GC based environments (like CLR/Mono) are almost always faster than straight memory allocation. I highly recommend you research it... and if you're going to try and prove it with 5 lines of code, don't waste your time. That's not a real world test. Test it instead for example with an XML parser that generates a DOM tree and then deletes/dereferences it.
As a religious non-Java programmer and a devout Java basher, I'll shoot down the "Not suitable for nuclear reactors" thing. Java is 100 times more suitable for a nuclear reactor in most cases than C or C++ since the "object model" you would use in a Java program would centralize most critical bugs to a few lines of code that can be fixed to repair the whole program instead of spending months on diddling all the little memory and pointer related bugs you're likely to encounter. Also, for applications that are heavy allocators, relocatable memory in a Java environment can cause a system written by an "average programmer" to run much longer without crashing because of one memory abuse situation or another. Almost no "average programmers" even know where to begin to deal with memory fragmentation issues, yet they DO cause tons of problems.
In the case of this trading system, it's obvious Microsoft tried throwing hardware at the problem. That was all fine and good. Hell, add 500 more web servers and use 5 over those 32 physical Xeon processor machines from Unisys to drive the database..NET will make NO difference at this level. The flaw at this point was poorly coded SQL. After all, by distributing the load of the web traffic across 500 blade servers, there was little chance that the.NET program they were running was the problem.
Instead, it's FAR more likely that abuse of the database was the real problem. Most database front ends querying data from SQL servers are written by mediocre database UI developers that have no respect for what the SQL server might actually have to do in order to process their queries. On top of that, they like to do things like create tons of views and indexes that all need to be updated constantly. Queries get SLOWED down and it doesn't matter how fast the application is, the SQL server can't keep up with the crap code on the back end.
Yeh, cause I'm going to directly attach all my devices to the Internet. Some idiot in marketting doesn't get it.
Using protocols like XMPP, SIP, etc... the devices will connect to servers for session initiation. Given low bandwidth situations where there are settings like "Turn oven on at 5:12pm", messages will be passed without the need for firewall traversal directly from the server which already have open connections to the devices.
For higher bandwidth situations, like a camera in the fridge that lets you monitor whether the light is out or if your cheese is green, firewall traversal mechanisms will be used. STUN and derivatives are reliable now.
Each house or community really only needs a single public IP address now. There's little or no benefit of IP addresses for the user anymore.
Seriously, first the catholics come out and agrees the earth is round. Now the English come out and admit they were wrong about mistreating a man over his sexual preference.
This is a trend that I don't like! The day I see white hatted, "god fearing" Alabamans who spend most of their days sitting on their porch drinking cheap beer voting in favor of gun control and marrying into other races I'm going to just shoot myself because then we'll know the earth is coming to an end.
This world is just getting to crazy. If you can't depend on the stupidity of humanity, what can you possibly depend on?
Typing speed is what matters. I've never taken a single touch typing class, and with the exception of knowing what the two notches on the F and J keys are there for, I have little idea of what finger is for what key. The result? I type at 90+ words per minute and have extremely high accuracy.
Touch typing classes were MUCH more relevant in the days when correction tape was used and it meant that important papers would have to be completely retyped when there was a mistake. Alternately, it was important when correction tape or white out was actually a major office expense. Both of these issues are entirely irrelevant today.
If you want to push for something, how about hand writing classes since there are massive numbers of people that after leaving high school use a pen or pencil for little more than writing their names or doodling a picture on their notepad during a meeting. Penmanship is at an all-time low. Boys who were classically bad writers to begin with are probably unlikely to be able to read their own writing anymore. Girls are the new boys, their handwriting is deplorable as well now.
An even better idea, how about mandatory short-hand classes so that when people do not have computers available to them (for example in meetings) will be able to write in some for or another that allows them to take accurate notes and still read it afterwards when they're back in front of their computers. It's been around since the days of Caesar, believed to have been invented by Cicero's manservant Marcus Tullius Tiro and yet, while being a most efficient form of writing is still barely used outside of court rooms.
People who need to learn to type will learn on their own. On top of that, it's rare that you encounter a high school student these days that can't manage at least 30 words per minute. Their greatest flaw is no longer in typing speed, but the fact that even with a spell checker, they can't spell for shit. Let's not forget that spell checkers don't cover things like They're Their and There.
I still have in a basement or the garage the original manuals that shipped with the original IBM PC aaaaand, guess what. In the back of the programmers reference manual is the full, commented source to the system BIOS.
There was no reverse engineering of the BIOS involved, instead, it was simply reimplementing it using the original code that was published with the PC.
I don't know if it was common practice to do so back then with other systems, but by releasing full source to the BIOS, it probably saved IBM thousands of hours properly documenting the API of the BIOS.
Keep in mind that for the most part, until Ralf Brown took it upon himself to document as much of the PC interrupts as possible, the BIOS source was probably the only decent documentation available for programmers.
I'm an U.S. natural citizen living in a socialist democracy. We have socialized medicine, socialized education (through Ph.D.), and many other social functions of the government. Poverty is measured in fractions of a percent.
The labor unions are not run by guys who wear $5000 suits and don't like their pictures taken. They're run by union reps who actually represent the unions.
Fact is, in this country, we take for granted the freedoms Americans are constantly being reminded they once had... or had to give up to have other freedoms.
We have a higher percentage of homes with guns than America does, but they are typically only found in houses of official military reserve. Guns just aren't a part of culture. They typically only come up in discussions about paranoid Americans who are gun freaks.
We have a crime level low enough that the police department doesn't even bother with budgets for forensics, it's cheaper to use other countries when needed.
Our kids play outside unattended and we don't panic.
Before a picture is taken down from somewhere, there is at least some form of debate involved.
I'm NEVER going back... this utopian (except for the awful weather) society is everything Americans try to convince themselves America is.
Only real problem here is that since the educational level on average is much higher than in the U.S., we have to import labor to do most of the crap work.
I'm sure that the writer of the article could have wasted time suggesting that this was "as opposed to Personal Navigation Devices such as those used by the typical consumer while driving to the Grand Canyon on vacation", but any reader with a quarter of a brain should have been able to read that without the print being involved.
I mean, seriously, that's worse than pathetic! You can make stable systems on ANY platform as long as you plan for things to go wrong.
After all, fault tolerance for mission critical systems should be at the application level for the most part. Doing it at the system level makes you entirely dependent on the system itself remaining stable.
It sounds more likely that the developers who made the system were run of the mill "I made a calculator in C#, I'm a real programmer now!" types. You find these guys in any language.
In systems like this, if you have to use SQL, the use Oracle on whatever system Oracle delivers on. Make it redundant as hell, make at least several fail-over paths and if the UI is web based, then load balance with fail-over across at least 10 servers. No single byte of data should exist on any ONE machine, it should be duplicated/mirrored to hell and back.
At this level, it makes absolutely no difference what platform you're running on, in fact, running a Java platform on Windows AND Linux (or another Unix) should be a minimum so that when operating specific bugs pop up, fail over would keep things running on the system which doesn't have the bug.
While Google doesn't mind spending the money for H.264 or the risk of legal action of sleeper patents on Ogg technologies, other companies either already have alternative solutions or at least see Adobe Flash or Silverlight as a good enough solution that they're simply not interested in wasting time on dealing with CODEC related issues that they feel were solved a long time ago.
The issue is by no means even related to what CODEC is ideal today. That's just a crock of... well you know. Instead, the real issue is that W3C took what feels like 10 years to make even a simple update to HTML and in reality, if they were to mandate a specific CODEC as a minimum requirement to meet spec, it would be a total waste of time. I can justify this without ever saying patent, copyright or anything else of that sort.
Video playback requires that a minimum of 5 components are present in a browser:
1) Source - the place where the data comes from. This should support file based (via HTTP for example), seekable stream based (via RTSP and RTP with support for STUN or alternate firewall traversal), live stream based (via RTP with SIP or XMPP for session negotiation as well as STUN, TURN, and/or ICE for firewall traversal).
2) Demultiplexers - these split streams into their individual elementary streams. RTP doesn't need to be multiplexed, however the clock resolution of RTP is too low to be useful for the most part. So using something like ISO13818-1:2000 transport stream beneath is a good idea. For file based, using the Quicktime container format or another for file based media must be supported. In reality, this is far more complex to sort out than the CODEC itself since it doesn't require a mathematician/DSP expert to design a new container format and therefore they're far more plentiful and all present their own challenges for stream synchronization.
3) Audio CODECs - no detail needed
4) Video CODECs - also no detail needed
5) Sinks - the place where data is finally synchronized and presented to the user. Generally this means embedding something like OpenGL or framebuffer contexts directly within the browser itself. Unless the browser is natively rendering to this format, all the layering issues generally present in plug-ins are equally problematic.
While a video tag might make it logically simple for the web designer to say "stick my video here", the real problem is, simply choosing a standard CODEC for audio and a standard CODEC for video is actually the easiest part. Heck, choose 10, if you have the rest of the architecture in place, you can choose 100 and it would make no difference in complexity. The CODECs once they're written, licensed, etc... are trivial.
The real problem is, how does the user receive the media. And how it's presented.
For this, the real solution to the problem of cross platform and cross browser compatibility is that W3C or Ecma needs to invest heavily into a virtual machine platform similar to.NET CLR or Java VM. Now before you get carried away with which is better. Neither of them are even close to suitable to what's really needed. What's needed is a VM environment (more similar to.NET as opposed to JavaVM) that is capable of JIT compiling vectorized code for the native platform. Also, a context similar to canvas needs to be optimized for extremely high performance access by this VM and an standard, high end audio component needs to be present. The machine should natively support platform optimized mutexed queues and can even define a packet format that would make it possible to take advantage of things like EDMA on TI OMAP processors commonly used in mobile phones.
Where's this leading. Easy, why does W3C need to start a CODEC war when the solution is that the web site could provide the CODEC and demultiplexer using a scripting language or intermediate language (such as MSiL or Java Byte Code) that is ideally suitable for i
Seriously, you seem to think that the BD+ has won. If anything you're missing out on a few interesting points here.
First, if they won, then even Slysoft wouldn't be able to create new patches to circumvent the encryption. The issue here isn't whether they will or not. The issue is, how long will it take them to get around it this time. If anything, it keeps things a little entertaining, but it's still a non-issue.
Second, apparently BD+ is losing in many ways since there's not even enough interest in Blu-Ray for the open source community to waste their efforts in making the format consistently playable. Therefore, it's not an issue of trusted computing as much as a "Who really gives a crap" type scenario.
Third, high quality movie rips are entirely possible through many alternate methods, even if they are more time consuming and less convenient. As long as a film can be played, it can be copied. It's only a matter of how long does it take. For the moment, the convenience level is low since the resolutions are high enough that the time required to re-encode an HD film is high. Using new technologies like Intel's Larabee will change the playing field by quite a bit since there will be more processing power for running x264 or other encoders coming around.
I work in the world of hardware video encoders and real-time in full-HD is still a challenge, even with specialized hardware. These days, it's the average time it takes to rip and re-encode a DVD with 2-pass high quality encoding is 15 minutes on a not-so-special PC. To do a roughly similar job from an unencrypted Blu-Ray takes 24 hours at least.
Don't mistake lack of interest as being defeat. There just isn't enough interest in busting the encryption on Blu-Ray because the time to reencode is just TOO much. Once the CPU power for HD encoding becomes more readily available, if Blu-Ray even still exists, it will be cracked and present in a lot more systems.
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USB 3.0 is about to make it into mainstream this year and it has a 4.8Gbit per second speed. It seems to me that since USB 3.0 is now golden and read to go, then it should be supported as opposed to the measly 720Mbps provided by this spec.
Let's face it, display port is about video. It should be possible to transmit high definition video to the PC over the USB port. High definition video as defined by SMTPE requires 3.0Gbps, USB overhead will easily add an additional 25% on top of that. So, USB 3.0 is a requirement for something interesting.
If it requires a different cable to do it, oh well, get it over with already. After all, you still have to special order display port cables most of the time anyway.
Bottlenext isn't the Javascript. It's the DOM model. Javascript compilers and interpreters in modern browsers (and Flash) are truly special. They are JIT compilers which very quickly are offering some of the best compiled code available. In addition, given that the code is compiled locally, they will soon start producing better code than even the Intel compiler on x86 since the code would be native to the local architecture accounting for everything from available instructions to the pipeline distance between cache misses to cache coherency mechanisms.
With all that, it won't make a hill of beans of difference since for EcmaScript to do anything of interest, it has to interact with the browser's internal representation of the web standards. Since branches of the DOM tree aren't directly addressable in that way and even simple changes to the tree can require reparsing a million objects or more to rerender the page in the browser, performance bottlenecks are now in the DOM model and not the language runtime.
If the DOM model of the browser itself were implemented in EcmaScript and the layout engine were as well, then it would theoretically be possible to remove all these bottlenecks. To do this, it would be necessary to do something like adopt ActionScript as opposed to EcmaScript across the browsers (for object orientation), port the entire engine of the browser to ActionScript and make a call interface for timing, graphics, fonts, windowing etc.. available as objects to the ActionScript engine.
It can be done and if nothing else, the project mentioned in this article show that there are people deranged enough to do this like that.
What makes browser companies so interesting (me being alumni of one of them) is that they are full of REALLY smart guys who have spent years making their browsers faster and faster and having had "cross-browser-maker barbeques" I've learned there's never any shortage of ideas to make them even faster.
5 years down the road, people will be talking about the performance of their H.265 CODECs written in EcmaScript 7 on different browsers.
That's right. Governments are letting people freely access bodies of water and are even delivering via pipes, for a nominal charge water to consumers around the world.
This is seriously impacting the business of companies such a Perrier, Evian, Imsdal, Peligrino and others who charge $5-$6 per half liter of this refreshing liquid. Companies like Coca-Cola are getting all the water they need to produce billions of liters of their drugs without paying these water sellers a single bloody red cent.
I've calculated and if every human on the planet (6 billion or so) consumes an average of 2 liters of water per day, then each would have had to pay $20-$24 per day to these firms for a total of $120,000,000,000 per day in lost revenues for these water vendors. That's $432 trillion of lost revenues for these firms over the same period these book sellers are claiming.
The catch is, people have been using this liquid without license or royalties for 10,000 years (if we believe the christians or figure that due to population growth, the previous X number of years of water consumption by the smaller population would pad out the lower number of people over the following 10,000 years). So, we'd have to figure that it's $4.320 quintillion is lost revenues for these firms all because water bodies are available to everyone free of charge.
Additionally, there's a direct theft issue to consider. The bodies of water owned by the bottled water vendors suffer from theft by evaporation all day, nearly every day. Their premium water is stolen from them and there's nothing they can do about it. The water is then distributed (via rain) across "lesser" water bodies which are freely available to everyone. The only compensation they get in return is to have their superior water stock diluted by the rain generated by evaporation of lesser water sources around the world which they would have access to free of charge anyway (if they wanted it).
THIS HAS TO END.
I recommend we, as supporters of these companies that have been so clearly robbed of sales opportunities unite and lobby our governments to close off all free or unlicensed access to all water sources, fresh or desalinizable to the general public and we formulate a compensation plan which would guarantee these water companies 25% of each countries GDP until this debt is resolved.
Personally, I love spouting statistics, but those are the one based on logic such as "this won't matter in 99% of all circumstances". I admit that mathematical statistics just don't interest me as the stats I use don't need to be all that accurate. I do use them for real time protocol development, but for those, a cook book is good enough. No point learning the math on them. Takes too long and I don't gain enough from the effort to justify it. My math learning brain capacity is better spent focusing on differential equations and linear algebra. I don't have the brain cells left for a 3rd discipline :)
:)
I love programming, but I despise trying to implement algorithms written by math geeks. They're typically sloppy and depend heavily on background information that I just don't care about. Write some pseudo code instead of using 30 pages describing the variables in an equation. When I had to start working with wavelet transforms, I had to learn some weird french notation for math I've never seen before that looked like Polish not Greek. (and I mean polish the language, not making polish jokes)
I'm a strong believer that programmers should have at least better than generalized math skills, but I also believe that stats geeks and math geeks should be at least able to write in Matcad or R or something. Then at least a programmer can do something with it.
If a stat geek and a code geek are expected to work with one another, they should at least have some way of speaking with one another and I genuinely believe that the stat geek can learn to program enough to make an example a lot easier than a code geek can learn to read their math.
I work in a company made up entirely of developers who have learned that instead of saying "Hmm... nope, that's not my thing, cya!" they instead say "It's not my thing, let's see if we can sort it out though." we help each other out and we solve problems. If you happen to be a math or a stats geek, we'll work with you to try and understand the garble that you're attempting to communicate, but it'll take far more than just "here's the math, cya" because then we'll just interpret it however it seems to make sense to us. And I promise you, it'll be wrong
Teamwork solves these problems.
Agreed.
Sadly it sounds like the boss is trying to make excuses for lack of productivity and figured that music is the most likely thing to target which seems like an "obvious" solution to the problem.
Personally, I'd continue listening to my music and if he doesn't like it, then I'd start working more from the house. In fact, I'd convince as many people as possible to work more from the house claiming "without my music to listen to, I can't hear myself think in this place, so to get anything done, I have to do it from the house".
Or else, you can walk around wearing ear phones and if the boss asks why you're listening to music, explain that you're "Listening to the news, not music", "Not listening to music, just using them as ear plugs to block out the noise around me", "Listening to ambient sounds like ocean waves and birds chirping", "Joan Collins last novel", "Learning to speak swahili", "listening to a motivational speaker to improve my self confidence since I'm feeling as if my boss treats me as a child".
We give our boys legos, blocks, erector/mechano, tinker toys, electronics kits, microscopes, telescopes, child size carpenters tools.
We give our girls Barbies, Littlest Pet Shop, Disney Princesses, CD Players, Bratz, hair brushes, make up, etc...
Girls have a higher "social intelligence" in most cases as spend their youth pretending to be mommies or party girls. So they learn their social skills early and attempt to mature to womanhood early.
Almost all boy toys are puzzles of some type or another. The "intelligent ones" spend their entire youths puzzling things out or attempting to figure out how to do things.
There are exceptions to both, I see it all the time at my kids' school. But on average, when you get to the school, of the children doing productive things (as opposed to kicking a ball around). Girls are coloring or making bead pictures. Boys are building and playing with mechanical or otherwise educational toys.
We categorize our children from birth and raise them differently. Women don't lack the intelligence that men do, men simply excel at the types of tasks found on IQ tests since they spend their entire childhood indirectly training for them.
It's often why in a typical middle class relationship (excluding couples with lawyers, marketing drones, pointed haired bosses etc...) that men are expected to devise solutions to complex problems. It's also why children tend to think "pappa's smarter than momma". It isn't that the women can't do it, in fact, single mothers have to solve all the same problems as the pappa does in a family. It's the fact that pappa's get more satisfaction from solving problems of those types and if women couldn't get us to do that stuff, they would probably have to do all the work in the house.
As for people talking about George W. Bush's IQ, it was Sr. that was reported to have 120, the reports I've read on Jr. had him closer to 100. Either way, on the IQ scale, they're both pretty much next to vegetables.
enough said.
It's a catch 22, the paper costs more because they can't demand the advertising prices. They can't demand the advertising prices because there aren't enough readers anymore.
Fact is, specially formatted news papers that can be viewed with news paper style type setting on a device like a Kindle as well as allow printing of sections to Letter/A4 pages would be the way I would buy a subscription.
Last night I spent the better half of the evening replacing the busted shell of my daughter's Nintendo DS Lite which took a hard fall and the hinges busted leaving the screen dangling by the wires. For the $12 for a new shell, it is well worth it to repair the unit.
The DS is an excellent piece of equipment. It's small, but not too small. It's light, but heavy enough to be comfortable. It has great battery life and even my original Nintendo DS (pre-lite) still functions for hours on a single charge.
If I were to make any improvements to the DS, I would make the charger USB based and make it so that save games and such could be backed up similar to the iPhone.
There is a fantastic software library for the DS with hundreds if not thousands of titles. The unit still plays Gameboy Advance games and was even quite entertaining to play guitar hero on.
In fact, game play on the DS is wonderful. I've never stopped enjoying playing on the unit. From Mario to Final Fantasy it's an awesome unit. What I'm most surprised about is that no one has developed a gyro/motion sensor that would fit into the advance cartridge slot to make games more Wii like.
The only thing that a "Revolutionary New Design" would bring would be the need to buy higher resolution versions of the same titles. Fact is, for the screen size, the games are more than good enough already. Using classic address hacking methods (similar to the original 8086 LIM/EMS extensions) it's possible to make games bigger and bigger.
I haven't felt an urge to buy a DSi since it doesn't appear to offer anything over what I already have. It might be different if the game store were more like Apple's so that I could install the same game on both of my kids' devices, but for now, switching game cards between devices is good enough.
The Playstation Portable is a much more advanced device and still to this day, I've yet to see any games for it that make me say "Wow I need that". I'm sure that Nintendo could probably build a market for new games on a new device, but really, what's the point? Nintendo makes far more money off of licensing than off of the console. The more games that get sold, the more they make. The console can actually be sold at a loss (like they would actually need to hehe) and they'd still get rich.
I hope that if they ever do come out with a successor to the DS, they make it so that DS games play without any problems. I think if it came down to choosing a new Nintendo device which couldn't play the old games, I'd just get the kids iPod Touches instead.
Now all we need is Pokemon or Bakugan for iPhone.
Symbian has a clear market domination in this chart, but it is important to also point out that of those 50%, the percentage of people who ever even heard of Symbian is small, the percentage of those people who know what Symbian is, is even smaller. The percentage of people who feel comfortable purchasing anything through Ovi is tiny. The percentage of people who would buy a Symbian app vs. a Java one is minuscule.
On the other hand, Maemo suffers an entirely different problem and much of that is that the users are more likely to try to get their hands on open source or free apps made for the devices.
iPhone is the market most dominated by people willing to spend money on apps since Apple has done a fantastic job convincing everyone that everyone else is doing it and loving it.
Here's the BIGGEST reason by Symbian app development is nearly a waste of time. Too many phone models. Too many processors that may or may not be fast enough. Too many RAM configurations, Symbian phones often come with 4 megs or less RAM. Too many screen sizes. Too many input methods. Too many windowing toolkits that are incompatible since Symbian never really solidified the GUI ABI.
In short, iPhone which is one model a year and is more or less backwards compatible is a MUCH better solutions for app developers. Palm is likely to be the same. Don't know much about Blackberry. Don't think I've ever seen one. But I don't recall seeing too many different models.
Android on the other hand is an enigma since it suffers many of the same problems as Symbian and Windows Mobile, but there's hacker momentum behind it.
Nokia is a telephone platform for old ladies, and yes, Series 60 has pretty much replaced everything else at Nokia, so the old ladies are in fact buying "Smart Phones" without even knowing it.
I seems to me that by waiting until this late in the game, to the point which nearly the entire world's Internet and telecommunications infrastructure is based on Ethernet in on incarnation or another is just plain sleezy.
The fact that 3Com, once a reputable company of top notch networking technology appears to be trying make money by exercising their patent pool through a 3rd party to raise much needed money. This is sad.
There was a point when the 3Com 3c509 and 3c905 ethernet adapters dominated the Ethernet world. In fact, while their cards were more expensive and more complex than nearly any other on the market, they were likely to be found in nearly every PC that was built of quality parts (meaning machines that chose ASUS motherboards over some fly by night).
The integration of Ethernet logic within chipsets pretty much destroyed the 3Com business model, after all, 3Com made more off the adapters than anything else. Today however nearly every high end motherboard I encounter implements a Marvell Ethernet PHY. Intel is selling tons of Ethernet PHY's to embedded vendors that implement their designs on FPGAs (meaning most high end rack based devices). 3Com is nowhere to be seen.
I have been patiently waiting for 3Com to come back and start taking the high end workstation and the server market seriously. I've been waiting for them to make great products again. Instead, they keep shoveling out lower and lower interest items. The trust the world once associated with their quality is decreasing so rapidly, soon people will see them as no better than Linksys or D-Link.
If I were 3Com, I'd seriously consider taking a project like Vyatta or the likes, start developing it into a high end system capable of managing switching (Layer-2 to Layer-4) and then build every product starting with their cheapest routers based on it. I'd start producing new silicon with high end features like TCP and UDP offloading and trying to get into the mass market PHY business. Most importantly, I'd start selling trust.
The problem is, by exercising these patents which people knew about but trusted 3Com to never exercise since it would just force all the other vendors on the market to lash back at them with their huge patent pools, they're destroying the last remaining bit of trust which was for a long time the only the 3Com had left.
Rest In Peace 3Com, it's unfortunate that everything I ever loved about you is gone. Another great innovator has died. Now you can sleep eternally in a grave dug next to SCOs
I can't say Vista was the best OS I ever ran, but I ran it at least on my main system for 2 years and I never found myself hating it. Hell, I even did real-time software development on it. Couldn't have been that bad.
Many people in HR positions are still actually religious. Many people in policy positions are also religious. There are many religions that look at gambling or contributing to gambling as being a sin.
While they won't pro-actively think "Hmm... he's been involved in gambling and therefore he's a bastard from the deepest pits of hell", instead it will make at least a subconscious impact on them to see you as an immoral person.
I would recommend that you avoid the position if possible. I've had friends that have struggled finding work after having been employed by gambling companies that started off legitimate enough, but through changes of management and misappropriation of company resources ended badly.
the right tool for the job? .NET is fantastic for many different things. In fact, I have written high end video encoder systems in .NET that performed all real time and file based management for multiple 1.5gbps streams in .NET. However for the high demand code, I used C++ and even a few lines of assembly (I can't resist it, just have to write them, helps me sleep at night).
.NET is ENTIRELY! possible and even practical. Unfortunately, in a company like Microsoft, the developer with the skill set for such a job will almost always end up on development teams for Windows, .Net itself, Visual Studio, even Office. The developers left over to write database programs for customers will be of a much lower grade. Besides, there are very few good real-time systems developers that would choose to work on a database program rather than on something more interesting, like... I don't know... shaving toe nails for old ladies. Really, database programming is what people do when they can't do anything else, it's the data-entry job of programmers.
.NET will make NO difference at this level. The flaw at this point was poorly coded SQL. After all, by distributing the load of the web traffic across 500 blade servers, there was little chance that the .NET program they were running was the problem.
Developing high performance systems using
Sometimes Java is still a modern VM environment. CLR generally IS NOT. It has some features you would consider a VM runtime system, but if anything, those features improve performance over straight out compiling the MSIL code. Ideally, it would allow trace metrics to be calculated and where branches can be predicted, long traces can be compiled without cache-misses and penalties... creating MUCH higher performance code.
As for GC. Well, unless you can develop a system that eliminates memory allocation altogether and uses no threading while doing it. Good GC based environments (like CLR/Mono) are almost always faster than straight memory allocation. I highly recommend you research it... and if you're going to try and prove it with 5 lines of code, don't waste your time. That's not a real world test. Test it instead for example with an XML parser that generates a DOM tree and then deletes/dereferences it.
As a religious non-Java programmer and a devout Java basher, I'll shoot down the "Not suitable for nuclear reactors" thing. Java is 100 times more suitable for a nuclear reactor in most cases than C or C++ since the "object model" you would use in a Java program would centralize most critical bugs to a few lines of code that can be fixed to repair the whole program instead of spending months on diddling all the little memory and pointer related bugs you're likely to encounter. Also, for applications that are heavy allocators, relocatable memory in a Java environment can cause a system written by an "average programmer" to run much longer without crashing because of one memory abuse situation or another. Almost no "average programmers" even know where to begin to deal with memory fragmentation issues, yet they DO cause tons of problems.
In the case of this trading system, it's obvious Microsoft tried throwing hardware at the problem. That was all fine and good. Hell, add 500 more web servers and use 5 over those 32 physical Xeon processor machines from Unisys to drive the database.
Instead, it's FAR more likely that abuse of the database was the real problem. Most database front ends querying data from SQL servers are written by mediocre database UI developers that have no respect for what the SQL server might actually have to do in order to process their queries. On top of that, they like to do things like create tons of views and indexes that all need to be updated constantly. Queries get SLOWED down and it doesn't matter how fast the application is, the SQL server can't keep up with the crap code on the back end.
So, while you are bla
Yeh, cause I'm going to directly attach all my devices to the Internet. Some idiot in marketting doesn't get it.
Using protocols like XMPP, SIP, etc... the devices will connect to servers for session initiation. Given low bandwidth situations where there are settings like "Turn oven on at 5:12pm", messages will be passed without the need for firewall traversal directly from the server which already have open connections to the devices.
For higher bandwidth situations, like a camera in the fridge that lets you monitor whether the light is out or if your cheese is green, firewall traversal mechanisms will be used. STUN and derivatives are reliable now.
Each house or community really only needs a single public IP address now. There's little or no benefit of IP addresses for the user anymore.
Using iPhone 3.1 in Norway on a phone which I bought, then canceled the plan on and unlocked.
No issue here.
Seriously, first the catholics come out and agrees the earth is round. Now the English come out and admit they were wrong about mistreating a man over his sexual preference.
This is a trend that I don't like! The day I see white hatted, "god fearing" Alabamans who spend most of their days sitting on their porch drinking cheap beer voting in favor of gun control and marrying into other races I'm going to just shoot myself because then we'll know the earth is coming to an end.
This world is just getting to crazy. If you can't depend on the stupidity of humanity, what can you possibly depend on?
Typing speed is what matters. I've never taken a single touch typing class, and with the exception of knowing what the two notches on the F and J keys are there for, I have little idea of what finger is for what key. The result? I type at 90+ words per minute and have extremely high accuracy.
Touch typing classes were MUCH more relevant in the days when correction tape was used and it meant that important papers would have to be completely retyped when there was a mistake. Alternately, it was important when correction tape or white out was actually a major office expense. Both of these issues are entirely irrelevant today.
If you want to push for something, how about hand writing classes since there are massive numbers of people that after leaving high school use a pen or pencil for little more than writing their names or doodling a picture on their notepad during a meeting. Penmanship is at an all-time low. Boys who were classically bad writers to begin with are probably unlikely to be able to read their own writing anymore. Girls are the new boys, their handwriting is deplorable as well now.
An even better idea, how about mandatory short-hand classes so that when people do not have computers available to them (for example in meetings) will be able to write in some for or another that allows them to take accurate notes and still read it afterwards when they're back in front of their computers. It's been around since the days of Caesar, believed to have been invented by Cicero's manservant Marcus Tullius Tiro and yet, while being a most efficient form of writing is still barely used outside of court rooms.
People who need to learn to type will learn on their own. On top of that, it's rare that you encounter a high school student these days that can't manage at least 30 words per minute. Their greatest flaw is no longer in typing speed, but the fact that even with a spell checker, they can't spell for shit. Let's not forget that spell checkers don't cover things like They're Their and There.
I still have in a basement or the garage the original manuals that shipped with the original IBM PC aaaaand, guess what. In the back of the programmers reference manual is the full, commented source to the system BIOS.
There was no reverse engineering of the BIOS involved, instead, it was simply reimplementing it using the original code that was published with the PC.
I don't know if it was common practice to do so back then with other systems, but by releasing full source to the BIOS, it probably saved IBM thousands of hours properly documenting the API of the BIOS.
Keep in mind that for the most part, until Ralf Brown took it upon himself to document as much of the PC interrupts as possible, the BIOS source was probably the only decent documentation available for programmers.
I'm an U.S. natural citizen living in a socialist democracy. We have socialized medicine, socialized education (through Ph.D.), and many other social functions of the government. Poverty is measured in fractions of a percent.
The labor unions are not run by guys who wear $5000 suits and don't like their pictures taken. They're run by union reps who actually represent the unions.
Fact is, in this country, we take for granted the freedoms Americans are constantly being reminded they once had... or had to give up to have other freedoms.
We have a higher percentage of homes with guns than America does, but they are typically only found in houses of official military reserve. Guns just aren't a part of culture. They typically only come up in discussions about paranoid Americans who are gun freaks.
We have a crime level low enough that the police department doesn't even bother with budgets for forensics, it's cheaper to use other countries when needed.
Our kids play outside unattended and we don't panic.
Before a picture is taken down from somewhere, there is at least some form of debate involved.
I'm NEVER going back... this utopian (except for the awful weather) society is everything Americans try to convince themselves America is.
Only real problem here is that since the educational level on average is much higher than in the U.S., we have to import labor to do most of the crap work.
I'm sure that the writer of the article could have wasted time suggesting that this was "as opposed to Personal Navigation Devices such as those used by the typical consumer while driving to the Grand Canyon on vacation", but any reader with a quarter of a brain should have been able to read that without the print being involved.
I like the name. I want it. Tempting to setup a server in Antigua and get some trackers running.
I mean, seriously, that's worse than pathetic! You can make stable systems on ANY platform as long as you plan for things to go wrong.
After all, fault tolerance for mission critical systems should be at the application level for the most part. Doing it at the system level makes you entirely dependent on the system itself remaining stable.
It sounds more likely that the developers who made the system were run of the mill "I made a calculator in C#, I'm a real programmer now!" types. You find these guys in any language.
In systems like this, if you have to use SQL, the use Oracle on whatever system Oracle delivers on. Make it redundant as hell, make at least several fail-over paths and if the UI is web based, then load balance with fail-over across at least 10 servers. No single byte of data should exist on any ONE machine, it should be duplicated/mirrored to hell and back.
At this level, it makes absolutely no difference what platform you're running on, in fact, running a Java platform on Windows AND Linux (or another Unix) should be a minimum so that when operating specific bugs pop up, fail over would keep things running on the system which doesn't have the bug.
While Google doesn't mind spending the money for H.264 or the risk of legal action of sleeper patents on Ogg technologies, other companies either already have alternative solutions or at least see Adobe Flash or Silverlight as a good enough solution that they're simply not interested in wasting time on dealing with CODEC related issues that they feel were solved a long time ago.
... well you know. Instead, the real issue is that W3C took what feels like 10 years to make even a simple update to HTML and in reality, if they were to mandate a specific CODEC as a minimum requirement to meet spec, it would be a total waste of time. I can justify this without ever saying patent, copyright or anything else of that sort.
:
.NET CLR or Java VM. Now before you get carried away with which is better. Neither of them are even close to suitable to what's really needed. What's needed is a VM environment (more similar to .NET as opposed to JavaVM) that is capable of JIT compiling vectorized code for the native platform. Also, a context similar to canvas needs to be optimized for extremely high performance access by this VM and an standard, high end audio component needs to be present. The machine should natively support platform optimized mutexed queues and can even define a packet format that would make it possible to take advantage of things like EDMA on TI OMAP processors commonly used in mobile phones.
The issue is by no means even related to what CODEC is ideal today. That's just a crock of
Video playback requires that a minimum of 5 components are present in a browser
1) Source - the place where the data comes from. This should support file based (via HTTP for example), seekable stream based (via RTSP and RTP with support for STUN or alternate firewall traversal), live stream based (via RTP with SIP or XMPP for session negotiation as well as STUN, TURN, and/or ICE for firewall traversal).
2) Demultiplexers - these split streams into their individual elementary streams. RTP doesn't need to be multiplexed, however the clock resolution of RTP is too low to be useful for the most part. So using something like ISO13818-1:2000 transport stream beneath is a good idea. For file based, using the Quicktime container format or another for file based media must be supported. In reality, this is far more complex to sort out than the CODEC itself since it doesn't require a mathematician/DSP expert to design a new container format and therefore they're far more plentiful and all present their own challenges for stream synchronization.
3) Audio CODECs - no detail needed
4) Video CODECs - also no detail needed
5) Sinks - the place where data is finally synchronized and presented to the user. Generally this means embedding something like OpenGL or framebuffer contexts directly within the browser itself. Unless the browser is natively rendering to this format, all the layering issues generally present in plug-ins are equally problematic.
While a video tag might make it logically simple for the web designer to say "stick my video here", the real problem is, simply choosing a standard CODEC for audio and a standard CODEC for video is actually the easiest part. Heck, choose 10, if you have the rest of the architecture in place, you can choose 100 and it would make no difference in complexity. The CODECs once they're written, licensed, etc... are trivial.
The real problem is, how does the user receive the media. And how it's presented.
For this, the real solution to the problem of cross platform and cross browser compatibility is that W3C or Ecma needs to invest heavily into a virtual machine platform similar to
Where's this leading. Easy, why does W3C need to start a CODEC war when the solution is that the web site could provide the CODEC and demultiplexer using a scripting language or intermediate language (such as MSiL or Java Byte Code) that is ideally suitable for i
Seriously, you seem to think that the BD+ has won. If anything you're missing out on a few interesting points here.
First, if they won, then even Slysoft wouldn't be able to create new patches to circumvent the encryption. The issue here isn't whether they will or not. The issue is, how long will it take them to get around it this time. If anything, it keeps things a little entertaining, but it's still a non-issue.
Second, apparently BD+ is losing in many ways since there's not even enough interest in Blu-Ray for the open source community to waste their efforts in making the format consistently playable. Therefore, it's not an issue of trusted computing as much as a "Who really gives a crap" type scenario.
Third, high quality movie rips are entirely possible through many alternate methods, even if they are more time consuming and less convenient. As long as a film can be played, it can be copied. It's only a matter of how long does it take. For the moment, the convenience level is low since the resolutions are high enough that the time required to re-encode an HD film is high. Using new technologies like Intel's Larabee will change the playing field by quite a bit since there will be more processing power for running x264 or other encoders coming around.
I work in the world of hardware video encoders and real-time in full-HD is still a challenge, even with specialized hardware. These days, it's the average time it takes to rip and re-encode a DVD with 2-pass high quality encoding is 15 minutes on a not-so-special PC. To do a roughly similar job from an unencrypted Blu-Ray takes 24 hours at least.
Don't mistake lack of interest as being defeat. There just isn't enough interest in busting the encryption on Blu-Ray because the time to reencode is just TOO much. Once the CPU power for HD encoding becomes more readily available, if Blu-Ray even still exists, it will be cracked and present in a lot more systems.