Do you really, really truly, believe that a significant portion of Apple's user base is capable of successfully servicing their own phones?
Yes if the back of the phone was easily removable. Every owner of a non-Apple phone has at some time or other removed the back of the phone, e.g. to change the SIM or the SD card, or to replace the battery. Even the most incompetent of people can manage it, or at least hand it over to someone who can.
The fact that Apple are making it hard and harder to replace a battery should tell you all you need to know.
Has anyone drawn up a comparison diagram of which manufacturers use what kind of screws in their cell phones?
My phone (an HTC) uses pop clips. A thumbnail under one edge loosens the back and the rest easily unclips. The phone before that (a Nokia) had a metal back which slide off. The fact is most phones manage to feature a removable cover to replace a phone or sim or memory card.
You can't just patch it in. SOCs that offer hardware assisted decoding expect the software to feed a buffer with data and out pops a video frame on the other side. And vice versa for encoding - video frame in, data out. There is likely little opportunity for intervention or modification of how it works if things are in hardware. If it's software assisted then maybe.
I do think that the codec could be vulnerable to a patent battle. Unless Google are indemnifying WebM, you may well find that MPEG-LA or individual stakeholders pick particular sites to be the target of lawsuits.
Apple want people to throw their otherwise functional phone away and buy a new one. That is the only reason for sealing in a battery and making it difficult to replace. Maybe Apple make some money on their servicing but make sure to jack up the price and apply odious terms & conditions (e.g. you won't get your phone back or your data) to put people off doing it at all.
Meanwhile virtually every other phone manufacturer manages to include a removable cover. My HTC desire accomplishes it with the mind crushingly difficult inclusion of a little indentation to insert a thumbnail and pop clips that allow the back to be removed. A spare battery costs 20 euros.
I am surprised the EU hasn't stomped on Apple or passed regulations that force them to stop doing what they're doing. There is no reason aesthetic or otherwise for sealing the battery in like this.
If they want to kill flash, why not support H264 in their browser? Simple.
All this dithering over H264 just hands Adobe a gift which is a field of mutually incompatible browsers. What happens when a site wants to play a video to some browser and be sure it will play? Well they'll embed a Flash plugin of course.
Wouldn't you, as a video host, much rather have to worry about supporting two open, royalty-free formats than several closed ones?
As a video host I would be more concerned of the non-existence of hardware that supported those formats and did live transcoding. I would ultimately conclude that I can just stream H264 anyway by embedding a Flash plugin in the page. In other words it wouldn't change a thing other than make Flash more entrenched than it already is.
I think you've nailed it. Rather than push people to HTML 5 standards, site content providers will actually get pushed to using proprietary plugins. It will have the opposite effect than the one intended.
MPEG2 can do HDTV but it does it inefficiently. It takes about 2x the bitrate to subjectively match the output of H264. Space is at a premium for satellite / cable boxes so obviously this is a major impediment which is why HD and even some SD broadcasts are AVC depending where in the world you are. MPEG2 was used in some early Blu Ray discs probably because authoring tools H264 encoders weren't up to snuff at the time.
The codecs are similar. It might be possible to use some of the acceleration capabilities in some chips, but it still won't be as good as a chip designed for webm.
Not in a million years. You're talking new silicon.
Of course if Google ran banks of GPGPUs or Cell processors they could always change them to support WebM.
I also don't believe Google are doing this for altruistic reasons. They have massive data centres filled with hardware expressly designed to stream content in H264 in realtime. Their investment must be enormous..
It seems more likely to me that is some kind of power play. They want to piss on Apple & Microsoft's parade by forcing them to dance to a tune played by Google. Google will be stewards of this codec and if it becomes a web standard they may force their competitors to support it (e.g. in their browsers & desktop / phone operating systems) or risk looking "non standard". It diminishes their competitors offerings just like supporting Flash in Android did.
Secondly, if Google have such an enormous ongoing investment in H264 then they must be paying a pretty penny to MPEG-LA and possibly a lot more when certain web moratoriums are up. I would not be surprised if they are waving this codec around to threaten MPEG-LA to either drop or modify their existing licensing agreement.
So I don't think Google are doing this for reasons for altruism and I don't believe they'll never support H264. WebM is just a stick and they may well do an about face when it serves its purpose.
One of my engineering professors worked on something like this in the 90s, when I asked him why we never saw anything like this come into use he said that they knew that the first time anyone was killed in an accident involving one of the automated vehicles the entire project would be dead.
A better way to look at it is - it would never work properly. There are too many variables to control to ever create a safe system. Cars coming and going from the convoy, potholes, radio interference, blackice, snow, fog, hail, heat, cold, light, dark, roadspray, road camber, road works, floods, diversions, animals & people walking over the road, mechanical / electrical failure, tyre blowouts, malfunctioning lights, traffic cops, junctions & cross roads, vehicles running out of fuel, spilled loads, emergency vehicle priority, oil slicks, debris, multiple implementations of the same "convoy" software & hardware with their own malfunctions, quirks & bugs.
It just can't work the ways roads are designed now. Accidents would be commonplace and possibly fatal. Perhaps if there were a special lane with a guiding wire underneath you might be able to control some parameters but even there you are looking at an engineering nightmare. So yes litigation probably is a fear, with good reason.
You may as well paint a target on yourself if you a) brag about hacking something, b) disclose what you did, c) sign your hack, d) do it over and over.
You might be anonymous, just like the genius thief who takes a dump on the sofa, but you're just waving a red rag at a bull. Law enforcement is obviously going to devote more time to catching a serious serial offender than if the hacks were disconnected, possibly committed by multiple people. One screwup is all they might need to catch you.
And no it's not just people like Manning (who btw exercised reasonable fieldcraft but then sobbed out his life story to a fellow cracker). Hackers are convicted all the time and frequently because they're not as clever as they think or they can't help bragging to someone who might turn them in.
Sign your leaks with strong encryption and leak them anonymously, and you will be safe.
Of course that's a bit like taking a shit on the couch of every house you burgle. You're safe while you remain anonymous, you're screwed if you're ever caught. Once they catch you for one offence they more or less have a cast iron against you for those other offences on you too.
I think beta 9 is pretty stable too. I've observed freezes possibly due to garbage collection and Slashdot's preview pane often screws up focus in FF4b9 but its still a pretty good browser. I think performance & performance is somewhat better than 3.6 but not hugely so. The new url bar is okay, but the lack of legacy style status text widget is a needless annoyance when it would probably take 20 or 30 lines of JS to include one with the browser.
I still prefer Firefox over Chrome. While performance still isn't as good, things like AdBlock, print preview and more powerful privacy settings make up for that.
Panorama has never struck me as a critical feature of Firefox. It's a pretty way to arrange tabs into groups - I'm not quite sure what problem exactly it's trying to solve although I suppose you could craft a boss mode from it or something. If it's blocking the release I don't think much would be lost by disabling the shortcuts to the feature and pushing it out until 4.1. For starters it means 60 bugs are gone instantly for this release.
I think a an instant buy function has very little to do with piracy. It just a cynical and artificial way of boosting single sales. If a "buy now" button lights up in the radio app when music plays, then the music with the most airtime gets more revenues and races up the sales chart faster. If radio stations also get a cut of the proceeds (as they probably would if they're providing playlists for this feature) then it just becomes payola through the backdoor.
Bad analogy. Steve Jobs is as rich as Croesus and a narcissist to boot. He's not some poor little animal getting poked with a stick. While I feel sorry for someone with an illness and wouldn't mock them for that I don't see why I should like the fucker, the monopolistic practices Apple engages in, or care if his ickle wickle feelings are hurt.
The problem isn't that they don't have a plan, it's that they have about five or six different plans, all half-baked, self-competing and receiving of little attention. The above comparison to General Motors is very apt.
Nokia had a plan, it was called Symbian. Then they had another plan called Meego. All tied together in knots with an online service called Ovi. I think they really don't know what they're doing. Meanwhile companies like HTC, Motorola, Sony & Samsung are kerb stomping them with Android devices and of course Apple is too.
You're not getting my point. Sugar is a C++ app running on a purpose built version Linux. A prerequisite to doing anything is Linux and a knowledge of C++ development on Linux. That immediately limits people who will bother to contribute.
If OLPC were using Android then one immediate benefit is that any developer regardless of OS could write apps. Google provide an SDK which includes pretty much all they need to get going and it works through Eclipse on Windows, Mac or Linux.
Since the tools are available to more developers and they're friendlier too, OLPC will get more volunteers.
I'm note trivializing the work that would have to be done to move to Android. After all, it's merely practically a total rewrite of the entire UI. But it would have long term benefits for contributors, platform portability, and possibly even making Sugar a GUI that could be installed on other Android tablets. I imagine that if Sugar existed for tablets it would be enormously popular for parents, especially if its the same shell found in educational tablets.
I am not sure that Android would be any better than Sugar.
Well it would be if they ever intend to produce a tablet version. Come to that, it might be better for a desktop too since it would allow apps to be written in Java and developed on Windows, Linux or Mac. This could help enormously to popularize the project and might even allow some crossover with apps being a downloadable for other Android devices.
That might explain it. Books are print on demand so the price is calculated by the number of pages. The author gets a % cut of that. Although there are other reasons - lack of proper editing, ego etc.
If someone were serious about self publishing, the first thing they would do is get an ISBN. Then the book gets printed under their own publishing name with the rights that entails, such as being able to sell the book on your own terms, price etc.
IIRC it also costs oodles for licensing for those making browsers, which in turn raises the costs of making a browser, which in turns hurts competition.
So open the video tag and make it easy for users and site providers to add codecs if they wish. Browser tries to play some content it doesn't understand and it says "this video cannot be played without installing a plugin, do you want to install a plugin?". There would be a trusted list of plugins.
Better yet, make the default behaviour to utilise the media frameworks in all desktop OSs to try and play the content. That's what the frameworks are there for in the first place. H264 codecs are easy to come by and chances are most users have them already, possibly have paid for them too with their OS licence.
In summary the browser doesn't have to implement a damned thing for H264 and even if it did, it's not the browser's job to play nanny. If browsers want to take the moral highground of what users can or cannot do, they can start by disabling plugins altogether.
Amazon sets the price for vanity (oops "self published") books by the page. At least if you self publish and have an ISBN you can set your own price. What recourse to app developers have? Perhaps the answer is for devs to steer clear altogether, or perhaps set up a cooperative where they have more clout to negotiate their own terms.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes if the back of the phone was easily removable. Every owner of a non-Apple phone has at some time or other removed the back of the phone, e.g. to change the SIM or the SD card, or to replace the battery. Even the most incompetent of people can manage it, or at least hand it over to someone who can.
The fact that Apple are making it hard and harder to replace a battery should tell you all you need to know.
Has anyone drawn up a comparison diagram of which manufacturers use what kind of screws in their cell phones?
My phone (an HTC) uses pop clips. A thumbnail under one edge loosens the back and the rest easily unclips. The phone before that (a Nokia) had a metal back which slide off. The fact is most phones manage to feature a removable cover to replace a phone or sim or memory card.
I do think that the codec could be vulnerable to a patent battle. Unless Google are indemnifying WebM, you may well find that MPEG-LA or individual stakeholders pick particular sites to be the target of lawsuits.
6 is the answer
Meanwhile virtually every other phone manufacturer manages to include a removable cover. My HTC desire accomplishes it with the mind crushingly difficult inclusion of a little indentation to insert a thumbnail and pop clips that allow the back to be removed. A spare battery costs 20 euros.
I am surprised the EU hasn't stomped on Apple or passed regulations that force them to stop doing what they're doing. There is no reason aesthetic or otherwise for sealing the battery in like this.
All this dithering over H264 just hands Adobe a gift which is a field of mutually incompatible browsers. What happens when a site wants to play a video to some browser and be sure it will play? Well they'll embed a Flash plugin of course.
As a video host I would be more concerned of the non-existence of hardware that supported those formats and did live transcoding. I would ultimately conclude that I can just stream H264 anyway by embedding a Flash plugin in the page. In other words it wouldn't change a thing other than make Flash more entrenched than it already is.
I think you've nailed it. Rather than push people to HTML 5 standards, site content providers will actually get pushed to using proprietary plugins. It will have the opposite effect than the one intended.
MPEG2 can do HDTV but it does it inefficiently. It takes about 2x the bitrate to subjectively match the output of H264. Space is at a premium for satellite / cable boxes so obviously this is a major impediment which is why HD and even some SD broadcasts are AVC depending where in the world you are. MPEG2 was used in some early Blu Ray discs probably because authoring tools H264 encoders weren't up to snuff at the time.
Not in a million years. You're talking new silicon.
Of course if Google ran banks of GPGPUs or Cell processors they could always change them to support WebM.
It seems more likely to me that is some kind of power play. They want to piss on Apple & Microsoft's parade by forcing them to dance to a tune played by Google. Google will be stewards of this codec and if it becomes a web standard they may force their competitors to support it (e.g. in their browsers & desktop / phone operating systems) or risk looking "non standard". It diminishes their competitors offerings just like supporting Flash in Android did.
Secondly, if Google have such an enormous ongoing investment in H264 then they must be paying a pretty penny to MPEG-LA and possibly a lot more when certain web moratoriums are up. I would not be surprised if they are waving this codec around to threaten MPEG-LA to either drop or modify their existing licensing agreement.
So I don't think Google are doing this for reasons for altruism and I don't believe they'll never support H264. WebM is just a stick and they may well do an about face when it serves its purpose.
A better way to look at it is - it would never work properly. There are too many variables to control to ever create a safe system. Cars coming and going from the convoy, potholes, radio interference, blackice, snow, fog, hail, heat, cold, light, dark, roadspray, road camber, road works, floods, diversions, animals & people walking over the road, mechanical / electrical failure, tyre blowouts, malfunctioning lights, traffic cops, junctions & cross roads, vehicles running out of fuel, spilled loads, emergency vehicle priority, oil slicks, debris, multiple implementations of the same "convoy" software & hardware with their own malfunctions, quirks & bugs.
It just can't work the ways roads are designed now. Accidents would be commonplace and possibly fatal. Perhaps if there were a special lane with a guiding wire underneath you might be able to control some parameters but even there you are looking at an engineering nightmare. So yes litigation probably is a fear, with good reason.
You might be anonymous, just like the genius thief who takes a dump on the sofa, but you're just waving a red rag at a bull. Law enforcement is obviously going to devote more time to catching a serious serial offender than if the hacks were disconnected, possibly committed by multiple people. One screwup is all they might need to catch you.
And no it's not just people like Manning (who btw exercised reasonable fieldcraft but then sobbed out his life story to a fellow cracker). Hackers are convicted all the time and frequently because they're not as clever as they think or they can't help bragging to someone who might turn them in.
Of course that's a bit like taking a shit on the couch of every house you burgle. You're safe while you remain anonymous, you're screwed if you're ever caught. Once they catch you for one offence they more or less have a cast iron against you for those other offences on you too.
I think performance & performance , gah startup & performance.
I think beta 9 is pretty stable too. I've observed freezes possibly due to garbage collection and Slashdot's preview pane often screws up focus in FF4b9 but its still a pretty good browser. I think performance & performance is somewhat better than 3.6 but not hugely so. The new url bar is okay, but the lack of legacy style status text widget is a needless annoyance when it would probably take 20 or 30 lines of JS to include one with the browser. I still prefer Firefox over Chrome. While performance still isn't as good, things like AdBlock, print preview and more powerful privacy settings make up for that.
Panorama has never struck me as a critical feature of Firefox. It's a pretty way to arrange tabs into groups - I'm not quite sure what problem exactly it's trying to solve although I suppose you could craft a boss mode from it or something. If it's blocking the release I don't think much would be lost by disabling the shortcuts to the feature and pushing it out until 4.1. For starters it means 60 bugs are gone instantly for this release.
I think a an instant buy function has very little to do with piracy. It just a cynical and artificial way of boosting single sales. If a "buy now" button lights up in the radio app when music plays, then the music with the most airtime gets more revenues and races up the sales chart faster. If radio stations also get a cut of the proceeds (as they probably would if they're providing playlists for this feature) then it just becomes payola through the backdoor.
Oh sure, he's a pauper I get it now.
Bad analogy. Steve Jobs is as rich as Croesus and a narcissist to boot. He's not some poor little animal getting poked with a stick. While I feel sorry for someone with an illness and wouldn't mock them for that I don't see why I should like the fucker, the monopolistic practices Apple engages in, or care if his ickle wickle feelings are hurt.
Nokia had a plan, it was called Symbian. Then they had another plan called Meego. All tied together in knots with an online service called Ovi. I think they really don't know what they're doing. Meanwhile companies like HTC, Motorola, Sony & Samsung are kerb stomping them with Android devices and of course Apple is too.
You're not getting my point. Sugar is a C++ app running on a purpose built version Linux. A prerequisite to doing anything is Linux and a knowledge of C++ development on Linux. That immediately limits people who will bother to contribute.
If OLPC were using Android then one immediate benefit is that any developer regardless of OS could write apps. Google provide an SDK which includes pretty much all they need to get going and it works through Eclipse on Windows, Mac or Linux.
Since the tools are available to more developers and they're friendlier too, OLPC will get more volunteers.
I'm note trivializing the work that would have to be done to move to Android. After all, it's merely practically a total rewrite of the entire UI. But it would have long term benefits for contributors, platform portability, and possibly even making Sugar a GUI that could be installed on other Android tablets. I imagine that if Sugar existed for tablets it would be enormously popular for parents, especially if its the same shell found in educational tablets.
Well it would be if they ever intend to produce a tablet version. Come to that, it might be better for a desktop too since it would allow apps to be written in Java and developed on Windows, Linux or Mac. This could help enormously to popularize the project and might even allow some crossover with apps being a downloadable for other Android devices.
If someone were serious about self publishing, the first thing they would do is get an ISBN. Then the book gets printed under their own publishing name with the rights that entails, such as being able to sell the book on your own terms, price etc.
So open the video tag and make it easy for users and site providers to add codecs if they wish. Browser tries to play some content it doesn't understand and it says "this video cannot be played without installing a plugin, do you want to install a plugin?". There would be a trusted list of plugins.
Better yet, make the default behaviour to utilise the media frameworks in all desktop OSs to try and play the content. That's what the frameworks are there for in the first place. H264 codecs are easy to come by and chances are most users have them already, possibly have paid for them too with their OS licence.
In summary the browser doesn't have to implement a damned thing for H264 and even if it did, it's not the browser's job to play nanny. If browsers want to take the moral highground of what users can or cannot do, they can start by disabling plugins altogether.
Amazon sets the price for vanity (oops "self published") books by the page. At least if you self publish and have an ISBN you can set your own price. What recourse to app developers have? Perhaps the answer is for devs to steer clear altogether, or perhaps set up a cooperative where they have more clout to negotiate their own terms.