Can you accept that art is different for every person, and not all people will have the same tastes as yourself? Does everyone who doesn't have the same taste in art as yourself qualify as a 'prig'?
You said:
"Only a handful of prigs think such things have meaning, and the meaning they largely invent to see if they can outwit the other prigs in their artsy clique."
There are innumerable pieces of art that I find pointless, boring, disgusting, offensive, or hardly worth mention, but if someone appreciates something in them, then who am I to dictate otherwise, and of what possible benefit is there to slam the fans of such art?
Art is by definition, doing something created that is in itself creative, clever, weird, beautiful, or shocking. To do any of those things implies at least talent to evoke a response and talent implies art. If you view a piece of 'art' which you found bland and worthless, then it was not art to you, or the 'artist' was simply not skilled and hence not an artist.
They are all valid expressions of 'art', which is why our world is full of every flavor of art that can be imagined. Whether it's the novelty of buying a black box that sells itself (literally) or some other artistic expression, it could still be considered art if it evokes thought, conversation, or emotion (good or bad).
But they do so at the risk of their users. If a browser doesn't display a page, users will simply use another browser. I never said their ideals aren't lofty. They simply aren't realistic.
Where is the harm in them providing the ability to use codecs that are available to the underlying OS?
The tethering 'unlimited' plan just gets you an extra 5GB for a total of 10GB's of 'unlimited' data. If you want to connect to an Exchange Server however, that will cost you an additional $15 dollars on top of the $30 dollars to get that 5GB of 'unlimited' data.
AT&T's plan is really unlimited in the proper sense of the term. There is no data cap.
"Which is exactly what will happen if a proprietary format becomes the standard."
That argument doesn't work even through beer (as in free) goggles. Pretty much every media standard on your typical electronics device like a PC, your Television, and your iPod all contain proprietary licenses. MPEG-2 for DVD's, MP3, AC3, H.264. All huge successes, and all standards in their time. Companies wouldn't be interested in investing in new technologies if they can't profit off of it. Even patents have their place.
It would be almost impossible to find any successful gadget today that isn't laden with proprietary technology, yet technology marches on. FOSS is great, but I wouldn't say it's necessary in the grand scheme of things. If/When these big sites stop using Flash (I pray for that day), and switch to H.264 only, Mozilla had better pray they have a solution because the typical end user could care less about their 'ideals':
I found this part of TFA curious:
"Mozilla should pick up and use H.264 codecs that are already installed on the user's system. I've previously written about a variety of reasons this would be a bad idea, especially on Windows. Really there are two main issues:
* Most users with Windows Vista and earlier do not have an H.264 codec installed. So for the majority of our users, this doesn't solve any problem.
* It pushes the software freedom issues from the browser (where we have leverage to possibly change the codec situation) to the platform (where there is no such leverage). You still can't have a completely free software Web client stack. "
Their first mistake is ignoring Windows 7. Love it or hate it, it will inherit XP, and by such, it will support H.264. This would solve a huge slice of their problem which would only get smaller as Windows 7 adoption increases. OS X already has this support built in which takes care of another big (albeit far smaller than Windows) player and that would also be a no-brainer. That leaves Linux, which will managed just fine on it's own as it always does. Why would you NOT take a step that would allow functionality for millions? Granted, right now Mozilla has market share, but that will quickly dwindle if they can't compete with the others.
Their second mistake is putting their ideals in front of their users and assuming the users will stick with them. Users are fickle. Ask most users what Mozilla's 'ideals' are they will just give you a blank stare. Users just want a browser that works. It seems to me that Mozilla is assuming too much trying to force this issue to remain in the browser or by demanding that they specify Ogg as the official HTML5 video standard. They simply don't want to admit that they never had control of the codec situation in the first place. An easy solution for the typical end user is just a quick browser download away.
Their third mistake is assuming that they have even the smallest chance of success with Ogg against the juggernaut that H.264 has become. It's almost as if they believe it will somehow surpass h.264 in the market place. H.264 is already supported by millions of Blu-Ray players, music players, web sites, and software vendors. When you get that much market acceptance, you're going to lose unless you offer something substantially a step above, and Ogg simply doesn't do that. It is based on old MPEG-4 Part 2 technology and arguably doesn't offer much better compression than the old MPEG-2 standard. The final nail in the coffin is due to the fact that there is also no market support for hardware acceleration for Ogg. It is no trivial task for PC manufacturers, and smart phone manufacturer's to replace internals if some chip ever came along to add hardware acceleration for Ogg. Why should they bother? H.264 is unquestionably here to stay for many years to come. Mozilla's only hope is if sites like YouTube cave and offer up their content in Ogg. Get a major player like that to do it and you at least grease the wheels. B
I found the end of your link to be the most interesting piece of the whole document:
"In brief, the fact that all the foreign relations power is vested in the National Government and that no formal restriction is imposed on the treaty-making power in the international context352 leaves little room for the notion of a limited treaty-making power with regard to the reserved rights of the States or in regard to the choice of matters concerning which the Federal Government may treat with other nations; protected individual rights appear to be sheltered by specific constitutional guarantees from the domestic effects of treaties, and the separation of powers at the federal level may require legislative action to give municipal effect to international agreements."
Another question. What if the premise of this treaty is fundamentally against the rights stated in the constitution? Could a treaty be ruled as invalid by the legislature? The whole bit about requiring ISP's to hand over user information without a warrant or even suspicion of violating IP, and allowing border guards to determine whether something is in violation of copyright even without a complaint being filed.
These all go against the basic premise of presumption of innocence, and requires no burden of proof. This is a basic tenant of our law.
According to what I've read, that is exactly why it's behind closed doors. Apparently the first thing that happens is each country makes ridiculous claims, and they ask for ridiculous deals, and then they slowly work their way back to reality. If it was all in the public eye, everything would be nice and politically correct, but they would never agree or disagree on anything for fear of exposure and they would never get to the guts of the treaty in the public eye. Really disingenuous that they are only inviting those pushing for the treaty and not those that are against such legislation. Makes the discussion and perspective rather one sided.
Does anyone know if this will be an 'executive' treaty, or one that will have to be ratified by 2/3 of the Senate? I can't imagine that regardless of what goes behind closed doors, the voting public will be too kind to any politician that sells it's citizens down the river.
He's mounted the scope in cement, which accounts for the stability. Apparently it's wrapped in foil to prevent heat dissipation. You can actually get much better imaging in the winter as the heat always creates distortions in the atmosphere. He had a problem with the cement mount heating up and then causing distortions in the evenings. Very clever. I would imagine he uses the same technique as most amateur astrophotographers. He either uses a long exposure camera, or a cam. With the camera, he would take various length exposures (possibly in separate color lengths, combining the rgb later), or if he's using a cam, he would collect segments of video, and then evaluate each frame from the video to cherry pick the best frames and then stack those good frames using any number of stacking programs (most of which are FOSS). The stacking allows you to increase the signal to noise ratio significantly. The only problem with cams are the fact that they aren't designed for night work, and they tend to generate a lot of noise on their own.
I have an 8" Celestron but I never use it these days. The on-board computer is a little glitchy, and I could never get it to track properly for long exposures. It was great for local sights like the outer gas giants, and it could image decent pictures of mars, including the ice caps.
Why are they even allowed to prosecute such claims like '3000' downloads without any actual proof as to the number of times it was downloaded? Since when does the law allow the prosecution to 'guess'?
I can't agree more. Sharing a song to me has always seemed like a minor infraction, yet the courts insist on persecuting the person sharing the song for all of the copies downloaded, when it is the people who download from that person that are infringing. In essence they are holding the one person they did catch, responsible for the crimes of the people downloading.
They say that this person shared X number of songs, and guess that it was shared with hundreds or thousands of people, but that doesn't change the basic fact that the people downloading it are the ones actually infringing on the copyright. The person sharing it has already done so (can you be prosecuted for the same crime multiple times? I know they can throw X number of 'counts' of something, but I'm not sure how that works). If it's the RIAA who is actually one of the people downloading, wouldn't it almost be a form of entrapment?
Sorry if these are basic questions, as IANAL, but it just seems wrong on a basic level to me. Is the person sharing the music innocent? Of course not, but the punishment just doesn't seem to fit the crime.
True. Bad choice of words. I should have said 'supported by' instead:
"On October 17, 2007, the World Wide Web Consortium encouraged interested people to take part in a "Video on the Web Workshop", held on December 12, 2007 for two days.[10] A number of global companies were involved, submitting position papers.[11] Among them, Nokia's paper[12] states that "a W3C-led standardization of a 'free' codec, or the active endorsement of proprietary technology such as Ogg by W3C, is, in our opinion, not helpful." Ogg's codecs are licensed under the BSD open source license, and are therefore not proprietary in any accepted sense of the word. Apple Computer have also opposed the inclusion of Ogg formats in the HTML standard on the grounds that H.264 performs better and is already more widely supported, citing patents and the lack of precedents of "Placing requirements on format support", even at the "SHOULD" level, in HTML specifications.[13]
In response to such criticism, WHATWG has cited concerns over the Ogg formats still being within patent lifetime and thus vulnerable to unknown patents.[14] Such submarine patents may also exist for non-free formats like MP3 and H.264. Also, the AVC patent licensing policy is subject to change in a not-yet-clear manner.[15] [edit] HTML5 turns neutral"
On December 10, 2007, the HTML 5 specification was updated[16], replacing the reference to concrete formats:
User agents should support Ogg Theora video and Ogg Vorbis audio, as well as the Ogg container format.
with a placeholder:[17]
It would be helpful for interoperability if all browsers could support the same codecs. However, there are no known codecs that satisfy all the current players: we need a codec that is known to not require per-unit or per-distributor licensing, that is compatible with the open source development model, that is of sufficient quality as to be usable, and that is not an additional submarine patent risk for large companies. This is an ongoing issue and this section will be updated once more information is available.[18]
I'll end up burning some Karma here, but so be it. To your mind, their plan is to bury their heads in the sand in regards to h.264 and pretend it doesn't exist? That obviously won't happen, and the bug reports indicate they don't believe it will either. They are aware of the issue but they don't have a production ready solution.
OGG has already lost the war (was there ever really one to begin with)? If Mozilla was to choose to go down that path, they certainly could (one of the benefits of FOSS), but they would become irrelevant by doing so considering the other big players already support it in some fasion.
It's noble to aspire to such lofty goals, but realistic to understand that they will eventually have to support all of the codecs in the HTML5 standard, not just those that they deem worthy.
To my mind, this is no different than MPEG, MPEG-2, AC3, MP3, AAC, H.264, DivX, etc. Although FOSS might dislike their licensing and patents and strive to create reverse engineered solutions, you'll find it supported in one way or another in every flavor of Linux. It's just not realistic to think otherwise.
Although I can see some benefit to keeping this under government control, here we are 40 years later, using the same basic technologies while lacking the same capabilities that put us on the moon. It seems that the only thing that's happened at NASA in the last 50 years is a lot of money has been spent. We have the shuttle, based on a hybrid of flight end propulsion technologies during that time, but it's old, dated, and long past it's prime. Is there any reason NASA can't certify the safety of such after it's submitted by the private sector?
I can't help but wonder if it's time to let the private sector in. Some competitiveness, innovation, and new blood are what's needed right now, not NASA.
I think the summary was fine and that it's obviously a concern about throttling in regards to latency. Games, far more than youtube and other streaming sites, are far more impacted by latency. If the ISP's using throttling, or delaying tactics at the packet level to prioritize traffic, it will have a huge impact on the online gaming experience. What's funny is the effects may be subtle to borderline irritating so that users get a degraded experience that would be easy to blame on the content provider and not the internet provider.
That nails it exactly. It's kind of amusing reading all of these posts about the technical merits of OGG, how licensing fees suck, exporting international versions, ad-nauseum, but in the end, Firefox needs users, and basic users don't care about any of these things. They just want a browser that works.
As far as I know, there are no major sites yet that force you to use HTML5 and h.264. Unless someone specifically looks for the/html5 on youtube, they won't even notice a difference. I DO think the FF folks should be in panic mode though. Granted they hold a very large market share and that can't be insignificant to the folks at YouTube, but when a popular site like youtube is flirting heavily with changing standards in such a public way, you have to stop and take notice. It's the epitome of 'viral advertising'.
That said, why didn't the FF folks see this coming and already have a workaround in place? The writing was on the wall over a year ago (as far back as 2008?) that youtube was experimenting with piping out h.264 instead of flash. Why are they seemingly so unprepared for this?
If the http://www.youtube.com/html5 address becomes well known, and 'regular' Firefox users get irritated, a switch to Chrome is linked right on the youtube pages they can't view under the beta.
If you search the return link however, there are no phrases matching "why is windows so expensive" or "why is microsoft windows so expensive", or any other variant of that phrase that I can see.
When you put in a specific quoted phrase into a search engine, you expect it to actually find hits with that result. In this case, searching for "Why is windows so expensive" or "why is microsoft windows so expensive" returns a first result of "Why are Mac's So Expensive?"
If you click on the first link returned by Bing, no where in the linked article does it even have a matching phrase for your actual query.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you accept that art is different for every person, and not all people will have the same tastes as yourself? Does everyone who doesn't have the same taste in art as yourself qualify as a 'prig'?
You said:
"Only a handful of prigs think such things have meaning, and the meaning they largely invent to see if they can outwit the other prigs in their artsy clique."
There are innumerable pieces of art that I find pointless, boring, disgusting, offensive, or hardly worth mention, but if someone appreciates something in them, then who am I to dictate otherwise, and of what possible benefit is there to slam the fans of such art?
Art is by definition, doing something created that is in itself creative, clever, weird, beautiful, or shocking. To do any of those things implies at least talent to evoke a response and talent implies art. If you view a piece of 'art' which you found bland and worthless, then it was not art to you, or the 'artist' was simply not skilled and hence not an artist.
They are all valid expressions of 'art', which is why our world is full of every flavor of art that can be imagined. Whether it's the novelty of buying a black box that sells itself (literally) or some other artistic expression, it could still be considered art if it evokes thought, conversation, or emotion (good or bad).
But they do so at the risk of their users. If a browser doesn't display a page, users will simply use another browser. I never said their ideals aren't lofty. They simply aren't realistic.
Where is the harm in them providing the ability to use codecs that are available to the underlying OS?
You guys have to buy a license to watch television? I've never heard of this. How bizarre that we are so fundamentally different.
Both Verizon 'unlimited' plans are limited to 5GB.
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/181590/verizon_droid_tethering_will_cost_you.html
The tethering 'unlimited' plan just gets you an extra 5GB for a total of 10GB's of 'unlimited' data. If you want to connect to an Exchange Server however, that will cost you an additional $15 dollars on top of the $30 dollars to get that 5GB of 'unlimited' data.
AT&T's plan is really unlimited in the proper sense of the term. There is no data cap.
"God is transcendental. The real number line can not contain Him."
Apparently Comcast can however. Go over your cap, and he's history...
"Which is exactly what will happen if a proprietary format becomes the standard."
That argument doesn't work even through beer (as in free) goggles. Pretty much every media standard on your typical electronics device like a PC, your Television, and your iPod all contain proprietary licenses. MPEG-2 for DVD's, MP3, AC3, H.264. All huge successes, and all standards in their time. Companies wouldn't be interested in investing in new technologies if they can't profit off of it. Even patents have their place.
It would be almost impossible to find any successful gadget today that isn't laden with proprietary technology, yet technology marches on. FOSS is great, but I wouldn't say it's necessary in the grand scheme of things. If/When these big sites stop using Flash (I pray for that day), and switch to H.264 only, Mozilla had better pray they have a solution because the typical end user could care less about their 'ideals':
I found this part of TFA curious:
"Mozilla should pick up and use H.264 codecs that are already installed on the user's system. I've previously written about a variety of reasons this would be a bad idea, especially on Windows. Really there are two main issues:
* Most users with Windows Vista and earlier do not have an H.264 codec installed. So for the majority of our users, this doesn't solve any problem.
* It pushes the software freedom issues from the browser (where we have leverage to possibly change the codec situation) to the platform (where there is no such leverage). You still can't have a completely free software Web client stack. "
Their first mistake is ignoring Windows 7. Love it or hate it, it will inherit XP, and by such, it will support H.264. This would solve a huge slice of their problem which would only get smaller as Windows 7 adoption increases. OS X already has this support built in which takes care of another big (albeit far smaller than Windows) player and that would also be a no-brainer. That leaves Linux, which will managed just fine on it's own as it always does. Why would you NOT take a step that would allow functionality for millions? Granted, right now Mozilla has market share, but that will quickly dwindle if they can't compete with the others.
Their second mistake is putting their ideals in front of their users and assuming the users will stick with them. Users are fickle. Ask most users what Mozilla's 'ideals' are they will just give you a blank stare. Users just want a browser that works. It seems to me that Mozilla is assuming too much trying to force this issue to remain in the browser or by demanding that they specify Ogg as the official HTML5 video standard. They simply don't want to admit that they never had control of the codec situation in the first place. An easy solution for the typical end user is just a quick browser download away.
Their third mistake is assuming that they have even the smallest chance of success with Ogg against the juggernaut that H.264 has become. It's almost as if they believe it will somehow surpass h.264 in the market place. H.264 is already supported by millions of Blu-Ray players, music players, web sites, and software vendors. When you get that much market acceptance, you're going to lose unless you offer something substantially a step above, and Ogg simply doesn't do that. It is based on old MPEG-4 Part 2 technology and arguably doesn't offer much better compression than the old MPEG-2 standard. The final nail in the coffin is due to the fact that there is also no market support for hardware acceleration for Ogg. It is no trivial task for PC manufacturers, and smart phone manufacturer's to replace internals if some chip ever came along to add hardware acceleration for Ogg. Why should they bother? H.264 is unquestionably here to stay for many years to come. Mozilla's only hope is if sites like YouTube cave and offer up their content in Ogg. Get a major player like that to do it and you at least grease the wheels. B
I found the end of your link to be the most interesting piece of the whole document:
"In brief, the fact that all the foreign relations power is vested in the National Government and that no formal restriction is imposed on the treaty-making power in the international context352 leaves little room for the notion of a limited treaty-making power with regard to the reserved rights of the States or in regard to the choice of matters concerning which the Federal Government may treat with other nations; protected individual rights appear to be sheltered by specific constitutional guarantees from the domestic effects of treaties, and the separation of powers at the federal level may require legislative action to give municipal effect to international agreements."
I mean after the fact. Lets say that the senate signs off on the treaty, could it later be challenged on legal grounds?
Another question. What if the premise of this treaty is fundamentally against the rights stated in the constitution? Could a treaty be ruled as invalid by the legislature? The whole bit about requiring ISP's to hand over user information without a warrant or even suspicion of violating IP, and allowing border guards to determine whether something is in violation of copyright even without a complaint being filed.
These all go against the basic premise of presumption of innocence, and requires no burden of proof. This is a basic tenant of our law.
According to what I've read, that is exactly why it's behind closed doors. Apparently the first thing that happens is each country makes ridiculous claims, and they ask for ridiculous deals, and then they slowly work their way back to reality. If it was all in the public eye, everything would be nice and politically correct, but they would never agree or disagree on anything for fear of exposure and they would never get to the guts of the treaty in the public eye. Really disingenuous that they are only inviting those pushing for the treaty and not those that are against such legislation. Makes the discussion and perspective rather one sided.
Does anyone know if this will be an 'executive' treaty, or one that will have to be ratified by 2/3 of the Senate? I can't imagine that regardless of what goes behind closed doors, the voting public will be too kind to any politician that sells it's citizens down the river.
He's mounted the scope in cement, which accounts for the stability. Apparently it's wrapped in foil to prevent heat dissipation. You can actually get much better imaging in the winter as the heat always creates distortions in the atmosphere. He had a problem with the cement mount heating up and then causing distortions in the evenings. Very clever. I would imagine he uses the same technique as most amateur astrophotographers. He either uses a long exposure camera, or a cam. With the camera, he would take various length exposures (possibly in separate color lengths, combining the rgb later), or if he's using a cam, he would collect segments of video, and then evaluate each frame from the video to cherry pick the best frames and then stack those good frames using any number of stacking programs (most of which are FOSS). The stacking allows you to increase the signal to noise ratio significantly. The only problem with cams are the fact that they aren't designed for night work, and they tend to generate a lot of noise on their own.
I have an 8" Celestron but I never use it these days. The on-board computer is a little glitchy, and I could never get it to track properly for long exposures. It was great for local sights like the outer gas giants, and it could image decent pictures of mars, including the ice caps.
Why are they even allowed to prosecute such claims like '3000' downloads without any actual proof as to the number of times it was downloaded? Since when does the law allow the prosecution to 'guess'?
I can't agree more. Sharing a song to me has always seemed like a minor infraction, yet the courts insist on persecuting the person sharing the song for all of the copies downloaded, when it is the people who download from that person that are infringing. In essence they are holding the one person they did catch, responsible for the crimes of the people downloading.
They say that this person shared X number of songs, and guess that it was shared with hundreds or thousands of people, but that doesn't change the basic fact that the people downloading it are the ones actually infringing on the copyright. The person sharing it has already done so (can you be prosecuted for the same crime multiple times? I know they can throw X number of 'counts' of something, but I'm not sure how that works). If it's the RIAA who is actually one of the people downloading, wouldn't it almost be a form of entrapment?
Sorry if these are basic questions, as IANAL, but it just seems wrong on a basic level to me. Is the person sharing the music innocent? Of course not, but the punishment just doesn't seem to fit the crime.
Just not supported by the browser ;) Agreed.
True. Bad choice of words. I should have said 'supported by' instead:
"On October 17, 2007, the World Wide Web Consortium encouraged interested people to take part in a "Video on the Web Workshop", held on December 12, 2007 for two days.[10] A number of global companies were involved, submitting position papers.[11] Among them, Nokia's paper[12] states that "a W3C-led standardization of a 'free' codec, or the active endorsement of proprietary technology such as Ogg by W3C, is, in our opinion, not helpful." Ogg's codecs are licensed under the BSD open source license, and are therefore not proprietary in any accepted sense of the word. Apple Computer have also opposed the inclusion of Ogg formats in the HTML standard on the grounds that H.264 performs better and is already more widely supported, citing patents and the lack of precedents of "Placing requirements on format support", even at the "SHOULD" level, in HTML specifications.[13]
In response to such criticism, WHATWG has cited concerns over the Ogg formats still being within patent lifetime and thus vulnerable to unknown patents.[14] Such submarine patents may also exist for non-free formats like MP3 and H.264. Also, the AVC patent licensing policy is subject to change in a not-yet-clear manner.[15]
[edit] HTML5 turns neutral"
On December 10, 2007, the HTML 5 specification was updated[16], replacing the reference to concrete formats:
User agents should support Ogg Theora video and Ogg Vorbis audio, as well as the Ogg container format.
with a placeholder:[17]
It would be helpful for interoperability if all browsers could support the same codecs. However, there are no known codecs that satisfy all the current players: we need a codec that is known to not require per-unit or per-distributor licensing, that is compatible with the open source development model, that is of sufficient quality as to be usable, and that is not an additional submarine patent risk for large companies. This is an ongoing issue and this section will be updated once more information is available.[18]
I'll end up burning some Karma here, but so be it. To your mind, their plan is to bury their heads in the sand in regards to h.264 and pretend it doesn't exist? That obviously won't happen, and the bug reports indicate they don't believe it will either. They are aware of the issue but they don't have a production ready solution.
OGG has already lost the war (was there ever really one to begin with)? If Mozilla was to choose to go down that path, they certainly could (one of the benefits of FOSS), but they would become irrelevant by doing so considering the other big players already support it in some fasion.
It's noble to aspire to such lofty goals, but realistic to understand that they will eventually have to support all of the codecs in the HTML5 standard, not just those that they deem worthy.
To my mind, this is no different than MPEG, MPEG-2, AC3, MP3, AAC, H.264, DivX, etc. Although FOSS might dislike their licensing and patents and strive to create reverse engineered solutions, you'll find it supported in one way or another in every flavor of Linux. It's just not realistic to think otherwise.
Although I can see some benefit to keeping this under government control, here we are 40 years later, using the same basic technologies while lacking the same capabilities that put us on the moon. It seems that the only thing that's happened at NASA in the last 50 years is a lot of money has been spent. We have the shuttle, based on a hybrid of flight end propulsion technologies during that time, but it's old, dated, and long past it's prime. Is there any reason NASA can't certify the safety of such after it's submitted by the private sector?
I can't help but wonder if it's time to let the private sector in. Some competitiveness, innovation, and new blood are what's needed right now, not NASA.
Not to belabor the point, but it does 'just work' on Safari and Chrome. There are no external 'packages' to install or anything of the sort.
I consider over a year of warning with no implementation in production 'unprepared'.
I think the summary was fine and that it's obviously a concern about throttling in regards to latency. Games, far more than youtube and other streaming sites, are far more impacted by latency. If the ISP's using throttling, or delaying tactics at the packet level to prioritize traffic, it will have a huge impact on the online gaming experience. What's funny is the effects may be subtle to borderline irritating so that users get a degraded experience that would be easy to blame on the content provider and not the internet provider.
That nails it exactly. It's kind of amusing reading all of these posts about the technical merits of OGG, how licensing fees suck, exporting international versions, ad-nauseum, but in the end, Firefox needs users, and basic users don't care about any of these things. They just want a browser that works.
As far as I know, there are no major sites yet that force you to use HTML5 and h.264. Unless someone specifically looks for the /html5 on youtube, they won't even notice a difference. I DO think the FF folks should be in panic mode though. Granted they hold a very large market share and that can't be insignificant to the folks at YouTube, but when a popular site like youtube is flirting heavily with changing standards in such a public way, you have to stop and take notice. It's the epitome of 'viral advertising'.
That said, why didn't the FF folks see this coming and already have a workaround in place? The writing was on the wall over a year ago (as far back as 2008?) that youtube was experimenting with piping out h.264 instead of flash. Why are they seemingly so unprepared for this?
If the http://www.youtube.com/html5 address becomes well known, and 'regular' Firefox users get irritated, a switch to Chrome is linked right on the youtube pages they can't view under the beta.
LOL ;) Bing Response: We did not find any results for "Why is Microsoft Windows so awesome".
I just double checked, and I still get the 'mac' result in the U.S. Very curious that Canada gets a different result. Can someone else confirm?
Here's the first returned link in the U.S. for Bing if anyone is curious:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061212021150AAOfyNz
If you search the return link however, there are no phrases matching "why is windows so expensive" or "why is microsoft windows so expensive", or any other variant of that phrase that I can see.
When you put in a specific quoted phrase into a search engine, you expect it to actually find hits with that result. In this case, searching for "Why is windows so expensive" or "why is microsoft windows so expensive" returns a first result of "Why are Mac's So Expensive?"
If you click on the first link returned by Bing, no where in the linked article does it even have a matching phrase for your actual query.
Why is the parent modded troll? The results are easily reproducible:
http://www.bing.com/search?q=%22Why+is+Microsoft+Windows+so+expensive%3F%22&go=&form=QBLH&qs=n&sc=1-40
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=%22Why+is+Microsoft+Windows+so+expensive%3F%22&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&aql=&aqi=&oq=%22Why+is+Microsoft+Windows+so+expensive%3F%22&fp=e8d6ef47431c6a4a
The specific first hit on Bing is the specific answers.yahoo.com question "Why are Mac's So Expensive".