you're way off. GPL violations happen all the time. The issue doesn't appear on slashdot until the responsible parties have repeatedly been warned, and refused to correct their mistakes. And even after that, the wronged parties just ask for corrective action. If some author filed a lawsuit immediately, and started demanding royalties, you'd see a very similar response here.
The odd thing is that the church could simply pay for the access for their poor parishioners. But, they do not want that.
That seems quite an odd dig, since the Catholic church is probably the single largest charitable organization, anywhere, and has been for centuries...
Did I miss a memo? Since when is anyone with money supposed to bankrupt themselves rather than speak out on a cause? Seems odd you're complaining about the city not fixing potholes, when you could simply pay a construction company to fix it. No, you want the government to do that...
Besides, I expect providing high speed internet access to the poor, particularly in remote areas, would get extremely expensive, quickly. $70/month for slow satellite internet service with bandwidth caps? $700/month for a leased T-1 line? Rural areas are massively difficult to serve, particularly when you're not a service provider of any kind, without and infrastruture to build on, or recognized rights to do any of it.
With a couple windows open at the same time (eg. any pop-up windows from your main Kiosk app) X11 without a WM is an absolute nightmare. XFwm is nice enough to allow you to customize (ie. remove all) which buttons appear on the title bar. Keyboard shortcuts should be dealt with as well...
The PANEL is the important part in this case, though. We need to allow the user to launch one of several apps of their choice. We could have written a launcher app, but that seems incredibly unnecessary when nearly every DE out there launches app. Seemed pretty straight forward to reuse a common DE, and a custom theme. Got us 99% of the way there. The last 1% was a huge nightmare, as some of the examples above hopefully conveys.
It's hard to think of things that I don't like about it...
Let me get you started, then.
You only get an icon on the panel. Descriptive text only shows up after a couple seconds of mouseover.
No themes that disable window borders. The included themes all have thick borders, and even modifying them some, I didn't find a way to drop it below that last 1 pixel width.
No easy way to quickly disable all keyboard shortcuts... one unnoticed minor version upgrade added a zillion new shortcuts that caused several nasty mysteries (at work, over the phone), and once I tracked it down, I had to spend 5 mintues on one station disabling all the shortcuts, one by one, because there's no "none" preset included to start from, only the default/all.
I could come up with a dozen more if I was in front of an XFce system right now, but that'll have to do.
As you may have guessed, my main interest in XFce is something of a Kiosk environment. It works reasonably well, but the above issues are rather significant. #1 in particular makes it hard to recomend, since keywords are easier to convey than icons, and can be much more self explanatory.
For my own part. I loved XFce many years ago when it was an (improved) CDE clone, and used it as my DE for a couple years, until the small bugs finally drove me nuts, and made me a blackbox convert for life.
Going back to it though, it's become much heavier and less responsive, and the great ease of use, like right-clicking on an icon to bring up properties allowing configuration in a matter of seconds. Now, you've got to launch a configuration app, which presents 15 configuration apps, and each is plenty complex. Adding icons to the panel? No problem, but it'll turn into a bunch of random numbered xml files on your hard drive (something like LauncherAJDJFSDEFFCD.xml) making hand-editing tempting, and nearly necessary...
So, for all its years of progress, many of the basic issues still haven't been addressed, and other very basic things they can't get right. This may be intentional, someone convinced they know better than the end users what your desktop should and shouldn't look like. Other stuff is probably just laziness, or lack of forethough. Some certainly are copying GNOME, but just being way behind the curve (GNOME v1.x was mighty small, fast sleek and simple, too.).
Not that any of this is to say it isn't a good DE. It just never seems to be complete for any particular use case, and I'm not all that encouraged by the direction it has gone over the years.
He makes a few quips about how ugly they are, and then admits he knows nothing about airplanes. How could that POSSIBLY be much better than... ANYTHING?
I'd love to hear an expert opinion, and see some projected performance stats. Now THAT would be a much better article.
ATSC was defined before H.264 was. DVB is newer and supports H.264.
The DVB standard is only SLIGHTLY newer than ATSC, and BOTH are older than H.264.
ATSC technically added support for H.264 in 2008
Just as DVB did...
There are a few big differences between ATSC and DVB adoption.
1) ATSC was adopted by US/CA, and pretty much no-one else. There aren't 100 different examples of adoption of the standard, years apart, by different countries, with different topologies and priorities. DVB was.
2) Early adopters of DVB made a (poor, IMHO) decision to directly transition from analog to digital (DVB), without the upgrade in resolution that came with ATSC in US/CA. This meant that countries like the UK switched over to DVB more quickly, but now there is demand for high-def, and so they're going through another round of upgrades much later, this time with H.264 support often in the mix.
3) DVB is vague. It might mean DVB-T, DVB-S, DVB-H, DVB-C, etc. Only DVB-T is directly comparable to ATSC. The others are quite different in scope and trade-offs. So DVB-S (satellite), at least, always had great demand for drastic bandwidth reductions, even when visual quality is compromised, where H.264 is advantageous.
We will be stuck with MPEG-2 for broadcast TV for the next 50-80 years; just as long as good old NTSC held on before biting the dust
"Stuck" isn't the word for it. H.264 is a low-bitrate codec. It excels at compressing video down to bitrates lower than which transparent compression (no perceptible artifacts) is not possible. At high bitrates, H.264 has very, very little to offer over MPEG-2. MPEG-2 was designed for high bitrate encoding without perceptible quality loss from the beginning. H.264 can do slightly better, of course, but it does so at tremendous expense in terms of processing power needed for encoding and decoding. The added cost isn't compelling either. Additionally, most of the features that can give H.264 an advantage (like multiple reference frames) would be impractical in broadcast, where flipping through channels would become interminably slow.
Sometimes I wonder why do people reply to posts they don't read:
I'd ask you the same.
He was arguing the advantages of H.264 for a future standard. I pointed out the CURRENT standard has NONE of those "advantages", so they apparently aren't advantages at all.
You're way off. Neither is a player yet. Right now, the only contender is Flash.
It has no "native" support in Windows, or OS X, or iPhone, or iPad, etc. No native support on any platform out there. Only partially supported by mobile devices, with content like HULU locked out.
Its not a formally approved standard by anybody. Its a completely proprietary product.
2 of the 3 codecs it supports aren't supported by most mobile platforms. One of those 3, VP6, is extremely similar to WebM (aka. VP8/VPx). Nobody complained then or now.
Web distribution is a target format, not an intermediate format, so support in editors is a non-issue.
Consumer camera support is something, but pretty trivial.
H.264's inclusion in IE9 is pretty trivial, since the majority of the world is simply NOT using IE9. If they're using older versions of IE, they don't get H.264 support. If they're not using IE at all, they don't get H.264 support.
I'll say that H.264 has a bit of an advantage, but its fairly small. Its to be expected from a format with a several-year head start. I suspect its probably not enough to overcome the advantage of cold hard cash. And I'm even more sure its not enough to overcome the advantage of Google controlling Youtube, and having the ability to force people to use WebM or be unable to visit the most popular video content site, anywhere. That is why Google dominates this fight.
If you want to claim WP is so wonderful on technical articles, I suggest you take a stroll over to "Digital Audio Broadcasting". Its a complete piece of crap, filled with blatantly factually incorrect information. For years it was zealously guarded by a couple individuals with a heavy anti-DAB bias, and financial interest in the same. Numerous appeals to admins have been made over the years, with absolutely no mediative action ever taken. In fact the admins will dutifully block people for the 3RR with no regard give to who is responsible.
Or even better, take a look at "Fractal Antennas". An article that has been systematically controlled by the company of the same name in order to promote themselves and their products. They've repeatedly removed all references to their competitors, and any information that makes them or their products look less than perfect. And they're playing for the long term, so even if you could get the admins to do the right thing, once the blocks are lifted, perhaps months later, the company line will be restored. Its not even a secret, with edits coming from IPs within a few miles of the company's headquarters.
This is a good example of what Wikipedia is doomed to become. There isn't millions of dollars interested in maintaining truth and unbiased accuracy, but there is in maintaining a biased view benefitial to one group. The more significant Wikipedia becomes, the more money interested in systematically corrupting it. Its a fundamentally unsustainable model, that hasn't even been managed remotely as well as it could have been.
Explain to me how these fundamental issues can be avoided, and then go and fix these two examples, and keep them fixed, and I might belive WP has ANY more value than a public bulletin board.
Your statement is utterly wrong. Ask the guy who wrote the VP3 spec, and he'll tell you that VPx codecs are really quite odd compared to any others.
WebM most definitely does NOT share a nontrivial amount of code with H.264... I belive you made that claim here on/. Before, and apparently ignored my reply, or chose to disbelieve it...
WebM is able to share a lot of code with other codecs in ffmpeg/libavcoded, but that is absolutely NOT h.264. The code WebM shares is mainly VP6, VP3, and Theora. Its the same in the MPEG world... any MPEG-2 decoder can handle MPEG-1 video, because they are so similar. And MPEG4 ASP video decoders have a lot in common with 1/2 as well. The other bits of code shared are general decoding routines that any video codec is going to use.
The idea that specialized H.264 decoder hardware could possibly handle WebM is completely laughable. There are vast numbers of fundamental differences between the very data ordering of the two codecs. And the specialized hardware we're talking about is the kind that won't play even supported videos if they are a few pixels larger than the max, or maybe just has too few keyframes per second. Once you've personally gotten a highly specialized H.264 decoder accelerating PNG decoding, we'll talk about something difficult like WebM...
I guess you can't convince people of the truth if they really want to believe a myth badly enough.
Yes, who needs to honor their previous contractual obligations, when you can just declare bankruptcy?
And I think you need to catch up on your news, because GM most certainly did go into bankruptcy. It was a damn huge story, too. So your statment that the government wouldn't allow it to happen, is provably false.
MP3 sounded "good enough" right up until SBR (found in HE-AAC) came along and wiped the floor with it on MP3's turf. There's definitely a law of diminishing returns in high quality lossy reproduction, but in the low bitrate stuff, where close is good enough, the playing field is pretty wide open, and MP3 is squarely in the low bitrate camp, as is H.264.
Until we have audio files as small as MIDI files, and videos as small as SVG animations, there's tremendous potential for dramatic improvements in low bitrate encodings... where perceivable but non-annoying artifacts are considered a perfectly acceptable trade off.
Turn the clock back 20 years, and it wasn't MPEG-2 video on the web, was it? Even though satellite TV, and radio (DAB), and digitial tapes, and DVDs were all using it. The web was still somewhat in the grips of RealMedia's proprietary formats, while gradually switching over to WMV, and nobody said we should all be using MPEG-2 then...
Frankly, I don't see digitial broadcast radio ever taking off. The economics are wrong, the demographics are wrong, and the demand curve for broadcast radio is wrong.
Television broadcasts over the air will continue to use MPEG-2 pretty much worldwide, and will not change for a good 50 years. H.264's impressiveness is at low bitrates. It has next to nothing to offer for high quality video at very high bitrates (though no worse, quality wise) and the licensing and processing costs are a big downside.
For cable, the pipe is big and cheap, and OTA is MPEG2, so they may well stick with the standard... or not. For satellite TV, yes it looks like H.264 will be the standard.
Bluray is an interesting case. Its fascinating just how difficult of a time its having displacing the tired old DVD. Probably a lot DRM related. This isn't necessarily a temporary situation. With VHS, tapes were maybe 1/4th the resolution of broadcast TV, and laserdiscs, SVHS, VCD, etc couldn't knock it off its pedistal for all their technical superiority and added convenience.
DVRs will follow the other standards. For OTA, they'll need to have MPEG2 forever, in addition to H.264. Who knows, maybe WebM will end up in there too.
Finally, what "H.264" are you referring to? The H.264 videos on that Bluray or satellite broadcast wont work on your iPhone, no matter what. So where's the magic advantage to having the internet use the same name codec as broadcasters? And let's not get into lossy versus lossless H.264. In any case, my Divx files aren't going anywhere...
JPEG, GIF and MP3 all have/had encumbered with licenses yet they are still to this day, web standards.
JPEG has NEVER, EVER, been encumbered.
GIF was believed to be free, it was only just before the patent expired that Unisys decided they could extract some money from the unsuspecting.
MP3 is a popular format, but it has never been a web standard. And people started using it because, like GIFs, there was no sign anyone would try to collect royalties at the time. Not to mention all those in countries where software patents can't even be legally enforced... and today, you'll mod definitely get irate geeks if you post MP3 files, screaming about this Ogg Vorbis thing. Which I always though was odd, since Musepack has been around longer, and is undenyably the best high quality lossy audio codec around, as all frequency domain codecs have unavoidable artifacts, and Musepack and MP2 are the only time domain codecs you've ever heard of. Why MP2 isn't more popular is beyond me.
Sadly, I can't agree with you more. The support staff at big company X aren't any better than you'd get if you put up a job listing for random people with experience with company X's equipment. This is my conclusion from years of experience with networking hardware vendors.
And what's oh so much worse is when they're wrong, the onus is on you to prove to your terrified bosses that the expert at big company X is an idiot who doesn't know thing 1 about big company X's products. I get more pop quizes from support techs than answers, and more than that, their answers are so unreliable that you can't take it to mean anything. They'll spend an hour explaining why X's products can't do Z, while a 5 minute test would have proven otherwise.
So, save your money, and invest it in a lab, then pocket the rest.
Support is only good for long term part replacement, guaranteeing a given part will still be available 10 years from now. You can't always stock up on everything and assume it will work after sitting on a shelf untested for years.
Its a nice theory, but people most certainly do NOT choose the cheapest wireless phone service they can, with good cellular service as low as $35/mo unlimited, and most everyone paying 2-4x that... so why wouldn't their apparent myopic behavior extend to initial prices of the phones themselves?
You're making an idiot out of yourself. First of all, there is no "they", so they haven't been saying anything. Secondly, the rumors of a Verizon iPhone are not just random idiots here and there... Its been announced by major news media players like The Wall Street Journal. The millions of orders for CDMA iPhones went to the manufacturer some time ago, and at this point, Verizon has already sent out the press inventations for the big announcement coming in just a few days, and Apple has prepared their support staff for heavy call traffic next month. The evidence is overwhelming. And if you'd just kept your mouth shut for a few more days, you wouldn't have had the opportunity to make yourself look foolish...
BTW, Apple and AT&T renegotiated their contract some time ago, so your information on exclusivity is horribly out of date at best. Additionally, I don't see why you would be skeptical. Verizon is the biggest carrier, and Apple is losing marketshare to Android... they desperately want to get together with Verizon, and Verizon sees the chance to take a bigger piece of the wireless market. They've been the biggest promoters of Android phones because they couldn't risk getting left behind by the AT&T iPhone, and soon wont need to fight nearly so hard for their share of the smartphone market.
Boost mobile bottoms out at $40/year, so if you're really not using it at all, you might be slightly better off with T-Mobile prepaid. However, if you actually use the thing, Boost Mobile is just $35/mo for unlimited everything, though the data with that is rather slow. That's almost as cheap as a landline, or just about any VoIP plans, and just about all of us have to have a phone number, no matter what, anyhow. With that, you can get a Motorola I1 smartphone running Android 1.5. A bit outdated, but decent.
If instead you want a Blackberry, they have plenty, but there they require an extra $10/mo for faster 3G data access.
Selling support contracts won't work out for you any better than selling games would if you keep the same mindset that's failed so many 'Linux' companies...
RedHat said it best, there's about 1/10th as much money to be made in Open Source as their is in proprietary software. If you go in charging the same prices as Microsoft, and have as much expensive overhead that you can't cut out, you're not going to make it, with support contracts or anything else.
There's no question at this point that Linux will dominate the computing world for decades to come. One servers and high-end clusters, the majority of competitors has died off entirely, and the rest have been badly bruised...
In the embedded space, Linux has been a major force for a long time, and now with Android looking like it will dominate in the smart phone/PDA space, and possibly in the tablet market as well, and a good chance it will make inroads in the netbook space as well, the question is only HOW developers will learn to live with it, because its a major player in all areas of growth.
Take it from me, you want a device with a large, fold out keyboard you can rest all 10 fingers on and touch type. Nothing else matters remotely as much as this one thing... Typing with one finger, or your thumbs, takes 10X as long.
The gold standard is the Psion 5mx or Revo from 10 years ago... back when cell phones were tethered to PDAs for the business traveler, and every PDA but the Psions were either glorified alarm clocks, or flashy toys you couldn't actually get anything done on... Sure, this means a bulkier phone in your pocket, but it also means you get a much larger screen, and more room for batteries, expansion, etc.
WTH? Another genius with a billion dollar idea? Sorry, but no...
There's no such thing as unused memory, and hasn't been for a couple decades. Any portions of memory not allocated by programs are used to cache data read from the disk...
So shutting them off will mildly reduce power consumption, right up until one bit of that cached data is needed... then, hitting up the disk will consume more power than you ever saved, and as an added bonus, you've taken a performance hit, too.
SSDs don't change that fact, either, they just make it slightly less expensive. And if there was any benefit to be had, manufacturers would just ship devices with much less memory, and maybe a bit swapfile on the ssd. No matter how you slice it, your idea makes no sense.
Slashdot Mirror
you're way off. GPL violations happen all the time. The issue doesn't appear on slashdot until the responsible parties have repeatedly been warned, and refused to correct their mistakes. And even after that, the wronged parties just ask for corrective action. If some author filed a lawsuit immediately, and started demanding royalties, you'd see a very similar response here.
That seems quite an odd dig, since the Catholic church is probably the single largest charitable organization, anywhere, and has been for centuries...
Did I miss a memo? Since when is anyone with money supposed to bankrupt themselves rather than speak out on a cause? Seems odd you're complaining about the city not fixing potholes, when you could simply pay a construction company to fix it. No, you want the government to do that...
Besides, I expect providing high speed internet access to the poor, particularly in remote areas, would get extremely expensive, quickly. $70/month for slow satellite internet service with bandwidth caps? $700/month for a leased T-1 line? Rural areas are massively difficult to serve, particularly when you're not a service provider of any kind, without and infrastruture to build on, or recognized rights to do any of it.
Same reason people buy cars, rather than always renting .
With a couple windows open at the same time (eg. any pop-up windows from your main Kiosk app) X11 without a WM is an absolute nightmare. XFwm is nice enough to allow you to customize (ie. remove all) which buttons appear on the title bar. Keyboard shortcuts should be dealt with as well...
The PANEL is the important part in this case, though. We need to allow the user to launch one of several apps of their choice. We could have written a launcher app, but that seems incredibly unnecessary when nearly every DE out there launches app. Seemed pretty straight forward to reuse a common DE, and a custom theme. Got us 99% of the way there. The last 1% was a huge nightmare, as some of the examples above hopefully conveys.
Let me get you started, then.
You only get an icon on the panel. Descriptive text only shows up after a couple seconds of mouseover.
No themes that disable window borders. The included themes all have thick borders, and even modifying them some, I didn't find a way to drop it below that last 1 pixel width.
No easy way to quickly disable all keyboard shortcuts... one unnoticed minor version upgrade added a zillion new shortcuts that caused several nasty mysteries (at work, over the phone), and once I tracked it down, I had to spend 5 mintues on one station disabling all the shortcuts, one by one, because there's no "none" preset included to start from, only the default/all.
I could come up with a dozen more if I was in front of an XFce system right now, but that'll have to do.
As you may have guessed, my main interest in XFce is something of a Kiosk environment. It works reasonably well, but the above issues are rather significant. #1 in particular makes it hard to recomend, since keywords are easier to convey than icons, and can be much more self explanatory.
For my own part. I loved XFce many years ago when it was an (improved) CDE clone, and used it as my DE for a couple years, until the small bugs finally drove me nuts, and made me a blackbox convert for life.
Going back to it though, it's become much heavier and less responsive, and the great ease of use, like right-clicking on an icon to bring up properties allowing configuration in a matter of seconds. Now, you've got to launch a configuration app, which presents 15 configuration apps, and each is plenty complex. Adding icons to the panel? No problem, but it'll turn into a bunch of random numbered xml files on your hard drive (something like LauncherAJDJFSDEFFCD.xml) making hand-editing tempting, and nearly necessary...
So, for all its years of progress, many of the basic issues still haven't been addressed, and other very basic things they can't get right. This may be intentional, someone convinced they know better than the end users what your desktop should and shouldn't look like. Other stuff is probably just laziness, or lack of forethough. Some certainly are copying GNOME, but just being way behind the curve (GNOME v1.x was mighty small, fast sleek and simple, too.).
Not that any of this is to say it isn't a good DE. It just never seems to be complete for any particular use case, and I'm not all that encouraged by the direction it has gone over the years.
He makes a few quips about how ugly they are, and then admits he knows nothing about airplanes. How could that POSSIBLY be much better than... ANYTHING?
I'd love to hear an expert opinion, and see some projected performance stats. Now THAT would be a much better article.
The DVB standard is only SLIGHTLY newer than ATSC, and BOTH are older than H.264.
Just as DVB did...
There are a few big differences between ATSC and DVB adoption.
1) ATSC was adopted by US/CA, and pretty much no-one else. There aren't 100 different examples of adoption of the standard, years apart, by different countries, with different topologies and priorities. DVB was.
2) Early adopters of DVB made a (poor, IMHO) decision to directly transition from analog to digital (DVB), without the upgrade in resolution that came with ATSC in US/CA. This meant that countries like the UK switched over to DVB more quickly, but now there is demand for high-def, and so they're going through another round of upgrades much later, this time with H.264 support often in the mix.
3) DVB is vague. It might mean DVB-T, DVB-S, DVB-H, DVB-C, etc. Only DVB-T is directly comparable to ATSC. The others are quite different in scope and trade-offs. So DVB-S (satellite), at least, always had great demand for drastic bandwidth reductions, even when visual quality is compromised, where H.264 is advantageous.
"Stuck" isn't the word for it. H.264 is a low-bitrate codec. It excels at compressing video down to bitrates lower than which transparent compression (no perceptible artifacts) is not possible. At high bitrates, H.264 has very, very little to offer over MPEG-2. MPEG-2 was designed for high bitrate encoding without perceptible quality loss from the beginning. H.264 can do slightly better, of course, but it does so at tremendous expense in terms of processing power needed for encoding and decoding. The added cost isn't compelling either. Additionally, most of the features that can give H.264 an advantage (like multiple reference frames) would be impractical in broadcast, where flipping through channels would become interminably slow.
I'd ask you the same.
He was arguing the advantages of H.264 for a future standard.
I pointed out the CURRENT standard has NONE of those "advantages", so they apparently aren't advantages at all.
Go away troll.
You're way off. Neither is a player yet. Right now, the only contender is Flash.
It has no "native" support in Windows, or OS X, or iPhone, or iPad, etc. No native support on any platform out there. Only partially supported by mobile devices, with content like HULU locked out.
Its not a formally approved standard by anybody. Its a completely proprietary product.
2 of the 3 codecs it supports aren't supported by most mobile platforms. One of those 3, VP6, is extremely similar to WebM (aka. VP8/VPx). Nobody complained then or now.
Web distribution is a target format, not an intermediate format, so support in editors is a non-issue.
Consumer camera support is something, but pretty trivial.
H.264's inclusion in IE9 is pretty trivial, since the majority of the world is simply NOT using IE9. If they're using older versions of IE, they don't get H.264 support. If they're not using IE at all, they don't get H.264 support.
I'll say that H.264 has a bit of an advantage, but its fairly small. Its to be expected from a format with a several-year head start. I suspect its probably not enough to overcome the advantage of cold hard cash. And I'm even more sure its not enough to overcome the advantage of Google controlling Youtube, and having the ability to force people to use WebM or be unable to visit the most popular video content site, anywhere. That is why Google dominates this fight.
If you want to claim WP is so wonderful on technical articles, I suggest you take a stroll over to "Digital Audio Broadcasting". Its a complete piece of crap, filled with blatantly factually incorrect information. For years it was zealously guarded by a couple individuals with a heavy anti-DAB bias, and financial interest in the same. Numerous appeals to admins have been made over the years, with absolutely no mediative action ever taken. In fact the admins will dutifully block people for the 3RR with no regard give to who is responsible.
Or even better, take a look at "Fractal Antennas". An article that has been systematically controlled by the company of the same name in order to promote themselves and their products. They've repeatedly removed all references to their competitors, and any information that makes them or their products look less than perfect. And they're playing for the long term, so even if you could get the admins to do the right thing, once the blocks are lifted, perhaps months later, the company line will be restored. Its not even a secret, with edits coming from IPs within a few miles of the company's headquarters.
This is a good example of what Wikipedia is doomed to become. There isn't millions of dollars interested in maintaining truth and unbiased accuracy, but there is in maintaining a biased view benefitial to one group. The more significant Wikipedia becomes, the more money interested in systematically corrupting it. Its a fundamentally unsustainable model, that hasn't even been managed remotely as well as it could have been.
Explain to me how these fundamental issues can be avoided, and then go and fix these two examples, and keep them fixed, and I might belive WP has ANY more value than a public bulletin board.
Your statement is utterly wrong. Ask the guy who wrote the VP3 spec, and he'll tell you that VPx codecs are really quite odd compared to any others.
WebM most definitely does NOT share a nontrivial amount of code with H.264... I belive you made that claim here on /. Before, and apparently ignored my reply, or chose to disbelieve it...
WebM is able to share a lot of code with other codecs in ffmpeg/libavcoded, but that is absolutely NOT h.264. The code WebM shares is mainly VP6, VP3, and Theora. Its the same in the MPEG world... any MPEG-2 decoder can handle MPEG-1 video, because they are so similar. And MPEG4 ASP video decoders have a lot in common with 1/2 as well. The other bits of code shared are general decoding routines that any video codec is going to use.
The idea that specialized H.264 decoder hardware could possibly handle WebM is completely laughable. There are vast numbers of fundamental differences between the very data ordering of the two codecs. And the specialized hardware we're talking about is the kind that won't play even supported videos if they are a few pixels larger than the max, or maybe just has too few keyframes per second. Once you've personally gotten a highly specialized H.264 decoder accelerating PNG decoding, we'll talk about something difficult like WebM...
I guess you can't convince people of the truth if they really want to believe a myth badly enough.
Yes, who needs to honor their previous contractual obligations, when you can just declare bankruptcy?
And I think you need to catch up on your news, because GM most certainly did go into bankruptcy. It was a damn huge story, too. So your statment that the government wouldn't allow it to happen, is provably false.
Slashdot would absolutely have to change its name. Something like "colonAF" Id say.
MP3 sounded "good enough" right up until SBR (found in HE-AAC) came along and wiped the floor with it on MP3's turf. There's definitely a law of diminishing returns in high quality lossy reproduction, but in the low bitrate stuff, where close is good enough, the playing field is pretty wide open, and MP3 is squarely in the low bitrate camp, as is H.264.
Until we have audio files as small as MIDI files, and videos as small as SVG animations, there's tremendous potential for dramatic improvements in low bitrate encodings... where perceivable but non-annoying artifacts are considered a perfectly acceptable trade off.
Turn the clock back 20 years, and it wasn't MPEG-2 video on the web, was it? Even though satellite TV, and radio (DAB), and digitial tapes, and DVDs were all using it. The web was still somewhat in the grips of RealMedia's proprietary formats, while gradually switching over to WMV, and nobody said we should all be using MPEG-2 then...
Frankly, I don't see digitial broadcast radio ever taking off. The economics are wrong, the demographics are wrong, and the demand curve for broadcast radio is wrong.
Television broadcasts over the air will continue to use MPEG-2 pretty much worldwide, and will not change for a good 50 years. H.264's impressiveness is at low bitrates. It has next to nothing to offer for high quality video at very high bitrates (though no worse, quality wise) and the licensing and processing costs are a big downside.
For cable, the pipe is big and cheap, and OTA is MPEG2, so they may well stick with the standard... or not. For satellite TV, yes it looks like H.264 will be the standard.
Bluray is an interesting case. Its fascinating just how difficult of a time its having displacing the tired old DVD. Probably a lot DRM related. This isn't necessarily a temporary situation. With VHS, tapes were maybe 1/4th the resolution of broadcast TV, and laserdiscs, SVHS, VCD, etc couldn't knock it off its pedistal for all their technical superiority and added convenience.
DVRs will follow the other standards. For OTA, they'll need to have MPEG2 forever, in addition to H.264. Who knows, maybe WebM will end up in there too.
Finally, what "H.264" are you referring to? The H.264 videos on that Bluray or satellite broadcast wont work on your iPhone, no matter what. So where's the magic advantage to having the internet use the same name codec as broadcasters? And let's not get into lossy versus lossless H.264. In any case, my Divx files aren't going anywhere...
JPEG has NEVER, EVER, been encumbered.
GIF was believed to be free, it was only just before the patent expired that Unisys decided they could extract some money from the unsuspecting.
MP3 is a popular format, but it has never been a web standard. And people started using it because, like GIFs, there was no sign anyone would try to collect royalties at the time. Not to mention all those in countries where software patents can't even be legally enforced... and today, you'll mod definitely get irate geeks if you post MP3 files, screaming about this Ogg Vorbis thing. Which I always though was odd, since Musepack has been around longer, and is undenyably the best high quality lossy audio codec around, as all frequency domain codecs have unavoidable artifacts, and Musepack and MP2 are the only time domain codecs you've ever heard of. Why MP2 isn't more popular is beyond me.
Efficiency is very important... And cattle are terribly inefficient at all of the above. They aren't cheap either.
Sadly, I can't agree with you more. The support staff at big company X aren't any better than you'd get if you put up a job listing for random people with experience with company X's equipment. This is my conclusion from years of experience with networking hardware vendors.
And what's oh so much worse is when they're wrong, the onus is on you to prove to your terrified bosses that the expert at big company X is an idiot who doesn't know thing 1 about big company X's products. I get more pop quizes from support techs than answers, and more than that, their answers are so unreliable that you can't take it to mean anything. They'll spend an hour explaining why X's products can't do Z, while a 5 minute test would have proven otherwise.
So, save your money, and invest it in a lab, then pocket the rest.
Support is only good for long term part replacement, guaranteeing a given part will still be available 10 years from now. You can't always stock up on everything and assume it will work after sitting on a shelf untested for years.
Its a nice theory, but people most certainly do NOT choose the cheapest wireless phone service they can, with good cellular service as low as $35/mo unlimited, and most everyone paying 2-4x that... so why wouldn't their apparent myopic behavior extend to initial prices of the phones themselves?
You're making an idiot out of yourself. First of all, there is no "they", so they haven't been saying anything. Secondly, the rumors of a Verizon iPhone are not just random idiots here and there... Its been announced by major news media players like The Wall Street Journal. The millions of orders for CDMA iPhones went to the manufacturer some time ago, and at this point, Verizon has already sent out the press inventations for the big announcement coming in just a few days, and Apple has prepared their support staff for heavy call traffic next month. The evidence is overwhelming. And if you'd just kept your mouth shut for a few more days, you wouldn't have had the opportunity to make yourself look foolish...
BTW, Apple and AT&T renegotiated their contract some time ago, so your information on exclusivity is horribly out of date at best. Additionally, I don't see why you would be skeptical. Verizon is the biggest carrier, and Apple is losing marketshare to Android... they desperately want to get together with Verizon, and Verizon sees the chance to take a bigger piece of the wireless market. They've been the biggest promoters of Android phones because they couldn't risk getting left behind by the AT&T iPhone, and soon wont need to fight nearly so hard for their share of the smartphone market.
Boost mobile bottoms out at $40/year, so if you're really not using it at all, you might be slightly better off with T-Mobile prepaid. However, if you actually use the thing, Boost Mobile is just $35/mo for unlimited everything, though the data with that is rather slow. That's almost as cheap as a landline, or just about any VoIP plans, and just about all of us have to have a phone number, no matter what, anyhow. With that, you can get a Motorola I1 smartphone running Android 1.5. A bit outdated, but decent.
If instead you want a Blackberry, they have plenty, but there they require an extra $10/mo for faster 3G data access.
Selling support contracts won't work out for you any better than selling games would if you keep the same mindset that's failed so many 'Linux' companies...
RedHat said it best, there's about 1/10th as much money to be made in Open Source as their is in proprietary software. If you go in charging the same prices as Microsoft, and have as much expensive overhead that you can't cut out, you're not going to make it, with support contracts or anything else.
There's no question at this point that Linux will dominate the computing world for decades to come. One servers and high-end clusters, the majority of competitors has died off entirely, and the rest have been badly bruised...
In the embedded space, Linux has been a major force for a long time, and now with Android looking like it will dominate in the smart phone/PDA space, and possibly in the tablet market as well, and a good chance it will make inroads in the netbook space as well, the question is only HOW developers will learn to live with it, because its a major player in all areas of growth.
Coca cola is making a killing bottling tap water. Why go to great expense when you can get just as much money with trash?
Take it from me, you want a device with a large, fold out keyboard you can rest all 10 fingers on and touch type. Nothing else matters remotely as much as this one thing... Typing with one finger, or your thumbs, takes 10X as long.
The gold standard is the Psion 5mx or Revo from 10 years ago... back when cell phones were tethered to PDAs for the business traveler, and every PDA but the Psions were either glorified alarm clocks, or flashy toys you couldn't actually get anything done on... Sure, this means a bulkier phone in your pocket, but it also means you get a much larger screen, and more room for batteries, expansion, etc.
WTH? Another genius with a billion dollar idea? Sorry, but no...
There's no such thing as unused memory, and hasn't been for a couple decades. Any portions of memory not allocated by programs are used to cache data read from the disk...
So shutting them off will mildly reduce power consumption, right up until one bit of that cached data is needed... then, hitting up the disk will consume more power than you ever saved, and as an added bonus, you've taken a performance hit, too.
SSDs don't change that fact, either, they just make it slightly less expensive. And if there was any benefit to be had, manufacturers would just ship devices with much less memory, and maybe a bit swapfile on the ssd. No matter how you slice it, your idea makes no sense.