In that world, why bother maintaining enough expensive disk space (with backups) for a video format that will be obsolete 6 months after you download it?
Disk space is extremely inexpensive now, and will get far more so in the future.
I have cheap, high-speed internet right now... Where I'm planning to move, I'll have no choice but to switch to expensive, low-speed dial-up. It will be an long time before such places are no longer the norm, and an extremely long time before they become legitimately hard to find...
MPEG-2 has been the overwhelmingly dominant format for video and audio since the early 90s. All other formats, up til MPEG-4 are simply poor proprietary re-implementations with next to no improvements to be had, and tremendous drawbacks. Now, MPEG-4/H.264, with it's few small (REAL!) improvements seems to be finally showing people what crap and smoke and mirrors all the proprietary crap is, and wiping them all out. I can't help but wonder how long it will be until everyone forgets the lesson, and starts falling for the same simplistic tricks again.
American Generals refused to believe the early reports of the speed and agility of the Zero.
A) Believing every rumor is NOT the opposite of arrogance.
B) In fact, they had good reason to disbelieve the reports. Their only problem was that they made certain assumptions about how much of a death-trap the Japanese military were willing to make their planes... Get rid of all armor, and a plane can climb much faster. Of course it dives MUCH SLOWER, so upon figuring this out this fact, future dogfights became immensely one-sided.
British Generals refused to fund the development of the jet engine until the Germans fielded theirs.
High tech for high tech's sake is usually a bad move. German jets were just slightly faster than the fastest prop aircraft, and really diverted resources away from better uses of that money.
Yet the countries with the advanced high-tech military hardware still fell to the swarming hordes that out-produced them materially.
Not really true. Things like radar were also highly advanced military technologies, which the US/Brits had, and the Germans/Japanese did not.
In short, the Axis were only slightly more advanced than the Allies. Where the level of military technology is more disparate, it certainly can and does become an overwhelming advantage.
The obvious conclusion that you seem to have missed is that at least for some amount of people, Apple provides value worth the cost.
People said that back in the Dot.Com era, too. Of course it always has to be a nebulous black box... Nobody will dare say WHAT value that is, because it didn't add up then, and it doesn't add up now. The most popular was "adaptive" something-or-other and man-power savings, at a price that would take hundreds of years to pay off...
In short, with a trivial amount of effort, you can find adequate, or even superior products, for a much lower price.
It's a great position to be in during the boom, but it's also the first to go when anything changes, and people are forced to justify their decisions.
but Chipzilla has always been able to keep abreast because of their fabrication prowess.
Not really. Back in the P4 days, Intel was kept afloat by dumping chips on the market. Deep pockets keep Intel around...
Today, Intel has a smaller process, but they don't have the SOI tech that AMD/IBM has for quite some time, so the fab advantage is considerably smaller than it appears.
Intel surpassed AMD in performance, not because of their fab, but because they managed to push new features, and keep redesigning their chips every week, where AMD couldn't keep up. Intel doubled the speed of SSE on their chip, AMD kept producing more of their same until several chips down the line.
AMD wasn't exactly ahead of Intel with x86-64... The Itanium came out long before the Opteron, Intel just chose the wrong way to go.
That would be the "profitable" niche - and they appear to have taken over the "profitable" corner of every game board they play on.
Back in the Dot.Com era, there were plenty of companies out there that were all hype with little to show for it. I would continuously ask myself "Why does this crap sell?". Then the crash came, the companies that were nothing but hype were the first against the wall, they went away, the world went back to normal, and I said "Oh, now I understand!"
Now, while Apple continues to sell slightly better than mediocre products for 10X what they're worth, on hype alone, I keep asking myself "Why?" With the economy in a slide, and history apparently repeating itself once again, I'm preparing, once again, to understand...
The fact that America is still struggling to sort out its medical system, 60-90 years after everyone else did, is telling in and of itself.
The American medical system was working quite well for many years. The fact that it doesn't work the way you think it should doesn't make it bad or wrong. Several economic shifts transformed it into it's current, deplorable state. "everyone else" with their wonderful "fixed" medical system may well experience the same problems in the future... It's not as if any other medical system is without its faults. At best, other health care systems are just slightly less expensive, with plenty of drawbacks to go with them.
And I might point out "everyone else" is currently struggling to sort out their economies in non-boom times, fumbling around to figure out issues the US has settled 80 years ago.
but that's a far cry from broadcasting content that contains any real substance or concrete information, much less reporting balanced news a la the BBC.
Why would you compare cable news networks in the US to the BBC? A bit of a straw man there. Compare news from the BBC to news from NBC, CBS or ABC, and suddenly the US doesn't look so bad... I'm not sure the BBC could make it as a legitimate news outlet in the US if it tried.
You have to ensure that all communications are viable all the time.
We have guaranteed, near-instantaneous communications built into all electrical systems ever built... It's called VOLTAGE. If you know what it's nominally supposed to be, you can easily determine whether the system is underloaded, optimal, overloaded, etc, and to what extent...
then we're left wondering why someone can workout forever and not see a change (as reported in TFA).
No. No we aren't. It's extremely clear. The difference between vigorous exercise and being sedentary is minuscule. To burn off a pizza, you really have to run a marathon.
The article, which you're citing without understanding, specifically states that consuming a single bottle of Gatoraide during your workout will more than defeat the calories burnt by that workout.
It has been well known (by those who know anything about the subject) that exercise is simply not a practical way to lose weight. Dietitians will tell you that you need to change your diet to lose weigh. Exercise is useful ONLY to help maintain body weight (ie. not getting fatter).
You can make assertions all you want, but the explanation for why working out doesn't work is known, has been know for a very long time, and has nothing at all to do with glucose levels. This has been shown in theory, and it's been proven in practice.
Finally he shows how fat has been wrongfully vilified over the past 50 years, and so if you take fat (high-density energy storage) out of the diet, it is replaced with carbs, and that itself is what triggers the storage system.
In theory, practice doesn't matter...
In practice, many studies have been done, and none have shown notably higher weight loss from low card diets than from low fat diets.
In practice, reducing the amount of calories you eat will cause you to lose weight. Carbs, fat, doesn't matter.
Instead of being a small, simple browser that just did one thing well; Firefox has become way too bloated and indeed the plans for the future seem to impart it with a ribbon-like interface and more nonsensical things.
Firefox was a lie from the very beginning...
It got massively popular as the smaller, lighter, faster browser. It went viral and overtook the Mozilla suite. Problem was, it was NEVER smaller, faster, or lighter, in either CPU time or memory footprint. The difference was absolutely trivial.
So, complaining that it's no longer something that it never was, isn't very damming.
Note: Firefox and Mozilla suck. It really should be 1/10th the size, and render pages about 100X faster. We were well on our way, but the conversion to CSS left all the lightweight browsers ineffective. Links used to be great, but now it renders no better than lynx, whether in text or GUI mode, so nobody bothers... Too bad, since the keyboard UI was the best ever conceived, and now appears dead. Konq-Embedded now requires much of KDE, QT is not longer good enough, and the UI wasn't ever that good to being with. Of the old fast & light browsers, it looks like only Dillo has a chance of being brought into modern times. Just few more features and page rendering improvements, and I'll take the hit and use it as my primary browser, non-standard websites be-dammed!
Don't bother mentioning Opera... Much like Firefox, Opera was all hype, and very little in the way of improved performance. Not to mention the UI has always been god-awful... the biggest thing Firefox has in it's favor (a far cry from Links, though).
I mean, it'd basically be a packet-switched network, but with cars instead of pieces of data. It's a relatively benign IT problem.
Congestion control becomes a much scarier problem...
While I would certainly stop driving on the freeways at that point, I can see it being a major spectator draw to stand at the side of the freeway around rush hour, watching the bulldozers idling at the side of the road, and waiting to see which random car they pick to knock into the ditch to reduce congestion, TCP buffer style.
Its crazy that you can be sent to jail for many years and be alienated from society for the rest of your days for having a certain amount of bits stored on hard drives/flash memory/toggle switches arranged in a certain way.
Non-public digital photographs of a murder, or electronic copies of classified documents, are also just bits arranged in a certain way...
The "bits" aren't the problem, it's how you came about them, and what they indicate that is at issue. In fact you can legally generate all the images of child pornography you want, as long as it isn't real.
You're welcome to cat/dev/urandom to file$n.bmp and see how much child porn you get out of it...
The easiest fix at a utility scale is to increase the amount of spinning reserve so that causing a cascading failure requires control of multiple generating facilities.
No. The only reason we have "cascading failures" in the grid is because there isn't enough electrical isolation. It's just a giant bus that, when there's a problem, generating plants have 2 choices: shut everything down / just sit back and hope and pray your generators won't be destroyed.
If each major circuit / sub-station had just a bit of smarts, they could notice the power drop and shut themselves down, instead of trying to disparately to continue getting all the power needed. It's the difference between a few areas blacked-out momentarily, and a brown-out across the whole system, which in-turn risks causing equipment damage, necessitating a whole-system shutdown.
Playing video in an embed tag requires the user to have a platform-specific plugin installed.
In what way is Quicktime et al. "platform specific" while Flash is not?
The user interface you get depends on the specific plugin used and can only be customized in a plugin-specific way.
The interface of every web-page is browser and user-specific. I don't see the problem. In fact, it seems a huge advantage that users can choose their own interface. I have yet to see a single case where some Flash video player had any positive site-specific customizations.
Loading the plugin will often freeze the user's browser for several seconds and/or cause crashes
A) Baseless nonsense. B) Flash is an embedded plugin. It certainly can certainly do all of the above things. C) There's no reason to assume the video tag can't an wont do the above. D) Even if you get rid of plugins for video, you'll still have plugins for other file types.
Plugins don't play nice with CSS opacity and z-order
That's a nice checklist of worthless features that nobody will ever actually use.
Fullscreen and positioning have always worked fine with plugins.
Flash took over from embed because it provided a customizable UI, consistent API, workable fullscreen mode, and reliable codec support.
Sites built custom UI's on top of embedded media players long before flash got video support. They also pretty much all had fullscreen support, and great performance to boot.
The installed-base for Windows Media playback was 93%+... Flash started getting a foothold long before it even came close to rivaling that, so that's certainly no explanation. And now, you have 3 different versions of the flash player, with 3 different supported codecs to deal with... Wonderfully inconsistent.
There is something to be said for not wasting your advice on a company that refuses to take it, especially when someone else can put your time to better use.
There's this little thing called capitalism, which optimally distributes resources to those who can best utilize them. In short, if you can get more use out of a resource, you can afford to pay more for that resource.
If someone is willing to pay Vixie more, I expect he'd take them up on the offer...
"The Linux dev model is the worst form of development, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." - Winston Churchill
The Linux dev model isn't the only one in existence, isn't the only one that has withstood for a lengthy period of time, and certainly isn't the only one with plausible contention for the best (as opposed to democracy).
The FreeBSD (core-team) development model has certainly been around, in it's current form longer than the Linux kernel, and it doesn't suffer from many of the criticisms of Linux. It has plenty of its own criticisms, of course, but that's besides the point. It certainly isn't self-evidence that the Linux development model is the best... In fact Linux of today even has to compete with Linux from several years ago, before it switched to the "nothing is stable" model...
You shouldn't be allowed to create an abomination like TIVO with open source.
BSD is Open Source, and the license is perfectly fine with TIVO's business model.
The GPL is not Open Source, but "Free Software", Stallman's own term, hence the FSF. In short, it tries to FORCE all software to be free, Open Source does not.
By all means, someone explain to me why the <Video> tag is in any way better than the <Embed> tag that's existed for 1.4.5 years now, and why it's going to rescue the world from Flash, which took over because people decided they didn't want to use <Embed> anymore...
I can't remember the last time Intel had poor yields ( or were admitting to it) but this has been an issue for pretty much everyone else for years, particularly AMD.
This is utter nonsense. Intel has chip shortages *almost* every year. They are WORSE than AMD and others in this regard.
Slashdot Mirror
How dare you discuss the end of the world, and completely omit the key role of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man?
Disk space is extremely inexpensive now, and will get far more so in the future.
I have cheap, high-speed internet right now... Where I'm planning to move, I'll have no choice but to switch to expensive, low-speed dial-up. It will be an long time before such places are no longer the norm, and an extremely long time before they become legitimately hard to find...
MPEG-2 has been the overwhelmingly dominant format for video and audio since the early 90s. All other formats, up til MPEG-4 are simply poor proprietary re-implementations with next to no improvements to be had, and tremendous drawbacks. Now, MPEG-4/H.264, with it's few small (REAL!) improvements seems to be finally showing people what crap and smoke and mirrors all the proprietary crap is, and wiping them all out. I can't help but wonder how long it will be until everyone forgets the lesson, and starts falling for the same simplistic tricks again.
A) Believing every rumor is NOT the opposite of arrogance.
B) In fact, they had good reason to disbelieve the reports. Their only problem was that they made certain assumptions about how much of a death-trap the Japanese military were willing to make their planes... Get rid of all armor, and a plane can climb much faster. Of course it dives MUCH SLOWER, so upon figuring this out this fact, future dogfights became immensely one-sided.
High tech for high tech's sake is usually a bad move. German jets were just slightly faster than the fastest prop aircraft, and really diverted resources away from better uses of that money.
Not really true. Things like radar were also highly advanced military technologies, which the US/Brits had, and the Germans/Japanese did not.
In short, the Axis were only slightly more advanced than the Allies. Where the level of military technology is more disparate, it certainly can and does become an overwhelming advantage.
People said that back in the Dot.Com era, too. Of course it always has to be a nebulous black box... Nobody will dare say WHAT value that is, because it didn't add up then, and it doesn't add up now. The most popular was "adaptive" something-or-other and man-power savings, at a price that would take hundreds of years to pay off...
In short, with a trivial amount of effort, you can find adequate, or even superior products, for a much lower price.
It's a great position to be in during the boom, but it's also the first to go when anything changes, and people are forced to justify their decisions.
Not really. Back in the P4 days, Intel was kept afloat by dumping chips on the market. Deep pockets keep Intel around...
Today, Intel has a smaller process, but they don't have the SOI tech that AMD/IBM has for quite some time, so the fab advantage is considerably smaller than it appears.
Intel surpassed AMD in performance, not because of their fab, but because they managed to push new features, and keep redesigning their chips every week, where AMD couldn't keep up. Intel doubled the speed of SSE on their chip, AMD kept producing more of their same until several chips down the line.
AMD wasn't exactly ahead of Intel with x86-64... The Itanium came out long before the Opteron, Intel just chose the wrong way to go.
Back in the Dot.Com era, there were plenty of companies out there that were all hype with little to show for it. I would continuously ask myself "Why does this crap sell?". Then the crash came, the companies that were nothing but hype were the first against the wall, they went away, the world went back to normal, and I said "Oh, now I understand!"
Now, while Apple continues to sell slightly better than mediocre products for 10X what they're worth, on hype alone, I keep asking myself "Why?" With the economy in a slide, and history apparently repeating itself once again, I'm preparing, once again, to understand...
MHO
The American medical system was working quite well for many years. The fact that it doesn't work the way you think it should doesn't make it bad or wrong. Several economic shifts transformed it into it's current, deplorable state. "everyone else" with their wonderful "fixed" medical system may well experience the same problems in the future... It's not as if any other medical system is without its faults. At best, other health care systems are just slightly less expensive, with plenty of drawbacks to go with them.
And I might point out "everyone else" is currently struggling to sort out their economies in non-boom times, fumbling around to figure out issues the US has settled 80 years ago.
Why would you compare cable news networks in the US to the BBC? A bit of a straw man there. Compare news from the BBC to news from NBC, CBS or ABC, and suddenly the US doesn't look so bad... I'm not sure the BBC could make it as a legitimate news outlet in the US if it tried.
We have guaranteed, near-instantaneous communications built into all electrical systems ever built... It's called VOLTAGE. If you know what it's nominally supposed to be, you can easily determine whether the system is underloaded, optimal, overloaded, etc, and to what extent...
No. No we aren't. It's extremely clear. The difference between vigorous exercise and being sedentary is minuscule. To burn off a pizza, you really have to run a marathon.
The article, which you're citing without understanding, specifically states that consuming a single bottle of Gatoraide during your workout will more than defeat the calories burnt by that workout.
It has been well known (by those who know anything about the subject) that exercise is simply not a practical way to lose weight. Dietitians will tell you that you need to change your diet to lose weigh. Exercise is useful ONLY to help maintain body weight (ie. not getting fatter).
You can make assertions all you want, but the explanation for why working out doesn't work is known, has been know for a very long time, and has nothing at all to do with glucose levels. This has been shown in theory, and it's been proven in practice.
In theory, practice doesn't matter...
In practice, many studies have been done, and none have shown notably higher weight loss from low card diets than from low fat diets.
In practice, reducing the amount of calories you eat will cause you to lose weight. Carbs, fat, doesn't matter.
Firefox was a lie from the very beginning...
It got massively popular as the smaller, lighter, faster browser. It went viral and overtook the Mozilla suite. Problem was, it was NEVER smaller, faster, or lighter, in either CPU time or memory footprint. The difference was absolutely trivial.
So, complaining that it's no longer something that it never was, isn't very damming.
Note: Firefox and Mozilla suck. It really should be 1/10th the size, and render pages about 100X faster. We were well on our way, but the conversion to CSS left all the lightweight browsers ineffective. Links used to be great, but now it renders no better than lynx, whether in text or GUI mode, so nobody bothers... Too bad, since the keyboard UI was the best ever conceived, and now appears dead. Konq-Embedded now requires much of KDE, QT is not longer good enough, and the UI wasn't ever that good to being with. Of the old fast & light browsers, it looks like only Dillo has a chance of being brought into modern times. Just few more features and page rendering improvements, and I'll take the hit and use it as my primary browser, non-standard websites be-dammed!
Don't bother mentioning Opera... Much like Firefox, Opera was all hype, and very little in the way of improved performance. Not to mention the UI has always been god-awful... the biggest thing Firefox has in it's favor (a far cry from Links, though).
Congestion control becomes a much scarier problem...
While I would certainly stop driving on the freeways at that point, I can see it being a major spectator draw to stand at the side of the freeway around rush hour, watching the bulldozers idling at the side of the road, and waiting to see which random car they pick to knock into the ditch to reduce congestion, TCP buffer style.
Non-public digital photographs of a murder, or electronic copies of classified documents, are also just bits arranged in a certain way...
The "bits" aren't the problem, it's how you came about them, and what they indicate that is at issue. In fact you can legally generate all the images of child pornography you want, as long as it isn't real.
You're welcome to cat /dev/urandom to file$n.bmp and see how much child porn you get out of it...
No. The only reason we have "cascading failures" in the grid is because there isn't enough electrical isolation. It's just a giant bus that, when there's a problem, generating plants have 2 choices: shut everything down / just sit back and hope and pray your generators won't be destroyed.
If each major circuit / sub-station had just a bit of smarts, they could notice the power drop and shut themselves down, instead of trying to disparately to continue getting all the power needed. It's the difference between a few areas blacked-out momentarily, and a brown-out across the whole system, which in-turn risks causing equipment damage, necessitating a whole-system shutdown.
In what way is Quicktime et al. "platform specific" while Flash is not?
The interface of every web-page is browser and user-specific. I don't see the problem. In fact, it seems a huge advantage that users can choose their own interface. I have yet to see a single case where some Flash video player had any positive site-specific customizations.
A) Baseless nonsense.
B) Flash is an embedded plugin. It certainly can certainly do all of the above things.
C) There's no reason to assume the video tag can't an wont do the above.
D) Even if you get rid of plugins for video, you'll still have plugins for other file types.
That's a nice checklist of worthless features that nobody will ever actually use.
Fullscreen and positioning have always worked fine with plugins.
Sites built custom UI's on top of embedded media players long before flash got video support. They also pretty much all had fullscreen support, and great performance to boot.
The installed-base for Windows Media playback was 93%+... Flash started getting a foothold long before it even came close to rivaling that, so that's certainly no explanation. And now, you have 3 different versions of the flash player, with 3 different supported codecs to deal with... Wonderfully inconsistent.
And?
I do like how you ignore OBJECT as well.
Look at the file extension, or read the mime type.. Just like EVERYTHING ELSE ON THE WEB.
If "no automated system can tell" then how could browser plugins possibly work?
Because it doesn't require proprietary software, works on every browser, is much more flexible, and performs extremely well.
I'd like to see how you'd do that for RTSP, FTP, and any of the dozens of other internet protocols Akamai serves up...
There's this little thing called capitalism, which optimally distributes resources to those who can best utilize them. In short, if you can get more use out of a resource, you can afford to pay more for that resource.
If someone is willing to pay Vixie more, I expect he'd take them up on the offer...
The Linux dev model isn't the only one in existence, isn't the only one that has withstood for a lengthy period of time, and certainly isn't the only one with plausible contention for the best (as opposed to democracy).
The FreeBSD (core-team) development model has certainly been around, in it's current form longer than the Linux kernel, and it doesn't suffer from many of the criticisms of Linux. It has plenty of its own criticisms, of course, but that's besides the point. It certainly isn't self-evidence that the Linux development model is the best... In fact Linux of today even has to compete with Linux from several years ago, before it switched to the "nothing is stable" model...
Don't tell him or Google that... I'm sure he prefers to eat in-between maintaining Linux.
That's 14.5 years now... June 1995.
BSD is Open Source, and the license is perfectly fine with TIVO's business model.
The GPL is not Open Source, but "Free Software", Stallman's own term, hence the FSF. In short, it tries to FORCE all software to be free, Open Source does not.
By all means, someone explain to me why the <Video> tag is in any way better than the <Embed> tag that's existed for 1.4.5 years now, and why it's going to rescue the world from Flash, which took over because people decided they didn't want to use <Embed> anymore...
I'll just hold my breath...
This is utter nonsense. Intel has chip shortages *almost* every year. They are WORSE than AMD and others in this regard.
September 2005
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/manufacturers-report-intel-chipset-shortage,1410.html
May 2008
http://www.slashgear.com/intel-atom-demand-prompts-chipset-shortages-0111422/
Sep 2009
http://en.newspeg.com/Intel-G31-chipset-shortages-to-get-worse-in-4Q09-as-Intel-cuts-back-supply-43419056.html
Frito Lay chips outsell ARM chips by a large margin...
Of course they're vastly different things, and not remotely comparable, but you don't seem to care about that in the slightest...