Those are numbers based on a keynote speech and are full of assumptions. Pretty much each number comes with a "assumed" or "suggests." Anywhere you have seen real numbers and not ones made up based on somethine steve jobs said in a keynote? Not to be rude or anything but Steve Jobs has basically been caught on more than one occasion of, how should we say.... bending the truth.
I used to use the YouTube one... I no longer have an iPhone... but the YouTube web app was actually better than the built in YouTube app in my opinion. Also, as far as I know, WebApps aren't the only use of the embeded WebUI thingy... you use that in actual apps the get browser functionality. If you haven't noticed HTML in any of your apps you aren't looking very hard.
What they were saying is developing apps with html rendering gives you a much faster rendering in Android when compared to the iPhone. This is kind of a big deal if you ask me... a lot of apps I use clearly are rendering HTML with what I assume are these very rendering engines that were tested.
If you had a nickle for every person in the US you would only have between 15 and 16 million dollars. Bill Gates is worth quite a bit more than that. Even if everyone in the US asked you multiple time you still wouldn't be all that close to being as rich as Bill gates. Even if they all gave you a dollar... twice... uhm yeah... still pretty far away. Bill Gates has a lot of money.
"Would some of us like to see it more popular than, say, Flash to serve up video?"
Read what you are responding to. They don't say flash is the codec used, they say that flash is what is used to serve up the video content. What they are saying is embed and object tags containing flash files, which may or may not contain H.264 encoded video, are used to deliver the video content instead of a straight video tag. Firefox can handle this just fine. While youtube briefly attempted to switch to the straight video tag they have gone back to serving up their videos in flash files. If the world were using the video tag to serve up video, then, and only then, would Firefox have an issue with not being able to render H.264 encoded videos.
"To suggest it's the most adopted is wishful thinking."
Is absolutely correct. Please notice, again the word codec is not in this statement. They are simply stating that the internet at large is serving its video files with flash, not with html5 video tags.
That is an odd comparison, saying you can't run an ad network on the PS3 or Wii. A better comparison would be saying that Sony or Nintendo prevent you from using whatever ad network you want in the games you sell for their platform. As far as I know, they do not prevent such a thing. That is why the iPhone is being singled out here.
But... they didn't tell you first... they released the iphone... people went out and bought the iphone... developers started building applications for the iphone... then adobe decided to make something that allowed you to convert flash apps to said iphone OS... THEN apple said no you can't do that. It isn't just adobe either... there are other development platforms affected here.
What if I bought an iphone JUST so I could build apps in Mono for it? Now I cant? How is that okay again? How does that fit into your over simplified logic of what is happening here?
I really don't care either way, I have no intention of building apps for the iphone ever, but your point isn't insightful it is inaccurate.
demand cant be met... odd that I can go to bestbuy right now and purchase one.
1 million sold to brick and mortar/catalog stores does not equate to 1 million sold to consumers. Why no one calls them on this number is beyond me. Must be the magic they have in them.
So, writing an application for the iPhone is free now? I mean, it probably only took them an hour or so right? Seems like a pretty simple solution they have come up with couldn't have taken them more than two.
"Americans seem happy with what we have and there is no motivation to make things better despite the fact that there's plenty of room for improvement."
Ahhh, the fluoride in the water is totally working.
Tort reform isn't the problem, there are several comments above about it... Texas tried that, has it made their health insurance any cheaper? No. Has it helped Joe Consumer pay his medical expenses? No.
Having personally gone to doctors for open heart surgery I can actually answer your question. I went to Canada and had surgery there the second time because the heart surgeon in Toronto was better than the heart surgeon in Buffalo. So, yes, I'd be okay with going to a cheaper doctor as long as they were good at what they do. How many times have sports teams payed WAY too much for a star player only to see they got a mediocre player instead? That happens more often than not, no? Sure, some star players are totally worth the money they are paid (to their teams) but many are not. Basically, the amount of money someone makes in no way determines how good at their job they actually are, it just shows that they are interested in making lots of money. Would you rather have a doctor who wants to make a lot of money or one who gets excited about his job? Is windows better than linux because it costs more? Certainly since they are able to charge more money for it it must be better right?
I don't think people are mad that doctors are making lots of money, I think people are mad that insurance companies are making lots of money. Why are we paying a private companies to make money off our health problems? That to me seems stupid.
Still, this bill sucks and does very little to actually improve the system here. In fact, I think it is probably going to make things worse for a lot of people. The upper class will continue to get good coverage as they have always gotten and the middle class will have to feel the burden of helping out the poor. I do think we should help out the poor, but I think the insurance companies should not be private companies. I don't think our tax money should be fed to the private insurance companies to help the poor afford their overpriced service. I think they should be forced to provide service at a reasonable price instead but this bill does little to nothing to make that actually happen.
Tell that to Activision and Ubisoft, both have recently released games at 59.99 for the PC. I'm not saying that Blizzard will as well, but I wouldn't be totally shocked if they did.
Actually, the latest reference in that document is basing stuff on data from 1996 (most of the references are from the 80s or early 90s) and well... LCDs (and monitors in general) have certainly changed a lot since then. Basically... that information is no longer to be taken as gospel and is not about current technology.
Doctors now say that really, LCD displays are not bad for the eyes at all, and what is bad is the setup of the screen (not an issue with a portable LCD like a phone) and the lack of blinking you do when reading for long periods of time (which isn't related to LCDs at all and is a problem for eInk too).
Here is a timely blog post on the NY Times for slightly more info...
Basically... eInk isn't really any better, lacks in contrast, and is not good for reading in low light situations.
I think the eInk industry has done a really good job at making people believe something that isn't true. People's eyes go bad as they get older, your LCD monitor probably isn't the cause though.
Yeah, and that is becoming very close to being true. As phones advance they will have ereaders in them. Right now iPhones do. I would be extremely surprised if there wasn't already multiple ebook reading software out for android. I used to read ebooks on my palm pilot (which if you recall eventually made phones). I know there are ereaders for blackberrys. Now, regular cellphones don't currently have the resolution to make reading enjoyable (though some do have ereaders), but "smart phones" do, and more and more smart phones are out each year.
All netbooks are "e readers" now that is correct. My girlfriend reads books (mostly checked out from the seattle public library) on her computer. She could just as easily do so on a netbook. She actually prefers the laptop to her phone, though reads on both.
That is one of my points actually, that ebook readers will be more popular if they aren't just ebook readers. The defining factor of an ebook reader, as was suggested, is NOT eink.
Hint: if they equate eink to ebooks they probably are new to ebooks.
Seriously... while I think the iPad is a poor choice in ebook readers it sure as hell isn't because it has a color screen that doesnt require an external light source to make it readable. In fact, my choice currently is an iPhone. Why? Because I have it with me ALL the time. I can read at night while my girlfriend is sleeping without having a light on and finally, it can do lots of other things besides being a book. Oh, and turning pages doesnt take an insanely long amount of time like e-ink does.
Also, the iPhone offers you many options in terms of ebook readers. Stanza is the one I use, but if you have a kindle, you can use the Kindle reader and read the books you have already "purchased" there. Built in web browser for online repositories.
Assuming you did nothing wrong while using last.fm, i.e you legally own the music you listen to. You could just represent yourself, since basically, it is obvious they have no proof of you doing something illegal if in fact you didn't do anything illegal. Like you said, if it looks like you might win they will drop the case. They do this enough times and it costs them a bunch of money to start the process. This is only useful for them to catch actual criminals, i.e. people who listen to music they downloaded illegally (oh the horror!!!), though I suspect (for the most part) they are really only concerned with people uploading music illegally.
And that gets back to the original comment's question, how will this work as proof of anything? If they already know you were sharing a copy of an album, say before it was released and could also prove that you listened to the song from your computer before the album was released... I could see that helping their case, though they would probably need more evidence.
sony does it on the PSN, and they use regular dollar amounts... the trick is, you have to spend at least $5 (which you have noted). but the thing is, that works out WAY better for the consumer than the microsoft system since the majority of the games are over $5 and any remaining money in your wallet is just that... money, you know exactly what its worth.
the ONLY reason microsoft does this is for the exact reason described above... it isnt to avoid a 5 cent charge (it wouldnt be much more than that considering the volume they are doing them at, i know, i have set up payment systems before) its to get you to buy more and buy things you normally wouldnt (themes and picture packs...) because you already have the points in there. points arent money, its easier to spend them and not know what its actually costing you... its a marketing trick... it always has been and they are not the first to do such a thing.
i have also set up donation systems for non profits and also seen this sort of thing, one for a fairly high traffic site that processes a decent number of donations. while cvv2 checks help, in my experience even with cvv2 checks and address verification checks you still need to do things like track the number of attempted donations per N minutes for a particular ip address. blacklisting anything that doesnt pass the test for a day or two... i do a few other strange things with the form submission to keep the number down. its pretty crazy stuff as it very much looks as though its people hand typing in the information (1 every 30 to 45 seconds) and they clearly have the cvv number and address of the card being tested. pretty frightening stuff... your identity is being tested right now for a $1 donation.
perhaps you are unfamiliar with the difference between film and video. there can be as much of a difference between old movies as there is with new movies when put onto either format. the number of "pixels" (grains of silver halide) is way more than you get on a standard DVD (and really, way more than you get on an HD format) so moving an old movie onto a hi-def format gives you a much better quality than you would get if you dumped it onto standard DVD. Not to mention the fact that for playback on an HDTV set, especially 1080p, DVD has to upscale its content to fill the pixels. Upscaling makes things blurry.
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"Have you looked at a vanilla install of Firefox? Compare that with Opera and the number of features in Firefox is pretty much approaching zero."
This actually describes why I use Firefox.
Uh, sure, I agree... but can you see through your phone with your eyes like the insightful comment I replied to seems to claim?
Really? You can see through your phone with your eyes??? Maybe I need to upgrade mine, think there is an app for that?
Those are numbers based on a keynote speech and are full of assumptions. Pretty much each number comes with a "assumed" or "suggests." Anywhere you have seen real numbers and not ones made up based on somethine steve jobs said in a keynote? Not to be rude or anything but Steve Jobs has basically been caught on more than one occasion of, how should we say.... bending the truth.
I used to use the YouTube one... I no longer have an iPhone... but the YouTube web app was actually better than the built in YouTube app in my opinion. Also, as far as I know, WebApps aren't the only use of the embeded WebUI thingy... you use that in actual apps the get browser functionality. If you haven't noticed HTML in any of your apps you aren't looking very hard.
If you look at the actual numbers, you will see that the AppStore is a break-even affair for Apple.
How does one go about doing this? Everything I have read has been speculation. As far as I can tell, no numbers have actually been released.
What they were saying is developing apps with html rendering gives you a much faster rendering in Android when compared to the iPhone. This is kind of a big deal if you ask me... a lot of apps I use clearly are rendering HTML with what I assume are these very rendering engines that were tested.
If you had a nickle for every person in the US you would only have between 15 and 16 million dollars. Bill Gates is worth quite a bit more than that. Even if everyone in the US asked you multiple time you still wouldn't be all that close to being as rich as Bill gates. Even if they all gave you a dollar... twice... uhm yeah... still pretty far away. Bill Gates has a lot of money.
"Would some of us like to see it more popular than, say, Flash to serve up video?"
Read what you are responding to. They don't say flash is the codec used, they say that flash is what is used to serve up the video content. What they are saying is embed and object tags containing flash files, which may or may not contain H.264 encoded video, are used to deliver the video content instead of a straight video tag. Firefox can handle this just fine. While youtube briefly attempted to switch to the straight video tag they have gone back to serving up their videos in flash files. If the world were using the video tag to serve up video, then, and only then, would Firefox have an issue with not being able to render H.264 encoded videos.
"To suggest it's the most adopted is wishful thinking."
Is absolutely correct. Please notice, again the word codec is not in this statement. They are simply stating that the internet at large is serving its video files with flash, not with html5 video tags.
That is an odd comparison, saying you can't run an ad network on the PS3 or Wii. A better comparison would be saying that Sony or Nintendo prevent you from using whatever ad network you want in the games you sell for their platform. As far as I know, they do not prevent such a thing. That is why the iPhone is being singled out here.
But... they didn't tell you first... they released the iphone... people went out and bought the iphone... developers started building applications for the iphone... then adobe decided to make something that allowed you to convert flash apps to said iphone OS... THEN apple said no you can't do that. It isn't just adobe either... there are other development platforms affected here.
What if I bought an iphone JUST so I could build apps in Mono for it? Now I cant? How is that okay again? How does that fit into your over simplified logic of what is happening here?
I really don't care either way, I have no intention of building apps for the iphone ever, but your point isn't insightful it is inaccurate.
demand cant be met... odd that I can go to bestbuy right now and purchase one.
1 million sold to brick and mortar/catalog stores does not equate to 1 million sold to consumers. Why no one calls them on this number is beyond me. Must be the magic they have in them.
So, writing an application for the iPhone is free now? I mean, it probably only took them an hour or so right? Seems like a pretty simple solution they have come up with couldn't have taken them more than two.
"Americans seem happy with what we have and there is no motivation to make things better despite the fact that there's plenty of room for improvement."
Ahhh, the fluoride in the water is totally working.
Tort reform isn't the problem, there are several comments above about it... Texas tried that, has it made their health insurance any cheaper? No. Has it helped Joe Consumer pay his medical expenses? No.
Having personally gone to doctors for open heart surgery I can actually answer your question. I went to Canada and had surgery there the second time because the heart surgeon in Toronto was better than the heart surgeon in Buffalo. So, yes, I'd be okay with going to a cheaper doctor as long as they were good at what they do. How many times have sports teams payed WAY too much for a star player only to see they got a mediocre player instead? That happens more often than not, no? Sure, some star players are totally worth the money they are paid (to their teams) but many are not. Basically, the amount of money someone makes in no way determines how good at their job they actually are, it just shows that they are interested in making lots of money. Would you rather have a doctor who wants to make a lot of money or one who gets excited about his job? Is windows better than linux because it costs more? Certainly since they are able to charge more money for it it must be better right?
I don't think people are mad that doctors are making lots of money, I think people are mad that insurance companies are making lots of money. Why are we paying a private companies to make money off our health problems? That to me seems stupid.
Still, this bill sucks and does very little to actually improve the system here. In fact, I think it is probably going to make things worse for a lot of people. The upper class will continue to get good coverage as they have always gotten and the middle class will have to feel the burden of helping out the poor. I do think we should help out the poor, but I think the insurance companies should not be private companies. I don't think our tax money should be fed to the private insurance companies to help the poor afford their overpriced service. I think they should be forced to provide service at a reasonable price instead but this bill does little to nothing to make that actually happen.
Tell that to Activision and Ubisoft, both have recently released games at 59.99 for the PC. I'm not saying that Blizzard will as well, but I wouldn't be totally shocked if they did.
Actually, the latest reference in that document is basing stuff on data from 1996 (most of the references are from the 80s or early 90s) and well... LCDs (and monitors in general) have certainly changed a lot since then. Basically... that information is no longer to be taken as gospel and is not about current technology.
Doctors now say that really, LCD displays are not bad for the eyes at all, and what is bad is the setup of the screen (not an issue with a portable LCD like a phone) and the lack of blinking you do when reading for long periods of time (which isn't related to LCDs at all and is a problem for eInk too).
Here is a timely blog post on the NY Times for slightly more info...
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/do-e-readers-cause-eye-strain/?ref=books
Basically... eInk isn't really any better, lacks in contrast, and is not good for reading in low light situations.
I think the eInk industry has done a really good job at making people believe something that isn't true. People's eyes go bad as they get older, your LCD monitor probably isn't the cause though.
Yeah, and that is becoming very close to being true. As phones advance they will have ereaders in them. Right now iPhones do. I would be extremely surprised if there wasn't already multiple ebook reading software out for android. I used to read ebooks on my palm pilot (which if you recall eventually made phones). I know there are ereaders for blackberrys. Now, regular cellphones don't currently have the resolution to make reading enjoyable (though some do have ereaders), but "smart phones" do, and more and more smart phones are out each year.
All netbooks are "e readers" now that is correct. My girlfriend reads books (mostly checked out from the seattle public library) on her computer. She could just as easily do so on a netbook. She actually prefers the laptop to her phone, though reads on both.
That is one of my points actually, that ebook readers will be more popular if they aren't just ebook readers. The defining factor of an ebook reader, as was suggested, is NOT eink.
Hint: if they equate eink to ebooks they probably are new to ebooks.
Seriously... while I think the iPad is a poor choice in ebook readers it sure as hell isn't because it has a color screen that doesnt require an external light source to make it readable. In fact, my choice currently is an iPhone. Why? Because I have it with me ALL the time. I can read at night while my girlfriend is sleeping without having a light on and finally, it can do lots of other things besides being a book. Oh, and turning pages doesnt take an insanely long amount of time like e-ink does.
Also, the iPhone offers you many options in terms of ebook readers. Stanza is the one I use, but if you have a kindle, you can use the Kindle reader and read the books you have already "purchased" there. Built in web browser for online repositories.
I don't think it worked out so well for Michael Jackson... may he R.I.P.
Assuming you did nothing wrong while using last.fm, i.e you legally own the music you listen to. You could just represent yourself, since basically, it is obvious they have no proof of you doing something illegal if in fact you didn't do anything illegal. Like you said, if it looks like you might win they will drop the case. They do this enough times and it costs them a bunch of money to start the process. This is only useful for them to catch actual criminals, i.e. people who listen to music they downloaded illegally (oh the horror!!!), though I suspect (for the most part) they are really only concerned with people uploading music illegally.
And that gets back to the original comment's question, how will this work as proof of anything? If they already know you were sharing a copy of an album, say before it was released and could also prove that you listened to the song from your computer before the album was released... I could see that helping their case, though they would probably need more evidence.
I think you are describing cable television, and the answer is yes, they now make more money.
sony does it on the PSN, and they use regular dollar amounts... the trick is, you have to spend at least $5 (which you have noted). but the thing is, that works out WAY better for the consumer than the microsoft system since the majority of the games are over $5 and any remaining money in your wallet is just that... money, you know exactly what its worth.
the ONLY reason microsoft does this is for the exact reason described above... it isnt to avoid a 5 cent charge (it wouldnt be much more than that considering the volume they are doing them at, i know, i have set up payment systems before) its to get you to buy more and buy things you normally wouldnt (themes and picture packs...) because you already have the points in there. points arent money, its easier to spend them and not know what its actually costing you... its a marketing trick... it always has been and they are not the first to do such a thing.
i have also set up donation systems for non profits and also seen this sort of thing, one for a fairly high traffic site that processes a decent number of donations. while cvv2 checks help, in my experience even with cvv2 checks and address verification checks you still need to do things like track the number of attempted donations per N minutes for a particular ip address. blacklisting anything that doesnt pass the test for a day or two... i do a few other strange things with the form submission to keep the number down. its pretty crazy stuff as it very much looks as though its people hand typing in the information (1 every 30 to 45 seconds) and they clearly have the cvv number and address of the card being tested. pretty frightening stuff... your identity is being tested right now for a $1 donation.
perhaps you are unfamiliar with the difference between film and video. there can be as much of a difference between old movies as there is with new movies when put onto either format. the number of "pixels" (grains of silver halide) is way more than you get on a standard DVD (and really, way more than you get on an HD format) so moving an old movie onto a hi-def format gives you a much better quality than you would get if you dumped it onto standard DVD. Not to mention the fact that for playback on an HDTV set, especially 1080p, DVD has to upscale its content to fill the pixels. Upscaling makes things blurry.