Facebook may very well already be encoding its videos in H.264 (which is supported by Flash). In this case, all they need to do is to wrap the files into an MP4 container, with no transcoding necessary.
YouTube already supports this, and I imagine, will begin to do it by default in the near future.
The openness of the Android platform is what really is blowing me away.
Out of curiosity, are there any Android devs here who can comment on how easy/convenient the platform is to develop for?
App store shenanigans aside, the iPhone seems to be a rather nice platform to write software on. How does Android compare? Is the documentation good? Can most apps be written without a maze of external libraries?
(Genuine question here -- I don't own either, and have only developed for BlackBerry (ick))
Have you actually followed Al Franen's senate career? He's one of the more eloquent and civil senators serving today. He seems to take his senate career more seriously than some lifelong politicians do.
If anything, his career as a comedy writer has helped him get a pulse on the feelings of the electorate. A comedian needs to be perceptive of his audience, just like a politician should. In fact, the two jobs share a number of traits.
Yes, but minors aren't afforded full constitutional rights. There's a pretty long history of case law supporting this.
On the other hand, a law that allows police to detain "brown people" for not carrying papers is definitely unreasonable search and seizure (Catch 22: Police cannot determine who is illegal and who is not by pulling people off of the street, because natural-born citizens are not required to carry papers -- "obvious" indicators such as race or language don't provide probable cause, as the US already has a huge number of 2nd-generation immigrants, and no official national language).
You mean the loans that they paid off ahead of schedule, with interest?
Yeah. Big debacle there. If you want to complain about the recovery act, go right ahead. However, it's a bit foolish to single out the single most successful portion of the bill.
We gave loans to GM and the banks so that they could purge their toxic assets, and get back on their feet with the many legitimately-worthwhile portions of their respective businesses. So far, they've exceeded everybody's expectations, especially GM, which most of us had assumed to be moribund just a few months ago.
That's debatable. Minivans today more closely resemble the Renault Espace than the VW Van. Although the Dodge Caravan launched a few months before the Espace, and definitely had more of the VW Bus's 'pedigree' evident, its subsequent revisions made it resemble the Espace more and more closely.
You're looking at the past with rose-colored goggles. There were very few (if any) 21" CRTs that did 1600x1200 *well.* Most users ended up turning them down to 1280x1024.
You've got a point about the widescreen laptops -- it's not a great aspect ratio to work in on a small screen (although it does have the practical advantage of allowing the laptop to be shaped like a book, allowing it to fit more easily into backpacks and luggage). I'm pretty sure a lot of Netbooks are still 4:3. I lament the demise of Apple's 12" PowerBook -- best damn machine they ever made, and mine's still chugging along all these years later. The form factor is simply fantastic.
Print out a page of text with incrementally decreasing font sizes (or an eye chart).
Adjust the zoom level in your PDF reader so that the letters are the same physical size as the printed chart.
Now, which of the two is more legible? (Hint: The answer is always going to be the paper, even if you've got an awesome monitor, and a godawful printer)
This is also highly evident when holding an iPhone up next to a Droid or Nexus One. Even though the iPhone's multimedia capabilities are clearly better, the increased pixel density on the latest batch of Android phones makes them much more pleasant to use for everyday tasks, even when the fonts are the same physical "size." (This also makes the awful BlackBerry screens truly inexcusable, given that E-Mail is their "killer app." Those awesome keyboards seem rather silly, when you can only see a few lines of text at a time, and BlackBerry's UI designers don't seem to have ever considered the fact that their screens are tiny.)
The library went to a lot of trouble to prove that their records from the 18th century are probably a bit inaccurate. It could have been as simple as a star-struck librarian forgetting to update the register.
Maybe, but probably not. They found the rest of the set of books, minus the volumes that Washington borrowed. I suppose it could be a coincidence, but it would appear that Mr. Washington's estate owes the NYPL a great deal of money, and their book back.
1) Engadget and Gizmodo both stole phones!? 2) I won't deny that hype-building is something of a pastime for Apple, but this is distinctly not their way of doing things. 3) People walk around with camouflaged, non-functional engineering samples? 4) The design reflects current trends, but the seams are so, so, so incredibly un-apple-like. Also, would a metallic phone with an internal antenna even work?
Oh, cut the crap. The "big government" that you guys love to complain about didn't exist in 1914.
This could just as easily have happened in any other big city (in fact, it has at least once). NIMBYism doesn't have much hold in DC, primarily because the city has very little sovereignty of its own. It astonishes me to this day that the city managed to keep I-95 out of the city center.
The problem is that we didn't just have a vote for the government to take over health care. If we did, there might be some hope.
You're right. Instead, we had an election where we (overwhelmingly) voted for a party that touted HCR as a huge portion of its platform. Shame on them for following through on their promises!
I'm torn on this -- although multitasking was certainly there in Win9x, it was notoriously unstable.
On the other hand, MacOS classic wasn't exactly a bastion of stability either. The lack of multitasking became particularly conspicuous once OS9 came around.
Can we just agree to be happy that better operating systems have come around for both platforms?
That's not a solution for those of use who don't want to be constantly carrying around, swapping, recharging, and paying for spare batteries.
It's a shame that nobody even seems to want to compete with Apple in terms of battery life.
Like the GP mentioned -- it's hard to take any non-Apple laptops seriously these days, given just how superior their hardware is. Even if you can't easily swap the batteries, it doesn't really matter, because they already last more than twice as long as the competition.
The non-removable battery isn't a Jobs-ian lockdown either. The design allows Apple to extrude a lithium-polymer battery to fit into all of the nooks and crannies of the computer's chassis, making more efficient use of the space inside the laptop, and therefore increasing capacity. If you find that it no longer holds a charge (unlikely, since Li-Pol batteries are supposedly more resilient than normal Li-ion cells) replacement takes only a few minutes with a screwdriver.
(Long Disclaimer: I'm not an Apple fanboi per se. I disagree with their current politics. However, I'm a (very) satisfied owner of a 5-year-old 12" Powerbook that has served me incredibly well. Tough as nails, tiny, full-featured, and pretty fast back in its day. Few laptops today can make that claim. You'd be crazy to contest that Apple are the market leaders for laptop design, and have been for quite some time.)
Seriously -- I was under the impression that On2 had kept VP8 under wraps. The demos on On2's site are nice, but hardly revolutionary. x264 have made some great strides with H.264 quality since the original encoder was released too.
That said, VP8's killer feature seems to be that compression artifacts look a whole lot more "natural" than any other codec I've seen.
Although I'll grant you that Apple doesn't have a monopoly, putting them in the same market segment as RIM is disingenuous at best.
AFAIK, there are no legitimate competitors to RIM's BES, giving them a nearly 100% market share in their segment.
In the consumer segment, there's Apple, Android, Palm, Blackberry, and other phones of above-average intelligence. It's actually a fairly competitive market at the moment.
Apple's behavior here is pretty rotten (they finally passed Hanlon's razor with these new restrictions), although they're not a monopoly. IMHO, we need some consumer protection laws to prevent Apple/Sony from arbitrarily locking down their devices. Their current behavior is definitely wrong, and definitely against the public interest -- however, it's also almost definitely legal.
Actually, this could have some bad effects -- it has the potential to fragment the online video market even further.
There's now no way in hell that Mozilla will ever support h.264. Previously, h264 support for Firefox was basically inevitable because there was no way in hell that Theora was going to overtake h264 as the dominant format.
That said, it's nice that we've got an open codec that's (supposedly) actually decent.
A year ago it was reported [computerworld.com] that H-1B workers OUTNUMBERED unemployed techies!
That's a disingenuous argument.
1) Could the legions of unemployed workers do the jobs of the H-1B workers? Some, perhaps. Definitely not all. 2) H-1B workers that get laid off don't get counted anywhere. They're just sent home. 3) There are lots of H-1B workers that came to the US back when there was a shortage of available talent, and are in the middle of their "stay." How exactly would you propose rectifying this situation? 4) There are plenty of Americans working abroad. I don't have the numbers handy, but IIRC, America is only barely a net importer of talent.
But there is an explanation now - that's what TFA is about. Jobs has effectively admitted that this is strictly about Apple controlling the user interface, and not permitting cross-platform development.
Fixed that for you. Although the end result is essentially the same, it's all the more maddening that Jobs actually does have 25+ years of history to back him up on this.
Cross-platform UIs suck. If Apple has one selling point to its name, it's that its products generally have a consistent and well-planned user interface.
I'm not agreeing with Apple here -- quite the contrary. However, it's frustrating because Steve actually has a legitimate point to make. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I have yet to see a decent cross-platform UI model -- somewhat ironically, Adobe Air is the only thing I've seen that even comes close.
The problem with IE Tab (and it's variants) is that it just embeds the IE rendering engine inside a Firefox tab. You might as well just launch IE, since, indirectly, that's what you are doing anyway.
Right. It allows you to use legacy IE-only applications without interrupting your workflow. I use it for a few sites on my intranet, and it's a genuine time-saver.
Most importantly, this doesn't actually help anybody that's not using Windows.
Right. But if you're an organization looking to achieve ISO-9001 compliance, odds are you're in an all-windows environment anyway. Like I mentioned, non-IE browsers still do work, and support should get better in the next version or two.
Slashdot Mirror
Facebook may very well already be encoding its videos in H.264 (which is supported by Flash). In this case, all they need to do is to wrap the files into an MP4 container, with no transcoding necessary.
YouTube already supports this, and I imagine, will begin to do it by default in the near future.
The openness of the Android platform is what really is blowing me away.
Out of curiosity, are there any Android devs here who can comment on how easy/convenient the platform is to develop for?
App store shenanigans aside, the iPhone seems to be a rather nice platform to write software on. How does Android compare? Is the documentation good? Can most apps be written without a maze of external libraries?
(Genuine question here -- I don't own either, and have only developed for BlackBerry (ick))
Have you actually followed Al Franen's senate career? He's one of the more eloquent and civil senators serving today. He seems to take his senate career more seriously than some lifelong politicians do.
If anything, his career as a comedy writer has helped him get a pulse on the feelings of the electorate. A comedian needs to be perceptive of his audience, just like a politician should. In fact, the two jobs share a number of traits.
Yes, but minors aren't afforded full constitutional rights. There's a pretty long history of case law supporting this.
On the other hand, a law that allows police to detain "brown people" for not carrying papers is definitely unreasonable search and seizure (Catch 22: Police cannot determine who is illegal and who is not by pulling people off of the street, because natural-born citizens are not required to carry papers -- "obvious" indicators such as race or language don't provide probable cause, as the US already has a huge number of 2nd-generation immigrants, and no official national language).
You mean the loans that they paid off ahead of schedule, with interest?
Yeah. Big debacle there. If you want to complain about the recovery act, go right ahead. However, it's a bit foolish to single out the single most successful portion of the bill.
We gave loans to GM and the banks so that they could purge their toxic assets, and get back on their feet with the many legitimately-worthwhile portions of their respective businesses. So far, they've exceeded everybody's expectations, especially GM, which most of us had assumed to be moribund just a few months ago.
You could have just as easily written that without the snark, especially given that you had a few decent points in there.
Yeah, but Windows Mobile isn't much better.
"It looks like you're trying to drive to Bethesda. Would you like help writing a letter?"
That's debatable. Minivans today more closely resemble the Renault Espace than the VW Van. Although the Dodge Caravan launched a few months before the Espace, and definitely had more of the VW Bus's 'pedigree' evident, its subsequent revisions made it resemble the Espace more and more closely.
You're looking at the past with rose-colored goggles. There were very few (if any) 21" CRTs that did 1600x1200 *well.* Most users ended up turning them down to 1280x1024.
You've got a point about the widescreen laptops -- it's not a great aspect ratio to work in on a small screen (although it does have the practical advantage of allowing the laptop to be shaped like a book, allowing it to fit more easily into backpacks and luggage). I'm pretty sure a lot of Netbooks are still 4:3. I lament the demise of Apple's 12" PowerBook -- best damn machine they ever made, and mine's still chugging along all these years later. The form factor is simply fantastic.
Print out a page of text with incrementally decreasing font sizes (or an eye chart).
Adjust the zoom level in your PDF reader so that the letters are the same physical size as the printed chart.
Now, which of the two is more legible?
(Hint: The answer is always going to be the paper, even if you've got an awesome monitor, and a godawful printer)
This is also highly evident when holding an iPhone up next to a Droid or Nexus One. Even though the iPhone's multimedia capabilities are clearly better, the increased pixel density on the latest batch of Android phones makes them much more pleasant to use for everyday tasks, even when the fonts are the same physical "size." (This also makes the awful BlackBerry screens truly inexcusable, given that E-Mail is their "killer app." Those awesome keyboards seem rather silly, when you can only see a few lines of text at a time, and BlackBerry's UI designers don't seem to have ever considered the fact that their screens are tiny.)
Also wrong. The drug halted metastasis in mice. For all we know, it could kill every human who comes into contact with it.
Hence, trials.
The library went to a lot of trouble to prove that their records from the 18th century are probably a bit inaccurate. It could have been as simple as a star-struck librarian forgetting to update the register.
Maybe, but probably not. They found the rest of the set of books, minus the volumes that Washington borrowed. I suppose it could be a coincidence, but it would appear that Mr. Washington's estate owes the NYPL a great deal of money, and their book back.
Too much about this just doesn't add up.
1) Engadget and Gizmodo both stole phones!?
2) I won't deny that hype-building is something of a pastime for Apple, but this is distinctly not their way of doing things.
3) People walk around with camouflaged, non-functional engineering samples?
4) The design reflects current trends, but the seams are so, so, so incredibly un-apple-like. Also, would a metallic phone with an internal antenna even work?
You missed the part where this is the Dali Clock. The iPhone needs to melt in order for the program to be completely functional.
Oh, cut the crap. The "big government" that you guys love to complain about didn't exist in 1914.
This could just as easily have happened in any other big city (in fact, it has at least once). NIMBYism doesn't have much hold in DC, primarily because the city has very little sovereignty of its own. It astonishes me to this day that the city managed to keep I-95 out of the city center.
The problem is that we didn't just have a vote for the government to take over health care. If we did, there might be some hope.
You're right. Instead, we had an election where we (overwhelmingly) voted for a party that touted HCR as a huge portion of its platform. Shame on them for following through on their promises!
Very few politicians live in that part of town.
I'm torn on this -- although multitasking was certainly there in Win9x, it was notoriously unstable.
On the other hand, MacOS classic wasn't exactly a bastion of stability either. The lack of multitasking became particularly conspicuous once OS9 came around.
Can we just agree to be happy that better operating systems have come around for both platforms?
That's not a solution for those of use who don't want to be constantly carrying around, swapping, recharging, and paying for spare batteries.
It's a shame that nobody even seems to want to compete with Apple in terms of battery life.
Like the GP mentioned -- it's hard to take any non-Apple laptops seriously these days, given just how superior their hardware is. Even if you can't easily swap the batteries, it doesn't really matter, because they already last more than twice as long as the competition.
The non-removable battery isn't a Jobs-ian lockdown either. The design allows Apple to extrude a lithium-polymer battery to fit into all of the nooks and crannies of the computer's chassis, making more efficient use of the space inside the laptop, and therefore increasing capacity. If you find that it no longer holds a charge (unlikely, since Li-Pol batteries are supposedly more resilient than normal Li-ion cells) replacement takes only a few minutes with a screwdriver.
(Long Disclaimer: I'm not an Apple fanboi per se. I disagree with their current politics. However, I'm a (very) satisfied owner of a 5-year-old 12" Powerbook that has served me incredibly well. Tough as nails, tiny, full-featured, and pretty fast back in its day. Few laptops today can make that claim. You'd be crazy to contest that Apple are the market leaders for laptop design, and have been for quite some time.)
[citation-needed]
Seriously -- I was under the impression that On2 had kept VP8 under wraps. The demos on On2's site are nice, but hardly revolutionary. x264 have made some great strides with H.264 quality since the original encoder was released too.
That said, VP8's killer feature seems to be that compression artifacts look a whole lot more "natural" than any other codec I've seen.
It's better, but is it that much better?
Although I'll grant you that Apple doesn't have a monopoly, putting them in the same market segment as RIM is disingenuous at best.
AFAIK, there are no legitimate competitors to RIM's BES, giving them a nearly 100% market share in their segment.
In the consumer segment, there's Apple, Android, Palm, Blackberry, and other phones of above-average intelligence. It's actually a fairly competitive market at the moment.
Apple's behavior here is pretty rotten (they finally passed Hanlon's razor with these new restrictions), although they're not a monopoly. IMHO, we need some consumer protection laws to prevent Apple/Sony from arbitrarily locking down their devices. Their current behavior is definitely wrong, and definitely against the public interest -- however, it's also almost definitely legal.
Actually, this could have some bad effects -- it has the potential to fragment the online video market even further.
There's now no way in hell that Mozilla will ever support h.264. Previously, h264 support for Firefox was basically inevitable because there was no way in hell that Theora was going to overtake h264 as the dominant format.
That said, it's nice that we've got an open codec that's (supposedly) actually decent.
A year ago it was reported [computerworld.com] that H-1B workers OUTNUMBERED unemployed techies!
That's a disingenuous argument.
1) Could the legions of unemployed workers do the jobs of the H-1B workers? Some, perhaps. Definitely not all.
2) H-1B workers that get laid off don't get counted anywhere. They're just sent home.
3) There are lots of H-1B workers that came to the US back when there was a shortage of available talent, and are in the middle of their "stay." How exactly would you propose rectifying this situation?
4) There are plenty of Americans working abroad. I don't have the numbers handy, but IIRC, America is only barely a net importer of talent.
But there is an explanation now - that's what TFA is about. Jobs has effectively admitted that this is strictly about Apple controlling the user interface, and not permitting cross-platform development.
Fixed that for you. Although the end result is essentially the same, it's all the more maddening that Jobs actually does have 25+ years of history to back him up on this.
Cross-platform UIs suck. If Apple has one selling point to its name, it's that its products generally have a consistent and well-planned user interface.
I'm not agreeing with Apple here -- quite the contrary. However, it's frustrating because Steve actually has a legitimate point to make. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I have yet to see a decent cross-platform UI model -- somewhat ironically, Adobe Air is the only thing I've seen that even comes close.
The problem with IE Tab (and it's variants) is that it just embeds the IE rendering engine inside a Firefox tab. You might as well just launch IE, since, indirectly, that's what you are doing anyway.
Right. It allows you to use legacy IE-only applications without interrupting your workflow. I use it for a few sites on my intranet, and it's a genuine time-saver.
Most importantly, this doesn't actually help anybody that's not using Windows.
Right. But if you're an organization looking to achieve ISO-9001 compliance, odds are you're in an all-windows environment anyway. Like I mentioned, non-IE browsers still do work, and support should get better in the next version or two.