Unfortunately, you're exactly right. From the blog:
(sic)"It’s stated intention is to allow Flash banner ads to execute on the iPad and iPhone, but there are plenty of other interesting applications (such as news site infographics)."
There would be a lot of money to be made in cajoling those flash-based banner ads onto iPad / iPhone. Yep, lots o' money...
Very impressive! However, given Flash's performance issues even when compiled natively for mobile devices, this is more of a proof of concept then something usable.
Note that this differs between signed and unsigned apps. Unsigned apps result in more notifications to the user, and RIM doesn't actually approve applications like Apple does. So anyone can sign unlimited apps for $50.
A long time ago, when Project Gutenberg texts were really the only "ebooks" one could find, I had the idea of creating a separate data file that would accompany the.txt files. My idea was to leave the actual content of the book in plaintext for maximum portability, but allow fancy formatting (pagination, font, links, etc) via a separate binary file which would reference the.txt by character position. The key point is that the original Gutenberg texts would not be touched.
If edits were made to just the.txt without updating the formatting (which would mainly consist of fixing typos or OCR errors), then the binary could be "updated" by doing a diff between the old and new.txt files and offsetting the formatting positions appropriately. The beauty of it is that the binary could be updated independently of the content.
I foresaw another group of volunteers, essentially residing above the Gutenberg group, that would format the content to match specific editions of the books. Multiple formatting could accompany a single.txt, allowing the reader to select the edition they wanted.
Anyway I thought that sort of scheme would be the ultimate ebook format, but since it obviously isn't DRM friendly it would never fly in this day and age.
Can someone explain how using a debit or credit card to purchase an iPad prevents the buyer from reselling it? And how is that considered the "black market"?
"Why don't we have a government coding office? We have a government printing office."
That comparison is ridiculous. A proper comparison would be "We engineer our own government printing presses and copiers, why don't we engineer our own software?" But of course the government doesn't engineer printing presses...
Now that I've thought about this more, if Apple were really, REALLY, clever, they would plant fakes - perhaps prototypes, or even specially created units - just to lead everyone off track. The planting of a second unit exactly matching the first would only reinforce the illusion.
So these are either the real units, or they are a strategic deception by Apple.
The timing on this was almost perfect for me. My brother came in from out of state last week, and he's a big fan of MechWarrior 4. So I installed on my laptop from his discs and we did the disc-swapping trick so we could play multiplayer on my lan. Anyway, I searched for the info on the game and saw Microsoft finally approved it for free release last month, but it hadn't been released yet. One week sooner would have been pretty amazing timing for me...
A $99 iPad would be a true game-changer, and I think something along those lines is the next step.
I'm not an Apple historian, and this is an actual question, but has Apple ever sold a product at anything but a premium price? Any Apple product I can think over the last decade has cost far more than the median price of equivalent hardware by Apple's competitors.
iPod Touches aren't $99, and they've been on the market for a number of years. Plus, if the iPad was $99, what would an iPod Touch sell for? $69? Never, ever, ever going to happen. I could see the iPad maybe selling for $399 eventually, but I would be very surprised if it ever sold for less.
The summary is wrong. It is the founder of Virgin Atlantic that wants compensation, not the government. Has anyone ever heard of a government wanting to dish out compensation?
When I was a kid (like not even 10) "In Search of..." used to come on in the evening. All Nimoy had to do was start narrating and I would be creeped out immediately. Didn't matter if he was talking about Bigfoot or aliens or The Bermuda Triangle, he scared the crap out of me. I'd probably laugh if I watched that show now, but back then when I was little, it was practically traumatizing. Am I the only one that crawled down a little deeper under the covers at night after watching that show?
Sure. I have a just-turned-2 year old. Legally he cannot be placed in the front seat (even with a proper carrier), so his car seat is in the row of seats behind me, where I cannot even physically touch him. I cannot read to him, or play with him, or do anything but say words out of my mouth. Last week we made a 14 hour round trip (and Mom couldn't go), and I was very, very thankful that he enjoys watching Curious George and Elmo on the integrated entertainment system, because otherwise he would have been miserable - bored out of his mind, screaming his head off, and stressing me out and taking my concentration away from driving.
We stopped and grabbed a couple DVDs out of a RedBox for a buck a piece, and returned them the next day at our local RedBox when we got home.
We even have a TV and DVD player at our house too. More than one, believe it or not.
We have two vehicles - one with an integrated dual-screen entertainment system (screens fold down from the ceiling), and another vehicle with a $100 DVD player strapped to the back of the seat (actually came with two screens, but the wires going between them got in the way too much so we only use one screen).
Let me say there is no comparison. Having an integrated system is so much better it's not even funny. There are audio IR blasters integrated into the ceiling which allow 4 people to listen to the movie simultaneously via wireless headphones. If the movie is piped through the car's sound system then it is in full surround through the Bose audio system. My HTC Touch Pro 2 has video out, so I can plug it into the car and play Youtube, encoded videos, etc, right through the integrated system. Wired headphone jacks throughout, DVD controls on the ceiling in addition to standard IR remote. And the best part is the screens fold flat into the ceiling and totally disappear. Out of sight, out of mind, can't be stolen, scratched or have crap spilled on them.
The BEST option, if money was no object, would be to purchase a vehicle with a fully integrated entertainment system, then add an "automotive" PC that can play back through that system as a secondary display (with the primary display being a touch screen in the front).
What Jobs is talking about here is that he doesn't want a scenario like the Windows version of iTunes, which has an entirely different GUI and widget set than the host OS in which it is running. Applications like that seem totally out of place, and are confusing to users because they depart so drastically from the GUI design of the host OS - for example, not having the standard Windows title bar. Apple would never release a fish-out-of-water application like that for non-OS X platforms, so why should they allow other developers to do the same on the platforms they control? What a bunch of hypocrites (and in a self-serving way I'm quite happy that Apple isn't allowing CS4 as a toolset for developing iPhone apps - so for now I'd like to thank them for this decision).
Mozilla will certainly continue the good fight against h.264 for some time
I think this is part of what the original story is talking about. Survival mode isn't making a noble stand for an idealistic cause. You practically said it is a losing battle (and I agree), so the most important thing is for Mozilla to not lose any market share just to put up a "good fight". It's more important for Firefox to stay a viable product, even at the risk of compromising here and there, so it can influence other aspects of the future browser market and standards.
The thing that concerns me the most is the issue with HTML5 video codecs. Microsoft, Google and Apple all want Flash to die. Apple's latest licensing change with iPhone OS 4.0 is a full-out declaration of war against Adobe.
HTML5, SVG, hyper-optimized Javascript and the embedded video tag will make Flash redundant. If Firefox cannot stay on the bleeding edge of these advancements then it does not stand a chance.
So I suggest less bells and whistles (skinning / themes, for example), and more concentration on HTML5 - especially the video codec licensing / patent issue.
There are a number of issues that have some scientists skeptical that the newly found Australopithecus Sediba is our ancestor. One is that Homo habilis is significantly older (by around half a million years), and is more human-like than Australopithecus Sediba. The other is that the anatomy simply does not fall into line with the other specimens. The length of the arms, etc, seem a step backwards. Perhaps it was a parallel branch that died out.
It's hard to argue this is the ancestor of Homo when it's occurring much later than the earliest members of the genus Homo by half a million years," said anthropologist Brian Richmond of George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
Sure Apple allows Java. You just include the JRE built into your app, which loads your static java bytecodes. As long as you don't retrieve any additional java or bytecodes dynamically then you're fine.
The question is how small can a JRE be made, and is it possible to strip down the java libraries to only what is needed by the application to make them as small as possible?
Has anyone done this? I don't know, but technically it is allowed. My game engine includes the lua scripting engine, and although it is technically possible for us to dynamically retrieve new lua sources from the net (like we do images, data and audio), we don't in order to adhere to Apple's requirements (in fact, there's no way they can even test for that, because we could simply not distribute lua code from our server until AFTER the app goes live).
Many other iPhone apps and games include various scripting languages, in all flavors imaginable (JIT, precompiled bytecodes, true scripting), so technically Java is no different.
No, this is legitimate. If you pause the video you'll see perfectly crisp ANSI chars, and not just an encoded video of ANSI rendering. Same thing with full screen. On my HD monitor it is perfectly crisp while playing. Also, both CPU cores are literally idle playing this video.
Of course Youtube would have to pre-process and "encode" the video into ANSI first - this isn't some video rendering mode of the player, but the actual stream is ANSI. It is very doubtful Youtube will actually go to to the trouble of encoding millions of videos in this way.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, you're exactly right. From the blog:
(sic)"It’s stated intention is to allow Flash banner ads to execute on the iPad and iPhone, but there are plenty of other interesting applications (such as news site infographics)."
There would be a lot of money to be made in cajoling those flash-based banner ads onto iPad / iPhone. Yep, lots o' money...
Very impressive! However, given Flash's performance issues even when compiled natively for mobile devices, this is more of a proof of concept then something usable.
Note that this differs between signed and unsigned apps. Unsigned apps result in more notifications to the user, and RIM doesn't actually approve applications like Apple does. So anyone can sign unlimited apps for $50.
A long time ago, when Project Gutenberg texts were really the only "ebooks" one could find, I had the idea of creating a separate data file that would accompany the .txt files. My idea was to leave the actual content of the book in plaintext for maximum portability, but allow fancy formatting (pagination, font, links, etc) via a separate binary file which would reference the .txt by character position. The key point is that the original Gutenberg texts would not be touched.
If edits were made to just the .txt without updating the formatting (which would mainly consist of fixing typos or OCR errors), then the binary could be "updated" by doing a diff between the old and new .txt files and offsetting the formatting positions appropriately. The beauty of it is that the binary could be updated independently of the content.
I foresaw another group of volunteers, essentially residing above the Gutenberg group, that would format the content to match specific editions of the books. Multiple formatting could accompany a single .txt, allowing the reader to select the edition they wanted.
Anyway I thought that sort of scheme would be the ultimate ebook format, but since it obviously isn't DRM friendly it would never fly in this day and age.
I would think that the "companies" doing lucrative business selling exploits would not be voluntarily participating in a survey of this sort.
Can someone explain how using a debit or credit card to purchase an iPad prevents the buyer from reselling it? And how is that considered the "black market"?
Since they made up an excuse before they were caught they're in the clear on this one.
"Why don't we have a government coding office? We have a government printing office."
That comparison is ridiculous. A proper comparison would be "We engineer our own government printing presses and copiers, why don't we engineer our own software?" But of course the government doesn't engineer printing presses...
Now that I've thought about this more, if Apple were really, REALLY, clever, they would plant fakes - perhaps prototypes, or even specially created units - just to lead everyone off track. The planting of a second unit exactly matching the first would only reinforce the illusion.
So these are either the real units, or they are a strategic deception by Apple.
Looks exactly like the phone Gizmodo got their hands on, except this one has a SIM slot on the right. I tend to believe these are the real deal.
"would have to tread even more lightly as it pushes farther and farther offshore in search of energy"
Is there a correlation between the amount of methane hydrates and the distance from shore?
modfunny 318230
The timing on this was almost perfect for me. My brother came in from out of state last week, and he's a big fan of MechWarrior 4. So I installed on my laptop from his discs and we did the disc-swapping trick so we could play multiplayer on my lan. Anyway, I searched for the info on the game and saw Microsoft finally approved it for free release last month, but it hadn't been released yet. One week sooner would have been pretty amazing timing for me...
A $99 iPad would be a true game-changer, and I think something along those lines is the next step.
I'm not an Apple historian, and this is an actual question, but has Apple ever sold a product at anything but a premium price? Any Apple product I can think over the last decade has cost far more than the median price of equivalent hardware by Apple's competitors.
iPod Touches aren't $99, and they've been on the market for a number of years. Plus, if the iPad was $99, what would an iPod Touch sell for? $69? Never, ever, ever going to happen. I could see the iPad maybe selling for $399 eventually, but I would be very surprised if it ever sold for less.
The summary is wrong. It is the founder of Virgin Atlantic that wants compensation, not the government. Has anyone ever heard of a government wanting to dish out compensation?
When I was a kid (like not even 10) "In Search of..." used to come on in the evening. All Nimoy had to do was start narrating and I would be creeped out immediately. Didn't matter if he was talking about Bigfoot or aliens or The Bermuda Triangle, he scared the crap out of me. I'd probably laugh if I watched that show now, but back then when I was little, it was practically traumatizing. Am I the only one that crawled down a little deeper under the covers at night after watching that show?
Sure. I have a just-turned-2 year old. Legally he cannot be placed in the front seat (even with a proper carrier), so his car seat is in the row of seats behind me, where I cannot even physically touch him. I cannot read to him, or play with him, or do anything but say words out of my mouth. Last week we made a 14 hour round trip (and Mom couldn't go), and I was very, very thankful that he enjoys watching Curious George and Elmo on the integrated entertainment system, because otherwise he would have been miserable - bored out of his mind, screaming his head off, and stressing me out and taking my concentration away from driving.
We stopped and grabbed a couple DVDs out of a RedBox for a buck a piece, and returned them the next day at our local RedBox when we got home.
We even have a TV and DVD player at our house too. More than one, believe it or not.
We have two vehicles - one with an integrated dual-screen entertainment system (screens fold down from the ceiling), and another vehicle with a $100 DVD player strapped to the back of the seat (actually came with two screens, but the wires going between them got in the way too much so we only use one screen).
Let me say there is no comparison. Having an integrated system is so much better it's not even funny. There are audio IR blasters integrated into the ceiling which allow 4 people to listen to the movie simultaneously via wireless headphones. If the movie is piped through the car's sound system then it is in full surround through the Bose audio system. My HTC Touch Pro 2 has video out, so I can plug it into the car and play Youtube, encoded videos, etc, right through the integrated system. Wired headphone jacks throughout, DVD controls on the ceiling in addition to standard IR remote.
And the best part is the screens fold flat into the ceiling and totally disappear. Out of sight, out of mind, can't be stolen, scratched or have crap spilled on them.
The BEST option, if money was no object, would be to purchase a vehicle with a fully integrated entertainment system, then add an "automotive" PC that can play back through that system as a secondary display (with the primary display being a touch screen in the front).
What Jobs is talking about here is that he doesn't want a scenario like the Windows version of iTunes, which has an entirely different GUI and widget set than the host OS in which it is running. Applications like that seem totally out of place, and are confusing to users because they depart so drastically from the GUI design of the host OS - for example, not having the standard Windows title bar. Apple would never release a fish-out-of-water application like that for non-OS X platforms, so why should they allow other developers to do the same on the platforms they control? What a bunch of hypocrites (and in a self-serving way I'm quite happy that Apple isn't allowing CS4 as a toolset for developing iPhone apps - so for now I'd like to thank them for this decision).
Mozilla will certainly continue the good fight against h.264 for some time
I think this is part of what the original story is talking about. Survival mode isn't making a noble stand for an idealistic cause. You practically said it is a losing battle (and I agree), so the most important thing is for Mozilla to not lose any market share just to put up a "good fight". It's more important for Firefox to stay a viable product, even at the risk of compromising here and there, so it can influence other aspects of the future browser market and standards.
The thing that concerns me the most is the issue with HTML5 video codecs. Microsoft, Google and Apple all want Flash to die. Apple's latest licensing change with iPhone OS 4.0 is a full-out declaration of war against Adobe.
HTML5, SVG, hyper-optimized Javascript and the embedded video tag will make Flash redundant. If Firefox cannot stay on the bleeding edge of these advancements then it does not stand a chance.
So I suggest less bells and whistles (skinning / themes, for example), and more concentration on HTML5 - especially the video codec licensing / patent issue.
There are a number of issues that have some scientists skeptical that the newly found Australopithecus Sediba is our ancestor. One is that Homo habilis is significantly older (by around half a million years), and is more human-like than Australopithecus Sediba. The other is that the anatomy simply does not fall into line with the other specimens. The length of the arms, etc, seem a step backwards. Perhaps it was a parallel branch that died out.
It's hard to argue this is the ancestor of Homo when it's occurring much later than the earliest members of the genus Homo by half a million years," said anthropologist Brian Richmond of George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
National Geographic
Sure Apple allows Java. You just include the JRE built into your app, which loads your static java bytecodes. As long as you don't retrieve any additional java or bytecodes dynamically then you're fine.
The question is how small can a JRE be made, and is it possible to strip down the java libraries to only what is needed by the application to make them as small as possible?
Has anyone done this? I don't know, but technically it is allowed. My game engine includes the lua scripting engine, and although it is technically possible for us to dynamically retrieve new lua sources from the net (like we do images, data and audio), we don't in order to adhere to Apple's requirements (in fact, there's no way they can even test for that, because we could simply not distribute lua code from our server until AFTER the app goes live).
Many other iPhone apps and games include various scripting languages, in all flavors imaginable (JIT, precompiled bytecodes, true scripting), so technically Java is no different.
And by the way, could we let the "fixed that for you" meme die? It's rude, and it's getting old.
Did it died?
No, this is legitimate. If you pause the video you'll see perfectly crisp ANSI chars, and not just an encoded video of ANSI rendering. Same thing with full screen. On my HD monitor it is perfectly crisp while playing. Also, both CPU cores are literally idle playing this video.
Of course Youtube would have to pre-process and "encode" the video into ANSI first - this isn't some video rendering mode of the player, but the actual stream is ANSI. It is very doubtful Youtube will actually go to to the trouble of encoding millions of videos in this way.