What would laying off wireline and other legacy installers have to do with the Time Warner acquisition? What would it have to do with anything other than, I dunno, LEGACY TELCO STUFF IS DYING.
Ars is not giving us a straight story - they say on one hand that video will be throttled to 10Mbps, and on the other that it will be throttled to 480p on phones and 720p on tablets.
For starters, they won't know what resolution the video is if it's coming across HTTPS (which more and more is). And if they're just going on bandwidth and capping it at 10Mbps, that's not going to have a huge effect, because you can get a solid 1080 HD stream in 5Mbps using H.264, and you can get a pretty decent 4K stream under 10Mbps with h.265.
Here's a pretty good summary by someone I've known for several decades, who practically invented the organic "business", and was a grower for WFM up until this year:
"I've had a couple of days to digest Amazon's hostile takeover of Whole Foods, and despite what organic boosters and corporate shills may say, this takeover is probably a very good marker for the end of an era.
As an agronomist and farmer I have always attempted to build organic certification as a marketing tool for the most agronomically-responsible growers, equally dedicated to land-care and to superior-quality food for the people eating the food we produce. In the early days the processors were *allies*, looking to expand markets for farmers.
Back in 1986 the first corporate player, and a small one at that, attempted to co-opt the term "organic" for his own shady marketing. I was able to scare him off with a couple of 25$ lawyer's "cease and desist" letters, but like the first cockroach, I knew there were more.
By 1993 the battle was fully engaged. Corporate players in the organic market -- at this point nearly all of them independent and small -- pushed for government standardization and control of organic certification, Here's the key thing... those standards were to be a ceiling, as well as a floor. Nobody would be allowed to market one sort of organic certification as any better than any other. No higher standards allowed.
It took until 2003 to put it all in place, and it is little surprise that the rampant buyouts and corporate concentration in processed organic foods began at that point. Some fifteen years later essentially *zero* independent organic processors remain.
What's more, back 20 years ago total organic sales (USA) were about 8 Billion dollars, of which organic farmers garnered about half. These days organic sales are nearly 50 billion dollars, of which organic farmers (and there are a lot more of them now) receive perhaps 6 Billion dollars. The corporate profits from the word "organic" are astounding. The consumers are wishful suckers. I have inspected many hundreds of processing operations for certification, and have a tremendously good idea of what a small percentage of the consumer price is related to ingredients. I'm talking low single digits of retail price. The rest of the markup is captured by corporate players.
Whole Foods hung on for a long time as an independent player, but were blind-sided by a couple of slick New York hedge-fund sharks who quietly bought up enough shares to exert effective control. Typically that's 10 percent of shares. Founder John Mackey last week publicly called the two of them "bastards", but it was too late.
There are many possible places this all can go, none of them good. As but one example, Amazon has just patented a system [Slashdot covered this 2 days ago ] which will not only track any individual customer's movement in their stores, and not only link to that customer's personal demographics, but will also force all that customer's internet activity to go through the store's wifi and blocking -- key part of the patent -- any attempts to comparison shop using any device whatever.
I devoted my entire career to building an agronomically-sound organic industry, particularly at the level of the well-managed family farm. I lost. The organic premium was intended to compensate *growers* for the extra effort required to care properly for the land. These days the entire market value of the word "organic" is being liquidated and monetized by a handful of huge corporations.
With a very few exceptions -- Organic Valley dairy products chief amongst them -- it is now quite simply a waste of your money to purchase organic anything, especially if it's a processed food. You pay dollars more and the farmer sees a couple of cents.
Do not be suckered in by an organic label any longer, except when you buy direct from farmers you know and trust."
They overpaid for a company that was already in trouble. The hedge fund stockholders pulled the same move with WFM that Bass Pro did with Cabela's, which is effectively a sophisticated Pump & Dump scam - run the stock price down, pick up more shares, make it an attractive takeover target, find a willing buyer, and as soon as the stock shoots up, unload at a huge profit, and leave everyone else holding the bag.
They've already laid off thousands of workers in the last couple of years, and not backfilled many more who left voluntarily. WFM was in serious trouble, and Amazon may have overpaid for it.
... Is the biggest fscking scam/joke of any layoff process. That's about as useful as getting a free year of "Credit monitoring" when yet another company is sloppy with your credit card data.
1300VA Smart-UPS, Dell T110, Dell R210, Dell Optiplex 790 (Plex media server), Couple of Dell CS23. Network is Motorola SBR, HP T5740 running pfSense, Aruba IAP-225 (802.11ac), HP 2915 10-port PoE switch, Ubiquiti PicoStation feeding into Ubiquiti toughswitch to remotely connect printer and Ooma for home phone. Office phone is Yealink T38G.
Also have a couple of servers offsite in real datacenters and on EC2 and Azure.
I too have had really bad results with IPv6 (TunnelBroker) when connecting to anything Google. You would think that Google of all companies would have their IPv6 poop in a group.
Who are you saying is "against" HTML5? DASH-IF? It's a complementary technology, not a competing one. There's no "contractual" issue here. Netflix hasn't switched to DASH until very recently because the technology hasn't been fully developed until very recently. There certainly wouldn't be a contractual obligation for members of the forum to use non-DASH technologies, that would be absurd.
DASH (which, since you're unclear on it, stands for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) is an emerging industry standard way of transporting streaming media. As I mentioned earlier, HTML5 is not a streaming standard, it's a browser rendering standard. DASH is a streaming standard that is currently emerging, which uses HTML5 (and associated CSS and Javascript) to render the video in the browser. The members of DASH-IF are the ones developing and implementing the standard. Development of DASH is one of the main reasons Microsoft backed away from Silverlight. Other players in DASH-IF deal with transport (such as Akamai, Cisco) and encoding (Adobe, Dolby, DTS).
Correct, in order to use RTMP, you must use Flash (as I mentioned in the original post - HTML5 doesn't preclude using a Flash object). There are players such as JWPlayer that do an excellent job of using HTML5 media objects if supported and falling back to Flash if they're not, in order to provide a seamless experience to the end user (but Android is still a mess).
DASH is going a long way towards fixing the mess, but it's still very early in that lifecycle. One of the really neat things about it is that the manifest makes available a list of what video and audio segments are available (and what codecs, bitrates, etc), and the client picks what it needs based on its capabilities. If a DASH manifest makes available a 2.0 stereo audio track at 128Kbps, a 5.1 surround track, a 7.1 surround track, and a 22.1 surround track (don't laugh, 22.1 is part of the upcoming 8K spec), along with a 4K video track and various resolutions and bitrates below that, it will pick whatever's appropriate for your hardware - playing on a mobile device over headphones? Player will pick whichever video track is appropriate for your screen/bandwidth and the 2.0 stereo. Output via HDMI from the same device? Switch the audio over to the surround. And so forth.
"HTML5" in the context of streaming simply refers to placing a media object on a page without benefit of external players such as Flash or Silverlight. The HTML5 spec quite intentionally does not specify codecs or transports in order to be flexible to upcoming technologies (which change awfully fast in the streaming world). Since HTML (and by extension Javascript) deals with rendering, not transport (that's done over HTTP), it's a technical impossibility to stream with HTML.
It's not used widely at all - it was useful in the days of multibitrate audio-only streaming (it's been around for ever) but I haven't encountered it in any of the modern streaming server platforms.
Microsoft is a charter member of the DASH industry Forum (along with Adobe and Netflix and a few others) and is really pushing DASH (if the hype is to be believed, it's the Second Coming). That said, it has a lot of very useful technical benefits over silverlight or HLS.
The main reason they used silverlight is that of all the ways of streaming content, Silverlight has the most robust DRM support. It's been said that MPEG-DASH combines the best of HLS and Silverlight into an open protocol - namely, HLS' ease of use with Silverlight's robust DRM. HLS has decent DRM support as well, but it's still a proprietary Apple protocol (a "standard" in the Sony sense of the word: because they say it's a standard)
That's because ChromeOS has supported MSE for MPEG-DASH for about a year now. At this point, Netflix is in the driver's seat for pushing DASH adoption. They'll be early to the game on H.265 as well.
Slashdot Mirror
What would laying off wireline and other legacy installers have to do with the Time Warner acquisition? What would it have to do with anything other than, I dunno, LEGACY TELCO STUFF IS DYING.
Ars is not giving us a straight story - they say on one hand that video will be throttled to 10Mbps, and on the other that it will be throttled to 480p on phones and 720p on tablets.
For starters, they won't know what resolution the video is if it's coming across HTTPS (which more and more is). And if they're just going on bandwidth and capping it at 10Mbps, that's not going to have a huge effect, because you can get a solid 1080 HD stream in 5Mbps using H.264, and you can get a pretty decent 4K stream under 10Mbps with h.265.
Here's a pretty good summary by someone I've known for several decades, who practically invented the organic "business", and was a grower for WFM up until this year:
"I've had a couple of days to digest Amazon's hostile takeover of Whole Foods, and despite what organic boosters and corporate shills may say, this takeover is probably a very good marker for the end of an era.
As an agronomist and farmer I have always attempted to build organic certification as a marketing tool for the most agronomically-responsible growers, equally dedicated to land-care and to superior-quality food for the people eating the food we produce. In the early days the processors were *allies*, looking to expand markets for farmers.
Back in 1986 the first corporate player, and a small one at that, attempted to co-opt the term "organic" for his own shady marketing. I was able to scare him off with a couple of 25$ lawyer's "cease and desist" letters, but like the first cockroach, I knew there were more.
By 1993 the battle was fully engaged. Corporate players in the organic market -- at this point nearly all of them independent and small -- pushed for government standardization and control of organic certification, Here's the key thing ... those standards were to be a ceiling, as well as a floor. Nobody would be allowed to market one sort of organic certification as any better than any other. No higher standards allowed.
It took until 2003 to put it all in place, and it is little surprise that the rampant buyouts and corporate concentration in processed organic foods began at that point. Some fifteen years later essentially *zero* independent organic processors remain.
What's more, back 20 years ago total organic sales (USA) were about 8 Billion dollars, of which organic farmers garnered about half. These days organic sales are nearly 50 billion dollars, of which organic farmers (and there are a lot more of them now) receive perhaps 6 Billion dollars.
The corporate profits from the word "organic" are astounding. The consumers are wishful suckers. I have inspected many hundreds of processing operations for certification, and have a tremendously good idea of what a small percentage of the consumer price is related to ingredients. I'm talking low single digits of retail price. The rest of the markup is captured by corporate players.
Whole Foods hung on for a long time as an independent player, but were blind-sided by a couple of slick New York hedge-fund sharks who quietly bought up enough shares to exert effective control. Typically that's 10 percent of shares. Founder John Mackey last week publicly called the two of them "bastards", but it was too late.
There are many possible places this all can go, none of them good. As but one example, Amazon has just patented a system [Slashdot covered this 2 days ago ] which will not only track any individual customer's movement in their stores, and not only link to that customer's personal demographics, but will also force all that customer's internet activity to go through the store's wifi and blocking -- key part of the patent -- any attempts to comparison shop using any device whatever.
I devoted my entire career to building an agronomically-sound organic industry, particularly at the level of the well-managed family farm. I lost. The organic premium was intended to compensate *growers* for the extra effort required to care properly for the land. These days the entire market value of the word "organic" is being liquidated and monetized by a handful of huge corporations.
With a very few exceptions -- Organic Valley dairy products chief amongst them -- it is now quite simply a waste of your money to purchase organic anything, especially if it's a processed food. You pay dollars more and the farmer sees a couple of cents.
Do not be suckered in by an organic label any longer, except when you buy direct from farmers you know and trust."
In retail, if you can get above 3%, you're having a decent year. If you hit 5%, you're having a FANTASTIC year.
Interestingly enough, that's about what the margins in the oil business are as well. Razor-thin, but they do ridiculous volume.
And the "Pills and Powders" section of Whole Foods (as in any "natural" grocery) is about the only profitable aisle in the store.
They overpaid for a company that was already in trouble. The hedge fund stockholders pulled the same move with WFM that Bass Pro did with Cabela's, which is effectively a sophisticated Pump & Dump scam - run the stock price down, pick up more shares, make it an attractive takeover target, find a willing buyer, and as soon as the stock shoots up, unload at a huge profit, and leave everyone else holding the bag.
They've already laid off thousands of workers in the last couple of years, and not backfilled many more who left voluntarily. WFM was in serious trouble, and Amazon may have overpaid for it.
... Is the biggest fscking scam/joke of any layoff process. That's about as useful as getting a free year of "Credit monitoring" when yet another company is sloppy with your credit card data.
Actually, the AR-15 was a 5.56mm version of the 7.62mm AR-10, not the other way around.
Still typically comes in at or above a buck a round. Not cheap stuff.
I own an early 1940s-vintage version of this rifle, and it's a solid piece of gear.
Nobody said it was.
1300VA Smart-UPS, Dell T110, Dell R210, Dell Optiplex 790 (Plex media server), Couple of Dell CS23. Network is Motorola SBR, HP T5740 running pfSense, Aruba IAP-225 (802.11ac), HP 2915 10-port PoE switch, Ubiquiti PicoStation feeding into Ubiquiti toughswitch to remotely connect printer and Ooma for home phone. Office phone is Yealink T38G.
Also have a couple of servers offsite in real datacenters and on EC2 and Azure.
I too have had really bad results with IPv6 (TunnelBroker) when connecting to anything Google. You would think that Google of all companies would have their IPv6 poop in a group.
Who are you saying is "against" HTML5? DASH-IF? It's a complementary technology, not a competing one. There's no "contractual" issue here. Netflix hasn't switched to DASH until very recently because the technology hasn't been fully developed until very recently. There certainly wouldn't be a contractual obligation for members of the forum to use non-DASH technologies, that would be absurd.
DASH (which, since you're unclear on it, stands for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) is an emerging industry standard way of transporting streaming media. As I mentioned earlier, HTML5 is not a streaming standard, it's a browser rendering standard. DASH is a streaming standard that is currently emerging, which uses HTML5 (and associated CSS and Javascript) to render the video in the browser. The members of DASH-IF are the ones developing and implementing the standard. Development of DASH is one of the main reasons Microsoft backed away from Silverlight. Other players in DASH-IF deal with transport (such as Akamai, Cisco) and encoding (Adobe, Dolby, DTS).
Correct, in order to use RTMP, you must use Flash (as I mentioned in the original post - HTML5 doesn't preclude using a Flash object). There are players such as JWPlayer that do an excellent job of using HTML5 media objects if supported and falling back to Flash if they're not, in order to provide a seamless experience to the end user (but Android is still a mess).
DASH is going a long way towards fixing the mess, but it's still very early in that lifecycle. One of the really neat things about it is that the manifest makes available a list of what video and audio segments are available (and what codecs, bitrates, etc), and the client picks what it needs based on its capabilities. If a DASH manifest makes available a 2.0 stereo audio track at 128Kbps, a 5.1 surround track, a 7.1 surround track, and a 22.1 surround track (don't laugh, 22.1 is part of the upcoming 8K spec), along with a 4K video track and various resolutions and bitrates below that, it will pick whatever's appropriate for your hardware - playing on a mobile device over headphones? Player will pick whichever video track is appropriate for your screen/bandwidth and the 2.0 stereo. Output via HDMI from the same device? Switch the audio over to the surround. And so forth.
"HTML5" in the context of streaming simply refers to placing a media object on a page without benefit of external players such as Flash or Silverlight. The HTML5 spec quite intentionally does not specify codecs or transports in order to be flexible to upcoming technologies (which change awfully fast in the streaming world). Since HTML (and by extension Javascript) deals with rendering, not transport (that's done over HTTP), it's a technical impossibility to stream with HTML.
It's not used widely at all - it was useful in the days of multibitrate audio-only streaming (it's been around for ever) but I haven't encountered it in any of the modern streaming server platforms.
Microsoft is a charter member of the DASH industry Forum (along with Adobe and Netflix and a few others) and is really pushing DASH (if the hype is to be believed, it's the Second Coming). That said, it has a lot of very useful technical benefits over silverlight or HLS.
http://dashif.org/members/
The main reason they used silverlight is that of all the ways of streaming content, Silverlight has the most robust DRM support. It's been said that MPEG-DASH combines the best of HLS and Silverlight into an open protocol - namely, HLS' ease of use with Silverlight's robust DRM. HLS has decent DRM support as well, but it's still a proprietary Apple protocol (a "standard" in the Sony sense of the word: because they say it's a standard)
It's not a matter of what browser it THINKS you have, it's a matter of the browser supporting what you need to stream encrypted MPEG-DASH.
Chromecast also supports DASH.
(and yes, I do own one of these shirts: http://shirt.woot.com/offers/online-debate-team)
Streaming is what I do for a living. On a daily basis I encounter a lot of misinformation perpetrated by marketing schmucks.
That's because ChromeOS has supported MSE for MPEG-DASH for about a year now. At this point, Netflix is in the driver's seat for pushing DASH adoption. They'll be early to the game on H.265 as well.