Re:HTML5 for the win? Sorry, that's not a codec.
on
YouTube Revamp Imminent?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
With Google's purchase of ON2, maybe the answer is for Google to release for free On2 VP6 or On2 VP7 or something and then make that the primary non-flash codec for Google. Google can then make VP6 or VP7 or whatever (whichever one is file-size and quality competitive with h.264) the main codec for YouTube.
The #1 thing they can do is to seperate content from transport. Ban anyone from offering both internet access AND content (such as Cable TV).
Right now the Cable providers like Comcast and Warner have a vested interest in making sure people CANT get decent throughput and access to the increasing number of options for "TV" content online (legal and otherwise). Take away the conflict of interest where the cable companies deliberatly want to stop Hulu, BitTorrent, YouTube etc in order to prop up the business model of Cable (both the service and the channels) and things may improve.
I know of several airport terminals which have 2 or more levels with the departure gates and areas on the upper level. Then they have a set of fast moving up escalators on the inside of security screening and a set of fast moving down escalators that pop out of the sterile area on the upper level. Cameras and sensors can detect someone trying to move backwards up the down escalators
So the ground floor has the check-in desks, baggage claim (this is a domestic airport so no passport control), rent-a-car desks and other stuff along with security screening. And the entire upper floor is the sterile area with aerobridges out to the airplanes, stairs to the tarmac for access to smaller planes, waiting lounge and seating, retail and food vendors etc.
Anyone tries to climb the wrong way up the escalators will find they are moving too fast to do it and/or they quickly get pounced on by the airport security people before they can get to the sterile area.
Ok, so if you need to have workers that have work approved "secure" thumb drives, you make the encryption driver (TrueCrypt or otherwise) part of the default install so that you dont need admin privileges when you plug it in (windows can do that AFAIK)
I think one issue for Adobe was that Apple promised a 64-bit version of Carbon (which would have allowed Adobe to port its main apps to 64-bit on mac without the need to rewrite them in Coca) but then after promising it for so long abandoning the idea.
Bell Labs was able to do what they did because of the cross-subsidy system that AT&T had. AT&T Long Lines (long distance arm) charged a lot more than their costs and used the revenue to fund the high service standards at the local Bell companies and to fund the R&D at Bell Labs. Western Electric (the manufacturing arm of AT&T) also used profits from their products to fund Bell Labs.
The cross-subsidy setup was one of the big reasons why the government wanted to break up AT&T so much (another was heavy pressure and lobbying from companies like MCI and Sprint that wanted to get into long distance telecommunications)
Its not just about the money, they dont want to hire anyone that actually KNOWS something about the stuff they sell because someone like that will be a lot less likely to push and more likely to, ya, know, actually sell people what they WANT (items that probably make RS a lot less profit than the cellphone crap)
The security measures taken by El Al are genuine security, not security theater. Measures like subjecting all bags to depressurization (to trigger any bombs with altitude sensors) and having armed sky marshals on all flights.
But the risks for El Al are much greater (and the number of flights they have smaller than many airlines) so they can afford these extra security measures.
Even if you do that, I can still find at least 20 things on the plane itself that can be used to kill or incapacitate the pilots and crew (which is generally the easiest answer if you want to bring down the airplane) Not to mention that Al-Queda could easily teach their terrorists the art of killing with your bare hands.
Short of putting all the passengers to sleep with pills or knockout gas, it is impossible to stop a determined terrorist from gaining control of the plane and/or damaging it in such a way as to cause it to crash.
The #1 issue with cellphones is the fact that when you are in an airplane up in the air, your phone is in range of so many towers (and passing between towers so fast) that your phone would overload the network rather than get a stable signal.
There is talk of micro-cells in airplanes that would allow your phone to connect to them instead of anything on the ground which would overcome the problems.
It may be true that "Pro" gear costs $$$ but for these bands in their garages producing MP3 files and burnt CDs, they arent going to go for "Pro" gear (especially if their band only has electric guitars, vocals, drums and maybe keyboard and not fancy instruments like pianos or violins)
These bands arent going to produce songs as good as the big boys get from a proper studio but they arent trying. They are just producing something that sounds good enough and that they can use to get their band out there beyond those who can hear them in person.
If you want to shoot on film, sure, you have to pay big bucks but with the increase in the use of digital film-making and the growth in the capabilities of digital cameras (including digital SLRs with video record and digital video cameras), the cost for the kit you need to produce filmed content (even "HD" content) is comming down all the time.
The content industries will NEVER accept the new world because they know that in the new world, they wont be the king of the hill anymore. Right now in the old world, companies like Sony, Warner, Fox, Universal, Disney, EMI and Paramount are king of the hill.
With the new world order eliminating the huge production costs (you dont NEED a big studio full of gear to record a song anymore, you can do it in your garage with a PC, some software and some microphones to record with) and distribution costs (you can distribute your songs either for free or for pay online very easily without a middleman), you dont need the big dinosaurs anymore and they are doing everything they can to stop it from happening.
And unlike previous times when disruptive technologies were invented, those who stand to loose the most have the ear of government and are attempting to outlaw the disruptive technologies BEFORE they become mainstream.
Here in Australia, I have relatives on a sheep station half a days drive away from the nearest town and they can get a stable HSPA data connection through Telstra NextG (with an external antenna) and if they stand in the right place, they can even get a call out with a NextG handset.
If Telstra can get service to somewhere with so little population density, there is NO excuse for the poor state of cellular service in the US.
I am not an expert in weapons or killing people by any means but give me some time in the passenger cabin of an empty airplane (i.e. an airplane with just its standard equipment BEFORE any luggage, carry-on bags or passengers have been loaded) and easily find a way to kill someone (be it the pilots, flight attendants or passengers) and even to compromise the integrity of the aircraft should I want to do that.
An Al Queda operative with training would have an even easier job of doing so and could attack an airplane (with the aim to bring it down or to kill the pilots or whatever) even if the government takes this crap to the logical conclusion and bans anyone from bringing anything into the passenger cabin of an airplane except for a TSA issued orange jumpsuit.
But as long as the sheeple continue to believe the lies and FUD fed to them by the corporate media and continues to demand "action" on terrorism, we will see this kind of crap going on.
If it wasnt for the way that pretty much every government since World War II has been paid bribes by the airline industry and the auto/oil industry to kill off the railways, a train would be a valid option for a short or medium distance journey (a train from say New York to LA doesn't make sense but a train from NYC to DC or even NYC to Chicago may well make sense given how annoying flying has become)
If the law (or the regulations applying to the BBC or whatever) prohibit encryption, said prohibition should apply to the entire signal as transmitted by the BBC over the air.
The right way to compare diesel and petrol cars is to compare the "cost per mile", i.e. how much it costs for the fuel to drive one mile of average driving conditions.
IE8 is much better than IE6 and the sooner we can kill off IE6 in favor of IE7 and IE8, the better. Now, I am not saying that IE8 is better than alternatives like Firefox (I use SeaMonkey myself) but its better than IE6 (in fact, the only browsers I know of that were worse than IE6 were IE5.x and Netscape 4.x)
Power is dead? Tell that to Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony, all of whom are using PPC chips of various kinds in their current generation consoles.
Cell is basically a PPC core with a bunch of specialist number-crunching coprocessors attached. And its by no means dead unless you consider the fact that a Cell CPU is found in every one of the 27 million and counting PS3 systems out there as being dead.
I will grant that PPC is dead as a desktop CPU with x86 being the only viable solution at this point for mainstream general purpose computers.
The problem with the switch to ARM is that for the kind of grunt you need in these sorts of machines (vs a MP3 player or a cellphone or whatever), the price difference between ARM and x86 is not big enough for consumers to pick the ARM option.
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With Google's purchase of ON2, maybe the answer is for Google to release for free On2 VP6 or On2 VP7 or something and then make that the primary non-flash codec for Google.
Google can then make VP6 or VP7 or whatever (whichever one is file-size and quality competitive with h.264) the main codec for YouTube.
Why not make large (in terms of expected bandwidth use) files available through BitTorrent in order to take load off the Wikileaks servers?
As long as they dont let the writer, director or main actors from I, Robot near ANY future Asimov efforts...
The #1 thing they can do is to seperate content from transport. Ban anyone from offering both internet access AND content (such as Cable TV).
Right now the Cable providers like Comcast and Warner have a vested interest in making sure people CANT get decent throughput and access to the increasing number of options for "TV" content online (legal and otherwise). Take away the conflict of interest where the cable companies deliberatly want to stop Hulu, BitTorrent, YouTube etc in order to prop up the business model of Cable (both the service and the channels) and things may improve.
I know of several airport terminals which have 2 or more levels with the departure gates and areas on the upper level. Then they have a set of fast moving up escalators on the inside of security screening and a set of fast moving down escalators that pop out of the sterile area on the upper level. Cameras and sensors can detect someone trying to move backwards up the down escalators
So the ground floor has the check-in desks, baggage claim (this is a domestic airport so no passport control), rent-a-car desks and other stuff along with security screening. And the entire upper floor is the sterile area with aerobridges out to the airplanes, stairs to the tarmac for access to smaller planes, waiting lounge and seating, retail and food vendors etc.
Anyone tries to climb the wrong way up the escalators will find they are moving too fast to do it and/or they quickly get pounced on by the airport security people before they can get to the sterile area.
Ok, so if you need to have workers that have work approved "secure" thumb drives, you make the encryption driver (TrueCrypt or otherwise) part of the default install so that you dont need admin privileges when you plug it in (windows can do that AFAIK)
I think one issue for Adobe was that Apple promised a 64-bit version of Carbon (which would have allowed Adobe to port its main apps to 64-bit on mac without the need to rewrite them in Coca) but then after promising it for so long abandoning the idea.
Just remember how much of the early Unix work was done on DEC hardware.
Bell Labs was able to do what they did because of the cross-subsidy system that AT&T had. AT&T Long Lines (long distance arm) charged a lot more than their costs and used the revenue to fund the high service standards at the local Bell companies and to fund the R&D at Bell Labs. Western Electric (the manufacturing arm of AT&T) also used profits from their products to fund Bell Labs.
The cross-subsidy setup was one of the big reasons why the government wanted to break up AT&T so much (another was heavy pressure and lobbying from companies like MCI and Sprint that wanted to get into long distance telecommunications)
Its not just about the money, they dont want to hire anyone that actually KNOWS something about the stuff they sell because someone like that will be a lot less likely to push and more likely to, ya, know, actually sell people what they WANT (items that probably make RS a lot less profit than the cellphone crap)
The security measures taken by El Al are genuine security, not security theater. Measures like subjecting all bags to depressurization (to trigger any bombs with altitude sensors) and having armed sky marshals on all flights.
But the risks for El Al are much greater (and the number of flights they have smaller than many airlines) so they can afford these extra security measures.
Even if you do that, I can still find at least 20 things on the plane itself that can be used to kill or incapacitate the pilots and crew (which is generally the easiest answer if you want to bring down the airplane)
Not to mention that Al-Queda could easily teach their terrorists the art of killing with your bare hands.
Short of putting all the passengers to sleep with pills or knockout gas, it is impossible to stop a determined terrorist from gaining control of the plane and/or damaging it in such a way as to cause it to crash.
The #1 issue with cellphones is the fact that when you are in an airplane up in the air, your phone is in range of so many towers (and passing between towers so fast) that your phone would overload the network rather than get a stable signal.
There is talk of micro-cells in airplanes that would allow your phone to connect to them instead of anything on the ground which would overcome the problems.
It may be true that "Pro" gear costs $$$ but for these bands in their garages producing MP3 files and burnt CDs, they arent going to go for "Pro" gear (especially if their band only has electric guitars, vocals, drums and maybe keyboard and not fancy instruments like pianos or violins)
These bands arent going to produce songs as good as the big boys get from a proper studio but they arent trying. They are just producing something that sounds good enough and that they can use to get their band out there beyond those who can hear them in person.
If you want to shoot on film, sure, you have to pay big bucks but with the increase in the use of digital film-making and the growth in the capabilities of digital cameras (including digital SLRs with video record and digital video cameras), the cost for the kit you need to produce filmed content (even "HD" content) is comming down all the time.
The content industries will NEVER accept the new world because they know that in the new world, they wont be the king of the hill anymore.
Right now in the old world, companies like Sony, Warner, Fox, Universal, Disney, EMI and Paramount are king of the hill.
With the new world order eliminating the huge production costs (you dont NEED a big studio full of gear to record a song anymore, you can do it in your garage with a PC, some software and some microphones to record with) and distribution costs (you can distribute your songs either for free or for pay online very easily without a middleman), you dont need the big dinosaurs anymore and they are doing everything they can to stop it from happening.
And unlike previous times when disruptive technologies were invented, those who stand to loose the most have the ear of government and are attempting to outlaw the disruptive technologies BEFORE they become mainstream.
Can AES run on the CPUs seen in the many dirt cheap "$0 on contract" or "$50 prepaid with $50 of calls" type dumb-phones that are out there?
Here in Australia, I have relatives on a sheep station half a days drive away from the nearest town and they can get a stable HSPA data connection through Telstra NextG (with an external antenna) and if they stand in the right place, they can even get a call out with a NextG handset.
If Telstra can get service to somewhere with so little population density, there is NO excuse for the poor state of cellular service in the US.
I am not an expert in weapons or killing people by any means but give me some time in the passenger cabin of an empty airplane (i.e. an airplane with just its standard equipment BEFORE any luggage, carry-on bags or passengers have been loaded) and easily find a way to kill someone (be it the pilots, flight attendants or passengers) and even to compromise the integrity of the aircraft should I want to do that.
An Al Queda operative with training would have an even easier job of doing so and could attack an airplane (with the aim to bring it down or to kill the pilots or whatever) even if the government takes this crap to the logical conclusion and bans anyone from bringing anything into the passenger cabin of an airplane except for a TSA issued orange jumpsuit.
But as long as the sheeple continue to believe the lies and FUD fed to them by the corporate media and continues to demand "action" on terrorism, we will see this kind of crap going on.
If it wasnt for the way that pretty much every government since World War II has been paid bribes by the airline industry and the auto/oil industry to kill off the railways, a train would be a valid option for a short or medium distance journey (a train from say New York to LA doesn't make sense but a train from NYC to DC or even NYC to Chicago may well make sense given how annoying flying has become)
If the law (or the regulations applying to the BBC or whatever) prohibit encryption, said prohibition should apply to the entire signal as transmitted by the BBC over the air.
The right way to compare diesel and petrol cars is to compare the "cost per mile", i.e. how much it costs for the fuel to drive one mile of average driving conditions.
IE8 is much better than IE6 and the sooner we can kill off IE6 in favor of IE7 and IE8, the better.
Now, I am not saying that IE8 is better than alternatives like Firefox (I use SeaMonkey myself) but its better than IE6 (in fact, the only browsers I know of that were worse than IE6 were IE5.x and Netscape 4.x)
Power is dead? Tell that to Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony, all of whom are using PPC chips of various kinds in their current generation consoles.
Cell is basically a PPC core with a bunch of specialist number-crunching coprocessors attached. And its by no means dead unless you consider the fact that a Cell CPU is found in every one of the 27 million and counting PS3 systems out there as being dead.
I will grant that PPC is dead as a desktop CPU with x86 being the only viable solution at this point for mainstream general purpose computers.
The problem with the switch to ARM is that for the kind of grunt you need in these sorts of machines (vs a MP3 player or a cellphone or whatever), the price difference between ARM and x86 is not big enough for consumers to pick the ARM option.