That's the key point here. The article is a PR spin to try to make it seem like MS is protecting users.
This is spot on and could be very dangerous territory for both Microsoft and Apple.
Between them they control a substantial portion of the browser market. They could very quickly find themselves in trouble from both US and EU authorities if they attempted to extend their monopoly on desktops and browsers into video codecs, especially if they both have their hands in the patents and licensing controlling that codec.
Perhaps because the vast majority of their users don't use it, because it's a comparatively large package so including it excludes other more desired features, and because apt-get install gimp isn't too great a hurdle for anyone who does need it.
Re:Buying ARM for a leg?
on
Apple To Buy ARM?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Antitrust is a crock. Nobody except for whomever owns the property of ARM has any right to say how ARM's processors can be used.
Ah yes, because you know more about economics than every significant economist since the days of the Roman empire. And that's why you're sitting here posting on/. You're right and everyone from John Stuart Mill to Adam Smith got it wrong.
Businesses are out to make money. If they are allowed to become a monopoly, they can simply create artificial scarcity by lowering production and consequently increasing prices beyond their natural level. It's happened before, will happen again in the future and is the reason there have been laws against it for the past few thousand years.
This has nothing to do with property rights. It's to do with protecting the free market so it can continue to work as intended, to develop wealth and grow the economy.
Typically laws don't outlaw being a monopoly - after all if you invent something new and have no competitors, you're a de facto monopoly and that's not illegal. Abusing a monopoly like I described above is where you get in trouble.
Anti-trust regulators would look at why Apple would want to buy ARM and the likely impact on Apple's competitors. What can Apple gain through owning ARM that it doesn't get from being a customer? ARM license their IP widely, Apple can do pretty much as it likes with that technology - as it just did with the A4 chip. There's little obvious need for them to buy the company, other than to hinder their competitors.
I can't understand why they would force another socket design on customers. I am using a four year old motherboard and recently replaced my AMD CPU with a current model. It was a drop in replacement. Sure I could get some benefits from a newer MB, but I can make the upgrade at a time of my choosing. I can spread the cost, get the big boost from the CPU now and get a smaller boost from a new MB in a year's time.
Board manufacturers have to spend money implementing the new socket. Retailers are stuck with old stock that no-one wants because a new socket is around the corner.
It raises prices and hurts the end user. Why are we still seeing this behavior?
Dude - the iPad has 256 MB of RAM. It'[s not just about the processor.
The computer I owned in 1993 would happily multitask with 4MB RAM and an 8MHz ARM processor. The iPad has lots more RAM and a substantially faster and more modern ARM processor.
Even if the processor is multicore it's still not a 6 core Xeon so they can't just waste CPU time.
Yes, I hated the way I could only run one application at a time on my Pentium 3 desktop.
Seriously now, we've been multitasking for a very long time with/single core CPUs. It's a pretty poor excuse to say.we're taking out time to do it right'
The newest release of Flash can apparently generate iPhone compatible applications. Apple rewrote their developer terms that require you to write your iPhone apps to run directly on the platform using a spcified language (i.e. objective C, C, C++ or Javascript). Using a cross-compiler to develop an application is prohibited.
This would have been a big market for flash, Apple have closed it off for no apparent reason other than to spite Adobe.
As others will say - offload the video. My Atom n270 with 1gb ram can comfortably play 1080p video. CPU load average might hit 20%. Video is handled by Nvidia Ion.
I'm not entirely opposed to this. I'd love an ISP that would let me pay an extra $1 or 2 a month and give priority to my VoIP traffic. I'd happily pay for it to go faster than my or my neighbor's p2p download.
The trouble is the lack of last mile competition in the United States. Where you have only one or two carriers to choose from, you can't simply go elsewhere if they implement what could be a sensible measure in a way you don't like.
Still, I'm not sure we should be prohibiting something that could benefit users simply because it could be used in a way that doesn't.
I replaced my eeebox with an Acer Revo this year. For $200 US you get a small but fully fledged computer that runs Ubuntu just fine. It's a perfect box for xbmc. Firefox works just fine for web to your TV.
Best thing about it is the Nvidia Ion chipset, so you can do full 1080p playback. Biggest disadvantage is the lack of wireless. I added a USB wireless adapter.
For controls, you can use a wireless keyboard. For the XBMC you can use a Microsoft Media Center remote, or there's a decent remote for the iPhone/iPod touch.
My employer provides health insurance and I have to pay a significant premium for it. I've just learned that my premiums are going to jump over 200% percent next year to pay for your health insurance due to the new legislation that just passed. I can barely afford it now. Forget about next year. Hope you enjoy your "free" insurance.
I'm not even aware of the Republican's claiming the bill just passed will increase premiums for existing policy holders, certainly not by the scale you mention. Assuming you're not trolling, it sounds a lot like your employer wants to do some cost shifting and this reform is a convenient scapegoat.
Perhaps you could ask your employer what provision of the Bill is raising your premiums so you can raise this with your representatives? Or perhaps you could write to your insurance firm directly?
Do you have a wife and kids? If so, I'd love to hear about your premiums.
Have you any guarantee that you'd still be covered next year at an affordable premium if, say, you had a cancer diagnosis? Or would such a diagnosis result in you losing all healthcare?
Re:A false choice, of course...
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Compare like with like.
US Healthcare has fully loaded Cadillacs that cost 10x that of the very same fully loaded Cadillac in Europe.
Tell me, why does a child receiving a nebuliser treatment in a Doctor's surgery cost circa $300 on top of the visit cost when the reusable nebuliser costs under $100 and the drugs cost $4 for a month's supply at Walmart?
Why does an inhailer for asthma cost $100 at Target, yet the NHS in the UK procures them at under $10?
Why are the self employed all but excluded from healthcare altogether?
The security industry will always be unable to protect everyone 100% of the time. It is impossible to protect the clueless from anything....
The sooner all end users are clued-in instead of clueless, the sooner we may have a ray of hope.
Did you miss the bit in the summary where they mentioned Google? Now it is possible that Google had no anti-virus, no IDS and doesn't monitor in and outbound web traffic for potential threats, but I think it unlikely.
I find it hard to imagine that a firm which can to all intents and purposes hire the very brightest and smartest has a whole lot of clueless users. I doubt the Google end-users were doing anything stupid anyway.
For others, especially those with less resources, life is harder still. A zero day exploit doesn't need a user to be stupid, only to open a web page, through trickery, coercion or plain old bad luck.
This would have been useful in the summary. From the linked page:
Platform. Microsoft Windows
Details. The Apache HTTP Server, commonly referred to as Apache, is a popular open source web server software. mod_isapi is a core module of the Apache package that implements the Internet Server extension API. The extension allows Apache to serve Internet Server extensions (ISAPI.dll modules) for Microsoft Windows based hosts.
While I'm sure it will impact many people, I'd still imagine the majority of Apache users are running it on a platform other than Windows
Thank you, I guess I should have clarified that for those who think the world stops at the US border.
I looked some more after posting. I found these figures from 1998. Numbers today are probably higher because of massively increased car use in the developing world.
REGION DEATHS
Africa 170,000
Americas 126,000
China 179,000
Eastern Med 71,000
Europe 107,000
India 217,000
SE Asia 118,000
W. Pacific 41,000
TOTAL 1,029,000
How many people were killed last year in aircraft accidents? Hundreds would be my guesstimate. How many in car accidents? Tens of thousands would be my guess.
The wiki reckons you are off by an order of magnitude. There's been over 40,000 auto deaths every year for the past decade. About 115 per day. And that's only in the United States.
Given only a small fraction of motor accidents are fatal, I'd guess the overall number of accidents is well into the millions. More quick googling suggests about 6.5 million auto accidents in the US each year and almost 3 million injuries as a result.
Thanks to iPhone/iPod and actually rising market share, Apple matters but Apple has already decided back when nobody except media professionals and codec nerds knew about it. It is H264.
You're missing one big thing. Hardware manufacturers love developments that obsolete their equipment. That's how they sell upgrades.
Apple have a bunch of devices that support h264. You're right on that. Most of them also only support 720p.
Let's say Google offer an irrevocable royalty free license for codec they now own. It turns out to be as good or better than h264.
Apple's current use of h264 presents a future risk. A future license fee could cost them tens or hundreds of millions per year. It would be straightforward to launch new devices that support 1080p with hardware decoding of the new codec. Start off making all your 1080p content encoded in the new codec and then in four or five years you can turn off support for h264. Most customers have by then upgraded so are not inconvenienced. The rest are encouraged to buy something new. And at the same time, future risk is diminished as you stop using h264.
I think you misinterpreted my use of "cannot be compared". You seem to have taken it as a literal, as if I was saying there is no way of calculating the cost differential between digital and paper production.
I was in fact implying that the cost differential is so great between the two that one production method cannot be compared as like the other.
Cost per ANY copy of ANYTHING is directly dependent on subscription volume and even more for digital content...
I can assure you that the cost of entry into digital distribution is a heck of a lot lower than that for printing a newspaper.
The overheads to produce, print, distribute and sell a printed newspaper, overnight to every major city in the United States are massive and really cannot be legitimately compared to the digital equivalent.
Slashdot Mirror
This is spot on and could be very dangerous territory for both Microsoft and Apple.
Between them they control a substantial portion of the browser market. They could very quickly find themselves in trouble from both US and EU authorities if they attempted to extend their monopoly on desktops and browsers into video codecs, especially if they both have their hands in the patents and licensing controlling that codec.
Perhaps because the vast majority of their users don't use it, because it's a comparatively large package so including it excludes other more desired features, and because apt-get install gimp isn't too great a hurdle for anyone who does need it.
Ah yes, because you know more about economics than every significant economist since the days of the Roman empire. And that's why you're sitting here posting on /. You're right and everyone from John Stuart Mill to Adam Smith got it wrong.
Businesses are out to make money. If they are allowed to become a monopoly, they can simply create artificial scarcity by lowering production and consequently increasing prices beyond their natural level. It's happened before, will happen again in the future and is the reason there have been laws against it for the past few thousand years.
This has nothing to do with property rights. It's to do with protecting the free market so it can continue to work as intended, to develop wealth and grow the economy.
Typically laws don't outlaw being a monopoly - after all if you invent something new and have no competitors, you're a de facto monopoly and that's not illegal. Abusing a monopoly like I described above is where you get in trouble.
Anti-trust regulators would look at why Apple would want to buy ARM and the likely impact on Apple's competitors. What can Apple gain through owning ARM that it doesn't get from being a customer? ARM license their IP widely, Apple can do pretty much as it likes with that technology - as it just did with the A4 chip. There's little obvious need for them to buy the company, other than to hinder their competitors.
Why would it need to keep a constant GPS signal? Is the camera moving?
I can't understand why they would force another socket design on customers. I am using a four year old motherboard and recently replaced my AMD CPU with a current model. It was a drop in replacement. Sure I could get some benefits from a newer MB, but I can make the upgrade at a time of my choosing. I can spread the cost, get the big boost from the CPU now and get a smaller boost from a new MB in a year's time.
Board manufacturers have to spend money implementing the new socket. Retailers are stuck with old stock that no-one wants because a new socket is around the corner.
It raises prices and hurts the end user. Why are we still seeing this behavior?
The computer I owned in 1993 would happily multitask with 4MB RAM and an 8MHz ARM processor. The iPad has lots more RAM and a substantially faster and more modern ARM processor.
Yes, I hated the way I could only run one application at a time on my Pentium 3 desktop.
Seriously now, we've been multitasking for a very long time with /single core CPUs. It's a pretty poor excuse to say .we're taking out time to do it right'
I think this goes a long way beyond html5 video.
The newest release of Flash can apparently generate iPhone compatible applications. Apple rewrote their developer terms that require you to write your iPhone apps to run directly on the platform using a spcified language (i.e. objective C, C, C++ or Javascript). Using a cross-compiler to develop an application is prohibited.
This would have been a big market for flash, Apple have closed it off for no apparent reason other than to spite Adobe.
As others will say - offload the video. My Atom n270 with 1gb ram can comfortably play 1080p video. CPU load average might hit 20%. Video is handled by Nvidia Ion.
I'm not entirely opposed to this. I'd love an ISP that would let me pay an extra $1 or 2 a month and give priority to my VoIP traffic. I'd happily pay for it to go faster than my or my neighbor's p2p download.
The trouble is the lack of last mile competition in the United States. Where you have only one or two carriers to choose from, you can't simply go elsewhere if they implement what could be a sensible measure in a way you don't like.
Still, I'm not sure we should be prohibiting something that could benefit users simply because it could be used in a way that doesn't.
I replaced my eeebox with an Acer Revo this year. For $200 US you get a small but fully fledged computer that runs Ubuntu just fine. It's a perfect box for xbmc. Firefox works just fine for web to your TV.
Best thing about it is the Nvidia Ion chipset, so you can do full 1080p playback. Biggest disadvantage is the lack of wireless. I added a USB wireless adapter.
For controls, you can use a wireless keyboard. For the XBMC you can use a Microsoft Media Center remote, or there's a decent remote for the iPhone/iPod touch.
I'm not even aware of the Republican's claiming the bill just passed will increase premiums for existing policy holders, certainly not by the scale you mention. Assuming you're not trolling, it sounds a lot like your employer wants to do some cost shifting and this reform is a convenient scapegoat.
Perhaps you could ask your employer what provision of the Bill is raising your premiums so you can raise this with your representatives? Or perhaps you could write to your insurance firm directly?
Do you have a wife and kids? If so, I'd love to hear about your premiums.
Have you any guarantee that you'd still be covered next year at an affordable premium if, say, you had a cancer diagnosis? Or would such a diagnosis result in you losing all healthcare?
Compare like with like.
US Healthcare has fully loaded Cadillacs that cost 10x that of the very same fully loaded Cadillac in Europe.
Tell me, why does a child receiving a nebuliser treatment in a Doctor's surgery cost circa $300 on top of the visit cost when the reusable nebuliser costs under $100 and the drugs cost $4 for a month's supply at Walmart?
Why does an inhailer for asthma cost $100 at Target, yet the NHS in the UK procures them at under $10?
Why are the self employed all but excluded from healthcare altogether?
That page says:
Did you miss the bit in the summary where they mentioned Google? Now it is possible that Google had no anti-virus, no IDS and doesn't monitor in and outbound web traffic for potential threats, but I think it unlikely.
I find it hard to imagine that a firm which can to all intents and purposes hire the very brightest and smartest has a whole lot of clueless users. I doubt the Google end-users were doing anything stupid anyway.
For others, especially those with less resources, life is harder still. A zero day exploit doesn't need a user to be stupid, only to open a web page, through trickery, coercion or plain old bad luck.
Probably. 322 Tbit/sec is quite a lot.
Well, it's 3.5x faster than their fastest CRS-1 that was available yesterday. So it's an improvement, but not exactly a revolution.
I thought Bic razors came with a blade. Perhaps you are thinking of Gillette?
This would have been useful in the summary. From the linked page:
While I'm sure it will impact many people, I'd still imagine the majority of Apache users are running it on a platform other than Windows
Thank you, I guess I should have clarified that for those who think the world stops at the US border. I looked some more after posting. I found these figures from 1998. Numbers today are probably higher because of massively increased car use in the developing world.
REGION DEATHS
Africa 170,000
Americas 126,000
China 179,000
Eastern Med 71,000
Europe 107,000
India 217,000
SE Asia 118,000
W. Pacific 41,000
TOTAL 1,029,000
I guess Geography wasn't your strong point at school. Here, let me tell you a secret. There are real people over those borders, not just dragons.
The wiki reckons you are off by an order of magnitude. There's been over 40,000 auto deaths every year for the past decade. About 115 per day. And that's only in the United States.
Given only a small fraction of motor accidents are fatal, I'd guess the overall number of accidents is well into the millions. More quick googling suggests about 6.5 million auto accidents in the US each year and almost 3 million injuries as a result.
You're missing one big thing. Hardware manufacturers love developments that obsolete their equipment. That's how they sell upgrades.
Apple have a bunch of devices that support h264. You're right on that. Most of them also only support 720p.
Let's say Google offer an irrevocable royalty free license for codec they now own. It turns out to be as good or better than h264.
Apple's current use of h264 presents a future risk. A future license fee could cost them tens or hundreds of millions per year. It would be straightforward to launch new devices that support 1080p with hardware decoding of the new codec. Start off making all your 1080p content encoded in the new codec and then in four or five years you can turn off support for h264. Most customers have by then upgraded so are not inconvenienced. The rest are encouraged to buy something new. And at the same time, future risk is diminished as you stop using h264.
I think you misinterpreted my use of "cannot be compared". You seem to have taken it as a literal, as if I was saying there is no way of calculating the cost differential between digital and paper production.
I was in fact implying that the cost differential is so great between the two that one production method cannot be compared as like the other.
I can assure you that the cost of entry into digital distribution is a heck of a lot lower than that for printing a newspaper.
The overheads to produce, print, distribute and sell a printed newspaper, overnight to every major city in the United States are massive and really cannot be legitimately compared to the digital equivalent.