Fringe really did get more interesting later. But yeah... resolve a series. That's a problem. So one should probably not watch Fringe anyway if that's important.
I guess you didn't like the finale of Lost either, did you?
What's with the inability of JJ Abrams shows to actually tie up the whole thing properly? The Lost ending had nothing to do with the rest of the show, which makes it extremely crappy.
The short answer is that according to the evaluation metrics that we've refined over more than a decade, Google's search quality is better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness.
When I search for stuff, I usually get a bunch of "find best price" crap, or nonsense from eHow and other useless sites like that.
I didn't like the first episode of Lost either. But then I started watching it during the 3rd or 4th season, and I was hooked. And before the last two seasons, I watched all the way from the beginning again. And I think that was a good way to do it, because a lot of stuff from the first season (and following seasons) contains foreshadowing for future seasons. It was really quite interesting when I knew the context of things that were happening in the first season, and that kept me watching it. The ending was atrocious, though. Holy fucking shit.
No one wants to watch a scifi show where people do nothing but solve complicated math problems on a chalk board for 45 minutes.
No, people desperately want to believe that the stuff Fringe does is actually real. So it resonates with people's desire to believe. I enjoy Fringe personally, but I must say that the constant "validation" of superstitious bullshit gets a bit annoying at times. Especially in the episode that was dropped from season 1 or something, which was full-on superstitious nonsense, and didn't even pretend to be "science."
No. Those ones don't pretend to be science (sci-fi) and deliver something completely different. They're more honest about what they offer: the ability to drool over someone who is more talented than you.
Yeah, and it's not like Fringe is called... "Fringe."
H264 support through Flash is not the same as native H264 support. Flash might be supported by all browsers, but that doesn't mean that those browsers support H264.
Also, Flash will add WebM support in the near future.
Google bundling Flash (proprietary plugin) but not bundling H.264 (open standard) makes the web more open?!?
H264 is not an open standard (see the W3C patent policy), and native video support is different from a bundled plugin. Chrome needs to support Flash because that's what all video sites are using. It's called pragmatism. The end-result will be a more open web.
Google being the sole vendor and owner of the WebM format (proprietary format) makes the web more open?!?
WebM is an open-source project. Anyone can take the WebM code or specification and freely use it for anything. Yes, this is more open than the patent-encumbered H264.
WebM is almost certainly infringing on patents as well.
I should ignore your blatant FUD, but I'd like to point out that H264 doesn't protect you from patent lawsuits either. In fact, On2 has/had a huge patent portfolio, and I'm pretty sure H264 violates at least some of it.
Yes, what about it? Hardware acceleration for WebM will arrive this year, and all Android devices are obviously going to support hardware acceleration of WebM. That was kind of part of the point I made when I mentioned WebM support on Android.
I'm not biased against Google, I'm biased against their poor choices of late, primarily because they seem like poor choices.
I don't see how a choice that makes the web more open is a poor choice. H264 is a poor choice because it's patent-encumbered, and if it is allowed to become the dominant format for native video, the result is a more closed web.
You are forgetting that when Firefox 4 is released, WebM will be the most widely supported codec by far. IE9 will not magically capture major market share overnight. So it doesn't matter if IE9 doesn't support WebM. IE9 is basically irrelevant. Older versions will keep having more users.
Safari on Mac will fight the fight for H264 on the desktop all by itself. Ouch.
Flash supporting H264 is irrelevant. Or rather, it's a good thing, because Flash can be used as a fallback while WebM takes over the market. Future versions of Flash will support WebM anyway.
WebM will be natively supported on all future Android devices. That's a huge market, and will probably be the dominant mobile OS.
You are clearly biased against Google and WebM. You refuse to look at the reality of the situation. Apple fanboy, perhaps?
Interestingly enough I prefer Firefox's grouping because I can work on one set at a time and not get distracted.
So... Like Opera's sessions, or using separate windows?
If I see/. in my tabs I will want to check it out. I tried Opera's and I was rather disappointed - I group my tabs so that my tabarea looks cleaner and I don't need to see stuff which I know will distract me from my work.
However Chrome is lighter weight (no email, newsgroups, HTML/java composer).
Actually, Opera is lighter than Chrome. Opera is a (less than) 7 MB download. Chrome is 30+ MB! Mail just reuses what the browser is already capable of with some tiny stuff to put it together as an email client. The HTML composer is just the regular contenteditable field you see on web pages. So as you can see, Opera is much smaller than Chrome. Much more tightly coded.
What are the red herrings and straw men and bunch of irrelavent things?
Anything that doesn't address the claimed topic of the article: Openness.
If his definition of open web standard is wrong and H.264 is not an open standard according to the W3C's definition, then how is GIF different from H.264 in this regard?
Excellent point. Gif was a pain in the ass for many years. It should have never been used on the web.
I thought his argument--that just as the img tag allows for an unspecified number of formats to be supported and just as the W3C allows the industry to choose what gets supported, so it is with the video tag--to be perfectly fair.
The fact that the img tag did not specify an image format caused the gif mess. That mistake shouldn't be repeated with video.
Regarding Flash being a plugin, that seems to me like a fairly pedantic (or at best, technical) distinction, but I'm willing to concede a distinction between a company supporting a plugin because it's an industry standard while being against a supposedly closed codec as part of a native tag.
Basically, Flash lets Chrome play all those videos out there. Just about all videos on the web are using Flash. So Google can promote WebM as the open solution, while still supporting video on the web as it looks today, while the market transitions from Flash to WebM.
No, his article is supposed to be about openness. And yet he talks about all kinds of other things.
H264 might be an established standard, but it is not an open standard. Even Microsoft agrees that an open standard needs to be royalty-free! Read the W3C's patent policy for more information.
As for quality, WebM is good enough. That's all it needs to be. Quality is not really relevant.
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Fringe really did get more interesting later. But yeah... resolve a series. That's a problem. So one should probably not watch Fringe anyway if that's important.
What's with the inability of JJ Abrams shows to actually tie up the whole thing properly? The Lost ending had nothing to do with the rest of the show, which makes it extremely crappy.
H264 is closed, and not compatible with an open web. The winner needs to be VP8, or the web will be less open.
When I search for stuff, I usually get a bunch of "find best price" crap, or nonsense from eHow and other useless sites like that.
I didn't like the first episode of Lost either. But then I started watching it during the 3rd or 4th season, and I was hooked. And before the last two seasons, I watched all the way from the beginning again. And I think that was a good way to do it, because a lot of stuff from the first season (and following seasons) contains foreshadowing for future seasons. It was really quite interesting when I knew the context of things that were happening in the first season, and that kept me watching it. The ending was atrocious, though. Holy fucking shit.
No, people desperately want to believe that the stuff Fringe does is actually real. So it resonates with people's desire to believe. I enjoy Fringe personally, but I must say that the constant "validation" of superstitious bullshit gets a bit annoying at times. Especially in the episode that was dropped from season 1 or something, which was full-on superstitious nonsense, and didn't even pretend to be "science."
Yeah, and it's not like Fringe is called... "Fringe."
Also, Flash will add WebM support in the near future.
H264 is not an open standard (see the W3C patent policy), and native video support is different from a bundled plugin. Chrome needs to support Flash because that's what all video sites are using. It's called pragmatism. The end-result will be a more open web.
WebM is an open-source project. Anyone can take the WebM code or specification and freely use it for anything. Yes, this is more open than the patent-encumbered H264.
I should ignore your blatant FUD, but I'd like to point out that H264 doesn't protect you from patent lawsuits either. In fact, On2 has/had a huge patent portfolio, and I'm pretty sure H264 violates at least some of it.
Basically any widely used video editing application. Near future means probably in the first half of 2011, probably within the first quarter.
Yes, what about it? Hardware acceleration for WebM will arrive this year, and all Android devices are obviously going to support hardware acceleration of WebM. That was kind of part of the point I made when I mentioned WebM support on Android.
I don't see how a choice that makes the web more open is a poor choice. H264 is a poor choice because it's patent-encumbered, and if it is allowed to become the dominant format for native video, the result is a more closed web.
WebM will be supported by all important video editing applications in the near future.
Safari on Mac will fight the fight for H264 on the desktop all by itself. Ouch.
Flash supporting H264 is irrelevant. Or rather, it's a good thing, because Flash can be used as a fallback while WebM takes over the market. Future versions of Flash will support WebM anyway.
WebM will be natively supported on all future Android devices. That's a huge market, and will probably be the dominant mobile OS.
You are clearly biased against Google and WebM. You refuse to look at the reality of the situation. Apple fanboy, perhaps?
I thought WebM support in IE9 was as easy as installing it as a system codec. No browser plugin would be required. Am I wrong?
Dragonfly works offline. It downloads and caches it the first time you run it.
So... Like Opera's sessions, or using separate windows?
Sounds like you are rationalizing...
Actually, Opera is lighter than Chrome. Opera is a (less than) 7 MB download. Chrome is 30+ MB! Mail just reuses what the browser is already capable of with some tiny stuff to put it together as an email client. The HTML composer is just the regular contenteditable field you see on web pages. So as you can see, Opera is much smaller than Chrome. Much more tightly coded.
Anything that doesn't address the claimed topic of the article: Openness.
Excellent point. Gif was a pain in the ass for many years. It should have never been used on the web.
The fact that the img tag did not specify an image format caused the gif mess. That mistake shouldn't be repeated with video.
Basically, Flash lets Chrome play all those videos out there. Just about all videos on the web are using Flash. So Google can promote WebM as the open solution, while still supporting video on the web as it looks today, while the market transitions from Flash to WebM.
Computing power isn't everything anyway. In fact, it's pretty much irrelevant, as the DS and Wii have shown.
Flash video could use any format, so that's irrelevant. This is about native video support in browsers, not plugins.
The point is that they are converting even h264, so they might as well convert to a free and open format.
H264 might be an established standard, but it is not an open standard. Even Microsoft agrees that an open standard needs to be royalty-free! Read the W3C's patent policy for more information.
As for quality, WebM is good enough. That's all it needs to be. Quality is not really relevant.
Nintendo never sells them at a loss. And their console is the #1 selling console this generation. Sounds like good business to me! :D
Sounds like browser sniffing to me. In other words, it's got nothing to do with bugginess in Opera.
Maybe they should stop doing that then. And actually, Wii sells more than anyone else, and it is not sold at a loss.