iOS has been able to multitask since before it was called iOS. It just wasn't available to third party apps until the phone's hardware caught up (it's just no good on a 3G, which is why you can't officially have 3rd party mutitasking on that model).
There is one vendor that does just that: Apple. Even if you buy it and never intend to run OS X other than for the 10 minutes it takes you to set a Bootcamp partition, the Windows experience on them is very good. All the drivers and necessary stuff you need is on the OS X install disc that comes with the machine (and also on every retail copy of OS X) and you just pop it in after the windows installer finishes and it automatically handles all the drivers and utilities and leaves you with a fully configured, fully working Windows laptop with zero bloatware.
Hell, it doesn't even put iTunes on there by default;)
Whether the price premium for the machine itself and then a further cost for a copy of Windows is worth it is an exercise left to the individual.
I've set up a quite a number of machines for a local businessman who liked the iMac's form factor but a major part of his business relies on Windows-only software. He started with a batch of 4 test machines that I set up for him and liked them so much he went and converted the whole office and workshop, ditching all the midi-towers and clunky keyboards he had before.
It's a very well put together song, and he has a point. However, it's a laptop - we demand all these power-packed machines in a tiny space with low weight, so there are going to be compromises made in the relative ease of taking it apart.
He says he wants a Mac instead, and while I love Apple Macs, he's going to find the exact same problem when he comes to take it apart and clean the fan(s) - multiple screws, removal of all sorts of pieces, damn near stripping the thing to the bone to get to something like the fan, since it tends to be one unit that is part of the heatsink assembly, or at the very least intertwined with it (the fans on the Powerbook 15", for example, are separate, but you can't replace the RHS one without removing the logic board, and you can't replace the one in the 12" without removing the heatsink). He will also find that Apple laptops have similar un-re-usable thermal pads that provide the interface between the CPU, GPU and the heatsink. The unibody line of MB and MBPs are a different beast again.
It's common to all laptops, and unless you make consideration to taking them apart in the design stage, it's going to be designed with miniaturisation, cooling efficiency and weight in mind. Ease of servicing is not even on the list, or if it is it's right at the bottom. Looking at the video the Pavillion looks no more difficult or involved to take apart than the many Apple laptops I have done over the years (as a skilled hobbyist, not as a job). It's not for the faint of heart, but they were never designed to be "easy to clean the fan" - if he wanted an easy machine to work on at home, he should have bought a desktop.
"MPEG LA's licensing terms are incompatible with both open standards and open software. They are anti-openness."
"The MPEG-LA terms are incompatible with open source in general and GPL specifically."
Conflating the two in the first instance, then not in the second, and I addressed the second - there are open source licences available that allow things like H.264 and other royalty/proprietary (although H.264 is not proprietary as such as an open specification) - the Mozilla foundation already has one and Firefox is available under that licence. So, it's not incompatible with "open source in general" and that's not even getting into the fact that open source also covers things like the BSD licence. The GPL is not the entirety or the be all and end all of open source. While the GPL is clearly important (and I'm glad it exists) it is only one piece of the puzzle.
Speaking of the principle of charity, when have I launched into ad hominem attacks against you? Admittedly my opening reply to you calling the MPEG LA an anti openness extortion cartel was a little barbed, but it wasn't a personal insult. At every turn here I have disagreed with a lot of what you have said but I have attacked the arguments you have made, not you personally. I can't launch an ad hominem against your argument. You're the one skirting around the edge with a questioning over whether I understand the vocabulary I am using, although I suppose it is fair given that I opened with a facetious remark.
In my experience, *all* patented things are encumbered by those same patents. The patent system as it stands now is ineffective and is more of a hassle than a benefit to a great swathe of people. It's expensive, inconsistent, corrupt, and still offers no perfect assurances that your patented widget is protected. A "merely" patented thing, especially in the modern era is really no better than a so called "patent encumbered" thing.
You could argue, successfully, that not all cars have steering wheels. You couldn't argue that not all cars have steering wheels by calling me a moronic idiot - that would be an ad hominem. I try the best I can to avoid doing that, since it's unproductive and unbecoming. It doesn't mean I can't vehemently disagree with you though if I think your argument is circular, or in error, and it doesn't mean I think you're an idiot.
As far as Jpeg and PDF go - I did *not* claim they weren't royalty free, I claimed they had patents attached to them. And while Firefox itself doesn't have much to do with PDF, it does have the ability to create PDF files (but for some reason can't read them - I suspect for security reasons). You're misreading what I said, either deliberately or otherwise, and I'm leaning toward the former since the post with the claim in it os only a couple of lines.
Anyway, so, having been called on deliberately conflating open source and open standard, and citing yourself that there's no fixed definition (and that royalties are not incompatible with the term) you are not restating that the MPEG LA's terms are "incompatible with open source in general and the GPL specifically" and have left out the open standards part, whereas just a couple of posts ago you were claiming it was also incompatible with open standards too (which I guess is odd, since you yourself are stating that it's something that so far doesn't have a full consensus, yet still claim to be able to define accurately enough to state 'incompatibility' with). In other words, "if I disagree with a definition, I will call it the minority position". If we're purely going by pure numbers for the accuracy of a statement, then I'm going to have to say "Windows is clearly the best operating system since it is the most popular".
Standards like USB and GSM, and on the codec side, H.264, AAC, HDV, etc are widely considered open standards by a widely accepted definition of the term. That some people (the FSF especially) claim that the term "doesn't count" and to use *their* definition as the actual cast-iron one is hypocrisy of the highest order.
You state that Firefox "can't" include H.264, which is nonsense. The Mozilla foundation could easily afford the licencing cost (it is capped) and they can offer Firefox under a different licence for the build that contained H.264 support (for example, its own MPL licence which already has precedent for combining open source and proprietary/non-free code in the same application). They can then offer the normal "non-tainted" version under the GPL.
It's not that they can't offer it, their position is purely ideological, and it's a position that I respect (far from being "someone who refuses to accept facts and change [his] position"), but I have looked at the wider implications of their stance. Their goal is a noble one, and one I support: the standardisation of the web on open standards that are also royalty free. I personally don;t believe that H.264 is the battleground to fight that particular battle on, though, although I'm not going to begrudge them their right to do so if they choose. All they are achieving in the short to medium term is the longevity of flash by trying to hobble H.264. Get rid of flash first, and get the HTML5 train properly rolling, then start dealing with codecs - the beauty of the video tag is the ability to easily offer up multiple formats if necessary. Thus, when something better than H.264 comes along (and the MPEG group is attempting to work on that right now, although getting flamed for it on slashdot, and getting confused with the MPEG LA) and then replace it.
H.264 has "won" the codec battle in the medium term - it has hardware decoding support in myriad portable devices, it is technically extremely good (and it is still better than WebM and Theora), and it is supported by multiple large companies. If there is a compelling alternative in the future, they will go for it - this could be Dirac, which will be compatible with OSS, or it could be something else. Just because companies like Apple, MS, Sony etc have settled on H.264 now doesn't mean they will automatically go for the royalty-encumbered one next time - they will pick the best tool for the job, and unfortunately for OSS right now, that is H.264. It is "established" in the market, and will be a standard format until the next one comes along.
Whether I dispute your assertions or not, you are asking me to provide citations when you yourself provide none, other than your pejorative description of what it is the MPEG LA does.
Does that mean I'm free to describe the Mozilla foundation as an "anti-business, anti-freedom-to-choose roadblock that is ensuring the survival of flash"?
You also claim that the MPEG LA's terms are incompatible with open standards, which is funny since H.264 is an open standard. The fact that you (and many others on slashdot) like to muddy the waters as to the actual meaning of what an open standard is (there is no actual fixed definition which you are quick to point out, yet also simultaneously claim to be the authority on what it *isn't*).
As it stands right now H.264 is an open standard, along with other codecs such as AAC. A codec like MP3 however, is *not* an open standard, although it is also patented like H.264 and MP3. Just because something is patented does not exclude it from being an open standard. This is common in hardware connectors too - USB, RS-232, Mini-displayport - all patented, but all open standards, some of them royalty free, some not.
It is also completely different to Open Source (and open source software). Just because they use the same word beginning with O does not make them the same.
As far as "reexamining my beliefs" I think I am pretty much ok where I am. I don't actually agree with the MPEG LA's stance on alternative codecs - I think it's a short sighted move that will only serve to hurt H.264, which would be unfortunate. But as with any large entity it's very rarely a black and white situation -companies are not just "good" or "evil" as much as slashdot would like to make out. They may do dumb consumer-unfriendly things sometimes, but in general the world is a not filled with conspiracies and Machiavellian plans to exterminate open source software and consumer freedom.
Just scroll through a few slashdot stories at random that feature positive stories from "the enemy" (as defined by slashdot) and it's always rationalised as some ulterior motive that somehow ties in with their "evil" nature. It's simply not possible that they could do anything good! At least, not here on slashdot.
Even three positive MS stories in a row gets comments that it's somehow becoming a shill for MS, or comments that the MPEG group itself (which is not affiliated with the MPEG LA in any way, but try telling that to a commenter on slashdot) is working on a royalty free codec, but no! This can't be! It's really a plot to undermine royalty free and free codecs so that their expensive ones will make more money!
It's just getting old and tiresome. Let's not even get into the sizable population of slashdot users who are active anthropogenic climate change deniers. It really is the final trick in emulating Fox News. It's very difficult to get even a slightly objective commentary on topics on slashdot anymore, what with trolling summaries, deliberately misleading summaries, legions of people with multiple accounts for mod bombing, and for targeting specific users and following them around modding down everything they post and this overriding groundswell that simply everything is some grand conspiracy.
I am not saying that jailbreaking will void the warranty - read my post again carefully. I am stating that if a manufacturer offers a switch that allows you to go "off piste" that the warranty would then no longer apply in the event that something you changed caused it to break. If something else goes wrong unrelated to the changes then of course that is covered.
Quicktime can play H.264 though, as can Windows Media Player. There's no reason that a person needs Quicktime to see H.264. The key is the container format, or the nature of the stream delivered to the browser, so we need a standard format and a standard container.
Right, because I'm going to distribute my movie in the same format that the camera uses. If it's going for broadcast I put it in a format that the broadcaster wants (which won;t be the one the camera uses, necessarily, especially if it's a prosumer one), and if it's going for a film release it will be on 35mm or into a digital format for a digital projector that is still unlikely to be the same as the camera's format.
If you have "creativity and artistic innovation" you are not concerned overly with your tools.
The editing software alone, if you want decent stuff, will cost you more than any licence to use the codec in your camera.
Just try putting Linux on a turnkey computer sold from a retailer like Best Buy or HP and then asking them for support when it breaks.
And it's not necessarily software that can damage the device. The software might be fine, but what if someone installs an app that hooks up your phone to some other hardware device, but the connection is incompatible (or the person doing it messed up when putting the cable together) and you put 50V across two sensitive pins by accident? Just as a hypothetical.
A warranty covers a device as sold and outlines use cases, and also outlines what is not covered. It's pretty standard as far as consumer goods goes.
Right, and I should be able to force WalMart to give away my free newspaper (that I support with ads).
If I tell WalMart to stock it in their store for nothing, they can't tell me "no", nor decide not to carry it because it contains things they don't want to carry, like sex or editorials for competing stores.
That sounds exactly like the sort of "rights" that America is so proud of, yes?
Or do you mean "everyone has rights, except private store owners that I do not like, if they want to exercise a right that results in a situation I disagree with then they should be stopped!"
Reminds me of Sarah Palin talking about the Islamic community centre being built in Manhattan - "I know they have a right to do it, but should they?"
For the same reason that any warranty-covered device loses the protection of the warranty if you change something on it - you can't guarantee that you didn't break it yourself.
In the majority of cases, going into the equivalent of "jailbroken" mode won't have any negative effect, but there is always the possibility that something may go wrong - huge data loss (and poisoning of your backup on sync), maybe you drop a new baseband firmware on there that puts it outside the licenced spectrum, etc. Once you put a switch in place that says "go nuts", you know that most people really won;t do anything to affect the warranty, but there will be some who take it way outside the coverage. It's only usual that this is not covered.
You can't simultaneously claim "it's my phone, I should be able to do *absolutely anything at all* to it" on one hand and on the other say "anything I do that breaks it must still be covered by the warranty!"
Buy a 27" iMac and add a user-installed external SATA port by connecting one up to the unused internal one on the logic board and dremmeling a small slot on the bottom of the case near the RAM door, but don't expect Apple to fix it under Applecare for free if you damage it.
I know that, but that's irrelevant. The discussion is about XBMC and the hardware it runs on.
If I'd wanted a large, noisily-fan-cooled, media centre then perhaps the Xbox 360 would be an option. Especially if I actually had any interest *at all* in console games, which I really don't.
So, I could spend $200 on getting a large, noisy Xbox 360 and only ever using it as a media centre, or I could spend $99 to get a small, fanless media centre that works well with the media centre I have upstairs because it's also XBMC. Alternatively I could spend a little more (edging towards the cost of an Xbox 360) to get something like a Revo, if your post is really just a thinly veiled "zomg anything but Apple". For that sort of money you get a hard drive (unlike the $200 360) and it's still much smaller.
Yeah, so many modified and tweaked Xbox 360s and PS3s.....
oh right.
The vast majority of "gamers" right now are using consoles, which are the very definition of a fixed data point in terms of hardware and non-tweaking.
The second really massive growth area in gaming has been in casual games, which have attracted an entirely new set of people into games, and these are wildly successful on small, portable devices. Casual games are huge.
Any future game setup on the AppleTV, and the current gaming market on iOS and Android as it exists right now really don't have "gamer" in the traditional definition of the word within a country proverbial of their target demographic. Those gamers are fine off on their own trying to get an extra 5fps out of Crysis by running liquid helium over their GPU. Meanwhile, iOS casual game developers are making hay while the sun shines. Apple is *already* "competing with the Wii on the low end" - casual games that cost a lot less than $50 each are proven to make enough money to attract developers large and small.
It's $99, and one of the best XBMC devices out there right now. The old ones can even be upgraded to 1080p by swapping out the wifi card with an HD decoder (you are then limited to ethernet only). Hardly overpriced compared to the other stuff in the market that fills the same niche.
So you'll have games like Scrabble that exist right now - the board is on the iPad, you keep your tiles on your iPhone or iPod Touch and swipe them onto the iPad board to lay them. It seems like a logical extension to bring the AppleTV into this, since it is also an iOS device.
You could control your Angry Bird catapult from your phone's screen and have the results show on your TV, etc etc.
The iTunes video content is quite expensive, and is the last vestige of DRM in the store too. That said, if you wait to buy "box sets" the per-episode costs come down. I believe it is set up this way to recoup as much as possible from people who are not watch the adverts on cable TV during currently-airing shows, so if you want to keep up with the latest stuff as it comes out, it costs you a fortune to not see ads.
Bundles of older TV shows, or past seasons, are much more akin to DVD costs.
Slashdot Mirror
iOS has been able to multitask since before it was called iOS. It just wasn't available to third party apps until the phone's hardware caught up (it's just no good on a 3G, which is why you can't officially have 3rd party mutitasking on that model).
Which is exactly what Android does too.
There is one vendor that does just that: Apple. Even if you buy it and never intend to run OS X other than for the 10 minutes it takes you to set a Bootcamp partition, the Windows experience on them is very good. All the drivers and necessary stuff you need is on the OS X install disc that comes with the machine (and also on every retail copy of OS X) and you just pop it in after the windows installer finishes and it automatically handles all the drivers and utilities and leaves you with a fully configured, fully working Windows laptop with zero bloatware.
Hell, it doesn't even put iTunes on there by default ;)
Whether the price premium for the machine itself and then a further cost for a copy of Windows is worth it is an exercise left to the individual.
I've set up a quite a number of machines for a local businessman who liked the iMac's form factor but a major part of his business relies on Windows-only software. He started with a batch of 4 test machines that I set up for him and liked them so much he went and converted the whole office and workshop, ditching all the midi-towers and clunky keyboards he had before.
It's a very well put together song, and he has a point. However, it's a laptop - we demand all these power-packed machines in a tiny space with low weight, so there are going to be compromises made in the relative ease of taking it apart.
He says he wants a Mac instead, and while I love Apple Macs, he's going to find the exact same problem when he comes to take it apart and clean the fan(s) - multiple screws, removal of all sorts of pieces, damn near stripping the thing to the bone to get to something like the fan, since it tends to be one unit that is part of the heatsink assembly, or at the very least intertwined with it (the fans on the Powerbook 15", for example, are separate, but you can't replace the RHS one without removing the logic board, and you can't replace the one in the 12" without removing the heatsink). He will also find that Apple laptops have similar un-re-usable thermal pads that provide the interface between the CPU, GPU and the heatsink. The unibody line of MB and MBPs are a different beast again.
It's common to all laptops, and unless you make consideration to taking them apart in the design stage, it's going to be designed with miniaturisation, cooling efficiency and weight in mind. Ease of servicing is not even on the list, or if it is it's right at the bottom. Looking at the video the Pavillion looks no more difficult or involved to take apart than the many Apple laptops I have done over the years (as a skilled hobbyist, not as a job). It's not for the faint of heart, but they were never designed to be "easy to clean the fan" - if he wanted an easy machine to work on at home, he should have bought a desktop.
"MPEG LA's licensing terms are incompatible with both open standards and open software. They are anti-openness."
"The MPEG-LA terms are incompatible with open source in general and GPL specifically."
Conflating the two in the first instance, then not in the second, and I addressed the second - there are open source licences available that allow things like H.264 and other royalty/proprietary (although H.264 is not proprietary as such as an open specification) - the Mozilla foundation already has one and Firefox is available under that licence. So, it's not incompatible with "open source in general" and that's not even getting into the fact that open source also covers things like the BSD licence. The GPL is not the entirety or the be all and end all of open source. While the GPL is clearly important (and I'm glad it exists) it is only one piece of the puzzle.
Speaking of the principle of charity, when have I launched into ad hominem attacks against you? Admittedly my opening reply to you calling the MPEG LA an anti openness extortion cartel was a little barbed, but it wasn't a personal insult. At every turn here I have disagreed with a lot of what you have said but I have attacked the arguments you have made, not you personally. I can't launch an ad hominem against your argument. You're the one skirting around the edge with a questioning over whether I understand the vocabulary I am using, although I suppose it is fair given that I opened with a facetious remark.
In my experience, *all* patented things are encumbered by those same patents. The patent system as it stands now is ineffective and is more of a hassle than a benefit to a great swathe of people. It's expensive, inconsistent, corrupt, and still offers no perfect assurances that your patented widget is protected. A "merely" patented thing, especially in the modern era is really no better than a so called "patent encumbered" thing.
You could argue, successfully, that not all cars have steering wheels. You couldn't argue that not all cars have steering wheels by calling me a moronic idiot - that would be an ad hominem. I try the best I can to avoid doing that, since it's unproductive and unbecoming. It doesn't mean I can't vehemently disagree with you though if I think your argument is circular, or in error, and it doesn't mean I think you're an idiot.
As far as Jpeg and PDF go - I did *not* claim they weren't royalty free, I claimed they had patents attached to them. And while Firefox itself doesn't have much to do with PDF, it does have the ability to create PDF files (but for some reason can't read them - I suspect for security reasons). You're misreading what I said, either deliberately or otherwise, and I'm leaning toward the former since the post with the claim in it os only a couple of lines.
Anyway, so, having been called on deliberately conflating open source and open standard, and citing yourself that there's no fixed definition (and that royalties are not incompatible with the term) you are not restating that the MPEG LA's terms are "incompatible with open source in general and the GPL specifically" and have left out the open standards part, whereas just a couple of posts ago you were claiming it was also incompatible with open standards too (which I guess is odd, since you yourself are stating that it's something that so far doesn't have a full consensus, yet still claim to be able to define accurately enough to state 'incompatibility' with). In other words, "if I disagree with a definition, I will call it the minority position". If we're purely going by pure numbers for the accuracy of a statement, then I'm going to have to say "Windows is clearly the best operating system since it is the most popular".
Standards like USB and GSM, and on the codec side, H.264, AAC, HDV, etc are widely considered open standards by a widely accepted definition of the term. That some people (the FSF especially) claim that the term "doesn't count" and to use *their* definition as the actual cast-iron one is hypocrisy of the highest order.
You state that Firefox "can't" include H.264, which is nonsense. The Mozilla foundation could easily afford the licencing cost (it is capped) and they can offer Firefox under a different licence for the build that contained H.264 support (for example, its own MPL licence which already has precedent for combining open source and proprietary/non-free code in the same application). They can then offer the normal "non-tainted" version under the GPL.
It's not that they can't offer it, their position is purely ideological, and it's a position that I respect (far from being "someone who refuses to accept facts and change [his] position"), but I have looked at the wider implications of their stance. Their goal is a noble one, and one I support: the standardisation of the web on open standards that are also royalty free. I personally don;t believe that H.264 is the battleground to fight that particular battle on, though, although I'm not going to begrudge them their right to do so if they choose. All they are achieving in the short to medium term is the longevity of flash by trying to hobble H.264. Get rid of flash first, and get the HTML5 train properly rolling, then start dealing with codecs - the beauty of the video tag is the ability to easily offer up multiple formats if necessary. Thus, when something better than H.264 comes along (and the MPEG group is attempting to work on that right now, although getting flamed for it on slashdot, and getting confused with the MPEG LA) and then replace it.
H.264 has "won" the codec battle in the medium term - it has hardware decoding support in myriad portable devices, it is technically extremely good (and it is still better than WebM and Theora), and it is supported by multiple large companies. If there is a compelling alternative in the future, they will go for it - this could be Dirac, which will be compatible with OSS, or it could be something else. Just because companies like Apple, MS, Sony etc have settled on H.264 now doesn't mean they will automatically go for the royalty-encumbered one next time - they will pick the best tool for the job, and unfortunately for OSS right now, that is H.264. It is "established" in the market, and will be a standard format until the next one comes along.
Jpeg for one, Flash for another (even via the plugin - there is no reason not to provide that same avenue for H.264 to hand off to the OS).
It can also write PDF files.
Yes, just as reliable as some guy on slashdot claiming it to be unsafe.
Just sayin'
Whether I dispute your assertions or not, you are asking me to provide citations when you yourself provide none, other than your pejorative description of what it is the MPEG LA does.
Does that mean I'm free to describe the Mozilla foundation as an "anti-business, anti-freedom-to-choose roadblock that is ensuring the survival of flash"?
You also claim that the MPEG LA's terms are incompatible with open standards, which is funny since H.264 is an open standard. The fact that you (and many others on slashdot) like to muddy the waters as to the actual meaning of what an open standard is (there is no actual fixed definition which you are quick to point out, yet also simultaneously claim to be the authority on what it *isn't*).
As it stands right now H.264 is an open standard, along with other codecs such as AAC. A codec like MP3 however, is *not* an open standard, although it is also patented like H.264 and MP3. Just because something is patented does not exclude it from being an open standard. This is common in hardware connectors too - USB, RS-232, Mini-displayport - all patented, but all open standards, some of them royalty free, some not.
It is also completely different to Open Source (and open source software). Just because they use the same word beginning with O does not make them the same.
As far as "reexamining my beliefs" I think I am pretty much ok where I am. I don't actually agree with the MPEG LA's stance on alternative codecs - I think it's a short sighted move that will only serve to hurt H.264, which would be unfortunate. But as with any large entity it's very rarely a black and white situation -companies are not just "good" or "evil" as much as slashdot would like to make out. They may do dumb consumer-unfriendly things sometimes, but in general the world is a not filled with conspiracies and Machiavellian plans to exterminate open source software and consumer freedom.
Just scroll through a few slashdot stories at random that feature positive stories from "the enemy" (as defined by slashdot) and it's always rationalised as some ulterior motive that somehow ties in with their "evil" nature. It's simply not possible that they could do anything good! At least, not here on slashdot.
Even three positive MS stories in a row gets comments that it's somehow becoming a shill for MS, or comments that the MPEG group itself (which is not affiliated with the MPEG LA in any way, but try telling that to a commenter on slashdot) is working on a royalty free codec, but no! This can't be! It's really a plot to undermine royalty free and free codecs so that their expensive ones will make more money!
It's just getting old and tiresome. Let's not even get into the sizable population of slashdot users who are active anthropogenic climate change deniers. It really is the final trick in emulating Fox News. It's very difficult to get even a slightly objective commentary on topics on slashdot anymore, what with trolling summaries, deliberately misleading summaries, legions of people with multiple accounts for mod bombing, and for targeting specific users and following them around modding down everything they post and this overriding groundswell that simply everything is some grand conspiracy.
"anti openness extortion cartel"
Jeez, we really have turned into the Fox News of the tech world.
What next? I hate America because I think Mozilla's stance on H.264 is somewhat silly, given that they do support other "patent encumbered" formats?
I am not saying that jailbreaking will void the warranty - read my post again carefully. I am stating that if a manufacturer offers a switch that allows you to go "off piste" that the warranty would then no longer apply in the event that something you changed caused it to break. If something else goes wrong unrelated to the changes then of course that is covered.
It's not Microsoft's fault that your browser is intentionally not supporting H.264, for whatever reason it chooses to do so.
Perhaps they should drop jpeg support too, since that is also "patent encumbered".
Quicktime is not a format though.
Quicktime can play H.264 though, as can Windows Media Player. There's no reason that a person needs Quicktime to see H.264. The key is the container format, or the nature of the stream delivered to the browser, so we need a standard format and a standard container.
Right, because I'm going to distribute my movie in the same format that the camera uses. If it's going for broadcast I put it in a format that the broadcaster wants (which won;t be the one the camera uses, necessarily, especially if it's a prosumer one), and if it's going for a film release it will be on 35mm or into a digital format for a digital projector that is still unlikely to be the same as the camera's format.
If you have "creativity and artistic innovation" you are not concerned overly with your tools.
The editing software alone, if you want decent stuff, will cost you more than any licence to use the codec in your camera.
Irrelevant.
You are not forced to buy an iPhone - you can buy a Droid (where incidentally, Google has similar polices on its marketplace).
The fact that the App Store is the only store on the iPhone makes no difference to the rights of the people who own it.
Should the only store in a small town 100 miles from nowhere be forced to sell things it doesn't want to because it's the only store around?
Just try putting Linux on a turnkey computer sold from a retailer like Best Buy or HP and then asking them for support when it breaks.
And it's not necessarily software that can damage the device. The software might be fine, but what if someone installs an app that hooks up your phone to some other hardware device, but the connection is incompatible (or the person doing it messed up when putting the cable together) and you put 50V across two sensitive pins by accident? Just as a hypothetical.
A warranty covers a device as sold and outlines use cases, and also outlines what is not covered. It's pretty standard as far as consumer goods goes.
Right, and I should be able to force WalMart to give away my free newspaper (that I support with ads).
If I tell WalMart to stock it in their store for nothing, they can't tell me "no", nor decide not to carry it because it contains things they don't want to carry, like sex or editorials for competing stores.
That sounds exactly like the sort of "rights" that America is so proud of, yes?
Or do you mean "everyone has rights, except private store owners that I do not like, if they want to exercise a right that results in a situation I disagree with then they should be stopped!"
Reminds me of Sarah Palin talking about the Islamic community centre being built in Manhattan - "I know they have a right to do it, but should they?"
For the same reason that any warranty-covered device loses the protection of the warranty if you change something on it - you can't guarantee that you didn't break it yourself.
In the majority of cases, going into the equivalent of "jailbroken" mode won't have any negative effect, but there is always the possibility that something may go wrong - huge data loss (and poisoning of your backup on sync), maybe you drop a new baseband firmware on there that puts it outside the licenced spectrum, etc. Once you put a switch in place that says "go nuts", you know that most people really won;t do anything to affect the warranty, but there will be some who take it way outside the coverage. It's only usual that this is not covered.
You can't simultaneously claim "it's my phone, I should be able to do *absolutely anything at all* to it" on one hand and on the other say "anything I do that breaks it must still be covered by the warranty!"
Buy a 27" iMac and add a user-installed external SATA port by connecting one up to the unused internal one on the logic board and dremmeling a small slot on the bottom of the case near the RAM door, but don't expect Apple to fix it under Applecare for free if you damage it.
It's not really an "about face" since the Mpeg group and the MPEG-LA are not the same thing.
You can't really about-face from someone else's position.
I know that, but that's irrelevant. The discussion is about XBMC and the hardware it runs on.
If I'd wanted a large, noisily-fan-cooled, media centre then perhaps the Xbox 360 would be an option. Especially if I actually had any interest *at all* in console games, which I really don't.
So, I could spend $200 on getting a large, noisy Xbox 360 and only ever using it as a media centre, or I could spend $99 to get a small, fanless media centre that works well with the media centre I have upstairs because it's also XBMC. Alternatively I could spend a little more (edging towards the cost of an Xbox 360) to get something like a Revo, if your post is really just a thinly veiled "zomg anything but Apple". For that sort of money you get a hard drive (unlike the $200 360) and it's still much smaller.
You can't run XBMC on an Xbox 360, which is what we're talking about here.
I am aware there are other media centre solutions on the software side, but we are talking XBMC hardware here.
Yeah, so many modified and tweaked Xbox 360s and PS3s.....
oh right.
The vast majority of "gamers" right now are using consoles, which are the very definition of a fixed data point in terms of hardware and non-tweaking.
The second really massive growth area in gaming has been in casual games, which have attracted an entirely new set of people into games, and these are wildly successful on small, portable devices. Casual games are huge.
Any future game setup on the AppleTV, and the current gaming market on iOS and Android as it exists right now really don't have "gamer" in the traditional definition of the word within a country proverbial of their target demographic. Those gamers are fine off on their own trying to get an extra 5fps out of Crysis by running liquid helium over their GPU. Meanwhile, iOS casual game developers are making hay while the sun shines. Apple is *already* "competing with the Wii on the low end" - casual games that cost a lot less than $50 each are proven to make enough money to attract developers large and small.
It's $99, and one of the best XBMC devices out there right now. The old ones can even be upgraded to 1080p by swapping out the wifi card with an HD decoder (you are then limited to ethernet only). Hardly overpriced compared to the other stuff in the market that fills the same niche.
So you'll have games like Scrabble that exist right now - the board is on the iPad, you keep your tiles on your iPhone or iPod Touch and swipe them onto the iPad board to lay them. It seems like a logical extension to bring the AppleTV into this, since it is also an iOS device.
You could control your Angry Bird catapult from your phone's screen and have the results show on your TV, etc etc.
The iTunes video content is quite expensive, and is the last vestige of DRM in the store too. That said, if you wait to buy "box sets" the per-episode costs come down. I believe it is set up this way to recoup as much as possible from people who are not watch the adverts on cable TV during currently-airing shows, so if you want to keep up with the latest stuff as it comes out, it costs you a fortune to not see ads.
Bundles of older TV shows, or past seasons, are much more akin to DVD costs.