And on that point, this Apple fan will agree with you - there is no hardware support for H.264 decoding in OS X. I'm not sure why it's not there, since it wouldn't be too hard to add. My best guess is that it's to maintain a parallel with some of the older GPU-hobbled systems that wouldn't support it (but are otherwise not that that old in computer terms).
At any rate, it should at least be an option.
The current state of flash is an *abomination* on OS X though. Back before the BBC added swf verification to their iPlayer streams, the Mac version of XBMC would play back beautiful high bitrate HD programs without the cpu even breaking sweat (on top of OS X) where the flash plugin on the same OS is struggling and pegging at least 1 core at 100%. The HD content from iPlayer is unwatchable on OS X due to frame dropping. It's better (slightly) if you go full screen, but not much.
But even leaving aside the GPU acceleration argument (and OS X should definitely have it, let's hope soon) a very high bitrate H.264 HD file is no trouble for OS X in Quicktime or XBMC, or VLC, or Mplayer. Flash is the odd one out.
The bulk of the low level stuff in OS X (ie, the stuff you say they "refused to give") is open source. Perhaps Adobe doesn't know how to check code out of SVN.
CoreAnimation is well documented for developers, I don;t see how Apple could "refuse to give" this information only to Adobe. "Don't tell them about the website! Then their flash player will suck on OS X! What if they google it? They won't google it, they'll take our word for it that there's no documentation!"
Not really. Banning Quicktime on Windows wouldn't affect Apple users at all, unless they have an iPhone on Windows. But then you were talking about some sort of "Apple Cult" who presumably wouldn't have a Windows box as the home machine for their iPhone.
I have had first hand experience of "lazy development" - and I can understand why it was done. This is the use of the Cider wrapper to port games to OS X. I can see why some game companies go this route - it's cheaper than writing native code, but the result has universally sucked. This further enhances the stereotype that the Mac performs poorly for games (when it's the poor emulation of a windows box, with the Windows version of the game inside the wrapper causing the issue).
Poorly cross platform code makes all of the alternative platforms look bad, except the original. It can be done right, and in the case of the iPhone we're not talking about emulation per se, but the point is similar. We know the App Store is already controlled - why is it such a surprise that a language requirement could be added? While it may be a little annoying for developers, ultimately if it makes the user experience better, it has succeeded.
What goes on under the bonnet really doesn't concern the end user - only the final quality of the product. The PS2 was a *dog* to develop for, with a complex and difficult dev process, but the devs put up with it because the quality of the output was outstanding (for the consoles of the time).
The iPhone is not a device created to celebrate developer freedom - it is first and foremost a consumer device, and decisions related to it will always be about the end user first. This will no doubt piss off many developers who will gnash and scream that Apple aren;t doing what *they* want them to do, but ultimately, this will not change things all that much for the bulk of the developers on the platform.
That depends. It matters a great deal I think. It may be worth paying for the licence, and you have the option if you want it, unlike a closed format where your only option is reverse engineering. For systems like GSM, fully patented but open standards are in use that supply royalties to the original companies that developed them.
It's not always bad if the result is an open, but patented standard.
We can continue to push for royalty free standards and fully OSS-friendly codecs, but dismissing the middle ground (as Mozilla is trying to do by being overly stubborn with H.264) is not helping. I understand their reluctance and their stand, but sometimes you have to compromise for the benefit of all (binary drivers for GPUs in Linux come to mind as another example - not ideal, but small steps, and beneficial results for both parties in the meantime).
"The ITU-T H.264 standard and the ISO/IEC MPEG-4 AVC standard (formally, ISO/IEC 14496-10 - MPEG-4 Part 10, Advanced Video Coding) are jointly maintained so that they have identical technical content."
Just because it is patented doesn't mean it's not open.
It is the opposite side of the coin from something like WMV, which is proprietary.
They released big chunks of changes at once, especially in the early days, since they had been working on the fork for about a year before they made it public. They switched to a CVS model that made it easier, but there were also grumblings that some of the changes made it less KHTML-like (but that did help to make it more portable).
They also (not immediately) released the other parts of the engine that they wrote from scratch under a BSD licence to go with the GPL components.
Yes, clearly, but I think the original assertion by the troll was that Apple took KHTML, changed the name to WebKit and put it in a browser and called it done and they they haven't done or contributed anything and that every new development is a KHTML-crafted change.
They also open sourced the other parts of Webkit that they wrote (under a BSD-style licence) to go with the GPL licensed bits.
Yes, they rolled their own Javascript engine for Safari 4, but based on the original engine with large improvements in speed. This is Nitro (or SquirrelFish, or SFX, or whatever it is being called right now).
They also did *massive* work on the CSS core to enable Safari (and Webkit itself) to pass Acid 2. So "working fine" before Apple "ripped it apart" to make it more standards compliant.
Apple have done a great deal of work on Webkit, not to diminish any of the work done by people on KHTML before that, but any charge that Apple haven't done much, or just rebadged it and called it done, or have negatively affected KHTML or Webkit is just a non starter.
Again, if you read his post (and my reply when some AC also tried to point this out) he says he has a 3GS, which was released 6 months after the first Android phone.
Read my post again. I am not disputing that Dell has more variety; that is a clear no brainer.
My point is that even though Dell has more variety, doesn't mean that Apple doesn't have any. The two do not correlate. Your original assertion was that because Apple has no sub-$1k gaming laptop that they had no variety. Well, you actually said "little actual variety" (direct quote), despite having demonstrably different product lines that are physically different from one another in pretty marked ways - some are laptops, one is the size of a few CDS, one is designed to be expandable, the other has a screen built in but is a desktop. They also sell phones and music players.
The fundamental raw product lines are reasonably similar to Dell - Inspiron/Latitude in laptops for example, with a large array of configurations of those base products (far more than with the MacBook and MacBook Pro configs, but still based on a small subset of designs).
As to whether "gaylordest" is a word, however, is perhaps a discussion for another time. Maybe it's a word in high school.
Again, since your level of discourse appears to only go so high that "gaylordest" is actually a word in your vocabulary, I will repeat that I am not saying that Apple has more variety than Dell, nor did I ever state or imply that in earlier posts.
Right, Burger King offers unlimited ways to make your burger, it doesn't mean that McDonalds, who use a set menu, don't have variety.
By definition, Apple don't sell just one product that is the same. That is the the literal definition of a variety of products. Just because they don't have as many as Dell or Lenovo doesn't invalidate that.
So wait, because they a lacking a sub $1000 gaming laptop, they have no variety? Despite selling laptops, a small PC, an all in one and a tower?
The new Macbook is reasonable with a 9400M - there's a video of someone putting it through its paces on youtube with Oblivion and TF2 on high settings. Hardly cutting edge, but then why are you looking at Apple if you want a dedicated mobile gaming rig? Laptops with hefty GPUs are available from other suppliers.
My point was that their computer market is different from their commodity handset/tablet market, and that a business model in one does not automatically mean that business model is used in the other. They can sell two different business models without having to homogenise.
He says he has a 3GS - Android was definitely out by the time the 3GS was in stores. The HTC Dream was out in October 2008 (the first Android phone). The 3GS was released 6 months later.
So, he bought a 3GS despite Android phones being available, and now he's moaning about "having to break the law" to use his phone the way he wants.
And in a poll of 20,000 hypothetical consumers on the street, the number who have heard of Android is? The number who know what an iPhone is, is?
Android is gaining ground (as expected - it is a clear competitor) but it is nowhere near troubling Apple yet, purely due to exposure and marketing (which is highly important).
Android also has some serious downsides compared to the iPhone, chief among them being fragmentation of the platform - not all the apps work on all the handsets, and there are numerous versions of the software out there on different handsets. Version control is poor, the app marketplace behaves oddly - working fine on one device, but failing on another device on the same wireless network. You can't browse the marketplace officially in a web browser (I mean seriously, wtf! no brainer).
There are pros and cons to both platforms, purely by nature of their business models.
Either, both. It just means you don;t have to code something specifically for your ads (if you already have an app), and will be able to add them more easily (if you have a new app).
It allows apps that already have ads to change the source slightly to cut out any "home rolled" code that the OS itself now duplicates.
Does make all their cars like the GT40 because that's the one with the biggest profit margin? No, they sell a variety of products that meet different needs, much like Apple does.
The iPhone/iPad market is not the same as the OS X market.
Having bought 10 or 11 copies of Final Cut Studio over the years, they wouldn't go with an app store model because the install is approximately 80 gigs if you install everything, including the loops, fonts and other assets that you can use in Motion projects, DVD projects, Soundtrack etc. Plus, the box it comes in is about 6 inches thick and 90% is filled by the printed manuals (although they also provide all those manuals as PDFs on the disks). I'm not downloading that over the internet.
Maybe if Adobe pulled its thumb out of its ass and made a decent implementation of flash for OS X then Apple would be more willing to throw them a bone on the iPhone OS.
Slashdot Mirror
And on that point, this Apple fan will agree with you - there is no hardware support for H.264 decoding in OS X. I'm not sure why it's not there, since it wouldn't be too hard to add. My best guess is that it's to maintain a parallel with some of the older GPU-hobbled systems that wouldn't support it (but are otherwise not that that old in computer terms).
At any rate, it should at least be an option.
The current state of flash is an *abomination* on OS X though. Back before the BBC added swf verification to their iPlayer streams, the Mac version of XBMC would play back beautiful high bitrate HD programs without the cpu even breaking sweat (on top of OS X) where the flash plugin on the same OS is struggling and pegging at least 1 core at 100%. The HD content from iPlayer is unwatchable on OS X due to frame dropping. It's better (slightly) if you go full screen, but not much.
But even leaving aside the GPU acceleration argument (and OS X should definitely have it, let's hope soon) a very high bitrate H.264 HD file is no trouble for OS X in Quicktime or XBMC, or VLC, or Mplayer. Flash is the odd one out.
The bulk of the low level stuff in OS X (ie, the stuff you say they "refused to give") is open source. Perhaps Adobe doesn't know how to check code out of SVN.
CoreAnimation is well documented for developers, I don;t see how Apple could "refuse to give" this information only to Adobe. "Don't tell them about the website! Then their flash player will suck on OS X! What if they google it? They won't google it, they'll take our word for it that there's no documentation!"
You mean like C and C++?
Not really. Banning Quicktime on Windows wouldn't affect Apple users at all, unless they have an iPhone on Windows. But then you were talking about some sort of "Apple Cult" who presumably wouldn't have a Windows box as the home machine for their iPhone.
I have had first hand experience of "lazy development" - and I can understand why it was done. This is the use of the Cider wrapper to port games to OS X. I can see why some game companies go this route - it's cheaper than writing native code, but the result has universally sucked. This further enhances the stereotype that the Mac performs poorly for games (when it's the poor emulation of a windows box, with the Windows version of the game inside the wrapper causing the issue).
Poorly cross platform code makes all of the alternative platforms look bad, except the original. It can be done right, and in the case of the iPhone we're not talking about emulation per se, but the point is similar. We know the App Store is already controlled - why is it such a surprise that a language requirement could be added? While it may be a little annoying for developers, ultimately if it makes the user experience better, it has succeeded.
What goes on under the bonnet really doesn't concern the end user - only the final quality of the product. The PS2 was a *dog* to develop for, with a complex and difficult dev process, but the devs put up with it because the quality of the output was outstanding (for the consoles of the time).
The iPhone is not a device created to celebrate developer freedom - it is first and foremost a consumer device, and decisions related to it will always be about the end user first. This will no doubt piss off many developers who will gnash and scream that Apple aren;t doing what *they* want them to do, but ultimately, this will not change things all that much for the bulk of the developers on the platform.
*usually* means royalty free, but not always.
From your link.
That depends. It matters a great deal I think. It may be worth paying for the licence, and you have the option if you want it, unlike a closed format where your only option is reverse engineering. For systems like GSM, fully patented but open standards are in use that supply royalties to the original companies that developed them.
It's not always bad if the result is an open, but patented standard.
We can continue to push for royalty free standards and fully OSS-friendly codecs, but dismissing the middle ground (as Mozilla is trying to do by being overly stubborn with H.264) is not helping. I understand their reluctance and their stand, but sometimes you have to compromise for the benefit of all (binary drivers for GPUs in Linux come to mind as another example - not ideal, but small steps, and beneficial results for both parties in the meantime).
It's an open standard. This is well known.
"The ITU-T H.264 standard and the ISO/IEC MPEG-4 AVC standard (formally, ISO/IEC 14496-10 - MPEG-4 Part 10, Advanced Video Coding) are jointly maintained so that they have identical technical content."
Just because it is patented doesn't mean it's not open.
It is the opposite side of the coin from something like WMV, which is proprietary.
They released big chunks of changes at once, especially in the early days, since they had been working on the fork for about a year before they made it public. They switched to a CVS model that made it easier, but there were also grumblings that some of the changes made it less KHTML-like (but that did help to make it more portable).
They also (not immediately) released the other parts of the engine that they wrote from scratch under a BSD licence to go with the GPL components.
Yes, clearly, but I think the original assertion by the troll was that Apple took KHTML, changed the name to WebKit and put it in a browser and called it done and they they haven't done or contributed anything and that every new development is a KHTML-crafted change.
They also open sourced the other parts of Webkit that they wrote (under a BSD-style licence) to go with the GPL licensed bits.
H.264 is an open standard, so the fox is not crying.
Yes, they rolled their own Javascript engine for Safari 4, but based on the original engine with large improvements in speed. This is Nitro (or SquirrelFish, or SFX, or whatever it is being called right now).
They also did *massive* work on the CSS core to enable Safari (and Webkit itself) to pass Acid 2. So "working fine" before Apple "ripped it apart" to make it more standards compliant.
Apple have done a great deal of work on Webkit, not to diminish any of the work done by people on KHTML before that, but any charge that Apple haven't done much, or just rebadged it and called it done, or have negatively affected KHTML or Webkit is just a non starter.
Again, if you read his post (and my reply when some AC also tried to point this out) he says he has a 3GS, which was released 6 months after the first Android phone.
Read my post again. I am not disputing that Dell has more variety; that is a clear no brainer.
My point is that even though Dell has more variety, doesn't mean that Apple doesn't have any. The two do not correlate. Your original assertion was that because Apple has no sub-$1k gaming laptop that they had no variety. Well, you actually said "little actual variety" (direct quote), despite having demonstrably different product lines that are physically different from one another in pretty marked ways - some are laptops, one is the size of a few CDS, one is designed to be expandable, the other has a screen built in but is a desktop. They also sell phones and music players.
The fundamental raw product lines are reasonably similar to Dell - Inspiron/Latitude in laptops for example, with a large array of configurations of those base products (far more than with the MacBook and MacBook Pro configs, but still based on a small subset of designs).
As to whether "gaylordest" is a word, however, is perhaps a discussion for another time. Maybe it's a word in high school.
Again, since your level of discourse appears to only go so high that "gaylordest" is actually a word in your vocabulary, I will repeat that I am not saying that Apple has more variety than Dell, nor did I ever state or imply that in earlier posts.
Right, Burger King offers unlimited ways to make your burger, it doesn't mean that McDonalds, who use a set menu, don't have variety.
By definition, Apple don't sell just one product that is the same. That is the the literal definition of a variety of products. Just because they don't have as many as Dell or Lenovo doesn't invalidate that.
So wait, because they a lacking a sub $1000 gaming laptop, they have no variety? Despite selling laptops, a small PC, an all in one and a tower?
The new Macbook is reasonable with a 9400M - there's a video of someone putting it through its paces on youtube with Oblivion and TF2 on high settings. Hardly cutting edge, but then why are you looking at Apple if you want a dedicated mobile gaming rig? Laptops with hefty GPUs are available from other suppliers.
My point was that their computer market is different from their commodity handset/tablet market, and that a business model in one does not automatically mean that business model is used in the other. They can sell two different business models without having to homogenise.
Yes, sorry I meant to say the new iPhone OS, not WebOS.
Yes, you just made the point that he went on to mention in the same post you quoted, including the same example of a honeycomb.
He says he has a 3GS - Android was definitely out by the time the 3GS was in stores. The HTC Dream was out in October 2008 (the first Android phone). The 3GS was released 6 months later.
So, he bought a 3GS despite Android phones being available, and now he's moaning about "having to break the law" to use his phone the way he wants.
Should have bought an Android phone.
So it basically implements multitasking like Android does it, with state saving and helper processes.
And in a poll of 20,000 hypothetical consumers on the street, the number who have heard of Android is? The number who know what an iPhone is, is?
Android is gaining ground (as expected - it is a clear competitor) but it is nowhere near troubling Apple yet, purely due to exposure and marketing (which is highly important).
Android also has some serious downsides compared to the iPhone, chief among them being fragmentation of the platform - not all the apps work on all the handsets, and there are numerous versions of the software out there on different handsets. Version control is poor, the app marketplace behaves oddly - working fine on one device, but failing on another device on the same wireless network. You can't browse the marketplace officially in a web browser (I mean seriously, wtf! no brainer).
There are pros and cons to both platforms, purely by nature of their business models.
Either, both. It just means you don;t have to code something specifically for your ads (if you already have an app), and will be able to add them more easily (if you have a new app).
It allows apps that already have ads to change the source slightly to cut out any "home rolled" code that the OS itself now duplicates.
Why did slashdot eat the word "Ford" from my post. I remember typing it because I originally put "Frod" and corrected myself inline. Weird.
Because they are totally different markets.
Does make all their cars like the GT40 because that's the one with the biggest profit margin? No, they sell a variety of products that meet different needs, much like Apple does.
The iPhone/iPad market is not the same as the OS X market.
Having bought 10 or 11 copies of Final Cut Studio over the years, they wouldn't go with an app store model because the install is approximately 80 gigs if you install everything, including the loops, fonts and other assets that you can use in Motion projects, DVD projects, Soundtrack etc. Plus, the box it comes in is about 6 inches thick and 90% is filled by the printed manuals (although they also provide all those manuals as PDFs on the disks). I'm not downloading that over the internet.
Different markets.
Maybe if Adobe pulled its thumb out of its ass and made a decent implementation of flash for OS X then Apple would be more willing to throw them a bone on the iPhone OS.
Why did you buy it then, and not an Android based phone? It clearly didn't do what you wanted it to do and you knew that before you bought it.
I can't use a Corvette to move a sofa without extensive modification or strapping it to the roof in an unwieldy manner, but I don't whine about it.