Netflix doesn't use RTP style streaming, at least not with the Rokus I own. They stream using buffers and yes they use TCP, not UDP. Just from watching the video I can tell there is about 30 seconds of video buffered. Looking at the stats on my router I can see the spikes as the movie buffers then it drops off. It doesn't truly "stream". VOIP and teleconferencing require RTP, not movie streaming.
The trade-off in performance for the most common used virus-scanning packages is huge and should be taken into consideration. Lately I've used co-workers new laptops that make my 5 year old Pentium-M with Ubuntu seem very fast by comparison.
In my experience with helping "friends" (people who find out I work with computers) with their computers, most of them have virus software installed that failed to detect the malicious software. And when I tried to remove it I had to try half a dozen scanners to find one that will detect and remove the virus or trojan.
Virus software is not like a seat belt. It's more akin to the E.R. doctor trying to patch things up after they've gone to hell. If you run a scan and find something, your system is no longer trustworthy.
There's no replacement for educating users, but the OS and program software can go a long way to help keep a system secure without the unnecessary overhead of checking each file for every signature of every piece of malware ever developed.
After reading the posts in this thread about why people need multiple monitors, it's obvious to me that virtual desktops would work just as well or better for most cases. You can switch from one virtual desktop to another nearly as fast as your eyes can move from one monitor to another except your eyes don't need to move. Not to mention the wasted desk space, equipment and electricity.
I always keep 4 desktops and group my related tasks. Currently I have my work related stuff on one, a personal project on another and Slashdot on a third (just kidding. Slashdot is on the first). Someone will probably come along and reply to this with a legitimate use of multiple monitors, and they exist, but I still assert that most cases could be facilitated using virtual desktops. And think about this. I can take "4 monitors" with me to a library or coffee shop without any more weight or size than a laptop. So if you MUST have multiple monitors to work, you're stuck at the location where the monitors are.
Each and every one of those 50 cables will have to have its own hole dug
That's not the way I read it. The grandparent said "50 incoming optical lines (1 cm thick bundle)", which I took to mean that the 50 optical cables contained in a single cover. So there is only one hole needed. I've been told that the major cost is not the cable, but the digging, so I say cram as many cables as you can while you're there. Sure there will still be some shared infrastructure where those cables terminate, but it's still the best option we're looking at.
I just don't understand the pessimism towards FTH. We implemented a phone network over 60 years ago and look what it did for us. My imagination runs wild thinking of what could be done with synchronous multi-Gbps fiber connections as ubiquitous as POTS. Having fast, reliable, affordable Internet access would open the door for companies to offer services over this medium. The obvious ones are phone and TV, which would benefit from REAL competition. Businesses and individuals alike could make large datasets geographically redundant in real-time as the data rates would be similar to SATA (1.5, 3 GBPS) speeds (yea, there's still latency). High quality video streams and conferences would be the norm instead of the exception they are now (my upstream rate is 2 Mbps on a good day). Consider what happened from dial-up (56K) to what we're at now (~10Mbps/~1Mbps). Now think about the jump to 10Gbps/10Gbps or even 1Gbps/1Gbps. It's a similar sized leap and I think we can expect similar sized advances as a result. Either way, we should wire up our buildings with fiber and while we're digging throw in some extra fiber to grow.
Integrity be damned! It's just business, right? Doing things because it's the right thing to do is so passé.
This is the same mentality that ships the workforce overseas and in general does things that are bad for the country in the long run. Please stop encouraging spineless behavior.
Being Slashdot, many here are IT workers so I think this thread has gotten really one sided. This guy didn't go about things the right way, but seeing the responses here has reaffirmed my suspicions about the state of IT. IT exists to SUPPORT business, yet they often take an authoritative attitude towards those performing the core business. Several times in this discussion, it's stated that this guy should be fired for this unthinkable act. You'd think he put everyone's life in danger or something, not plugged something into the wall. Get some perspective, guys.
I have a good idea why IT is this way. They're on the line if a virus breaks out or if data is stolen or if something breaks, etc. But don't be surprised when somebody tries to do something with a computer to make their business run better and it doesn't fit in with the policy. Instead of rising up to destroy the person, step in and educate them and help them find the best way to accomplish the goal. Remember that IT exists to support the business, not the other way around.
Many here have servers hosted in datacenters; I have several at Linode.com. $30 per month gets you 300GB transfer per months in addition to the actual server access. I don't know what the data rate is, but I usually get about 30 Mbps. Note that this service, in a data center, does NOT have unlimited transfer. And I don't expect ISPs to offer unlimited transfer, but I do expect value for my dollar.
That said, the caps should not be the same for every plan. It doesn't make sense to offer the same cap for the slowest and fastest data rate plans. At the very least, they should increase with the tiers. If I had my rathers, you could choose the balance of data rate and cap for a certain price point. And even more so (probably not feasible with the tech), you could configure the download and UPLOAD data rates.
GUI is about discovery and until someone comes up with a GUI that can "discover" every possible thing you may want to do, CLI will be the best option for many tasks.
According to this article, Cloud Drive is based on S3. The cost per GB for Cloud Drive is $1 per GB per year, where as S3 is $.14 per GB per month, or about $1.68 per GB per year plus transfer costs. Even if they're using reduced redundancy, Cloud Drive is still cheaper and S3 has transfer costs. Cloud Drive does require annual payments, so that may be a factor, but assuming they provide some sort of API to Cloud Drive or it's http and someone writes a library to access it, why would you pay more for S3?
Seven years ago, would you have done ie6 only development because the money was there? I think many here would, but personally I couldn't be satisfied with myself knowing I was helping to ruin the web. On top of being horribly standards deficient, ie6 only ran on Windows so it served to lock people in. There are other reasons for choosing to not participate in a technology. Mainly, as in the case with ie6, that one doesn't want to help a technology become more prevalent.
If.NET was really cross-platform, it would be more appealing to me. But I've been around long enough to know that MS intends for it to be just another piece to lock people into its ecosystem, and I don't wish to be a part of that. I'm a bit of an idealist, I admit, but I want to see computing move forward and I think that programming to a single vendor, single OS platform, even if it is not bad, does not accomplish this.
3. Client Performance: SSL websites are slower than non-SSL websites. Not such a big deal again these days, but I remember when I had to wait it would seem forever for the images on my online banking site to load, cursing them every time for such a graphically-intensive SSL site.
Resumed handshakes can really speed up performance for a client's subsequent SSL connections. So the performance hit depends on the type of traffic being served. Many clients connecting once would be very expensive, while a few clients connecting frequently would be much less expensive.
I've got 855GM Integrated Graphics on my laptop. It has always worked well on Windows and never on Linux despite the drivers being open sourced and the hardware specs being available. I'm using Lucid, but it's still a problem today See Lucidi8xxFreezes for a list of the workarounds.
The truth is that even with hardware specs, it takes people with both the required skill and motivation to make things work and keep them working.
My SIP server (Asterisk 1.6) is fine. I've got 4 other SIP phones on it, 3 in Houston and 1 in Michigan and they perform great. I assume you mean PCMU/A by PCM, which requires the least amount of encoding/decoding, but has the highest bandwidth requirement (about 90 kbps with overhead). Also, PCMU is what POTS uses so it's as close to perfect as you can get when using a POTS gateway. For comparison, on calls my latency from Houston to Michigan is less than that from my N900 to the PBX on a LAN. I get similar results regardless of codec. I've concluded that most people have a higher tolerance for latency than myself. That's why I run Asterisk with Vitelity in the first place; I can't stand a long conversation on a high latency over-compressed cell phone voice stream.
On a LAN, there shouldn't be any perceivable latency on an echo test, yet I get about.2 seconds at best using Mameo's SIP client. I thought it might be the wifi power conservation (try an ssh session into the N900 and you'll notice the lag), but tuning that setting (I forget now what it was), while making the ssh sessions more responsive had a marginal effect on the SIP sessions. I've also flashed the device to make sure I hadn't goofed up some default setting.
I have a similar setup (N900/Asterisk/Vitelity) and I have found the Maemo SIP client to be very laggy even on WIFI. Also T-Mobile's data 3 and 3.5G isn't reliable enough for practical use of SIP calls. Have you encountered similar issues and how did you handle them?
A compromise is not necessary. At least not for situations like this one.
Consider something more like SSL's certificate revocation list. I know little about Android, but assuming it uses a software management system similar to Debian's dpkg, each software installation has a signature. For each repository (app store) the device uses, it would subscribe to an application revocation list. When an application is listed for removal the device could CHOOSE to remove the app OR NOT. I'm emphasizing choice, because the power to remove an application is transferred from the content provider to the device owner. The remote control stuff just bothers me, regardless of the controller's motives.
More thoughts. You could have more information in the ARL (application revocation list) including severity and a detailed message which explains the problem. This would allow the user to understand why the app is to be removed and to be made aware of what negative effects the malware may have imposed.
I imagine the reason for remote wipe is not so much to stop malware, but more likely for removing functionality against the user's will as Amazon has done with some of its e-books on the Kindle. I say this because a kill-switch implementation would surely be far more complex to implement than what I've proposed and I can't be the first to think of this simple solution to the potential malware problem.
Microsoft abusing their monopoly yet again, using their desktop OS to force their way into the search (advertising) market. They haven't changed a bit.
It's as if MS is trying to gain the same position they had with IBM PC compatibles. They think the same strategy will work for them again. And if there is anything to be learned from that, the hardware manufacturers were marginalized with Windows.
I hope that's not the case. I would like to see a competitive environment with good interoperability between competing systems instead of the monopoly and vendor lock-in based strategies of the last 20 years. Which, BTW, I'm convinced has severely hindered progress in general computing.
On the face, your comment sounds pragmatic, but it is truly apathetic.
For instance, consider the MS Office format. Plenty of people use and exchange.doc(x) formatted files and friends because "it works for them". I work with public records, many of which go back to 1950. Most of the old paper records were scanned using the standard group 4 compressed tiff format. I guarantee you those will have the same readability 50 years from now as they do today. 10 years ago WordPerfect was the standard in the office and today many of those files can't be read reliably or at all with the current MS Office software. The same will be true for.doc and.doc(x) files. There would be some inconvenience in using a standard like ODF, but in 50 years those files would be readable. Doing what is good for the long term isn't always the easiest or cheapest option for the short term. But like you, most people don't care; they're just apathetic.
In a government office (I've worked in one) most computer operations can be handled by commodity programs like browsers and text editors. There are very few people that require specialized software or devices, so I'll bet these complaints are cherry picked and even if valid don't warrant a full scale switch away from the current system. That's absurd, and as pointed out by others most likely a political move motivated by the BSA. Windows + Office licenses on these people is wasted, and in Germany's case, the money is leaving the city and country. What's happens is that the government decision maker gets convinced he needs to purchase a Windows and MS Office license for every government employee. I see a problem here and I'm a "Real Person".
accidentally restarted it instead of logged out (yes, it has that extra popup)
Am I in the minority to think that using a GUI as the primary server interface is retarded? I know there' s Monad (or Power Shell) now, but it seems like nobody uses it except in arguments to say "Windows can do that too". On a Unix or Linux system, there would be no way to confuse logging out with shutting down. And you would need get root to shut the server down. I'm not kidding or trolling; It is sad that so many people find administration via RDP to a server as acceptable and that they can't see that "ssh server command" is sooo much more efficient.
Because implementing a web standard shouldn't require payment and carry restrictions.
Choosing a standard doesn't preclude the use of other codecs. However, we need a format we can depend on being available regardless of browser or OS or whether somebody has "payed up". And so what if Google does pay to include h.264 in Chrome? There are many other browsers, most without the financial backing to purchase a codec license for every user.
People talk about h.264 like it's the be-all end-all of video codecs, but in 5-7 years, it will be surpassed just as mpeg2 and mpeg4 (xvid and friends) were before it. And at that time the difference in quality between webm and h.264 will seem insignificant. webm is good enough for youtube and cnet videos and family video archives and posting for friends to see - the typical ways we like to share video. Blu-ray will still use h.264 and flash and silverlight will still work, but they'll make up the minority of use cases. It you're streaming a movie in 1080p to your nice HDTV, you may still use your licensed player watching your video encoded in h.264 high-profile by a licensed video encoder. But Joe Smoe can post his video of his kids up for the whole family to see and not have to worry if they're running Windows or OSX or Debian or FreeBSD or what browser they're using. He can have confidence that they will see his video.
And about the support for phones and other devices. Most smart phone users have a hard time holding on to their phones for more than a year or 2 max. By the time this all settles, most people here will not be using the same phone they're using at this moment. And as I understand, on most devices, it's a software issue as they contain a DSP that can speed up decoding.
Slashdot Mirror
Netflix doesn't use RTP style streaming, at least not with the Rokus I own. They stream using buffers and yes they use TCP, not UDP. Just from watching the video I can tell there is about 30 seconds of video buffered. Looking at the stats on my router I can see the spikes as the movie buffers then it drops off. It doesn't truly "stream". VOIP and teleconferencing require RTP, not movie streaming.
The trade-off in performance for the most common used virus-scanning packages is huge and should be taken into consideration. Lately I've used co-workers new laptops that make my 5 year old Pentium-M with Ubuntu seem very fast by comparison. In my experience with helping "friends" (people who find out I work with computers) with their computers, most of them have virus software installed that failed to detect the malicious software. And when I tried to remove it I had to try half a dozen scanners to find one that will detect and remove the virus or trojan. Virus software is not like a seat belt. It's more akin to the E.R. doctor trying to patch things up after they've gone to hell. If you run a scan and find something, your system is no longer trustworthy. There's no replacement for educating users, but the OS and program software can go a long way to help keep a system secure without the unnecessary overhead of checking each file for every signature of every piece of malware ever developed.
After reading the posts in this thread about why people need multiple monitors, it's obvious to me that virtual desktops would work just as well or better for most cases. You can switch from one virtual desktop to another nearly as fast as your eyes can move from one monitor to another except your eyes don't need to move. Not to mention the wasted desk space, equipment and electricity.
I always keep 4 desktops and group my related tasks. Currently I have my work related stuff on one, a personal project on another and Slashdot on a third (just kidding. Slashdot is on the first). Someone will probably come along and reply to this with a legitimate use of multiple monitors, and they exist, but I still assert that most cases could be facilitated using virtual desktops. And think about this. I can take "4 monitors" with me to a library or coffee shop without any more weight or size than a laptop. So if you MUST have multiple monitors to work, you're stuck at the location where the monitors are.
Each and every one of those 50 cables will have to have its own hole dug
That's not the way I read it. The grandparent said "50 incoming optical lines (1 cm thick bundle)", which I took to mean that the 50 optical cables contained in a single cover. So there is only one hole needed. I've been told that the major cost is not the cable, but the digging, so I say cram as many cables as you can while you're there. Sure there will still be some shared infrastructure where those cables terminate, but it's still the best option we're looking at.
I just don't understand the pessimism towards FTH. We implemented a phone network over 60 years ago and look what it did for us. My imagination runs wild thinking of what could be done with synchronous multi-Gbps fiber connections as ubiquitous as POTS. Having fast, reliable, affordable Internet access would open the door for companies to offer services over this medium. The obvious ones are phone and TV, which would benefit from REAL competition. Businesses and individuals alike could make large datasets geographically redundant in real-time as the data rates would be similar to SATA (1.5, 3 GBPS) speeds (yea, there's still latency). High quality video streams and conferences would be the norm instead of the exception they are now (my upstream rate is 2 Mbps on a good day). Consider what happened from dial-up (56K) to what we're at now (~10Mbps/~1Mbps). Now think about the jump to 10Gbps/10Gbps or even 1Gbps/1Gbps. It's a similar sized leap and I think we can expect similar sized advances as a result. Either way, we should wire up our buildings with fiber and while we're digging throw in some extra fiber to grow.
Integrity be damned! It's just business, right? Doing things because it's the right thing to do is so passé.
This is the same mentality that ships the workforce overseas and in general does things that are bad for the country in the long run. Please stop encouraging spineless behavior.
It's not so clear. There's still a cloud over C# and .NET implementations not from MS. See Here..
You are essentially arguing that we should be stifling innovation, just more slowly. That is nonsense and doesn't fly.
No, he clearly argues that a shorter copyright is better than both what we have now and nothing at all. You misstated his argument.
Being Slashdot, many here are IT workers so I think this thread has gotten really one sided. This guy didn't go about things the right way, but seeing the responses here has reaffirmed my suspicions about the state of IT. IT exists to SUPPORT business, yet they often take an authoritative attitude towards those performing the core business. Several times in this discussion, it's stated that this guy should be fired for this unthinkable act. You'd think he put everyone's life in danger or something, not plugged something into the wall. Get some perspective, guys.
I have a good idea why IT is this way. They're on the line if a virus breaks out or if data is stolen or if something breaks, etc. But don't be surprised when somebody tries to do something with a computer to make their business run better and it doesn't fit in with the policy. Instead of rising up to destroy the person, step in and educate them and help them find the best way to accomplish the goal. Remember that IT exists to support the business, not the other way around.
Many here have servers hosted in datacenters; I have several at Linode.com. $30 per month gets you 300GB transfer per months in addition to the actual server access. I don't know what the data rate is, but I usually get about 30 Mbps. Note that this service, in a data center, does NOT have unlimited transfer. And I don't expect ISPs to offer unlimited transfer, but I do expect value for my dollar.
That said, the caps should not be the same for every plan. It doesn't make sense to offer the same cap for the slowest and fastest data rate plans. At the very least, they should increase with the tiers. If I had my rathers, you could choose the balance of data rate and cap for a certain price point. And even more so (probably not feasible with the tech), you could configure the download and UPLOAD data rates.
GUI is about discovery and until someone comes up with a GUI that can "discover" every possible thing you may want to do, CLI will be the best option for many tasks.
According to this article, Cloud Drive is based on S3. The cost per GB for Cloud Drive is $1 per GB per year, where as S3 is $.14 per GB per month, or about $1.68 per GB per year plus transfer costs. Even if they're using reduced redundancy, Cloud Drive is still cheaper and S3 has transfer costs. Cloud Drive does require annual payments, so that may be a factor, but assuming they provide some sort of API to Cloud Drive or it's http and someone writes a library to access it, why would you pay more for S3?
Seven years ago, would you have done ie6 only development because the money was there? I think many here would, but personally I couldn't be satisfied with myself knowing I was helping to ruin the web. On top of being horribly standards deficient, ie6 only ran on Windows so it served to lock people in. There are other reasons for choosing to not participate in a technology. Mainly, as in the case with ie6, that one doesn't want to help a technology become more prevalent.
If .NET was really cross-platform, it would be more appealing to me. But I've been around long enough to know that MS intends for it to be just another piece to lock people into its ecosystem, and I don't wish to be a part of that. I'm a bit of an idealist, I admit, but I want to see computing move forward and I think that programming to a single vendor, single OS platform, even if it is not bad, does not accomplish this.
3. Client Performance: SSL websites are slower than non-SSL websites. Not such a big deal again these days, but I remember when I had to wait it would seem forever for the images on my online banking site to load, cursing them every time for such a graphically-intensive SSL site.
Resumed handshakes can really speed up performance for a client's subsequent SSL connections. So the performance hit depends on the type of traffic being served. Many clients connecting once would be very expensive, while a few clients connecting frequently would be much less expensive.
The latency from the handshake is unavoidable. Otherwise, it is just CPU intensive. SSL/TLS can resume previous sessions, which is a tremendous help.
It doesnt't work on any of my computers unlike its competitors. Firefox, Opera, Chrome and even Safari are multi-platform.
I've got 855GM Integrated Graphics on my laptop. It has always worked well on Windows and never on Linux despite the drivers being open sourced and the hardware specs being available. I'm using Lucid, but it's still a problem today See Lucidi8xxFreezes for a list of the workarounds.
The truth is that even with hardware specs, it takes people with both the required skill and motivation to make things work and keep them working.
My SIP server (Asterisk 1.6) is fine. I've got 4 other SIP phones on it, 3 in Houston and 1 in Michigan and they perform great. I assume you mean PCMU/A by PCM, which requires the least amount of encoding/decoding, but has the highest bandwidth requirement (about 90 kbps with overhead). Also, PCMU is what POTS uses so it's as close to perfect as you can get when using a POTS gateway. For comparison, on calls my latency from Houston to Michigan is less than that from my N900 to the PBX on a LAN. I get similar results regardless of codec. I've concluded that most people have a higher tolerance for latency than myself. That's why I run Asterisk with Vitelity in the first place; I can't stand a long conversation on a high latency over-compressed cell phone voice stream.
On a LAN, there shouldn't be any perceivable latency on an echo test, yet I get about .2 seconds at best using Mameo's SIP client. I thought it might be the wifi power conservation (try an ssh session into the N900 and you'll notice the lag), but tuning that setting (I forget now what it was), while making the ssh sessions more responsive had a marginal effect on the SIP sessions. I've also flashed the device to make sure I hadn't goofed up some default setting.
I have a similar setup (N900/Asterisk/Vitelity) and I have found the Maemo SIP client to be very laggy even on WIFI. Also T-Mobile's data 3 and 3.5G isn't reliable enough for practical use of SIP calls. Have you encountered similar issues and how did you handle them?
Or you can by an SIP phone.
A compromise is not necessary. At least not for situations like this one.
Consider something more like SSL's certificate revocation list. I know little about Android, but assuming it uses a software management system similar to Debian's dpkg, each software installation has a signature. For each repository (app store) the device uses, it would subscribe to an application revocation list. When an application is listed for removal the device could CHOOSE to remove the app OR NOT. I'm emphasizing choice, because the power to remove an application is transferred from the content provider to the device owner. The remote control stuff just bothers me, regardless of the controller's motives.
More thoughts. You could have more information in the ARL (application revocation list) including severity and a detailed message which explains the problem. This would allow the user to understand why the app is to be removed and to be made aware of what negative effects the malware may have imposed.
I imagine the reason for remote wipe is not so much to stop malware, but more likely for removing functionality against the user's will as Amazon has done with some of its e-books on the Kindle. I say this because a kill-switch implementation would surely be far more complex to implement than what I've proposed and I can't be the first to think of this simple solution to the potential malware problem.
Microsoft abusing their monopoly yet again, using their desktop OS to force their way into the search (advertising) market. They haven't changed a bit.
It's as if MS is trying to gain the same position they had with IBM PC compatibles. They think the same strategy will work for them again. And if there is anything to be learned from that, the hardware manufacturers were marginalized with Windows.
I hope that's not the case. I would like to see a competitive environment with good interoperability between competing systems instead of the monopoly and vendor lock-in based strategies of the last 20 years. Which, BTW, I'm convinced has severely hindered progress in general computing.
On the face, your comment sounds pragmatic, but it is truly apathetic.
For instance, consider the MS Office format. Plenty of people use and exchange .doc(x) formatted files and friends because "it works for them". I work with public records, many of which go back to 1950. Most of the old paper records were scanned using the standard group 4 compressed tiff format. I guarantee you those will have the same readability 50 years from now as they do today. 10 years ago WordPerfect was the standard in the office and today many of those files can't be read reliably or at all with the current MS Office software. The same will be true for .doc and .doc(x) files. There would be some inconvenience in using a standard like ODF, but in 50 years those files would be readable. Doing what is good for the long term isn't always the easiest or cheapest option for the short term. But like you, most people don't care; they're just apathetic.
In a government office (I've worked in one) most computer operations can be handled by commodity programs like browsers and text editors. There are very few people that require specialized software or devices, so I'll bet these complaints are cherry picked and even if valid don't warrant a full scale switch away from the current system. That's absurd, and as pointed out by others most likely a political move motivated by the BSA. Windows + Office licenses on these people is wasted, and in Germany's case, the money is leaving the city and country. What's happens is that the government decision maker gets convinced he needs to purchase a Windows and MS Office license for every government employee. I see a problem here and I'm a "Real Person".
accidentally restarted it instead of logged out (yes, it has that extra popup)
Am I in the minority to think that using a GUI as the primary server interface is retarded? I know there' s Monad (or Power Shell) now, but it seems like nobody uses it except in arguments to say "Windows can do that too". On a Unix or Linux system, there would be no way to confuse logging out with shutting down. And you would need get root to shut the server down. I'm not kidding or trolling; It is sad that so many people find administration via RDP to a server as acceptable and that they can't see that "ssh server command" is sooo much more efficient.
Because implementing a web standard shouldn't require payment and carry restrictions.
Choosing a standard doesn't preclude the use of other codecs. However, we need a format we can depend on being available regardless of browser or OS or whether somebody has "payed up". And so what if Google does pay to include h.264 in Chrome? There are many other browsers, most without the financial backing to purchase a codec license for every user.
People talk about h.264 like it's the be-all end-all of video codecs, but in 5-7 years, it will be surpassed just as mpeg2 and mpeg4 (xvid and friends) were before it. And at that time the difference in quality between webm and h.264 will seem insignificant. webm is good enough for youtube and cnet videos and family video archives and posting for friends to see - the typical ways we like to share video. Blu-ray will still use h.264 and flash and silverlight will still work, but they'll make up the minority of use cases. It you're streaming a movie in 1080p to your nice HDTV, you may still use your licensed player watching your video encoded in h.264 high-profile by a licensed video encoder. But Joe Smoe can post his video of his kids up for the whole family to see and not have to worry if they're running Windows or OSX or Debian or FreeBSD or what browser they're using. He can have confidence that they will see his video.
And about the support for phones and other devices. Most smart phone users have a hard time holding on to their phones for more than a year or 2 max. By the time this all settles, most people here will not be using the same phone they're using at this moment. And as I understand, on most devices, it's a software issue as they contain a DSP that can speed up decoding.