Real games written in a real language? Good for you if you get your gaming from crappy flash games but in my experience, flash games are poorly performing 2D games.
You need to take a class in remedial reading. He is talking about Safari crashing a mac. To the average layman, when a program like Safari crashes, they think of it as their "computer" crashing.
we'll be using a different format. Yes, it will be encumbered by patents, DRM and a bunch of other shit we don't even know yet - but it will not be H.264. I don't really see how this extension of free licensing could be profitable to them.
You are missing the forest for the trees. The MPLA makes money on licensing fees for encoders and decoders. By offering royalty free streaming for a time, the format becomes popular which means that more encoders and decoders are sold which generates more income.
It is possible that they may continue to offer free licensing of for distribution through further extensions. Doing it this way rather than just offering blanket permission to stream give them a few advantages:
1. It allows them to track how many sites are using their technology.
2. They can still go after webmasters who have not registered for the free license to stream.
3. They can revoke a license from someone deliberately distributing pirated video.
Your point is that Apple benefits by leveraging on the open source community?
On the iphone/ipad, why not have the cellular control part of the software protected and allow the user access to the rest of the OS? Several laptops etc have cellular cards... yet they're not locked down like the iphone/ipad. Methinks you're drinking the cool-aid.
So, you think that open source projects just develop by themselves and that they work for free? Go dig through the recent stories on slashdot. Most high profile developers in Open source projects are paid directly by their employers to work on open source projects and this work benefits not only their employer but the community at large. This is how the open source movement works. The bearded hippies at universities do not do most of the heavy lifting in the development of open source software.
You at as if Apple does not contribute anything back to those projects or that they did not release anything to the open source community. It would be counter-productive for them to not contribute fixes and enhancements.
The difference with laptop cards is that they known who has each one and closely monitor the traffic they generate. If you were to do something untoward on their network, you would not only lose your connection quickly but you would have FBI agents knocking down your door. Cellular phones are a lot more portable and because it is a communication device, there are different rules about monitoring them compared with a data only network devices. With a card, they are an ISP but with a cellphone, they are a telecommunications carrier.
when you jailbreak a cellphone, you are putting lives at risk.
This is only indicative of a serious design flaw.
Imagine that the internet worked like that. With the many rooted computers out there, the internet would have been brought down to the ground by now.
Do you understand what a jailbreak is? The iPhone OS in the default configuration has third party apps running in BSD jail sandboxes. When you "jailbreak", you are removing the security model so that there are no more sandboxes. When you install 3G Unrestrictor, you are modifying the cellular networking stack using code that has not been properly tested. Now with this hacked stack and the ability to run any code you want, you can run deliberately malicious or buggy code that can bring down cell towers. Explain to me how this is indicative of a design flaw if people are choosing to destroy all of the safeguards on the device? They are removing sandboxes, encryption and app signing and the guard at the 3G network gate. In a jailbroken device, there is no security left and the inmates are running the asylum.
Jailbreak your non-cellular Wifi devices all you want but when you jailbreak a cellphone, you are putting lives at risk.
Hyperbole much?
Not really. If you are installing software on jailbroken devices, are you compiling from source or are you more likely going to search the web for repositories and just blindly install software from them? The latter is most likely for the majority of jailbreakers. When I was playing with my jailbroken iPod Touch (Wifi only device), I recall there being a trojan masquerading around as a copy of Customize 1.3. It could have been much worse like a trojan that would bring down the local towers network nodes either deliberately or because of bugs in its networking code. If cell towers started crashing, that could cost lives if someone is trying to call 911 or has been hurt and is on the line with 911 when it happens.
If you brick your device while on Wifi, you are not really hurting anyone especially if you are on your home network but if you are accessing the cell network with say, 3G unrestrictor, you can cause damage if you run buggy code.
The iPhone is a "phone". Do you get it? It operates on a public "cellular network" and its main purpose is for make "phone calls". Even the much hyped as "open" Android "phones" are locked down to a certain extent. Whenever you are accessing the cellular network on an appliance, that appliance will have some limitations applied to it whether it be by Apple, Nokia or Google.
I think you have been fooled by looks. The complexity of OS X is hidden under an easy to use UI and you don't have to use the terminal for anything because the UI is largely complete but if you want, you can access the terminal. You can add cron jobs manually if your really want to but again, there are free tools out there that will let you tweak even that via a GUI interface.
The main difference between OS X and linux, beside the look and feel of the GUI and the included frameworks is that there are so many GUIs to choose from on linux and none of them are complete enough that you don't sometimes have to drop to the terminal to change settings.
OS X is at least as complex as any other *nix OS as it is a combination of a Mach kernel, BSD and GNU shell user land and an object oriented OpenStep UI and applications frameworks.
Enough with the hyperbole. Go onto any mac, navigate to/Applications/Utilities. Open up terminal and hack to your heart's content. You have access to shell scripts, ruby, python, perl and PHP. I sometimes have geektool running accessing a local PHP script that scrapes local weather information and icons for display on my desktop. All of the standard unix and GNU tools are at your disposal. Settings for the system are stored in XML.plist files. The Mac OS X will never be locked down like the iPhone OS.
I have no problem with things running on the iPhone in a sandbox as it accesses the public cellular networks. Anyone caught breaking the cellular network by installing unstable software on a jailbroken deserves to have their ass kicked to the point that they are in a hospital eating through a straw for several months. Jailbreak your non-cellular Wifi devices all you want but when you jailbreak a cellphone, you are putting lives at risk.
Devices like the iPhone and iPad are supposed to be networked appliances, not general purpose computers.
PS. Here are a few links for you since you seem to be clueless as to how to use google.
Software, software, software attracts developer, developers, developer. Hardware specs give hardware fanboys a hardon but without a good API and distribution system, developers and consumers will not go with it.
I guess it just rocks too much to provide support for even basic internet technologies.
So much more fun to re-invent the wheel, and lock your codebase to a single mobile platform.
Hand in your geek card. I've had to use wireshark and manually code a webservice client in python by connecting via network sockets and sending the mime encoded XML SOAP request. I was integrating with a third party enterprise system which had a webservice that was so locked down that it did not provide a way of requesting a WSDL. I had to take a some vendor supplied example code written in Java, run it against the webservice, capture the response request and response in wireshark and then use that to code the python webservice client.
If you cannot write a soap handler without libraries then you you are not a real coder but one of those Visual Basic "burger flippers" pretending to be a professional developer.
not really. I don't have a mac as my primary development machine. so I couln't develop iPad apps even if I wanted to learn objective C. But I might have more luck being able to write c# on my thinkpad instead. nothing about laziness at all here.
If you are not willing to use the right tools for the job then you should avoid the iPhone platform. I prefer using macs at home but guess what? I use windows, VS.NET and whatever other tools that I have to get my work done at work. I put my platform preferences aside when I arrive at work.
Are you a professional developer or a fanboy? You cannot be both when you are at work.
If you want to learn how to develop for the iPhone OS then you need to learn Objective-C.
You didn't gave any particular reasons as to why someone who already knows C# (or knows both languages, but prefers C#) should need to learn Objective-C. Just because Apple says it's the "main native language" on the platform doesn't automatically make it the best choice. And end user couldn't care less what his applications are written in, so long as they run well.
Ok, here are some reasons:
1. Even with the recompile to native, you will end up including a lot of useless baggage in the resulting executable. This is known as bloat which is something you want to avoid.
2. Mono Touch does not support everything that Objective-C does so it is best practice to choose the language with the most support for the task at hand.
3. Mono Touch costs extra money and you lose a lot of the debugging functionality which you get with a natively developed app.
4. Performance will suffer. See point 1.
5. Use the best tool or language for the job. We used Java and Python in one project because it was what was supported the third party vendor we were integrating with even though most of our codebase is C#. Build tools and standards for versioning were brought across to have an integrated build across languages.
6. Learning a new language should be viewed as an opportunity rather than a burden. Any developer that has the attitude of not wanting to learn should be shown the door IMHO.
I don't care if you have an existing codebase in C#. You are going to have to expose your code as generic webservices anyway since Mono for the iPhone does not support.NET remoting anyway.
Right, because the only type of applications is a thin client that connects to web services.
Maybe you have an existing codebase that you want to run on the iPhone.
Trying to use Mono Touch as a crutch smacks of laziness and fear of learning.
No, it smacks of wanting to re-use code to deliver a solution at lower cost in less time and with fewer bugs compared with trying to rewrite things from scratch.
If you are developing something other than a thin client, then most of your code is throw away anyway when you are porting to a new platform.
As to your second point, refactoring code is now encouraged by the agile movement. Trying to reuse code on a new platform may not be a good idea. Old code can contain bugs which are exposed on a new platform. Are you advocating emulation? Much of Mono code emulates the windows way of doing things in the same way as Wine does. A rewrite is a better option and it could expose bugs in the existing codebase that you might not catch if you just to a quick port.
Reuse of C code for generic functions can make sense but using C# does not make sense because you have to embed a lot of extra code into the resulting executable during the recompile to native.
When I joined my current employer, I did not know how to write in perl but I learned quickly and took over development of our first e-commerce service and we launched on time. During my time there I've learned perl, VFP, C#, Python and Java.
If you want to learn how to develop for the iPhone OS then you need to learn Objective-C.
I don't care if you have an existing codebase in C#. You are going to have to expose your code as generic webservices anyway since Mono for the iPhone does not support.NET remoting anyway. Once your "cloud" services are available as standard web services, they can be accessed by any language and it makes sense to learn the main native language of the iPhone OS platform.
Trying to use Mono Touch as a crutch smacks of laziness and fear of learning.
Open source software should not be "free" to download for people who have not contributed considerable code to the project.
Ah, somebody fixated on creating artificial scarcity and who can't cope with the idea of non-rivalrous goods.
The world is a richer place when things can be freely copied billions of times.
Artificial scarcity, copyright and patents, are a primitive hack to encourage creation that possibly was going to happen anyway, nothing more, and often cost society much more than they give.
This has nothing to do with artificial scarcity. It has to do with people valuing the work of others. When you pay for something, you are much more likely to value it but if it is free, it becomes something that has no value to you and is easily disposable.
You seem to think that you are entitled to the work of others. Just because something is free, it does not mean that is does not have value. Unfortunately, many people like you do not see value in things that are free so it become necessary for you to work or pay for it in order to appreciate what something is worth. The problem is with your mindset.
Open source software is written by people and it takes considerable effort. It's just so sad that most people are not capable of appreciating the value of a gift given by someone to the community at large. It should inspire you to contribute donations or learn how to program and contribute something yourself instead of being selfish and sponging off the good nature of others.
You are changing the subject (cameras vs editors). But anyway.
You found a chicken and egg problem with a proposed standard, congrats.
Editors are software, easily patch-able if there is demand.
Editors can output uncompressed and/or MJPEG which can be used by a dedicated encoder. It's possible to do Theora now, no question about it.
Easy? So I take it that you have never written any software I take it? I've been working as a software developer for over a decade. It all appears deceptively easy to the uninitiated.
A lot of people use tools like Quicktime, iLife or Movie Maker to quickly edit and upload their videos to places like Youtube. Where are people expected to get encoding software? Will it work seamlessly? Will they even care enough to choose Theora when the default might be H264? Where will these videos be hosted? How easy will it be to upload the videos?
Most people don't even know what software is out there that allows you to play back Theora let alone encode in that format.
Most people don't know about any of it for H.264 either, or for JPEGs or PNGs for that matter. They just go to a site with Firefox or Chrome and Theora video "just works". As far as encoding is concerned, anyone who knows enough to write HTML5 should be able to google for it.
Thank you for proving my point. People expect their software to "just work". Without content in Theora format, they will have nothing to watch. As for creating and publishing in H264 format, there is Quicktime and iMovie which now support uploading in H264 to Youtube from within the application.
The Canadian carriers rolled out a coast to coast HSPA+ (UMTS 3G+) network in a little over a year.
No they didn't. They skipped two whole provinces and most of Northern Ontario -- 3000km on Highway 1 with no HSPA+ coverage from anyone but Rogers.
Well, that's still pretty damn good considering the short time span. Almost nobody lives in Northern Ontario so they concentrated on the majority of the population. As for Saskatchewan and Manitoba, they have had to negotiate with SaskTel and MTS for a network sharing agreement before they can enter that market. Blame those carriers in those provinces.
What has Verizon done in that time span? Where is their network?
Uh, yeah. It is pretty universal that GSM phones do not work inside hospitals even in the ER waiting room. They block GSM phones because they are known to cause problems with their equipment. If you have to make a call, step outside and make a call. CDMA phones do still work inside hospitals because they use different air interfaces and frequencies.
I get signal almost everywhere on my iPhone on Fido but I could not get any signal when I was waiting to get admitted to the ER.
The US is rather large, and rather sparsely populated. It's harded to maintain a network of up-to-date towers with full coverage here than in finland. Not that it excuses *AT&T's* piss poor infrastructure planning and spending, but it helps explain it.
That is a poor excuse. Canada somehow managed to have a major coast to coast GSM network (Rogers/Fido) that works and then have their CDMA carriers roll out an HSPA network in around a year.
It'll take years to roll out a stable LTE network that is as large as their 3G CDMA network. In iPhone time that is over 2 generations of iPhones that they'd lose sales on. Believe me, if there is a Verizon iPhone out within the next year it will either be CDMA only or both CDMA and GSM.
Right, because Apple's iPhone is in trouble right now.... not. Over 50 percent of iPhones are sold in countries other than the US now. Most of the world that actually buys smartphones use GSM. Out of the remaining CDMA countries, most of them use a variation of the standard that is not compatible with Verizon and Sprint anyway. For example, South Korea is transitioning to GSM but their version of CDMA uses SIM cards and would not work on Sprint or Verizon.
LTE is the 4G standard of the GSM world that build upon UMTS (3G GSM). There is one problem with Verizon going to LTE directly. There are no handsets available unless they can make it fully backwards compatible with existing UMTS handsets like the iPhone.
The Canadian carriers rolled out a coast to coast HSPA+ (UMTS 3G+) network in a little over a year. They started planning it around the time that the iPhone 3G arrived on the incumbent GSM carriers (Rogers/Fido). It offers 21 Megabits per second download rates on data cards. I'm on Fido and I'm pretty happy with my service and the price I pay but I'm envious of the speeds on Bell/Telus.
So then Mozilla could charge 99 cents as a one time fee to download the official binary per year (updates from within Firefox would be free for the year). They could also enforce that anyone releasing unofficial builds would not be allowed to call it "Firefox" or include H264 support. Most people are willing to pay 99 cents especially if you frame it as paying to support H264 support and to support future development.
Cheapskates would be told that they have to download the source and build it themselves.
The GPL offers free access to the source. It does not demand that binaries must be gratis.
Another alternative would be to simply bind Firefox to Core Video (OS X) and Direct Show (windows). Firefox could offer linux users H264 support for a small fee as an optional download.
Care factor zero. It is not supposed to be the responsibility of web browser developers to worry about sort of stuff for plugins so why would HTML 5 video be any different?
You can buy a licence from MPEGLA for a using an opensource implementation of H264 such as ffmpeg or x264, entreprises do that already.
The patents are public so there's no need to hide source code of implementations.
Exactly. Also, binaries do not have to be gratis. There is no requirement for the developers to offer the binaries for free even under the GPL. If you don't want to pay, download the source and figure out how to build it yourself or pay a small amount of money (less than the price of a meal most likely) and contribute towards the support of your favourite software project while getting the convenience of a binary build.
Slashdot Mirror
What would take the place of FLASH games?
Real games written in a real language? Good for you if you get your gaming from crappy flash games but in my experience, flash games are poorly performing 2D games.
You need to take a class in remedial reading. He is talking about Safari crashing a mac. To the average layman, when a program like Safari crashes, they think of it as their "computer" crashing.
we'll be using a different format. Yes, it will be encumbered by patents, DRM and a bunch of other shit we don't even know yet - but it will not be H.264. I don't really see how this extension of free licensing could be profitable to them.
You are missing the forest for the trees. The MPLA makes money on licensing fees for encoders and decoders. By offering royalty free streaming for a time, the format becomes popular which means that more encoders and decoders are sold which generates more income.
It is possible that they may continue to offer free licensing of for distribution through further extensions. Doing it this way rather than just offering blanket permission to stream give them a few advantages:
1. It allows them to track how many sites are using their technology.
2. They can still go after webmasters who have not registered for the free license to stream.
3. They can revoke a license from someone deliberately distributing pirated video.
Your point is that Apple benefits by leveraging on the open source community?
On the iphone/ipad, why not have the cellular control part of the software protected and allow the user access to the rest of the OS? Several laptops etc have cellular cards... yet they're not locked down like the iphone/ipad. Methinks you're drinking the cool-aid.
So, you think that open source projects just develop by themselves and that they work for free? Go dig through the recent stories on slashdot. Most high profile developers in Open source projects are paid directly by their employers to work on open source projects and this work benefits not only their employer but the community at large. This is how the open source movement works. The bearded hippies at universities do not do most of the heavy lifting in the development of open source software.
You at as if Apple does not contribute anything back to those projects or that they did not release anything to the open source community. It would be counter-productive for them to not contribute fixes and enhancements.
The difference with laptop cards is that they known who has each one and closely monitor the traffic they generate. If you were to do something untoward on their network, you would not only lose your connection quickly but you would have FBI agents knocking down your door. Cellular phones are a lot more portable and because it is a communication device, there are different rules about monitoring them compared with a data only network devices. With a card, they are an ISP but with a cellphone, they are a telecommunications carrier.
when you jailbreak a cellphone, you are putting lives at risk.
This is only indicative of a serious design flaw.
Imagine that the internet worked like that. With the many rooted computers out there, the internet would have been brought down to the ground by now.
Do you understand what a jailbreak is? The iPhone OS in the default configuration has third party apps running in BSD jail sandboxes. When you "jailbreak", you are removing the security model so that there are no more sandboxes. When you install 3G Unrestrictor, you are modifying the cellular networking stack using code that has not been properly tested. Now with this hacked stack and the ability to run any code you want, you can run deliberately malicious or buggy code that can bring down cell towers. Explain to me how this is indicative of a design flaw if people are choosing to destroy all of the safeguards on the device? They are removing sandboxes, encryption and app signing and the guard at the 3G network gate. In a jailbroken device, there is no security left and the inmates are running the asylum.
Jailbreak your non-cellular Wifi devices all you want but when you jailbreak a cellphone, you are putting lives at risk.
Hyperbole much?
Not really. If you are installing software on jailbroken devices, are you compiling from source or are you more likely going to search the web for repositories and just blindly install software from them? The latter is most likely for the majority of jailbreakers. When I was playing with my jailbroken iPod Touch (Wifi only device), I recall there being a trojan masquerading around as a copy of Customize 1.3. It could have been much worse like a trojan that would bring down the local towers network nodes either deliberately or because of bugs in its networking code. If cell towers started crashing, that could cost lives if someone is trying to call 911 or has been hurt and is on the line with 911 when it happens.
If you brick your device while on Wifi, you are not really hurting anyone especially if you are on your home network but if you are accessing the cell network with say, 3G unrestrictor, you can cause damage if you run buggy code.
How do you like living in a dream world?
The main difference between OS X and linux, beside the look and feel of the GUI and the included frameworks is that there are so many GUIs to choose from on linux and none of them are complete enough that you don't sometimes have to drop to the terminal to change settings.
OS X is at least as complex as any other *nix OS as it is a combination of a Mach kernel, BSD and GNU shell user land and an object oriented OpenStep UI and applications frameworks.
I have no problem with things running on the iPhone in a sandbox as it accesses the public cellular networks. Anyone caught breaking the cellular network by installing unstable software on a jailbroken deserves to have their ass kicked to the point that they are in a hospital eating through a straw for several months. Jailbreak your non-cellular Wifi devices all you want but when you jailbreak a cellphone, you are putting lives at risk.
Devices like the iPhone and iPad are supposed to be networked appliances, not general purpose computers.
PS. Here are a few links for you since you seem to be clueless as to how to use google.
http://www.opensource.apple.com/
http://www.apple.com/opensource/
All I did was type in the following keywords into google: " Apple Open Source". I know, that is so non-obvious *sarcasm*.
Software, software, software attracts developer, developers, developer. Hardware specs give hardware fanboys a hardon but without a good API and distribution system, developers and consumers will not go with it.
I guess it just rocks too much to provide support for even basic internet technologies.
So much more fun to re-invent the wheel, and lock your codebase to a single mobile platform.
Hand in your geek card. I've had to use wireshark and manually code a webservice client in python by connecting via network sockets and sending the mime encoded XML SOAP request. I was integrating with a third party enterprise system which had a webservice that was so locked down that it did not provide a way of requesting a WSDL. I had to take a some vendor supplied example code written in Java, run it against the webservice, capture the response request and response in wireshark and then use that to code the python webservice client.
If you cannot write a soap handler without libraries then you you are not a real coder but one of those Visual Basic "burger flippers" pretending to be a professional developer.
not really. I don't have a mac as my primary development machine. so I couln't develop iPad apps even if I wanted to learn objective C. But I might have more luck being able to write c# on my thinkpad instead. nothing about laziness at all here.
If you are not willing to use the right tools for the job then you should avoid the iPhone platform. I prefer using macs at home but guess what? I use windows, VS.NET and whatever other tools that I have to get my work done at work. I put my platform preferences aside when I arrive at work.
Are you a professional developer or a fanboy? You cannot be both when you are at work.
If you want to learn how to develop for the iPhone OS then you need to learn Objective-C.
You didn't gave any particular reasons as to why someone who already knows C# (or knows both languages, but prefers C#) should need to learn Objective-C. Just because Apple says it's the "main native language" on the platform doesn't automatically make it the best choice. And end user couldn't care less what his applications are written in, so long as they run well.
Ok, here are some reasons:
1. Even with the recompile to native, you will end up including a lot of useless baggage in the resulting executable. This is known as bloat which is something you want to avoid.
2. Mono Touch does not support everything that Objective-C does so it is best practice to choose the language with the most support for the task at hand.
3. Mono Touch costs extra money and you lose a lot of the debugging functionality which you get with a natively developed app.
4. Performance will suffer. See point 1.
5. Use the best tool or language for the job. We used Java and Python in one project because it was what was supported the third party vendor we were integrating with even though most of our codebase is C#. Build tools and standards for versioning were brought across to have an integrated build across languages.
6. Learning a new language should be viewed as an opportunity rather than a burden. Any developer that has the attitude of not wanting to learn should be shown the door IMHO.
Right, because the only type of applications is a thin client that connects to web services.
Maybe you have an existing codebase that you want to run on the iPhone.
No, it smacks of wanting to re-use code to deliver a solution at lower cost in less time and with fewer bugs compared with trying to rewrite things from scratch.
If you are developing something other than a thin client, then most of your code is throw away anyway when you are porting to a new platform.
As to your second point, refactoring code is now encouraged by the agile movement. Trying to reuse code on a new platform may not be a good idea. Old code can contain bugs which are exposed on a new platform. Are you advocating emulation? Much of Mono code emulates the windows way of doing things in the same way as Wine does. A rewrite is a better option and it could expose bugs in the existing codebase that you might not catch if you just to a quick port.
Reuse of C code for generic functions can make sense but using C# does not make sense because you have to embed a lot of extra code into the resulting executable during the recompile to native.
If you want to learn how to develop for the iPhone OS then you need to learn Objective-C.
I don't care if you have an existing codebase in C#. You are going to have to expose your code as generic webservices anyway since Mono for the iPhone does not support .NET remoting anyway. Once your "cloud" services are available as standard web services, they can be accessed by any language and it makes sense to learn the main native language of the iPhone OS platform.
Trying to use Mono Touch as a crutch smacks of laziness and fear of learning.
Open source software should not be "free" to download for people who have not contributed considerable code to the project.
Ah, somebody fixated on creating artificial scarcity and who can't cope with the idea of non-rivalrous goods.
The world is a richer place when things can be freely copied billions of times.
Artificial scarcity, copyright and patents, are a primitive hack to encourage creation that possibly was going to happen anyway, nothing more, and often cost society much more than they give.
This has nothing to do with artificial scarcity. It has to do with people valuing the work of others. When you pay for something, you are much more likely to value it but if it is free, it becomes something that has no value to you and is easily disposable.
You seem to think that you are entitled to the work of others. Just because something is free, it does not mean that is does not have value. Unfortunately, many people like you do not see value in things that are free so it become necessary for you to work or pay for it in order to appreciate what something is worth. The problem is with your mindset.
Open source software is written by people and it takes considerable effort. It's just so sad that most people are not capable of appreciating the value of a gift given by someone to the community at large. It should inspire you to contribute donations or learn how to program and contribute something yourself instead of being selfish and sponging off the good nature of others.
You are changing the subject (cameras vs editors). But anyway.
Easy? So I take it that you have never written any software I take it? I've been working as a software developer for over a decade. It all appears deceptively easy to the uninitiated.
A lot of people use tools like Quicktime, iLife or Movie Maker to quickly edit and upload their videos to places like Youtube. Where are people expected to get encoding software? Will it work seamlessly? Will they even care enough to choose Theora when the default might be H264? Where will these videos be hosted? How easy will it be to upload the videos?
Most people don't know about any of it for H.264 either, or for JPEGs or PNGs for that matter. They just go to a site with Firefox or Chrome and Theora video "just works". As far as encoding is concerned, anyone who knows enough to write HTML5 should be able to google for it.
Thank you for proving my point. People expect their software to "just work". Without content in Theora format, they will have nothing to watch. As for creating and publishing in H264 format, there is Quicktime and iMovie which now support uploading in H264 to Youtube from within the application.
The Canadian carriers rolled out a coast to coast HSPA+ (UMTS 3G+) network in a little over a year.
No they didn't. They skipped two whole provinces and most of Northern Ontario -- 3000km on Highway 1 with no HSPA+ coverage from anyone but Rogers.
Well, that's still pretty damn good considering the short time span. Almost nobody lives in Northern Ontario so they concentrated on the majority of the population. As for Saskatchewan and Manitoba, they have had to negotiate with SaskTel and MTS for a network sharing agreement before they can enter that market. Blame those carriers in those provinces.
What has Verizon done in that time span? Where is their network?
I get signal almost everywhere on my iPhone on Fido but I could not get any signal when I was waiting to get admitted to the ER.
The US is rather large, and rather sparsely populated. It's harded to maintain a network of up-to-date towers with full coverage here than in finland. Not that it excuses *AT&T's* piss poor infrastructure planning and spending, but it helps explain it.
That is a poor excuse. Canada somehow managed to have a major coast to coast GSM network (Rogers/Fido) that works and then have their CDMA carriers roll out an HSPA network in around a year.
HSPA coverage maps in Canada:
http://www.iphoneincanada.ca/iphone-rogers/network-coverage-maps-bell-vs-telus-vs-fido-vs-rogers/
It'll take years to roll out a stable LTE network that is as large as their 3G CDMA network. In iPhone time that is over 2 generations of iPhones that they'd lose sales on. Believe me, if there is a Verizon iPhone out within the next year it will either be CDMA only or both CDMA and GSM.
Right, because Apple's iPhone is in trouble right now.... not. Over 50 percent of iPhones are sold in countries other than the US now. Most of the world that actually buys smartphones use GSM. Out of the remaining CDMA countries, most of them use a variation of the standard that is not compatible with Verizon and Sprint anyway. For example, South Korea is transitioning to GSM but their version of CDMA uses SIM cards and would not work on Sprint or Verizon.
The Canadian carriers rolled out a coast to coast HSPA+ (UMTS 3G+) network in a little over a year. They started planning it around the time that the iPhone 3G arrived on the incumbent GSM carriers (Rogers/Fido). It offers 21 Megabits per second download rates on data cards. I'm on Fido and I'm pretty happy with my service and the price I pay but I'm envious of the speeds on Bell/Telus.
Cheapskates would be told that they have to download the source and build it themselves.
The GPL offers free access to the source. It does not demand that binaries must be gratis.
Another alternative would be to simply bind Firefox to Core Video (OS X) and Direct Show (windows). Firefox could offer linux users H264 support for a small fee as an optional download.
Just bind to ffmpeg/ffdshow/CoreVideo. They all support H.264, and your responsibility is zero.
And lose all the extra optimisation and swish features that are only possible for a decoder they have full control over.
Care factor zero. It is not supposed to be the responsibility of web browser developers to worry about sort of stuff for plugins so why would HTML 5 video be any different?
You can buy a licence from MPEGLA for a using an opensource implementation of H264 such as ffmpeg or x264, entreprises do that already.
The patents are public so there's no need to hide source code of implementations.
Exactly. Also, binaries do not have to be gratis. There is no requirement for the developers to offer the binaries for free even under the GPL. If you don't want to pay, download the source and figure out how to build it yourself or pay a small amount of money (less than the price of a meal most likely) and contribute towards the support of your favourite software project while getting the convenience of a binary build.