However, they are steering the market into accepting walled gardens, and Microsoft is going from an open platform (open in the "run whatever you want" sense - actually, it was shared source, even) to a closed one.
And, the "you can only use certain languages" is an attempt to make it significantly harder to write multi-platform software without outright saying "don't port to another platform."
And I'm saying Google should be that patent troll. They're big enough that they can troll the entire system, for the purpose of bringing it down, and I think they'd do it if they felt that it's not too evil, and benefits them. (And, I think, with all the licensing fees they'll have to pay to MPEG LA, and the amount of patent suits being brought against them, it does benefit them.)
It makes them very vulnerable to the normal "we'll sue you unless you license us your patents" method, but NOT the "everyone put their cards on the table and sue each other, and to hell with licensing the patents" method.
In that case, those with the most patents have the most to lose. Those with the least patents have the most to gain, because a LOT of patents will get invalidated.
That will only last for a very short time, though - patent reform will be pushed through very quickly to work around that particular issue, if all electronics and software are banned.
And those are just the essential patents - in working around them, you may well stumble upon other patents.
The other thing is to just host everything in Russia, transcode all video in Russian compute farms, and just get ridiculous amounts of bandwidth to Russia for sending raw, uncompressed video.
The other thing is, in this specific case, H.264 probably infringes on some of On2's patents for VP3.
Google now owns On2, and therefore owns the VP3 patents.
Theora is based on VP3, with an unlimited royalty-free license to the VP3 patents.
Google is financially supporting TheorARM, which is meant to be a high-performance Theora decoder for ARM CPUs.
Google doesn't have very many patents, and they have a lot of money, to buy lawyers.
Google is probably the best company to push the button, and start Global Thermonuclear Patent War - they've got the least to lose (they can't lose many patents, not having many,) and they've got some of the most to gain.
All it takes is suing MPEG LA, and not going for just royalties like a patent troll would, but going for the destruction of MPEG LA. Then everyone starts suing everyone, and we get Mutually Assured Patent Destruction. Which is good for everyone.
However, arguably, the production company wouldn't be able to charge for the filming. So, in theory, for a movie that costs $1 million to produce, if the film crew charges $20,000 to film the movie, they'll not get that - they would have to be filming the video for their own personal, non-commercial use. They COULD decode to raw, uncompressed video as an intermediate format, and then charge $20,000 for the service of transcoding the raw video to Theora, however, and give the transcoded video to the production company. Or, transcode to Theora, and then sell the transcoded footage for $20,000, but that's shaky.
While Canonical is actually on the MPEG LA licensee list, they don't necessarily need to be a licensee to sell licenses.
They aren't the developer of those codecs, and are simply acting as a storefront, selling someone else's codecs. That's like saying that Best Buy has to be an MPEG LA licensee to sell copies of Windows and OS X, because they have H.264 decoders in them.
They changed the keyboard layout multiple times, with the//e (//c used the same layout) and then the IIGS (and IIe Platinum and IIc Plus.)
And, from 1980 on, Apple tried to kill the Apple II. I'm not sure they ever tried their "damnedest to kill off any competition" to the Apple II, other than the Bell and Howell ][+, which did push the Commodore PET completely out of the school market. In fact, they were generating competition for the Apple II, and neglecting it, thinking Apple II sales were about to die any second now. They kept going 13 years after Apple's first attempt to kill the Apple II line, and it took 9 years for their last attempt to actually work - and even then, only because they made a//e-on-a-card for the Mac LC.
There is another approach that some phone makers (RIM) have done.
Launch the phone as a CDMA/GSM/UMTS world phone, with the GSM/UMTS radio for Euro-only frequencies, on Verizon in the US. The CDMA radio just lies dormant in Europe, but the GSM/UMTS radio works fine on almost all carriers there, while running perfectly on Verizon (and optionally Sprint) here.
Of course, you can spin it another way. ARM is an IP company - they don't make chips, they make IP (their architecture specifications, and their CPU designs) that they then license to other companies. Then again, they're not a patent troll, their IP is generally fairly good (even if the various architecture versions and features are ridiculously confusing,) and they actually do license it, rather than just keep it so they can sue people.
T-Mobile has some 3G bands in common with Europe, AT&T doesn't, and IIRC there's not any world 3G chipsets. Therefore, one phone model can work on 3G in both Europe and the US if the US carrier is T-Mobile. If it's AT&T, the European model is stuck on EDGE, or they have to make a second model for Europe.
We actually do have a vector-based GUI in Vista/7.
It works quite well on apps that are written to use it.
Aero is also a desktop compositing engine, which means that the GPU handles a lot more of the screen redraw and such.
It also handles such things as... raster-scaling GDI applications to the appropriate size (rather than relying on the GDI app to get the size right, they never do,) when you've got the DPI increased in Vista/7.
I'm stuck on an i945-based machine because it's the newest reliable (T61p is not reliable) hardware that fits in the 15.0" T6x-series ThinkPad case, and therefore is the newest reliable hardware capable of holding and driving a 4:3 display. I'm not militant about wide vs. 4:3, my preferred setup is compatible with a widescreen, but I refuse to go very far backwards in pixel count, and I've got a 2048x1536 LCD swapped into this machine. 1920x1200 won't cut it.
I've thought of swapping this panel into a W700's chassis, and building an adapter to take up the width difference between this panel and a 17" widescreen, but that'd be a bit screwy.
Of course, I do have an IBM T221 hooked to a video card installed in an Advanced Dock, for when I need a lot more pixels.
MIPS, SPARC, and SuperH could probably be adapted to those workloads, too.
However, MIPS and SuperH were last in PDAs many years ago, SPARC hasn't been in PDAs ever (except for a prototype from 1992,) and Intel has x86 chips ready for smartphones. They're not much good, but they are available.
However, the ARMs are much smaller physically, and you could probably get a 16-core Cortex-A9 MPCore setup in the same space as a quad-core (or maybe even dual-core) x86 CPU.
Slashdot Mirror
However, they are steering the market into accepting walled gardens, and Microsoft is going from an open platform (open in the "run whatever you want" sense - actually, it was shared source, even) to a closed one.
And, the "you can only use certain languages" is an attempt to make it significantly harder to write multi-platform software without outright saying "don't port to another platform."
Netscape wasn't sticking to standards, either, though.
Citation needed. Software patents being legal in the US seem to contradict that.
And I'm saying Google should be that patent troll. They're big enough that they can troll the entire system, for the purpose of bringing it down, and I think they'd do it if they felt that it's not too evil, and benefits them. (And, I think, with all the licensing fees they'll have to pay to MPEG LA, and the amount of patent suits being brought against them, it does benefit them.)
It makes them very vulnerable to the normal "we'll sue you unless you license us your patents" method, but NOT the "everyone put their cards on the table and sue each other, and to hell with licensing the patents" method.
In that case, those with the most patents have the most to lose. Those with the least patents have the most to gain, because a LOT of patents will get invalidated.
That will only last for a very short time, though - patent reform will be pushed through very quickly to work around that particular issue, if all electronics and software are banned.
And those are just the essential patents - in working around them, you may well stumble upon other patents.
The other thing is to just host everything in Russia, transcode all video in Russian compute farms, and just get ridiculous amounts of bandwidth to Russia for sending raw, uncompressed video.
The other thing is, in this specific case, H.264 probably infringes on some of On2's patents for VP3.
Google now owns On2, and therefore owns the VP3 patents.
Theora is based on VP3, with an unlimited royalty-free license to the VP3 patents.
Google is financially supporting TheorARM, which is meant to be a high-performance Theora decoder for ARM CPUs.
Google doesn't have very many patents, and they have a lot of money, to buy lawyers.
Google is probably the best company to push the button, and start Global Thermonuclear Patent War - they've got the least to lose (they can't lose many patents, not having many,) and they've got some of the most to gain.
All it takes is suing MPEG LA, and not going for just royalties like a patent troll would, but going for the destruction of MPEG LA. Then everyone starts suing everyone, and we get Mutually Assured Patent Destruction. Which is good for everyone.
However, arguably, the production company wouldn't be able to charge for the filming. So, in theory, for a movie that costs $1 million to produce, if the film crew charges $20,000 to film the movie, they'll not get that - they would have to be filming the video for their own personal, non-commercial use. They COULD decode to raw, uncompressed video as an intermediate format, and then charge $20,000 for the service of transcoding the raw video to Theora, however, and give the transcoded video to the production company. Or, transcode to Theora, and then sell the transcoded footage for $20,000, but that's shaky.
There's 1135 patents worldwide that are essential to H.264, 1114 of which are active, 162 of which are active and in the US.
Here's the list: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avc-att1.pdf
The trick is probably to use a 20 (or maybe 25, to avoid old submarine patents) year old technology to get around it.
And since when was it ever legal to copy someone's ROM, unless they explicitly allowed you to?
And, since when did any major home computer manufacturer allow people to?
Apple? No.
Commodore? No.
Tandy? No.
Let's go outside of the US... Acorn? No.
Sinclair? No.
Correct me if I'm wrong on any of this...
They can always half-assedly support H.264. Encode the H.264 streams in 240p. Usable, but terrible quality, and small filesize.
However, VP8 was specifically designed to decode well on the mobile DSPs that are there to decode H.264.
So, while there may not be a "hardware" implementation yet, it was designed for such an implementation to exist.
FLV, IIRC, supports On2 VP6 and H.264 for the video codec choices.
VP7, the successor to VP6, is used by Skype, and some other streaming video services.
VP8 is a modified VP7 that's tuned to be better for mobile DSPs, IIRC.
While Canonical is actually on the MPEG LA licensee list, they don't necessarily need to be a licensee to sell licenses.
They aren't the developer of those codecs, and are simply acting as a storefront, selling someone else's codecs. That's like saying that Best Buy has to be an MPEG LA licensee to sell copies of Windows and OS X, because they have H.264 decoders in them.
They changed the keyboard layout multiple times, with the //e (//c used the same layout) and then the IIGS (and IIe Platinum and IIc Plus.)
And, from 1980 on, Apple tried to kill the Apple II. I'm not sure they ever tried their "damnedest to kill off any competition" to the Apple II, other than the Bell and Howell ][+, which did push the Commodore PET completely out of the school market. In fact, they were generating competition for the Apple II, and neglecting it, thinking Apple II sales were about to die any second now. They kept going 13 years after Apple's first attempt to kill the Apple II line, and it took 9 years for their last attempt to actually work - and even then, only because they made a //e-on-a-card for the Mac LC.
There is another approach that some phone makers (RIM) have done.
Launch the phone as a CDMA/GSM/UMTS world phone, with the GSM/UMTS radio for Euro-only frequencies, on Verizon in the US. The CDMA radio just lies dormant in Europe, but the GSM/UMTS radio works fine on almost all carriers there, while running perfectly on Verizon (and optionally Sprint) here.
Of course, you can spin it another way. ARM is an IP company - they don't make chips, they make IP (their architecture specifications, and their CPU designs) that they then license to other companies. Then again, they're not a patent troll, their IP is generally fairly good (even if the various architecture versions and features are ridiculously confusing,) and they actually do license it, rather than just keep it so they can sue people.
There's another reason, though.
T-Mobile has some 3G bands in common with Europe, AT&T doesn't, and IIRC there's not any world 3G chipsets. Therefore, one phone model can work on 3G in both Europe and the US if the US carrier is T-Mobile. If it's AT&T, the European model is stuck on EDGE, or they have to make a second model for Europe.
(but where is there free land to found a colony of non-stoopids?)
The ocean.
Although Opera was ad-supported from version 5 to 7.2, IIRC.
We actually do have a vector-based GUI in Vista/7.
It works quite well on apps that are written to use it.
Aero is also a desktop compositing engine, which means that the GPU handles a lot more of the screen redraw and such.
It also handles such things as... raster-scaling GDI applications to the appropriate size (rather than relying on the GDI app to get the size right, they never do,) when you've got the DPI increased in Vista/7.
I'm stuck on an i945-based machine because it's the newest reliable (T61p is not reliable) hardware that fits in the 15.0" T6x-series ThinkPad case, and therefore is the newest reliable hardware capable of holding and driving a 4:3 display. I'm not militant about wide vs. 4:3, my preferred setup is compatible with a widescreen, but I refuse to go very far backwards in pixel count, and I've got a 2048x1536 LCD swapped into this machine. 1920x1200 won't cut it.
I've thought of swapping this panel into a W700's chassis, and building an adapter to take up the width difference between this panel and a 17" widescreen, but that'd be a bit screwy.
Of course, I do have an IBM T221 hooked to a video card installed in an Advanced Dock, for when I need a lot more pixels.
MIPS, SPARC, and SuperH could probably be adapted to those workloads, too.
However, MIPS and SuperH were last in PDAs many years ago, SPARC hasn't been in PDAs ever (except for a prototype from 1992,) and Intel has x86 chips ready for smartphones. They're not much good, but they are available.
However, the ARMs are much smaller physically, and you could probably get a 16-core Cortex-A9 MPCore setup in the same space as a quad-core (or maybe even dual-core) x86 CPU.