This is like the worst Chomskian view of Elites manipulating mass opinion
This is the funniest, hippiest statement I've heard in a while. Criminals engaged a financial journalist to modify some wikipedia articles. If they are the Elites, you got a real fucking crazy view on society, mate..
TheRegister really is going downhill. It always was a tabloid read at best but this is just sad.
As the author of the code he has ALL right to close the source and accept money to do it.
Even as the author of GPL code, he has the right to close the source and never release a single new version, and accept money as a reason to do this.
Why should there be any shame in providing for your family? If he released it as BSD licensed code or GPL code, if anyone has a copy at any point in the past they can use that code as licensed for all time to come. They just will have to write their own updates and features.
Isn't that the BEAUTY of open source? If you're that concerned, let him take the money, and fork the project yourself.
Yes, Apple do vet submissions to the only distribution channel but they DO have a vested interest in keeping applications that run on their phone above a certain watermark of quality.
Yes, it means a lot of apps will not get there, but, would you rather have a distribution channel with thousands of great apps where most of them do something unique, or MILLIONS of absolutely loathesome apps where most of them do nothing the other apps don't do, most of them are buggy as hell and most of them have been written because the author doesn't like X way or Y method that another existing app is licensed or developed?
The "open" Linux development model really has a lot to answer for when it can produce Exchange Server replacements that go GPL, and nobody has an exchange *client* for Linux that runs off it (see a couple past stories). Move this to the Android phones and you will have an HTC Dream which has 15 AOL messenger apps, none of which fucking work, all of which will get equal usage from the customer base, so no developer can ever get the userbase they want out of it.
Alternatively on the iPhone you have 3, which almost work (up to the point that the official AIM client is as bad as you'd expect from AOL).
As for Java being a nicer development environment than Objective C, give me a fucking break. I hate Objective C but I would sell my grandmother before being forced to develop every application in Java. Have you ever tried writing for a mobile device using a desktop system? It's just not the same platform in Java.
Apple really have done iPhone developers a service here by making the iPhone run the same Cocoa apps as the desktop system does with very few restrictions and damn near 90% of the same APIs (functionality restrictions for not having a 24" Cinema Display, keyboard, mouse or nVidia's latest juice-monster, notwithstanding).
If it all comes down to whether Google's open model is better than Apple's closed model, then you have to do it from the position where you are NOT an existing Java developer or Apple developer fully conversant in Objective C. You have to do it from the point of view of what you would like to see running, and not from the purely philosophical basis that you should be able to run anything you like (if you have an iPhone developer kit, you CAN run anything you like!). In all these respects, the article is one big failure to say anything relevant.
What I want to see is a phone based on Qt/Embedded - like the Trolltech Greenphone was supposed to be. Then I get to write in C++ or Java or Python or Ruby (not that I would touch the last 3, but if you have a language binding installed you can go right ahead and start) using a common toolkit, the same kinds of features Apple placed on the iPhone, and all the middleware APIs and abstractions for Bluetooth, OBEX, networking, media playback (be it Phonon or Helix) and web browsing (yay WebKit!) or whatever else. And it has the same advantage as Apple's toolkit; it's the same set of APIs as you use on the desktop, maybe in KDE or maybe a more embedded solution.
Imagine developing KDE Plasmoids which you can dump on your phone. Imagine a KDE Plasmoid on your phone and one on your desktop, which talk to each other (peer to peer communication protocol could mean they are the SAME plasmoid, just on different devices!). This is exactly where the market needs to bloody go.
Funny, it automatically reloads the inbox in it's own here.. and gives me a notification. You're right about the calendar though...
Even so, OWA simply is the best Not-Windows client for Exchange there is. I'm a little disappointed really though that nobody wanted to make an Open Source Exchange Client even though there are a couple Exchange 2007 replacements. I guess enterprise server makes more money than enterprise client for server ever will (could you even sell a mail client these days?)
Intel just proved it was only increasing failures by 0.6% though.
That meets my expectations; a server lasts as long as a server lasts. It's components will fail, on the whole, exactly when they mean to fail, and not because your server room is too warm.
I have had the (dis)pleasure to work on a server which was installed in a print room at a major newspaper publisher. The thing was *CAKED* in black dust, it was nearly an inch thick in places. We took it outside, took the vacuum cleaner to it, and replaced the fan, and it started working again. The only reason it didn't boot in the first place is because it refused to while the fans weren't spinning.
> suggesting that servers may be sturdier than believed
Anyone who thought you couldn't run a reliable server in 85+ degree heat in a sweaty, humid room with water dripping on a *sealed chassis* was a moron anyway. Most servers come with filters on the fan vents, are pretty tightly sealed shut otherwise (and none of them would vent out of the top of a chassis because it would impact the servers above and below, so where's the water going to drip into?)
Air conditioning and all the other niceness we get in server rooms is just an insurance policy.
I'm not sure. $2.87m may be enough to pay for failures, but what if you had to add extra redundancy to the system in the first place to make up for that small amount of failures? Extra boxes to maintain, with their own MTBFs.. extra space taken up, extra electricity drawn.
I think a better solution - not as extreme, granted - would be to just turn the aircon temperature dial up a notch or two. Has anyone worked out how much money you'd save in the same datacenter by just doing that?
Most datacenters and even little server rooms I've been in have had the dial set to something ridiculous like 65. There's no reason your server room needs to be that cold, at all. You just have to keep it at a reasonable ambient temperature somewhere below the system's maximum rating (most processors will happily run for 5 years at a die temperature of 105C, you can't blow hot air over a processor and expect it to stay cool though.
So, why not keep your server room at 80, save yourself the 0.6% extra failures, and maybe (at a guess) $1.3m a year instead of $2.87?
ZFS-FUSE works fine. If you can build a kernel with an initrd which loads FUSE, ZFS-FUSE and mounts the root filesystem, you have absolutely no troubles whatsoever and absolutely acceptable performance for a MythTV box and a couple of servers. And if you managed to set up MythTV over ReiserFS then this isn't going to be a problem for you at all.
The fact that it's in userspace is not a barrier to entry and nor is it "not available" just because it's not a kernel module.
I think the Dutch are very excited to speak English, but you'll only get that at work. The moment you go to the store, the lady behind the deli counter won't speak a nit of English - possibly purely stubborn, I am sure they know English, they just don't want to think in it (let's be honest, meat and cheese in other languages is not something you'd commit to memory even if you worked in it). The other problem is that Dutch companies (unlike German or French companies) won't pay you to go learn Dutch. They're happy with your English. A lot of German companies will sign you up to a conversation-level German language course, before they put you in for anything else like a CCNA or MCSE whatever.
You pick it up eventually, and can get around, to the point that you are at the same risk of getting some kind of throat cancer practising your words.. I've heard actually the best way is to have a kid, and send them to school. They come back speaking Dutch, and you HAVE to learn it..
I think there is a definite toss-up though between learning a marginal, single-country language (Finnish, Swedish) for that country, and learning a more generic and "mainstream" one (French, German, etc.). You can get around France, Switzerland, Belgium and most of the Netherlands with French. Same with German, and you can add Austria to it too. If the intent is to travel around Europe, knowing Norwegian is not going to get you very far outside of Norway..
Seeding Americans back into the Old British Empire is always a good thing.
Actually India can be a terrible place for a US tech worker to get a job. They may let you in and you may GET a job, but they have a frightful turnover. And in the end, a local with equal skills willing to work for 1/8th the salary can always do your job - this is the whole reason outsourcing took off.
I wouldn't risk it, even if the economy for this kind of work in India is skyrocketing and the salaries rising, until they're getting paid the same as you will be.
That's usually a good idea, although you could get a job in a country like The Netherlands without knowing any Dutch - they really prize people who can speak real English.
Knowing Dutch is a godsend because it's hard to get by each day without it (although most dutch kids learn 2 extra languages by the time they leave school, French and English being the obvious chouces, a lot of them knowing German too, or something else). But you pick it up.
I'm not fluent in French (despite having a grade in it) or German but I can do enough to order coffee and tell someone to get out of my way on the street, and understand what they're saying if not actually contribute to the conversation. That's usually more than enough.
Probably for getting work in computer science or engineering is more down to your talent than your language. Most tech jobs where coding is required, for larger companies, will encourage commenting code in English (so that all their employees can maintain it).
Just look for a job, and while you're searching.. learn up to the basic level of a couple of European languages like French and German (Spanish might even help you back home too) and you'll be fine. You could get a job anywhere with those.
Personally, if I had to choose a European country to work in, it'd be Germany. Frankfurt and Munich are pretty much where it is at.
Ogg Theora is proprietary. In every sense of the legal term, it is. It was developed by an independant company without an industry-recognized standards body and continues to do so. It also has several patents which are only licensed to the Xiph foundation, as mentioned in the article.
Stallman will disagree since he uses "proprietary" as a counterpart to "free", but this is only his odd definition of the term and weird wordplay.
What Ogg Theora *is*, is ROYALTY FREE.
What I don't understand here, is why the HTML5 tag can't include several video formats; it is obvious that while also a "proprietary" set of formats which require patent licensing and some require streaming royalties, MPEG4, H.264 and 3GPP video are by and large THE defacto industry standards, ratified by the MPEG group and ISO and ITU, for video playback and video conferencing these days, and will probably continue to be for a very long time. Browsing the web on an iPhone you can guarantee to support these. Browsing the web on a Blu-Ray player (maybe as part of special content), the same applies. How many video discs did you buy at the store, how many iTunes downloads, came in Theora format? None:D
MJPEG is also an option as this is used by a lot of webcam software, and the amount of work to decode it over a current browser is minimal if it already supports JPEG.
What Nokia etc. are worried about is entering into an agreement via the W3C to implement Theora in their devices and somehow, somewhere have to end up open sourcing a lot of stuff by proxy. They really won't want to do that at all.
So, why not have MPEG4 and derivatives, *and* Ogg Theora? And any other mimetype you care to pick which describes some standard-compliant video format like MPEG4, or AAC or MP3 audio... the stuff we use on our MP3 players, phones, video playback devices and already stream from the web? Just like some MP3 players can't play AAC music, some browsers just won't play Theora (and in the end, they wouldn't anyway, because decoding Theora on a 200MHz ARM phone chip with only an MPEG4 decode engine is probably going to be about as efficient as calling your neighbour via the Moon)
And to Nokia, why does the HTML specification need to even mention DRM? The DRM is entirely an OS-level component (as there is a trust path to be considered which cannot be handled by browser alone) which can be optionally embedded in a file or wrapped around a file. You could add DRM to Ogg Theora, why not use another royalty-free format like DReaM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DReaM ?. I think what is more pertinent to define is recommended streaming transports; video src="blah.ogg" just isn't enough is it? What about RTP or RTSP, use of MMS? W3C need not define the transport protocol but it should at least say which ones should become more common and which ones are just Completely Out, Not Going In At All.
At Genesi (company I work for) we just prepped a demo system with openSUSE 11.0, Xfce, Firefox and OpenOffice in exactly those specs (400MHz PowerPC, 128MB RAM, and we did the test system with a Radeon 9250). It works really quite well..
You can actually get very very reasonable performance out of a Linux distribution tailored to a device like this. Your memory ceiling is the main problem, but if you have the features in the hardware, you can take advantage of them. The same hardware will run a Compiz wobbly-windows desktop with the rotating cube (using Open Source Radeon r200 drivers) without any real slowdown.
Most of the problems we've experienced on this is the slightly dodgy disk controller (no DMA) and audio playback is a little stuttery when you start moving windows around, if you're not careful. But, this is not usually a concern. Firefox is as fast as you'd expect; reasonable browsing experience. OpenOffice takes aeons to load, but it does this even on the best of systems. We tried improving it with the systray starter, but that just makes the rest of the system less responsive. There's about 40MB "free" memory you can reclaim from Linux' caches and buffers after login, which is more than enough to go to Facebook or Google Mail.
That should set a few alarm bells ringing in Redmond
Why? Firefox users update from 2 to 3 because version 2 pretty much sucked.
IE6 and IE7, the difference is in a bit of web standards compatibility (that most websites work around anyway under IE6) and that hideous new button bar. There's not a great reason to update from IE6 other than "security" like the phishing filter and the gold download bar getting more and more in the way, and that is barely a back of the mind concern for most of the browsing public. IE7 is not faster, it doesn't render any popular, well-written websites better, it just makes developers' lives easier. Users don't give a crap in the same way.
I think the difference here would be that Firefox 2 to 3 would never be mandated by Mozilla, whereas Microsoft could always slip IE7 as a mandatory security update to Windows, seeing as large swathes of it would like to make use of MSHTML, ActiveX plugins and the changes there. You can't say that Firefox improves your OS, only your internet experience:)
Personally I dropped IE8 on my system to do some development work and check some things out, and installed IETab in Firefox so I could switch between IE and Gecko and run Firebug/YSlow at the same time. I am in the minority I think..
I really do wonder what alarm bells must be ringing, for Microsoft to look around and wonder why Firefox has such a high upgrade rate..
I'd be curious to know what the total system power consumption of the board (CPU, northbridge etc.), and power brick gives. x86 system board manufacturers do like to tell you the power consumption of the CPU alone (1W in this case) but they haven't factored in the large northbridge with graphics, MPEG4 acceleration, and the other peripherals turned on. Playing an MPEG4 will stress the system enough and with a 4W northbridge you'd probably still need the passive heatsink for safety in a warm room.
The northbridge (is that a CLE266?) will probably burn out far before the CPU does, which makes this a silly test really.
We use external graphics on the Efika (a Radeon 9250 or somesuch) which brings the total power consumption up to 7W with a hard disk (i.e. play back an MPEG4 from hard disk and you draw 7W). The CPU stays cool, there is no northbridge, and the Radeon even in a case with no active cooling doesn't overheat.. there are better, newer processors coming out (MPC5121E) of the same specs with extra acceleration units, integrated graphics (PowerVR) etc. which have a maximum power budget of 3W, a 2.5" hard disk usually comes in around ~2.5W or lower during heavy disk access. There will be no active cooling here, no heatsinks or case fans, and it will still work..
I am just trying to fathom what the challenge actually is.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the funniest, hippiest statement I've heard in a while. Criminals engaged a financial journalist to modify some wikipedia articles. If they are the Elites, you got a real fucking crazy view on society, mate..
TheRegister really is going downhill. It always was a tabloid read at best but this is just sad.
Why would there be any shame in that?
As the author of the code he has ALL right to close the source and accept money to do it.
Even as the author of GPL code, he has the right to close the source and never release a single new version, and accept money as a reason to do this.
Why should there be any shame in providing for your family? If he released it as BSD licensed code or GPL code, if anyone has a copy at any point in the past they can use that code as licensed for all time to come. They just will have to write their own updates and features.
Isn't that the BEAUTY of open source? If you're that concerned, let him take the money, and fork the project yourself.
Yes, Apple do vet submissions to the only distribution channel but they DO have a vested interest in keeping applications that run on their phone above a certain watermark of quality.
Yes, it means a lot of apps will not get there, but, would you rather have a distribution channel with thousands of great apps where most of them do something unique, or MILLIONS of absolutely loathesome apps where most of them do nothing the other apps don't do, most of them are buggy as hell and most of them have been written because the author doesn't like X way or Y method that another existing app is licensed or developed?
The "open" Linux development model really has a lot to answer for when it can produce Exchange Server replacements that go GPL, and nobody has an exchange *client* for Linux that runs off it (see a couple past stories). Move this to the Android phones and you will have an HTC Dream which has 15 AOL messenger apps, none of which fucking work, all of which will get equal usage from the customer base, so no developer can ever get the userbase they want out of it.
Alternatively on the iPhone you have 3, which almost work (up to the point that the official AIM client is as bad as you'd expect from AOL).
As for Java being a nicer development environment than Objective C, give me a fucking break. I hate Objective C but I would sell my grandmother before being forced to develop every application in Java. Have you ever tried writing for a mobile device using a desktop system? It's just not the same platform in Java.
Apple really have done iPhone developers a service here by making the iPhone run the same Cocoa apps as the desktop system does with very few restrictions and damn near 90% of the same APIs (functionality restrictions for not having a 24" Cinema Display, keyboard, mouse or nVidia's latest juice-monster, notwithstanding).
If it all comes down to whether Google's open model is better than Apple's closed model, then you have to do it from the position where you are NOT an existing Java developer or Apple developer fully conversant in Objective C. You have to do it from the point of view of what you would like to see running, and not from the purely philosophical basis that you should be able to run anything you like (if you have an iPhone developer kit, you CAN run anything you like!). In all these respects, the article is one big failure to say anything relevant.
What I want to see is a phone based on Qt/Embedded - like the Trolltech Greenphone was supposed to be. Then I get to write in C++ or Java or Python or Ruby (not that I would touch the last 3, but if you have a language binding installed you can go right ahead and start) using a common toolkit, the same kinds of features Apple placed on the iPhone, and all the middleware APIs and abstractions for Bluetooth, OBEX, networking, media playback (be it Phonon or Helix) and web browsing (yay WebKit!) or whatever else. And it has the same advantage as Apple's toolkit; it's the same set of APIs as you use on the desktop, maybe in KDE or maybe a more embedded solution.
Imagine developing KDE Plasmoids which you can dump on your phone. Imagine a KDE Plasmoid on your phone and one on your desktop, which talk to each other (peer to peer communication protocol could mean they are the SAME plasmoid, just on different devices!). This is exactly where the market needs to bloody go.
Funny, it automatically reloads the inbox in it's own here.. and gives me a notification. You're right about the calendar though...
Even so, OWA simply is the best Not-Windows client for Exchange there is. I'm a little disappointed really though that nobody wanted to make an Open Source Exchange Client even though there are a couple Exchange 2007 replacements. I guess enterprise server makes more money than enterprise client for server ever will (could you even sell a mail client these days?)
That could be so much more poignant if you could actually spell.
Legend has it they added this in exchange 2007 service pack 1
Works fine here, and in Firefox too...
What's wrong with Outlook Web Access? Use Firefox or even Prism/XULRunner or whatever and you have everything you need.
Intel just proved it was only increasing failures by 0.6% though.
That meets my expectations; a server lasts as long as a server lasts. It's components will fail, on the whole, exactly when they mean to fail, and not because your server room is too warm.
I have had the (dis)pleasure to work on a server which was installed in a print room at a major newspaper publisher. The thing was *CAKED* in black dust, it was nearly an inch thick in places. We took it outside, took the vacuum cleaner to it, and replaced the fan, and it started working again. The only reason it didn't boot in the first place is because it refused to while the fans weren't spinning.
> suggesting that servers may be sturdier than believed
Anyone who thought you couldn't run a reliable server in 85+ degree heat in a sweaty, humid room with water dripping on a *sealed chassis* was a moron anyway. Most servers come with filters on the fan vents, are pretty tightly sealed shut
otherwise (and none of them would vent out of the top of a chassis because it would impact the servers above and below, so where's the water going to drip into?)
Air conditioning and all the other niceness we get in server rooms is just an insurance policy.
I'm not sure. $2.87m may be enough to pay for failures, but what if you had to add extra redundancy to the system in the first place to make up for that small amount of failures? Extra boxes to maintain, with their own MTBFs.. extra space taken up, extra electricity drawn.
I think a better solution - not as extreme, granted - would be to just turn the aircon temperature dial up a notch or two. Has anyone worked out how much money you'd save in the same datacenter by just doing that?
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/jul/30/un-takes-on-hot-air-for-good-of-the-world/
Most datacenters and even little server rooms I've been in have had the dial set to something ridiculous like 65. There's no reason your server room needs to be that cold, at all. You just have to keep it at a reasonable ambient temperature somewhere below the system's maximum rating (most processors will happily run for 5 years at a die temperature of 105C, you can't blow hot air over a processor and expect it to stay cool though.
So, why not keep your server room at 80, save yourself the 0.6% extra failures, and maybe (at a guess) $1.3m a year instead of $2.87?
British cars always sound like they get better MPG but then our gallons are bigger.. is the MPG quote they made in imperial or US?
Bollocks.
ZFS-FUSE works fine. If you can build a kernel with an initrd which loads FUSE, ZFS-FUSE and mounts the root filesystem, you have absolutely no troubles whatsoever and absolutely acceptable performance for a MythTV box and a couple of servers. And if you managed to set up MythTV over ReiserFS then this isn't going to be a problem for you at all.
The fact that it's in userspace is not a barrier to entry and nor is it "not available" just because it's not a kernel module.
:D
I wish I hadn't posted so I could mod this up :)
I think the Dutch are very excited to speak English, but you'll only get that at work. The moment you go to the store, the lady behind the deli counter won't speak a nit of English - possibly purely stubborn, I am sure they know English, they just don't want to think in it (let's be honest, meat and cheese in other languages is not something you'd commit to memory even if you worked in it). The other problem is that Dutch companies (unlike German or French companies) won't pay you to go learn Dutch. They're happy with your English. A lot of German companies will sign you up to a conversation-level German language course, before they put you in for anything else like a CCNA or MCSE whatever.
You pick it up eventually, and can get around, to the point that you are at the same risk of getting some kind of throat cancer practising your words.. I've heard actually the best way is to have a kid, and send them to school. They come back speaking Dutch, and you HAVE to learn it..
I think there is a definite toss-up though between learning a marginal, single-country language (Finnish, Swedish) for that country, and learning a more generic and "mainstream" one (French, German, etc.). You can get around France, Switzerland, Belgium and most of the Netherlands with French. Same with German, and you can add Austria to it too. If the intent is to travel around Europe, knowing Norwegian is not going to get you very far outside of Norway..
Seeding Americans back into the Old British Empire is always a good thing.
Actually India can be a terrible place for a US tech worker to get a job. They may let you in and you may GET a job, but they have a frightful turnover. And in the end, a local with equal skills willing to work for 1/8th the salary can always do your job - this is the whole reason outsourcing took off.
I wouldn't risk it, even if the economy for this kind of work in India is skyrocketing and the salaries rising, until they're getting paid the same as you will be.
That's usually a good idea, although you could get a job in a country like The Netherlands without knowing any Dutch - they really prize people who can speak real English.
Knowing Dutch is a godsend because it's hard to get by each day without it (although most dutch kids learn 2 extra languages by the time they leave school, French and English being the obvious chouces, a lot of them knowing German too, or something else). But you pick it up.
I'm not fluent in French (despite having a grade in it) or German but I can do enough to order coffee and tell someone to get out of my way on the street, and understand what they're saying if not actually contribute to the conversation. That's usually more than enough.
Probably for getting work in computer science or engineering is more down to your talent than your language. Most tech jobs where coding is required, for larger companies, will encourage commenting code in English (so that all their employees can maintain it).
Just look for a job, and while you're searching.. learn up to the basic level of a couple of European languages like French and German (Spanish might even help you back home too) and you'll be fine. You could get a job anywhere with those.
Personally, if I had to choose a European country to work in, it'd be Germany. Frankfurt and Munich are pretty much where it is at.
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/college/masters-west-search
Tier Tier Tier Tier. There's a list on the left so you can select Tier 3 or 4 and only view those.
Oh yeah, [WINKY SMILEY]
Ogg Theora is proprietary. In every sense of the legal term, it is. It was developed by an independant company without an industry-recognized standards body and continues to do so. It also has several patents which are only licensed to the Xiph foundation, as mentioned in the article.
Stallman will disagree since he uses "proprietary" as a counterpart to "free", but this is only his odd definition of the term and weird wordplay.
What Ogg Theora *is*, is ROYALTY FREE.
What I don't understand here, is why the HTML5 tag can't include several video formats; it is obvious that while also a "proprietary" set of formats which require patent licensing and some require streaming royalties, MPEG4, H.264 and 3GPP video are by and large THE defacto industry standards, ratified by the MPEG group and ISO and ITU, for video playback and video conferencing these days, and will probably continue to be for a very long time. Browsing the web on an iPhone you can guarantee to support these. Browsing the web on a Blu-Ray player (maybe as part of special content), the same applies. How many video discs did you buy at the store, how many iTunes downloads, came in Theora format? None :D
MJPEG is also an option as this is used by a lot of webcam software, and the amount of work to decode it over a current browser is minimal if it already supports JPEG.
What Nokia etc. are worried about is entering into an agreement via the W3C to implement Theora in their devices and somehow, somewhere have to end up open sourcing a lot of stuff by proxy. They really won't want to do that at all.
So, why not have MPEG4 and derivatives, *and* Ogg Theora? And any other mimetype you care to pick which describes some standard-compliant video format like MPEG4, or AAC or MP3 audio... the stuff we use on our MP3 players, phones, video playback devices and already stream from the web? Just like some MP3 players can't play AAC music, some browsers just won't play Theora (and in the end, they wouldn't anyway, because decoding Theora on a 200MHz ARM phone chip with only an MPEG4 decode engine is probably going to be about as efficient as calling your neighbour via the Moon)
And to Nokia, why does the HTML specification need to even mention DRM? The DRM is entirely an OS-level component (as there is a trust path to be considered which cannot be handled by browser alone) which can be optionally embedded in a file or wrapped around a file. You could add DRM to Ogg Theora, why not use another royalty-free format like DReaM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DReaM ?. I think what is more pertinent to define is recommended streaming transports; video src="blah.ogg" just isn't enough is it? What about RTP or RTSP, use of MMS? W3C need not define the transport protocol but it should at least say which ones should become more common and which ones are just Completely Out, Not Going In At All.
At Genesi (company I work for) we just prepped a demo system with openSUSE 11.0, Xfce, Firefox and OpenOffice in exactly those specs (400MHz PowerPC, 128MB RAM, and we did the test system with a Radeon 9250). It works really quite well..
You can actually get very very reasonable performance out of a Linux distribution tailored to a device like this. Your memory ceiling is the main problem, but if you have the features in the hardware, you can take advantage of them. The same hardware will run a Compiz wobbly-windows desktop with the rotating cube (using Open Source Radeon r200 drivers) without any real slowdown.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=uXioGhnbmi8
Most of the problems we've experienced on this is the slightly dodgy disk controller (no DMA) and audio playback is a little stuttery when you start moving windows around, if you're not careful. But, this is not usually a concern. Firefox is as fast as you'd expect; reasonable browsing experience. OpenOffice takes aeons to load, but it does this even on the best of systems. We tried improving it with the systray starter, but that just makes the rest of the system less responsive. There's about 40MB "free" memory you can reclaim from Linux' caches and buffers after login, which is more than enough to go to Facebook or Google Mail.
What's the betting it's Red Flag?
I bet everyone has already suggested it but, let's put another oar in...
Why? Firefox users update from 2 to 3 because version 2 pretty much sucked.
IE6 and IE7, the difference is in a bit of web standards compatibility (that most websites work around anyway under IE6) and that hideous new button bar. There's not a great reason to update from IE6 other than "security" like the phishing filter and the gold download bar getting more and more in the way, and that is barely a back of the mind concern for most of the browsing public. IE7 is not faster, it doesn't render any popular, well-written websites better, it just makes developers' lives easier. Users don't give a crap in the same way.
I think the difference here would be that Firefox 2 to 3 would never be mandated by Mozilla, whereas Microsoft could always slip IE7 as a mandatory security update to Windows, seeing as large swathes of it would like to make use of MSHTML, ActiveX plugins and the changes there. You can't say that Firefox improves your OS, only your internet experience :)
Personally I dropped IE8 on my system to do some development work and check some things out, and installed IETab in Firefox so I could switch between IE and Gecko and run Firebug/YSlow at the same time. I am in the minority I think..
I really do wonder what alarm bells must be ringing, for Microsoft to look around and wonder why Firefox has such a high upgrade rate..
Browser Sync was so awesome, I'll miss it *slits wrists*
Anywhere from 5 years to forever? :D
What happens if the northbridge dies before the CPU, is the challenge invalidated?
I'd be curious to know what the total system power consumption of the board (CPU, northbridge etc.), and power brick gives. x86 system board manufacturers do like to tell you the power consumption of the CPU alone (1W in this case) but they haven't factored in the large northbridge with graphics, MPEG4 acceleration, and the other peripherals turned on. Playing an MPEG4 will stress the system enough and with a 4W northbridge you'd probably still need the passive heatsink for safety in a warm room.
The northbridge (is that a CLE266?) will probably burn out far before the CPU does, which makes this a silly test really.
We use external graphics on the Efika (a Radeon 9250 or somesuch) which brings the total power consumption up to 7W with a hard disk (i.e. play back an MPEG4 from hard disk and you draw 7W). The CPU stays cool, there is no northbridge, and the Radeon even in a case with no active cooling doesn't overheat.. there are better, newer processors coming out (MPC5121E) of the same specs with extra acceleration units, integrated graphics (PowerVR) etc. which have a maximum power budget of 3W, a 2.5" hard disk usually comes in around ~2.5W or lower during heavy disk access. There will be no active cooling here, no heatsinks or case fans, and it will still work..
I am just trying to fathom what the challenge actually is.