Looking over the API and the simpler nature of the subject I doubt it would take a few weeks. If you have some code lingering around to manage similar API's you can sling together an app over a weekend.
I've had a few beers but the API looked wholly sensible to me. Depending on what you're doing I'd say a weekend might even be on the high end of the estimate.
But then I do have a comp sci degree, so maybe that's just the edumacation talking. Not that it made me a good coder, mind you.
Though enterprise customers will be able to develop and deploy their own apps outside of the marketplace. It's in the original engadget article that informationweek one links to.
I think Microsoft is banking on cornering the business market, which has worked well for them in the past. I guess they wouldn't even have bothered with an app store if Apple wasn't so succesfull with it.
But if you're willing to step away from open hardware altogether, and accept a stack which is mostly open-source and fully non-restrictive, it _can_ be commercially viable. Maemo is exactly that.
Except Nokia as a company is more than willing to take competitors down through patent litigation. Not exactly in the spirit of open source.
I find being polite and pleasant do deal with lets me fly right through customs and immigration wherever I go.
I once waited nearly 3 hours in line at chicago airport for them to fingerprint me. I don't think being polite and pleasant would've got me through faster.
If it wasn't expired the fact that it's "old" should be irrelevant. The expiration date is when a passport is deemed too old, not some security goon's opinion.
If your passport looks like a rag that's been through the wash a few too many times, then that's also a good reason. Perhaps this wasn't it, but it seems plausible that something like this was the case.
My point was that h.264 is available to everyone they care about, either natively or through flash. Concerning transcoding, there's a difference between transcoding old videos, and providing duplicates of every single video on the site at four different compression ratios.
I did not mean to imply that encoding in h.264 is free. But it's by no means cumbersomely expensive for major operators like Google. Whether or not the BBC chose to develop their own codec only on the basis of price is something I think would need some more looking into.
Let me just add that I want a free and open format just as much as the next guy. But there's what we'd like to happen and what is going to happen. I'm not trying to argue that h.264 is the better choice, I'm arguing that, as things stand, it's the only choice, by virtue of its support from the major vendors.
His point was that talk is cheap, what's important is what you've managed to do. See the critic's criticism from Ratatouille for elaboration.
Of course this is Slashdot, the very definition of all talk and no action, so...
This is from the same school of thought that thinks we can't criticize what went on in Vietnam because we "haven't been there". It's just another form of the ad hominem.
However, the new tag could also be used (even though in a less useful way than otherwise) if there is, which is unfortunately the most likely scenario, no industry consensus on a single codec. Assuming that there are two camps (H.264 and Theora; or maybe three if Google pushes for VP8), web servers could then provide different Uniform Resource Identifiers for the files, based on the browser that makes the web page request; or the file names (thus the URIs) could be identical but dependent on which browser is in use, a different file could be provided.
The video element allows you to list several sources with different codecs. You don't need to do any web sniffing, just let the client decide. The problem here is that transcoding a video to two different codecs means you about double your CPU and storage requirements. Given enough video (like on any of the video sharing sites) it's just not (commercially) feasible to support multiple formats at the same time. So video providers such as Google on youtube will go with the following solution: they'll transcode to h.264, make that available and serve it via flash to whomever doesn't have h.264 video support. Firefox users get shafted either way.
Theora will remain in niche use, but I don't see any way that h.264 doesn't end up winning over the major sites, especially since it has the support of all the proprietary browser vendors.
There's a whole slew of feature that increase the reliability and performance of these filesystems on large disks. Basically, they're more modern than what we have now. Do some reading: http://lwn.net/Articles/342892/
And so how does one derive plastics from nuclear energy, oh Wise One? Fuels are not the only products cracked from oil.
I suppose you could argue (devil's advocate here) that if you were to cut out oil for most domestic transportation and power generation, you wouldn't need to do any offshore drilling. It seems somewhat easier to shut off a well when it blows up on land.
if you want to bring a GOOD smartphone to market you write your own OS specific to your hardware. what developers seem to fail to understand is that an operating system for such a device is almost trivial to create. the bigger challenge is with the GUI layer running on top of the OS (which most people are content with also calling the "OS" when it isn't)
again, a functional GUI platform is also trivial to implement for a company already undergoing design and manufacturing of electronic devices on a large scale.
Except, you know, you're wrong. Symbian? WebOS? Plagued with all sorts of problems, performance being one. And one of those wasn't even written from scratch.
I haven't called Bigjeff5, or anyone else, a "dumbass", so you can make your own apologies to them.
That's what it sounded like what you were implying to me. But apologies if I misread that bit.
Let's have a look... how many rigs have I worked on? Oh gods, I'd have to read my CV... let's say in the order of forty in the last decade and forget the previos decade and a bit. How many have not had a remote control panel for the BOP stack, as Bigjeff (and the New York Times, according to you) says? Not one that I'm aware of. Many have had two remote panels (one in the blast-protected accommodation ; one at the lifeboat stations at the other end of the rig ; it is left as an exercise to the reader to work out why there are often two remote panels at opposite ends of the rig). Those are of course, in addition to the routine control panel in the driller's control cabin ("dog house").
I always assumed they were talking about some sort of installation not on the rig. If nobody gets to either of those shutoff points (because the rig is exploding around them, I can imagine that might make engaging the controls hard), there would still be a way to shut it down off-rig somehow. It makes sense to me that they wouldn't install something like that since as you say (further below) there are all sorts of automated mechanisms that are supposed to engage anyway. The infuriating thing about mainstream coverage is always that everything is so vague you have a hard time knowing what exactly it is they're talking about.
The list of safety mechanisms is handy, thanks.
PSandusky (yes, I do recognise the Leather Goddess reference) obliquely cites the Challenger disaster (was it Challenger ? - one of the shuttles that killed it's crew), which is well and good ; in the same vein, I wonder how many people at Cape Caneveral get repeated safety warnings for smoking while cleaning out the rocket fuel silos?
Not sure what you're saying here. People on oil rigs smoke near possibly explosive fumes?
Interesting to note, perhaps, that the people on wikipedia elected PRAM instead, as apparently they considered PCM to be little more than a marketing term.
Accidents are not to be confused with criminal negligence. An accident is what happens when you 'spill the milk' at home, when a oil platform goes up in flames, blows up and they can't shut down the flow of oil, that is criminal negligence.
If they had a failsafe system in place that they believed would shut down the flow of oil in the event of a catastrophic failure, and they genuinely believed and had tested that it would work, then it is not criminal negligence.
If they knew somehow that this system would not work and didn't move to replace/upgrade it, then it's criminal negligence.
The nytimes ran an article that pretty much agreed with everything BigJeff5 said (supposedly told to them by BP). So either you're claiming BP is lying about what's happened or you should enlighten us just to why you are calling him a dumbass.
They still lack a medical lab. Claiming condoms worsen the AIDS problem is the modern-day equivalent of Galileo trial. Except that this time it kills thousands of people.
I believe their point with condoms was that it encourages people to have sex (and thus..). I don't think a medical lab would help there, maybe a statistics lab?
Isn't this also considered outdated? Test results I've reviewed show the video/audio quality is no better than an MP3 or AAC encoded file, and far inferior to newer codecs like MP3pro (MP3+SBR), MPEG4 VLC, or AAC+SBR
I suppose you meant audio quality? And vorbis instead of ogg? You realise the article was about the container format right?
While the fields in Ogm are based on Window's VfW, they can be created and parsed on any platform quite easily. I've NEVER used Ogm one Windows, I've ALWAYS used it under Unix systems. Ogmtools can be used to generate such files, and MPlayer (which works on damn near every platform, from Linux, Windows, and OSX to VMS and OS/2) will play them out of the box, with no additional dependencies.
Monty:
The result was parseable as Ogg container but [...]
I think his point in that section was, there's a more general way to do it.
Twitter + posterous is a good idea. If you're wondering what to use Google Buzz for, this is also one way you could put it to use. Just post a link on twitter to your buzz post (automatic or no) whenever you feel you really need to write a longer post. It has facebook style conversation (which I usually despise, but they have their place) and allows you to do longer form posts of mostly text (what you would normally use a blog for). Having a blog is silly for most of us, since we're not really writers and don't quite put up the word count to justify having a blog.
Now this is all assuming you can work out how to deal with the whole twitter/buzz integration thing. Buzz is still kinda clunky to use, a real google product really.
Slashdot Mirror
Looking over the API and the simpler nature of the subject I doubt it would take a few weeks. If you have some code lingering around to manage similar API's you can sling together an app over a weekend.
I've had a few beers but the API looked wholly sensible to me. Depending on what you're doing I'd say a weekend might even be on the high end of the estimate.
But then I do have a comp sci degree, so maybe that's just the edumacation talking. Not that it made me a good coder, mind you.
As long as you don't use any frameworks. At all. Very cross platform friendly.
Though enterprise customers will be able to develop and deploy their own apps outside of the marketplace. It's in the original engadget article that informationweek one links to.
I think Microsoft is banking on cornering the business market, which has worked well for them in the past. I guess they wouldn't even have bothered with an app store if Apple wasn't so succesfull with it.
But if you're willing to step away from open hardware altogether, and accept a stack which is mostly open-source and fully non-restrictive, it _can_ be commercially viable. Maemo is exactly that.
Except Nokia as a company is more than willing to take competitors down through patent litigation. Not exactly in the spirit of open source.
I find being polite and pleasant do deal with lets me fly right through customs and immigration wherever I go.
I once waited nearly 3 hours in line at chicago airport for them to fingerprint me. I don't think being polite and pleasant would've got me through faster.
If it wasn't expired the fact that it's "old" should be irrelevant. The expiration date is when a passport is deemed too old, not some security goon's opinion.
If your passport looks like a rag that's been through the wash a few too many times, then that's also a good reason. Perhaps this wasn't it, but it seems plausible that something like this was the case.
My point was that h.264 is available to everyone they care about, either natively or through flash. Concerning transcoding, there's a difference between transcoding old videos, and providing duplicates of every single video on the site at four different compression ratios.
I did not mean to imply that encoding in h.264 is free. But it's by no means cumbersomely expensive for major operators like Google. Whether or not the BBC chose to develop their own codec only on the basis of price is something I think would need some more looking into.
Let me just add that I want a free and open format just as much as the next guy. But there's what we'd like to happen and what is going to happen. I'm not trying to argue that h.264 is the better choice, I'm arguing that, as things stand, it's the only choice, by virtue of its support from the major vendors.
His point was that talk is cheap, what's important is what you've managed to do. See the critic's criticism from Ratatouille for elaboration.
Of course this is Slashdot, the very definition of all talk and no action, so...
This is from the same school of thought that thinks we can't criticize what went on in Vietnam because we "haven't been there". It's just another form of the ad hominem.
D'oh. webkit based browsers
I was under the impression most people moving away from firefox were jumping over to webkit browser. Which is also feature-rich and widely used.
However, the new tag could also be used (even though in a less useful way than otherwise) if there is, which is unfortunately the most likely scenario, no industry consensus on a single codec. Assuming that there are two camps (H.264 and Theora; or maybe three if Google pushes for VP8), web servers could then provide different Uniform Resource Identifiers for the files, based on the browser that makes the web page request; or the file names (thus the URIs) could be identical but dependent on which browser is in use, a different file could be provided.
The video element allows you to list several sources with different codecs. You don't need to do any web sniffing, just let the client decide. The problem here is that transcoding a video to two different codecs means you about double your CPU and storage requirements. Given enough video (like on any of the video sharing sites) it's just not (commercially) feasible to support multiple formats at the same time. So video providers such as Google on youtube will go with the following solution: they'll transcode to h.264, make that available and serve it via flash to whomever doesn't have h.264 video support. Firefox users get shafted either way.
Theora will remain in niche use, but I don't see any way that h.264 doesn't end up winning over the major sites, especially since it has the support of all the proprietary browser vendors.
There's a whole slew of feature that increase the reliability and performance of these filesystems on large disks. Basically, they're more modern than what we have now. Do some reading: http://lwn.net/Articles/342892/
As far as I'm concerned, he stopped making movies after Grosse Pointe Blank.
You must be new here.
And so how does one derive plastics from nuclear energy, oh Wise One?
Fuels are not the only products cracked from oil.
I suppose you could argue (devil's advocate here) that if you were to cut out oil for most domestic transportation and power generation, you wouldn't need to do any offshore drilling. It seems somewhat easier to shut off a well when it blows up on land.
if you want to bring a GOOD smartphone to market you write your own OS specific to your hardware. what developers seem to fail to understand is that an operating system for such a device is almost trivial to create. the bigger challenge is with the GUI layer running on top of the OS (which most people are content with also calling the "OS" when it isn't)
again, a functional GUI platform is also trivial to implement for a company already undergoing design and manufacturing of electronic devices on a large scale.
Except, you know, you're wrong. Symbian? WebOS? Plagued with all sorts of problems, performance being one. And one of those wasn't even written from scratch.
I haven't called Bigjeff5, or anyone else, a "dumbass", so you can make your own apologies to them.
That's what it sounded like what you were implying to me. But apologies if I misread that bit.
Let's have a look ... how many rigs have I worked on? Oh gods, I'd have to read my CV ... let's say in the order of forty in the last decade and forget the previos decade and a bit. How many have not had a remote control panel for the BOP stack, as Bigjeff (and the New York Times, according to you) says? Not one that I'm aware of. Many have had two remote panels (one in the blast-protected accommodation ; one at the lifeboat stations at the other end of the rig ; it is left as an exercise to the reader to work out why there are often two remote panels at opposite ends of the rig). Those are of course, in addition to the routine control panel in the driller's control cabin ("dog house").
I always assumed they were talking about some sort of installation not on the rig. If nobody gets to either of those shutoff points (because the rig is exploding around them, I can imagine that might make engaging the controls hard), there would still be a way to shut it down off-rig somehow. It makes sense to me that they wouldn't install something like that since as you say (further below) there are all sorts of automated mechanisms that are supposed to engage anyway. The infuriating thing about mainstream coverage is always that everything is so vague you have a hard time knowing what exactly it is they're talking about.
The list of safety mechanisms is handy, thanks.
PSandusky (yes, I do recognise the Leather Goddess reference) obliquely cites the Challenger disaster (was it Challenger ? - one of the shuttles that killed it's crew), which is well and good ; in the same vein, I wonder how many people at Cape Caneveral get repeated safety warnings for smoking while cleaning out the rocket fuel silos?
Not sure what you're saying here. People on oil rigs smoke near possibly explosive fumes?
Interesting to note, perhaps, that the people on wikipedia elected PRAM instead, as apparently they considered PCM to be little more than a marketing term.
Accidents are not to be confused with criminal negligence. An accident is what happens when you 'spill the milk' at home, when a oil platform goes up in flames, blows up and they can't shut down the flow of oil, that is criminal negligence.
If they had a failsafe system in place that they believed would shut down the flow of oil in the event of a catastrophic failure, and they genuinely believed and had tested that it would work, then it is not criminal negligence.
If they knew somehow that this system would not work and didn't move to replace/upgrade it, then it's criminal negligence.
The nytimes ran an article that pretty much agreed with everything BigJeff5 said (supposedly told to them by BP). So either you're claiming BP is lying about what's happened or you should enlighten us just to why you are calling him a dumbass.
Just saying.
They still lack a medical lab. Claiming condoms worsen the AIDS problem is the modern-day equivalent of Galileo trial. Except that this time it kills thousands of people.
I believe their point with condoms was that it encourages people to have sex (and thus..). I don't think a medical lab would help there, maybe a statistics lab?
As for OGG:
Isn't this also considered outdated? Test results I've reviewed show the video/audio quality is no better than an MP3 or AAC encoded file, and far inferior to newer codecs like MP3pro (MP3+SBR), MPEG4 VLC, or AAC+SBR
I suppose you meant audio quality? And vorbis instead of ogg? You realise the article was about the container format right?
No, Monty is simply lying about this point.
While the fields in Ogm are based on Window's VfW, they can be created and parsed on any platform quite easily. I've NEVER used Ogm one Windows, I've ALWAYS used it under Unix systems. Ogmtools can be used to generate such files, and MPlayer (which works on damn near every platform, from Linux, Windows, and OSX to VMS and OS/2) will play them out of the box, with no additional dependencies.
Monty:
The result was parseable as Ogg container but [...]
I think his point in that section was, there's a more general way to do it.
Twitter + posterous is a good idea. If you're wondering what to use Google Buzz for, this is also one way you could put it to use. Just post a link on twitter to your buzz post (automatic or no) whenever you feel you really need to write a longer post. It has facebook style conversation (which I usually despise, but they have their place) and allows you to do longer form posts of mostly text (what you would normally use a blog for). Having a blog is silly for most of us, since we're not really writers and don't quite put up the word count to justify having a blog.
Now this is all assuming you can work out how to deal with the whole twitter/buzz integration thing. Buzz is still kinda clunky to use, a real google product really.
You're missing the point if you think there's only one way to use twitter.