Or more accurately, Chrome OS will push HTML 5 apps, making Flash and MS Flash (Silverlight) obsolete.
Microsoft is already targeting Smooth Streaming as the trojan horse for pushing Silverlight (and already successfully managed to force anyone who wanted to watch the Olympics or the DNC last year to download Silverlight 2). However, Apple has done an end run around Microsoft by submitting very similar technology it calls HTTP Live Streaming to the IETF as a proposed standard, patterned after SHOUTcast/Icecast HTTP streaming of MP3 (basically upgrading Internet radio to Internet TV).
And while Microsoft dutifully tries to push Silverlight out as The Only Client of its Smooth Streaming, Apple already has shipped HTTP Live Streaming in iPhone 3.0 to its installed base of +40 million active mobile iPhone/iPod Touch users, with partners Akamai and big name MPEG transport stream encoder vendors. In contrast, Smooth Streaming is designed to tie streaming only to Microsoft's streamer, IIS, and Silverlight on the client (surprise!).
Any client that can play H.264/AAC audio/video from MPEG transport streams can play content targeted to the iPhone. You can serve it from any web server. You don't need to create an iPhone App to deliver content to the iPhone, it streams right from the web, right now. That means it will be easy for vendors such as Palm or Android to support streaming video targeted to the iPhone, despite having a much smaller installed base than the iPhone. And with the release of Snow Leopard, QuickTime X will stream HTTP Live Streaming from the desktop, and presumably, Apple TV.
This tears away the primary need for Flash or MS Flash (Silverlight), paving the way open for HTML 5 to push compliant browsers (FireFox, Opera, Safari, other WebKit browsers) into the forefront and leave a dwindling minority on IE 6/7/8 with Silverlight/Flash. Best, HTML 5 can provide fallback, offering HTTP Live Streaming as the first option, H.264 progressive download as a secondary, Ogg Theora for Wikipedia hosting videos that won't play on any mobile devices outside of the desktop PC, and Flash for the Neanderthals among us.
Opera Mini isn't really a web browser, it's a Java ME client for Opera's proxy servers, which render pages and send a proprietary slimmed down version to the applet. There's nothing "standards compliant" about it.
Microsoft hasn't released any apps for the iPhone, clearly indicating that it isn't a legitimate software company, but merely a marketing company that perpetuates the Windows monopoly.
Market share implies a market. Comparing "Linux" to the iPhone is like comparing "a 10% increase" of two totally different numbers.
If you're talking about Linux on the desktop, then it can be compared to other desktop operating systems.
- It's hard to pinpoint how many Linux users there are, because.iso downloads are meaningless and Linux isn't represented in hardware sales as Mac OS X and Windows are. - Browser logs give some idea of the installed base of Linux users, but compared to other PCs, it isn't very high. That's because most Linux PCs are acting as servers and not browsing the web as consumer oriented Macs and Windows PCs are.
If you're talking about Linux on mobile devices, then it can be compared to the iPhone.
- It's easier to identify the mobile market share of Linux, as it is tied to hardware. But Linux is rarely the platform on mobile devices. The Android, the Palm Pre, and many Motorola Chinese phones all use a Linux kernel, but it's not relevant to the platform or the software they run. The only mobile devices that are really Linux are maybe Nokia's failed Maemo tablets. - Browser logs clearly indicate that despite only representing a sizable chunk of the smartphone market, Apple dominates the mobile web with more than 50% of mobile web traffic.
While it's true that mobile traffic doesn't compare with desktop traffic volumes, it is clearly the future and has the potential to dramatically alter the computing landscape. So Microsoft's current ~60% of the desktop (who'd have thought!) is close to Apple's share of the mobile web. That gives Apple the ability to push HTML 5 and the use of open standards, including ISO MPEG H.264 and Apple's IETF-proposed HTTP Live streaming protocol on the iPhone, the opposite of what Microsoft has done over the last 15 years to tie every standard to its own proprietary platform: Windows.
You are confusing mobile phones with smartphones capable of browsing the web. There are not a billion smartphones being sold.
You are also confusing high end mobiles that are pretty much just phones with a keypad for texting and the kind of browser in the iPhone. The only phones that can compete with the iPhone in browsing are those that use WebKit (and a few Opera non-mini phones).
Apple owns the mobile web because a plurality of web traffic is being generated/consumed by iPhone users. This is killing Flash and promoting standard video.
There's no reason for you to rail against it, as its better for FOSS users to install H.264 themselves (Jesus, you downloaded Firefox, can't you download a freaking codec too bitches?) than it is to be forced to render Flash or Silverlight with whatever Adobe and Microsoft want to offer you in terms of a craptastic Flash/MS Flash player.
It's worth worrying about if you have $30 billion, a hardware-centric market for your products, and the ability to license a safer alternative.
Mozilla has none of those things. This is an issue of different perspectives from different entities in different positions. No need to cast it as a good vs. evil battle.
What isn't controversial is that Theora is simply old technology. As you point out, if there were some commercial viability in using it, On2 would still be selling it and Google wouldn't be complaining that it isn't good enough for... YouTube videos (!)
The good news is that the "single commercial vendor" is selecting open, interoperable standards because it is an underdog company in terms of market share.
The standard Apple is selecting for its successful product is a unanimous industry decision. So in reality, it's Mozilla that is trying to screw up video distribution by throwing in a political monkey wrench, which would likely result in an extension of the Internet being stuck to Flash + Silverlight.
It appears do you not know the difference between a container and a codec, among other things.
You may also not know that Apple is regularly sued, including the Burst lawsuit against QuickTime for "faster than real time media delivery." Microsoft gave the Burst trolls something like $50 million, but Apple fought them in court and invalidated most of their patents, and ended up paying them nearly nothing.
But carry on with your ignorant conspiracy theory, I'm sure there are a lot of people who will agree that a third rate, obsolete codec is the cat's ass just because its developer abandoned it and gave up its worthless royalty rights. surely we should abandon the state of the art for this crap just because ignorant freetards think it's a smashing idea.
Microsoft tried to derail MPEG4 to establish its own Window Media codecs and the ASF container, which the ISO had rejected in 1998 for a container based upon QuickTime's instead.
So Microsoft got its proprietary technologies rubber-stamped by its pet standards org, the SMPTE, as VC-1 and has since failed in the market as well.
In its HTTP Streaming proposal for MS Flash (Silverlight), the vanquished Microsoft is now specifying the MPEG4 container.
But yes, the MPEG4 patent pool has tech from everybody in it, that's why its the most desirable codec. At least we have some idea of where the tech came from.
There is no risk-free path. However, there's much less risk for Apple to work with the rest of the world minus Microsoft (and MS is coming around on MPEG4 in some areas) than to head off into unexplored FOSS territory to support a codec/container that nobody else is using apart from video game studios.
If Ogg/Theora comes under fire, guess who will get targeted: some game developers or Apple and its $30 billion. If MPEG4 gets targeted, it will be one troll vs. the rest of the world.
The "problem" is that FOSS political advocates hoped that HTML5 would designate Ogg as a standard container and therefore ratchet free codecs into relevance.
Instead, the world is continuing to use ISO/MPEG standards that are technically superior, already supported in silicon, and can actually rival the best Microsoft can offer as a proprietary codec vendor.
FOSS advocates would rather have something third rate declared the standard so that companies that actually support FOSS development, such as Apple and Google, would be disadvantaged in taking on Microsoft. FOSS is unwittingly working to keep Microsoft in charge, much like the Ralph Nader crowd saying there's no difference between Gore and Bush and fating us into 8 years of torture dictatorship, religion, and environmental destruction.
Perhaps you're not aware that there are already Ogg+Theora etc plugins for QuickTime, and that anyone can install them for free.
Some of the reasons Apple has no interest in using FOSS codecs are:
- Codecs are bleeding edge technology, and FOSS is typically behind the curve (as Theora is) - Codec algorithms are patented to high heaven and impossibly difficult to vet for patent submarines. - Nobody sues FOSS until a monied company adopts it. Apple doesn't want to be the target. - There is already a technically superior, non-patent encumbered, world wide standard with ubiquitous silicon support: ISO/MPEG - Apple has already spend years investing in AAC/H.264. - Apple doesn't want to double its development efforts just to perform pointless political posturing to satisfy people who don't pay for anything.
The mention of Apple managed to spleen together two unrelated ideas: "expressing concerns over patents despite the fact that the codec can be used royalty-free."
There is no relationship between worrying about patent submarines and Ogg being royalty free. This is simple idiot-targeted editorializing. Apple doesn't want to be the deep pocketed commercial implementation of Ogg that ends up having to pay patent trolls. That's why it is going with the ISO/MPEG standard, which pools patents together from everyone. Mozilla doesn't want to use the standard because it is the opposite: penniless and non-commercial. Its entire business plan is based on pushing users to do Google searches as that $50M in search fees is its only source of income.
The only good news is that Apple owns the mobile web with the iPhone, so it can pretty much establish HTML5 itself and provide Flash-killer standards-based video without any help from Firefox.
So VP Biden tells a bunch of elite dinner mates about this bunker where Cheney hid out and came up with his hermit insane policies for ruling as emperor under the figurehead of Bush, and this is terrible because now some elite old white dudes know national secrets.
But ITS NOT A PROBLEM FOR FOX NEWS TO MAKE THIS PUBLIC to the millions of gun-toting latent terrorists in its audience who are programmed to hate anyone with a less than Palin level of right-winged-ness.
Yes, this makes sense. If spreading such secrets is a national emergency, why did Fox choose to do it explicitly? And why weren't they laughed off the planet for this hysterical level of hypocrisy?
No, MS Works does not count as a graphical Office suite because:
* it wasn't graphical until Windows arrived (unless you count colored DOS text as graphical) in the early 90s (nobody used it before then, and please don't revise history to suggest they did)
* nor was it a suite. It was an integrated app that did different tasks, like 1984's AppleWorks, at least through version 4.5 in 1995, a half decade AFTER Office arrived for the Mac.
In other words, MS Works was an AppleWorks clone.
MS Office recreated Lisa Office.
See a parallel there? Both were several years behind. AppleWorks outsold Works, and Apple forced MS to stop advertising that its Works was the top seller.
Had Apple continued to develop its own Lisa Office apps for the Mac rather than bending to third party developer pressure to leave the market open for them, Apple would never have needed to partner with Microsoft to ship its failed DOS apps for the Mac as graphical apps. Microsoft would not have been able to rip off the Mac, Bill Gates could not have used exclusivity Excel for Mac as a bargaining chip for obtaining a free license to Mac IP from Apple CEO John Sculley, and Microsoft would have fizzled out as a DOS vendor in the shadow of OS/2, without an application suite of Mac apps it could port to the PC to launch Windows.
But Apple bowed to its third party developers, Microsoft screwed the company over, and then killed off its own DOS third party developers (Lotus, Word Perfect, ect) and ended up as the company with a lock on both the PC operating system and the PC Office market.
CueCat had a lot riding on it and lots of fairly high profile partners. Perhaps if it wasn't in the retarded shape of a big plastic cat it might have taken off.
But what's this about the "ludicrously priced Apple Lisa"? Sure it was $10,000 in 1983, but it wasn't targeted to home users. The only other graphical computing package available at the time, the VisIon hardware/software kit from the makers of VisiCalc, the killer app spreadsheet, was less impressive and just as expensive.
"the base VisiOn software and a mouse cost $790, each application cost between $250 and $400, and it required a $5000 hard drive upgrade on top of a $2000 PC"
It was not hard to price a $10,000 PC in the mid-80s simply by adding a little RAM and a hard drive. The Lisa pioneered a new class of hardware at a reasonable cost compared to its newness and the competition.
Apple's Lisa also invented the Office desktop suite, which was bundled into its price. If you wanted an integrated suite of Office software, you'd have to wait out the 80s for another seven years before Microsoft could reassemble its own Office suite for the Macintosh, and then later Windows.
Security is defined as "the state of being free from danger or threat" and Safety is similarly defined as "the condition of being protected from or unlikely to cause danger, risk, or injury."
Security comes from the Latin securitas or securus "free from care" while safety comes from the salvitas or salvus meaning "safe."
So if there were any real nuance of difference between being safe and being secure, then security would have the edge in meaning over "feeling safe", while safety could be said to imply actually "being safe." But the words are really interchangeable, and how you use them can suggest either.
The real discrepancy that needs to be pointed out between the Mac and Windows is that while Microsoft has recently invested more into building a fancy security infrastructure, Mac users continue to both feel safer and to actually be safer in the sense of being free from danger or threat.
There is clearly no immediate or impending threat to Macs, and there is little in the way of market forces or that wishful thinking pundit invention of "hacker pride" that will result in something to turn Macs into the disaster that has dogged Windows since the late 90s.
What pundits like to do is equate low risk, self-injury actions with high risk, difficult to escape from events. This is straight up misinformation mixed with fear, uncertainty and doubt. For example, nearly everyone is claiming that:
* Downloading iLife warez that pretend to be stolen software * from a non-trusted source * assigning it privileges to install on your system * and then finding that you have installed a background process that does something ugly that you can trivially remove
is the same as:
* Trying to use Windows to browse the web and use email * finding that you've been automatically infected with adware and viral malware without knowing it * then finding that your PC is also self replicating attacks or sending spam on to other systems * then realizing that the design of Windows' registry makes it difficult to clean things out * then noticing how much of your CPU capacity is being used to protect you from all of these threats via malware and virus scanners * then finding out how expensive it is to spend hours cleaning up the mess yourself, or alternatively paying some Nerd Patrol $300 to "diagnose" that your PC is hosed.
They are not the same, and only a liar would keep suggesting that Mac and Windows users face the same dangers and threats. If you're paying attention, you'll notice that those who keep suggesting this almost always work for an Anti-Virus company working to make money off of Mac users. This shouldn't require any help in dot connection.
A theoretical flaw in Safari, no matter how urgently the pundits bark about it, is not the "same problem" as active exploits that are actually occurring to Windows users. You equate them falsely. Your comparison is not relevant to reality.
Similarly, talking about Mosaic being "standards compliant" at a time when there was no real lack of standards compliance is completely irrelevant to what Apple did, certainly in association with Mozilla and Opera, with Safari to level the browser playing field perverted by Microsoft's dominance and induce a resurgence of standards-based development that was successful enough to force MS to make efforts to follow.
Reading the rest of your comment would require clicking a link, and so far you haven't enticed me with any desire to continue refuting this circular, pointless arguing about nothing.
I would encourage you to rely on research and facts and critical thought over printing false recollections of a distorted history that apologizes for Microsoft's criminal conduct and equates minor complaints about Apple with serious wrongdoing by Microsoft.
You don't want to sound like a Fox News anchor wishing to live 5 years ago.
Cutting funding for the pie in the sky, futuristic hydrogen research that Bush shooed in as a distraction while killing all viable research that could credibly be competitive with Saudi oil (or Iraqi oil once he freed it with the blood of thousands of Americans and trillions of dollars of our children's future for short term profits for his partners, a plan that subsequently failed to work out as planned) is just as sensible as cutting funding for Bush's failed "abstinence-only" sex education/state religion, which was just as misguided.
The problem isn't that you could have been more clear" or that I should have "read your reply properly," but that you are simply and quite obviously wrong....although I should have properly noted that you were moderated as flamebait before falling into your trap of illogical, circular nonsense peddling.
There is an obvious corollary to "It could be argued that if an OS ships with more updates then maybe it was a bit lacking when it was first released" when defending Microsoft release schedule.
"Particularly in fixing the well-published security holes in Safari. The point I am making here is that the very criticisms you level at Microsoft can be levelled equally at Apple"... No, no they can't. Unless you also equate stubbing your toe on your bed with running over your foot with an improperly designed lawn mower. I presented you with some relevant facts to bring realism into to world view, clearly these pearls were unwelcome to your trough-rooting snout.
Mosaic was based on initial web standards in the late 90s, but since then both Netscape (built on Mosaic by its founder) and Microsoft (IE was based on Spyglass, the commercial offshoot of NCSA's Mosaic) worked very hard to pervert the web into a series of browser-specific proprietary conventions.
If you are not aware of the gross lack of standardization in the web browser field, welcome back from your decade long coma.
Or perhaps two decades: Apple supported TCP/IP on Macs starting in (!) 1988 with MacTCP, and delivered its second TCP/IP networking architecture in 1995 as OpenTransport. Macs were TCP/IP capable before anyone used Windows, let alone TCP/IP on Windows. Apple continued to support AppleTalk, but Microsoft continued to support NetBEUI, too, so the idea that you couldn't configure your Macs really has no bearing on the fact that Microsoft has only ever followed in the tech industry, despite its leadership position and its vast resources.
"Apple didn't even broach the idea of TCP/IP until Microsoft had adopted it for their desktops - in my distance memory"... Perhaps it's better to know what you're talking about before you repeat distant memories colored by decades of propaganda about how wonderful its been to have the tech industry locked up under the talons of a criminal monopolist gang of tasteless snake oil salesmen like Ballmer and Gates.
Microsoft isn't automatically bad, it just has a record of doing terrible things to hold back progress and then blind simple people, giving them the idea that MS leads and delivers innovation by copying others ten years later.
Slashdot Mirror
Or more accurately, Chrome OS will push HTML 5 apps, making Flash and MS Flash (Silverlight) obsolete.
Microsoft is already targeting Smooth Streaming as the trojan horse for pushing Silverlight (and already successfully managed to force anyone who wanted to watch the Olympics or the DNC last year to download Silverlight 2). However, Apple has done an end run around Microsoft by submitting very similar technology it calls HTTP Live Streaming to the IETF as a proposed standard, patterned after SHOUTcast/Icecast HTTP streaming of MP3 (basically upgrading Internet radio to Internet TV).
And while Microsoft dutifully tries to push Silverlight out as The Only Client of its Smooth Streaming, Apple already has shipped HTTP Live Streaming in iPhone 3.0 to its installed base of +40 million active mobile iPhone/iPod Touch users, with partners Akamai and big name MPEG transport stream encoder vendors. In contrast, Smooth Streaming is designed to tie streaming only to Microsoft's streamer, IIS, and Silverlight on the client (surprise!).
Any client that can play H.264/AAC audio/video from MPEG transport streams can play content targeted to the iPhone. You can serve it from any web server. You don't need to create an iPhone App to deliver content to the iPhone, it streams right from the web, right now. That means it will be easy for vendors such as Palm or Android to support streaming video targeted to the iPhone, despite having a much smaller installed base than the iPhone. And with the release of Snow Leopard, QuickTime X will stream HTTP Live Streaming from the desktop, and presumably, Apple TV.
This tears away the primary need for Flash or MS Flash (Silverlight), paving the way open for HTML 5 to push compliant browsers (FireFox, Opera, Safari, other WebKit browsers) into the forefront and leave a dwindling minority on IE 6/7/8 with Silverlight/Flash. Best, HTML 5 can provide fallback, offering HTTP Live Streaming as the first option, H.264 progressive download as a secondary, Ogg Theora for Wikipedia hosting videos that won't play on any mobile devices outside of the desktop PC, and Flash for the Neanderthals among us.
Apple launches HTTP Live Streaming standard in iPhone 3.0 : with a timeline and history of Internet streaming and links to example sites.
Yeah, Microsoft promises not to sue users to propagate Silverlight creep on Linux, as long as they are content to use an old version.
Silverlight = MS Flash: replacing the open web with a closed binary that only works well on Windows.
Ogg Theora, H.264 and the HTML 5 Browser Squabble
Opera Mini isn't really a web browser, it's a Java ME client for Opera's proxy servers, which render pages and send a proprietary slimmed down version to the applet. There's nothing "standards compliant" about it.
Ogg Theora, H.264 and the HTML 5 Browser Squabble
Microsoft hasn't released any apps for the iPhone, clearly indicating that it isn't a legitimate software company, but merely a marketing company that perpetuates the Windows monopoly.
Ogg Theora, H.264 and the HTML 5 Browser Squabble
Market share implies a market. Comparing "Linux" to the iPhone is like comparing "a 10% increase" of two totally different numbers.
If you're talking about Linux on the desktop, then it can be compared to other desktop operating systems.
- It's hard to pinpoint how many Linux users there are, because .iso downloads are meaningless and Linux isn't represented in hardware sales as Mac OS X and Windows are.
- Browser logs give some idea of the installed base of Linux users, but compared to other PCs, it isn't very high. That's because most Linux PCs are acting as servers and not browsing the web as consumer oriented Macs and Windows PCs are.
If you're talking about Linux on mobile devices, then it can be compared to the iPhone.
- It's easier to identify the mobile market share of Linux, as it is tied to hardware. But Linux is rarely the platform on mobile devices. The Android, the Palm Pre, and many Motorola Chinese phones all use a Linux kernel, but it's not relevant to the platform or the software they run. The only mobile devices that are really Linux are maybe Nokia's failed Maemo tablets.
- Browser logs clearly indicate that despite only representing a sizable chunk of the smartphone market, Apple dominates the mobile web with more than 50% of mobile web traffic.
While it's true that mobile traffic doesn't compare with desktop traffic volumes, it is clearly the future and has the potential to dramatically alter the computing landscape. So Microsoft's current ~60% of the desktop (who'd have thought!) is close to Apple's share of the mobile web. That gives Apple the ability to push HTML 5 and the use of open standards, including ISO MPEG H.264 and Apple's IETF-proposed HTTP Live streaming protocol on the iPhone, the opposite of what Microsoft has done over the last 15 years to tie every standard to its own proprietary platform: Windows.
Ogg Theora, H.264 and the HTML 5 Browser Squabble
Mac OS X Leopard, obviously.
Ogg Theora, H.264 and the HTML 5 Browser Squabble
You are confusing mobile phones with smartphones capable of browsing the web. There are not a billion smartphones being sold.
You are also confusing high end mobiles that are pretty much just phones with a keypad for texting and the kind of browser in the iPhone. The only phones that can compete with the iPhone in browsing are those that use WebKit (and a few Opera non-mini phones).
Apple owns the mobile web because a plurality of web traffic is being generated/consumed by iPhone users. This is killing Flash and promoting standard video.
There's no reason for you to rail against it, as its better for FOSS users to install H.264 themselves (Jesus, you downloaded Firefox, can't you download a freaking codec too bitches?) than it is to be forced to render Flash or Silverlight with whatever Adobe and Microsoft want to offer you in terms of a craptastic Flash/MS Flash player.
Do you also wonder why fragile old ladies prefer to go to the store in the daylight hours rather than walk through dark alleys alone at night?
There is such a thing as strength in numbers.
It's worth worrying about if you have $30 billion, a hardware-centric market for your products, and the ability to license a safer alternative.
Mozilla has none of those things. This is an issue of different perspectives from different entities in different positions. No need to cast it as a good vs. evil battle.
What isn't controversial is that Theora is simply old technology. As you point out, if there were some commercial viability in using it, On2 would still be selling it and Google wouldn't be complaining that it isn't good enough for ... YouTube videos (!)
The good news is that the "single commercial vendor" is selecting open, interoperable standards because it is an underdog company in terms of market share.
The standard Apple is selecting for its successful product is a unanimous industry decision. So in reality, it's Mozilla that is trying to screw up video distribution by throwing in a political monkey wrench, which would likely result in an extension of the Internet being stuck to Flash + Silverlight.
It appears do you not know the difference between a container and a codec, among other things.
You may also not know that Apple is regularly sued, including the Burst lawsuit against QuickTime for "faster than real time media delivery." Microsoft gave the Burst trolls something like $50 million, but Apple fought them in court and invalidated most of their patents, and ended up paying them nearly nothing.
But carry on with your ignorant conspiracy theory, I'm sure there are a lot of people who will agree that a third rate, obsolete codec is the cat's ass just because its developer abandoned it and gave up its worthless royalty rights. surely we should abandon the state of the art for this crap just because ignorant freetards think it's a smashing idea.
Microsoft tried to derail MPEG4 to establish its own Window Media codecs and the ASF container, which the ISO had rejected in 1998 for a container based upon QuickTime's instead.
So Microsoft got its proprietary technologies rubber-stamped by its pet standards org, the SMPTE, as VC-1 and has since failed in the market as well.
In its HTTP Streaming proposal for MS Flash (Silverlight), the vanquished Microsoft is now specifying the MPEG4 container.
But yes, the MPEG4 patent pool has tech from everybody in it, that's why its the most desirable codec. At least we have some idea of where the tech came from.
Microsoft's Plot to Kill QuickTime
There is no risk-free path. However, there's much less risk for Apple to work with the rest of the world minus Microsoft (and MS is coming around on MPEG4 in some areas) than to head off into unexplored FOSS territory to support a codec/container that nobody else is using apart from video game studios.
If Ogg/Theora comes under fire, guess who will get targeted: some game developers or Apple and its $30 billion. If MPEG4 gets targeted, it will be one troll vs. the rest of the world.
The "problem" is that FOSS political advocates hoped that HTML5 would designate Ogg as a standard container and therefore ratchet free codecs into relevance.
Instead, the world is continuing to use ISO/MPEG standards that are technically superior, already supported in silicon, and can actually rival the best Microsoft can offer as a proprietary codec vendor.
FOSS advocates would rather have something third rate declared the standard so that companies that actually support FOSS development, such as Apple and Google, would be disadvantaged in taking on Microsoft. FOSS is unwittingly working to keep Microsoft in charge, much like the Ralph Nader crowd saying there's no difference between Gore and Bush and fating us into 8 years of torture dictatorship, religion, and environmental destruction.
But yay they lost this time. As they tend to.
Perhaps you're not aware that there are already Ogg+Theora etc plugins for QuickTime, and that anyone can install them for free.
Some of the reasons Apple has no interest in using FOSS codecs are:
- Codecs are bleeding edge technology, and FOSS is typically behind the curve (as Theora is)
- Codec algorithms are patented to high heaven and impossibly difficult to vet for patent submarines.
- Nobody sues FOSS until a monied company adopts it. Apple doesn't want to be the target.
- There is already a technically superior, non-patent encumbered, world wide standard with ubiquitous silicon support: ISO/MPEG
- Apple has already spend years investing in AAC/H.264.
- Apple doesn't want to double its development efforts just to perform pointless political posturing to satisfy people who don't pay for anything.
The mention of Apple managed to spleen together two unrelated ideas: "expressing concerns over patents despite the fact that the codec can be used royalty-free."
There is no relationship between worrying about patent submarines and Ogg being royalty free. This is simple idiot-targeted editorializing. Apple doesn't want to be the deep pocketed commercial implementation of Ogg that ends up having to pay patent trolls. That's why it is going with the ISO/MPEG standard, which pools patents together from everyone. Mozilla doesn't want to use the standard because it is the opposite: penniless and non-commercial. Its entire business plan is based on pushing users to do Google searches as that $50M in search fees is its only source of income.
The only good news is that Apple owns the mobile web with the iPhone, so it can pretty much establish HTML5 itself and provide Flash-killer standards-based video without any help from Firefox.
So VP Biden tells a bunch of elite dinner mates about this bunker where Cheney hid out and came up with his hermit insane policies for ruling as emperor under the figurehead of Bush, and this is terrible because now some elite old white dudes know national secrets.
But ITS NOT A PROBLEM FOR FOX NEWS TO MAKE THIS PUBLIC to the millions of gun-toting latent terrorists in its audience who are programmed to hate anyone with a less than Palin level of right-winged-ness.
Yes, this makes sense. If spreading such secrets is a national emergency, why did Fox choose to do it explicitly? And why weren't they laughed off the planet for this hysterical level of hypocrisy?
No, MS Works does not count as a graphical Office suite because:
* it wasn't graphical until Windows arrived (unless you count colored DOS text as graphical) in the early 90s (nobody used it before then, and please don't revise history to suggest they did)
* nor was it a suite. It was an integrated app that did different tasks, like 1984's AppleWorks, at least through version 4.5 in 1995, a half decade AFTER Office arrived for the Mac.
In other words, MS Works was an AppleWorks clone.
MS Office recreated Lisa Office.
See a parallel there? Both were several years behind. AppleWorks outsold Works, and Apple forced MS to stop advertising that its Works was the top seller.
Had Apple continued to develop its own Lisa Office apps for the Mac rather than bending to third party developer pressure to leave the market open for them, Apple would never have needed to partner with Microsoft to ship its failed DOS apps for the Mac as graphical apps. Microsoft would not have been able to rip off the Mac, Bill Gates could not have used exclusivity Excel for Mac as a bargaining chip for obtaining a free license to Mac IP from Apple CEO John Sculley, and Microsoft would have fizzled out as a DOS vendor in the shadow of OS/2, without an application suite of Mac apps it could port to the PC to launch Windows.
But Apple bowed to its third party developers, Microsoft screwed the company over, and then killed off its own DOS third party developers (Lotus, Word Perfect, ect) and ended up as the company with a lock on both the PC operating system and the PC Office market.
I guess it can't stop you from typing, but at least it will prevent you from talking.
CueCat had a lot riding on it and lots of fairly high profile partners. Perhaps if it wasn't in the retarded shape of a big plastic cat it might have taken off.
But what's this about the "ludicrously priced Apple Lisa"? Sure it was $10,000 in 1983, but it wasn't targeted to home users. The only other graphical computing package available at the time, the VisIon hardware/software kit from the makers of VisiCalc, the killer app spreadsheet, was less impressive and just as expensive.
"the base VisiOn software and a mouse cost $790, each application cost between $250 and $400, and it required a $5000 hard drive upgrade on top of a $2000 PC"
It was not hard to price a $10,000 PC in the mid-80s simply by adding a little RAM and a hard drive. The Lisa pioneered a new class of hardware at a reasonable cost compared to its newness and the competition.
Apple's Lisa also invented the Office desktop suite, which was bundled into its price. If you wanted an integrated suite of Office software, you'd have to wait out the 80s for another seven years before Microsoft could reassemble its own Office suite for the Macintosh, and then later Windows.
Office Wars 3 - How Microsoft Got Its Office Monopoly
In the dictionary that ships with Mac OS X:
Security is defined as "the state of being free from danger or threat" and Safety is similarly defined as "the condition of being protected from or unlikely to cause danger, risk, or injury."
Security comes from the Latin securitas or securus "free from care" while safety comes from the salvitas or salvus meaning "safe."
So if there were any real nuance of difference between being safe and being secure, then security would have the edge in meaning over "feeling safe", while safety could be said to imply actually "being safe." But the words are really interchangeable, and how you use them can suggest either.
The real discrepancy that needs to be pointed out between the Mac and Windows is that while Microsoft has recently invested more into building a fancy security infrastructure, Mac users continue to both feel safer and to actually be safer in the sense of being free from danger or threat.
There is clearly no immediate or impending threat to Macs, and there is little in the way of market forces or that wishful thinking pundit invention of "hacker pride" that will result in something to turn Macs into the disaster that has dogged Windows since the late 90s.
What pundits like to do is equate low risk, self-injury actions with high risk, difficult to escape from events. This is straight up misinformation mixed with fear, uncertainty and doubt. For example, nearly everyone is claiming that:
* Downloading iLife warez that pretend to be stolen software
* from a non-trusted source
* assigning it privileges to install on your system
* and then finding that you have installed a background process that does something ugly that you can trivially remove
is the same as:
* Trying to use Windows to browse the web and use email
* finding that you've been automatically infected with adware and viral malware without knowing it
* then finding that your PC is also self replicating attacks or sending spam on to other systems
* then realizing that the design of Windows' registry makes it difficult to clean things out
* then noticing how much of your CPU capacity is being used to protect you from all of these threats via malware and virus scanners
* then finding out how expensive it is to spend hours cleaning up the mess yourself, or alternatively paying some Nerd Patrol $300 to "diagnose" that your PC is hosed.
They are not the same, and only a liar would keep suggesting that Mac and Windows users face the same dangers and threats. If you're paying attention, you'll notice that those who keep suggesting this almost always work for an Anti-Virus company working to make money off of Mac users. This shouldn't require any help in dot connection.
Kaspersky Sells Mac AntiVirus Fear Using Charlie Miller... Mac AntiVirus Foe
"a pejorative political neologism coined by the American conservative political columnist, and psychiatrist, Charles Krauthammer"
Shouldn't you link to Conservapedia?
I think the link is:
www.conservapedia.com/people_jesus_hates/homosexuals/intellectuals/any_criticism_of_war_criminals.asp
Your problem is understanding relevance.
A theoretical flaw in Safari, no matter how urgently the pundits bark about it, is not the "same problem" as active exploits that are actually occurring to Windows users. You equate them falsely. Your comparison is not relevant to reality.
Similarly, talking about Mosaic being "standards compliant" at a time when there was no real lack of standards compliance is completely irrelevant to what Apple did, certainly in association with Mozilla and Opera, with Safari to level the browser playing field perverted by Microsoft's dominance and induce a resurgence of standards-based development that was successful enough to force MS to make efforts to follow.
Reading the rest of your comment would require clicking a link, and so far you haven't enticed me with any desire to continue refuting this circular, pointless arguing about nothing.
I would encourage you to rely on research and facts and critical thought over printing false recollections of a distorted history that apologizes for Microsoft's criminal conduct and equates minor complaints about Apple with serious wrongdoing by Microsoft.
You don't want to sound like a Fox News anchor wishing to live 5 years ago.
Exactly, mod up.
Cutting funding for the pie in the sky, futuristic hydrogen research that Bush shooed in as a distraction while killing all viable research that could credibly be competitive with Saudi oil (or Iraqi oil once he freed it with the blood of thousands of Americans and trillions of dollars of our children's future for short term profits for his partners, a plan that subsequently failed to work out as planned) is just as sensible as cutting funding for Bush's failed "abstinence-only" sex education/state religion, which was just as misguided.
The problem isn't that you could have been more clear" or that I should have "read your reply properly," but that you are simply and quite obviously wrong. ...although I should have properly noted that you were moderated as flamebait before falling into your trap of illogical, circular nonsense peddling.
There is an obvious corollary to "It could be argued that if an OS ships with more updates then maybe it was a bit lacking when it was first released" when defending Microsoft release schedule.
"Particularly in fixing the well-published security holes in Safari. The point I am making here is that the very criticisms you level at Microsoft can be levelled equally at Apple"... No, no they can't. Unless you also equate stubbing your toe on your bed with running over your foot with an improperly designed lawn mower. I presented you with some relevant facts to bring realism into to world view, clearly these pearls were unwelcome to your trough-rooting snout.
Mosaic was based on initial web standards in the late 90s, but since then both Netscape (built on Mosaic by its founder) and Microsoft (IE was based on Spyglass, the commercial offshoot of NCSA's Mosaic) worked very hard to pervert the web into a series of browser-specific proprietary conventions.
If you are not aware of the gross lack of standardization in the web browser field, welcome back from your decade long coma.
Or perhaps two decades: Apple supported TCP/IP on Macs starting in (!) 1988 with MacTCP, and delivered its second TCP/IP networking architecture in 1995 as OpenTransport. Macs were TCP/IP capable before anyone used Windows, let alone TCP/IP on Windows. Apple continued to support AppleTalk, but Microsoft continued to support NetBEUI, too, so the idea that you couldn't configure your Macs really has no bearing on the fact that Microsoft has only ever followed in the tech industry, despite its leadership position and its vast resources.
"Apple didn't even broach the idea of TCP/IP until Microsoft had adopted it for their desktops - in my distance memory"... Perhaps it's better to know what you're talking about before you repeat distant memories colored by decades of propaganda about how wonderful its been to have the tech industry locked up under the talons of a criminal monopolist gang of tasteless snake oil salesmen like Ballmer and Gates.
Microsoft isn't automatically bad, it just has a record of doing terrible things to hold back progress and then blind simple people, giving them the idea that MS leads and delivers innovation by copying others ten years later.