There are some SyncML servers, like https://www.mobical.net/ [mobical.net] . They seem to be able to provide the services for free
Free to you, but not because it doesn't cost them. Their business model allows them to offer you a free service because you're their Guinea Pig. What they learn from servicing you, they sell on to other people. It took me about 30 seconds to find this explanation on their web site:
"The purpose of Mobical.net is to introduce people all over the world to the benefits of using Tactel’s product Mobical for mobile synchronization. Tactel doesn't make any profit from this service; we only use it to develop, test and market new mobile synchronization technology that we sell to our customers: network operators, handset vendors, service providers, etc. That is how we can offer a free service and still make a business, and that is why we are committed to ensuring the privacy, integrity and security of your data."
Canonical's business model is different and so they need to charge for the infrastructure (servers, disks, network, etc) required to provide this service. As they said, they have no problem with free software, but free services are a different beast all together. Don't be a tight arse. If you want them to succeed, then support them !!
That's how I remember it as well. But it wasn't just the Alpha chip that Intel were forced to manufacture (after being forced to buy the Hudson MA fab) but StrongARM as well. Remember that? Ultimately it was this that set the stage for the death of Alpha. After suffering years of neglect at the hands of Intel in fabrication technology advancements, and missing out on many planned die shrinks that would have kept it ahead, it finally got the axe before the EV8 variant had a chance to see the light of day. That was surely political. EV8's design was so far ahead of the competition that the first generation of Itanium would have been still born. Management could not allow that to happen and risk jeopardizing all the money they were going to make, so they killed it.
Hmm, I have my ear close to the ground on these things and I'm not sure I believe you. If by "ported to X64" you mean there's been a skunkworks project to get them to a point where they do a minimal boot, then possibly. But beyond that I very much doubt it. The amount of effort to port either O/S and all their associated layered products would be huge and expensive. I could see it happening for OpenVMS as that pretty much has its own ecosystem that's separate from and sort of immune from the machinations of *ix and windows, but it would make no sense for HP-UX. Do you really think that HP-UX on x86-64 would stand a snowball's chance in hell as a competitor to Linux? I don't. HP would be better off writing an HP-UX application compatibility layer for (for example) Red Hat Linux to allow their customers to port their apps easily. HP are a dominant player in the x86-64 server space, so they aught to be able to hang on those customers.
Oh come on. It's really disingenuous to be quoting that kind of shit. Have you ever taken a really close look at the kind of hardware the vendors use to get these benchmark numbers? Database app benchmarks are almost always very sensitive to I/O, and these kinds of numbers are usually generated by systems that have their I/O card slots max'd out, with several hundred (if not thousands) of small high speed disks behind them. The cost of these solutions in real life would be crippling. Vendor quoted benchmarks should usually be taken with a generous pinch of salt.
In reality that's only going to be of use to customers who are already running Red Hat on Itanium. No one making a decision today is going to commit to a solution that only has a 4 year shelf life. If they want Red Hat today and they're in that enterprise space they'll go Nehalem-EX for the best combination of RAS + performance + price.
Well kind of. Red Hat recently announced that they were dropping Itanium starting with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. How long will it be before the rest of the distro gang follow suit?
Bullshit. Most users only use the search bars on Firefox and IE, anyway. And they frequently type URLs into them. If I had a nickel for every time I saw someone type "google" into the search bar, click the first result from MSN and then type a search
Agreed. My wife does this all the time, despite me pointing out the site she's after is cached in URL bar because she goes there every day. So for her a combined URL and search bar is a blessing. In fact, I've even got used to it myself and discovered I really like it. Chrome over all is just a better browser than IE, Firefox or Safari, IMO. And having made the switch I have no intention of switching back.
He claims that Theora is more comparable to MJPEG, then H.264
No he didn't. What he said was:
You might as well say uncompressed video is a viable alternative, too... Or maybe good old MJPEG
He was being sarcastic! My response was to refocus on the rest of his message: you know, the bulk of it that you ignored where he weighed H.264 against Theora.
With that out of the way, why should a take a comparison that encodes from a H.264 source and gives different frames for comparison without explaining why? And, heck, at least use x264, no need to handicap H.264.
You should have taken a closer look at my second link where Martin Fiedler (KeyJ) does the encoder comparison. He is using x264. Try reading it.
The same way that it helps normal power users who want to use their ATI and Intel cards on 64-bit OSes when Linux's customer base shrinks to nothing because the "normal people" migrate to Windows due to their refusal to ship closed-source drivers with the kernel
Unfortunately that doesn't aid your argument one bit, as it's Windows Firefox users that are the relevant demographic here. Last October Phoronix reported on a question and answer session with NVIDIA's Andy Ritger who leads the user-space side of the NVIDIA UNIX Graphics Driver team, where he stated that their linux driver download rate is 0.5% the size of their Windows driver downloads. Kind of puts things in perspective eh!
Taking a stand will always alienate some people, but surrendering will similarly always hurt your chances of success. The key is in knowing when to do which one, and I (along with the Mozilla guys and a good portion of the F/OSS community) believe it's time for the former.
No one who advocates including H.264 in Firefox today is talking about surrender. If you must, then think of it as a strategic retreat in order to regroup for a battle to come, because now is not the right time. Getting Theora friendly browser installs out there in sufficient numbers before making a big push for change is essential for success. If you can't see that then I'm sorry for you, cos you're wrong. As for a good portion of the F/OSS community supporting your position, I don't think you have a majority on this at all. There are a lot of hard core F/OSS supporter out there who are speaking against against Mozilla on this one because we believe it's tantamount to cutting off your nose to spite your face.
You don't? fork Firefox and add h.264 support yourself, or just move to IE if that's what you want
Not possible for me as I don't run Windows (only Mac OS X and Linux). I've already made my choice (to eat my own dog food) and switched to Chrome/Chromium on both of them. And this is why your argument (and Mozilla's) is so weak: why should I make the effort to fork and hack Firefox when competitors (Google and Opera) have already done the hard work for me? For a Windows user who doesn't give a flying fig about F/OSS and just wants to view their content the choice is even easier: IE, Safari, Chrome or Opera. Firefox will be the least attractive option because functionally it will appear broken.
As for me, well you can serve me H.264 or Theora and I'm covered thank you very much.
And how does it help "normal webmasters" who want to display their video in Theora when Mozilla's customer base shrinks to nothing because the "normal people" migrate off Firefox? That's what will happen if Mozilla don't support H.264: and good chunk go back to using IE. Mozilla's actions will end up shrinking the number of Theora capable browsers in circulation, will cede market share and power to Microsoft and harm Theora's chances.
Sometimes you need to know when to retreat from a battle in order to win the war.
The battle over codes needs to be left for another day
I totally agree. There are two battles to be won here in order to win the war. The first battle (flash.vs. HTML5) has to be fought and won first to get rid of flash. This sets the stage for the next fight. The second (Theora.vs. H.264) can only be fought if enough browsers in circulation at the time have built in support for Theora as well as H.264.
If Mozilla refuse to support H.264 then one of two things will happen:
1) In order to support the Firefox customer base, content providers will stick to using H.264 based Flash video. The HTML5 video tag doesn't get used much and Theora doesn't even get a sniff.
2) Content providers don't give a fig about supporting Firefox and move with the times to HTML5 video. Windows users who've switched from IE to Firefox will look elsewhere when they discover they can't view the content they want and the Firefox customer base will shrink. Some of those will go to Chrome, but IE9 looks like it could be a strong contender and is likely to grab some back. The number of Theora capable browsers in circulation will go down and Theora won't stand a chance.
The best solution is for Mozilla to support H.264 at this time and strive for a situation where Firefox + Chrome + Opera market share is sufficient that using Theora becomes a viable option for content providers. If Mozilla don't do this Theora is sunk.
as long as the actual codec is 1) a separate project, and 2) developed outside the org
Or they could just buy a license. It's not like they don't have the money.
They know my full name and the name of my wife; my birthday and home town and a google email address. That's it. What's the big deal about that? It's not like they have access to any of my bank details, credit cards, NI number, passport number, or anything that would really cause me grief if it got into the wrong hands.
Stop making a mountain out of a mole hill. Sheesh !
Either you're the luckiest man alive, or you're bullshitting. It's extremely easy to find examples of malware infected versions of photoshop from torrent and other wares sites. Just google for it.
I also know people who've picked up malware from downloading other files (e.g. mp3's) when using limewire for example to trawl p2p and torrent networks. So I'll see your anecdotal evidence and raise you one.
It entered the land of bittorrent download and piracy years ago
And is now lightly sprinkled with a tasty cocktail of viruses and malware. It will serve you right when your thieving ways are rewarded with an empty bank account. If you want free, do it the responsible way and go open source!
I guess you have never heard of the term supercruise then. If it's ok for airplanes to cruise at supersonic speeds, then it's also ok for a cruise missile. And general consensus on the net does not agree with you.
And maybe/perhaps Adobe ship their own H.264 implementation because Apple have shut them out of using the same in QuickTime. See my reply to the AC below for the reasons why.
Really? So what do you make of this tech article from Adobe then? It starts off nice and promising:
Flash supports Apple's QuickTime API (which in turns supports many different codecs) and Microsoft's AVI file format and its related codecs. By leveraging these technologies, Flash is able to transcode video to and from Flash Video (FLV) format.
But then goes on to say:
Other limitations:
* Flash cannot import MPEG video streams through QuickTime * Flash cannot import the audio track of MPEG video through QuickTime.
Clearly Adobe's use of the Quicktime API got 'nobbled', and that was back in 2005.
Then a year later in 2006 Apple delivered it's next knock-out punch. Apple used to support Flash natively in Quicktime until they suddenly and without any warning switched it off in QuickTime 7.1.3 and yanked the rug out from underneath its developers, leaving them no where to go.
Fat lot of good that does for a significant chunk of the Linux user base. VDPAU is Nvidia only: there is no support there for Intel or ATI chipsets.
Perhaps you mean XvMC - oh sorry, that's old and is only partially supported (to varying degrees by the different graphics hardware vendors) and is effectively dead now.
Ah I know, let's all use VxBA - oh dam, that's ATI only (competition for VDPAU) so we can't code for that and include everyone either.
How about VD API - the first attempt to ditch XvMC and reinvent the wheel from scratch. Well blow me down, after all this time there's only minimal native support for a few Intel and S3 chipsets. VDPAU can be used as a backend so that brings Nvidia into the fold, but no ATI. Oh hang on, there's a late development.. hurray now it has AMD Radeon's UVD2 chipset support to: shame it's a proprietary extension though, no open source. So VD API doesn't cut the mustard either.
Lastly there's Gallium3D. Finally an Open Source, smart, well thought out and very portable solution (can work on Linux, FreeBSD, smart phones, etc). It's got strong backing from VMware with solid roots from Tungsten Graphics and is making good progress. If you're interested there's a nice PDF presentation on it's design here.
In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under Linux and Mac OS. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. We will continue to evaluate adding the feature to Linux and Mac OS in future releases.
How Apple react to this will be a good litmus test of how fair Steve J is prepared to be with Adobe. Will he make the APIs available to benefit his customers but risk making HTML5 less attractive, or will he just ignore them and play hard ball.
As for Linux, the historical lack of a unified approach to solving this (that includes all interested parties) is going to leave us out in the cold for some time yet. Let's hope that Gallium3D sticks, gains enough traction and doesn't get dropped for something else a few years down the road. That will make a nice change!
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Free to you, but not because it doesn't cost them. Their business model allows them to offer you a free service because you're their Guinea Pig. What they learn from servicing you, they sell on to other people. It took me about 30 seconds to find this explanation on their web site:
Canonical's business model is different and so they need to charge for the infrastructure (servers, disks, network, etc) required to provide this service. As they said, they have no problem with free software, but free services are a different beast all together. Don't be a tight arse. If you want them to succeed, then support them !!
That's how I remember it as well. But it wasn't just the Alpha chip that Intel were forced to manufacture (after being forced to buy the Hudson MA fab) but StrongARM as well. Remember that? Ultimately it was this that set the stage for the death of Alpha. After suffering years of neglect at the hands of Intel in fabrication technology advancements, and missing out on many planned die shrinks that would have kept it ahead, it finally got the axe before the EV8 variant had a chance to see the light of day. That was surely political. EV8's design was so far ahead of the competition that the first generation of Itanium would have been still born. Management could not allow that to happen and risk jeopardizing all the money they were going to make, so they killed it.
Hmm, I have my ear close to the ground on these things and I'm not sure I believe you. If by "ported to X64" you mean there's been a skunkworks project to get them to a point where they do a minimal boot, then possibly. But beyond that I very much doubt it. The amount of effort to port either O/S and all their associated layered products would be huge and expensive. I could see it happening for OpenVMS as that pretty much has its own ecosystem that's separate from and sort of immune from the machinations of *ix and windows, but it would make no sense for HP-UX. Do you really think that HP-UX on x86-64 would stand a snowball's chance in hell as a competitor to Linux? I don't. HP would be better off writing an HP-UX application compatibility layer for (for example) Red Hat Linux to allow their customers to port their apps easily. HP are a dominant player in the x86-64 server space, so they aught to be able to hang on those customers.
Oh come on. It's really disingenuous to be quoting that kind of shit. Have you ever taken a really close look at the kind of hardware the vendors use to get these benchmark numbers? Database app benchmarks are almost always very sensitive to I/O, and these kinds of numbers are usually generated by systems that have their I/O card slots max'd out, with several hundred (if not thousands) of small high speed disks behind them. The cost of these solutions in real life would be crippling. Vendor quoted benchmarks should usually be taken with a generous pinch of salt.
In reality that's only going to be of use to customers who are already running Red Hat on Itanium. No one making a decision today is going to commit to a solution that only has a 4 year shelf life. If they want Red Hat today and they're in that enterprise space they'll go Nehalem-EX for the best combination of RAS + performance + price.
Well kind of. Red Hat recently announced that they were dropping Itanium starting with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. How long will it be before the rest of the distro gang follow suit?
Agreed. My wife does this all the time, despite me pointing out the site she's after is cached in URL bar because she goes there every day. So for her a combined URL and search bar is a blessing. In fact, I've even got used to it myself and discovered I really like it. Chrome over all is just a better browser than IE, Firefox or Safari, IMO. And having made the switch I have no intention of switching back.
No he didn't. What he said was:
You might as well say uncompressed video is a viable alternative, too... Or maybe good old MJPEG
He was being sarcastic! My response was to refocus on the rest of his message: you know, the bulk of it that you ignored where he weighed H.264 against Theora.
You should have taken a closer look at my second link where Martin Fiedler (KeyJ) does the encoder comparison. He is using x264. Try reading it.
Unfortunately that doesn't aid your argument one bit, as it's Windows Firefox users that are the relevant demographic here. Last October Phoronix reported on a question and answer session with NVIDIA's Andy Ritger who leads the user-space side of the NVIDIA UNIX Graphics Driver team, where he stated that their linux driver download rate is 0.5% the size of their Windows driver downloads. Kind of puts things in perspective eh!
No one who advocates including H.264 in Firefox today is talking about surrender. If you must, then think of it as a strategic retreat in order to regroup for a battle to come, because now is not the right time. Getting Theora friendly browser installs out there in sufficient numbers before making a big push for change is essential for success. If you can't see that then I'm sorry for you, cos you're wrong. As for a good portion of the F/OSS community supporting your position, I don't think you have a majority on this at all. There are a lot of hard core F/OSS supporter out there who are speaking against against Mozilla on this one because we believe it's tantamount to cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Not possible for me as I don't run Windows (only Mac OS X and Linux). I've already made my choice (to eat my own dog food) and switched to Chrome/Chromium on both of them. And this is why your argument (and Mozilla's) is so weak: why should I make the effort to fork and hack Firefox when competitors (Google and Opera) have already done the hard work for me? For a Windows user who doesn't give a flying fig about F/OSS and just wants to view their content the choice is even easier: IE, Safari, Chrome or Opera. Firefox will be the least attractive option because functionally it will appear broken.
As for me, well you can serve me H.264 or Theora and I'm covered thank you very much.
You don't wait for it to finish, there is no finish. You just click on the background and it loads the rest of the site.
Flash isn't just used for the landing page: it's the whole site. Every scrap of it is flash. I feel sick!
Well the parent hasn't replied, so I will. Here is your first comparison to look at, and here is your second. Both found H.264 to be superior.
Oh, and here's some crow for you to snack on while you're reading.
And how does it help "normal webmasters" who want to display their video in Theora when Mozilla's customer base shrinks to nothing because the "normal people" migrate off Firefox? That's what will happen if Mozilla don't support H.264: and good chunk go back to using IE. Mozilla's actions will end up shrinking the number of Theora capable browsers in circulation, will cede market share and power to Microsoft and harm Theora's chances.
Sometimes you need to know when to retreat from a battle in order to win the war.
I totally agree. There are two battles to be won here in order to win the war. The first battle (flash .vs. HTML5) has to be fought and won first to get rid of flash. This sets the stage for the next fight. The second (Theora .vs. H.264) can only be fought if enough browsers in circulation at the time have built in support for Theora as well as H.264.
If Mozilla refuse to support H.264 then one of two things will happen:
1) In order to support the Firefox customer base, content providers will stick to using H.264 based Flash video. The HTML5 video tag doesn't get used much and Theora doesn't even get a sniff.
2) Content providers don't give a fig about supporting Firefox and move with the times to HTML5 video. Windows users who've switched from IE to Firefox will look elsewhere when they discover they can't view the content they want and the Firefox customer base will shrink. Some of those will go to Chrome, but IE9 looks like it could be a strong contender and is likely to grab some back. The number of Theora capable browsers in circulation will go down and Theora won't stand a chance.
The best solution is for Mozilla to support H.264 at this time and strive for a situation where Firefox + Chrome + Opera market share is sufficient that using Theora becomes a viable option for content providers. If Mozilla don't do this Theora is sunk.
Or they could just buy a license. It's not like they don't have the money.
They know my full name and the name of my wife; my birthday and home town and a google email address. That's it. What's the big deal about that? It's not like they have access to any of my bank details, credit cards, NI number, passport number, or anything that would really cause me grief if it got into the wrong hands.
Stop making a mountain out of a mole hill. Sheesh !
Either you're the luckiest man alive, or you're bullshitting. It's extremely easy to find examples of malware infected versions of photoshop from torrent and other wares sites. Just google for it.
I also know people who've picked up malware from downloading other files (e.g. mp3's) when using limewire for example to trawl p2p and torrent networks. So I'll see your anecdotal evidence and raise you one.
And is now lightly sprinkled with a tasty cocktail of viruses and malware. It will serve you right when your thieving ways are rewarded with an empty bank account. If you want free, do it the responsible way and go open source!
Or you can do it this way:
$ gconftool-2 --set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout --type string ":minimize,maximize,close"
I guess you have never heard of the term supercruise then. If it's ok for airplanes to cruise at supersonic speeds, then it's also ok for a cruise missile. And general consensus on the net does not agree with you.
And maybe/perhaps Adobe ship their own H.264 implementation because Apple have shut them out of using the same in QuickTime. See my reply to the AC below for the reasons why.
Really? So what do you make of this tech article from Adobe then? It starts off nice and promising:
Flash supports Apple's QuickTime API (which in turns supports many different codecs) and Microsoft's AVI file format and its related codecs. By leveraging these technologies, Flash is able to transcode video to and from Flash Video (FLV) format.
But then goes on to say:
Other limitations:
* Flash cannot import MPEG video streams through QuickTime
* Flash cannot import the audio track of MPEG video through QuickTime.
Clearly Adobe's use of the Quicktime API got 'nobbled', and that was back in 2005.
Then a year later in 2006 Apple delivered it's next knock-out punch. Apple used to support Flash natively in Quicktime until they suddenly and without any warning switched it off in QuickTime 7.1.3 and yanked the rug out from underneath its developers, leaving them no where to go.
Fat lot of good that does for a significant chunk of the Linux user base. VDPAU is Nvidia only: there is no support there for Intel or ATI chipsets.
Perhaps you mean XvMC - oh sorry, that's old and is only partially supported (to varying degrees by the different graphics hardware vendors) and is effectively dead now.
Ah I know, let's all use VxBA - oh dam, that's ATI only (competition for VDPAU) so we can't code for that and include everyone either.
How about VD API - the first attempt to ditch XvMC and reinvent the wheel from scratch. Well blow me down, after all this time there's only minimal native support for a few Intel and S3 chipsets. VDPAU can be used as a backend so that brings Nvidia into the fold, but no ATI. Oh hang on, there's a late development .. hurray now it has AMD Radeon's UVD2 chipset support to: shame it's a proprietary extension though, no open source. So VD API doesn't cut the mustard either.
Lastly there's Gallium3D. Finally an Open Source, smart, well thought out and very portable solution (can work on Linux, FreeBSD, smart phones, etc). It's got strong backing from VMware with solid roots from Tungsten Graphics and is making good progress. If you're interested there's a nice PDF presentation on it's design here.
It's not a crap article because it's true. If you look at the 10.1 public beta release notes it says:
In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under Linux and Mac OS. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. We will continue to evaluate adding the feature to Linux and Mac OS in future releases.
How Apple react to this will be a good litmus test of how fair Steve J is prepared to be with Adobe. Will he make the APIs available to benefit his customers but risk making HTML5 less attractive, or will he just ignore them and play hard ball.
As for Linux, the historical lack of a unified approach to solving this (that includes all interested parties) is going to leave us out in the cold for some time yet. Let's hope that Gallium3D sticks, gains enough traction and doesn't get dropped for something else a few years down the road. That will make a nice change!
Well said.
Or you can go direct to the actual Ubuntu Brand page and see the new screenshots as they were meant to be viewed, i.e. larger.
Agreed. There should be a special kind of hell waiting for these people.