Web development has expanded into a very large and exciting platform for content and applications, both on the server and client.
Still, every time I open an article about it, all I see is a developer who's tortured at the thought of generating endless CRUD forms and writing elaborate explanations, why he had no choice, *no choice* at all, but climb high up on the abstraction ladder, so that he can do basic validation in cute one-liners.
That's great, but that's just a minor fraction of what web development constitutes today. The vast majority of those prefabbed CRUD frameworks do horribly at handling load, scaling across servers, hand-tuning the details to the customer's preference... and well, they do horribly at anything but CRUD. The web is more than CRUD and I do feel bad for the developers who do it for such lengths of time, they get accustomed to the false idea that this is the entirety of what web development is all about.
How quick was it? Was it so quick, that you'd think they had the edit prepared in advance, just waiting for the "outrage"? Come on guys, those are old, old tricks.
So, anyway, Microsoft have a new mobile device again with a hip ad again, awkward name again, that's trying to compete with a similar device from Apple again. Best of luck to them.
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
Did you consider that one of the reasons the Opera browser may have being accepted is because of the attention that Opera brought to the subject? It is certainly possible that Apple's decision to allow the app would have been affected by the fact that Opera is a European company involved in a high-profile ongoing EU antitrust case regarding web browsers. Rejecting the app would probably have triggered an antitrust complaint from Opera, and that is the kind of attention that Apple could do without.
While I'm sure there's a moment of truth in your perspective, you need to see what Opera Mini is. It's, simply put, a free VNC client especially designed for web browsing. There are plenty of VNC clients on the AppStore right now and it's been the case for a long long time. Opera Mini is a web browser on your iPhone about as much as remoting into your WinXP PC from the iPhone is running WinXP on your iPhone.
As you know, Apple doesn't want to lose control of the platform experience and ecosystem, so they forbid apps that can load other apps. That's the big reason why a real non-webkit browser won't be accepted: it's a slippery slope.
If they did allow, browser "X", that browser could start adding iPhone API support for web apps little by little, and before you know it, it has creeped up to a full app platform that bypasses the AppStore completely. Instead, no JavaScript or Flash gets executed on the iPhone with Opera Mini, it's all computed remotely, and as such it can't easily be called an app platform on the phone itself.
Google bought some bandwidth to be able to send site content to users. Those users bought some bandwidth to be able to receive it. What's the problem?
Technically Google doesn't buy lots of bandwidth nowadays, the way people might imagine. They instead hook directly to many peers and at the backbones. That said, when the rest of us pay for "bandwidth", we pay exactly for building and maintaining the kind of infrastructure Google built themselves. But it explains why on the surface you can spin it like they did.
2) Google cuts them off so that the above doesn't happen. These ISPs customers start screaming "Why am I paying you for access to the Internet, when you aren't providing it?" and they start switching to other providers that aren't pulling this.
There may be areas where you can't pick another ISP, that said, something else may happen.
In China, when you cannot reach a site, you can't opt out of China's firewall, but you use proxies. Many, many, small, widely geographically, randomly distributed proxies.
Might be a pain to use for videos, but I never underestimate a user hellbent on getting his funny cat video.
Good luck to the ISPs sending thousands of little invoices to every one of those proxies.
If VP8 really is as good as On2 claimed, Google could save some pretty good money by serving up YouTube videos in VP8 format instead of H264. And even better, Google would not have to worry about the H.264 patent owners changing the rates or changing the rules.
I don't think Google really wants to re-encode their entire YouTube catalog in yet another codec, but V8 serves a very particular role in this picture.
Google is basically keeping ISO/IEC MPEG in check by basically stating "if you do something stupid, we'll do everything possible to use V8 to make your life harder". So we may see some PR work and posturing, and V8 will likely end up in Google Chrome as well.
Whether everyone will jump to using V8 is still questionable at this point. But having it around will keep H.264 more accessible to everyone, which is good news.
Google bought the company few months ago in order to improve their Google Wave and Google Docs offerings, and I'm happy to see these efforts come to fruition. Google left the Etherpad.com service up for some more time. The end of that grace period is April 14-th (2 days from now), so you have 2 days to go and check what the new Google Docs will probably feel like. Make sure to check out the timeline replay feature, downright eerie and good fit for Google's pattern of Ubiquitous Tracking of Everything, I think.
One would think only if the Google Bot happens to be indexing your site at that exact moment; one would additionally think they'll revisit to see if it's structural or not?
If you use Google Webmaster Central you may notice that, while Google's algorithm is smart, it's also very overestimated in some areas, and involves plenty of manual tweaking by the Google employees for it to work properly.
Site Speed is not calculated solely from the times the Google bot takes to crawl the page, it's calculated from Google toolbars that have the pagerank feature enabled (that feature calls home which sites you visit, and how fast the page got loaded).
Whether Google can detect clusters of frequent accesses such as from "slashdotting" is entirely under question, since most slashdot users may not have google toolbar with pagerank on, but for the *few* users that do, the site will just appear slow in general.
Additionally, if a site targets a demographic that has worse latency (low income people, areas with dial-up and so on), then, again, that site will appear to be slower, while actually the visitors have slower internet in general.
Additionally yet, often the reason a site is slow is somewhere along the route, nowhere close to either the visitor ISP, not the site server, and it's not for all users either. So if you have bad luck or due to your content you pick up users that happen to often be routed through the bad route, you'll lose page rank.
Survival mode is how good software dies. In survival mode companies often forget what good software really is, and people on stop start throwing around big words on differentiating from the competition and longer and longer bullet point feature lists.
This is how we got the much dreaded "personas" (copied from Chrome Themes) and why Firefox'es 4.0 UI drafts looks like an exercise of how the offspring of Chrome and Internet Explorer 8 would look like.
Mozilla has been in survival mode ever since Google announced Chrome. Or didn't you notice they *solely* depend on the handouts from a company that now has their own browser (and a good browser!).
That's a tough spot to be on, if Firefox loses market share, they'll fade into oblivion, and if they aggressively compete, even if they gain 99% market share, Google could easily pull their plug on a whim. Oh, there's Bind and Yahoo you say, they'll pay to be in the search bar! Because... of course the savvy techies who helped the cousin install Firefox won't restore Google as the search engine, when said cousin calls them and asks for it. Right.
So, if I get this right... when you use Chrome, you're in risk that it will track your every Google search, your every Gmail mail, your every YouTube video, your every Blogger comment, your every Google Groups post, your every Picasa picture, your every visit on sites using Google Analytics, and while we're at it, they also have a deal with Twitter to get your every tweet and they crawled your every website page.
In short, Google got you long before you started using Chrome. Using any other browser. You may as well relax and enjoy it.
Raising awareness of Chrome's issues is a good thing, but I think those of us who deal with security, corporate secrets and so on knew that long before someone else had to tell us, and have procedures in place on how to securely query and exchange information. The mainstream web was never exactly a very "privacy minded" medium. I use Chrome for casual browsing and install it for friends and relatives. There's nothing Chrome would give away for those people that Google didn't already have from their other sources.
John Dowdell is a "user relations" guy at Adobe. He answers to users on support forums, writes a blog on Adobe topics and reads customer feedback at Adobe.
He doesn't speak for Adobe's strategy, nor is his opinion to be considered that of Adobe. In fact it says so on his blog: "Views are my own".
Plus, Adobe's been saying for the past few years "there's no HTML vs Flash" war namely since they don't want to position Flash as an HTML alternative (which is stupid in 2010) but as necessary extension to HTML.
You see? It's subtle. HTML won't replace Flash, but you still need Flash together with HTML in your browser and your mobile device (by the way: Flash 10.1 coming to a cellphones pretty soon). It's just another step in a survival strategy that will keep Flash from becoming irrelevant.
All their latest features focus on the unique strengths of a proprietary binary plugin that a public standard like HTML can't deliver quickly, or at all, which is: fully consistent performance across platforms, quick innovation, highly specialized features (such as pixel shaders, is this coming in HTML5? No. I thought so). We need that ingredient too, next to HTML5, to form a healthy ecosystem on the web, as much as some people hate to admit it.
But John Dowdell still doesn't speak for Adobe's strategy, so accept his blog for what it is.
Just because the question says something, doesn't mean you can't fill-in anything else. Of course, that doesn't take the blame from the sites for introducing a security hole many regular folks fall into.
First, it creates a false premise where people need to pick "SQL" versus "no SQL", while many real-world systems intelligently combine relational and non-relational data storage for their needs. There is no conflict.
Second, there's nothing wrong with SQL as a language in particular, and in fact many of the "noSQL" engines are starting to support and extending basic SQL queries, instead of reinventing their own query language for the same purpose.
Somehow, I find it surprising that you're managing to saturate a modern hard drive via a single network connection. Are you running extremely slow PCs on a ridiculously fast network? The workflow that you describe sounds pretty normal for a design studio.
Disks still have one set of read/write heads. If they are directed to read/write on multiple locations at once, both tasks will see performance drop significantly. This is the same reason why defragmenting improves performance.
Apart from that, it's easy to forget hard disks used to easily strain the CPU before DMA transfers became common. While local reads/writes can go through DMA, casually allowing high speed transfers, everything that goes through samba is still going through the CPU, which the designer is also using at that moment.
Forget Farmville, Flash puzzlers and 8-bit home computer emulators. The next generation of browser games will be able to take advantage of DirectX 11 effects, not to mention multi-core processing and both Havok and PhysX physics effects.
Why does this sound familiar. Maybe because it reminds me of Macromedia Shockwave, the browser plugin from the 90-s. With OpenGL, Direct3D support and Havok for physics effects. Yet today we still play Farmville and Flash puzzlers, some of which make millions of dollars per month for their makers.
Every year another naive startup announces the next generation of gaming on the web. History is full of 3D plugins that failed to gain much traction beyond a small niche of devoted users.
The fact is browser experience should be light, compatible and ubiquitious among a range of devices, and Flash/Silverlight is already pushing the limits of what is practical in a browser plugin. If your app will be big, resource-hungry and platform-specific, then offline applications simply work better.
When Nintendo announced their new console, they hinted that the way we use the controller will surprise us. Various amateur 3D concepts popped up around the net, and most of them displayed a Nintendo controller with a touch-controlled LCD display, controls would change depending on the game.
Now we see Sony applying for a patent on the very same idea, a bunch of amateurs came up with in their free time few years ago.
Hybrids, being more complex vehicles than classic cars or pure electric vehicles don't handle as easily, and might not perform as well in fast or extreme conditions. Furthermore, they won't save a lot of gas when driving at constant and/or high speeds, such as highway or a race track.
But they are really good in urban environment when you need to often slow down and speed up to accommodate heavy traffic, as then the brake mechanism kicks in saving energy and and the electric engines is used in those short runs/speedups that are so frequent in city driving conditions. It's perfect for taking the kids, going shopping, commute to work and back, you know things you always wanted to do with your Porsche 911.
By the way, most of not all hybrids license technology from Toyota for their operation. Can't wait to see what faulty brakes or accidental acceleration on a Porsche 911 looks like.
They don't want to enable you to use H.264 in any way, directly or indirectly, for political reasons.
Those political reasons somehow don't forbid them from supporting Flash's closed source plugin, which does support H264.
Here's a "novel" idea: When Firefox encounters a <video> tag, it uses whatever H264 capable player is installed as a plugin. This can be Windows Media Player (supports H264 in Windows 7), Quicktime (H264 supported), or Flash player (by including a little video player flash file with the browser).
Firefox has played a major role in reviving standards support, bringing back browser competition and nudging Microsoft into updating Internet Explorer, but if they choose to be stubborn on obvious issues because of "political reasons", the world will just switch to the next thing and forget them entirely, the way it happened with Netscape.
Oh really? Because to me, Phobos and Deimos (Mars' moons) are little more than a few trillion tons of metal, ceramics, volatiles and a few million tons of precious metals sitting in a nice stable orbit over Mars. Just perfect to supply the Earth with some rare metals, the moon and LEO with volatiles and any space tourism around Mars. The view is fantastic and I'd bet there's people who would pay pretty big bucks to take a vacation to Martian orbit or even visit the surface. You woyuld have to have a profound lack of imagination to not see any "profit" in going to Mars and in space exploration in general. Resources, tourism, research etc. plenty of profit to be made, it's just a matter of building up the necessary technology and infrastructure.
Based on your business plan, I come to the conclusion that the difference between business and sci-fi is that the latter needs to be at least remotely based in reality.
Apple's hardware turns out to be more 'open' than the company intended -- Jobs originally wanted to keep third-party apps off the iPhone, for example.
This is a poor example. It has been Apple's policy forever to not acknowledge their intent before they are ready to present it. While Jobs scorned people for suggesting video iPod, he's been working on iPod and deals with movie companies. While he pushed Safari as the "iPhone platform", his team has been working on the iPhone SDK and documentation. While Jobs openly mocked the Kindle, he's already been working on the Apple tablet for over an year.
If one can't see past these basics of marketing at Apple, I wonder why would I trust the rest of the analysis in this article:P
Slashdot Mirror
http://apirocks.com/html5/html5.html#slide1
Web development has expanded into a very large and exciting platform for content and applications, both on the server and client.
Still, every time I open an article about it, all I see is a developer who's tortured at the thought of generating endless CRUD forms and writing elaborate explanations, why he had no choice, *no choice* at all, but climb high up on the abstraction ladder, so that he can do basic validation in cute one-liners.
That's great, but that's just a minor fraction of what web development constitutes today. The vast majority of those prefabbed CRUD frameworks do horribly at handling load, scaling across servers, hand-tuning the details to the customer's preference... and well, they do horribly at anything but CRUD. The web is more than CRUD and I do feel bad for the developers who do it for such lengths of time, they get accustomed to the false idea that this is the entirety of what web development is all about.
prompting a quick edit and an apologetic tweet.
How quick was it? Was it so quick, that you'd think they had the edit prepared in advance, just waiting for the "outrage"?
Come on guys, those are old, old tricks.
So, anyway, Microsoft have a new mobile device again with a hip ad again, awkward name again, that's trying to compete with a similar device from Apple again. Best of luck to them.
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
Talking about Perl, this is the official Perl 6 site:
http://perl6.org/
Srsly :P
Did you consider that one of the reasons the Opera browser may have being accepted is because of the attention that Opera brought to the subject? It is certainly possible that Apple's decision to allow the app would have been affected by the fact that Opera is a European company involved in a high-profile ongoing EU antitrust case regarding web browsers. Rejecting the app would probably have triggered an antitrust complaint from Opera, and that is the kind of attention that Apple could do without.
While I'm sure there's a moment of truth in your perspective, you need to see what Opera Mini is. It's, simply put, a free VNC client especially designed for web browsing. There are plenty of VNC clients on the AppStore right now and it's been the case for a long long time. Opera Mini is a web browser on your iPhone about as much as remoting into your WinXP PC from the iPhone is running WinXP on your iPhone.
As you know, Apple doesn't want to lose control of the platform experience and ecosystem, so they forbid apps that can load other apps. That's the big reason why a real non-webkit browser won't be accepted: it's a slippery slope.
If they did allow, browser "X", that browser could start adding iPhone API support for web apps little by little, and before you know it, it has creeped up to a full app platform that bypasses the AppStore completely. Instead, no JavaScript or Flash gets executed on the iPhone with Opera Mini, it's all computed remotely, and as such it can't easily be called an app platform on the phone itself.
Google bought some bandwidth to be able to send site content to users. Those users bought some bandwidth to be able to receive it. What's the problem?
Technically Google doesn't buy lots of bandwidth nowadays, the way people might imagine. They instead hook directly to many peers and at the backbones. That said, when the rest of us pay for "bandwidth", we pay exactly for building and maintaining the kind of infrastructure Google built themselves. But it explains why on the surface you can spin it like they did.
2) Google cuts them off so that the above doesn't happen. These ISPs customers start screaming "Why am I paying you for access to the Internet, when you aren't providing it?" and they start switching to other providers that aren't pulling this.
There may be areas where you can't pick another ISP, that said, something else may happen.
In China, when you cannot reach a site, you can't opt out of China's firewall, but you use proxies. Many, many, small, widely geographically, randomly distributed proxies.
Might be a pain to use for videos, but I never underestimate a user hellbent on getting his funny cat video.
Good luck to the ISPs sending thousands of little invoices to every one of those proxies.
If VP8 really is as good as On2 claimed, Google could save some pretty good money by serving up YouTube videos in VP8 format instead of H264. And even better, Google would not have to worry about the H.264 patent owners changing the rates or changing the rules.
I don't think Google really wants to re-encode their entire YouTube catalog in yet another codec, but V8 serves a very particular role in this picture.
Google is basically keeping ISO/IEC MPEG in check by basically stating "if you do something stupid, we'll do everything possible to use V8 to make your life harder". So we may see some PR work and posturing, and V8 will likely end up in Google Chrome as well.
Whether everyone will jump to using V8 is still questionable at this point. But having it around will keep H.264 more accessible to everyone, which is good news.
If "real-time collaboration" and "side chat bar" sounds familiar, it's Etherpad:
Etherpad.com
Google bought the company few months ago in order to improve their Google Wave and Google Docs offerings, and I'm happy to see these efforts come to fruition. Google left the Etherpad.com service up for some more time. The end of that grace period is April 14-th (2 days from now), so you have 2 days to go and check what the new Google Docs will probably feel like. Make sure to check out the timeline replay feature, downright eerie and good fit for Google's pattern of Ubiquitous Tracking of Everything, I think.
...close to and prioritising Google. Gotcha.
That'd do nothing. Speed isn't detect via the Google bots or from the google servers
One would think only if the Google Bot happens to be indexing your site at that exact moment; one would additionally think they'll revisit to see if it's structural or not?
If you use Google Webmaster Central you may notice that, while Google's algorithm is smart, it's also very overestimated in some areas, and involves plenty of manual tweaking by the Google employees for it to work properly.
Site Speed is not calculated solely from the times the Google bot takes to crawl the page, it's calculated from Google toolbars that have the pagerank feature enabled (that feature calls home which sites you visit, and how fast the page got loaded).
Whether Google can detect clusters of frequent accesses such as from "slashdotting" is entirely under question, since most slashdot users may not have google toolbar with pagerank on, but for the *few* users that do, the site will just appear slow in general.
Additionally, if a site targets a demographic that has worse latency (low income people, areas with dial-up and so on), then, again, that site will appear to be slower, while actually the visitors have slower internet in general.
Additionally yet, often the reason a site is slow is somewhere along the route, nowhere close to either the visitor ISP, not the site server, and it's not for all users either. So if you have bad luck or due to your content you pick up users that happen to often be routed through the bad route, you'll lose page rank.
Survival mode is how good software dies. In survival mode companies often forget what good software really is, and people on stop start throwing around big words on differentiating from the competition and longer and longer bullet point feature lists.
This is how we got the much dreaded "personas" (copied from Chrome Themes) and why Firefox'es 4.0 UI drafts looks like an exercise of how the offspring of Chrome and Internet Explorer 8 would look like.
Mozilla has been in survival mode ever since Google announced Chrome. Or didn't you notice they *solely* depend on the handouts from a company that now has their own browser (and a good browser!).
That's a tough spot to be on, if Firefox loses market share, they'll fade into oblivion, and if they aggressively compete, even if they gain 99% market share, Google could easily pull their plug on a whim. Oh, there's Bind and Yahoo you say, they'll pay to be in the search bar! Because... of course the savvy techies who helped the cousin install Firefox won't restore Google as the search engine, when said cousin calls them and asks for it. Right.
On a lot of devices over 20 different device
That's a *feature*? "Yay we get to target 20 different CPU characteristics / featuresets / screensizes etc.!"
Nope, not a feature at all.
So, if I get this right... when you use Chrome, you're in risk that it will track your every Google search, your every Gmail mail, your every YouTube video, your every Blogger comment, your every Google Groups post, your every Picasa picture, your every visit on sites using Google Analytics, and while we're at it, they also have a deal with Twitter to get your every tweet and they crawled your every website page.
In short, Google got you long before you started using Chrome. Using any other browser. You may as well relax and enjoy it.
Raising awareness of Chrome's issues is a good thing, but I think those of us who deal with security, corporate secrets and so on knew that long before someone else had to tell us, and have procedures in place on how to securely query and exchange information. The mainstream web was never exactly a very "privacy minded" medium. I use Chrome for casual browsing and install it for friends and relatives. There's nothing Chrome would give away for those people that Google didn't already have from their other sources.
I find it instructive as to Adobe's perspective.
That would be a bad idea.
John Dowdell is a "user relations" guy at Adobe. He answers to users on support forums, writes a blog on Adobe topics and reads customer feedback at Adobe.
He doesn't speak for Adobe's strategy, nor is his opinion to be considered that of Adobe. In fact it says so on his blog: "Views are my own".
Plus, Adobe's been saying for the past few years "there's no HTML vs Flash" war namely since they don't want to position Flash as an HTML alternative (which is stupid in 2010) but as necessary extension to HTML.
You see? It's subtle. HTML won't replace Flash, but you still need Flash together with HTML in your browser and your mobile device (by the way: Flash 10.1 coming to a cellphones pretty soon). It's just another step in a survival strategy that will keep Flash from becoming irrelevant.
All their latest features focus on the unique strengths of a proprietary binary plugin that a public standard like HTML can't deliver quickly, or at all, which is: fully consistent performance across platforms, quick innovation, highly specialized features (such as pixel shaders, is this coming in HTML5? No. I thought so). We need that ingredient too, next to HTML5, to form a healthy ecosystem on the web, as much as some people hate to admit it.
But John Dowdell still doesn't speak for Adobe's strategy, so accept his blog for what it is.
Mother's Maiden name?
Answer: K3kRDQ59r950ed
Pet's first name?
Answer: I5H2KzAB9fT6fN
Favourite Band?
Answer: 25u9yC1DTIkHR6
Just because the question says something, doesn't mean you can't fill-in anything else. Of course, that doesn't take the blame from the sites for introducing a security hole many regular folks fall into.
Am I the only one who frowns at this moniker?
First, it creates a false premise where people need to pick "SQL" versus "no SQL", while many real-world systems intelligently combine relational and non-relational data storage for their needs. There is no conflict.
Second, there's nothing wrong with SQL as a language in particular, and in fact many of the "noSQL" engines are starting to support and extending basic SQL queries, instead of reinventing their own query language for the same purpose.
I suppose "lessRDBMSabuse" was less catchy...
Somehow, I find it surprising that you're managing to saturate a modern hard drive via a single network connection. Are you running extremely slow PCs on a ridiculously fast network? The workflow that you describe sounds pretty normal for a design studio.
Disks still have one set of read/write heads. If they are directed to read/write on multiple locations at once, both tasks will see performance drop significantly. This is the same reason why defragmenting improves performance.
Apart from that, it's easy to forget hard disks used to easily strain the CPU before DMA transfers became common. While local reads/writes can go through DMA, casually allowing high speed transfers, everything that goes through samba is still going through the CPU, which the designer is also using at that moment.
Forget Farmville, Flash puzzlers and 8-bit home computer emulators. The next generation of browser games will be able to take advantage of DirectX 11 effects, not to mention multi-core processing and both Havok and PhysX physics effects.
Why does this sound familiar. Maybe because it reminds me of Macromedia Shockwave, the browser plugin from the 90-s. With OpenGL, Direct3D support and Havok for physics effects. Yet today we still play Farmville and Flash puzzlers, some of which make millions of dollars per month for their makers.
Every year another naive startup announces the next generation of gaming on the web. History is full of 3D plugins that failed to gain much traction beyond a small niche of devoted users.
The fact is browser experience should be light, compatible and ubiquitious among a range of devices, and Flash/Silverlight is already pushing the limits of what is practical in a browser plugin. If your app will be big, resource-hungry and platform-specific, then offline applications simply work better.
When Nintendo announced their new console, they hinted that the way we use the controller will surprise us. Various amateur 3D concepts popped up around the net, and most of them displayed a Nintendo controller with a touch-controlled LCD display, controls would change depending on the game.
Now we see Sony applying for a patent on the very same idea, a bunch of amateurs came up with in their free time few years ago.
Obvious patent is obvious.
Hybrids, being more complex vehicles than classic cars or pure electric vehicles don't handle as easily, and might not perform as well in fast or extreme conditions. Furthermore, they won't save a lot of gas when driving at constant and/or high speeds, such as highway or a race track.
But they are really good in urban environment when you need to often slow down and speed up to accommodate heavy traffic, as then the brake mechanism kicks in saving energy and and the electric engines is used in those short runs/speedups that are so frequent in city driving conditions. It's perfect for taking the kids, going shopping, commute to work and back, you know things you always wanted to do with your Porsche 911.
By the way, most of not all hybrids license technology from Toyota for their operation. Can't wait to see what faulty brakes or accidental acceleration on a Porsche 911 looks like.
They don't want to enable you to use H.264 in any way, directly or indirectly, for political reasons.
Those political reasons somehow don't forbid them from supporting Flash's closed source plugin, which does support H264.
Here's a "novel" idea: When Firefox encounters a <video> tag, it uses whatever H264 capable player is installed as a plugin. This can be Windows Media Player (supports H264 in Windows 7), Quicktime (H264 supported), or Flash player (by including a little video player flash file with the browser).
Firefox has played a major role in reviving standards support, bringing back browser competition and nudging Microsoft into updating Internet Explorer, but if they choose to be stubborn on obvious issues because of "political reasons", the world will just switch to the next thing and forget them entirely, the way it happened with Netscape.
Oh really? Because to me, Phobos and Deimos (Mars' moons) are little more than a few trillion tons of metal, ceramics, volatiles and a few million tons of precious metals sitting in a nice stable orbit over Mars. Just perfect to supply the Earth with some rare metals, the moon and LEO with volatiles and any space tourism around Mars. The view is fantastic and I'd bet there's people who would pay pretty big bucks to take a vacation to Martian orbit or even visit the surface. You woyuld have to have a profound lack of imagination to not see any "profit" in going to Mars and in space exploration in general. Resources, tourism, research etc. plenty of profit to be made, it's just a matter of building up the necessary technology and infrastructure.
Based on your business plan, I come to the conclusion that the difference between business and sci-fi is that the latter needs to be at least remotely based in reality.
Apple's hardware turns out to be more 'open' than the company intended -- Jobs originally wanted to keep third-party apps off the iPhone, for example.
This is a poor example. It has been Apple's policy forever to not acknowledge their intent before they are ready to present it. While Jobs scorned people for suggesting video iPod, he's been working on iPod and deals with movie companies. While he pushed Safari as the "iPhone platform", his team has been working on the iPhone SDK and documentation. While Jobs openly mocked the Kindle, he's already been working on the Apple tablet for over an year.
If one can't see past these basics of marketing at Apple, I wonder why would I trust the rest of the analysis in this article :P
Mozilla has released Firefox 3.6 today, which adds support for Personas, lightweight themes that can be installed without restarting the browser
I think someone just jumped the shark.
I can't explain to myself how adding a theme engine on top of another theme engine was somehow near the top of their todo list.