Price is not everything, the standards matter since nobody would want to be enslaved to a single platform and a company rather than industry professional boards.
Honestly man, get your facts straight, for Christ's sake. WMV is also a certified standard, just like MPEG4 is. Yes, MS certified it.
I suspect you'll start leaning towards "but omg the patents" to which I'll say the same applies to MPEG4.
Whatever the merit of his suggestions, the idea that ISO is new to high-pressure corporate gamesmanship and requires a condescending lecture from a titan of industry like "the CEO of Freecode" has to qualify as the laugh of the day.
Hmmm... I always wanted to give a piece of my mind to NASA, every time they screw up, I thought "even *I* can handle fireworks twice each year, what's so god damn complex".
You know what, I'm gonna send them an open letter.
Why WMV? Why can't it be MPEG4 format? WMV is Windows Media, it will stay as Windows media especially after MS discontinued their working Windows Media Player using Universal binary as excuse.
MPEG4 has no DRM. Further any idea how much broadcast licence costs for MPEG4? Do you think it's free? Yep, Internet streaming is broadcast again, and WMV is cheaper to broadcast than MPEG4.
I am not saying "Use Flash"- I am just trying to explain that just because a player exists on Linux/OS X, it doesn't make a technology "multiplatform".
That could shock you but, just because you like to make up things in your own way, doesn't mean you can work around common sense.
BBC needs multiplatform WMV player: Silverlight is such a player with support from Mono.
Whether Moonlight will continue to be supported by MS is completely irrelevant. The existing version will not stop playing WMV-s, which is the only thing BBC needs.
Adobe products are multi platform, Silverlight/Moonlight is not. Can you create content on Linux/OS X?
Could you have picked a worse example? You can create Silverlight content on Linux as it's WMV, XML and plain text format script, without compilation, just like you can make a web page in Notepad. Not to mention the.NET/Mono plugins for Eclipse.
And Adobe's Flash has no DRM, not it has Linux development tools.
I'm a Flash developer and would've said "hey, use Flash" if it made sense, but you're just being silly now.
"a minority of fanatics who believe that iPhone costed every single dollar of those $600 they paid."
I'm not sure those people are wrong.
They're apparently wrong now in the aftermath, the $600 model costs $400 now. It doesn't matter what it costs to buy the parts, or build them. On the market, now iPhone costs $200 less than it cost two days ago.
Also you realize, even if Apple could subsidize the price with the AT&T contract, it's the same contract, the users who bought the phone for $600 won't pay less to AT&T, so it's not a relevant question at all how the price was formed and whether the contract helped.
Not to forget iPod touch costs almost the same, with no AT&T contract (or phone feature) to go with it.
See, this is exactly an example of the FUD and ignorance that I'm talking about. There's no way that shortcuts and tab behaviour are better implemented in Firefox than in Opera. Opera blows Firefox out of the water in both regards.
Looks like Opera has a fanbase denial problems the same as Firefox does.
I've been using Opera before Firefox existed, and I said what I said based on what I personally witness seeing people used to IE7/Firefox work in Opera.
I'm suggesting what would help Opera take over: dev tools, simpler more Firefox-like interface and better branding/marketing.
And you say "nah it's perfect as it is, you ignorant foo!"... right, it's perfect with sub 1% market share. Enjoy.
Perhaps, but the BBC content is free. The DRM exists just to expire the content. Not tat it works, I just crack it with fairuse4wm.
Makes me wonder, why aren't they simply using Silverlight. Supports WMV, WVM's DRM, and is multiplatform (Silverlight on Windows/Mac and 100% compatible Moonlight on Linux).
Before, people used to say "I don't like ads in my browser" as an excuse for not using it. Then when it became free, it was "I use lots of GreaseMonkey scripts", despite the fact that you can use most GM scripts in Opera too.
Well, I like Opera but I use Firefox for another similar reason. Since I genuinely would prefer to use Opera (sick of FF's performance honestly), please answer one more complaint if possible:
"I use FireBug and WebDeveloper Toolbar"
There's a dev menu plugin for Opera that has some rudimentary development tools similar to the webdev toolbar, but nothing to match the arsenal of FireBug for JS/HTML/CSS debugging and manipulation.
And it honestly matters a lot to a developer. And developers matter a lot to a browser, we're the early adopters.
Firefox zealots who typically use nothing more than ignorance and FUD to put it down.
Seriously, the amount of anti-Opera, pro-Firefox propaganda (for want of a better word) here on Slashdot is ridiculous. Opera is, and always has been, a top-notch product.
I'm a Firefox user and wholeheartedly agree with your comments on Firefox' less than stellar performance and the zealotry.
But you know, things aren't always so simple in the real world. Would there be no such blatant Firefox propaganda, there would be no Firefox adotpion by devs and techies, they would not push Firefox to their relatives, companies and friends, and IE7 wouldn't exist as a result (and IE8 is in the works now with even better CSS/JS support, and rumored XHTML support).
In fact it may turn out that the Firefox propaganda is the only way we could've gotten out of the stale "IE6 is good enough" situation, and open the doors for future adoption of other free browsers on the desktop, such as Opera.
The ball is in Opera's court. They have the technology, have the ability: they need to make it work more like Firefox UI-wise.. Yea:( Well, with IE7 copying Firefox' shortcuts and tab behaviour, this is what people are used to, and I'm afraid Opera feels a bit awkward compared. It's ridiculous given Opera originated those features, but that's life. Firefox implemented them better in the UI department.
And Opera needs better marketing, and possibly even better name (they could spun a Firefox-like UI with a new name).
Look no further than the Wii. Nintendo could have easily charged $300 and still come in under its competitors while increasing margin, but they actually thought about it.
How about you look further than Wii. Of the top 3 consoles right now, Wii makes the highest margin of all three. That is, they make a margin >0, and PS3 and XBOX360 make margin 0.
The rest of your story is about the same quality as well.
I bought Nokia phone without sound, ringtones, color screen, or camera or anything at al, for $250 few years ago. Now I can't sell it for $10.
That's life, and Steve only gave the $100 credit because he pays for the fanbase he built, a minority of fanatics who believe that iPhone costed every single dollar of those $600 they paid. Look at the forums and you'll see fans sing praises about how Apple is much better than Dell since they use better parts and have better QA (which is funny since they use the same parts and have about the same QA). You'll see talk about design, and how good design is expensive to do.
They believed iPhone costed $600 hard dollars, and that would be so for a long time. They're now disillusioned since the imaginary value they purchased has just gotten 33% less.
And hence have two options : 1. learn something new, get less fanboyish, more cynical and continue your life; 2. turn against your idol and whine like a sissy.
If Apple was as devious as people claim, issuing an announcement about a rebate ahead of the actual rebate is a terrible non-profix-maximizing idea.
Apple doesn't sell iPods to robots. Pissing off their customers and letting the negative PR spill for two weeks would be one hell of a "profit maximizing" strategy I tell ya.
Even better if most of them spend it on Apple software. Such as, I dunno, maybe Leopard? Due out next month? Teh Steve is laughing all the way to the bank, and this time I'm laughing right along. This is so brilliant it almost has to be on purpose.
Something you learn in basic economics, is that opportunity loss is a loss as any. I know what you think: "haha, software costs $0, so they didn't give you anything at all".
Nope, piracy of the OS itself is almost non-existent on Macs, and those early buyers would purchase Leopard for $100. Those are $100 lost for Apple, never mind how they are going to be spent.
The benefit for Apple here is that it's not cash but store credit, from then on, what they do with it is doesn't matter.
Assuming that Java/C# are the last word in programming language behavior is simply foolish. Sure, they're popular today.
I didn't assume they're the last word, Erlang isn't either though. I said they're used a lot and we're stuck with them.
The deduction that they'll be replaced like anything before them isn't good though: computer technology was young before. Now it costs millions to port the vast amount of code written and interconnected with other code, to something else.
There are companies still out there stuck with COBOL. The same effect with massively increased power will become apparent for C/Java/C#/PHP/Python and what not code in 10-20 years. We're stuck with it.
Thats complete bull shit. If Adobe opened up the Flash Player Adobe would be making the same if not more profit. Opening up the Flash Player and swf format will bring Flash to many new devices out of the box that currently have no Flash support(phones, PDAs, gaming consoles, etc)
Adobe, and previously Macromedia, have been licensing the source code to device makers to port it to their devices (mobile, console or otherwise). They also license the Flash Lite players to PDA and mobile phone devices.
This is an important revenue income for Adobe, and companies do pay good money for a license because of Flash's "de facto standard" status: their devices become better if they support Flash. Remember people complaining how iPhone doesn't support Flash, apparently people demand Flash whether it's free or not. It just shows how much you know about any of this.
But if you know more than "corporate morons" then you must be pretty well on your own, why do you even care about any of this, there are far more important things for an important person like you to care about.
The first chapter is avalable online to get a taste of the book (and the language).
Right.. sot he first chapter goes on an on how hot it is that once you assign a value to a variable, it can no longer be changed. You see, that's super hot, since you can assign Pi = 3.14 and then you can't change it.
But unlike constants those single-assignment vars can't be optimized at compile time, and still can't replace normal variables.
All in all, no wonder the language isn't popular. We're way way past drastic differences in the languages we'll use. We're stuck with C/Java like syntax, OOP and anything new regarding concurrency will be rolled up on top of it, versus replace it.
There are mountains of code out there in C-like languages that needs to be reused.
I believe concurrency will in the end be most implemented via RAM transactions, which proves a simple and effective model for handling race conditions, while retaining the look of the separate procedures as imperative sequential code as we know it today.
Yup, he has one about Microsoft releasing Windows for free under GNU GPL as well. I hope Microsoft will listen too. If anything, both letters have about the same chance of succeeding.
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Price is not everything, the standards matter since nobody would want to be enslaved to a single platform and a company rather than industry professional boards.
Honestly man, get your facts straight, for Christ's sake. WMV is also a certified standard, just like MPEG4 is. Yes, MS certified it.
I suspect you'll start leaning towards "but omg the patents" to which I'll say the same applies to MPEG4.
Whatever the merit of his suggestions, the idea that ISO is new to high-pressure corporate gamesmanship and requires a condescending lecture from a titan of industry like "the CEO of Freecode" has to qualify as the laugh of the day.
Hmmm... I always wanted to give a piece of my mind to NASA, every time they screw up, I thought "even *I* can handle fireworks twice each year, what's so god damn complex".
You know what, I'm gonna send them an open letter.
- CEO of my mom's basement.
I'd like a multi threaded browser, where something heavy in one tab doesnt drag the rest of the browser down to a crawl...
Of all the popular browsers, only FF isn't multithreaded does aforementioned slowing down to a crawl with a slow tab.
Why WMV? Why can't it be MPEG4 format? WMV is Windows Media, it will stay as Windows media especially after MS discontinued their working Windows Media Player using Universal binary as excuse.
MPEG4 has no DRM. Further any idea how much broadcast licence costs for MPEG4? Do you think it's free? Yep, Internet streaming is broadcast again, and WMV is cheaper to broadcast than MPEG4.
I am not saying "Use Flash"- I am just trying to explain that just because a player exists on Linux/OS X, it doesn't make a technology "multiplatform".
That could shock you but, just because you like to make up things in your own way, doesn't mean you can work around common sense.
BBC needs multiplatform WMV player: Silverlight is such a player with support from Mono.
Whether Moonlight will continue to be supported by MS is completely irrelevant. The existing version will not stop playing WMV-s, which is the only thing BBC needs.
Adobe products are multi platform, Silverlight/Moonlight is not. Can you create content on Linux/OS X?
.NET/Mono plugins for Eclipse.
Could you have picked a worse example? You can create Silverlight content on Linux as it's WMV, XML and plain text format script, without compilation, just like you can make a web page in Notepad. Not to mention the
And Adobe's Flash has no DRM, not it has Linux development tools.
I'm a Flash developer and would've said "hey, use Flash" if it made sense, but you're just being silly now.
"a minority of fanatics who believe that iPhone costed every single dollar of those $600 they paid."
I'm not sure those people are wrong.
They're apparently wrong now in the aftermath, the $600 model costs $400 now. It doesn't matter what it costs to buy the parts, or build them. On the market, now iPhone costs $200 less than it cost two days ago.
Also you realize, even if Apple could subsidize the price with the AT&T contract, it's the same contract, the users who bought the phone for $600 won't pay less to AT&T, so it's not a relevant question at all how the price was formed and whether the contract helped.
Not to forget iPod touch costs almost the same, with no AT&T contract (or phone feature) to go with it.
See, this is exactly an example of the FUD and ignorance that I'm talking about. There's no way that shortcuts and tab behaviour are better implemented in Firefox than in Opera. Opera blows Firefox out of the water in both regards.
Looks like Opera has a fanbase denial problems the same as Firefox does.
I've been using Opera before Firefox existed, and I said what I said based on what I personally witness seeing people used to IE7/Firefox work in Opera.
I'm suggesting what would help Opera take over: dev tools, simpler more Firefox-like interface and better branding/marketing.
And you say "nah it's perfect as it is, you ignorant foo!"... right, it's perfect with sub 1% market share. Enjoy.
Perhaps, but the BBC content is free. The DRM exists just to expire the content. Not tat it works, I just crack it with fairuse4wm.
Makes me wonder, why aren't they simply using Silverlight. Supports WMV, WVM's DRM, and is multiplatform (Silverlight on Windows/Mac and 100% compatible Moonlight on Linux).
Now is that enough for you, or do Opera need to call this functionality 'adblock plus', 'flashblock' and 'noscript' and supply it in addon form? :-)
You're kidding, but better user-friendliness (user-obviousness as I call it), marketing and branding may be exactly what Opera needs.
Incidentally, it's exactly the same thing opera needs. Is the name cursed?
So how about the browser that really matters? I can't believe they left out Konqueror!
I can't believe they left out Netscape 4 and Mosaic!
Before, people used to say "I don't like ads in my browser" as an excuse for not using it. Then when it became free, it was "I use lots of GreaseMonkey scripts", despite the fact that you can use most GM scripts in Opera too.
Well, I like Opera but I use Firefox for another similar reason. Since I genuinely would prefer to use Opera (sick of FF's performance honestly), please answer one more complaint if possible:
"I use FireBug and WebDeveloper Toolbar"
There's a dev menu plugin for Opera that has some rudimentary development tools similar to the webdev toolbar, but nothing to match the arsenal of FireBug for JS/HTML/CSS debugging and manipulation.
And it honestly matters a lot to a developer. And developers matter a lot to a browser, we're the early adopters.
Firefox zealots who typically use nothing more than ignorance and FUD to put it down.
:( Well, with IE7 copying Firefox' shortcuts and tab behaviour, this is what people are used to, and I'm afraid Opera feels a bit awkward compared. It's ridiculous given Opera originated those features, but that's life. Firefox implemented them better in the UI department.
Seriously, the amount of anti-Opera, pro-Firefox propaganda (for want of a better word) here on Slashdot is ridiculous. Opera is, and always has been, a top-notch product.
I'm a Firefox user and wholeheartedly agree with your comments on Firefox' less than stellar performance and the zealotry.
But you know, things aren't always so simple in the real world. Would there be no such blatant Firefox propaganda, there would be no Firefox adotpion by devs and techies, they would not push Firefox to their relatives, companies and friends, and IE7 wouldn't exist as a result (and IE8 is in the works now with even better CSS/JS support, and rumored XHTML support).
In fact it may turn out that the Firefox propaganda is the only way we could've gotten out of the stale "IE6 is good enough" situation, and open the doors for future adoption of other free browsers on the desktop, such as Opera.
The ball is in Opera's court. They have the technology, have the ability: they need to make it work more like Firefox UI-wise.. Yea
And Opera needs better marketing, and possibly even better name (they could spun a Firefox-like UI with a new name).
We'll see how it pans out.
Does it choke rendering Digg's Sucky Comment system, like FF?
:( but because of the dev tools.
FF is the only one to choke so easily rendering larger pages, you know. Unfortunately.
Even before 9.5, Opera still beat the crap out of Firefox in CPU/RAM usage, but then, so did IE.
I still like Firefox
The past tense of cost is cost. Get it right. Yes, this is a spelling flame, and I'm a fucking pedant.
:)
Thanks
No risk of data corruption if you forget to charge it or otherwise let the battery run low, eh?
Naw. Not at all...
Shit, I knew it we forgot something! Thank you, smart Slashdot reader!
- A Seagate engineer.
Look no further than the Wii. Nintendo could have easily charged $300 and still come in under its competitors while increasing margin, but they actually thought about it.
How about you look further than Wii. Of the top 3 consoles right now, Wii makes the highest margin of all three. That is, they make a margin >0, and PS3 and XBOX360 make margin 0.
The rest of your story is about the same quality as well.
I bought Nokia phone without sound, ringtones, color screen, or camera or anything at al, for $250 few years ago. Now I can't sell it for $10.
That's life, and Steve only gave the $100 credit because he pays for the fanbase he built, a minority of fanatics who believe that iPhone costed every single dollar of those $600 they paid. Look at the forums and you'll see fans sing praises about how Apple is much better than Dell since they use better parts and have better QA (which is funny since they use the same parts and have about the same QA). You'll see talk about design, and how good design is expensive to do.
They believed iPhone costed $600 hard dollars, and that would be so for a long time. They're now disillusioned since the imaginary value they purchased has just gotten 33% less.
And hence have two options : 1. learn something new, get less fanboyish, more cynical and continue your life; 2. turn against your idol and whine like a sissy.
Guess which was the easier one.
If Apple was as devious as people claim, issuing an announcement about a rebate ahead of the actual rebate is a terrible non-profix-maximizing idea.
Apple doesn't sell iPods to robots. Pissing off their customers and letting the negative PR spill for two weeks would be one hell of a "profit maximizing" strategy I tell ya.
Even better if most of them spend it on Apple software. Such as, I dunno, maybe Leopard? Due out next month?
Teh Steve is laughing all the way to the bank, and this time I'm laughing right along. This is so brilliant it almost has to be on purpose.
Something you learn in basic economics, is that opportunity loss is a loss as any. I know what you think: "haha, software costs $0, so they didn't give you anything at all".
Nope, piracy of the OS itself is almost non-existent on Macs, and those early buyers would purchase Leopard for $100. Those are $100 lost for Apple, never mind how they are going to be spent.
The benefit for Apple here is that it's not cash but store credit, from then on, what they do with it is doesn't matter.
When it becomes mainstream, it'll be just a checkbox I tick when I create a table on my Oracle, MS SQL, PGSQL or MySQL store to use it.
Stop with the nonsense.
Assuming that Java/C# are the last word in programming language behavior is simply foolish. Sure, they're popular today.
I didn't assume they're the last word, Erlang isn't either though. I said they're used a lot and we're stuck with them.
The deduction that they'll be replaced like anything before them isn't good though: computer technology was young before. Now it costs millions to port the vast amount of code written and interconnected with other code, to something else.
There are companies still out there stuck with COBOL. The same effect with massively increased power will become apparent for C/Java/C#/PHP/Python and what not code in 10-20 years. We're stuck with it.
Hacked Ipodtouch + Skype = Goodness? Boy would that put a stick in Apple's craw.
Uhmm yea... maybe this is why it doesn't have speaker and microphone, huh.
Thats complete bull shit. If Adobe opened up the Flash Player Adobe would be making the same if not more profit. Opening up the Flash Player and swf format will bring Flash to many new devices out of the box that currently have no Flash support(phones, PDAs, gaming consoles, etc)
Adobe, and previously Macromedia, have been licensing the source code to device makers to port it to their devices (mobile, console or otherwise). They also license the Flash Lite players to PDA and mobile phone devices.
This is an important revenue income for Adobe, and companies do pay good money for a license because of Flash's "de facto standard" status: their devices become better if they support Flash. Remember people complaining how iPhone doesn't support Flash, apparently people demand Flash whether it's free or not. It just shows how much you know about any of this.
But if you know more than "corporate morons" then you must be pretty well on your own, why do you even care about any of this, there are far more important things for an important person like you to care about.
The first chapter is avalable online to get a taste of the book (and the language).
Right.. sot he first chapter goes on an on how hot it is that once you assign a value to a variable, it can no longer be changed. You see, that's super hot, since you can assign Pi = 3.14 and then you can't change it.
But unlike constants those single-assignment vars can't be optimized at compile time, and still can't replace normal variables.
All in all, no wonder the language isn't popular. We're way way past drastic differences in the languages we'll use. We're stuck with C/Java like syntax, OOP and anything new regarding concurrency will be rolled up on top of it, versus replace it.
There are mountains of code out there in C-like languages that needs to be reused.
I believe concurrency will in the end be most implemented via RAM transactions, which proves a simple and effective model for handling race conditions, while retaining the look of the separate procedures as imperative sequential code as we know it today.
Fantastic post! Hopefully Adobe will listen.
Yup, he has one about Microsoft releasing Windows for free under GNU GPL as well. I hope Microsoft will listen too. If anything, both letters have about the same chance of succeeding.