Netflix does their "HD" at 720/30p or 720/24p, in VC-1 (nee WMV9), at variable rates up to about 3.6Mb/s. Not all that far from what you want.. could be better, depending on what video encoding you had in mind (or worse... VC-1 is much better than MPEG-2, but not as good as AVC. Netflix uses it because the decoder is less complex, so it runs on more systems...and because they're seriously in bed with Microsoft).
Curiously, on my satellite system, without passing daily download caps, and using the late night "no caps" option, I can download a maximum of about 110GB per month. Of course, actual bandwidth becomes an issue in the 2AM-7AM "no cap" window, but this is the most I could ever download. Two Blu-Ray discs, with some change back.
For this, I pay about $110 per month. And this is the best internet option in my area right now. It's not always greener on the other side of the river....
I don't think so. Where I live now, I have septic and well, so no such services. But at my old place, property taxes were just that... property taxes. Additional services were not taxes, but... well, services. You had to pay for water in and poop out. And unlike electricity, water was actually very similar to internet charges. You didn't pay per liter/gallon, but if you hit a certain threshold, your price went up. I hit that exactly once, one year I had to fill and empty the pool (in ground, 45ft x 30ft) an unusual number of times.
I don't believe there's any place, at least in the USA, where property taxes also cover water and sewer service fees. They are, very much, a different kind of thing, with month going to markedly different places. And in my current place, I still pay property taxes ($12,000 a year or so, on 26 acres, most of it forest).
We had four snowstorms last year in South New Jersey.. each over 20" in depth. I shoveled out the first one, along my 1/5 mile driveway, took me 6 hours. Next weekend, I bought a snow blower. Isn't that standard equipment up there in the Great White North (along with Blues, Touqes, Rush albums, and back-bacon.. at least, that's why I like Canada).
You all probably have some of the same issues we have in the rural parts of the lower 48... big business internet companies would rather cover the same house 2-4 times in a high population area than offer me one local alternative. So my only choice is satellite or cellular. And cellular has increasingly been made a non-option, due to download caps.
Which is enough to support at most 30-40 Blu-Ray class video streams at a time. Or nearly 300 NetFlix streams. That might help as the backhaul to a local node in a moderate-sized neighborhood, but it's no backbone for this.
Slowing down the start of a film affects latency, it doesn't change bandwidth at all. It would allow a connection with more random traffic to work well, but a 1.5Mb/s pipe will never support a 3.0Mb/s video in realtime. Period.
Netflix's problem is already manifest... they're competing with 25-35Mb/s Blu-Ray video, 19Mb/s broadcast, and 8-12Mb/s satellite/cable (maybe better) in HD with lower quality (720/30p, 720/24p vs. 1080/60i or 1080/24p, usually) at 3.8Mb/s peak bitrate. And they're using VC-1/WMV, not AVC, so their quality is already somewhat lower for the same bitrate. They can't cut this and still compete with other forms of pay-per-view. Netflix themselves won by advancing the rental model... most of the download-to-buy schemes didn't survive the dramatically lower video quality.
Actually... you're probably pretty typical. If you have any reasonable broadband service, you more often than not have a choice. That's the effect of deregulation for sure.. there are many people who have no wired option (they might get satellite, or cellular modem.. both seriously flawed compared to even the basic DSL plans)... I'm in that group. No wired option where I live, and I pay $120 per month for 1.5Mb/s down, 300kb/s up.. and a daily high-speed limit of 500MB (limits are off between 2AM and 7AM, Eastern Time). At least there are no penalties if you run over.. though if you do, Hugesnet will let you pay $12 for the next 500MB if you need it. Given this, it would take me $60 to watch a Netflix HD film in realtime.. well, if I didn't have less than half the necessary bandwidth to stream it.
In short -- you're lucky. Don't move. Competition, while good, it always localized. Regulation, ages back, is the only reason I can get wired telephone service. And this is in New Jersey.. I can imagine it's worse in the West.
This was inevitable, and anyone paying close attention saw this coming a thousand miles away. Years ago, when I first heard talk of "the internet" being the upgrade for DVD, I kind of had to laugh. Because there's absolutely no way your ISP is going to let you buy Blu-Ray quality video online, on a regular basis.
Netflix, and other similar models (Apple TV, etc) have adopted what I think of as the proper internet video model: a replacement for rental and PPV. But even with Netflix's 3.8Mb/s for HD (basically 1/10th the quality of Blu-Ray), they're crazy huge compared to most other video sources. Sure, YouTube has been upping their standards to 2Mb/s and maybe more, but the limit on all currently available normal YouTube accounts (those not grandfathered into the "Director's" account, and those not owned by major media companies in partner with YouTube/Google) is 10 minutes. The average film runs over two hours.
And it's clear, already, that Netflix was a huge success, even before they did the online thing. They pretty much killed the meatspace DVD rental business, thanks to their streamlined mail system and all-you-can-eat pricing. They've become one the Post Office's largest clients, as a result.
ISPs can offer unlimited service based on the idea that there's no practical limit.. most people will never get close (and, for many, they'll simply dump those habitual outliers). A single film over Netflix will run around 3.2GB. While that's not insane by geek standards, it's crazy compared to most consumer uses: program updates (100MB, less than once a week), YouTube videos (150MB for an HD, 10min video.. usually much less), etc. They don't have anywhere near the bandwidth to support everyone hitting the limits all at once. But that's precisely what the Netflix model is encouraging... which makes it even worse, in some ways, than online purchases.
If I buy a video, it's larger, but I'm probably going to buy well in advance. So my download doesn't necessarily stop on anyone else's, and for that matter, a smart server could manage bandwidth to optimize costs. For Netflix, it's realtime playback. They buffer up, but if there are too many viewing at the same time (far more likely, given the realtime and "regular consumer" push), the streaming fails. Meanwhile, before that, Netflix is sucking up most what's available, and most likely, around the same after work -- prime time hours. Netflix could in theory help here by pushing videos to you ahead of time... unfortunately, most of the devices suppoting Netflix don't have a spare few GB to store the film.
Doesn't make any sense, sorry. The Nexus One was no "large screen" Android phone... it had the usual 3.7" screen, same as the Motorola Droid that preceded it to market and really got the Android market going. I think the HTC and Droid X introductions were just the inevitable effect of getting companies who produce multiple models for multiple market segments finally involved in the high-end smart phone business.
The real promise of the Nexus One was dead on arrival. Google promised a phone that would work on any carrier, but delivered one that did 3G for T-Mobile, but not AT&T. They promised realistic pricing, but delivered it with the artificially high pricing of all stand-alone cellphones... always necessary to get deals with carriers -- which they did, anyway, with T-Mo. A realistically priced high end smart phone would sell for less than $100 more than a similarly priced high-end PMP/PDA. Add $35 parts to an iPod Touch and you have an iPhone.
No surprises... the average Windows laptop sold last year for about $550 in the USA.... probably close to $500 once the numbers are tallied for 2010. And that doesn't include Netbooks, which were tracked as a separate class. That says something about the functional price of things like ChromeOS and non-Windows Tablet systems. Ok, sure, Apple has a fairly large zombie following who will shell out far more for a glorified iPod, but I would be surprised if the price on these things didn't settle in at or below that of a typical Netbook.
More correctly, they're reformatting a Flash/AVC "wrapper" and HTML tag (or at least those they can detect, since flash players usually involve other code) into the very same video in an MP4 wrapper with a tag. Conceptually trivial, if all you're after is playing flash video. A far cry from supporting all of flash, particularly since the video sites are the first to offer HTML5 alternatives (YouTube, for example).
There are millions of sites authored in Flash (ActionScript) that have nothing to do with video. In many cases, sites that really would work just dandy in normal HTML/CSS. But that doesn't make it a non-problem for end-users who simply want the full web on their smartphone. Before I had Flash on my Droid, I had to go to a PC browser to see Mini-Circuit's web site (they make RF components) or check-out on J.C. Penney's e-commerce site. Nothing whatsoever to do with video. And no more a battery drain or other issue than JavaScript.
The reason is simple: Adobe's authoring tools are very nice. They allow a content person to author the kind of site you'd need real programmers for in JavaScript.
This is how you know Apple wasn't serious about killing off Flash. If you wanted to get rid of Flash effectively, you don't target end users, you find out why people use it, and make them want to change. An authoring tool that does what Flash does, as well as Flash, in HTML4/5 + CSS + JavaScript, given away free, would solve this problem. And in fact, Adobe's tools are moving toward this anyway... they are going to support authoring in HTML5, some day (given HTML5 isn't quite really real until 2012 or so, there's time).
VP8 is substantially better than MPEG-2 at the same bitrate. It's not yet demonstrably as good as MPEG-4 Part 10/H.264/AVC, but it's close. VP8 has also shown to be superior to MPEG-4 Part 2/ASP/DivX/XviD, particularly at lower, net-friendly bitrates. As well as VP3, Ogg Theora, and of course, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2... the ancestor of all of these DCT-based CODECs.
And to many people, close is close enough, given the open source nature. Google's releasing VP8 has already had a useful effect -- it was only after that happened that the MPEG-LA promised not implement the long promised charges on AVC streaming.
Only interesting thing wind up in stories. The reason you and I are probably not characters in a TV series (ala "The Truman Show")... we don't do enough different things, day to day, to entertain an audience. The stories worth telling to a large group of people are by their very nature extreme, at least along some axis.
Really... just what are these doing on a "Science Fiction" channel. Ok, granted, I don't believe in ghosts, so it's kind of proper that a ghost hunting show implicitly (at least) acknowledges that supernatural phenomena are fake, by being on SyFy (given the lack of a suitable Fantasy Channel), But you'd kind of think that the people involved would rather not be so open about the show being a fraud. Same with professional wrestling... fiction, sure. Scripted fiction, in fact. But "science"? This belongs elsewhere; maybe Spike or Logo.
In short, SyFy is rapidly becoming unwatchable, at least if you're an actual fan of science fiction.
Or BSG. We knew the cylons would nearly wipe out the humans, they'd flee, and eventually find Earth. We the same level of story framework for Caprica. The what isn't the interesting part, anyway, whether it's fiction or history... the hows and whys are what a story interesting.
I don't really have a problem with the prequel series as a concept. I actually have been enjoying "Caprica", though I went into it knowing it couldn't be anything like BSG. And even BSG had a more or less foregone conclusion, give that it was a "reimagining" of the original series. They made BSG interesting by taking out all the cheese, and adding dozens of unexpected and rich details. And writing stories for actual adults, which could include themes of religion, sex, and politics. This was, I think, the only instance of "the enemy is indistinguishable from us" where that was a really valid plot detail, not just a way to money on SFX.
In short, the value of a well done series is the journey, not the destination, whether you know the destination or not up front.
And of course, the other big win in Dalvik -- the code is architecture independent. The same release runs unmodified on ARM-based cellphones, x86 based netbooks and tablets, MIPS-based STBs, etc. Sure, the NDK removes this, but it's only employed when performance is critical. And sure, the security factor... you don't really want to be carrying all those Windows problems in your pocket, eh?
The original Amiga 2000 keyboards were made by Cherry, but after that, they were generally something fairly generic -- maybe from Mitsumi (we bought lots of commodity pieces from Mitsumi). I think the best part of the Amiga keyboards was just a little elimination of the really stupid ideas from the PC keyboard, such as the gigantic and fairly useless caps-lock key (an artifact, I guess, from the days of the IBM Selectric typewriter or something). I guess I really did love the large return key, too.
The Commodore keyboards, from the C128 on anyway, were somewhat inspired by the DEC VT-100 style of keyboard. That's because we all used that style of terminal in the day. Seemed much more "computer-like" than the IBM keyboard.
While that's a possible position, it's also the fact that Nokia's hurting on cash and losing market share. SymbianOS lost 10% share in the last year, and that's before people saw it going away. One big problem Nokia had was the simple fact that most SymbianOS users think they have a feature phone: they use the built-in stuff to browse the web, but they don't download apps. Most phones don't even come with the Ovi store app, and none did before mid-2009. So Nokia has pretty much guaranteed the grass is greener on the other side.
In theory, Nokia should be doing well. They had a 50% share of the smart phone market in 2009, at least technically, and the smart phone market is the strongest and most profitable segment of the cell phone market. And yet, here's Apple, with less than 10% the market, making 30+% of all profit in the market -- more than Nokia, LG, and a few others combined. And the SymbianOS market is now down to 40%, and the year's not even over yet. That 40% sounds good, but not with -10% annual momentum behind it.
Part of the problem, too, is that Nokia's offerings have matched their market position. Most of their "hot new" phones for 2010 look like someone else's idea of a hot new phone for 2008. And the better ones... are not on SymbianOS.
If Nokia actually has the software chops to compete with their own OS, imagine if they tapped Android for the foundation, and built whatever they needed to distinguish themselves in the market on top of that. As it standard, they're doing some of that anyway with MeeGo, but without the traction that Android has. Maybe they have a clear plan with MeeGo, but they've also been doing Linux phones and devices a long time, and haven't really go anywhere with them. Why would MeeGo be different?
It's not just an idle question, either. Smart phone sales in 2010 are about 250 million... Nokia has about 100 million of that action. By 2014, they're estimating that will double to 500 million. At their current rate of collapse, Nokia will be lucky to still be selling smartphones in 2014... they could realistically have only 10% of the market. And all those 500 million are not new customers... they're the same old customers, buying smartphones instead of feature or dumb phones. So Nokia's losing a big chunk of their non-smart market, and if they don't have a viable smartphone platform, those sales are going elsewhere.
If you look at the numbers, the vast majority of MONEY is being made by a small minority of the people (I don't think a minority can be vast, so I won't exactly parallel your statement here). As of 2007, 15% of the US population owned 85% of the country's wealth; the top 1% owned 34.6% of the country's wealth. But you look at financial wealth (eg, subtract your house's value), the top 1% owned 42.7% of the country's financial wealth.
It's a little bit worse globally -- the top 10% control 83% of the world's wealth... the top 1% control 43% of the world's wealth. Worse, but only a little bit.
And these are 2007 figures. It's worse now.
So basically, the bottom 85% of the country is sharing 15% of the wealth. Any question, now, about why some of these people aren't taxed -- the don't make enough to be taxed. No one's paying taxes on the first $20,000 or so of income (varies by your household/dependencies)... not you, not me, not Warren Buffett. We all get that same tax break... so stop complaining about poor people not paying taxes. What's disturbing is that I'm paying a higher percentage of my income in taxes than Warren Buffett is, despite his being in that 1% (and 0.1%, etc) exclusive club.
They want it both ways -- the taxes on businesses are "too high"... on paper, so they complain about them. But in reality, they're not paying anything close to the base tax rate for a business... no business worth its salt is paying anything close to what a business in Europe would pay, much less the expected rate for a US company.
And yeah, it's the same for individuals. Warren Buffett came out about this a few years ago -- don't recall if he was #1 or #3 richest in the country back then, but it doesn't matter. He was paying a lower tax rate ON HIS INDIVIDUAL INCOME that I was that year (and I'm sure, most of us with a good job but not "wealth").
They seem to have convinced the low-information voters that this is a Good Thing, and that somehow, this is going to affect their taxes. Just as they were convinced that the inheritance tax (eg, the "Death Tax") would somehow be a huge burden when willing that double-wide to their kin-folk. Even with the $1,000,000 exclusion at the time...
Of course, being idiots, they don't realize that Buffett is getting the same tax breaks on his first $50,000 as anyone making $50,000, and he's paying the same taxes on his first $100,000 as I am... it's just that for me, that's all year, and for him, that's like lunchtime on January 1. He's telling us all he SHOULD be paying higher taxes (and by extension, other very rich people) I don't understand why we don't listen.
Not only that, but a little variety of devices leads to a better OS.
Despite years of supporting different resolution on MacOS, Apple had the brain-damaged idea of only supporting 480x320 displays on all versions of the iOS up to the specially hacked original version on the iPad. Android apps might be better optimized for one resolution vs. another, but I have yet to find an application that doesn't use my Droid's screen in a reasonable way. Apple had to go to the crazy extreme of building in a 960x640 pixel display in the iPhone 4, just do old apps could be handled by a 2x2 scaling factor. Ok, it's a nice display, but it would be even nicer if all of their apps adjusted to screen rez as well as Android apps do.
Of course, Jobs only gets to say its fragmented by making things up, and by dropping support of older firmware. So you're supported by iOS 4 or iOS3... or you're just plain not supported. Ok, sure, the upgrades are cheap, but it's also telling that he's only allowing for two versions still being supportable. If that continues, he's got real problems, since most of the current devices can't run iOS4, and the few older ones that do, don't run it well.
And the "making it up" part... each separate HW/SW combination does not even remotely constitute a different version of Android. I don't know where Stevie Boy got his CS degree... oh, right, he doesn't have one. Someone at Apple should tell him that one major purpose of any OS is to abstract HW from SW. Or point out, it's kind of like supporting MacOS systems, fragmentation-wise... only less so, since 2.2 and 2.1 constitute the vast majority of Android devices ever created.
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Netflix does their "HD" at 720/30p or 720/24p, in VC-1 (nee WMV9), at variable rates up to about 3.6Mb/s. Not all that far from what you want.. could be better, depending on what video encoding you had in mind (or worse... VC-1 is much better than MPEG-2, but not as good as AVC. Netflix uses it because the decoder is less complex, so it runs on more systems...and because they're seriously in bed with Microsoft).
Curiously, on my satellite system, without passing daily download caps, and using the late night "no caps" option, I can download a maximum of about 110GB per month. Of course, actual bandwidth becomes an issue in the 2AM-7AM "no cap" window, but this is the most I could ever download. Two Blu-Ray discs, with some change back.
For this, I pay about $110 per month. And this is the best internet option in my area right now. It's not always greener on the other side of the river....
I don't think so. Where I live now, I have septic and well, so no such services. But at my old place, property taxes were just that... property taxes. Additional services were not taxes, but ... well, services. You had to pay for water in and poop out. And unlike electricity, water was actually very similar to internet charges. You didn't pay per liter/gallon, but if you hit a certain threshold, your price went up. I hit that exactly once, one year I had to fill and empty the pool (in ground, 45ft x 30ft) an unusual number of times.
I don't believe there's any place, at least in the USA, where property taxes also cover water and sewer service fees. They are, very much, a different kind of thing, with month going to markedly different places. And in my current place, I still pay property taxes ($12,000 a year or so, on 26 acres, most of it forest).
We had four snowstorms last year in South New Jersey.. each over 20" in depth. I shoveled out the first one, along my 1/5 mile driveway, took me 6 hours. Next weekend, I bought a snow blower. Isn't that standard equipment up there in the Great White North (along with Blues, Touqes, Rush albums, and back-bacon.. at least, that's why I like Canada).
You all probably have some of the same issues we have in the rural parts of the lower 48... big business internet companies would rather cover the same house 2-4 times in a high population area than offer me one local alternative. So my only choice is satellite or cellular. And cellular has increasingly been made a non-option, due to download caps.
Which is enough to support at most 30-40 Blu-Ray class video streams at a time. Or nearly 300 NetFlix streams. That might help as the backhaul to a local node in a moderate-sized neighborhood, but it's no backbone for this.
Sorry... no. I ran into that very same bug just now.
Slowing down the start of a film affects latency, it doesn't change bandwidth at all. It would allow a connection with more random traffic to work well, but a 1.5Mb/s pipe will never support a 3.0Mb/s video in realtime. Period.
Netflix's problem is already manifest... they're competing with 25-35Mb/s Blu-Ray video, 19Mb/s broadcast, and 8-12Mb/s satellite/cable (maybe better) in HD with lower quality (720/30p, 720/24p vs. 1080/60i or 1080/24p, usually) at 3.8Mb/s peak bitrate. And they're using VC-1/WMV, not AVC, so their quality is already somewhat lower for the same bitrate. They can't cut this and still compete with other forms of pay-per-view. Netflix themselves won by advancing the rental model... most of the download-to-buy schemes didn't survive the dramatically lower video quality.
Actually... you're probably pretty typical. If you have any reasonable broadband service, you more often than not have a choice. That's the effect of deregulation for sure.. there are many people who have no wired option (they might get satellite, or cellular modem.. both seriously flawed compared to even the basic DSL plans)... I'm in that group. No wired option where I live, and I pay $120 per month for 1.5Mb/s down, 300kb/s up.. and a daily high-speed limit of 500MB (limits are off between 2AM and 7AM, Eastern Time). At least there are no penalties if you run over.. though if you do, Hugesnet will let you pay $12 for the next 500MB if you need it. Given this, it would take me $60 to watch a Netflix HD film in realtime.. well, if I didn't have less than half the necessary bandwidth to stream it.
In short -- you're lucky. Don't move. Competition, while good, it always localized. Regulation, ages back, is the only reason I can get wired telephone service. And this is in New Jersey.. I can imagine it's worse in the West.
This was inevitable, and anyone paying close attention saw this coming a thousand miles away. Years ago, when I first heard talk of "the internet" being the upgrade for DVD, I kind of had to laugh. Because there's absolutely no way your ISP is going to let you buy Blu-Ray quality video online, on a regular basis.
Netflix, and other similar models (Apple TV, etc) have adopted what I think of as the proper internet video model: a replacement for rental and PPV. But even with Netflix's 3.8Mb/s for HD (basically 1/10th the quality of Blu-Ray), they're crazy huge compared to most other video sources. Sure, YouTube has been upping their standards to 2Mb/s and maybe more, but the limit on all currently available normal YouTube accounts (those not grandfathered into the "Director's" account, and those not owned by major media companies in partner with YouTube/Google) is 10 minutes. The average film runs over two hours.
And it's clear, already, that Netflix was a huge success, even before they did the online thing. They pretty much killed the meatspace DVD rental business, thanks to their streamlined mail system and all-you-can-eat pricing. They've become one the Post Office's largest clients, as a result.
ISPs can offer unlimited service based on the idea that there's no practical limit.. most people will never get close (and, for many, they'll simply dump those habitual outliers). A single film over Netflix will run around 3.2GB. While that's not insane by geek standards, it's crazy compared to most consumer uses: program updates (100MB, less than once a week), YouTube videos (150MB for an HD, 10min video.. usually much less), etc. They don't have anywhere near the bandwidth to support everyone hitting the limits all at once. But that's precisely what the Netflix model is encouraging... which makes it even worse, in some ways, than online purchases.
If I buy a video, it's larger, but I'm probably going to buy well in advance. So my download doesn't necessarily stop on anyone else's, and for that matter, a smart server could manage bandwidth to optimize costs. For Netflix, it's realtime playback. They buffer up, but if there are too many viewing at the same time (far more likely, given the realtime and "regular consumer" push), the streaming fails. Meanwhile, before that, Netflix is sucking up most what's available, and most likely, around the same after work -- prime time hours. Netflix could in theory help here by pushing videos to you ahead of time... unfortunately, most of the devices suppoting Netflix don't have a spare few GB to store the film.
Doesn't make any sense, sorry. The Nexus One was no "large screen" Android phone... it had the usual 3.7" screen, same as the Motorola Droid that preceded it to market and really got the Android market going. I think the HTC and Droid X introductions were just the inevitable effect of getting companies who produce multiple models for multiple market segments finally involved in the high-end smart phone business.
The real promise of the Nexus One was dead on arrival. Google promised a phone that would work on any carrier, but delivered one that did 3G for T-Mobile, but not AT&T. They promised realistic pricing, but delivered it with the artificially high pricing of all stand-alone cellphones... always necessary to get deals with carriers -- which they did, anyway, with T-Mo. A realistically priced high end smart phone would sell for less than $100 more than a similarly priced high-end PMP/PDA. Add $35 parts to an iPod Touch and you have an iPhone.
No surprises... the average Windows laptop sold last year for about $550 in the USA.... probably close to $500 once the numbers are tallied for 2010. And that doesn't include Netbooks, which were tracked as a separate class. That says something about the functional price of things like ChromeOS and non-Windows Tablet systems. Ok, sure, Apple has a fairly large zombie following who will shell out far more for a glorified iPod, but I would be surprised if the price on these things didn't settle in at or below that of a typical Netbook.
More correctly, they're reformatting a Flash/AVC "wrapper" and HTML tag (or at least those they can detect, since flash players usually involve other code) into the very same video in an MP4 wrapper with a tag. Conceptually trivial, if all you're after is playing flash video. A far cry from supporting all of flash, particularly since the video sites are the first to offer HTML5 alternatives (YouTube, for example).
There are millions of sites authored in Flash (ActionScript) that have nothing to do with video. In many cases, sites that really would work just dandy in normal HTML/CSS. But that doesn't make it a non-problem for end-users who simply want the full web on their smartphone. Before I had Flash on my Droid, I had to go to a PC browser to see Mini-Circuit's web site (they make RF components) or check-out on J.C. Penney's e-commerce site. Nothing whatsoever to do with video. And no more a battery drain or other issue than JavaScript.
The reason is simple: Adobe's authoring tools are very nice. They allow a content person to author the kind of site you'd need real programmers for in JavaScript.
This is how you know Apple wasn't serious about killing off Flash. If you wanted to get rid of Flash effectively, you don't target end users, you find out why people use it, and make them want to change. An authoring tool that does what Flash does, as well as Flash, in HTML4/5 + CSS + JavaScript, given away free, would solve this problem. And in fact, Adobe's tools are moving toward this anyway... they are going to support authoring in HTML5, some day (given HTML5 isn't quite really real until 2012 or so, there's time).
VP8 is substantially better than MPEG-2 at the same bitrate. It's not yet demonstrably as good as MPEG-4 Part 10/H.264/AVC, but it's close. VP8 has also shown to be superior to MPEG-4 Part 2/ASP/DivX/XviD, particularly at lower, net-friendly bitrates. As well as VP3, Ogg Theora, and of course, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2... the ancestor of all of these DCT-based CODECs.
And to many people, close is close enough, given the open source nature. Google's releasing VP8 has already had a useful effect -- it was only after that happened that the MPEG-LA promised not implement the long promised charges on AVC streaming.
Only interesting thing wind up in stories. The reason you and I are probably not characters in a TV series (ala "The Truman Show")... we don't do enough different things, day to day, to entertain an audience. The stories worth telling to a large group of people are by their very nature extreme, at least along some axis.
Really... just what are these doing on a "Science Fiction" channel. Ok, granted, I don't believe in ghosts, so it's kind of proper that a ghost hunting show implicitly (at least) acknowledges that supernatural phenomena are fake, by being on SyFy (given the lack of a suitable Fantasy Channel), But you'd kind of think that the people involved would rather not be so open about the show being a fraud. Same with professional wrestling... fiction, sure. Scripted fiction, in fact. But "science"? This belongs elsewhere; maybe Spike or Logo.
In short, SyFy is rapidly becoming unwatchable, at least if you're an actual fan of science fiction.
Or BSG. We knew the cylons would nearly wipe out the humans, they'd flee, and eventually find Earth. We the same level of story framework for Caprica. The what isn't the interesting part, anyway, whether it's fiction or history... the hows and whys are what a story interesting.
I don't really have a problem with the prequel series as a concept. I actually have been enjoying "Caprica", though I went into it knowing it couldn't be anything like BSG. And even BSG had a more or less foregone conclusion, give that it was a "reimagining" of the original series. They made BSG interesting by taking out all the cheese, and adding dozens of unexpected and rich details. And writing stories for actual adults, which could include themes of religion, sex, and politics. This was, I think, the only instance of "the enemy is indistinguishable from us" where that was a really valid plot detail, not just a way to money on SFX.
In short, the value of a well done series is the journey, not the destination, whether you know the destination or not up front.
And of course, the other big win in Dalvik -- the code is architecture independent. The same release runs unmodified on ARM-based cellphones, x86 based netbooks and tablets, MIPS-based STBs, etc. Sure, the NDK removes this, but it's only employed when performance is critical. And sure, the security factor... you don't really want to be carrying all those Windows problems in your pocket, eh?
The original Amiga 2000 keyboards were made by Cherry, but after that, they were generally something fairly generic -- maybe from Mitsumi (we bought lots of commodity pieces from Mitsumi). I think the best part of the Amiga keyboards was just a little elimination of the really stupid ideas from the PC keyboard, such as the gigantic and fairly useless caps-lock key (an artifact, I guess, from the days of the IBM Selectric typewriter or something). I guess I really did love the large return key, too.
The Commodore keyboards, from the C128 on anyway, were somewhat inspired by the DEC VT-100 style of keyboard. That's because we all used that style of terminal in the day. Seemed much more "computer-like" than the IBM keyboard.
While that's a possible position, it's also the fact that Nokia's hurting on cash and losing market share. SymbianOS lost 10% share in the last year, and that's before people saw it going away. One big problem Nokia had was the simple fact that most SymbianOS users think they have a feature phone: they use the built-in stuff to browse the web, but they don't download apps. Most phones don't even come with the Ovi store app, and none did before mid-2009. So Nokia has pretty much guaranteed the grass is greener on the other side.
In theory, Nokia should be doing well. They had a 50% share of the smart phone market in 2009, at least technically, and the smart phone market is the strongest and most profitable segment of the cell phone market. And yet, here's Apple, with less than 10% the market, making 30+% of all profit in the market -- more than Nokia, LG, and a few others combined. And the SymbianOS market is now down to 40%, and the year's not even over yet. That 40% sounds good, but not with -10% annual momentum behind it.
Part of the problem, too, is that Nokia's offerings have matched their market position. Most of their "hot new" phones for 2010 look like someone else's idea of a hot new phone for 2008. And the better ones... are not on SymbianOS.
If Nokia actually has the software chops to compete with their own OS, imagine if they tapped Android for the foundation, and built whatever they needed to distinguish themselves in the market on top of that. As it standard, they're doing some of that anyway with MeeGo, but without the traction that Android has. Maybe they have a clear plan with MeeGo, but they've also been doing Linux phones and devices a long time, and haven't really go anywhere with them. Why would MeeGo be different?
It's not just an idle question, either. Smart phone sales in 2010 are about 250 million... Nokia has about 100 million of that action. By 2014, they're estimating that will double to 500 million. At their current rate of collapse, Nokia will be lucky to still be selling smartphones in 2014... they could realistically have only 10% of the market. And all those 500 million are not new customers... they're the same old customers, buying smartphones instead of feature or dumb phones. So Nokia's losing a big chunk of their non-smart market, and if they don't have a viable smartphone platform, those sales are going elsewhere.
If you look at the numbers, the vast majority of MONEY is being made by a small minority of the people (I don't think a minority can be vast, so I won't exactly parallel your statement here). As of 2007, 15% of the US population owned 85% of the country's wealth; the top 1% owned 34.6% of the country's wealth. But you look at financial wealth (eg, subtract your house's value), the top 1% owned 42.7% of the country's financial wealth.
[Edward N. Wolff, New York University: http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html%5D
It's a little bit worse globally -- the top 10% control 83% of the world's wealth... the top 1% control 43% of the world's wealth. Worse, but only a little bit.
And these are 2007 figures. It's worse now.
So basically, the bottom 85% of the country is sharing 15% of the wealth. Any question, now, about why some of these people aren't taxed -- the don't make enough to be taxed. No one's paying taxes on the first $20,000 or so of income (varies by your household/dependencies)... not you, not me, not Warren Buffett. We all get that same tax break... so stop complaining about poor people not paying taxes. What's disturbing is that I'm paying a higher percentage of my income in taxes than Warren Buffett is, despite his being in that 1% (and 0.1%, etc) exclusive club.
They want it both ways -- the taxes on businesses are "too high"... on paper, so they complain about them. But in reality, they're not paying anything close to the base tax rate for a business... no business worth its salt is paying anything close to what a business in Europe would pay, much less the expected rate for a US company.
And yeah, it's the same for individuals. Warren Buffett came out about this a few years ago -- don't recall if he was #1 or #3 richest in the country back then, but it doesn't matter. He was paying a lower tax rate ON HIS INDIVIDUAL INCOME that I was that year (and I'm sure, most of us with a good job but not "wealth").
They seem to have convinced the low-information voters that this is a Good Thing, and that somehow, this is going to affect their taxes. Just as they were convinced that the inheritance tax (eg, the "Death Tax") would somehow be a huge burden when willing that double-wide to their kin-folk. Even with the $1,000,000 exclusion at the time...
Of course, being idiots, they don't realize that Buffett is getting the same tax breaks on his first $50,000 as anyone making $50,000, and he's paying the same taxes on his first $100,000 as I am... it's just that for me, that's all year, and for him, that's like lunchtime on January 1. He's telling us all he SHOULD be paying higher taxes (and by extension, other very rich people) I don't understand why we don't listen.
Not only that, but a little variety of devices leads to a better OS.
Despite years of supporting different resolution on MacOS, Apple had the brain-damaged idea of only supporting 480x320 displays on all versions of the iOS up to the specially hacked original version on the iPad. Android apps might be better optimized for one resolution vs. another, but I have yet to find an application that doesn't use my Droid's screen in a reasonable way. Apple had to go to the crazy extreme of building in a 960x640 pixel display in the iPhone 4, just do old apps could be handled by a 2x2 scaling factor. Ok, it's a nice display, but it would be even nicer if all of their apps adjusted to screen rez as well as Android apps do.
Of course, Jobs only gets to say its fragmented by making things up, and by dropping support of older firmware. So you're supported by iOS 4 or iOS3... or you're just plain not supported. Ok, sure, the upgrades are cheap, but it's also telling that he's only allowing for two versions still being supportable. If that continues, he's got real problems, since most of the current devices can't run iOS4, and the few older ones that do, don't run it well.
And the "making it up" part... each separate HW/SW combination does not even remotely constitute a different version of Android. I don't know where Stevie Boy got his CS degree... oh, right, he doesn't have one. Someone at Apple should tell him that one major purpose of any OS is to abstract HW from SW. Or point out, it's kind of like supporting MacOS systems, fragmentation-wise... only less so, since 2.2 and 2.1 constitute the vast majority of Android devices ever created.