I'm every-so-slightly older, and never had much use for just a phone. Other people want to call me; I'm not going to make that many phone calls.
A networked pocket computer, on the other hand, makes a tone of sense... I may not have grown up on cell phones, but I started learning to code when I was 12 (not that easy in 1973... fortunately, my Dad let me use his department's Cyber72 over the weekend, dial in to Bell Labs in Holmdel). A year later, I was hacking around on UNIX, System III I think it was.
Even for slightly older folks here, I doubt this all that unique... there's far more value in "pocket computer" than "pocket phone". I tried to love the Palms, years back. They were passable PDAs and pretty awful phones, but very bad doing the web thing. Android seems to have fixed all of these things... it's hard to imagine not having a DROID in my pocket these days, even if I sometimes only use the phone for 10 minutes a month.
Kind of expensive.... but if you just wanted the GPS, it sure beats an extra $30/month. Incidently, Garmin's map supplier is NAVTEQ... who is owned by Nokia.
I have a dedicated Pioneer unit in my car -- on dash, but also integrated into the audio system. It cost me $180 plus $25 for the integration amplifier, and a few hours of splicing wires. This gives me a nice 5" screen, voice recognition (not as good as Google's, but few are), excellent bluetooth speakerphone with automatic audio ducking during phone calls, MP3 and video player if I car to, etc. I did pay $50 for one map update... not for life, but "expected life of unit"... well, pretty much the next 100,000 miles in my 2003 Prius, so maybe another map update or two in time.
On the other hand, if I had already had the DROID, I would not likely have bothered installing the Pioneer. Google Nav IS that good. While you do lose satellite views if you lose the wireless link, it does cache the route before you go. So you keep navigating if you lose coverage, or if a phone call comes along (they don't call it "Evolution Data-Only" for nothing, the 3G protocol on the DROID). If you get to your destination and have no data link, THEN you're screwed. The Google Nav team is apparently planning something to help here in the future.
They do, but only because it helps perpetuate the telco's control over you. They list the phone at $600, and you can pay $200... or even $100... that pricing is pretty plastic (I paid $100 for my DROID, out of pocket). They make it really easy to get a nice pocket computer, but they also know that schlepping these things around, they're lucky to last two years (in the case of an iPhone, the non-replaceable battery doesn't last two years except for casual users). So they'll get you next time.
Meanwhile, you're locked into a contract. You can break it, sure, but they not only have the termination penalty, but you have to pay off that expensive phone.
The bottom line: this prices are a total fiction. You can track this by looking at the devices. Entry level "free" phones these days cost about $20-25 to manufacture, soup to nuts. They list price is usually about $200. Any normal CE product would be around $50. Or take the iPhone... lists at $500-$600. But go to Best Buy.. they have the iPod Touch starting at around $200-$225... same device with about $40 in parts chucked out (cellular modem ~$30, bluetooth chip ~$3, microphone ~$1, etc.)
All the rumors were that Google was going to change this. They didn't.
Obviously, beyond the USA, where telco bundles are not always the rule, things may vary somewhat. Of course, elsewhere it's worse... Canadians have to deal with 3 year contracts as the standard, even given that the industry is only building devices with a 2-year life expectancy.
DVI was better than HDMI in some computer uses, simply because it was a transitional form... it can carry analog and digital signals. HDMI is digital-only. In fact, HDMI is signal compatible with DVI... HDMI 1.3 can run to pixel rates beyond those of DVI, but any single-link DVI output can run into an HDMI input (there's a dual link HDMI cable, but no one uses it).
DisplayPort is better because, well, it's a computer industry standard. Most of the computer world has an uncomfortable relationship with HDMI... they're supporting it here and there, but it's a consumer standard after all. The most practical advantage of either DisplayPort or HDMI is connector size -- the connectors are small. DVI connectors are huge. DisplayPort 1.2 actually supports higher bandwidth than HDMI 1.3... not a huge issue unless you're using more than 8-bits per color in your signals and/or going beyond 2560x1600. That's actually more interesting than it might seem, given that digital film is transitioning to the 4K format (4000x2000 nominal pixels), which isn't really supported by any of these interfaces quite yet. Ok, 4096x2160/24p is supported in HDMI 1.4... that's technically 4K, as long as you're just content with a 2D movie (I guess I'd be happy with that).
The other advantage for computers: DisplayPort includes a very fast 2-way protocol... HDMI 1.4 also supports a slower 100Mb/s Ethernet connection, and a few other new bells and whistles. DisplayPort is royalty-free... the PC world HATES paying the $0.04 per port HDMI royalty. Unlike DVI but like HDMI, DisplayPort supports an audio link. It also supports a much, much harder encryption scheme, DPCP, based on 128-bit AES, rather than the intentionally simple (read: low cost) HDCP protocol.
The slightly ugly secret about DisplayPort is that full speed links are limited to 2m. It drops down to a lower display rates for runs up to 15m (at least 1920x1080/60p).
No, Toslink (Toslink actually refers to the connector... the rest is the Sony/Philips standard, which is S/PDIF run into an LED) is not capable of full HD audio. This is optical driven by LEDs over plastic cables, keep in mind... it can mange Dolby Digital 5.1, which is run at below stereo PCM rates, or DTS, which is run at PCM rates. But you need eight channels of PCM at 24-bit/192kHz to fully support Blu-Ray over a digital cable. It's true that the ADAT Lightpipe protocol used these same plastic cables (with a shorter maximum length) to deliver 8 PCM channels at 24-bit/48kHz, but that's a different data protocol. And will definitely fail over many common consumer cables.
No HDCP support, but the consumer Toslink standard only supports CD or compressed DVD quality anyway. The HDCP rules require downrezzing of HD audio to CD quality when sent over non-secure links. So optical works just dandy, within the range of its capabilities in the consumer world.
I'm a A/V wizard (audiophile has such "another one born every minute" connotations) and I totally agree.. for the average consumer, the TV makes a great hub. And while the manufacturers do seem to be cutting down on the support for ports in monitors, I have seen no such evidence of this happening in full televisions.
The one thing I do miss is an audio chain output from the TV. Ok, my current Samsung has a Sony/Philips optical output, but that's just silly on a TV with HDMI inputs -- I need PCMx8 audio chain output. Years and years back, I had one of the first televisions designed to be used with external amplification, from Techniques (Panasonic's slightly higher-end audio division). This had a full audio chain output, so the TV could remain the video switching hub if you wanted it to be so. In most systems not using the TV speakers, the amplifier has to be the switching hub, which is confusing to consumers. And easily prevented.
But aside from that, the trend is clearly for more ports on televisions.
Yeah, that's a crime... and if you're paying $8.00 on line, you're getting a pretty long cable, or you're overpaying. Try Monoprice.com.... they even do volume pricing.
There's a simple reason for the $100+ cables at Best Buy -- they have determined customers are smart on some issues, stupid on others. They will price shop to get the best deal on the HDTV. But once they're getting that, they go slightly insane, and spend hundreds on accessories, like $100 cables (actually, Best Buy has one for over $130 last I checked, and it's only like an 8ft cable) and extended warranties they'll never use. So they generally make up the margins they actually want, without losing the sale to online vendors with more honest pricing (well, some of them).
Oh, settle down... televisions all have analog inputs still: CVBS, Y/C, YPrPb, probably even VGA. Sure, in Europe, you pronounce that "SCART" and just hope your favorite of the many SCART interfaces is implemented on your new piece of kit (don't start with me, I designed video devices in Germany back in the late 1990s... SCART was a mess, even then, even if it did occasionally work well). Hell, I have all of these, as well as the HDMI's, on my dual 24" monitors. At least in the USA, the demand in new TVs is more ports... all the legacy ports, and as many HDMIs as they'll give you.
That's kind of silly anyway... most folks with more than an HDMI device or two are going to be switching HDMI though a digital amplifier anyway... I haven't used the audio in my media room TVs for 20 years... long before I had an actual "media room".
It's the computer folks who are making it all digital-only now. They're cutting back on LCD monitor prices so much, it's getting hard to find "TV" input options on computer monitors, even VGA is a dying interface. Ironically, they're also rapidly switching to 16:9 panels made for cheap HDTVs, rather than the 16:10 panels of a year or two ago.
And if you want to get complex on the consumer's buttocks, try to explain to them why all the companies doing extended control protocols (eg, control your Blu-Ray player on-screen on your TV over HDMI) are doing this all proprietary now. This was actually a done, completed, and working deal over Firewire, about a decade ago. I plug any of my Firewire cameras into my TV -- not one is a Samsung -- and control them just dandy with the OSD. So yeah, there's plenty of bad behavior here, but on actual TVs, it's not the collection of ports, at least not here in the USA. Even craptastic LCD my wife bought for the kitchen has VGA, HDMI, and all the regular TV analog ports.
Actually, maybe you're thinking "Web 2.0"... the original point of the Web was hypertext document sharing. There was absolutely no concern for moving horsepower from clients to servers.
And this kind of horsepower isn't about displaying a web page, it's about displaying a video. Any AVC video is going to be an issue without the right combination of hardware and software for playback, on any device. That doesn't mean it's the wrong answer. Or that Flash is necessarily the right way to do it. It does absolutely suggest that allowing web browsers to use the OS-level support for any given video CODEC, where available, is going to be critical to proper web video playback.
In the early days, there were a number of video player attempts that did their decoder in Java (in the days when Java was a built-in on most browsers, not a plug-in). They failed for these same reasons: you couldn't build an efficient enough decoder in Java alone. There's no HTML5 problem per se, but many implementations are going the same way, insisting on the video decoder be built-into the browser, and ONLY built-in. These are going to run like AVC on the Mac today, rather than being barely an issue, as I see AVC on my system with a properly accelerated player.
Yup. But it's very nicely accelerated in hardware. There are even Netbook solutions that can play back full 1080p AVC... not many, but they do exist. When using Microsoft's new H.264 CODEC (Windows 7) and DXVA 2.0 on a nVidia 8800GT on my Q9550 (Quad Core at 2.83GHz), I'm seeing about 12% CPU... 1080/60p video. It's about half that on 1080/60i video. Software-only players are challenged at playing this sort of video back glitch-free on this machine -- ok, not bleeding edge anymore, but still faster than most people use. Whatever the reasons, if you're not using AVC with video acceleration, you ought to have a problem.
And that is just video... the rest of Flash is no big deal.
Adobe was expressing their displeasure with the very, very small numbers of Macs being sold in those latter PowerPC days, combined with Apple's emergence as a direct competitor to Adobe on the Mac platform (matched Adobe 1:1 on many content creation applications: Video NLE, DVD Authoring, Audio Sequencer, etc.). Once Apple got on Intel and boosted their sales, it was much less effort on Adobe's part to support the Mac, and money does speaks well about such things.
Right.. and its only ever their version of Javascript. You can write a browser for the iPhone, as long as it's also using WebKit, also using their Javascript engine, and otherwise doesn't violate their space. But it can't multitask in the limited way theirs does. But hey, I guess add-on browsers can give you tabs or something.
Not so much. Most consumers have no idea that Apple's this controlling, and really don't get the limitations. At first. In time, some do.. that's why many iPhone users are switching to Android devices. Android will be the inevitable winner in this contest, and Apple's policies are only helping that happen sooner.
Customers complain about the lack of flash, Apple's control of things, the flakiness of the network, etc. But they still buy new iPhones. So this is entirely a straw-man argument... Apple is not protecting users from Flash in the least. They're protecting their iTunes store profits, that's it, all she wrote.
Apple cares far more about their potential bottom line than they do about empowering the user. Way, way more. They have always seen Flash as a means to subvert the notion that Apple controls and generally gets paid for every application that on the iPhone. If you're playing a Flash game on the iPhone, you're not playing an iPhone native game... despite the fact the two could be identical playing experiences.
This is a general rule, it's not just Flash. Apple will not allow any other means of programming the iPhone from the outside. Well, other than Javascript. Their Javascript -- you can't sell a replacement, even if it's 10x faster (well, Apple themselves might be interested, or Palm, given their standard SDK is based on Javascript, HTML and CSS). You can't buy Commodore 64 or Nintendo emulators, for the very same reason -- my desire to run Commodore BASIC 2.0 games from 1983 on my smart phone is overridden by the fear that prospect instills in the Apple PTB (eg, Steve Jobs). Apparently, Commodore 64 games would be so wildly popular on the iPhone, they would stop all game sales and ruin Apple. Or some-such.
Apple would not be held responsible for stupid Flash sites or Commodore 64 games lack of quality control. And it's not as if Apple is all that much about quality control on the apps they approve, anyway -- they still have issues, there are still very poorly rated apps in the iTunes store.
As for "computer"... yeah, the iPhone is very much a computer. So are DVD players and Microwave ovens these days. The iPhone proports to be an application processing computer.. the same basic class of computer as a PC or a PDA, even if the particulars are different. The thing is, unlike most other such devices (PCs, Macs, Android devices, Palm WebOS device, Windows Mobile devices, etc) there are two kinds of applications on the device: those from Apple, and those from everyone else. Apple's can multitask, live as daemons, etc. All others are one-shot deals. So while I can, say, play music on museek or Pandora on my DROID while I write an email or play a game or look up something on a map, one can only do that with Apple's media player on the iPhone. As a developer, you are always second class. The customer is rather treated like #2 on the iPhone as well.
You have your iPhone supporters all over.. I have at least one in the family, sad to say (and she's got a PhD from Stanford, so hey, whadda I know?) But here, I would expect them to be far less common. I think most people here value computing freedom and actually do understand the issues. There's no place for an iPhone in that universe.
Firefox could just support system video CODECs, even as a fallback for anything it doesn't have installed. Though I'd probably rather run an OS-tuned version of any particular CODEC than the generic one in Firefox. Even if the MPEG-LA said "just kidding", closed down shop, make all their patents go away, and went off to join a hippie commune in Oregon, you're still probably better off running the AVC CODEC that's built-in on your OS than the one they want to build into the browser. They're caving on this stance for Fennic, simply because no Smart Phone or other small device would handle AVC at all without video acceleration, much less handle it low-power. But go to 1080p, and the same is true of much of the PCs today.
Google doesn't care that much about the storage requirements. Where they're vulnerable is the actual video streaming... bandwidth is still very expensive. They're storing the video only once (well, up to three times I suppose, based on the resolution options), but they're streaming them hundreds or millions of times. If they switched to Ogg Theora, despite the claims of the Theora people, they would need more bits per unit quality. That's expressed in very real cash numbers for any big video site like YouTube.
In fact, this may be why Google bought On2 last year. On2, for anyone paying attention, created the VP3 video CODEC upon which Ogg Theora was originally based. And the VP6 CODEC that was used sometimes in flash video before AVC began to dominate. And the VP7 and VP8 CODECs. This last one claims to outperform AVC substantially, at least on low bitrate video. If true, that could mean free money for Google. At least assuming it's not a burden to play back on average PCs, and they stick to 720p and below.
Or you just run Chrome instead of Firefox. Or the Flash plug-in.
Yeah, you can add plug-ins, but unless it's possible to add additional types via a plug-in (maybe it is, I don't know the details of Firefox's internals well enough), HTML5 web sites will fail back to their default. Which is probably same AVC file in a flash wrapper... that's actually the simplest thing available to web authors, particularly since most of the video is already AVC.
HTML5 was supposed to be the thing that gets rid of Flash, but they totally screwed it up. I don't have any problem with allowing different CODECs, but there should have been one agreed-upon standard. None of the folks involved were willing to budge... the open source folks were not backing away from Ogg Theora. Various others were not willing to risk Ogg Theora (it MAY be patent free, but hasn't been tested, and there's no organization taking the heat if any patents do emerge), and they were already using AVC. And in particular, the coding efficiency of Theora (based on On2's open sourced VP3 CODEC) just doesn't compare to that of AVC. Google's already hurting on YouTube's bandwidth expenses... changing to Theora would make a bad situation worse.
That's probably, in fact, why they bought On2. On2 claims their VP8 CODEC outperforms AVC at low bitrates... Google could save a bundle if they got people to switch. They could also actually solve the problem, if they decided to just give it away. You never know.. that's just what they did when they bought Android.
I wouldn't advocate adding plug-in per se to enable other forms of video. But I mean, this IS the 21rst century -- every major OS already has a video subsystem in place. If you can't agree upon the browser's built-in, at least support the OS's CODEC interface as an option. Most people would use that anyway, and here's why. I have a bunch of different video players on my PC. With a recent version of VLC, using its own internal AVC CODEC (multithreaded but not accelerated) I see about 50-65% CPU, aggregate, on my Q9550 machine running Windows 7 64-bit. If I run that video on stupid old Windows Media Player (which, on XP, couldn't even begin to play this sort of video), I see 12% CPU, give or take. This is using DXVA 2.0 video acceleration on a decent graphics card (nVidia 8800GT). CODECs built-in to open source browers are unlikely to tap native hardware acceleration... those present in the OS probably already are.
Now, yeah, the Firefox people are rejecting the idea of using OS-resident video CODECs, claiming they're not reliable, and that users will blame Firefox for this problem. I believe this is the same reason Firefox isn't using the TCP/IP stack, the file system, the graphics drivers, etc. present in modern operating system. Oh, wait, they are... great, now I know who to blame for those Windows 7 bugs. The end result of this will, of course, be that users just leave Firefox behind. That's a real shame... Mozilla has done such a nice job of repairing the damage of the latter days of Netscape, both in market share and, at least for awhile, resuming the lead on web browser features (though Opera's been in there too... I found both tabs and bookmark sync in Opera first). I'm sure Google would love to take up the slack, but it would really be a shame for Firefox to go down on a point of religion rather than technology.
Hell, they could always ship it with "use external video CODECs" disabled in Preferences. And sure, it'll be a month before someone releases a mod, or (eek) plug-in to enable that feature, anyway. But the end result will be that Firefox users are still using Flash for video, if they don't largely jump ship for Chrome.
And even if they do, there's absolutely no reason for Linux to be affected by this. I can run Chrome and Opera in Linux today. That capability isn't going away. Sure, pretty much all Linux distros come with Firefox, but then again, all Windows "distros" come with IE, and yet, anyone who knows what they're doing gets Firefox, Opera, or Chrome as perhaps thing #1 to do once you're on a new Windows install. Firefox might go the same way, in time. Or just keep using Flash.
The Movie Principle. In Westerns, the bad guy draws first, the good guy wins. In cop/action movies, the bad guy always has the Uzi, the good guy always has the handgun. Unless he took an Uzi from a bad guy, of course.
Also, in many action films, the good guy is a secret superhero, like James Bond or Jack Bauer. He can be hurt, sometimes, but cannot possible be killed. So of course he can use a single handgun to fight off an army of bad guys with Uzis or other heavy weaponry -- he is invincible.
.. in Westerns, the guy who draws first is always the bad guy. And the bad guy always loses. Easy.
But this isn't remotely new. Consider a Samurai battle. Two Samurai might face each other for hours, without actually striking, waiting for an opening. Any attack inherently offers an opening, particularly when you're using the same two-handed sword for offense as well as defense. In "A Book of Five Rings", Miyamoto Musashi teaches the concept of alway remaining focused but relaxed in an encounter, and counter-attacking simultaneous with the original attack. This is used very heavily in Aikido, which is a martial art based entirely on defense/counter-attacks (I practiced it for five and a half years).. you basically blend with the motion of an attack, hopefully making the attack ineffective. Sure, it's much harder to learn than some other martial arts, and we don't get to break boards. But we do get to practice with weapons.
Of course, Musashi also created niten'ichi, the two sword technique (one katana, one shorter sword, the wakizashi, which were originally recycled from broken katana). Even better to defend and counter-attack at the same time.
That's a very good point... not only do drivers need to be licensed, but cars have to pass a variety of safety tests, or they're not allowed on the road. I think, long before there's any license to use the internet, there will need to be high standards of internet "vehicles". Windows is very clearly "unsafe at any speed", and needs to be immediately taken off all internet connections, until such time as the manufacturer can complete recall work to render it safe for the information superhighway.
.. a driver's license to release operating systems. Think of all the time and effort the world would have been spared, had Microsoft actually had to study up on this, fail several times, and MAYBE get their learner's permit at some point. It would have eliminated MS-DOS and, while I think the NT kernel would pass fine, we would have been spared the horrible arcane way the Windows GUI works.
But I think he really means an internet fingerprint... any activity you do online can be uniquely traced back to you. That's what this clown is really talking about. Only, like a "license" it works two-ways... not only can you be traced, but you can be blocked, based on your ID, as well. Maybe, er... "passport" is the word he was looking for. Oh, yeah, that's right.. this is the guy who was pushing Microsoft Passport years back. Also the one who was going around in the early 00's and maybe late 90's attacking the FOSS movement every chance he got.
So, I retract "clown" and replace it with "ass-clown". No reason to listen to him about this any more than anything else the guy's ever had to say. When he talks, it's in an attempt to make money for Microsoft at the expense of the public.
... it's that the basic point... eBooks are SUPPOSED to kill paper books. Or at least replace them, for those who use eBooks. Who will more every year, particularly once the proprietary formats fail and eBooks can be ready by every eBook reader.
As for Hardcover prices... well, there's a difference between the quality and longevity of a hardcover versus the paperback. That's the only true value of the hardcover book. The rest is marketing... the early release... like seeing a film in the theater now, or waiting for the DVD or Blu-Ray later... or the HBO presentation later still.
But that's not true of an eBook... there is virtually no cost of duplication, far cheaper to make than paperbacks. And more restricted, at least with DRM; you can't resell them, or lend them in any real way. You may not be able to annotate them, either. Thus, much less value than a paperback, in the same way that MP3 and AACs are of lower value -- the product itself, then a CD. Some value may be regained at the point-of-sale; they're sold in other ways: singles and impulse... I can buy a piece of a CD, and have it right now. That keeps the basic individual price relative high.. and yet, I've still managed to buy whole MP3 albums on Amazon for $2-$4 each. Which is about the right value, versus an $8-12 CD, or $15-$20 SACD or DVD-Audio Disc.
It's understandable that the publishers don't like this, in general. For one, they understand hardcovers and paperbacks, but can't quite get their heads wrapped around an eBook as being something different. They want it to be a hardcover, Amazon wants it to be a paperback, but delivered at about the same time as a hardcover. I think, in reality, this is a different form, and needs to be treated as such. For one, there are lots of publisher's expenses associated with a hardcover: printing fees, distribution, in-store kiosks, maybe shelving fees, etc. All of these, at the very least, should be subtracted from the retail price and the publisher's piece of the book sale. Otherwise, they're going to be using this as a trick to increase revenues, even though they're performing significantly less of a service.
And in fact, that's the real issue here. The book publishing industry has never been quite as abusive of "the talent" as the record industry, but they still want the bulk of profits if they can get it. If I buy a book, it still lists the author's copyright... most CDs will claim a copyright by the record company, despite their being just another kind of publisher. This has resulted in push-back by artists, some self-publishing, some going all digital or mostly digital. That works, particularly for established artists (Prince, Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, etc). The rise of eBooks will enable this same route by writers. Maybe not for awhile.. the eBook reader is a relative new thing, but already at some level of acceptance due to the use of general purpose computers, just as the walkman and similar personal stereos laid the ground for an easy acceptance, then dominance, of the MP3 player/PMP.
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I'm every-so-slightly older, and never had much use for just a phone. Other people want to call me; I'm not going to make that many phone calls.
A networked pocket computer, on the other hand, makes a tone of sense... I may not have grown up on cell phones, but I started learning to code when I was 12 (not that easy in 1973... fortunately, my Dad let me use his department's Cyber72 over the weekend, dial in to Bell Labs in Holmdel). A year later, I was hacking around on UNIX, System III I think it was.
Even for slightly older folks here, I doubt this all that unique... there's far more value in "pocket computer" than "pocket phone". I tried to love the Palms, years back. They were passable PDAs and pretty awful phones, but very bad doing the web thing. Android seems to have fixed all of these things... it's hard to imagine not having a DROID in my pocket these days, even if I sometimes only use the phone for 10 minutes a month.
Kind of expensive.... but if you just wanted the GPS, it sure beats an extra $30/month. Incidently, Garmin's map supplier is NAVTEQ... who is owned by Nokia.
I have a dedicated Pioneer unit in my car -- on dash, but also integrated into the audio system. It cost me $180 plus $25 for the integration amplifier, and a few hours of splicing wires. This gives me a nice 5" screen, voice recognition (not as good as Google's, but few are), excellent bluetooth speakerphone with automatic audio ducking during phone calls, MP3 and video player if I car to, etc. I did pay $50 for one map update... not for life, but "expected life of unit"... well, pretty much the next 100,000 miles in my 2003 Prius, so maybe another map update or two in time.
On the other hand, if I had already had the DROID, I would not likely have bothered installing the Pioneer. Google Nav IS that good. While you do lose satellite views if you lose the wireless link, it does cache the route before you go. So you keep navigating if you lose coverage, or if a phone call comes along (they don't call it "Evolution Data-Only" for nothing, the 3G protocol on the DROID). If you get to your destination and have no data link, THEN you're screwed. The Google Nav team is apparently planning something to help here in the future.
They do, but only because it helps perpetuate the telco's control over you. They list the phone at $600, and you can pay $200... or even $100... that pricing is pretty plastic (I paid $100 for my DROID, out of pocket). They make it really easy to get a nice pocket computer, but they also know that schlepping these things around, they're lucky to last two years (in the case of an iPhone, the non-replaceable battery doesn't last two years except for casual users). So they'll get you next time.
Meanwhile, you're locked into a contract. You can break it, sure, but they not only have the termination penalty, but you have to pay off that expensive phone.
The bottom line: this prices are a total fiction. You can track this by looking at the devices. Entry level "free" phones these days cost about $20-25 to manufacture, soup to nuts. They list price is usually about $200. Any normal CE product would be around $50. Or take the iPhone... lists at $500-$600. But go to Best Buy.. they have the iPod Touch starting at around $200-$225... same device with about $40 in parts chucked out (cellular modem ~$30, bluetooth chip ~$3, microphone ~$1, etc.)
All the rumors were that Google was going to change this. They didn't.
Obviously, beyond the USA, where telco bundles are not always the rule, things may vary somewhat. Of course, elsewhere it's worse... Canadians have to deal with 3 year contracts as the standard, even given that the industry is only building devices with a 2-year life expectancy.
DVI was better than HDMI in some computer uses, simply because it was a transitional form... it can carry analog and digital signals. HDMI is digital-only. In fact, HDMI is signal compatible with DVI... HDMI 1.3 can run to pixel rates beyond those of DVI, but any single-link DVI output can run into an HDMI input (there's a dual link HDMI cable, but no one uses it).
DisplayPort is better because, well, it's a computer industry standard. Most of the computer world has an uncomfortable relationship with HDMI... they're supporting it here and there, but it's a consumer standard after all. The most practical advantage of either DisplayPort or HDMI is connector size -- the connectors are small. DVI connectors are huge. DisplayPort 1.2 actually supports higher bandwidth than HDMI 1.3... not a huge issue unless you're using more than 8-bits per color in your signals and/or going beyond 2560x1600. That's actually more interesting than it might seem, given that digital film is transitioning to the 4K format (4000x2000 nominal pixels), which isn't really supported by any of these interfaces quite yet. Ok, 4096x2160/24p is supported in HDMI 1.4... that's technically 4K, as long as you're just content with a 2D movie (I guess I'd be happy with that).
The other advantage for computers: DisplayPort includes a very fast 2-way protocol... HDMI 1.4 also supports a slower 100Mb/s Ethernet connection, and a few other new bells and whistles. DisplayPort is royalty-free... the PC world HATES paying the $0.04 per port HDMI royalty. Unlike DVI but like HDMI, DisplayPort supports an audio link. It also supports a much, much harder encryption scheme, DPCP, based on 128-bit AES, rather than the intentionally simple (read: low cost) HDCP protocol.
The slightly ugly secret about DisplayPort is that full speed links are limited to 2m. It drops down to a lower display rates for runs up to 15m (at least 1920x1080/60p).
No, Toslink (Toslink actually refers to the connector... the rest is the Sony/Philips standard, which is S/PDIF run into an LED) is not capable of full HD audio. This is optical driven by LEDs over plastic cables, keep in mind... it can mange Dolby Digital 5.1, which is run at below stereo PCM rates, or DTS, which is run at PCM rates. But you need eight channels of PCM at 24-bit/192kHz to fully support Blu-Ray over a digital cable. It's true that the ADAT Lightpipe protocol used these same plastic cables (with a shorter maximum length) to deliver 8 PCM channels at 24-bit/48kHz, but that's a different data protocol. And will definitely fail over many common consumer cables.
No HDCP support, but the consumer Toslink standard only supports CD or compressed DVD quality anyway. The HDCP rules require downrezzing of HD audio to CD quality when sent over non-secure links. So optical works just dandy, within the range of its capabilities in the consumer world.
I'm a A/V wizard (audiophile has such "another one born every minute" connotations) and I totally agree.. for the average consumer, the TV makes a great hub. And while the manufacturers do seem to be cutting down on the support for ports in monitors, I have seen no such evidence of this happening in full televisions.
The one thing I do miss is an audio chain output from the TV. Ok, my current Samsung has a Sony/Philips optical output, but that's just silly on a TV with HDMI inputs -- I need PCMx8 audio chain output. Years and years back, I had one of the first televisions designed to be used with external amplification, from Techniques (Panasonic's slightly higher-end audio division). This had a full audio chain output, so the TV could remain the video switching hub if you wanted it to be so. In most systems not using the TV speakers, the amplifier has to be the switching hub, which is confusing to consumers. And easily prevented.
But aside from that, the trend is clearly for more ports on televisions.
Yeah, that's a crime... and if you're paying $8.00 on line, you're getting a pretty long cable, or you're overpaying. Try Monoprice.com.... they even do volume pricing.
There's a simple reason for the $100+ cables at Best Buy -- they have determined customers are smart on some issues, stupid on others. They will price shop to get the best deal on the HDTV. But once they're getting that, they go slightly insane, and spend hundreds on accessories, like $100 cables (actually, Best Buy has one for over $130 last I checked, and it's only like an 8ft cable) and extended warranties they'll never use. So they generally make up the margins they actually want, without losing the sale to online vendors with more honest pricing (well, some of them).
Oh, settle down... televisions all have analog inputs still: CVBS, Y/C, YPrPb, probably even VGA. Sure, in Europe, you pronounce that "SCART" and just hope your favorite of the many SCART interfaces is implemented on your new piece of kit (don't start with me, I designed video devices in Germany back in the late 1990s... SCART was a mess, even then, even if it did occasionally work well). Hell, I have all of these, as well as the HDMI's, on my dual 24" monitors. At least in the USA, the demand in new TVs is more ports... all the legacy ports, and as many HDMIs as they'll give you.
That's kind of silly anyway... most folks with more than an HDMI device or two are going to be switching HDMI though a digital amplifier anyway... I haven't used the audio in my media room TVs for 20 years... long before I had an actual "media room".
It's the computer folks who are making it all digital-only now. They're cutting back on LCD monitor prices so much, it's getting hard to find "TV" input options on computer monitors, even VGA is a dying interface. Ironically, they're also rapidly switching to 16:9 panels made for cheap HDTVs, rather than the 16:10 panels of a year or two ago.
And if you want to get complex on the consumer's buttocks, try to explain to them why all the companies doing extended control protocols (eg, control your Blu-Ray player on-screen on your TV over HDMI) are doing this all proprietary now. This was actually a done, completed, and working deal over Firewire, about a decade ago. I plug any of my Firewire cameras into my TV -- not one is a Samsung -- and control them just dandy with the OSD. So yeah, there's plenty of bad behavior here, but on actual TVs, it's not the collection of ports, at least not here in the USA. Even craptastic LCD my wife bought for the kitchen has VGA, HDMI, and all the regular TV analog ports.
Actually, maybe you're thinking "Web 2.0"... the original point of the Web was hypertext document sharing. There was absolutely no concern for moving horsepower from clients to servers.
And this kind of horsepower isn't about displaying a web page, it's about displaying a video. Any AVC video is going to be an issue without the right combination of hardware and software for playback, on any device. That doesn't mean it's the wrong answer. Or that Flash is necessarily the right way to do it. It does absolutely suggest that allowing web browsers to use the OS-level support for any given video CODEC, where available, is going to be critical to proper web video playback.
In the early days, there were a number of video player attempts that did their decoder in Java (in the days when Java was a built-in on most browsers, not a plug-in). They failed for these same reasons: you couldn't build an efficient enough decoder in Java alone. There's no HTML5 problem per se, but many implementations are going the same way, insisting on the video decoder be built-into the browser, and ONLY built-in. These are going to run like AVC on the Mac today, rather than being barely an issue, as I see AVC on my system with a properly accelerated player.
Yup. But it's very nicely accelerated in hardware. There are even Netbook solutions that can play back full 1080p AVC... not many, but they do exist. When using Microsoft's new H.264 CODEC (Windows 7) and DXVA 2.0 on a nVidia 8800GT on my Q9550 (Quad Core at 2.83GHz), I'm seeing about 12% CPU... 1080/60p video. It's about half that on 1080/60i video. Software-only players are challenged at playing this sort of video back glitch-free on this machine -- ok, not bleeding edge anymore, but still faster than most people use. Whatever the reasons, if you're not using AVC with video acceleration, you ought to have a problem.
And that is just video... the rest of Flash is no big deal.
Adobe was expressing their displeasure with the very, very small numbers of Macs being sold in those latter PowerPC days, combined with Apple's emergence as a direct competitor to Adobe on the Mac platform (matched Adobe 1:1 on many content creation applications: Video NLE, DVD Authoring, Audio Sequencer, etc.). Once Apple got on Intel and boosted their sales, it was much less effort on Adobe's part to support the Mac, and money does speaks well about such things.
Right.. and its only ever their version of Javascript. You can write a browser for the iPhone, as long as it's also using WebKit, also using their Javascript engine, and otherwise doesn't violate their space. But it can't multitask in the limited way theirs does. But hey, I guess add-on browsers can give you tabs or something.
Not so much. Most consumers have no idea that Apple's this controlling, and really don't get the limitations. At first. In time, some do.. that's why many iPhone users are switching to Android devices. Android will be the inevitable winner in this contest, and Apple's policies are only helping that happen sooner.
Customers complain about the lack of flash, Apple's control of things, the flakiness of the network, etc. But they still buy new iPhones. So this is entirely a straw-man argument... Apple is not protecting users from Flash in the least. They're protecting their iTunes store profits, that's it, all she wrote.
Apple cares far more about their potential bottom line than they do about empowering the user. Way, way more. They have always seen Flash as a means to subvert the notion that Apple controls and generally gets paid for every application that on the iPhone. If you're playing a Flash game on the iPhone, you're not playing an iPhone native game... despite the fact the two could be identical playing experiences.
This is a general rule, it's not just Flash. Apple will not allow any other means of programming the iPhone from the outside. Well, other than Javascript. Their Javascript -- you can't sell a replacement, even if it's 10x faster (well, Apple themselves might be interested, or Palm, given their standard SDK is based on Javascript, HTML and CSS). You can't buy Commodore 64 or Nintendo emulators, for the very same reason -- my desire to run Commodore BASIC 2.0 games from 1983 on my smart phone is overridden by the fear that prospect instills in the Apple PTB (eg, Steve Jobs). Apparently, Commodore 64 games would be so wildly popular on the iPhone, they would stop all game sales and ruin Apple. Or some-such.
Apple would not be held responsible for stupid Flash sites or Commodore 64 games lack of quality control. And it's not as if Apple is all that much about quality control on the apps they approve, anyway -- they still have issues, there are still very poorly rated apps in the iTunes store.
As for "computer"... yeah, the iPhone is very much a computer. So are DVD players and Microwave ovens these days. The iPhone proports to be an application processing computer.. the same basic class of computer as a PC or a PDA, even if the particulars are different. The thing is, unlike most other such devices (PCs, Macs, Android devices, Palm WebOS device, Windows Mobile devices, etc) there are two kinds of applications on the device: those from Apple, and those from everyone else. Apple's can multitask, live as daemons, etc. All others are one-shot deals. So while I can, say, play music on museek or Pandora on my DROID while I write an email or play a game or look up something on a map, one can only do that with Apple's media player on the iPhone. As a developer, you are always second class. The customer is rather treated like #2 on the iPhone as well.
You have your iPhone supporters all over.. I have at least one in the family, sad to say (and she's got a PhD from Stanford, so hey, whadda I know?) But here, I would expect them to be far less common. I think most people here value computing freedom and actually do understand the issues. There's no place for an iPhone in that universe.
Firefox could just support system video CODECs, even as a fallback for anything it doesn't have installed. Though I'd probably rather run an OS-tuned version of any particular CODEC than the generic one in Firefox. Even if the MPEG-LA said "just kidding", closed down shop, make all their patents go away, and went off to join a hippie commune in Oregon, you're still probably better off running the AVC CODEC that's built-in on your OS than the one they want to build into the browser. They're caving on this stance for Fennic, simply because no Smart Phone or other small device would handle AVC at all without video acceleration, much less handle it low-power. But go to 1080p, and the same is true of much of the PCs today.
Google doesn't care that much about the storage requirements. Where they're vulnerable is the actual video streaming... bandwidth is still very expensive. They're storing the video only once (well, up to three times I suppose, based on the resolution options), but they're streaming them hundreds or millions of times. If they switched to Ogg Theora, despite the claims of the Theora people, they would need more bits per unit quality. That's expressed in very real cash numbers for any big video site like YouTube.
In fact, this may be why Google bought On2 last year. On2, for anyone paying attention, created the VP3 video CODEC upon which Ogg Theora was originally based. And the VP6 CODEC that was used sometimes in flash video before AVC began to dominate. And the VP7 and VP8 CODECs. This last one claims to outperform AVC substantially, at least on low bitrate video. If true, that could mean free money for Google. At least assuming it's not a burden to play back on average PCs, and they stick to 720p and below.
Or you just run Chrome instead of Firefox. Or the Flash plug-in.
Yeah, you can add plug-ins, but unless it's possible to add additional types via a plug-in (maybe it is, I don't know the details of Firefox's internals well enough), HTML5 web sites will fail back to their default. Which is probably same AVC file in a flash wrapper... that's actually the simplest thing available to web authors, particularly since most of the video is already AVC.
HTML5 was supposed to be the thing that gets rid of Flash, but they totally screwed it up. I don't have any problem with allowing different CODECs, but there should have been one agreed-upon standard. None of the folks involved were willing to budge... the open source folks were not backing away from Ogg Theora. Various others were not willing to risk Ogg Theora (it MAY be patent free, but hasn't been tested, and there's no organization taking the heat if any patents do emerge), and they were already using AVC. And in particular, the coding efficiency of Theora (based on On2's open sourced VP3 CODEC) just doesn't compare to that of AVC. Google's already hurting on YouTube's bandwidth expenses... changing to Theora would make a bad situation worse.
That's probably, in fact, why they bought On2. On2 claims their VP8 CODEC outperforms AVC at low bitrates... Google could save a bundle if they got people to switch. They could also actually solve the problem, if they decided to just give it away. You never know.. that's just what they did when they bought Android.
I wouldn't advocate adding plug-in per se to enable other forms of video. But I mean, this IS the 21rst century -- every major OS already has a video subsystem in place. If you can't agree upon the browser's built-in, at least support the OS's CODEC interface as an option. Most people would use that anyway, and here's why. I have a bunch of different video players on my PC. With a recent version of VLC, using its own internal AVC CODEC (multithreaded but not accelerated) I see about 50-65% CPU, aggregate, on my Q9550 machine running Windows 7 64-bit. If I run that video on stupid old Windows Media Player (which, on XP, couldn't even begin to play this sort of video), I see 12% CPU, give or take. This is using DXVA 2.0 video acceleration on a decent graphics card (nVidia 8800GT). CODECs built-in to open source browers are unlikely to tap native hardware acceleration... those present in the OS probably already are.
Now, yeah, the Firefox people are rejecting the idea of using OS-resident video CODECs, claiming they're not reliable, and that users will blame Firefox for this problem. I believe this is the same reason Firefox isn't using the TCP/IP stack, the file system, the graphics drivers, etc. present in modern operating system. Oh, wait, they are... great, now I know who to blame for those Windows 7 bugs. The end result of this will, of course, be that users just leave Firefox behind. That's a real shame... Mozilla has done such a nice job of repairing the damage of the latter days of Netscape, both in market share and, at least for awhile, resuming the lead on web browser features (though Opera's been in there too... I found both tabs and bookmark sync in Opera first). I'm sure Google would love to take up the slack, but it would really be a shame for Firefox to go down on a point of religion rather than technology.
Hell, they could always ship it with "use external video CODECs" disabled in Preferences. And sure, it'll be a month before someone releases a mod, or (eek) plug-in to enable that feature, anyway. But the end result will be that Firefox users are still using Flash for video, if they don't largely jump ship for Chrome.
And even if they do, there's absolutely no reason for Linux to be affected by this. I can run Chrome and Opera in Linux today. That capability isn't going away. Sure, pretty much all Linux distros come with Firefox, but then again, all Windows "distros" come with IE, and yet, anyone who knows what they're doing gets Firefox, Opera, or Chrome as perhaps thing #1 to do once you're on a new Windows install. Firefox might go the same way, in time. Or just keep using Flash.
Well, yeah, but "Yojimbo" was inspired by "The Glass Key" and by any number of John Ford Westerns.
“Mediocre writers borrow. Great writers steal.“ -T. S. Eliot
"The bad artists imitate. The great artists steal." - Pablo Picasso. Or was it Banksy?
The Movie Principle. In Westerns, the bad guy draws first, the good guy wins. In cop/action movies, the bad guy always has the Uzi, the good guy always has the handgun. Unless he took an Uzi from a bad guy, of course.
Also, in many action films, the good guy is a secret superhero, like James Bond or Jack Bauer. He can be hurt, sometimes, but cannot possible be killed. So of course he can use a single handgun to fight off an army of bad guys with Uzis or other heavy weaponry -- he is invincible.
.. in Westerns, the guy who draws first is always the bad guy. And the bad guy always loses. Easy. But this isn't remotely new. Consider a Samurai battle. Two Samurai might face each other for hours, without actually striking, waiting for an opening. Any attack inherently offers an opening, particularly when you're using the same two-handed sword for offense as well as defense. In "A Book of Five Rings", Miyamoto Musashi teaches the concept of alway remaining focused but relaxed in an encounter, and counter-attacking simultaneous with the original attack. This is used very heavily in Aikido, which is a martial art based entirely on defense/counter-attacks (I practiced it for five and a half years).. you basically blend with the motion of an attack, hopefully making the attack ineffective. Sure, it's much harder to learn than some other martial arts, and we don't get to break boards. But we do get to practice with weapons. Of course, Musashi also created niten'ichi, the two sword technique (one katana, one shorter sword, the wakizashi, which were originally recycled from broken katana). Even better to defend and counter-attack at the same time.
That's a very good point... not only do drivers need to be licensed, but cars have to pass a variety of safety tests, or they're not allowed on the road. I think, long before there's any license to use the internet, there will need to be high standards of internet "vehicles". Windows is very clearly "unsafe at any speed", and needs to be immediately taken off all internet connections, until such time as the manufacturer can complete recall work to render it safe for the information superhighway.
.. a driver's license to release operating systems. Think of all the time and effort the world would have been spared, had Microsoft actually had to study up on this, fail several times, and MAYBE get their learner's permit at some point. It would have eliminated MS-DOS and, while I think the NT kernel would pass fine, we would have been spared the horrible arcane way the Windows GUI works.
But I think he really means an internet fingerprint... any activity you do online can be uniquely traced back to you. That's what this clown is really talking about. Only, like a "license" it works two-ways... not only can you be traced, but you can be blocked, based on your ID, as well. Maybe, er... "passport" is the word he was looking for. Oh, yeah, that's right.. this is the guy who was pushing Microsoft Passport years back. Also the one who was going around in the early 00's and maybe late 90's attacking the FOSS movement every chance he got.
So, I retract "clown" and replace it with "ass-clown". No reason to listen to him about this any more than anything else the guy's ever had to say. When he talks, it's in an attempt to make money for Microsoft at the expense of the public.
... it's that the basic point... eBooks are SUPPOSED to kill paper books. Or at least replace them, for those who use eBooks. Who will more every year, particularly once the proprietary formats fail and eBooks can be ready by every eBook reader.
As for Hardcover prices... well, there's a difference between the quality and longevity of a hardcover versus the paperback. That's the only true value of the hardcover book. The rest is marketing... the early release... like seeing a film in the theater now, or waiting for the DVD or Blu-Ray later... or the HBO presentation later still.
But that's not true of an eBook... there is virtually no cost of duplication, far cheaper to make than paperbacks. And more restricted, at least with DRM; you can't resell them, or lend them in any real way. You may not be able to annotate them, either. Thus, much less value than a paperback, in the same way that MP3 and AACs are of lower value -- the product itself, then a CD. Some value may be regained at the point-of-sale; they're sold in other ways: singles and impulse... I can buy a piece of a CD, and have it right now. That keeps the basic individual price relative high.. and yet, I've still managed to buy whole MP3 albums on Amazon for $2-$4 each. Which is about the right value, versus an $8-12 CD, or $15-$20 SACD or DVD-Audio Disc.
It's understandable that the publishers don't like this, in general. For one, they understand hardcovers and paperbacks, but can't quite get their heads wrapped around an eBook as being something different. They want it to be a hardcover, Amazon wants it to be a paperback, but delivered at about the same time as a hardcover. I think, in reality, this is a different form, and needs to be treated as such. For one, there are lots of publisher's expenses associated with a hardcover: printing fees, distribution, in-store kiosks, maybe shelving fees, etc. All of these, at the very least, should be subtracted from the retail price and the publisher's piece of the book sale. Otherwise, they're going to be using this as a trick to increase revenues, even though they're performing significantly less of a service.
And in fact, that's the real issue here. The book publishing industry has never been quite as abusive of "the talent" as the record industry, but they still want the bulk of profits if they can get it. If I buy a book, it still lists the author's copyright... most CDs will claim a copyright by the record company, despite their being just another kind of publisher. This has resulted in push-back by artists, some self-publishing, some going all digital or mostly digital. That works, particularly for established artists (Prince, Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, etc). The rise of eBooks will enable this same route by writers. Maybe not for awhile.. the eBook reader is a relative new thing, but already at some level of acceptance due to the use of general purpose computers, just as the walkman and similar personal stereos laid the ground for an easy acceptance, then dominance, of the MP3 player/PMP.