pedanticfreak

Google may eventually stop bundling Adobe Flash if it becomes obsolete, but there is no reason to do it out of spite. Plugins are a part of the web and are in line with Google's culture of extensibility. See also vendor modifications to Android OS. If anything Google will open up plugin autoupdates to more plugin vendors.

Google may eventually drop Adobe Flash if it becomes obsolete, but there is no reason to do it out of spite. Plugins are a part of the web and are in line with Google's culture of extensibility. See also vendor modifications to Android OS. If anything Google will open up plugin autoupdates to more plugin vendors.

It is far too late for Jobs' illness to have any effect on the iPhone 5. That product is practically done from a design standpoint if it is going to be in user's hands by July.

If anything the iPhone 5 will be largely similar to the iPhone 4 except faster and with an NFC chip in it. And yes, a dual CDMA/GSM radio which happens to come from Qualcomm.

I think he means C-style syntax rather than C family of languages. Java certainly is made to read like C and C++ more than anything else even if it is very different under the hood.

It depends on what you think is cheap. But Java developers that even know a little are doing fairly well right now. Java developers that know a lot can demand top dollar and there are tons more opportunities to earn that amount than with pretty much any technology.

Chrome is 100% compliant without extraneous h264 support. The HTML5 spec contains no requirement for h264. If you want to blame anyone then blame the W3C working group for not specifying a codec.

As of now h264 is on the same level as ActiveX and VBScript so you might as well ask for Chrome to support those, too.

Granted, in this respect WebM is not perfect either. But at least WebM is meets the criteria to be a part of the W3C spec without modification whereas currently h264 does not.

tl;dr Don't complain if Chrome uses WebM for <video>. My browser will only support Dirac and we're both right.

A more factual account of the medals:

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/about/medals/

The relevant excerpt:

Professor Bohr's Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen had been a refuge for German Jewish physists since 1933. Max von Laue and James Franck had deposited their medals there to keep them from being confiscated by the German authorities. After the occupation of Denmark in April 1940, the medals were Bohr's first concern, according to the Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy (also of Jewish origin and a 1943 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry), who worked at the institute. In Hitler's Germany it was almost a capital offense to send gold out of the country. Since the names of the Laureates were engraved on the medals, their discovery by the invading forces would have had very serious consequences. To quote George de Hevesy (Adventures in Radioisotope Research, Vol. 1, p. 27, Pergamon, New York, 1962), who talks about von Laue's medal: "I suggested that we should bury the medal, but Bohr did not like this idea as the medal might be unearthed. I decided to dissolve it. While the invading forces marched in the streets of Copenhagen, I was busy dissolving Laue's and also James Franck's medals. After the war, the gold was recovered and the Nobel Foundation generously presented Laue and Frank with new Nobel medals." de Hevesy wrote to von Laue after the war that the task of dissolving the medals had not been easy, as gold is "exceedingly unreactive and difficult to dissolve." The Nazis occupied Bohr's institute and searched it very carefully but they did not find anything. The medals quietly waited out the war in a solution of aqua regia.

The font problem seems to be localized to Chrome on Windows machines. Chrome on my Macbook renders the font correctly. The page still renders unusually slowly on the Macbook though.

Some of these games (e.g. Gates of Olympus) explicitly mention Firefox 4, so the stable build of Chrome might be "too old."

I have nothing meaningful to contribute, but I want to say this is a monumental step forward.

Some people here seem to predict this heralds the end of language education for most people. Maybe that's true. But I actually think this will contribute to earlier and more frequent exposure to foreign languages. And that may ultimately do more for language learning than compulsory education ever did.

Renders wrong in Chrome for me. Seriously guys? Good thing it's not an HTML5 gallery showcasing the benefits of open standards.

Now officially confirmed to be in iOS 4.3 Beta 1 which was released today.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/12/ios-4-3-beta-arrives-for-...

One way to monetize it is for standardized test preparation. Companies like Kaplan charge an arm and a leg for sample tests.

Likewise you could align the questions with common curriculums and sell separate fortifying study packs for primary and secondary school subjects.

I'd probably sell a 12-month pass to each individual subject for $1 and have a set of achievements for each that will drag you through a variety of questions multiple times to unlock them all. Hopefully you get the person to buy another subject the next semester and so on.

All of this requires actually studying the standardized tests and curricula and may need customization per state.

Your competitor in this space: http://www.ixl.com/

Looking at the actual jobs that get pulled up by clicking on "historian," it looks like they are incorrectly identifying engineering jobs that use a product called "Historian" or talk about "historian data" from monitoring devices as actual jobs for historians.

I would think even a rudimentary spot check would have caught such a glaring error before they published the article.

Credibility fail.

Flash and h264 are completely different and are not at all equivalent.

Google doesn't support Flash. Google supports BROWSER PLUGINS. And Flash is by far the most popular plugin to the point of being ubiquitous. Google CAN'T drop support for Flash without dropping support for plugins. Google could, symbolically, stop bundling the Flash plugin. But really they believe in an open plugin standard which allows for browser extensions.

By comparison h264 is more like a proprietary, out of spec superset of the HTML standard. Building h264 support directly into the browser is equivalent to supporting IE specific markup. Or maybe even ActiveX. It just exposes Google to patent suits.

The real problem is the W3C needs to recommend a codec for the HTML5 video tag. Until they do there is no chance for standards compliant implementations to exist because there is no standard. h264 is not a solution because it's not part of the standard. And it won't become part of the standard until it loses the patent encumberance.

The sooner these trade metrics are recalculated the better. The misinformation from bad trade data can be disasterous for economic policy and ammo for fruitless political infighting.

Money gets taxed multiple times. That's not the point. I earn $50. I pay taxes on it. Then I buy something from you for $30. You pay taxes on that $30. Then you buy something for Jim for $10. Jim is taxed on that $10 you paid him. That same $50 got taxed three times in my example and will continue to get taxed until someone stuffs what's left under a mattress.

To your second point: Yes, obviously corporations are owned by people. But nothing forces a corporation to pay a dividend. So if you don't tax the corporation itself, the corporation becomes a tax free investment vehicle. People would just keep everything in a corporation including investments, cash reserves, houses, cars, jets, yachts, etc.

I find Google's behavior to be sociopathic and Enron-like. While it's perfectly "legal" it is socially irresponsible. If Google wants to withhold monies because it thinks corporate expansion is better for society, it should withhold from its charitable contributions rather than its taxes. Otherwise pay your goddamn taxes. I pay mine, I don't want to pay Google's, too.

Keep in mind this freelancer is probably from overseas where the cost of living and wages are very different from the US. If this person is from India they would make a lot less working for McDonalds there.

On the flip side, in no other field can someone leave the university and expect a good job regardless of interest or talent in said field.

Do you know what happens to art or English majors that aren't desperately passionate about their trade? They are shift managers working retail.

A multiple choice test isn't the best way. But asking someone to write a real piece of software over a 4 hour period (a 'test' if you will) would be an extremely good interviewing method. Especially if you did it in something like EtherPad and can review the person's thought process afterward.

Regardless, I completely disagree that you can completely vet someone over a cup of coffee. Especially for highly competitive positions. That might be a good screening interview, but that is not enough to make a final hiring decision unless the person is already recommended.

It will probably be $20 per month on Verizon. That is what it charges currently for other phones.

Verizon did make this service free on the Palm Pre, so it's possible it could be free for the iPhone 4 as well. But I think that was more because the Palm Pre was unpopular whereas the iPhone will be plenty popular.

Totally untrue? So one country in Europe works therefore all the other countries do as well?

I would welcome more countries adding a plan like the one you described. But so far that's the only one I've seen.

By comparison the Verizon plan supports over 200 countries. You just go (after enabling Global Roaming, of course) and your phone recognizes the new towers automatically. You don't have to buy a new SIM card, hope this country's carrier has some kind of non-outrageous data plan, and so on.

I think SIM switching is works best for people who move to one place for reasonably long periods of time and know a decent number of local people they want to call/text. For example I know a few people who are from Taiwan who go back for a few months at a time to visit family. Getting a local SIM for those few months is really nice. But getting a SIM for France for a week then another SIM for Spain for three days and another SIM for Italy for a week. That's just a pain in the ass.

Two possibilities.

First, Google could go software only for older hardware. It will suck for them. But by the time YouTube phases out h264 there will be few of these and the latest hardware will accelerate both WebM and h264.

Second, there could be a way to utilize the h264 hardware decoder to work with WebM through a wrapper. The ffmpeg decoder for WebM is basically a wrapper around the existing ffmpeg h264 decoder already. I've never worked with decoders myself, but this at least seems plausible.

Regardless, I think bundling WebM software decoding along side h264 decoding in the YouTube iOS app is a no-brainer even if YouTube doesn't take advantage of it right away.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with the 4-hour test anecdote. But I think most people here would agree a warm body has more potential for harm than a cold seat when it comes to software developers. However you want to ensure you don't get a problem employee, whether it's with 4-hour tests or whatever, it is definitely a good practice regardless of how badly you need to hire someone.

Also, I completely believe that it's too hard to find good developers. I'm not sure if I've just been unfortunate due to industry or geography, but I know very few people I can recommend with confidence. And I have seen all kinds of mediocrity trying to pass as software developers. The places I have seen are the stuff TheDailyWTF is made of.

Don't switch. Period.

Android is a huge step up from Blackberry or Windows Mobile, but it is a big step down from iOS. Android lacks basic usability touches; the manufacturer customizations don't make things any better. Battery life is dismal. Additionally the system pauses all the time when performing basic tasks.

Some of these problems, I think, are fundamental to using a virtual machine for everything. The performance overhead is exacerbated by the less powerful mobile hardware. The garbage collection causes noticeable pauses. And more battery is used to accomplish less.

The other problems are rooted in design. Whoever was doing the UI for Google did not understand good UI. Sorry. Impressive looking UI elements waste space, get in the way, and actually slowed me down for no reason. Little iOS UI touches like the elastic scrolling that let you know you're at the end of a list are absent, making you wonder if you're at the bottom of the list or if the device is just taking a break to collect some garbage. I usually scroll repeatedly just to make sure whereas on iOS I see the bounce and I know I'm done immediately.

You're on AT&T. As long as you're happy with the service stay there and stick with an iPhone for now. Personally, I would not even consider another Android device until after 3.0 fixes some of the UI problems. And even then I have serious reservations about Android's technical fitness due to the VM.

I realize lots of people have all kinds of confidence in Android's technical fitness. People far more accomplished than myself. But whatever. The emperor has no clothes. It might be a good design for a portable OS, but it's not a good design for a mobile OS.

Actually they are equivalent. HTML5 video tag is codec agnostic. In this instance HTML5 includes to both WebM and h264 video over HTML5. Both are DOA.

So why support h264, which is scary and patent encumbered, when Google can give a little boost to its own WebM standard at no risk to Chrome's viability in the browser market?

I wonder if the dismal housing market and the rising demand for software will finally force corporations to figure out how to manage remote developers.

It's not like wages for the common programmer are going to keep skyrocketing until companies are buying your house to relocate your family.

Flash will support WebM in a future version. Additionally, Google could update the iOS YouTube app to support WebM in a future iOS version.

Once both reach sufficient market saturation YouTube will be able to completely switch from h264 to WebM.

Sometimes all of the profit is where you'd least expect it. $10 per month for VZNavigator? How much of that is really a cost to Verizon?

See also: extended warranties.

HTML5 video is DOA and Google might as well lay the groundwork for the next round. Major content providers don't support HTML5 video. Netflix, Hulu, and anyone else with intellectual property to protect want nothing to do with it. So we're going to need to keep our proprietary plugins and our proprietary apps through the HTML5 era. Even YouTube needs to stay proprietary.

So if HTML5 video is DOA, why support h264? Why be democratic when people are going to use Flash and Silverlight anyway? At least this way there might be a real push for the standard HTML5 video codec to be free and open source.

Crapware isn't an expense, it's a source of revenue. Think of it like the ads on Google's result page. Just another conduit for commerce the carrier and manufacturer use improve profitability.

Deciding to kill a source of revenue, whether it's more appealing to the consumer or not, becomes harder to justify when that source of revenue is paying off creditors and funding new development.