matt hamann
musings from here to there
Friendship Baptist Church Gets a New Look!
0The folks over at Friendship Baptist in Raleigh, NC have finally launched a brand-new (and long awaited) update to their website! Designed and built by The Worthwhile Company, the new site completes another phase of the multi-year revamp of their web presence. Check out the great work!
Google and h.264. Hypocrisy? Hardly.
0For all of the people out there claiming that Google just wanted to make a “big announcement” on “Verizon iPhone day,” it sure has created quite the buzz. I sincerely doubt that was their mission, but if somehow it was, I’d say they succeeded. Big time.
But for all of the absurd tech pundits who seem to think that removal of h.264 is a bad thing, you’d think the world was coming to an end. But this really is a good thing! Especially for consumers!!
I mean, look at the facts…
- h.264
- Almost half (like 47%) of PC browsers in use on the web don’t support h.264. (Firefox, Chrome, Opera…the former two which are still climbing the market share charts)
- The two browsers that do support h.264 are IE 9 and Safari. IE 9 isn’t even really showing up on the usage charts at this point, and Safari barely holds 5% market share–doesn’t seem to be going much of anywhere.
- The MPEG LA strictly controls h.264 licensing. It’s currently able to be used “royalty free” to end users, but that clause doesn’t apply if the content encoded in h.264 is produced commercially. Encoders and decoders (hardware and software alike) are required to pay patent licensing fees. (One reason BluRay movies cost so much more than traditional DVDs)
- h.264 is a well supported codec among consumer electronic devices, and is a “standard” in terms of wide digital media and film studio use. Beyond the ITU group though (which really isn’t a standards body), the codec is not truly a standard–especially in the realm of the web, where there is no native support except via a Flash layer.
- h.264 is not an open standard or an open source project. In any way. Whatsoever. Period. Anyone declaring otherwise is either mistaken or lying.
- webm
- All of the aforementioned browsers (excepting Safari, of course) will fully support the webm codec.
- webm is an open source project, completely unencumbered by license fees
- It is fully supported by Google and too many other hardware and software manufacturers to list.
- While not a true web standard (yet), it is in line with the w3c’s philosophy and is backed by every major open-source browser vendor.
- It easily matches h.264 in both quality, speed, and efficiency (i.e. neither codec is superior to the other).
As I stated before, the above list is not my personal opinion, it is supportable fact.
Anyway, Google moving away from h.264 is great news for those of us who want an open, unbiased, unencumbered, and generally “free” web! Naturally, the people who support h.264 as a web standard are probably fans of communism and socialism too–just sayin’. It’s not that I’m against the format, just the philosophy behind it. If h.264 could shake the shackles of the MPEG LA and be completely open sourced, I wouldn’t have a problem supporting it whatsoever. But corporations are greedy, so I don’t see this happening anytime soon.
What about Flash, though? I’ve seen many articles and tweets criticizing Google for being huge hypocrites for not removing Flash support from Chrome as well. Unfortunately, most of these folks are mindless drones who have listened to the lies told to them by those with agendas…like, oh…a certain CEO of a major Fruit company. The fact is (and I’ve definitely addressed this in previous posts) that Flash is a web standard, is open-source, and isn’t a video codec. It’s a rich media file format that just so happens to support video in addition to a ton of other stuff. The part of Flash that isn’t open source, is Adobe’s content creation and playback tools. There’s not much stopping any other developer from writing their own open source Flash production tools. I suspect that they’d just have trouble selling it against Adobe’s gold standard products. Google is not being hypocritical at all! Especially since Flash will support webm as well as a plethora of other formats.
Here’s the thing about Flash. The main reason most content publishers are still using it (other than its ubiquity) is the fact that it supports content protection (read: DRM). I’m not a fan of DRM by any means whatsoever. In fact, that was my main complaint with the whole iTunes model earlier this decade. But DRM aside, if Google quit supporting Flash on Chrome, they’d be significantly limiting users’ web experience. There’s not much by way of native h.264 video on the web, so this point is moot. Examine Mozilla’s stand on the issue as well and a similar pattern emerges. They won’t support the majorly encumbered h.264, yet they built better support and security for Flash directly into the browser.
Bottom line: I won’t be supporting h.264 or any browser that does include native support. webm will become the dominant web video standard over the next decade and any who do not provide support for it in their hardware or software will be left in the 2000s. Face it: an open web is better for everyone.
Tablets are Dead
2Tablets. Who knew that they would do so well (relatively speaking) after failing (at least in the mainstream marketplace) miserably so many times before? Both Apple and Samsung will have shipped several million units by the end of 2010, and many people across the world have a tablet device prominently on their Christmas gift list. Certainly many analysts are ready to declare the market for tablets a roaring success. Because the devices have been so popular with consumers, many retail outlets are featuring them to (and pushing them at) consumers. Additionally, the market will get even more crowded as a new iPad, the Blackberry Playbook, and several Android tablets come to market in early 2011.
But apart from all of the hype, news articles written, and plans to produce various new tablet models in the near term, I honestly believe the market is doomed to eventual failure as just another passing fad. A fad off of which manufacturers may make multiple billions of dollars, of course.
That’s a pretty bold statement, I know–and certainly not one which I make lightly. But my argument is this: while tablets may be fun to use and convenient at certain times, they don’t really evolve the personal computer much, if at all. It’s more like a step backward. (I feel like I’ve said that before…)
Let’s look briefly at the evolution of the mobile phone. We started with huge bricks whose single purpose and capability was making phone calls. Useful, no? Well, as time went on, we saw these phones get smaller while adding new and better features like text messaging and limited web surfing. At the same time, we had the PDA market offering apps, calendars, contacts storage, to-do lists, and again–limited web browsing. But then we realized that a PDA combined with a cell phone would be sweet! And thus, the smartphone was born, and now we’re activating hundreds of thousands of them every single day. It was a natural marriage.
On the PC side, we’ve gone from huge room-sized computers to desktop PCs to ultraportable laptops, and with each iteration things continue getting better. In my opinion, the so-called netbook (or perhaps ultraportable laptops) are probably one of the best mobile computing devices out there. It’s still technically a laptop, but made to be as thin and light as affordably possible. Netbooks are great productivity machines–you can run a full office suite, gain access to an unlimited number of web applications, and even (if you dare) probably run software like Adobe Suite, Eclipse, Visual Studio, etc (not all at once, of course). The full-size keyboard makes most of those activities rather effortless. That’s so much better than the virtual tap-a-type keyboards found on tablet machines. Those things are pretty useless when it comes to actually getting stuff done. Netbooks don’t stop at productivity though. They also make great multimedia machines and low-end gaming devices!
My point is this: nearly anything a tablet can do, a netbook can do better. Now, there’s certainly something to be said for having a touch screen. I have to admit that some applications are inherently more satisfying when you can physically manipulate a device by touching it. That’s certainly cool and useful, but most of the time a keyboard and pointer are insanely more useful than a finger pushing stuff around on a screen. I think tablets and netbooks should converge into mostly netbook with a little tablet thrown in (i.e. a touchscreen that can be collapsed overtop the keyboard. Dell, Lenovo, and some other PC manufacturers are doing this already, and from what I’ve seen, it works quite well. That’s exactly where mobile computing should be headed. Not with limited, touch-centric OSes like iOS, Android, and Blackberry OS–but with full OSes like Windows and Unix with some touch-based enhancements integrated in. It’s been done before, but perhaps imperfectly. It’ll improve with time.
Basically, I don’t care how much money corps think they can make with tablets. I’d much rather they innovate and create truly useful experiences rather than spend time and money on limited use toys like the iPad and Galaxy Tab.
Okay, rant over. Feel free to drop your own two-cents in the comments below…
How Today’s Press Writes News Articles
0I am upset. No, rather–I’m ticked! Pretty much beyond words, but I’ll attempt to describe this continuing phenomenon anyway. Here’s the problem, in brief:
- Analyst (sometimes “reputable” and sometimes a nobody) or “random employee at company X” makes a statement about some product or service company X or Y offers.
- Somehow this statement ends up being on the record, or captured by someone (random person’s secretary?) who decides it belongs on the record.
- News pundits pick up on the statement, and write a “breaking” story on how The Company will succeed, fail, or otherwise be affected by product or service A, B, or C. In fact, sometimes these “reporters” seem to insinuate that the world economy will collapse in its entirety if The Company fails at releasing Product B by Date Z.
- In order to back up the “story,” the “reporter” throws in some statistics from here and there, plus some pseudo-facts from who knows where. You won’t be able to find the source, since news outlets just report so-called “facts” reported by other news outlets, who in turn get their facts from– yeah, you get it. It’s a vicious circle with no real beginning.
- Add out-of-context quotes from three other “analysts” and submit to the editor.
- Editor is busy playing Starcraft II and can’t be bothered. Clicks “Approve” on all stories in his queue.
- Article gets released. The world prepares to meet its bitter end on Date Z.
- Repeat.
Yeah, big problem! So how do we fix it? Easy–try this simple three-step formula.
- Fire every “business analyst” on the planet. They’re useless.
- Require every reporter to back-up each fact in their article with hard evidence. Not “so-and-so said such-and-such,” but real, honest-to-goodness fact. (e.g. “It rained yesterday.”)
- Attach every editor’s job security to articles they approve. For every approved article that contains factual errors, their salary is cut by 5%.
Done.
I’m to the point where I’m just going to stop reading the news. Life’s better without it, anyway…