Linked List: March 14, 2012

Wednesday, 14 March 2012

Chris Pirillo’s Dad Uses Mac OS X for the First Time ★

Nice follow-up to the piece where he gets lost trying Windows 8. Eye-opening to see how essential it is for him to get to the Google homepage to get anywhere else on the web. (Perhaps he’s a Firefox user, accustomed to Firefox’s default homepage, which is a Firefox-branded Google web search field.)

iPhone Becomes Bestselling Phone in Japan for First Time ★

Imagine how much better it’d be selling there if the Japanese didn’t hate it.

The Most Telling Sign that H.264 Is Still Rising in Prominence ★

Piracy groups have switched from Xvid to MP4/H.264 as their preferred format for bootleg TV episodes.

Gizmodo Reviews the Sony Tablet P ★

Brent Rose:

Should I Buy It?

No. Absolutely not. If it only cost $150 I would still say no, but that’s not the case. It’s $400 with a two-year AT&T data contract (which isn’t cheap) or a completely insane $550 off-contract. I really like that Sony was trying to do something different with the tablet form factor, but instead of getting best of both worlds, they got worst of both.

Trying something different is indeed a great idea. The problem is with companies that try something different, it turns out shitty, and they ship it anyway.

Told-You-So of the Day ★

Yours truly, back in January 2010:

The practical effect of Mozilla’s current position will not be to drive adoption of Ogg Theora. What’s going to happen is that Safari, Chrome, and even IE9 users will be served HTML5 video, and Firefox users will get Flash. Publishers will support both HTML5 video (for Safari, Chrome, and IE9 users) alongside Flash (for browsers that don’t support HTML5 and H.264) because they already have the Flash video publishing infrastructure in place, and because Flash can be used to publish H.264-encoded video. Publishers don’t have to encode (and store) video twice; they can encode (and store) it once and serve it two different ways. The sites that are the most popular — YouTube being number one, obviously — would bear the most expense to support an additional encoding format. It isn’t going to happen.

So, even those using the latest version of Firefox will be treated like they’re using a legacy browser. Mozilla’s intransigence in the name of “openness” will result in Firefox users being served video using the closed Flash Player plugin, and behind the scenes the video is likely to be encoded using H.264 anyway.

That was written before Google opened the VP8 codec and WebM Project — and it’s true that Google has since dual-encoded YouTube’s copious library in both H.264 and WebM. But I think my core argument was correct: by not embracing native H.264 <video> playback, Firefox users have been stuck with less-efficient H.264 Flash Player playback.

I suspect one factor driving Mozilla’s rethinking of its stance on this is that Flash Player’s future prospects have diminished greatly over the last two years. Then, there were many who believed in Adobe’s promise of a full version of Flash for mobile platforms. Now, even Adobe has abandoned it. Without Flash as a fallback for H.264 playback, Mozilla-based browsers for mobile platforms will need to either support H.264 playback natively, or eschew it completely.

How Yahoo Weaponized Andy Baio’s Work ★

Andy Baio:

I thought I was giving them a shield, but turns out I gave them a missile with my name permanently engraved on it.

I was naive. Even if the original intention was truly defensive, a patent portfolio can easily change hands, and a company can even more easily change its mind. Since I left in 2007, Yahoo has had three CEOs and a board overhaul.

The scary part is that even the most innocuous patent can be used to crush another’s creativity. One of the patents I co-invented is so abstract, it could not only cover Facebook’s News Feed, but virtually any activity feed. It puts into very sharp focus the trouble with software patents: Purposefully vague wording invites broad interpretation.

Some software patent suits are spiteful, some are just shitty, but some reek of desperation. Yahoo’s gambit feels desperate to me.

Yahoo Sues Facebook for Patent Infringement ★

Kara Swisher:

In what is either the boldest gamble of its history or the most boneheaded, Yahoo has filed a massive patent infringement lawsuit against Facebook.

Idealism vs. Pragmatism: Mozilla Debates Supporting H.264 Video Playback ★

Ryan Paul, at Ars Technica:

Google’s major investment in advancing its unencumbered VP8 codec gave open Web advocates hope that H.264 could still be displaced, but it hasn’t happened. The lack of follow-through from Google on its promise to remove H.264 from Chrome has eroded faith in the search giant’s ability to popularize VP8. Gal says that it’s no longer feasible to wait for the open codec to gain additional traction.

“Google pledged many things they didn’t follow through with and our users and our project are paying the price,” he wrote. “H.264 wont go away. Holding out just a little longer buys us exactly nothing.”

Exactly. Glad to see Mozilla rethinking their stance on this.

Here’s a quote from Firefox developer Justin Dolske, in a mailing list post:

We spent a lot of time and made a lot of blog posts about why H.264 was bad for the web. Leaving those who advocated for us suddenly high-and-dry doesn’t feel like the right thing to do.

“Idealism vs. Pragmatism” is exactly what’s going on here. Because as time goes on, the practical arguments in favor of supporting WebM exclusively over H.264 are looking worse and worse. No one is serving WebM. Everyone is serving H.264. And while Mozilla is both talking the talk and walking the walk with regard to their ideals regarding open video, their supposed partner Google is merely talking the talk, shipping a wildly popular browser (Chrome) and mobile platform (Android) that fully support H.264.