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Daring Fireball: The Original Tablet

I’ve long pondered why the Newton failed. I think it defies any simple explanation. Its problems and shortcomings were multivariate — it was a confluence of factors that led to it never really taking off. Ultimately the entire Newton product line was killed by Steve Jobs when he returned to the helm at Apple. I, among many others, would argue that the Newton could have still been saved. It certainly never flourished, but it wasn’t a total market failure, either. And Palm’s success in the 1990s proved that there was a market.

via Daring Fireball: The Original Tablet.

iPad Snivelers: Put Up or Shut Up

Nerds! You’re not smarter or better than the people who just want to use your creations for their own purpose. You want it both ways: to be able to complain about the incompetency of your family when you’re asked to help them work on their computers, but to swing around the half-understood ideas of dead authors when a company actually decides to build a computer that doesn’;t crumble to dust as a matter of course.

via iPad Snivelers: Put Up or Shut Up – Engineers – Gizmodo.

I posted something about the best quote ever that came from this article, but I thought this would be worth a second mention.

No, you can’t do that with H.264

The text could hardly be clearer: you do not have a license for commercial use of H.264. Call it “Final Cut Pro Hobbyist”. Do you post videos on your website that has Google Adwords? Do you edit video on a consulting basis? Do you want to include a video in a package sent to your customers? Do your clients send you video clips as part of your business? Then you’re using the encoder or decoder for commercial purposes, in violation of the license.

[…]

This last thing is actually a particularly interesting point. If you encode a video using one of these (open-source) unlicensed encoders, you’re practicing patents without a license, and you can be sued. But hey, maybe you’re just a scofflaw. After all, it’s not like you’re making trouble for anyone else, right? Wrong. If you send a video to a friend who uses a licensed decoder, and they watch it, you’ve caused them to violate their own software license, so they can be sued too.

via No, you can’t do that with H.264 « Digital Diary of Ben Schwartz.

HTML5 video and H.264

Unisys was asking some web site owners $5,000-$7,500 to able to use GIFs on their sites. Note that these patents expired about five years ago, so this isn’t an issue today, but it’s still instructive. It’s scary to think of a world where you would have to fork up $5000 just to be able to use images on a web site. Think about all of the opportunity, the weblogs, the search engines (even Google!) and all the other the simple ideas that became major services that would never have been started because of a huge tax being put on being able to use a fundamental web technology. It makes the web as a democratic technology distinctly un-democratic.

We’re looking at the same situation with H.264, except at a far larger scale.

via Christopher Blizzard · HTML5 video and H.264 – what history tells us and why we’re standing with the web.

Mass Effect 2 Review – AusGamers.com

If you played and loved Mass Effect, picking this one up is a complete no-brainer. Fans of regular shooters however, may want to exercise more caution. If you don't care much for sci-fi or don't generally have the attention span for drama and just want to blow stuff up then your mileage may vary, but if you love a good yarn this game should touch you in all the right places. With terrific script-writing, exceptional voice-acting and yet more substance added to an already wondrous Universe, Mass Effect 2 is as good as interactive storytelling gets.

via Mass Effect 2 Review – AusGamers.com.