Like you already hinted yourself, for many people it really is much more useful to devise and implement a clever 'cheat' than to just blindly repeat some mathematical trick the way the teacher wants you to repeat it. There's all kinds of real-world skills involved cheating your way through the common math exercises taught in schools, which usually teach students no more than how they have to jump through hoops.

As an example: myself, I have never been a big star on maths in school, because I found deriving stuff by hand or simplifying goniometric expressions to be extremely boring and pointless. I did (and do) understand the fundamental concepts behind them, but I didn't (and do not) know from the top of my head what the derivative of x^2*log(2x+1) is, and if I ever need to know, I'll just fire up Mathematica. Because I consistently slacked on my math exercises and homework, I got low grades and no satisfaction from mathematics at all.

Now, eventually I chose to go to college and study Computer Science at a university famous for their extremely theoretical, formal CS curriculum, I got my MSc without any major problems, and I got a job writing very complex and very specific simulation models full of FFTs, (non-) linear regression, computational geometry, curve fitting etc. Turned out that skills like being able to find and understand relevant literature, decomposition of problems, and thinking in abstractions, and most importantly: communicating with people who are experts on the theory, are much more important than learning a few tricks so you can show the teacher how to 'prove the quadratic formula' (read: repeat some symbolic gibberish you might not even understand).

If everyone was destined to be a mathematician or a teacher, learning all these tricks and details might be the most useful way to teach mathematics. In reality, most people will only ever need to be able to understand the basic theory behind math concepts, and asking them to prove all kinds of random stuff, derive expressions by hand, rewrite and simplify expressions, it does not help them at all, and it is more likely to scare them away from mathematics completely.

You are fooling yourself if you still believe in that 'Apple cult' crap by now. Of all the people I know who use Apple products, maybe one or two could be described as having a 'cult-like dedication to Apple', and then I would be including myself just so I can come up with more than one example. Most of them just buy stuff because they like the way it looks and works, and because they hear their friends say good things about them. With over 90% 'high or very high' customer satisfaction, Apple doesn't need any 'cult-like dedication', the word-of-mouth marketing from their users already does half the PR for them, and the main driver behind that is customer satisfaction.

Now, of course you could argue that the customer satisfaction numbers that Apple scores are inflated, and that this 90% of satisfied users all have Stockholm syndrome, or a simply bragging to each other because they like to pimp their gadgets, but that simply doesn't make any sense at all. No company can keep up selling polished turds for over 10 years and still have the whole world think their products are great while they aren't. You might be able to pull that off once, using sufficient hype and a big marketing push that distracts from the downsides of your product, but if it actually sucks and is not worth it's money, you'll be out of business within 1 or 2 generations of your product. Nobody buys a polished turd twice.

In my perception it's more often Apple's competitors that try to create hype and distraction to sell inferior products to a loyal following of customers who don't want to buy anything made by Apple, out of principle. I'm not implying that includes you yourself, but when people don't seem to be able to get passed the 'Apple cult', 'sheep', 'buy everything with an Apple logo' or 'believe everything their god Steve Jobs tells them', it usually means someone is trying too hard to justify their own, personal preferences, without having to acknowledge that they are 'different' from what most 'normal' people enjoy in their tech purchases.

My last job was writing software that was tested/deployed to Solaris/SunOS (yes, the really old version) on sparc and x86-64, FreeBSD 4 and 5, 3 different Linux distro's (Redhat, Fedora Core and Ubuntu on the development workstations), on 3 different architectures (x86, x86-64 and itanium) and HP/UX on PA-Risc. You could say a pretty large subset of common Unix systems and platforms.

To extend the scope of our regression testing at one point we included OS X on PPC (since we didn't have any other PPC machines) just to see if it would be easy and if it would catch some issues masked on other OS's. It took 1 day to get all the build scripts adapted for OS X (which needed customizations for *every* OS we supported), and the complete source base except for some ancient Tcl/Tk GUI worked right away. Over 10 million lines of C and C++ code.

Over the years we've had that OS X machine it was one of, if not *the* system that needed the least tweaking or working around non-standard C/C++ standard libraries, Unix userland differences, compiler problems, etc. The HP/UX was the worst with the ancient compilers, the Solaris machines came in second with their masochistic userland and compatibility libraries that are installed in a million locations different on every system, the Ubuntu and Redhat systems were easiest, but OS X and BSD were not far off.

So yes, I can attest that OS X is a perfectly capable OS for Unix development, even if you go much lower-level than Python. If you manage to break code that runs perfectly fine on BSD or Linux, but not on OS X, 99 out of a 100 times it's because your code is dodgy and you are simply 'lucky' it didn't break on other Unixes yet.

Wow, this must be one of the funniest things I've read on here in a long time. The iPad basically defined the whole market for consumer-tablets, and the iPad 2 simply widens that gap even more. It's been released publically and in great numbers before any of the Honeycomb tablets, it trounces all of them in terms of specs (except for some very minor details) AND price, it's a product that actually works and is finished, not a half-baked rush job, and it has a library of applications that is literally somewhere in the neighborhood of 1000 times larger than Honeycomb. Of all the other competing tablets running other OS's, none of them have materialized beyond vaporware. Yet here you are, claiming that Apple is playing catch-up, and the iPad 2 is very much 'me too' compared to the Xoom, which has no applications, weaker hardware, higher price, is running half-baked almost beta software that doesn't even support all of its hardware features, the ones Motorola actually got around to actually adding instead of just advertising with them (such as 4G and Flash). And then they say 'Apple fanboys' are living in a reality distortion field... :-S

The iPhone 4 is almost a year old and the iPhone 5 will be around in a month or 3. Yet, even without dual core, it's still snappier than any of the very few Android handsets on the market that have a dual-core CPU (I think there are only 2 or 3 available right now, I know just the Atrix 4G and the LG x2). Vritually no Android applications make any use of the dual-cores at all by the way. Which leaves your argument with just a stupid gimmick like 3D and a network technology that's more marketing fluff than an actual performance specification. Over here, Vodafone will be upgrading their 3G network to support 28 Mbps speeds, while that '4G' thing you are talking about (which in fact is just a name for a handful of different technologies, some of which are not even '4G' by definition) is hardly faster than 7.2 Mbps 3G in many areas.

The GUS sound blaster support (it was emulated, by the way) was terrible and didn't work properly in many games. When games started to go to Windows the GUS was basically dead, because Gravis never managed to write decent drivers for it, which had something to do with the fact that the GUS did not support DMA streamed audio or something. It's wavetable/sequencer-based design was basically almost fundamentally incompatible with the way Windows sound drivers were supposed to work. I never managed to get decent WIndows performance out of the GUS under Windows with the experimental drivers Gravis released but stopped developing before they actually worked.

Which was a shame, because I always loved my GUS, back then it was without any doubt the best soundcard for wavetable sequencer music, and years ahead of the competition. I did buy a Gravis Ultrasound MAX after that, which had a secondary SB16 compatible chip (an ESS Maestro something) for Windows sound.

Yes, it rings the 'someone comparing totally unrelated things based on flawed assumptions and drawing nonsensical conclusions'-bell.

You can like or hate Apple any way you like, but they are not locking you in or out of non-standard proprietary document formats or secret API's in any way, in fact they use open and commonly accepted and interchangeable formats and technology almost everywhere. Just because they lock down iOS for various reasons you might not like, but that do make a whole lot of sense from Apple's perspective, doesn't automatically carry over to anything. In terms of openness, standards compliance, power-user abilities and customization, OS X is not much different from e.g. most linux distributions.

It's not Apple turning into an evil empire, it's the irrational fear for successful entities that drives the popular antipathy towards Apple these days.

Charlie Miller is the kind of fireman who doesn't mind screaming FIRE! in a theater every now and then, just so he can make a point to stress his own relevance extinguishing fires. Every time anything is published on OS X security, this guy is quoted along with some title of some books he wrote. He might know a lot about OS X security and the way you could theoretically exploit it, but that's hardly a measure how secure OS X is compared to other operating systems.

Every time I read an article that brings up the 'small market share' that makes OS X 'less attractive to malware writers' I know I can safely disregard anything in it. People have been saying this for decades, meanwhile OS X market share has almost quadrupled, many Mac users are the kind of people with disposable income and credit cards, yet *no* viruses *whatsoever* have *ever* managed to succesfully exploit Macs. Not a *single* one. No matter how much bigger the Windows market share is, you'd expect at least one or two prolific malware writers to give it a shot, just to make a point, or to make a market out of the 10% of Macs already out there.

Both articles linked are just like that. A summary of security features OS X doesn't have, and/or a list of 'critical security flaws' and how fast they are solved, and a concluding remark that 'OS X users do not have to worry _yet_, because OS X market share is still not high enough for it to be interesting'. We'll talk yet another decade from now and see how many OS X viruses have surfaced in the mean time...

Flash video: yes. Flash animation: no.

The whole point of the anti-Flash thing is that no-one should _need_ a Flash plugin just to wrap a video stream in a container, on a device that can play video just fine without said plugin. That includes Android. Flash games and animations will always be inefficient and clumsy compared to native implementations. I can understand Flash developers go crazy if they can't use their favorite development environment, but I've never understood why some end-users have come to think that more Flash content is a good thing for them. The sooner Flash dies, the sooner everyone will have more native applications that perform better than the heaps of 'write-once, deploy everywhere' crap that Flash is used for 9 out of 10 times.

I believe that nothing of what you've said is actually true, just more of the same old H264 fear mongering you see a lot on Slashdot.

The royalty scheme includes payments for commercial encoder/decoder writers, subscription services that make money from hosting H264 video, and hardware manufacturers that include H264 playback or encoding in their devices. If you shoot a movie using an H264-capable camera, the cost of the royalties will already be absorbed in the hardware, and will be somewhere in the neighbourhood of $0.10. If you re-encode to whatever other format you like to avoid H264 royalties, nobody is stopping you or charging you, except maybe the encoder writer (who will again factor the ~$0.10 H264 royalties in the price of his product). If you want to distribute your movie using a medium that uses H264 encoding (Blu-Ray disc for example) you will have to negotiate terms with a publisher anyway, which will cover a license to use the Blu-Ray disc format. This is no different from publishing on DVD, VHS or whatever other distribution medium. You can choose to distribute VP8 discs if you like, but you'll likely sell zero of them, because first of all nobody can play them with their home theatre sets, and second, the quality will be utter crap since VP8 was never intended for high-bitrate video in the first place.

So you can have your Kool-Aid like everyone else spreading horror stories about H264, but the fact of the matter is that it's just another piece in the long chain of technologies you use to shoot, produce and distribute video that you didn't invent and implement yourself, and therefore have to indirectly pay a small fee for. The MPEG-LA royalties are in fact very reasonable, they only apply to *profitable* use, you only have to pay them above a certain amount of *profit* you make from your movie, they have an upper-bound to the amount of money you have to pay, and in terms of 'cost per unit sold' they translate to a marginal negligible of the typical resale value of the item you are selling. There is no, I repeat *no*, levy on a not-for-profit H264 video you shot and encoded using licensed H264 tools and want to host on a website.

[quote]You've misunderstood it. The licensee, and only that licensee, loses all rights forever if _they_ make any VP8 patent claim against anyone.[/quote]

The legalese in the VP8 licensing terms is pretty dense so I'm not pretending to be able to see it for what it's worth, legally, but the way I read it, it says something along the lines of 'if you facilitate any patent litigation suit against VP8 you will loose any right licensing or using it'. Signing a patent cross-licensing agreement with MPEG-LA to be able to continue selling your VP8-products when the shit hits the fan might very well constitute 'facilitation of patent litigation against VP8' since you'd be pretty much acknowledging VP8 infringes MPEG-LA patents if you did that.

Anyway, the risks alone will prevent manufacturers from investing millions (if not billions) of dollars in VP8-based products anyway. Compared to just ponying up the H264 royalties and getting a better codec that is safe from patent claims in return, going the VP8 route makes no sense at all from a business point of view. Which is exactly why Google is acting royally stupid here, trying to force sub-standard technology under the pretense that it is 'free' and 'open', but not wanting to take responsibility for it when it turns out they are wrong.

Agreed. And I do have some evidence to back up why you're right. On my 11 hour flight yesterday the plane was crowded with people using their iPads, and they all seemed extremely satisfied with them. The couple in the isle next to me had one each and have been watching movies on it almost the entire freaking flight, all on a single charge, and surprise, without hearing a single complaint about how the 4:3 aspect ratio was bothering them or whatver. People were playing games on them, having fun, showing off stuff and just enjoying it in general. Somehow I don't have the impression they would have been happier with a Galaxy Tab or some other nerdy Android device with no tablet-optimized stuff whatsoever available for it.

So does or did this whitelist ever contain the default Android browser?

How did they 'irrevocably give up their rights to enforce their patents' any more than MPEG-LA 'giving up their rights to levy royalties for non-profit use of H264'. In terms of hypothetical scenario's for getting screwed as a non-profit customer, Google and MPEG-LA are in the same boat.

As for the indemnification against patent claims, it's pretty obvious that you'd have to be epically stupid to invest heavily in WebM as a company, because Google is specifically saying (in the licensing terms of WebM), that as soon as you get involved in a patent lawsuit and try to settle so you can continue selling your products, the 'free' license you had on WebM will be revoked. Yes, that's true, go look it up: the licensing terms for WebM prohibit settling any patent infringement lawsuits, and Google will not help you out if you get sued because you make money off of WebM based products and it turns out WebM isn't so 'patent-free' after all. At least the MPEG-LA has a large patent pool that was specifically founded to protect the H264 format and the MPEG-LA members from patent infringement claims.

Oh really, because the way I'm reading it, node 3 and the other few people who don't seem to blindly ride the Google 'free', Google 'open'-train are the only ones that actually seem to be able to formulate any substantial arguments in this discussion.

Meanwhile, people like yourself, are stuck at hypothesizing how MPEG-LA will rape you, how WebM is somehow less proprietary or closed than H264, how throwing away billions of dollars of vested interest in the most advanced video coding technology is a good thing, how WebM is supposedly 'on par' with H264 in terms of encoding quality (it isn't, read up on the analysis of actual experts like the people behind x264', how WebM is somehow going to 'take over' because it 'is open' and 'will be improved by the open-source community' while it is in fact a spec set in stone and completely controlled by Google, and last but not least, how advanced technology like h264 is apparantly not worth paying for, because ripping it off, crippling it and then giving it away 'for free' to support a strategy of turning everything into an ad-supported illusion of 'freedom' is the way to go.

I tend to have an open mind about software patents, the advantages and disadvantages of both FOSS and closed-source software, and the value of technological innovation, but the way the FOSS crowd is cheering for Google here really makes me sick, it seems like every last bit of rational thinking disappears as soon as someone breaks out the 'free' and 'open' aspect. Filtering out all the arguments in favor of WebM that are bollocks, really only a single argument remains: it's free as in beer (for now). It's free as in beer, and it's crap, so we should prefer it over 'good and paid for' because 'free as in beer' sounds so much like 'free as in speech'.

I never thought I'd ever say something like this, but the way you and your likewise-minded co-posters here are arguing genuinely makes me hope MPEG-LA will soon file and win some patent suits against WebM, just to show how narrowminded and short-sighted the arguments in favor of WebM are, everyone can continue enjoying the most advanced video coding technology in existence, and the MPEG-LA can continue working on making it even better with H265, without having to worry someone like Google will again rip them off and repackage their work as 'open' and 'free' software.

Don't bother trying to come up with reasonable arguments in this discussion. I tried it with the last topic on H264 vs. VP8, and it didn't work. Just reading the majority of the comments in this topic makes me cringe, to the point that I'm starting to wonder why I ever started liking FOSS in the first place, because the discussion on this issue seems to imply that FOSS has become mostly about 'OMG everything has to be free in beer' and how every piece of patented technology is supposedly so trivial it should be unpatentable.

It's really sad how apparently the most rabid FOSS supporters, the ones commenting here, prefer ripping off other people's work, reformatting it and taking features out so they can sell it as 'open' and 'free' just so said companies can keep pretending their mission to turn the world in one big ad-supported 'free as in beer' world of crippled crappy technology. And that this is somehow better for anyone, compared to paying up to a reasonable licensing scheme to use an advanced piece of technology created by others, which cost millions to develop, instead of re-inventing the wheel badly. The amount of FUD about the supposed intentions of the MPEG-LA and the hypothetical things that could happen that would make 'the web' somehow 'closed' or 'proprietary' or would somehow trick us all into getting raped by MPEG-LA would have been laughable if it wasn't so terribly sad.