Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment If you can get a devkit, that is (Score 1) 372

If you can't find a place that suits you, start your own.

And watch suppliers decline to do business with your startup company because they don't like your lack of experience or they don't like where its office is located. For example, some makers of computing platforms lock down who's allowed to have a devkit, and they have a history of reserving devkits for the most experienced companies with traditional offices.

Comment Re:learn2English (Score 1) 175

If you don't like Google apps, buy a phone that doesn't bundle them

with a phone, when you buy it from a carrier, they put on all these extra apps that you don't need

You can start with your own post, where you will see the whining. Then read what I wrote, where you'll see the simple fix.

In some North American markets, especially those served by CDMA2000 carriers, it's either buy your phone from the carrier or get 0 bars. These carriers tend not to sell any devices that allow viewing web pages and loading user-made apps without Apple's walled garden or Google's alleged spyware. Is your "simple fix" doing without?

Comment Early lack of Google Checkout (Score 1) 175

The difference between iOS and Android in this respect was that during the Android 1.x days, manufacturers and carriers sold Android phones in countries where Google hadn't yet opened Google Checkout. This meant that in order to get an app into Android Market in any of those countries, the developer had to make the app available without charge. The common way to do that involved selling advertising space. This set price expectations on Android lower than they are on iOS, where Apple has made sure to open the iTunes Store in a country before selling iPod, iPhone, or iPad products there.

Comment Re:What? (Score 1) 175

No but it does tell you that the app will transfer data.

It's hard to find apps whose manifest doesn't request the INTERNET permission. Is there some sort of control within Google Play Store that would let the user filter apps by permissions?

If you're that worried about the amount of data transferred then use the application for a minute or two

Which would require first buying the app, after which point my ISP already has my money for the bandwidth used for downloading it, and Google already has my money for buying it.

Comment Emigrating isn't always practical (Score 1) 194

Transcoding isn't fun or fast. I'd rather have my files in such a format that I can actually use instead of some format that I would need to convert before being able to play.

If you archive a 4K video, you need to scale it down anyway before it'll play efficiently on a handheld device, no matter what codecs that device accepts. Besides, if you produced video, you may want to archive the source footage in its original format and a non-destructive edit decision list.

Also, my country does not have software patents, so h.264 is (legally) free to me.

But does it have anticircumvention legislation (DMCA, EUCD, etc.)? Besides, the process of finding a country with acceptable living conditions and visa requirements, finding an employer to sponsor a work visa, and finally moving one's family isn't practical for everyone, I understand.

Comment Licensed encoder for video editor (Score 1) 194

If you have a camcorder, the license to create h.264 is present as part of the camcorder. This includes phones and everything else people submit to YouTube, for example.

It doesn't include video game footage or anything else that's edited because as I understand it, the video editing software needs to have its own licensed encoder.

Comment Re:bad for standards (Score 1) 194

H.264 videos and H.264 decoding hardware has been used everywhere for almost a decade now.

Make it two decades and we'll talk.

we're on the verge of switching to H.265 which is about twice as good as H.264.

Not so fast though. When I made a similar point, people mentioned that video providers will continue because they have the choice of decoding H.265 in battery-gulping software or H.264 in battery-sipping hardware.

Comment If it's "unknown advertisement servers (Score 1) 194

It sounds like you want all scripts associated with an HTML document to come from the same domain as the document. Say a publisher (the operator of a web site on which an advertisement appears) ran its own ad server on its own domain (such as "ptb.example.com"). Would you be fine with that? Say a publisher established a CNAME for an ad network's server (such as "ptbgoog.example.com") and served ads from there. Would you be fine with that?

Comment Archiving your own or someone else's? (Score 1) 194

True, but if you save all your files in H.264, you are guaranteed an archival data format that can be read by software that won't suddenly stop working.

If you are archiving a video that you produced, what's the big advantage of H.264 over VP8? VP8 is rate-distortion comparable to H.264 baseline, and VP8 is free today. An archival copy needs to be read by software, not necessarily read by specialized hardware in a battery-constrained device.

If you are archiving a video that someone else produced, most streaming video providers have a policy of implementing technical measures to prevent just that, backed by national anticircumvention legislation.

Slashdot Top Deals

We gave you an atomic bomb, what do you want, mermaids? -- I. I. Rabi to the Atomic Energy Commission

Working...