I don't see how a choice that makes the web more open is a poor choice.

Google bundling Flash (proprietary plugin) but not bundling H.264 (open standard) makes the web more open?!?

Google being the sole vendor and owner of the WebM format (proprietary format) makes the web more open?!?

H264 is a poor choice because it's patent-encumbered

WebM is almost certainly infringing on patents as well.

An open technology which anyone can use, free of charge or fear of legal action.

It's open source. It's not an open standard. The "free [from] fear of legal action" remains to be seen.

Yes, the specs of H.264 are open. But so are VP8's.
...
As above, both specs are open

You don't know what "open standard" even means.

POSIX is an open standard. HTML is an open standard. H.264 is an open standard. VP8 is an open-source project.

Even worse, an open-source project with no industry support managed by a single company. Blind faith in OSS won't solve that intractable problem.

than how would you describe Apple and Microsoft's work to make sure the only way to play a video is the use of a proprietary format?

H.264 is an open standard. It has an ISO/IEC number. More than 30 companies contributed to its development; those companies come from a diverse background spanning hardware and software and content. By all definitions H.264 is as open a standard as POSIX or HTML.

Now on the other hand WebM is owned by a single company, which by its very definition means that WebM is proprietary.

The only difference is that WebM is open source. Woe betide the future of free software if the OSS spastics now believe open-source is somehow better than open-standards. Open-source software is nothing unless it follows open-standards. WebM as it stands now is just another proprietary piece of junk.

Stop defending software patents as being legitimate concepts in a debate over formats

If you live in the USA, UK, Europe, Australia, or most of the modern world where software patents are legally enforceable, then software patents are legitimate concepts in the debate. Your personal ideology notwithstanding, until the laws on software patents are changed they are most certainly relevant.

Anyone who does not approve of what they are doing right now either has a hidden agenda or did not understand the underlying issues.

What we actually have here is a single vendor (Google) trying to achieve market dominance in one technology by leveraging existing market share in another technology. Even worse Google is doing all this to destroy an actual open standard (H.264). The underlying issue is Google wants to dictate the video format for the Internet at the expense of open standards.

A single vendor. Their video format. Nobody else gets a say in the matter. Who would willingly cheer for that?

Anyone who does not approve of what they are doing right now either has a hidden agenda or did not understand the underlying issues.

Oh the irony.

You said that there is no kernel-level virtualization for Linux

No I didn't. You are a crazy person. Go be crazy elsewhere.

I said Linux has no direct equivalent to Solaris Zones. That statement is true, your foul mouth non-withstanding.

You should re-read the definition of strawman. You aren't using the term correctly.

The "in what ways it is better" question was answered 5 posts up. Your question was about direct equivalency. The fact that they have different implementations is all the proof you need that they are not direct equivalents.

Not a direct equivalent. OpenSolaris has a FAQ on this:

http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+zones/faq#HQArecontainerslikeLinuxvServers

OpenVZ and FreeBSD Jails are equivalent conceptually to Solaris Containers. The difference is the extent to which they've been implemented. Sun went the whole hog and made Solaris Containers "first class citizens". All the user space tools were modified to understand zones. All the documentation was updated. All the application suites were updated. They're not a ill-supported second-rate tack-on so you can tick the "we've got that" feature box.

If you want the analogy, it's like Microsoft saying "don't use Apache, we've got a webserver too" and pointing to IIS. In theory, true. In practise, bullshit.

LXC will one day be a zones alternative. Right now it's a pre-1.0 alpha with severely reduced functionality. I consider it basically unusable in its current form.

Same deal for BTRFS. One day it will be a ZFS alternative. Right now it's only for BTRFS developers.

Unless I am confused, "Zones" are virtual machines. If you think there is no equivalent, I guess you are not familiar with Xen or KVM, or the dozens of other VMs out there.

Yes, you are confused, which probably indicates your lack of familiarity with Solaris Zones.

Xen, KVM, VMware, Sun Logical Domains, and Sun Virtualbox, are all examples of hardware virtualisation. They simulate a hardware platform; a virtual machine. Each VM has its own kernel and scheduler and memory space and device drivers and virtualised storage.

Solaris Zones is an example of operating system virtualisation. There is no direct equivalent on Linux. There is a single kernel for all the zones. A single set of device drivers. A single process tree. Potentially a single storage system. It's extremely lightweight compared to virtual machines.

Thinking of Zones as "virtual machines" is simply wrong. They are more like process groups, or process sets, and in fact on Solaris they are implemented in part by using resource groups. There is virtualisation but it's not at the machine layer; that's why they're not virtual machines.

To illustrate the significant differences, on the same hardware that Xen can run 10 VMs, Solaris can run 100s of zones. Xen can lose 10% or more CPU to overheads, Solaris Zones loses less than 1%. Xen can lose as much as 90% of I/O performance, Solaris Zones loses less than 1%. Xen places restrictions on the resources available to each VM, Solaris Zones can gain access to the full resources of the hardware. Xen requires each VM to be patched and maintained separately, Solaris Zones are patched and maintained through the "host" OS.

These benefits are only possible because Solaris Zones are not VMs.

Absolutely. You have it 100% correct.

Take the comment I made below about a piece by Mussorgsky I'm learning to play. As written the tempo is largo with 3/4 timing. I've been experimenting by adding a half quaver delay to the end of each fourth bar. It conveys a slightly sadder feeling to the piece; as if the subject is exhausted and is pausing for breath.

On top of that I'm surging the tempo during a rising section near the middle. There are no written indications that the tempo should change, but it makes sense within the character of the piece. The only written indication is the dynamic rise; the change in tempo is my interpretation.

Other musicians (or students, I'm still a student, not a musician yet) will have different interpretations. That's what makes it music, rather than a repetitive action.

It most definitely is. Many modern or romantic pieces have ill-defined tempo; it is up to the interpretation of the musician as to how it should be played.

I'm just a student (a slow dim-witted student; my teacher has infinite patience) and I'm currently studying a piece by Mussorgsky. Throughout the piece the tempo surges and fades. None of this is written down. It's all interpretation based on my knowledge of Mussorgsky's style, my gut telling me how the music should "feel", and the sadness I'm trying to convey through the playing.

At my last playing I chose a fairly unusual interpretation of the tempo, with sustained pauses and dramatic rapid movement during a middle section. My teacher said strictly speaking I wasn't even close to what was written (true) but he liked my interpretation, saying it had a calm and peaceful quality.

I used to have a very naive understanding of music until I tried learning it in depth. I'm still fairly naive about it all - I'm only a student - but my eyes have opened as to how much room there is for interpretation. The music score is at best a guide.

So, do modern radios tune differently, or are you making a false analogy here? Is the antenna length critical for phones but not conventional radios?

It's not that critical. The antenna actually receives a fairly wide band of frequencies. Old radios use a resonant circuit to "vibrate" with the desired frequency. You adjust the resonance with a variable inductor (like you saw) or a variable capacitor (plates of metal that interleaved without touching). The antenna length isn't critical; it just has to be roughly right.

Modern radios use a technique called heterodyning. There's a local oscillator and some tricky electronics that combines the RF and the oscillator and then extracts the desired signal. It's more accurate and stable. The antenna length again is not critical. The maths behind a modern radio is graspable by anybody who can do basic trig.

Mobile phone radios are far more complicated. The maths is well beyond most people (some of it is still beyond me, and I have multiple university degrees, one of them in actual engineering). That's why I'm suspicious of anybody who claims to "know" the "fault" behind the iPhone 4 antenna. I'm especially suspicious of anybody who tries to explain that fault using high-school radio theory (e.g. they start talking about capacitance, inductance, or "shorting" an antenna). It's not that simple. Mobile phone radios have to cope with a lot of crap in the RF, and they do some very incredible things, so any explanation centred around a person's experience with AM or FM radio is borderline irrelevant.

tl;dr He is making a false analogy.