So is a web browser, which is exactly my point.

That's why I don't want every random site creating its own app. When I said those words, it was in the context of a general-purpose mobile app, not a niche app for a single small website.

Web browsers on mobile devices don't provide facilities for downsampling the images, though, which makes standalone apps rather useful for sites that rely on photo uploading over slow cellular connections.

CPU/GPU integration is for farmers, to paraphrase Seymour Cray.

CPU/GPU integration has much lower latency than discrete a GPU. The HSA based AMD chips pass data from the fast, single threaded, fast branching core to the massive array of relatively slow FPU units in a few nanoseconds.

Which is why HSA benchmarks seem to work so well

http://www.tomshardware.com/re...
http://wccftech.com/amd-kaveri...

If you want fast comptuting, low latency comms is where it's at :)

MPEG-LA claims to have full H265 patent coverage, so it'll be decided in the courts if MPEG-LA can defend their H265 claims against HEVC Advance. My guess is that MPEG-LA knows what they've got and HEVC Advance is making a big show for shareholders. Technicolor already put it in their last quarterly earnings report that they had massive profit potential from their HEVC patents. To me this looks like a fake out by companies like Technicolor to trump up the value of their patents while MPEG-LA continues to do real business with reasonable terms. By the time Technicolor et-all's stock holders realize that they aren't making anything off of their ludicrous terms they'll have moved on to the next scam.

Not to mention bandwidth. How are you going to move 500TB to the cloud and back in a reasonable time frame? You're looking at several months even over a gigabit connection.

Sure there is. That's exactly what RSS [wikipedia.org] was made to do. Not only can you visit a site, get a feed, and add it yourself, but there are also applications that curate and categorize popular RSS feeds so that you can search for and add them without having to visit the websites first.

The problem is that RSS is one-directional. If I want to post, I still have to go back to a browser window and use whatever random, horrible, non-mobile-friendly interface the site designers came up with. And posting is usually the part where a native app would be beneficial; the reading part is easy by comparison....

And despite what you say, the facebook app is pretty much standard on every user's smart phone, and the app only shows content from facebook ...

... and is used exclusively by people who have accounts on the site. That's a completely different usage model than just going to a website and browsing it, which is to say that you didn't really contradict my main point with that example.

Facebook is also a bit of an exception because of the sheer amount of time that many people spend on it, the potential benefits of tighter integration with the operating system (background notifications), etc.

But for every exception, there are a thousand non-exceptions. Even though I have the FB app installed, I wouldn't really consider installing a Slashdot app; the way I interact with the site is completely different, with my FB interaction being a lot more active, and involving a lot more photo uploads and other such activities that web browsers do pretty badly in the mobile world.

During your rant, I couldn't help but think, 'But they DO have a standardized app for accessing all the websites', and it's called the browser!

The problem is, mobile devices don't handle web forums very well. Web designers don't design their themes with mobile devices in mind, resulting in text that's too small to read, text entry fields that are too wide for the screen, etc. That's not true for every site, but it is pretty common.

An actual native app, by contrast, is likely to be designed by people who actually understand the platform and its limitations, its screen size, etc. So potentially, if done properly, it can produce a much better user experience than a browser is likely to produce (though a browser could produce a similarly good experience if all the web designers took the time to design their sites properly for mobile devices... and I want a pony...).

Not really. My TV takes uncompressed data. Once an encoder is available, the only things that matter these days are whether the following things support the codec:

• Chrome
• Safari
• Firefox
• iOS
• Android
• YouTube
• to a lesser extent, OS X, Windows, and Internet Explorer

If you cover those, all other clients of the codecs are lost in the noise, so it is probably safe to use it on your own site for your own content.

It doesn't really matter at all whether the codec used to encode the content for delivery is the same as the codec used to encode it during production. In fact, I would seriously hope that 100% of video production is being done with a higher quality codec than the low-bitrate crap that is being used to deliver content over the 'net. Therefore, whether Mitsubishi et al choose to support a codec or not is mostly irrelevant.

In practice, only three companies actually need to work together to make such a patent-free codec happen: Apple, Microsoft, and Google. Firefox would quickly adopt any patent-free codec that those three got behind. That makes the entire rest of the industry pretty much completely irrelevant. Those three companies could mandate a transition to a new, patent-free codec, and the entire world would practically trip over themselves to make it happen.

So no, those industrial giants aren't really a problem. In fact, they aren't even relevant in the grand scheme of codecs except to the extent that the big three graciously allow them to be.

It is truly an epic fail to believe that some random visitor to your website is going to want to install your app just to read a piece of content—particularly if that user got there through a Google search. Yet for some reason, just about every forum out there pops up one of these idiotic app interstitials when I try to view some random post on their site. I didn't go there because I want to be a regular visitor to the site, which means I sure as h*** don't want to install their app just to read the tiny piece of content that may or may not even contain the information I need to do whatever I'm trying to get done.

The right time to ask a user to install an app is when the user creates an account on the site. Up until that point, the user is probably an infrequent visitor and is unlikely to want to install the app. Even at that point, the user may not want to install the app, but at least there's some nonzero possibility that he or she might.

Of course, the real train wreck is that there's no standard for making websites' contents available for app use, which would allow a user to install one reader that can read content on any of the dozen sites that he or she might be interested in. There's really no chance of me installing an app that only lets me read content from one website, because A. it is unlikely to be much better than viewing the website (because probably the same people designed it), and B. I already have more apps than I can deal with anyway. But if every website I visit standardized on a feed scheme, along with a common authentication system and a common reply system, I could see myself installing a single app that worked with all of them.

Here's a way that the government could be even less involved: don't DO that. Let people who want to show programs to a large audience find their own way to fund the production and dissemination of that material.

The courts, i.e. the gouvernment still has to enforce copyright in order for that to work. IOW, the government is always involved.

Say, by selling ads or attracting sponsors, etc.

Now you're under much more direct influence from the advertisers and sponsors. I'd argue strongly that under the current system the government has less influence over the BBC than advertisers and sponsors do on commercial channels.

Why should someone who doesn't want to fund a given program be forced to, under penalty of being dragged through court? I have zero interest in watching our many all-sports programming options (ESPN, etc).

Because we as a country thing that's the best trade-off. I've yet to see evidence that we're wrong. As a taxpayer, you have to fund all sorts of things you're not interested in. If you don't want to watch anything live, then you don't have to pay the live broadcast fee. You still get to enjoy the entire back catalogue via iPlayer, and in fact all the other channels offering on demant stuff.

You think the "best system we have" is for the government to be the enforcer in an arrangement where I'm forced to give them money anyway?

Yes.

And (I'm guessing you're American), but American TV does not exactly convince me otherwise. Sure you have some great shows (much better on the whole), but your TV services are woefully uncritical of the government, unless it's along very strictly partisan lines. I have never, ever seen anything like this on American TV:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uwlsd8RAoqI

If you don't watch it, that's an interviewer on BBC news in the biggest time slot giving a very senior serving politican a very hard time indeed. The politician keeps weaselling out aswers and the interviewer simply does not accept. After being asked the same question again and again and again, the politician runs out of weasel words and finally admits what he did.

And this is not like the partisan screeching you get on Fox News. That is what a good news service ought to be doing.

The argument "tax is bad" is not enough to convince me of your arguments. Taxes are the price of civilisation, after all.

Ah, so in Britain the government isn't involved in tax collection and enforcement.

What's that got to do with the BBC? You have to buy a licese if you wish to receive live broadcasts.

The BBC gets to collect the fees, which they outsource to Crapita. If crapita find you are doing unlicensed things, and can collect evidence, they can then send that evidence on to the CPS. If you're dumb enough to (a) watch live TV without a license and (b) let the Crapita people in to collect evidence then you'll get prosecuted. If you tell them to eff-off, there's nothing they can do.

or have any say, whatsoever, over how that money is allocated.

Nope. The BBC keeps the money (actually, Crapita keep the money, and they pay the BBC a fixed fee), and get to do whatever they like with it. Of course there's a corporate charter etc. The only lever the government have is to change the license fee which essentially controls how much the BBC gets. The BBC, like the NHS is a rather sensitive topic, so this is not something they do lightly.

TL;DR you are mistaken. The BBC is not allocated funds out of the general budget. The mechanism for collecting of funds is purposefully kept separate from general taxation precisely do the government has little control over the BBC.

That is an interesting system indeed! Who handles all of that, if not the government?

Now you know: the money isn't allocated from taxes, so the government doesn't handle it. And yes it is a good system. It's not perfect but it's the best we have. It's freer from government influence than other funding mechanisms and also free from corporate influences, e.g. Sith Murdoch.

What kind of video editing tools out there support ogg vorbis

Well, given that very many games use ogg/vorbis for audio precisely because it's royalty free, I imagine there's a good commercial tools to deal with it. Fewer games use theora, but it's not nonzero and includes large ones like Diablo III.

But anyway what? Don't people edit in lossless then transcode to a lossy format at the end anyway?

She paid twice as much total for her Macbook as I paid for my Asus Zenbook

I'm curious about that. Last time I (well, my SO actually) bought a Zenbook (UX21 as it happens), it was very similar to the equivalent 11 inch macbook air. It was I think it was slightly cheaper but had a larger drive. The outer dimensions, and critically the weight were pretty much the same.

The main driving factor in spec/price seemed to be driven by who has most recently released a new model, the new models always being slightly better value than the old ones from other manufactuers as they seem to not alter the price over the life.

I know you mentioned training, but that's something of an optional extra. For anyone here buying for themselves, Apple laptops are a similar price to other PCs of a simialar spec. And by spec, I mean the full spec including weight, screen quality and build quality, not just the MHz :)

The UX21 however at the time ran Linux much more smoothly which was what sealed the deal and as a bonus had a superior range of ports, including native VGA which is actually really useful on the conference circuit as most projectors still seem to be VGA---and when there are options the VGA ones seem to be more reliable. Digressing, I think that's because they're wired in and VGA has a much longer cable throw and the projectors are expensive and old, so have worse support for the newer standards.