I worked for NTL briefly over a decade ago, just when they were first trialling cable modems, there was talk then of the possibility of offering Ethernet to the Premises, but it it didnt and couldnt happen because of the infrastructure costs.

Those little cabinets at the end of each street, where the fibre optic network terminates, were made to fit exactly all the equipment needed at the time, there is no expansion room at all to add ethernet switches, or fibre switches, or well anything.

So they would have to rip out and replace all the cabinets on every street across the country in order to offer any terribly new or exciting services to the masses, something i dont see them doing anytime soon, if ever.

all video codecs decode to YUV data, as a result pretty much every GPU for over a decade has included hardware acceleration for handling that.

any sane person wanting to modify or overlay on that data would do so in YUV space, but not adobe, flash goes and hauls the entire frame over into RGB space, a big cpu hit in itself, then does its overlays, then expects the video hardware to help it with this rgb mode video it has, fail.

i dont care how much legacy code there is in flash expecting rgb mode, converting all you drawing operations to yuv (on the fly if necessary) and thus keeping the video data in yuv has got to be way way faster.

not doing this right is just plain laziness on adobes part, as has been pointed out.

Question 1:

Your phone can do "multitasking" -- explain to me what the advantage to this is? I mean, the advantage over the iPhone, that is - since the iPhone is obviously multitasking as it will play music, check your email, run a phone conversation, and allow you to launch any 3rd-party app, all at the same time. I suppose my question is, what real-world advantages have you seen with this "multitasking"

Heres a really simple example for you: MyTracks, a pretty easy to use GPS track log program you can get free off the market, i can run it, start it logging, and then do something else whilst it continues to run in the background.

Its not an application that needs my interaction other than to start and stop it, and i dont want to lock my entire device up doing that simple task all on its own.

I think its almost on the right lines, but the tux part is too much.

What you want is one of those trendy lifestyle type adverts, show a young trendy person going about their daily trendy lifestyle, interacting with various things along the way, phone, laptop, ATM, etc etc. Then go back and point out that every single thing they used was running Linux.

There are a number of successful brand advertisments like this already, that in essence are telling you "you too can have a cool life like this, and product/company $foo is what makes it happen"

If its voluntary self certification that he is suggesting, then he is over a decade late. I was adding ICRA content ratings to my websites back as early at 1997. It's the end users choice then if they want to set their filtering software to block it or not.

Oh, the other "problem" is that it is manual transmission. Slushboxes suck up fuel economy like most people don't even believe.

Technology has moved on you know, Semi-Auto boxes, its basically a manual box with a computer controlled clutch and shift mechanism, the manufacturers claim that in full-auto mode these get BETTER fuel economy than the equivalent manual in average driving conditions, as the computer wont run the engine at higher revs/gear combos than is actually needed.

Having driven a manual all my life i find myself now just leaving this in full auto mode, its right most of the time, and when i know something it cant anticipate, like a hill coming, i just flap the appropriate paddle and it changes gear at my request and carries on. If it ticks you off (i thought it would but it never has) you can just switch to manual mode and change gear up/down yourself.