links for 2009-07-07

"The HTML 5 video element has the potential to liberate streaming Internet video from plugin prison, but a debate over which codec to define in the standard is threatening to derail the effort. Ars takes a close look at the HTML 5 codec controversy and examines the relative strengths and weaknesses of H.264 and Ogg Theora." Essentially no one standard for all browsers.

"New protests have flared in Urumqi, two days after 156 people died and 800 were injured in the western Chinese city. At least 200 Uighurs faced off against police in Urumqi on Tuesday following news that 1,434 people were arrested in connection with Sunday's riots. Trouble also spread outside of Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang, with protests on Monday near a mosque in Kashgar. Beijing blames ethnic Muslim Uighurs for the violence, but exiled Uighurs say police fired on students."

"First, the good news. Both Twitter and Flickr deleted our photos within seconds. Direct links to the photos in question broke after a quick hard refresh, so you can be sure that your salacious pictures mistakenly posted to Flickr while inebriated will no longer be accessible to your enemies (assuming they didn't copy them to their hard drives, that is). Facebook and MySpace, however, did not fare so well. As of this writing, both images we used are still available on Facebook and MySpace servers despite having been "deleted" in May. (For embarrassment's sake, here are my two photos that were deleted from Facebook and MySpace; depending on when you read this article, these photos may or may not still be up). " Good job Twitter and Flickr, bad job Facebook and MySpace.

I want a tricked out name tag too.

"It's two very different ways of attacking a problem. The academics attack it to gain new insights, while engineers attack the problem to solve it using currently available knowledge. It should be noted thought that engineers might also gain new insights while solving a problem, Lars Bak has for example 18 patents in VM technology."

"How fickle are kids these days? Just when all the grown ups started figuring out Facebook, college and high school users have declined in absolute number by 20% and 15% respectively in a mere six months, according to estimates Facebook provides to advertisers that were archived for tracking by an outside firm. Facebook users aged 55 and over have skyrocketed from under 1 million to nearly six million in the same time period. There are more Facebook users over 55 years old today than there are high school students using the site." Better question where are the kids going then? Because I can assure you they aren't going to Twitter.

"On Fox & Friends, Mike Huckabee falsely suggested that Vice President Biden disclaimed responsibility for the economy and that George Bush did not claim to have "inherited" a weakening economy." Oh Huckabee facts are so hard aren't they.

"Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe has branded a top US envoy "an idiot" with a condescending attitude. He said that Johnnie Carson, US assistant secretary of state for African affairs, wanted to dictate what Zimbabwe could and could not do." Mugabe is nothing if not amusing.

"G.M. appears poised to exit bankruptcy as soon as Thursday, when it is expected to complete the sale of its best assets to a newly formed company that will be smaller and unencumbered by huge debts and liabilities. A federal bankruptcy judge, Robert E. Gerber, paved the way on Sunday for the next phase of the auto giant’s reorganization by approving the sale of assets like Chevrolet and Cadillac to a new, privately held G.M. that will be 60 percent owned by the United States government. G.M. and the Obama administration are hoping to close the sale by Thursday, when a four-day stay ordered by the judge expires." Good luck.

"By not supporting the practical format, Mozilla isn’t making a brave statement or taking a stand: they’re just keeping everyone on Flash and preventing meaningful adoption of HTML 5’s <video> element." Makes a fair amount of sense. I guess my question is how much would Mozilla wind up having to pay to support H.264 and will other open source browsers ever support H.264? While Opera, Mozilla, Chrome, Safari and IE are the largest browsers they aren't the only ones. Mozilla may be thinking about the other smaller open source browsers.

Why should parents be on Facebook and what does it mean for them specifically.

"Facebook will likely be posting billions of dollars in revenue in five years, up from about $500 million this year, according to Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mark Andreessen who sits on Facebook's board. Andreessen told Reuters that the world's most popular online social network could pile up $1 billion in revenue this year if it pushed harder on selling advertising." That's impressive.

"Gallic pride aside, Mr. Devedjian has a point. While he plans to spend 75 percent of France’s stimulus money this year, the White House is giving itself until fall 2010 to lay out that big a share of the American expenditure. And many experts predict that Washington will fall short of that goal."

"Obama's anti-trust cop Christine Varney is dusting off the Sherman Act and reviewing wireless companies' exclusive handset deals–most notably AT&T's monopoly control over Apple's iPhone." That could get fun.

"This might not be right, though. Maybe, had they been more broad and less technical, some of the great physicists of the last few decades would have made dramatic breakthroughs in a field like quantum information or complexity theory, rather than pushing harder at the narrow concerns of particle physics or condensed matter. Easy to speculate, hard to provide much compelling evidence either way." Interesting.

ABC is know on Hulu.

"We have attempted to collect a variety of data about the relative popularity of programming languages, mostly out of curiousity. To some degree popularity does matter – however it is clearly not the only thing to take into account when choosing a programming language. Most experienced programmers should be able to learn the basics of a new language in a week, and be productive with it in a few more weeks, although it will likely take much longer to truly master it." Normalizing the data the order goes: C, Java, Python, C++, PHP, C#, Haskell, Ruby and so on.

"BT, the most prominent proponent of the concept, has put its plans on hold, The Guardian reports. BT has been working with Phorm, a company that has developed technology it says can track users while at the same time keeping advertisers from knowing their identities. While privacy advocates complained that the system was overly intrusive, the British government did not object." Yes.