Yostivanich

“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.