Monthly Archive:: March 2010

Now that Internet Explorer 9 has been let out its cage, we all know a great deal more about Microsoft's position towards the video codec situation with the HTML5 video tag. Microsoft has chosen for H264, a codec it already includes in Windows by default anyway. This means that apart from Firefox and Opera, every other major browser will support H264. Some are seeing this as a reason for Mozilla to give in to their ideals and include support for H264 as well - I say: Mozilla, stick to your ideals. The last people you should be listening to in matters like this are web developers.

A serious dispute is brewing in the world of ebooks, pitting publishers and Apple against giant online retailer Amazon. A significant part of the appeal of ebooks is that they are (or should be) much cheaper than printed editions. In the publishing world, royalties paid to the author typically represent just 10% of the retail price. Both publishers and retailers take their cut. Printing is usually 30%, and then there are warehousing and shipping costs.

"The city of Amsterdam has been involved for several years in building Citynet, a partnership between the city and two private investors to wire 40000 Amsterdam buildings with fiber. And it's not just fiber, it's open access fiber - any ISP can sign up to use the infrastructure and deliver ultra-fast Internet access. In 2008, the European Union ruled that the city's involvement in the project was in fact legal, and that it was not improperly interfering in the market. We asked Herman Wagter, CEO of the company that built Citynet fiber project, to talk about how he got the job done, and to explain the challenges of rolling out fiber in a densely crowded European city." In case you're wondering: no, I don't live in Amsterdam. My small hick town has plans for fibre too, however.

Finally - after a few weeks, HTC has actually officially issued a statement regarding the patent infringement lawsuit Apple has thrown towards the Taiwanese phone maker. As you probably already anticipated, HTC states it will fully defend itself against Apple. It's on, it's on.

"With the release of hundreds of pages of court documents in the legal dispute between Google and Viacom over the presence of copyright material on YouTube, Google has released a statement on the case. The statement was attributed to Zahavah Levine, YouTube chief counsel."

Two days ago, Technologizer revealed a new Marevell android tablet. Today, Marvell published a press release with more details on specs and price; apparently the Moby tablet wil cost USD 99 and is targeting education. Here is ARMdevices' take on this new Armada 600 powered tablet.

"Being the developer of a Qt-based mobile solution is really really nice nowadays – especially as Android support is well on its way. For all those of you new to the topic: the moment Qt has been ported, you can run your Qt-based applications on the operating system. Bogdan Vatra the brain behind the Qt port - let's see what he has to say!"

Google's Native Client (NaCl) is a browser technology to deliver native x86 binaries to users on Windows, Mac and Linux. Whilst this bridges the gap between modern JavaScript speeds and native binaries, portability is limited and that's especially important on the web where there's greater device diversity than on the desktop. Google are announcing that NaCl now also supports x86-64 and ARM. In addition to this Google are also announcing the ANGLE project, an open source compatibility layer to map WebGL (OpenGL ES for the web) to DirectX calls for Windows systems without an OpenGL library.

"Google is working to bring Web software to televisions through a partnership with Intel, Sony and Logitech, according to two people involved in the discussions with the companies. The project, called Google TV, uses Intel chips, with Switzerland's Logitech developing a keyboard that operates as a remote control, said one of the people, who declined to be named because the matter isn't public."

This one was accidentally deleted from the submission queue when it was first submitted some time ago, so I decided to keep it around for a slow news day (such as this one - dear lord, it's quiet). FFmpeg developer Mans penned down a number of crucial problems with the Ogg container format.

"In this article, the authors investigate the impact of DRM restrictions on the demand for music downloads. estimates the impact of DRM on consumers' willingness to pay for songs (both favorites and nonfavorites) and on the producer revenues and profits. Based on two studies of more 2000 college students, the results suggest that despite the potential advantages offered by some DRM restrictions, on balance the elimination of DRM has a net positive impact on producer revenue, profit, and consumer welfare."

"By encouraging more people to post videos in Wikipedia articles, we can bring theora video played in html5 to a very large audience. Currently, there are very few wikipedia articles that have videos. We hope that this campaign will bring thousands more to the site and show people how great theora can be. HTML 5 video, which plays without Flash, is a wonderful step towards a more open web - but if it depends on proprietary codecs like h.264, we will still be stuck with a gatekeeper for online video."

"Google is changing the way it handles the unique identifier that accompanies each installation of its Chrome browser. As noticed by H-Online, a Google white paper says the company will now delete the unique ID after the browser updates itself for the first time. Google has confirmed with The Reg that the change will be made with the upcoming Chrome 4.1."

Since MIX10 is still under way, we're going to have quite a few Microsoft items this week, with Windows Phone 7 Series and Internet Explorer 9 being the main points of focus. We've been speculating a while now about if and how Microsoft would support multitasking on their upcoming mobile operating system reboot, and now we finally have answers: no, it won't do multitasking - at least, not right away.