I honestly don’t know how Mozilla’s organization actually makes money.  But I do know how the others make money and the fact that they have a reliable revenue streams from other sources that could support the licensing costs of H.264 (at the point when it starts costing) is not a trivial consideration, I would think.

Update: Gruber now seems to have started painting himself into a corner.  Like,

“I don’t know what the MPEG LA will do come 2016.”

Not much to make business decisions on then, is it?  And,

“Perhaps they will attempt to charge web publishers for licenses to distribute H.264 video. But if they do, web publishers will react the way they did to Unisys’s GIF threats: by switching to another format.”

Well then, why not do it now?  But the clunker is:

“But if Mozilla’s position were really about idealism — tough love for the good of the web in the name of free, open file formats — then in addition to not supporting H.264, they’d drop support for plugins like Flash Player. I believe such a move would just drive Firefox users to Chrome and Safari (or even back to IE), and I suspect Mozilla knows this, too, which is why dropping plugin support isn’t being discussed. But they can’t say Firefox only supports free and open video formats while still supporting Flash.”

This makes no sense.  The entire debate has nothing to do with plugin support.  Plugins aren’t the issue.  The issue is native support for formats.  Mozilla isn’t saying Adobe shouldn’t offer the Flash plugin.  They’re saying they don’t want to support H.264 natively for the <video> tag.  That’s a big difference.

You can take whatever interpretation of Mozilla’s statements you like – tough love, idealisim, open format philanthropy – but it still doesn’t make sense for Mozilla to support a format that they’re at risk of being charged for licensing if it doesn’t fit into their business model.

Eleven percent of those under the age of 25 would interrupt sex for a message, and 24 percent under 25 would answer a message in the bathroom.

…is a bit silly.  But really, it seems to me almost like it’s a restructuring of social norms.  Is it a problem, or is it just an evolving expectation that we have with the immediacy in communication and relationships?

Although, if you’re interrupting sex for a message you’re just not doing it right.

(From io9)

It’s true, though: if you’re a witch, you won’t drown.

In the same spirit, I’m going to start a company called Apple. I think they’ll understand when my legal team demands they change their name. Not that big of a deal.

What’s most interesting to me about the Lifehacker article is that there should even be an article at all.  Its subject “Is The Web Crucial To Your Morning Routine?” is about as germane as “is the telephone crucial to your morning routine?” or “do you turn on the TV for the morning weather or open a newspaper?”

My routine involves roughly, turning on the computer and leaving it to boot, make a pit stop in the washroom, to the kitchen and make some tea, pour some cereal and then sit down to check out what news or weather updates have come up – on the net.  It’s my main (and preferred) source of information that informs my day and it seems that it should figure into the start of it (I don’t have kids yet, will change, I’m sure).  However, is it really that much different from looking to the sky to see if it’s going to rain today or running around the corner to grab the paper to see if the economy has tanked and I should buy extra tins of food for the bomb shelter?

This had been happening for months and I started to get suspicious that it might be BT doing something sneaky like sending a reboot command to the router.  After all, they update the firmware remotely and silently with out telling you.  Who knows what else they can do?

I renewed my search for an answer a few days ago and came across this posting in a forum in which it’s reported that a British Telecom support person says that it’s a fault in the firmware (version 8.1.H.G) and should be fixed by the end of June (which it wasn’t).  There’s also this posting in which it’s suggested that it was a security feature programmed into the firmware.  To do what, exactly?

If it was, in fact, a security “feature” is crippling the router the best way to handle it?  Who exactly is being protected by the unit indiscriminately rebooting itself?  What’s the scenario in that programmer’s head that leads to the conclusion that killing my FTP transfers is the right thing to do?  Although, this smacks of middle management incompetence not having the scope to understand the ramifications of their actions when they say “do this dumb thing.”

The “feature” apparently only kicks in when you’re doing uploading with no download traffic (as if this is a tell-tale sign of perfidy) so just go download something while you’re uploading and maybe it will work.

Sat-nav clearly suits an era which has given up on understanding the roads as a coherent, logical system – an era in which map-reading may be going the way of obsolete skills like calligraphy and roof-thatching.

I honestly wish I knew more about how the editorial process in the mainstream media works.  I can’t fathom the genesis of this story and I can’t understand the fear-mongering behind it or why its acceptable to crank out a fluff-piece that does nothing but weep about the loss of our humanity (which isn’t happening, in case you were wondering).  And yes, I am aware that this is quite a common pattern, particularly on slow news days.

But seriously: I can read a bloody map and use a compass and I have to say, driving in some rural England’s back-roads both tools would have done nothing for me.  The sat-nav saved me a lot of time and backtracking, particularly when you’re in an area where road signage is optionally accurate, if also even optional.

This piece is quite incredible, though.  It pushes so many buttons you’d think the authors keyboard only had 1 key (labelled STUPID).  Here’s another gem:

Men in particular seem to recoil from being given digital instructions, and read the satnav woman’s pregnant pauses, or her curt phrases like “make a legal U-turn” and “recalculating the route”, as stubborn or bossy. Of course, they are reading too much into it. Sat-nav is just a dumb computer, obeying its algorithms.

Yeah, let’s play that gender-role card.  I do like the sly reference to robotic women, though.

Look, anybody who takes offence at a machine generated voice or gets lost on their own neighbourhood’s streets need to take a closer look at themselves.  As one Slashdot commenter wryly said it’s “akin to asking if real men don’t use hammers. I wouldn’t use one to open an egg, but I would use one to fix my stairs.”  Yes, sat-nav is a tool.  If you don’t know how to use tools, don’t take them out of the box.  That is all.

More importantly, there’s usually nobody looking over your shoulder when you log in to a website. It’s just you, sitting all alone in your office, suffering reduced usability to protect against a non-issue.

While I agree with Jakob’s general observations about usability and the apparent cost of failed password attempts, I think the alternative isn’t quite acceptable.  Because frankly, we’re not all sitting alone in our office.  Many of us, are in fact, in the real world…like airports and coffee shops.

Perhaps the solution would be to implement into browsers a mechanism to un-mask password fields if you’re absolutely sure you’re not being snooped on (or at least confident enough to take the risk).  After all, there’s nothing in the HTML spec that prevents this behaviour.  Desktop operating systems do it all the time these days.  Although, there’s nothing either that says that a plain text field can’t be used just be used either (which kind of makes the whole thing moot anyway).

Regardless, people with fat fingers hamming away on their iPhones should be the last people to complain about password masking: while they’re out there flaunting their precious little gadgets like a prom date, they’re the very ones being protected by masking.  Granted, their passwords are probably something asinine like the name of their cat.  They should use something like 1Password.