Regarding the treadmill, however — I was a YMCA member back in the mid 90s, and in their gym they has stationary bikes with big video screens. You pedaled and steered, and moved around in a virtual world. It wasn’t a game, per se — there were no puzzles to solve and so forth — just a big environment you could bike around in and explore. You could even go underwater and see sunken ships and the like. (Of course, this was computer graphics circa 1992-3, so a bit blocky by today’s standards….)

Oh yes, I almost forgot. You and I have the same model toothbrush.

The best toothbrush I ever used was by a company called “Pro-Dentec”, their “Rotadent”. It doesn’t just go back and forth, it rotates the brush entirely around. The cleaning is fantastic, but (like Quicktime) it’s expensive and encumbered with patents and copyrights. They want the monopoly profits they get by keeping _control_.

One reason I love the Creative Commons, the GPL, is that the best ideas get used and built on by many people. Quality improves at lightning speeds compared to “traditional” industries.

you are exactly right and there is nothing wrong with it….

This has come from computer programmers, such as myself. When we create a variable name in a program, we’re generally not allowed spaces. Consequently, we invented this method of making multi-word names. The use of UpperCaseLetters makes it easier to read, and avoids ambiguity.

And you might find it QuiteInteresting to know that we call it CamelCase because the words have “humps” in them.

My point is that most products are simple at heart. It takes multi-coloured moulded plastics, emotional branding, excessive packaging, and tenuous marketing: all to make us feel that we’re buying something special. I’d consider the toothbrush bits to be heavily-marketed ‘valueless-adding’. I keenly await its inclusion in a 2015 TV production entitled, “100 Most Pointless Gadgets”.

This post was brought to you from the 96-point multi-tactile linguistic expression device, capable of solving all the world’s problems in five minutes*.

It’ll never happen. Standardisation of a media codec for HTML5 that is.

In the same way as a Colgate professional electric toothbrush uses an incompatible charger from the Oral-B one described (if they all simply used the same charging stations maybe we’d end up with less plastic being wasted).

Or how about laptops which all use the exact same voltage and amps with the exact same connectors?

Cars that used the same parts?

Human beings that are completely predictable?

It’ll never happen.

Working within the media codecs for streaming area [ahem], it is a field which has never been standardised. It’s as much a fault of the companies that have invented different ways of compressing and delivering these files, as it is for us allowing them to do so. A very topical example would be – why doesn’t iPhone/iPod Touch natively support Flash Video?

The latest incarnation of Flash Video supports h.264. Quicktime supports h.264. Erm – so to the normal person you’d think h.264 = h.264

Well, you are correct – at least at the codec level – once you actually get into how the video is delivered over a network, you discover that Adobe (Macromedia) has created it’s own proprietary transport protocol (RTMP) which they *will not* publish, as it’s part of their ‘content protection’ solution for content owners.

A lot of people got very excited about the fact that Flash was going to support some MPEG standards – but they really screwed everyone when they decided that full streaming would require their proprietary, and not yet fully tested or released, streaming servers.

So a Flash Video h.264 stream will not currently playback in a Quicktime player. Or at least without adding licensed support for RTMP.

Remember when RealNetworks brought out their original media codecs? Until they fell fowl of the ‘proprietary’ bug, though later they somewhat successfully (certainly from a B2B viewpoint) formed Helix a community supported framework that is used in many embedded devices – like mobile phones. Helix embraces standards too, and it has support for Real’s proprietary codecs if you really have to.

So – consider Ogg. The codec might be open source, but the delivery method seems less clear.

Dirac – streaming? It’s too proprietary. See – Sony’s ATRAC3 codec.

Now, who’s for a discussion about the benefits of Betamax over VHS? Anyone?

I agree wholeheartedly with the rest of what you are saying though – the IMG tag simply specifies ‘here is an image’ and as far as I can see the spec does not say that JPG or PNG images must be supported.

And we don’t yet know what MS would have done if Vorbis or Theora support was defined in the spec. It could have been the clause that torpedoed the spec, while removing it moves that battle to another day. Given that they took no part in the early stages of WHAT-WG and HTML-5 it’s still uncertain what their attitude is.

Going back to Mr.Fry’s original blog – I would like to say that the developer community was not uniformly up in arms, only a small, vocal, but important and influential part. For the vast majority of web developers and designers, the ability to create an inline movie player in a web page, with custom playback controls and CSS styling, without having to use Flash, will be a huge advantage. As will being able to use a URL to link directly to 4′33 in the middle of a long video. (In fact, as we know, the vast majority of developers out there were happiest when IE6 was at the peak of it’s dominance and that entitled them to ignore all else).

Enidd says, “Oh, so do I. Exercise without intellectual stimulation is more tedious than a four-hour-long Christmas special. I searched long and hard for the augmented treadmill beast on the Interweb (almost a quest in itself, but without the longed for benefit to the upper thighs). After days of hunting, I discovered this – http://www.fpgamerunner.com/index.html – and thought I had defeated the end-of-level boss in single combat. Sadly, it was not the case – the FPGameRunner seems to be just vapourware and my emails have gone unanswered.”