Disqus - Latest Comments for jemaleddin

Re: OkCupid CEO: We Will Not Charge Users Following Match.com Acquisition

Jemaleddin — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 17:15:44 -0000

I know.

I'm calling him a liar.

Re: OkCupid CEO: We Will Not Charge Users Following Match.com Acquisition

Jemaleddin — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 17:05:43 -0000

No censorship? Where did this page go: http://webcache.googleuserc...

Re: an answer to John Gruber: Google dropping H.264 is good for everyone

Jemaleddin — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 16:39:51 -0000

That's a fair question. (Though you're kinda ducking my points my asking it!) I'm not going to try to speak to Microsoft's strategy since it appears that they've had it hooked up to a random number generator for the last 10 years.

But for Apple, you're really minimizing the situation by saying that it'd cost them nothing in licensing fees. Obviously they have the money to pay whatever licenses they like, but WebM adoption wouldn't be free for them:

a) Unlike Google, they have a LOT of software that produces, edits and displays video. Adding WebM to their toolchain is a significant investment. Adding it to Safari seems simple enough, but can you imagine people that care about Open software being okay with them stopping there? :-)

b) While we can argue about the potential for patent liability of any given standard all day, it's the case that Apple is protected from patent suits by the strong portfolio of the MPEG-LA consortium. Meanwhile, Google owns the patents to WebM and refuses to indemnify users or implementors. Why would anyone risk using that, especially at the scale that Apple operates?

And that's all putting aside the fact that WebM is a demonstrably inferior solution to H.264. File sizes are larger, processing efficiency for implementors is higher, quality is lower. Going to that much trouble for a second- or third-best solution seems silly.

More importantly, Apple has already got a significant stake in H.264. They've shipped millions of devices with hardware decoding for H.264 built in. They've convinced much of the video-publishing industry to switch to it, and based their own push for open web standards against Adobe's Flash in part on their ability to efficiently play web video because of H.264.

Besides which: arguing that Apple is slowing down the progress of HTML5 would be pretty disingenuous considering how influential they've been in its creation and adoption. Let's not lose sight of the fact that much of the work in that area has been done by the Webkit team - without whose hard work there wouldn't be a Chrome for us to argue about. :-)

Re: an answer to John Gruber: Google dropping H.264 is good for everyone

Jemaleddin — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 05:33:53 -0000

But those are just organizations signalling their intent to do something. You were talking about adoption. What percentage of web users have the ability to play WebM today? How many video sites output WebM? How many cameras record to WebM? Which video editing packages write or edit WebM?

I think we know the answers to those questions: very few, almost none, none, and none.

My point is that I think you have what Google is doing backwards. It isn't that enough people are using WebM, it's that Google thinks that Chrome has enough users that they can force the issue. But that's not realistic: content providers aren't going to start using WebM after this announcement, they're more likely to keep using Flash with H.264 as it's now - more than ever - the only cross-platform choice. This isn't so much Google supporting an open source project as Google further strengthening Flash's position in the market.

What's sad to me is that what Google has done here is stall the progress on adoption of the HTML5 video tag. It's back to plugins for most people now.

And to Aaron's point above, many folks have claimed that WebM is just as patent-encumbered as anything else - if only because the patent system is so screwed up. But that's another discussion. :-)

Re: an answer to John Gruber: Google dropping H.264 is good for everyone

Jemaleddin — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 18:01:01 -0000

I'm confused. You said, "Once WebM saw adoption, improvements, and a healthy open-source community, Google was ready to drop H.264, and so they did."

Adoption? By whom?

Re: Mozilla Explains Why Firefox 4 Has Tabs on Top [VIDEO]

Jemaleddin — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 09:53:23 -0000

The truly scary part of this is the idea of letting web pages remove the back button. NOES!

As a guy who uses Chrome, I find tabs on top uncontroversial.

Re: Here's the part where I tease you about Snow in America

Jemaleddin — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:54:50 -0000

I think you mean that you're ignorant. You can't educate dumb. But I'll agree: you're a moron AND you're ignorant.

Also, you don't know how to use the reply button.

Or how to read a forecast. We'll have some 34 degree hours on Friday-Sunday, but that's not going to melt 50 inches of snow. Then we've got more snow coming in on Monday. This is going to be with us for a while. My zip code is 21212: look it up.

Look: my walks were shoveled as soon as the 30mph winds stopped on Saturday. And they will be tomorrow once the 30mph winds stop again. And I'll shovel for my elderly neighbors and go to work on unplowed roads like I've been doing. I don't need anybody to tell me what to do - I grew up in parts of America that get FAR more snow than you do. I don't need any advice from you.

You know what else doesn't help? Self-aggrandizing bullshit from people who claim to know all about living with snow but are acting like 30mph winds and 50 inches of snow are nothing. Get bent, dumbass. If you couple pull your head out of your ass long enough to look at a map, you'd recognize that this is THE SOUTH. You ever heard of "Dixie"? That's the area south of the Mason-Dixon line - the one that separates Maryland from Pennsylvania. We haven't had snow like this since 1922. You cannot expect people to react to the kind of storm that you only see once every century as though it were nothing. And again: if you knew shit about snow OR the forecast around here, you'd know that this is some serious shit to deal with.

Now either shut the fuck up or come down here and shovel. Between power outages and traffic accidents and roofs caving in, people are going to die because of this storm, and I don't need your advice.

Re: Here's the part where I tease you about Snow in America

Jemaleddin — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:52:53 -0000

Oh my god, the brigade of Hotmail morons continues. Is that the official email provider of morons in Canada the way that AOL is here?

a) If what Kelly wrote is what passes for comedy in Canada, it's no wonder everyone with a shred of comedic talent comes to America.

b) You're full of shit.

Edmonton gets an average of 123.5 cm/snow a year, not 150 you exaggerating jackass. (It's cute that you were closer in inches.) We're getting more than that in five days. Not over the course of a year, 5 days. Go ahead and pretend that wouldn't close schools in Alberta if you like, but you know you're lying to yourself.

And people are going to work, you moron. I've been to work this week, and every store, restaurant and gas station I've been to has been open. And no, the city didn't plow my street. Or the street next to it. Somehow we've all gotten by.

And I have to tell you: it's cute hearing all these Canadians talk shit about snow. I grew up in Ironwood, Michigan. We got an AVERAGE of over 250 inches a year. (635cm, since I know you can't do the conversion right.) That's more than any of the 100 most populous Canadian cities. And you know what? We missed school sometimes. Sometimes people couldn't go to work!

So to recap: you don't know what you're talking about either, and you're also not funny. I'm glad my Canadian friends aren't morons like the pair of you.

Re: Here's the part where I tease you about Snow in America

Jemaleddin — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:30:37 -0000

It doesn't really matter what your intent was, Kelly. What you posted was ignorant, poorly worded, and in serious need of some copy editing. Worst of all, it isn't funny. Were you drunk?

Read back what you wrote and ask yourself: is that a good example of the kind of writing the world should expect from a product of the Canadian educational system?

Re: jemaleddumblr - McCain - Smithers 08

Jemaleddin — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 13:02:01 -0000

Not that I know of - but it would be awesome, no?

Re: Off-Topic

Jemaleddin — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 11:22:48 -0000

John,

You're not a software developer (but a much better designer than me - that's clear!), so I don't expect you to know this, but absolutely everything Garrett is complaining about is his fault.

First of all, his app broke because he didn't use an official API from Google to get the data. That means that he was probably just logging in with the users's credentials and trying to scrape the data from the web page into his app - a big no-no. Web pages change so frequently that "screen-scraping" is universally maligned by programmers for exactly these reasons: it's going to break sooner rather than later. He should have talked to Google first - which, when he got around to it, resulted in them giving him an API!

With that in mind, developing an iPhone app in that way is suicide - he knew going in how long the approval process was (since you can't check the code of an app as a user, you *do* want Apple checking these things, right?), and how long it would take to fix when his connection inevitably broke. This isn't him fixing a bug - that's a mistake in programming. This is him fixing a mistake in approach.

But on top of that blaming the user is disgraceful. Marking a problem as solved when he knows that it doesn't work for anyone but him is idiotic. Mocking users on his page for complaining that his broken app is broken is disgusting.

These are rookie programmer mistakes - what's surprising is how much support he's getting for them.

Re: Ego-maniacal…

Jemaleddin — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 09:49:38 -0000

The app store approval process is certainly slower than anyone would like, but at least it's a known quantity. You just have to bear in mind that updates aren't going to happen as quickly as you like. Does anyone think that there shouldn't be an approval process?

Which means that the lesson to take from Garrett's problems is that you shouldn't build an app whose main feature is (it seems) based on unsupported screen-scraping. It's fine to build a website that screenscrapes another website because you know that if it all goes wrong, you can fix it and by virtue of the way the web works it'll be fixed for all your users. But you wouldn't build a desktop app that way.

Had Garrett talked to Google BEFORE deploying his app, he might have gotten a real API and avoided all of this trouble.

If you HAVE to base an app on screen-scraping, the best bet might be to route traffic like that through your own server (and hope people don't mind their credentials being routed that way) so that you can keep the code that inspects the html under your control for fixes when it inevitably changes.