Just when it looked like HTML 5 might pave the way for a truly universal web page rendering standard, the most important specifications for the 21st century—audio and video—will languish, perhaps to die on the vine. Ian Hickson:

After an inordinate amount of discussions, both in public and privately, on the situation regarding codecs for video and audio in HTML 5, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that there is no suitable codec that all vendors are willing to implement and ship.

In other words, major browser publishers, including Apple, Mozilla, Google, Opera, and Microsoft could not agree on which codec to use, so, no standard. The fragmented mess continues.

You’ve seen the ads on TV. You’ve read the reviews. Now, you want a cell phone with 3G. Which US network is the best? Sprint, Verizon, or AT&T? Six pages of techno mumbo jumbo and lots of ads, but interesting results:

During March and April, we spent a day testing the major 3G services in 13 cities across the United States. Verizon’s service showed a combination of speed and reliability, Sprint’s results lent credence to its ‘most dependable’ claim, and AT&T’s network showed fast upload speeds in most cities.

The real question is, which smart phone is best? iPhone, Palm Pre, or BlackBerry?

The latest exoplanet to be discovered is the M-dwarf GJ 1214b, a watery planet barely 40 light years from earth. John Trimmer in Ars:

...the latest discovery comes from some pretty mundane hardware—a collection of 40cm telescopes—and has some very compelling properties: a super earth that’s likely to harbor liquid water, and orbits a star that’s close enough to allow current observatories to image its atmosphere.

How special is earth compared to a super earth far away?

Depending on how reflective the planet’s atmosphere is, it may have temperatures as high as 555K, or as low as 393K—the latter figure is only 20°C above the boiling point of water. That’s far and away the coolest planet we’ve yet spotted, and a far cry from the only other super earth we know much about, which is hot enough that its atmosphere probably contains vaporized titanium oxides.

Ouch.

Reebok’s new EasyTone walking shoe is a hit. Why? Reebok says leg and buttock muscles are better toned than regular walking shoes. Tara Parker-Pope in the NYT:

While most athletic shoes offer support and cushioning, the new muscle-activating shoes are engineered to create a sense of instability. Design elements like curved soles and Reebok’s “balance pods” are said to force the wearer to engage stabilizing muscles further, resulting in additional toning for calf, hamstring and gluteal muscles.

Is it the shoe or the attitude that comes with the shoe?

The shoes are designed only for walking, and because of the instability design, wearers are discouraged from running, jumping and engaging in other athletic activities while wearing them. So the real effect may come from simple awareness that they are wearing a muscle-activating shoe, causing them to walk more briskly and with purpose.

It’s the attitude.

Football makes for strange bedfellows. And exciting drama. Green Bay Packers’ quarterback Brett Favre retired. Then came out of retirement. Then retired again. Then came out of retirement. Again. Lane Kiffin was hired to run the Oakland Raiders and ran them to a 5-15 record, and a big mess. He was run out of town by team owner Al Davis. Kiffin went to Tennessee for a year. Now he’s gone. Again. Where did Kiffin turn up? Dan Wetzel:

USC, which is facing a multi-sport, department-wide NCAA bloodletting next month, just hired a guy who in his tenure at Tennessee was a walking secondary violation (six of them), had two players booted off the team after an attempted armed robbery and leaves with NCAA investigators looking into how the program used recruiting hostesses. And, of course, he was a Trojan assistant when the compliance trouble USC must answer for began.

A mess at USC, a mess at Oakland, a mess at Tennessee. Let me predict a mess at USC.

In another sign that change is coming to the world of computing, Google’s John Herlihy says:

In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs.

Herlihy is based in Europe and obviously has never seen a Japanese PC keyboard. But three years?

The digital world is fundamentally different to the traditional business world. Things happen much faster, websites spring up from nowhere, a video could be a YouTube hit in hours.

I wonder what that has to do with desktop computers? Also, I note that the digital world is merely a subset of the so-called ‘traditional business world.’

At the end of the day it’s the customer who owns the cash. That’s why we construct our organisation to deliver value. The underlying framework is to make it easier for people to do business, solve problems and move on.

Google’s customers are advertisers. Over 99-percent of Google’s revenue comes from advertising. Google, so far, is a one-trick pony. A wealthy one-trick pony with a desire to disrupt the technology landscape.

For example, Microsoft and Apple create and sell mobile operating systems; the former directly to cell phone manufacturers, the latter on Apple products. Google’s Android mobile device operating system is given away free.

That’s disruptive.

Mobile makes the world’s information universally accessible. Because there’s more information and because it will be hard to sift through it all, that’s why search will become more and more important. This will create new opportunities for new entrepreneurs to create new business models – ubiquity first, revenue later.

Money quote: “ubiquity first, revenue later.”

That’s easy to say for a company with very deep pockets and a dominant market share on the cash cow product—advertising. In reality, Google remains a one-trick pony, self-annointed king of the internet advertising industry.

Meanwhile, computing—apps, games, utilities, connectivity—is moving from the desktop to mobile devices, but it’s an embrace, a dance of change, rather than a death knell for desktops.

Leno and Letterman notwithstanding, what is the one thing Americans do more than Europeans every night? Browse the internet. Nate Anderson on internet traffic:

North American Internet traffic peaks at 11pm and drops off consistently all night; European traffic peaks at 7pm and plummets soon after.

Someone is staying up late and someone is going to be early.

The data certainly suggests that Europeans tend not to use the Internet for evening reading/entertainment/guild raids, while Americans are increasingly using it to watch video and play games in the evenings.

If it’s not going to be early, what is different about the respective browsing habits?

North Americans spend their evenings playing online games, watching porn, watching online movies and TV shows, and browsing the Web.

So, what are the Europeans doing?