They start to feel evil the first time you buy a game on Steam that is unplayable. Their answer: "too bad." The last time I bought a game in a store that didn't work, I got a refund or a replacement, my choice.
And to your point about profit, it has never been demonstrated that disallowing sales of used copies reduces profit. Just as it has never been proved that piracy actually impacts the sales of copyrighted material. The fashion industry doesn't get copyright protection, and they stand by the argument "people who buy knock-offs aren't our customers, so we don't consider those sales potential profits for us." Amazon makes money on used item sales. A person who isn't willing to buy a NEW COPY of something but is willing to buy a USED COPY because of the price difference is often missed profit for companies like Steam -- they aren't going to buy the game new, they aren't your customer, but they COULD BE your customer, if you didn't think fucking over your customers was the best idea.
Valve tries to get both of these by having these sales, but a lot of companies won't let Valve sell copies of a game below a certain fixed % of the MSRP, so if it's a new game and MSRP is $60.00, where the retailer makes $3/copy sold or some absurdly small number, individuals aren't required to resell at MSRP, so if I buy the game at $60.00, play it, and decide I don't want it anymore, I can sell it for say $45. Now if Steam said "I'll help you find a buyer for 10% of the cost" then I'd be pocketing $40.50 and Steam would get $4.50, when I sell it. $4.50 is more profit than Steam is allowed to make from selling a new copy at MSRP, AND both me and the buyer are happy -- I recouped a loss, and they got it at a discount (and say they were in that category that WILL NOT BUY the game at the MSRP price). Steam just made $1.50 MORE on a price-fixed item by supporting and facilitating the sale of used games, in a system where customers own actual copies of games, not just a subscription to a license. That's a very common example that demonstrates significant profit potential over their "huge discounts, no refunds, and no ownership" model. Most people I know don't buy games at MSRP on Steam, they wait for sales, and that is some anecdotal evidence to support the idea that there are far more people willing to buy a used copy of a game than a new one -- a huge market that Steam doesn't capture until a game is antiquated, at which point the profit margins are minimal and only acceptable in incredible volumes.
My use of 'evil' is to describe how they treat customers -- we aren't allowed to buy a copy. It's not because they're trying to "make money." It is not apparent at all that such a draconian and broken business model will generate more profit. It is apparent, though, that forcing customers to forego rights that would normally be granted to them in the hopes that you might make a profit fits this definition very well:
violating moral principles; not conforming to the patterns of conduct usually accepted or established as consistent with principles of personal and social ethics.
Valve had a lot of respect from me. Back when I enjoyed their games (and still own copies, which I can legally sell). When Steam came out, I thought it was utter shit, until they made it better. It was pretty cool having my Valve games in a common launcher and being able to talk to friends (I didn't like Xfire and AIM sucked). But then they added the store and started demanding forfeiture of rights in order to buy games through it and get very little added-benefit on top of it except their distribution network, and then they had gone too far. If they're really so costly to implement, why not add an actual subscription to Steam so premium members who consume those features the most (higher bandwidth caps, priority downloads, etc) are paying extra instead of screwing everyone?
But you can sell that DVD copy back to the store or to another person, in general, and it's becoming a trend now to consider licenses re-sellable too, so account-bound DRM (aka Digital Rights Removal) will be either illegal or must facilitate the trade of licenses in the future (in the EU now, probably in NA soon enough). I buy an MMO, play it for 3 months, farm everything out, and I can usually sell my account for more money than I paid to play the game in total.
And that's JUST analyzing my cost. It's even cheaper for the purchasers of used games, because they too can re-sell it, and over time it gets even lower than the cost of buying a game on Steam.
You have to run Steam even in wine to run any game you purchased through the Steam Store. You still have to run it. If you own the game separately and it has wine support, it's trivial to run it on OSX or Linux.
All of this can be provided while using software that is licensed to the buyer, not to Valve. Steam can also in that case implement a market for used game licenses. The reason Valve doesn't do this is because they believe they will make more money if you never own a copy of a game and that nobody else can ever purchase your used copy (you have to buy it fresh from Steam or trade an unbound game). One could very easily re-implement all of Steam's features for these games without the draconian and probably illegal "subscription model" on top of it. Let people keep their licenses and have rights. It is not a technical requirement of Steam; it's just pure greed and by definition evil.
When you buy a book or a cd/dvd/bd, you own a copy, and as a copy holder, you have certain rights granted by copyright law. Those include the right to make copies for personal use and sell your copy but not to distribute copies. This is true of a lot of software, though the trend is towards licenses in software. A recent ruling in the EU has established there that licenses are transferable too, like a copy. Steam, however, sells you a subscription to a license to further obfuscate ownership and deny consumer rights. They also abuse this indirection as a legal technicality to avoid being obligated to ever give a refund (even though legally they must if a product/service is defective). They claim a subscription is devoid of the possibility to be defective; a legally shady loophole that is probably illegal, but needs a judgement, which has never happened.
My issues with the Steam store are, and take your pick:
I can't sell my games when I don't want to play them anymore.
I can't get a refund on a game that is so brokenly buggy that I cannot even play it (this happened to me) without spending millions of dollars on a lawsuit.
I can't play my games without steam. This precludes compat llayers like wine, too.
And many more I don't care to type on my iPhone. Steam is a fine tool for social gaming and game management, but the business model used by the Steam store is just unacceptable.
I mean, at a certain point, constantly trying to sneak in legislation that's been rejected by congress and by the people is clearly not in the best interest of this country. Treason:
The crime of betraying one's country, esp. by attempting to kill the sovereign or overthrow the government.
It would seem, to me at least, that this fits the definition of Treason very well. Or is it the case that congresspeople are granted complete immunity and impunity to all laws?
Buy a game and have it not work. Valve will "troubleshoot" for you and then tell you to go fuck yourself. Do that to a legitimate software retailer and they'll give you a refund. Buy a car, have it not work, take it back to the dealer and they'll fix it or give you another one, or a refund. Buy a new computer, have a part that's defective, get it replaced or get a refund. Hell, buy a new computer, sell your old one to someone else. Have you tried selling a CS 1.6 copy on Steam to another person? Hint: you can't. Whoops.
Buy a game on steam, have it not work, be told there are no refunds and that they can't do anything about it. And legally, they aren't obligated to either, because they sold you a subscription to a license, and they upheld their end of the bargain.
It's up to the consumer to decide whether they trust Valve or not, though there should be a very clear disclaimer that you never actually buy a game through Steam, and if one day GabeN decided to shut down Steam, nothing you purchased through Steam would ever work again, but if you buy games THEN add them to Steam, you still get everything, and if you ever decide you want to sell a game, you can do that too. I'm not even certain their business model is legal, as I can't find any court cases where it's been challenged, but Valve is basically writing their own laws, so I have to think it's probably not.
Steam's subscription model is anti-consumer; that itself is sufficient to warrant dismissal of Steam as a valid outlet for purchasing games, regardless of any DRM they impose, be it permissive or not. You don't have any rights to that content outside of what Valve says you can do with it (sure, you can run it offline and you can make backups to save us money on bandwidth, but nope, you can never resell it, or run it without steam, because you don't own the copy!). Nope. Buy games THEN put them on Steam. Never the other way around.
It would probably have more to do with the legal issues and that a game developer must allow Steam to have digital distribution rights and quite an incredibly powerful license to the software. You see, Valve doesn't sell games on Steam. They sell subscriptions to a license to a game. Valve owns the licenses, you own a very limited subscription to that license, and it affords you no rights under law, and it can be terminated at Valve's discretion for any reason or no reason. To distribute a game under that framework, I presume there's legal footwork to be done, and to do that for EVERY SINGLE GAME ANYONE EVER MADE, EVER would be an intractable problem indeed. If you go into it with a publisher saying "our customers want this game" and they deal with the legal issues up front, customers get games they want and Valve has less legal work to do.
I still say nobody should ever buy a game from Steam again. The reason they can sell games at 80% off is because you never actually own a copy of any game purchased through Steam, so you're literally paying Valve to let you play in their sandbox; at the end of the day, you have to go home, and all the toys stay with Valve. This is the most anti-consumer system I could imagine; complete and total dismissal of all consumer rights.
Except they have the most draconian DRM system ever invented in the history of man: all you purchase is a revocable once-billed subscription to a license of a game. That means you don't have first sale rights or any rights under copyright law. That means you don't even own a license. Valve owns your license, and all you have is an active subscription to the game via Valve. Non-ownership of paid for merchandise is far beyond anything else you listed.
It does not matter what Valve puts on Steam. I will never purchase another game via Steam. I will always purchase the game in such a manner that I have rights and own a copy, then I will add the game to Steam. I do not need a potentially illegal DRM system controlling my access to things I purchase.
Its legality is questionable since all Valve employees and even Steam's own store website use terms such as "buy" and "purchase" and "game" instead of "subscribe" and "Valve owned license," yet in their legal verbage they refer only to subscriptions, never mentioning purchased products. "People who bought game X also bought the following: " -- this is misleading since technically nobody on Steam has ever actually purchased a game through steam.
I find it hilarious that Obj-C is ranked so far above something like Javascript. These indexes are meant to rate popularity, right? So subjective qualitative WTF-is-wrong-with-your-language arguments aside, the sheer volume of Javascript programming going on in browsers (that includes a large portion of phone-based software in webapps built for phones) should surely dwarf Obj-C. I also find that JS questions tend to dominate SO, too, much more so than Java, Obj-C, or C/C++. In fact, the numbers from SO are:
So as you say, I can't find these indices valid at all, as they fail horribly to be accurate. For instance, the transparent index lists JS as a "script language." Nice.
How about by Internet explorer/explorer.exe? As I recall you could search the Internet and local via their duality as far back as win 95 or potentially 98.
This is misleading, both in the benchmarks but also here. I very much dislike this entire article because it's very inaccurate and doesn't attempt to explain why certain things are the way they are. For instance, you have 2 categories where IE magically rapes Chrome and Firefox. Firefox and Chrome get near daily updates and have engineers who are obsessed with making every little thing as fast as possible. Chrome even uses Webkit, which is developed just as fervently at Apple. Microsoft rarely updates Trident or JScript. It is illogical given the resources and the amount of work invested that you would assume a test that shows IE9 (not even IE10) outperforming either of these browsers significantly is an accurate test. Even worse, the article combines unrelated categories of tests into a composite score.
For load speed - we don't know how this was measured. It isn't mentioned. Is it measured by the browser's own tools? IE may trigger a "done loading" right after it performs a layout of the DOM. Unless you know that the browsers are consistent with the metric being used, they don't matter. IE has routinely screwed up things like event fire order in order to "improve performance" but really all it does is break something that works in every other browser. I am not satisfied that the same has not occurred here. And if you come at it logically, Firefox and Chrome have much more powerful CSS and HTML rendering engines. Those websites where IE9 scored significantly higher have an HTML5 doctype. So you're also comparing nearly fully-compliant HTML5 browsers against an HTML4 browser. What's worse, is that if you look at cached load time, which is, as you state, THE MOST IMPORTANT METRIC, Chrome wins hands down and Firefox is better than IE. The fact that it changes so dramatically when caching is introduced implies that the metric being used in an uncached test is favorable to IE, which likely stems from the fact that it is making huge assumptions and doing pre-layouts while content is still downloading.
For "HTML5 performance" which is really just Canvas performance - I just ran the test myself. IE9 did not beat Chrome. And IE9's framerate was not consistent, while Chrome's was consistent throughout. What it looks like is that Microsoft has over-optimized certain rendering tasks to show off their own demos and any rendered output that is similar gets a huge performance boost, but the overall performance from IE9's Canvas is inconsistent and terrible. It'd be like playing an FPS where when you're not shooting a gun you have 50000 fps, but when you get into a firefight it drops to 3 fps. Why the huge difference? Tricks -- what IE is known for doing to get better scores.
Overall, this article is terrible. Half of the tests are subjective, and half of them don't matter. Hell, they rank WebGL and HTML5 HW accel below Java and Silverlight in performance. The only major website still using Silverlight is Netflix. And I haven't used a Java applet in.. 5 years?
Google Chrome and Firefox at the least, before the iPhone ever did it, allowed you to search your own local history AND the internet from the URL bar. Local searches showed up in the preview, but if you hit enter, it would pass the search onto your favorite browser. Software patents should all be invalidated, IMO.
It really isn't. What we're talking about here is voting platform reform. I don't really care how voting is done (via computerized terminal, via paper ballot, or even via Internet, after all I can file my taxes online). What I care about is that the system we have in place for voting for candidates almost always elects a candidate that a minority (generally a superminority) actually wants to be president. It also gives political parties extreme power based on sheer advertisement; most people view it as this-guy-or-that-guy and so they just pick the one they don't like and vote for the other guy. Political advertisement capitalizes on this behavior which is indeed caused by FPTP. It's also susceptible to gerrymandering and isn't friendly to new parties. And the entire electoral college is completely unnecessary given modern transportation systems, so we need to throw that out altogether.
When we say "voting reform," I fundamentally mean that I want the actual voting system we use changed. We need a system that isn't susceptible to gerrymandering, that doesn't suffer from the spoiler effect, and that meets the condorcet criterion. Take your pick: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system. On top of that, we need to shut down campaign contributions from corporations, political advertisement in main-stream media, and require all of the relevant information be gathered somewhere online like at vote.gov or something and make it accessible to everyone via public libraries, etc.
There's a lot of reform that needs to be done, the least of which is how we collect votes. Come on guys, this is such a strawman to the real issues. Having your vote for dumbass #1 stolen and given to dumbass #2 doesn't matter. You are getting a dumbass as president almost nobody wants either way.
I wrote a virus when I was under 15 (too long ago to tell my exact age). It wasn't fancy, it basically disabled lots of stuff in Windows (98 at the time, and by overwriting parts of the PE header in a bunch of system files) and added itself to start on launch (before the login screen) so it would BSOD every boot unless you had a special key written in a file named "C:\opensesame.txt". I also wrote a little tool to remove it. It would attempt to copy itself to every bootable device plugged into the system (by adding an autorun.inf entry for it, back when EVERYTHING you plugged into your computer executed the autorun by default, lol). I made a few other things like tools that made the system unusable until I pressed a secret key-combo and unlocked the computer, but most were less virus-ey and more securit-ey; at least they worked when anyone could use a floppy recovery disk to overwrite your password in your SAM file. Hell, once my mom tried to put one of those commercial computer "security" apps on the computer that required a password before the login-screen would be shown, you know, to keep me from using the computer and doing my ever-so-important pre-algebra or learning where commas should go in a sentence and how to not write run-on sentences etc. With what I knew, I just booted into an MS-DOS prompt and found the exe it was running (it was conspicuously named and under program files, lol?) and renamed it so it would fail to launch and happily continued using the computer.
I started doing this after having an old DOS system I had infected by a bootsector virus. I researched it, and what it did on floppy drives to spread, and I was completely fascinated by the idea of writing software to "do bad things." It had never occurred to me. I wasn't too interested in writing the software to maliciously damage others' systems, rather just to disable my own and then fix it. And this fascination eventually lead to me learning, on my own, X86 assembly in 9th grade and getting into reverse-code-engineering and malware analysis (which is a big hobby of mine these days, not my profession). The success of seeing someone else do something that seemed completely impossible and learning how they did it lead me to do the same in other aspects of my life. I saw both XQZ and Viper-G in half-life based games and I was fascinated, leading me to read the source of similar cheats and write my own (that was one of favorite hobbies), along with writing bots and trying to (unsuccessfully, usually) write emulators for game servers. All the while I kept learning more than I would ever learn in school, and only because I saw a virus destroy my old MS-DOS machine and I was free to be curious and investigate.
I don't see how that's a bad thing for a kid to do, at the very least to explore security issues with their own system, so they can better understand just how vulnerable they are and what they can actually do with a computer. Computers are enormously powerful machines. To confine people to using programs written by others is such an abuse of how awesome they are.
Yet they still call it a "game purchase" not a "very limited game subscription license." We need legal clarification specifically that services that offer "subscription based acquisition and licensing" for services/products that do not themselves require a fee-based subscription actually constitutes a sale under copyright law. IIRC, we've had rulings recently that are starting to head in that direction, but we need a big one here that invalidates the legality of Steam's "no refunds, no trading, no sales, just you giving your money to us forever" system. Otherwise, we should all simply purchase games and add them to steam as a game manager rather than as a store. I can't actually believe this model is still legal. The EFF must not be targeting Valve at all.
That was EPIC. I've seen so many fireworks shows and they're always the exact same. Pop. A few more pops. Bam. Some silence.. pop pop. A few fancy looking fireworks. Repeat for 20 minutes. Then unleash 20 things at once and call it a finale.
What I always want to see is EVERYTHING going off at once. That's some shit you don't forget, like when a bottle-rocket falls over and comes flying at you, you know?
"Perspective?" Your post is full of logical fallacies. The damage is in perpetuating a model of digital distribution that mandates DRM and stomps on consumer rights. Failure to understand how the destruction of rights is damage indicates you're either incredibly ignorant (to the point of sheer stupidity) or a shill. The AC implies shill. Have a nice day.
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Because 'CETA' !== 'ACTA'. Next article, please!
And to your point about profit, it has never been demonstrated that disallowing sales of used copies reduces profit. Just as it has never been proved that piracy actually impacts the sales of copyrighted material. The fashion industry doesn't get copyright protection, and they stand by the argument "people who buy knock-offs aren't our customers, so we don't consider those sales potential profits for us." Amazon makes money on used item sales. A person who isn't willing to buy a NEW COPY of something but is willing to buy a USED COPY because of the price difference is often missed profit for companies like Steam -- they aren't going to buy the game new, they aren't your customer, but they COULD BE your customer, if you didn't think fucking over your customers was the best idea.
Valve tries to get both of these by having these sales, but a lot of companies won't let Valve sell copies of a game below a certain fixed % of the MSRP, so if it's a new game and MSRP is $60.00, where the retailer makes $3/copy sold or some absurdly small number, individuals aren't required to resell at MSRP, so if I buy the game at $60.00, play it, and decide I don't want it anymore, I can sell it for say $45. Now if Steam said "I'll help you find a buyer for 10% of the cost" then I'd be pocketing $40.50 and Steam would get $4.50, when I sell it. $4.50 is more profit than Steam is allowed to make from selling a new copy at MSRP, AND both me and the buyer are happy -- I recouped a loss, and they got it at a discount (and say they were in that category that WILL NOT BUY the game at the MSRP price). Steam just made $1.50 MORE on a price-fixed item by supporting and facilitating the sale of used games, in a system where customers own actual copies of games, not just a subscription to a license. That's a very common example that demonstrates significant profit potential over their "huge discounts, no refunds, and no ownership" model. Most people I know don't buy games at MSRP on Steam, they wait for sales, and that is some anecdotal evidence to support the idea that there are far more people willing to buy a used copy of a game than a new one -- a huge market that Steam doesn't capture until a game is antiquated, at which point the profit margins are minimal and only acceptable in incredible volumes.
My use of 'evil' is to describe how they treat customers -- we aren't allowed to buy a copy. It's not because they're trying to "make money." It is not apparent at all that such a draconian and broken business model will generate more profit. It is apparent, though, that forcing customers to forego rights that would normally be granted to them in the hopes that you might make a profit fits this definition very well:
Valve had a lot of respect from me. Back when I enjoyed their games (and still own copies, which I can legally sell). When Steam came out, I thought it was utter shit, until they made it better. It was pretty cool having my Valve games in a common launcher and being able to talk to friends (I didn't like Xfire and AIM sucked). But then they added the store and started demanding forfeiture of rights in order to buy games through it and get very little added-benefit on top of it except their distribution network, and then they had gone too far. If they're really so costly to implement, why not add an actual subscription to Steam so premium members who consume those features the most (higher bandwidth caps, priority downloads, etc) are paying extra instead of screwing everyone?
But you can sell that DVD copy back to the store or to another person, in general, and it's becoming a trend now to consider licenses re-sellable too, so account-bound DRM (aka Digital Rights Removal) will be either illegal or must facilitate the trade of licenses in the future (in the EU now, probably in NA soon enough). I buy an MMO, play it for 3 months, farm everything out, and I can usually sell my account for more money than I paid to play the game in total.
And that's JUST analyzing my cost. It's even cheaper for the purchasers of used games, because they too can re-sell it, and over time it gets even lower than the cost of buying a game on Steam.
You have to run Steam even in wine to run any game you purchased through the Steam Store. You still have to run it. If you own the game separately and it has wine support, it's trivial to run it on OSX or Linux.
All of this can be provided while using software that is licensed to the buyer, not to Valve. Steam can also in that case implement a market for used game licenses. The reason Valve doesn't do this is because they believe they will make more money if you never own a copy of a game and that nobody else can ever purchase your used copy (you have to buy it fresh from Steam or trade an unbound game). One could very easily re-implement all of Steam's features for these games without the draconian and probably illegal "subscription model" on top of it. Let people keep their licenses and have rights. It is not a technical requirement of Steam; it's just pure greed and by definition evil.
My issues with the Steam store are, and take your pick:
And many more I don't care to type on my iPhone. Steam is a fine tool for social gaming and game management, but the business model used by the Steam store is just unacceptable.
It would seem, to me at least, that this fits the definition of Treason very well. Or is it the case that congresspeople are granted complete immunity and impunity to all laws?
Buy a game and have it not work. Valve will "troubleshoot" for you and then tell you to go fuck yourself. Do that to a legitimate software retailer and they'll give you a refund. Buy a car, have it not work, take it back to the dealer and they'll fix it or give you another one, or a refund. Buy a new computer, have a part that's defective, get it replaced or get a refund. Hell, buy a new computer, sell your old one to someone else. Have you tried selling a CS 1.6 copy on Steam to another person? Hint: you can't. Whoops.
Buy a game on steam, have it not work, be told there are no refunds and that they can't do anything about it. And legally, they aren't obligated to either, because they sold you a subscription to a license, and they upheld their end of the bargain.
It's up to the consumer to decide whether they trust Valve or not, though there should be a very clear disclaimer that you never actually buy a game through Steam, and if one day GabeN decided to shut down Steam, nothing you purchased through Steam would ever work again, but if you buy games THEN add them to Steam, you still get everything, and if you ever decide you want to sell a game, you can do that too. I'm not even certain their business model is legal, as I can't find any court cases where it's been challenged, but Valve is basically writing their own laws, so I have to think it's probably not.
So long as we define "DRM done right" as "no DRM at all."
Steam's subscription model is anti-consumer; that itself is sufficient to warrant dismissal of Steam as a valid outlet for purchasing games, regardless of any DRM they impose, be it permissive or not. You don't have any rights to that content outside of what Valve says you can do with it (sure, you can run it offline and you can make backups to save us money on bandwidth, but nope, you can never resell it, or run it without steam, because you don't own the copy!). Nope. Buy games THEN put them on Steam. Never the other way around.
It would probably have more to do with the legal issues and that a game developer must allow Steam to have digital distribution rights and quite an incredibly powerful license to the software. You see, Valve doesn't sell games on Steam. They sell subscriptions to a license to a game. Valve owns the licenses, you own a very limited subscription to that license, and it affords you no rights under law, and it can be terminated at Valve's discretion for any reason or no reason. To distribute a game under that framework, I presume there's legal footwork to be done, and to do that for EVERY SINGLE GAME ANYONE EVER MADE, EVER would be an intractable problem indeed. If you go into it with a publisher saying "our customers want this game" and they deal with the legal issues up front, customers get games they want and Valve has less legal work to do.
I still say nobody should ever buy a game from Steam again. The reason they can sell games at 80% off is because you never actually own a copy of any game purchased through Steam, so you're literally paying Valve to let you play in their sandbox; at the end of the day, you have to go home, and all the toys stay with Valve. This is the most anti-consumer system I could imagine; complete and total dismissal of all consumer rights.
Just to point out, what Steam does is the epitome of anti-consumer. You have NO consumer rights, whatsoever, over anything you "purchase" on Steam.
Except they have the most draconian DRM system ever invented in the history of man: all you purchase is a revocable once-billed subscription to a license of a game. That means you don't have first sale rights or any rights under copyright law. That means you don't even own a license. Valve owns your license, and all you have is an active subscription to the game via Valve. Non-ownership of paid for merchandise is far beyond anything else you listed.
It does not matter what Valve puts on Steam. I will never purchase another game via Steam. I will always purchase the game in such a manner that I have rights and own a copy, then I will add the game to Steam. I do not need a potentially illegal DRM system controlling my access to things I purchase.
Its legality is questionable since all Valve employees and even Steam's own store website use terms such as "buy" and "purchase" and "game" instead of "subscribe" and "Valve owned license," yet in their legal verbage they refer only to subscriptions, never mentioning purchased products. "People who bought game X also bought the following: " -- this is misleading since technically nobody on Steam has ever actually purchased a game through steam.
I find it hilarious that Obj-C is ranked so far above something like Javascript. These indexes are meant to rate popularity, right? So subjective qualitative WTF-is-wrong-with-your-language arguments aside, the sheer volume of Javascript programming going on in browsers (that includes a large portion of phone-based software in webapps built for phones) should surely dwarf Obj-C. I also find that JS questions tend to dominate SO, too, much more so than Java, Obj-C, or C/C++. In fact, the numbers from SO are:
231,861 questions tagged 'Javascript'
91,526 questions tagged 'Objective-c'
So as you say, I can't find these indices valid at all, as they fail horribly to be accurate. For instance, the transparent index lists JS as a "script language." Nice.
How about by Internet explorer/explorer.exe? As I recall you could search the Internet and local via their duality as far back as win 95 or potentially 98.
+1, forgot about that one.
I'm running 2 580 GTX 3GBs in SLI, and I tested with Chrome 20.
Onto your favorite search engine*. Foo ... bar.
This is misleading, both in the benchmarks but also here. I very much dislike this entire article because it's very inaccurate and doesn't attempt to explain why certain things are the way they are. For instance, you have 2 categories where IE magically rapes Chrome and Firefox. Firefox and Chrome get near daily updates and have engineers who are obsessed with making every little thing as fast as possible. Chrome even uses Webkit, which is developed just as fervently at Apple. Microsoft rarely updates Trident or JScript. It is illogical given the resources and the amount of work invested that you would assume a test that shows IE9 (not even IE10) outperforming either of these browsers significantly is an accurate test. Even worse, the article combines unrelated categories of tests into a composite score.
.. 5 years?
For load speed - we don't know how this was measured. It isn't mentioned. Is it measured by the browser's own tools? IE may trigger a "done loading" right after it performs a layout of the DOM. Unless you know that the browsers are consistent with the metric being used, they don't matter. IE has routinely screwed up things like event fire order in order to "improve performance" but really all it does is break something that works in every other browser. I am not satisfied that the same has not occurred here. And if you come at it logically, Firefox and Chrome have much more powerful CSS and HTML rendering engines. Those websites where IE9 scored significantly higher have an HTML5 doctype. So you're also comparing nearly fully-compliant HTML5 browsers against an HTML4 browser. What's worse, is that if you look at cached load time, which is, as you state, THE MOST IMPORTANT METRIC, Chrome wins hands down and Firefox is better than IE. The fact that it changes so dramatically when caching is introduced implies that the metric being used in an uncached test is favorable to IE, which likely stems from the fact that it is making huge assumptions and doing pre-layouts while content is still downloading.
For "HTML5 performance" which is really just Canvas performance - I just ran the test myself. IE9 did not beat Chrome. And IE9's framerate was not consistent, while Chrome's was consistent throughout. What it looks like is that Microsoft has over-optimized certain rendering tasks to show off their own demos and any rendered output that is similar gets a huge performance boost, but the overall performance from IE9's Canvas is inconsistent and terrible. It'd be like playing an FPS where when you're not shooting a gun you have 50000 fps, but when you get into a firefight it drops to 3 fps. Why the huge difference? Tricks -- what IE is known for doing to get better scores.
Overall, this article is terrible. Half of the tests are subjective, and half of them don't matter. Hell, they rank WebGL and HTML5 HW accel below Java and Silverlight in performance. The only major website still using Silverlight is Netflix. And I haven't used a Java applet in
Google Chrome and Firefox at the least, before the iPhone ever did it, allowed you to search your own local history AND the internet from the URL bar. Local searches showed up in the preview, but if you hit enter, it would pass the search onto your favorite browser. Software patents should all be invalidated, IMO.
It really isn't. What we're talking about here is voting platform reform. I don't really care how voting is done (via computerized terminal, via paper ballot, or even via Internet, after all I can file my taxes online). What I care about is that the system we have in place for voting for candidates almost always elects a candidate that a minority (generally a superminority) actually wants to be president. It also gives political parties extreme power based on sheer advertisement; most people view it as this-guy-or-that-guy and so they just pick the one they don't like and vote for the other guy. Political advertisement capitalizes on this behavior which is indeed caused by FPTP. It's also susceptible to gerrymandering and isn't friendly to new parties. And the entire electoral college is completely unnecessary given modern transportation systems, so we need to throw that out altogether.
Relevant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo
When we say "voting reform," I fundamentally mean that I want the actual voting system we use changed. We need a system that isn't susceptible to gerrymandering, that doesn't suffer from the spoiler effect, and that meets the condorcet criterion. Take your pick: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system. On top of that, we need to shut down campaign contributions from corporations, political advertisement in main-stream media, and require all of the relevant information be gathered somewhere online like at vote.gov or something and make it accessible to everyone via public libraries, etc.
There's a lot of reform that needs to be done, the least of which is how we collect votes. Come on guys, this is such a strawman to the real issues. Having your vote for dumbass #1 stolen and given to dumbass #2 doesn't matter. You are getting a dumbass as president almost nobody wants either way.
I wrote a virus when I was under 15 (too long ago to tell my exact age). It wasn't fancy, it basically disabled lots of stuff in Windows (98 at the time, and by overwriting parts of the PE header in a bunch of system files) and added itself to start on launch (before the login screen) so it would BSOD every boot unless you had a special key written in a file named "C:\opensesame.txt". I also wrote a little tool to remove it. It would attempt to copy itself to every bootable device plugged into the system (by adding an autorun.inf entry for it, back when EVERYTHING you plugged into your computer executed the autorun by default, lol). I made a few other things like tools that made the system unusable until I pressed a secret key-combo and unlocked the computer, but most were less virus-ey and more securit-ey; at least they worked when anyone could use a floppy recovery disk to overwrite your password in your SAM file. Hell, once my mom tried to put one of those commercial computer "security" apps on the computer that required a password before the login-screen would be shown, you know, to keep me from using the computer and doing my ever-so-important pre-algebra or learning where commas should go in a sentence and how to not write run-on sentences etc. With what I knew, I just booted into an MS-DOS prompt and found the exe it was running (it was conspicuously named and under program files, lol?) and renamed it so it would fail to launch and happily continued using the computer.
I started doing this after having an old DOS system I had infected by a bootsector virus. I researched it, and what it did on floppy drives to spread, and I was completely fascinated by the idea of writing software to "do bad things." It had never occurred to me. I wasn't too interested in writing the software to maliciously damage others' systems, rather just to disable my own and then fix it. And this fascination eventually lead to me learning, on my own, X86 assembly in 9th grade and getting into reverse-code-engineering and malware analysis (which is a big hobby of mine these days, not my profession). The success of seeing someone else do something that seemed completely impossible and learning how they did it lead me to do the same in other aspects of my life. I saw both XQZ and Viper-G in half-life based games and I was fascinated, leading me to read the source of similar cheats and write my own (that was one of favorite hobbies), along with writing bots and trying to (unsuccessfully, usually) write emulators for game servers. All the while I kept learning more than I would ever learn in school, and only because I saw a virus destroy my old MS-DOS machine and I was free to be curious and investigate.
I don't see how that's a bad thing for a kid to do, at the very least to explore security issues with their own system, so they can better understand just how vulnerable they are and what they can actually do with a computer. Computers are enormously powerful machines. To confine people to using programs written by others is such an abuse of how awesome they are.
Yet they still call it a "game purchase" not a "very limited game subscription license." We need legal clarification specifically that services that offer "subscription based acquisition and licensing" for services/products that do not themselves require a fee-based subscription actually constitutes a sale under copyright law. IIRC, we've had rulings recently that are starting to head in that direction, but we need a big one here that invalidates the legality of Steam's "no refunds, no trading, no sales, just you giving your money to us forever" system. Otherwise, we should all simply purchase games and add them to steam as a game manager rather than as a store. I can't actually believe this model is still legal. The EFF must not be targeting Valve at all.
That was EPIC. I've seen so many fireworks shows and they're always the exact same. Pop. A few more pops. Bam. Some silence.. pop pop. A few fancy looking fireworks. Repeat for 20 minutes. Then unleash 20 things at once and call it a finale.
What I always want to see is EVERYTHING going off at once. That's some shit you don't forget, like when a bottle-rocket falls over and comes flying at you, you know?
"Perspective?" Your post is full of logical fallacies. The damage is in perpetuating a model of digital distribution that mandates DRM and stomps on consumer rights. Failure to understand how the destruction of rights is damage indicates you're either incredibly ignorant (to the point of sheer stupidity) or a shill. The AC implies shill. Have a nice day.