in my opinion Chrome Frame itself serve's little to none purpose. If you can install it, you could install the actual Chrome (or some other) browser aswell
I broadly agree with you, but I can see one situation where it might be useful: a bunch of related pages, some of which work in and benefit from a modern browser and some of which don't, used in a single workflow. You'd sacrifice a lot of convenience if you used two separate browsers here.
It might help to convince management to bring things up to date, too: you can get incremental benefits from incremental improvement, rather than having to commit to overhauling the entire universe in one go.
as long as Microsoft continues to push Silverlight... any alternative approach within MS is going to stagnate
Yes and no. MS clearly have no strategic interest in encouraging SVG. But I doubt there's all that much overlap between the Silverlight and IE teams, and I'm sure that a lot of the IE guys are decent enough engineers to be embarrassed about their product's foot-dragging. So far, MS have been able to keep SVG off the mainstream Web by refusing to support it. If Google's SVG-on-Flash takes off, and they switch Maps etc to it, this will no longer be the case. People will be using SVG, and will be able to see that their friends with FF/Chrome/Safari/Opera are having a better time with it than they are.
The best chance I can see of IE getting solid, native SVG support soon would be if they switch to using WebKit as their primary rendering engine, with Trident relegated to a compatibility mode. Yes, it sounds implausible. But:
Apple did it. And have been doing it long enough to have flushed out any lurking patent trolls.
IE isn't the strategic weapon it used to be; standards-compliance is pretty good and improving, and you don't see significant IE-only sites on the public internet these days. If it's not locking end-users into the Windows client, and it's not bringing in any revenue, why keep throwing dev resource at it?
Some bits of Microsoft - don't ever think that any organization that big is monolithic - have been quietly getting a clue of late. I was stunned when they announced they'd be shipping and supporting jQuery with Visual Studio. Seriously, jaw-on-the-floor stunned.
There were rumours along these lines soon after IE8 shipped. I suspect they were largely wishful thinking, but it does make a lot of sense.
Meh. I'm not sure which one is the attacker in your scenario, but IMHO that's still requiring physical access. You need to:
1) Be right next to the target, and probably known to them, since people don't generally borrow hardware from total strangers 2) Have a plausible reason for having a spare keyboard handy 3) Be able to sabotage the victim's keyboard so that it "acts up" when you need it to
All in all, I don't find this remotely scary. This is not going to be the dreaded Mac Virus Of The Apocalypse (you know, the one that could take down an entire advertising agency or small art college).
If someone has sufficient permissions on your machine to update your firmware, aren't you kind of screwed already? I suppose they could swap your (external) keyboard for a compromised one, but that still implies physical access.
That said, given that the ability to update is useful, and that the flash memory size we're talking about is so small, is there a significant downside to having the OS check hashes of the firmware code on initialization?
Realtime, web-based collaborative text editor. If you don't especially care about the data being hosted out there amongst the tubes, free. (I suspect that the people suggesting SVN et al don't quite understand what pair programming is...)
Describing them explicitly as "rentals" might dissipate some ire on the limited-installs thing, but it would in no way excuse the practice of PERMANENTLY installing malware on the user's machine, which is what this suit is about.
gpu's aren't really parallel in that [traditional multithreaded] sense, they are parallel in the SIMD sense.
Actually, they're somewhere in between. Some current hardware can reallocate individual processors between fragment and vertex processing depending on the current workload profile. Even at the level of an individual processor lots of "threads" may be running simultaneously; this is to hide latency when a shader program blocks on memory (texture or framebuffer) access.
If you look at NV's descriptions of their 8xx-series drivers, they talk about *hundreds* of threads in flight at any given time. These aren't threads in the classical sense - there's no preemption, for a start - but they're much, much more advanced than SIMD-style "apply this instruction to all these values" parallelism.
You're missing the point entirely. GPUs in the near future will essentially be general-purpose massively-multicore processors. (Not entirely so, but close enough for "GPU" to become a misnomer.)
You don't need separate binaries for Intel versus AMD processors, and you don't have to write to an API to achieve portability between such different CPUs. Given sufficiently general hardware, there's no inherent reason why GPUs should be any different. There will still be a place for libraries, but their role will be more like C libraries than like GL/DX.
People really need to realize that: - OpenGL is still the ONLY really cross-platform 3D API
Yes. That doesn't mean that it's any good by today's standards, or that many people will want to use it. The question is about "cutting-edge" crossplatform 3D. Archaic crufty obtuse painful unreliable buggy 3D is, I'll grant you, probably safe. Yay.
- OpenGL is not only for games. It is used heavily from movie production to industrial design
As above. Plus I doubt whether those niches are big enough to support robust works-anywhere consumer implementations all by themselves.
- Even within the game industry the PlayStation3 uses OpenGL
The PS3 supports something very like OpenGL ES, but it's not used much. Most devs target the native graphics API instead; I gather it's faster.
This is not the first time this has happened. GL2 was also supposed to be a cleanup, but turned out to be anything but. This latest fiasco is more significant as a failure of governance than of technology. All the right ideas were there; they were published in some detail over a year ago in the Pipeline newsletters. But the ARB very obviously a) can't agree to get anything meaningful done, and b) now has subzero credibility with developers. It's not coming back from that.
So yes, I think cutting-edge cross-platform 3D is dead for the next 2-3 years. Let's face it, it was never exactly healthy. It's not the end of the world. Linux share is currently growing mostly at the low end, netbooks etc, while the Mac seems to be thriving despite the fact that Apple doesn't give a flying fsck about gaming and never has.
Fast forward a couple of years, though, and things like Larrabee will be hitting the market; embarrassingly parallel hardware that can be programmed with standard languages and tools. The API's role as gatekeeper of functionality will be gone. And suddenly, 3D rendering libs can be written by anyone with the time and expertise, without having to go through Microsoft or the ARB or NV or AMD/ATi or Intel or anyone. Experimentation, competition, cross-fertilization, evolution. Remember Outcast's voxel engine? Seen things like Anti-Grain? This will happen.
(Or, yes, people could just reimplement the DXwhatever API directly, but that would be a little disappointing.)
Today was not a good day, by any stretch of the imagination. But it's not the end.
I'll believe Apple care about gaming when they devote engineering effort - ANY engineering effort - toward improving SDL or some hypothetical equivalent.
Any sign of this so far? Nope. Their current pitch to game developers is "come on over, waste brain cells learning our dead-end niche programming language, chain yourselves to our mind-bogglingly retarded UI that thinks opaque binary blob is an acceptable source format".
<River> Call me if anything interesting shows up </River>
A shame nobody bothered to inform the manufacturers and proponents of this system about this particular wisdom.
Why would they care? The manufacturers want to sell stuff. The proponents want to look as if they're Doing Something. Neither group particularly gives a damn whether the system works or not.
If you're going to shill for Silverlight (which you clearly are, given your Scoble-soundbite title and your previous post here), at least be honest about it. This reads like one of those "evaluation guides" that sales put out for lazy journalists: "An XYZ app should be judged on features A, B, and C; by coincidence, our new XYZalizer product does A, B and C..."
I fully sympathize with your desire for a better way, but not at the cost of throwing away the Web and replacing it with the $VENDOR Network, which is what Silverlight (and others) are trying to do. Microsoft will not support an open Web. Not yet. They can't; they're institutionally addicted to monopoly rents, and monopoly rents require platform lock-in, whether that platform be Win32 or Silverlight or anything else.
I think Mark Pilgrim said it best, and far more entertainingly: "Seriously? Seriously? Do I really have to explain why this is a bad idea? Again? To a bunch of technological virgins who haven't been fucked yet?"
(Incidentally, we did a quick evaluation of Silverlight a few months back, and once you stripped away the layers of PR I really couldn't see what the excitement was about. All the demo apps were some variation of "Oh look, it's a another video player. Just what the world was waiting for." Completely uninspiring. And we're a.NET shop; gawd only knows what everyone else thought.)
At 99 cents / song it would cost roughly $5,000 to fill a 20GB iPod (assuming an average of 4MB / song).
I've seen variations of this argument a few times, and genuinely don't understand it. Leaving aside all the other things that people might put onto iPods, why should X amount of storage somehow oblige music sellers to reduce prices to a level where filling X is reasonably cheap? If I buy a bigger bookcase, are publishers obligated to cut the price of books? If I move to a house with a double garage, are car manufacturers obligated to halve the price of cars?
In other words, why is the problem automatically "your music is too expensive", rather than "my iPod is too big"?
The finale of Season 3 even has Starbuck coming back from the dead, apparently as a figment of Lee's imagination. Oh great, another character inexplicably living in someone's head.
Would it have killed you to put in a spoiler warning? Way to blurt out the main (?) shock of Season 3 before it's even started over here.
I specifically didn't use the word "money," because I didn't mean money; I was speaking more generally about the total material cost of a war, which is not just the cost in hard currency, but also in equipment and material, training dollars, missed opportunities, diverted resources, inflated goods prices due to trade disruption, and everything else.
Hmm. Most of the things you list there are money to all intents and purposes, but I take your point; you're talking about (to be cold-hearted and vile for a moment) fundamentally illiquid assets. You can't field a new combat-ready brigade or build an aircraft carrier overnight for any amount of money, any more than you can get babies faster by throwing more women at the problem. I do think "treasure" is a crappy descriptor for such things, though. "Stockpiles" is closer, but lacks a certain oratorical je ne sais quoi.
In any case, thanks for the enlightenment. Have a notional +1 Informative on me.
(WTF was Roosevelt sabre-rattling about in 1899, anyway? The Spanish-American War?)
Fully agree with your points, just curious about something:
In short, you trade treasure for blood.
This has been bugging me for a while. For the last six months or so, a new grammatical rule seems to have appeared which forbids the use of the words "blood" and "money" in the same sentence; in this context "money" must always be replaced with "treasure". Thus far I've only really seen this come up in political rhetoric; your post is the first example I've seen of the rule creeping into general discourse.
Was there a memo? Why is it cold-hearted and vile to juxtapose blood with money, but not with treasure? No amount of dollar bills can compare with a human life, but a casket of gold dubloons, arr, that's worth a few corpses, matey.
If the text is too small, make it bigger by increasing the font size. Don't compromise the resolution of everything on the system just to make the text bigger.
In an ideal world, you'd be absolutely right. In the current one, not so much. I have an old Dell laptop with a 15.4" screen at 1920x1200, and WinXP really doesn't cope all that well. Changing the DPI setting (the "correct" solution) broke pretty much everything. Keeping the standard-but-wrong DPI and cranking up font sizes used to mostly work except for dialog boxes, which go badly messed up. At some point MS gave up and changed their policy via an update; now, dialog box text is always sized for 96dpi and cannot be enlarged.
Ironically, the only thing that manages layout flawlessly and respects font size prefs is Eclipse's SWT toolkit. MS stuff is absolutely nowhere.
Slashdot Mirror
I broadly agree with you, but I can see one situation where it might be useful: a bunch of related pages, some of which work in and benefit from a modern browser and some of which don't, used in a single workflow. You'd sacrifice a lot of convenience if you used two separate browsers here.
It might help to convince management to bring things up to date, too: you can get incremental benefits from incremental improvement, rather than having to commit to overhauling the entire universe in one go.
Yes and no. MS clearly have no strategic interest in encouraging SVG. But I doubt there's all that much overlap between the Silverlight and IE teams, and I'm sure that a lot of the IE guys are decent enough engineers to be embarrassed about their product's foot-dragging. So far, MS have been able to keep SVG off the mainstream Web by refusing to support it. If Google's SVG-on-Flash takes off, and they switch Maps etc to it, this will no longer be the case. People will be using SVG, and will be able to see that their friends with FF/Chrome/Safari/Opera are having a better time with it than they are.
The best chance I can see of IE getting solid, native SVG support soon would be if they switch to using WebKit as their primary rendering engine, with Trident relegated to a compatibility mode. Yes, it sounds implausible. But:
There were rumours along these lines soon after IE8 shipped. I suspect they were largely wishful thinking, but it does make a lot of sense.
Tidal?
Meh. I'm not sure which one is the attacker in your scenario, but IMHO that's still requiring physical access. You need to:
1) Be right next to the target, and probably known to them, since people don't generally borrow hardware from total strangers
2) Have a plausible reason for having a spare keyboard handy
3) Be able to sabotage the victim's keyboard so that it "acts up" when you need it to
All in all, I don't find this remotely scary. This is not going to be the dreaded Mac Virus Of The Apocalypse (you know, the one that could take down an entire advertising agency or small art college).
If someone has sufficient permissions on your machine to update your firmware, aren't you kind of screwed already? I suppose they could swap your (external) keyboard for a compromised one, but that still implies physical access.
That said, given that the ability to update is useful, and that the flash memory size we're talking about is so small, is there a significant downside to having the OS check hashes of the firmware code on initialization?
Realtime, web-based collaborative text editor. If you don't especially care about the data being hosted out there amongst the tubes, free. (I suspect that the people suggesting SVN et al don't quite understand what pair programming is...)
http://etherpad.com/
Howard Stringer's quote, not yours, but...
And yet, Facebook.
Firefox has sufficient market share that there will be enough websites that use OGG to force Microsoft to add the support.
Yes, that worked out so well for SVG.
Describing them explicitly as "rentals" might dissipate some ire on the limited-installs thing, but it would in no way excuse the practice of PERMANENTLY installing malware on the user's machine, which is what this suit is about.
gpu's aren't really parallel in that [traditional multithreaded] sense, they are parallel in the SIMD sense.
Actually, they're somewhere in between. Some current hardware can reallocate individual processors between fragment and vertex processing depending on the current workload profile. Even at the level of an individual processor lots of "threads" may be running simultaneously; this is to hide latency when a shader program blocks on memory (texture or framebuffer) access.
If you look at NV's descriptions of their 8xx-series drivers, they talk about *hundreds* of threads in flight at any given time. These aren't threads in the classical sense - there's no preemption, for a start - but they're much, much more advanced than SIMD-style "apply this instruction to all these values" parallelism.
You're missing the point entirely. GPUs in the near future will essentially be general-purpose massively-multicore processors. (Not entirely so, but close enough for "GPU" to become a misnomer.)
You don't need separate binaries for Intel versus AMD processors, and you don't have to write to an API to achieve portability between such different CPUs. Given sufficiently general hardware, there's no inherent reason why GPUs should be any different. There will still be a place for libraries, but their role will be more like C libraries than like GL/DX.
People really need to realize that:
- OpenGL is still the ONLY really cross-platform 3D API
Yes. That doesn't mean that it's any good by today's standards, or that many people will want to use it. The question is about "cutting-edge" crossplatform 3D. Archaic crufty obtuse painful unreliable buggy 3D is, I'll grant you, probably safe. Yay.
- OpenGL is not only for games. It is used heavily from movie production to industrial design
As above. Plus I doubt whether those niches are big enough to support robust works-anywhere consumer implementations all by themselves.
- Even within the game industry the PlayStation3 uses OpenGL
The PS3 supports something very like OpenGL ES, but it's not used much. Most devs target the native graphics API instead; I gather it's faster.
...and probably irrelevant in the longer term.
This is not the first time this has happened. GL2 was also supposed to be a cleanup, but turned out to be anything but. This latest fiasco is more significant as a failure of governance than of technology. All the right ideas were there; they were published in some detail over a year ago in the Pipeline newsletters. But the ARB very obviously a) can't agree to get anything meaningful done, and b) now has subzero credibility with developers. It's not coming back from that.
So yes, I think cutting-edge cross-platform 3D is dead for the next 2-3 years. Let's face it, it was never exactly healthy. It's not the end of the world. Linux share is currently growing mostly at the low end, netbooks etc, while the Mac seems to be thriving despite the fact that Apple doesn't give a flying fsck about gaming and never has.
Fast forward a couple of years, though, and things like Larrabee will be hitting the market; embarrassingly parallel hardware that can be programmed with standard languages and tools. The API's role as gatekeeper of functionality will be gone. And suddenly, 3D rendering libs can be written by anyone with the time and expertise, without having to go through Microsoft or the ARB or NV or AMD/ATi or Intel or anyone. Experimentation, competition, cross-fertilization, evolution. Remember Outcast's voxel engine? Seen things like Anti-Grain? This will happen.
(Or, yes, people could just reimplement the DXwhatever API directly, but that would be a little disappointing.)
Today was not a good day, by any stretch of the imagination. But it's not the end.
Yes, but that ("Il faut manger...") is clearly not a pangram, or anywhere close.
I'll believe Apple care about gaming when they devote engineering effort - ANY engineering effort - toward improving SDL or some hypothetical equivalent.
Any sign of this so far? Nope. Their current pitch to game developers is "come on over, waste brain cells learning our dead-end niche programming language, chain yourselves to our mind-bogglingly retarded UI that thinks opaque binary blob is an acceptable source format".
<River> Call me if anything interesting shows up </River>
A shame nobody bothered to inform the manufacturers and proponents of this system about this particular wisdom.
Why would they care? The manufacturers want to sell stuff. The proponents want to look as if they're Doing Something. Neither group particularly gives a damn whether the system works or not.
If you're going to shill for Silverlight (which you clearly are, given your Scoble-soundbite title and your previous post here), at least be honest about it. This reads like one of those "evaluation guides" that sales put out for lazy journalists: "An XYZ app should be judged on features A, B, and C; by coincidence, our new XYZalizer product does A, B and C..."
.NET shop; gawd only knows what everyone else thought.)
I fully sympathize with your desire for a better way, but not at the cost of throwing away the Web and replacing it with the $VENDOR Network, which is what Silverlight (and others) are trying to do. Microsoft will not support an open Web. Not yet. They can't; they're institutionally addicted to monopoly rents, and monopoly rents require platform lock-in, whether that platform be Win32 or Silverlight or anything else.
I think Mark Pilgrim said it best, and far more entertainingly: "Seriously? Seriously? Do I really have to explain why this is a bad idea? Again? To a bunch of technological virgins who haven't been fucked yet?"
(Incidentally, we did a quick evaluation of Silverlight a few months back, and once you stripped away the layers of PR I really couldn't see what the excitement was about. All the demo apps were some variation of "Oh look, it's a another video player. Just what the world was waiting for." Completely uninspiring. And we're a
At 99 cents / song it would cost roughly $5,000 to fill a 20GB iPod (assuming an average of 4MB / song).
I've seen variations of this argument a few times, and genuinely don't understand it. Leaving aside all the other things that people might put onto iPods, why should X amount of storage somehow oblige music sellers to reduce prices to a level where filling X is reasonably cheap? If I buy a bigger bookcase, are publishers obligated to cut the price of books? If I move to a house with a double garage, are car manufacturers obligated to halve the price of cars?
In other words, why is the problem automatically "your music is too expensive", rather than "my iPod is too big"?
For your Illustrator user, it's worth keeping an eye on Xara Xtreme.
In 1870, people would say we could not get to the moon because horses would not survive in the vacuum of space.
I think you're being a bit dismissive of the 1870ites, particularly given that Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon was first published in 1865.
The finale of Season 3 even has Starbuck coming back from the dead, apparently as a figment of Lee's imagination. Oh great, another character inexplicably living in someone's head.
Would it have killed you to put in a spoiler warning? Way to blurt out the main (?) shock of Season 3 before it's even started over here.
But however, I think you have a point in that it may be becoming clichéd. I'll have to get more creative in the future.
Lymph and real estate FTW!
I specifically didn't use the word "money," because I didn't mean money; I was speaking more generally about the total material cost of a war, which is not just the cost in hard currency, but also in equipment and material, training dollars, missed opportunities, diverted resources, inflated goods prices due to trade disruption, and everything else.
Hmm. Most of the things you list there are money to all intents and purposes, but I take your point; you're talking about (to be cold-hearted and vile for a moment) fundamentally illiquid assets. You can't field a new combat-ready brigade or build an aircraft carrier overnight for any amount of money, any more than you can get babies faster by throwing more women at the problem. I do think "treasure" is a crappy descriptor for such things, though. "Stockpiles" is closer, but lacks a certain oratorical je ne sais quoi.
In any case, thanks for the enlightenment. Have a notional +1 Informative on me.
(WTF was Roosevelt sabre-rattling about in 1899, anyway? The Spanish-American War?)
Fully agree with your points, just curious about something:
In short, you trade treasure for blood.
This has been bugging me for a while. For the last six months or so, a new grammatical rule seems to have appeared which forbids the use of the words "blood" and "money" in the same sentence; in this context "money" must always be replaced with "treasure". Thus far I've only really seen this come up in political rhetoric; your post is the first example I've seen of the rule creeping into general discourse.
Was there a memo? Why is it cold-hearted and vile to juxtapose blood with money, but not with treasure? No amount of dollar bills can compare with a human life, but a casket of gold dubloons, arr, that's worth a few corpses, matey.
If the text is too small, make it bigger by increasing the font size. Don't compromise the resolution of everything on the system just to make the text bigger.
In an ideal world, you'd be absolutely right. In the current one, not so much. I have an old Dell laptop with a 15.4" screen at 1920x1200, and WinXP really doesn't cope all that well. Changing the DPI setting (the "correct" solution) broke pretty much everything. Keeping the standard-but-wrong DPI and cranking up font sizes used to mostly work except for dialog boxes, which go badly messed up. At some point MS gave up and changed their policy via an update; now, dialog box text is always sized for 96dpi and cannot be enlarged.
Ironically, the only thing that manages layout flawlessly and respects font size prefs is Eclipse's SWT toolkit. MS stuff is absolutely nowhere.