And that is to blame website developers who use flash for stuff that it ain't needed for. Such as playing video. The video tag works now (not on IE, but lets face it, if you got IE, you got flash) so support it.
It works, yes, but . . .
It doesn't support fullscreening at all in any released browser, only in Firefox 3.6.
It doesn't support programmatic fullscreening in any browser, or even in the spec itself – so you can't have a custom "click to go fullscreen" button.
It doesn't support control over autobuffering in Chrome or Safari. They always fully buffer anything you put on the page, wasting your and your viewers' bandwidth if the video is never actually played.
Firefox supports autobuffering control, but it's either no buffering at all until the user hits play, or always buffer the whole thing – no "buffer just enough to start playing right away" mode.
And this is even ignoring the codec issue. (If you have an existing H.264 video, should you re-encode it as Theora? Trying to lossily compress something already lossily compressed = awful quality.) I wouldn't use it over a Flash player on a general-audience site until implementations are a bit more mature. Video support is a big, complicated feature, and it needs time to become really great.
(Of course, you could always use <video> as fallback if Flash is missing, rather than the reverse. That would be nice for me, as a Chrome Linux user whose browser tends to crash and burn if I enable plugins.)
If you're a web site developer, it's probably best to host both, and have your pages detect what the browser supports.
And right there is why the HTML5 video tag will never defeat Flash video in its current form. With Flash, you need only one encoding.
"Never" is a bit strong. Apple is reconsidering its decision to avoid Theora, last I heard, but since it involves lawyers it's taking a long time. In the long term, I expect everyone will settle on a baseline royalty-free format that works well enough, like Theora.
Yes, it is. The codebase is much, much larger, and the graphics
technology pushes a lot of paths that are not usually optimized. It
probably wouldn't be all that bad to get it running on the nvidia binary
drivers, but the chance of it working correctly and acceptably anywhere
else would be small. If you are restricted to it only working on the
closed source drivers, you might as well boot into windows and get the
fully tested and tuned experience...
I.e., they're still using OpenGL; the problem is Linux graphics drivers, especially the open-source ones.
As soon as Microsoft implements the current SVG standards in IE, they should be welcomed into the process of refining the standards further.
Until they implement the current SVG standards, they should be kept away.
[Opinions mine, not IBM's.]
IBM happens to employ Sam Ruby, one of the co-chairs of the HTMLWG. Would you say IBM should not be allowed to have its members in the HTMLWG to work on HTML5 until IBM has a working HTML4 implementation? Because, you know, they don't, as far as I've heard.
"Committee stuffing is a standard practice for Microsoft. Microsoft raped ISO with their office file formats, leaving the organization in limbo. The whole campaign against the format have raised an army of people, which are furious about the dirty tactics used by Microsoft to get the broken standard through ISO. This anger won't go away, and I wish good luck to Microsoft to get it adopted by governments. The reputation of Microsoft went down below zero with this process."
The SVG Working Group is composed of . . . well, it seems to be "query failed" right now. But anyway, each organization gets one vote. It's made up of Microsoft's competitors. Microsoft cannot stuff the committee, it's not possible within W3C procedures, unless they get lots of little organizations to join and pay them to swing the vote. Which they've never done in well over a decade of W3C membership, despite being members of the Working Groups for CSS, Web Fonts, HTML, etc., etc. So no, they're probably joining the committee to influence the standard because they want to implement it and have feedback. Like every other implementer. Even if their motives differ a bit.
Actually, microsoft's recent track record with the W3C is quite positive. In IE8 they implemented full support for CSS 2.1 (they even released a large test suite to help the other browsers improve their CSS 2.1 support) and a decent level of support for WAI ARIA (accessibility spec). They also looked ahead and implemented native json encoding/decoding (part of HTML5), and the web storage spec (yet to be finalized). And they've contributed positively to the HTML5 working group.
I agree with all of those except the last. Microsoft has been virtually silent in the HTMLWG. There were a few posts by Adrian Bateman, and one or two other people who posted something and then usually let it hang without further discussion, but that's about it. They even employ one of the three co-chairs, Paul Cotton, but he says very little that's not strictly administrative. The impression I get is that the developers don't freely engage in discussion, just drop off collective feedback and watch what happens.
In contrast, Microsoft employees have been very active in some WG mailing lists I've subscribed to, like the CSS and font WGs. Dunno what the deal is with HTML5, but it doesn't seem like what Microsoft's most focused on right now. I'd be surprised to see large-scale HTML5 implementation in IE9, although I'm sure they'll add a few more features.
Microsoft has a proven track record and a known strategy of packing standards boards to subvert them for their own uses.
If you think the SVG Working Group is going to be subverted by Microsoft, you haven't participated much in the W3C. Each organization gets one vote, if a vote is needed, and every single organization in the Working Group is almost certainly a competitor of Microsoft. We're not talking some organization of government reps that Microsoft can buy off; you can't buy off your own competitors.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if IE9 at a bare minimum supports <video> and <audio> It's such a simple thing to hack into the engine that even they should be able to pull it off without any fuss.
From talking with Gecko, WebKit, and Presto developers on the public-html and whatwg mailing lists about video/audio, my impression is that they definitely are not so simple. But Adrian Bateman of Microsoft has clearly stated on public-html that he thinks video and audio are a good idea, so it seems likely they'll go for it at some point (although I wouldn't bet on IE9).
As for codecs, I'd bet they do like Apple and just go with supporting whatever the system video codecs are (Safari uses QuickTime). They already have complete video-playing implementations, like Apple but unlike Mozilla or Opera or Google, so why would they rewrite or fork it for IE? Although, like Apple, they do hold patents on H.264, so maybe they'll also avoid Theora support.
I do hope they don't join just to ruin the standard or offer halfassed support for it.
Why else *would* they join?
I'm all for Microsoft-bashing, but that's over the top. Microsoft realizes that sometimes their interests lie in supporting certain standards. They support lots of standards to the letter. CSS2.1 support in IE8 is as good as any other browser if not better, for instance. Their C and C++ compilers, SQL database, POSIX implementation, and so forth are about as standards-compliant as anyone else's (which is "not very" in some cases, to be fair). They don't do this out of altruism, obviously, but they realize sometimes people want good support for particular standards.
3. Lock and bar the cockpit doors for the flight's duration.
Seriously, just stop at that. The only reason to target planes is to use them as bigger bombs than you could have gotten otherwise. If the worst you can do is kill the couple hundred people on the plane, you may as well just rent an eighteen-wheeler, fill it with explosives, drive it to downtown Manhattan at 8 AM, and detonate it there. Much more damage than taking down one measly jumbo jet, and much harder to stop.
I don't know why these idiots persist in trying to attack airplanes just to blow them up, frankly. Why didn't Mr. Underpants wait a few more days and give Times Square a shot at midnight on New Year's Eve? He could have had a whole trenchcoat full of explosives. Or heck, just throw a couple of grenades, if you can get 'em. Much more reliable to use something designed for the job.
Um, you do now that casualty-wise, in the US over the last 20 years, a large percentage of Terrorism Victims are from White Militia members, right? Between Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City, and The guy at the Atlanta Olympics... (which only killed one person, and indirectly...)
Have you gotten up to 2,973 killed by white militia members, and more than 6,000 wounded? Because that's how many people some Arab Muslims killed in one day a few years back. I think it's safe to say that Arab Muslims are a bigger terrorism threat than white militia members right now. (Although both are of course much smaller threats than, say, getting killed in a car accident.)
Banning bundling would be harsh for users who "can't afford" to pay full price up front, and would rather spread the real cost of the phone across the length of the contract.
This is done in plenty of markets by just using installment plans. You don't have to link it to the carrier contract.
Our educational system is totally broken when the educated just want things to fit. Even in mathematics, we're promoting a crop of "just tell me what to do!"
As a grad student in pure mathematics, I'm curious: do you mean in low-level math education, or mathematical research? Basic math education is often just about giving you the tools you need to do your job, so there's nothing wrong with just telling people what to do. Higher-level courses (meaning the kinds only pure-math majors typically take) do require you to actually understand the material and be able to prove things from first principles, probably far more so than any other field.
"In September 2004, editors of several prominent medical journals (including the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Annals of Internal Medicine, and JAMA) announced that they would no longer publish results of drug research sponsored by pharmaceutical companies unless that research was registered in a public database from the start.[11] In this way, negative results should no longer be able to disappear."
But I guess research by anyone other than pharmaceutical companies is allowed to disappear? I guess researchers who aren't tied to corporations never have pet theories that they would like to see come true because they've invested the last ten years of their life in it, for instance? Or for social or moral reasons?
All studies should be published, that anyone conducts. Maybe just put up on the web with a note to the effect of "We obviously messed this one up pretty bad, huh?", but put somewhere. That's the only way to ensure that metastudies aren't hopelessly corrupted by publication bias. Which can be due to researchers throwing out data because they think they messed it up, research funders throwing out data because it doesn't help their bottom line, reviewers rejecting studies because they don't like the conclusion or the researcher isn't prestigious enough, lots of things.
I had two systems, both 64-bit Fedora, that I tried Chrome on. On one, Flash worked fine from the moment I installed Chrome. On the other, Chrome didn't even notice the plugin existed. Flash (32-bit, wrapped with mozilla-plugin-config) worked just fine in Firefox on both computers. When I compared the two systems, it turned out that one was missing a symbolic link. The file is in/usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins-wrapped, but Chrome was looking in/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins.
The rating you are looking for is AO, adults only. It's a real ESRB rating. It is more or less the "anything goes" rating. The reason you don't see much of it is because most retailers refuse to carry games with that rating. It's a real rating though and there have been a few games with it (Sim's Singles being one of them). An accurate depiction of the Old Testament would most certainly qualify for that rating.
I don't see why you'd think that. About the only thing that gets AO is actual pornography. The Bible discusses sex sometimes, but never very explicitly. It relies very heavily on euphemism – "know" and "lie with" and so on. The most explicit things I can think of are in Song of Songs, and that's very mild by today's standards. (Like: "Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.") Likewise, the Bible doesn't depict graphic violence, it just says something like "Phineas got up and stabbed him with a spear" at most.
If the entire Bible were depicted as a game, with violence and sex made as explicit (or non-explicit) as in the text, it would probably be T at most, quite possibly E10+. No swearing, no detailed descriptions of violence, only oblique reference to sex – what could anyone possibly think would merit even M, let alone AO? Other than, you know, knee-jerk anti-religious sentiment by people who have never read more than two chapters of the Bible but are happy to make it sound like religious zealots are hypocrites.
Opera is smaller, faster and with features better integrated and streamlined. It can do what prety much most of the most popular Firefox extensions can, and without everything breaking with each release. Oh, and it's crazy fast and has the most responsive UI, period.
Have you tried Chrome? Its UI seems about as responsive as Opera's to me — meaning no perceptible lag at all. Likewise on rendering/JS speed, although that's harder to gauge and is a much more rapidly-changing landscape right now.
The only way I can see hardware security reaching true theoretical unbreakability is if we get to the level where the uncertainty principle prevents observing the hardware in action, but I'm not sure if it will be feasible to have the hardware even run reliably under those conditions.
Well, this idea is pretty much the basis for quantum cryptography: if anyone observes the transmission, it gets corrupted. So it's evidently possible for some things.
the best part is that each tab gets its own thread. IE8 and Chrome are the only browsers that do this (to my knowledge) and it's really handy - broken websites don't hork up your entire browsing session like they do in Firefox and Opera.
Process, not thread. And Firefox is working on this and should have it done in the next year or two, with any luck (I don't see a timetable).
OSX/Linux will let you use up to 64gb ram on a 32bit os, ms artificially restrict you unless you buy the expensive "enterprise server" version...
Which will break all your drivers anyway, so you may as well use 64-bit. 32-bit with PAE means drivers don't necessarily work, because the structure of the page tables is totally different, some data structures are different to accommodate effectively longer pointers, etc.
OSX will let you run a 32bit kernel with a 64bit userland incase your drivers aren't ported to 64bit yet...
I don't know why Windows doesn't do this, admittedly. It's a clever idea. (For Linux it's largely pointless because the drivers are almost all open-source.)
Linux will let you use a 64bit kernel with a 32bit userland, or a mixed userland...
So will all 64-bit OSes. You can run 32-bit programs fine on 64-bit Windows.
MS force you to use a 64bit kernel if you want a 64bit userland or support for more than 4gb of address space, but the 64bit kernel is often totally unusable if you don't have the drivers you need.. MS would have benefitted from doing what Apple did, Apple/Linux have less of an issue with drivers anyway because most come with source code enabling a 64bit recompile, or in the case of apple most of the hardware is supplied by them anyway.
Right, this is the key. Apple and Linux control their essential drivers very directly, Microsoft does not. Legacy 32-bit apps work fine on a 64-bit OS, legacy drivers do not, because they're not insulated from the hardware. So MS has to pressure an immense number of third-party driver developers to update all their drivers to work on 64-bit, Apple and Linux don't.
Wow, how badly did you screw the pootch in the planing stages if you are changing the columns of a live DB?
Requirements change over time, new features need schema changes. Unless you somehow know exactly what your needs will be for all eternity, you're going to have to change the DB schema sometimes to support a new feature or fix a bug.
Online upgrades. Suppose you have a service that needs to be available on a 24 x 7 basis. Is there any reason to shut everything down just because the upgrade script needs to add a new column, drop an old one, or increase the precision or maximum length of an existing one?
We do software as a service, for example, and generally speaking, we don't take our site down *ever*, certainly not for application software updates. Logged in users stay logged in and continue their work without noticing.
The same is true for any serious MySQL site. Just with MySQL, you have to go to the hassle of take out slave, apply change, let slave catch up, repeat for all other slaves, promote some slave to master, apply change to old master to get everything working. This works for changing columns' type/adding columns/removing columns/etc. because MySQL normally uses statement-based replication, not row-based. It can be fiddly, but it works fine. Wikipedia has no downtime for database changes, or any planned downtime at all, and it's a pure MySQL shop. Of course, being able to change tables without this whole procedure is probably quite convenient.
It's one of the few things that really "just works" across all browsers, regardless of the underlying O/S.
<img> works perfectly across all browsers, last I checked. So does pretty much all actual HTML markup that people use, as long as you don't get into weird stuff like <keygen>. And a fair bit of CSS and JS. There's no reason to expect <video> and <canvas> won't be the same, eventually.
Perhaps that is why the web as a whole has adopted Flash so readily, (for better or worse), and why I feel we'll never be rid of it even when html5 is "live".
Flash becomes a heck of a lot less useful as soon as its market share drops below 80%. Suddenly to use your page, users have to click through a whole bunch of buttons and install some extra software, feh! Then HTML5 becomes more attractive, so fewer sites use Flash, fewer users install it, . . .
Now, how long do you think the 98% Flash installation base will last when you no longer need it to view videos at any popular site? That might be just two or three years from now. Remember that neither Microsoft nor Apple likes Flash: they don't want to depend on Adobe for their browsers to work. They'd be happy to make sure it's not bundled by default and is inconvenient to install.
My prediction is that Flash will be well on its way to becoming a niche product within five years if all goes well. Although admittedly, that's a significant "if".
I bet that there are no technical reasons why it takes 5 years or more to come up with an HTML standard. I bet that there are lots of political reasons for that. I bet that a small team of engineers could do a better job in less time than a bureaucratic committee.
HTML5 is developed by the WHATWG, which more or less is a small team of engineers rather than a bureaucratic committee. It's driven almost entirely by implementers. The reason things aren't happening immediately is because the various browser developers only have a limited amount of development resources; they can only assign some of them to implementing new markup-level features (as opposed to security features, UI, bug fixes, etc.); and HTML5 defines a huge number of new features (latest draft is 696 pages). The spec is basically done, we're only waiting on implementation now. It's coming, piece by piece.
Slashdot Mirror
And that is to blame website developers who use flash for stuff that it ain't needed for. Such as playing video. The video tag works now (not on IE, but lets face it, if you got IE, you got flash) so support it.
It works, yes, but . . .
And this is even ignoring the codec issue. (If you have an existing H.264 video, should you re-encode it as Theora? Trying to lossily compress something already lossily compressed = awful quality.) I wouldn't use it over a Flash player on a general-audience site until implementations are a bit more mature. Video support is a big, complicated feature, and it needs time to become really great.
(Of course, you could always use <video> as fallback if Flash is missing, rather than the reverse. That would be nice for me, as a Chrome Linux user whose browser tends to crash and burn if I enable plugins.)
And right there is why the HTML5 video tag will never defeat Flash video in its current form. With Flash, you need only one encoding.
"Never" is a bit strong. Apple is reconsidering its decision to avoid Theora, last I heard, but since it involves lawyers it's taking a long time. In the long term, I expect everyone will settle on a baseline royalty-free format that works well enough, like Theora.
Hasn't Carmack all but reversed his position on DirectX, saying that OpenGL is failing to keep up?
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/08/24/0059218/Linux-Port-For-ids-Tech-5-Graphics-Engine-Unlikely?from=rss
From your own link:
I.e., they're still using OpenGL; the problem is Linux graphics drivers, especially the open-source ones.
As soon as Microsoft implements the current SVG standards in IE, they should be welcomed into the process of refining the standards further.
Until they implement the current SVG standards, they should be kept away.
[Opinions mine, not IBM's.]
IBM happens to employ Sam Ruby, one of the co-chairs of the HTMLWG. Would you say IBM should not be allowed to have its members in the HTMLWG to work on HTML5 until IBM has a working HTML4 implementation? Because, you know, they don't, as far as I've heard.
Here we go again: http://noooxml.wikidot.com/
"Committee stuffing is a standard practice for Microsoft. Microsoft raped ISO with their office file formats, leaving the organization in limbo. The whole campaign against the format have raised an army of people, which are furious about the dirty tactics used by Microsoft to get the broken standard through ISO. This anger won't go away, and I wish good luck to Microsoft to get it adopted by governments. The reputation of Microsoft went down below zero with this process."
The SVG Working Group is composed of . . . well, it seems to be "query failed" right now. But anyway, each organization gets one vote. It's made up of Microsoft's competitors. Microsoft cannot stuff the committee, it's not possible within W3C procedures, unless they get lots of little organizations to join and pay them to swing the vote. Which they've never done in well over a decade of W3C membership, despite being members of the Working Groups for CSS, Web Fonts, HTML, etc., etc. So no, they're probably joining the committee to influence the standard because they want to implement it and have feedback. Like every other implementer. Even if their motives differ a bit.
Actually, microsoft's recent track record with the W3C is quite positive. In IE8 they implemented full support for CSS 2.1 (they even released a large test suite to help the other browsers improve their CSS 2.1 support) and a decent level of support for WAI ARIA (accessibility spec). They also looked ahead and implemented native json encoding/decoding (part of HTML5), and the web storage spec (yet to be finalized). And they've contributed positively to the HTML5 working group.
I agree with all of those except the last. Microsoft has been virtually silent in the HTMLWG. There were a few posts by Adrian Bateman, and one or two other people who posted something and then usually let it hang without further discussion, but that's about it. They even employ one of the three co-chairs, Paul Cotton, but he says very little that's not strictly administrative. The impression I get is that the developers don't freely engage in discussion, just drop off collective feedback and watch what happens.
In contrast, Microsoft employees have been very active in some WG mailing lists I've subscribed to, like the CSS and font WGs. Dunno what the deal is with HTML5, but it doesn't seem like what Microsoft's most focused on right now. I'd be surprised to see large-scale HTML5 implementation in IE9, although I'm sure they'll add a few more features.
Microsoft has a proven track record and a known strategy of packing standards boards to subvert them for their own uses.
If you think the SVG Working Group is going to be subverted by Microsoft, you haven't participated much in the W3C. Each organization gets one vote, if a vote is needed, and every single organization in the Working Group is almost certainly a competitor of Microsoft. We're not talking some organization of government reps that Microsoft can buy off; you can't buy off your own competitors.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if IE9 at a bare minimum supports <video> and <audio> It's such a simple thing to hack into the engine that even they should be able to pull it off without any fuss.
From talking with Gecko, WebKit, and Presto developers on the public-html and whatwg mailing lists about video/audio, my impression is that they definitely are not so simple. But Adrian Bateman of Microsoft has clearly stated on public-html that he thinks video and audio are a good idea, so it seems likely they'll go for it at some point (although I wouldn't bet on IE9).
As for codecs, I'd bet they do like Apple and just go with supporting whatever the system video codecs are (Safari uses QuickTime). They already have complete video-playing implementations, like Apple but unlike Mozilla or Opera or Google, so why would they rewrite or fork it for IE? Although, like Apple, they do hold patents on H.264, so maybe they'll also avoid Theora support.
I do hope they don't join just to ruin the standard or offer halfassed support for it.
Why else *would* they join?
I'm all for Microsoft-bashing, but that's over the top. Microsoft realizes that sometimes their interests lie in supporting certain standards. They support lots of standards to the letter. CSS2.1 support in IE8 is as good as any other browser if not better, for instance. Their C and C++ compilers, SQL database, POSIX implementation, and so forth are about as standards-compliant as anyone else's (which is "not very" in some cases, to be fair). They don't do this out of altruism, obviously, but they realize sometimes people want good support for particular standards.
3. Lock and bar the cockpit doors for the flight's duration.
Seriously, just stop at that. The only reason to target planes is to use them as bigger bombs than you could have gotten otherwise. If the worst you can do is kill the couple hundred people on the plane, you may as well just rent an eighteen-wheeler, fill it with explosives, drive it to downtown Manhattan at 8 AM, and detonate it there. Much more damage than taking down one measly jumbo jet, and much harder to stop.
I don't know why these idiots persist in trying to attack airplanes just to blow them up, frankly. Why didn't Mr. Underpants wait a few more days and give Times Square a shot at midnight on New Year's Eve? He could have had a whole trenchcoat full of explosives. Or heck, just throw a couple of grenades, if you can get 'em. Much more reliable to use something designed for the job.
Um, you do now that casualty-wise, in the US over the last 20 years, a large percentage of Terrorism Victims are from White Militia members, right? Between Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City, and The guy at the Atlanta Olympics... (which only killed one person, and indirectly...)
Have you gotten up to 2,973 killed by white militia members, and more than 6,000 wounded? Because that's how many people some Arab Muslims killed in one day a few years back. I think it's safe to say that Arab Muslims are a bigger terrorism threat than white militia members right now. (Although both are of course much smaller threats than, say, getting killed in a car accident.)
Banning bundling would be harsh for users who "can't afford" to pay full price up front, and would rather spread the real cost of the phone across the length of the contract.
This is done in plenty of markets by just using installment plans. You don't have to link it to the carrier contract.
Our educational system is totally broken when the educated just want things to fit. Even in mathematics, we're promoting a crop of "just tell me what to do!"
As a grad student in pure mathematics, I'm curious: do you mean in low-level math education, or mathematical research? Basic math education is often just about giving you the tools you need to do your job, so there's nothing wrong with just telling people what to do. Higher-level courses (meaning the kinds only pure-math majors typically take) do require you to actually understand the material and be able to prove things from first principles, probably far more so than any other field.
"In September 2004, editors of several prominent medical journals (including the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Annals of Internal Medicine, and JAMA) announced that they would no longer publish results of drug research sponsored by pharmaceutical companies unless that research was registered in a public database from the start.[11] In this way, negative results should no longer be able to disappear."
But I guess research by anyone other than pharmaceutical companies is allowed to disappear? I guess researchers who aren't tied to corporations never have pet theories that they would like to see come true because they've invested the last ten years of their life in it, for instance? Or for social or moral reasons?
All studies should be published, that anyone conducts. Maybe just put up on the web with a note to the effect of "We obviously messed this one up pretty bad, huh?", but put somewhere. That's the only way to ensure that metastudies aren't hopelessly corrupted by publication bias. Which can be due to researchers throwing out data because they think they messed it up, research funders throwing out data because it doesn't help their bottom line, reviewers rejecting studies because they don't like the conclusion or the researcher isn't prestigious enough, lots of things.
I had two systems, both 64-bit Fedora, that I tried Chrome on. On one, Flash worked fine from the moment I installed Chrome. On the other, Chrome didn't even notice the plugin existed. Flash (32-bit, wrapped with mozilla-plugin-config) worked just fine in Firefox on both computers. When I compared the two systems, it turned out that one was missing a symbolic link. The file is in /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins-wrapped, but Chrome was looking in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins.
Adding a symbolic link solved it.
More info: Getting Flash to work on Google Chrome for 64-bit Linux.
Did you report the bug?
The rating you are looking for is AO, adults only. It's a real ESRB rating. It is more or less the "anything goes" rating. The reason you don't see much of it is because most retailers refuse to carry games with that rating. It's a real rating though and there have been a few games with it (Sim's Singles being one of them). An accurate depiction of the Old Testament would most certainly qualify for that rating.
I don't see why you'd think that. About the only thing that gets AO is actual pornography. The Bible discusses sex sometimes, but never very explicitly. It relies very heavily on euphemism – "know" and "lie with" and so on. The most explicit things I can think of are in Song of Songs, and that's very mild by today's standards. (Like: "Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.") Likewise, the Bible doesn't depict graphic violence, it just says something like "Phineas got up and stabbed him with a spear" at most.
If the entire Bible were depicted as a game, with violence and sex made as explicit (or non-explicit) as in the text, it would probably be T at most, quite possibly E10+. No swearing, no detailed descriptions of violence, only oblique reference to sex – what could anyone possibly think would merit even M, let alone AO? Other than, you know, knee-jerk anti-religious sentiment by people who have never read more than two chapters of the Bible but are happy to make it sound like religious zealots are hypocrites.
Opera is smaller, faster and with features better integrated and streamlined. It can do what prety much most of the most popular Firefox extensions can, and without everything breaking with each release. Oh, and it's crazy fast and has the most responsive UI, period.
Have you tried Chrome? Its UI seems about as responsive as Opera's to me — meaning no perceptible lag at all. Likewise on rendering/JS speed, although that's harder to gauge and is a much more rapidly-changing landscape right now.
The only way I can see hardware security reaching true theoretical unbreakability is if we get to the level where the uncertainty principle prevents observing the hardware in action, but I'm not sure if it will be feasible to have the hardware even run reliably under those conditions.
Well, this idea is pretty much the basis for quantum cryptography: if anyone observes the transmission, it gets corrupted. So it's evidently possible for some things.
As the huge 32/64bit transition begins (next 12 to 36 months my guess)
Uh-huh. Is that like the year of the Linux desktop?
the best part is that each tab gets its own thread. IE8 and Chrome are the only browsers that do this (to my knowledge) and it's really handy - broken websites don't hork up your entire browsing session like they do in Firefox and Opera.
Process, not thread. And Firefox is working on this and should have it done in the next year or two, with any luck (I don't see a timetable).
OSX/Linux will let you use up to 64gb ram on a 32bit os, ms artificially restrict you unless you buy the expensive "enterprise server" version...
Which will break all your drivers anyway, so you may as well use 64-bit. 32-bit with PAE means drivers don't necessarily work, because the structure of the page tables is totally different, some data structures are different to accommodate effectively longer pointers, etc.
OSX will let you run a 32bit kernel with a 64bit userland incase your drivers aren't ported to 64bit yet...
I don't know why Windows doesn't do this, admittedly. It's a clever idea. (For Linux it's largely pointless because the drivers are almost all open-source.)
Linux will let you use a 64bit kernel with a 32bit userland, or a mixed userland...
So will all 64-bit OSes. You can run 32-bit programs fine on 64-bit Windows.
MS force you to use a 64bit kernel if you want a 64bit userland or support for more than 4gb of address space, but the 64bit kernel is often totally unusable if you don't have the drivers you need.. MS would have benefitted from doing what Apple did, Apple/Linux have less of an issue with drivers anyway because most come with source code enabling a 64bit recompile, or in the case of apple most of the hardware is supplied by them anyway.
Right, this is the key. Apple and Linux control their essential drivers very directly, Microsoft does not. Legacy 32-bit apps work fine on a 64-bit OS, legacy drivers do not, because they're not insulated from the hardware. So MS has to pressure an immense number of third-party driver developers to update all their drivers to work on 64-bit, Apple and Linux don't.
Wow, how badly did you screw the pootch in the planing stages if you are changing the columns of a live DB?
Requirements change over time, new features need schema changes. Unless you somehow know exactly what your needs will be for all eternity, you're going to have to change the DB schema sometimes to support a new feature or fix a bug.
Online upgrades. Suppose you have a service that needs to be available on a 24 x 7 basis. Is there any reason to shut everything down just because the upgrade script needs to add a new column, drop an old one, or increase the precision or maximum length of an existing one?
We do software as a service, for example, and generally speaking, we don't take our site down *ever*, certainly not for application software updates. Logged in users stay logged in and continue their work without noticing.
The same is true for any serious MySQL site. Just with MySQL, you have to go to the hassle of take out slave, apply change, let slave catch up, repeat for all other slaves, promote some slave to master, apply change to old master to get everything working. This works for changing columns' type/adding columns/removing columns/etc. because MySQL normally uses statement-based replication, not row-based. It can be fiddly, but it works fine. Wikipedia has no downtime for database changes, or any planned downtime at all, and it's a pure MySQL shop. Of course, being able to change tables without this whole procedure is probably quite convenient.
It's funny you mention Flash.
It's one of the few things that really "just works" across all browsers, regardless of the underlying O/S.
<img> works perfectly across all browsers, last I checked. So does pretty much all actual HTML markup that people use, as long as you don't get into weird stuff like <keygen>. And a fair bit of CSS and JS. There's no reason to expect <video> and <canvas> won't be the same, eventually.
Perhaps that is why the web as a whole has adopted Flash so readily, (for better or worse), and why I feel we'll never be rid of it even when html5 is "live".
Flash becomes a heck of a lot less useful as soon as its market share drops below 80%. Suddenly to use your page, users have to click through a whole bunch of buttons and install some extra software, feh! Then HTML5 becomes more attractive, so fewer sites use Flash, fewer users install it, . . .
Now, how long do you think the 98% Flash installation base will last when you no longer need it to view videos at any popular site? That might be just two or three years from now. Remember that neither Microsoft nor Apple likes Flash: they don't want to depend on Adobe for their browsers to work. They'd be happy to make sure it's not bundled by default and is inconvenient to install.
My prediction is that Flash will be well on its way to becoming a niche product within five years if all goes well. Although admittedly, that's a significant "if".
I bet that there are no technical reasons why it takes 5 years or more to come up with an HTML standard. I bet that there are lots of political reasons for that. I bet that a small team of engineers could do a better job in less time than a bureaucratic committee.
HTML5 is developed by the WHATWG, which more or less is a small team of engineers rather than a bureaucratic committee. It's driven almost entirely by implementers. The reason things aren't happening immediately is because the various browser developers only have a limited amount of development resources; they can only assign some of them to implementing new markup-level features (as opposed to security features, UI, bug fixes, etc.); and HTML5 defines a huge number of new features (latest draft is 696 pages). The spec is basically done, we're only waiting on implementation now. It's coming, piece by piece.