Because solid state's main hold back has always been capacity.
SSDs have plenty of capacity. The problem is price per unit capacity. You can get 1 TB SSDs . . . they just cost over $3000. (But one of them claims 1.4 GB/s read/write speeds. Nice.)
The list of supported codecs in Firefox for is hardcoded and can't be changed by plugins, by design. (Maybe if they were invasive enough they could do some horrible hack, I don't know, but I wouldn't bet on it.)
On chrome it might be difficult to change but Firefox lets you rewrite the page before it renders. Further, since it's HTML, you can rewrite it with userjs through the DOM even AFTER it renders. Consequently you ought to be able to simply turn video tags into embed tags and pass them off to a plugin.
True, but you're not going to get the same experience as an actual native <video> implementation. You might be able to implement the HTML5 video APIs, but that would take work. You'd also have a hard time making it work correctly with CSS, etc. You could only do an ugly hack this way, not a proper implementation. So I think it's more likely that sites will just encode to both VP8 and H.264 rather than try to hack something like this up for Firefox.
But I'm not clear as to what "the odds that the two input probabilities match" means... that implies, to me, that it returns a 1 if the inputs are identical and 0 if not. I'm thinking it instead means, "Given events A and B with inputs p(A) and p(B), Bayesian NAND represents p(A and B)." Or perhaps p(A nand B)... I don't know.
It's not possible to compute p(A and B) from just p(A) and p(B). You need other information, like p(A|B) or p(B|A). For example, flip two coins, X and Y. If A = "X is heads", B = "Y is heads", then p(A) = 1/2, p(B) = 1/2, p(A and B) = 1/4. If A = "X is heads", B = "X is tails", then p(A) = 1/2, p(B) = 1/2, p(A and B) = 0. So the gate couldn't possibly mean either of those things.
H.264 will be solved on Firefox with a plugin whether it's official or not.
The list of supported codecs in Firefox for <video> is hardcoded and can't be changed by plugins, by design. (Maybe if they were invasive enough they could do some horrible hack, I don't know, but I wouldn't bet on it.)
I hope you realized that the UI and extensions of firefox are written in Javascript, when you complain those speed issues, most of them are somewhat related with speed of javascript.
Unlikely. Interface lag is going to be caused by too much stuff being done on the thread that renders the interface. IIRC, Chrome was written from the beginning with a dedicated interface thread that did no blocking syscalls or other real work. Thus it usually responds instantly to input, no matter what you're doing. One of the performance improvements they're doing in Firefox 4 is moving stuff off the interface thread, so that the interface feels snappier. The kinds of computations that are sped up by the JaegerMonkey work are almost certain to be irrelevant to Firefox's responsiveness.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a browser implementer, so possibly I don't know what I'm talking about.)
You may well be right. I hope you are. However, five years is an eternity in Internet time.
True. But I'm just talking about when Flash is practically extinct. It's already on the way down, and HTML5 is already close to an acceptable replacement for some basic use-cases. I'd bet on top-tier video sites switching to HTML5 by default on some platforms in less than two years (they already support HTML5 as an option). Obviously there will be no massive change in the next six months – that's only practical when the client and server are controlled by the same party.
To check your perspective, please try to identify any top tier web-based business today that is still using the same core technologies as it was five years ago.
I'm not familiar with many top-tier websites, but the one I am familiar with is Wikipedia. That still runs on MediaWiki on top of LAMP behind Squid, pretty much the same as five years ago, although with a number of fairly significant improvements across the board. Most of the others are so secretive that it's hard to say, unless the site actually didn't exist five years ago. Regardless, your general point is correct.
No, but they're still standardized. Standardization is just when the exact way to do something is written down in a central and agreed-upon place. Editor's Drafts are standards. You can even have standards that aren't written down in any special place at all, like rel="nofollow". You might call some of these de facto standards rather than proper "official" standards, but they're still standards. To reach W3C Recommendation, every single feature of a document (which is often very large) must have two independent implementations and often a full test suite. Most of the individual features may well have been standardized years before.
In any case, for real projects rather than exploratory or for-fun pages, it is what's implemented that counts. There's no rule that we can't change a project to use a better technology later if one is available, but it's pretty hard to run a successful project using a better technology that most users don't have yet.
Yep, sure. It's standardized, but as I said, it's not implemented. The distinction is important, since a lot of random Slashdotters seem to blame the W3C for slow standards progress. In fact, in core web technologies like CSS and HTML5, it's the implementers who are usually the bottleneck, since writing a spec is typically quicker than coding the feature.
Did you see the video of that Quake 2? It has major frame rate drops (and I doubt it was running on specs from 5 years ago) and took many elements beyond html5 to do that (in their words "we use WebGL, the Canvas API, HTML 5 elements, the local storage API, and WebSockets"). So many extras means more problems to support on different OS's.
All of the technologies you list are part of "HTML5" in the broad sense. "HTML5" colloquially means "all recent standards-based additions to the web platform". They're all supported more or less interoperably by different browsers on different OSes, although not all of them are finalized yet (for example, WebSockets isn't fully stable).
Now go try Quake Live which is running Flash.
As other people pointed out, it's not Flash, it's its own plugin. So you're comparing HTML5 to native code. Yeah, no kidding, native code will be faster than JavaScript. But it has all sorts of other problems: it's insecure, it's harder to install, it only works on specific platforms.
Now are you really trying to tell me that [etc., etc.] is the proof that Flash is dying and ready to be replaced by the standard HTML5?
Flash is not dying quickly, it's dying slowly. It's not going to be replaced right now: IE is too much of a problem. Give it a few years and we'll see.
The basic problem is that while it's easy to criticise Flash, the available alternatives simply aren't up to the job yet, nor are they going to be any time soon.
Depends what you mean by "soon". I predict less than five years until Flash is no longer widely used except as fallback or for niche features.
If you're a fan of open, portable standards and advocate HTML5 and CSS over Flash, please remember how much of HTML5 and CSS3 isn't actually standardised yet. Most of these clever demo pages are based on non-portable, browser-specific CSS, which looks similar to what might one day go in CSS3 but often varies subtly between rendering engines, so the CSS files are full of almost the same styling written in three not-quite-identical ways.
Really? Give examples of this, please. In CSS you sometimes have to state the same exact rule three times or more, but it's the same rule with the same syntax in all common cases I can think of except gradients. HTML5 video/canvas generally don't require many cross-browser hacks. You just have to stick to what all browsers have implemented. Libraries like jQuery can also abstract away browser differences for you.
In fact, this stuff is generally standardized already. The problem is it's not always implemented, and when it is, often it's only in newer browsers. So HTML5 will take time to win, but it will win, at least for the common cases. Plugins might always be needed for special functionality that's too narrow to standardize, but not for basic video viewing, browser games, etc.
Of course, Oracle controls btrfs as well, and its future doesn't exactly look so great at this point, either
Oracle doesn't control btrfs. It's part of the Linux kernel. Oracle pays the one who's currently in charge of btrfs development, Chris Mason, but a) someone else could take over if he left (look at how many developers there are); and b) plenty of other companies would be willing to hire him if Oracle didn't want to pay him to work on btrfs anymore. Oracle has influence over btrfs, but not control.
Oracle also owns BTRFS. Anyone that develops IP whilst an employee gives Oracle full ownership of the that IP.
Oracle could change the license of BTRFS from GPL to closed source tomorrow if they wanted to.
Lots of people have contributed to btrfs. It's part of the Linus' tree, not a separate thing that Oracle controls. Oracle only holds the copyright on what its employees (like Chris Mason) have written. It couldn't release a closed-source version of the filesystem without getting licenses from all the non-Oracle people who contributed, or rewriting all their code. You only need to look over the commit history to see how many people that is. Most of the commits don't look like they come from Oracle employees, judging by the e-mail addresses.
With servers so close to users, Google could not only send its data faster but also avoid sending it over the Internet backbone that connects service providers and for which they all pay
Does anyone seriously believe Google is sending data to Verizon over the backbones? There's a little thing called peering. ISPs go over their traffic records, find the data centers they're paying the backbones the most to ship traffic to, and run direct lines instead when that would save them money in the long term. IIRC, even Wikipedia only pays for about half of its bandwidth – the rest is peering. Google must use orders of magnitude more bandwidth, so I can't believe it's paying for practically any of it. It wouldn't be worth it for any significant ISP not to peer with Google.
But of course, you can't dare take driving away from them, because getting behind the wheel of a 75mph 3,000lb chunk of steel before you can even be trusted to smoke, vote, hold a full time job, or live on your own is considered about as "unamerican" as you can get.
Or maybe you can't take driving away from them because in large parts of the country, they have to drive to get to school/the doctor/etc., since the population density is sometimes too low for any kind of public transportation (or non-motor transportation, like bicycles) to be workable.
(if GPSes with pre-digested machine-format maps, and RTS units in fully computer-generated environments, with perfect knowledge of the location of all objects in the virtual space, are still fucking it up, real world systems with sensors and machine vision and stuff have a way to go...)
There are plenty of third-person RPGs with "move to" commands that work flawlessly even if you click on someplace very distant: I've had my character take the most direct route when I did that in Dragon Age even when it took like a minute on a roundabout path to get there. AFAICT, a typical PC can do excellent pathfinding for one actor at a time, if you do it right. Just not hundreds, like you get in RTSes. But an onboard car computer only needs to do one at a time.
Really, selling online I've noticed that Europeans are terrible consumers. They don't listen well to our support staff, they immediately charge back if the service is not up to par, etc. etc. It's a hell dealing with Europeans.
If you're looking to make money, honestly, invest in US consumers first. Much easier to part them from their money and to convince them not to cancel/buy more.
Maybe this is related to the fact that the European Union has per-capita GDP of $32,600 (#42 in the world), while the United States has per-capita GDP of $46,400 (#11 in the world). As people get richer, it's less and less worthwhile to spend time being picky about what you buy. I bet Europeans are a heck of a lot less picky than Middle Easterners, say.
Have you noticed that Europe has a much bigger uptake of Linux, Firefox and in the older days Amiga?
I've often wondered if this is Europe being "open minded"....
I would love to be able to say the same about Australia...
Or maybe it's just because they're anti-American and anti-corporate. Microsoft, Apple, etc. are American corporations, while Linux, Firefox, etc. are not-for-profit and thoroughly international. The seventh Halloween Document is the results of a survey conducted by Microsoft, and one of the findings is that a major reason for favoring Linux is as "an alternative to Microsoft". 61% of French respondents, 37% of Germans, and 35% of Swedes gave this as their top reason for supporting Linux. Not that it works better, or costs less, they just hate Microsoft.
Americans, on the other hand, are much more pro-corporate, and (duh) pro-American. This open-source stuff sounds suspiciously hippie and foreign. Australia is a pretty conservative and pro-American nation too, so the same might apply.
In fact, what's possibly the most pro-open source country in the world? Venezuela. You know, run by Hugo Chávez, who doesn't get along well with America. Is it a big surprise that they don't want their entire computing infrastructure dependent on Americans?
The next time anyone comes up with an explanation that makes them or those they admire (e.g., Europeans) look good, try thinking up a more cynical explanation. It will probably be more correct.
I love it here in Europe, just the other day a colleague of mine surprised me by wanting to install Ubuntu.
Funny thing, but as an American, I run into other Americans on a regular basis who use Ubuntu. Like my best friend's fiancée told me that her whole family uses Ubuntu, and I field questions all the time on the message board I run from people (mostly Americans) who want to install Ubuntu. Maybe it's not so special to Europe?
Fortunately, you are wrong. See this Cybercrime blog entry (written by a law professor) for the gory legal details. The meat and potatoes of the post:
The Supreme Court has held, basically, that you're giving testimony - testifying - when you're communicating, i.e., when you're revealing your knowledge of certain facts or sharing your thoughts or opinions with the government. U.S. v. Kirschner, supra. You can't claim the 5th Amendment privilege to refuse to surrender physical evidence such as your blood, hair or saliva; it only applies to communications, i.e., to something that look like what a witness does when she takes the stand at trial.
Okay, I looked up a bit on Google, and it seems like this is unclear. Some lawyers argue for each position, but there's been no decision on the matter above the district court level. United States v. Boucher is the only case so far on the matter: a magistrate judge ruled that disclosing the key did constitute self-incrimination, but a district judge overruled him and said it didn't. Text of the district court decision is here.
The reasoning was that the court was only demanding that he produce the contents of his laptop, not that he tell them any information. They wouldn't mind if he typed the password into the laptop himself rather than tell it to them. Since the government knew in advance that there were files on the computer that belonged to him – which they'd practically always know when confiscating your laptop and finding an encrypted drive – he's not admitting anything by giving them the passphrase. It's no different from if they demanded the key to a locked cabinet, which they're allowed to do.
But this interpretation isn't binding anywhere yet. The question is still up in the air.
Congress should just nationalize the entire telco grid
Which they definitely would have to provide just compensation for, under the Fifth Amendment. So how many trillions of dollars would that work out to, do you think?
What if it's NOT encrypted, and that's just noise left over from stress testing the drive with random read-writes?
Then it's not going to look like it's encrypted. An encrypted hard disk will almost always have some clear identifying mark, like some cleartext code at the beginning which prints out "please enter passphrase:" when you try booting from it, and tries to decrypt the key using the passphrase.
Of course, you might not know the password. No way to be sure, but the jury doesn't need to be sure. It just needs to be beyond a reasonable doubt, and not even that in civil cases.
Cops: "We confiscated your external HDD, only it's encrypted. Give us your password."
SuspecT: "No."
Cops: "Passwords are property and thus you have to, as it's part of the HDD."
Suspect: "I claim 5th amendment rights."
Cops: "We have a Warrant for the seizure and search of this HDD, and you're blocking us from doing it. Therefore, you can rot in jail until you give up and give us what we want."
Um, yeah. IANAL, but this is called "obstruction of justice". If the police have a warrant that permits them to search your hard disk, and you try to prevent them, that's a crime. You can't be compelled to testify against yourself, but you have to permit the police to access your property if they have a legitimate warrant.
You see, what Canonical is now realizing is that they're in a tribe all by themselves. And they can't handle this revelation becoming public, because it really shows just how little they've contributed back to the community over the past few years. This recent GNOME survey just shows how little they've done for GNOME. The Linux Kernel survey showed much the same numbers. And if we ran around to the rest of the big free software communities, I'm certain we'd see much the same numbers, yet again.
This presupposes that the only way to contribute back to the community is in the form of code. That's a natural perspective for a programmer to take, but it's wrong. Ubuntu has done a great deal to advance free software by integrating it into a reliable and easy-to-use package that's appealing to the average person. That's a distribution's job: to bring together software from disparate sources so that it forms a cohesive whole.
Now, if you write code that would be useful to the community, you should release it to the community. If Canonical were writing the code but sitting on it to try edging out their rivals, that would be reprehensible. But they aren't. They're mostly not writing the code in the first place. What major features have they written for existing projects but refused to upstream? Not many.
Rather, they've just made the strategic decision to focus on things other than improving upstream projects. They aren't hiding any code that upstream would want, they just don't write much of it to begin with. Not everyone has to do everything; some organizations can focus on upstream and some on downstream. What Canonical has done is made a distro that's brought an untold number of people to Linux. That gets you more eyes on the code, more contributions – just indirectly.
An acquaintance started me out on Linux a few years ago. He suggested Ubuntu to begin with, and it worked very smoothly. As a direct consequence of that, I've submitted multiple small fixes to upstream projects to improve the desktop experience. If I had used a distro that was less easy to use, maybe I'd have been scared off. Those patches are filed under "volunteer work", but Canonical had a hand in creating them nonetheless.
This is not a zero-sum game. If Ubuntu can get more people to use Linux, that benefits all of us. It has unquestionably done an excellent job at that, and we should applaud it. Getting people to use Linux is what Canonical has done best to date, and it's logical for them to keep focusing on what they do well. That they haven't also paid for big improvements to upstream doesn't negate their other achievements in the slightest, and should not be held against them, any more than we should criticize Debian for not working to solve world hunger.
Insurance companies (at least, well-run insurance companies) are fundamentally socialist in nature as well. It's the ones which forget that and start becoming too capitalist that are problematic.
Insurance companies have nothing to do with socialism. Socialism is when means of production are collectively owned, and therefore (theoretically) used for the benefit of workers or the general public rather than their owner's interests. Insurance companies are usually privately owned and for-profit. You can have collectively-owned insurance companies, but no more so than for anything else.
If you're trying to say that insurance is akin to sharing or a social network, you misunderstand it. Insurance amortizes risk. You pay the insurance company moderate amounts of money over time, and in exchange it reduces your risk of having to pay a large sum of money all at once (when your car is totaled, etc.). This is a private transaction between two parties, with no collective action involved.
It typically happens that the insurance company gets the pool it uses to insure you from many other people, but this is inessential. You could be just as well insured by a rich dude who will pay out of his own pocket when you come to collect. Moreover, other types of companies work the same way. If you pay for customer support when buying something, you're effectively paying into a pool of customer service reps, who will only service a minority of customers. Is that somehow "collective" or "socialist"? No; it's just a company that has obligations toward a lot of people, and it raises money to cover its costs by charging for services.
The idea that insurance companies do or should serve as some kind of wealth redistribution has led to a lot of problems when it comes to health insurance. In a sane world, health insurance would not cover a routine doctor visit, any more than car insurance covers your gas bills; there's no risk, so what's the point of involving a middleman?
But since so many people think health insurance is supposed to take money from healthy people to give to poor people, I get insurance coverage for routine checkups, whether I like it or not. And then my insurance company has to raise premiums to cover that. So now instead of me paying $100 for the appointment, the insurance company pays $80 (less because they want to cut costs), and I pay them $120 (extra to cover overhead). The doctor gets less money, I get less money, both of us have to fill out lots of tedious paperwork. Everyone loses, except the insurance companies.
Wealth redistribution is fine, I'm in favor of it (to some extent). But there's a really efficient way to do it: charge rich people taxes, and hand cash directly to poor people. Trying to subsidize unhealthy people by forcing everyone to let some third party (usually chosen by their employer or government, not them) review all their medical expenses, decide what treatment they're allowed to get, and collect large sums of money from everyone, but requiring them to charge the same amount for healthy and unhealthy people – so that healthy people pay more than they would have otherwise, and unhealthy people maybe hopefully pay less – that is just crazy.
Health insurance as we know it needs to be scrapped and replaced with insurance that covers only catastrophes, where you only have to deal with it once every few years at most and hopefully never, like with car and fire insurance. Let people choose their insurance provider, instead of having it forced on them by their employer. Then, if we think poor people or unhealthy people need more help from society, help them out in the most direct, efficient, and transparent way possible: take cash directly from the people who need it least, and give it directly to those who need it most.
As recent consumers SSDs go, the WD 64GB is very, very average; if you try some of the faster, larger SSDs, say one based on Sandforce SF-1200 controller or even a latter-day Indilinx, that have higher random IOPs, going back to disk is unbearably slow for any operation that isn't cached in RAM.
. . . which means almost nothing on a typical desktop once your system is booted. I used an X25-M for a while on my desktop as the root partition, and it made a massive difference about, oh, two or three times a day. Typical activity like browsing, chat, e-mail doesn't touch the disk much if you have a decent amount of RAM.
Instead, I moved my SSD to my Windows machine, which I use for gaming. There it's a huge win, because most game developers apparently haven't figured out that you could actually cache assets in advance when the player gets close to the next level, so loading screens are heavily disk-bound. The game (currently Dragon Age) starts much faster, levels load much faster. For web browsing, though? No big difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Because solid state's main hold back has always been capacity.
SSDs have plenty of capacity. The problem is price per unit capacity. You can get 1 TB SSDs . . . they just cost over $3000. (But one of them claims 1.4 GB/s read/write speeds. Nice.)
The list of supported codecs in Firefox for is hardcoded and can't be changed by plugins, by design. (Maybe if they were invasive enough they could do some horrible hack, I don't know, but I wouldn't bet on it.)
On chrome it might be difficult to change but Firefox lets you rewrite the page before it renders. Further, since it's HTML, you can rewrite it with userjs through the DOM even AFTER it renders. Consequently you ought to be able to simply turn video tags into embed tags and pass them off to a plugin.
True, but you're not going to get the same experience as an actual native <video> implementation. You might be able to implement the HTML5 video APIs, but that would take work. You'd also have a hard time making it work correctly with CSS, etc. You could only do an ugly hack this way, not a proper implementation. So I think it's more likely that sites will just encode to both VP8 and H.264 rather than try to hack something like this up for Firefox.
But I'm not clear as to what "the odds that the two input probabilities match" means... that implies, to me, that it returns a 1 if the inputs are identical and 0 if not. I'm thinking it instead means, "Given events A and B with inputs p(A) and p(B), Bayesian NAND represents p(A and B)." Or perhaps p(A nand B)... I don't know.
It's not possible to compute p(A and B) from just p(A) and p(B). You need other information, like p(A|B) or p(B|A). For example, flip two coins, X and Y. If A = "X is heads", B = "Y is heads", then p(A) = 1/2, p(B) = 1/2, p(A and B) = 1/4. If A = "X is heads", B = "X is tails", then p(A) = 1/2, p(B) = 1/2, p(A and B) = 0. So the gate couldn't possibly mean either of those things.
H.264 will be solved on Firefox with a plugin whether it's official or not.
The list of supported codecs in Firefox for <video> is hardcoded and can't be changed by plugins, by design. (Maybe if they were invasive enough they could do some horrible hack, I don't know, but I wouldn't bet on it.)
I hope you realized that the UI and extensions of firefox are written in Javascript, when you complain those speed issues, most of them are somewhat related with speed of javascript.
Unlikely. Interface lag is going to be caused by too much stuff being done on the thread that renders the interface. IIRC, Chrome was written from the beginning with a dedicated interface thread that did no blocking syscalls or other real work. Thus it usually responds instantly to input, no matter what you're doing. One of the performance improvements they're doing in Firefox 4 is moving stuff off the interface thread, so that the interface feels snappier. The kinds of computations that are sped up by the JaegerMonkey work are almost certain to be irrelevant to Firefox's responsiveness.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a browser implementer, so possibly I don't know what I'm talking about.)
Going to be difficult for all those billions of LAM(ysql)P users until they gets a better way of storing them.
Apparently support for ipv6 is "Status: On-Hold - Priority: Low". So it looks like we're all going to have to migrate to LAP(ostgres)P.
Or just store them in strings, which is what the MySQL software I know about does for IPv4 anyway. Just make the string field a bit longer.
You may well be right. I hope you are. However, five years is an eternity in Internet time.
True. But I'm just talking about when Flash is practically extinct. It's already on the way down, and HTML5 is already close to an acceptable replacement for some basic use-cases. I'd bet on top-tier video sites switching to HTML5 by default on some platforms in less than two years (they already support HTML5 as an option). Obviously there will be no massive change in the next six months – that's only practical when the client and server are controlled by the same party.
To check your perspective, please try to identify any top tier web-based business today that is still using the same core technologies as it was five years ago.
I'm not familiar with many top-tier websites, but the one I am familiar with is Wikipedia. That still runs on MediaWiki on top of LAMP behind Squid, pretty much the same as five years ago, although with a number of fairly significant improvements across the board. Most of the others are so secretive that it's hard to say, unless the site actually didn't exist five years ago. Regardless, your general point is correct.
Actually, no CSS3 module has yet become a W3C Recommendation.
No, but they're still standardized. Standardization is just when the exact way to do something is written down in a central and agreed-upon place. Editor's Drafts are standards. You can even have standards that aren't written down in any special place at all, like rel="nofollow". You might call some of these de facto standards rather than proper "official" standards, but they're still standards. To reach W3C Recommendation, every single feature of a document (which is often very large) must have two independent implementations and often a full test suite. Most of the individual features may well have been standardized years before.
In any case, for real projects rather than exploratory or for-fun pages, it is what's implemented that counts. There's no rule that we can't change a project to use a better technology later if one is available, but it's pretty hard to run a successful project using a better technology that most users don't have yet.
Yep, sure. It's standardized, but as I said, it's not implemented. The distinction is important, since a lot of random Slashdotters seem to blame the W3C for slow standards progress. In fact, in core web technologies like CSS and HTML5, it's the implementers who are usually the bottleneck, since writing a spec is typically quicker than coding the feature.
Did you see the video of that Quake 2? It has major frame rate drops (and I doubt it was running on specs from 5 years ago) and took many elements beyond html5 to do that (in their words "we use WebGL, the Canvas API, HTML 5 elements, the local storage API, and WebSockets"). So many extras means more problems to support on different OS's.
All of the technologies you list are part of "HTML5" in the broad sense. "HTML5" colloquially means "all recent standards-based additions to the web platform". They're all supported more or less interoperably by different browsers on different OSes, although not all of them are finalized yet (for example, WebSockets isn't fully stable).
Now go try Quake Live which is running Flash.
As other people pointed out, it's not Flash, it's its own plugin. So you're comparing HTML5 to native code. Yeah, no kidding, native code will be faster than JavaScript. But it has all sorts of other problems: it's insecure, it's harder to install, it only works on specific platforms.
Now are you really trying to tell me that [etc., etc.] is the proof that Flash is dying and ready to be replaced by the standard HTML5?
Flash is not dying quickly, it's dying slowly. It's not going to be replaced right now: IE is too much of a problem. Give it a few years and we'll see.
The basic problem is that while it's easy to criticise Flash, the available alternatives simply aren't up to the job yet, nor are they going to be any time soon.
Depends what you mean by "soon". I predict less than five years until Flash is no longer widely used except as fallback or for niche features.
If you're a fan of open, portable standards and advocate HTML5 and CSS over Flash, please remember how much of HTML5 and CSS3 isn't actually standardised yet. Most of these clever demo pages are based on non-portable, browser-specific CSS, which looks similar to what might one day go in CSS3 but often varies subtly between rendering engines, so the CSS files are full of almost the same styling written in three not-quite-identical ways.
Really? Give examples of this, please. In CSS you sometimes have to state the same exact rule three times or more, but it's the same rule with the same syntax in all common cases I can think of except gradients. HTML5 video/canvas generally don't require many cross-browser hacks. You just have to stick to what all browsers have implemented. Libraries like jQuery can also abstract away browser differences for you.
In fact, this stuff is generally standardized already. The problem is it's not always implemented, and when it is, often it's only in newer browsers. So HTML5 will take time to win, but it will win, at least for the common cases. Plugins might always be needed for special functionality that's too narrow to standardize, but not for basic video viewing, browser games, etc.
Of course, Oracle controls btrfs as well, and its future doesn't exactly look so great at this point, either
Oracle doesn't control btrfs. It's part of the Linux kernel. Oracle pays the one who's currently in charge of btrfs development, Chris Mason, but a) someone else could take over if he left (look at how many developers there are); and b) plenty of other companies would be willing to hire him if Oracle didn't want to pay him to work on btrfs anymore. Oracle has influence over btrfs, but not control.
Oracle also owns BTRFS. Anyone that develops IP whilst an employee gives Oracle full ownership of the that IP.
Oracle could change the license of BTRFS from GPL to closed source tomorrow if they wanted to.
Lots of people have contributed to btrfs. It's part of the Linus' tree, not a separate thing that Oracle controls. Oracle only holds the copyright on what its employees (like Chris Mason) have written. It couldn't release a closed-source version of the filesystem without getting licenses from all the non-Oracle people who contributed, or rewriting all their code. You only need to look over the commit history to see how many people that is. Most of the commits don't look like they come from Oracle employees, judging by the e-mail addresses.
With servers so close to users, Google could not only send its data faster but also avoid sending it over the Internet backbone that connects service providers and for which they all pay
Does anyone seriously believe Google is sending data to Verizon over the backbones? There's a little thing called peering. ISPs go over their traffic records, find the data centers they're paying the backbones the most to ship traffic to, and run direct lines instead when that would save them money in the long term. IIRC, even Wikipedia only pays for about half of its bandwidth – the rest is peering. Google must use orders of magnitude more bandwidth, so I can't believe it's paying for practically any of it. It wouldn't be worth it for any significant ISP not to peer with Google.
But of course, you can't dare take driving away from them, because getting behind the wheel of a 75mph 3,000lb chunk of steel before you can even be trusted to smoke, vote, hold a full time job, or live on your own is considered about as "unamerican" as you can get.
Or maybe you can't take driving away from them because in large parts of the country, they have to drive to get to school/the doctor/etc., since the population density is sometimes too low for any kind of public transportation (or non-motor transportation, like bicycles) to be workable.
(if GPSes with pre-digested machine-format maps, and RTS units in fully computer-generated environments, with perfect knowledge of the location of all objects in the virtual space, are still fucking it up, real world systems with sensors and machine vision and stuff have a way to go...)
There are plenty of third-person RPGs with "move to" commands that work flawlessly even if you click on someplace very distant: I've had my character take the most direct route when I did that in Dragon Age even when it took like a minute on a roundabout path to get there. AFAICT, a typical PC can do excellent pathfinding for one actor at a time, if you do it right. Just not hundreds, like you get in RTSes. But an onboard car computer only needs to do one at a time.
I wrote a script to disassemble all the programs on my computer to check for comments which say "start keylogger".
Disassembled binaries generally have no comments, but you get points for effort.
Really, selling online I've noticed that Europeans are terrible consumers. They don't listen well to our support staff, they immediately charge back if the service is not up to par, etc. etc. It's a hell dealing with Europeans.
If you're looking to make money, honestly, invest in US consumers first. Much easier to part them from their money and to convince them not to cancel/buy more.
Maybe this is related to the fact that the European Union has per-capita GDP of $32,600 (#42 in the world), while the United States has per-capita GDP of $46,400 (#11 in the world). As people get richer, it's less and less worthwhile to spend time being picky about what you buy. I bet Europeans are a heck of a lot less picky than Middle Easterners, say.
Have you noticed that Europe has a much bigger uptake of Linux, Firefox and in the older days Amiga? I've often wondered if this is Europe being "open minded"....
I would love to be able to say the same about Australia...
Or maybe it's just because they're anti-American and anti-corporate. Microsoft, Apple, etc. are American corporations, while Linux, Firefox, etc. are not-for-profit and thoroughly international. The seventh Halloween Document is the results of a survey conducted by Microsoft, and one of the findings is that a major reason for favoring Linux is as "an alternative to Microsoft". 61% of French respondents, 37% of Germans, and 35% of Swedes gave this as their top reason for supporting Linux. Not that it works better, or costs less, they just hate Microsoft.
Americans, on the other hand, are much more pro-corporate, and (duh) pro-American. This open-source stuff sounds suspiciously hippie and foreign. Australia is a pretty conservative and pro-American nation too, so the same might apply.
In fact, what's possibly the most pro-open source country in the world? Venezuela. You know, run by Hugo Chávez, who doesn't get along well with America. Is it a big surprise that they don't want their entire computing infrastructure dependent on Americans?
The next time anyone comes up with an explanation that makes them or those they admire (e.g., Europeans) look good, try thinking up a more cynical explanation. It will probably be more correct.
I love it here in Europe, just the other day a colleague of mine surprised me by wanting to install Ubuntu.
Funny thing, but as an American, I run into other Americans on a regular basis who use Ubuntu. Like my best friend's fiancée told me that her whole family uses Ubuntu, and I field questions all the time on the message board I run from people (mostly Americans) who want to install Ubuntu. Maybe it's not so special to Europe?
Fortunately, you are wrong. See this Cybercrime blog entry (written by a law professor) for the gory legal details. The meat and potatoes of the post:
Okay, I looked up a bit on Google, and it seems like this is unclear. Some lawyers argue for each position, but there's been no decision on the matter above the district court level. United States v. Boucher is the only case so far on the matter: a magistrate judge ruled that disclosing the key did constitute self-incrimination, but a district judge overruled him and said it didn't. Text of the district court decision is here.
The reasoning was that the court was only demanding that he produce the contents of his laptop, not that he tell them any information. They wouldn't mind if he typed the password into the laptop himself rather than tell it to them. Since the government knew in advance that there were files on the computer that belonged to him – which they'd practically always know when confiscating your laptop and finding an encrypted drive – he's not admitting anything by giving them the passphrase. It's no different from if they demanded the key to a locked cabinet, which they're allowed to do.
But this interpretation isn't binding anywhere yet. The question is still up in the air.
Congress should just nationalize the entire telco grid
Which they definitely would have to provide just compensation for, under the Fifth Amendment. So how many trillions of dollars would that work out to, do you think?
What if it's NOT encrypted, and that's just noise left over from stress testing the drive with random read-writes?
Then it's not going to look like it's encrypted. An encrypted hard disk will almost always have some clear identifying mark, like some cleartext code at the beginning which prints out "please enter passphrase:" when you try booting from it, and tries to decrypt the key using the passphrase.
Of course, you might not know the password. No way to be sure, but the jury doesn't need to be sure. It just needs to be beyond a reasonable doubt, and not even that in civil cases.
I like the prescedent.
Cops: "We confiscated your external HDD, only it's encrypted. Give us your password."
SuspecT: "No."
Cops: "Passwords are property and thus you have to, as it's part of the HDD."
Suspect: "I claim 5th amendment rights."
Cops: "We have a Warrant for the seizure and search of this HDD, and you're blocking us from doing it. Therefore, you can rot in jail until you give up and give us what we want."
Um, yeah. IANAL, but this is called "obstruction of justice". If the police have a warrant that permits them to search your hard disk, and you try to prevent them, that's a crime. You can't be compelled to testify against yourself, but you have to permit the police to access your property if they have a legitimate warrant.
You see, what Canonical is now realizing is that they're in a tribe all by themselves. And they can't handle this revelation becoming public, because it really shows just how little they've contributed back to the community over the past few years. This recent GNOME survey just shows how little they've done for GNOME. The Linux Kernel survey showed much the same numbers. And if we ran around to the rest of the big free software communities, I'm certain we'd see much the same numbers, yet again.
This presupposes that the only way to contribute back to the community is in the form of code. That's a natural perspective for a programmer to take, but it's wrong. Ubuntu has done a great deal to advance free software by integrating it into a reliable and easy-to-use package that's appealing to the average person. That's a distribution's job: to bring together software from disparate sources so that it forms a cohesive whole.
Now, if you write code that would be useful to the community, you should release it to the community. If Canonical were writing the code but sitting on it to try edging out their rivals, that would be reprehensible. But they aren't. They're mostly not writing the code in the first place. What major features have they written for existing projects but refused to upstream? Not many.
Rather, they've just made the strategic decision to focus on things other than improving upstream projects. They aren't hiding any code that upstream would want, they just don't write much of it to begin with. Not everyone has to do everything; some organizations can focus on upstream and some on downstream. What Canonical has done is made a distro that's brought an untold number of people to Linux. That gets you more eyes on the code, more contributions – just indirectly.
An acquaintance started me out on Linux a few years ago. He suggested Ubuntu to begin with, and it worked very smoothly. As a direct consequence of that, I've submitted multiple small fixes to upstream projects to improve the desktop experience. If I had used a distro that was less easy to use, maybe I'd have been scared off. Those patches are filed under "volunteer work", but Canonical had a hand in creating them nonetheless.
This is not a zero-sum game. If Ubuntu can get more people to use Linux, that benefits all of us. It has unquestionably done an excellent job at that, and we should applaud it. Getting people to use Linux is what Canonical has done best to date, and it's logical for them to keep focusing on what they do well. That they haven't also paid for big improvements to upstream doesn't negate their other achievements in the slightest, and should not be held against them, any more than we should criticize Debian for not working to solve world hunger.
Insurance companies (at least, well-run insurance companies) are fundamentally socialist in nature as well. It's the ones which forget that and start becoming too capitalist that are problematic.
Insurance companies have nothing to do with socialism. Socialism is when means of production are collectively owned, and therefore (theoretically) used for the benefit of workers or the general public rather than their owner's interests. Insurance companies are usually privately owned and for-profit. You can have collectively-owned insurance companies, but no more so than for anything else.
If you're trying to say that insurance is akin to sharing or a social network, you misunderstand it. Insurance amortizes risk. You pay the insurance company moderate amounts of money over time, and in exchange it reduces your risk of having to pay a large sum of money all at once (when your car is totaled, etc.). This is a private transaction between two parties, with no collective action involved.
It typically happens that the insurance company gets the pool it uses to insure you from many other people, but this is inessential. You could be just as well insured by a rich dude who will pay out of his own pocket when you come to collect. Moreover, other types of companies work the same way. If you pay for customer support when buying something, you're effectively paying into a pool of customer service reps, who will only service a minority of customers. Is that somehow "collective" or "socialist"? No; it's just a company that has obligations toward a lot of people, and it raises money to cover its costs by charging for services.
The idea that insurance companies do or should serve as some kind of wealth redistribution has led to a lot of problems when it comes to health insurance. In a sane world, health insurance would not cover a routine doctor visit, any more than car insurance covers your gas bills; there's no risk, so what's the point of involving a middleman?
But since so many people think health insurance is supposed to take money from healthy people to give to poor people, I get insurance coverage for routine checkups, whether I like it or not. And then my insurance company has to raise premiums to cover that. So now instead of me paying $100 for the appointment, the insurance company pays $80 (less because they want to cut costs), and I pay them $120 (extra to cover overhead). The doctor gets less money, I get less money, both of us have to fill out lots of tedious paperwork. Everyone loses, except the insurance companies.
Wealth redistribution is fine, I'm in favor of it (to some extent). But there's a really efficient way to do it: charge rich people taxes, and hand cash directly to poor people. Trying to subsidize unhealthy people by forcing everyone to let some third party (usually chosen by their employer or government, not them) review all their medical expenses, decide what treatment they're allowed to get, and collect large sums of money from everyone, but requiring them to charge the same amount for healthy and unhealthy people – so that healthy people pay more than they would have otherwise, and unhealthy people maybe hopefully pay less – that is just crazy.
Health insurance as we know it needs to be scrapped and replaced with insurance that covers only catastrophes, where you only have to deal with it once every few years at most and hopefully never, like with car and fire insurance. Let people choose their insurance provider, instead of having it forced on them by their employer. Then, if we think poor people or unhealthy people need more help from society, help them out in the most direct, efficient, and transparent way possible: take cash directly from the people who need it least, and give it directly to those who need it most.
As recent consumers SSDs go, the WD 64GB is very, very average; if you try some of the faster, larger SSDs, say one based on Sandforce SF-1200 controller or even a latter-day Indilinx, that have higher random IOPs, going back to disk is unbearably slow for any operation that isn't cached in RAM.
. . . which means almost nothing on a typical desktop once your system is booted. I used an X25-M for a while on my desktop as the root partition, and it made a massive difference about, oh, two or three times a day. Typical activity like browsing, chat, e-mail doesn't touch the disk much if you have a decent amount of RAM.
Instead, I moved my SSD to my Windows machine, which I use for gaming. There it's a huge win, because most game developers apparently haven't figured out that you could actually cache assets in advance when the player gets close to the next level, so loading screens are heavily disk-bound. The game (currently Dragon Age) starts much faster, levels load much faster. For web browsing, though? No big difference.