This book depicts incest and child sexual acts and it should be the first to go. It also promotes hate crimes against homo sexuals, slavery and violence towards women.
It doesn't "depict" anything, because it's a book, not images. It does refer to acts such as incest, but not in a way that anyone would consider pornographic – it's stuff like "and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father" (Genesis 19:33, KJV). It speaks about sexual acts only via heavy euphemism, never explicitly.
I'd also like to know what "child sexual acts" the Bible even refers to. I can't think of any, offhand. I don't think anyone minded pedophilia in Biblical times (or, indeed, any time pre-1900) the way we do today, but I don't recall that it's mentioned anywhere.
If you want to say it promotes sexism or homophobia, of course, no argument there.
On one PC I tried, I get roughly 50 fps on Flash and 20 fps on HTML5 Canvas running this demo.
What versions of the browser and Flash, and OS? Using Flash 10 on Ubuntu 9.10, I get 25-40 FPS in Chrome 5 (dev channel) for Flash, and 50 FPS in the HTML test. (Canvas and SVG are slower than HTML, but as fast as Flash or faster.) Opera 10.50 also performs somewhat faster on canvas than on Flash, although its HTML doesn't work right (the balls are square . ..) and SVG is slower than Flash. Firefox (3.6 and 3.7a5) does seem to do best on Flash, though.
Sadly designers are a snobbish and wasteful sort, so here we go with all this crap polluting the CSS standard only to allow morons to make entire websites in Comic Sans MS.
They could already do that, since most people have Comic Sans MS installed by default. The advantage of @font-face is that it allows sites to attain even greater levels of bad taste and illegibility than you can get with preinstalled fonts. After all, OSes go through considerable testing, so you can be sure that all preinstalled fonts' horribleness falls at least slightly below the level that causes testers to gouge their eyes out and/or commit suicide. With web fonts, the sky's the limit!
How about a small daemon that at intervals re-assigns the running processes to the cores in a balanced way (or one of your choice), and also sets the affinity for new processes.
Yes, great idea. So that we don't have any idle CPU time, it would probably be best to run it every time any CPU core becomes available. That's pretty often, so actually, a daemon might not be a good idea; maybe it should be in the kernel instead. Now, what shall we call it? How about a "scheduler"?
I also recently started playing Dragon Age (Bioware). . . . On the plus side, it allows a fairly free story line, with your choice of what order you want to solve the major plot points, and what side you want to be on
What?! Where's the option to join up with the darkspawn? I must have missed it.:(
So yes a tool would be nice, but you're deluded if you think HTML5 is an adequate replacement for all but the most sedentary content. Perhaps someone needs to define proper extensions to HTML, SVG, DOM etc. that allows content to be tweened with timing critical hinting, audio etc. that Flash supplies which make it so useful for animation & video content.
That's basically what's happening. HTML5 as it stands defines a basic set of APIs that let you do 90% of what you want to do with Flash in practice (although sometimes with more effort). As people try out the new APIs, they report things that are missing and can't be faked, and the most common requests will get prioritized for future versions of the standard.
For instance, HTML5 doesn't yet support reading from a webcam or microphone, but there are rough sketches in that direction (hitherto unimplemented). Another recent thing someone pointed out is that games need a way to lock your mouse cursor to their box, so you can use your mouse as you expect for FPSes without throwing the cursor out of the browser window when you do a sharp turn. WebKit has already implemented an experimental API to fullscreen video, which is missing from the current spec. These things are getting handled, in time.
Outside the US there are no software patents, therefore h.264 can't have any patent over it, therefore MPEG-LA can't threaten anybody for anything.
Wrong. The MPEG-LA claims patents in many countries, including much of Europe. Boris Zbarsky of Mozilla looked at the huge list of H.264 patents, and came up with the following countries where some aspect of H.264 is patented:
Asia: Japan, China, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, India
Americas: Canada, Mexico
Australia
He said he only looked at the first 6 pages out of 43, and wasn't looking very carefully, so there are probably patents in many more countries too. Needless to say, they only need one patent per country to force you to pay royalties.
Currently there is no h.264 content out there for HTML5 video
Um, you mean other than YouTube? And Vimeo? If you use the HTML5 beta for either of those sites, you get, yes, H.264 served as <video>. To the contrary, by comparison there's no Theora content out there for HTML5 video: only Wikimedia (which has vastly less video than YouTube or Vimeo) and maybe one or two smaller sites.
Which harmful effects are those? Have there been credible, peer-reviewed studies which actually show any negative effect of seeing violence on a screen?
Yes, plenty. There are tons of randomized, controlled psychology studies that measure short-term increases in aggression from playing violent vs. non-violent video games. Nobody has a large controlled study that shows long-term effects, though, like actual increases in crime rates, because large controlled studies are extremely expensive.
If I remember correctly, though, the Ninth Circuit's decision mentioned in a footnote that even if you could prove that violent video games directly cause an increase in violent crime, that wouldn't be enough justification to restrict them. After all, you can't ban sales of Mein Kampf even if you can prove it would increase hate crime. Speech that indirectly encourages crime is still protected by the First Amendment. (Although I'm not sure why violent video games, or porn or whatever, constitute "speech", that's what the courts say . ..)
Many medicines are sold for profit margins that are hard to justify to anyone with a conscience. It's fine for drug companies to make a profit, a handsome profit even. But resources for medical care are finite and just because a drug company is able to charge a lot doesn't always mean they should.
In large businesses, profit is reinvested in the company. A few percent might go to bonuses for executives or dividends to shareholders, but the vast majority will be invested in expanding the business in some way. (E.g., Pfizer pays its CEO around $15 million – under 0.05% of its $50 billion annual revenue.) In the case of a drug research company, much of the profit probably goes into R&D, since that's probably their biggest expense. (Pfizer's Annual Report for 2009 says $7.8 billion in R&D expenses.) So the high drug costs are funding more drug research. Where do they get R&D money from, after all, if not from drug sale profits?
Put another way: if you cut drug company profits, are they going to make up for it by cutting dividends and executive salaries, or by cutting R&D and releasing fewer innovative drugs? Take a guess. If you want to cut drug costs, you have to cut R&D costs – like by making drug approval trials much, much cheaper.
Unless I'm mistaken this is at least a violation of the Berne treaty, you can't treat domestic and international copyrights from the signatories differently... maybe we should put them on some sort of copyright watchlist;)
You can't treat works differently based on the nationality of their author:
Protection in the country of origin is governed by domestic law. However, when the author is not a national of the country of origin of the work for which he is protected under this Convention, he shall enjoy in that country the same rights as national authors. (Source: Article 5(3))
But this is discrimination based on the intended market of the work, which is entirely different. A foreign company would have just as much right as a domestic one to prohibit some of its goods from being resold in America, so this is allowed by the Berne Convention.
Um, do you understand the attack at all? The attackers intercepted your cookies from Google, using a standard man-in-the-middle attack, and used them to access your account. Cookie whitelisting is useless here: the only cookies are legitimate ones from Google, and if you deny those, you can't log in (as with any cookie-based authentication).
The protection for AC2 is tacked on. Settlers 7 received somewhat better protection and there is no working server emulator for it yet. In the future it will be more dynamic and most likely include server side game logic. The significance of it not being truly cracked even with a basic protection as in AC2 is this: every time Ubisoft releases a new game then the pirates must play through the entire game collecting the values which can take a few weeks to get 100% unless the process can somehow be automated. This is over and above any changes to the protocol used to communicate between the client and server between games which the cracker must code for to capture those values.
I don't get it. Why can't they patch out the checks for the server's values from the binary? Is it something devious like keeping a few dozen critical bytes for each map on the server, like a key that decrypts the assets? You'd think the attackers could synthesize key requests once they got the hang of it, if so, so they wouldn't actually have to play the game to get all the keys.
Either Schmidt is stupid (and I don't buy that) or he thinks you are.
Or he was grossly misquoted?
If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it's important, for example that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.
The latter part makes it seem like he's talking purely pragmatically: it's always possible others will find out what you do, so the only safe option is not to do it. He's also clearly leaving open the possibility that you might legitimately want to hide something: "maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" (not definitely), and then "but if really need that kind of privacy . .." (implying that some people do need it). The last sentence makes it sound like he's only talking about crimes.
But we really have no idea, since we don't know the full context. If you look at a clip of the video, it's clear that what was said immediately before this line was cut off in the original published interview video. We can't be sure what question he was even responding to, or what context he was putting the statement in.
But hey, let's just pick a soundbite that proves Google is evil, then paraphrase it so it's even more clear-cut. That makes things simpler.
Also, remember that source control systems add a significant performance penalty that is also proportional to the number of files, not just the number of bytes. So although the giant compressed tarball may take only five minutes to download from kernel.org (which is an eternity), I'd expect a source checkout to take a good bit longer.
Seems so. Not that this is good evidence by itself that Linux's development model is flawed – this is a pretty small cost compared to the other things at stake here.
it does.
my firefox is dynamically linked to system libpng i.e..
It's now also dynamically linked to system libtheora. Same deal. It's not linked to some generic image-rendering library that decides which formats to support. The reason is very simple: image and video in HTML must integrate with the surrounding content. You have to be able to style it with CSS, overlay other content on it, manipulate it in all sorts of complicated ways with script, etc. A generic image or video rendering library is not likely to support all these features, or at least not with the necessary performance. Try overlaying content on Flash and see how well that works (hint: last I checked, it doesn't).
It's worth pointing out that no browser is using a video backend that they don't control. Firefox is using libtheora, Opera is using GStreamer, Chrome is using ffmpeg, Safari is using QuickTime or something related to that (including on Windows). All of them are either open-source, or controlled by the browser vendor, not the OS (except Safari on OS X and IE on Windows, but only incidentally). You just don't have the flexibility otherwise.
Disclaimer: I'm not a browser developer, I only hang out with them on standards lists/IRC channels, and this reflects my own poor understanding of things that have been said in my presence.
Apple has licensed those patents for free to anyone implementing the canvas tag as defined in the HTML5 standard.
Not quite. They've disclosed them, that's all. They only have to make a legally binding decision on whether to license them once HTML5 reaches Recommendation status. Ian Hickson, the editor, predicts that will be in 2022 or so. You can read the W3C Patent Policy yourself, and the list of disclosed patents. (Note "disclosed", not "licensed".)
Just to clarify, I like it that way. I don't look forward to the day when any old site can peg my CPU and I can't prevent it. God knows, some people's JavaScript is bad enough.
Adobe doesn't care so much if they peg your CPU, because you're forced to use their product anyway. If an actual browser renders sites very slowly, on the other hand, people will leave it for a different browser. Performance is paramount to browser implementers.
Take a look at Apple... the only HTML5 standard they are supporting is the one already implemented in Webkit (coincidentally, it's their own platform). Sure, they've put up a "standards group" to make it seem like they care about others think, but the WHATWG standard is really "what Apple thinks best suits their interest".
Um, what? The WHATWG standard is written by Ian Hickson, who works for Google. There's theoretically a short list of members who can overrule him, but a) that includes people from Apple, Opera, Google, and Mozilla, as well as one freelancer; and b) it does nothing in practice, just lets Ian call the shots.
The spec also currently has a W3C version that mirrors the WHATWG version. Changes to the W3C version can be made by a procedure that ultimately boils down to approval by the three co-chairs, who are employed by Apple, IBM, and Microsoft. The W3C itself, including the TAG headed by Tim Berners-Lee, also has a say in how the standard develops there. In principle, substantive differences could arise between the WHATWG and W3C versions, but so far Ian has implemented all the non-editorial approved change proposals in both specs (AFAIK).
I'm all for saying Apple is basically evil, but saying Apple controls HTML5 is ridiculous.
It really is a trade off for the hosting company of CPU and load vs. bandwidth, and I'm assuming bandwidth is cheaper for them on normal hosting package.
CPU overhead of gzip is negligible, and can be avoided anyway if you just cache the gzipped files (which also saves memory). Bandwidth is far more expensive. gzip is disabled on some hosts probably because it's disabled by default in some web servers, which is probably (at least in JS's case) because some ancient versions of IE used to have trouble with gzipped JS. (What web servers do enable JS gzip by default, any of them?)
Nothing. Flash will never be replaced, and by the time you start seeing Canvas ads, you'll have Canvasblock:)
No you won't, because canvas will be implemented by browsers that actually compete with each other, and so won't be a buggy/crashy piece of trash. Of course, your standard ad blockers will block canvas ads just fine.
I don't know who actually invented it, but your logic isnt really flawless
The HTML canvas element was copied from Safari. Originally, Apple devised and implemented it themselves entirely for internal use. When the WHATWG was looking to extend standard HTML with more application-centric markup, and decided it wanted a 2D graphics API, basing it on an existing well-tested and featureful API that already had a browser implementation apparently seemed like a good idea.
This was a few years before I started following the WHATWG and web standards, so I don't know the details offhand, but Apple definitely invented the canvas element, as much as anyone can be said to have invented an HTML element.
Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but I thought that WebGL was essentially an implementation of some of the core elements of OpenGL in Javascript, meaning--if I understand correctly--that anything that works with WebGL could run in an HTML5-compliant browser such as Mobile Safari.
Is this not correct? Is WebGL an actual plug-in like Flash?
No, it's not. WebGL is a standard that's being built into some browsers. It defines an alternate backend (context) to the canvas element, which lets you do 3D rendering instead of 2D. The 2D context is much older and more widely implemented, and for a long time was the only one specced, so when people say "canvas" they usually mean "canvas with 2D rendering context", but WebGL is canvas too.
One of those W3C standards is that an element id or name cannot begin with a digit. It can contain digits mind you, it just can't begin with one.
This is true in HTML 4.01 and all non-HTML5 versions of XHTML. It is no longer true in HTML5:
The id attribute specifies its element's unique identifier (ID). The value must be unique amongst all the IDs in the element's home subtree and must contain at least one character. The value must not contain any space characters.
It now just has to be non-empty, and can't contain ASCII whitespace. I'm waiting for this to be widely implemented so I can switch MediaWiki to not use awful id's with ad hoc UTF-8 hex digits in them . . . the old (HTML 4.01) rules didn't allow non-ASCII characters either.
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This book depicts incest and child sexual acts and it should be the first to go. It also promotes hate crimes against homo sexuals, slavery and violence towards women.
It doesn't "depict" anything, because it's a book, not images. It does refer to acts such as incest, but not in a way that anyone would consider pornographic – it's stuff like "and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father" (Genesis 19:33, KJV). It speaks about sexual acts only via heavy euphemism, never explicitly.
I'd also like to know what "child sexual acts" the Bible even refers to. I can't think of any, offhand. I don't think anyone minded pedophilia in Biblical times (or, indeed, any time pre-1900) the way we do today, but I don't recall that it's mentioned anywhere.
If you want to say it promotes sexism or homophobia, of course, no argument there.
On one PC I tried, I get roughly 50 fps on Flash and 20 fps on HTML5 Canvas running this demo.
What versions of the browser and Flash, and OS? Using Flash 10 on Ubuntu 9.10, I get 25-40 FPS in Chrome 5 (dev channel) for Flash, and 50 FPS in the HTML test. (Canvas and SVG are slower than HTML, but as fast as Flash or faster.) Opera 10.50 also performs somewhat faster on canvas than on Flash, although its HTML doesn't work right (the balls are square . . .) and SVG is slower than Flash. Firefox (3.6 and 3.7a5) does seem to do best on Flash, though.
Sadly designers are a snobbish and wasteful sort, so here we go with all this crap polluting the CSS standard only to allow morons to make entire websites in Comic Sans MS.
They could already do that, since most people have Comic Sans MS installed by default. The advantage of @font-face is that it allows sites to attain even greater levels of bad taste and illegibility than you can get with preinstalled fonts. After all, OSes go through considerable testing, so you can be sure that all preinstalled fonts' horribleness falls at least slightly below the level that causes testers to gouge their eyes out and/or commit suicide. With web fonts, the sky's the limit!
How about a small daemon that at intervals re-assigns the running processes to the cores in a balanced way (or one of your choice), and also sets the affinity for new processes.
Yes, great idea. So that we don't have any idle CPU time, it would probably be best to run it every time any CPU core becomes available. That's pretty often, so actually, a daemon might not be a good idea; maybe it should be in the kernel instead. Now, what shall we call it? How about a "scheduler"?
I also recently started playing Dragon Age (Bioware). . . . On the plus side, it allows a fairly free story line, with your choice of what order you want to solve the major plot points, and what side you want to be on
What?! Where's the option to join up with the darkspawn? I must have missed it. :(
So yes a tool would be nice, but you're deluded if you think HTML5 is an adequate replacement for all but the most sedentary content. Perhaps someone needs to define proper extensions to HTML, SVG, DOM etc. that allows content to be tweened with timing critical hinting, audio etc. that Flash supplies which make it so useful for animation & video content.
That's basically what's happening. HTML5 as it stands defines a basic set of APIs that let you do 90% of what you want to do with Flash in practice (although sometimes with more effort). As people try out the new APIs, they report things that are missing and can't be faked, and the most common requests will get prioritized for future versions of the standard.
For instance, HTML5 doesn't yet support reading from a webcam or microphone, but there are rough sketches in that direction (hitherto unimplemented). Another recent thing someone pointed out is that games need a way to lock your mouse cursor to their box, so you can use your mouse as you expect for FPSes without throwing the cursor out of the browser window when you do a sharp turn. WebKit has already implemented an experimental API to fullscreen video, which is missing from the current spec. These things are getting handled, in time.
Outside the US there are no software patents, therefore h.264 can't have any patent over it, therefore MPEG-LA can't threaten anybody for anything.
Wrong. The MPEG-LA claims patents in many countries, including much of Europe. Boris Zbarsky of Mozilla looked at the huge list of H.264 patents, and came up with the following countries where some aspect of H.264 is patented:
He said he only looked at the first 6 pages out of 43, and wasn't looking very carefully, so there are probably patents in many more countries too. Needless to say, they only need one patent per country to force you to pay royalties.
Currently there is no h.264 content out there for HTML5 video
Um, you mean other than YouTube? And Vimeo? If you use the HTML5 beta for either of those sites, you get, yes, H.264 served as <video>. To the contrary, by comparison there's no Theora content out there for HTML5 video: only Wikimedia (which has vastly less video than YouTube or Vimeo) and maybe one or two smaller sites.
Which harmful effects are those? Have there been credible, peer-reviewed studies which actually show any negative effect of seeing violence on a screen?
Yes, plenty. There are tons of randomized, controlled psychology studies that measure short-term increases in aggression from playing violent vs. non-violent video games. Nobody has a large controlled study that shows long-term effects, though, like actual increases in crime rates, because large controlled studies are extremely expensive.
If I remember correctly, though, the Ninth Circuit's decision mentioned in a footnote that even if you could prove that violent video games directly cause an increase in violent crime, that wouldn't be enough justification to restrict them. After all, you can't ban sales of Mein Kampf even if you can prove it would increase hate crime. Speech that indirectly encourages crime is still protected by the First Amendment. (Although I'm not sure why violent video games, or porn or whatever, constitute "speech", that's what the courts say . . .)
Many medicines are sold for profit margins that are hard to justify to anyone with a conscience. It's fine for drug companies to make a profit, a handsome profit even. But resources for medical care are finite and just because a drug company is able to charge a lot doesn't always mean they should.
In large businesses, profit is reinvested in the company. A few percent might go to bonuses for executives or dividends to shareholders, but the vast majority will be invested in expanding the business in some way. (E.g., Pfizer pays its CEO around $15 million – under 0.05% of its $50 billion annual revenue.) In the case of a drug research company, much of the profit probably goes into R&D, since that's probably their biggest expense. (Pfizer's Annual Report for 2009 says $7.8 billion in R&D expenses.) So the high drug costs are funding more drug research. Where do they get R&D money from, after all, if not from drug sale profits?
Put another way: if you cut drug company profits, are they going to make up for it by cutting dividends and executive salaries, or by cutting R&D and releasing fewer innovative drugs? Take a guess. If you want to cut drug costs, you have to cut R&D costs – like by making drug approval trials much, much cheaper.
Unless I'm mistaken this is at least a violation of the Berne treaty, you can't treat domestic and international copyrights from the signatories differently... maybe we should put them on some sort of copyright watchlist ;)
You can't treat works differently based on the nationality of their author:
But this is discrimination based on the intended market of the work, which is entirely different. A foreign company would have just as much right as a domestic one to prohibit some of its goods from being resold in America, so this is allowed by the Berne Convention.
Cookie white-listing seems saner and saner.
Um, do you understand the attack at all? The attackers intercepted your cookies from Google, using a standard man-in-the-middle attack, and used them to access your account. Cookie whitelisting is useless here: the only cookies are legitimate ones from Google, and if you deny those, you can't log in (as with any cookie-based authentication).
The protection for AC2 is tacked on. Settlers 7 received somewhat better protection and there is no working server emulator for it yet. In the future it will be more dynamic and most likely include server side game logic. The significance of it not being truly cracked even with a basic protection as in AC2 is this: every time Ubisoft releases a new game then the pirates must play through the entire game collecting the values which can take a few weeks to get 100% unless the process can somehow be automated. This is over and above any changes to the protocol used to communicate between the client and server between games which the cracker must code for to capture those values.
I don't get it. Why can't they patch out the checks for the server's values from the binary? Is it something devious like keeping a few dozen critical bytes for each map on the server, like a key that decrypts the assets? You'd think the attackers could synthesize key requests once they got the hang of it, if so, so they wouldn't actually have to play the game to get all the keys.
Either Schmidt is stupid (and I don't buy that) or he thinks you are.
Or he was grossly misquoted?
The latter part makes it seem like he's talking purely pragmatically: it's always possible others will find out what you do, so the only safe option is not to do it. He's also clearly leaving open the possibility that you might legitimately want to hide something: "maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" (not definitely), and then "but if really need that kind of privacy . . ." (implying that some people do need it). The last sentence makes it sound like he's only talking about crimes.
But we really have no idea, since we don't know the full context. If you look at a clip of the video, it's clear that what was said immediately before this line was cut off in the original published interview video. We can't be sure what question he was even responding to, or what context he was putting the statement in.
But hey, let's just pick a soundbite that proves Google is evil, then paraphrase it so it's even more clear-cut. That makes things simpler.
Also, remember that source control systems add a significant performance penalty that is also proportional to the number of files, not just the number of bytes. So although the giant compressed tarball may take only five minutes to download from kernel.org (which is an eternity), I'd expect a source checkout to take a good bit longer.
$ time git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git; beep -r3 /tmp/linux-2.6/.git/
Initialized empty Git repository in
remote: Counting objects: 1541121, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (245956/245956), done.
remote: Total 1541121 (delta 1283118), reused 1540764 (delta 1282805)
Receiving objects: 100% (1541121/1541121), 342.13 MiB | 285 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (1283118/1283118), done.
Checking out files: 100% (32295/32295), done.
real 28m18.664s
user 5m11.007s
sys 0m23.085s
Seems so. Not that this is good evidence by itself that Linux's development model is flawed – this is a pretty small cost compared to the other things at stake here.
it does. my firefox is dynamically linked to system libpng i.e..
It's now also dynamically linked to system libtheora. Same deal. It's not linked to some generic image-rendering library that decides which formats to support. The reason is very simple: image and video in HTML must integrate with the surrounding content. You have to be able to style it with CSS, overlay other content on it, manipulate it in all sorts of complicated ways with script, etc. A generic image or video rendering library is not likely to support all these features, or at least not with the necessary performance. Try overlaying content on Flash and see how well that works (hint: last I checked, it doesn't).
It's worth pointing out that no browser is using a video backend that they don't control. Firefox is using libtheora, Opera is using GStreamer, Chrome is using ffmpeg, Safari is using QuickTime or something related to that (including on Windows). All of them are either open-source, or controlled by the browser vendor, not the OS (except Safari on OS X and IE on Windows, but only incidentally). You just don't have the flexibility otherwise.
Disclaimer: I'm not a browser developer, I only hang out with them on standards lists/IRC channels, and this reflects my own poor understanding of things that have been said in my presence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framekiller
one line of code:
top.location.replace(self.location.href);
put it in every page you ever publish on the web
it's not 100% foolproof, nothing is
but it's so little effort for protection from an important kind of xss attack
Wikipedia used to have that, but dropped it. It interferes with useful services like Google Translate (IIRC).
Apple has licensed those patents for free to anyone implementing the canvas tag as defined in the HTML5 standard.
Not quite. They've disclosed them, that's all. They only have to make a legally binding decision on whether to license them once HTML5 reaches Recommendation status. Ian Hickson, the editor, predicts that will be in 2022 or so. You can read the W3C Patent Policy yourself, and the list of disclosed patents. (Note "disclosed", not "licensed".)
Just to clarify, I like it that way. I don't look forward to the day when any old site can peg my CPU and I can't prevent it. God knows, some people's JavaScript is bad enough.
Adobe doesn't care so much if they peg your CPU, because you're forced to use their product anyway. If an actual browser renders sites very slowly, on the other hand, people will leave it for a different browser. Performance is paramount to browser implementers.
Take a look at Apple... the only HTML5 standard they are supporting is the one already implemented in Webkit (coincidentally, it's their own platform). Sure, they've put up a "standards group" to make it seem like they care about others think, but the WHATWG standard is really "what Apple thinks best suits their interest".
Um, what? The WHATWG standard is written by Ian Hickson, who works for Google. There's theoretically a short list of members who can overrule him, but a) that includes people from Apple, Opera, Google, and Mozilla, as well as one freelancer; and b) it does nothing in practice, just lets Ian call the shots.
The spec also currently has a W3C version that mirrors the WHATWG version. Changes to the W3C version can be made by a procedure that ultimately boils down to approval by the three co-chairs, who are employed by Apple, IBM, and Microsoft. The W3C itself, including the TAG headed by Tim Berners-Lee, also has a say in how the standard develops there. In principle, substantive differences could arise between the WHATWG and W3C versions, but so far Ian has implemented all the non-editorial approved change proposals in both specs (AFAIK).
I'm all for saying Apple is basically evil, but saying Apple controls HTML5 is ridiculous.
It really is a trade off for the hosting company of CPU and load vs. bandwidth, and I'm assuming bandwidth is cheaper for them on normal hosting package.
CPU overhead of gzip is negligible, and can be avoided anyway if you just cache the gzipped files (which also saves memory). Bandwidth is far more expensive. gzip is disabled on some hosts probably because it's disabled by default in some web servers, which is probably (at least in JS's case) because some ancient versions of IE used to have trouble with gzipped JS. (What web servers do enable JS gzip by default, any of them?)
Nothing. Flash will never be replaced, and by the time you start seeing Canvas ads, you'll have Canvasblock :)
No you won't, because canvas will be implemented by browsers that actually compete with each other, and so won't be a buggy/crashy piece of trash. Of course, your standard ad blockers will block canvas ads just fine.
implementing != inventing
I don't know who actually invented it, but your logic isnt really flawless
The HTML canvas element was copied from Safari. Originally, Apple devised and implemented it themselves entirely for internal use. When the WHATWG was looking to extend standard HTML with more application-centric markup, and decided it wanted a 2D graphics API, basing it on an existing well-tested and featureful API that already had a browser implementation apparently seemed like a good idea.
This was a few years before I started following the WHATWG and web standards, so I don't know the details offhand, but Apple definitely invented the canvas element, as much as anyone can be said to have invented an HTML element.
Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but I thought that WebGL was essentially an implementation of some of the core elements of OpenGL in Javascript, meaning--if I understand correctly--that anything that works with WebGL could run in an HTML5-compliant browser such as Mobile Safari. Is this not correct? Is WebGL an actual plug-in like Flash?
No, it's not. WebGL is a standard that's being built into some browsers. It defines an alternate backend (context) to the canvas element, which lets you do 3D rendering instead of 2D. The 2D context is much older and more widely implemented, and for a long time was the only one specced, so when people say "canvas" they usually mean "canvas with 2D rendering context", but WebGL is canvas too.
One of those W3C standards is that an element id or name cannot begin with a digit. It can contain digits mind you, it just can't begin with one.
This is true in HTML 4.01 and all non-HTML5 versions of XHTML. It is no longer true in HTML5:
It now just has to be non-empty, and can't contain ASCII whitespace. I'm waiting for this to be widely implemented so I can switch MediaWiki to not use awful id's with ad hoc UTF-8 hex digits in them . . . the old (HTML 4.01) rules didn't allow non-ASCII characters either.