> I do wish I'd heard about this sooner though. What a great opportunity to triple an investment.
Hmmm, If only there was some automatic way to get news really quickly and take action on it. Oh - I know, why don't you hook an automated script up to a popular on line news channel! It can trade automatically as soon as an event like this becomes known. Brilliant!
> Plugins are a major issue, and that's almost certainly the next thing to be put in its own process.
Actually, if you read the comic, in Chrome (apparently) plugins already run in separate processes to the pages they live in. This is one of the most interesting aspects of it.
Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
·
· Score: 1
I'm guessing that's part of it but it's also the slick startup time.
I think this is just the first phase - they want a trusted beachhead in the browser market where they can launch from. My prediction: in a few months we will get a Google Apps installer that will install all the apps so that they have nice shortcuts in the menu and function seamlessly as if they were native apps, launching, of course, in a dedicated Chrome runtime with almost native performance.
With the huge increase in javascript performance you can start doing some things that are impossible right now - full feature grammar checking, spell checking, diagrams, mathematics, even image processing - all in javascript on the client.
I think this could be a pretty interesting way of attacking MS.
Who cares if laws are copyrighted? Seriously! Linux is copyrighted. FreeBSD is copyrighted. Copyright is AUTOMATIC. You can't even type a slashdot post without it being copyrighted.
Get over it.
What matters is free access to laws. As long as the law is licensed to be available and easily read by people it's fine.
It's hard to figure out exact details, however it looks like the In Private blocking will in fact completely block 3rd party content once it has appeared on too many pages. So - yes, the movies, flash, pdfs, java applets etc etc will be completely blocked once they tick up over a dozen or so appearances as 3rd party content and your concern is addressed. This will stop them using trivial things like single pixel transparent gifs to set cookies etc, and to that extent it will work.
However what I can't figure out is what makes anybody think the advertising industry won't just work their way around this by randomizing the URLs of the tracking content (trivial with url rewriting for example). Even if they have to allocate a zillion separate domains and correlate the data across them it's going to be pretty simple to circumvent it. Once the circumventions are in place, it will actually be harder for the end user to see if they are being tracked or not than it was before, and the simple things I do today (like block all cookies from some domains) wont' work any more.
It's kind of a non-sensical concept because Javascript as a language is capable of things C can't do, like eval new code at run time, modify existing types etc.
By the time you have a fair comparison (ie. written C code that can really do everything Javascript can), you have basically written Javascript itself in C. So all these comparisons are really just based on getting subsets of Javascript where it is really doing no more than plain C can do to run as fast as similar plain C, and guess what, that is done more or less by compiling said Javascript to native code.
I find it amusing that all these higher level languages (everything from Java, to Javascript to Python or VB) continuously promote how they are "nearly as fast as plain C now" but then a release or two rolls by and voila they suddenly announce they have improved performance by 10x or some similar metric. But when you ask the question, "oh, so are you 10x as fast as C now?", the reply will be "oh, no, but we're nearly as fast as C!"
Big problem I ran into was peripherals not working.
It's not so fun when you get Vista home on your new PC and try and print something and... it doesn't work, and then you find that the manufacturer for your 4 year old printer is not even contemplating making drivers for it. My guess is that this is probably a big reason for downgrades - as soon as people get home and plug in their years old printer / webcam / usb wifi / external drive / whatever and it doesn't work - XP comes out of the box and goes on the machine pretty quick.
Having said that - I installed Vista last weekend and I really like. Despite all the clamor about it UAC is just about perfect as far as I'm concerned.
I couldn't agree with you less, or with the GP more -
Flash is just horrible for the web. It's the inverse of just about everything that makes the web great. The long list of evil things about flash include:
* hides source from users
* makes content like images, videos and sounds inaccessible via direct navigation
* controls navigational flow and path of users so they do what the site owner wants them to do instead of what they want to do
* disables browser features such as control of layout, presentation, fonts, styling
* violates privacy by secretly storing cookies, bypassing the normal controls / notifications a browser puts on them.
There are plenty of ways to present rich multimedia without flash - most people using flash are doing so not because it's necessary but because they see a perceived benefit from the above points which are actually hostile to the web and it's users.
> Point is, newly bought Mac is ready out of box for average Joe Six-Pack. Newly bought Dell with Vista has to be brought to your geek friend to make out of it something the Joe Six-Pack can use.
Where on earth does this myth come from? My mother (about 70 years old) bought a brand new laptop on the weekend, vista pre-installed. She's up and using everything on it. It works *great*. She's doing photos, videos, email, everything. She loves it. (No it wasn't from dell, but I assume that's a place marker for "generic big name supplier").
For some irony: she found they shipped an XP CD in the box and was kind of baffled by it - "why did they do that? Should I install it?". I thought that was kind of funny but also an interesting demonstration of how out of hand the negative perception of Vista has gotten.
> You can't like Dell - because it is albeit useful but only a tool. But you can like Apple products because they are made to be liked. And they are also useful.
WTF? I'll like who and what I want to like. I own a dell laptop and I love it. It does some things I just can't get from Apple (one of which is - it slots into a beautiful docking station on my desk which hooks it up to my monitor and about 18 other peripherals that I use when I'm in power mode in my office). Try as I might I can't find anything that even comes close for a Mac laptop. I love my dell laptop so much I'm probably going straight to Dell for my next one in spite of the fact that I have a desire to develop iphone apps and Apple have rudely locked out anyone without a new mac from developing for iphones. Shame about that - guess I won't be exploring that market for a while. (I may wipe my new Dell and install linux on it, but that's another discussion...)
> And quite pointless with people moving to mobile devices instead of desktops.
I actually disagree. When I have a legion of devices from tablets, to desktops, mobile phones etc., many of which get replaced rather frequently, I'd much rather have a single deal with MS that says *I* am licensed to use Office and all I need is to put my key in on any device and it will load whatever version is appropriate over the 'net and I can use it on that device.
Of course, I rather doubt MS will be so kind as to do what I want, but I don't think it's pointless - if it happened it would be better from my point of view.
Yes, you obviously can copyright a game you make, but it's somewhat ridiculous to suggest that copyright violation is what happened in this case. I very much doubt the scrabulous folks shoved their Scrabble board onto the scanner to make their version.
I haven't had the need but when I do was going to take a look at the recently released Yahoo design stencils to see if they are useful for this kind of task:
I've worked in a similar situation to that and let me tell you, it's a nightmare.
The software gets horribly warped to the individual flights of fancy of the CEO who is such a bizarrely unrepresentative user that their input is almost useless.
They also expect that anything they say should be implemented at the drop of a hat so you drop everything and do stupid useless hacks that just to keep the idiot CEO happy.
The only people to give you feedback on your product are it's intended users and you must do everything you can to ingratiate them into helping you perfect it.
a) they have failed to demonstrate (yet) that they can capitalize on anything other than search and advertising, which they basically have saturated (as you note)
and
b) they have very little "lockin" - people could all move to a new, better search engine tomorrow and that advertising revenue would evaporate over night.
So they are essentially an anti-growth story - the likely outcomes are all on the downside - unless they really do invent something world changing - but we're still waiting to see it if they are.
One thing I wonder about is whether these cloud services will suffer the same problems as other centralized infrastructure installations - eg. such as the power grid.
Presumably Amazon has some actual very high but finite number of physical servers that is supporting EC2. What happens when (just for example) Christmas comes around and there are huge spikes in activity for specific hours of the day as people do last minute christmas shopping?
When across the board a large number of their customers suddenly allocate dozens more instances, are Amazon going to be able to meet that demand? Do they really have enough servers sitting idle to magically allocate enough to meet peak demand at any one time of the year?
It will be interesting to see if any such events arise.
Unless you've specifically configured it only to be visible to direct friends you may be surprised at who can see it. By default anybody in any networks you are in will be able to see it.
That means if you were foolish to say "Why yes, I do live in the state of New York!" (or where ever) at signup or any later time you may well have exposed your number to anybody in that state. Similar traps exist throughout Facebook - it's basically a minefield of privacy violation traps.
I wish what you say was true - but it's not.
CSS, even if you have compliance to recent specs (which we don't) fundamentally lacks the kind of layout options that you need to create truly slick interfaces.
Browser DOM support differs substantially across the major browsers - so much that you would be insane to build a complex app without some kind of framework or library to abstract away the differences.
Now - I do agree that using HTML and CSS can be a good foundation for delivering apps - but eschewing the use of frameworks to help do it is insanity.
I am primarily interested in whether JDK 7 is going to make it out this year or not. For the longest time it's been forecast to arrive in 2008, and yet, the existing binary snapshots seem very immature (ie. completely missing major features supposedly in Java7).
The silence is starting to concern me, I think Java desperately needs the updates in 1.7 to keep it alive in the face of competition from more dynamic languages.
Part of the problem is that for most people successful AI is something that behaves like a human, and yet at the same time, one of the reasons we use computers is specifically that they are *not* like humans.
Do you really want a computer that has non-deterministic behavior, occasionally having emotional freak outs, getting depressed, tired, nervous, needing comfort, suffering from boredom or a combination of all these on any random day? I think you really don't, and nobody is interested commercially in creating such a thing. And yet, unless you build in those qualities you will never have something truly "human like".
It's easy for confusion to arise when you are a complete moron with the IQ of a tadpole. The whole premise of the article is in these few lines:
"Google has said since it unveiled Android Nov. 1 that there would be phones based on the operating system in the second half of 2008. The Wall Street Journal, citing Google as a source, is reporting that the Android handsets "won't arrive until the fourth quarter.
Confused, I asked Google for clarification..."
Since Q4 2008 is by definition 2nd half of 2008, the whole story is a complete non-sequitur. The author needs to go back to high school, no kindergarten and learn some basic logic.
I actually don't mind the authorities having powers like this: if it's necessary in a time of emergency, then it's necessary. However I also think:
a) anybody detained should be treated like royalty while in detention. I'm talking spa, swimming pool, tennis courts, full dvd, games collection, personal massuer, 3 course a la carte menu for every meal etc.
b) massive compensation for those held unjustly: something like $1 million / day. If there really is a risk the detainee is going to pull off a massive terrorist attack then $42 million is nothing in terms of cost to prevent it. However it certainly should put a brake on abuse of these powers.
I don't understand why people like you don't just turn it off or set your status to "busy" or "out". Every single IM client supports this, and yet there seem to be a never ending stream of people complaining that IM interrupts them.
For me the status feature of IM is one of the most useful features of all. It means I can see *without* interrupting you if you are busy or not. That means I can avoid interrupting you when you don't want to be interrupted. If you use IM right, you'll get less interruption than if you don't use it at all.
Slashdot Mirror
> I do wish I'd heard about this sooner though. What a great opportunity to triple an investment.
Hmmm, If only there was some automatic way to get news really quickly and take action on it. Oh - I know, why don't you hook an automated script up to a popular on line news channel! It can trade automatically as soon as an event like this becomes known. Brilliant!
> Plugins are a major issue, and that's almost certainly the next thing to be put in its own process.
Actually, if you read the comic, in Chrome (apparently) plugins already run in separate processes to the pages they live in. This is one of the most interesting aspects of it.
I'm guessing that's part of it but it's also the slick startup time.
I think this is just the first phase - they want a trusted beachhead in the browser market where they can launch from. My prediction: in a few months we will get a Google Apps installer that will install all the apps so that they have nice shortcuts in the menu and function seamlessly as if they were native apps, launching, of course, in a dedicated Chrome runtime with almost native performance.
With the huge increase in javascript performance you can start doing some things that are impossible right now - full feature grammar checking, spell checking, diagrams, mathematics, even image processing - all in javascript on the client.
I think this could be a pretty interesting way of attacking MS.
I'm bemused by this whole argument.
Who cares if laws are copyrighted? Seriously! Linux is copyrighted. FreeBSD is copyrighted. Copyright is AUTOMATIC. You can't even type a slashdot post without it being copyrighted.
Get over it.
What matters is free access to laws. As long as the law is licensed to be available and easily read by people it's fine.
I had the same question.
It's hard to figure out exact details, however it looks like the In Private blocking will in fact completely block 3rd party content once it has appeared on too many pages. So - yes, the movies, flash, pdfs, java applets etc etc will be completely blocked once they tick up over a dozen or so appearances as 3rd party content and your concern is addressed. This will stop them using trivial things like single pixel transparent gifs to set cookies etc, and to that extent it will work.
However what I can't figure out is what makes anybody think the advertising industry won't just work their way around this by randomizing the URLs of the tracking content (trivial with url rewriting for example). Even if they have to allocate a zillion separate domains and correlate the data across them it's going to be pretty simple to circumvent it. Once the circumventions are in place, it will actually be harder for the end user to see if they are being tracked or not than it was before, and the simple things I do today (like block all cookies from some domains) wont' work any more.
It's kind of a non-sensical concept because Javascript as a language is capable of things C can't do, like eval new code at run time, modify existing types etc.
By the time you have a fair comparison (ie. written C code that can really do everything Javascript can), you have basically written Javascript itself in C. So all these comparisons are really just based on getting subsets of Javascript where it is really doing no more than plain C can do to run as fast as similar plain C, and guess what, that is done more or less by compiling said Javascript to native code.
I find it amusing that all these higher level languages (everything from Java, to Javascript to Python or VB) continuously promote how they are "nearly as fast as plain C now" but then a release or two rolls by and voila they suddenly announce they have improved performance by 10x or some similar metric. But when you ask the question, "oh, so are you 10x as fast as C now?", the reply will be "oh, no, but we're nearly as fast as C!"
Big problem I ran into was peripherals not working.
It's not so fun when you get Vista home on your new PC and try and print something and ... it doesn't work, and then you find that the manufacturer for your 4 year old printer is not even contemplating making drivers for it. My guess is that this is probably a big reason for downgrades - as soon as people get home and plug in their years old printer / webcam / usb wifi / external drive / whatever and it doesn't work - XP comes out of the box and goes on the machine pretty quick.
Having said that - I installed Vista last weekend and I really like. Despite all the clamor about it UAC is just about perfect as far as I'm concerned.
I couldn't agree with you less, or with the GP more -
Flash is just horrible for the web. It's the inverse of just about everything that makes the web great. The long list of evil things about flash include:
* hides source from users
* makes content like images, videos and sounds inaccessible via direct navigation
* controls navigational flow and path of users so they do what the site owner wants them to do instead of what they want to do
* disables browser features such as control of layout, presentation, fonts, styling
* violates privacy by secretly storing cookies, bypassing the normal controls / notifications a browser puts on them.
There are plenty of ways to present rich multimedia without flash - most people using flash are doing so not because it's necessary but because they see a perceived benefit from the above points which are actually hostile to the web and it's users.
Ok folks, don't worry!
Just keep chanting the mantra that Microsoft never innovates anything and everything will be ok.
I'm sure there will be a linux port of this soon and then we can all go back to complaining about how Microsoft copies everything from Apple.
> Point is, newly bought Mac is ready out of box for average Joe Six-Pack. Newly bought Dell with Vista has to be brought to your geek friend to make out of it something the Joe Six-Pack can use.
Where on earth does this myth come from? My mother (about 70 years old) bought a brand new laptop on the weekend, vista pre-installed. She's up and using everything on it. It works *great*. She's doing photos, videos, email, everything. She loves it. (No it wasn't from dell, but I assume that's a place marker for "generic big name supplier").
For some irony: she found they shipped an XP CD in the box and was kind of baffled by it - "why did they do that? Should I install it?". I thought that was kind of funny but also an interesting demonstration of how out of hand the negative perception of Vista has gotten.
> You can't like Dell - because it is albeit useful but only a tool. But you can like Apple products because they are made to be liked. And they are also useful.
WTF? I'll like who and what I want to like. I own a dell laptop and I love it. It does some things I just can't get from Apple (one of which is - it slots into a beautiful docking station on my desk which hooks it up to my monitor and about 18 other peripherals that I use when I'm in power mode in my office). Try as I might I can't find anything that even comes close for a Mac laptop. I love my dell laptop so much I'm probably going straight to Dell for my next one in spite of the fact that I have a desire to develop iphone apps and Apple have rudely locked out anyone without a new mac from developing for iphones. Shame about that - guess I won't be exploring that market for a while. (I may wipe my new Dell and install linux on it, but that's another discussion ...)
> And quite pointless with people moving to mobile devices instead of desktops.
I actually disagree. When I have a legion of devices from tablets, to desktops, mobile phones etc., many of which get replaced rather frequently, I'd much rather have a single deal with MS that says *I* am licensed to use Office and all I need is to put my key in on any device and it will load whatever version is appropriate over the 'net and I can use it on that device.
Of course, I rather doubt MS will be so kind as to do what I want, but I don't think it's pointless - if it happened it would be better from my point of view.
Yes, you obviously can copyright a game you make, but it's somewhat ridiculous to suggest that copyright violation is what happened in this case. I very much doubt the scrabulous folks shoved their Scrabble board onto the scanner to make their version.
I haven't had the need but when I do was going to take a look at the recently released Yahoo design stencils to see if they are useful for this kind of task:
http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/wireframes/
I've worked in a similar situation to that and let me tell you, it's a nightmare.
The software gets horribly warped to the individual flights of fancy of the CEO who is such a bizarrely unrepresentative user that their input is almost useless.
They also expect that anything they say should be implemented at the drop of a hat so you drop everything and do stupid useless hacks that just to keep the idiot CEO happy.
The only people to give you feedback on your product are it's intended users and you must do everything you can to ingratiate them into helping you perfect it.
I think they are way over valued because
a) they have failed to demonstrate (yet) that they can capitalize on anything other than search and advertising, which they basically have saturated (as you note)
and
b) they have very little "lockin" - people could all move to a new, better search engine tomorrow and that advertising revenue would evaporate over night.
So they are essentially an anti-growth story - the likely outcomes are all on the downside - unless they really do invent something world changing - but we're still waiting to see it if they are.
I really do.
In fact, the documents state that I myself an am alien. Any non-US citizen can get these documents - just apply for a visa to visit the US.
One thing I wonder about is whether these cloud services will suffer the same problems as other centralized infrastructure installations - eg. such as the power grid.
Presumably Amazon has some actual very high but finite number of physical servers that is supporting EC2. What happens when (just for example) Christmas comes around and there are huge spikes in activity for specific hours of the day as people do last minute christmas shopping?
When across the board a large number of their customers suddenly allocate dozens more instances, are Amazon going to be able to meet that demand? Do they really have enough servers sitting idle to magically allocate enough to meet peak demand at any one time of the year?
It will be interesting to see if any such events arise.
Unless you've specifically configured it only to be visible to direct friends you may be surprised at who can see it. By default anybody in any networks you are in will be able to see it.
That means if you were foolish to say "Why yes, I do live in the state of New York!" (or where ever) at signup or any later time you may well have exposed your number to anybody in that state. Similar traps exist throughout Facebook - it's basically a minefield of privacy violation traps.
There's some irony in this appearing on slashdot today: it seems like all I can get out of reddit all morning is a "Service Unavailable" message :-)
I wish what you say was true - but it's not.
CSS, even if you have compliance to recent specs (which we don't) fundamentally lacks the kind of layout options that you need to create truly slick interfaces.
Browser DOM support differs substantially across the major browsers - so much that you would be insane to build a complex app without some kind of framework or library to abstract away the differences.
Now - I do agree that using HTML and CSS can be a good foundation for delivering apps - but eschewing the use of frameworks to help do it is insanity.
I am primarily interested in whether JDK 7 is going to make it out this year or not. For the longest time it's been forecast to arrive in 2008, and yet, the existing binary snapshots seem very immature (ie. completely missing major features supposedly in Java7).
The silence is starting to concern me, I think Java desperately needs the updates in 1.7 to keep it alive in the face of competition from more dynamic languages.
Part of the problem is that for most people successful AI is something that behaves like a human, and yet at the same time, one of the reasons we use computers is specifically that they are *not* like humans.
Do you really want a computer that has non-deterministic behavior, occasionally having emotional freak outs, getting depressed, tired, nervous, needing comfort, suffering from boredom or a combination of all these on any random day? I think you really don't, and nobody is interested commercially in creating such a thing. And yet, unless you build in those qualities you will never have something truly "human like".
It's easy for confusion to arise when you are a complete moron with the IQ of a tadpole. The whole premise of the article is in these few lines:
"Google has said since it unveiled Android Nov. 1 that there would be phones based on the operating system in the second half of 2008. The Wall Street Journal, citing Google as a source, is reporting that the Android handsets "won't arrive until the fourth quarter. Confused, I asked Google for clarification..."
Since Q4 2008 is by definition 2nd half of 2008, the whole story is a complete non-sequitur. The author needs to go back to high school, no kindergarten and learn some basic logic.
I actually don't mind the authorities having powers like this: if it's necessary in a time of emergency, then it's necessary. However I also think:
a) anybody detained should be treated like royalty while in detention. I'm talking spa, swimming pool, tennis courts, full dvd, games collection, personal massuer, 3 course a la carte menu for every meal etc.
b) massive compensation for those held unjustly: something like $1 million / day. If there really is a risk the detainee is going to pull off a massive terrorist attack then $42 million is nothing in terms of cost to prevent it. However it certainly should put a brake on abuse of these powers.
I don't understand why people like you don't just turn it off or set your status to "busy" or "out". Every single IM client supports this, and yet there seem to be a never ending stream of people complaining that IM interrupts them.
For me the status feature of IM is one of the most useful features of all. It means I can see *without* interrupting you if you are busy or not. That means I can avoid interrupting you when you don't want to be interrupted. If you use IM right, you'll get less interruption than if you don't use it at all.