Every application has a single UI thread (per process). This is true on Windows (yes, even WPF), GTK+/Gnome, Qt/KDE and any other Operating System/UI Framework. Chrome has a separate UI thread for each page because it has a separate *process* for each page.
Also note that with any UI program, you cannot do UI calls on another thread. The main UI core is inherently single-threaded. This makes it complicated to do any background work on other threads.
For example, if you load a web page (HTML/DOM, CSS, JavaScript, images) on a separate thread, you need to marshal that data to the UI thread to do the rendering, which will kill performance. Chrome is faster for each page because it is running each page in its own process (which has its own UI thread). This does mean that they are loading the rendering/WebKit code, flash plugin, and resources in each web page process (which increases the memory used). That is, if you load two instances of GMail or slashdot, Chrome has to keep two instances of all the HTML/DOM, JavaScript and images loaded, whereas Firefox can share the resources between both pages.
Firefox is slightly different in that the Gecko engine renders the UI itself, so this may be able to be made multi-threaded, but it is still talking to a single-threaded host window. There may also be mileage in rendering to an OpenGL or Direct2D/3D context on a separate thread and then blitting it to the window. I don't know if that works on separate threads.
Multi-threading also introduces a whole host of interesting issues (especially when sharing data across them), which makes bugs difficult to track down.
Bloat and responsiveness are different things. I can write small programs that are very unresponsive, not because of bloat but because of a poor choice of algorithm or any number of other things.
There are many things that impact performance, and in a complex codebase like Firefox and Chrome it can be difficult to track down.
Legacy code is code that is not supported, or if it is then only critical bug fixes are made to it (e.g. IE6 or XP). By definition, that means that you do not refactor that code. Refactoring can and does introduce a degree of risk [1].
Firefox has an old codebase that has gone through many releases. It has functionality that it needs to maintain. That said, it *is* being actively worked on and improved in all areas.
[1] Refactoring should be a series of reversible transforms where both pieces of code are identical in behaviour. Refactoring is *not* rewriting the code with a new algorithm or replacing it from scratch. You *can* completely rewrite and rearchitecture code using refactoring; I have done, but those took 60-80 refactorings (with checkins to the source control system to make it easy to back-track). However, we are all human, and mistakes can and do happen. Ideally, you should have the code under test with good code coverage to help ensure that you haven't broken anything, but not all code can easily be placed under test.
Plus, competition is always a good thing. It will push Gecko, WebKit (WebKit is the engine), Trident (for IE) and the others (I can't recall the name of Opera's engine) to all become better engines. In the end, the users will benefit because they get faster engines that have better support for web standards.
If you have a single engine, it is likely to stagnate.
You mention launch time and page load times, but that does not indicate bloat. That indicates that there are performance issues that can (and are) being investigated.
Is it the 8.1 MB installer? If so, that is small compared to others.
Is it the startup time? If so, there are I/O bottlenecks that are being investigated and addressed. And at the end of the day, how often do you actually open the web browser.
Is it the responsiveness? If so, that is due to graphics performance and there has been work to improve things. 3.6.3 is better at scrolling on Linux, and the team are looking at supporting Direct2D/Write on Win7 (they were the first to investigate that, before Microsoft announced IE9).
Is it page load times? If so, there may well be improvements that can be made.
Is it the look of the UI? Chrome has a more minimal UI, so could be perceived as having less bloat. Firefox is converging to a similar (not identical) UI.
Is it memory usage? There have been memory leaks that have been plugged over the 3.x browser lifetime. There may be others, I don't know. Note also that a high memory usage may be flash (out-of-process plugins will help here) or may be image/page caching algorithms/logic (which help with responsiveness).
Is it the heavy use of COM in internal interfaces? If so, the mozilla team are aware of this and have been making changes to slowly remove this (but not from the DOM). The mozilla codebase is large (as is true with any sufficiently large codebase, including WebKit) and making large changes takes time.
Is it JavaScript performance? Firefox is not the fastest in this, but the speeds are sufficiently capable to run even more demanding sites comfortably. And also, work is being done to improve this.
Trademarks are there for identifying brands. This is so that someone cannot come along and create another product with the same name (be it software, hardware, fast food, shop name, shampoo or whatever). Protecting identity here is a good thing.
Copyright is about protecting the written text (be it a book or code or documentation), or audio or video. This is there so that people do not make copies of your work and sell them as their own. This protection is needed, but is currently too long. Maybe it should last the lifetime of the author(s). I don't know what benefit it has beyond that; maybe it should last an additional 5-10 years, after which, if no new material has been added by the inheritors it should go into the public domain, unless the author requests that it go into the public domain.
Patents are intended to provide a 5 or so year window for the inventor to have a lead in the market on something that is sufficiently novel and innovative. After that, others were allowed to produce similar products. Now, patents are a minefield and should be restored to what they were.
If you want the latest bleeding edge packages, you risk a lot of instability and potential for breakage/bugs. The new packages need testing, especially when they are all combined together as a distro does, ideally on as much hardware as possible. This is the position that Debian-unstable and Ubuntu are in -- they sacrifice stability for being up-to-date.
If you want a rock-solid system, you tend to use older packages that are more mature and have gone through an extensive stabilisation period.
Now, Ubuntu has their.10 releases that don't fall under the LTS guarantee. These could be used to add the latest bleeding-edge packages and make potentially breaking changes. This then gives 6 months for the kinks to be ironed out.
Then, with the LTS.04 release, they can make minor point updates to packages (e.g. 3.6.0 to 3.6.4) to get the latest bug-fixes for those packages. They can also focus on adding polish and smoothing out the rough edges. This then makes the LTS release highly suited to long-term support.
This approach would allow Ubuntu to keep the 6 month release schedule without sacrificing the stability of the LTS release. There will always be bugs, though.
However, Ubuntu have a tendency to put unstable packages in LTS (e.g. Firefox 3 beta, since Mozilla was going to end-of-life 2.x during the LTS period).
If Firefox uses something like DirectShow on Windows:
1/ they will need to have codec support for theora (not necessarily installed);
2/ the H.264 codec is only available on Windows 7 and later, and they cannot legally ship a H.264 codec for XP/Vista;
3/ they need to ensure that the DirectShow output works with the layers/svg/smil infrastructure as well as DirectWrite/Direct2D on Windows 7 -- e.g. does having a rotating, scaling video in a smil/svg file work;
4/ they need to ensure that the audio output works well with other audio content (e.g. playing a and object at the same time);
5/ they would have to work around/live with any issues in the use of DirectShow/framework.
Same for GStreamer (which may not necessarily be installed on all Linux platforms).
In addition, you also need a multimedia layer in the browser to support all of the multimedia frameworks, in addition to the audio and graphics support layers required at the moment.
One of the best examples of this is "How it Should Have Ended: Terminator" [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBBw9E2Q_aY] -- it is a trailer for a Terminator meets Back to the Future.
It is awesome!
It does a very good job of building your excitement for the hypothetical film. It is well paced and conceived.
A good film trailer makes you want to go and see the film. Likewise, game demos should be sufficient to make you want to buy the game (e.g. the 1 hour demos offered by a lot of the casual games -- giving you enough gameplay to see if you want to pay for it to continue).
It's like using an IE, Firefox, Flash or Acrobat Reader exploit to compromise a Windows machine.
Ultimately, your security is only as strong as it's weakest link (like having a sophisticated multi-lock system on the door to your house and leaving a window unlocked/open.). If you use a simple password, it is easy to break into any system. If you use an unpatched Operating System, or any of the associated platforms (.NET/MFC/Qt/Flash/...) or applications, you could be open to an exploit.
Attacks like this and malware are becoming increasingly more sophisticated. Look at conficker for example -- that actively blocked you from browsing to security websites and killed processes that were installing updates to patch the machine or to remove conficker.
The article, section, header, footer and aside tags don't have any presentation information (except that section/section/h1 is similar to using h2). A HTML5 browser should only have the following presentation logic done via CSS:
article, section, header, footer, aside { display: block; }
Anything more fancy is done by CSS. Which means that you can have a single CSS theme file (WordPress, ZenGarden, whatever) that is used by *any* website that uses HTML5 markup.
Tags like header and footer denote semantics which are part of the content (content denotes what is displayed, not how it is displayed). They don't say "the footer should be in a 10pt font" -- that is up to the CSS. They (and the other layout elements) denote the semantics of what is currently being done in an ad-hoc way. They allow things like search engines to identify relevant information (e.g. ignore the footer sections).
HTML5 is looking to be a great standard. Not perfect by any means, but it is a good step forward (giant leap?) in the right direction. Having a defined way of processing HTML5 and having an XML variant (XHTML) unified to the same DOM makes it easier to choose how you want to write/generate your HTML content.
There were some nice ideas in XHTML2, but it didn't pan out. That does not mean that some of those ideas cannot be integrated into HTML in the future like section has been.
It is also good to see Google seeking to improve video support.
Gradually, HTML5 support will improve, as will support for CSS3 as these standards get finalised. Also, audio and video support will stabilise as well. These, with all the advances in support for MathML, SVG, SMIL and other standards as well as performance improvements for JavaScript and hardware-accelerated page rendering mean that the web is only growing in strength.
As for JavaScript, it is just a scripting language -- you can do anything with it and hook it to anything. You do know that the "fetch more comments" feature of slashdot uses javascript? You do know that thunderbird and firefox make use of javascript for binding their UI together?
What I understand this meaning is that these changes will need to go in the upstream codebases to get any form of traction. As a result, if the Windows version does not have autotools support, or provide a posix compatibility layer because thou shalt do things the "Windows way", then you are going to have to complicate the upstream code.
APIs like Qt, and tools like CMake end up making this process easier, but that is a decision for the upstream codebase.
Alternatively, if the code is forked so that the Windows port is done in such a way that is incompatible with Linux and those repositories get sanctioned as the official repositories then they will stop working on Linux and Microsoft would have won. Remember when Balmer said that he wants all open source to be done on top of Windows. This helps his vision.
I also find it strange (or perhaps not, given some recent developments) that this project is being hosted on launchpad, and therefore falls under Ubuntu/Canonical's wing where their #1 bug is replacing Windows.
What about libraries built with different compilers and compiler versions?
Problems include:
1/ dealing with memory heaps from different C/C++ runtimes
2/ changes in C++ standard library type representations
3/ changes in exception handling logic; throwing an exception from a gcc C++ shared library to an msvc one
4/ changes in behaviour and binary compatibility of debug/release versions, and components built with different flags/compiler settings (e.g. building without wchar_t and with wchar_t as a native type results in different ABIs when using std::wstring types (basic_string vs basic_string) for msvc compilers)
5/ building with _DEBUG vs NDEBUG
These reasons and more are why binaries from different build settings, compilers and compiler versions are not mixed and one of the reasons why you wnd up with duplicates of the same shared library (especially on Windows).
Are you aware that:
1/ Microsoft are stopping using WinSxS assemblies for managing the C/C++ runtimes as it is complex to manage and get right;
2/ With XP, Microsoft were selling WinSxS as being able to deploy different versions of the binaries, but for Vista/Win7 they are now saying that WinSxS is for archival purposes (see the Engineering 7 blog)
3/ It does not really work as intended in practice -- e.g. comctl32 version 6 is different in Vista/Win7 than in XP, yet the applications that reference the XP version use the Vista/7 version
It comes from the pronunciation of "blogs" in some accents:
*/blA.gz/ -- the 'o' is pronounced the same as in "b(o)ther", where "f(a)ther" and "b(o)ther" are pronounced differently (e.g. British Accents) [to pronounce this, pronounce it as the "ah" in "f(a)ther", but round the lips like in "b(oo)k" and keep it a short sound]
*/blA:gz/ -- the 'o' is pronounced the same as "f(a)ther", where "f(a)ther" and "b(o)ther" are pronounced the same (e.g. some American Accents)
*/blOgz/ -- the 'o' is pronounced the same as "m(ore)" (e.g. some American Accents)
The/blOgz/ pronunciation gets transliterated as "blawgs". Therefore, it is a transliteration of that accent and not a typo. It was probably chosen for this and (as people on Groklaw have noted) that it contains the word "law" in it.
I like technology, but it seems to me that the media companies are pushing newer technologies faster than ever and are then wondering why they are performing badly. CDs, DVDs and other technology (hell, even colour television) took a while to take off, and it wasn't until the market was effectively saturated, and the technologies became affordable and commonplace, that other technologies were introduced.
First it was High-Def and HDMI compatible vs compliant. Then it was HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray.
Blu-Ray disks are finally starting to become affordable, but they come with the required HDMI upgrade of all your connecting audio/video hardware.
With the RealD 3D televisions and associated content as well, especially with the competing players/technologies coming out soon after HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray, it is unclear how things are going to pan out -- for example, are there going to be 3D Blu-Ray disks that require new hardware?
To me, the home entertainment hardware is looking fragmented, and will continue to become even more fragmented as time goes on.
Slashdot Mirror
UI is only a part of the development that goes into Firefox. It also happens to be the most noticeable.
Every application has a single UI thread (per process). This is true on Windows (yes, even WPF), GTK+/Gnome, Qt/KDE and any other Operating System/UI Framework. Chrome has a separate UI thread for each page because it has a separate *process* for each page.
Also note that with any UI program, you cannot do UI calls on another thread. The main UI core is inherently single-threaded. This makes it complicated to do any background work on other threads.
For example, if you load a web page (HTML/DOM, CSS, JavaScript, images) on a separate thread, you need to marshal that data to the UI thread to do the rendering, which will kill performance. Chrome is faster for each page because it is running each page in its own process (which has its own UI thread). This does mean that they are loading the rendering/WebKit code, flash plugin, and resources in each web page process (which increases the memory used). That is, if you load two instances of GMail or slashdot, Chrome has to keep two instances of all the HTML/DOM, JavaScript and images loaded, whereas Firefox can share the resources between both pages.
Firefox is slightly different in that the Gecko engine renders the UI itself, so this may be able to be made multi-threaded, but it is still talking to a single-threaded host window. There may also be mileage in rendering to an OpenGL or Direct2D/3D context on a separate thread and then blitting it to the window. I don't know if that works on separate threads.
Multi-threading also introduces a whole host of interesting issues (especially when sharing data across them), which makes bugs difficult to track down.
Bloat and responsiveness are different things. I can write small programs that are very unresponsive, not because of bloat but because of a poor choice of algorithm or any number of other things.
There are many things that impact performance, and in a complex codebase like Firefox and Chrome it can be difficult to track down.
citation required
Legacy code is code that is not supported, or if it is then only critical bug fixes are made to it (e.g. IE6 or XP). By definition, that means that you do not refactor that code. Refactoring can and does introduce a degree of risk [1].
Firefox has an old codebase that has gone through many releases. It has functionality that it needs to maintain. That said, it *is* being actively worked on and improved in all areas.
[1] Refactoring should be a series of reversible transforms where both pieces of code are identical in behaviour. Refactoring is *not* rewriting the code with a new algorithm or replacing it from scratch. You *can* completely rewrite and rearchitecture code using refactoring; I have done, but those took 60-80 refactorings (with checkins to the source control system to make it easy to back-track). However, we are all human, and mistakes can and do happen. Ideally, you should have the code under test with good code coverage to help ensure that you haven't broken anything, but not all code can easily be placed under test.
Plus, competition is always a good thing. It will push Gecko, WebKit (WebKit is the engine), Trident (for IE) and the others (I can't recall the name of Opera's engine) to all become better engines. In the end, the users will benefit because they get faster engines that have better support for web standards.
If you have a single engine, it is likely to stagnate.
Why is it bloated? What makes you say that?
You mention launch time and page load times, but that does not indicate bloat. That indicates that there are performance issues that can (and are) being investigated.
Is it the 8.1 MB installer? If so, that is small compared to others.
Is it the startup time? If so, there are I/O bottlenecks that are being investigated and addressed. And at the end of the day, how often do you actually open the web browser.
Is it the responsiveness? If so, that is due to graphics performance and there has been work to improve things. 3.6.3 is better at scrolling on Linux, and the team are looking at supporting Direct2D/Write on Win7 (they were the first to investigate that, before Microsoft announced IE9).
Is it page load times? If so, there may well be improvements that can be made.
Is it the look of the UI? Chrome has a more minimal UI, so could be perceived as having less bloat. Firefox is converging to a similar (not identical) UI.
Is it memory usage? There have been memory leaks that have been plugged over the 3.x browser lifetime. There may be others, I don't know. Note also that a high memory usage may be flash (out-of-process plugins will help here) or may be image/page caching algorithms/logic (which help with responsiveness).
Is it the heavy use of COM in internal interfaces? If so, the mozilla team are aware of this and have been making changes to slowly remove this (but not from the DOM). The mozilla codebase is large (as is true with any sufficiently large codebase, including WebKit) and making large changes takes time.
Is it JavaScript performance? Firefox is not the fastest in this, but the speeds are sufficiently capable to run even more demanding sites comfortably. And also, work is being done to improve this.
The Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere.
Trademarks are there for identifying brands. This is so that someone cannot come along and create another product with the same name (be it software, hardware, fast food, shop name, shampoo or whatever). Protecting identity here is a good thing.
Copyright is about protecting the written text (be it a book or code or documentation), or audio or video. This is there so that people do not make copies of your work and sell them as their own. This protection is needed, but is currently too long. Maybe it should last the lifetime of the author(s). I don't know what benefit it has beyond that; maybe it should last an additional 5-10 years, after which, if no new material has been added by the inheritors it should go into the public domain, unless the author requests that it go into the public domain.
Patents are intended to provide a 5 or so year window for the inventor to have a lead in the market on something that is sufficiently novel and innovative. After that, others were allowed to produce similar products. Now, patents are a minefield and should be restored to what they were.
Don't you mean: "Neener, neener, I *filed* it first!"
If you want the latest bleeding edge packages, you risk a lot of instability and potential for breakage/bugs. The new packages need testing, especially when they are all combined together as a distro does, ideally on as much hardware as possible. This is the position that Debian-unstable and Ubuntu are in -- they sacrifice stability for being up-to-date.
If you want a rock-solid system, you tend to use older packages that are more mature and have gone through an extensive stabilisation period.
Now, Ubuntu has their .10 releases that don't fall under the LTS guarantee. These could be used to add the latest bleeding-edge packages and make potentially breaking changes. This then gives 6 months for the kinks to be ironed out.
Then, with the LTS .04 release, they can make minor point updates to packages (e.g. 3.6.0 to 3.6.4) to get the latest bug-fixes for those packages. They can also focus on adding polish and smoothing out the rough edges. This then makes the LTS release highly suited to long-term support.
This approach would allow Ubuntu to keep the 6 month release schedule without sacrificing the stability of the LTS release. There will always be bugs, though.
However, Ubuntu have a tendency to put unstable packages in LTS (e.g. Firefox 3 beta, since Mozilla was going to end-of-life 2.x during the LTS period).
Four words: RTFA.
If Firefox uses something like DirectShow on Windows:
1/ they will need to have codec support for theora (not necessarily installed);
2/ the H.264 codec is only available on Windows 7 and later, and they cannot legally ship a H.264 codec for XP/Vista;
3/ they need to ensure that the DirectShow output works with the layers/svg/smil infrastructure as well as DirectWrite/Direct2D on Windows 7 -- e.g. does having a rotating, scaling video in a smil/svg file work;
4/ they need to ensure that the audio output works well with other audio content (e.g. playing a and object at the same time);
5/ they would have to work around/live with any issues in the use of DirectShow/framework.
Same for GStreamer (which may not necessarily be installed on all Linux platforms).
In addition, you also need a multimedia layer in the browser to support all of the multimedia frameworks, in addition to the audio and graphics support layers required at the moment.
Radio? Top of the Pops? MTV? VH1? Viva.tv? ...
Think of the songs that get released as singles.
One of the best examples of this is "How it Should Have Ended: Terminator" [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBBw9E2Q_aY] -- it is a trailer for a Terminator meets Back to the Future.
It is awesome!
It does a very good job of building your excitement for the hypothetical film. It is well paced and conceived.
A good film trailer makes you want to go and see the film. Likewise, game demos should be sufficient to make you want to buy the game (e.g. the 1 hour demos offered by a lot of the casual games -- giving you enough gameplay to see if you want to pay for it to continue).
It's like using an IE, Firefox, Flash or Acrobat Reader exploit to compromise a Windows machine.
Ultimately, your security is only as strong as it's weakest link (like having a sophisticated multi-lock system on the door to your house and leaving a window unlocked/open.). If you use a simple password, it is easy to break into any system. If you use an unpatched Operating System, or any of the associated platforms (.NET/MFC/Qt/Flash/...) or applications, you could be open to an exploit.
Attacks like this and malware are becoming increasingly more sophisticated. Look at conficker for example -- that actively blocked you from browsing to security websites and killed processes that were installing updates to patch the machine or to remove conficker.
So, is this the new communism? The new witch hunts?
Sanger: Wikipedia is a distributor of the communist agenda and everyone associated with it is a communist.
The article, section, header, footer and aside tags don't have any presentation information (except that section/section/h1 is similar to using h2). A HTML5 browser should only have the following presentation logic done via CSS:
article, section, header, footer, aside { display: block; }
Anything more fancy is done by CSS. Which means that you can have a single CSS theme file (WordPress, ZenGarden, whatever) that is used by *any* website that uses HTML5 markup.
Tags like header and footer denote semantics which are part of the content (content denotes what is displayed, not how it is displayed). They don't say "the footer should be in a 10pt font" -- that is up to the CSS. They (and the other layout elements) denote the semantics of what is currently being done in an ad-hoc way. They allow things like search engines to identify relevant information (e.g. ignore the footer sections).
HTML5 is looking to be a great standard. Not perfect by any means, but it is a good step forward (giant leap?) in the right direction. Having a defined way of processing HTML5 and having an XML variant (XHTML) unified to the same DOM makes it easier to choose how you want to write/generate your HTML content.
There were some nice ideas in XHTML2, but it didn't pan out. That does not mean that some of those ideas cannot be integrated into HTML in the future like section has been.
It is also good to see Google seeking to improve video support.
Gradually, HTML5 support will improve, as will support for CSS3 as these standards get finalised. Also, audio and video support will stabilise as well. These, with all the advances in support for MathML, SVG, SMIL and other standards as well as performance improvements for JavaScript and hardware-accelerated page rendering mean that the web is only growing in strength.
As for JavaScript, it is just a scripting language -- you can do anything with it and hook it to anything. You do know that the "fetch more comments" feature of slashdot uses javascript? You do know that thunderbird and firefox make use of javascript for binding their UI together?
You mean CoApp-ting ;)
What I understand this meaning is that these changes will need to go in the upstream codebases to get any form of traction. As a result, if the Windows version does not have autotools support, or provide a posix compatibility layer because thou shalt do things the "Windows way", then you are going to have to complicate the upstream code.
APIs like Qt, and tools like CMake end up making this process easier, but that is a decision for the upstream codebase.
Alternatively, if the code is forked so that the Windows port is done in such a way that is incompatible with Linux and those repositories get sanctioned as the official repositories then they will stop working on Linux and Microsoft would have won. Remember when Balmer said that he wants all open source to be done on top of Windows. This helps his vision.
I also find it strange (or perhaps not, given some recent developments) that this project is being hosted on launchpad, and therefore falls under Ubuntu/Canonical's wing where their #1 bug is replacing Windows.
What about libraries built with different compilers and compiler versions?
Problems include:
1/ dealing with memory heaps from different C/C++ runtimes
2/ changes in C++ standard library type representations
3/ changes in exception handling logic; throwing an exception from a gcc C++ shared library to an msvc one
4/ changes in behaviour and binary compatibility of debug/release versions, and components built with different flags/compiler settings (e.g. building without wchar_t and with wchar_t as a native type results in different ABIs when using std::wstring types (basic_string vs basic_string) for msvc compilers)
5/ building with _DEBUG vs NDEBUG
These reasons and more are why binaries from different build settings, compilers and compiler versions are not mixed and one of the reasons why you wnd up with duplicates of the same shared library (especially on Windows).
Are you aware that:
1/ Microsoft are stopping using WinSxS assemblies for managing the C/C++ runtimes as it is complex to manage and get right;
2/ With XP, Microsoft were selling WinSxS as being able to deploy different versions of the binaries, but for Vista/Win7 they are now saying that WinSxS is for archival purposes (see the Engineering 7 blog)
3/ It does not really work as intended in practice -- e.g. comctl32 version 6 is different in Vista/Win7 than in XP, yet the applications that reference the XP version use the Vista/7 version
It comes from the pronunciation of "blogs" in some accents: /blA.gz/ -- the 'o' is pronounced the same as in "b(o)ther", where "f(a)ther" and "b(o)ther" are pronounced differently (e.g. British Accents) [to pronounce this, pronounce it as the "ah" in "f(a)ther", but round the lips like in "b(oo)k" and keep it a short sound] /blA:gz/ -- the 'o' is pronounced the same as "f(a)ther", where "f(a)ther" and "b(o)ther" are pronounced the same (e.g. some American Accents) /blOgz/ -- the 'o' is pronounced the same as "m(ore)" (e.g. some American Accents)
*
*
*
The /blOgz/ pronunciation gets transliterated as "blawgs". Therefore, it is a transliteration of that accent and not a typo. It was probably chosen for this and (as people on Groklaw have noted) that it contains the word "law" in it.
c.f. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_low_back_vowels
NOTE: I am using Kirshenbaum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirshenbaum) as /. does not accept Unicode IPA characters.
I like technology, but it seems to me that the media companies are pushing newer technologies faster than ever and are then wondering why they are performing badly. CDs, DVDs and other technology (hell, even colour television) took a while to take off, and it wasn't until the market was effectively saturated, and the technologies became affordable and commonplace, that other technologies were introduced.
First it was High-Def and HDMI compatible vs compliant. Then it was HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray.
Blu-Ray disks are finally starting to become affordable, but they come with the required HDMI upgrade of all your connecting audio/video hardware.
With the RealD 3D televisions and associated content as well, especially with the competing players/technologies coming out soon after HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray, it is unclear how things are going to pan out -- for example, are there going to be 3D Blu-Ray disks that require new hardware?
To me, the home entertainment hardware is looking fragmented, and will continue to become even more fragmented as time goes on.