Are they serious? Americans wouldn't like more durable plastic money because it's not American paper money? I've never lived in a world with paper money, and whenever I go overseas I always notice that paper money is flimsy and often torn, not to mention in the tropics it's sweaty. Plastic money is the way to go.
The US "rejects" changes to its currency because it never pushes changes properly. The dollar coin being one example. How do you get people to switch from dollar bills to dollar coins? By not printing dollar bills any more and taking them out of circulation when they go through clearing. Eventually everyone switches whether they want to or not. As a further incentive you pass legislation that makes old currency non-legal tender after some reasonable point, after which people must exchange it at a central bank.
If the situation with dollars sounds pathetic, that's because it is. European countries are far more adept at switching notes than the US, so adept in fact that most of Europe switched entirely from one entire currency to another in the space of a few months. Not only does it mean currency can more readily introduce anti counterfeiting measures but can also include more features for blind & sight impaired people too such as coloured notes & size differences in coinage.
This is an indication of support for the Steam distribution platform, and some Valve games on Linux. Good luck getting EA to build Linux binaries for their games, because Steam doesn't do that for you.
I don't see why it couldn't. They could licence and bundle one of the Wine libs that exist for running Windows games on Linux and Mac and make the experience completely transparent to the end user. Games would have to be tested & certified of course, but other than that it wouldn't require EA or anyone else to especially support Linux any more than they do right now.
Time and money is all it requires, apparently neither of which Apple is willing to spend on this problem. And why should they? As you pointed out there are better alternatives anyway. All adding this would do is increase the amount of money Apple claims from developers to cover the cost of the time and money spent on it.
Time and money easily recouped by selling adult apps. Where adult is anything from porn, gambling or merely any uncensored / unrated application that a grown person should freely be able to choose to view for themselves.
Does any official app store for any smart phone sell pornographic material? I know Google doesn't. To paraphrase you, ' Google's android is supposedly the master of openness, its amazing how Apple haters forget that the product they hold as the gold standard does exactly the same thing they are trying to hang Apple for.'
By "paraphrase", you mean "invent shit". I haven't mentioned android once in this particular thread. Although since you mention it Android allows users to install unsigned apps, including competing app stores if they wish.
As for app stores that sell porn, I think you'll find even the Apple store sells porn - Playboy for example as well as content completely unsuitable for minors, e.g. sex jokes plus numerous other dodgy sex & gambling apps. All of which piss over Steve Job's argument that the iPhone doesn't do porn. Apparently it's okay to put porn on the Apple app store except when it isn't, as judged by some arbitrary and ever shifting criteria.
And yes other official app stores do too. For example, my phone is on the O2 network - FRONT PAGE of their store links to "Babes 18+" and from that the "Art of Sex". I expect other networks do likewise and depending on country I expect some show actual hardcore porn too if you pay for it.
Apple isn't willing to put real age verification in to iTMS, so they don't sell anything that would legally require it. I would personally rather they don't spend the money on it as it's just not needed. They aren't filtering the devices, so I don't see how users really have much to complain about and most likely the loudest complainers are those who never would buy an iPhone in the first place.
You got your argument back to front, and it certainly doesn't make sense that way around either. As for users, yes they have a lot to complain about - one company is inventing arbitrary and often completely unreasonable restrictions on what they may do with their own property including what apps they can run. They should be as mad as hell, and given the enormous popularity of jail break software clearly some of them are.
Who the hell buys porn? And even if you did, what's to stop you subscribing through one of the many web based porn sites and have it streamed direct to your iPhone in glorious h264?
As for the app store, Apple are allegedly the master of usability. So its amazing how many excuses its apologists come up with to explain away their restrictions and shortcomings.
It's funny how the app store already implements age ratings but you claim it's impossible for them to add verification. Even when other sites and other services like cable TV manage it. A very simple verification step would be for Apple to charge some small denomination onto a credit card, and for the card holder to look up the account and type the timestamp and amount back into the the store. Once done any adult / gambling section could be unlocked. Easy.
But clearly that's too difficult for Apple isn't it?
And iPhone users (including children) don't have access to porn? Last time I checked (guilty as charged!) there are iPhone specific streaming sites for porn. Instead of going to the app store all they have to open up Safari and google for the goodies.
Exactly, so unless the iPhone suddenly implements web content filtering (including streaming vids), I find Steve's statement absurd.
My understanding is that that's not the case. That the people who pirate the most also tend to be the largest purchasers of legitimate music.
I expect there are many kinds of users. Hardcore pirates (lamers) who would never pay for anything ever. Those people are not lost sales because they're lamers. At the other end perhaps there are try-before-they-buy kind of people who buy music they actually like. Everyone else falls somewhere along that scale. I expect many people on that scale would switch if there was a fast, convenient and affordable way to acquire non DRM'd music legitimately but there isn't.
The music industry figures are complete bollocks. They're trying to accuse 1/10th the population of Ireland to explain away a drop in sales. There are plenty of other factors to consider before reaching for a scapegoat and I suspect in large part it's their own reluctance to move with the times which has seen them lose money.
Whoever modded you Flamebait was dead wrong. Open disclosure is one of the major principles of security, and security through obscurity is an awful thing to trust in. It's true that openly available systems can be more susceptible to attacks, but a sufficiently robust system should be able to stand up to the scrutiny.
Hmm, I think Google's security team (and virtually any other) would disagree. You could follow best practice with regards to the design of a security and still not wish to advertise it to all and sundry. Why give the attacker the advantage of knowing what database / backends are involved, or the internal IPs, or the names of the developers who wrote the code, or the format of the payload inside some encrypted cookie, or any other detail that might show up in the source.
In an ideal world, perhaps it wouldn't matter if those things leaked out because security would be so perfect to withstand anything. But it isn't an ideal world, and sometimes secrecy is an extra layer of defence in its own right.
I think Ebert might possibly have a point if we were stuck in some 1980's arcade but we're not. There are numerous video games which demonstrate artistic / stylistic qualities and there are numerous video games that demonstrate a plot. It is quite absurd to say games can never be art because there are plenty of examples that say otherwise and the list keeps growing by the day.
I was listening to TodayFM in Ireland and some music spokes drone claimed there were 650,000 active pirates in Ireland. Out of a population of 6 million. This figure in itself is laughably high but on top of that the industry claimed they were losing 69 million annually due to piracy. This implies that these 650,000 pirates were responsible for over 100 lost revenue each just in music sales.
These figures are so implausible that it is a wonder that any government takes them seriously at all. It's clear that piracy does result in lost sales, but the music / movie industry is doing itself no favours by lying. Pirates almost by definition place less value on an item than a music industry. The industry might think a CD is worth 15 but the pirate clearly begs to differ. It therefore makes no sense to say a pirated copy = one lost sale since the pirate would be unlikely to have paid full price in any event.
Exactly. And if some anomalous data comes down the pipe showing the prediction may have been wrong for some child who was locked away due to being convicted of pre-crime all we have to do is bury the minority report.
All this spin about precrime is utterly absurd. This is simple application of risk analysis. Some delinquent kids are more likely to reoffend than others. If those tendencies can be identified through data analysis then probation services can more effectively to target potential reoffenders.
If a state has thousands of young offenders on file with necessary criminal & rehabilitation data to make predictions of future behaviour, why shouldn't they do it? I assume Florida doesn't have infinite money to spend on probation officers etc., so any tool which allows them to more effectively allocate resources has to be a good thing. That doesn't mean the IBM tool is effective and it would have to prove its worth through some kind of objective study but I don't see any reason in principle they shouldn't do this.
Re:An updated Workplace Shell would be great
on
Is OS/2 Coming Back?
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· Score: 1
Ummm... what? You mean it wasnt like Win 3.1? What other UI design was there that was prominent back in 1992? And it was such a mess that Microsoft copied it (yes, it, not MacOS) for Win95 (check the DOJ court docs and such for proof).
OS/2's life extended before and after Win95, and certainly was covered by MacOS. For the whole time the desktop experience was ugly, unintuitive and really never caught up with other operating systems. Windows certainly was behind with Windows 3.1 but it surpassed it by Win95. Even simple things like dragging an icon in OS/2 were mapped onto the right mouse button. There was no excuse for crap like that. Warp 3 / 4 attempted to fix the worst of the UI's ugliness but didn't go far enough.
Really? Are you sure? Every true/native OS/2 app is a collection WPS SOM objects or acts like one. There were some poorly written ones that didnt work perhaps... but those were rare. And even in that event, an OS/2 system runs TWO Workplace Shells... not one. If an app crashes the WPS, OS/2 switches the context info and such to the second copy and kills the first... then spawns yet another background copy of the WPS for the possibility of another crash. I have rarely seen WPS crashes or "destabilization"
They weren't rare at all. Just installing the OS/2 "Bonus Pak", i.e. IBM's own collection of apps was enough to turn the desktop into a crashy mess. Your only hope was to keep up to date with the latest CSDs because things were so unstable otherwise. It was easy to kill the desktop, or (as bad) have it left there hanging. It wasn't helped by having a single Windows event queue for the entire OS meaning one badly behaved app affected everything.
Ah... you are comparing OS/2 2.0's setup... the only thing "ugly" about that was not a ton of eye candy... that was changed in later releases to top style tabs... which are far nicer to use and look at that WinXP's variant that does row upon row of tabs. Instead, it does it in a way that was later adopted by Firefox for website tabs in it's multi-tabbed interface.
I'm never said nothing improved, but it certainly did not improve enough. As for top style tabs, I think you'll find Windows got there first.
It (Win95) was never more responsive for the feature set. Win95 was slower due to the overhead of using a web browser component to open every folder view.
Now who's getting confused. The default Win95 desktop didn't integrate any IE functionality. The IE 4.0 "Desktop Update" feature did that and was rightly lambasted as a horrible mess which is why it was so short lived. No disagreement about that from me. The default desktop however was pretty clean and functional. It certainly had it's faults, such as shortcuts and running on a 16-bit shim but as a user experience it was miles ahead of OS/2. Just having multiple windows message queues made it more responsive.
I dont see anything in your post that resembles reality.
I worked for IBM when this whole Win95 / OS/2 Warp war was going on. Yes Microsoft were being anticompetitive, yes OS/2 was technically in most regards a better product. I wouldn't have even been working for them at all if I didn't use it as my home operating system. I wanted OS/2 to succeed and if you can be bothered you can find plenty of post by myself in the last 10 years on the subject. I saw the utter apathy to OS/2 from the inside of the company. I saw no drive to make the product more usable, no drive to bring consistency between different parts of OS/2 or the Bonus Pak. The left hand simply didn't know or care what the right hand was doing.
At the time I was developing video conferencing apps for OS/2 & NT which were doing some pretty low level stuff, hooking into graphics drivers for screen recording etc. Guess which was the lead platform in my project? It wasn't OS/2. In the end (and despite our code working pretty well) IBM canned the whole project and bought into Intel Proshare instead. Guess which platform that ran on? It wasn't OS/2. Developing on OS/2 compared to NT was a nightmare thanks command-line only tools, lack of editors and the dreaded single message queue. Thank fuck for watchcat or I think I would have completely lost my mind.
Re:An updated Workplace Shell would be great
on
Is OS/2 Coming Back?
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· Score: 1, Informative
The OS/2 WPS was a mess, gleefully ignoring years of UI design built into contemporary operating systems. There is no doubt it was powerful, but the WPS was very easy to destablize (e.g. by installing an app that had WPS SOM objects), it was very ugly to look at, and employed some arcane / bizarre notions of usability thanks to CUA. Even simple things like cutting and pasting were far complicated than the equivalent Windows / Mac. Opening a simple object's settings might reveal some ugly notebook style dialog with tabs running down two axis with buttons on tabs leading to even more dialogs. Even in its day it compared quite poorly against the Windows 95+ interface. Win95 had it's own faults (e.g. shortcuts sucked compared to shadows), but it was cleaner, simpler, and more responsive.
I don't see any reason at all to dig up WPS for any reason except nostalgia. It might be nice if GNOME/KDE had a better support for "live" objects much like SOM but I hoped they learnt from the mistakes of WPS if/when they implement them.
I'm expecting that if Adobe did produce some workable Flash to HTML5 canvas converter that Apple would ban converted JS or Safari would be patched and mysteriously start suffering timing & memory issues that ruin the playback.
Not to knock your comment or anything but if modern Android phones (as opposed to ancient ones ?!?!) are not as simple to use as any other smart phone. If this were true why on earth is there even a need for task manager Android apps to exist? I'm not saying Android isn't a great OS. It is damn nice. What I am saying is that if there is a need for a task manager they are doing it wrong.
Android is a multitasking phone OS. You can run more than one app at the same time, unlike the iPhone (until 4.0 turns up). Some people just like being able kill tasks even though the OS is quite capable of killing apps for itself if memory runs low. Again, this ability to tinker, improve, augment should be seen as a benefit. If I as a user or a developer don't like a default component I can just extend or replace it with one of my own choosing.
It's not a browser, it's a glorified picture viewer. Opera Mini displays a picture of the site with some knowledge of what bits of the picture are links so the user can click on them. A proper browser would be something like Opera Mobile which executes Javascript, HTML, plugins and anything else it wants to locally on the device.
There's now no way in hell that Mozilla will ever support h.264. Previously, h264 support for Firefox was basically inevitable because there was no way in hell that Theora was going to overtake h264 as the dominant format.
Hmmm I don't know. h264 is the industry standard for the foreseeable future. It's embedded into devices, into software, into tools and it is a natural format to exchange clips in. Why exactly should Google or any other video provider spend a lot of money to apply lossy conversion to change h264 content to some other video format? VP8 is also just a video codec, and says nothing about what audio format to use which is an often overlooked issue.
Even if Google Chrome, Opera & Mozilla supported the format Microsoft & Apple may not, It's also questionable whether Adobe would either.
Aside from all this, it doesn't excuse Mozilla from just opening up their video tag. It isn't hard to do and would allow Mozilla to ship with Theora / VP8 if they wish while still allowing other content types to be supplied. Most operating systems ship with an h264 licence any way so there really is no plausible reason that a browser should not allow a user to make use of it.
Android doesn't require you tinker at all. Out of the box, modern Android phones are as usable and simple as any other smart phone out there. But if you want to tinker, at least some devices allow for it.
I think where Google have been smart is they recognize that leaving the doors open saves them a pile of hassle, keeps the hackers happy and most people would keep the default settings anyway. Everyone is happy.
I don't see how it hurts Apple at all. Apple can pump out a new OS and it's up to 3rd parties to play catchup. Apple doesn't have to make any concessions any more than the Linux kernel does to binary drivers.
Neither do I accept that Flash sucks purely because of Adobe. NPAPI plugins can be windowed or windowless. Windowed plugins are far more efficient both for plugins and browsers because there is minimal interaction except for setup & tear down. The plugin owns its own native window that sits over the top of content but otherwise handles its own painting which can even be on a different thread if it wants. Except the Mac doesn't support windowed plugins.
Windowless plugins are much slower. They rely on the browser to call them to render (they might even be sandwiched in the Z-order between DOM elements) and incur a far higher overhead because they paint on the one thread. Throw in software video decoding and it's not hard to see why performance on the Mac suffers.
It's completely simplistic to blame Adobe when there are fundamental design issues that mean Apple deserves their own share of the blame. Of course Apple could help resolve this issue but instead they're pretending they have nothing to do with the problem when they clearly do.
Steve Job's comments can't be taken at face value. If I use/buy an Apple iPhone app, I am stuck on Apple's platform forever (assuming I wish to keep my possessions). If I use/buy an Adobe Flash app, it doesn't matter what the OS is because my app runs through something that sits on top. So Apple sees Flash as a threat because it prevents lockin.
That's the only reason Jobs has banned it. Every thing else is just some bullshit excuse. It should be quite within the means of Apple to support Flash on a handheld device. A simple way would be to put placeholders where each flash app resides in the page and require the user to touch the placeholder for the app to start. Touching one open app would stop any existing Flash app. Then the device isn't overwhelmed by too many open instances. Besides, if it were just the Flash runtime, why ban Flash apps which have been converted into native executables? There is no excuse. All the excuses emanating from Apple and its apologists are incredibly weak.
I would not be surprised if Safari browser acquired some mysterious new limitations on its timing precision, or throughput when using the canvas element to counter Adobe there too. I wonder what lame excuse will be trotted out if/when that happens.
It would be nice if companies opened up their dead operating systems, but often times they would be infected with licenced code, or involve patents and simply it's easier and less effort to keep it closed.
What evidence do you have that it is inefficient? I expect most applications would struggle if multiple instances of a player running in the same address space had to be simultaneously delivering audio and video. If you find it especially onerous, I suggest installing a Flash / ad blocker to limit the number of running instances.
Aside from that, plugins are at the mercy of the browser to deliver in a timely fashion. This is doubly true for the Mac where plugins tend to be windowless due the way Carbon works. Windowless plugins must scream at the browser to be repainted and to receive mouse / keyboard. The NPAPI also defines hacks so that Cocoa browsers can run Carbon plugins and vice versa which must add another layer of problems. I would not be surprised AT ALL, if performance of Flash was especially bad under Safari because of this. And if this is the case then Apple deserves more than its fair share of the blame.
It's not trivial to set up a paywall but it is still relatively straightforward. Any application server could be configured to intercept and validate a request. Typically it will be done with session cookie(s) holding encrypted data of some kind. If the cookie is absent or expired or invalid you redirect the browser off to the login page. If the cookie is valid, you send the browser off to the requested content. I imagine a paywall site would also have to do some kind of IP validation to prevent 1 guy buying access and posting up the info online for everyone else to use.
You're asking an organization setup to promote free-as-in-freedom software, a charity, to simply get over themselves, turn it into a free-as-in-beer project, and break with their ethics.
Sure why not? Firefox allows me to install proprietary plugins so what's the deal about me installing proprietary plugins that just so happen to play a video format?
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The US "rejects" changes to its currency because it never pushes changes properly. The dollar coin being one example. How do you get people to switch from dollar bills to dollar coins? By not printing dollar bills any more and taking them out of circulation when they go through clearing. Eventually everyone switches whether they want to or not. As a further incentive you pass legislation that makes old currency non-legal tender after some reasonable point, after which people must exchange it at a central bank.
If the situation with dollars sounds pathetic, that's because it is. European countries are far more adept at switching notes than the US, so adept in fact that most of Europe switched entirely from one entire currency to another in the space of a few months. Not only does it mean currency can more readily introduce anti counterfeiting measures but can also include more features for blind & sight impaired people too such as coloured notes & size differences in coinage.
I don't see why it couldn't. They could licence and bundle one of the Wine libs that exist for running Windows games on Linux and Mac and make the experience completely transparent to the end user. Games would have to be tested & certified of course, but other than that it wouldn't require EA or anyone else to especially support Linux any more than they do right now.
Time and money easily recouped by selling adult apps. Where adult is anything from porn, gambling or merely any uncensored / unrated application that a grown person should freely be able to choose to view for themselves.
Does any official app store for any smart phone sell pornographic material? I know Google doesn't. To paraphrase you, ' Google's android is supposedly the master of openness, its amazing how Apple haters forget that the product they hold as the gold standard does exactly the same thing they are trying to hang Apple for.'
By "paraphrase", you mean "invent shit". I haven't mentioned android once in this particular thread. Although since you mention it Android allows users to install unsigned apps, including competing app stores if they wish.
As for app stores that sell porn, I think you'll find even the Apple store sells porn - Playboy for example as well as content completely unsuitable for minors, e.g. sex jokes plus numerous other dodgy sex & gambling apps. All of which piss over Steve Job's argument that the iPhone doesn't do porn. Apparently it's okay to put porn on the Apple app store except when it isn't, as judged by some arbitrary and ever shifting criteria.
And yes other official app stores do too. For example, my phone is on the O2 network - FRONT PAGE of their store links to "Babes 18+" and from that the "Art of Sex". I expect other networks do likewise and depending on country I expect some show actual hardcore porn too if you pay for it.
Apple isn't willing to put real age verification in to iTMS, so they don't sell anything that would legally require it. I would personally rather they don't spend the money on it as it's just not needed. They aren't filtering the devices, so I don't see how users really have much to complain about and most likely the loudest complainers are those who never would buy an iPhone in the first place.
You got your argument back to front, and it certainly doesn't make sense that way around either. As for users, yes they have a lot to complain about - one company is inventing arbitrary and often completely unreasonable restrictions on what they may do with their own property including what apps they can run. They should be as mad as hell, and given the enormous popularity of jail break software clearly some of them are.
As for the app store, Apple are allegedly the master of usability. So its amazing how many excuses its apologists come up with to explain away their restrictions and shortcomings.
It's funny how the app store already implements age ratings but you claim it's impossible for them to add verification. Even when other sites and other services like cable TV manage it. A very simple verification step would be for Apple to charge some small denomination onto a credit card, and for the card holder to look up the account and type the timestamp and amount back into the the store. Once done any adult / gambling section could be unlocked. Easy.
But clearly that's too difficult for Apple isn't it?
Exactly, so unless the iPhone suddenly implements web content filtering (including streaming vids), I find Steve's statement absurd.
I expect there are many kinds of users. Hardcore pirates (lamers) who would never pay for anything ever. Those people are not lost sales because they're lamers. At the other end perhaps there are try-before-they-buy kind of people who buy music they actually like. Everyone else falls somewhere along that scale. I expect many people on that scale would switch if there was a fast, convenient and affordable way to acquire non DRM'd music legitimately but there isn't.
The music industry figures are complete bollocks. They're trying to accuse 1/10th the population of Ireland to explain away a drop in sales. There are plenty of other factors to consider before reaching for a scapegoat and I suspect in large part it's their own reluctance to move with the times which has seen them lose money.
Hmm, I think Google's security team (and virtually any other) would disagree. You could follow best practice with regards to the design of a security and still not wish to advertise it to all and sundry. Why give the attacker the advantage of knowing what database / backends are involved, or the internal IPs, or the names of the developers who wrote the code, or the format of the payload inside some encrypted cookie, or any other detail that might show up in the source.
In an ideal world, perhaps it wouldn't matter if those things leaked out because security would be so perfect to withstand anything. But it isn't an ideal world, and sometimes secrecy is an extra layer of defence in its own right.
I think Ebert might possibly have a point if we were stuck in some 1980's arcade but we're not. There are numerous video games which demonstrate artistic / stylistic qualities and there are numerous video games that demonstrate a plot. It is quite absurd to say games can never be art because there are plenty of examples that say otherwise and the list keeps growing by the day.
These figures are so implausible that it is a wonder that any government takes them seriously at all. It's clear that piracy does result in lost sales, but the music / movie industry is doing itself no favours by lying. Pirates almost by definition place less value on an item than a music industry. The industry might think a CD is worth 15 but the pirate clearly begs to differ. It therefore makes no sense to say a pirated copy = one lost sale since the pirate would be unlikely to have paid full price in any event.
All this spin about precrime is utterly absurd. This is simple application of risk analysis. Some delinquent kids are more likely to reoffend than others. If those tendencies can be identified through data analysis then probation services can more effectively to target potential reoffenders.
If a state has thousands of young offenders on file with necessary criminal & rehabilitation data to make predictions of future behaviour, why shouldn't they do it? I assume Florida doesn't have infinite money to spend on probation officers etc., so any tool which allows them to more effectively allocate resources has to be a good thing. That doesn't mean the IBM tool is effective and it would have to prove its worth through some kind of objective study but I don't see any reason in principle they shouldn't do this.
OS/2's life extended before and after Win95, and certainly was covered by MacOS. For the whole time the desktop experience was ugly, unintuitive and really never caught up with other operating systems. Windows certainly was behind with Windows 3.1 but it surpassed it by Win95. Even simple things like dragging an icon in OS/2 were mapped onto the right mouse button. There was no excuse for crap like that. Warp 3 / 4 attempted to fix the worst of the UI's ugliness but didn't go far enough.
Really? Are you sure? Every true/native OS/2 app is a collection WPS SOM objects or acts like one. There were some poorly written ones that didnt work perhaps... but those were rare. And even in that event, an OS/2 system runs TWO Workplace Shells... not one. If an app crashes the WPS, OS/2 switches the context info and such to the second copy and kills the first... then spawns yet another background copy of the WPS for the possibility of another crash. I have rarely seen WPS crashes or "destabilization"
They weren't rare at all. Just installing the OS/2 "Bonus Pak", i.e. IBM's own collection of apps was enough to turn the desktop into a crashy mess. Your only hope was to keep up to date with the latest CSDs because things were so unstable otherwise. It was easy to kill the desktop, or (as bad) have it left there hanging. It wasn't helped by having a single Windows event queue for the entire OS meaning one badly behaved app affected everything.
Ah... you are comparing OS/2 2.0's setup... the only thing "ugly" about that was not a ton of eye candy... that was changed in later releases to top style tabs... which are far nicer to use and look at that WinXP's variant that does row upon row of tabs. Instead, it does it in a way that was later adopted by Firefox for website tabs in it's multi-tabbed interface.
I'm never said nothing improved, but it certainly did not improve enough. As for top style tabs, I think you'll find Windows got there first.
It (Win95) was never more responsive for the feature set. Win95 was slower due to the overhead of using a web browser component to open every folder view.
Now who's getting confused. The default Win95 desktop didn't integrate any IE functionality. The IE 4.0 "Desktop Update" feature did that and was rightly lambasted as a horrible mess which is why it was so short lived. No disagreement about that from me. The default desktop however was pretty clean and functional. It certainly had it's faults, such as shortcuts and running on a 16-bit shim but as a user experience it was miles ahead of OS/2. Just having multiple windows message queues made it more responsive.
I dont see anything in your post that resembles reality.
I worked for IBM when this whole Win95 / OS/2 Warp war was going on. Yes Microsoft were being anticompetitive, yes OS/2 was technically in most regards a better product. I wouldn't have even been working for them at all if I didn't use it as my home operating system. I wanted OS/2 to succeed and if you can be bothered you can find plenty of post by myself in the last 10 years on the subject. I saw the utter apathy to OS/2 from the inside of the company. I saw no drive to make the product more usable, no drive to bring consistency between different parts of OS/2 or the Bonus Pak. The left hand simply didn't know or care what the right hand was doing.
At the time I was developing video conferencing apps for OS/2 & NT which were doing some pretty low level stuff, hooking into graphics drivers for screen recording etc. Guess which was the lead platform in my project? It wasn't OS/2. In the end (and despite our code working pretty well) IBM canned the whole project and bought into Intel Proshare instead. Guess which platform that ran on? It wasn't OS/2. Developing on OS/2 compared to NT was a nightmare thanks command-line only tools, lack of editors and the dreaded single message queue. Thank fuck for watchcat or I think I would have completely lost my mind.
I don't see any reason at all to dig up WPS for any reason except nostalgia. It might be nice if GNOME/KDE had a better support for "live" objects much like SOM but I hoped they learnt from the mistakes of WPS if/when they implement them.
I'm expecting that if Adobe did produce some workable Flash to HTML5 canvas converter that Apple would ban converted JS or Safari would be patched and mysteriously start suffering timing & memory issues that ruin the playback.
Android is a multitasking phone OS. You can run more than one app at the same time, unlike the iPhone (until 4.0 turns up). Some people just like being able kill tasks even though the OS is quite capable of killing apps for itself if memory runs low. Again, this ability to tinker, improve, augment should be seen as a benefit. If I as a user or a developer don't like a default component I can just extend or replace it with one of my own choosing.
It's not a browser, it's a glorified picture viewer. Opera Mini displays a picture of the site with some knowledge of what bits of the picture are links so the user can click on them. A proper browser would be something like Opera Mobile which executes Javascript, HTML, plugins and anything else it wants to locally on the device.
Hmmm I don't know. h264 is the industry standard for the foreseeable future. It's embedded into devices, into software, into tools and it is a natural format to exchange clips in. Why exactly should Google or any other video provider spend a lot of money to apply lossy conversion to change h264 content to some other video format? VP8 is also just a video codec, and says nothing about what audio format to use which is an often overlooked issue.
Even if Google Chrome, Opera & Mozilla supported the format Microsoft & Apple may not, It's also questionable whether Adobe would either.
Aside from all this, it doesn't excuse Mozilla from just opening up their video tag. It isn't hard to do and would allow Mozilla to ship with Theora / VP8 if they wish while still allowing other content types to be supplied. Most operating systems ship with an h264 licence any way so there really is no plausible reason that a browser should not allow a user to make use of it.
I think where Google have been smart is they recognize that leaving the doors open saves them a pile of hassle, keeps the hackers happy and most people would keep the default settings anyway. Everyone is happy.
Neither do I accept that Flash sucks purely because of Adobe. NPAPI plugins can be windowed or windowless. Windowed plugins are far more efficient both for plugins and browsers because there is minimal interaction except for setup & tear down. The plugin owns its own native window that sits over the top of content but otherwise handles its own painting which can even be on a different thread if it wants. Except the Mac doesn't support windowed plugins.
Windowless plugins are much slower. They rely on the browser to call them to render (they might even be sandwiched in the Z-order between DOM elements) and incur a far higher overhead because they paint on the one thread. Throw in software video decoding and it's not hard to see why performance on the Mac suffers.
It's completely simplistic to blame Adobe when there are fundamental design issues that mean Apple deserves their own share of the blame. Of course Apple could help resolve this issue but instead they're pretending they have nothing to do with the problem when they clearly do.
That's the only reason Jobs has banned it. Every thing else is just some bullshit excuse. It should be quite within the means of Apple to support Flash on a handheld device. A simple way would be to put placeholders where each flash app resides in the page and require the user to touch the placeholder for the app to start. Touching one open app would stop any existing Flash app. Then the device isn't overwhelmed by too many open instances. Besides, if it were just the Flash runtime, why ban Flash apps which have been converted into native executables? There is no excuse. All the excuses emanating from Apple and its apologists are incredibly weak.
I would not be surprised if Safari browser acquired some mysterious new limitations on its timing precision, or throughput when using the canvas element to counter Adobe there too. I wonder what lame excuse will be trotted out if/when that happens.
It would be nice if companies opened up their dead operating systems, but often times they would be infected with licenced code, or involve patents and simply it's easier and less effort to keep it closed.
Aside from that, plugins are at the mercy of the browser to deliver in a timely fashion. This is doubly true for the Mac where plugins tend to be windowless due the way Carbon works. Windowless plugins must scream at the browser to be repainted and to receive mouse / keyboard. The NPAPI also defines hacks so that Cocoa browsers can run Carbon plugins and vice versa which must add another layer of problems. I would not be surprised AT ALL, if performance of Flash was especially bad under Safari because of this. And if this is the case then Apple deserves more than its fair share of the blame.
I just spotted a case of sour grapes on Larry's website.
It's not trivial to set up a paywall but it is still relatively straightforward. Any application server could be configured to intercept and validate a request. Typically it will be done with session cookie(s) holding encrypted data of some kind. If the cookie is absent or expired or invalid you redirect the browser off to the login page. If the cookie is valid, you send the browser off to the requested content. I imagine a paywall site would also have to do some kind of IP validation to prevent 1 guy buying access and posting up the info online for everyone else to use.
Sure why not? Firefox allows me to install proprietary plugins so what's the deal about me installing proprietary plugins that just so happen to play a video format?