I remember a time when Americans would be bothered by being detained by any government official for more than 0 minutes. Looks like consent's been well manufactured in you.
That's a fairly accurate summary of the pompous attitude at Google: "We're so smart that if we fuck up it must be someone else's fault." Its spokestroll didn't even say, "The specs are hard to read and we are too self-confident to ask for clarification on the official MS developer forums," instead bitching about some unfair advantage for Microsoft which isn't even properly specified. Let me tell you a spec so convoluted that no-one has ever written a full implementation of a recent incarnation: the W3C's HTML. The difference is that web site designers all test in multiple browsers, whereas document creators don't have the time to test in multiple Office suites.
Guess what? A higher degree and a good canteen don't necessarily make you smart (I'm sure many of us can attest to that:)), nor do they make you able or willing to understand communications from fellow humans. Not invented here!
Hindsight cannot rationally be considered in deciding whether some decision was asinine. A fool is someone who ignores or misjudges available data rather than data which does not exist.
I know it's easy as an American in 2010 to think that war is something which happens "over there" with buttons and rockets, but when your (France, Britain) population has been through the Great War not 20 years before, of course you want to avoid war again. Better to ask: how would Europe have developed through the 20th century if its countries were as trigger-happy as your idea of hindsight would want them to be? If, at each opportunity for war, they'd forgotten how horrible it was the previous time?
Now it could be argued that Britain/France "could have done more" during the Phoney War - I mean, things go really well and quick when you roll in with all guns blazing, as US in Afghanistan and Iraq - but you're wrong. To give some examples:
1. The French Saar offensive began on 7 September. 2. HMS Courageous was sunk on 17 September. 3. The Luftwaffe attacked warships in Scotland from 16 October, with casualties on both sides.
50%. Decades of FARC border skirmishes and difficult diplomacy after the US installs military bases in Colombia to "help in the fight against rebels and drug traffickers" (uhuh) != Chavez invading Colombia.
Yes, Venezuela is more sympathetic toward FARC than the US, pointing out the hypocrisy of labelling them terrorists and negotiating for release of hostages rather than "hurr bomb them all!". In similar logic, the US invaded England because it did nothing about American support for the Provisional IRA and Clinton helped push the Good Friday agreements.
Contrast this with South America, which is populated by 3 types of people: un-educated peasants, druglords, and warlords.
Oh, at least 4! You're forgetting the resident agents of the appropriate US government department who've spent the past 50+ years trying to keep them that way.
Jokes would happen during and after recent retirement, being 2001 (remembering that we're talking space science timescales, not Internet meme timescales). By the third week of 2003, 40% of US space shuttles had been destroyed, even while old timers were still tediously proclaiming US victory over the evil Reds.
SFC would have had a stronger argument if he'd mentioned technical and bureaucratic US space programme fuck-ups in general, rather than just the shuttle... no-one said it was easy, but you don't deserve any slack when you start claiming that you're better than everyone else.
Like Apple with OS X a decade ago, once you've got your start, you stop pretending to be "different" and caring for the developer community, and cater to your real revenue generators: in this case, the carriers.
(1) It's perfectly common in British English to omit "to be" in that instance (not "are"). American? 0/1
(2) No points for trying to simplify what I said then castigating me for not saying something else. I chose "privacy policies" because these contain the chatter people ignore when they see "free stuff!" - especially as students ignorant of workplace law. 0/1
The problem is not that people aren't concerned about their privacy - try walking in on any Facebook user while he/she is taking a shower - the problem is that they don't really consider the wording and implications of the privacy policies of organisations they're giving their data to.
(3) The comma has a purpose here: to make it clear that you're targeting all young crowds rather than just the ones "who grow up thinking...". If I were writing prose for somewhere more important than an Interweb discussion board then I'd probably either change the sentence structure to employ an obvious introductory clause or remove the subordinate entirely and apply a semicolon. Although TBH I'd make it my duty to employ the comma splice to irk you. 0.5/1
In conclusion,,, I'd award you 0.5/3 were you not posting AC. Did I correct your grammar in some previous post? Were you lurking in the shadows to get me back? Your attempt seemed fairly desperate:-).
FWIW, I knew a guy at school who was investigated by British police about 14 years ago for downloading manuals like this and being involved with a group of people involved in distributing such material and building shit for kicks... a Bachelors and a Masters later, he is now working at the Ministry of Defence (the UK DoD) as a strategist.
This doesn't surprise me at all. He was a fairly bright chap - though nothing spectacular - but his heart remained that of a pathological kid who liked pain and blowing shit up. The military want a monopoly on that sort of person; they'll either catch you when they can mould you, or get rid of you.
Moreover, you haven't demonstrated it to be false -- it may be difficult to implement. HTML5 evidently is not.
It is not necessary to prove any random assertion false in order for it to not be true. As you've said, there's more interest in implementing W3C specs than Adobe specs. Still, HTML5 has 0 complete implementations, and Flash has 1.
but that doesn't tell me whether or not they're allowed to read the specs yet
[existence of non-Adobe incomplete Flash implementations] Citation needed.
You are lazy. I'll give you three which take about 15 seconds to find on the web, and you can do the job of finding three more (hint: I could find 5 with a cursory search, and the 6th is fairly obscure; I'd already heard of 5). The most well-known incomplete implementation is gnash. Scaleform is a commercial implementation with hardware acceleration. Swfdec is a fairly amateur implementation which has been mostly abandoned.
It actually looks like they just care about DRM, and would use HTML5 if it had the appropriate features.
It looks like good-enough DRM on a platform which actually exists and is successfully in production is one of the things they care about, yes.
Otherwise, your rant here makes no sense in light of the native iPhone client they have planned.
Is that an HTML5-based iPhone client? If not, what's your point?
For example, contrary to your claim, HTML5 does seem mostly implemented by the browsers I'm using. What's missing?
I never said that you claimed SVG supports local SQL storage
You're making arguments in response to the strawman argument that "SVG is a suitable replacement for HTML5". I was arguing for SVG in the context of canvas, it was obvious that I was arguing for SVG in the context of canvas, and you were being deliberately obtuse because it felt good to you to so boldly tear down an argument which hadn't been made.
To fake it on top of SVG (or HTML), you'd have to create separate elements behind the element that's moving, and be careful to disable all events on those so they can't be interacted with, and remove them when you're done
If only you could group elements in SVG. If only there were a generic way to add filters in SVG, and that could be used, say, to produce motion blur. The problem with SVG is that you have to read the spec instead of canvas where everyone can be lazy and reimplement his own way.
You can abuse anything, so the fact that a tool can be abused is no reason to avoid it. (I doubt I'd like an entire website in Canvas much better than an entire website in Flash.)
The whole point here being that canvas and most of its HTML5 friends are no better in principle than Flash, and (currently) are worse in practice.
I'm done with this thread. I appreciate that you're at least responding, but your lack of effort at researching most basic points is too frustrating. Thanks.
Have they actually opened the spec to the point where third-party players are feasible?
Yes. A lot of your argument is based on making a random assumption and then arguing on the basis that the assumption is true, and this is your first instance.
That could just be that Gnash sucks, it could just be that everyone already has Flash, and it could be that everyone's focused on HTML5. But it could also be because it's a hard spec to implement
Second instance.
"Full" or not, it has multiple working, competing implementations, and many cross-browser demos on top of it.
There are half a dozen working, competing, incomplete implementations of Flash, and many fully fledged production cross-browser apps on top of it.
Now why would Chrome, Firefox, even IE participate in something that's merely "Apple's troll"? Any credibility you had till this point is pretty much gone.
In brief, because they're web browsers, and their remit is to implement W3C's HTML spec, not to write it. Other motives include Google's dream of holding all your data and serving everything via Javascript. MS, as usual, is just paying lip service in the hope of preserving browser marketshare.
Well, that or using the entirely open HTML5. See how that works?
No, not at all. I don't see lots of iApps being written in the "entirely open HTML5", and I don't see Apple showing any sign of wanting iApps to be written in the "entirely open HTML5". Apple aren't stupid, and they're not about to promote a store full of software which can run on any competing platform.
So does img.
And years 4 to 9 of the web were awash with huge imagemaps which everyone hated and which were soon replaced with smarter HTML as people accepted that an img was for an image, not for intelligence. Canvas is just a return to the bad old days.
Besides, what does canvas have to do with this? This would be about video vs Flash, and video is even more just another kind of img.
video is a not entirely insane tag, but it appears in HTML5 with the baggage of debates about video formats and canvas and other things which no-one's going to implement fully and uniformly.
In the mean time, Flash is far from modular.
It's as modular as you pretend HTML can be, i.e. you could make a non-conforming implementation leaving out as many features as you want.
also happens to be the single biggest attack vector
Bullcrap. The browsers themselves are the single biggest attack vectors, and more complexity in basic HTML is inviting more attack vectors. The greatest problem is the fundamentally broken design of HTML-as-app-delivery which allows so many vulnerabilities from sneakily malformed inputs/uploads to XSS attacks to multiple opportunities for information disclosure, etc.
[SVG] WTF does this have to do with Hulu?
Maybe Hulu can see that the painful bloat of HTML5, which won't be fully or even mostly implemented by major browsers, isn't worth considering - even if there's one or two features they could try employing.
While you're at it, how do I get local SQL storage in SVG?
Suddenly, a strawman.
How about a simple, efficient motion blur effect?
Argh. I wish I could go back to TBL in 1994 and say, "You know what this simple, effective mark-up language is missing? A built-in simple, efficient motion blur effect."
and no you can not write a better one or it would have been done.
Obvious fallacy. 2/10.
Until you come back with an IEEE or RFC# where it states that adobe is a standard
Until you can come back with a Commandment from God stating that the IEEE or IETF approval are necessary and sufficient before something is labelled "standard", etc etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember a time when Americans would be bothered by being detained by any government official for more than 0 minutes. Looks like consent's been well manufactured in you.
Dammit, Yvan, you follow me with bad jokes like a stubborn dingleberry.
Flood the news with trivial stories which cause people to stop taking him seriously?
In other news, BROWN LEAVES HOTEL.
If the goal was to end the "mainstream Cold War" at all costs, he could have bombed Moscow and started a nuclear holocaust.
As it happens, he didn't do anything quite as bad, but he did the give the world something worse than the Cold War.
That's a fairly accurate summary of the pompous attitude at Google: "We're so smart that if we fuck up it must be someone else's fault." Its spokestroll didn't even say, "The specs are hard to read and we are too self-confident to ask for clarification on the official MS developer forums," instead bitching about some unfair advantage for Microsoft which isn't even properly specified. Let me tell you a spec so convoluted that no-one has ever written a full implementation of a recent incarnation: the W3C's HTML. The difference is that web site designers all test in multiple browsers, whereas document creators don't have the time to test in multiple Office suites.
Guess what? A higher degree and a good canteen don't necessarily make you smart (I'm sure many of us can attest to that :)), nor do they make you able or willing to understand communications from fellow humans. Not invented here!
Hindsight cannot rationally be considered in deciding whether some decision was asinine. A fool is someone who ignores or misjudges available data rather than data which does not exist.
I know it's easy as an American in 2010 to think that war is something which happens "over there" with buttons and rockets, but when your (France, Britain) population has been through the Great War not 20 years before, of course you want to avoid war again. Better to ask: how would Europe have developed through the 20th century if its countries were as trigger-happy as your idea of hindsight would want them to be? If, at each opportunity for war, they'd forgotten how horrible it was the previous time?
Now it could be argued that Britain/France "could have done more" during the Phoney War - I mean, things go really well and quick when you roll in with all guns blazing, as US in Afghanistan and Iraq - but you're wrong. To give some examples:
1. The French Saar offensive began on 7 September.
2. HMS Courageous was sunk on 17 September.
3. The Luftwaffe attacked warships in Scotland from 16 October, with casualties on both sides.
Hindsight's always about how obvious it is that the evil foetus should have been aborted in the first trimester, isn't it?
50%. Decades of FARC border skirmishes and difficult diplomacy after the US installs military bases in Colombia to "help in the fight against rebels and drug traffickers" (uhuh) != Chavez invading Colombia.
Yes, Venezuela is more sympathetic toward FARC than the US, pointing out the hypocrisy of labelling them terrorists and negotiating for release of hostages rather than "hurr bomb them all!". In similar logic, the US invaded England because it did nothing about American support for the Provisional IRA and Clinton helped push the Good Friday agreements.
Contrast this with South America, which is populated by 3 types of people: un-educated peasants, druglords, and warlords.
Oh, at least 4! You're forgetting the resident agents of the appropriate US government department who've spent the past 50+ years trying to keep them that way.
I see your crushing, err, Google search and raise you an article by Krugman on Reagan's legacy.
What are you doing on Slashdot when you should be in Venezuela mandatorily fighting Chavez?
Jokes would happen during and after recent retirement, being 2001 (remembering that we're talking space science timescales, not Internet meme timescales). By the third week of 2003, 40% of US space shuttles had been destroyed, even while old timers were still tediously proclaiming US victory over the evil Reds.
SFC would have had a stronger argument if he'd mentioned technical and bureaucratic US space programme fuck-ups in general, rather than just the shuttle... no-one said it was easy, but you don't deserve any slack when you start claiming that you're better than everyone else.
Pop quiz:
Britain declared war on Germany ___ days after the German invasion of Poland.
Venezuela has invaded ___ allies of the US.
I wonder why...
Because he's an awful editor.
It makes you uncomfortable that he seems to have a point, doesn't it?
His point being what?
Could kdawson's opinion be any more obvious?
It has whatever responsibility it's told its shareholders that it has, which isn't necessarily profit at all costs - or even profit, strictly.
Regardless, "I had to kill him - someone paid me to do it and I can't go back on my contract!" doesn't cut it.
Like Apple with OS X a decade ago, once you've got your start, you stop pretending to be "different" and caring for the developer community, and cater to your real revenue generators: in this case, the carriers.
(1) It's perfectly common in British English to omit "to be" in that instance (not "are"). American? 0/1
(2) No points for trying to simplify what I said then castigating me for not saying something else. I chose "privacy policies" because these contain the chatter people ignore when they see "free stuff!" - especially as students ignorant of workplace law. 0/1
The problem is not that people aren't concerned about their privacy - try walking in on any Facebook user while he/she is taking a shower - the problem is that they don't really consider the wording and implications of the privacy policies of organisations they're giving their data to.
(3) The comma has a purpose here: to make it clear that you're targeting all young crowds rather than just the ones "who grow up thinking...". If I were writing prose for somewhere more important than an Interweb discussion board then I'd probably either change the sentence structure to employ an obvious introductory clause or remove the subordinate entirely and apply a semicolon. Although TBH I'd make it my duty to employ the comma splice to irk you. 0.5/1
In conclusion,,, I'd award you 0.5/3 were you not posting AC. Did I correct your grammar in some previous post? Were you lurking in the shadows to get me back? Your attempt seemed fairly desperate :-).
Tanstaafl, indeed. And that's the lesson Google doesn't want you to learn.
I guess it's like Facebook: target the young crowds, who then grow up thinking privacy policies unimportant when they enter the workplace.
FWIW, I knew a guy at school who was investigated by British police about 14 years ago for downloading manuals like this and being involved with a group of people involved in distributing such material and building shit for kicks... a Bachelors and a Masters later, he is now working at the Ministry of Defence (the UK DoD) as a strategist.
This doesn't surprise me at all. He was a fairly bright chap - though nothing spectacular - but his heart remained that of a pathological kid who liked pain and blowing shit up. The military want a monopoly on that sort of person; they'll either catch you when they can mould you, or get rid of you.
Moreover, you haven't demonstrated it to be false -- it may be difficult to implement. HTML5 evidently is not.
It is not necessary to prove any random assertion false in order for it to not be true. As you've said, there's more interest in implementing W3C specs than Adobe specs. Still, HTML5 has 0 complete implementations, and Flash has 1.
but that doesn't tell me whether or not they're allowed to read the specs yet
Oh dear; I was hoping that you'd take the hint and look it up. Effective May 1, 2008, Adobe removed the entire licensing agreement from the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications. These licensing restrictions had meant that no one could build software that would "play" SWF content.
[existence of non-Adobe incomplete Flash implementations] Citation needed.
You are lazy. I'll give you three which take about 15 seconds to find on the web, and you can do the job of finding three more (hint: I could find 5 with a cursory search, and the 6th is fairly obscure; I'd already heard of 5). The most well-known incomplete implementation is gnash. Scaleform is a commercial implementation with hardware acceleration. Swfdec is a fairly amateur implementation which has been mostly abandoned.
It actually looks like they just care about DRM, and would use HTML5 if it had the appropriate features.
It looks like good-enough DRM on a platform which actually exists and is successfully in production is one of the things they care about, yes.
Otherwise, your rant here makes no sense in light of the native iPhone client they have planned.
Is that an HTML5-based iPhone client? If not, what's your point?
For example, contrary to your claim, HTML5 does seem mostly implemented by the browsers I'm using. What's missing?
You really are lazy.
I never said that you claimed SVG supports local SQL storage
You're making arguments in response to the strawman argument that "SVG is a suitable replacement for HTML5". I was arguing for SVG in the context of canvas, it was obvious that I was arguing for SVG in the context of canvas, and you were being deliberately obtuse because it felt good to you to so boldly tear down an argument which hadn't been made.
To fake it on top of SVG (or HTML), you'd have to create separate elements behind the element that's moving, and be careful to disable all events on those so they can't be interacted with, and remove them when you're done
If only you could group elements in SVG. If only there were a generic way to add filters in SVG, and that could be used, say, to produce motion blur. The problem with SVG is that you have to read the spec instead of canvas where everyone can be lazy and reimplement his own way.
You can abuse anything, so the fact that a tool can be abused is no reason to avoid it. (I doubt I'd like an entire website in Canvas much better than an entire website in Flash.)
The whole point here being that canvas and most of its HTML5 friends are no better in principle than Flash, and (currently) are worse in practice.
I'm done with this thread. I appreciate that you're at least responding, but your lack of effort at researching most basic points is too frustrating. Thanks.
Have they actually opened the spec to the point where third-party players are feasible?
Yes. A lot of your argument is based on making a random assumption and then arguing on the basis that the assumption is true, and this is your first instance.
That could just be that Gnash sucks, it could just be that everyone already has Flash, and it could be that everyone's focused on HTML5. But it could also be because it's a hard spec to implement
Second instance.
"Full" or not, it has multiple working, competing implementations, and many cross-browser demos on top of it.
There are half a dozen working, competing, incomplete implementations of Flash, and many fully fledged production cross-browser apps on top of it.
Now why would Chrome, Firefox, even IE participate in something that's merely "Apple's troll"? Any credibility you had till this point is pretty much gone.
In brief, because they're web browsers, and their remit is to implement W3C's HTML spec, not to write it. Other motives include Google's dream of holding all your data and serving everything via Javascript. MS, as usual, is just paying lip service in the hope of preserving browser marketshare.
Well, that or using the entirely open HTML5. See how that works?
No, not at all. I don't see lots of iApps being written in the "entirely open HTML5", and I don't see Apple showing any sign of wanting iApps to be written in the "entirely open HTML5". Apple aren't stupid, and they're not about to promote a store full of software which can run on any competing platform.
So does img.
And years 4 to 9 of the web were awash with huge imagemaps which everyone hated and which were soon replaced with smarter HTML as people accepted that an img was for an image, not for intelligence. Canvas is just a return to the bad old days.
Besides, what does canvas have to do with this? This would be about video vs Flash, and video is even more just another kind of img.
video is a not entirely insane tag, but it appears in HTML5 with the baggage of debates about video formats and canvas and other things which no-one's going to implement fully and uniformly.
In the mean time, Flash is far from modular.
It's as modular as you pretend HTML can be, i.e. you could make a non-conforming implementation leaving out as many features as you want.
also happens to be the single biggest attack vector
Bullcrap. The browsers themselves are the single biggest attack vectors, and more complexity in basic HTML is inviting more attack vectors. The greatest problem is the fundamentally broken design of HTML-as-app-delivery which allows so many vulnerabilities from sneakily malformed inputs/uploads to XSS attacks to multiple opportunities for information disclosure, etc.
[SVG] WTF does this have to do with Hulu?
Maybe Hulu can see that the painful bloat of HTML5, which won't be fully or even mostly implemented by major browsers, isn't worth considering - even if there's one or two features they could try employing.
While you're at it, how do I get local SQL storage in SVG?
Suddenly, a strawman.
How about a simple, efficient motion blur effect?
Argh. I wish I could go back to TBL in 1994 and say, "You know what this simple, effective mark-up language is missing? A built-in simple, efficient motion blur effect."
and no you can not write a better one or it would have been done.
Obvious fallacy. 2/10.
Until you come back with an IEEE or RFC# where it states that adobe is a standard
Until you can come back with a Commandment from God stating that the IEEE or IETF approval are necessary and sufficient before something is labelled "standard", etc etc.