I wanted something like this for quite a while, except my primary use cases are for preventing inactivity-related actions: 1) don't lock the screen if I'm still at the computer, regardless of the inactivity timeout; and 2) don't dim the screen if I'm looking at it. I'm probably reading and I like the brightness level just the way it is.
The iPhone and iPad notwithstanding, Flash is beginning to show up on other mobile device platforms.
Exactly 1 single other platform : Android. All the rest are only promises for some time in the future.
Both you and the article author are somewhat misinformed. Flash has been running on mobile platforms for quite a while, albeit in the form of Flash Lite, which is not on par with the desktop version.
My 4-year old Nokia N80 can run older Flash content from the web (I think up to Flash 7), but more importantly it runs "phone applications" written in Flash.
You're of course correct with the rest of your arguments -- I'm not too fond of Flash myself.
All I can say is a subjective "smooth enough". And it's been actually supported for quite a while by all major browsers except IE. And IE9 will come with hardware-accelerated canvas (it was covered on/. not long ago), and Firefox has it partially working in trunk.
Re:Getting ready for the MS bash
on
Recomputing the Sky
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Playing devil's advocate -- it's pretty trivial to make a Silverlight interface to pan and zoom around a giant image like this. It's less trivial to do the same thing with, say, JavaScript or Flash.
Actually you're trolling more than playing devil's advocate. There's a sh*tload of zoom & pan-enabled image viewing libraries, both in JS and Flash, all using tiles just like Silverlight -- try to google some.
And for that matter it's trivial to DIY from scratch using canvas, which of course IE conveniently doesn't support, but that problem was solved too long ago. OpenLayers, which you might have seen at work at OpenStreetMap, includes a VML rendering backend, besides canvas and SVG.
The really funny part about your "advocating" is that MS has an Ajax library that does exactly the same thing as its Silverlight counterpart: http://www.seadragon.com/developer/ajax/
People still don't get it, however. The WePad thinks it can compete with the iPad with hardware features but will run Linux... which is a server or desktop OS.
You mean Linux... which is a server, or supercomputer, or desktop, or laptop, or netbook, router, TV, camera, handheld, media player, embedded device, [...] OS.
A very long time ago it was a server OS. Now it can be tailored for everything, and it is everywhere. Except on toasters I guess, those are BSDs.
Don't confuse the kernel with the graphics / widget libraries. Which by the way are cheerfully getting to that level of adaptability as well.
ROFL, wait, so you're defending Firefox's idiotic stance while, simultaneously, actively attempting to work around it? Hypocritical much?
No, I'm defending Firefox's stance because it's moral, and branding it a lost cause doesn't make it idiotic. And no, I'm working around Flash, as I have before with http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/50771
Nice straw man though. Maybe I should pull a Godwin on you: joining the German Resistance was obviously idiotic, right?
As far as non-Windows users are concerned, the most painful problem is Flash being crap for video playback, and the fix for that is one add-on or greasemonkey script away.
That's not a fix. That's a hack to work around the Firefox devs. But if you're happy with a degraded browsing experience because Mozilla can't get their heads out of their collective ideological asses, that's your choice. The rest of us will just move on and find a project that gives users the option to make their own choices, as opposed to dictating to them from on high.
Please do. In case you haven't figured out, you're 100% free to switch to a different browser, or fork Firefox and port the Fennec changes you seem so familiar with. Would you now please let "the rest of us" make our own choices too?
No, garbage is saying the war is over
What war? You really think Firefox choosing to hobble their browser is gonna somehow change the software patent landscape? Please, get real. The users will move on, baffled by Firefox's stance, and Mozilla will achieve nothing while damaging their own reputation in the process.
I hope you do realise you sound like a desperate guy ditched by his girlfriend, who's screaming out loud how his life will be great without her, while she'll suffer like hell because he was the best thing that ever happened to her...
Lieber Herr Gott mach mich stumm Daß ich nicht nach Dachau komm.
If the world embraces HTML 5 video overnight and everybody and their dog switches to Chrome because of its h264 support, it's already too late.
Yes, but the "overnight" part gives them slack to rock the boat some.
If they're playing a game of brinkmanship, it's a dangerous game. If they take it too far they're done, and they won't be able to raise awareness about ANY of the issues they care about. Patents are important, but I'm not sure H264 is the issue to push it on.
Maybe, but (IMO) it's not that dangerous -- not until IE9 is about to ship, anyway.
About other issues they want to raise awareness about, I come short trying to find others as important. The browser wars are on again, and this time with more and stronger players. IE is going standards-compliant for fear of irrelevance, the EU spanked MS hard (10 years too late), and Google is here to stay... So you could say they already did their job wonderfully on that front.
but they're choosing not to implement it for strictly ideological reasons.
Yes.
Hell, did you even read the description of the addon?
Guess what, I'm using it.
lose all the integrated DOM support, video overlays, and all the other crap that makes the video element superior to straight object embedding.
And the sites using those features are... http://people.mozilla.com/~prouget/demos/round/index.xhtml ? As far as non-Windows users are concerned, the most painful problem is Flash being crap for video playback, and the fix for that is one add-on or greasemonkey script away.
Please, that's garbage. The battle is lost.
The battle may be lost, but that doesn't change a thing. No, garbage is saying the war is over, and then crying foul when someone else has the balls to take a stand.
Problem is, the Firefox devs decided they don't want to do that for political reasons, and so Fennec's implementation won't be ported to Firefox. Thank you asshole developers!
I rather suspect they decided to not do that *right now* for political reasons.
Right now html5 video is not widespread, and their purpose is still chewing at the IE marketshare. If the world embraces html5 video overnight and everybody and their dog switches to Chrome because of its h264 support, you can be damn sure they'll fold. The same if IE9 comes out with html5 support.
Right now they have nothing to worry about (except maybe inconveniencing some foul-mouthed slashdot poster that can't be bothered to search for solutions, e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/83149/ ).
So as long as there's no real threat of pushing Firefox towards irrelevance, *now* is the right time to make a stand and raise awareness about how detrimental patents are to free software. Thank you, developers with a backbone!
This is really cool until you find yourself trying to log in from the same access point where somebody with a virus was attached earlier in the day. Better to just use crypto (key-based authentication only) and rate-limiting.
You can mitigate that with knockd. Or if you're paranoid enough stick to knockd all the way...
I for one left password authentication enabled in sshd, and made all user passwords unusable (passwd -l). Let the bots have their fun and waste time.
The only improvement to this would be fail2ban with a tarpit rule...
Certainly under linux ram used as disk cache is marked "free".
No, it's marked as "cached". Try `free -m` in the command line: the "free" column reports the _real_ free memory. Many new Windows converts fall for that and go berserk about why their machine eats up all RAM, failing to read the 2nd line that presents the free memory including buffers/cache.
It was high time Windows started caching data from disk more aggressively, but if it starts swapping because of that, they obviously got it wrong.
Blah, blah straight out of the *AA indoctrination manual. BitTorrent facilitates piracy. Control over the content you buy facilitates piracy. Control over your hardware facilitates piracy.
Got news for you: crossing the street facilitates getting run over by a car. Drinking water facilitates choking to death. Guns facilitate... you get the point.
Of course jail-breaking facilitates piracy, because it facilitates freedom. And freedom of the little person facilitates corporations making less profit. You see, when the customer is in control you have to do things deeply annoying to your shareholders, like staying competitive without vendor lock-in, spending money on R&D, and providing quality products.
For some freedom-loving nerds, the iPhone is a quality product only if they can do whatever they please with it, not what the turtle-necked Jesus dictates. Hardware-wise it's an excellent product, but that doesn't change the fact that it's artificially crippled to maximise profits.
One app at a time, lack of bluetooth profiles that could be available in software, locked tethering, impossibility to install whatever application you wish, impossibility to use whatever application you want on your computer to access the device, the list goes on. Some people find such artificial crippling just as unethical as IP piracy. But hey, screw ethics, right?
There's two sides to every story. Watch this piece of reporting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PbFeIxrilI -- Don't you start feeling for that guy? Don't you hope he gets rescued? Well, it's the same priest that got the Darwin Award, so how is this possible? Moments ago you were amused by his idiocy...
Of course the video comes packaged in church marketing, so it's supposed to make you feel like that. But would you still call him an idiot? Or rather a stupid but noble man?
I for one would call him naive. Naive for the cause he chose, naive thinking he'll be alright after getting drifted away, naive not bailing out when he had the opportunity. And that got him killed, but he didn't give up because he thought his cause was just.
Maybe we should take pride in such naivety, instead of branding it as utter idiocy.
Asus came up with a nice hack on their EeePC dubbed "Boot Booster". It dumps the system state right after POST on a HDD partition, and on subsequent boots it reads that straight into memory, so you have 1-second "POSTs" going straight to the bootloader.
And then you have coreboot, which is as fast as the machine it runs on: without taking any shortcuts, it can do all the grunt work in 3 seconds or so.
Maybe the breakthrough is Windows booting fast, but that's a different story.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or trolling, but I'll bite:
I've been sitting my ass on mobiles for 10 years. That's all my phones except my first brick of a Sony, that couldn't fit in my backpocket.
Out of all the perverted treatment I subjected my phones to, the only one that got hurt was an Ericsson T28: its screen got cracked when I slipped on ice and landed on my ass. That's my full weight landing on a thin glass+electronics+thin metal/plastic shell, and the phone was still working but the LCD was barely readable.
Compare that to 2 out of 6 iPhone owners I know -- they got their screens cracked: one vibrated itself off a table, and the other one got dropped on concrete. I know I've dropped my phones many-a-times from varying heights, and none got hurt. Probably because other manufacturers build their devices for real-world use, and test them as such: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zES6byXbOaE -- jump to about 6:00 and witness the bending test, aka ass-sitting-on-cellphone-test.
Does Apple test the iThingies like that? Do they bake them to unbearable temperatures? Probably not, because this looks like a design flaw easily uncovered with a bit of prodding/bending/overheating.
Slashdot Mirror
What alternative do you propose?
Password Hasher: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3282/
No, like most people who say that ... he only supports someone else's information being made public.
Anthropomorphising governments and corporations, are we?
I wanted something like this for quite a while, except my primary use cases are for preventing inactivity-related actions: 1) don't lock the screen if I'm still at the computer, regardless of the inactivity timeout; and 2) don't dim the screen if I'm looking at it. I'm probably reading and I like the brightness level just the way it is.
The iPhone and iPad notwithstanding, Flash is beginning to show up on other mobile device platforms.
Exactly 1 single other platform : Android. All the rest are only promises for some time in the future.
Both you and the article author are somewhat misinformed. Flash has been running on mobile platforms for quite a while, albeit in the form of Flash Lite, which is not on par with the desktop version.
My 4-year old Nokia N80 can run older Flash content from the web (I think up to Flash 7), but more importantly it runs "phone applications" written in Flash.
You're of course correct with the rest of your arguments -- I'm not too fond of Flash myself.
All I can say is a subjective "smooth enough". And it's been actually supported for quite a while by all major browsers except IE. And IE9 will come with hardware-accelerated canvas (it was covered on /. not long ago), and Firefox has it partially working in trunk.
Playing devil's advocate -- it's pretty trivial to make a Silverlight interface to pan and zoom around a giant image like this. It's less trivial to do the same thing with, say, JavaScript or Flash.
Actually you're trolling more than playing devil's advocate. There's a sh*tload of zoom & pan-enabled image viewing libraries, both in JS and Flash, all using tiles just like Silverlight -- try to google some.
And for that matter it's trivial to DIY from scratch using canvas, which of course IE conveniently doesn't support, but that problem was solved too long ago. OpenLayers, which you might have seen at work at OpenStreetMap, includes a VML rendering backend, besides canvas and SVG.
The really funny part about your "advocating" is that MS has an Ajax library that does exactly the same thing as its Silverlight counterpart: http://www.seadragon.com/developer/ajax/
Now there's an interesting idea. Someone should code a botnet that only downloads and shares copyrighted content, nothing else malicious.
The "metaserver" can be just a tracker. And if you're scared of a central server needed for authentication, look no further than kerberos.
People still don't get it, however. The WePad thinks it can compete with the iPad with hardware features but will run Linux... which is a server or desktop OS.
You mean Linux... which is a server, or supercomputer, or desktop, or laptop, or netbook, router, TV, camera, handheld, media player, embedded device, [...] OS.
A very long time ago it was a server OS. Now it can be tailored for everything, and it is everywhere. Except on toasters I guess, those are BSDs.
Don't confuse the kernel with the graphics / widget libraries. Which by the way are cheerfully getting to that level of adaptability as well.
Guess what, I'm using it.
ROFL, wait, so you're defending Firefox's idiotic stance while, simultaneously, actively attempting to work around it? Hypocritical much?
No, I'm defending Firefox's stance because it's moral, and branding it a lost cause doesn't make it idiotic. And no, I'm working around Flash, as I have before with http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/50771
Nice straw man though. Maybe I should pull a Godwin on you: joining the German Resistance was obviously idiotic, right?
As far as non-Windows users are concerned, the most painful problem is Flash being crap for video playback, and the fix for that is one add-on or greasemonkey script away.
That's not a fix. That's a hack to work around the Firefox devs. But if you're happy with a degraded browsing experience because Mozilla can't get their heads out of their collective ideological asses, that's your choice. The rest of us will just move on and find a project that gives users the option to make their own choices, as opposed to dictating to them from on high.
Please do. In case you haven't figured out, you're 100% free to switch to a different browser, or fork Firefox and port the Fennec changes you seem so familiar with. Would you now please let "the rest of us" make our own choices too?
No, garbage is saying the war is over
What war? You really think Firefox choosing to hobble their browser is gonna somehow change the software patent landscape? Please, get real. The users will move on, baffled by Firefox's stance, and Mozilla will achieve nothing while damaging their own reputation in the process.
I hope you do realise you sound like a desperate guy ditched by his girlfriend, who's screaming out loud how his life will be great without her, while she'll suffer like hell because he was the best thing that ever happened to her...
Lieber Herr Gott mach mich stumm
Daß ich nicht nach Dachau komm.
If the world embraces HTML 5 video overnight and everybody and their dog switches to Chrome because of its h264 support, it's already too late.
Yes, but the "overnight" part gives them slack to rock the boat some.
If they're playing a game of brinkmanship, it's a dangerous game. If they take it too far they're done, and they won't be able to raise awareness about ANY of the issues they care about. Patents are important, but I'm not sure H264 is the issue to push it on.
Maybe, but (IMO) it's not that dangerous -- not until IE9 is about to ship, anyway.
About other issues they want to raise awareness about, I come short trying to find others as important. The browser wars are on again, and this time with more and stronger players. IE is going standards-compliant for fear of irrelevance, the EU spanked MS hard (10 years too late), and Google is here to stay... So you could say they already did their job wonderfully on that front.
but they're choosing not to implement it for strictly ideological reasons.
Yes.
Hell, did you even read the description of the addon?
Guess what, I'm using it.
lose all the integrated DOM support, video overlays, and all the other crap that makes the video element superior to straight object embedding.
And the sites using those features are... http://people.mozilla.com/~prouget/demos/round/index.xhtml ? As far as non-Windows users are concerned, the most painful problem is Flash being crap for video playback, and the fix for that is one add-on or greasemonkey script away.
Please, that's garbage. The battle is lost.
The battle may be lost, but that doesn't change a thing. No, garbage is saying the war is over, and then crying foul when someone else has the balls to take a stand.
Problem is, the Firefox devs decided they don't want to do that for political reasons, and so Fennec's implementation won't be ported to Firefox. Thank you asshole developers!
I rather suspect they decided to not do that *right now* for political reasons.
Right now html5 video is not widespread, and their purpose is still chewing at the IE marketshare. If the world embraces html5 video overnight and everybody and their dog switches to Chrome because of its h264 support, you can be damn sure they'll fold. The same if IE9 comes out with html5 support.
Right now they have nothing to worry about (except maybe inconveniencing some foul-mouthed slashdot poster that can't be bothered to search for solutions, e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/83149/ ).
So as long as there's no real threat of pushing Firefox towards irrelevance, *now* is the right time to make a stand and raise awareness about how detrimental patents are to free software. Thank you, developers with a backbone!
It's hosted on yahoo servers. That's more than unfortunate... it's sad.
This is really cool until you find yourself trying to log in from the same access point where somebody with a virus was attached earlier in the day. Better to just use crypto (key-based authentication only) and rate-limiting.
You can mitigate that with knockd. Or if you're paranoid enough stick to knockd all the way...
I for one left password authentication enabled in sshd, and made all user passwords unusable (passwd -l). Let the bots have their fun and waste time.
The only improvement to this would be fail2ban with a tarpit rule...
Certainly under linux ram used as disk cache is marked "free".
No, it's marked as "cached". Try `free -m` in the command line: the "free" column reports the _real_ free memory. Many new Windows converts fall for that and go berserk about why their machine eats up all RAM, failing to read the 2nd line that presents the free memory including buffers/cache.
It was high time Windows started caching data from disk more aggressively, but if it starts swapping because of that, they obviously got it wrong.
The new market is hot. D'oh.
Jail-breaking facilitates piracy
Blah, blah straight out of the *AA indoctrination manual. BitTorrent facilitates piracy. Control over the content you buy facilitates piracy. Control over your hardware facilitates piracy.
Got news for you: crossing the street facilitates getting run over by a car. Drinking water facilitates choking to death. Guns facilitate... you get the point.
Of course jail-breaking facilitates piracy, because it facilitates freedom. And freedom of the little person facilitates corporations making less profit. You see, when the customer is in control you have to do things deeply annoying to your shareholders, like staying competitive without vendor lock-in, spending money on R&D, and providing quality products.
For some freedom-loving nerds, the iPhone is a quality product only if they can do whatever they please with it, not what the turtle-necked Jesus dictates. Hardware-wise it's an excellent product, but that doesn't change the fact that it's artificially crippled to maximise profits.
One app at a time, lack of bluetooth profiles that could be available in software, locked tethering, impossibility to install whatever application you wish, impossibility to use whatever application you want on your computer to access the device, the list goes on. Some people find such artificial crippling just as unethical as IP piracy. But hey, screw ethics, right?
Slashdot needs a "Troll +1" mod, so people can learn to recognize such wonderful red herring mastery.
There's two sides to every story. Watch this piece of reporting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PbFeIxrilI -- Don't you start feeling for that guy? Don't you hope he gets rescued? Well, it's the same priest that got the Darwin Award, so how is this possible? Moments ago you were amused by his idiocy...
Of course the video comes packaged in church marketing, so it's supposed to make you feel like that. But would you still call him an idiot? Or rather a stupid but noble man?
I for one would call him naive. Naive for the cause he chose, naive thinking he'll be alright after getting drifted away, naive not bailing out when he had the opportunity. And that got him killed, but he didn't give up because he thought his cause was just.
Maybe we should take pride in such naivety, instead of branding it as utter idiocy.
Maybe you should refrain from such comments until you learn the difference between let's and lets...
This is hardly some major breakthrough.
Asus came up with a nice hack on their EeePC dubbed "Boot Booster". It dumps the system state right after POST on a HDD partition, and on subsequent boots it reads that straight into memory, so you have 1-second "POSTs" going straight to the bootloader.
And then you have coreboot, which is as fast as the machine it runs on: without taking any shortcuts, it can do all the grunt work in 3 seconds or so.
Maybe the breakthrough is Windows booting fast, but that's a different story.
Do Kensington locks on macbooks feature a magsafe connector?
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or trolling, but I'll bite:
I've been sitting my ass on mobiles for 10 years. That's all my phones except my first brick of a Sony, that couldn't fit in my backpocket.
Out of all the perverted treatment I subjected my phones to, the only one that got hurt was an Ericsson T28: its screen got cracked when I slipped on ice and landed on my ass. That's my full weight landing on a thin glass+electronics+thin metal/plastic shell, and the phone was still working but the LCD was barely readable.
Compare that to 2 out of 6 iPhone owners I know -- they got their screens cracked: one vibrated itself off a table, and the other one got dropped on concrete. I know I've dropped my phones many-a-times from varying heights, and none got hurt. Probably because other manufacturers build their devices for real-world use, and test them as such: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zES6byXbOaE -- jump to about 6:00 and witness the bending test, aka ass-sitting-on-cellphone-test.
Does Apple test the iThingies like that? Do they bake them to unbearable temperatures? Probably not, because this looks like a design flaw easily uncovered with a bit of prodding/bending/overheating.
No, 1GB of RAM means in fact 1GiB, because everything memory-related works in powers of 2.