Oh, and the truth is I think the idea of WebGL is a very good one. I'd really like to see sites where there is just one canvas tag with a script injecting WebGL into it. The thing is I've tried the samples, I've played with it, and it was a terrible experience. The sole defamer of WebGL is JavaScript. JavaScript is a text language, really everything is text and that is right down to the fact that you can change the text of the script while the script is running ["feature"?]. GLES is a very binary/data oriented experience and that just did not translate well to JavaScript at all. On top of that FireBug just can't deal with WebGL scripts at the moment. Maybe all this will change, but how many more years is that going to take? I want 3D web apps now.
I also love OpenGL. I've been using it since I was 16. I'm a little dissatisfied with how Khronos is dealing with it in some respects, but in others I'm quite happy. GLES 2.0 in particular I like a lot - I like the control it gives me and I love how quickly the world has embraced it.
I used to hate Flash too, but then I realized Adobe really did an excellent job with ActionScript3 and the compiler, API, and a lot of tools are completely free (as in beer). AS3 as a language is much more powerful than JavaScript and it has many less issues. On top of that AS3 had noticably faster communication time for XHR when making a ton of tiny parallel requests. And don't think I'm just bad with JavaScript, I've done a lot of it and at times have found it a very good tool for the job (I wrote the SpinShot script and JavaScript was and is the superior solution: http://spinshot.info./
I found all this out just as I was having a terrible time trying to get an SNS game working in JavaScript/HTML5. The client wanted it to run on iPhone as well as on the desktop and also wanted IE compatibility - so that meant a lot of fall-backs. A month in the whole thing was a disaster - massive massive amounts of code and everything looked and acted different on different browsers despite the fact we were using canvas. Oh and the iPhone just didn't work because you couldn't drag properly unless you jumped through all sorts of ridiculous "because it's Apple" hoops. Our designer, who uses Adobe stuff, somehow ran across someone posting on a forum they were using the "free" mxmlc compiler to do raw AS3. I grabbed it, popped open VIM, did hello world, figured out some compiler flags and threw together a Makefile with local-debugging and release profiles, and spent the weekend porting the application (on Ubuntu x64!). Not only did it work gorgeously but AS3 has much more robust OO and the language is a lot more streamlined so I was able to decompose the code much more efficiently, break it up into more files and have more logical objects, and deal with image affines and other things with native object features. I ported the whole thing in a weekend and it ran better, was easier to understand, and debugging was much more solid process.
The thing is the client wanted iPhone, so I asked my designer about that and he informed me there were tools to port Flash applications to iPhone apps. I called the client, showed her the JavaScript version and the Flash version, explained about the iPhone and how we would have to port which we had not done so we didn't know about the complexity. She chose Flash, we finished way sooner than we expected, and the whole experience really opened my eyes as to why so many web apps use Flash. You are doing yourself a disservice if you don't check it out. The client ended up not wanting an iPhone app so we never actually did port it but we're about to do just that in a few weeks with an in-house SNS app so we'll see how that goes.
I don't like that flash is proprietary, I don't like that it isn't even fully open standard, but I also need to make money an I need to code quickly and efficiently. The truth is there are more users with Flash than there are with capable HTML5 browsers. Flash runs on Android now, including 3D, and the 3D is actually impressively smooth (we're testing on the Galapagos phone). On top of that is Air, which you can use to make your Flash apps into full desktop software that is fully cross platform AND runs on Android and can be sold as an app in the market. Open or not Adobe has saved me time and made me money all while delivering a fairly nice development experience - and it didn't cost me anything.
Actually I started coding OpenGL on an SGI octane well before it was considered a consumer technology and I understand it quite well. I've written many applications using OpenGL and have written quite a few things with GLES 1 and 2. I do like GLES, I don't like GLES in JavaScript because as a language JavaScript really is terrible. It's slow, the context of "this" can sometimes change randomly, it's terrible at dealing with binary data and it runs differently on everything.
I do use firebug and it easily the best tool for debugging but that doesn't change the fact that there are much better debuggers for other languages. And I do know how XHR works and I use JSON.
Don't just assume I'm an idiot because I have an opinion. Maybe you should go download the mxmlc compiler and actually check out Away3D and compare what you have there to any tool in WebGL/JavaScript. I write ActionScript3 in vim and use makefiles to compile it by the way.
Adobe Molehill, the new accelerated 3D architecture for Flash and Flex basically does the same things.
Are we also supposed to write WebGL games with notepad?
I've tried out WebGL several times now and I can tell you it's disgusting. JavaScript is a terrible language, the only thing that makes it close to bearable is jQuery but even then you're still dealing with something there is almost no way to efficiently debug, no editor really fully supports, and still doesn't have a full standard or a standard everyone abides by. Imagine writing a full 3D game in JavaScript, somehow getting it to pass data efficiently with AJAX, then opening it up in IE to see it doesn't run at all and then in a WebKit browser only to find random areas are transparent or some of the models are all screwed up. This is exactly what will happen. Seriously, Silverlight+XNA or Flash/Flex are the only real solutions out there. WebGL will be a disaster and trying to code in it will be a waste of your time.
I'm assuming you are American. This is not always the case in other countries and it is certainly not the case here in Japan. Loyalty between company and employee is an important part of our corporate culture and loyal employees are often very well rewarded. There is also the option to jump back and fourth, we call it "haken" and you choose or get chosen for a job you are likely to be good at and work on short term contracts. The downside to haken is that you don't get raises or benefits and after a few years will be getting less than your corporate employee counterparts.
Hah, I'm Japanese with an American father living in Japan. Sometimes it bothers me when people assume I'm some dipshit foreigner but it's never really been a problem. Still, the racism is natural and I share it. All the time I see foreigners do things that are just not societally acceptable - they act like they are exempt from local rules and they can just get away with being obnoxious and discourteous. Some of them do their best to follow customs but most don't - and that image rubs off on "white" me. Of course this also means I get the "play dumb, act foreign" card and people will go out of their way to help me out or let me off the hook if I got in trouble. Still, I'd trust a full blood Japanese any day of the week before a foreigner - surely that's racist but it's also out of personal experience.
Groupon started here in Japan, got real big real quick, then in the period of maybe 2 weeks lost all of their businesses that were worth it and the deals got increasingly worse. From all angles it looked like a fantastic explosion of failure, and it was quickly picked up by news programs that interviewed the businesses that stopped using it. They all said the same thing, "they used overly complicated numbers and tricked us, the experience was terrible and we gained nothing". The businesses that continued to use it said "you need to think of it as an advertising cost - whatever you put out you need to think of as a 100% loss".
Those data samples prove your assumption is correct. Look at how the spots spread out over time (in the sample videos), the size of the spots is the strength of the signal. Triangulate that and if you can take into account geographic and physical features and you'll have a fairly accurate tracking system. Phones in Japan don't usually have GPS but they all have Navi - all the location data is just triangulated from towers.
It's passive reception from the towers being logged on the device - so it would have no effect on aircraft and I'm assuming it would comply with regulations.
Ditto. You can run Ruby in the browser though, just set script type="text/ruby" to be parsed by your native Ruby parser and you're off.... if you can find a way to efficiently interact with the DOM/page...
And it wouldn't be the first. There are ways to run Python and Ruby on the client - in other-words type="text/ruby" can work if the client has it set up correctly. You need to interact with the DOM to do useful things on the page though. There's also the issue of security but it doesn't look like NaTcl has handled that either yet.
Why can students use a calculator on a test to begin with? And a graphing calculator!? Then you're just testing how well they can use the calculator - no wonder Americans suck at math.
I will give you a million dollars if you can produce in HTML5 in a month what I can produce in Flash in a week. Wait, before you even try I'll tell you right now it's impossible - more than half the features you'd need aren't even close to being in the HTML5 standard. The fact is it takes more time to develop iOS apps than it does flash apps - and even though Adobe has done their best to make porting easy it's still a pain in the ass.
Actually "it's just garbage that's marketed well to a bunch of cultists" DOES explain the repeat customers and the high customer satisfaction ratings. It's the same set of marketing phenomens that drive ALL designer brands. Take Lois Vitton for example, they sell brown fake leather (yeah! a lot of Vitton items use fake leather) wallets with the same generic design spray painted in gold for hundreds of dollars. People will line up to buy new items and despite the poor material quality (a Vitton wallet will break down in a few years of normal use - faster than say a cloth wallet) they love the items and swear by the brand name. Obviously you aren't involved in marketing or sales - the fact is there are consumers who buy things based on brand image which has NOTHING to do with quality; and this is the majority of consumers. The "informed consumer" will compare other factors before brand, and it is that "informed consumer" the Android tablets are trying to grab first. Unfortunately the informed consumer may not even be interested in tablets, or they may find the iPad fits their needs and price-point better. This is precisely why Android tablets NEED to be priced lower and they NEED to inform the market in what ways and why Android is the better platform.
So in summary let me rewrite your calculation there: (Garbage OR Good product) + Good Marketing = huge sales.
As long as the screen hinges still work yes. It's even got rubber feet to prevent from slipping whereas your tablet has a curved back which will only encourage spilling.
Slashdot Mirror
They're just putting the thing in their lineup.It's not like they are shelling out to produce the thing.
Oh, and the truth is I think the idea of WebGL is a very good one. I'd really like to see sites where there is just one canvas tag with a script injecting WebGL into it. The thing is I've tried the samples, I've played with it, and it was a terrible experience. The sole defamer of WebGL is JavaScript. JavaScript is a text language, really everything is text and that is right down to the fact that you can change the text of the script while the script is running ["feature"?]. GLES is a very binary/data oriented experience and that just did not translate well to JavaScript at all. On top of that FireBug just can't deal with WebGL scripts at the moment. Maybe all this will change, but how many more years is that going to take? I want 3D web apps now.
I also love OpenGL. I've been using it since I was 16. I'm a little dissatisfied with how Khronos is dealing with it in some respects, but in others I'm quite happy. GLES 2.0 in particular I like a lot - I like the control it gives me and I love how quickly the world has embraced it.
I used to hate Flash too, but then I realized Adobe really did an excellent job with ActionScript3 and the compiler, API, and a lot of tools are completely free (as in beer). AS3 as a language is much more powerful than JavaScript and it has many less issues. On top of that AS3 had noticably faster communication time for XHR when making a ton of tiny parallel requests. And don't think I'm just bad with JavaScript, I've done a lot of it and at times have found it a very good tool for the job (I wrote the SpinShot script and JavaScript was and is the superior solution: http://spinshot.info./
I found all this out just as I was having a terrible time trying to get an SNS game working in JavaScript/HTML5. The client wanted it to run on iPhone as well as on the desktop and also wanted IE compatibility - so that meant a lot of fall-backs. A month in the whole thing was a disaster - massive massive amounts of code and everything looked and acted different on different browsers despite the fact we were using canvas. Oh and the iPhone just didn't work because you couldn't drag properly unless you jumped through all sorts of ridiculous "because it's Apple" hoops. Our designer, who uses Adobe stuff, somehow ran across someone posting on a forum they were using the "free" mxmlc compiler to do raw AS3. I grabbed it, popped open VIM, did hello world, figured out some compiler flags and threw together a Makefile with local-debugging and release profiles, and spent the weekend porting the application (on Ubuntu x64!). Not only did it work gorgeously but AS3 has much more robust OO and the language is a lot more streamlined so I was able to decompose the code much more efficiently, break it up into more files and have more logical objects, and deal with image affines and other things with native object features. I ported the whole thing in a weekend and it ran better, was easier to understand, and debugging was much more solid process.
The thing is the client wanted iPhone, so I asked my designer about that and he informed me there were tools to port Flash applications to iPhone apps. I called the client, showed her the JavaScript version and the Flash version, explained about the iPhone and how we would have to port which we had not done so we didn't know about the complexity. She chose Flash, we finished way sooner than we expected, and the whole experience really opened my eyes as to why so many web apps use Flash. You are doing yourself a disservice if you don't check it out. The client ended up not wanting an iPhone app so we never actually did port it but we're about to do just that in a few weeks with an in-house SNS app so we'll see how that goes.
I don't like that flash is proprietary, I don't like that it isn't even fully open standard, but I also need to make money an I need to code quickly and efficiently. The truth is there are more users with Flash than there are with capable HTML5 browsers. Flash runs on Android now, including 3D, and the 3D is actually impressively smooth (we're testing on the Galapagos phone). On top of that is Air, which you can use to make your Flash apps into full desktop software that is fully cross platform AND runs on Android and can be sold as an app in the market. Open or not Adobe has saved me time and made me money all while delivering a fairly nice development experience - and it didn't cost me anything.
Actually I started coding OpenGL on an SGI octane well before it was considered a consumer technology and I understand it quite well. I've written many applications using OpenGL and have written quite a few things with GLES 1 and 2. I do like GLES, I don't like GLES in JavaScript because as a language JavaScript really is terrible. It's slow, the context of "this" can sometimes change randomly, it's terrible at dealing with binary data and it runs differently on everything.
I do use firebug and it easily the best tool for debugging but that doesn't change the fact that there are much better debuggers for other languages. And I do know how XHR works and I use JSON.
Don't just assume I'm an idiot because I have an opinion. Maybe you should go download the mxmlc compiler and actually check out Away3D and compare what you have there to any tool in WebGL/JavaScript. I write ActionScript3 in vim and use makefiles to compile it by the way.
Oh, and fuck you for wasting my time.
Adobe Molehill, the new accelerated 3D architecture for Flash and Flex basically does the same things.
Are we also supposed to write WebGL games with notepad?
I've tried out WebGL several times now and I can tell you it's disgusting. JavaScript is a terrible language, the only thing that makes it close to bearable is jQuery but even then you're still dealing with something there is almost no way to efficiently debug, no editor really fully supports, and still doesn't have a full standard or a standard everyone abides by. Imagine writing a full 3D game in JavaScript, somehow getting it to pass data efficiently with AJAX, then opening it up in IE to see it doesn't run at all and then in a WebKit browser only to find random areas are transparent or some of the models are all screwed up. This is exactly what will happen. Seriously, Silverlight+XNA or Flash/Flex are the only real solutions out there. WebGL will be a disaster and trying to code in it will be a waste of your time.
I'm assuming you are American. This is not always the case in other countries and it is certainly not the case here in Japan. Loyalty between company and employee is an important part of our corporate culture and loyal employees are often very well rewarded. There is also the option to jump back and fourth, we call it "haken" and you choose or get chosen for a job you are likely to be good at and work on short term contracts. The downside to haken is that you don't get raises or benefits and after a few years will be getting less than your corporate employee counterparts.
Not all Asians are Chinese. Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese etc. have radically different cultures.
I've heard Taiwan is almost culturally closer to Japan than China - perhaps what you say is exemplary of that.
Hah, I'm Japanese with an American father living in Japan. Sometimes it bothers me when people assume I'm some dipshit foreigner but it's never really been a problem. Still, the racism is natural and I share it. All the time I see foreigners do things that are just not societally acceptable - they act like they are exempt from local rules and they can just get away with being obnoxious and discourteous. Some of them do their best to follow customs but most don't - and that image rubs off on "white" me. Of course this also means I get the "play dumb, act foreign" card and people will go out of their way to help me out or let me off the hook if I got in trouble. Still, I'd trust a full blood Japanese any day of the week before a foreigner - surely that's racist but it's also out of personal experience.
Groupon started here in Japan, got real big real quick, then in the period of maybe 2 weeks lost all of their businesses that were worth it and the deals got increasingly worse. From all angles it looked like a fantastic explosion of failure, and it was quickly picked up by news programs that interviewed the businesses that stopped using it. They all said the same thing, "they used overly complicated numbers and tricked us, the experience was terrible and we gained nothing". The businesses that continued to use it said "you need to think of it as an advertising cost - whatever you put out you need to think of as a 100% loss".
Those data samples prove your assumption is correct. Look at how the spots spread out over time (in the sample videos), the size of the spots is the strength of the signal. Triangulate that and if you can take into account geographic and physical features and you'll have a fairly accurate tracking system. Phones in Japan don't usually have GPS but they all have Navi - all the location data is just triangulated from towers.
Actually no, any app would have access to this data. Apps have access to certain areas and files on the device and this is one of those areas.
They were, it's in the EULA - which you didn't read and hit "Agree" on.
It's passive reception from the towers being logged on the device - so it would have no effect on aircraft and I'm assuming it would comply with regulations.
Ditto. You can run Ruby in the browser though, just set script type="text/ruby" to be parsed by your native Ruby parser and you're off.... if you can find a way to efficiently interact with the DOM/page...
And it wouldn't be the first. There are ways to run Python and Ruby on the client - in other-words type="text/ruby" can work if the client has it set up correctly. You need to interact with the DOM to do useful things on the page though. There's also the issue of security but it doesn't look like NaTcl has handled that either yet.
That is the second word, the first one is F*ck.
Why can students use a calculator on a test to begin with? And a graphing calculator!? Then you're just testing how well they can use the calculator - no wonder Americans suck at math.
No way I'm reading your entire response there. Go take a marketing class.
Perhaps the vast majority of sites you use? And since when was this a debate?
I will give you a million dollars if you can produce in HTML5 in a month what I can produce in Flash in a week. Wait, before you even try I'll tell you right now it's impossible - more than half the features you'd need aren't even close to being in the HTML5 standard. The fact is it takes more time to develop iOS apps than it does flash apps - and even though Adobe has done their best to make porting easy it's still a pain in the ass.
Actually "it's just garbage that's marketed well to a bunch of cultists" DOES explain the repeat customers and the high customer satisfaction ratings. It's the same set of marketing phenomens that drive ALL designer brands. Take Lois Vitton for example, they sell brown fake leather (yeah! a lot of Vitton items use fake leather) wallets with the same generic design spray painted in gold for hundreds of dollars. People will line up to buy new items and despite the poor material quality (a Vitton wallet will break down in a few years of normal use - faster than say a cloth wallet) they love the items and swear by the brand name. Obviously you aren't involved in marketing or sales - the fact is there are consumers who buy things based on brand image which has NOTHING to do with quality; and this is the majority of consumers. The "informed consumer" will compare other factors before brand, and it is that "informed consumer" the Android tablets are trying to grab first. Unfortunately the informed consumer may not even be interested in tablets, or they may find the iPad fits their needs and price-point better. This is precisely why Android tablets NEED to be priced lower and they NEED to inform the market in what ways and why Android is the better platform.
So in summary let me rewrite your calculation there: (Garbage OR Good product) + Good Marketing = huge sales.
Your analogy is far, far too accurate.
I agree with Bios_Hakr 100% here, right down to the brand choices and in that order.
As long as the screen hinges still work yes. It's even got rubber feet to prevent from slipping whereas your tablet has a curved back which will only encourage spilling.