<video src="http://v2v.cc/~j/theora_testsuite/320x240.ogg" autoplay>
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I don't think it will be that hard for people to switch. As you say, the main obstacle is implementation in a majority of browsers. Once that's achieved, switching would be a no-brainer.
If JavaFX were an open standard, it would be more interesting. No technology that isn't an open standard is a good choice in the long run. Although the current combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is kludgy, it's what we have and does work for millions of web sites. The vast majority of the sites I use work just fine with web standards except for media playback.
I'm really looking forward to HTML5 providing that essential component so that Flash (and any other proprietary plugin) will become unnecessary for the vast majority of sites. Even if HTML 5 only succeeds in video and audio, that's a huge improvement. Unfortunately, the success of HTML 5 video and audio depends on useful baseline codecs, which isn't happening because of broken patent systems.
You're absolutely right that control of data is essential. That's true whether they live on your PC or on someone else's server. For example, I'm not too concerned with using Gmail and Google Docs, since I can easily get my data out of those in standard formats if I decide I don't like Google any more. I think online apps and data storage will be increasingly important for everyone, so we need to be paying attention to how well different services deal with data formats and other interoperability issues.
While I agree that using "GNU/Linux" instead of "Linux" is not of utmost importance, GNU is more important to modern Free operating systems than most other components, so "GNU/Linux" makes more sense than "GNU/X.org/Apache/BSD/Linux".
While some very small Linux-based systems use C libraries other than Glibc, can you name one that doesn't depend on GNU development tools? In fact, it's hard to find a non-Microsoft operating system in common use (Free or non-Free) that doesn't depend on GNU development tools.
Coreboot is irrelevant, as it's neither an operating system nor an operating system kernel. Coreboot initializes hardware, then loads a target. Originally, the target was always a Linux image, but now it can be a number of other things. Linux by itself can't do much useful. The only thing I can think of is routing, but that must be set up by userspace programs.
Clearly, Linux has been far more successful than the GNU kernel project. The GNU people are very happy for the success of Linux. However, Linux could not have become as successful as it is without the groundwork laid by the GNU project. So, while I don't think it's necessary to always mention GNU with Linux, I try to do so because it seems that GNU often isn't given enough credit.
This is not in the least insightful. If you read TFA, you'll see that since the flaw is in the standard specification, it does affect all implementations. The article doesn't say the flaw is only on Debian; it says that's where the flaw was found.
Using "their", "they", "they're" interchangeably or confusing "accept" and "except" is incorrect no matter where you are. I wouldn't be surprised if you find more common incorrect usage of those words in LA than other places, but it's not a dialect issue.
While I'm not in the habit of using the word "fanny" for anything, I'll certainly be careful in the future. I guess that gives a whole new dimension to the term "fanny pack."
Speaking of accents, South African ones usually sound like a mix of Australian and Dutch to me. Though I was born in the US, I grew up overseas and went to school at an international school in a Dutch speaking country.
I've long been bothered about the expression "I could care less" and it seems I'm not the only one. I wasn't even aware it was uniquely American, but it never made sense to me when it clearly means, "I couldn't care less." It reminds me of how odd it is that "flammable" and "inflammable" are synonyms, though the process to produce the alternate forms is probably very different.
That's very interesting. I've learned a number of British terms and spellings by reading, but I'd never seen that one before. I thought the author had experienced a very bad spell checker substitution, but I couldn't figure out what the word was supposed to be.
I think that mainly comes from the fact that most Windows machines have an icon labeled "Internet" on the desktop and Start Menu. So if the "Internet" is broken it could mean anything from Internet Explorer (or whatever is the default browser) being broken to an ethernet cable being unplugged to DNS lookups failing to ISP routing problems. Many users don't understand that the Internet is distinct from the web browser, let alone that there are different web browsers.
I'd argue that your mom was not wrong to attempt to use 30 Firefox tabs. I'm not surprised she had trouble, since I sometimes run into trouble when I have many windows and/or tabs open simultaneously, but I see that as a limitation of Firefox. Once you told her not to keep so many tabs open simultaneously, she can avoid the problem, but I don't think she should have assumed she couldn't use 30. Ideally, computers and software should let people work in whatever way makes the most sense to them. Of course, in the real world, we have to learn and work around limitations of computers and software.
While any storage of bits can be called "memory," I don't think it's correct to call a hard disk drive "RAM." From the Wikipedia article:
The word random thus refers to the fact that any piece of data can be returned in a constant time, regardless of its physical location and whether or not it is related to the previous piece of data.
The only word the acronyms "RAM" and "ROM" have in common is "memory."
Yeah, when technical people say "memory," we usually mean "RAM," but a hard drive or SSD is technically memory too. So, when a user is confused about RAM vs. disk space, I say that they're different kinds of memory (short term vs. long term) and point out that the word "memory" usually refers to the short term kind.
Whether reading from a disk is an input operation depends on the scope of the machine I guess. It's an input operation from the point of view of the CPU.
While the office analogy probably makes more sense to most people, the kitchen one makes more sense to me personally. That's only because I use a kitchen and I don't use the old office components like filing cabinets and desktops. When I hear "file," I don't think of a piece of paper. When I hear "desktop," I don't think of a horizontal surface.
While using the office analogy is probably a good idea for someone over 35, it wouldn't be for someone who's grown up using a computer. What analogy should we use for the generation that's grown up with computers, but still doesn't know the difference between a hard drive and RAM?
Yeah, I'm sure all the students MIT accepts sprung from their mothers' wombs as fully formed engineers. None of them should ever need to learn the basics. If you think the point of the NerdKits is for use by current students of MIT, read the description on the home page:
A NerdKit is appropriate for software hackers looking to branch out into electronics, and has educational material to allow even middle-schoolers and high-schoolers (ages 12+) looking for a fun challenge to learn by doing, especially with the help of a techie parent!
You'd probably bash kids for playing with Legos too, since real world machines and buildings aren't made that way.
While some players of WWII games might think it would be glamorous to really be there, my attitude is the opposite. While I enjoy the challenge of playing WWII-themed games, I also notice how often I die. I have no illusions that being in the real situations that inspired the games would be fun.
Unfortunately, it's an area that still requires a lot of education. It's in the interest of the established proprietary vendors such as Microsoft to associate "commercial" with "proprietary" or "non-free" since one might infer that you can't use FLOSS for commerce.
However, what I find particularly dismaying is how common it is for developers of FLOSS packages to use "commercial" to mean "proprietary." For example, Qt which offers a "commercial" version and Magento, which has a section of their site for "commercial" extensions. I find Magento's use of the term especially ironic, since Magento itself is Free Software designed specifically to facilitate commerce. I'm not sure if examples like that are unintentional confusion over terms, or deliberate muddying the waters because they don't fully believe in the value of FLOSS.
The term "commercial" could mean several things when applied to Free or Open Source software, such as "used for operating a business" or "used in supporting clients." However, the way it's usually used is incorrect and misleading. Many people use "commercial" to mean "proprietary," which is the opposite of Free or Open Source. However, since many people and companies use Free or Open Source software in a commercial context, using "commercial" to mean "proprietary" just muddies the water.
You've enlightened me, sir! Up to now I couldn't understand why proprietary software like Windows and Internet Explorer have experienced so many fewer security vulnerabilities than Free ones like OpenBSD and Firefox. The customers speak and Microsoft listens!
Well, it's a good thing you can distinguish between good and bad software. Maybe you can even employ that skill when choosing which to use. And if you choose Free, Commercialsoftware, you can't lose, right?
But seriously, if you don't have to pay any money for the privilege of installing and running some piece of software, that's one less thing you'll loose if it turns out to be a bad choice. I don't care how much bad software is out there (of any license or cost). I only care about the good stuff. If you avoid all gratis or libre software because a large percentage of those categories is of poor quality, you might as well avoid the web because such a high percentage of websites suck.
Religions are false (easy to prove since there are many of them and they contradict themselves), so anything 'anti-religion' stands a good chance of being true. In short.
Perhaps you should have quoted a more current version of the entry:
Great Runes: n.
Uppercase-only text or display messages. Some archaic operating systems still emit these. See also runes, smash case, fold case.
There is a widespread legend (repeated by earlier versions of this entry, though tagged as folklore) that the uppercase-only support of various old character codes and I/O equipment was chosen by a religious person in a position of power at the Teletype Company because supporting both upper and lower cases was too expensive and supporting lower case only would have made it impossible to spell 'God' correctly. Not true; the upper-case interpretation of teleprinter codes was well established by 1870, long before Teletype was even founded.
Slashdot Mirror
Using HTML 5 video and audio elements is simpler than Flash.
Here's how you embed a typical Flash video:
Here's how you embed a video in HTML 5:
I don't think it will be that hard for people to switch. As you say, the main obstacle is implementation in a majority of browsers. Once that's achieved, switching would be a no-brainer.
If JavaFX were an open standard, it would be more interesting. No technology that isn't an open standard is a good choice in the long run. Although the current combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is kludgy, it's what we have and does work for millions of web sites. The vast majority of the sites I use work just fine with web standards except for media playback.
I'm really looking forward to HTML5 providing that essential component so that Flash (and any other proprietary plugin) will become unnecessary for the vast majority of sites. Even if HTML 5 only succeeds in video and audio, that's a huge improvement. Unfortunately, the success of HTML 5 video and audio depends on useful baseline codecs, which isn't happening because of broken patent systems.
You're absolutely right that control of data is essential. That's true whether they live on your PC or on someone else's server. For example, I'm not too concerned with using Gmail and Google Docs, since I can easily get my data out of those in standard formats if I decide I don't like Google any more. I think online apps and data storage will be increasingly important for everyone, so we need to be paying attention to how well different services deal with data formats and other interoperability issues.
While I agree that using "GNU/Linux" instead of "Linux" is not of utmost importance, GNU is more important to modern Free operating systems than most other components, so "GNU/Linux" makes more sense than "GNU/X.org/Apache/BSD/Linux".
While some very small Linux-based systems use C libraries other than Glibc, can you name one that doesn't depend on GNU development tools? In fact, it's hard to find a non-Microsoft operating system in common use (Free or non-Free) that doesn't depend on GNU development tools.
Coreboot is irrelevant, as it's neither an operating system nor an operating system kernel. Coreboot initializes hardware, then loads a target. Originally, the target was always a Linux image, but now it can be a number of other things. Linux by itself can't do much useful. The only thing I can think of is routing, but that must be set up by userspace programs.
Clearly, Linux has been far more successful than the GNU kernel project. The GNU people are very happy for the success of Linux. However, Linux could not have become as successful as it is without the groundwork laid by the GNU project. So, while I don't think it's necessary to always mention GNU with Linux, I try to do so because it seems that GNU often isn't given enough credit.
This is not in the least insightful. If you read TFA, you'll see that since the flaw is in the standard specification, it does affect all implementations. The article doesn't say the flaw is only on Debian; it says that's where the flaw was found.
I think would be able to distinguish an Australian from a Kiwi accent if I listened carefully enough after watching many hours of LOTR extras.
Yeah, that sounds like she wasn't using the tabs very effectively.
Using "their", "they", "they're" interchangeably or confusing "accept" and "except" is incorrect no matter where you are. I wouldn't be surprised if you find more common incorrect usage of those words in LA than other places, but it's not a dialect issue.
While I'm not in the habit of using the word "fanny" for anything, I'll certainly be careful in the future. I guess that gives a whole new dimension to the term "fanny pack."
Speaking of accents, South African ones usually sound like a mix of Australian and Dutch to me. Though I was born in the US, I grew up overseas and went to school at an international school in a Dutch speaking country.
I've long been bothered about the expression "I could care less" and it seems I'm not the only one. I wasn't even aware it was uniquely American, but it never made sense to me when it clearly means, "I couldn't care less." It reminds me of how odd it is that "flammable" and "inflammable" are synonyms, though the process to produce the alternate forms is probably very different.
That's very interesting. I've learned a number of British terms and spellings by reading, but I'd never seen that one before. I thought the author had experienced a very bad spell checker substitution, but I couldn't figure out what the word was supposed to be.
I think that mainly comes from the fact that most Windows machines have an icon labeled "Internet" on the desktop and Start Menu. So if the "Internet" is broken it could mean anything from Internet Explorer (or whatever is the default browser) being broken to an ethernet cable being unplugged to DNS lookups failing to ISP routing problems. Many users don't understand that the Internet is distinct from the web browser, let alone that there are different web browsers.
You should have just installed VLC the first time.
I'd argue that your mom was not wrong to attempt to use 30 Firefox tabs. I'm not surprised she had trouble, since I sometimes run into trouble when I have many windows and/or tabs open simultaneously, but I see that as a limitation of Firefox. Once you told her not to keep so many tabs open simultaneously, she can avoid the problem, but I don't think she should have assumed she couldn't use 30. Ideally, computers and software should let people work in whatever way makes the most sense to them. Of course, in the real world, we have to learn and work around limitations of computers and software.
While any storage of bits can be called "memory," I don't think it's correct to call a hard disk drive "RAM." From the Wikipedia article:
The word random thus refers to the fact that any piece of data can be returned in a constant time, regardless of its physical location and whether or not it is related to the previous piece of data.
The only word the acronyms "RAM" and "ROM" have in common is "memory."
Yeah, when technical people say "memory," we usually mean "RAM," but a hard drive or SSD is technically memory too. So, when a user is confused about RAM vs. disk space, I say that they're different kinds of memory (short term vs. long term) and point out that the word "memory" usually refers to the short term kind.
Whether reading from a disk is an input operation depends on the scope of the machine I guess. It's an input operation from the point of view of the CPU.
While the office analogy probably makes more sense to most people, the kitchen one makes more sense to me personally. That's only because I use a kitchen and I don't use the old office components like filing cabinets and desktops. When I hear "file," I don't think of a piece of paper. When I hear "desktop," I don't think of a horizontal surface.
While using the office analogy is probably a good idea for someone over 35, it wouldn't be for someone who's grown up using a computer. What analogy should we use for the generation that's grown up with computers, but still doesn't know the difference between a hard drive and RAM?
Yeah, I'm sure all the students MIT accepts sprung from their mothers' wombs as fully formed engineers. None of them should ever need to learn the basics. If you think the point of the NerdKits is for use by current students of MIT, read the description on the home page:
You'd probably bash kids for playing with Legos too, since real world machines and buildings aren't made that way.
While some players of WWII games might think it would be glamorous to really be there, my attitude is the opposite. While I enjoy the challenge of playing WWII-themed games, I also notice how often I die. I have no illusions that being in the real situations that inspired the games would be fun.
Unfortunately, it's an area that still requires a lot of education. It's in the interest of the established proprietary vendors such as Microsoft to associate "commercial" with "proprietary" or "non-free" since one might infer that you can't use FLOSS for commerce.
However, what I find particularly dismaying is how common it is for developers of FLOSS packages to use "commercial" to mean "proprietary." For example, Qt which offers a "commercial" version and Magento, which has a section of their site for "commercial" extensions. I find Magento's use of the term especially ironic, since Magento itself is Free Software designed specifically to facilitate commerce. I'm not sure if examples like that are unintentional confusion over terms, or deliberate muddying the waters because they don't fully believe in the value of FLOSS.
The term "commercial" could mean several things when applied to Free or Open Source software, such as "used for operating a business" or "used in supporting clients." However, the way it's usually used is incorrect and misleading. Many people use "commercial" to mean "proprietary," which is the opposite of Free or Open Source. However, since many people and companies use Free or Open Source software in a commercial context, using "commercial" to mean "proprietary" just muddies the water.
You've enlightened me, sir! Up to now I couldn't understand why proprietary software like Windows and Internet Explorer have experienced so many fewer security vulnerabilities than Free ones like OpenBSD and Firefox. The customers speak and Microsoft listens!
Well, it's a good thing you can distinguish between good and bad software. Maybe you can even employ that skill when choosing which to use. And if you choose Free, Commercial software, you can't lose, right?
But seriously, if you don't have to pay any money for the privilege of installing and running some piece of software, that's one less thing you'll loose if it turns out to be a bad choice. I don't care how much bad software is out there (of any license or cost). I only care about the good stuff. If you avoid all gratis or libre software because a large percentage of those categories is of poor quality, you might as well avoid the web because such a high percentage of websites suck.
Now THERE'S some unassailable logic.
Perhaps you should have quoted a more current version of the entry: