SuSE OpenLinux had an old 3.0.7 version of Firefox while Vista had a newer version.
Firefox 3.5 has a totally rewritten javascript engine from scratch. It uses some dynamic tree mathmatical aglorithms to perform operations many times faster and has support for javascript functions mapped in ram before execution. Vista used Firefox 3.5 while SuSE had Firefox 3.0.7 installed without the new javascript engine. Firefox 3.0.x was a ram hog compared to 3.5 too.
I also imagine Safari would execute on MacOSX much better than Windows since its designed for it. Itunes is kind of proof as it sucks on Windows.
I see nothing but conflicts of interest and bribing in every and I mean every single function of government I see.
How about the government works for... hmmm Gee the people! I feel what happened in Massachusetts last week is how we as Americans feel. Why can't government programs like medicaid and medicare focus on... uh the people and not lining insurance company interests. THe army could actually be focused on defense and not the contracting industry and the IRS could focus on funding and not the poor innocent Intuit and accounting firms. I do not have to mention the FED reserve as its owned by all the private banks to ensure wealth of bankers.
It is absolutely disgusting and shows yet again how corrupt and ineffective the American government is. What happened in Massachusetts shows how upset we are with American insurance companies, banks, and now this.
Its used because its free (for now) and is using an illegal bait and switch technique to build a false standard and then own the world.
I bet the mpeg consortium probably paid flash and Apple to use its technology to make it standard then bribed the w3c, and now are going to charge everyone through the roof. Cable companies are doing this and now are $200 a month and go up 15% a year. It will be a few thousand a month a decade from now. These same executives want to own the web and h.264 is their way to do it.
Having it part of html5 is pushing the effort to standardize on it as well.
Its not ideology at all in my opinion. Mozilla lawyers simply stated, do not include H.264 because its legally owned by someone else.
I do not like this situation either and think its ridiculous. The mozilla foundation has a legal responsibility to protect its assets against frivolous lawsuits.
Thats what people do not get. If you want h.264 use IE or pay for a license. Linking is just as liable as coding a patent. Just research DVD Jon? Mozilla may even have to cripple their own browser. The MPAA lawyers are crazy enough to do this if you look at their past.
"As long as there are mainstream platforms that don't support Theora, either you have to encode to H.264 yourself (and pay) or have someone else (e.g. YouTube) encode and host it for you.
Well Firefox now is sizable enough that the reverse is true. If Firefox wont support H.264 then developers will be reluctant to use it. Java has supported H.264 for years so you can write a JavaFX, applet, or flash to display it. That is a whole can of worms altogether.
Developers want standards but unfortunately its not in their best interest long term to standardize on a patented technology. You will be stuck with proprietary tools, drm, and high barriers of entry for those wanting to have their own sites.
If its patented it does not belong in a standards body PERIOD. Whats the point of using standards then?
We are simply not forcing patented technologies in HTML 5. It does not belong in it and the www consortium wants an alternative to flash. This is a reasonable requests.
Mozilla is upset because they can't use html 5 purely. They simply just can't distribute it and a year from now you may have to wipe your precious linux box for Windows so you can participate on the web when the mpeg companies start being jerks and pusing drm and monopoly fees on everyone.
Worse Hollywood has been known to throw teenagers in jail for linking code and websites. Firefox might have to crippled and force everyone to use IE.
Has anyone looked at the firefox 3.x welcome screen that shows videos welcoming you to firefox?
That was theora/vorbis and they looked fine to me and even better than youtube.
Sure there might be a few HD purists (those that have gold plated plugs for their audio cables) that will tell you a difference exists. But can the eye really spot it? Oh Theora uses more cpu than mpeg4... mpeg 4 plays fine on old pentium IIs. A modern video card and cpu combo can play Theora fine.
Also h.264 is downgraded in sites like youtube for bandwidth reasons so you do not get supperior quality anyway.
We need firefox to exists and it will be a problem next year I fear. Html and the web is endanger from these silly patents. Standards exists so we do not have to rely on monopolies, patents, and secrets to do everyday work. Its not a standard if its owned. It simply belongs to a someone who now has a monopoly.
I think many slashdotters have a knee jerk reaction to those promoting freedom due to RMS being a little extreme.
I just want to get something to work hassle free. To me supporting H.264 is about using $$$$ tools like adobe flash to create sites and use internet applications. Html is supposed to be as open as you can get. I do not care if people are greedy and yes supporting this will be the death of firefox and ultimately the internet. Lawyers from other companies will then demand payments for things like displaying the letter A with a font and using a network, and a whole bunch of endless redicious fees.
Then firefox will receede and IE will take over and html 5 development will mean expensive proprietary tools that only work on windows, etc.
Yes I willl use proprietary products if it gets the job done. However the internet is the only free thing left and I do not want a return to AOL, MSN, in the1990's where creativity was discouraged and $$$ ruled the day on who gets to develop software.
With html5 and free software codecs we can use our own tools and encourage innovation. The net is free now but that is endangered. The lack of IPv4 addresses by domain squatters, h.264, and flash are creating problems.
I wonder if speculators and investors are buying up all the IP4 addresses just to resell them at 10x the price. The same speculators that made billions doing this to housing until a bubble formed.
Or am I just paranoid? I would be tempted myself if I were an evil billionaire.
A competitor will come in and make it cheaper and companies like Walmart will use its leveredge to make it happen. If patents get in the way then companyA will outsource to India or China where these silly IP laws wont hurt them and they can cut on labor costs. This is what the new economy is about. About going cheap and betting on volume in cheap countries.
If Intel wont make cheap Atom processors then AMD or someone else will make ARM processors and make revunue based on volume instead of price.
This is the new norm and patents only have a limited life span.
Suse took out cleartype fonts and java apps like NetBeans wont enable it and distros have a crippled font management that looks blury on modern lcd screens. Even with the command line arguments the JVM wont produce making it butt ugly on laptop. KDE is in a very sad state. The apis supposed to be cool now but the envrionment is just horrible. I used to love KDE.
Gnome is nice and usable on Ubuntu now but still is not perfect. I used to like Afterstep, Window Maker, and KDE in the old days but with the eye candy in MacOSX and Vista it looks very dated. Berly can support some of the effects but most distros come with compiviz (whatever is called) which is conservative and the title bars look dated.
Linux does not have a sales team and therefore is losing the server market.
Management always buys what the marketing sales teams at proprietary software companies push and they become friends with the sales teams. What is interesting is in the severe recession we are in now is that this approach does not work well. If the budget is slashed to $0 for software upgrades it does not matter what the discount is. Linux actually wins hands down.
All this shows is perhaps conflicts of interest are involved in giving discounts to purchasers. In the end the employer looses.
I used to be a huge KDE proponent in the past due to excellent FreeBSD support and the extensive set of APIs. Gnome seamed like a hack on top of another window manager a decade ago in comparison and I noticed all the errors in X when I did a "startx" to turn x on (ah the old days).
But after switching back to windows and then trying Ubuntu I was deeply impressed with gnome recently as it works very well. KDE is a montrosity. I can't customize its well unusable and annoying.
I can't play wow under wine (shutter) without a proprietary ati driver.
If I paid for it I do not want to wait until its obsolete to use it. This is why people use Windows. It just works and gets the job done with the least amount of effort. It may not be the best but I lose freedom if I can't use my computer fully even if I can't use the source code.
My wife and I play wow but most users prefer to use a wii or ps3 if they want to play games.
Its frustrating and I agree that the intel chipsets and integrated chips (not true video cards) put desktops 5 - 6 years behind and piss off game developers forcing them to port only to consoles.
The netbook phenomena shows this trend for slim boring graphics that are cheap cheap and uh cheap.
Most game developers have left the pc as a result due to angry kids whose parents get a nice i945 graphics chipset computer for them and they wonder why Crysis is a slide show.
Thats the problem. All the companies in the world have unused capacity sitting as the rich keep investing hoping the poor and unemployed start buying their products. As long as people don't buy products you have a deficit.
Who pays for IT? Money has to come in from somewhere and anyone can do a service which means the price will be too low to live on. This is especially true if out of work people become competitive for any job they can get.
People live off actual products. What did you use today? Lets see a typical work day. Shower get to work, use your car, use gas, use your computer, use electricity, eat lunch, go home, watch tv, and so on. How many services were involved and how many physical products?
Television programming is a service and electricity is. Everything including your toaster you used for your english muffins is produced and used.
My point is we can't live without these things and have just services for each other.
Wal-mart is the economy for any small town with the exception of government employees. Without a tax base government workers are going to be next on the chopping block. Poverty stricken countries are poor because of an imbalance of power between the rich and the very poor. We are heading down that road and if we do not do something too we wont have any purchasing or bargaining power to not become very poor ourselves while the rich will horde everything. Then we will be where the other poorer countries are at now.
The reason America became a powerhouse was the natural resources and limited labor supply. The middle class came to exist as a result of the distribution of wealth. Now this is going away.
"So in summary, we'd be better off if Silicon Valley were replaced with textile factories."
Hey a job is a job. Most of the Silicon Valley businesses are shell Chinese or Indian ones where the actual labor and product is produced. At least if textile factories replace them they will at least give a minimal wage job to those without one now.
Its not like any textile is done in China or anything.
Slashdot Mirror
SuSE OpenLinux had an old 3.0.7 version of Firefox while Vista had a newer version.
Firefox 3.5 has a totally rewritten javascript engine from scratch. It uses some dynamic tree mathmatical aglorithms to perform operations many times faster and has support for javascript functions mapped in ram before execution. Vista used Firefox 3.5 while SuSE had Firefox 3.0.7 installed without the new javascript engine. Firefox 3.0.x was a ram hog compared to 3.5 too.
I also imagine Safari would execute on MacOSX much better than Windows since its designed for it. Itunes is kind of proof as it sucks on Windows.
I see nothing but conflicts of interest and bribing in every and I mean every single function of government I see.
How about the government works for ... hmmm Gee the people! I feel what happened in Massachusetts last week is how we as Americans feel. Why can't government programs like medicaid and medicare focus on ... uh the people and not lining insurance company interests. THe army could actually be focused on defense and not the contracting industry and the IRS could focus on funding and not the poor innocent Intuit and accounting firms. I do not have to mention the FED reserve as its owned by all the private banks to ensure wealth of bankers.
Time for the torches indeed.
It is absolutely disgusting and shows yet again how corrupt and ineffective the American government is. What happened in Massachusetts shows how upset we are with American insurance companies, banks, and now this.
Vote out the incumbents in 2010!
Its used because its free (for now) and is using an illegal bait and switch technique to build a false standard and then own the world.
I bet the mpeg consortium probably paid flash and Apple to use its technology to make it standard then bribed the w3c, and now are going to charge everyone through the roof. Cable companies are doing this and now are $200 a month and go up 15% a year. It will be a few thousand a month a decade from now. These same executives want to own the web and h.264 is their way to do it.
Having it part of html5 is pushing the effort to standardize on it as well.
Its not ideology at all in my opinion. Mozilla lawyers simply stated, do not include H.264 because its legally owned by someone else.
I do not like this situation either and think its ridiculous. The mozilla foundation has a legal responsibility to protect its assets against frivolous lawsuits.
They can't use h.264. Its owned by someone else.
Thats what people do not get. If you want h.264 use IE or pay for a license. Linking is just as liable as coding a patent. Just research DVD Jon? Mozilla may even have to cripple their own browser. The MPAA lawyers are crazy enough to do this if you look at their past.
"As long as there are mainstream platforms that don't support Theora, either you have to encode to H.264 yourself (and pay) or have someone else (e.g. YouTube) encode and host it for you.
Well Firefox now is sizable enough that the reverse is true. If Firefox wont support H.264 then developers will be reluctant to use it. Java has supported H.264 for years so you can write a JavaFX, applet, or flash to display it. That is a whole can of worms altogether.
Developers want standards but unfortunately its not in their best interest long term to standardize on a patented technology. You will be stuck with proprietary tools, drm, and high barriers of entry for those wanting to have their own sites.
If its patented it does not belong in a standards body PERIOD. Whats the point of using standards then?
We are not forcing theora.
We are simply not forcing patented technologies in HTML 5. It does not belong in it and the www consortium wants an alternative to flash. This is a reasonable requests.
Mozilla is upset because they can't use html 5 purely. They simply just can't distribute it and a year from now you may have to wipe your precious linux box for Windows so you can participate on the web when the mpeg companies start being jerks and pusing drm and monopoly fees on everyone.
Worse Hollywood has been known to throw teenagers in jail for linking code and websites. Firefox might have to crippled and force everyone to use IE.
Has anyone looked at the firefox 3.x welcome screen that shows videos welcoming you to firefox?
That was theora/vorbis and they looked fine to me and even better than youtube.
Sure there might be a few HD purists (those that have gold plated plugs for their audio cables) that will tell you a difference exists. But can the eye really spot it? Oh Theora uses more cpu than mpeg4 ... mpeg 4 plays fine on old pentium IIs. A modern video card and cpu combo can play Theora fine.
Also h.264 is downgraded in sites like youtube for bandwidth reasons so you do not get supperior quality anyway.
We need firefox to exists and it will be a problem next year I fear. Html and the web is endanger from these silly patents. Standards exists so we do not have to rely on monopolies, patents, and secrets to do everyday work. Its not a standard if its owned. It simply belongs to a someone who now has a monopoly.
The commercial influence is why I am against h.264. Its in everyone's interest to keep html open as possible... well except the media companies.
I think many slashdotters have a knee jerk reaction to those promoting freedom due to RMS being a little extreme.
I just want to get something to work hassle free. To me supporting H.264 is about using $$$$ tools like adobe flash to create sites and use internet applications. Html is supposed to be as open as you can get. I do not care if people are greedy and yes supporting this will be the death of firefox and ultimately the internet. Lawyers from other companies will then demand payments for things like displaying the letter A with a font and using a network, and a whole bunch of endless redicious fees.
Then firefox will receede and IE will take over and html 5 development will mean expensive proprietary tools that only work on windows, etc.
Yes I willl use proprietary products if it gets the job done. However the internet is the only free thing left and I do not want a return to AOL, MSN, in the1990's where creativity was discouraged and $$$ ruled the day on who gets to develop software.
With html5 and free software codecs we can use our own tools and encourage innovation.
The net is free now but that is endangered. The lack of IPv4 addresses by domain squatters, h.264, and flash are creating problems.
Well the investors have to get their 15% return every quarter for all of eternity somehow. This is whats expected in this day and age.
I wonder if speculators and investors are buying up all the IP4 addresses just to resell them at 10x the price. The same speculators that made billions doing this to housing until a bubble formed.
Or am I just paranoid? I would be tempted myself if I were an evil billionaire.
There is a flaw to that line of thinking.
A competitor will come in and make it cheaper and companies like Walmart will use its leveredge to make it happen. If patents get in the way then companyA will outsource to India or China where these silly IP laws wont hurt them and they can cut on labor costs. This is what the new economy is about. About going cheap and betting on volume in cheap countries.
If Intel wont make cheap Atom processors then AMD or someone else will make ARM processors and make revunue based on volume instead of price.
This is the new norm and patents only have a limited life span.
Fonts drive me crazy too. Its 2009 now folks!
Suse took out cleartype fonts and java apps like NetBeans wont enable it and distros have a crippled font management that looks blury on modern lcd screens. Even with the command line arguments the JVM wont produce making it butt ugly on laptop. KDE is in a very sad state. The apis supposed to be cool now but the envrionment is just horrible. I used to love KDE.
Gnome is nice and usable on Ubuntu now but still is not perfect. I used to like Afterstep, Window Maker, and KDE in the old days but with the eye candy in MacOSX and Vista it looks very dated. Berly can support some of the effects but most distros come with compiviz (whatever is called) which is conservative and the title bars look dated.
"Doesn't change the fact that it is a non-standard distro that doesn't even have X11."
I do not know about you but that sounds like a feature to me.
Consumers do not know this.
Witness the intel integrated graphics. Many wow players bought these notebooks and were shocked when wow ran at a full 5ps in Dalaran.
The phrase money talks and sh*t walks is true.
Linux does not have a sales team and therefore is losing the server market.
Management always buys what the marketing sales teams at proprietary software companies push and they become friends with the sales teams. What is interesting is in the severe recession we are in now is that this approach does not work well. If the budget is slashed to $0 for software upgrades it does not matter what the discount is. Linux actually wins hands down.
All this shows is perhaps conflicts of interest are involved in giving discounts to purchasers. In the end the employer looses.
I used to be a huge KDE proponent in the past due to excellent FreeBSD support and the extensive set of APIs. Gnome seamed like a hack on top of another window manager a decade ago in comparison and I noticed all the errors in X when I did a "startx" to turn x on (ah the old days).
But after switching back to windows and then trying Ubuntu I was deeply impressed with gnome recently as it works very well. KDE is a montrosity. I can't customize its well unusable and annoying.
But the open source ones do not work.
I can't play wow under wine (shutter) without a proprietary ati driver.
If I paid for it I do not want to wait until its obsolete to use it. This is why people use Windows. It just works and gets the job done with the least amount of effort. It may not be the best but I lose freedom if I can't use my computer fully even if I can't use the source code.
Gnome is 100% open sourced and gnu licensed and therefore is not proprietary.
I do not get it.
My wife and I play wow but most users prefer to use a wii or ps3 if they want to play games.
Its frustrating and I agree that the intel chipsets and integrated chips (not true video cards) put desktops 5 - 6 years behind and piss off game developers forcing them to port only to consoles.
The netbook phenomena shows this trend for slim boring graphics that are cheap cheap and uh cheap.
Most game developers have left the pc as a result due to angry kids whose parents get a nice i945 graphics chipset computer for them and they wonder why Crysis is a slide show.
Invest in what?
Thats the problem. All the companies in the world have unused capacity sitting as the rich keep investing hoping the poor and unemployed start buying their products. As long as people don't buy products you have a deficit.
Who pays for IT? Money has to come in from somewhere and anyone can do a service which means the price will be too low to live on. This is especially true if out of work people become competitive for any job they can get.
People live off actual products. What did you use today? Lets see a typical work day. Shower get to work, use your car, use gas, use your computer, use electricity, eat lunch, go home, watch tv, and so on. How many services were involved and how many physical products?
Television programming is a service and electricity is. Everything including your toaster you used for your english muffins is produced and used.
My point is we can't live without these things and have just services for each other.
Wal-mart is the economy for any small town with the exception of government employees. Without a tax base government workers are going to be next on the chopping block. Poverty stricken countries are poor because of an imbalance of power between the rich and the very poor. We are heading down that road and if we do not do something too we wont have any purchasing or bargaining power to not become very poor ourselves while the rich will horde everything. Then we will be where the other poorer countries are at now.
The reason America became a powerhouse was the natural resources and limited labor supply. The middle class came to exist as a result of the distribution of wealth. Now this is going away.
"So in summary, we'd be better off if Silicon Valley were replaced with textile factories."
Hey a job is a job. Most of the Silicon Valley businesses are shell Chinese or Indian ones where the actual labor and product is produced. At least if textile factories replace them they will at least give a minimal wage job to those without one now.
Its not like any textile is done in China or anything.