If google wants to, they can put anybody anywhere they want.
Depends on whether a court would find them to have monopolistic control over a vital resource or not. Because if a judge did, then Google might be on the hook for anti-trust behavior should they decide to pull any stunts.
Look on the bright side, at least ReactOS went somewhere. It may be kind of late in starting, but it was fairly well managed from the beginning. Contrast that with the FreeDows project, the secretive brainchild of a whiz-kid who bit off more than he could chew. The end result? Absolutely nothing.
At least with ReactOS, it's likely to live on in some form as it's already useful to many people. (Fringe cases or not.) Even if it stays behind the Windows curve, it will be one more product nipping at Microsoft's heels.
Before any wise crackers jump in, "President of America" means "President of the American Arm of Sega". But you already knew that. Countdown to trolls in 5... 4... 3...
So the President of America gets approval to make changes against Japans better judgement, makes Sega millions upon millions of dollars, and it's a sad story? WTF?
Forget the phrase 'sharp as a tack.' Now, thanks to new University of Alberta research, the popular expression might become, 'sharp as a single atom tip formed by chemically assisted spatially controlled field evaporation.
it depends what you mean by "completely" destroyed itself
As in "everyone dead". (Which is Mr. Hawking's concern.) The problem is that there really isn't any good examples of this in history. Mr. Diamond's book addresses the matter of economic collapse, which can create "ghost towns". The key is that everyone leaves a ghost town rather than being killed off by whatever factors are working against them. Ergo, they survive.
The closest example I've been able to come up with are the American Indian civilizations. Diseases brought by European explorers managed to wipe out large numbers of American residents. By the time that colonization had started, the remaining Indians were either part of nomadic tribes (what most people think of as "Native Americans") or were integrated into the new colonies (thus the reason why latinos fail to resemble their Spanish anscestors).
So I take it you never believed the saying that we had a enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over.
Just because it's oft-repeated doesn't make the hyperbole any truer.
Don't you think we will develop more powerful weapons over time? What's to stop one of these future weapons from being a global killer?
Simple physics. The amount of energy it takes to destroy an even small portion of the surface is incredible. I've played around with the figures on a few antimatter devices. Even enough antimatter to send a ship on a constant-acceleration course to Proxima Centauri wouldn't be enough to more than scar the Earth. About the best you can do is throw a very large asteroid at the Earth. This presents several problems, though:
1. It would take forever to move something that large. Therefore, you'd leave plenty of time for others to notice. 2. Humans aren't dinosaurs. The initial blast would be insufficient to destroy the human populace, though it would block out the sun for a bit. Ingenuitive humans would quickly ramp up on hydroponics and low-light foodstuffs to compensate. 3. Being able to move a large asteroid implies space travel. Which further implies a strong liklihood of off-Earth colonies.
Our big shiny toys put unprecedented powers of destruction in the hands of very few people. We are quite capable of destroying ourselves now in a way that would not have been easy in the past.
Two points:
1. It would take a weapon larger than anything we have in existence to kill off the human race. Cultural segregation or no, at least some people will survive even the most brutal attempts of destruction. As it so happens, all of our "weapons of mass destruction" combined are barely enough to wipe out all the major population centers.
2. Scale the matter back to local civilizations. Come up with an example or two where a civilization managed to completely destroy itself. I can't really come up with any good examples myself, though I can come up with a few examples of civilizations destroyed by other civilizations. (But not completely! The survivors are almost always integrated into the conquering civilization.) As I said, our instinct for survival is too high.
If he wants a more detailed answer than that, he should ask a more detailed question. As any historian can tell you, the "social, political, and environmental chaos" he refers to is absolutely nothing new. The only difference between then and now is that our toys are bigger and shinier.
Pick any period in human history, and I think you'll find that it's easy to define "social, political, and environmental chaos" that worked against the residents of the period. In fact, the conditions that humans have found acceptable in past periods of history are regularly referred to as "squalor" in this day and age. Yet there are precious few examples of civilizations that were wiped out by such conditions.
Yes, the human race makes a lot of messes. Sometimes we stumble across messes that aren't our own doing. Any way you cut it, though, humans will always react to a problem before it reaches the level of self-destruction. Our instict for survival is too strong to do otherwise.
...is that their argument would have held water if they had done a bit more work. i.e. Instead of saying, "the top 10 viruses only work on Windows", performing an analysis of what flaws were exploited would have been more useful. Then they could have claimed that, "based on the flaws exploited by the most dangerous viruses today, it seems that Mac users will remain more secure for the time being."
I see you cut and pasted this from a spell-checker-free site while I was fooling with telling a story and HTML formatting.
Nope. I quoted it from memory on the spot, adding my own embellishments. I waited around a good 10 minutes or before I start, just to make sure you weren't posting it. Then I went ahead and typed it up.
You've never heard the Pot Roast joke? What's this world coming to?! We'd better correct that immediately!:-)
The joke goes like this:
A newly-wed husband noticed that every time his wife cooked a ham, she would first cut off a quarter of it and put it in another pan. She would then put both pans into the oven to cook them. After pondering over why she might be doing this, he finally decided to ask her, "Honey, why do you always put a quarter of the ham in another pan?"
"Why, I don't know," she replied. "My mother always did it that way, so that's the way I do it."
Being a curious fellow, he convinced his wife to ask her mother next time she saw her.
A few weeks later, she's talking with her mom and asks about the ham. "Mother, why did you always cut off a quarter of the ham before cooking it?"
"Why, I don't know," she replied. "My mother always did it that way, so that's the way I do it!"
When she related this to her husband, they both became even more curious! After much wrangling about bothering her grandmother (who was currently residing in a nursing home, bless her heart) they decided to pay her a visit and ask about the ham.
A few days later, they visit her at the home with a beautiful bouquet of flowers. She is duely impressed and asks to what she owes the visit. The couple, feeling a bit embarrassed, beat around the bush for awhile. After a bit of chatting, they finally get up the nerve to ask.
"Grandmother, we've been wondering. I learned from mother to always cut off a quarter of the ham before cooking it. When I asked her why she did it, she said that she learned it from you. So we're kind of curious, why do you cut off a quarter of the ham before cooking it?"
"What?!?" she exclaims, "You came all this way to ask me that?!?"
"Um. Yes grandma," the granddaughter replies sheepishly.
Grandma huffed a little at the rediculous question, shook her head, and then finally uttered her answer,
"There's only one reason why I always cut a quarter of the ham off before I cooked it. My pan was too small!"
I leave you to figure out the moral of the story.:-)
One would assume they mean the keys to stored data. Where would you get that assumption from? The story is about data transmissions over the Internet. The original responder replied that we should "encrypt everything" to prevent this. I don't see any method of interpreting the matter other than, "Generate new keys for each Internet session."
Simple. Generate a new set every session. As long as they're cached in memory only, you'll never know the keys or be able to provide them to law enforcement.
So XUL is like AJAX, except it doesn't work on other browsers?
XUL is like DHTML, except that it's a complete GUI toolkit and works on other browsers. The app I linked to is an AJAX app. (Which has nothing to do with DHTML, other than the fact that they're usually coupled.)
I could think of a high emotion chess champion game in which you fear loosing in front of thousands of people for example
Tone that back to two guys in a park, and the game can still be just as much fun. There's uncertainty (and perhaps a bit of anxiety) over the outcome, elation from making excellent moves, disappointment when things are going poorly, and intellectual stimulation when your opponent is an even match. Yet none of those emotional and physical stresses are fear. For a game like Chess, you actually have to concoct a situation under which fear will be felt. (Like someone with weak nerves at a national championship.)
Even in video games, the same holds true. I don't feel any fear when I play Pole Position. Why should I? My only enemy is the clock! But I do feel focused, elated, disappointed, frustrated, anxious, happy, angry, annoyed, and a whole gamut of other emotions, depending on how the game is going for me.
Tell you what. You find me the fear in crossword puzzles, and I'll agree with you that fear is necessary to gaming. Otherwise, can we agree that it's merely one of many stresses that can be used to make the challenge of a game interesting?
Note how all of them discuss bindings to NATIVE widgets. The support has been there for YEARS, it's just played down in favor of XUL Themes in the main browser trunks for portability reasons.
The themes that I create try to use as many native widgets from the operating system as possible.
I'm trying to tell you, the Mozilla platform allows both types of widgets. The bindings are there. If you don't believe me, go read the XPCom and XBL source code. They link off to native components when available. I don't know what your tools are telling you, but they're wrong.
What an impassioned rant! With all the energy and time you put into it, I really feel sorry that's it's so incredibly wrong.:(
because the entire interface is implemented using Gecko, the widgets aren't native.
As it so happens, the widgets are native. Mozilla exposes the underlying implementation. Which is why buttons look like Windows, Mac, or GTK+ buttons. The caveat to this is that you can create XUL buttons/components that are entirely virtual. These components are generally used to produce skins like that used in Firefox. But most XUL applications actually rely on the native components instead. Which is why the Amazon browser I linked to looks like a native Windows app.
JavaScript is an interpretted language. And it's slllllllow.
It's also just glue. All the heavy lifting is done by the XPCOM components, which are FAAAAAASSSST.
This means that if an application is using JavaScript to do heavy lifting, the application will literally freeze while it can no longer accept messages. The windows will stop redrawing. Clicks will be ignored. Nothing will happen until the JavaScript finishes and the UI thread can start handling messages again.
Putting aside for a moment that this is an issue in all GUI programming, Mozilla does support multithreading. It just doesn't do it at the Javascript level. Threads are pushed down to the XPCom level instead, where they do the most good. (e.g. The XmlHttpRequest object can run synchronously or asynchronously.) If you really must multithread your JavaScript app, then cooperative multithreading is easy to do. Timed call-backs allow you to regain control whenever you need it, or in spurts if you'll be processing for a long period of time.
Let me just come out and state what you're trying to say: The article is full of it.
Horror is not necessary to a video game and more than it's necessary to Chess. A video game is about a goal that you wish to acheive. Generally, obtaining the goal should imply some sort of challenge, otherwise there would be little point.
Now if one dives into the challenge portion of video games, one does realize that these challenges do cause stress. Usually we're talking about a raised heartrate, higher state of alertness, and concentration. But it can also mean fear, angst, and concern. It all depends on the type of game, and the goal that the player wishes to achieve.
If horror games are do it for you, is there any surprise that the player will expect to be scared out of the wits? But where's the fear in Super Mario Bros? Or Tetris? Wing Commander? Honestly, there's none to speak of. In the case of Wing Commander, the fantasy aspect of becoming a star fighter pilot is the overriding aspect that makes the challenge interesting. All these games are interesting without any hint of fear. Humans need to be stressed, but different people have different stress needs. Recognizing that when creating a game can help a designer make it much more accessable to the target audience.
SongBird just goes to show what XUL can really do. Most people shun it with a, "Coding serious applications in JavaScript? Yeah, right." But with the XPCOM Standard Library as a foundation, the XUL platform is really a great way to build applications. (There's a really cool application here that shows off XUL's abilities.)
XULRunner is still a problem, though. It's not clear to most programmers that XUL applications can function just as well standing alone as in a browser. Songbird is a great start, but does anyone know if there's a list of existing XULRunner applications? If such a list existed, it would be a lot easier to show people what XUL can do just by pointing them to a single URL.
I don't see the merit of comparing consoles from different generations for their power comsumption. Of course they need more juice... but they're doing a lot more with it.
??? I can get you an ARM board that'll be three times as fast as a Pentium 90, but use barely a fraction of the power.
Believe it or not, computer equipment *is* getting more efficient. The problem is that massive amounts of power are being dumped into them for "maximum performance". Shades of Alpha?
Slashdot Mirror
If google wants to, they can put anybody anywhere they want.
Depends on whether a court would find them to have monopolistic control over a vital resource or not. Because if a judge did, then Google might be on the hook for anti-trust behavior should they decide to pull any stunts.
Look on the bright side, at least ReactOS went somewhere. It may be kind of late in starting, but it was fairly well managed from the beginning. Contrast that with the FreeDows project, the secretive brainchild of a whiz-kid who bit off more than he could chew. The end result? Absolutely nothing.
At least with ReactOS, it's likely to live on in some form as it's already useful to many people. (Fringe cases or not.) Even if it stays behind the Windows curve, it will be one more product nipping at Microsoft's heels.
Before any wise crackers jump in, "President of America" means "President of the American Arm of Sega". But you already knew that. Countdown to trolls in 5... 4... 3...
So the President of America gets approval to make changes against Japans better judgement, makes Sega millions upon millions of dollars, and it's a sad story? WTF?
How about, "sharper than a tack?"
Has a nice ring to it, don't you think?
As in "everyone dead". (Which is Mr. Hawking's concern.) The problem is that there really isn't any good examples of this in history. Mr. Diamond's book addresses the matter of economic collapse, which can create "ghost towns". The key is that everyone leaves a ghost town rather than being killed off by whatever factors are working against them. Ergo, they survive.
The closest example I've been able to come up with are the American Indian civilizations. Diseases brought by European explorers managed to wipe out large numbers of American residents. By the time that colonization had started, the remaining Indians were either part of nomadic tribes (what most people think of as "Native Americans") or were integrated into the new colonies (thus the reason why latinos fail to resemble their Spanish anscestors).
Simple physics. The amount of energy it takes to destroy an even small portion of the surface is incredible. I've played around with the figures on a few antimatter devices. Even enough antimatter to send a ship on a constant-acceleration course to Proxima Centauri wouldn't be enough to more than scar the Earth. About the best you can do is throw a very large asteroid at the Earth. This presents several problems, though:
1. It would take forever to move something that large. Therefore, you'd leave plenty of time for others to notice.
2. Humans aren't dinosaurs. The initial blast would be insufficient to destroy the human populace, though it would block out the sun for a bit. Ingenuitive humans would quickly ramp up on hydroponics and low-light foodstuffs to compensate.
3. Being able to move a large asteroid implies space travel. Which further implies a strong liklihood of off-Earth colonies.
Thank you for proving my point for me.
As I said, check any point in history and you'll find "political, social, and environmental chaos".
Two points:
1. It would take a weapon larger than anything we have in existence to kill off the human race. Cultural segregation or no, at least some people will survive even the most brutal attempts of destruction. As it so happens, all of our "weapons of mass destruction" combined are barely enough to wipe out all the major population centers.
2. Scale the matter back to local civilizations. Come up with an example or two where a civilization managed to completely destroy itself. I can't really come up with any good examples myself, though I can come up with a few examples of civilizations destroyed by other civilizations. (But not completely! The survivors are almost always integrated into the conquering civilization.) As I said, our instinct for survival is too high.
Answer: By shear force of will
If he wants a more detailed answer than that, he should ask a more detailed question. As any historian can tell you, the "social, political, and environmental chaos" he refers to is absolutely nothing new. The only difference between then and now is that our toys are bigger and shinier.
Pick any period in human history, and I think you'll find that it's easy to define "social, political, and environmental chaos" that worked against the residents of the period. In fact, the conditions that humans have found acceptable in past periods of history are regularly referred to as "squalor" in this day and age. Yet there are precious few examples of civilizations that were wiped out by such conditions.
Yes, the human race makes a lot of messes. Sometimes we stumble across messes that aren't our own doing. Any way you cut it, though, humans will always react to a problem before it reaches the level of self-destruction. Our instict for survival is too strong to do otherwise.
...is that their argument would have held water if they had done a bit more work. i.e. Instead of saying, "the top 10 viruses only work on Windows", performing an analysis of what flaws were exploited would have been more useful. Then they could have claimed that, "based on the flaws exploited by the most dangerous viruses today, it seems that Mac users will remain more secure for the time being."
Other browsers, like Mozilla Suite?
Whoops, that was a typo. It should have read, "XUL is like DHTML, except that it's a complete GUI toolkit and doesn't work on other browsers."
I see you cut and pasted this from a spell-checker-free site while I was fooling with telling a story and HTML formatting.
:D
Nope. I quoted it from memory on the spot, adding my own embellishments. I waited around a good 10 minutes or before I start, just to make sure you weren't posting it. Then I went ahead and typed it up.
Next time, HURRY UP!
The joke goes like this:
I leave you to figure out the moral of the story.
One would assume they mean the keys to stored data.
Where would you get that assumption from? The story is about data transmissions over the Internet. The original responder replied that we should "encrypt everything" to prevent this. I don't see any method of interpreting the matter other than, "Generate new keys for each Internet session."
Prove that you no longer have the keys
Simple. Generate a new set every session. As long as they're cached in memory only, you'll never know the keys or be able to provide them to law enforcement.
So XUL is like AJAX, except it doesn't work on other browsers?
XUL is like DHTML, except that it's a complete GUI toolkit and works on other browsers. The app I linked to is an AJAX app. (Which has nothing to do with DHTML, other than the fact that they're usually coupled.)
Howdy! I think you replied to the wrong person. You want one level up. :)
I could think of a high emotion chess champion game in which you fear loosing in front of thousands of people for example
Tone that back to two guys in a park, and the game can still be just as much fun. There's uncertainty (and perhaps a bit of anxiety) over the outcome, elation from making excellent moves, disappointment when things are going poorly, and intellectual stimulation when your opponent is an even match. Yet none of those emotional and physical stresses are fear. For a game like Chess, you actually have to concoct a situation under which fear will be felt. (Like someone with weak nerves at a national championship.)
Even in video games, the same holds true. I don't feel any fear when I play Pole Position. Why should I? My only enemy is the clock! But I do feel focused, elated, disappointed, frustrated, anxious, happy, angry, annoyed, and a whole gamut of other emotions, depending on how the game is going for me.
Tell you what. You find me the fear in crossword puzzles, and I'll agree with you that fear is necessary to gaming. Otherwise, can we agree that it's merely one of many stresses that can be used to make the challenge of a game interesting?
BTW, here are relevant bug reports:
3 05 79 57 81 32 98 8 51 9
(Make sure you copy and paste them. Bugzilla doesn't allow referrals from Slashdot.)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1177
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2832
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2970
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2430
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2313
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1746
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6227
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1600
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1317
Note how all of them discuss bindings to NATIVE widgets. The support has been there for YEARS, it's just played down in favor of XUL Themes in the main browser trunks for portability reasons.
I'm trying to tell you, the Mozilla platform allows both types of widgets. The bindings are there. If you don't believe me, go read the XPCom and XBL source code. They link off to native components when available. I don't know what your tools are telling you, but they're wrong.
As it so happens, the widgets are native. Mozilla exposes the underlying implementation. Which is why buttons look like Windows, Mac, or GTK+ buttons. The caveat to this is that you can create XUL buttons/components that are entirely virtual. These components are generally used to produce skins like that used in Firefox. But most XUL applications actually rely on the native components instead. Which is why the Amazon browser I linked to looks like a native Windows app.
JavaScript is an interpretted language. And it's slllllllow.
It's also just glue. All the heavy lifting is done by the XPCOM components, which are FAAAAAASSSST.
This means that if an application is using JavaScript to do heavy lifting, the application will literally freeze while it can no longer accept messages. The windows will stop redrawing. Clicks will be ignored. Nothing will happen until the JavaScript finishes and the UI thread can start handling messages again.
Putting aside for a moment that this is an issue in all GUI programming, Mozilla does support multithreading. It just doesn't do it at the Javascript level. Threads are pushed down to the XPCom level instead, where they do the most good. (e.g. The XmlHttpRequest object can run synchronously or asynchronously.) If you really must multithread your JavaScript app, then cooperative multithreading is easy to do. Timed call-backs allow you to regain control whenever you need it, or in spurts if you'll be processing for a long period of time.
Let me just come out and state what you're trying to say: The article is full of it.
Horror is not necessary to a video game and more than it's necessary to Chess. A video game is about a goal that you wish to acheive. Generally, obtaining the goal should imply some sort of challenge, otherwise there would be little point.
Now if one dives into the challenge portion of video games, one does realize that these challenges do cause stress. Usually we're talking about a raised heartrate, higher state of alertness, and concentration. But it can also mean fear, angst, and concern. It all depends on the type of game, and the goal that the player wishes to achieve.
If horror games are do it for you, is there any surprise that the player will expect to be scared out of the wits? But where's the fear in Super Mario Bros? Or Tetris? Wing Commander? Honestly, there's none to speak of. In the case of Wing Commander, the fantasy aspect of becoming a star fighter pilot is the overriding aspect that makes the challenge interesting. All these games are interesting without any hint of fear. Humans need to be stressed, but different people have different stress needs. Recognizing that when creating a game can help a designer make it much more accessable to the target audience.
In short, beware of the pop psychologists.
SongBird just goes to show what XUL can really do. Most people shun it with a, "Coding serious applications in JavaScript? Yeah, right." But with the XPCOM Standard Library as a foundation, the XUL platform is really a great way to build applications. (There's a really cool application here that shows off XUL's abilities.)
XULRunner is still a problem, though. It's not clear to most programmers that XUL applications can function just as well standing alone as in a browser. Songbird is a great start, but does anyone know if there's a list of existing XULRunner applications? If such a list existed, it would be a lot easier to show people what XUL can do just by pointing them to a single URL.
I don't see the merit of comparing consoles from different generations for their power comsumption. Of course they need more juice... but they're doing a lot more with it.
??? I can get you an ARM board that'll be three times as fast as a Pentium 90, but use barely a fraction of the power.
Believe it or not, computer equipment *is* getting more efficient. The problem is that massive amounts of power are being dumped into them for "maximum performance". Shades of Alpha?