Is he not being realistic, though? Cap-and-trade will inevitably increase energy prices, initially to cover the overhead of the system itself while older energy sources are replaced, and later on because the market will have acclimated to these artificially high prices, such that the newer sources can get away with charging the same rates. Last I checked, this point wasn't even controversial; the real question is whether or not it's worth doing.
The PS3 is, first and foremost, a Blu-Ray player. That's how it was designed, that's how it was marketed, and that's what it still is to many people. It should be counted among Blu-Ray players for that reason. Likewise with XBox 360 HD-DVD drives, though I agree with you that the numbers on those are probably low.
> human language inherently introduces ambiguities that will plague standards specs until > the end of time
Specs are more heavily relying on algorithmic definitions of behavior, precisely for this reason.
And again, it helps to some degree. It is not, however, a panacea, nor does it remove the absolute necessity of proper testing. That the Web has somehow limped along for a few years without proper test suites does not mean they are not necessary; it only means that there is a serious problem that needs to be corrected. Tests are the cure.
> Certainly you can.
I don't think you understand.... fully testing all possible combinations of CSS2.1 features is likely to result in a total size of tests that exceeds currently available global storage capacity. It's not just a matter of "effort"; it's actually a matter of fundamental physical resource limits.
That would indeed be impractical, but fortunately it is not necessary. Continuing with your CSS example, you do not in fact have to generate all possible combinations of CSS or all possible CSS documents to show that these tests will pass. A large part of the the QA task is determining which tests are needed in order to prove that the others would pass.
There are 1-2 dozen different DOM specs; again, some are more important than others. Interoperability on the important ones is pretty good, forcing Acid3 to focus on the unimportant ones.
The DOM Events module would like to have a word with you. Interoperability has indeed improved in parts of the DOM. This has made those areas in where interoperability hasn't improved more important, because the interoperable areas are frankly a solved problem. It's true that this is pure infrastructure, rather than the latest shiny object to come along. This does not make it less important.
And I don't think support for some standards should be a primary goal, even if those happen to be the ones with overhyped tests for them. In fact, I don't think 100% support for any standard should automatically be the _primary_ goal. It should depend on exactly what that 100% support entails.
100% support should only be a goal for those standards one claims to support. On those standards, however, 99% is a failing grade. Support it all or not at all, and finish what you start before moving on to the next shiny object.
> This is why Web platforms of the future will not be based on specifications, but > on the test suites.
Actually, no. This is why people are much more careful about not writing ambiguous specifications now.
Ultimately, that isn't enough: human language inherently introduces ambiguities that will plague standards specs until the end of time. A large part of the point of test suites is to resolve those ambiguities.
This is not to say that human-readable specs are bad things. They're necessary for almost anyone to be able to understand the standard being implemented. But they are, and should be, the first line; not the final word.
You can't "test suite" your way to full coverage of something like CSS 2.1: too many features, too many combinations, too many things to test.
Certainly you can. This is what QA is for. It takes a lot of initial effort, which is the point of automated testing, but a properly-designed suite can deal with basically anything that is deemed to matter by the people who created the specs. It's all a matter of how much the test makers and standards creators are willing to do.
> If Mozilla wants to be seen as taking standards seriously again
Which standards? Some standards are more important than others.
Indeed they are. The most important being HTML, CSS, ECMAScript, and the DOM: standards out there in the wild right now, being used in pages the world over, and claimed to be supported by most major browsers.
It might just be that stuff the acid test is not testing is more important than stuff it should be... (and is in fact the case with parts of acid3).
No, it's not the case. Quite an easy statement to make, when you don't have to back anything up.
So I challenge you: what makes XBL more important than, say, CSS? Acid3 tests real-world problems that prominent developers have been complaining about for years. Sure, these aren't the latest shiny tech toys, but they provide the infrastructure necessary to make the newer up-and-comers practical.
It might also be that supporting the standard and not supporting it at all are both better options than supporting just the part that the test tests.
Better still would be to make test suites that actually cover the whole standard. Until that happens, Acid3 -testing the parts that people care about to solve the problems people care about- are the best we have.
So no, 100% test-compliance should never be the primary goal. Support for the standards that are useful to support should be.
If you don't pass the tests, you do not support the standard. Period.
even iCab -a browser developed by one person- beat them to full compliance by months
That's disingenuous. The version of iCab (4.6) that passed the Acid3 test uses the same WebKit rendering engine as Safari and Chrome. And it beat Safari 4 to market by 1 day.
True, but out of scope: I was talking about Acid2, not Acid3.
Cripes, people; read the patent before going all WHARRGARBL.
You cannot save progress that the game makes for you. It's right there in the patent, explicitly specified in no uncertain terms. When you turn off the demo mode, you're dropped back where you left off, not where the computer did. The computer can show you a path, but you still have to take it yourself. Except in puzzle games, knowing the path and walking the path are two very different things, and if knowing what to do makes it easy then something is wrong with the game design.
The thing about Acid tests is that specs are ambiguous: there are often multiple possible meanings to a given section, and inevitable different people will implement them in different ways. Some of those will be incompatible, yet both can claim compliance, so this helps no one. Tests, on the other hand, are unambiguous: either you pass or you do not.
This is why Web platforms of the future will not be based on specifications, but on the test suites. Acid tests are not perfect at this, but they are light-years better than previous practice. If Mozilla wants to be seen as taking standards seriously again, they are going to have to start taking these tests seriously, and that means 100% as soon as possible.
They've improved over Acid2, at least, when even iCab -a browser developed by one person- beat them to full compliance by months. But they still have a long way to go. When major tests like this are developed, 100% needs to be a dealbreaker goal for the next major release, not something put off until 2-3 big releases in the future. Opera gets this, and the WebKit folks get this. Mozilla used to, back in the days of the first CSS Acid Test. But somewhere along the way, they lost sight of it, and they need to be reminded.
Yeah, right. More like "Ubisoft wants more easy graphics-are-everything cash-ins and the current crop of consoles is losing its marketing effectiveness."
Some 50% of the marketplace currently indicates that public demand is not, in fact, for "the best machine possible": people just want better games, and they don't care very much about the technology used to deliver them. The only ones demanding "the best machine possible" are technophiles more interested in the hardware than they are in the games, and Ubisoft is looking to throw them a couple of buzzwords as an easy way to spur sales.
Just FYI, JPEG and PNG are complementary to each other (lossy, lossless) while GIF and PNG are competing in the same usage category (with the differences being that GIF supports animation* and PNG supports 24-bit and alpha support).
* MNG doesn't count as basically nothing supports it.
Of course. I assumed that this was a given. They coexist, each in their own niches. I believe the same will happen for video.
I suspect that H.264 and Theora will emerge as dual coexisting standards for the video tag, much as GIF, JPEG, and PNG coexist as standards for the img tag. Browsers will eventually support both, either natively or through easy plug-in access, and no one will really care all that much.
Ummm, one's a forced reallocation of scare goods, the other isn't.
Yes, actually, it is. The point of copyright is that the rightsholder has the initial rights to all copies made: when you make one, it belongs to them. By not rendering it up to them, you have stolen it.
People say that making a copy is what makes copyright not theft, when in fact it's the opposite: the creation of a copy is precisely what makes it theft. This is part of why, for example, libraries qualify as fair use despite getting the work out to so many people: no new copies are created in the process, and so nothing is stolen. The same goes for the used-media market: again, no new copies, ergo no theft.
The balance of power in copyright is certainly too far off in favor of the creators, but the fact remains: pirates are nothing but common thieves. Those of us who wish to see a better balance, with more protection for the legitimate rights of legitimate users, must resist the temptation to consider pirates as allies: they are not. The "piracy != theft" line is ridiculous and invalid, unworthy of debate or respect.
Why the heck does the law make an imessuarably small dent in a megacorporations profits more important than fraud being perpetrated against a citizen? its ridiculous and very wrong.
If everyone is to be treated as equal before the law, then fraud is fraud, no matter the perpetrator, no matter the victim, no matter the amount of harm done. That's not bias at all; in fact, it's the opposite.
No need to make exercise fun. Exercise is like sex, when you're doing it your body is spewing dopamine, endorphins, and bodily fluids in all directions.
Total nonsense! The EU is doing what the USA should have done a decade ago.
And that's precisely the problem: a decade has passed since this should have been done. Conditions have changed, and unbundling the browser no longer stands any chance of countering IE's unfair advantage. More likely, in fact, that advantage will only get worse.
Here's how it works: without a bundled browser, getting a browser becomes significantly more of a hassle, unless of course you use the handy built-in "Get Internet Explorer" bookmark, conveniently provided on the user's desktop. Microsoft will likely not stop there, either; they'll offer free CDs with IE on it at retail outlets. Combine these, and unbundling the browser actually makes it harder to choose a competitor's product, while only slightly increasing Microsoft's cost to keep its browser front and center.
Nothing gets "leaked" before a major trade press event like this unless the company wants it to happen. The "BAW i dun lik when peeps say stuff b4 my speech" bit is just an act, and not a convincing one. Leaks build hype, and everyone knows this. It's all part of the show.
Right now, they're winning on hardware sold, but losing on the software side with the lowest attach rate of the generation, because everyone's playing Wii Sports, and apparently not much else on the console.
Your data must be old. PS3 fell behind Wii for attach rate a while back.
People fail. Systems fail. These things are parts of life. But they do not often fail for the same reasons, and thus, they do not always fail at the same time. Just as there are systems to take over in case the pilot fails, so to does the pilot need to be able to take over in case the systems fail. Is this a guarantee of safety or success? Of course not. But it another level of redundancy in case something goes wrong, and it does so in a way whatever took out either the pilot or systems is unlikely to be able to immediately take out the other. Manual override is, in a sense, the other half of fly-by-wire.
Would this have saved the Air France flight? I don't know. Nobody does for sure, and given the difficulty of locating the black box in this case we may never know for sure. But the number of plausible scenarios is finite, and certainly in some of them a manual override could have at least given the plane a better chance. There are also some in which manual override wouldn't have changed the outcome. Given what we know about this particular incident, it is very unlikely that manual override could have made it worse.
Either way, if Airbus doesn't currently allow for manual override, it needs to start. Pilots also need to be trained in its proper use, which includes not using it unnecessarily. Many or even most pilots may never need to use a manual override, but that doesn't matter: manual override is not there for most pilots. It's there for those rare but critical points when nothing else will do.
I'm not an interface elitist or an apple fanboy, but I can't use software that gets on my nerves and Opera and Vista occupy the top two slots for that.
Sounds like an interface elitist to me. Possibly even an Apple fanboy, if you insist on "native widgets" instead of controls that are actually suited to a Web environment (for example, by responding to styling). Users of other platforms conceded the necessity of this long ago; only the Apple zealots hold out against it, and they hurt the Web by doing so.
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Wait a minute. Did Noah have daughters too?
Probably, but the sons are also said to have brought their wives with them.
Is he not being realistic, though? Cap-and-trade will inevitably increase energy prices, initially to cover the overhead of the system itself while older energy sources are replaced, and later on because the market will have acclimated to these artificially high prices, such that the newer sources can get away with charging the same rates. Last I checked, this point wasn't even controversial; the real question is whether or not it's worth doing.
The PS3 is, first and foremost, a Blu-Ray player. That's how it was designed, that's how it was marketed, and that's what it still is to many people. It should be counted among Blu-Ray players for that reason. Likewise with XBox 360 HD-DVD drives, though I agree with you that the numbers on those are probably low.
> human language inherently introduces ambiguities that will plague standards specs until
> the end of time
Specs are more heavily relying on algorithmic definitions of behavior, precisely for this reason.
And again, it helps to some degree. It is not, however, a panacea, nor does it remove the absolute necessity of proper testing. That the Web has somehow limped along for a few years without proper test suites does not mean they are not necessary; it only means that there is a serious problem that needs to be corrected. Tests are the cure.
> Certainly you can.
I don't think you understand.... fully testing all possible combinations of CSS2.1 features is likely to result in a total size of tests that exceeds currently available global storage capacity. It's not just a matter of "effort"; it's actually a matter of fundamental physical resource limits.
That would indeed be impractical, but fortunately it is not necessary. Continuing with your CSS example, you do not in fact have to generate all possible combinations of CSS or all possible CSS documents to show that these tests will pass. A large part of the the QA task is determining which tests are needed in order to prove that the others would pass.
There are 1-2 dozen different DOM specs; again, some are more important than others. Interoperability on the important ones is pretty good, forcing Acid3 to focus on the unimportant ones.
The DOM Events module would like to have a word with you. Interoperability has indeed improved in parts of the DOM. This has made those areas in where interoperability hasn't improved more important, because the interoperable areas are frankly a solved problem. It's true that this is pure infrastructure, rather than the latest shiny object to come along. This does not make it less important.
And I don't think support for some standards should be a primary goal, even if those happen to be the ones with overhyped tests for them. In fact, I don't think 100% support for any standard should automatically be the _primary_ goal. It should depend on exactly what that 100% support entails.
100% support should only be a goal for those standards one claims to support. On those standards, however, 99% is a failing grade. Support it all or not at all, and finish what you start before moving on to the next shiny object.
TBH, 93% is a *very* respectable score.
Only in the absence of competitors that have been doing 100% for months. Once that happens, 99% is as bad as zero.
> This is why Web platforms of the future will not be based on specifications, but
> on the test suites.
Actually, no. This is why people are much more careful about not writing ambiguous specifications now.
Ultimately, that isn't enough: human language inherently introduces ambiguities that will plague standards specs until the end of time. A large part of the point of test suites is to resolve those ambiguities.
This is not to say that human-readable specs are bad things. They're necessary for almost anyone to be able to understand the standard being implemented. But they are, and should be, the first line; not the final word.
You can't "test suite" your way to full coverage of something like CSS 2.1: too many features, too many combinations, too many things to test.
Certainly you can. This is what QA is for. It takes a lot of initial effort, which is the point of automated testing, but a properly-designed suite can deal with basically anything that is deemed to matter by the people who created the specs. It's all a matter of how much the test makers and standards creators are willing to do.
> If Mozilla wants to be seen as taking standards seriously again
Which standards? Some standards are more important than others.
Indeed they are. The most important being HTML, CSS, ECMAScript, and the DOM: standards out there in the wild right now, being used in pages the world over, and claimed to be supported by most major browsers.
It might just be that stuff the acid test is not testing is more important than stuff it should be... (and is in fact the case with parts of acid3).
No, it's not the case. Quite an easy statement to make, when you don't have to back anything up.
So I challenge you: what makes XBL more important than, say, CSS? Acid3 tests real-world problems that prominent developers have been complaining about for years. Sure, these aren't the latest shiny tech toys, but they provide the infrastructure necessary to make the newer up-and-comers practical.
It might also be that supporting the standard and not supporting it at all are both better options than supporting just the part that the test tests.
Better still would be to make test suites that actually cover the whole standard. Until that happens, Acid3 -testing the parts that people care about to solve the problems people care about- are the best we have.
So no, 100% test-compliance should never be the primary goal. Support for the standards that are useful to support should be.
If you don't pass the tests, you do not support the standard. Period.
That's disingenuous. The version of iCab (4.6) that passed the Acid3 test uses the same WebKit rendering engine as Safari and Chrome. And it beat Safari 4 to market by 1 day.
True, but out of scope: I was talking about Acid2, not Acid3.
Cripes, people; read the patent before going all WHARRGARBL.
You cannot save progress that the game makes for you. It's right there in the patent, explicitly specified in no uncertain terms. When you turn off the demo mode, you're dropped back where you left off, not where the computer did. The computer can show you a path, but you still have to take it yourself. Except in puzzle games, knowing the path and walking the path are two very different things, and if knowing what to do makes it easy then something is wrong with the game design.
The thing about Acid tests is that specs are ambiguous: there are often multiple possible meanings to a given section, and inevitable different people will implement them in different ways. Some of those will be incompatible, yet both can claim compliance, so this helps no one. Tests, on the other hand, are unambiguous: either you pass or you do not.
This is why Web platforms of the future will not be based on specifications, but on the test suites. Acid tests are not perfect at this, but they are light-years better than previous practice. If Mozilla wants to be seen as taking standards seriously again, they are going to have to start taking these tests seriously, and that means 100% as soon as possible.
They've improved over Acid2, at least, when even iCab -a browser developed by one person- beat them to full compliance by months. But they still have a long way to go. When major tests like this are developed, 100% needs to be a dealbreaker goal for the next major release, not something put off until 2-3 big releases in the future. Opera gets this, and the WebKit folks get this. Mozilla used to, back in the days of the first CSS Acid Test. But somewhere along the way, they lost sight of it, and they need to be reminded.
Are they really trying to shorten the console generation cycle down from what Playstation 1 had?
Are they still clueless about what is a good game and what is pointless graphics/realism crap?
New generations don't make games better.
No, but a new crop of buzzwords makes games very easy to sell to technophiles. That's what Ubisoft is after: sales without effort.
Yeah, right. More like "Ubisoft wants more easy graphics-are-everything cash-ins and the current crop of consoles is losing its marketing effectiveness."
Some 50% of the marketplace currently indicates that public demand is not, in fact, for "the best machine possible": people just want better games, and they don't care very much about the technology used to deliver them. The only ones demanding "the best machine possible" are technophiles more interested in the hardware than they are in the games, and Ubisoft is looking to throw them a couple of buzzwords as an easy way to spur sales.
Just FYI, JPEG and PNG are complementary to each other (lossy, lossless) while GIF and PNG are competing in the same usage category (with the differences being that GIF supports animation* and PNG supports 24-bit and alpha support).
* MNG doesn't count as basically nothing supports it.
Of course. I assumed that this was a given. They coexist, each in their own niches. I believe the same will happen for video.
I suspect that H.264 and Theora will emerge as dual coexisting standards for the video tag, much as GIF, JPEG, and PNG coexist as standards for the img tag. Browsers will eventually support both, either natively or through easy plug-in access, and no one will really care all that much.
Ummm, one's a forced reallocation of scare goods, the other isn't.
Yes, actually, it is. The point of copyright is that the rightsholder has the initial rights to all copies made: when you make one, it belongs to them. By not rendering it up to them, you have stolen it.
People say that making a copy is what makes copyright not theft, when in fact it's the opposite: the creation of a copy is precisely what makes it theft. This is part of why, for example, libraries qualify as fair use despite getting the work out to so many people: no new copies are created in the process, and so nothing is stolen. The same goes for the used-media market: again, no new copies, ergo no theft.
The balance of power in copyright is certainly too far off in favor of the creators, but the fact remains: pirates are nothing but common thieves. Those of us who wish to see a better balance, with more protection for the legitimate rights of legitimate users, must resist the temptation to consider pirates as allies: they are not. The "piracy != theft" line is ridiculous and invalid, unworthy of debate or respect.
But remember copy right infringement != theft.
Yes, it is. There is no valid difference between the two.
Why the heck does the law make an imessuarably small dent in a megacorporations profits more important than fraud being perpetrated against a citizen? its ridiculous and very wrong.
If everyone is to be treated as equal before the law, then fraud is fraud, no matter the perpetrator, no matter the victim, no matter the amount of harm done. That's not bias at all; in fact, it's the opposite.
No need to make exercise fun. Exercise is like sex, when you're doing it your body is spewing dopamine, endorphins, and bodily fluids in all directions.
I call it: "The Aristocrats!"
Total nonsense! The EU is doing what the USA should have done a decade ago.
And that's precisely the problem: a decade has passed since this should have been done. Conditions have changed, and unbundling the browser no longer stands any chance of countering IE's unfair advantage. More likely, in fact, that advantage will only get worse.
Here's how it works: without a bundled browser, getting a browser becomes significantly more of a hassle, unless of course you use the handy built-in "Get Internet Explorer" bookmark, conveniently provided on the user's desktop. Microsoft will likely not stop there, either; they'll offer free CDs with IE on it at retail outlets. Combine these, and unbundling the browser actually makes it harder to choose a competitor's product, while only slightly increasing Microsoft's cost to keep its browser front and center.
Nothing gets "leaked" before a major trade press event like this unless the company wants it to happen. The "BAW i dun lik when peeps say stuff b4 my speech" bit is just an act, and not a convincing one. Leaks build hype, and everyone knows this. It's all part of the show.
But of more importance to trolls: is the server also petrified?
Right now, they're winning on hardware sold, but losing on the software side with the lowest attach rate of the generation, because everyone's playing Wii Sports, and apparently not much else on the console.
Your data must be old. PS3 fell behind Wii for attach rate a while back.
People fail. Systems fail. These things are parts of life. But they do not often fail for the same reasons, and thus, they do not always fail at the same time. Just as there are systems to take over in case the pilot fails, so to does the pilot need to be able to take over in case the systems fail. Is this a guarantee of safety or success? Of course not. But it another level of redundancy in case something goes wrong, and it does so in a way whatever took out either the pilot or systems is unlikely to be able to immediately take out the other. Manual override is, in a sense, the other half of fly-by-wire.
Would this have saved the Air France flight? I don't know. Nobody does for sure, and given the difficulty of locating the black box in this case we may never know for sure. But the number of plausible scenarios is finite, and certainly in some of them a manual override could have at least given the plane a better chance. There are also some in which manual override wouldn't have changed the outcome. Given what we know about this particular incident, it is very unlikely that manual override could have made it worse.
Either way, if Airbus doesn't currently allow for manual override, it needs to start. Pilots also need to be trained in its proper use, which includes not using it unnecessarily. Many or even most pilots may never need to use a manual override, but that doesn't matter: manual override is not there for most pilots. It's there for those rare but critical points when nothing else will do.
So you've gotten so desperate to hate the Wii that you're now saying Mario isn't a real game? Sounds like someone needs a nap.
I'm not an interface elitist or an apple fanboy, but I can't use software that gets on my nerves and Opera and Vista occupy the top two slots for that.
Sounds like an interface elitist to me. Possibly even an Apple fanboy, if you insist on "native widgets" instead of controls that are actually suited to a Web environment (for example, by responding to styling). Users of other platforms conceded the necessity of this long ago; only the Apple zealots hold out against it, and they hurt the Web by doing so.
One of the great travesties of gaming, that. The man got little more than a new computer and a modest bonus.
In America, you get games and play them. In Soviet Russia, you make games and get played!