Most of the comments have been about the version numbering...
I'm curious about the change to rendering. It seems to me they're saying, "these OS layout engines (Quartz et al) are too slow - we'll just route around them". Understandable, but it's kind of a shame that they'll presumably be re-solving a lot of the problems that Quartz et al deal with (e.g. are they going to do their own font rendering?), and I wonder why their concerns can't be addressed by altering Quartz.
I'm not criticising the decision, I'm just curious as to the reasoning that goes on when such decisions are made. (I'm always interested in the practical examples of why those lessons they drum into you at university about the myriad benefits of code reuse, standing on the shoulders of giants etc don't really pan out in the real world.)
Is the job they're doing fundamentally different? (such that rendering via Quartz was the wrong idea in the first place) Is there some key component that fundamentally could not be in Quartz? (maybe, embedding videos or somesuch) Is it that Quartz isn't open source (or Apple cooperative enough) and so Mozilla can't realistically get them to fix it in a sensible timescale? Is it that they'd have to do this with all the vendors, which isn't feasible? Is it that abstracting on top of different vendors' APIs turns out to be too much of a headache? (maybe a pure-Quartz implementation would be as fast as the OpenGL version but it's all the Mozilla layers above Quartz that are sub-optimal?)
I wonder if their rendering engine will be released as an independent library that Gnome/KDE etc could incorporate if they wanted to.
CWE is about "weaknesses", i.e. security. Does anyone know of a similar group or research into classifying and ranking common software errors? For example:
- dereferencing null pointers - memory leaks - stack corruption via buffer overflow - out-by-one errors - errors in error handling code that is infrequently run - deadlock/resource contention - faults characteristic of concurrency - use of globals and code with side-effects
etc. All the stuff you learnt about at university, and then went on to rediscover in your job.
I've always thought that anyone designing a new programming language should have a big list of these and consider in each case what the language/compiler/library provides to mitigate/avoid these (garbage collection, static analysis, etc).
Brits may have good oral health but looking into the average adult's mouth is like staring into a box full of piano keys. We just don't seem to have the culture of paying a lot of money to give our kids braces here; or at least, if we do then there's a generational lag that's preventing me from seeing the results, and it'll get better over time.
It comes in two parts, a 'base' and the rest of it. The default base can be swapped out for jQuery (or a couple of other JS libraries) via an ExtJS 'adapter' which deals with various things including namespace issues, so use of both jQuery and ExtJS is officially blessed.
We evaluated a few others, but ExtJS's widget set seemed more comprehensive. (The killer at the time for us was a robust tree control supporting drag and drop.) Having used it for a while, it is fairly complex, but whenever you think something is way harder than it should be it generally turns out to be for sound architectural reasons that you didn't appreciate when you began. Even without a support contract, support in the general "free" forums has been quite good as long as you post sensibly.
It's not enough for YOU to be careful about what you put out there; a lot about you can be inferred from what your friends put out there.
E.g. you may not want Google to know your phone number and home address, but guess what? Chances are if one of your friends has an Android phone, chances are they've sync'd their contacts up to Google, including all your details, a picture of you, your birthday, etc.
Your friends are busily posting pictures of you on Facebook, possibly geotagged and timestamped, and are happily tagging them with your name. They keep spamming your email address with invites to join Facebook and LinkedIn. You may be declining, but guess what? Facebook and LinkedIn keep track of those invites, along with all the details your friends submitted about you (e.g. your full name, job title etc).
There was a story a few years back about the UK DNA register. The expert explained that as long as they had roughly 10% of the population in the database, it didn't matter if people opted out, they could still be identified by matches against their relatives' DNA and inferences from other records (e.g. birth records).
I think the same is true of the online world; you can try to opt out, but others will happily splurge everything they know about you, and you can't control that.
I don't know whether the death penalty would be on the table for whatever crimes the US believes him to have committed, but that could block his extradition from the UK at least.
Wikipedia says: "Many countries and areas, such as Canada, Macao,[1] Mexico, and most European nations, will not allow extradition if the death penalty may be imposed on the suspect unless they are assured that the death sentence will not be passed or carried out. In the case of Soering v. United Kingdom, the European Court of Human Rights held that it would violate Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights to extradite a person to the United States from the United Kingdom in a capital case."
My firefox RSS thingy had truncated the title to "Massive Gamma Ray Bubbles Discovered In Milk" which I think you'll agree would have been a much more interesting article:)
It mystifies me why anyone who voted for a party that has proportional representation more or less as its #1 priority -- which would essentially guarantee coalition government forever after -- would then be outraged that, in a coalition, that party has had to make compromises and doesn't get to do everything it promised.
Their failure is in not ramming this point home every time someone brings it up. Don't forget that they got a pretty tiny proportion of seats =10%ish? If Nick Clegg just said, "Look, we don't like this regressive Tory crap either, and we'll try and change it when we have a bigger say in things, but we don't have much of a mandate and have had to make some concessions to get some of our other stuff through," I think people would grumble but accept it. I expect that they will start doing this towards the end of the parliament when elections are looming.
The alternatives -- a full-on Tory government or a failed minority government followed by a further election with no guarantee of a definitive outcome -- seem shittier to me than what we've got.
I just hope AV gets through so we at last have a hope of ending the Tories-destroy/Labour-overspends cycle, and I can finally vote for the candidate I want rather than against the one I don't want. Not once in my life have I had the representation I wanted at any level of government (except for my MEP).
App developers just need to think about the spec they want vs the number of handsets of that spec in the market.
This translates to: "in the fragmented Android market, you need to choose your fragment".
Or (if disparaging Engadget despite fundamentally agreeing with them makes you squeamish) perhaps this translation: "There is no such thing as the Android market, there is the Droid market, the Galaxy S market, the Desire market, etc."
How easy is it to get information about all the shards of the Android market and so make a decision about what to target? All the pie charts I've seen have wedges that just say "Android" or at best "Android 1.6, 2.0" etc.
I just download TV via torrent with the commercials already cut out [...] At this point I feel adversarial towards the distributors and producers of TV content. They just take and take and take.
Does anyone know where I can get a new irony meter? Mine just broke.
This is an example of the kind of innovation that happens in the developing world, where ingenious, relatively low-tech, cheap solutions are found to problems that don't really exist in the developed world.
The Economist had an article on this in the last year or so (and a stupid name for it that was irritating but would at least have helped me google it up for you).
Browser development is not Google's core business (advertising is). When push comes to shove, they will choose their business interests over your browser experience.
Look at iTunes. It's just a media player. But Apple has no interest in making it the best possible media player - if they did, it would (to take a random example) allow syncing to as many portable players as possible, rather than just iPods. iTunes serves Apple's core business interests. I'd be really surprised if Chrome didn't go the same way.
Browser development is Mozilla's core business. Pushing for an open internet directly supports this.
I've no idea why this is moderated "Funny". It's what I perceive too -- directors run companies for their own benefit, all other considerations appear to be secondary.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you've misunderstood what String Theory is all about...
Sweet! Does it ship with Pulse Audio?
Isn't Cyanogen mod essentially an Android distro?
Most of the comments have been about the version numbering...
I'm curious about the change to rendering. It seems to me they're saying, "these OS layout engines (Quartz et al) are too slow - we'll just route around them". Understandable, but it's kind of a shame that they'll presumably be re-solving a lot of the problems that Quartz et al deal with (e.g. are they going to do their own font rendering?), and I wonder why their concerns can't be addressed by altering Quartz.
I'm not criticising the decision, I'm just curious as to the reasoning that goes on when such decisions are made. (I'm always interested in the practical examples of why those lessons they drum into you at university about the myriad benefits of code reuse, standing on the shoulders of giants etc don't really pan out in the real world.)
Is the job they're doing fundamentally different? (such that rendering via Quartz was the wrong idea in the first place)
Is there some key component that fundamentally could not be in Quartz? (maybe, embedding videos or somesuch)
Is it that Quartz isn't open source (or Apple cooperative enough) and so Mozilla can't realistically get them to fix it in a sensible timescale?
Is it that they'd have to do this with all the vendors, which isn't feasible?
Is it that abstracting on top of different vendors' APIs turns out to be too much of a headache? (maybe a pure-Quartz implementation would be as fast as the OpenGL version but it's all the Mozilla layers above Quartz that are sub-optimal?)
I wonder if their rendering engine will be released as an independent library that Gnome/KDE etc could incorporate if they wanted to.
Ah wow. Very cool indeed, thanks.
CWE is about "weaknesses", i.e. security. Does anyone know of a similar group or research into classifying and ranking common software errors? For example:
- dereferencing null pointers
- memory leaks
- stack corruption via buffer overflow
- out-by-one errors
- errors in error handling code that is infrequently run
- deadlock/resource contention
- faults characteristic of concurrency
- use of globals and code with side-effects
etc. All the stuff you learnt about at university, and then went on to rediscover in your job.
I've always thought that anyone designing a new programming language should have a big list of these and consider in each case what the language/compiler/library provides to mitigate/avoid these (garbage collection, static analysis, etc).
Anyway - anyone know of such a list/research?
Isn't Step 1 already splitting seawater into fresh water and brine?
This is not my experience at all. I get about 1 ad per album.
Brits may have good oral health but looking into the average adult's mouth is like staring into a box full of piano keys. We just don't seem to have the culture of paying a lot of money to give our kids braces here; or at least, if we do then there's a generational lag that's preventing me from seeing the results, and it'll get better over time.
We use ExtJS at work to do web forms.
It comes in two parts, a 'base' and the rest of it. The default base can be swapped out for jQuery (or a couple of other JS libraries) via an ExtJS 'adapter' which deals with various things including namespace issues, so use of both jQuery and ExtJS is officially blessed.
We evaluated a few others, but ExtJS's widget set seemed more comprehensive. (The killer at the time for us was a robust tree control supporting drag and drop.) Having used it for a while, it is fairly complex, but whenever you think something is way harder than it should be it generally turns out to be for sound architectural reasons that you didn't appreciate when you began. Even without a support contract, support in the general "free" forums has been quite good as long as you post sensibly.
It's not enough for YOU to be careful about what you put out there; a lot about you can be inferred from what your friends put out there.
E.g. you may not want Google to know your phone number and home address, but guess what? Chances are if one of your friends has an Android phone, chances are they've sync'd their contacts up to Google, including all your details, a picture of you, your birthday, etc.
Your friends are busily posting pictures of you on Facebook, possibly geotagged and timestamped, and are happily tagging them with your name. They keep spamming your email address with invites to join Facebook and LinkedIn. You may be declining, but guess what? Facebook and LinkedIn keep track of those invites, along with all the details your friends submitted about you (e.g. your full name, job title etc).
There was a story a few years back about the UK DNA register. The expert explained that as long as they had roughly 10% of the population in the database, it didn't matter if people opted out, they could still be identified by matches against their relatives' DNA and inferences from other records (e.g. birth records).
I think the same is true of the online world; you can try to opt out, but others will happily splurge everything they know about you, and you can't control that.
I don't know whether the death penalty would be on the table for whatever crimes the US believes him to have committed, but that could block his extradition from the UK at least.
Wikipedia says: "Many countries and areas, such as Canada, Macao,[1] Mexico, and most European nations, will not allow extradition if the death penalty may be imposed on the suspect unless they are assured that the death sentence will not be passed or carried out. In the case of Soering v. United Kingdom, the European Court of Human Rights held that it would violate Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights to extradite a person to the United States from the United Kingdom in a capital case."
Variable scoping -- in javascript especially!
I'd add, "errors in the error handling"
My firefox RSS thingy had truncated the title to "Massive Gamma Ray Bubbles Discovered In Milk" which I think you'll agree would have been a much more interesting article :)
It mystifies me why anyone who voted for a party that has proportional representation more or less as its #1 priority -- which would essentially guarantee coalition government forever after -- would then be outraged that, in a coalition, that party has had to make compromises and doesn't get to do everything it promised.
Their failure is in not ramming this point home every time someone brings it up. Don't forget that they got a pretty tiny proportion of seats =10%ish? If Nick Clegg just said, "Look, we don't like this regressive Tory crap either, and we'll try and change it when we have a bigger say in things, but we don't have much of a mandate and have had to make some concessions to get some of our other stuff through," I think people would grumble but accept it. I expect that they will start doing this towards the end of the parliament when elections are looming.
The alternatives -- a full-on Tory government or a failed minority government followed by a further election with no guarantee of a definitive outcome -- seem shittier to me than what we've got.
I just hope AV gets through so we at last have a hope of ending the Tories-destroy/Labour-overspends cycle, and I can finally vote for the candidate I want rather than against the one I don't want. Not once in my life have I had the representation I wanted at any level of government (except for my MEP).
Ah I spoke too soon. Here's a pie chart:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/13/visualized-tweetdeck-beta-usage-chart-beautifully-showcases-and/
App developers just need to think about the spec they want vs the number of handsets of that spec in the market.
This translates to: "in the fragmented Android market, you need to choose your fragment".
Or (if disparaging Engadget despite fundamentally agreeing with them makes you squeamish) perhaps this translation: "There is no such thing as the Android market, there is the Droid market, the Galaxy S market, the Desire market, etc."
How easy is it to get information about all the shards of the Android market and so make a decision about what to target? All the pie charts I've seen have wedges that just say "Android" or at best "Android 1.6, 2.0" etc.
I just download TV via torrent with the commercials already cut out [...] At this point I feel adversarial towards the distributors and producers of TV content. They just take and take and take.
Does anyone know where I can get a new irony meter? Mine just broke.
This is an example of the kind of innovation that happens in the developing world, where ingenious, relatively low-tech, cheap solutions are found to problems that don't really exist in the developed world.
The Economist had an article on this in the last year or so (and a stupid name for it that was irritating but would at least have helped me google it up for you).
Er... how exactly do you get an internet connection from an ISP without giving them any subscriber information?
Is there such a thing as an anonymous ISP subscription?
Browser development is not Google's core business (advertising is). When push comes to shove, they will choose their business interests over your browser experience.
Look at iTunes. It's just a media player. But Apple has no interest in making it the best possible media player - if they did, it would (to take a random example) allow syncing to as many portable players as possible, rather than just iPods. iTunes serves Apple's core business interests. I'd be really surprised if Chrome didn't go the same way.
Browser development is Mozilla's core business. Pushing for an open internet directly supports this.
Dammit Enviroknot, stop trolling!
*BANHAMMER*
He pretty much hits the nail on the head with every single problem I've had with Linux audi
Bloody latency, the 'o' still hasn't arrived.
I've no idea why this is moderated "Funny". It's what I perceive too -- directors run companies for their own benefit, all other considerations appear to be secondary.
If there were as many reactors as are needed to replace coal stations, we might see many more Chernobyls.