Apple could get concessions like better integration with traditional telco infrastructure. Remember Visual Voicemail in the OG iPhone, credited to the collaboration with AT&T? Maybe now we'll see IP calling, integrated FaceTime, etc. Also, Apple could get service guarantees for iPhone users like guaranteed infrastructure investments, unlimited and unthrottled data and/or tethering. Also, piles of money. Perhaps the new iPhone is more expensive to manufacture and Apple needs bigger subsidies that only Sprint agreed to.
IMAX 3D still uses linear polarization, and ghosting is a constant problem. The recent advance that really is driving the current 3D movie craze isn't digital shooting or projection but circular polarization filters as used in RealD, which effectively solve the ghosting problems all other polarized 3D systems have had, and are cheap enough to be disposable.
That list is missing one of the most important depth cues: motion parallax. It's not present in still images. It is present in video to a limited extent, but it doesn't account for viewer motion; only camera motion. The only way you'll get correct motion parallax for viewer motion in 3 dimensions is with head tracking or holograms.
Even if you've never used the Address Book app this information could be in there. In the OS X first-launch setup dialog it asks for your real name, and that gets automatically inserted into the address book. I'd wager that most people who use Macs have done this, so their real names are accessible to any website using this technique.
Additionally, though this is less likely, if you fill out the registration form during setup I believe that information also goes into the address book, so there's your home address and email too.
You don't need a fast charger at your house; overnight charging will work great using cheaper non-peak power, and will probably extend your battery life vs. fast charging all the time. Fast charge stations can be spaced as sparsely as gas stations.
Gyroscopes don't have to spin. MEMS gyroscopes vibrate instead. They do have moving parts, but the moving parts are insanely tiny, fabricated on silicon chips, and packaged in standard microchip packages. Quite amazing, really, when you think about it.
Net neutrality campaigners aren't just worried about "normal" internet connections, whatever that means. Net neutrality principles apply to *all* internet connections.
This situation is the reverse of the normal network neutrality problem. Normally you would expect AT&T to charge extra for the use of Skype, and that would be a clear net neutrality violation. Having Skype charge extra for using AT&T's network is less bad; Skype is not an ISP and there are many competing VoIP alternatives which do not charge. However, if AT&T is involved in Skype's decision to charge, for example if AT&T is charging Skype directly and Skype is passing that cost on, then it's still a net neutrality problem.
There are tons of translation add-ons for Firefox. The reason it's not built-in is because it's not actually a feature of the browser; it's a web service. Chrome's translation feature works by sending your entire page to Google's translation servers. Mozilla doesn't run a translation server farm; it would be prohibitively expensive for them.
On the contrary. It is *extremely* rude to throw up a confirmation dialog before every trivial system maintenance task.
As has been pointed out below, System Restore is basically only useful for resolving problems so severe they prevent your system from booting. Once your system has booted you don't really need older restore points, and they take up a *lot* of space. Deleting them is absolutely the right decision for the average user. The *real* problem here is probably the UI for creating system restore points not mentioning the deletion policies and generally misleading people into believing that creating restore points manually is a useful thing to do.
These people creating restore points all the time remind me of the people who get obsessed with defragmenting their disks every night...
No, actually this is a separate effort entirely. This is a product of the same group which produced the "Polaris" 80-core chip, and is meant for research into communication models and memory architectures for massively parallel systems.
Larrabee is still ongoing as a separate project with a different focus. Larrabee is all about getting maximum throughput by adding a wide vector unit with a whole new instruction set to each x86 core. As far as anyone outside Intel knows, the plan is still to eventually release some Larrabee prototypes as-is (with the texture units and everything), and to develop a Larrabee 2 with the lessons learned that can actually compete directly with GeForce and Radeon in the graphics card market.
Indeed; here's an example search showing caption results. I'm just surprised that, of the several articles "covering" this story that I've seen, none have mentioned (even in passing) the applicability of universal captioning to search.
I haven't seen any mention of search, which seems odd. Google is adding captions to every YouTube video, and nobody is interested in whether you'll be able to search the captions or not? Seems to me like it could be quite useful to search the captions of every video on YouTube.
It's true that theoretically shaders can't do much, but shader compilers are imperfect, and since GPUs have no hardware memory protection, compiler or driver bugs could easily result in read/write access to arbitrary video memory, allowing a shader to directly read/write the contents of your screen, or corrupt important data structures to exploit the kernel-mode part of the video driver and gain complete system access.
Video drivers are complex and notoriously buggy gobs of code which run partially in kernel mode and were designed for speed, not security. Allowing any random webpage to make DirectX/OpenGL calls directly (even without shaders) is a huge security concern.
The difference is that in 1-2 years WebGL will be built into your browser and enabled by default; not only on your PC but your Mac and your iPhone and your Android devices, whereas this crappy Windows-only plugin will still be a crappy Windows-only plugin.
It would be easy enough to prove that CNNIC is performing man-in-the-middle attacks. To perform a man-in-the-middle attack on (for example) gmail, CNNIC would have to send a fraudulent certificate to users. That certificate would be ironclad evidence that CNNIC can't be trusted, so all someone has to do is present one.
Yes! In fact the client does have every CA cert already loaded on its hard drive. Every browser comes with a list of CA certs that it accepts; other CA certs are simply not accepted. At no point is any CA cert downloaded over the Internet (except as part of a browser installation package, but if China were tampering with these it would have been noticed by security researchers). This is how SSL gets its resistance to man-in-the-middle attacks; it all comes from the preinstalled list of trusted root CAs.
Consider yourself educated. SSL is not vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.
No, SSL is not vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. The attack you describe only works as an attack on the certificate authority itself. It can only work if the Chinese government possesses the private keys of a CA which is in the default "trusted" list of the user's web browser. If the user knows which CA is compromised in this way, they can remove that CA from their trusted list and the attack will no longer work.
Do you know if any Chinese CAs come preinstalled in popular browsers? I don't think they do.
In what way is Quicktime et al. "platform specific" while Flash is not?
Quicktime runs on two platforms: OS X and Windows, and many Windows machines don't have it. It sorta runs on iPhone but the codec support and user interface is completely different. Flash runs on four platforms: OS X, Windows, Linux, and Solaris, and is commonly installed on all of them. Flash isn't as cross-platform as the web itself, but it's better than any other video plugin.
As for your "et al." Windows Media player is obviously platform specific, and there are no other widely-deployed video plugins. Also, the WMP plugin for non-IE browsers is no longer shipped with Windows as of Vista.
The interface of every web-page is browser and user-specific. I don't see the problem.
Not sure what you mean by that. Sure, there are differences between browsers, but they're nothing like the differences between Quicktime and Windows Media Player.
In fact, it seems a huge advantage that users can choose their own interface.
So you're seriously suggesting that instead of the video tag we should have many competing video plugins with different UIs, APIs, and supported codecs, which users should choose and install based on their preference, and then every website should support all of them to enable user choice? Now that I think about it, I guess that's actually a pretty accurate description of the way things worked before Flash video. Minus the "every website should support all of them" because that never happened.
A) Baseless nonsense. B) Flash is an embedded plugin. It certainly can certainly do all of the above things. C) There's no reason to assume the video tag can't an wont do the above. D) Even if you get rid of plugins for video, you'll still have plugins for other file types.
A) You're entitled to your opinion, but you're wrong. B) Flash can and does do all of these things; that's why the video tag is better than Flash. However, Flash does have the advantage over other video plugins because it's so widely used it's almost always already in RAM before the user visits your page, so you don't get the loading delay. C) The reason to believe it won't is that it doesn't. Have you even tried it? D) Complete non sequitur. I'm sorry, but the video tag doesn't feed the hungry or bring world peace either.
That's a nice checklist of worthless features that nobody will ever actually use. Fullscreen and positioning have always worked fine with plugins.
A quick Google search for "flash z-index" will prove you wrong. I can only assume you've never written a lot of code dealing with plugins because frustrations and limitations are everywhere. Also, the Quicktime plugin doesn't support fullscreen at all. Never has. The WMP plugin does, but the default UI doesn't even provide a button for it. You just have to know to double-click or right-click.
And now, you have 3 different versions of the flash player, with 3 different supported codecs to deal with.
According to Adobe, >90% of browsers have Flash 10 with H.264 installed. >99% of browsers have Flash 9 with at least VP6, and some number in between (likely on the high end) have Flash 9 with H.264. That's only 2 codecs you need to worry about, and in reality likely only one.
Playing video in an embed tag requires the user to have a platform-specific plugin installed. The user interface you get depends on the specific plugin used and can only be customized in a plugin-specific way. The Javascript API offered by the player is also plugin-specific and probably not as useful as the standard API provided by the video tag. Loading the plugin will often freeze the user's browser for several seconds and/or cause crashes. Plugins don't play nice with CSS opacity and z-order and are often buggy with respect to positioning, resizing, full-page zoom, and DOM manipulation. New advanced CSS features like transforms and animation are not likely to play nice with plugins either.
Flash took over from embed because it provided a customizable UI, consistent API, workable fullscreen mode, and reliable codec support. The video tag has the first two of these and is likely to get fullscreen support soon. Unfortunately codec support is a sticking point...
There will soon be much less need for 3D from 2D hacks, because there's a new technology coming that produces 3D pictures directly: Time-of-flight cameras. Today they are really expensive but they're going to become much cheaper very soon. This is what XBox's Project Natal is based on.
If you want browser control over animations, then take a look at WebKit's CSS Animation proposal. Instead of driving animations with opaque Javascript you can specify them declaratively in CSS, and as a side effect the browser gains control over the implementation.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple could get concessions like better integration with traditional telco infrastructure. Remember Visual Voicemail in the OG iPhone, credited to the collaboration with AT&T? Maybe now we'll see IP calling, integrated FaceTime, etc. Also, Apple could get service guarantees for iPhone users like guaranteed infrastructure investments, unlimited and unthrottled data and/or tethering. Also, piles of money. Perhaps the new iPhone is more expensive to manufacture and Apple needs bigger subsidies that only Sprint agreed to.
IMAX 3D still uses linear polarization, and ghosting is a constant problem. The recent advance that really is driving the current 3D movie craze isn't digital shooting or projection but circular polarization filters as used in RealD, which effectively solve the ghosting problems all other polarized 3D systems have had, and are cheap enough to be disposable.
That list is missing one of the most important depth cues: motion parallax. It's not present in still images. It is present in video to a limited extent, but it doesn't account for viewer motion; only camera motion. The only way you'll get correct motion parallax for viewer motion in 3 dimensions is with head tracking or holograms.
Free is cheaper than $10, download is better than CD, plus leaderboards and matchmaking are great additions.
Um, the fact that jailbreakme.com works is proof that all those things are lining up perfectly. This is a real working exploit.
Even if you've never used the Address Book app this information could be in there. In the OS X first-launch setup dialog it asks for your real name, and that gets automatically inserted into the address book. I'd wager that most people who use Macs have done this, so their real names are accessible to any website using this technique.
Additionally, though this is less likely, if you fill out the registration form during setup I believe that information also goes into the address book, so there's your home address and email too.
http://www.xrez.com/yose_proj/Yose_process.html
You don't need a fast charger at your house; overnight charging will work great using cheaper non-peak power, and will probably extend your battery life vs. fast charging all the time. Fast charge stations can be spaced as sparsely as gas stations.
Gyroscopes don't have to spin. MEMS gyroscopes vibrate instead. They do have moving parts, but the moving parts are insanely tiny, fabricated on silicon chips, and packaged in standard microchip packages. Quite amazing, really, when you think about it.
Net neutrality campaigners aren't just worried about "normal" internet connections, whatever that means. Net neutrality principles apply to *all* internet connections.
This situation is the reverse of the normal network neutrality problem. Normally you would expect AT&T to charge extra for the use of Skype, and that would be a clear net neutrality violation. Having Skype charge extra for using AT&T's network is less bad; Skype is not an ISP and there are many competing VoIP alternatives which do not charge. However, if AT&T is involved in Skype's decision to charge, for example if AT&T is charging Skype directly and Skype is passing that cost on, then it's still a net neutrality problem.
There are tons of translation add-ons for Firefox. The reason it's not built-in is because it's not actually a feature of the browser; it's a web service. Chrome's translation feature works by sending your entire page to Google's translation servers. Mozilla doesn't run a translation server farm; it would be prohibitively expensive for them.
On the contrary. It is *extremely* rude to throw up a confirmation dialog before every trivial system maintenance task.
As has been pointed out below, System Restore is basically only useful for resolving problems so severe they prevent your system from booting. Once your system has booted you don't really need older restore points, and they take up a *lot* of space. Deleting them is absolutely the right decision for the average user. The *real* problem here is probably the UI for creating system restore points not mentioning the deletion policies and generally misleading people into believing that creating restore points manually is a useful thing to do.
These people creating restore points all the time remind me of the people who get obsessed with defragmenting their disks every night...
No, actually this is a separate effort entirely. This is a product of the same group which produced the "Polaris" 80-core chip, and is meant for research into communication models and memory architectures for massively parallel systems.
Larrabee is still ongoing as a separate project with a different focus. Larrabee is all about getting maximum throughput by adding a wide vector unit with a whole new instruction set to each x86 core. As far as anyone outside Intel knows, the plan is still to eventually release some Larrabee prototypes as-is (with the texture units and everything), and to develop a Larrabee 2 with the lessons learned that can actually compete directly with GeForce and Radeon in the graphics card market.
Indeed; here's an example search showing caption results. I'm just surprised that, of the several articles "covering" this story that I've seen, none have mentioned (even in passing) the applicability of universal captioning to search.
I haven't seen any mention of search, which seems odd. Google is adding captions to every YouTube video, and nobody is interested in whether you'll be able to search the captions or not? Seems to me like it could be quite useful to search the captions of every video on YouTube.
It's true that theoretically shaders can't do much, but shader compilers are imperfect, and since GPUs have no hardware memory protection, compiler or driver bugs could easily result in read/write access to arbitrary video memory, allowing a shader to directly read/write the contents of your screen, or corrupt important data structures to exploit the kernel-mode part of the video driver and gain complete system access.
Video drivers are complex and notoriously buggy gobs of code which run partially in kernel mode and were designed for speed, not security. Allowing any random webpage to make DirectX/OpenGL calls directly (even without shaders) is a huge security concern.
The difference is that in 1-2 years WebGL will be built into your browser and enabled by default; not only on your PC but your Mac and your iPhone and your Android devices, whereas this crappy Windows-only plugin will still be a crappy Windows-only plugin.
It would be easy enough to prove that CNNIC is performing man-in-the-middle attacks. To perform a man-in-the-middle attack on (for example) gmail, CNNIC would have to send a fraudulent certificate to users. That certificate would be ironclad evidence that CNNIC can't be trusted, so all someone has to do is present one.
Yes! In fact the client does have every CA cert already loaded on its hard drive. Every browser comes with a list of CA certs that it accepts; other CA certs are simply not accepted. At no point is any CA cert downloaded over the Internet (except as part of a browser installation package, but if China were tampering with these it would have been noticed by security researchers). This is how SSL gets its resistance to man-in-the-middle attacks; it all comes from the preinstalled list of trusted root CAs.
Consider yourself educated. SSL is not vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.
No, SSL is not vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. The attack you describe only works as an attack on the certificate authority itself. It can only work if the Chinese government possesses the private keys of a CA which is in the default "trusted" list of the user's web browser. If the user knows which CA is compromised in this way, they can remove that CA from their trusted list and the attack will no longer work.
Do you know if any Chinese CAs come preinstalled in popular browsers? I don't think they do.
Here's a 7500x7500 (56 megapixel) image of the fractal: http://seadragon.com/view/fnr.
In what way is Quicktime et al. "platform specific" while Flash is not?
Quicktime runs on two platforms: OS X and Windows, and many Windows machines don't have it. It sorta runs on iPhone but the codec support and user interface is completely different. Flash runs on four platforms: OS X, Windows, Linux, and Solaris, and is commonly installed on all of them. Flash isn't as cross-platform as the web itself, but it's better than any other video plugin.
As for your "et al." Windows Media player is obviously platform specific, and there are no other widely-deployed video plugins. Also, the WMP plugin for non-IE browsers is no longer shipped with Windows as of Vista.
The interface of every web-page is browser and user-specific. I don't see the problem.
Not sure what you mean by that. Sure, there are differences between browsers, but they're nothing like the differences between Quicktime and Windows Media Player.
In fact, it seems a huge advantage that users can choose their own interface.
So you're seriously suggesting that instead of the video tag we should have many competing video plugins with different UIs, APIs, and supported codecs, which users should choose and install based on their preference, and then every website should support all of them to enable user choice? Now that I think about it, I guess that's actually a pretty accurate description of the way things worked before Flash video. Minus the "every website should support all of them" because that never happened.
A) Baseless nonsense.
B) Flash is an embedded plugin. It certainly can certainly do all of the above things.
C) There's no reason to assume the video tag can't an wont do the above.
D) Even if you get rid of plugins for video, you'll still have plugins for other file types.
A) You're entitled to your opinion, but you're wrong.
B) Flash can and does do all of these things; that's why the video tag is better than Flash. However, Flash does have the advantage over other video plugins because it's so widely used it's almost always already in RAM before the user visits your page, so you don't get the loading delay.
C) The reason to believe it won't is that it doesn't. Have you even tried it?
D) Complete non sequitur. I'm sorry, but the video tag doesn't feed the hungry or bring world peace either.
That's a nice checklist of worthless features that nobody will ever actually use. Fullscreen and positioning have always worked fine with plugins.
A quick Google search for "flash z-index" will prove you wrong. I can only assume you've never written a lot of code dealing with plugins because frustrations and limitations are everywhere. Also, the Quicktime plugin doesn't support fullscreen at all. Never has. The WMP plugin does, but the default UI doesn't even provide a button for it. You just have to know to double-click or right-click.
And now, you have 3 different versions of the flash player, with 3 different supported codecs to deal with.
According to Adobe, >90% of browsers have Flash 10 with H.264 installed. >99% of browsers have Flash 9 with at least VP6, and some number in between (likely on the high end) have Flash 9 with H.264. That's only 2 codecs you need to worry about, and in reality likely only one.
You asked for it...
Playing video in an embed tag requires the user to have a platform-specific plugin installed. The user interface you get depends on the specific plugin used and can only be customized in a plugin-specific way. The Javascript API offered by the player is also plugin-specific and probably not as useful as the standard API provided by the video tag. Loading the plugin will often freeze the user's browser for several seconds and/or cause crashes. Plugins don't play nice with CSS opacity and z-order and are often buggy with respect to positioning, resizing, full-page zoom, and DOM manipulation. New advanced CSS features like transforms and animation are not likely to play nice with plugins either.
Flash took over from embed because it provided a customizable UI, consistent API, workable fullscreen mode, and reliable codec support. The video tag has the first two of these and is likely to get fullscreen support soon. Unfortunately codec support is a sticking point...
There will soon be much less need for 3D from 2D hacks, because there's a new technology coming that produces 3D pictures directly: Time-of-flight cameras. Today they are really expensive but they're going to become much cheaper very soon. This is what XBox's Project Natal is based on.
If you want browser control over animations, then take a look at WebKit's CSS Animation proposal. Instead of driving animations with opaque Javascript you can specify them declaratively in CSS, and as a side effect the browser gains control over the implementation.