Whoa! How did that never take off? It's basically almost SVG, with a few disadvantages, but it works in Internet Explorer right now?! Why did W3C decide to reinvent the wheel with SVG, when they could have just extended VML?
Well, at least that proves that the Internet Explorer team wouldn't have too much work to do to implement basic SVG rendering; the important work is already done for them. The only explanations for their continued lack of support are laziness or malicious intent to impose their proprietary standards like XAML.
There is a reason the web took off the way it has, like few other things before it, and continues to grow at an incredible rate even today, ushering in a whole new era of communication. And it's not because everybody's intellectual property has been safely locked away where nobody can "harm" it. There is a place for DRM and content restrictions, but the general public web is not it.
Anybody who can't stand the thought of people "pausing" their precious intellectual property (oh noes!!!), or using the information contained in it in any way other than private viewing by a single individual (who doesn't record it, save it for later, reverse-engineer it, or modify it in the slightest, of course) is working counter to the spirit of the web. Not that people should rip off other people's work without attribution all over the place; but treating everybody as a criminal to stop the few who might err is stupid and restricts progress.
Oh, forgot one: not resizable. Flash is vector-graphics-based, and yet you hardly ever seen a Flash site that even allows their embedded Flash to resize with the browser window, much less change the font size (and don't even think about custom user CSS for a high-contrast legible-font accessibility scheme). It sure is frustrating trying use a 640x480 Flash website on a 1600x1200 display. I notice that the Laszlo example programs display this fault; even the ones that display their own internal resizable windows are limited to a certain specific size.
Also, I'd like to make it clear that I realize HTML and Javascript can be abused to produce many of the same problems endemic to flash. However, in many cases smart browsers can override web developer stupidity, because HTML isn't tightly controlled by a single implementor who is beholden to the developers of the stupid sites (see pop-up blocking, etc). And in HTML you have to go far out of your way to produce the same user annoyances you get for free with Flash.
Subverts normal web navigation, making it impossible to link to a certain part of a Flash site, and making the browser back/forward and history not work.
Doesn't use the normal page/link structure of the web, making Google less effective.
Doesn't allow effective screen-scraping.
Can't see where links are going in the status bar.
Allows disabling of the context menu (removal of the "pause" and "stop" items, for example)
Controlled by a single company.
No good open-source implementation.
Usually not accessible.
Discourages open exchange of ideas and information by obfuscating source code, disallowing text and image copy/paste, not having "view source".
Encourages unconventional, restrictive, flashy, and universally bad user interface design.
No volume control, enabling those retarded "shoot the paparrazi" ads that blast your ears out if you have your volume up for listening to music.
Now, before you start getting all mad at me and flaming, know that I realize many of these problems are not exactly inherent to the technology, but are caused by the people who use it. However, IMHO that doesn't excuse Flash from these problems. You can't judge a technology on its technical merits alone; only on how it is eventually used. Flash provides affordances to web developers that cause them to make sites with these problems. A better technology would encourage doing the right thing by default, or do the right thing automatically.
Oh, really? I didn't realize they were revving the version number. I guess not, as I probably would have heard about it. Maybe for Safari 3...
Actually, I doubt the Safari codebase is in as bad a shape as suggested by the article; a lot of it is probably just KDE developers' unfamiliarity with Safari's quirks. Looking at someone else's code is always harder than looking through your own.
It really drives me nuts when I see open source projects get bogged down in years of 'refactoring'
This is a valid concern but it hardly applies to the KDE project, which is consistently releasing quality software at a rate matched by no other open-source project that I know of. KHTML improves noticably with every release. I'm sorry the rate isn't fast enough for you, but accusing the KHTML developers of becoming bogged down in refactoring is just silly. The only thing slowing KHTML development is a lack of qualified and interested coders, which is a problem many projects face. If you don't want to help, then stop your backseat software engineering.
In an open-source project, things are different. Since you can't force people to hack on the code, the elegance of the code has a direct impact on how many people are willing to work on it, which in turn has a direct impact on future quality. You can't say "damn the elegance, just make it work" because a year from now nobody will be working on the bloated mess KHTML has become anymore. Code quality eventually benefits the users too. (actually closed-source projects benefit from code quality as well, due to increased developer productivity, but they don't lose developers like open source can)
Also, I'd like to point out that the reason Apple chose KHTML in the first place was its elegant, simple code. Perhaps for Safari 2 they might go back to the source and re-port the new KHTML, if their codebase becomes too intractable.
When I said "AJAX", I meant "HTML, CSS, and Javascript", not "interactive web application". I meant to specifically exclude all things Flash. Flash is not cool, was never cool and likely will stay uncool, especially at Adobe. There are so many reasons; I can list them if you want.
I agree that animated SVG likely will never make it (especially now that Adobe's SVG plugin has conflict of interest, and Microsoft is never going to implement it). But you're the one missing the point. Vector graphics are not the point (Google maps does just fine without them). Web applications are the point. Animated SVG is irrelevant; it is unnecessary for web applications because they don't need swooshy translucent themed animated unintuitive buttons. Web applications also don't need to look like standard applications with resizable windows and menu bars.
What web applications *do* need is to be like GMail and Google Maps. What web applications need is a solid framework that abstracts away the vagaries of doing cross-browser Javascript/XmlHttpRequest/HTML/CSS, and allows development at a little bit higher level. I think something like Laszlo (or perhaps Laszlo itself) could be implemented on top of AJAX instead of Flash. It wouldn't have vector graphics, but aside from that disadvantage it could be an extremely capable platform. (Actually IMHO lack of animated vector graphics would be advantageous in many situations; it might keep the graphic artists from adding pointless distracting time-wasting animations and ignoring basic UI principles, which is one of my many problems with Flash.)
Yeah, and I feel stupider just for having done so. It reads like a bad novelization of a "major motion picture". As I read the book, I could just see Crichton sitting there thinking "OK, now I'll write in a couple cool CG special-effects shots for the movie".
I hear the movie deal was done before the book even came out. Unfortunately the plot and characters were overlooked, there's not a shred of originality in the whole thing. And the science doesn't even bear talking about.
I liked Jurassic Park, and Sphere was awesome, but his latest stuff is just trash. Crichton should just admit he knows very little about real science and go back to writing enjoyable science fiction that doesn't pretend to be a commentary on society's faith in technology and the scientific community.
Flash, Java,.NET, XUL, blah. If Laszlo really wants to make a difference, you should target AJAX. Focus less on reinventing the user interface with unintuitive sliding buttons everywhere (hint: users don't want to learn a whole new user interface paradigm). Focus more on the easy fast rich application development with responsive client-side UI code, eliminating the round-trip delay of traditional web apps. Make it possible to develop GMail or Google Maps in Laszlo, easily, and watch the world beat a path to your door. Offer skinned sliding translucent windows rendered at about 1 frame per second in the Flash plugin, and watch the lukewarm reaction from the Slashdot community.
What kind of logic is that? Debian isn't harder to install than Gentoo, and everything's always precompiled which is more convenient. Furthermore, Debian puts a lot of work into every supported architecture (of which there are a lot), to the point where they practically port software such as XFree86 to those architectures themselves. No other Linux distribution does that, including Gentoo. Just because you're compiling from source doesn't mean it will work on any architecture. And to the extent that Gentoo does work on other architectures, it should probably thank Debian for finding the bugs and submitting the patches.
Re:How about doing something actually useful ?
on
Next Generation X11
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· Score: 1
You think I don't know about Alt-Enter? This fullscreen mode is different from normal media player fullscreen mode. I guess it is actually a function of the driver, which makes it NVIDIA's problem. You can set it so that whenever you start an application that plays video, the video "takes over" a display of your choosing, obscuring everything on the display (in addition to playing in its normal window, which can be made fullscreen or not independently). This is great when hooked up to a TV or projector because you can stick the player on the first monitor, and only the video ever gets shown on the TV. PowerPoint has a similar capability to take over the second display, but that's a feature specific to PowerPoint.
Anyway, whenever Windows realizes that the TV is off (which is sometimes hours after it actually has been turned off) the video starts covering the first display, and the next time I start a media player, it takes over the display until I manage to quit the media player, which is sometimes hard when you're basically blind. Like I said, it's probably an NVIDIA problem. Some of Linux's problems may be due to NVIDIA drivers as well.
Oh, and Quake 1 looked so much better at the time GoldenEye was released? I definitely prefer GoldenEye to the graphics of Quake 1. But if you judge how much fun you're having by counting the number of players and adding up the number of pixels in the screen resolution, then I guess I can't help you.
The fuss is that you're not sitting alone at your computer fragging people on another continent; you're fragging your friend who's yelling at you from three feet away, watching the same TV. You don't have to plan ahead, set up networks, and lug around giant computer boxes for a LAN party to do that either (in those days most people didn't have laptops or even flat panel monitors, so it was even more of a pain). Also, the levels were good and the weapons were fun. A 32 player game isn't automatically 8 times as fun as a 4-player game. In fact, number of players has very little to do with how much fun you can have.
And even if you completely ignore the multiplayer, GoldenEye was an excellent single player game as well, with lots of levels and tons of replayability. The cheat system and the unlockable difficulties and extra levels were implemented flawlessly. Even today, you don't see many games with extra unlockable single player levels.
Re:How about doing something actually useful ?
on
Next Generation X11
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· Score: 1
Maybe Windows works great on your laptop, but I've had nothing but trouble this week moving desktops around and connecting them to different monitors. Windows rarely does the right thing, and sometimes even has to be rebooted just to notice the change. Also, sometimes after I disconnect my TV Windows likes to switch around my preferences so that any video that starts goes fullscreen on my main monitor instead of the TV, covering the player, desktop, and mouse pointer until I can figure out how to quit the video player with the keyboard (Alt-F4, unless I've focused another application with the invisible mouse, in which case I'm screwed).
Windows could use a lot of improvement in that area. Maybe some of it is the fault of NVIDIA's drivers, but maybe some of Linux's problems are their fault too (when using their driver).
Re:X free of CPU and RAM usage
on
Next Generation X11
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· Score: 2, Informative
Um, JPEG is already very fast. Even if you could accelerate it on the GPU, there's really no reason to. The speedup would not be "incredible", more like "unnoticable". The RAM usage would not go down, you would just use video RAM instead of system RAM, which is *not* a good trade (video RAM is much more precious).
The bottleneck in remote X11 display is *not* decompressing and recompressing JPEGs, it is the network. Modern remote-display systems (NX, VNC) already use JPEG compression. And they already work very fast over a LAN; in many cases fast enough that you don't even notice them. You don't have to imagine "very fast thin client Linux boxes", just go set some up!
Are you seriously suggesting that GoldenEye was not a great game? Or are you just unaware of how awesome it was?
Perfect Dark wasn't quite as good as GoldenEye, and was plagued an unbearably slow framerate, but it was still a decent game. Rare made other good N64 games (Diddy Kong Racing, Banjo-Kazooie, Conker's Bad Fur Day). They're fun, but the problem is that they aren't "serious" games for "hardcore" gamers. They're definitely kid-focused. (Well, Conker is not exactly for kids but has a childish, cartoony feel. It really seems to have an identity crisis. Still a fun and funny game though.)
I haven't played Star Fox Adventures, but I've heard it's decent. Their XBox release, Grabbed by the Ghoulies, is another kid-type game. The demo seemed merely okay (though the title screen was awesome). However, I strongly suspect that the XBox Conker game due to come out next will be a very good (and funny) game. Hopefully they can get XBox gamers to take it seriously enough to actually buy it and figure that out.
I haven't read the book in the article, but I heartily recommend On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins,the Palm Pilot guy who recently founded his own AI company. It's an exceedingly interesting and insightful book, explaining a broad, coherent, plausible, and testable theory about how the brain works, and how it could be implemented in a computer (and why we have so far been unsuccessful).
Basically, (if his theories are correct) the problem is one of memory capacity and (more importantly) access speed. Jeff Hawkins would say that the idea of a "central executive" in the brain as described in the article is wrong; the "processing" is done in the memory itself, as in neural nets, which perform complex tasks without having a separate "processor" and "memory". However, simply implementing neural nets on a normal Von Neumann-architecture computer will run into the Von Neumann bottleneck long before the computer reaches processing parity with the human brain.
Truly implementing a human brain in silicon would require putting processing power directly in the memory (a fabled "Non-Von-Neumann architecture"). But I should let you read the book for yourself, and come to your own conclusions.
Perhaps, but that doesn't invalidate the conclusion drawn from the surveys in this article, which is based on a change in responses over time, not one set of responses.
(Speaking hypothetically of course, assuming SP2 really was mandatory) If the vendor hasn't issued an update yet, they are the ones dragging their feet and likely won't release an update until forced to. This forces them to. If, after all the encouragement and warnings that Microsoft has given, your vendor *still* doesn't release a patch or workaround before the mandatory SP2 install date, thus rendering their software unusable for everybody using Windows XP (which is extremely unlikely), then I think you need a new vendor. And if you locked yourself into one vendor so irrevocably that that is impossible, then I think you need to reexamine your software purchasing policies.
Business can still easily choose to block their computers from accessing Windows Update and manage the update process themselves. In this case SP2 is not a forced install.
Most of the problems reported on that page (including the Photoshop CS problem) are only for AMD64 processors with NX, which few people actually have. Furthermore, those problems have probably already been fixed; this page still lists problems with old versions for people who haven't bothered to upgrade yet.
Personally, I wish SP2 *would* be a forced upgrade for everybody. It's not like people haven't had time to prepare; it's been over 6 months right? Anybody who is not yet ready is dragging their feet, likely to never get ready until they're forced to. SP2 on every Windows machine would make the Internet a better place; fewer security holes mean fewer viruses and fewer zombie spam relays, which benefits everybody.
So far all those robots do is walk forward at one speed. To do more (like stop, or turn, or climb stairs, or get up after they fall) they will eventually need joint control. What is really necessary is a servo with a clutch. Or artificial muscle. Then robots could harness passive dynamics but still be able to exercise control when necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, at least that proves that the Internet Explorer team wouldn't have too much work to do to implement basic SVG rendering; the important work is already done for them. The only explanations for their continued lack of support are laziness or malicious intent to impose their proprietary standards like XAML.
Anybody who can't stand the thought of people "pausing" their precious intellectual property (oh noes!!!), or using the information contained in it in any way other than private viewing by a single individual (who doesn't record it, save it for later, reverse-engineer it, or modify it in the slightest, of course) is working counter to the spirit of the web. Not that people should rip off other people's work without attribution all over the place; but treating everybody as a criminal to stop the few who might err is stupid and restricts progress.
Also, I'd like to make it clear that I realize HTML and Javascript can be abused to produce many of the same problems endemic to flash. However, in many cases smart browsers can override web developer stupidity, because HTML isn't tightly controlled by a single implementor who is beholden to the developers of the stupid sites (see pop-up blocking, etc). And in HTML you have to go far out of your way to produce the same user annoyances you get for free with Flash.
- Requires a browser plugin.
- Subverts normal web navigation, making it impossible to link to a certain part of a Flash site, and making the browser back/forward and history not work.
- Doesn't use the normal page/link structure of the web, making Google less effective.
- Doesn't allow effective screen-scraping.
- Can't see where links are going in the status bar.
- Allows disabling of the context menu (removal of the "pause" and "stop" items, for example)
- Controlled by a single company.
- No good open-source implementation.
- Usually not accessible.
- Discourages open exchange of ideas and information by obfuscating source code, disallowing text and image copy/paste, not having "view source".
- Encourages unconventional, restrictive, flashy, and universally bad user interface design.
- No volume control, enabling those retarded "shoot the paparrazi" ads that blast your ears out if you have your volume up for listening to music.
Now, before you start getting all mad at me and flaming, know that I realize many of these problems are not exactly inherent to the technology, but are caused by the people who use it. However, IMHO that doesn't excuse Flash from these problems. You can't judge a technology on its technical merits alone; only on how it is eventually used. Flash provides affordances to web developers that cause them to make sites with these problems. A better technology would encourage doing the right thing by default, or do the right thing automatically.Actually, I doubt the Safari codebase is in as bad a shape as suggested by the article; a lot of it is probably just KDE developers' unfamiliarity with Safari's quirks. Looking at someone else's code is always harder than looking through your own.
This is a valid concern but it hardly applies to the KDE project, which is consistently releasing quality software at a rate matched by no other open-source project that I know of. KHTML improves noticably with every release. I'm sorry the rate isn't fast enough for you, but accusing the KHTML developers of becoming bogged down in refactoring is just silly. The only thing slowing KHTML development is a lack of qualified and interested coders, which is a problem many projects face. If you don't want to help, then stop your backseat software engineering.
Also, I'd like to point out that the reason Apple chose KHTML in the first place was its elegant, simple code. Perhaps for Safari 2 they might go back to the source and re-port the new KHTML, if their codebase becomes too intractable.
I agree that animated SVG likely will never make it (especially now that Adobe's SVG plugin has conflict of interest, and Microsoft is never going to implement it). But you're the one missing the point. Vector graphics are not the point (Google maps does just fine without them). Web applications are the point. Animated SVG is irrelevant; it is unnecessary for web applications because they don't need swooshy translucent themed animated unintuitive buttons. Web applications also don't need to look like standard applications with resizable windows and menu bars.
What web applications *do* need is to be like GMail and Google Maps. What web applications need is a solid framework that abstracts away the vagaries of doing cross-browser Javascript/XmlHttpRequest/HTML/CSS, and allows development at a little bit higher level. I think something like Laszlo (or perhaps Laszlo itself) could be implemented on top of AJAX instead of Flash. It wouldn't have vector graphics, but aside from that disadvantage it could be an extremely capable platform. (Actually IMHO lack of animated vector graphics would be advantageous in many situations; it might keep the graphic artists from adding pointless distracting time-wasting animations and ignoring basic UI principles, which is one of my many problems with Flash.)
Yeah, and I feel stupider just for having done so. It reads like a bad novelization of a "major motion picture". As I read the book, I could just see Crichton sitting there thinking "OK, now I'll write in a couple cool CG special-effects shots for the movie".
I hear the movie deal was done before the book even came out. Unfortunately the plot and characters were overlooked, there's not a shred of originality in the whole thing. And the science doesn't even bear talking about.
I liked Jurassic Park, and Sphere was awesome, but his latest stuff is just trash. Crichton should just admit he knows very little about real science and go back to writing enjoyable science fiction that doesn't pretend to be a commentary on society's faith in technology and the scientific community.
Flash, Java, .NET, XUL, blah. If Laszlo really wants to make a difference, you should target AJAX. Focus less on reinventing the user interface with unintuitive sliding buttons everywhere (hint: users don't want to learn a whole new user interface paradigm). Focus more on the easy fast rich application development with responsive client-side UI code, eliminating the round-trip delay of traditional web apps. Make it possible to develop GMail or Google Maps in Laszlo, easily, and watch the world beat a path to your door. Offer skinned sliding translucent windows rendered at about 1 frame per second in the Flash plugin, and watch the lukewarm reaction from the Slashdot community.
What kind of logic is that? Debian isn't harder to install than Gentoo, and everything's always precompiled which is more convenient. Furthermore, Debian puts a lot of work into every supported architecture (of which there are a lot), to the point where they practically port software such as XFree86 to those architectures themselves. No other Linux distribution does that, including Gentoo. Just because you're compiling from source doesn't mean it will work on any architecture. And to the extent that Gentoo does work on other architectures, it should probably thank Debian for finding the bugs and submitting the patches.
Anyway, whenever Windows realizes that the TV is off (which is sometimes hours after it actually has been turned off) the video starts covering the first display, and the next time I start a media player, it takes over the display until I manage to quit the media player, which is sometimes hard when you're basically blind. Like I said, it's probably an NVIDIA problem. Some of Linux's problems may be due to NVIDIA drivers as well.
Oh, and Quake 1 looked so much better at the time GoldenEye was released? I definitely prefer GoldenEye to the graphics of Quake 1. But if you judge how much fun you're having by counting the number of players and adding up the number of pixels in the screen resolution, then I guess I can't help you.
And even if you completely ignore the multiplayer, GoldenEye was an excellent single player game as well, with lots of levels and tons of replayability. The cheat system and the unlockable difficulties and extra levels were implemented flawlessly. Even today, you don't see many games with extra unlockable single player levels.
Windows could use a lot of improvement in that area. Maybe some of it is the fault of NVIDIA's drivers, but maybe some of Linux's problems are their fault too (when using their driver).
The bottleneck in remote X11 display is *not* decompressing and recompressing JPEGs, it is the network. Modern remote-display systems (NX, VNC) already use JPEG compression. And they already work very fast over a LAN; in many cases fast enough that you don't even notice them. You don't have to imagine "very fast thin client Linux boxes", just go set some up!
Perfect Dark wasn't quite as good as GoldenEye, and was plagued an unbearably slow framerate, but it was still a decent game. Rare made other good N64 games (Diddy Kong Racing, Banjo-Kazooie, Conker's Bad Fur Day). They're fun, but the problem is that they aren't "serious" games for "hardcore" gamers. They're definitely kid-focused. (Well, Conker is not exactly for kids but has a childish, cartoony feel. It really seems to have an identity crisis. Still a fun and funny game though.)
I haven't played Star Fox Adventures, but I've heard it's decent. Their XBox release, Grabbed by the Ghoulies, is another kid-type game. The demo seemed merely okay (though the title screen was awesome). However, I strongly suspect that the XBox Conker game due to come out next will be a very good (and funny) game. Hopefully they can get XBox gamers to take it seriously enough to actually buy it and figure that out.
The V40z is Opteron-based, his link was wrong. The real link is here.
Basically, (if his theories are correct) the problem is one of memory capacity and (more importantly) access speed. Jeff Hawkins would say that the idea of a "central executive" in the brain as described in the article is wrong; the "processing" is done in the memory itself, as in neural nets, which perform complex tasks without having a separate "processor" and "memory". However, simply implementing neural nets on a normal Von Neumann-architecture computer will run into the Von Neumann bottleneck long before the computer reaches processing parity with the human brain.
Truly implementing a human brain in silicon would require putting processing power directly in the memory (a fabled "Non-Von-Neumann architecture"). But I should let you read the book for yourself, and come to your own conclusions.
Firefox 1.1 will provide an MSI package.
Perhaps, but that doesn't invalidate the conclusion drawn from the surveys in this article, which is based on a change in responses over time, not one set of responses.
Oops, I mean the File Soup Forums.
(Speaking hypothetically of course, assuming SP2 really was mandatory) If the vendor hasn't issued an update yet, they are the ones dragging their feet and likely won't release an update until forced to. This forces them to. If, after all the encouragement and warnings that Microsoft has given, your vendor *still* doesn't release a patch or workaround before the mandatory SP2 install date, thus rendering their software unusable for everybody using Windows XP (which is extremely unlikely), then I think you need a new vendor. And if you locked yourself into one vendor so irrevocably that that is impossible, then I think you need to reexamine your software purchasing policies.
- Business can still easily choose to block their computers from accessing Windows Update and manage the update process themselves. In this case SP2 is not a forced install.
- Most of the problems reported on that page (including the Photoshop CS problem) are only for AMD64 processors with NX, which few people actually have. Furthermore, those problems have probably already been fixed; this page still lists problems with old versions for people who haven't bothered to upgrade yet.
Personally, I wish SP2 *would* be a forced upgrade for everybody. It's not like people haven't had time to prepare; it's been over 6 months right? Anybody who is not yet ready is dragging their feet, likely to never get ready until they're forced to. SP2 on every Windows machine would make the Internet a better place; fewer security holes mean fewer viruses and fewer zombie spam relays, which benefits everybody.So far all those robots do is walk forward at one speed. To do more (like stop, or turn, or climb stairs, or get up after they fall) they will eventually need joint control. What is really necessary is a servo with a clutch. Or artificial muscle. Then robots could harness passive dynamics but still be able to exercise control when necessary.