It is saddled with decades of backwards compatibility issues as well, 16-bit modes, segmentation, IO ports, and other things that no one uses anymore if they can help it.
Actually, Google Native Client (NaCl) uses segmentation to sandbox downloaded code. It's either a brutal hack or a totally clever trick, I guess, depending on your POV.
Exactly. It's not like this footage is being buried. It is being analyzed to determine the full extent of the damage -- both in Japan and in California. What would be the point of releasing it to Fox News and the New York Post?
Qadaffi has been a state sponsor of international terrorism for decades. Libyan-initiated terrorist attacks have claimed the lives of countless American and European civilians. Qadaffi himself has admitted as much to the United Nations. As society, Qadaffi's Libya is comparable to Hussein's Iraq or Kim Jong Il's North Korea in terms of repression and the use of intelligence forces against its own citizens. Qadaffi likes to use assassination to silence his critics. He has put down attempts at revolt using violence in the past, killing hundreds of his own people. Personally, Qadaffi is belligerent, combative, and seems to suffer from delusions of grandeur, all of which make him unlikely to respond to diplomacy.
But don't let any of that get in the way of the absolutely surreal anti-intervention narrative around here.
Also, are you Americans going to continue to make surrender jokes now?
Based on my purely anecdotal perusal of my Facebook news feed, the current joke is along the lines of, "Awwwwww, look at France trying to get all tough."
According to TFA, the footage is being analyzed by nuclear power experts. What would be the point of disclosing it to the public -- lurid fascination?
Maybe the Japanese government just thinks the Japanese public's attention would be better directed toward rebuilding the nation in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami, which cause much more destruction and loss of life than this nuclear incident is ever likely to.
There's a reason I don't watch TV anymore, the creativity of the medium is approaching zero.
Seriously? When were you born? Do you have any idea what TV was like before shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Boardwalk Empire, The Walking Dead, Arrested Development, etc.? Just look at the difference between Battlestar Galactica (1978) and Battlestar Galactica (2004). Hell, even House is more intelligent and creative than pretty much any doctor show of the past (at least the first couple seasons were). At one time, for a "movie actor" to appear on a TV show was the career kiss of death, and TV actors would leave hit shows for the chance to be in the movies. Nowadays, established stars are practically flocking to the small screen, and as far as I can tell it's for good reason.
God's honest truth? I use Windows Media Center attached to my TV via component out, and for some reason it insists on capturing keyboard and mouse input on the secondary screen (the TV). I can no longer move the mouse to get back to my regular monitor. When I break out by pressing the Windows key, it messes up the aspect ratio on my TV; the TV normally has an anamorphic aspect mode, and Media Center understands it, but the regular Explorer mode doesn't. Windows Miracle #2782.
No. You still entertain yourself with your portable device but cannot understand why others do.
No. I use a portable device with a keyboard to post to/. because posting to/. requires a keyboard, at the very least a touchscreen. That is why I bought a laptop. But for watching TV in my home -- a completely passive act that requires neither a keyboard or a pointing device -- I already have a perfectly functional TV, and therefore don't need an interactive touchscreen device that's about one-tenth the size of my TV but costs almost as much. It's not "a portable device" if you're sitting on your living room couch, staring at it while holding it a few inches from your face. And, if you read TFA, you will see how this service requires you to be at home, sitting on your couch -- so I'd venture it makes a lot of sense to ask why you'd be staring at your iPad when your TV is right across the room.
Even now there are certain subjects to be discussed that you'd better not attach your name to. Some of these are in the 'politically correct' area People that in fact know better (in secret) will (in public) be hurrying to condemn you just to show everyone how correct and elevated they themselves are. Being redeemed after your death (like Galileo) doesn't really help you today. This is also true for certain topics in science.
By all means tell us what these topics are. I am pro-choice, against the death penalty, for gun control, pro-immigration, am generally liberal on social issues and moderately conservative on fiscal ones. Am I missing any bases here? Is the Man coming to put me to death like Galileo yet?
You're talking about political movements of the 1500s. I'm talking about connecting with my friends and family on Facebook. Big difference.
Some topics have to do with people that can afford to prosecute you on someone else's (company or taxpayer) dime. Remember that blogger that has to shell out 60,000 quid for saying things that are factually correct? Right. It would have been more convenient for him if he had presented these facts anonymously. Cowardly? Perhaps. Smart? For sure.
But who would have believed him? If you hide your identity to avoid people who are likely to call you a liar, what does that say about your integrity?
Because I'm really Facebook friends of Admiral Viscount Nelson, who hasn't been alive for over two hundred years.
That's your choice, I guess. But as TFA points out, this is discouraged on Facebook, and the vast majority of my friends on there use their real names and an identifiable photograph. Most of the abstract ideas/dead people/companies/products that you can "be friends with" are actually pages, not user accounts, and the distinction between the two is pretty clear. For example, I don't believe pages can send you friend requests -- only the other way around.
They're required to offer anything that should have been available over-the-air in the pre-digital days via Clear QAM. That means no History Channel and no Discovery, but then again, who would watch that crap when you've got six channels of PBS?
(Mind you, I'm not saying they don't encrypt those channels in some markets -- but they're not supposed to.)
One of my very first bosses said to me, back when I was still a teenager, that if you have something to say, you should be able to stand behind it. Even if all you're doing is dropping a note into the cash register saying "we keep running out of nickels," you should have enough character to sign it and date it. If you feel like you can't do that, maybe you shouldn't bother saying what it is you were planning to say. I still mostly agree with him about that.
Sure, I understand there are many cases where it would be preferable, or even essential, to remain anonymous: when you're acting as a whistleblower, for example, or working against an oppressive government. But for most exchanges that we have on a day-to-day basis -- the kind of thing Facebook is good for -- I think anonymity just spoils it.
Compare MySpace to Facebook, for example. On the former, you're inundated with friend requests from "DarkLordSeth79" and "PowrGrrl," where their photographs are screen grabs from anime or movies. I haven't used MySpace in a long time, but ultimately I found the only meaningful exchanges I had on there were with the dozen or so close friends whom I knew well already. Anybody whom I didn't know came off as a troll cloaked in MMORP wish-fulfillment. (See also the people who post on YouTube videos.)
So I guess in summary, 4chan has its place, and maybe that should remain the place for it. Facebook is a place for something else, and I for one am thankful.
Sure, it's good to have the source... It's nice to be able to see how things work, to make sure that they're doing the job we think they are, etc., etc. But that doesn't mean it's actually important to everyone that their software (and associated electronic devices) be open source.
This is one reason why Stallman uses the term "Free Software" and does not use the term "open source." He recognizes that most people may never have a need to actually access the source code to a program. The point is the freedom, not the source.
The point is that Stallman probably doesn't insist on full schematics for his microwave.
It wasn't long ago that I owned a battery-powered AM/FM radio that had the full schematic printed inside the battery compartment. Why shouldn't Stallman want that?
RMS is passionate about software and thinks it should all be free. That's fine for him. The average human being doesn't care.
I'm sure that's what Muammar Qadaffi says about democratic government.
But your average person doesn't care all that much about books. Seriously. As long as they can pick up a novel and read it, they'd be happy.
So your point is that people don't care and therefore people shouldn't care. Nice circular argument in favor of ignorance and totalitarianism.
In other words, programmers will continue to stay at lower pay scales and be treated like drones even though they do the hard work.
And yet many programmers seem to pride themselves on being arrogant primadonnas who are difficult to manage... analogies about "herding cats," etc. Sounds like maybe management really is the hard work.
CS5 FLA files are compressed directories whose structures are organized in an XML file. It is much easier to write an AIR app that processes assets in a CS5 FLA than it is to write any kind of app that parses a SWF's tags into JavaScript.
That's kind of what I meant when I said "they're easier to convert." Sorry I wasn't more literal. As for "preventing stealing," I stand by what I said -- Adobe has no incentive to create a tool that allows third parties to strip assets out of published SWF files.
Wallaby is an asset converter that may prolong the usefulness of Flash Professional, if it's released; it really has nothing at all to do with the Flash Player. There is a need for web-ready assets that Adobe can serve with an existing product.
I must admit I'm pretty confused by this comment. Flash SWF files are "Web-ready assets"... except on platforms where there is no Flash Player. I really don't see how you can claim my article "completely fails to address" this, when it's the entire focus.
From TFA: "More important, content, both in print and online, has long been Adobe's bailiwick -- and as the Web continues to evolve, it's not about to be caught with its pants down. A tool like Wallaby can help ensure that Adobe Flash continues to coexist with emerging standards such as HTML5, while still offering additional functionality where HTML5 falls short."
The converter was probably gimped on purpose so people stick with Flash.
I doubt that. It doesn't really make sense. If I'm given a tool that outputs crappy HTML5, I already know I have the option of writing HTML5 by hand. Why would I create content in Flash, then export it to crappy HTML5, instead of just implementing the same content in HTML5 myself (if HTML5 is what I want)?
Most of the stuff can be converted directly from ActionScript to JavaScript.
Not really. Or at least, it's not necessarily easy to do. ActionScript and JavaScript are different enough now that it's not a one-to-one translation. Adobe may manage it in the future, but there's probably not too much incentive, given that Adobe really still wants people to use Flash. I wouldn't call that "gimping the tool on purpose," though; it would be a significant investment to achieve what you're suggesting.
Hell, they might as well just get in touch with JQuery people and ask permission to embed JQuery in to the tool to make it less of a hassle to convert stuff over since JavaScript is, sadly, missing a bunch of useful functions.
If you read TFA, you'll see that's what they do. Every time you run the tool on an FLA file, it drops a copy of the jQuery library into the output directory. And they didn't even have to pick up the phone to do this, because jQuery can be licensed under the MIT license, which is commercially-permissive and allows re-use even within proprietary software.
Wallaby's not trying to port Flash content, otherwise it'd accept SWF files as input.
I presume the main reasons it accepts FLA files only are because A.) they're easier to convert, and B.) SWF is a deployment format, and Adobe is not interested in creating a tool that would allow end users to "steal" content from other people's SWF files; you need access to the original FLA project.
What McAllister should have focused on was that Adobe will create tooling that extends the relevance of their existing products as interest shifts from one technology to another.
I believe if you read the article you'll find that was my conclusion.
Slashdot Mirror
It is saddled with decades of backwards compatibility issues as well, 16-bit modes, segmentation, IO ports, and other things that no one uses anymore if they can help it.
Actually, Google Native Client (NaCl) uses segmentation to sandbox downloaded code. It's either a brutal hack or a totally clever trick, I guess, depending on your POV.
I get your point, but if Google was making these available for free, the evils of copyright would have been averted.
Kinda like how open source runs on free beer.
But then, maybe they stole this too.
Or maybe they just bought it from Cisco or Lucent, who were more than happy to sell it to them.
Normally I would point out that babies aren't born being 1 year old.
Apparently they are in Korea.
Exactly. It's not like this footage is being buried. It is being analyzed to determine the full extent of the damage -- both in Japan and in California. What would be the point of releasing it to Fox News and the New York Post?
Qadaffi has been a state sponsor of international terrorism for decades. Libyan-initiated terrorist attacks have claimed the lives of countless American and European civilians. Qadaffi himself has admitted as much to the United Nations. As society, Qadaffi's Libya is comparable to Hussein's Iraq or Kim Jong Il's North Korea in terms of repression and the use of intelligence forces against its own citizens. Qadaffi likes to use assassination to silence his critics. He has put down attempts at revolt using violence in the past, killing hundreds of his own people. Personally, Qadaffi is belligerent, combative, and seems to suffer from delusions of grandeur, all of which make him unlikely to respond to diplomacy.
But don't let any of that get in the way of the absolutely surreal anti-intervention narrative around here.
When the hell did the left pick up this crazy interventionism?
Wow, that's some nice revisionism. So a sitting Republican president has never authorized military intervention, huh? Fascinating.
Also, are you Americans going to continue to make surrender jokes now?
Based on my purely anecdotal perusal of my Facebook news feed, the current joke is along the lines of, "Awwwwww, look at France trying to get all tough."
Military intervention in places like Somalia would accomplish nothing productive; it's been tried.
That must explain the U.S.'s decision to get involved in Afghanistan (which has been in a near-constant state of war for the last 30 years).
According to TFA, the footage is being analyzed by nuclear power experts. What would be the point of disclosing it to the public -- lurid fascination?
Maybe the Japanese government just thinks the Japanese public's attention would be better directed toward rebuilding the nation in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami, which cause much more destruction and loss of life than this nuclear incident is ever likely to.
There's a reason I don't watch TV anymore, the creativity of the medium is approaching zero.
Seriously? When were you born? Do you have any idea what TV was like before shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Boardwalk Empire, The Walking Dead, Arrested Development, etc.? Just look at the difference between Battlestar Galactica (1978) and Battlestar Galactica (2004). Hell, even House is more intelligent and creative than pretty much any doctor show of the past (at least the first couple seasons were). At one time, for a "movie actor" to appear on a TV show was the career kiss of death, and TV actors would leave hit shows for the chance to be in the movies. Nowadays, established stars are practically flocking to the small screen, and as far as I can tell it's for good reason.
The problem with Packt publishing is that often, they're the ONLY ONES who produce a book on your particular subject.
Why review them then? A simple "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" should suffice, since you don't have any other choices.
God's honest truth? I use Windows Media Center attached to my TV via component out, and for some reason it insists on capturing keyboard and mouse input on the secondary screen (the TV). I can no longer move the mouse to get back to my regular monitor. When I break out by pressing the Windows key, it messes up the aspect ratio on my TV; the TV normally has an anamorphic aspect mode, and Media Center understands it, but the regular Explorer mode doesn't. Windows Miracle #2782.
No. You still entertain yourself with your portable device but cannot understand why others do.
No. I use a portable device with a keyboard to post to /. because posting to /. requires a keyboard, at the very least a touchscreen. That is why I bought a laptop. But for watching TV in my home -- a completely passive act that requires neither a keyboard or a pointing device -- I already have a perfectly functional TV, and therefore don't need an interactive touchscreen device that's about one-tenth the size of my TV but costs almost as much. It's not "a portable device" if you're sitting on your living room couch, staring at it while holding it a few inches from your face. And, if you read TFA, you will see how this service requires you to be at home, sitting on your couch -- so I'd venture it makes a lot of sense to ask why you'd be staring at your iPad when your TV is right across the room.
Even now there are certain subjects to be discussed that you'd better not attach your name to. Some of these are in the 'politically correct' area People that in fact know better (in secret) will (in public) be hurrying to condemn you just to show everyone how correct and elevated they themselves are. Being redeemed after your death (like Galileo) doesn't really help you today. This is also true for certain topics in science.
By all means tell us what these topics are. I am pro-choice, against the death penalty, for gun control, pro-immigration, am generally liberal on social issues and moderately conservative on fiscal ones. Am I missing any bases here? Is the Man coming to put me to death like Galileo yet?
You're talking about political movements of the 1500s. I'm talking about connecting with my friends and family on Facebook. Big difference.
Some topics have to do with people that can afford to prosecute you on someone else's (company or taxpayer) dime. Remember that blogger that has to shell out 60,000 quid for saying things that are factually correct? Right. It would have been more convenient for him if he had presented these facts anonymously. Cowardly? Perhaps. Smart? For sure.
But who would have believed him? If you hide your identity to avoid people who are likely to call you a liar, what does that say about your integrity?
Because I'm really Facebook friends of Admiral Viscount Nelson, who hasn't been alive for over two hundred years.
That's your choice, I guess. But as TFA points out, this is discouraged on Facebook, and the vast majority of my friends on there use their real names and an identifiable photograph. Most of the abstract ideas/dead people/companies/products that you can "be friends with" are actually pages, not user accounts, and the distinction between the two is pretty clear. For example, I don't believe pages can send you friend requests -- only the other way around.
Oh please, like you've never posted on Slashdot from a laptop.
Sure, but I've never watched TV on a laptop. Never seen a need to. See the distinction?
They're required to offer anything that should have been available over-the-air in the pre-digital days via Clear QAM. That means no History Channel and no Discovery, but then again, who would watch that crap when you've got six channels of PBS?
(Mind you, I'm not saying they don't encrypt those channels in some markets -- but they're not supposed to.)
One of my very first bosses said to me, back when I was still a teenager, that if you have something to say, you should be able to stand behind it. Even if all you're doing is dropping a note into the cash register saying "we keep running out of nickels," you should have enough character to sign it and date it. If you feel like you can't do that, maybe you shouldn't bother saying what it is you were planning to say. I still mostly agree with him about that.
Sure, I understand there are many cases where it would be preferable, or even essential, to remain anonymous: when you're acting as a whistleblower, for example, or working against an oppressive government. But for most exchanges that we have on a day-to-day basis -- the kind of thing Facebook is good for -- I think anonymity just spoils it.
Compare MySpace to Facebook, for example. On the former, you're inundated with friend requests from "DarkLordSeth79" and "PowrGrrl," where their photographs are screen grabs from anime or movies. I haven't used MySpace in a long time, but ultimately I found the only meaningful exchanges I had on there were with the dozen or so close friends whom I knew well already. Anybody whom I didn't know came off as a troll cloaked in MMORP wish-fulfillment. (See also the people who post on YouTube videos.)
So I guess in summary, 4chan has its place, and maybe that should remain the place for it. Facebook is a place for something else, and I for one am thankful.
programming becomes easier due to better languages (who still remembers manually allocating memory in C?)
Errrr... C programmers?
Sure, it's good to have the source... It's nice to be able to see how things work, to make sure that they're doing the job we think they are, etc., etc. But that doesn't mean it's actually important to everyone that their software (and associated electronic devices) be open source.
This is one reason why Stallman uses the term "Free Software" and does not use the term "open source." He recognizes that most people may never have a need to actually access the source code to a program. The point is the freedom, not the source.
The point is that Stallman probably doesn't insist on full schematics for his microwave.
It wasn't long ago that I owned a battery-powered AM/FM radio that had the full schematic printed inside the battery compartment. Why shouldn't Stallman want that?
RMS is passionate about software and thinks it should all be free. That's fine for him. The average human being doesn't care.
I'm sure that's what Muammar Qadaffi says about democratic government.
But your average person doesn't care all that much about books. Seriously. As long as they can pick up a novel and read it, they'd be happy.
So your point is that people don't care and therefore people shouldn't care. Nice circular argument in favor of ignorance and totalitarianism.
In other words, programmers will continue to stay at lower pay scales and be treated like drones even though they do the hard work.
And yet many programmers seem to pride themselves on being arrogant primadonnas who are difficult to manage... analogies about "herding cats," etc. Sounds like maybe management really is the hard work.
CS5 FLA files are compressed directories whose structures are organized in an XML file. It is much easier to write an AIR app that processes assets in a CS5 FLA than it is to write any kind of app that parses a SWF's tags into JavaScript.
That's kind of what I meant when I said "they're easier to convert." Sorry I wasn't more literal. As for "preventing stealing," I stand by what I said -- Adobe has no incentive to create a tool that allows third parties to strip assets out of published SWF files.
Wallaby is an asset converter that may prolong the usefulness of Flash Professional, if it's released; it really has nothing at all to do with the Flash Player. There is a need for web-ready assets that Adobe can serve with an existing product.
I must admit I'm pretty confused by this comment. Flash SWF files are "Web-ready assets"... except on platforms where there is no Flash Player. I really don't see how you can claim my article "completely fails to address" this, when it's the entire focus.
From TFA: "More important, content, both in print and online, has long been Adobe's bailiwick -- and as the Web continues to evolve, it's not about to be caught with its pants down. A tool like Wallaby can help ensure that Adobe Flash continues to coexist with emerging standards such as HTML5, while still offering additional functionality where HTML5 falls short."
The converter was probably gimped on purpose so people stick with Flash.
I doubt that. It doesn't really make sense. If I'm given a tool that outputs crappy HTML5, I already know I have the option of writing HTML5 by hand. Why would I create content in Flash, then export it to crappy HTML5, instead of just implementing the same content in HTML5 myself (if HTML5 is what I want)?
Most of the stuff can be converted directly from ActionScript to JavaScript.
Not really. Or at least, it's not necessarily easy to do. ActionScript and JavaScript are different enough now that it's not a one-to-one translation. Adobe may manage it in the future, but there's probably not too much incentive, given that Adobe really still wants people to use Flash. I wouldn't call that "gimping the tool on purpose," though; it would be a significant investment to achieve what you're suggesting.
Hell, they might as well just get in touch with JQuery people and ask permission to embed JQuery in to the tool to make it less of a hassle to convert stuff over since JavaScript is, sadly, missing a bunch of useful functions.
If you read TFA, you'll see that's what they do. Every time you run the tool on an FLA file, it drops a copy of the jQuery library into the output directory. And they didn't even have to pick up the phone to do this, because jQuery can be licensed under the MIT license, which is commercially-permissive and allows re-use even within proprietary software.
McAllister apparently thinks that Wallaby is a new development (it's several months old, in fact)
Only as a demo at Adobe events. Adobe only made the preview available for download this week.
(Adobe said that it was for non-interactive content several months ago).
Really? Strange that Adobe would spend so much time documenting interactivity in Wallaby content. (Warning: PDF.)
Wallaby's not trying to port Flash content, otherwise it'd accept SWF files as input.
I presume the main reasons it accepts FLA files only are because A.) they're easier to convert, and B.) SWF is a deployment format, and Adobe is not interested in creating a tool that would allow end users to "steal" content from other people's SWF files; you need access to the original FLA project.
What McAllister should have focused on was that Adobe will create tooling that extends the relevance of their existing products as interest shifts from one technology to another.
I believe if you read the article you'll find that was my conclusion.