I get your point, (and the previous poster as well who mentioned similar things) but how long until this sort of thing is included in Internet Explorer? Probably not until IE10, which is likely several years away. I'm not going to pick some technology which requires 80%+ of my users to download an entire new browser, that's an order of magnitude worse than requiring a plugin. So these things might be a good choice in the future, but for things that need to be done today, it's just not an option.
I definitely agree...but some things just can't be done in javascript. If you need more performance, video/audio, real tcp/ip socket connections (not that crazy 'comet' hack, or wasteful polling), zlib compression, even if you want to rotate an image to an arbitrary degree on the client with antialiasing, then you need flash. Java applets take too long to load, even though the runtime performance is usually better than flash. Flash has the advantage over Silverlight of install base. SVG has limited browser support & limited features compared to Flash.
Unfortunately there's really no other choice if you want to build certain types of (buzzword alert!) "Rich Media Applications".
More on-topic: This ScriptCore looks like Yet Another Javascript Framework (YAJF?). Some choices seem particularly odd, such as choosing to reimplement buttons through javascript code instead of using native browser widgets. And they say it's iPhone-compatible, but oddly one of their demo pages caused my Java VM plugin to start up! I'm not sure what it's being used for though.
What's this subtle wording here, implying that it's illegal to run non-apple approved applications on your iPhone? It really shows the sorry state of things these days, that people can believe there is anything wrong with running software on a device they own. I enjoy the many reverse engineers who perform their completely legal work in order to let me get more use out of a device that I paid for.
If I want to run a freeware/open source drawing application on my Nintendo DS that lets me save PNG files on a SD card, should that be illegal since it's not approved by Nintendo? Should I be forced to buy their crappy paint-by-numbers 'game' that's not even for sale in the US?
There are so many possibilities out there, that the hardware companies try to stop you from doing, because they are afraid of losing control. When in reality it doesn't stop piracy any, it only hurts the people who want to write their own code, and add new features. Take the Wii for example, it was possible to illegally pirate games for months before anyone hacked a way of running their own code. Well...I'm already quite offtopic, I better stop here.
Yeah, yeah, we hear this argument every time. But did you know most drug companies spend more on ADVERTISING then on actual research and development of new drugs?
I've been using andLinux for a while now, it's great for running linux apps under windows. Essentially it's a patched linux kernel that actually runs at the same time as the windows kernel, with a small manager which gives time to both windows and linux. Since it's not virtualized, performance is great. Display is done by running Xming, a win32 X11 server in rootless mode, which then connects over the virtual network to the linux host.
colinux itself is very user-unfriendly, but andLinux has a nice simple installer and launcher that lets you launch linux apps as if they were native windows ones. It's based off of an Ubuntu distro, so you can use apt-get and run pretty much any linux app. A few things don't work that well such as fast paced games, playing videos with mplayer etc, due to running over X11 over sockets with zero acceleration. But any standard desktop app should work fine.
From their site, Ulteo is also based on colinux, and it appears they go even further than andLinux in making it very userfriendly. But with userfriendlyness often comes with a lack of control, so if you are a linux power-user I'd highly recommend andLinux. It's great to be able to pull up a Konsole instead of having to use the lame windows command prompt (or the sucky cygwin stuff). The only thing that's really missing is being able to launch windows apps from a linux script, but that doesn't come up too often.
I once had a credit card company ring ME and refuse to say who they were until I confirmed who I was by giving my DOB. I rang them back on the proper number and went off at them.
Happened to me once, with a Wells Fargo credit card. Except it wasn't a person, it was a computer! (ie, voice prompts). And it wanted me to enter not my DOB, but my SSN!! At first I was sure it was a scam, that there was no way my bank would do something so stupid. But after hanging up & calling them back directly, I found out it was something they do. It's so sad how poor the security is for credit card related stuff these days in the US.
It's not quite as bad for me...I can drive to work in ~25 minutes, take bike+train to work in ~45 minutes, or walk+train to work in ~1 hour. But it still discourages me from taking public transport every day. Especially in the winter, it's no fun spending a lot of time in the cold & rain.
I don't know why people always complain about independant bookstores shutting down. There's a half dozen independant bookstores within walking distance of me, and to top it all off, the local Barnes&Noble just went out of buisness. So obviously it can still be done, the stores just have to know how to compete.
Luckily, the company that makes the MP3 IC also makes an OggVorbis IC, that is about the same cost. Of course I don't think it uses exactly the same connections, so you may need to update the schematic of the board a bit as well. But still perfectly doable, if you have the time / knowledge.
The compiler is open source, the virtual machine is open source, and flash is installed on something like 98% (depending on which version you target, and what your market is). The people who are militant about only running 100% open source are such a small market, it's not enough to influence most buisnesses, who most likely use lots of proprietary software already anyway, and buisnesses are the ones writing all the RIAs and other buzzword stuff.
I'm not saying flash is a good choice for content that is very text heavy. I think news sites or blogs in flash are dumb.
You also can't say flash is bad due to poor uses of the technology. Nobody is saying is bad because it was used to write spyware.
And as for widgets, browsers actually don't provide a lot of things. I'm thinking editable grids, sliders, date choosers, color pickers, tree views, menubars, and so forth. These all must be written in javascript, which is an order of magnitude slower than flash or java bytecode. (Though hopefully firefox 3 will use the open-sourced flash virtual machine, in order to speed things up)
Cut and paste is only broken in flash, if you consider giving programmers the ability to make some text non-selectable to be 'broken'.
Wii - yes (flash 7, lots of sites offer flash games tailored to the wii's interface) Cell phones - yes ("flash lite", newer phones with FL2 are equivilent to flash 7) Pocket PC - yes (at least 6) PSP - yes (6 or 7, not sure) PS3 - yes (don't know the version offhand, should be at least 7 since wii has that)
Gee, Flash 9 / Actionscript 3 has all of those features: * Static strict typing, that throws a runtime error if you try to cast to an incorrect type * Compiled into bytecode, with a JIT runtime * Cross-platform (windows, mac, linux and solaris)
around here, (northern california) you can get DSL starting at $20/mo for 1.5mbit/384kbit. My line actually gets like 1.5mbit/480kbit, so I'm pretty happy. Of course you can pay more to get faster.
Comcast usually runs specials, probably when my DSL contract runs out, if Comcast is running another one of their specials, i'll sign up for that (usually it's $20-$30, for 6months to a year)
Even said, all of us are living in the dark ages compared to other countries...Sweden for example you can get like 50mbit for the equivilent of $40USD/month. Don't get me started on japan and south korea.
1. The supposed upgrade file only contains 300 bytes of data. The rest is all zeros. I HIGHLY doubt someone could implement WPA in under 300 bytes. In addition, that's not counting the header on the file, so in reality there's probably zero data.
2. In DS games, all wifi code is implemented in eachh game. NOT the firmware. In order to add WPA support, you would have to patch the games themselves, not the firmware.
The power cable for the mac-mini can go in either way. it freaked me out a bit when I first set it up, since common sense says reversing the polarity of a power cable could have disasterous results.
Sorry, I meant license as in the thing you pay for when you get a piece of software on a CD with a license key. Not license as in the GPL or the EULA. I mean, how would the BSA even audit something like that? I highly doubt anybody anywhere has gotten into any kind of trouble for using the flash player against the eula. Feel free to cite something to prove me wrong though.
Surprisingly, they've actually released a Solaris version of the flash player recently (not the apollo framework, but it's related). They have versions for both x86 and sparc.
Slashdot Mirror
I get your point, (and the previous poster as well who mentioned similar things) but how long until this sort of thing is included in Internet Explorer? Probably not until IE10, which is likely several years away. I'm not going to pick some technology which requires 80%+ of my users to download an entire new browser, that's an order of magnitude worse than requiring a plugin. So these things might be a good choice in the future, but for things that need to be done today, it's just not an option.
I definitely agree...but some things just can't be done in javascript. If you need more performance, video/audio, real tcp/ip socket connections (not that crazy 'comet' hack, or wasteful polling), zlib compression, even if you want to rotate an image to an arbitrary degree on the client with antialiasing, then you need flash. Java applets take too long to load, even though the runtime performance is usually better than flash. Flash has the advantage over Silverlight of install base. SVG has limited browser support & limited features compared to Flash.
Unfortunately there's really no other choice if you want to build certain types of (buzzword alert!) "Rich Media Applications".
More on-topic: This ScriptCore looks like Yet Another Javascript Framework (YAJF?). Some choices seem particularly odd, such as choosing to reimplement buttons through javascript code instead of using native browser widgets. And they say it's iPhone-compatible, but oddly one of their demo pages caused my Java VM plugin to start up! I'm not sure what it's being used for though.
What's this subtle wording here, implying that it's illegal to run non-apple approved applications on your iPhone? It really shows the sorry state of things these days, that people can believe there is anything wrong with running software on a device they own. I enjoy the many reverse engineers who perform their completely legal work in order to let me get more use out of a device that I paid for.
If I want to run a freeware/open source drawing application on my Nintendo DS that lets me save PNG files on a SD card, should that be illegal since it's not approved by Nintendo? Should I be forced to buy their crappy paint-by-numbers 'game' that's not even for sale in the US?
There are so many possibilities out there, that the hardware companies try to stop you from doing, because they are afraid of losing control. When in reality it doesn't stop piracy any, it only hurts the people who want to write their own code, and add new features. Take the Wii for example, it was possible to illegally pirate games for months before anyone hacked a way of running their own code. Well...I'm already quite offtopic, I better stop here.
Yeah, yeah, we hear this argument every time. But did you know most drug companies spend more on ADVERTISING then on actual research and development of new drugs?
I've been using andLinux for a while now, it's great for running linux apps under windows. Essentially it's a patched linux kernel that actually runs at the same time as the windows kernel, with a small manager which gives time to both windows and linux. Since it's not virtualized, performance is great. Display is done by running Xming, a win32 X11 server in rootless mode, which then connects over the virtual network to the linux host.
colinux itself is very user-unfriendly, but andLinux has a nice simple installer and launcher that lets you launch linux apps as if they were native windows ones. It's based off of an Ubuntu distro, so you can use apt-get and run pretty much any linux app. A few things don't work that well such as fast paced games, playing videos with mplayer etc, due to running over X11 over sockets with zero acceleration. But any standard desktop app should work fine.
From their site, Ulteo is also based on colinux, and it appears they go even further than andLinux in making it very userfriendly. But with userfriendlyness often comes with a lack of control, so if you are a linux power-user I'd highly recommend andLinux. It's great to be able to pull up a Konsole instead of having to use the lame windows command prompt (or the sucky cygwin stuff). The only thing that's really missing is being able to launch windows apps from a linux script, but that doesn't come up too often.
Happened to me once, with a Wells Fargo credit card. Except it wasn't a person, it was a computer! (ie, voice prompts). And it wanted me to enter not my DOB, but my SSN!! At first I was sure it was a scam, that there was no way my bank would do something so stupid. But after hanging up & calling them back directly, I found out it was something they do. It's so sad how poor the security is for credit card related stuff these days in the US.
It's not quite as bad for me...I can drive to work in ~25 minutes, take bike+train to work in ~45 minutes, or walk+train to work in ~1 hour. But it still discourages me from taking public transport every day. Especially in the winter, it's no fun spending a lot of time in the cold & rain.
I don't know why people always complain about independant bookstores shutting down. There's a half dozen independant bookstores within walking distance of me, and to top it all off, the local Barnes&Noble just went out of buisness. So obviously it can still be done, the stores just have to know how to compete.
Actually the next release of the flash player (currently in public beta) supports both AAC audio and H.264 video. These are both fairly open formats from what I understand.
This was announced several months ago:
http://www.kaourantin.net/2007/08/what-just-happened-to-video-on-web_20.html
Luckily, the company that makes the MP3 IC also makes an OggVorbis IC, that is about the same cost. Of course I don't think it uses exactly the same connections, so you may need to update the schematic of the board a bit as well. But still perfectly doable, if you have the time / knowledge.
Here's a link to the chip:
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=8300
Try this:
http://www.skweezer.net/s.aspx/-/slashdot~org/index~pl?simpledesign=1&lowbandwidth=1
It's what I use for reading slashdot from my cellphone.
I use skweezer for reading slashdot on my phone. the main page is like 15KB only, but it still has the stories with their summaries.
s hdot.org%2Findex.pl%3Flowbandwidth%3D1%26simpledes ign%3D1
http://www.skweezer.net/s.aspx?q=http%3A%2F%2Fsla
you need to de-spam your blog. or are all those comments about "gay wrestling" really legitimate?
The compiler is open source, the virtual machine is open source, and flash is installed on something like 98% (depending on which version you target, and what your market is). The people who are militant about only running 100% open source are such a small market, it's not enough to influence most buisnesses, who most likely use lots of proprietary software already anyway, and buisnesses are the ones writing all the RIAs and other buzzword stuff.
I'm not saying flash is a good choice for content that is very text heavy. I think news sites or blogs in flash are dumb.
You also can't say flash is bad due to poor uses of the technology. Nobody is saying is bad because it was used to write spyware.
And as for widgets, browsers actually don't provide a lot of things. I'm thinking editable grids, sliders, date choosers, color pickers, tree views, menubars, and so forth. These all must be written in javascript, which is an order of magnitude slower than flash or java bytecode. (Though hopefully firefox 3 will use the open-sourced flash virtual machine, in order to speed things up)
Cut and paste is only broken in flash, if you consider giving programmers the ability to make some text non-selectable to be 'broken'.
Wii - yes (flash 7, lots of sites offer flash games tailored to the wii's interface)
Cell phones - yes ("flash lite", newer phones with FL2 are equivilent to flash 7)
Pocket PC - yes (at least 6)
PSP - yes (6 or 7, not sure)
PS3 - yes (don't know the version offhand, should be at least 7 since wii has that)
Gee, Flash 9 / Actionscript 3 has all of those features:
* Static strict typing, that throws a runtime error if you try to cast to an incorrect type
* Compiled into bytecode, with a JIT runtime
* Cross-platform (windows, mac, linux and solaris)
ha ha, you're getting screwed.
around here, (northern california) you can get DSL starting at $20/mo for 1.5mbit/384kbit. My line actually gets like 1.5mbit/480kbit, so I'm pretty happy. Of course you can pay more to get faster.
Comcast usually runs specials, probably when my DSL contract runs out, if Comcast is running another one of their specials, i'll sign up for that (usually it's $20-$30, for 6months to a year)
Even said, all of us are living in the dark ages compared to other countries...Sweden for example you can get like 50mbit for the equivilent of $40USD/month. Don't get me started on japan and south korea.
Here are two places I've seen that have very good prices for low-quantity custom PCB's:
http://pcbnet.com/
http://www.goldphoenixpcb.biz/special_price.php
I am 99% sure the above link is completely fake.
1. The supposed upgrade file only contains 300 bytes of data. The rest is all zeros. I HIGHLY doubt someone could implement WPA in under 300 bytes. In addition, that's not counting the header on the file, so in reality there's probably zero data.
2. In DS games, all wifi code is implemented in eachh game. NOT the firmware. In order to add WPA support, you would have to patch the games themselves, not the firmware.
Trust slashdot to repost months-old hoaxes...
The power cable for the mac-mini can go in either way. it freaked me out a bit when I first set it up, since common sense says reversing the polarity of a power cable could have disasterous results.
Sorry, I meant license as in the thing you pay for when you get a piece of software on a CD with a license key. Not license as in the GPL or the EULA. I mean, how would the BSA even audit something like that? I highly doubt anybody anywhere has gotten into any kind of trouble for using the flash player against the eula. Feel free to cite something to prove me wrong though.
Surprisingly, they've actually released a Solaris version of the flash player recently (not the apollo framework, but it's related). They have versions for both x86 and sparc.
One advantage: They are promising cross-platform support. Win & Mac with 1.0, and Linux support as well shortly after.
I don't think setting up a webserver on their desktop PC and then browsing to http://localhost/ is a good solution for the average user.