Last week one of their managers said in an interview that the cost of the EU-required documentation had wiped out most income of the past year. And now the EU does not accept this documentation:)
You got a cite for that? It shouldn't have cost them more than a couple millions to produce that documentation. What are they, mormons, writing on golden tablets or something?
In other news, I have a few hundred channels available on my DSL set-top box and on my computer through Videolan, oh my fscking god how do they do this? Yeah, it's multiplexed, and VOD is cached somewhere between me and the ISP's offices, GENIUSES.
Because non-programmers don't program in ANYTHING? Duh? Horse buggy makers are obsolete, their number has dwindled, both in percentage of anything and in percentage of vehicle makers. ASM programmers are not obsolete, their number is probably higher today than it was in the 70s. That's my point.
There are probably many times more people capable of programming in assembly language today than in the 70s. Kernel developpers, compiler developers (obviously!), CPU designers, embedded systems developpers and so on. On the other hand, there are many times less people capable of making horse buggies than in the XIXth century; that's obsolete.
Actually, the perceived performance issues of Firefox mostly stem from the fact it's a single-threaded architecture running on a JavaScript+XML interpreter (XULRunner).
There is indeed only one thread handling the UI and DOM, but there are multiple threads. Network operations, file decoding and so on run in separate threads from the UI. MAking a multithreaded UI is quite hard; note that IE (at least 6, most likely 7 too) does that too, with the difference that you can have separate windows in different processes altogether; but then they can't talk to each other through JS.
The only time this architecture is really a problem ATM is when JS from a page sucks up CPU: it bogs down the whole UI.
Moving to a fully multithreaded architecture is a very hard problem, esp. for such a complicated application, with such complex interactions as a web browser. Every single little thing would have to be synchronised, with big deadlock risks at each turn.
The only possible approach is to divide work among threads such as there is minimal, well understood interactions between them. You can't for example just have one thread per window, because HTML+DOM+JS expect to be able to touch other windows from the same domain. You could divide processes by originating domain; that's what Apprunner does. But then you have coordinate communication between the windows and the bookmarks, history and so on. Not too hard to do, but has to be weighed against the minimal gain.
Eventually, we will have to take advantage of many-cores CPU. That means that even DOM parsing will have to be multithreaded, for use on ultra low power 256 cores mobile cpus. Robert O'Callahan is working on this. But what you have in this case is a number of related threads with a very limited scope, and precisely defined interactions.
You can be compelled to give up your keys in the UK; but encryption is not illegal. The thing is, IIRC an SSL connection is supposed to have forward secrecy, i.e. you can't decrypt it after the fact if the two hosts have properly disposed of the random numbers they used. That's not true of PGP mail messages, which are supposed to be decryptable after they've been transmitted; the difference here is that the two parties are not in real time, bidirectional communication. So you can be forced to open your mail, but they can't force you to open your SSL communication if they have recorded the encrypted traffic, because there's nothing you can do about it anyway.
If mere suspicion triggers it, this will lead to a LOT of people being pissed off, and outrage will quickly win over the usual democratic boredom at the next election.
Unfortunately, our own Naboléon, the abominable Sarkonazi the first, is going to try to give us this same bullcrap. He appointed his big business buddy to head a commission which crapped out this three strikes nonsense. The commission was very democratic, it had representatives of the music industry, the cinema industry, the ISP business and the consumer electronics vendors. Notice something missing? Oh yeah, the people. Who cares about them?
Anyway, this plan is technically and legally doomed. Technically, because basic encryption will defeat it.
And legally, for a host of reasons. Let's say I'm downloading MP3s. How am I supposed to know a particular one is illegal? What if someone tells me this is Free music, while it's not. Who's liable? The user who believes he is? OR the person who claimed it is? Who's most likely very anonymous anyway... In the end there will be arguments in court over whether the user truely believed he was downloading something legit, not much of a stretch. But not something that can be decided without a court of law.
And anyway, considering there's already quite a lot of legitimate sources of ad-supported digital music, it will be more and more difficult to decipher who's legit or not. Should the user be blamed for picking the wrong download site? What about something like allofmp3.com, are the users -- who've paid -- supposed to guess it's not considered legit?
Then there is the question, mentioned in the original article, of someone using your connection without your knowledge. With the number of compromised machines and Wifi routers out there, this is going to be a serious problem. But not a technical one; because honestly, this is a problem that will NEVER be solved completely, as anyone with a modicum of computer security experience knows too well.
It's not a technical question, indeed, because there is no technical solution to this. What are they gonna do about it? Put fines on people with insecure PCs or routers? That won't even solve it. This hasn't been that much of a problem so far because computer "crime" was not defined too broadly yet; but now if merely download Britney Spear's latest barf-fest fits the definition of "crime," you've got a completely different ballpark.
It's not just the odd suspected paedo, whom, we can only hope, would be convicted on more than just his internet usage. Now you've got hundred of thousands of users who are going to complain, many of which will be of the usual RIAA gaffe type, like the disabled granny accused of pirating 50 cents or Metallica.
And he got plenty of guns, tanks, planes and other weapons in exchange for oil. From the US. This was not a one time honest mistake, it was a 30 year lasting crime. And as for the mullahs being so evil, that didn't stop that bastard Reagan from selling them weapons to finance terrorists in Nicaragua. Look up "Iran-Contra", that might educate you. So back to my point, for the past 60 years, the United States has been detrimental to democracy; and esp. so since the fall of the USSR, where there isn't a big bad straw man to justify all the BS.
I can assure you that there were plenty of apparatchiks living the good life under, say, Stalin. The Shah had a vicious secret police that praticed torture. Oh wait, it's not such a bad thing anymore.
Iran had a perfectly fine, democratically elected leader in the person of Mohamed Mossadegh in 1953. He had the outrecuidance to nationalize the oil industry, so the CIA fomented a coup against him and put the Shah in charge. The US then supported this asshole for close to 30 years, until iranians revolted in 1979. The revolution didn't end so swell, the mullahs took the helm eventually. But the country wouldn't be there if it wasn't for the sick US meddling. Sure, that was back in 1953, but the pattern continued in other countries over the world in the 55 years that followed. So yeah, the US is responsible, and the dumbass in chief you still have for 11 more months is apparently hell-bent on meddling still some more with Iran.
Since the end of WWII, the US has basically NEVER gone out of its way to promote democracy, in fact, at every occasion, it has favored tyrants and thrown democracies over the bridge for a couple bucks. Iran - Mossadegh, 1953 Guatemala Cuba - if you think Castro is not democratic enough, take a good look back at Battista Nicaragua in the 1980s - Reagan sold weapons to Iran through Israel to finance terrorist death squads, the Contras, to undermine the democratically elected Sandinistas, who happen to be too lefty for his tastes. Chile, Pinochet And the list goes on. My point is, we know the neo-cons want war with Iran, they don't care about democracy and freedom of speech one bit.
Broadband has progressed tremendously in most of Europe those past 5 years or so, thanks to gov't involvement but NOT in the form of sponsoring the infrastructure. What the gov'ts have done, pushed by the European Commission, is to enforce competition, and force former monopolies to share the last mile. This is why I pay 29 a month for 28Mbps ADSL2+, with unlimited int'l VoIP and a free (but admittedly kinda crappy) HD PVR, and why most of the population have access to decent broadband. FTTH is being rolled out; should get it within a year.
Those products are extremely reactive. They've gotta be... they're fucking explosives! Well, guess what, that means that they're disgusting, extremely toxic, induce vomiting, or all of the above. In fact, IIRC the supposed binary agents that were supposed to be used for the bomb that started the whole liquid ban bullshit are so reactive that they can't be kept in plastic, they have to be shipped in thick glass bottles, with thick glass caps. In other words, even the most autistic TSA agent should be able to tell the drinker is not sipping Evian.
You can charge $1 billion for GPL'd software if you want. You can ask people to register. You can also ask them to give you a lap dance or eat a live rodent. You just can't require them notto give it away to anyone afterwards.
Many people make this point of calling it a toy, but seriously... I use my MacBook at least several hours a day. It's the tool of my trade, just like a dentist's drill or a carpenter's hammer. Sure, unlike those, you can play with it as well as work with it, but I certainly can't work without my computer. Consider the amount of time you spend on your computer. The extra few hundred bucks you could spend on a better machine amortised over this time is really nothing. In fact, getting 1% more efficient at one's job is worth much more than a few hundred bucks.
I've never encountered RAM going bad. I've encountered a lot of RAM being bad to begin with, however. Sure, it could happen. Congratulations, a high-tech laptop is less serviceable than a whitebox PC. Whoddathunk it? As for the optical drive, I use mine every other month, why should I carry it around every day? The battery... 95% of users don't swap them around, the only exceptions being those who need extra long battery life. So we have established that the Air isn't going to compete in the rugged industrial laptop category... that's quite the bummer, buddy! Optical audio out? Completely useless. Stream over wifi or Bluetooth (has Apple implement hifi audio on their bluetooth stack in Leopard?). Apple sells a device for that. You're missing the point. The Air is not replacing the MacBook, it's a new product. So yeah, it's expensive. Too expensive for me, I'm keeping my MacBook and will buy an EEE to carry around, but this is a nice product and will sell like hotcakes, no doubt about it.
Slashdot Mirror
You got a cite for that? It shouldn't have cost them more than a couple millions to produce that documentation. What are they, mormons, writing on golden tablets or something?
Akamai.
Content Delivery Networks.
CDN, duh!
In other news, I have a few hundred channels available on my DSL set-top box and on my computer through Videolan, oh my fscking god how do they do this? Yeah, it's multiplexed, and VOD is cached somewhere between me and the ISP's offices, GENIUSES.
Because non-programmers don't program in ANYTHING? Duh?
Horse buggy makers are obsolete, their number has dwindled, both in percentage of anything and in percentage of vehicle makers.
ASM programmers are not obsolete, their number is probably higher today than it was in the 70s.
That's my point.
Why percentage of programmers? Why not percentage of the population as a whole? I bet the number has grown.
There are probably many times more people capable of programming in assembly language today than in the 70s. Kernel developpers, compiler developers (obviously!), CPU designers, embedded systems developpers and so on.
On the other hand, there are many times less people capable of making horse buggies than in the XIXth century; that's obsolete.
He argued against infinite copyright in front of the supreme court, against BigMedia's interest.
Yet it does. So does Eclipse. What does this have to do with anything?
Actually, the perceived performance issues of Firefox mostly stem from the fact it's a single-threaded architecture running on a JavaScript+XML interpreter (XULRunner).
There is indeed only one thread handling the UI and DOM, but there are multiple threads. Network operations, file decoding and so on run in separate threads from the UI. MAking a multithreaded UI is quite hard; note that IE (at least 6, most likely 7 too) does that too, with the difference that you can have separate windows in different processes altogether; but then they can't talk to each other through JS.
The only time this architecture is really a problem ATM is when JS from a page sucks up CPU: it bogs down the whole UI.
Moving to a fully multithreaded architecture is a very hard problem, esp. for such a complicated application, with such complex interactions as a web browser. Every single little thing would have to be synchronised, with big deadlock risks at each turn.
The only possible approach is to divide work among threads such as there is minimal, well understood interactions between them. You can't for example just have one thread per window, because HTML+DOM+JS expect to be able to touch other windows from the same domain. You could divide processes by originating domain; that's what Apprunner does.
But then you have coordinate communication between the windows and the bookmarks, history and so on. Not too hard to do, but has to be weighed against the minimal gain.
Eventually, we will have to take advantage of many-cores CPU. That means that even DOM parsing will have to be multithreaded, for use on ultra low power 256 cores mobile cpus. Robert O'Callahan is working on this. But what you have in this case is a number of related threads with a very limited scope, and precisely defined interactions.
You can read more on these issues at his blog:
Parallel Dom Access
Night of the living threads
You can be compelled to give up your keys in the UK; but encryption is not illegal. The thing is, IIRC an SSL connection is supposed to have forward secrecy, i.e. you can't decrypt it after the fact if the two hosts have properly disposed of the random numbers they used. That's not true of PGP mail messages, which are supposed to be decryptable after they've been transmitted; the difference here is that the two parties are not in real time, bidirectional communication.
So you can be forced to open your mail, but they can't force you to open your SSL communication if they have recorded the encrypted traffic, because there's nothing you can do about it anyway.
If mere suspicion triggers it, this will lead to a LOT of people being pissed off, and outrage will quickly win over the usual democratic boredom at the next election.
Unfortunately, our own Naboléon, the abominable Sarkonazi the first, is going to try to give us this same bullcrap. He appointed his big business buddy to head a commission which crapped out this three strikes nonsense. The commission was very democratic, it had representatives of the music industry, the cinema industry, the ISP business and the consumer electronics vendors. Notice something missing? Oh yeah, the people. Who cares about them?
... In the end there will be arguments in court over whether the user truely believed he was downloading something legit, not much of a stretch. But not something that can be decided without a court of law.
Anyway, this plan is technically and legally doomed. Technically, because basic encryption will defeat it.
And legally, for a host of reasons. Let's say I'm downloading MP3s. How am I supposed to know a particular one is illegal? What if someone tells me this is Free music, while it's not. Who's liable? The user who believes he is? OR the person who claimed it is? Who's most likely very anonymous anyway
And anyway, considering there's already quite a lot of legitimate sources of ad-supported digital music, it will be more and more difficult to decipher who's legit or not. Should the user be blamed for picking the wrong download site? What about something like allofmp3.com, are the users -- who've paid -- supposed to guess it's not considered legit?
Then there is the question, mentioned in the original article, of someone using your connection without your knowledge. With the number of compromised machines and Wifi routers out there, this is going to be a serious problem. But not a technical one; because honestly, this is a problem that will NEVER be solved completely, as anyone with a modicum of computer security experience knows too well.
It's not a technical question, indeed, because there is no technical solution to this. What are they gonna do about it? Put fines on people with insecure PCs or routers? That won't even solve it. This hasn't been that much of a problem so far because computer "crime" was not defined too broadly yet; but now if merely download Britney Spear's latest barf-fest fits the definition of "crime," you've got a completely different ballpark.
It's not just the odd suspected paedo, whom, we can only hope, would be convicted on more than just his internet usage. Now you've got hundred of thousands of users who are going to complain, many of which will be of the usual RIAA gaffe type, like the disabled granny accused of pirating 50 cents or Metallica.
And that's going to be a LOT of pissed off grannies. And younger people too. Many people NEED their internet connection for work. They will be really pissed off, even more so if they feel they've been wrongly accused. And you know what happens when people are not even THAT much pissed off around here?
And the contras killed thousands of civilians.
Way to go.
And he got plenty of guns, tanks, planes and other weapons in exchange for oil. From the US.
This was not a one time honest mistake, it was a 30 year lasting crime.
And as for the mullahs being so evil, that didn't stop that bastard Reagan from selling them weapons to finance terrorists in Nicaragua. Look up "Iran-Contra", that might educate you.
So back to my point, for the past 60 years, the United States has been detrimental to democracy; and esp. so since the fall of the USSR, where there isn't a big bad straw man to justify all the BS.
I can assure you that there were plenty of apparatchiks living the good life under, say, Stalin.
The Shah had a vicious secret police that praticed torture. Oh wait, it's not such a bad thing anymore.
Iran had a perfectly fine, democratically elected leader in the person of Mohamed Mossadegh in 1953.
He had the outrecuidance to nationalize the oil industry, so the CIA fomented a coup against him and put the Shah in charge. The US then supported this asshole for close to 30 years, until iranians revolted in 1979.
The revolution didn't end so swell, the mullahs took the helm eventually. But the country wouldn't be there if it wasn't for the sick US meddling. Sure, that was back in 1953, but the pattern continued in other countries over the world in the 55 years that followed. So yeah, the US is responsible, and the dumbass in chief you still have for 11 more months is apparently hell-bent on meddling still some more with Iran.
Since the end of WWII, the US has basically NEVER gone out of its way to promote democracy, in fact, at every occasion, it has favored tyrants and thrown democracies over the bridge for a couple bucks.
Iran - Mossadegh, 1953
Guatemala
Cuba - if you think Castro is not democratic enough, take a good look back at Battista
Nicaragua in the 1980s - Reagan sold weapons to Iran through Israel to finance terrorist death squads, the Contras, to undermine the democratically elected Sandinistas, who happen to be too lefty for his tastes.
Chile, Pinochet
And the list goes on.
My point is, we know the neo-cons want war with Iran, they don't care about democracy and freedom of speech one bit.
I looked around but couldn't find anything about this problem with Pidgin.
Broadband has progressed tremendously in most of Europe those past 5 years or so, thanks to gov't involvement but NOT in the form of sponsoring the infrastructure.
What the gov'ts have done, pushed by the European Commission, is to enforce competition, and force former monopolies to share the last mile. This is why I pay 29 a month for 28Mbps ADSL2+, with unlimited int'l VoIP and a free (but admittedly kinda crappy) HD PVR, and why most of the population have access to decent broadband. FTTH is being rolled out; should get it within a year.
Those products are extremely reactive. They've gotta be ... they're fucking explosives! Well, guess what, that means that they're disgusting, extremely toxic, induce vomiting, or all of the above. In fact, IIRC the supposed binary agents that were supposed to be used for the bomb that started the whole liquid ban bullshit are so reactive that they can't be kept in plastic, they have to be shipped in thick glass bottles, with thick glass caps.
In other words, even the most autistic TSA agent should be able to tell the drinker is not sipping Evian.
You can charge $1 billion for GPL'd software if you want. You can ask people to register. You can also ask them to give you a lap dance or eat a live rodent.
You just can't require them notto give it away to anyone afterwards.
Many people make this point of calling it a toy, but seriously ... I use my MacBook at least several hours a day. It's the tool of my trade, just like a dentist's drill or a carpenter's hammer. Sure, unlike those, you can play with it as well as work with it, but I certainly can't work without my computer.
Consider the amount of time you spend on your computer. The extra few hundred bucks you could spend on a better machine amortised over this time is really nothing. In fact, getting 1% more efficient at one's job is worth much more than a few hundred bucks.
I've never encountered RAM going bad. I've encountered a lot of RAM being bad to begin with, however. ... 95% of users don't swap them around, the only exceptions being those who need extra long battery life. So we have established that the Air isn't going to compete in the rugged industrial laptop category ... that's quite the bummer, buddy!
Sure, it could happen. Congratulations, a high-tech laptop is less serviceable than a whitebox PC. Whoddathunk it?
As for the optical drive, I use mine every other month, why should I carry it around every day?
The battery
Optical audio out? Completely useless. Stream over wifi or Bluetooth (has Apple implement hifi audio on their bluetooth stack in Leopard?). Apple sells a device for that.
You're missing the point. The Air is not replacing the MacBook, it's a new product. So yeah, it's expensive. Too expensive for me, I'm keeping my MacBook and will buy an EEE to carry around, but this is a nice product and will sell like hotcakes, no doubt about it.
Buy yourself a used USB hub on ebay, genius.
/ fark you
With such quality music, how is it possible they're losing market share??!