It would be a terrible step backward if humanity's major development platform [the Web] was controlled by a single vendor the way that previous platforms such as Windows have been,' says HTML 5 co-editor Ian Hickson, a Google employee
Yeah. It would be terrible if a major development platform (HTML5) was effectively controlled by a single person (Ian Hickson).
The browser venders should be implementing HOOKS to the operating system's native multimedia libraries
That would be awesome!
Then we'd see plenty of websites with "This website looks best when run with Windows Media 23 installed". (Or "Quicktime 13", or "Flash 14", or "libtheora1234"... etc)
I never expect Slashdot to have an unbiased point of view, but I generally expect something remotely resembling accuracy.
Theora does not entirely suck, but it's just not in the same ballpark as H.264 in terms of quality-per-bandwidth. Period.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is deluded or has some particular axe to grind, be it political or marketing.
The persons making the claims of Theora's competitiveness have HUGE conflict-of-interest claims in making it appear competitive, and an honest article headline and summary would have made this clear.
If your primary concern is "openness", then sure, Theora is for you. But if you want the best codec available today, and don't mind paying for it, don't delude yourself, and more importantly, don't try to delude Slashdot readers... it's dishonest and reflects poorly on your editorial choices.
Heh, little-known fact: C&C:G originally had a mission for the Terrorist faction that involved the player killing 200 civilians.
Using anthrax (or whatever the Toxin Tractors spewed).
It was cut at the last minute after EA Germany pointed out that it would give the game an "M" rating. But you can still see a snippet from it in the final end-of-game movie if you look closely (look for the tractor spraying green goo over a hapless peasant).
You'd think the producers would have had a bit more sense, but, you'd be wrong.
(Not that I'm innocent -- I worked on the game, which is how I know this, but somehow didn't allow myself to realize just how the overall tone of the game turned out till I saw the ad campaign.)
JSON is already a "native type" in JavaScript -- that was really the reason for its invention.
But yeah, running JSON thru eval() is a terrible, awful idea if you care about security at all. Manual parsing is currently required for safety.
Upcoming ES-3.1 and/or ES-Harmony may have a "secure" JSON parser, but there's been so much flux in the standardization process I don't know the current status.
BTW, not all caves are cold. Generally, the ambient temperature is the year-round-mean of the outside temperature, but depth, geothermal activity, etc can affect this, and then you have extreme cases like the Crystal Cave of Giants, which peaks at around 150F -- too hot for humans to survive for long.
Actually, caving (don't call it spelunking) is one of the areas that modern LEDs have absolutely taken over: the combination of efficiency, durability, longetivity, and small package size have completely replaced incandescent options (e.g., http://www.stenlight.com/)
Old-time carbide lamps still have limited application, mostly in giant caves and/or extremely long & cold expeditions, but Fluorescent has always been far too fragile in terms of packaging to warrant consideration.
Adobe Alchemy lets you compile C/C++ code into efficient bytecode for Flash.
Doesn't handle x86 ASM directly, but IMHO C/C++ is a much better target to start with in the first place.
The Alchemy toolchain is open-sourced, as is the Tamarin-backend that it uses. (Theoretically it doesn't require all of Flash to be deployed, just Tamarin.)
Some sites actually use features of Flash 8, 9 or 10. Or even more likely, they have the site set up to work with Flash 9 or better. Even if they don't use any features that are not in Flash 7.
Post the question to tamarin-devel@mozilla.org -- all the relevant people at Adobe are on that list, and although Alchemy is not technically part of the Tamarin project, it's related enough.
A debugger version of the 64-bit version is not available yet. When we release it ActionScript 2 debugging will not work due the obsolete protocol which depends on 32bit pointers. ActionScript 3 debugging will be supported.
Actually, ARM is getting first-class support (check out the source).
32-bit PowerPC will also get quality support, as both Adobe and Mozilla need it for legacy MacOS products. (64-bit PowerPC isn't as high a priority but contributions here would definitely be welcomed.)
I don't see any indication of active work on MIPS or Coldfire, but it would be welcome if anyone wants to undertake it. The code generator is pretty well insulated; adding new architectures is not trivial but is a reasonably isolated task.
Slashdot Mirror
Both the Adobe article and the "Sorry State Of Sound" article date from May 2007. The new article reinforces that the state *was* sorry then.
It would be a terrible step backward if humanity's major development platform [the Web] was controlled by a single vendor the way that previous platforms such as Windows have been,' says HTML 5 co-editor Ian Hickson, a Google employee
Yeah. It would be terrible if a major development platform (HTML5) was effectively controlled by a single person (Ian Hickson).
Oh, wait... it already is .
http://lastweekinhtml5.blogspot.com/
The browser venders should be implementing HOOKS to the operating system's native multimedia libraries
That would be awesome!
Then we'd see plenty of websites with "This website looks best when run with Windows Media 23 installed". (Or "Quicktime 13", or "Flash 14", or "libtheora1234"... etc)
It'd be just like 1998 all over again! KEWL!
I never expect Slashdot to have an unbiased point of view, but I generally expect something remotely resembling accuracy.
Theora does not entirely suck, but it's just not in the same ballpark as H.264 in terms of quality-per-bandwidth. Period.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is deluded or has some particular axe to grind, be it political or marketing.
The persons making the claims of Theora's competitiveness have HUGE conflict-of-interest claims in making it appear competitive, and an honest article headline and summary would have made this clear.
If your primary concern is "openness", then sure, Theora is for you. But if you want the best codec available today, and don't mind paying for it, don't delude yourself, and more importantly, don't try to delude Slashdot readers... it's dishonest and reflects poorly on your editorial choices.
HTML 5 is an open standard
By "open", I presume you mean "is controlled with an iron fist by Ian Hickson, who is a Google employee".
Heck, if it's good enough for Hixie, it's good enough for the world!
Theora may be equally as good
Actually, no. It is demonstrably false that Theora is even comparable to H.264.
No, I won't bother posting links with evidence showing this to be the case, as it's pretty damn easy to find.
Consider a thought experiment: if Theora is in fact comparable, why the hell are Apple, Adobe, etc, all paying the license fees for H.264?
The page told her to update her flash player. So I asked her: "Why don't you?". Her reply? "I don't want to install anything new anymore."
Wow, I guess HTML5 is not gonna be rockin' her world anytime soon then...
great for average users as long they can run the thing from a root CLI.
An average user doesn't even know what a "root CLI" *is*.
Heh, little-known fact: C&C:G originally had a mission for the Terrorist faction that involved the player killing 200 civilians.
Using anthrax (or whatever the Toxin Tractors spewed).
It was cut at the last minute after EA Germany pointed out that it would give the game an "M" rating. But you can still see a snippet from it in the final end-of-game movie if you look closely (look for the tractor spraying green goo over a hapless peasant).
You'd think the producers would have had a bit more sense, but, you'd be wrong.
(Not that I'm innocent -- I worked on the game, which is how I know this, but somehow didn't allow myself to realize just how the overall tone of the game turned out till I saw the ad campaign.)
> No silly and unsecure plugin to download
"silly" is a judgement call, but "unsecure" is a claim that can be backed with evidence (or not).
so why don't you point us to all the security flaws in Flash that have been exploited in meaningful ways.
go ahead... we'll wait.
(...crickets chirping...)
Um... that bouncing-ball demo that all the Amiga owners loved to show off?
Flash Player 10 for x86-64 Linux:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenotes_64bit.html
I used to dream of having punchcards.
All I had were the bits punched out from the punchcards.
Precisely, the complete genome sequenced and sorted. On a 2GB MicroSD card.
Dude: the menu is not the meal.
And that is NOT a horse. Horses eat. And poop. A lot.
JSON is already a "native type" in JavaScript -- that was really the reason for its invention.
But yeah, running JSON thru eval() is a terrible, awful idea if you care about security at all. Manual parsing is currently required for safety.
Upcoming ES-3.1 and/or ES-Harmony may have a "secure" JSON parser, but there's been so much flux in the standardization process I don't know the current status.
BTW, not all caves are cold. Generally, the ambient temperature is the year-round-mean of the outside temperature, but depth, geothermal activity, etc can affect this, and then you have extreme cases like the Crystal Cave of Giants, which peaks at around 150F -- too hot for humans to survive for long.
Actually, caving (don't call it spelunking) is one of the areas that modern LEDs have absolutely taken over: the combination of efficiency, durability, longetivity, and small package size have completely replaced incandescent options (e.g., http://www.stenlight.com/)
Old-time carbide lamps still have limited application, mostly in giant caves and/or extremely long & cold expeditions, but Fluorescent has always been far too fragile in terms of packaging to warrant consideration.
Adobe Alchemy lets you compile C/C++ code into efficient bytecode for Flash.
Doesn't handle x86 ASM directly, but IMHO C/C++ is a much better target to start with in the first place.
The Alchemy toolchain is open-sourced, as is the Tamarin-backend that it uses. (Theoretically it doesn't require all of Flash to be deployed, just Tamarin.)
I believe that is Flash 7.
Some sites actually use features of Flash 8, 9 or 10. Or even more likely, they have the site set up to work with Flash 9 or better. Even if they don't use any features that are not in Flash 7.
No, it's actually Flash 9.
Post the question to tamarin-devel@mozilla.org -- all the relevant people at Adobe are on that list, and although Alchemy is not technically part of the Tamarin project, it's related enough.
From the blog of Tinic Uro, the engineer who did the bulk of the work:
http://www.kaourantin.net/2008/11/64-bits.html
A debugger version of the 64-bit version is not available yet. When we release it ActionScript 2 debugging will not work due the obsolete protocol which depends on 32bit pointers. ActionScript 3 debugging will be supported.
Yep -- but it's all done in Flash, which as we all know, is Evil Incarnate!!!!
True, no Alpha/Coldfire/MIPS yet.
But as I said, I'd bet that ports for those would be welcomed, if anyone who wants to undertake them.
Actually, ARM is getting first-class support (check out the source).
32-bit PowerPC will also get quality support, as both Adobe and Mozilla need it for legacy MacOS products. (64-bit PowerPC isn't as high a priority but contributions here would definitely be welcomed.)
Sun is, in fact, pitching in on Sparc.
I don't see any indication of active work on MIPS or Coldfire, but it would be welcome if anyone wants to undertake it. The code generator is pretty well insulated; adding new architectures is not trivial but is a reasonably isolated task.
PowerPC is being added to the Nanojit (backend for Tracemonkey and Tamarin).
Help is welcomed. Hop onto #tamarin for pointers.