Not necessarily. Flash (which uses a JavaScript variant, the Tamarin engine) precompiles into bytecode, which is then converted into machine code by a JIT. So it's pretty darn fast by scripting language standards. Not as fast as straight C in the general case, but fast enough for many problems.
Tamarin is currently a superset of ECMAScript3. It is planned to become an implementation of ECMAScript 4.
ES3 (== JavaScript 1.x, basically) is a subset of ActionScript 3, which is a subset of ES4... which isn't yet finalized but does have a reference implementation in place.
Brendan Eich is not only the original inventor of JavaScript, he's one of the smartest guys I've ever met. Calling him an "airhead" is really pretty sad.
More to the point, he's correct: threads suck, in that mere mortal programmers have pretty much no chance of getting them right in the general case, and even superstars have problems with them. We need a better programming paradigm for taking advantage of multicore, but threads are NOT the right approach for a scripting-level language like ECMAScript.
The problem ain't the number of distros. The problem is the subtle compatibility issues.
If I want to develop commercial software then getting a reliable ABI across (say) 95% of 32-bit Intel distros is hard, because it's a moving target.
The Win32 API may suck, but it's also been pretty much stable for, what, 10 years? And despite the bugginess of Vista, MSFT has made huge efforts to avoid breaking stuff over the years (http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/) to keep that old crapware working.
The purpose of Tamarin wasn't to support 64-bit platforms. (In fact, it's still not 64-bit compliant, though work on that is underway. Want to help out?) It was written because the old scripting engine was slow and cranky and it was easier to write a new one than patch the old one.
And yeah, 64-bit compliance isn't rocket science, but it isn't free either, especially when you're writing a JIT that has to generate the proper assembly code... it's a nontrivial amount of engineering and testing time.
Since the rest of the Flash Player wasn't 64-bit ready, and since the market as a whole wasn't demanding it, engineering resources were devoted elsewhere.
With so many security holes, there must have been lots of exploits that have taken advantage of them.... viruses spread via them, privacy data leaked, computers crashed.... right?
Only problem is, I can't seem to find much evidence online of that actually happening.
Maybe you could help me out by point me at such evidence?
Call me a crusty old man of nearly 40, but CDs are the only way I purchase music now and likely to continue to be that way.
Why?
Well, mainly cuz the CDs that I bought ~20 years ago still work fine today, but the floppy disks I used in my Mac 512k ~20 years ago are essentially unreadable now.
I have no faith that spending money on iTunes (or whatever) will yield music that I can still use in another 20 years. (Not to mention the fact that the CDs are better sound quality. Yeahyeahyeah, maybe my ears can't really tell the difference, but it gives me more options when an even crazier compression scheme is discovered in the future.)
If CD sales are down, perhaps the reason is that it's getting harder and harder to find new interesting music... radio in the USA has become essentially worthless for this in the last 10 years due to massive corporate consolidation and uniform playlists. This sort of business model may make it easier in the short term for those companies, but long term they've lost a customer.
Errr... no, it runs just fine on those systems. It just doesn't run in native 64-bit mode. (Do you really care about the actual instruction set the player uses? If so, why?)
There is no better choice than to repeat your courses and prove mastery. Period.
In principle, I agree with you. But in practice, it just ain't true.
My team would desperately love to hire someone with a particular hard-to-find set of technical skills; if we found this person tomorrow, we'd hire him/her in a heartbeat, and wouldn't give a shit about GPA or even whether they had a degree in the first place.
If everything else was equal, sure, I'd favor the higher grades (with or without repeating classes).
But assuming your grades are decent enough to get you an interview in the first place, I'd be MUCH more interested in your participation in the open-source project, as it's much more likely to be indicative of your actual work performance.
Some places won't even look at candidates without high GPAs (my company included), but if you show yourself to be a stud on a project with visibility then no one will really care about your GPA... or even your degree or school, really.
As one of the original architects and engineers on Fireworks, let me correct you.
Fireworks did take a few bits of code from xRes: some of the smart paintbrush code, and some of the image-tile disk-paging code. And a few other bits and pieces.
But with no respect to the xRes team, who were very smart folks, they are really two completely separate codebases with nothing important in common, developed by completely separate teams.
Actually, PhotoStyler wasn't merged with Photoshop, it was just killed.
PhotoStyler wasn't written by Aldus, but (IIRC) a Taiwanese company called ULead. Aldus signed an exclusive-rights to distribute PhotoStyler, but when Adobe bought Aldus, Aldus used this exclusive-rights contract to just kill the product. But since they didn't own the code -- just the distribution rights -- they couldn't merge the code.
Apparently ULead is still around and still doing image apps (PhotoImpact?)
Interesting historical note is that Aldus FreeHand was also developed by another company (Altsys) and licensed to Aldus... but in this case the contract included a "no-compete" clause that forbade Aldus from marketing competing products. When Adobe bought Aldus, Altsys was able to argue that Illustrator was such a product (duh), and regained control of FreeHand... then turned around and sold their entire company to Macromedia, resulting in Macromedia FreeHand.
But I thought the Gospel Truth of Slashdot is that "GIMP is just as good as Photoshop"... if this were so, then Adobe is definitely not a monopoly, eh?
Slashdot Mirror
This is a valid comment, but is modded into oblivion for some reason...
I'm not saying put threads in the userspace (i.e. web pages than run in 10 threads), but put it in the engine for XUL
That's basically what he's saying: threads may have a place in the underlying runtime, but not in the toplevel userspace scripting language.
Not necessarily. Flash (which uses a JavaScript variant, the Tamarin engine) precompiles into bytecode, which is then converted into machine code by a JIT. So it's pretty darn fast by scripting language standards. Not as fast as straight C in the general case, but fast enough for many problems.
Tamarin is currently a superset of ECMAScript3. It is planned to become an implementation of ECMAScript 4.
ES3 (== JavaScript 1.x, basically) is a subset of
ActionScript 3, which is a subset of
ES4... which isn't yet finalized but does have a reference implementation in place.
For more info on the proposed ES4 standard and implementation, go here: http://www.ecmascript-lang.org/
Firefox tech airhead
Brendan Eich is not only the original inventor of JavaScript, he's one of the smartest guys I've ever met. Calling him an "airhead" is really pretty sad.
More to the point, he's correct: threads suck, in that mere mortal programmers have pretty much no chance of getting them right in the general case, and even superstars have problems with them. We need a better programming paradigm for taking advantage of multicore, but threads are NOT the right approach for a scripting-level language like ECMAScript.
The problem ain't the number of distros. The problem is the subtle compatibility issues.
If I want to develop commercial software then getting a reliable ABI across (say) 95% of 32-bit Intel distros is hard, because it's a moving target.
The Win32 API may suck, but it's also been pretty much stable for, what, 10 years? And despite the bugginess of Vista, MSFT has made huge efforts to avoid breaking stuff over the years (http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/) to keep that old crapware working.
What about the SpiderMonkey integration work, how's that going?
Not sure. You should ask someone at Mozilla.
Ah, ok.
:-)
It's in a usable state now, as long as you don't need 64-bit
As mentioned before, contributors to 64-bit work would be welcomed...
The purpose of Tamarin wasn't to support 64-bit platforms. (In fact, it's still not 64-bit compliant, though work on that is underway. Want to help out?) It was written because the old scripting engine was slow and cranky and it was easier to write a new one than patch the old one.
And yeah, 64-bit compliance isn't rocket science, but it isn't free either, especially when you're writing a JIT that has to generate the proper assembly code... it's a nontrivial amount of engineering and testing time.
Since the rest of the Flash Player wasn't 64-bit ready, and since the market as a whole wasn't demanding it, engineering resources were devoted elsewhere.
writing shitty players with security holes
With so many security holes, there must have been lots of exploits that have taken advantage of them.... viruses spread via them, privacy data leaked, computers crashed.... right?
Only problem is, I can't seem to find much evidence online of that actually happening.
Maybe you could help me out by point me at such evidence?
Go ahead. I'll wait.
More accurate would be "Adobe Issues Fixes For Flash Exploit That Could Log Keystrokes"...
Headline implies that exploits were just found and still exist. Not so.
Call me a crusty old man of nearly 40, but CDs are the only way I purchase music now and likely to continue to be that way.
Why?
Well, mainly cuz the CDs that I bought ~20 years ago still work fine today, but the floppy disks I used in my Mac 512k ~20 years ago are essentially unreadable now.
I have no faith that spending money on iTunes (or whatever) will yield music that I can still use in another 20 years. (Not to mention the fact that the CDs are better sound quality. Yeahyeahyeah, maybe my ears can't really tell the difference, but it gives me more options when an even crazier compression scheme is discovered in the future.)
If CD sales are down, perhaps the reason is that it's getting harder and harder to find new interesting music... radio in the USA has become essentially worthless for this in the last 10 years due to massive corporate consolidation and uniform playlists. This sort of business model may make it easier in the short term for those companies, but long term they've lost a customer.
Actually, ActionScript is a superset of ECMA 3, and is much closer to the upcoming EcmaScript4 standard in most ways.
That's odd... I just tried out the Video Editor that was written in ActionScript here:
http://www.youtube.com/ytremixer
and yet my browser is, strangely enough, still alive...
Flash doesn't run on Linux x86_64.
s h-9-on-64bit-linux-in-2-commands/
/etc/portage/package.unmask /etc/portage/package.unmask
Errr... no, it runs just fine on those systems. It just doesn't run in native 64-bit mode. (Do you really care about the actual instruction set the player uses? If so, why?)
http://www.jamesward.org/wordpress/2006/12/06/fla
First I added the net-www/netscape-flash package to
sudo vi
Then I emerged Flash 9 & the Netscape Plugin Wrapper
sudo emerge -av netscape-flash nspluginwrapper
There is no better choice than to repeat your courses and prove mastery. Period.
In principle, I agree with you. But in practice, it just ain't true.
My team would desperately love to hire someone with a particular hard-to-find set of technical skills; if we found this person tomorrow, we'd hire him/her in a heartbeat, and wouldn't give a shit about GPA or even whether they had a degree in the first place.
If everything else was equal, sure, I'd favor the higher grades (with or without repeating classes).
But assuming your grades are decent enough to get you an interview in the first place, I'd be MUCH more interested in your participation in the open-source project, as it's much more likely to be indicative of your actual work performance.
Some places won't even look at candidates without high GPAs (my company included), but if you show yourself to be a stud on a project with visibility then no one will really care about your GPA... or even your degree or school, really.
Larry Niven covered all these topics (and more) in his excellent essay, "The Theory and Practice of Teleportation".
Sadly, a quick google didn't show any copies on the web, but it's worth picking up one of his short-story collections that contains it.
It's inexcusable to say that murder is ever an appropriate recourse after crime.
Sure.
Well, except maybe for spammers.
I'd support opening up a new, inventive circle of Hell just for them.
(e.g., the spammers touting penis-enlargement pills will be forced to drag a 2-ton schlong over hot pointy rocks for all eternity...)
No worries.. I was a day late myself (out of town).
Thanks for the response.
As one of the original architects and engineers on Fireworks, let me correct you.
Fireworks did take a few bits of code from xRes: some of the smart paintbrush code, and some of the image-tile disk-paging code. And a few other bits and pieces.
But with no respect to the xRes team, who were very smart folks, they are really two completely separate codebases with nothing important in common, developed by completely separate teams.
Actually, PhotoStyler wasn't merged with Photoshop, it was just killed.
PhotoStyler wasn't written by Aldus, but (IIRC) a Taiwanese company called ULead. Aldus signed an exclusive-rights to distribute PhotoStyler, but when Adobe bought Aldus, Aldus used this exclusive-rights contract to just kill the product. But since they didn't own the code -- just the distribution rights -- they couldn't merge the code.
Apparently ULead is still around and still doing image apps (PhotoImpact?)
Interesting historical note is that Aldus FreeHand was also developed by another company (Altsys) and licensed to Aldus... but in this case the contract included a "no-compete" clause that forbade Aldus from marketing competing products. When Adobe bought Aldus, Altsys was able to argue that Illustrator was such a product (duh), and regained control of FreeHand... then turned around and sold their entire company to Macromedia, resulting in Macromedia FreeHand.
But I thought the Gospel Truth of Slashdot is that "GIMP is just as good as Photoshop"... if this were so, then Adobe is definitely not a monopoly, eh?
Thomas Knoll is still actively working on related technologies... in particular, Camera RAW processing.
Not only have I never found a store with the Wii in stock, I've never even seen one with a demo unit.
I'm starting to suspect it's all just a giant myth...