They're called web workers, in the process of being W3C standardized, with shipping code in Firefox 3.5, Safari 4 and Chrome, with fallbacks possible to google gears on other browsers. Basically they're threads with no shared memory model, relying only on message passing / event mechanisms for synchronization.
With web workers you can do stuff like ray tracing or interactive video processing in the browser. If you can't see the potential for that in client-side code then nothing I say further will convince you otherwise.
Microsoft has many programs to help tech startups get their software very cheaply, like bizspark and the action pack subscription. If you're a tech startup that's pirating microsoft software, you probably haven't done your homework.
People that take the time to look seriously at Open Office often like what they find.
At my job we switched to openoffice due to the licensing cost of office.
I was very positive about this at first, because I used openoffice writer at home for when I needed to type up a letter, and that had been a positive experience.
Using it all day for serious word processing quickly changed my mind. Word had one issue that annoyed me: bullet layout going on the fritz if you tried to get fancy with nesting and copy/paste. OO writer by contrast has dozens of issues that annoy me, some minor, some major. The supposed office compatibility is so poor that using it to exchange documents with office users is basically impossible (at least for anything that uses tables and headers/footers). It also has many bugs, some of which shockingly critical, like occasional irreversible corruption of a document when trying to save it with CTRL+S while auto-save is running.
I've done a complete 180 on openoffice. I don't think it's good enough to use, even if it's free. If I was the decision maker, I would chose to pay for microsoft office instead of using openoffice, because the time lost with openoffice's annoyances vastly outweighs the license cost of office.
If you build a house you get paid ONCE by the people who use it. Why should one effort at a film script (or software or music, etc.) grant you income for life?
That's just a matter of accounting. The writers could just charge more up-front and end up with the same amount earned at the end of the road.
The issue is not with how long they're paid, it's with how much they're paid. Do you think writers are overpaid? What do you base this on?
If someone has announced his intention to kill you and has the means to carry out that threat then you kill him first.
Actually, my first response would be "why on earth does someone hate me enough to want me dead?"
I think the objection is not to going after people that do harm, it's about blindly doing that, without thinking or doing anything about how it ever got that far.
Terrorism is a threat. To think otherwise is naive.
You're misreading the argument. It's not that terrorism isn't a threat, it's that this threat is overblown. In the U.S., more people die from car accidents in a day than die from terrorism in a year. In africa, more people die from hunger in a day than died on 9/11 (btw, the world currently produces enough food to feed everyone, it's only politics that prevents this from happening). Terrorism in the grand scope of things is pretty small as a risk.
Now, I know the counterpoint to that "terrorism may be a small risk, but it's an unknown risk, it only takes one guy one time to kill thousands...". That may be true, but then if it's so easy for terrorists to strike, why focus so much on killing them, which doesn't do much for lowering the risk? Why not solve the underlying causes? Why not seek oil independence so military presence in the middle east is no longer required? With the money spent on iraq, america could have dramatically reduced its dependence on foreign oil.
The argument on the other side is not that these aren't causes worth fighting for, it's that the effort spent fighting them is spent the wrong way. Terrorism isn't prevented by deploying troops, it's prevented by reshaping global politics. Then another argument is entirely is why this money is misspent, and for that you only have to look at the money trails in american politics. There's no need for america to spend more on defense than all the other nations in the world combined. It's not under that big of a threat.
The appropriate response to terrorism is to find those responsible and kill them.
Israel has been killing terrorists with dedication for half a century, and they're no safer today than they were then.
Terrorism is a symptom, not a cause. Killing terrorists to become safe is like having a liposuction to become thin. It works only in the short term, but in the long term you only make your problems bigger. The only right solution is changing your lifestyle.
Ofcourse, people have to be punished for their crimes, but going after evil-doers is just that, punishment. It has nothing to do with becoming safer.
Personally, as an American citizen, I could give a rats fuck what the international community thinks about us.
That thinking (which isn't exclusive to americans) is exactly why the poorest billion in the world are no better off today than they were 50 years ago. The problem is that international politics is still busy more with national self-interest than with trying to make life better for everyone. The whole system is deeply and fundamentally broken.
Still, things are changing. Asia has made huge leaps the past 50 years, to where they're going to surpass the US and EU. The world is changing, and you would do well to notice it: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_at_state.html
The sad thing is before his 1st term is over, we will be hardly distinguishable from most of the European countries in terms of economics and social and political policy.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
I swear, the way some americans talk about socialist europe you'd think we were all sleeping on dirty concrete floors and living off water and bread.
You think having to spend your Presidency worrying about the next attack is really better than having a domestic Presidency?
The thing is, 9/11 didn't change anything from the perspective of the president. The threat was just as big before, and it was just as big after. When you have the scale and footprint of the U.S. (remember, military bases in 63 countries!), you're going to have a lot of enemies. The threat is not immensely larger today than it was a decade ago, or two decades ago.
It was his choice to focus exclusively on the symptom (terrorism) instead of the cause (global trade and power imbalances). It was his choice to "solve" that problem by increasing the military presence in the middle east (which anyone should have known would only make things worse). He had a lot of opportunity and goodwill, and he deliberately chose to misapply it.
Users don't know what a browser engine is. They don't even know what a browser is. They know that if they click on the big blue e, they can google the internet, and that's pretty much all they know.
The reason they're not switching to chrome is because even if they do manage to click and install it, they won't even realize that they have to click the chrome icon instead of the ie icon to browse the web. And even if they get as far as realizing that, they won't like chrome because it looks too different.
What chrome frame has also demonstrated beyond a doubt is that microsoft could have shipped a solution that preserved IE6 compatibility and upgraded web standards at the same time. They didn't because they didn't want to.
Microsoft is going to keep delaying the web's advance as long as possible. They only way to get things done is to side-step them.
The best way to reduce surface of attack is to abandon IE entirely and switch to chrome, as it was the only browser nobody managed to crack during the Pwn2Own contest earlier this year.
If security trumped all else, everybody would be using chrome. That they aren't shows that functionality does matter. So, yes, sometimes you have to install a plugin to get things done.
Frankly, I don't think they have the right to deliberately handicap the stuff I paid for, without me getting a say in it. The changes to itunes were designed to make it do less. They were not accidental. No company has the right to retroactively and deliberately decide that the products they sold me should do less than they did when I bought them, even if that functionality was not one they intended originally. Macs are expensive enough as it is without apple going around sabotaging their feature set.
Think of yourself as a part-time salesman. You're not just building ideas, you're trying to sell them too. How do you sell ideas? The same way you sell anything else: marketing.
What you call bragging I would call a marketing campaign to soften management up for future ideas. It's the reason I'm a team leader even though I'm one of the most recent hires. It's also the reason why I have control over the feature roadmap of the products I'm developing, which is a rare perk in software engineering. I would have never been allowed to build the stuff I've built the past year if I hadn't learned to talk with management in their language instead of mine.
And yes, that does mean you have to do powerpoint presentations sometimes. Deal with it.
It certainly hasn't been my experience with the various major releases of OS X (10.2 through 10.6) - on the same hardware, each release has been faster.
See, this is how apple is smarter than microsoft. Apple started with something really slow and bloated (10.0), so that with a reasonable effort they could make each successive release faster.
NT was substantially more advanced than OS/2. Multiuser, SMP capable, fully 32 bit, almost-a-microkernel, etc.
This is the thing I never quite got. NT4 ran fine in 32 MB of ram, and it made 128 MB of ram seem infinite. And it did in fact multitask very well. I never understood why it was that XP had to be SO much heavier than NT, while still doing essentially the same stuff. I've always had this nagging feeling that the team that built NT4 really knew what they were doing, and that the guys that came after just weren't as good at their game.
You might want to give a practical example of an unregulated market that tends towards optimal efficiency.
The problem is this: the free market makes prices drop to marginal cost levels, so market agents have two incentives: (1) merge and acquire to increase scale and drop costs, so as to achieve higher profits, and (2) find ways to reduce market freedom so prices no longer have to remain at marginal cost levels. These two incentives combine to reduce market efficiency. Let any market run free, and it will rapidly tend towards oligopoly. Once the number of players becomes small enough, they start to cooperate to reduce market freedom and raise prices.
Alain de Botton wrote a book about modern day work that (among other things) covers the process of shipping tuna from where it is caught to where it is eaten.
Remarkable stuff, and it flies entirely under the radar even of the people who buy it. Highly recommend that book to anyone wanting to get some insight on the fabric of modern society.
Searching through the history has never been slow for me, I think you're just making excuses for Firefox mashing the functionality of something (history) with something else (ACTUAL TYPED URLs) that never should have been placed together in the first place.
UX testing disagrees with you. You're the exception. People that prefer everything in one bar are the rule. It doesn't make sense to cater the default behavior to the exception.
Even thinking about it logically, this makes sense. A url is a search query with one result. Why should you type search queries with one result in one box, and with more than one result in another box? It's arbitrary, and inefficient from a user perspective.
the mentality of devs is that the hardware can take the bloat just give it some time and as far as I am concerned it's a cancer slowly eroding away at what software should be. quick, clean and efficient.
It's exactly the wrong move from a cost-effectiveness standpoint to put too much effort in supporting old hardware. The replacement cost for hardware is an order of magnitude less than the engineering cost of supporting that hardware. If we kept everything working on decade-old hardware, it would mean less features got developed, which meant people could do less with their computers. You personally might not mind, but society as a whole would make a loss on that deal.
Which is not to say the firefox devs don't care about performance. A lot of performance work went into FF 3.5, and memory-wise it's gotten much leaner than FF3. It does mean that if you're running hardware more than 5 years old, you won't be catered to, and for good reason.
If you're interested in the economic theory behind why it doesn't make sense to support old computers, I can highly recommend "Free", by Chris Anderson (the audiobook version is actually free itself).
Probably not so much because this isn't a music or video player. Sony isn't in the book publishing industry, so they probably won't be hard-edge about their DRM. It's always the content arm of sony that dislocates the shoulder of the gadget arm.
It's just like if your Internet connection keeps going down.
Yes, if it's your internet connection going down because your phone company (applecom) keeps messing with your connection because you didn't buy your dsl modem from them, but instead chose to get it somewhere else (palmdsl).
In some countries, what apple is doing here is illegal (product tying). Itunes is the default music management app on the mac. In fact, on a new mac, it's the _only_ music management app. Why wouldn't palm want to interface with that? And why should they have to settle for the second-rate user experience that apple says they deserve, when apple reserves a first-rate experience for iphone buyers?
The worst thing are the apple apologists though. I own two ipods, two macs, and zero windows machines, but I'll readily admit: apple are worse than microsoft. They act like stuck-up little bitches, in all their product lines, no doubt about it, and it's starting to seriously get on my nerves. But hey, that's normal, it's a public corporation, and it's corporate DNA to behave badly if it nets a profit. What's not normal is people who have no financial stake in apple supporting that bad behavior. If they really cared about apple's products, they would be more critical of everything apple does, to get them to behave better.
Anyway enough ranting, but I'm putting my money where my mouth is, I'm expressly not buying an iphone out of retribution for apple's bad behavior, even though I had decided I was going to.
I only buy apple hardware to get the software. Apple for me is a software company. If they sold the exact same hardware with generic software, nobody would buy it.
I was doubting between getting an iphone and getting a pre. Now that I've seen this, I'm getting a pre out of spite, even though all my music is in itunes.
Slashdot Mirror
They're called web workers, in the process of being W3C standardized, with shipping code in Firefox 3.5, Safari 4 and Chrome, with fallbacks possible to google gears on other browsers. Basically they're threads with no shared memory model, relying only on message passing / event mechanisms for synchronization.
With web workers you can do stuff like ray tracing or interactive video processing in the browser. If you can't see the potential for that in client-side code then nothing I say further will convince you otherwise.
Microsoft has many programs to help tech startups get their software very cheaply, like bizspark and the action pack subscription. If you're a tech startup that's pirating microsoft software, you probably haven't done your homework.
People that take the time to look seriously at Open Office often like what they find.
At my job we switched to openoffice due to the licensing cost of office.
I was very positive about this at first, because I used openoffice writer at home for when I needed to type up a letter, and that had been a positive experience.
Using it all day for serious word processing quickly changed my mind. Word had one issue that annoyed me: bullet layout going on the fritz if you tried to get fancy with nesting and copy/paste. OO writer by contrast has dozens of issues that annoy me, some minor, some major. The supposed office compatibility is so poor that using it to exchange documents with office users is basically impossible (at least for anything that uses tables and headers/footers). It also has many bugs, some of which shockingly critical, like occasional irreversible corruption of a document when trying to save it with CTRL+S while auto-save is running.
I've done a complete 180 on openoffice. I don't think it's good enough to use, even if it's free. If I was the decision maker, I would chose to pay for microsoft office instead of using openoffice, because the time lost with openoffice's annoyances vastly outweighs the license cost of office.
If you build a house you get paid ONCE by the people who use it. Why should one effort at a film script (or software or music, etc.) grant you income for life?
That's just a matter of accounting. The writers could just charge more up-front and end up with the same amount earned at the end of the road.
The issue is not with how long they're paid, it's with how much they're paid. Do you think writers are overpaid? What do you base this on?
Actually, my first response would be "why on earth does someone hate me enough to want me dead?"
I think the objection is not to going after people that do harm, it's about blindly doing that, without thinking or doing anything about how it ever got that far.
You're misreading the argument. It's not that terrorism isn't a threat, it's that this threat is overblown. In the U.S., more people die from car accidents in a day than die from terrorism in a year. In africa, more people die from hunger in a day than died on 9/11 (btw, the world currently produces enough food to feed everyone, it's only politics that prevents this from happening). Terrorism in the grand scope of things is pretty small as a risk.
Now, I know the counterpoint to that "terrorism may be a small risk, but it's an unknown risk, it only takes one guy one time to kill thousands...". That may be true, but then if it's so easy for terrorists to strike, why focus so much on killing them, which doesn't do much for lowering the risk? Why not solve the underlying causes? Why not seek oil independence so military presence in the middle east is no longer required? With the money spent on iraq, america could have dramatically reduced its dependence on foreign oil.
The argument on the other side is not that these aren't causes worth fighting for, it's that the effort spent fighting them is spent the wrong way. Terrorism isn't prevented by deploying troops, it's prevented by reshaping global politics. Then another argument is entirely is why this money is misspent, and for that you only have to look at the money trails in american politics. There's no need for america to spend more on defense than all the other nations in the world combined. It's not under that big of a threat.
The appropriate response to terrorism is to find those responsible and kill them.
Israel has been killing terrorists with dedication for half a century, and they're no safer today than they were then.
Terrorism is a symptom, not a cause. Killing terrorists to become safe is like having a liposuction to become thin. It works only in the short term, but in the long term you only make your problems bigger. The only right solution is changing your lifestyle.
Ofcourse, people have to be punished for their crimes, but going after evil-doers is just that, punishment. It has nothing to do with becoming safer.
Personally, as an American citizen, I could give a rats fuck what the international community thinks about us.
That thinking (which isn't exclusive to americans) is exactly why the poorest billion in the world are no better off today than they were 50 years ago. The problem is that international politics is still busy more with national self-interest than with trying to make life better for everyone. The whole system is deeply and fundamentally broken.
Still, things are changing. Asia has made huge leaps the past 50 years, to where they're going to surpass the US and EU. The world is changing, and you would do well to notice it:
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_at_state.html
The sad thing is before his 1st term is over, we will be hardly distinguishable from most of the European countries in terms of economics and social and political policy.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
I swear, the way some americans talk about socialist europe you'd think we were all sleeping on dirty concrete floors and living off water and bread.
You think having to spend your Presidency worrying about the next attack is really better than having a domestic Presidency?
The thing is, 9/11 didn't change anything from the perspective of the president. The threat was just as big before, and it was just as big after. When you have the scale and footprint of the U.S. (remember, military bases in 63 countries!), you're going to have a lot of enemies. The threat is not immensely larger today than it was a decade ago, or two decades ago.
It was his choice to focus exclusively on the symptom (terrorism) instead of the cause (global trade and power imbalances). It was his choice to "solve" that problem by increasing the military presence in the middle east (which anyone should have known would only make things worse). He had a lot of opportunity and goodwill, and he deliberately chose to misapply it.
Computer science is not an exact science. Vagueness is to be expected, even in the little things.
Did you submit your idea to the html5 mailing list? It's a good idea. At the very least this should be debated within the scope of html5.
Users don't know what a browser engine is. They don't even know what a browser is. They know that if they click on the big blue e, they can google the internet, and that's pretty much all they know.
The reason they're not switching to chrome is because even if they do manage to click and install it, they won't even realize that they have to click the chrome icon instead of the ie icon to browse the web. And even if they get as far as realizing that, they won't like chrome because it looks too different.
What chrome frame has also demonstrated beyond a doubt is that microsoft could have shipped a solution that preserved IE6 compatibility and upgraded web standards at the same time. They didn't because they didn't want to.
Microsoft is going to keep delaying the web's advance as long as possible. They only way to get things done is to side-step them.
The best way to reduce surface of attack is to abandon IE entirely and switch to chrome, as it was the only browser nobody managed to crack during the Pwn2Own contest earlier this year.
If security trumped all else, everybody would be using chrome. That they aren't shows that functionality does matter. So, yes, sometimes you have to install a plugin to get things done.
Frankly, I don't think they have the right to deliberately handicap the stuff I paid for, without me getting a say in it. The changes to itunes were designed to make it do less. They were not accidental. No company has the right to retroactively and deliberately decide that the products they sold me should do less than they did when I bought them, even if that functionality was not one they intended originally. Macs are expensive enough as it is without apple going around sabotaging their feature set.
Think of yourself as a part-time salesman. You're not just building ideas, you're trying to sell them too. How do you sell ideas? The same way you sell anything else: marketing.
What you call bragging I would call a marketing campaign to soften management up for future ideas. It's the reason I'm a team leader even though I'm one of the most recent hires. It's also the reason why I have control over the feature roadmap of the products I'm developing, which is a rare perk in software engineering. I would have never been allowed to build the stuff I've built the past year if I hadn't learned to talk with management in their language instead of mine.
And yes, that does mean you have to do powerpoint presentations sometimes. Deal with it.
http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html
It certainly hasn't been my experience with the various major releases of OS X (10.2 through 10.6) - on the same hardware, each release has been faster.
See, this is how apple is smarter than microsoft. Apple started with something really slow and bloated (10.0), so that with a reasonable effort they could make each successive release faster.
NT was substantially more advanced than OS/2. Multiuser, SMP capable, fully 32 bit, almost-a-microkernel, etc.
This is the thing I never quite got. NT4 ran fine in 32 MB of ram, and it made 128 MB of ram seem infinite. And it did in fact multitask very well. I never understood why it was that XP had to be SO much heavier than NT, while still doing essentially the same stuff. I've always had this nagging feeling that the team that built NT4 really knew what they were doing, and that the guys that came after just weren't as good at their game.
You might want to give a practical example of an unregulated market that tends towards optimal efficiency.
The problem is this: the free market makes prices drop to marginal cost levels, so market agents have two incentives: (1) merge and acquire to increase scale and drop costs, so as to achieve higher profits, and (2) find ways to reduce market freedom so prices no longer have to remain at marginal cost levels. These two incentives combine to reduce market efficiency. Let any market run free, and it will rapidly tend towards oligopoly. Once the number of players becomes small enough, they start to cooperate to reduce market freedom and raise prices.
Alain de Botton wrote a book about modern day work that (among other things) covers the process of shipping tuna from where it is caught to where it is eaten.
http://www.alaindebotton.com/work/
Remarkable stuff, and it flies entirely under the radar even of the people who buy it. Highly recommend that book to anyone wanting to get some insight on the fabric of modern society.
Searching through the history has never been slow for me, I think you're just making excuses for Firefox mashing the functionality of something (history) with something else (ACTUAL TYPED URLs) that never should have been placed together in the first place.
UX testing disagrees with you. You're the exception. People that prefer everything in one bar are the rule. It doesn't make sense to cater the default behavior to the exception.
Even thinking about it logically, this makes sense. A url is a search query with one result. Why should you type search queries with one result in one box, and with more than one result in another box? It's arbitrary, and inefficient from a user perspective.
the mentality of devs is that the hardware can take the bloat just give it some time and as far as I am concerned it's a cancer slowly eroding away at what software should be. quick, clean and efficient.
It's exactly the wrong move from a cost-effectiveness standpoint to put too much effort in supporting old hardware. The replacement cost for hardware is an order of magnitude less than the engineering cost of supporting that hardware. If we kept everything working on decade-old hardware, it would mean less features got developed, which meant people could do less with their computers. You personally might not mind, but society as a whole would make a loss on that deal.
Which is not to say the firefox devs don't care about performance. A lot of performance work went into FF 3.5, and memory-wise it's gotten much leaner than FF3. It does mean that if you're running hardware more than 5 years old, you won't be catered to, and for good reason.
If you're interested in the economic theory behind why it doesn't make sense to support old computers, I can highly recommend "Free", by Chris Anderson (the audiobook version is actually free itself).
Looks cool, but what nasty DRM lurks underneath?
Probably not so much because this isn't a music or video player. Sony isn't in the book publishing industry, so they probably won't be hard-edge about their DRM. It's always the content arm of sony that dislocates the shoulder of the gadget arm.
It's just like if your Internet connection keeps going down.
Yes, if it's your internet connection going down because your phone company (applecom) keeps messing with your connection because you didn't buy your dsl modem from them, but instead chose to get it somewhere else (palmdsl).
In some countries, what apple is doing here is illegal (product tying). Itunes is the default music management app on the mac. In fact, on a new mac, it's the _only_ music management app. Why wouldn't palm want to interface with that? And why should they have to settle for the second-rate user experience that apple says they deserve, when apple reserves a first-rate experience for iphone buyers?
The worst thing are the apple apologists though. I own two ipods, two macs, and zero windows machines, but I'll readily admit: apple are worse than microsoft. They act like stuck-up little bitches, in all their product lines, no doubt about it, and it's starting to seriously get on my nerves. But hey, that's normal, it's a public corporation, and it's corporate DNA to behave badly if it nets a profit. What's not normal is people who have no financial stake in apple supporting that bad behavior. If they really cared about apple's products, they would be more critical of everything apple does, to get them to behave better.
Anyway enough ranting, but I'm putting my money where my mouth is, I'm expressly not buying an iphone out of retribution for apple's bad behavior, even though I had decided I was going to.
I only buy apple hardware to get the software. Apple for me is a software company. If they sold the exact same hardware with generic software, nobody would buy it.
I was doubting between getting an iphone and getting a pre. Now that I've seen this, I'm getting a pre out of spite, even though all my music is in itunes.