"The ITRON specification is a standard real-time OS kernel that can be tailored to any embedded system. ITRON already has been ported to a wide range of microprocessor architectures and has quickly become Japan's de facto standard for embedded systems. Today, the specification is used in an estimated 3 billion microprocessors."
So the Wikipedia article is wrong, as of 2003 TRON was used in billions of devices, not millions.
PNGs are a whole different ball of wax, but I still don't think PNGs really make sense for the web today. The reason being that IE6 doesn't support transparencies in PNGs right and PNGs without transparency offer no advantage over JPEGs (besides being a free standard, if that's your thing) and they're significantly larger. Sure, I use PNGs on my personal sites where I can afford to say "fuck you, IE6 users, I want full color and transparency and if you don't like the way it looks, upgrade your shitty browser", but you can't really convince a company to do that and make their website look weird for 40-60+ percent of their users. Thankfully though, IE7 does finally support PNGs right, but how long will it be before enough users upgrade, making IE6 obsolete? Not a lot of users bother to upgrade to IE7 while running XP so most people won't upgrade until they switch to Vista which at this point looks like it will be slow in coming. I think the best we can hope for is 2-3 years.
As for PNG for non-web use, you're absolutely right, PNG rocks and there are a lot of people who would have written it off as a failure 5 years ago. Since then, PNG has become in many ways a de-facto standard for a lot of image uses because it's the only widely implemented non-proprietary image format that supports full alpha transparency. This is exactly where it differs from SVG though, it addresses a specific crucial need, whereas SVG doesn't really offer a whole lot over other vector image formats and in some cases it has a lot less. If SVG were created such that it was truly on par with or surpassing other vector image formats and it was still non-proprietary, XML based and all the other good things it has going for it, then it would be a completely different story.
TRON has been a ridiculous success being one of, if not the most popular embedded operating systems in the world, meaning that it probably has more devices running it than the number of PCs running Windows/MacOS/Linux/etc. combined. Sure, I think it would be difficult to argue that it has changed "the whole face of computing", but really, is that anything to scoff at? I mean, how many technologies are there that have?
I like SVG, but I really don't see why so many people have been taking issue with this guy's statement that it has been a failure. First of all, it's pretty clear that he was talking about SVG failing as a web graphics format and in this regard I think he's completely right, I can't think of any page I've ever seen that embedded SVG images in them other than SVG example sites. It doesn't even seem to be gaining much steam now that more browsers support it, Firefox and Opera support natively and although IE doesn't, Adobe includes an SVG plug-in for IE with installations of Acrobat Reader (or at least they did, I haven't checked lately). The only time I regularly run into SVGs on the web is on sites like Wikipedia or sometimes F/OSS project sites, but even there, they're never embedded in the page, they're have a rasterized version of the SVG and then link to the SVG file as a "source" for it.
Outside of the web, I agree, it would be unfair to call SVG a failure, but that said, it hasn't been a runaway success either. SVG has been successful enough that people use it and it's generally well supported by most vector drawing applications, but most people don't work using SVGs, they use whatever format is native to their application (Inkscape users being an obvious exception because its native format effectively is SVG). Also, while SVG has gained acceptance as a platform/application agnostic way to send vector artwork to other people, it's still less popular than other formats like EPS (or even PDFs nowadays).
On the technical side it was not always the best of understanding between me and the team. For example, I was convinced that we needed to build-in a programming language, but the developers, Tim first, were very much opposed. It had to remain completely declarative. Maybe, but the net result is that the programming-vacuum filled itself with the most horrible kluge in the history of computing: Javascript.
Amen.
I can't help but think how much further along web applications would be if there were a programming language built-in from the start.
When's the last time you saw a music video on MTV?
Turn in your nerd card at the door on the way out. Every over-caffienated insomniac computer nerd should know that MTV runs videos between roughly 5AM and 8AM on weekdays, just as surely as we all know that Comedy Central goes to infomercials at 4AM and Comcast cable internet connections go down momentarily for maintenance at 3AM between Sunday and Monday.
The next thing you know you'll be trying to find a game for your console but all you'll find are a bunch of lame dating and reality shows and you'll say to yourself, "My God, what have I done?!"
Same as it ever was... same as it ever was... same as it ever was...
I believe it was Thomas Paine circa AD 1776 or so, who wrote: "In order that liberty be preserved, we must not allow oppression even unto our enemies, for in doing so we set a precedent that reaches back into ourselves."
Yes, but it is to be expected that most people won't understand that because after all, like Thomas Paine said: "Time makes more converts than reason".
That's right, I countered your Thomas Paine quote with another Thomas Paine quote. I'm challenging you to a Thomas Paine quote-off! May the best Thomas Paine quoter win! I urgently await your reply.
Sure, the upstream and downstream are being paid for, but those aren't the only directions that matter. ISPs have funded research which recently discovered the existence of heretofore unknown directions of bandwidth which are not accounted for in traditional network models and as such has not been profited upon until recently. These directions include the "leftstream" and "rightstream", the former being paid for by government subsidies and the latter being paid through extortion of content providers. Their research is ongoing though, with network theoreticians currently postulating that there may very well be a third set of bandwidth directions, colloquially known as the "forwardstream" and "backwardstream". We can also look forward to later discoveries which derive from current network ideas, such as the theorized existence of such bandwidth directions as the "upperrightstream".
The BBC is being asked to cough up to pay for bandwidth charges, otherwise traffic shaping will be used to limit access to the iPlayer
Am I the only one who sees this as a clear case of racketeering? Gee, this is pretty nice website you got here, it'd be a shame if anything were to happen too it...
The BBC isn't trying to get anything for free here, they pay for their internet connection and their consumers pay for there's as well, the ISP shouldn't expect anything beyond that. Threatening to throttle traffic from a particular site unless the owners pay up amounts to nothing more than extortion and it's a shame that the greedy ISP owners who think differently won't get treated to the same punishment that Vinnie the Protection Racket Thug would get for the same crime.
I don't know, that doesn't seem too unreasonable. I mean, I could take a pretty good guess at how big the web pages I write are and how big the images I use are, but just by glancing at any random webpage I don't think my guess would be pretty accurate. Likewise I think it's difficult to guess what would be an "average" size for a webpage. There are just too many variables involved.
Okay, I could imagine that *maybe* there are people willing to pay that much to stay in a space hotel. The problem is, what good is having a luxury space hotel suite if you can't hire strippers to dance in it, much less drink champagne in your hot tub with them. Face it folks, besides watching all your friends vomit, weightlessness is no fun.
Even if they do come out, unless they sticker under $40k, nobody's going to buy them.
You do realize this is made by BMW, right? Most of their cars are already over 40k and even their cheaper ones can approach $40k once you add-in a few options.
In any case, I don't think that's really the point. I'm sure this car is just a concept car, proving that it's possible. Developing cars like this gives them good press and if hydrogen cars begin to make sense economically then they've got a headstart on working with the technology.
they shut down any store which dared to sell Apple stuff.
Overall, I agree with your post, but there are still a few stores which sell Macs besides Apple stores. There's a store around here, Yes Computers that sells and services Apple systems and accessories. It is true though that they seem to have done a pretty good job of keeping stores from carrying their products (besides the iPod).
That's what I would have thought based on the pictures on Engadget, but prior to this article being posted, I caught a report on CNBC where they were talking about the new iMacs and also mentioned that there was an item under a black cloth that had yet to be revealed.
It's possible that CNBC made a mistake though, but I believe they had a correspondant at the press event. In any case, at the time this article was posted the event wasn't over, so it's still a little strange that it got posted.
Can we wait until the press event is over before an article is posted about it? At present isn't there still a product on stage under black cloth? Have you ever known something hidden underneath a cloak of black cloth to not be important?
I'm not saying that there isn't a lot of potential in the iPhone as a platform, I'm just saying that for this particular use, it's less than ideal. There are plenty of other apps that I imagine would be great.
Slashdot Mirror
Fact: 4 out of 5 neolithic dentists surveyed would recommend birch bark tar to their patients who chew tar.
"The ITRON specification is a standard real-time OS kernel that can be tailored to any embedded system. ITRON already has been ported to a wide range of microprocessor architectures and has quickly become Japan's de facto standard for embedded systems. Today, the specification is used in an estimated 3 billion microprocessors."
So the Wikipedia article is wrong, as of 2003 TRON was used in billions of devices, not millions.
PNGs are a whole different ball of wax, but I still don't think PNGs really make sense for the web today. The reason being that IE6 doesn't support transparencies in PNGs right and PNGs without transparency offer no advantage over JPEGs (besides being a free standard, if that's your thing) and they're significantly larger. Sure, I use PNGs on my personal sites where I can afford to say "fuck you, IE6 users, I want full color and transparency and if you don't like the way it looks, upgrade your shitty browser", but you can't really convince a company to do that and make their website look weird for 40-60+ percent of their users. Thankfully though, IE7 does finally support PNGs right, but how long will it be before enough users upgrade, making IE6 obsolete? Not a lot of users bother to upgrade to IE7 while running XP so most people won't upgrade until they switch to Vista which at this point looks like it will be slow in coming. I think the best we can hope for is 2-3 years.
As for PNG for non-web use, you're absolutely right, PNG rocks and there are a lot of people who would have written it off as a failure 5 years ago. Since then, PNG has become in many ways a de-facto standard for a lot of image uses because it's the only widely implemented non-proprietary image format that supports full alpha transparency. This is exactly where it differs from SVG though, it addresses a specific crucial need, whereas SVG doesn't really offer a whole lot over other vector image formats and in some cases it has a lot less. If SVG were created such that it was truly on par with or surpassing other vector image formats and it was still non-proprietary, XML based and all the other good things it has going for it, then it would be a completely different story.
TRON has been a ridiculous success being one of, if not the most popular embedded operating systems in the world, meaning that it probably has more devices running it than the number of PCs running Windows/MacOS/Linux/etc. combined. Sure, I think it would be difficult to argue that it has changed "the whole face of computing", but really, is that anything to scoff at? I mean, how many technologies are there that have?
Yes, but unfortunately, because it's Japanese, all genitalia will be censored with mosaic pixelations. :(
I like SVG, but I really don't see why so many people have been taking issue with this guy's statement that it has been a failure. First of all, it's pretty clear that he was talking about SVG failing as a web graphics format and in this regard I think he's completely right, I can't think of any page I've ever seen that embedded SVG images in them other than SVG example sites. It doesn't even seem to be gaining much steam now that more browsers support it, Firefox and Opera support natively and although IE doesn't, Adobe includes an SVG plug-in for IE with installations of Acrobat Reader (or at least they did, I haven't checked lately). The only time I regularly run into SVGs on the web is on sites like Wikipedia or sometimes F/OSS project sites, but even there, they're never embedded in the page, they're have a rasterized version of the SVG and then link to the SVG file as a "source" for it.
Outside of the web, I agree, it would be unfair to call SVG a failure, but that said, it hasn't been a runaway success either. SVG has been successful enough that people use it and it's generally well supported by most vector drawing applications, but most people don't work using SVGs, they use whatever format is native to their application (Inkscape users being an obvious exception because its native format effectively is SVG). Also, while SVG has gained acceptance as a platform/application agnostic way to send vector artwork to other people, it's still less popular than other formats like EPS (or even PDFs nowadays).
I can't help but think how much further along web applications would be if there were a programming language built-in from the start.
This is only open to those who have been approached/harassed by the RIAA. You can't sue somebody for something they *might* do to you.
MTV = Viacom = More money than the only stripper at a world-wide convention of lonely octagenarian oil barons.
Just because you don't care about Windows doesn't mean that it isn't running on countless millions of computers right now, drive letters and all.
That's right, I countered your Thomas Paine quote with another Thomas Paine quote. I'm challenging you to a Thomas Paine quote-off! May the best Thomas Paine quoter win! I urgently await your reply.
Sure, the upstream and downstream are being paid for, but those aren't the only directions that matter. ISPs have funded research which recently discovered the existence of heretofore unknown directions of bandwidth which are not accounted for in traditional network models and as such has not been profited upon until recently. These directions include the "leftstream" and "rightstream", the former being paid for by government subsidies and the latter being paid through extortion of content providers. Their research is ongoing though, with network theoreticians currently postulating that there may very well be a third set of bandwidth directions, colloquially known as the "forwardstream" and "backwardstream". We can also look forward to later discoveries which derive from current network ideas, such as the theorized existence of such bandwidth directions as the "upperrightstream".
The BBC isn't trying to get anything for free here, they pay for their internet connection and their consumers pay for there's as well, the ISP shouldn't expect anything beyond that. Threatening to throttle traffic from a particular site unless the owners pay up amounts to nothing more than extortion and it's a shame that the greedy ISP owners who think differently won't get treated to the same punishment that Vinnie the Protection Racket Thug would get for the same crime.
I don't know, that doesn't seem too unreasonable. I mean, I could take a pretty good guess at how big the web pages I write are and how big the images I use are, but just by glancing at any random webpage I don't think my guess would be pretty accurate. Likewise I think it's difficult to guess what would be an "average" size for a webpage. There are just too many variables involved.
Okay, I could imagine that *maybe* there are people willing to pay that much to stay in a space hotel. The problem is, what good is having a luxury space hotel suite if you can't hire strippers to dance in it, much less drink champagne in your hot tub with them. Face it folks, besides watching all your friends vomit, weightlessness is no fun.
How will they keep the mints from floating off the pillows?
In any case, I don't think that's really the point. I'm sure this car is just a concept car, proving that it's possible. Developing cars like this gives them good press and if hydrogen cars begin to make sense economically then they've got a headstart on working with the technology.
I understand your point, but c'mon, can you honestly tell me that if there were a fire convention, you wouldn't go? It sounds pretty awesome to me.
That's what I would have thought based on the pictures on Engadget, but prior to this article being posted, I caught a report on CNBC where they were talking about the new iMacs and also mentioned that there was an item under a black cloth that had yet to be revealed.
It's possible that CNBC made a mistake though, but I believe they had a correspondant at the press event. In any case, at the time this article was posted the event wasn't over, so it's still a little strange that it got posted.
Can we wait until the press event is over before an article is posted about it? At present isn't there still a product on stage under black cloth? Have you ever known something hidden underneath a cloak of black cloth to not be important?
I'm not saying that there isn't a lot of potential in the iPhone as a platform, I'm just saying that for this particular use, it's less than ideal. There are plenty of other apps that I imagine would be great.