Flash and Silverlight represent the mid-1990s way of doing things with third party browser addons. Back when we needed crutches like these, they were useful. The leg has healed, though, so it's time to throw the crutches under a bus.
No. We never needed flash to play internet video. If you link to a video directly, it will play in your system's default video player.
That's downloading a video file and playing it. That is the same as 1990's video. In 2011 I want to be able to seek in my video file (or watch live streams), I want autmatic adjustment of bitrate depending on my bandwidth, and whoever I'm downloading the video from want's to make sure I pay my subscription to watch this game. There are basically only a few technologies that handle this. And html5 isn't one of them.
This is a misconception from people who believe silverlight is a flash competitor, and a flash competitor only. Silverlight will continue to work as a browser plugin, but its focus will probably shift from "all things RIA" to streaming video. It is already obvious that there is a niche for subscription video (a lot of paid for video content has alread switched from flash/wmp to silverlight). Apart from streaming video, I can't see microsoft putting much weight behind silverlight as the solution for RIA on the web. For that, html5 is much more useful (which Adobe has discovered as well). As for the technology in Silverlight (i.e..xaml etc.) that has already evolved into the platform for WP7 development, and future windows platforms.
Why on earth should I switch to C++ to use Qt? Like I said, C# is way more productive than C++, so the intelligent choice in that case would be to use C# and Qt.
Gosh I just can't see why people see Java as the non-evil-corporation alternative! It's oracle for heavens sake, if you think microsoft screws developers on puropose you better believe Oracle does it for fun.
I weigh the pros and cons. In the end its all about getting a return on your investment. Most importantly, I prefer the tools surrounding.net (e.g. visual studio) to those surrounding the oss sphere (e.g. eclipse). It's no harder for me to port my application from.net to java than it is to port it from python to java. In fact, I think it is much simpler. The whole "porting" argument has no merit. To me choosing ms products just means they pay for themselves in productivity so that I get something back for the lock-in and the dollars spent on software.
Don't make business decisions on religious grounds. It's not good for business, and I don't even think its good for oss. As long as people choose the software they find best, I think competition will make all software better.
1) If you write a windows (only) desktop app, I recommend c# over c++ for most scenarios (some high perf. things such as games excluded). The productivity is much higher.
2) Windows phone apps. You definitely need.NET here.
3) Streaming video apps for desktop. Html5 can't do it, and Silverlights video streaming beats flash every day of the week. Neither is excellent, and SL has terrible linux support. But still, SL is the least bad one.
If the computers are only to be used for web browsing then any OS will do of course, but I'm assuming that the people you donate the computers to will buy printer X or webcam Y tomorrow and expect it to work after inserting the cd that comes in the box. Linux is excellent until you pop in a windows driver cd...
So I recommend leaving XP on there, just make sure security settings are ok, MSE is installed, use chrome for browsing, make a recovery partition and a simple bare-metal restore procedure etc. etc.
The whole point of not making it modular is to make it smaller and cheaper. You can still buy a componentized notebook which has twice the thickness as these, or choose a product from this segment which is a lot thinner. You can probably buy an ultrathin componentized notebook as well if you want to, but you will have to shell out three times the money. I'm happy with soldered parts if the size and prize is right.
The old segment isn't going away because there are more air-clones, just like notebooks weren't replaced by netbooks. More product segments actually offers more choice which is usually good for us measly consumers!
Mine draws zero watts when it is switched off. How is that related to Thermal Design Power?
"TDP" and power draw during "Light use" are two different things
Having my real name on fb/g+ only means one thing: people who don't know me can see my profile picture. Thats all. Why is this a problem regarding stalking? If one of my real friends (i.e. those that can see anything about me) is stalking me, then I have a real life problem, not an internet problem.
Kids on the other hand can't be trusted to judge who is a real friend and not, and also can't be expected to configure their privacy settings. That is why there are age limits on google, and your friend should probably tell her kids that.
It may have been good technology but with the systems guys building Windows preferring to stick with C++ the outcome was inevitable.
Why should the fact that some microsoft developers prefer C++ for the job mean that C#/.NET is unsuitable for other tasks? If I had to choose ONE platform for all apps, it would definitely be.NET over unmanaged development. I.e., I'd rather write a webapp, an office plugin and a mobile app in C#, than write all 3 in C++.
Because they failed to support its way of doing things.NET has always been a second class Windows citizen unable to make direct use of the Windows APIs — especially the latest.
Ask 100.NET developers if they feel that.NET is a second class citizen. They will have no Idea what you are talking about of course, as 90 of them are doing ASP.NET applications (which is a joy compared to classic asp). The remaining 10 are doing other things such as office plugins, WinPhone7-apps etc. etc. But if you ask 1000.NET developers, you may find one that actually uses.NET in the sense that might expose it as being a second class citizen in windows. I write heavy desktop applications in C#, and sometimes feel that frustration, but I can imagine the envy goes both ways. I wouldn't want to write anything db related without LINQ for example.
Microsoft, like Adobe, realize that RIA technology is a niche and should be used as such on the web. There are a few occasions when you cannot use html+js, so you need a RIA technology. I don't think msft ever claimed Silverlight was to be used to replace html on the web. It was created to compete with flash.
Silverlight (or other RIA-tech) can be used appropriately, for example for: phone-app-development, special embedded web applications (video player etc.), and on certain desktop-like web applications (kiosks, point of sale). Microsoft more or less openly reveals that this is what they are aiming for.
The only real killer app on the www these days for silverlight is video. Microsoft of course couldn't let adobe set the agenda for streaming video, and html 5 never had a shot as it only (afaik) allows displaying media files, not for example monitor the users playback of the media or have any such realtime two-way communication. Silverlight "smooth streaming" or whatever they call it, beat the only other two competitors (flash, wmp) hands down.
A machine that interprets human language and produces spoken answers is showing some of the most important parts of human intelligence, and it does so artificially. So this is very much artificial intelligence.
Sack the VM people too, at least those who decided that the implementation of generics should be through type erasure, in other words "type unsafety".
Next, dismantle the whole community process (Whoever wants an open system please fork at this exit). If Oracle just puts its weight behind java, it could
well be the needed injection it needs. Without the tools for parallelism, distributed computing and so on, java (both VM and language) will be a "mainframe" language.
C# shows what can be done if you have
a) lexical closures
b) VM-level generics
c) A process where the language evolves faster than through a vote by UN+dog.
If oracle just makes Java the "other".NET, it will be useable, but as a commercial second fiddle, it will probably be irrelevant.
If oracle does not make java the other.NET, the slow community process will make the language irrelevant within 5 years anyway.
So of the 3 topics here (Language, VM, Process) the language is the least important for the future of java.
I'd be offended if my morality was questioned because I had seen a test beforehand. I don't filter information based on what I should be able to know. I wouldn't steal the information from the professor to pass the test, but if someone handed me a copy of the test beforehand, I'd read it, not throw it away, and I wouldn't be ashamed.
Also, I expect the university where I pay tuition to work for my money, for example by not re-using publishers standard tests but instead writing new tests. Is the morality of the university and their corner-cutting re-use of tests even in question here?
There is another problem: one is creating a free platform to solve the problems that proprietary software does at a cost, or with a lock in.
The other problem is making this platform interesting enough to use, and interesting enough to develop (and develop FOR) so that it keeps its momentum (or gains a critical mass, as is the case with desktop linux). Understandably, these targets are somewhat in conflict.
If the extra production cost (stereo cameras etc.) is not enormous, why not PRODUCE every movie in 3D, regardless of whether its shown as 2D or 3D?
This argument could be applied to e.g. an indie film that the producer/director wants to do in black and white, but the people paying for the movie are not conviced. In that case, why not shoot it in color film, and make it b/w in post production? Of course, there are some creative technical details that will differ in some scenes with the use of color (or 3D). The argument is the same as when shooting RAW instead of JPG with a digital still camera. You can turn 3D into 2D, RAW into JPG and color film into black and white, but not the other way around!
If I was a movie studio that had to pay for all this, I'd insist on shooting the film in color and 3D. If the result was crap, I'd up the explosions and try to sell the movie as a 3D theme park ride kind of movie. If the movie turns out great, then let it be a good 2D movie rather then a theme park ride. That could mean 2D, silent film, black and white etc. The studio will always have the original color, 3D material with sound in case they want to release it on BlueRay3D or whatever format is cool in 10 years.
This debate is not about 2D vs. 3D, or which has a future. The argument is "if you are to spend a zillion dollars on a big action movie, do you want to cover all your bases?".
Negative public exposure could easily be considered a punishment, and punishment can't be administered unless you have been convicted of a crime. I know this is about DUI, but in general, in any sane media climate, a mugshot should never be shown of a person who is merely arrested and not convicted! I could understand if media some times can't tell the difference between arrested and convicted, but the police?
Publishing images of *convicted* people on a facebook page is more acceptable, but still debatable. For a DUI there probably won't be a lynch mob adding to the punishment, but for another crime (say child molestation) it would be a completely different story.
Are the answers to the puzzles below equivalent? Are two equivalent? Which two?
"I have two children, one of whom is a boy born on a Tuesday. What's the probability that my other child is a boy?"
"I have two children, at least one of whom is a boy born on a Tuesday. What's the probability that my other child is a boy?"
"I have two children, exactly one of whom is a boy born on a Tuesday. What's the probability that my other child is a boy?"
The first is the original puzzle. Not being a native english speaker, I'd interpret the first as being equivalent to the second.
And I might be completely wrong here, but if they are, then the information about tuesday is irrelevant, correct? Nothing
would prevent the other child from being born on a tuesday if they could both be?
Isn't this much like the puzzle "two coins total 30 cents, one of them is not a quarter" (the other is).
We have to stop perpetuating the myth a motherboard is some sort of future safe platform that you buy into that will support generation after generation of cheap but effective upgrades. It doesn't work that way. Sockets are created to be as cheap as possible while supporting the cpu in question. If it wasn't for lack of configuration options and replacement of faulty parts, we would be buying our cpus soldered to motherboards.
If the site owners need to make sure that everyone that reads the site also gets the ads, then they simply have to figure something else out. Make ad downloading mandatory in order to download the content, or mix ads and content in some more elaborate way. As long as I need to do a number of separate downloads for the ads (http requests for images for example), or even RUN ads as applications (for example flash), I choose when and if I download those ads. This is simply a problem with html and http, nothing else. Should be a disappearing problem as more and more sites realize they need to move off html in order to make sure that what people see is what they intend (for good and bad, ads being the bad).
I do agree that anyone can ban anyone off a private forum, at random, or for any reason however stupid.
If it was "cracked in one day" then this DRM scheme wasn't all it was made out to be. It was a simple "cd-check" style DRM that could be cracked by simply removing the checking from the code, or by creating a local server responding in the way the game expects. A real DRM scheme requiring permanent internet connection would of course not include the whole game in the installer, period. The best idea would be to have logic such as NPC AI hosted on remote servers.
I just don't buy that "all DRM will always be cracked within a day". For media perhaps, because of the analog hole. But for logic, you simply can't crack code that you don't have on your computer. You can circumvent it by writing another implementation, but at that point you just cannot be sure that the cracked version is all that the original is. DRM is here to stay, and for games (unlike for media), creating an undefeatable DRM should be really simple, by simply keeping half the product on the sellers side.
The other argument is that all DRM is evil because it is an inconvenience for paying customers and not for the pirates. That may be true, but that is just a fact of life. Inconvenience for honest people is created by dishonest people. The lock on your front door is that kind of inconvenience. You could refuse to buy a door with a lock in it if you want to (since you don't like that YOU are inconvenienced by someone elses dishonesty). But you don't. You buy the door with the lock and never think twice about it.
As far as "permanent internet connection" is concerned, it's just not an inconvenience anymore. Internet connection to a computer is the same as an electricity connection. My computer is completely useless without power, and all but useless without an internet connection. If the power goes down I could whine about the game not saving checkpoints often enough. The same could hold for internet connection. Sure, the electricity requirement is a true requirement while the internet connection is artificial, but it would not annoy me any more when my savegame is lost because of internet outage or a graphics driver failure than when it is lost because of a power blackout.
The Wikipedia article suggests some kind of link to automatic transmissions. This should be easy to note in a "natural experiment", where you just check the statistics of SUA in a country where automatic transmissions are common (USA) and compare them to a region where they are not (for example scandinavia).
I have never heard of any case of SUA in the nordic countries, which could be because there are none, or because they are too rare to occur given the lower number of cars.
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Flash and Silverlight represent the mid-1990s way of doing things with third party browser addons. Back when we needed crutches like these, they were useful. The leg has healed, though, so it's time to throw the crutches under a bus.
No. We never needed flash to play internet video. If you link to a video directly, it will play in your system's default video player.
That's downloading a video file and playing it. That is the same as 1990's video. In 2011 I want to be able to seek in my video file (or watch live streams), I want autmatic adjustment of bitrate depending on my bandwidth, and whoever I'm downloading the video from want's to make sure I pay my subscription to watch this game. There are basically only a few technologies that handle this. And html5 isn't one of them.
This is a misconception from people who believe silverlight is a flash competitor, and a flash competitor only. Silverlight will continue to work as a browser plugin, but its focus will probably shift from "all things RIA" to streaming video. It is already obvious that there is a niche for subscription video (a lot of paid for video content has alread switched from flash/wmp to silverlight). Apart from streaming video, I can't see microsoft putting much weight behind silverlight as the solution for RIA on the web. For that, html5 is much more useful (which Adobe has discovered as well). As for the technology in Silverlight (i.e. .xaml etc.) that has already evolved into the platform for WP7 development, and future windows platforms.
Why on earth should I switch to C++ to use Qt? Like I said, C# is way more productive than C++, so the intelligent choice in that case would be to use C# and Qt.
Gosh I just can't see why people see Java as the non-evil-corporation alternative! It's oracle for heavens sake, if you think microsoft screws developers on puropose you better believe Oracle does it for fun.
Don't make business decisions on religious grounds. It's not good for business, and I don't even think its good for oss. As long as people choose the software they find best, I think competition will make all software better.
2) Windows phone apps. You definitely need .NET here.
3) Streaming video apps for desktop. Html5 can't do it, and Silverlights video streaming beats flash every day of the week. Neither is excellent, and SL has terrible linux support. But still, SL is the least bad one.
If the computers are only to be used for web browsing then any OS will do of course, but I'm assuming that the people you donate the computers to will buy printer X or webcam Y tomorrow and expect it to work after inserting the cd that comes in the box. Linux is excellent until you pop in a windows driver cd...
So I recommend leaving XP on there, just make sure security settings are ok, MSE is installed, use chrome for browsing, make a recovery partition and a simple bare-metal restore procedure etc. etc.
The old segment isn't going away because there are more air-clones, just like notebooks weren't replaced by netbooks. More product segments actually offers more choice which is usually good for us measly consumers!
Mine draws zero watts when it is switched off. How is that related to Thermal Design Power? "TDP" and power draw during "Light use" are two different things
Kids on the other hand can't be trusted to judge who is a real friend and not, and also can't be expected to configure their privacy settings. That is why there are age limits on google, and your friend should probably tell her kids that.
It may have been good technology but with the systems guys building Windows preferring to stick with C++ the outcome was inevitable.
Why should the fact that some microsoft developers prefer C++ for the job mean that C#/.NET is unsuitable for other tasks? If I had to choose ONE platform for all apps, it would definitely be .NET over unmanaged development. I.e., I'd rather write a webapp, an office plugin and a mobile app in C#, than write all 3 in C++.
Because they failed to support its way of doing things .NET has always been a second class Windows citizen unable to make direct use of the Windows APIs — especially the latest.
Ask 100 .NET developers if they feel that .NET is a second class citizen. They will have no Idea what you are talking about of course, as 90 of them are doing ASP.NET applications (which is a joy compared to classic asp). The remaining 10 are doing other things such as office plugins, WinPhone7-apps etc. etc. But if you ask 1000 .NET developers, you may find one that actually uses .NET in the sense that might expose it as being a second class citizen in windows. I write heavy desktop applications in C#, and sometimes feel that frustration, but I can imagine the envy goes both ways. I wouldn't want to write anything db related without LINQ for example.
Microsoft, like Adobe, realize that RIA technology is a niche and should be used as such on the web. There are a few occasions when you cannot use html+js, so you need a RIA technology. I don't think msft ever claimed Silverlight was to be used to replace html on the web. It was created to compete with flash.
Silverlight (or other RIA-tech) can be used appropriately, for example for: phone-app-development, special embedded web applications (video player etc.), and on certain desktop-like web applications (kiosks, point of sale). Microsoft more or less openly reveals that this is what they are aiming for.
The only real killer app on the www these days for silverlight is video. Microsoft of course couldn't let adobe set the agenda for streaming video, and html 5 never had a shot as it only (afaik) allows displaying media files, not for example monitor the users playback of the media or have any such realtime two-way communication. Silverlight "smooth streaming" or whatever they call it, beat the only other two competitors (flash, wmp) hands down.
-156.6% is bad. In fact, anything under -100% would be considered a disaster in most sales departments.
A machine that interprets human language and produces spoken answers is showing some of the most important parts of human intelligence, and it does so artificially. So this is very much artificial intelligence.
Sack the VM people too, at least those who decided that the implementation of generics should be through type erasure, in other words "type unsafety". Next, dismantle the whole community process (Whoever wants an open system please fork at this exit). If Oracle just puts its weight behind java, it could well be the needed injection it needs. Without the tools for parallelism, distributed computing and so on, java (both VM and language) will be a "mainframe" language.
C# shows what can be done if you have
a) lexical closures
b) VM-level generics
c) A process where the language evolves faster than through a vote by UN+dog.
If oracle just makes Java the "other" .NET, it will be useable, but as a commercial second fiddle, it will probably be irrelevant. .NET, the slow community process will make the language irrelevant within 5 years anyway.
If oracle does not make java the other
So of the 3 topics here (Language, VM, Process) the language is the least important for the future of java.
I'd be offended if my morality was questioned because I had seen a test beforehand. I don't filter information based on what I should be able to know. I wouldn't steal the information from the professor to pass the test, but if someone handed me a copy of the test beforehand, I'd read it, not throw it away, and I wouldn't be ashamed.
Also, I expect the university where I pay tuition to work for my money, for example by not re-using publishers standard tests but instead writing new tests. Is the morality of the university and their corner-cutting re-use of tests even in question here?
New languages for the JVM are cool and all, but still no syntax fixes the problems inherent in the JVM. Mainly, the lack of generics.
There is another problem: one is creating a free platform to solve the problems that proprietary software does at a cost, or with a lock in. The other problem is making this platform interesting enough to use, and interesting enough to develop (and develop FOR) so that it keeps its momentum (or gains a critical mass, as is the case with desktop linux). Understandably, these targets are somewhat in conflict.
If the extra production cost (stereo cameras etc.) is not enormous, why not PRODUCE every movie in 3D, regardless of whether its shown as 2D or 3D?
This argument could be applied to e.g. an indie film that the producer/director wants to do in black and white, but the people paying for the movie are not conviced. In that case, why not shoot it in color film, and make it b/w in post production? Of course, there are some creative technical details that will differ in some scenes with the use of color (or 3D). The argument is the same as when shooting RAW instead of JPG with a digital still camera. You can turn 3D into 2D, RAW into JPG and color film into black and white, but not the other way around!
If I was a movie studio that had to pay for all this, I'd insist on shooting the film in color and 3D. If the result was crap, I'd up the explosions and try to sell the movie as a 3D theme park ride kind of movie. If the movie turns out great, then let it be a good 2D movie rather then a theme park ride. That could mean 2D, silent film, black and white etc. The studio will always have the original color, 3D material with sound in case they want to release it on BlueRay3D or whatever format is cool in 10 years.
This debate is not about 2D vs. 3D, or which has a future. The argument is "if you are to spend a zillion dollars on a big action movie, do you want to cover all your bases?".
Negative public exposure could easily be considered a punishment, and punishment can't be administered unless you have been convicted of a crime. I know this is about DUI, but in general, in any sane media climate, a mugshot should never be shown of a person who is merely arrested and not convicted! I could understand if media some times can't tell the difference between arrested and convicted, but the police? Publishing images of *convicted* people on a facebook page is more acceptable, but still debatable. For a DUI there probably won't be a lynch mob adding to the punishment, but for another crime (say child molestation) it would be a completely different story.
Are the answers to the puzzles below equivalent? Are two equivalent? Which two?
The first is the original puzzle. Not being a native english speaker, I'd interpret the first as being equivalent to the second. And I might be completely wrong here, but if they are, then the information about tuesday is irrelevant, correct? Nothing would prevent the other child from being born on a tuesday if they could both be?
Isn't this much like the puzzle "two coins total 30 cents, one of them is not a quarter" (the other is).
We have to stop perpetuating the myth a motherboard is some sort of future safe platform that you buy into that will support generation after generation of cheap but effective upgrades. It doesn't work that way. Sockets are created to be as cheap as possible while supporting the cpu in question. If it wasn't for lack of configuration options and replacement of faulty parts, we would be buying our cpus soldered to motherboards.
If the site owners need to make sure that everyone that reads the site also gets the ads, then they simply have to figure something else out. Make ad downloading mandatory in order to download the content, or mix ads and content in some more elaborate way. As long as I need to do a number of separate downloads for the ads (http requests for images for example), or even RUN ads as applications (for example flash), I choose when and if I download those ads. This is simply a problem with html and http, nothing else. Should be a disappearing problem as more and more sites realize they need to move off html in order to make sure that what people see is what they intend (for good and bad, ads being the bad).
I do agree that anyone can ban anyone off a private forum, at random, or for any reason however stupid.
If it was "cracked in one day" then this DRM scheme wasn't all it was made out to be. It was a simple "cd-check" style DRM that could be cracked by simply removing the checking from the code, or by creating a local server responding in the way the game expects. A real DRM scheme requiring permanent internet connection would of course not include the whole game in the installer, period. The best idea would be to have logic such as NPC AI hosted on remote servers.
I just don't buy that "all DRM will always be cracked within a day". For media perhaps, because of the analog hole. But for logic, you simply can't crack code that you don't have on your computer. You can circumvent it by writing another implementation, but at that point you just cannot be sure that the cracked version is all that the original is. DRM is here to stay, and for games (unlike for media), creating an undefeatable DRM should be really simple, by simply keeping half the product on the sellers side.
The other argument is that all DRM is evil because it is an inconvenience for paying customers and not for the pirates. That may be true, but that is just a fact of life. Inconvenience for honest people is created by dishonest people. The lock on your front door is that kind of inconvenience. You could refuse to buy a door with a lock in it if you want to (since you don't like that YOU are inconvenienced by someone elses dishonesty). But you don't. You buy the door with the lock and never think twice about it.
As far as "permanent internet connection" is concerned, it's just not an inconvenience anymore. Internet connection to a computer is the same as an electricity connection. My computer is completely useless without power, and all but useless without an internet connection. If the power goes down I could whine about the game not saving checkpoints often enough. The same could hold for internet connection. Sure, the electricity requirement is a true requirement while the internet connection is artificial, but it would not annoy me any more when my savegame is lost because of internet outage or a graphics driver failure than when it is lost because of a power blackout.
I have never heard of any case of SUA in the nordic countries, which could be because there are none, or because they are too rare to occur given the lower number of cars.