A well thought out post, but just to address the issue of cars and boats - driving an F1 car for a competitive race (even one that turns into a procession - the sport has its issues) is an extremely physically demanding task. The drivers have to be in excellent physical shape to stand any chance of being competitive, even if their car is excellent. It's also very hard to drive an F1 car well, as shown by Luca Badoa when he took over mid-season in Ferrari's 2nd car when Massa was struck on the head by a 200mph spring. He just couldn't drive the car anywhere close to its limit. (check a video of that freak accident by the way - you'll never look at an object striking your windscreen in the same way again - and he drove into this thing at over 150mph).
For an indication of the sort of forces involved, the drivers are subjected to repeated 2 to 3 G forces in corners, with some circuits featuring 5G corners. So in this respect, I think it can be considered a sport - even if you're skilled you can't just show up and be competitive, even with a better car. You have to practice and keep in shape, and get used to your car.
By that point in the thread we were talking about the synonymous nature of technical terms, and that Safari was a synonym for Webkit, even though technically it is not in the same way that Ubuntu is not a synonym for Linux.
It was more about being precise about meaning than anything else. I was less facetious in my second reply to the same poster.
Yes, and in this free market, Apple is allowed to do what it likes in its own store. It works both ways.
So, freedom of choice for everyone except Apple... who aren't allowed to set the rules of their own store.
I made the point in another thread that I think it would have been more accurate to state that it was the first browser on the iPhone to use something other than Webkit - I didn't mean to downplay that part.
You're unlikely to ever see a headless midrange - the iMac is it.
It won't be long before the iMac is updated with i5 across the board, with optional i7, and more powerful graphics. The 4850 option in the 27" is pushing it for heat at the moment as it is.
Valve's decision to make OS X a tier 1 platform should help to spur on the inclusion of much better GPUs - it's a feature of Apple's lineup that has always been the weak spot. My late 2006 iMac is still perfect for everything I need it for today except for the graphics card. If it had initially had a beefier card then I wouldn't be considering swapping it for a more powerful one until at least a year from now, but I'm feeling it slightly for some things (mainly games).
What, so the fact that they do have a freephone number and send out a pre paid box is somehow not taking pride or responsibility?
You are basing Apple's pride and responsibility on a third party vendor who sells Apple products?
When you are dealing with a mass produced product you're going to get the odd lemon. They have procedures for dealing with such things, and will even pay for your shipping and the phone call (as many companies will - I know it's not a special unique thing).
Quark might make back some of the ground they lost to Adobe in the wake of them dragging their feet in the move to OS X.
Xpress used to the hands-down app used for DTP, and now it's much more split between InDesign and Xpress - because Quark really did drag their feet *enormously* when Apple switched to OS X.
As far as Photoshop and Illustrator goes... who knows.
Apple itself doesn't use hardware acceleration (except on the 9400M chipset, and even then only very recently) for things like H.264.
Flash on Windows doesn't use hardware acceleration either (10.1 will), and the performance is better than the OS X version.
All of the graphics components of OS X are documented and other third party vendors seem to have no problems.
On2 even had a decent flash player built into its own app (used to use it to test flash videos with simple player templates that the software would make for you if you gave it a source video - it was much better than the flash plugin for the browser!)
just like everyone else who wants to build something that displays something on the screen. I'll give you another hint: "nothing aside from blessed quicktime components can actually use video acceleration" is bullshit. Have you even read the documentation?
You have full (and extremely well documented) access to the graphics abilities of OS X as a developer.
The complaints about "acceleration" are almost all related to the lack of hardware decoding of H.264 in OS X, which is limited to the Nvidia 9400M chipset only. Even "blessed" Quicktime doesn't use hardware decoding of H.264 on OS X (unless you have a Mac with a 9400M). Hopefully this will be added soon.
How can it do this? The CoreAnimation (which is new), CoreVideo, CoreAudio, OpenGL and other frameworks are public frameworks and well-documented in the developer literature.
As far as hardware acceleration goes, Flash is not even using that on Windows, where the performance is so much better (the new 10.1 Flash will be using hardware acceleration on Windows).
Apple themselves don't use hardware acceleration for animation and video for their own stuff (eg, screensavers, iTunes visualaliser, window animations etc), although they do have hardware acceleration for H.264 on the 9400M *only* in OS X and no other GPU at all, and even then, this is a very recent addition (Flash has been sucking on the platform since long before that).
This is not about hardware acceleration or "refusing to open things up" for Adobe, it's about very poor code and a platform that Adobe simply do not care about. There is no reason that it sucks so badly on OS X other than lack of interest in fixing it/lack of resources devoted to it.
Tell me how Apple can be actively blocking them from improving it when other third party plugin makers seem to be able to make decent plugins.
On2 even made a good flash plugin for its own software on OS X.
The very root post of this discussion calls this a victory for the free market now that the tyranny of the app store has been broken - how is that *not* a clear inference that now there is a competitor to Safari, the app store tyranny is broken?
The UI is just as crucial a part of an app as the back end - as you mentioned with Chrome (leaving aside the JM for a second), even with the same engine, their appearance and mechanics above Webkit are quite different.
A lot of the browsers available are mere front ends to Webkit in the way that ISP-bundled browsers were on top of Trident back in the day, but several are not and offer differences to Safari that are otherwise not there.
Someone pointed out to me in another post that it's not the alternative engine per se that is against the rules, it's specifically the Javascript interpreter, so presumably someone could write a browser that used Gecko or Presto or something else but use the built in JM that Safari uses (assuming it's not a private framework - it's not in desktop OS X)
What about something like fishing then, where hand-eye coordination and similar skills are what separate the good from the great.
Or golf - you don't have to be all that athletic to smack a golf ball (although there's clearly a minimum physical requirement, and a need to concentrate for long periods of time).
I'm not sure where I fall on the issue, but that it's not unique with the rise of "esport" - it has existed as long as there have been sports. Video games just brought a new medium to the table.
Blizzard are trying to shoehorn PvP Arena into an esport (at the expense of the PvE side of the game in my opinion, due to the way class skills have to be changed), and they are still not going to be able to properly balance it because the classes are inherently imbalanced, making it a poor choice for a competitive tournament beyond the limits of the game itself, but they succeeded with Starcraft which was honed and tuned into balance.
Darts and Snooker are considered sports, and those don;t have the same athletic requirement as football, or even car racing - F1 especially requires you to be in extreme physical shape if you are going to have any hope of driving that car on the edge for 2 hours at a time.
I think the definition of sport is closer to a competitive game where the interest in the outcome exceeds the participants, such that even people who have never played it, or have no interest in playing themselves are fans.
So anywhere Linux is mentioned, I can just say Ubuntu...
Clearly not - just because people do confuse it and start to come up with synonymous terms doesn't make it accurate, especially when specific technical issues are raised.
Yes, but the OS clearly has an impact. I can reboot this iMac into XP and identical flash content on websites I was just looking at on OS X use less than half the CPU, on *literally identical* hardware.
I'm sure that flash could run well on ARM, but the version of Flash on top of OS X right now (and iPhone OS is based on OS X) would not.
The core APIs required to do all this are all right there in OS X and are documented - other plugin makers can do it just fine (and On2 even did it with Flash itself with their in-program flash player for checking the flash video encodes you just made).
This is not Apple's fault - their documentation is extensive.
Quicktime itself does not hardware accelerate H.264 (except on the 9400M GPU) in OS X and it plays things just fine at low CPU load. This is not about hardware acceleration or access to private APIs, its just crappy code.
Where did I say it crashed my browser? It doesn't cause crashes, it's just very heavy on CPU - look at the screen shot. That's a 2Ghz Core 2 Duo iMac, and that page on Windows (while looking the same) doesn't push the CPU nearly as hard.
HD streams on BBC iPlayer drop frames, yet the exact same streams on XBMC running on top of OS X (ie, just start the XBMC app - no rebooting) play with a tenth of the CPU use (but stop after 1 minute since the addition of the swf verification by the BBC on their streams).
This is not a problem with my systems. I have 3 Macs, all with various levels of OS X (one of them PPC) and Flash is dreadful on all of them. Should I reinstall OS X on all three? My family members have another 3 Macs between them with the same issue. Should I reinstall them?
I am not disputing that it works - I have spent a lot of time on Blizzard's Diablo 3 site (looking forward to the game) and it's not full of crashes or impossibly slow animations or video, but it pushes my CPU up near the limit to do this. There's no way that the site would run on flash on the iPhone with a 600Mhz ARM cpu.
So, while flash is just about good enough for OS X (ie, they brute force it), it just won't work for the iPhone.
Tell me, should an SD stream also stutter - as this one did, and push the CPU as shown in the screenshot. I rebooted just to be sure. Bear in mind this isn't even the HD stream (that XBMC used to play perfectly at very low cpu load before the added the flash verification check), which is even worse in the browser plugin.
I took that a few minutes ago, on a fresh reboot of OS X 10.6.3, iMac Core 2 Duo 2.16Ghz, 2GB RAM, Safari 4.0.4.
There is no excuse for the performance to be that poor. If you set the stream to play fullscreen, you can at least get the SD stuff to play with no stuttering (and there is a visible drop is CPU use while playing fullscreen, so I assume there is some scaling thing going on or something, or some other processing that badly affects it).
I don't get any crashing though (and never said I did). It's not unique to my install of OS X either, and is common across all versions of OS X I have used, on many different Macs.
The video playing is not the only thing that pushes it though, as shown by my Diablo 3 flash website shot shown earlier.
So someone who uses Chrome over Safari on Windows or OS X is not making a choice, it's merely semantics?
The web browser is more than just the rendering engine.
My point was that it is a commonly held belief (based on the last article about browsers on the iPhone) that there were *no alternatives at all* on the iPhone, and that this article seems to be going the same way.
Any game with a competitive element that attracts enough spectators that are interested in the outcome becomes a sport.
You could even argue that Starcraft is a more "pure" sport than American Football - you can't just throw money at it to become better (beyond having a good computer, and Starcraft runs well on the Apollo CM computer built in the 60s).
Just because video games are comparatively "new" shouldn't rule them out of being a sport if enough people are interested - at least to the same level as American Football.
What about racing? Is the use of technology to build a car and race it round a track also worth of "get a fucking life" - I mean, what's the difference?
Competitive pool - playing a bar game as a sport?! pfffffffff!
Professional Scrabble, now that's just memorising a dictionary!
I think you *grossly* overestimate the knowledge of Basketball outside the US, or even outside interest of the sport itself.
I had no idea who he was either, and I lived in the US for over a year (just never happened to catch any basketball news).
Without looking it up do you know who Lionel Messi is? Or Wayne Rooney? Or Carlos Tevez? Lewis Hamilton?
Even if particular sports stars are international names, like the above four, it is very rare that they become known outside of their respective sports (especially outside of the country where the sport is big) - rare examples would be Jordan or Beckham, or Pelé.
Slashdot Mirror
No Wireless, less space than a Nomad. Lame.
I wouldn't bet against the iPad just yet. You just never know.
(disclaimer: I have no idea how well it will sell, or whether it will flop or be huge).
You betray yourself as a football fan though, since you shortened it to Barca and Man U, which are the common names used in the sport and by fans.
Lewis Hamilton drives for the McLaren F1 team.
A well thought out post, but just to address the issue of cars and boats - driving an F1 car for a competitive race (even one that turns into a procession - the sport has its issues) is an extremely physically demanding task. The drivers have to be in excellent physical shape to stand any chance of being competitive, even if their car is excellent. It's also very hard to drive an F1 car well, as shown by Luca Badoa when he took over mid-season in Ferrari's 2nd car when Massa was struck on the head by a 200mph spring. He just couldn't drive the car anywhere close to its limit. (check a video of that freak accident by the way - you'll never look at an object striking your windscreen in the same way again - and he drove into this thing at over 150mph).
For an indication of the sort of forces involved, the drivers are subjected to repeated 2 to 3 G forces in corners, with some circuits featuring 5G corners. So in this respect, I think it can be considered a sport - even if you're skilled you can't just show up and be competitive, even with a better car. You have to practice and keep in shape, and get used to your car.
By that point in the thread we were talking about the synonymous nature of technical terms, and that Safari was a synonym for Webkit, even though technically it is not in the same way that Ubuntu is not a synonym for Linux.
It was more about being precise about meaning than anything else. I was less facetious in my second reply to the same poster.
Yes, and in this free market, Apple is allowed to do what it likes in its own store. It works both ways.
So, freedom of choice for everyone except Apple... who aren't allowed to set the rules of their own store.
I made the point in another thread that I think it would have been more accurate to state that it was the first browser on the iPhone to use something other than Webkit - I didn't mean to downplay that part.
You're unlikely to ever see a headless midrange - the iMac is it.
It won't be long before the iMac is updated with i5 across the board, with optional i7, and more powerful graphics. The 4850 option in the 27" is pushing it for heat at the moment as it is.
Valve's decision to make OS X a tier 1 platform should help to spur on the inclusion of much better GPUs - it's a feature of Apple's lineup that has always been the weak spot. My late 2006 iMac is still perfect for everything I need it for today except for the graphics card. If it had initially had a beefier card then I wouldn't be considering swapping it for a more powerful one until at least a year from now, but I'm feeling it slightly for some things (mainly games).
What, so the fact that they do have a freephone number and send out a pre paid box is somehow not taking pride or responsibility?
You are basing Apple's pride and responsibility on a third party vendor who sells Apple products?
When you are dealing with a mass produced product you're going to get the odd lemon. They have procedures for dealing with such things, and will even pay for your shipping and the phone call (as many companies will - I know it's not a special unique thing).
Quark might make back some of the ground they lost to Adobe in the wake of them dragging their feet in the move to OS X.
Xpress used to the hands-down app used for DTP, and now it's much more split between InDesign and Xpress - because Quark really did drag their feet *enormously* when Apple switched to OS X.
As far as Photoshop and Illustrator goes... who knows.
Apple itself doesn't use hardware acceleration (except on the 9400M chipset, and even then only very recently) for things like H.264.
Flash on Windows doesn't use hardware acceleration either (10.1 will), and the performance is better than the OS X version.
All of the graphics components of OS X are documented and other third party vendors seem to have no problems.
On2 even had a decent flash player built into its own app (used to use it to test flash videos with simple player templates that the software would make for you if you gave it a source video - it was much better than the flash plugin for the browser!)
Perhaps Adobe should have started here: http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/referencelibrary/GettingStarted/GS_GraphicsImaging/
just like everyone else who wants to build something that displays something on the screen. I'll give you another hint: "nothing aside from blessed quicktime components can actually use video acceleration" is bullshit. Have you even read the documentation?
You have full (and extremely well documented) access to the graphics abilities of OS X as a developer.
The complaints about "acceleration" are almost all related to the lack of hardware decoding of H.264 in OS X, which is limited to the Nvidia 9400M chipset only. Even "blessed" Quicktime doesn't use hardware decoding of H.264 on OS X (unless you have a Mac with a 9400M). Hopefully this will be added soon.
How can it do this? The CoreAnimation (which is new), CoreVideo, CoreAudio, OpenGL and other frameworks are public frameworks and well-documented in the developer literature.
As far as hardware acceleration goes, Flash is not even using that on Windows, where the performance is so much better (the new 10.1 Flash will be using hardware acceleration on Windows).
Apple themselves don't use hardware acceleration for animation and video for their own stuff (eg, screensavers, iTunes visualaliser, window animations etc), although they do have hardware acceleration for H.264 on the 9400M *only* in OS X and no other GPU at all, and even then, this is a very recent addition (Flash has been sucking on the platform since long before that).
This is not about hardware acceleration or "refusing to open things up" for Adobe, it's about very poor code and a platform that Adobe simply do not care about. There is no reason that it sucks so badly on OS X other than lack of interest in fixing it/lack of resources devoted to it.
Tell me how Apple can be actively blocking them from improving it when other third party plugin makers seem to be able to make decent plugins.
On2 even made a good flash plugin for its own software on OS X.
The very root post of this discussion calls this a victory for the free market now that the tyranny of the app store has been broken - how is that *not* a clear inference that now there is a competitor to Safari, the app store tyranny is broken?
The UI is just as crucial a part of an app as the back end - as you mentioned with Chrome (leaving aside the JM for a second), even with the same engine, their appearance and mechanics above Webkit are quite different.
A lot of the browsers available are mere front ends to Webkit in the way that ISP-bundled browsers were on top of Trident back in the day, but several are not and offer differences to Safari that are otherwise not there.
Someone pointed out to me in another post that it's not the alternative engine per se that is against the rules, it's specifically the Javascript interpreter, so presumably someone could write a browser that used Gecko or Presto or something else but use the built in JM that Safari uses (assuming it's not a private framework - it's not in desktop OS X)
What about something like fishing then, where hand-eye coordination and similar skills are what separate the good from the great.
Or golf - you don't have to be all that athletic to smack a golf ball (although there's clearly a minimum physical requirement, and a need to concentrate for long periods of time).
I'm not sure where I fall on the issue, but that it's not unique with the rise of "esport" - it has existed as long as there have been sports. Video games just brought a new medium to the table.
Blizzard are trying to shoehorn PvP Arena into an esport (at the expense of the PvE side of the game in my opinion, due to the way class skills have to be changed), and they are still not going to be able to properly balance it because the classes are inherently imbalanced, making it a poor choice for a competitive tournament beyond the limits of the game itself, but they succeeded with Starcraft which was honed and tuned into balance.
Darts and Snooker are considered sports, and those don;t have the same athletic requirement as football, or even car racing - F1 especially requires you to be in extreme physical shape if you are going to have any hope of driving that car on the edge for 2 hours at a time.
I think the definition of sport is closer to a competitive game where the interest in the outcome exceeds the participants, such that even people who have never played it, or have no interest in playing themselves are fans.
Rounding up slaves and making them fight to the death, literally, also used to be a sport.
Times change.
It's not my idea - I don;t follow competitive Starcraft (or football, or nascar, or basketball) but I have an open mind.
To be less facetious, Ubuntu is Linux, right.
So anywhere Linux is mentioned, I can just say Ubuntu...
Clearly not - just because people do confuse it and start to come up with synonymous terms doesn't make it accurate, especially when specific technical issues are raised.
Yes, but the OS clearly has an impact. I can reboot this iMac into XP and identical flash content on websites I was just looking at on OS X use less than half the CPU, on *literally identical* hardware.
I'm sure that flash could run well on ARM, but the version of Flash on top of OS X right now (and iPhone OS is based on OS X) would not.
Does it run on top of OS X?
Who wrote it, and can we please port it to OS X and bolt it to Safari?
The core APIs required to do all this are all right there in OS X and are documented - other plugin makers can do it just fine (and On2 even did it with Flash itself with their in-program flash player for checking the flash video encodes you just made).
This is not Apple's fault - their documentation is extensive.
Quicktime itself does not hardware accelerate H.264 (except on the 9400M GPU) in OS X and it plays things just fine at low CPU load. This is not about hardware acceleration or access to private APIs, its just crappy code.
Where did I say it crashed my browser? It doesn't cause crashes, it's just very heavy on CPU - look at the screen shot. That's a 2Ghz Core 2 Duo iMac, and that page on Windows (while looking the same) doesn't push the CPU nearly as hard.
HD streams on BBC iPlayer drop frames, yet the exact same streams on XBMC running on top of OS X (ie, just start the XBMC app - no rebooting) play with a tenth of the CPU use (but stop after 1 minute since the addition of the swf verification by the BBC on their streams).
This is not a problem with my systems. I have 3 Macs, all with various levels of OS X (one of them PPC) and Flash is dreadful on all of them. Should I reinstall OS X on all three? My family members have another 3 Macs between them with the same issue. Should I reinstall them?
I am not disputing that it works - I have spent a lot of time on Blizzard's Diablo 3 site (looking forward to the game) and it's not full of crashes or impossibly slow animations or video, but it pushes my CPU up near the limit to do this. There's no way that the site would run on flash on the iPhone with a 600Mhz ARM cpu.
So, while flash is just about good enough for OS X (ie, they brute force it), it just won't work for the iPhone.
Tell me, should an SD stream also stutter - as this one did, and push the CPU as shown in the screenshot. I rebooted just to be sure. Bear in mind this isn't even the HD stream (that XBMC used to play perfectly at very low cpu load before the added the flash verification check), which is even worse in the browser plugin.
http://img690.imageshack.us/img690/2258/osxflashiplayerapr10.jpg
I took that a few minutes ago, on a fresh reboot of OS X 10.6.3, iMac Core 2 Duo 2.16Ghz, 2GB RAM, Safari 4.0.4.
There is no excuse for the performance to be that poor. If you set the stream to play fullscreen, you can at least get the SD stuff to play with no stuttering (and there is a visible drop is CPU use while playing fullscreen, so I assume there is some scaling thing going on or something, or some other processing that badly affects it).
I don't get any crashing though (and never said I did). It's not unique to my install of OS X either, and is common across all versions of OS X I have used, on many different Macs.
The video playing is not the only thing that pushes it though, as shown by my Diablo 3 flash website shot shown earlier.
It's just poor.
So Chrome is just Safari then. Got it.
So someone who uses Chrome over Safari on Windows or OS X is not making a choice, it's merely semantics?
The web browser is more than just the rendering engine.
My point was that it is a commonly held belief (based on the last article about browsers on the iPhone) that there were *no alternatives at all* on the iPhone, and that this article seems to be going the same way.
The app store is not a democracy, nor does it even pretend to be one, if you don't like Apple's rules, you are free to not participate.
But why?
Any game with a competitive element that attracts enough spectators that are interested in the outcome becomes a sport.
You could even argue that Starcraft is a more "pure" sport than American Football - you can't just throw money at it to become better (beyond having a good computer, and Starcraft runs well on the Apollo CM computer built in the 60s).
Just because video games are comparatively "new" shouldn't rule them out of being a sport if enough people are interested - at least to the same level as American Football.
What about racing? Is the use of technology to build a car and race it round a track also worth of "get a fucking life" - I mean, what's the difference?
Competitive pool - playing a bar game as a sport?! pfffffffff!
Professional Scrabble, now that's just memorising a dictionary!
Bill Oddie was fired from Jazz FM for playing too much jazz.
He went back to birdwatching.
I think you *grossly* overestimate the knowledge of Basketball outside the US, or even outside interest of the sport itself.
I had no idea who he was either, and I lived in the US for over a year (just never happened to catch any basketball news).
Without looking it up do you know who Lionel Messi is? Or Wayne Rooney? Or Carlos Tevez? Lewis Hamilton?
Even if particular sports stars are international names, like the above four, it is very rare that they become known outside of their respective sports (especially outside of the country where the sport is big) - rare examples would be Jordan or Beckham, or Pelé.
Nah, I think the fact that the milk for your coffee still comes from your mum's tit at 29 is #1.
(shouting up the stairs) Mom, we need more milk!
Mom: Ok honey, I'll squeeze some out later!
I can;t be bothered to type it out twice, but I answered seriously here:
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1616158&cid=31830762