IE9 Platform Preview 4 got a 96/100 score, with the last 4 points being in two technologies that MS considers "outdated."
Those would be: SVG Fonts - replaced by Web Open Font Format (WOFF), submitted to W3C by Microsoft, Mozilla Corp, and Opera AB. Currently supported by Firefox 3.6+, IE9 Preview 3+, Webkit Nightly Builds (with Safari support coming sometime soon), and Google Chrome 5+. As of this time, Opera (10.62) does not support WOFF.
SVG SMIL animation - Won't support the current or previous versions (1.0-3.0). While annoying, it's not really a surprise, as SMIL is currently undergoing major revision: "the SVG WG intends to coordinate with the CSS WG to make some changes to animation and to extend filters. There's already work started to reconcile CSS3 animations and SVG." (Source)
No XP support ? Good luck with that...... Well it's no longer supported right ? Still, not a good move....
In the end, it boils down to Return on Investment. MS doesn't think they'll sell enough new copies of XP to justify backporting their hardware accelerated Direct2D/DirectWrite code to the older DirectDraw API.
Absolutely do not include Sunspider in the results as Mozilla has caught Microsoft (IE) cheating. They are actively detecting these benchmarks are falsely providing results up to twenty times faster than they are able to actually execute the code. The only reason they got caught was because one benchmark was so much faster than what everyone else was doing and the nature of the benchmark seemed unlikely anyone would have such a significant advantage.
IE + Sunspider = absolute lies. The results are rigged.
The later two are far more likely to provide meaningful results. And Kraken is specifically designed to reflect exactly that.
Did you link to the wrong page or something? The blog entry you linked to says nothing of the sort, and shows IE9 as slower than every browser other than Firefox 4 in Sunspider.
They rated Ubuntu higher in the entertainment category than Windows (Ubuntu: 8 points ot of 10, Windows: 6). Even after thinking of the video DVD troubles. If that doesn't say everything you need to know about the quality of this comparison...
Yes, I thought it was quite strange.
That's not the only oddness in this review. Over in Performance & mobility, there's no indication that they even tried to install Windows 7 on their older machine (the comparison in said section is versus XP), yet that's the entire basis for its score in the entirety of Performance & mobility: (Ubuntu: 9 points, Windows: 8 points). Furthermore, the power management issue they ran into didn't seem to factor into Ubuntu's score in the same section.
On Usability, I almost said that they inappropriately dinged Ubuntu for having its built-in apps have OSX-style close, maximize, and minimize icons on one side, while Chrome had them on the other... until I remembered that moving the icons away from the GNOME/KDE defaults was an intentional decision in Ubuntu 10.4, and apparently this doesn't apply to programs that use different UI libs.
Unfortunately Valve say there are no plans for a Linux version of Steam.
But Steam runs in Wine and so do a surprising number of Steam games; I was playing Left 4 Dead and Fallout 3 at the weekend in Ubuntu, for example.
And given the vast variation in Linux distros, you're probably better off releasing Windows games that are Wine-compatible than a Linux binary that won't run on Ubuntu 12.04 or Redhat 6.3.
If you look at the job market, most of the jobs are dead-ends for FOSS. I.e. you will use whatever free software is there but you will not get the permission to contribute back. Canonical is one of very few companies where a software developer can get a job without legal harassment by copyrights and non-disclosure "agreements". I'm waiting for the day, where our biggest complaint is, that Canonical is helping customers migrate from Debian to Ubuntu. But at the moment there is bigger fish to fry.
Canonical hires software developers?
I mean, the complaint being aired is that Canonical contributes very little to any open source project. So, it goes to follow that, as a "software developer," your job at Canonical would be to either: 1. Develop Launchpad. 2. Repackage Debian packages.
Most people don't seem to understand the criticism that Shuttleworth is responding to.
The open source community does not begrudge Ubuntu's success at all. The issue is that the Ubuntu project fixes a lot of bugs from "upstream" open source projects, but has so far done a poor job at submitting these patches back to the upstream projects.
I can understand why this happens: It's very, very hard to manage a project as big as a complete operating system, and very, very time consuming to have to adhere to every single protocol for contributing patches to every single upstream project. If the point is to get things done for the end user, then it happens that the upstream packages lose here. And that's where the bitterness comes in: because the upstream packages don't get these patches, it means that other operating systems that use these projects don't get these patches, either. It thus seems as if Ubuntu is only patching for itself.
I'm sure this isn't the intent, though. Some of the critics have gone a bit overboard in accusing the Ubuntu project of doing this on purpose. I think that's shortsighted and unhelpful, and that's what Shuttleworth is responding to here. Though, as eloquent as he is, he's not doing a good job in this post of addressing the critique.
My own opinion is that the fault is not with Ubuntu, but with the staggering diversity and fragmentation of the open source world. It's hard enough to create a distribution that consumes all these projects, to produce back to them is monumentally hard.
What should be done is create a more uniform way for projects to receive patches. Perhaps a central repository where these patches could be places, and project maintainers can pull these from and merge in, if they think it's appropriate.
Fat change this will happen? Maybe, maybe not. I'm very impressed by Ubuntu's leadership in getting the open source world to think more about diverse end users. I think there's an opportunity to use this leadership to try to create a more streamlines path for "upstream" contribution. Projects would benefit from bug fixes and patches, other operating systems will benefit, and everybody will just be so happy forever.
You really don't understand how Ubuntu works, do you?
Ubuntu has one upstream: Debian. What Debian does with patches sent to them by Ubuntu is their problem.
About a year ago I upgraded my synaptic (the only user-friendly package manager I know so far). Turns out that the Debian guys missed a critical flaw which made Synaptic crash when loading the repos. Downgrading synaptic using command-line tools was a royal pain in the ass. That's the kind of errors that I hate, and the guys criticizing Ubuntu are much more prone to commit them.
Was this on Debian or Ubuntu? If Debian, was it in the stable repo, the testing repo, or the unstable repo?
I ask about Ubuntu because a lot of the packages in Ubuntu are repackaged from Debian Sid... the unstable repo. Debian's own comment about Sid?
"sid" is subject to massive changes and in-place library updates. This can result in a very "unstable" system which contains packages that cannot be installed due to missing libraries, dependencies that cannot be fulfilled etc. Use it at your own risk!
But seamonkey is no longer part of Mozilla. They are a separate company called SeaMonkey Council, and should be allowed to submit their own product to the EU. ----- And if the argument is: "FF and SM use the same mozilla base," that is not valid either. There are two Webkit browsers on the EU ballot.
"SeaMonkey and the SeaMonkey logo are registered trademarks of the Mozilla Foundation."
So, it's led by a different group... but is still a product of the Mozilla Foundation according to its own website.
That's an interesting way of looking at it, considering that it runs completely counter to the iOS 4 guidelines which forbid applications written in any programming language other than Objective C, C, or C++.
And this whole story is about them revoking that clause.
Yes, and adding it in the first place went against what the GGP said Apple's goal was. Which was my point.
Which leads to the question.. so what role do the networks play in the grand scheme of things... NBC / ABC / CBS / FOX are not all developing their own content, they buy that content from a show producer. If Apple develops enough mindshare and living rooms, you don't need NBC to order the episodes of a new show, Apple can buy it directly from the show's producers.
This could be a great play to cut out all the middlemen, not just the cable company or the satellite monthly fee, but the entire tv network system as well... it's possibly the biggest change in the business of TV in 50 years, and frankly none of the TV networks seem to notice yet.
Quite often, the TV networks fund the development of the show in return for exclusive rights to its original airing, and sometimes for the syndication rights as well.
A good tech analogy would be buying a computer from a big box store versus paying someone you know to build a computer for you from parts.
No significantly complex system comes out right the first time. Apple has a goal, I believe it's to give as much freedom to 3rd party developers without losing control of the platform.
That's an interesting way of looking at it, considering that it runs completely counter to the iOS 4 guidelines which forbid applications written in any programming language other than Objective C, C, or C++.
No, the truth is that Apple implicitly targeted Adobe's Flash Packager for iPhone (due out the week after the new iOS4 terms were announced), but had the side effect of banning other companies converters due to it.
However those things can and will be fixed without introducing "let's loof for 'sudo rm -rf/' everywhere" approach that only exists because Windows security model is broken and unfixable.
The Windows security model would be fine, except for two things:
Many, many Windows apps were not written with it in mind, and demand to be run with higher privileges than they actually need. Games in particular are bad about this, and they go to lengths to require said permissions even if you've adjusted the file permissions for the directories they need.
UAC was introduced to make this as annoying as possible to get developers to stop doing this. Surprise, it didn't work!
All files are given the Execute permission by default.
I abandoned javascript 12 years ago, frustrated by the inconsistencies amongst browsers and frustrating unexplainable errors. I tried it again last year and was surprised by its evolution : easy to code, many helpful libs, good integration with HTML through DOM, etc... If your feelings toward javascript are a bit old, maybe you should try it again.
I'm going to make a wild guess and say you found it easy to code... using the aforementioned helpful libraries.
Raw JS is still as much of a PITA now as it was 12 years ago. Worse now, since you have to take into account quirks across 4-5* JS engines instead of just 2.
* Sony allows cheap, off the shelf harddrive upgrades
* Sony allows cheap, off the shelf keyboard and mice to be used with the system
Wow, what a bunch of evil gamer hating misers are those Sony guys...
Oh, I didn't realise that they'd used cheaper generic parts instead of fabricating much more expensive proprietary hardware. And then they didn't go to excessive lengths to block the use of that hardware that was easier and cheaper for them to use. Good God, they are lovely after all. Such lovely, lovely thieves.
You are aware those points were in comparison with other game systems?
Nintendo's Wii doesn't allow internal storage at all. External storage is limited to SD cards... although an update early this year (or was that last year) allows it to use SDHC cards as well, which bumps the limit from 2GB to 32GB without changing devices.
Microsoft uses "standard" 2.5" drives in a proprietary case, but locks it to a few specific models. External storage is any USB Mass Storage device, but is limited to 2 devices at 16GB per device, for a max of 32GB without changing devices.
This is in contrast with Sony, who allows you to use any 2.5" SATA HDD. External storage is any USB Mass Storage device. If there are limits on either external or internal storage, I've not yet seen them.
As for keyboards and mice, from what I recall, the Wii and Xbox 360 limit keyboard support to the systems menu/dashboard. Neither the Wii or 360 support a mouse.
Now, the problem here is that you apparently bought a gaming system for non-gaming usage... but you're now responding in a thread about gaming saying you can't do any of that. Why?
I like OpenID, but if you couple it with a three factor authentication, whether it be a smartcard, or biometric, or whatever.. that's when it becomes useful.
Too bad the current implementation doesn't support it. Sadly, World of Warcraft and Starcraft II do.
Go figure.
Three factor authentication? So, something you know (password), something you have (smartcard), and something you are (biometrics)?
Slashdot Mirror
It already does! On ACID 2.
Oh, you meant ACID 3?
IE9 Platform Preview 4 got a 96/100 score, with the last 4 points being in two technologies that MS considers "outdated."
Those would be:
SVG Fonts - replaced by Web Open Font Format (WOFF), submitted to W3C by Microsoft, Mozilla Corp, and Opera AB. Currently supported by Firefox 3.6+, IE9 Preview 3+, Webkit Nightly Builds (with Safari support coming sometime soon), and Google Chrome 5+. As of this time, Opera (10.62) does not support WOFF.
SVG SMIL animation - Won't support the current or previous versions (1.0-3.0). While annoying, it's not really a surprise, as SMIL is currently undergoing major revision: "the SVG WG intends to coordinate with the CSS WG to make some changes to animation and to extend filters. There's already work started to reconcile CSS3 animations and SVG." (Source)
In the end, it boils down to Return on Investment. MS doesn't think they'll sell enough new copies of XP to justify backporting their hardware accelerated Direct2D/DirectWrite code to the older DirectDraw API.
Did you link to the wrong page or something? The blog entry you linked to says nothing of the sort, and shows IE9 as slower than every browser other than Firefox 4 in Sunspider.
Windows Updates, Optional Updates, Windows Search 4.0. Or at least I think that's the correct location, I don't have an XP machine any more*.
Alternately, MS has a separate download for it.
*Except at work, and that one is centrally managed.
That score is only temporary. Next month, Ubuntu will win by 3.10.
Yes, I thought it was quite strange.
That's not the only oddness in this review. Over in Performance & mobility, there's no indication that they even tried to install Windows 7 on their older machine (the comparison in said section is versus XP), yet that's the entire basis for its score in the entirety of Performance & mobility: (Ubuntu: 9 points, Windows: 8 points). Furthermore, the power management issue they ran into didn't seem to factor into Ubuntu's score in the same section.
On Usability, I almost said that they inappropriately dinged Ubuntu for having its built-in apps have OSX-style close, maximize, and minimize icons on one side, while Chrome had them on the other... until I remembered that moving the icons away from the GNOME/KDE defaults was an intentional decision in Ubuntu 10.4, and apparently this doesn't apply to programs that use different UI libs.
Cyclic Logic. Move up 3 parents.
Canonical hires software developers?
I mean, the complaint being aired is that Canonical contributes very little to any open source project. So, it goes to follow that, as a "software developer," your job at Canonical would be to either: 1. Develop Launchpad. 2. Repackage Debian packages.
You really don't understand how Ubuntu works, do you?
Ubuntu has one upstream: Debian. What Debian does with patches sent to them by Ubuntu is their problem.
Was this on Debian or Ubuntu? If Debian, was it in the stable repo, the testing repo, or the unstable repo?
I ask about Ubuntu because a lot of the packages in Ubuntu are repackaged from Debian Sid... the unstable repo. Debian's own comment about Sid?
(Source)
In Russia, bugs exploit you!
I heard Linus is secretly an ice bear!
As long as you don't assume it's a panacea... Foxit has had its own security exploits in the past.
As I recall, Google has tried.
However, eBay has made it so all payments there are required to go through PayPal. Which would seem to me to be a major misuse of monopoly powers...
"SeaMonkey and the SeaMonkey logo are registered trademarks of the Mozilla Foundation."
So, it's led by a different group... but is still a product of the Mozilla Foundation according to its own website.
Yes, and adding it in the first place went against what the GGP said Apple's goal was. Which was my point.
The current Mac Mini ($899) costs 9 times the price of the new AppleTV ($99). It sure as hell had better do more.
Quite often, the TV networks fund the development of the show in return for exclusive rights to its original airing, and sometimes for the syndication rights as well.
A good tech analogy would be buying a computer from a big box store versus paying someone you know to build a computer for you from parts.
That's an interesting way of looking at it, considering that it runs completely counter to the iOS 4 guidelines which forbid applications written in any programming language other than Objective C, C, or C++.
No, the truth is that Apple implicitly targeted Adobe's Flash Packager for iPhone (due out the week after the new iOS4 terms were announced), but had the side effect of banning other companies converters due to it.
The Windows security model would be fine, except for two things:
Really? Googling "Google Search" gives me completely different results.
I'm going to make a wild guess and say you found it easy to code... using the aforementioned helpful libraries.
Raw JS is still as much of a PITA now as it was 12 years ago. Worse now, since you have to take into account quirks across 4-5* JS engines instead of just 2.
*4 if you ignore Opera, 5 if you include it.
You are aware those points were in comparison with other game systems?
Nintendo's Wii doesn't allow internal storage at all. External storage is limited to SD cards... although an update early this year (or was that last year) allows it to use SDHC cards as well, which bumps the limit from 2GB to 32GB without changing devices.
Microsoft uses "standard" 2.5" drives in a proprietary case, but locks it to a few specific models. External storage is any USB Mass Storage device, but is limited to 2 devices at 16GB per device, for a max of 32GB without changing devices.
This is in contrast with Sony, who allows you to use any 2.5" SATA HDD. External storage is any USB Mass Storage device. If there are limits on either external or internal storage, I've not yet seen them.
As for keyboards and mice, from what I recall, the Wii and Xbox 360 limit keyboard support to the systems menu/dashboard. Neither the Wii or 360 support a mouse.
Now, the problem here is that you apparently bought a gaming system for non-gaming usage... but you're now responding in a thread about gaming saying you can't do any of that. Why?
Yes, virtual Mondays suck almost as much as real Mondays (my office was closed yesterday for Labor Day, so today is Virtual Monday for me, too).
Three factor authentication? So, something you know (password), something you have (smartcard), and something you are (biometrics)?
Or did you mean two factor?