If I remember, Sugar also had the ability to allow them to modify the source code on the fly. So it had Fisher Price simplicity, but it also had power, if they wanted it. And remember, this is all based on the idea that these kids haven't grown up with traditional Windows or Linux UIs, so it's a chance to let them build whatever actually works best for them.
Well, actually, Git would probably be better, but that's a matter of opinion. But even with a central server, Git is faster and simpler than SVN for most things.
Turn off Flash and see if it doesn't get a lot faster.
As for your claim, I'm going to shrug and say both that they're fast enough, and that we're talking about a fairly small piece of chrome. I don't know that anyone suggested building the entire UI that way -- although when it's happened, you end up with something that runs on netbooks.
A whole desktop using a HTML engine to render the entire desktop?
I don't know that I suggested that. Doesn't have to be pure HTML, nor did anyone suggest that it be the entire desktop. Oh, and the original proposal was apparently for CSS and XML -- so more like XUL.
Are you using Firefox? Its entire UI is done in XUL, and rendered by Gecko.
You know the nigthmare to create and respond to events using html and javascript?
It's actually like some beautiful dream...
Ok, yes, could be better. Has also been beaten into submission by frameworks. I can create and respond to an event nearly with a one-liner -- and I'm doing it not just with callbacks, but with callbacks that are also closures. Javascript is actually a good language -- I am not insane, I'm not being sarcastic, and if you really disagree, I suspect you don't know it very well.
And the ridiculous performance against a normal window manager like KDE or the actual GNOME?
KDE4 already uses Ecmascript (Javascript) for a few things. I wouldn't be surprised to find HTML and Webkit in there somewhere.
And for what it's worth, browser speeds are actually to the point where they occasionally double between releases. The fact that you think this would be slow mostly means you've dealt with slow, unoptimized implementations.
Or, in other words: Have you seen Chrome?
You maybe like to use a US$2000 machine to simply get the GUI usable
Actually, the machine cost more, but it does hell of a lot more than "simply get the GUI usable". KDE4 also runs on a five year old machine -- not particularly fast, but works fine, and better than the XP that was there.
I have no idea why you're modded insightful. I'm tempted to mod you down, but I'll reply, instead:
I know its fashionable these days to do everything over HTTP and inside a browser but it's just a fad.
Yeah, the Web is "just a fad". OK, I'll get off your lawn.
Oh, and what does HTTP have to do with this? Or a browser? This is just a rendering engine, nor is it the first app to do this -- Firefox itself does its UI in XUL, as does Thunderbird, Songbird, and several other apps.
Everybody knows it sucks from a design / efficiency point of view
Design, you may have a point. I'd be interested to hear it.
Efficiency is actually getting quite good, especially for what this is.
I'm not going to waste my time writing a detailed rant about why you shouldn't use a freaking browser rendering engine to draw your GUI for you because thanks to the openness of Linux I will just be able to load one of 10's of other, infinitely faster window managers.
Good. But if you'd written a longer rant, there might actually be more to discuss.
But let's go back to your original point:
Would it not be better to use a compiled, binary version of CSS for this sort of thing to reduce the overhead.
So... Why would we want to use a "compiled, binary" version of anything we don't have to? Your startup scripts are in Bash. If you're on Ubuntu, a fair amount of your upgrade scripts are in Python.
For efficiency's sake, you say. Ok, but why would you want it stored that way? Web browsers are proof that it really doesn't take that long to parse CSS, HTML, and Javascript. There's no reason the runtime can't store them in some binary/bytecode format, but why would you complicate the on-disk format?
For space? Those things compress well. And again, browsers are proof that compression is fast enough for people to not notice or care.
For boot time? Again, browsers prove that's kind of a non-issue -- most websites I view are massively more complex than some borders around a window. Turn on Flashblock, and tell me you wouldn't love for a computer to boot as fast as a typical website loads.
Now, I understand where you're coming from. I used Fluxbox for a long time. Then I realized that KDE4 loads in about two seconds on my machine, and zero seconds vs two seconds to load a GUI isn't enough of a difference for me to care, considering the functionality I get out of it. (Actually, I realized this with KDE3...)
And as for the functionality, I don't know the first thing about skinning a window manager. I do, however, know how to build HTML and CSS. So, me suddenly knowing how to build themes, easily, I call that a useful feature.
Wait, how does this make it easier? Metacity's code is open already.
There are going to be a ton more crackers wanting to find ways to exploit Safari and Chrome than there will ever be wanting to find flaws in a WM.
And a ton more hackers working to fix those flaws.
Basically, without WebKit GNOME is just another DE, interesting, but not worth the work to exploit. On the other hand, with a ready-made script, it wouldn't take too long for someone with no skills to exploit it.
So you're basically arguing in favor of security through obscurity, and against code reuse?
Also, I fail to see how it's more dangerous for the average user to have their WM compromised than their browser. It's a lot easier to trick people into visiting a website, just once, than it is to convince them to install your theme.
The genetic differences between two individuals within a race are far greater than the genetic differences between races.
"Slightness" brings the statistical significance of the study into question. It also raises the question of other factors -- IQ can be improved, with practice, and recent IQ tests are even subject to education. Given the actual situation of these races, and the cultures involved, it's quite arrogant of you to suggest that it's purely genetic.
The "wasteland" that is Africa -- you don't suppose that had anything to do with the domination of whites under things like Apartheid? And certainly, subject to that much discrimination, wouldn't your Einstein effect apply? Never mind that natural selection takes more than just a few centuries to apply, at least to humans.
Here is the bottom line: You're a racist looking for a rational, scientific justification for your racism. But just like creationists, if you're intellectually honest, you'll find that justification at odds with reality.
But if you really want to play this game, blue states have a higher IQ, on average, than red states. Does this mean Democrats are smarter? If so, why would they elect Obama -- if you're right, he should be a "failure" who "lacks the intelligence to succeed."
As a rule, they do, they just almost never get used. Similarly, console controllers generally work with PCs, you just rarely find a game taking advantage of them.
I think the primary difference is that people who label themselves agnostic are at the point where they can't rationally justify a belief in a god, but they don't want to let go entirely, nor do they want to make a stand that could possibly be proven wrong. They tend to give equal weight to both sides.
An atheist would tend to say, "The default position, given a lack of evidence, should be disbelief." Fun examples like the FSM help establish this -- no one in their right mind actually believes in the flying spaghetti monster, yet there is, if anything, more reason to believe in that than in Yahweh, as it attempts (satirically, of course) to actually explain why there is so much contradictory evidence, rather than simply pretending it doesn't exist.
If you apply "agnostic" to the atheist community, you lose the meaning of the word -- what you've bolded there, that the essential nature of things is unknown and unknowable, is a belief that both theists and atheists could hold. Agnosticism is a statement of how certain we can be about whether there's a god or not -- it says nothing about whether there actually is one, and it is certainly not the "not sure" position.
Many atheists might also be agnostic. Many might not -- why would you assume the question of a god's existence could never be answered, even if we don't know now?
Of course, if you really want to make your "it takes as much faith" statement, there are a few logically inconsistent definitions of God, to which I would say it takes as much "faith" to disbelieve those as to disbelieve that 2+2=5.
Example: There really hasn't ever been a good answer to the problem of evil. In order to get around that, you must either redefine "evil" in such a way that things like child rape are actually "good" somehow, or you must redefine "god" to remove one of the three omni's.
The second, from Wikipedia, supports the concept of "weak" and "strong" atheism.
Only the first supports yours...
But examine the word itself. The a- prefix negates -- an atheist is a non-theist. To say that theism is definitely wrong, and that we believe there is no god, is to be an anti-theist -- against theism.
Agnostic doesn't fit particularly well to the position of lack of affirmation, as it actually implies something more -- that the question itself is un-answerable, unknowable. It is compatible with both atheism and theism -- that is, I could be a theist who believes we can't really know if a god exists, and must accept it on faith, or I could be an atheist who disbelieves precisely because most gods are unfalsifiable claims.
If we say atheism is a positive affirmation that there is no god, and agnosticism is "not sure", that would leave us without a precise word for what agnostic is supposed to mean.
It's also worth mentioning: It's hard to find someone who both calls themselves and atheist, and agrees that it is a positive affirmation. I suspect the reason theists like to define it that way is that it's much easier to then attack their affirmation -- "Prove to me there's no god" -- whereas if atheism is a lack of belief, the burden of proof is right back on the theist, where it belongs -- "Prove to me there is a god."
It's not a new idea. The only real difference here is that it's associated with BitTorrent and The Pirate Bay, and is designed to handle a whole set of problems you won't have, like untrusted machines communicating over the Internet, and how to compensate people for using their hard drive to store your stuff.
It's true, I hadn't considered Zune, but the Zune isn't a phone. So, comparing Zune vs iPod, you end up about the same.
That's why I qualified it as "mobile".
I suppose the Xbox doesn't bother me nearly as much, as it's designed as a game platform, whereas the iPhone is designed as a general-purpose handheld computer/phone/everything, and is even advertised as such "There's an App for that," yet is still absurdly locked down.
WINE doesn't have the active support of Microosft and a clear license for implementation details.
And Moonlight is currently supported by Microsoft, but there's still the patent issues, and no reason to assume the support will continue forever. Moonlight and Mono in general lags far behind Silverlight and.NET -- much like the situation with Wine and Windows.
This player is already doing stuff that was in Silverlght 2 that's not even being proposed as part of HTML5, like Smooth Streaming.
Is that all?
I am guessing the point here is that if the network is too slow, it automatically switches to a lower-bandwidth stream. Useful, I suppose. I don't see where it's groundbreaking.
Regardless, I think I've shown my bias pretty clearly -- I don't want Flash or Silverlight. Youtube, and Google, are moving towards browser-centric technologies, rather than plugins.
We would disagree that Microsoft doesn't try to lockdown applications. There is much evidence to the contrary.
Perhaps they try -- however, they also make it quite possible for third-party developers to create Windows apps without so much as speaking to Microsoft.
I've seen various ports of various OSes to xbox, PS3, and so on as intellectual pursuits. WE OWN THE HARDWARE AND OUR DATA. Not license it, OWN IT. And we get to brick stuff any way we choose. Or not.
However, no sane application developer would try to sell a piece of software that required a user to risk bricking their hardware first.
The Moonlight and Mono crowd have about seven years of trying to get it right, but the slowness of the links to these F/OSS platforms has entrenched Microsoft's lead thoroughly.
Regardless, Microsoft actively works to improve Mono, and the languages and runtime are publicly specified. By your own admission, Apple is worse, as they have yet to even publish a spec.
Outlook is the app to beat these days-- it's a noose around people's necks.
Indeed -- but so is iTunes.
Software patents are still another vaguery that prevents compatibility. Some of these patents are especially onerous and bereft of sense, IMHO.
A lot of them are. However, Microsoft has occasionally signed contracts which attempt to say, in some way, that they won't sue you for patent infringement. Apple hasn't, and Apple seems to have as many patents as Microsoft.
In this case, we're talking about purposefully thwarting Palm from syncing with iTunes, just to fcuk Palm and its users.
If you say so. My point here is that Apple is like this -- they have always been like this -- they've been more proprietary, and more brutal towards competitors, even potential partners -- than Microsoft has. You could make a case that they're the same, but I don't think you could say that Apple was the good guy before this.
Do you let Microsoft approve of your Windows apps? Jailbreak is a similar but mandatory travesty. To not jailbreak an iPhone is to let Apple get away with this murder.
Well, right, the point is that end-users should not have to jailbreak their phones. We wouldn't tolerate this on a desktop OS, either.
Put another way: Microsoft doesn't try to lock down my Windows OS in that way, on the desktop or on Windows Mobile. They realize that allowing third party development is what makes the platform what it is.
Even Apple doesn't try, on the desktop.
The Android has an app store, just like the iPhone. But the Android also lets you install apps however you want. If someone wanted to build a competing app store, nothing's stopping them.
Only Apple, on the iPhone, and various game consoles, have this sort of castrated general-purpose computer concept -- where it's not completely an appliance, but you can only install "approved" software.
Point is: If you didn't see a move like this coming, you weren't paying attention.
Apple should publish a spec, or they're as guilty as a certain.NET Framework maker. It's time for Mono4iPhones.
Sorry, what?
I'm a bit confused as to how the.NET framework is anywhere near this bad. Microsoft does publish a spec, and they actively work with the Moonlight people to make sure it keeps working.
Sure, there are patent questions, but don't the same patent questions apply to things like Webkit and Bonjour?
That Apple rejects apps for arbitrary reasons doesn't mean you can't use them, it's just that they're not a channel for them.
Wrong. It's actually functionally the same as this -- if I create an app, I am now asking my users to jailbreak their phones in order to use it, unless I can get Apple to approve it.
This is the same thing -- Palm can either work out a deal with Apple, or ask their users to crack Apple's software.
It makes Apple look so very close to Microsoft in attitude that I'm apalled.
You must be new here.
I mean, think about it. The iPhone is a more locked-down platform than anything Microsoft has done in the mobile space, or on the desktop. And Apple is rejecting apps for fairly arbitrary reasons.
The reason you can "just watch stuff on YouTube" is because you have installed a plug-in from Adobe (or a clone) that lets you run flash applications. Silverlight is a plugin from Microsoft that lets you run silverlight applications.
First, Flash is already installed everywhere, and Silverlight is not. Flash has also been ported to more platforms than Silverlight.
plus the open source Moonlight works on Linux.
Moonlight can be relied on about as much as Wine.
Second, it's irrelevant. The main reasons for wanting Flash or Silverlight are going away, with faster Javascript VMs and HTML5 stuff like canvas and video. Youtube already supports html5 for at least some of their content. And I qualified it as, you may need to download a browser update -- whether IE will support these things is anyone's guess, but every other browser either will or does already.
Quicktime and Real are more in the category of Flash -- I don't particularly like them, either, but IE takes it a step beyond that, and screws up plain old HTML/CSS.
"It just shows the word browser has become a truly meaningless word," Gates said. "What's a browser? What's not a browser? If you're playing a movie, is that a browser or not a browser? If you're doing annotations, is that a browser? If you're editing text, is that a browser or not a browser? In large part, it's more an abuse of terminology than a real change."
Editing text has been part of browsing ever since HTML forms were introduced. Playing movies has been part of browsers since QuickTime and RealPlayer -- so, could easily be 10 years.
And of course, he's playing dumb about the real difference here. It seems like he's trying to suggest that it shouldn't be called a "browser", but rather, we should be talking about text editors and movie players.
No, see, the difference is whether I can just watch stuff on YouTube, edit text on Google Docs, pretty much do whatever I want on the Internet, without downloading anything other than a browser update. It means I get a fat client to some very cool services -- one that auto-updates the next time I refresh, yet one that's sufficiently sandboxed as not to be able to touch anything else in my OS.
It also means that when developing such applications, not only are they automatically cross-platform, but I can develop most of the logic as part of the server, and on the server side, I can use whatever technologies and languages I want.
And this reality is something Microsoft has been fighting since day 1, with the bastardization of web technology that is IE, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that Gates doesn't get it. I guess I gave him the benefit of the doubt...
Ballmer and Gates also stressed the fact that Google now has two operating systems--Chrome OS and Android. Ballmer noted that Microsoft learned with the separate Windows 95 for consumers and Windows NT for businesses that having two operating systems isn't necessarily a positive thing.
*facepalm*
Ok, leaving aside the fact that you've got, what, five or six versions of Vista, and it looks as though there will be even more versions of Win7 -- just what does Gates think runs on Windows Mobile? It's not Vista, and it's not Win7.
Sure, Chrome OS and Android are closer to each other than Windows Mobile and Vista, but they're still directed at different markets -- Chrome OS is meant for netbooks, while Android was meant for mobile phones. Android runs on netbooks, but serves an entirely different purpose -- while NT and Win95 look exactly the same -- oh, and as he pointed out, Android has a browser, meaning anything Chrome OS can do, Android can do -- meaning it's more like comparing Vista Starter with Vista Ultimate, whereas NT and Win95 actually had mutually incompatible software.
Slashdot Mirror
If I remember, Sugar also had the ability to allow them to modify the source code on the fly. So it had Fisher Price simplicity, but it also had power, if they wanted it. And remember, this is all based on the idea that these kids haven't grown up with traditional Windows or Linux UIs, so it's a chance to let them build whatever actually works best for them.
Seconded.
Well, actually, Git would probably be better, but that's a matter of opinion. But even with a central server, Git is faster and simpler than SVN for most things.
Depends who you're trying to convince. It really doesn't take much to download a pretty lady in a safer jpg or png form and set her as your wallpaper.
Turn off Flash and see if it doesn't get a lot faster.
As for your claim, I'm going to shrug and say both that they're fast enough, and that we're talking about a fairly small piece of chrome. I don't know that anyone suggested building the entire UI that way -- although when it's happened, you end up with something that runs on netbooks.
Are you... FUKING MAD?
I'm sane enough to know how to spell 'fucking'.
A whole desktop using a HTML engine to render the entire desktop?
I don't know that I suggested that. Doesn't have to be pure HTML, nor did anyone suggest that it be the entire desktop. Oh, and the original proposal was apparently for CSS and XML -- so more like XUL.
Are you using Firefox? Its entire UI is done in XUL, and rendered by Gecko.
You know the nigthmare to create and respond to events using html and javascript?
It's actually like some beautiful dream...
Ok, yes, could be better. Has also been beaten into submission by frameworks. I can create and respond to an event nearly with a one-liner -- and I'm doing it not just with callbacks, but with callbacks that are also closures. Javascript is actually a good language -- I am not insane, I'm not being sarcastic, and if you really disagree, I suspect you don't know it very well.
And the ridiculous performance against a normal window manager like KDE or the actual GNOME?
KDE4 already uses Ecmascript (Javascript) for a few things. I wouldn't be surprised to find HTML and Webkit in there somewhere.
And for what it's worth, browser speeds are actually to the point where they occasionally double between releases. The fact that you think this would be slow mostly means you've dealt with slow, unoptimized implementations.
Or, in other words: Have you seen Chrome?
You maybe like to use a US$2000 machine to simply get the GUI usable
Actually, the machine cost more, but it does hell of a lot more than "simply get the GUI usable". KDE4 also runs on a five year old machine -- not particularly fast, but works fine, and better than the XP that was there.
I have no idea why you're modded insightful. I'm tempted to mod you down, but I'll reply, instead:
I know its fashionable these days to do everything over HTTP and inside a browser but it's just a fad.
Yeah, the Web is "just a fad". OK, I'll get off your lawn.
Oh, and what does HTTP have to do with this? Or a browser? This is just a rendering engine, nor is it the first app to do this -- Firefox itself does its UI in XUL, as does Thunderbird, Songbird, and several other apps.
Everybody knows it sucks from a design / efficiency point of view
Design, you may have a point. I'd be interested to hear it.
Efficiency is actually getting quite good, especially for what this is.
I'm not going to waste my time writing a detailed rant about why you shouldn't use a freaking browser rendering engine to draw your GUI for you because thanks to the openness of Linux I will just be able to load one of 10's of other, infinitely faster window managers.
Good. But if you'd written a longer rant, there might actually be more to discuss.
But let's go back to your original point:
Would it not be better to use a compiled, binary version of CSS for this sort of thing to reduce the overhead.
So... Why would we want to use a "compiled, binary" version of anything we don't have to? Your startup scripts are in Bash. If you're on Ubuntu, a fair amount of your upgrade scripts are in Python.
For efficiency's sake, you say. Ok, but why would you want it stored that way? Web browsers are proof that it really doesn't take that long to parse CSS, HTML, and Javascript. There's no reason the runtime can't store them in some binary/bytecode format, but why would you complicate the on-disk format?
For space? Those things compress well. And again, browsers are proof that compression is fast enough for people to not notice or care.
For boot time? Again, browsers prove that's kind of a non-issue -- most websites I view are massively more complex than some borders around a window. Turn on Flashblock, and tell me you wouldn't love for a computer to boot as fast as a typical website loads.
Now, I understand where you're coming from. I used Fluxbox for a long time. Then I realized that KDE4 loads in about two seconds on my machine, and zero seconds vs two seconds to load a GUI isn't enough of a difference for me to care, considering the functionality I get out of it. (Actually, I realized this with KDE3...)
And as for the functionality, I don't know the first thing about skinning a window manager. I do, however, know how to build HTML and CSS. So, me suddenly knowing how to build themes, easily, I call that a useful feature.
Wait, how does this make it easier? Metacity's code is open already.
There are going to be a ton more crackers wanting to find ways to exploit Safari and Chrome than there will ever be wanting to find flaws in a WM.
And a ton more hackers working to fix those flaws.
Basically, without WebKit GNOME is just another DE, interesting, but not worth the work to exploit. On the other hand, with a ready-made script, it wouldn't take too long for someone with no skills to exploit it.
So you're basically arguing in favor of security through obscurity, and against code reuse?
Also, I fail to see how it's more dangerous for the average user to have their WM compromised than their browser. It's a lot easier to trick people into visiting a website, just once, than it is to convince them to install your theme.
Just for fun...
The genetic differences between two individuals within a race are far greater than the genetic differences between races.
"Slightness" brings the statistical significance of the study into question. It also raises the question of other factors -- IQ can be improved, with practice, and recent IQ tests are even subject to education. Given the actual situation of these races, and the cultures involved, it's quite arrogant of you to suggest that it's purely genetic.
The "wasteland" that is Africa -- you don't suppose that had anything to do with the domination of whites under things like Apartheid? And certainly, subject to that much discrimination, wouldn't your Einstein effect apply? Never mind that natural selection takes more than just a few centuries to apply, at least to humans.
Here is the bottom line: You're a racist looking for a rational, scientific justification for your racism. But just like creationists, if you're intellectually honest, you'll find that justification at odds with reality.
But if you really want to play this game, blue states have a higher IQ, on average, than red states. Does this mean Democrats are smarter? If so, why would they elect Obama -- if you're right, he should be a "failure" who "lacks the intelligence to succeed."
As a rule, they do, they just almost never get used. Similarly, console controllers generally work with PCs, you just rarely find a game taking advantage of them.
I think the primary difference is that people who label themselves agnostic are at the point where they can't rationally justify a belief in a god, but they don't want to let go entirely, nor do they want to make a stand that could possibly be proven wrong. They tend to give equal weight to both sides.
An atheist would tend to say, "The default position, given a lack of evidence, should be disbelief." Fun examples like the FSM help establish this -- no one in their right mind actually believes in the flying spaghetti monster, yet there is, if anything, more reason to believe in that than in Yahweh, as it attempts (satirically, of course) to actually explain why there is so much contradictory evidence, rather than simply pretending it doesn't exist.
If you apply "agnostic" to the atheist community, you lose the meaning of the word -- what you've bolded there, that the essential nature of things is unknown and unknowable, is a belief that both theists and atheists could hold. Agnosticism is a statement of how certain we can be about whether there's a god or not -- it says nothing about whether there actually is one, and it is certainly not the "not sure" position.
Many atheists might also be agnostic. Many might not -- why would you assume the question of a god's existence could never be answered, even if we don't know now?
Of course, if you really want to make your "it takes as much faith" statement, there are a few logically inconsistent definitions of God, to which I would say it takes as much "faith" to disbelieve those as to disbelieve that 2+2=5.
Example: There really hasn't ever been a good answer to the problem of evil. In order to get around that, you must either redefine "evil" in such a way that things like child rape are actually "good" somehow, or you must redefine "god" to remove one of the three omni's.
Your last two support my definition.
The second, from Wikipedia, supports the concept of "weak" and "strong" atheism.
Only the first supports yours...
But examine the word itself. The a- prefix negates -- an atheist is a non-theist. To say that theism is definitely wrong, and that we believe there is no god, is to be an anti-theist -- against theism.
Agnostic doesn't fit particularly well to the position of lack of affirmation, as it actually implies something more -- that the question itself is un-answerable, unknowable. It is compatible with both atheism and theism -- that is, I could be a theist who believes we can't really know if a god exists, and must accept it on faith, or I could be an atheist who disbelieves precisely because most gods are unfalsifiable claims.
If we say atheism is a positive affirmation that there is no god, and agnosticism is "not sure", that would leave us without a precise word for what agnostic is supposed to mean.
It's also worth mentioning: It's hard to find someone who both calls themselves and atheist, and agrees that it is a positive affirmation. I suspect the reason theists like to define it that way is that it's much easier to then attack their affirmation -- "Prove to me there's no god" -- whereas if atheism is a lack of belief, the burden of proof is right back on the theist, where it belongs -- "Prove to me there is a god."
In other words, strong atheist: $DEITY is undefined.
Agnostic: if($DEITY) will throw an exception, even if it is defined.
Incorrect. Ask any atheist today, or examine the wording, and you'll find it's a lack of affirmation.
The positive affirmation you want it to be would be called antitheism, not atheism.
Yes, and a network administrator would want a distributed filesystem, not a "storage cloud", whatever the fsck that means.
I understand what Freenet was trying to do -- and again, it's way more than what an admin wants, and way more overhead than a distributed filesystem.
Coda, and before that, AFS. Oh, and Lustre.
It's not a new idea. The only real difference here is that it's associated with BitTorrent and The Pirate Bay, and is designed to handle a whole set of problems you won't have, like untrusted machines communicating over the Internet, and how to compensate people for using their hard drive to store your stuff.
It's true, I hadn't considered Zune, but the Zune isn't a phone. So, comparing Zune vs iPod, you end up about the same.
That's why I qualified it as "mobile".
I suppose the Xbox doesn't bother me nearly as much, as it's designed as a game platform, whereas the iPhone is designed as a general-purpose handheld computer/phone/everything, and is even advertised as such "There's an App for that," yet is still absurdly locked down.
WINE doesn't have the active support of Microosft and a clear license for implementation details.
And Moonlight is currently supported by Microsoft, but there's still the patent issues, and no reason to assume the support will continue forever. Moonlight and Mono in general lags far behind Silverlight and .NET -- much like the situation with Wine and Windows.
This player is already doing stuff that was in Silverlght 2 that's not even being proposed as part of HTML5, like Smooth Streaming.
Is that all?
I am guessing the point here is that if the network is too slow, it automatically switches to a lower-bandwidth stream. Useful, I suppose. I don't see where it's groundbreaking.
Regardless, I think I've shown my bias pretty clearly -- I don't want Flash or Silverlight. Youtube, and Google, are moving towards browser-centric technologies, rather than plugins.
We would disagree that Microsoft doesn't try to lockdown applications. There is much evidence to the contrary.
Perhaps they try -- however, they also make it quite possible for third-party developers to create Windows apps without so much as speaking to Microsoft.
I've seen various ports of various OSes to xbox, PS3, and so on as intellectual pursuits. WE OWN THE HARDWARE AND OUR DATA. Not license it, OWN IT. And we get to brick stuff any way we choose. Or not.
However, no sane application developer would try to sell a piece of software that required a user to risk bricking their hardware first.
The Moonlight and Mono crowd have about seven years of trying to get it right, but the slowness of the links to these F/OSS platforms has entrenched Microsoft's lead thoroughly.
Regardless, Microsoft actively works to improve Mono, and the languages and runtime are publicly specified. By your own admission, Apple is worse, as they have yet to even publish a spec.
Outlook is the app to beat these days-- it's a noose around people's necks.
Indeed -- but so is iTunes.
Software patents are still another vaguery that prevents compatibility. Some of these patents are especially onerous and bereft of sense, IMHO.
A lot of them are. However, Microsoft has occasionally signed contracts which attempt to say, in some way, that they won't sue you for patent infringement. Apple hasn't, and Apple seems to have as many patents as Microsoft.
In this case, we're talking about purposefully thwarting Palm from syncing with iTunes, just to fcuk Palm and its users.
If you say so. My point here is that Apple is like this -- they have always been like this -- they've been more proprietary, and more brutal towards competitors, even potential partners -- than Microsoft has. You could make a case that they're the same, but I don't think you could say that Apple was the good guy before this.
Do you let Microsoft approve of your Windows apps? Jailbreak is a similar but mandatory travesty. To not jailbreak an iPhone is to let Apple get away with this murder.
Well, right, the point is that end-users should not have to jailbreak their phones. We wouldn't tolerate this on a desktop OS, either.
Put another way: Microsoft doesn't try to lock down my Windows OS in that way, on the desktop or on Windows Mobile. They realize that allowing third party development is what makes the platform what it is.
Even Apple doesn't try, on the desktop.
The Android has an app store, just like the iPhone. But the Android also lets you install apps however you want. If someone wanted to build a competing app store, nothing's stopping them.
Only Apple, on the iPhone, and various game consoles, have this sort of castrated general-purpose computer concept -- where it's not completely an appliance, but you can only install "approved" software.
Point is: If you didn't see a move like this coming, you weren't paying attention.
Apple should publish a spec, or they're as guilty as a certain .NET Framework maker. It's time for Mono4iPhones.
Sorry, what?
I'm a bit confused as to how the .NET framework is anywhere near this bad. Microsoft does publish a spec, and they actively work with the Moonlight people to make sure it keeps working.
Sure, there are patent questions, but don't the same patent questions apply to things like Webkit and Bonjour?
That Apple rejects apps for arbitrary reasons doesn't mean you can't use them, it's just that they're not a channel for them.
Wrong. It's actually functionally the same as this -- if I create an app, I am now asking my users to jailbreak their phones in order to use it, unless I can get Apple to approve it.
This is the same thing -- Palm can either work out a deal with Apple, or ask their users to crack Apple's software.
It makes Apple look so very close to Microsoft in attitude that I'm apalled.
You must be new here.
I mean, think about it. The iPhone is a more locked-down platform than anything Microsoft has done in the mobile space, or on the desktop. And Apple is rejecting apps for fairly arbitrary reasons.
The reason you can "just watch stuff on YouTube" is because you have installed a plug-in from Adobe (or a clone) that lets you run flash applications. Silverlight is a plugin from Microsoft that lets you run silverlight applications.
First, Flash is already installed everywhere, and Silverlight is not. Flash has also been ported to more platforms than Silverlight.
plus the open source Moonlight works on Linux.
Moonlight can be relied on about as much as Wine.
Second, it's irrelevant. The main reasons for wanting Flash or Silverlight are going away, with faster Javascript VMs and HTML5 stuff like canvas and video. Youtube already supports html5 for at least some of their content. And I qualified it as, you may need to download a browser update -- whether IE will support these things is anyone's guess, but every other browser either will or does already.
Quicktime and Real are more in the category of Flash -- I don't particularly like them, either, but IE takes it a step beyond that, and screws up plain old HTML/CSS.
Don't get me wrong, I love that this is happening.
But how, exactly, are they planning to make money?
...but this guy still makes me facepalm.
"It just shows the word browser has become a truly meaningless word," Gates said. "What's a browser? What's not a browser? If you're playing a movie, is that a browser or not a browser? If you're doing annotations, is that a browser? If you're editing text, is that a browser or not a browser? In large part, it's more an abuse of terminology than a real change."
Editing text has been part of browsing ever since HTML forms were introduced. Playing movies has been part of browsers since QuickTime and RealPlayer -- so, could easily be 10 years.
And of course, he's playing dumb about the real difference here. It seems like he's trying to suggest that it shouldn't be called a "browser", but rather, we should be talking about text editors and movie players.
No, see, the difference is whether I can just watch stuff on YouTube, edit text on Google Docs, pretty much do whatever I want on the Internet, without downloading anything other than a browser update. It means I get a fat client to some very cool services -- one that auto-updates the next time I refresh, yet one that's sufficiently sandboxed as not to be able to touch anything else in my OS.
It also means that when developing such applications, not only are they automatically cross-platform, but I can develop most of the logic as part of the server, and on the server side, I can use whatever technologies and languages I want.
And this reality is something Microsoft has been fighting since day 1, with the bastardization of web technology that is IE, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that Gates doesn't get it. I guess I gave him the benefit of the doubt...
Ballmer and Gates also stressed the fact that Google now has two operating systems--Chrome OS and Android. Ballmer noted that Microsoft learned with the separate Windows 95 for consumers and Windows NT for businesses that having two operating systems isn't necessarily a positive thing.
*facepalm*
Ok, leaving aside the fact that you've got, what, five or six versions of Vista, and it looks as though there will be even more versions of Win7 -- just what does Gates think runs on Windows Mobile? It's not Vista, and it's not Win7.
Sure, Chrome OS and Android are closer to each other than Windows Mobile and Vista, but they're still directed at different markets -- Chrome OS is meant for netbooks, while Android was meant for mobile phones. Android runs on netbooks, but serves an entirely different purpose -- while NT and Win95 look exactly the same -- oh, and as he pointed out, Android has a browser, meaning anything Chrome OS can do, Android can do -- meaning it's more like comparing Vista Starter with Vista Ultimate, whereas NT and Win95 actually had mutually incompatible software.