Or for people who are actually passionate about their careers.
For example, right now, I care very little about where I live, other than that I have fast Internet, and either I get freedom to choose the tools I want, or I get tools I actually enjoy using. For example, suppose I was given the choice between web development jobs in Ruby on Rails, Node.js, ASP.NET, or Oracle ADF. I might try the ASP.NET job out of curiosity, but there is no fucking way I'm doing Oracle ADF 8 hours a day. In fact, pretty much anything related to Oracle is already a code smell.
I mean, I don't care what the nightlife is (I don't drink), I don't much care about where I sleep (requirements are clean, safe, good Internet), and the other things I care about are likely to be just about anywhere -- a martial arts program, interesting women... Money is rarely a factor.
But the work is what I'm actually doing with my life. (Or, at the moment, school, but I've worked before, and I take the same approach to internships.)
If I were actually fairly busy, I'd love to have this sort of thing available to the family members who forward me crap. Funny stuff, interesting stuff, but really just pointless, time-wasting stuff. I'm really tempted to make a policy that if you don't have anything useful to add to the forwarded message, it gets flagged as spam -- I care what you have to say, but I don't care about the funny cat video you found.
I have to imagine that people would think twice before sending me People of Wall-Mart (with all the images attached to the email, naturally, rather than just fucking linking to it) if they knew my inbox had a few thousand unread messages.
But even this use would backfire in about the same way -- as soon as I actually get my inbox cleared, I can expect a hundred new useless messages from people who were waiting for the best time to send low-priority crap. And I tend to send email-has-been-read notifiers, but conditionally.
The whole point of email over IM or chat is that it's asynchronous. Not that you couldn't have all of them be asynchronous, which is one reason I was excited about Wave -- you could have the discussion be exactly as synchronous as it needed to be. Still, there's IM, phones, and finding me in person for when you need an answer RIGHT NOW -- but don't abuse it; the phone is on vibrate specifically to allow me to ignore a call if I don't feel like it's urgent. Email gets answered in the same way that tickets get closed -- as a break from other work, or when I run out of things to do, or during some time I've deliberately set aside for that.
To be entirely fair, it actually does make a lot of sense for browsers to consume stuff like this -- microformats would've been my first choice, but whatever. Consider: Right now, browsers can and do support discovering RSS feeds related to the current page. There's also a spec somewhere for a "universal edit button". Other things that might be relevant are hcalendar and hcard -- sure, search engines could consume these, but it'd also be cool to have my browser discover these things and communicate with my calendar or contact list.
But I don't know of any browsers actually doing this, other than the RSS bit, without third-party extensions -- and this, in particular, was all about search engines, whether or not the standards involved would be relevant to browsers.
But, in response, I'm sure that Sarah Palin thinks that Paul Revere stopped at every church, hopped off of his horse, ran inside and rang the bells before heading off to the next church.
Problem is, based on what she said, that wouldn't be so far off. I mean, compare this:
the British are aware as they're marching down the countryside, they hear church bells ringing -- she was right about that -- and warning shots being fired. That’s accurate.
With this:
...ringing those bells and making sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells...
So, she was right that bells were ringing and warning shots were being fired, but entirely wrong that Paul Revere was actually doing this, that he was doing this to warn the British, and that warning the British was the purpose of his ride. Nothing your guy with a PhD says offers any support for this actually being the case, or for Sarah Palin actually understanding, say, that Paul Revere didn't actually ring bells or fire shots. In fact, quite the opposite, from the article you quoted:
McConville said he also is not convinced that Palin’s remarks reflect scholarship.
"I would call her lucky in her comments," McConville said.
While you're not quite quote-mining, I'd suggest you take your own advice -- look at the facts, especially those which are uncomfortable for your position.
I'll give you that she wasn't quite as wrong as she at first glance appeared to be. But I don't see how you can get from what she actually said to anything remotely historically accurate. This isn't my own "unrealistic interpretation of what she meant." This is taking what she said, at face value, without doing all sorts of mental acrobatics just to give her the benefit of the doubt.
And this is why, when I started this thread, I linked to a list of differences. It's more than just Flash, though it's also a small enough list that you might easily write it off -- and it really does seem that these are mostly things they can't release because of licensing issues. Still, it's enough that it's fair to say that Chrome itself is proprietary, and Chromium is open source.
The thing is don't we already have these video codecs supported in most distributions?... In Ubuntu it pops up saying you are missing codecs usually and alerts you to install them if you so desire to.
Does it do that in Chrome, and for the Video Tag? I know it doesn't for Firefox. This was one of my bigger annoyances with the current implementations of HTML5 -- while IE and Safari actually connect to the OS' codec support, thus making it easy to install a new codec, it seems like Firefox and Chrome are determined to include the codecs inside the browser. Firefox itself is especially obnoxious -- the discussions I have with supporters of this usually lead to an argument about the security implications (really?), while the actual motivation is to deliberately make it as hard as possible for H.264 to win, thus making it as hard as possible for HTML5 Video to win.
If Kogan is shipping Chrome, and Samsung and Acer are shipping Chromium, these are different things. Not terribly different, but different enough that it'd be interesting either way.
See, Chromium is an open-source project. Chrome is Google's proprietary fork of Chromium -- essentially, Google tracks Chromium, but (I think?) adds some stuff to it. While they've removed h.264, that was a good example -- Google can pay for a license and include any amount of proprietary h.264 code they want in Chrome, but the Chromium project can't do the same.
Please correct me if this has changed. It'd be cool if there were no remaining proprietary bits in Chrome (or in Chrome OS), but I doubt it. The Wikipedia page on Chromium OS doesn't list any significant differences vs Chrome OS, but if the browsers themselves are significantly different, surely the OSes have to be?
You might be thinking of algorithmic self-assembly... and, sort of.
That class I mentioned spent most of our time working with an abstract tile assembly model. We had assignments to build programs and run them on one of these simulators, and otherwise spent most of the time proving stuff about them.
Unfortunately, while it's really easy to learn how to build these, I'm not sure there's a tutorial I can point you to.
The good news is that it is massively parallel. It's related, somewhat, to cellular automata, or Conway's Game of Life, except that it's strictly growth -- once a tile attaches, there's normally no way to detach it. But the idea is that anywhere a tile can attach, it eventually will, and fairly quickly -- while you do often have entirely sequential algorithms, your algorithm can theoretically scale with the number of locations tiles can currently attach. It's also Turing-complete, and kind of makes for a cool visualization of a Turing machine. You can also just make cool fractal patterns instead of trying to compute anything.
The bad news is that errors happen quite often, and there's no good way to correct or avoid them (yet). There are certain shapes which are impossible to build. The parallelization isn't by any means free -- one interesting example was a Turing machine with a binary alphabet which operates simultaneously on the entire set of natural numbers (or rather, spawned a new Turing machine for each natural number), with appropriate "output" to check for whether a given machine had halted, but each new machine runs at half the speed of the previous one, otherwise they'd run out of room. While tiles are cheap, tile types are not -- it's apparently expensive to synthesize DNA, but cheap to replicate it. And to do anything that isn't just compiling a Turing machine (which produces an impossible number of tile types), while technically algorithmic, is incredibly difficult and doesn't seem to benefit in any way from any of the languages or tools we've developed for programming.
This isn't just "parallel programming is hard." It's not just a different language or a different syntax. It's more like going back to drawing logic circuits by hand, only none of the components bear any resemblance to anything you've used before.
So, it's not likely anyone's going to be using these to mine bitcoins or crack RSA anytime soon. On the other hand, it's at the stage right now where you can still come in with a crazy idea that no one ever thought of before, and move the entire field by yourself. I suppose that's true of any field, but most fields, everyone's already thought of the more obvious crazy ideas.
I can imagine putting this in a cell. I just can't imagine why - or how.
I can imagine a few 'why's. Right now, in the barely-related field of DNA Origami, people are building machines out of DNA which target cancer cells -- I've heard it described as a "box" filled with chemotherapy poison, opens when it detects a cancer cell. The results are pretty jaw-dropping, if maybe a bit preliminary -- something like a 98% kill rate on the cancer cells without touching the healthy cells.
I'm being deliberately vague, because I'm already out of my depth on the comp sci side, and the bio side is just that much farther beyond me. I understood about half of what you said, so I'll defer to you if you don't see it being feasible to put this in a cell.
But here's the problem from the comp sci side: These just don't seem likely to be useful for computing alone, unless I'm right about it being useful to do this with DNA somehow (inputs and outputs are strands of DNA, etc). But this:
I could see that it would be any easy way to grow biological cell-based processors. Then if you could link them up, you get massive parallel computing.
Well, let's speculate on this... Let's be generous and assume we can get one usable circuit per core -- keep in mind that while these interactions are happening in parallel, you also need a reasonable concentration of each component if you want them to actually interact, so the circuit itself isn't necessarily parallel. Let's also be generous and assume a minute (not 10 hours) to perform an operation, since square root is a fairly complex operation.
A quick Google suggests something like 100 trillion cells in the human body. So, we have 100 trillion operations per minute, or about 1.7 trillion operations per second, or 1.7 terahertz. Even if we're generous and call it 1.7 teraflops, that's 1.7 teraflops in a structure the size of a human body.
And Intel got 1 teraflops on a 40W chip, four years ago. While the power requirements of the human body are somewhat more difficult to estimate, another random Google puts that at something like 80W. And just look at the size of the wafer in that video, versus the human standing next to it -- the wafer is barely bigger than his thumb.
So, I think I'm giving this optimistic numbers, and while it's not coming back as "You're crazy, that'll never work!" (other than the 1 minute per op instead of 10 hours), it still looks like CMOS 4 years ago beats DNA years from now.
If you're talking about your brain, that's not what this is. This is using actual DNA to perform computations.
Oh, by the way, last I checked, it's slow, and this is no exception:
Reif also pointed out a few downsides. One is the speed of calculation. The execution of a single gate can take anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes. Executing a four-bit square root could take up to 10 hours.
This isn't like quantum computing -- maybe they can make it faster, but I really don't see this having any inherent advantages over old-school tech like CMOS anytime soon.
What makes this interesting is the potential to do calculations inside living systems, or to actually interface our code with otherwise strictly biological processes. These "circuits" are just solutions of custom-designed DNA, and each "gate" takes small single-strands of DNA as input, and produce them as output, whether as a "wire" to another gate, or as the final output to be measured to check if the circuit is working. Now imagine putting that in a cell. (Oh, and this is why formal methods matter -- if someone's going to be putting code in your body, it's not enough to debug it, you want that shit proven correct.)
Disclaimer: While I did take a class (COM S 433 at ISU) which attempted to examine this stuff, this was covered at the very end of the semester, and no one (including the instructors) really had a good idea how these things actually work. I know enough to be dangerous, but there's a good chance I'm wrong about pretty much anything I say here. Read the papers yourself -- it's fascinating stuff.
The very point is you don't have to be high up on the "skilled" list to use them.
Which would've been easy enough to state, instead of "every. single. person."
Nor is it entirely irrelevant. You don't have to be high up on the "skilled" list, but you do have to be above and beyond the typical office drone. You also need motivation. And if you've got the skill and motivation to handle these things, it's not adding much to the equation to add, say, a prompt.
I mean, people understand prompts. They've dealt with them before. Much less common is, "I wanted to get back to the beginning, so I quit the app and restarted it, but I wasn't back at the beginning! Help!"
AND TWO OF THE FEATURES REQUIRE ABSOLUTELY NO KNOWLEDGE WHATSOEVER TO USE.
Bullshit, and I've addressed this. In the loosest sense, yes, you will be "using" them whether you intended to or not, unless you deliberately disable them -- assuming that's an option. This is a Mac, after all. But since you're not counting auto-save here, let's look at that: You need to learn the concept of "locking" a file, or creating a copy, rather than "saving" it. You're going to have to give up the idea of reverting to a saved version, and learn to use Versions instead if you screw something up too profoundly -- whereas ordinarily, your instinct would be to close without saving, then open again. These may be improvements, but they are also fundamental changes to the workflow, and we know how much the typical user loves change.
It may have been a mistake, but "save" has been a poor-man's version control for at least as long as it's been, well, saving. No, people generally don't call it that, but that is often what they're doing.
I really did think you couldn't possibly think I meant that Windows users will get to use Mac features on Windows.
What changed your mind? It certainly wasn't anything I said. I've never claimed such a thing.
That's the single-dumbest argument I've ever heard for not buying a Mac. I've never heard a single person say, "Macs don't have antivirus? Then I won't buy one!" (in fact, there are antivirus software for the Mac, but that doesn't detract from the absurdity of your argument)
Then I should mention that it's not my argument -- I have heard exactly this. I've also had people dislike Macs for other reasons of unfamiliarity -- "Where's the start button? How do I turn it off?" And even through to the point of "How do I defrag?"
Now, to be fair, it's not generally one thing which is going to turn a person off from using a Mac. But everything a Mac does differently than Windows is another argument for Joe Sixpack and Rosie the Receptionist to keep using what they're used to.
Maybe Mac users are different. Maybe they are genuinely smarter. But most of the time, when someone asks me how to do something with a computer, I honestly don't know. I just figure it out, and I do that very quickly. Why? Because when they can't figure it out, it's because they memorize, by rote, which menus to click, where the option is, etc. These are the reasons organizations are reluctant to upgrade to new versions of Windows -- because even before The Ribbon, you needed a training program for a new version of Office. Seriously.
So not only are you incorrect in a literal sense that seems to offend you greatly when you suggest that every single person can use these features, I suspect you're also wrong about it being "simple" enough for every single person to use. For most people, simplicity is irrelevant -- the more relevant question is, do they already know how to do this?
Tinker-nerd talk. People don't reboot to put a computer "into a known state".
Now you're the one being obtuse.
They may not call it that, but that is exactly what they do. "Something's wrong? Let's reboot and try to fix it." Or, every morning, boot up their
But I think if he said it wasn't him (although I'd use your modifier of "probably") and it later turned out it was, I don't think anybody in their right mind would hold him accountable.
Why not? I mean, as you said:
If you have superior crotch identifying ability from your long experience of staring at crotches (including your own) then I take my hat off to you.
...then why would you imply you did by saying that you are certain that's not your crotch?
All the more reason to want to demonstrate that you're better than the average politician......even if the downside of this approach is that it is, almost by definition, using "weasel words," although it is also telling the whole truth.
Personally, if I'd never seen the photo before, I'd just say no - it's not me. If it later turned out that it was, so what?
If it later turned out that it was, you can be shown to be at best incompetent at judging photos, and at worst a liar. It makes a lot more sense to say things like, "I have no idea where this photo came from, and it's probably not me."
If I get an account with one or two friends in other timezones, it's not just a matter of us paying less per month, we're also screwing up the game in that we can play a single character in shifts, so that character is always playing.
It's bad enough when people who have lives are automatically at a disadvantage (though not insurmountable) to people who can play five or ten hours a day. Now you've got a single character capable of playing twenty-four hours a day.
I honestly don't see how this applies to something like Netflix, though. If I rent or purchase a DVD, there's no good reason I can't lend it to a friend -- and lending them a Netflix account, or a Steam account, is actually significantly less functionality than I have with physical media in that I can't just lend them a single movie or game, I have to lend them the entire account.
Worse, as others have pointed out, there's already legal protection here. If you don't want me to lend my account, put that in the ToS with appropriate penalties -- no need to have the government do your work for you.
...and I have noticed some weirdness here. It seems like KWin disables desktop effects on fullscreen windows, yet disabling them entirely (there's a hotkey to toggle it) has a huge impact on the performance of most things (like games) that use the GPU.
Your first "point" is just plain stupid. Of course you have to have a computer that runs Lion to use features of Lion. I find it impossible to believe you actually think I meant that even people on Windows, or without a computer at all, can use these features.
Then how about you say "So that most people can use them," or "So that everyone is skilled enough to use them." Then it'd actually be true. As it is, I'm calling you on your hyperbole.
Your second point shows no understanding of how these features work. Two of them require no alteration in interaction whatsoever.
I'm sorry, but that's not an automatic win. Consider the number of people for whom Macs are a non-starter if they don't have anti-virus, not because they actually understand how anti-virus works, but because that's what happens on Windows. They will look for the interaction.
And assuming you're correct, they've now converted rebooting, a way a user knows to get into a known state, into not-quite-rebooting. Any user who's ever rebooted to solve a problem must now figure out where the "reboot without resume" option is.
anyone can pick up with virtually no effort.
You're again overestimating "anyone". "Anyone" doesn't just press random buttons. "Anyone" would have to be taught that this exists, and how to use it, and if Apple ever moved the button or changed what it looked like, "anyone" would have to relearn it from scratch.
This goes much further than "saving your session". For example, if you save your session in Safari or Firefox, it reloads the pages you had open. With Resume, it doesn't reload them from the web, it reloads the memory from the program exactly as it was when it quit.
In other words, if an application gets itself into a screwy state, quit and reopen is no longer a viable option, as it has been on every desktop OS for decades.
And how do you know this is how it works? The Apple website isn't entirely clear about that, though it is clear about one thing: You can only Resume applications which are written with Lion in mind. That sounds suspiciously like saving a session -- and that Firefox saves URLs or maybe HTML contents, rather than entire memory dumps, is a design decision of Firefox, there's no reason a session-saving API like KDE's would require such a thing.
Apple almost NEVER claims to be the first to come up with these features.
That's a distinction without a difference. Apple does claim to be innovative, or that these are innovations. They don't cite where these ideas are actually coming from.
My god man, most of that is simply "HOW DOES IT WORK?".
Or, more relevantly, questions about how the design of it is going to affect my use. For instance, from Apple's website and from what you've told me, I can infer that Resume is going to be exactly like saving a session, only more reliable, less efficient, and as always, only for supported applications. That tells me a lot about how useful it's going to be.
And yes, this makes you a tinker-nerd, that you want to get your fingers into each and every little detail.
I'm a "tinker-nerd" because I'd like to know how old versions of my documents are maintained? Really? That never occurs to normal people who have been burned by, say, losing old versions of their documents?
I may have asked it in a more technical way, and I may be asking for more technical depth, but the motivation isn't that I want my fingers in everything. It's that I don't want old files to evaporate because I'm relying on Versions -- or I'd like to know to what extent I can rely on Versions.
I guess it does make me less of a "normal person" in that normal people are just going to save the filename with a date when they care, but if this is your definition of "tinker-nerd", I'm not su
Berenhaut and Hilton are working to answer man questions: How do the ants migrate across different computer platforms and systems operating at different speeds?
I'm not entirely sure how that's a "man question", and I certainly don't want MANswers to attempt to answer it.
Oddly, this is also Microsoft deliberately giving up what was originally their biggest selling point against Apple -- the PC won because you could buy cheap clones from any number of manufacturers, and they'd all run DOS and Windows, whereas anything from Apple would have exactly one choice of hardware manufacturer and OS provider: Apple.
I'm sure sometimes it makes sense, but it seems to me that in most cases, it's a browser implementation detail which has better performance. What's relevant is that SVG is actually more flexible -- it does actually fit as a more natural extension to HTML. You can have things like hyperlinks inside it, and I'd imagine microformats. You, and your users, can mess with it in similar ways to what you do with HTML.
Canvas is for stuff you can't do with SVG, or for when you're absolutely sure SVG's capabilities are irrelevant. But as far as the DOM goes, Canvas is this opaque blob -- kind of similar to, say, a video tag. Sometimes it's exactly what you need, but would you ever use a video tag as a substitute for good old-fashioned DHTML animation, if you can do it both ways, even if the video tag had better performance in some browsers?
Disclaimer: I am not currently working with either technology, or, really, as a web developer. I've done some of this stuff in the past, but I didn't get too deep into either, partly because I actually couldn't count on either SVG or Canvas being present and working well for the browsers we were targeting, and partly because I didn't actually need either.
shitty scripting language that successfully rode Java's coat-tails, on no other merit than "it's what's available".
I wonder if you actually know a single thing about JavaScript. No, it's not Java. It's better in pretty much every way I care about.
What did we do with a stateless distributed document display system and a scripting language? Why we built stateful applications out of them.
Go read about REST, first of all. The documents are the state.
But I'm not entirely sure I see your point. Having the UI be as stateless as possible -- it doesn't care how I got to this URL, only whether the resource is still valid -- and having concepts like idempotence built into your app at a deep level, go a long way towards robust applications, stateful or otherwise.
We all booed and hissed at ActiveX and Java -- native code is insecure,
If you really think that's the reason ActiveX and Java were despised...
ActiveX really was a security hazard, and not because of native code, but because it was insufficiently sandboxed. It was never designed to run arbitrary code from the Web, it was designed to make it easier to extend local applications. It was designed for things that you might recognize in browsers as plugins and extensions. It was not meant for every web developer who couldn't be bothered to learn JavaScript to write "web" apps in native, Windows-only code.
Oh, and it was Windows-only.
Java was despised because it was slow. That was pretty much it. Security risks? The JVM is actually pretty damned secure, assuming you don't just click anything through that asks for it. No, people hated Java because it would add ten seconds or more to page load time. This is a stigma that's stuck to Java, despite ridiculous performance improvements over the years. It's probably the biggest reason Flash started winning, though I'm not sure either one loads faster these days.
And the way in which Java is still slow? Boot time. That's pretty much it -- once you get a Java app running, it's plenty fast.
But now we take JavaScript and compile it into insecure native machine code,
Are you retarded? The native-ness is irrelevant to security. From the developer's perspective, JavaScript is every bit as much a scripting language as before, it just runs faster. That the VM might have some vulnerabilities is pretty much irrelevant -- interpreters have had vulnerabilities, also.
run it in a slow hybrid VM,
Slow? JavaScript is about the fastest dynamic language of any sort by now. It certainly doesn't have the problem Java did -- aside from not inheriting Java's brain-dead language design, JavaScript also boots pretty much instantly. Hell, the entire Chrome browser, JavaScript VM and all, starts about as fast from a cold boot as opening a new tab, which is faster than I could ever possibly want.
And what's your problem with VMs? It is an implementation detail, after all. Keep in mind -- JavaScript was interpreted. Now it's sometimes compiled all the way to native code.
Meanwhile someone discovered that if you give the general public access to a software repository, and give coders a stable platform and channel to access customers via -- You can do the exact same bullshit as a web-app with less resources, and make it graphically slick too.
Great! Say, could you point me to this magical repository where I can run graphically slick, lower-resource, cross-platform applications without installing them, which I can use on any computer on the fucking planet, with full access to all my stuff?
Never mind that the Web comes with at least a half-dozen features off the top of my head that not every app has, and that people find themselves re-implementing in native desktop apps because people miss them from browsers. Bookmarking. The Back button. Z
Slashdot Mirror
Or for people who are actually passionate about their careers.
For example, right now, I care very little about where I live, other than that I have fast Internet, and either I get freedom to choose the tools I want, or I get tools I actually enjoy using. For example, suppose I was given the choice between web development jobs in Ruby on Rails, Node.js, ASP.NET, or Oracle ADF. I might try the ASP.NET job out of curiosity, but there is no fucking way I'm doing Oracle ADF 8 hours a day. In fact, pretty much anything related to Oracle is already a code smell.
I mean, I don't care what the nightlife is (I don't drink), I don't much care about where I sleep (requirements are clean, safe, good Internet), and the other things I care about are likely to be just about anywhere -- a martial arts program, interesting women... Money is rarely a factor.
But the work is what I'm actually doing with my life. (Or, at the moment, school, but I've worked before, and I take the same approach to internships.)
Sounds like the sort of study I'd love to read about, later, but I'd hate to participate in.
If I were actually fairly busy, I'd love to have this sort of thing available to the family members who forward me crap. Funny stuff, interesting stuff, but really just pointless, time-wasting stuff. I'm really tempted to make a policy that if you don't have anything useful to add to the forwarded message, it gets flagged as spam -- I care what you have to say, but I don't care about the funny cat video you found.
I have to imagine that people would think twice before sending me People of Wall-Mart (with all the images attached to the email, naturally, rather than just fucking linking to it) if they knew my inbox had a few thousand unread messages.
But even this use would backfire in about the same way -- as soon as I actually get my inbox cleared, I can expect a hundred new useless messages from people who were waiting for the best time to send low-priority crap. And I tend to send email-has-been-read notifiers, but conditionally.
The whole point of email over IM or chat is that it's asynchronous. Not that you couldn't have all of them be asynchronous, which is one reason I was excited about Wave -- you could have the discussion be exactly as synchronous as it needed to be. Still, there's IM, phones, and finding me in person for when you need an answer RIGHT NOW -- but don't abuse it; the phone is on vibrate specifically to allow me to ignore a call if I don't feel like it's urgent. Email gets answered in the same way that tickets get closed -- as a break from other work, or when I run out of things to do, or during some time I've deliberately set aside for that.
To be entirely fair, it actually does make a lot of sense for browsers to consume stuff like this -- microformats would've been my first choice, but whatever. Consider: Right now, browsers can and do support discovering RSS feeds related to the current page. There's also a spec somewhere for a "universal edit button". Other things that might be relevant are hcalendar and hcard -- sure, search engines could consume these, but it'd also be cool to have my browser discover these things and communicate with my calendar or contact list.
But I don't know of any browsers actually doing this, other than the RSS bit, without third-party extensions -- and this, in particular, was all about search engines, whether or not the standards involved would be relevant to browsers.
Since when is Apple a search engine?
But, in response, I'm sure that Sarah Palin thinks that Paul Revere stopped at every church, hopped off of his horse, ran inside and rang the bells before heading off to the next church.
Problem is, based on what she said, that wouldn't be so far off. I mean, compare this:
the British are aware as they're marching down the countryside, they hear church bells ringing -- she was right about that -- and warning shots being fired. That’s accurate.
With this:
...ringing those bells and making sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells...
So, she was right that bells were ringing and warning shots were being fired, but entirely wrong that Paul Revere was actually doing this, that he was doing this to warn the British, and that warning the British was the purpose of his ride. Nothing your guy with a PhD says offers any support for this actually being the case, or for Sarah Palin actually understanding, say, that Paul Revere didn't actually ring bells or fire shots. In fact, quite the opposite, from the article you quoted:
McConville said he also is not convinced that Palin’s remarks reflect scholarship.
"I would call her lucky in her comments," McConville said.
While you're not quite quote-mining, I'd suggest you take your own advice -- look at the facts, especially those which are uncomfortable for your position.
I'll give you that she wasn't quite as wrong as she at first glance appeared to be. But I don't see how you can get from what she actually said to anything remotely historically accurate. This isn't my own "unrealistic interpretation of what she meant." This is taking what she said, at face value, without doing all sorts of mental acrobatics just to give her the benefit of the doubt.
And this is why, when I started this thread, I linked to a list of differences. It's more than just Flash, though it's also a small enough list that you might easily write it off -- and it really does seem that these are mostly things they can't release because of licensing issues. Still, it's enough that it's fair to say that Chrome itself is proprietary, and Chromium is open source.
The thing is don't we already have these video codecs supported in most distributions?... In Ubuntu it pops up saying you are missing codecs usually and alerts you to install them if you so desire to.
Does it do that in Chrome, and for the Video Tag? I know it doesn't for Firefox. This was one of my bigger annoyances with the current implementations of HTML5 -- while IE and Safari actually connect to the OS' codec support, thus making it easy to install a new codec, it seems like Firefox and Chrome are determined to include the codecs inside the browser. Firefox itself is especially obnoxious -- the discussions I have with supporters of this usually lead to an argument about the security implications (really?), while the actual motivation is to deliberately make it as hard as possible for H.264 to win, thus making it as hard as possible for HTML5 Video to win.
If Kogan is shipping Chrome, and Samsung and Acer are shipping Chromium, these are different things. Not terribly different, but different enough that it'd be interesting either way.
See, Chromium is an open-source project. Chrome is Google's proprietary fork of Chromium -- essentially, Google tracks Chromium, but (I think?) adds some stuff to it. While they've removed h.264, that was a good example -- Google can pay for a license and include any amount of proprietary h.264 code they want in Chrome, but the Chromium project can't do the same.
Please correct me if this has changed. It'd be cool if there were no remaining proprietary bits in Chrome (or in Chrome OS), but I doubt it. The Wikipedia page on Chromium OS doesn't list any significant differences vs Chrome OS, but if the browsers themselves are significantly different, surely the OSes have to be?
Out of curiosity, is there a reason you'd store that as a prefix and not as a separate field?
You might be thinking of algorithmic self-assembly... and, sort of.
That class I mentioned spent most of our time working with an abstract tile assembly model. We had assignments to build programs and run them on one of these simulators, and otherwise spent most of the time proving stuff about them.
Unfortunately, while it's really easy to learn how to build these, I'm not sure there's a tutorial I can point you to.
The good news is that it is massively parallel. It's related, somewhat, to cellular automata, or Conway's Game of Life, except that it's strictly growth -- once a tile attaches, there's normally no way to detach it. But the idea is that anywhere a tile can attach, it eventually will, and fairly quickly -- while you do often have entirely sequential algorithms, your algorithm can theoretically scale with the number of locations tiles can currently attach. It's also Turing-complete, and kind of makes for a cool visualization of a Turing machine. You can also just make cool fractal patterns instead of trying to compute anything.
The bad news is that errors happen quite often, and there's no good way to correct or avoid them (yet). There are certain shapes which are impossible to build. The parallelization isn't by any means free -- one interesting example was a Turing machine with a binary alphabet which operates simultaneously on the entire set of natural numbers (or rather, spawned a new Turing machine for each natural number), with appropriate "output" to check for whether a given machine had halted, but each new machine runs at half the speed of the previous one, otherwise they'd run out of room. While tiles are cheap, tile types are not -- it's apparently expensive to synthesize DNA, but cheap to replicate it. And to do anything that isn't just compiling a Turing machine (which produces an impossible number of tile types), while technically algorithmic, is incredibly difficult and doesn't seem to benefit in any way from any of the languages or tools we've developed for programming.
This isn't just "parallel programming is hard." It's not just a different language or a different syntax. It's more like going back to drawing logic circuits by hand, only none of the components bear any resemblance to anything you've used before.
So, it's not likely anyone's going to be using these to mine bitcoins or crack RSA anytime soon. On the other hand, it's at the stage right now where you can still come in with a crazy idea that no one ever thought of before, and move the entire field by yourself. I suppose that's true of any field, but most fields, everyone's already thought of the more obvious crazy ideas.
I can imagine putting this in a cell. I just can't imagine why - or how.
I can imagine a few 'why's. Right now, in the barely-related field of DNA Origami, people are building machines out of DNA which target cancer cells -- I've heard it described as a "box" filled with chemotherapy poison, opens when it detects a cancer cell. The results are pretty jaw-dropping, if maybe a bit preliminary -- something like a 98% kill rate on the cancer cells without touching the healthy cells.
I'm being deliberately vague, because I'm already out of my depth on the comp sci side, and the bio side is just that much farther beyond me. I understood about half of what you said, so I'll defer to you if you don't see it being feasible to put this in a cell.
But here's the problem from the comp sci side: These just don't seem likely to be useful for computing alone, unless I'm right about it being useful to do this with DNA somehow (inputs and outputs are strands of DNA, etc). But this:
I could see that it would be any easy way to grow biological cell-based processors. Then if you could link them up, you get massive parallel computing.
Well, let's speculate on this... Let's be generous and assume we can get one usable circuit per core -- keep in mind that while these interactions are happening in parallel, you also need a reasonable concentration of each component if you want them to actually interact, so the circuit itself isn't necessarily parallel. Let's also be generous and assume a minute (not 10 hours) to perform an operation, since square root is a fairly complex operation.
A quick Google suggests something like 100 trillion cells in the human body. So, we have 100 trillion operations per minute, or about 1.7 trillion operations per second, or 1.7 terahertz. Even if we're generous and call it 1.7 teraflops, that's 1.7 teraflops in a structure the size of a human body.
And Intel got 1 teraflops on a 40W chip, four years ago. While the power requirements of the human body are somewhat more difficult to estimate, another random Google puts that at something like 80W. And just look at the size of the wafer in that video, versus the human standing next to it -- the wafer is barely bigger than his thumb.
So, I think I'm giving this optimistic numbers, and while it's not coming back as "You're crazy, that'll never work!" (other than the 1 minute per op instead of 10 hours), it still looks like CMOS 4 years ago beats DNA years from now.
If you're talking about your brain, that's not what this is. This is using actual DNA to perform computations.
Oh, by the way, last I checked, it's slow, and this is no exception:
Reif also pointed out a few downsides. One is the speed of calculation. The execution of a single gate can take anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes. Executing a four-bit square root could take up to 10 hours.
This isn't like quantum computing -- maybe they can make it faster, but I really don't see this having any inherent advantages over old-school tech like CMOS anytime soon.
What makes this interesting is the potential to do calculations inside living systems, or to actually interface our code with otherwise strictly biological processes. These "circuits" are just solutions of custom-designed DNA, and each "gate" takes small single-strands of DNA as input, and produce them as output, whether as a "wire" to another gate, or as the final output to be measured to check if the circuit is working. Now imagine putting that in a cell. (Oh, and this is why formal methods matter -- if someone's going to be putting code in your body, it's not enough to debug it, you want that shit proven correct.)
Disclaimer: While I did take a class (COM S 433 at ISU) which attempted to examine this stuff, this was covered at the very end of the semester, and no one (including the instructors) really had a good idea how these things actually work. I know enough to be dangerous, but there's a good chance I'm wrong about pretty much anything I say here. Read the papers yourself -- it's fascinating stuff.
The very point is you don't have to be high up on the "skilled" list to use them.
Which would've been easy enough to state, instead of "every. single. person."
Nor is it entirely irrelevant. You don't have to be high up on the "skilled" list, but you do have to be above and beyond the typical office drone. You also need motivation. And if you've got the skill and motivation to handle these things, it's not adding much to the equation to add, say, a prompt.
I mean, people understand prompts. They've dealt with them before. Much less common is, "I wanted to get back to the beginning, so I quit the app and restarted it, but I wasn't back at the beginning! Help!"
AND TWO OF THE FEATURES REQUIRE ABSOLUTELY NO KNOWLEDGE WHATSOEVER TO USE.
Bullshit, and I've addressed this. In the loosest sense, yes, you will be "using" them whether you intended to or not, unless you deliberately disable them -- assuming that's an option. This is a Mac, after all. But since you're not counting auto-save here, let's look at that: You need to learn the concept of "locking" a file, or creating a copy, rather than "saving" it. You're going to have to give up the idea of reverting to a saved version, and learn to use Versions instead if you screw something up too profoundly -- whereas ordinarily, your instinct would be to close without saving, then open again. These may be improvements, but they are also fundamental changes to the workflow, and we know how much the typical user loves change.
It may have been a mistake, but "save" has been a poor-man's version control for at least as long as it's been, well, saving. No, people generally don't call it that, but that is often what they're doing.
I really did think you couldn't possibly think I meant that Windows users will get to use Mac features on Windows.
What changed your mind? It certainly wasn't anything I said. I've never claimed such a thing.
That's the single-dumbest argument I've ever heard for not buying a Mac. I've never heard a single person say, "Macs don't have antivirus? Then I won't buy one!" (in fact, there are antivirus software for the Mac, but that doesn't detract from the absurdity of your argument)
Then I should mention that it's not my argument -- I have heard exactly this. I've also had people dislike Macs for other reasons of unfamiliarity -- "Where's the start button? How do I turn it off?" And even through to the point of "How do I defrag?"
Now, to be fair, it's not generally one thing which is going to turn a person off from using a Mac. But everything a Mac does differently than Windows is another argument for Joe Sixpack and Rosie the Receptionist to keep using what they're used to.
Maybe Mac users are different. Maybe they are genuinely smarter. But most of the time, when someone asks me how to do something with a computer, I honestly don't know. I just figure it out, and I do that very quickly. Why? Because when they can't figure it out, it's because they memorize, by rote, which menus to click, where the option is, etc. These are the reasons organizations are reluctant to upgrade to new versions of Windows -- because even before The Ribbon, you needed a training program for a new version of Office. Seriously.
So not only are you incorrect in a literal sense that seems to offend you greatly when you suggest that every single person can use these features, I suspect you're also wrong about it being "simple" enough for every single person to use. For most people, simplicity is irrelevant -- the more relevant question is, do they already know how to do this?
Tinker-nerd talk. People don't reboot to put a computer "into a known state".
Now you're the one being obtuse.
They may not call it that, but that is exactly what they do. "Something's wrong? Let's reboot and try to fix it." Or, every morning, boot up their
But I think if he said it wasn't him (although I'd use your modifier of "probably") and it later turned out it was, I don't think anybody in their right mind would hold him accountable.
Why not? I mean, as you said:
If you have superior crotch identifying ability from your long experience of staring at crotches (including your own) then I take my hat off to you.
...then why would you imply you did by saying that you are certain that's not your crotch?
All the more reason to want to demonstrate that you're better than the average politician... ...even if the downside of this approach is that it is, almost by definition, using "weasel words," although it is also telling the whole truth.
Personally, if I'd never seen the photo before, I'd just say no - it's not me. If it later turned out that it was, so what?
If it later turned out that it was, you can be shown to be at best incompetent at judging photos, and at worst a liar. It makes a lot more sense to say things like, "I have no idea where this photo came from, and it's probably not me."
If I get an account with one or two friends in other timezones, it's not just a matter of us paying less per month, we're also screwing up the game in that we can play a single character in shifts, so that character is always playing.
It's bad enough when people who have lives are automatically at a disadvantage (though not insurmountable) to people who can play five or ten hours a day. Now you've got a single character capable of playing twenty-four hours a day.
I honestly don't see how this applies to something like Netflix, though. If I rent or purchase a DVD, there's no good reason I can't lend it to a friend -- and lending them a Netflix account, or a Steam account, is actually significantly less functionality than I have with physical media in that I can't just lend them a single movie or game, I have to lend them the entire account.
Worse, as others have pointed out, there's already legal protection here. If you don't want me to lend my account, put that in the ToS with appropriate penalties -- no need to have the government do your work for you.
Unless the bugs are in, say, the nVidia driver.
...and I have noticed some weirdness here. It seems like KWin disables desktop effects on fullscreen windows, yet disabling them entirely (there's a hotkey to toggle it) has a huge impact on the performance of most things (like games) that use the GPU.
Your first "point" is just plain stupid. Of course you have to have a computer that runs Lion to use features of Lion. I find it impossible to believe you actually think I meant that even people on Windows, or without a computer at all, can use these features.
Then how about you say "So that most people can use them," or "So that everyone is skilled enough to use them." Then it'd actually be true. As it is, I'm calling you on your hyperbole.
Your second point shows no understanding of how these features work. Two of them require no alteration in interaction whatsoever.
I'm sorry, but that's not an automatic win. Consider the number of people for whom Macs are a non-starter if they don't have anti-virus, not because they actually understand how anti-virus works, but because that's what happens on Windows. They will look for the interaction.
And assuming you're correct, they've now converted rebooting, a way a user knows to get into a known state, into not-quite-rebooting. Any user who's ever rebooted to solve a problem must now figure out where the "reboot without resume" option is.
anyone can pick up with virtually no effort.
You're again overestimating "anyone". "Anyone" doesn't just press random buttons. "Anyone" would have to be taught that this exists, and how to use it, and if Apple ever moved the button or changed what it looked like, "anyone" would have to relearn it from scratch.
This goes much further than "saving your session". For example, if you save your session in Safari or Firefox, it reloads the pages you had open. With Resume, it doesn't reload them from the web, it reloads the memory from the program exactly as it was when it quit.
In other words, if an application gets itself into a screwy state, quit and reopen is no longer a viable option, as it has been on every desktop OS for decades.
And how do you know this is how it works? The Apple website isn't entirely clear about that, though it is clear about one thing: You can only Resume applications which are written with Lion in mind. That sounds suspiciously like saving a session -- and that Firefox saves URLs or maybe HTML contents, rather than entire memory dumps, is a design decision of Firefox, there's no reason a session-saving API like KDE's would require such a thing.
Apple almost NEVER claims to be the first to come up with these features.
That's a distinction without a difference. Apple does claim to be innovative, or that these are innovations. They don't cite where these ideas are actually coming from.
My god man, most of that is simply "HOW DOES IT WORK?".
Or, more relevantly, questions about how the design of it is going to affect my use. For instance, from Apple's website and from what you've told me, I can infer that Resume is going to be exactly like saving a session, only more reliable, less efficient, and as always, only for supported applications. That tells me a lot about how useful it's going to be.
And yes, this makes you a tinker-nerd, that you want to get your fingers into each and every little detail.
I'm a "tinker-nerd" because I'd like to know how old versions of my documents are maintained? Really? That never occurs to normal people who have been burned by, say, losing old versions of their documents?
I may have asked it in a more technical way, and I may be asking for more technical depth, but the motivation isn't that I want my fingers in everything. It's that I don't want old files to evaporate because I'm relying on Versions -- or I'd like to know to what extent I can rely on Versions.
I guess it does make me less of a "normal person" in that normal people are just going to save the filename with a date when they care, but if this is your definition of "tinker-nerd", I'm not su
From TFA:
Berenhaut and Hilton are working to answer man questions: How do the ants migrate across different computer platforms and systems operating at different speeds?
I'm not entirely sure how that's a "man question", and I certainly don't want MANswers to attempt to answer it.
Oddly, this is also Microsoft deliberately giving up what was originally their biggest selling point against Apple -- the PC won because you could buy cheap clones from any number of manufacturers, and they'd all run DOS and Windows, whereas anything from Apple would have exactly one choice of hardware manufacturer and OS provider: Apple.
...which is likely also missing the point.
I'm sure sometimes it makes sense, but it seems to me that in most cases, it's a browser implementation detail which has better performance. What's relevant is that SVG is actually more flexible -- it does actually fit as a more natural extension to HTML. You can have things like hyperlinks inside it, and I'd imagine microformats. You, and your users, can mess with it in similar ways to what you do with HTML.
Canvas is for stuff you can't do with SVG, or for when you're absolutely sure SVG's capabilities are irrelevant. But as far as the DOM goes, Canvas is this opaque blob -- kind of similar to, say, a video tag. Sometimes it's exactly what you need, but would you ever use a video tag as a substitute for good old-fashioned DHTML animation, if you can do it both ways, even if the video tag had better performance in some browsers?
Disclaimer: I am not currently working with either technology, or, really, as a web developer. I've done some of this stuff in the past, but I didn't get too deep into either, partly because I actually couldn't count on either SVG or Canvas being present and working well for the browsers we were targeting, and partly because I didn't actually need either.
shitty scripting language that successfully rode Java's coat-tails, on no other merit than "it's what's available".
I wonder if you actually know a single thing about JavaScript. No, it's not Java. It's better in pretty much every way I care about.
What did we do with a stateless distributed document display system and a scripting language? Why we built stateful applications out of them.
Go read about REST, first of all. The documents are the state.
But I'm not entirely sure I see your point. Having the UI be as stateless as possible -- it doesn't care how I got to this URL, only whether the resource is still valid -- and having concepts like idempotence built into your app at a deep level, go a long way towards robust applications, stateful or otherwise.
We all booed and hissed at ActiveX and Java -- native code is insecure,
If you really think that's the reason ActiveX and Java were despised...
ActiveX really was a security hazard, and not because of native code, but because it was insufficiently sandboxed. It was never designed to run arbitrary code from the Web, it was designed to make it easier to extend local applications. It was designed for things that you might recognize in browsers as plugins and extensions. It was not meant for every web developer who couldn't be bothered to learn JavaScript to write "web" apps in native, Windows-only code.
Oh, and it was Windows-only.
Java was despised because it was slow. That was pretty much it. Security risks? The JVM is actually pretty damned secure, assuming you don't just click anything through that asks for it. No, people hated Java because it would add ten seconds or more to page load time. This is a stigma that's stuck to Java, despite ridiculous performance improvements over the years. It's probably the biggest reason Flash started winning, though I'm not sure either one loads faster these days.
And the way in which Java is still slow? Boot time. That's pretty much it -- once you get a Java app running, it's plenty fast.
But now we take JavaScript and compile it into insecure native machine code,
Are you retarded? The native-ness is irrelevant to security. From the developer's perspective, JavaScript is every bit as much a scripting language as before, it just runs faster. That the VM might have some vulnerabilities is pretty much irrelevant -- interpreters have had vulnerabilities, also.
run it in a slow hybrid VM,
Slow? JavaScript is about the fastest dynamic language of any sort by now. It certainly doesn't have the problem Java did -- aside from not inheriting Java's brain-dead language design, JavaScript also boots pretty much instantly. Hell, the entire Chrome browser, JavaScript VM and all, starts about as fast from a cold boot as opening a new tab, which is faster than I could ever possibly want.
And what's your problem with VMs? It is an implementation detail, after all. Keep in mind -- JavaScript was interpreted. Now it's sometimes compiled all the way to native code.
Meanwhile someone discovered that if you give the general public access to a software repository, and give coders a stable platform and channel to access customers via -- You can do the exact same bullshit as a web-app with less resources, and make it graphically slick too.
Great! Say, could you point me to this magical repository where I can run graphically slick, lower-resource, cross-platform applications without installing them, which I can use on any computer on the fucking planet, with full access to all my stuff?
Never mind that the Web comes with at least a half-dozen features off the top of my head that not every app has, and that people find themselves re-implementing in native desktop apps because people miss them from browsers. Bookmarking. The Back button. Z
Falling back to SVG when canvas isn't available would be a mistake since every browser that supports SVG also supports canvas.
It also seems like it's missing the point. If what you want to do can be done in SVG, isn't that a better choice anyway than canvas?