Or just HTML5 video tag. Even if the iPhone doesn't already support it, Safari does (using QuickTime), so it doesn't seem wholly unlikely that iPhone Safari (using iPhone QucikTime) would support it.
That gets you Safari and Firefox, and it seems likely other browsers (Chrome, Konqueror, etc) will follow.
If that fails -- and it should be possible to gracefully detect that failure, which I think is not necessarily true with an object tag -- fall back to Flash and/or object tags.
(if anyone starts thinking iTunes, think of where iTunes is going in regards to DRM).
I'm also thinking about the fact that iTunes still requires that everything be bought through the iTunes application. It's not that fucking hard to put up a webpage that provides a download when you give it a credit card number. Nor is it that hard to then provide a REST API, so rich clients like iTunes can access it, too.
As it is, to get the advantage of that DRM-free-ness, I still have to install and use iTunes, which is going to use DRM for its own access, even if it gives me unencrypted files at the end. Which also means I'm going to have to use Windows or OS X, and then transfer the files to an OS of my choice, so I can play them on Amarok.
Oh yeah, and the iPod. And now the iPhone. Large chunks of the market, large chunks of consumer-unfriendly lock-in.
If you model interfaces from how individuals act, there will be as many interfaces as there are faces. Approximation will result in interface "races."
That's why we model them on metaphors.
But, it is worth watching how users actually think, what they actually care about, etc.
In terms of what can be measured, there are a few such as task switching speed, CPU overhead, and statistical learning curves.
CPU overhead is irrelevant for most of these. Not only are CPUs getting absurdly cheap, but I would consider that to be a form of preoptimization.
Put another way: The most efficient user interface that I know of, in terms of CPU usage (and while still being useful for anything), is the terminal. But once you determine that there's something you need to do which isn't being met by the terminal (web browsing, graphic design), you're going to have to spend the resources anyway.
Set up impossible goals such as "perfection" and, well...
Of course we'll never get there.
But in some cases, we can genuinely say that something is a step closer.
For example: Not caring about whether a program is running or not, in order to use it. Pretty much anyone in a position to build a new UI will do this -- see just about every smartphone in existence. The only people who would care are people who are feeling anal about performance, and that can be addressed to an extent that the only people really caring about that performance impact are also the kind of users who want their programs to run fewer (or more) threads (or processes).
If you can think of a good counterargument, let me know. But certainly,
their reasons may not even be logical or anything solvable.
we don't need those people. If their reasons are purely illogical, and it is a known, measurable improvement for everyone but them, they really aren't a priority. They may not have to adapt, of course -- especially with a system like Linux, say, where window managers and whole desktop environments can be chosen from hundreds, and swapped out at will -- but if they do, it's far less of a loss than forcing everyone else in the world to constantly, say, make that mental switch between clicking the taskbar or clicking the quicklauncher, and then remember to close it when they're done.
VLC can do hardware acceleration. The Flash Player can not.
The Flash Player certainly could do hardware acceleration, if it didn't suck. That was my point.
And, while I can understand that pixel-precision in the context of video as part of a larger application -- though I still would think that GPU-accelerated polygons would be better than pure-software vector graphics, for non-video elements -- what about the case where you're using Flash purely to play video?
My argument would be, that is a gross mis-use of Flash, or anything like it. Embed the video directly with that object tag, or use HTML5. Even so, you'd think Adobe would've reacted to things like YouTube by making the video playback not suck.
And by the way: The DirectX 9 requirement is a cop-out. For years before that, games have run faster and looked better than Flash content, and for as long as YouTube and ffmpeg's flv support have existed, video playback has been slower and looked worse in Flash than in any other application. If everyone else could make it work, why not Flash, at least when fullscreen?
Why not just use DirectX or OpenGL from the beginning? Or, once it became clear the hardware was available, why not take advantage of it when it is?
I was using a dock in WindowMaker before I saw OS X -- WindowMaker was, of course, "inspired" by the same source in NextStep.
The difference is, the dock is not only about running applications, it's meant to just be about applications. So, if I want to go to the Web, I click Firefox (or Safari), and if it's open, I get a window of it. If it's not open, it opens, and I get a window of it. I no longer have to think about whether stuff is open or not.
In fact, Leopard seems to even further de-emphasize the ability to know whether an application is running or not.
This is both good and bad -- good, because we really shouldn't have to care; bad, because there is still a concept of an application "running" or not at the Unix level. I really feel that this should be transparent, even to the application developer.
But I digress...
It's not just grouping windows. After all, you can still minimize a window on OS X, and it will become its own Dock icon. And you can put other things on the Dock.
No, it's all about mirroring the way users actually think, which is "I want to go to iTunes", and then "I want to go to Word", not "I want to launch iTunes" or "I want to find the running iTunes window" or "I want to close iTunes, then open Word". They want to go to iTunes until they want to go to something else.
Once they're in Word, then they can think about which document they want to open or find -- but an intelligent application could even hide that. Autosave with a near-infinite, persistent undo stack, and frequent backups, is much better, I think, than save/revert.
Storage is cheap, and software doesn't take a lot of space.
For my father, here is what I did:
Pair of 250 gig hard drives (my old ones). One formatted 50 gigs Windows, and 50 gigs just as a second NTFS partition. The other formatted as Linux.
Boot the Linux drive, then ntfsclone the Windows drive (be sure to use the -s option) -- even just with lzop compression, chances are you can fit quite a lot of images. Such as: Just after installing each item.
Standard backup solutions like rdiffbackup can be used for the other drive.
Then, when something goes wrong, boot Linux, use ClamAV to scan the data drive, and re-image the software drive. Problem solved.
Even so, it's still got the same problem Silverlight does: The open source project has to catch up from the beginning (8 months of the spec being open vs 13 years of Flash), while the proprietary version marches ahead.
Apple has almost universally been more locked-down than Microsoft, about almost everything. They only get away with it by making generally better products.
Neither one in isolation is that surprising, but the result is strange.
Or because they understand how the patent system works, and they've seen the upgrade treadmill of.NET?
Haven't you noticed? Mono has been playing catch-up with.NET for a long time now.
Have you used Silverlight 2.0? Because I'll tell you, writing code in.NET beats the pants off ActionScript any day of the week and twice on Sundays.
Who said anything about ActionScript?
Now, Javascript is actually a nice language, once you get to know it. I much prefer it to C#, though I'll grant that things like IronPython and IronRuby may eventually make.NET interesting...
Fred Brooks something something Man-Month...
So you say, and that's become the rhetoric of people making excuses for how Microsoft, with their resources, can consistently get this so wrong.
The problem is, other people are getting it right.
Usually, people complain about MS not ditching backwards compatibility in favor of "cleaner" implementations and here you are, saying that they are well known for doing exactly that.
Not quite.
Microsoft is well known for leaving all kinds of legacy cruft around, in an effort to preserve backwards compatibility. Sometimes, this works very well. Sometimes too well -- I really can't blame Microsoft for a piece of software being so poorly coded as to overflow when the version number is too big, but I do find it a bit disturbing that Microsoft fixes these problems anyway (by detecting such programs and lying to them about version number).
And yet, this is, in fact, the same Microsoft which consistently breaks backwards compatibility with old formats of Office documents. It's gotten so bad that sometimes, OpenOffice has better compatibility with a certain old document than newer versions of MS office.
They use "backwards compatibility" as an excuse not to fix IE's rendering problems... yet newer versions of IE require XP or later, and I'm guessing that before long they'll require Vista or later.
I don't really get it either, except the cynical side of me suspects it's entirely business reasons. There's clearly no technical reason DirectX 10 can't run on XP, for example, as people outside Microsoft, without access to the source, have backported it successfully.
First, it's got the same problem as any other proprietary application which opens specs -- there's only one implementation, and that implementation is proprietary. Most specs at least include a reference implementation.
More importantly, how long have the specs been open? Last I checked, they were only open for developing anything but a client/viewer.
GP doesn't know WTF they're talking about......but they're right. PDF is an open standard, implemented by other vendors in a way that sucks, yet Acrobat still sucks.
In fact, Adobe has never really been known for performance. For another fun test, take a Flash video, download the FLV, and play it in any other player. Compare CPU usage.
Last I tried this, in Flash, it was over 50% of a core. In VLC, or mplayer, or pretty much anything else -- despite the fact that this is FLV, which is presumably designed for Flash -- and it's less than 1%.
What I was talking about is to move that software function out of the OS entirely so that the computer could boot off a RamDisk.
So, presumably either there's a persistent store to back it, meaning you're just booting from that RAID anyway...
Or it's got some amount of power running through it, maybe backed by a battery....sounds pretty much exactly like a laptop in suspend-to-RAM. Otherwise known as Standby, or Sleep. If it's "safe sleep", you're even safe if power cuts out completely.
I don't really see how this would beat an SSD or a NAS-in-another-room for the same purpose. Mixing/burning doesn't exactly take a lot of disk IO, does it?
Microsoft doesn't want to use LGPL software in their OS for obvious reasons.
Sorry, it's not obvious. Were it GPL, you'd have a point.
Consider that Apple uses Webkit in Safari, which is shipped with OS X. Why is that not a problem for them?
Microsoft has no way to be 100% sure that the code in there is written by the people who claim to have written it
Apple has already taken that risk. No one has come forward. The iPhone is getting pretty huge, and it has Webkit on it.
Google has also taken that risk. It's on Android. It's in Chrome.
Many apps use and embed MSHTML/Trident including htmlhelp, MSDN library, the GameSpy Arcade frontend...
So include Trident as a legacy version. Apps which support the newer library can use it.
But when Wine uses Gecko, these same applications don't seem to have any problems.
Many web pages, especially on corporate intranets wont run in anything other than IE
Those pages are abortions. No new pages like that should be built.
For the existing ones, they don't necessarily work with IE7, and IE8 is about to be released (or is it out already?), so I think making a newer, incompatible version wouldn't be such a tragedy.
nor do these other browsers support any kind of "protected mode" ala IE7
...except Chrome, which is splitting it out per-process.
What's more, given the environments we've seen these run on, I doubt there would be any real problem doing that. It's a rendering engine -- why should it care what user it runs as? Everything that needs to run outside the sandbox is chrome anyway, and could be carried over.
Basically its just not possible to replace MSHTML/Trident with gecko or webkit and not break a whole bunch of stuff that is VERY important to Microsoft customers.
You mean, like they did with Vista and UAC? Microsoft isn't exactly known for backwards compatibility.
At the very least, they could start shipping other browsers as the default -- and this takes almost no effort. People for whom the above matters can use IE.
Silverlight could've been cool -- but they built it on.NET, which means it's going to be hard for a lot of people to trust. In any case, it's a plugin, as opposed to an actual, direct improvement to the existing technologies.
And they still haven't got those right. Why not take all of the Silverlight developers, and have them work on maybe finally getting CSS right in IE?
It's a lot easier to fix IE than to ditch IE and shoehorn Gecko/Webkit into the IE programming model.
Except that it's already been done, to an extent -- Gecko can be embedded in Wine, and used as a browser activex control.
And, current evidence would not tend to suggest that. Consider how many years Microsoft has been at it, and IE is still not fixed. Compare to several browsers which have been built from the ground up since IE6.
When I say easier, I mean for a company that would have to throw away a huge investment
It didn't work out. Oh well. Now would be a very good time to cut your losses.
as well as have many people around who know so much about a product that doesn't behave like that any more.
If you're talking about code, I can't imagine people want to work on IE, considering the alternatives. And there are plenty of open source developers they could hire.
If you're talking about end-users, they won't know, and they won't care. IE9 is going to be strange and different any way they do it. Why not make it strange, different, and actually better?
Plus, not invented here.
Neither was DOS. But if that's the reason, it's a truly petty reason that's costing them quite a lot.
If you see the development history of the various existing WS standards, especially the W3C ones, you'll see that Microsoft was a major driving force behind most of them, and many related standards...
That also seems odd, especially in light of the Halloween documents. A web service protocol (WebDAV) would've been great for Exchange, but was instead extended/extinguished.
I'm not just talking about web standards. Microsoft has been against any standard they can't control for pretty much their entire lifetime.
This is an open source project about web standards.
If Microsoft really cares about these things, why have they continued to hack on Trident, which has been so far behind in both of those areas? Why not just adopt Gecko or Webkit as the IE/Windows rendering engine?
As it is, they've consistently shunned open standards, including the Web. Only recently have they been starting to fix IE to follow web standards, and it really seems like they're doing the bare minimum they have to do to claim they're making an effort.
Maybe that's what this is, too? Good press for them, while at the same time, they're doing more to undermine web standards with things like Silverlight than they have ever done to support them?
just do this : "sudo echo -n 'disk' >/sys/power/state "
Actually, that won't work. The > is interpreted by the shell, which means the "echo" command will run as root, but the shell redirection will run as the user -- the exact opposite of what you want.
I've taken to doing things like this:
echo -n disk | sudo tee/sys/power/state
The extra output can be suppressed, if you really care, with a >/dev/null at the end.
You can't have something like a remote control since you need power to watch for a signal.
Not really. See: AM radios, RFID tags...
Question is whether it costs any power to have a transistor there, so that the power from the signal alone could start a chain reaction that wakes up the system.
Actually, it's pretty clear what they already do -- retain information about my searches, email, etc for several years, whether or not I delete it, and possibly forever after they've let me hide among 255 other people.
Moreover, it doesn't matter what I think Google will do, because I think that ultimately, Google will have to comply with a court order. If they didn't store my information in the first place, or purged it when I asked, they would have nothing of value to turn over to the government. If they retain it, then perhaps they will put up a fight, but perhaps they will lose.
Is there anything concrete that you can point do that google has done that is terrible
google.cn, for one. That is: They are deliberately cooperating and censoring at the PRC's request.
But it's not that it's terrible, so much as that their concerns are real and legitimate. The term FUD is usually used to describe vague fearmongering that has no real basis. I would say that these privacy concerns are very real and solid.
Also: Monopoly law is very clear. It applies regardless of whether a company is being "evil" or not -- having sufficient marketshare makes you a monopoly. Google is a search monopoly.
Slashdot Mirror
Or just HTML5 video tag. Even if the iPhone doesn't already support it, Safari does (using QuickTime), so it doesn't seem wholly unlikely that iPhone Safari (using iPhone QucikTime) would support it.
That gets you Safari and Firefox, and it seems likely other browsers (Chrome, Konqueror, etc) will follow.
If that fails -- and it should be possible to gracefully detect that failure, which I think is not necessarily true with an object tag -- fall back to Flash and/or object tags.
(if anyone starts thinking iTunes, think of where iTunes is going in regards to DRM).
I'm also thinking about the fact that iTunes still requires that everything be bought through the iTunes application. It's not that fucking hard to put up a webpage that provides a download when you give it a credit card number. Nor is it that hard to then provide a REST API, so rich clients like iTunes can access it, too.
As it is, to get the advantage of that DRM-free-ness, I still have to install and use iTunes, which is going to use DRM for its own access, even if it gives me unencrypted files at the end. Which also means I'm going to have to use Windows or OS X, and then transfer the files to an OS of my choice, so I can play them on Amarok.
Oh yeah, and the iPod. And now the iPhone. Large chunks of the market, large chunks of consumer-unfriendly lock-in.
If you model interfaces from how individuals act, there will be as many interfaces as there are faces. Approximation will result in interface "races."
That's why we model them on metaphors.
But, it is worth watching how users actually think, what they actually care about, etc.
In terms of what can be measured, there are a few such as task switching speed, CPU overhead, and statistical learning curves.
CPU overhead is irrelevant for most of these. Not only are CPUs getting absurdly cheap, but I would consider that to be a form of preoptimization.
Put another way: The most efficient user interface that I know of, in terms of CPU usage (and while still being useful for anything), is the terminal. But once you determine that there's something you need to do which isn't being met by the terminal (web browsing, graphic design), you're going to have to spend the resources anyway.
Set up impossible goals such as "perfection" and, well...
Of course we'll never get there.
But in some cases, we can genuinely say that something is a step closer.
For example: Not caring about whether a program is running or not, in order to use it. Pretty much anyone in a position to build a new UI will do this -- see just about every smartphone in existence. The only people who would care are people who are feeling anal about performance, and that can be addressed to an extent that the only people really caring about that performance impact are also the kind of users who want their programs to run fewer (or more) threads (or processes).
If you can think of a good counterargument, let me know. But certainly,
their reasons may not even be logical or anything solvable.
we don't need those people. If their reasons are purely illogical, and it is a known, measurable improvement for everyone but them, they really aren't a priority. They may not have to adapt, of course -- especially with a system like Linux, say, where window managers and whole desktop environments can be chosen from hundreds, and swapped out at will -- but if they do, it's far less of a loss than forcing everyone else in the world to constantly, say, make that mental switch between clicking the taskbar or clicking the quicklauncher, and then remember to close it when they're done.
VLC can do hardware acceleration. The Flash Player can not.
The Flash Player certainly could do hardware acceleration, if it didn't suck. That was my point.
And, while I can understand that pixel-precision in the context of video as part of a larger application -- though I still would think that GPU-accelerated polygons would be better than pure-software vector graphics, for non-video elements -- what about the case where you're using Flash purely to play video?
My argument would be, that is a gross mis-use of Flash, or anything like it. Embed the video directly with that object tag, or use HTML5. Even so, you'd think Adobe would've reacted to things like YouTube by making the video playback not suck.
And by the way: The DirectX 9 requirement is a cop-out. For years before that, games have run faster and looked better than Flash content, and for as long as YouTube and ffmpeg's flv support have existed, video playback has been slower and looked worse in Flash than in any other application. If everyone else could make it work, why not Flash, at least when fullscreen?
Why not just use DirectX or OpenGL from the beginning? Or, once it became clear the hardware was available, why not take advantage of it when it is?
I was using a dock in WindowMaker before I saw OS X -- WindowMaker was, of course, "inspired" by the same source in NextStep.
The difference is, the dock is not only about running applications, it's meant to just be about applications. So, if I want to go to the Web, I click Firefox (or Safari), and if it's open, I get a window of it. If it's not open, it opens, and I get a window of it. I no longer have to think about whether stuff is open or not.
In fact, Leopard seems to even further de-emphasize the ability to know whether an application is running or not.
This is both good and bad -- good, because we really shouldn't have to care; bad, because there is still a concept of an application "running" or not at the Unix level. I really feel that this should be transparent, even to the application developer.
But I digress...
It's not just grouping windows. After all, you can still minimize a window on OS X, and it will become its own Dock icon. And you can put other things on the Dock.
No, it's all about mirroring the way users actually think, which is "I want to go to iTunes", and then "I want to go to Word", not "I want to launch iTunes" or "I want to find the running iTunes window" or "I want to close iTunes, then open Word". They want to go to iTunes until they want to go to something else.
Once they're in Word, then they can think about which document they want to open or find -- but an intelligent application could even hide that. Autosave with a near-infinite, persistent undo stack, and frequent backups, is much better, I think, than save/revert.
Storage is cheap, and software doesn't take a lot of space.
For my father, here is what I did:
Pair of 250 gig hard drives (my old ones). One formatted 50 gigs Windows, and 50 gigs just as a second NTFS partition. The other formatted as Linux.
Boot the Linux drive, then ntfsclone the Windows drive (be sure to use the -s option) -- even just with lzop compression, chances are you can fit quite a lot of images. Such as: Just after installing each item.
Standard backup solutions like rdiffbackup can be used for the other drive.
Then, when something goes wrong, boot Linux, use ClamAV to scan the data drive, and re-image the software drive. Problem solved.
Did you even fucking try?
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=crysis+xp+directx+10
Ah. Good news, then.
Even so, it's still got the same problem Silverlight does: The open source project has to catch up from the beginning (8 months of the spec being open vs 13 years of Flash), while the proprietary version marches ahead.
Not that it won't happen, but it will take time.
It's not just 64-bit Linux.
Flash 10 at least made it watchable, and fixed fullscreen, and quite a few other issues.
But try VLC vs Flash on any platform, you'll probably get the same results.
Actually, I'm surprised.
Apple has almost universally been more locked-down than Microsoft, about almost everything. They only get away with it by making generally better products.
Neither one in isolation is that surprising, but the result is strange.
Because those people are not very bright.
Or because they understand how the patent system works, and they've seen the upgrade treadmill of .NET?
Haven't you noticed? Mono has been playing catch-up with .NET for a long time now.
Have you used Silverlight 2.0? Because I'll tell you, writing code in .NET beats the pants off ActionScript any day of the week and twice on Sundays.
Who said anything about ActionScript?
Now, Javascript is actually a nice language, once you get to know it. I much prefer it to C#, though I'll grant that things like IronPython and IronRuby may eventually make .NET interesting...
Fred Brooks something something Man-Month...
So you say, and that's become the rhetoric of people making excuses for how Microsoft, with their resources, can consistently get this so wrong.
The problem is, other people are getting it right.
So what's Microsoft's excuse, really?
Usually, people complain about MS not ditching backwards compatibility in favor of "cleaner" implementations and here you are, saying that they are well known for doing exactly that.
Not quite.
Microsoft is well known for leaving all kinds of legacy cruft around, in an effort to preserve backwards compatibility. Sometimes, this works very well. Sometimes too well -- I really can't blame Microsoft for a piece of software being so poorly coded as to overflow when the version number is too big, but I do find it a bit disturbing that Microsoft fixes these problems anyway (by detecting such programs and lying to them about version number).
And yet, this is, in fact, the same Microsoft which consistently breaks backwards compatibility with old formats of Office documents. It's gotten so bad that sometimes, OpenOffice has better compatibility with a certain old document than newer versions of MS office.
They use "backwards compatibility" as an excuse not to fix IE's rendering problems... yet newer versions of IE require XP or later, and I'm guessing that before long they'll require Vista or later.
I don't really get it either, except the cynical side of me suspects it's entirely business reasons. There's clearly no technical reason DirectX 10 can't run on XP, for example, as people outside Microsoft, without access to the source, have backported it successfully.
Not really.
First, it's got the same problem as any other proprietary application which opens specs -- there's only one implementation, and that implementation is proprietary. Most specs at least include a reference implementation.
More importantly, how long have the specs been open? Last I checked, they were only open for developing anything but a client/viewer.
Which proves two things:
GP doesn't know WTF they're talking about... ...but they're right. PDF is an open standard, implemented by other vendors in a way that sucks, yet Acrobat still sucks.
In fact, Adobe has never really been known for performance. For another fun test, take a Flash video, download the FLV, and play it in any other player. Compare CPU usage.
Last I tried this, in Flash, it was over 50% of a core. In VLC, or mplayer, or pretty much anything else -- despite the fact that this is FLV, which is presumably designed for Flash -- and it's less than 1%.
What I was talking about is to move that software function out of the OS entirely so that the computer could boot off a RamDisk.
So, presumably either there's a persistent store to back it, meaning you're just booting from that RAID anyway...
Or it's got some amount of power running through it, maybe backed by a battery. ...sounds pretty much exactly like a laptop in suspend-to-RAM. Otherwise known as Standby, or Sleep. If it's "safe sleep", you're even safe if power cuts out completely.
I don't really see how this would beat an SSD or a NAS-in-another-room for the same purpose. Mixing/burning doesn't exactly take a lot of disk IO, does it?
Microsoft doesn't want to use LGPL software in their OS for obvious reasons.
Sorry, it's not obvious. Were it GPL, you'd have a point.
Consider that Apple uses Webkit in Safari, which is shipped with OS X. Why is that not a problem for them?
Microsoft has no way to be 100% sure that the code in there is written by the people who claim to have written it
Apple has already taken that risk. No one has come forward. The iPhone is getting pretty huge, and it has Webkit on it.
Google has also taken that risk. It's on Android. It's in Chrome.
Many apps use and embed MSHTML/Trident including htmlhelp, MSDN library, the GameSpy Arcade frontend...
So include Trident as a legacy version. Apps which support the newer library can use it.
But when Wine uses Gecko, these same applications don't seem to have any problems.
Many web pages, especially on corporate intranets wont run in anything other than IE
Those pages are abortions. No new pages like that should be built.
For the existing ones, they don't necessarily work with IE7, and IE8 is about to be released (or is it out already?), so I think making a newer, incompatible version wouldn't be such a tragedy.
nor do these other browsers support any kind of "protected mode" ala IE7
...except Chrome, which is splitting it out per-process.
What's more, given the environments we've seen these run on, I doubt there would be any real problem doing that. It's a rendering engine -- why should it care what user it runs as? Everything that needs to run outside the sandbox is chrome anyway, and could be carried over.
Basically its just not possible to replace MSHTML/Trident with gecko or webkit and not break a whole bunch of stuff that is VERY important to Microsoft customers.
You mean, like they did with Vista and UAC? Microsoft isn't exactly known for backwards compatibility.
At the very least, they could start shipping other browsers as the default -- and this takes almost no effort. People for whom the above matters can use IE.
When did Flash become a web standard?
When did Flash become the only alternative?
We've still got HTML5, SVG, Javascript, etc.
Silverlight could've been cool -- but they built it on .NET, which means it's going to be hard for a lot of people to trust. In any case, it's a plugin, as opposed to an actual, direct improvement to the existing technologies.
And they still haven't got those right. Why not take all of the Silverlight developers, and have them work on maybe finally getting CSS right in IE?
It's a lot easier to fix IE than to ditch IE and shoehorn Gecko/Webkit into the IE programming model.
Except that it's already been done, to an extent -- Gecko can be embedded in Wine, and used as a browser activex control.
And, current evidence would not tend to suggest that. Consider how many years Microsoft has been at it, and IE is still not fixed. Compare to several browsers which have been built from the ground up since IE6.
When I say easier, I mean for a company that would have to throw away a huge investment
It didn't work out. Oh well. Now would be a very good time to cut your losses.
as well as have many people around who know so much about a product that doesn't behave like that any more.
If you're talking about code, I can't imagine people want to work on IE, considering the alternatives. And there are plenty of open source developers they could hire.
If you're talking about end-users, they won't know, and they won't care. IE9 is going to be strange and different any way they do it. Why not make it strange, different, and actually better?
Plus, not invented here.
Neither was DOS. But if that's the reason, it's a truly petty reason that's costing them quite a lot.
If you see the development history of the various existing WS standards, especially the W3C ones, you'll see that Microsoft was a major driving force behind most of them, and many related standards...
That also seems odd, especially in light of the Halloween documents. A web service protocol (WebDAV) would've been great for Exchange, but was instead extended/extinguished.
I'm not just talking about web standards. Microsoft has been against any standard they can't control for pretty much their entire lifetime.
This is an open source project about web standards.
If Microsoft really cares about these things, why have they continued to hack on Trident, which has been so far behind in both of those areas? Why not just adopt Gecko or Webkit as the IE/Windows rendering engine?
As it is, they've consistently shunned open standards, including the Web. Only recently have they been starting to fix IE to follow web standards, and it really seems like they're doing the bare minimum they have to do to claim they're making an effort.
Maybe that's what this is, too? Good press for them, while at the same time, they're doing more to undermine web standards with things like Silverlight than they have ever done to support them?
just do this : "sudo echo -n 'disk' > /sys/power/state "
Actually, that won't work. The > is interpreted by the shell, which means the "echo" command will run as root, but the shell redirection will run as the user -- the exact opposite of what you want.
I've taken to doing things like this:
The extra output can be suppressed, if you really care, with a >/dev/null at the end.
You can't have something like a remote control since you need power to watch for a signal.
Not really. See: AM radios, RFID tags...
Question is whether it costs any power to have a transistor there, so that the power from the signal alone could start a chain reaction that wakes up the system.
What you fear they might do, maybe.
Actually, it's pretty clear what they already do -- retain information about my searches, email, etc for several years, whether or not I delete it, and possibly forever after they've let me hide among 255 other people.
Moreover, it doesn't matter what I think Google will do, because I think that ultimately, Google will have to comply with a court order. If they didn't store my information in the first place, or purged it when I asked, they would have nothing of value to turn over to the government. If they retain it, then perhaps they will put up a fight, but perhaps they will lose.
Is there anything concrete that you can point do that google has done that is terrible
google.cn, for one. That is: They are deliberately cooperating and censoring at the PRC's request.
But it's not that it's terrible, so much as that their concerns are real and legitimate. The term FUD is usually used to describe vague fearmongering that has no real basis. I would say that these privacy concerns are very real and solid.
Also: Monopoly law is very clear. It applies regardless of whether a company is being "evil" or not -- having sufficient marketshare makes you a monopoly. Google is a search monopoly.
Copypasta.