It lets you pick your language - its moving towards the DLR (dynamic language runtime - hello Ruby/Python).
Flash, on the other hand, has given us Tamarin, which is already optimized towards dynamic languages. I wouldn't be surprised to see Ruby/Python in Flash very soon.
Its JIT compiled.
Flash is bytecode interpreted.
Its basically flash done properly.
Except for the part where Flash at least has a working closed solution on Linux, and a few attempts at open solutions. I wonder which is farther along, Gnash or Moonlight?
And no, I would say that the HTML5 Video tag is "flash done properly" -- not Yet Another Proprietary Plugin.
Well, color me skeptical, homer. Even for Fox News that seems a bit over the top.
I think it's photoshopped, too, but for other reasons.
The "terrorist fist-jab" is about as over the top as it gets, without actually re-branding it "Republican News" -- so nothing they do surprises me anymore, so much as saddens me.
You see? "Change" is meaningless. It isn't specific. It doesn't tell the people what exactly he will do.
Oh, specifics aren't the problem. He said, specifically, that he would support a filibuster of any bill which contained wiretapping indemnity.
I don't know what you call it in Washington, but here, I would say that a "Yea" vote is the exact fucking opposite of a filibuster.
He actually has plenty of very clear stances on a lot of issues -- just look at his website. More there than on McCain's, last I checked. So the problem isn't that he's afraid to say what he thinks.
The problem is, either he lies, or he changes his mind far too quickly.
Unfortunately, that also makes great fodder for one's political opponents. "Look, he voted against the Ice Cream For Orphans (And Some Other Stuff) Act! Why does he hate children so much?"
You would think that there'd be just as much fodder for you, if they try that.
"Hi, I just want you to know that I support Ice Cream For Orphans. I do not, however, support the Ice Cream For Orphans Act, as it also required daily anal sex for said orphans. Have you stopped to think about why my opponent wants to ass-rape children?"
Folk got way to over-excited about it. Unfortunately the telcos probably had a viable defense that they were acting (1) on government instructions and (2) on government advice that their action was legal.
So let them make that defense...
Regardless, what bothers me are these two facts:
Obama (or, at the very least, a member of his staff) said he would support a filibuster of any bill which granted such indemnity.
He didn't.
I like a lot of Obama's stated positions. I like them better than McCain's stated positions. But I don't like that he's willing to say something so clearly and directly, and go against it only a few months later.
I understand that it's OK for someone to change their mind, but that clear a statement, and that short a time until he did just the opposite (not only did he not filibuster, he voted for the thing) tells me that I can't believe a word he says.
I know you'll tell me I was naive to believe a politician in the first place, but I'm still not happy about it, because with things as they are, I'm going to be voting for someone I can't trust.
I don't recall if you jumped into the teleporter if you'd exit and continue your jump arc,
To some extent, I'd guess. It wouldn't be perfect, but let me put it this way: Duke 3D was a two-and-a-half-D game, not a 3D game.
This implies, among other things, that the engine didn't actually support rooms on top of one another -- that all had to be faked in some way.
So how could you swim underwater? The simple answer is, the surface of the water was a silent teleporter -- it might even have to be marked "water" -- and the "underwater" was actually a completely different place in the map.
Going upstairs was a different trick -- the fact that the game could handle two rooms, or "sectors", occupying the same space, so long as you couldn't see both at once. There was a lot of really creative level design involving staircases and the like to make it seem as though you had a two-story building, while never actually letting you see both stories at once.
If you want to get a really good idea of what the Duke3D engine was, find one of the secret levels -- the one with a big room in the middle, and a hallway ringing around the outside (kind of a donut shape) -- don't remember what it was called. I do remember that you could turn right three times, and end up in a different room -- there were four separate rooms (or "sectors") set in the same physical space.
Every database interface I've seen can import a tab or comma delimited file.
Which is great, if you want to use MySQL as a mail client.
Every email app that wants to can build a parser to do so. It's not like it's hard to import tab or comma delimited files.
If it's that easy, Thunderbird is open source. Go for it.
The fault lies with other programs that don't support a fully compatible and importable format like csv's.
Or, I don't know, mbox -- which actually is supported by far more things than CSVs. Which Thunderbird uses internally.
And you know what? That's in the FAQ. Something for you to try: Before flaming something, at least have the decency to check the FAQ to see if your accusation is actually true.
It's much easier for either of them to only have to compete with one opponent rather than the plethora of actual opinions out there.
If I may don my tinfoil hat for a moment... Eurasia and/or Eastasia.
But, more seriously, it does make sense -- more and more, Apple is becoming who people run to when they're sick of Windows. And they're left with something every bit as proprietary (more so, even), and still frequently bound to Microsoft (still need an XP license to run it in a virtual machine)...
I think Linux scares both of them more than each other.
And, even more seriously, I doubt this was a conscious decision to lock out Linux. I suspect, rather, that it was a boneheaded decision by someone who doesn't understand the way the Internet is supposed to work.
What 'standards' to support, and are supportable, is the catch.
Right. The state of various codecs is pretty sad right now.
That is: Apple is likely to just support whatever QuickTime does, but QuickTime will only include formats that Apple has licensed. They haven't had their lawyers look over the open formats (Theora, Vorbis, Dirac) to make sure that there's no risk of some submarine patent -- of some company just waiting for one of these formats to get popular, so they can start trolling.
On the other hand, Firefox really can't afford to license anything, so they'll probably only support open formats. Hopefully, they'll make it easy to plug things in, and on Medibuntu, I hope to see proper x264 support.
But the net result is, with the video tag as is, you're still going to be forcing people to install some sort of plugin, unless Apple does something really surprising.
First of all: I agree with you. I use Bazaar for my own personal projects.
But I think it's important to remember that any version control is better than none. Here's what I'd suggest as an order of importance:
Get onto version control, if you're not. If the VCS you choose sucks, you can change later, but anything's better than simple shared network storage -- or worse, emailing files (or patches) back and forth.
Next, make sure it's open source, if you can. Your source code and version history are probably your most important assets, as a developer -- the last thing you need is to lock them up in some proprietary format. It's probably easier to migrate from SVN to Git than from Visual SourceSafe to SVN.
Next, make sure it's distributed. At the very least, the distributed nature of Git, Bazaar, Mercurial, etc, all mean they've at least been forced to implement good merging. (SVN 1.5 merging is better than 1.4, but let's be honest -- it's still a joke.)
If you can go all the way to Git in one step, great. But those are the steps I'd suggest. And if you're going to go with a gigantic, monolithic open source repository, SVN is an order of magnitude better than CVS, yet behaves mostly the same.
The DNC didn't build anything themselves, nor should they... They chose a vendor....
First, we do agree that they chose this vendor -- so they probably should have gone with a different vendor, right?
Second, whether it's the DNC, some vendor, or Microsoft itself, there was, at some point, someone who made a choice to spend a bit of extra work on "choosing an OS"... which implies that money was spent (somewhere, somehow) to block that OS, instead of letting the site fail (or succeed!) on that OS.
Silverlight does exist for Linux. Perhaps not in a usable form, but it does exist. Because of the user-agent detection here, someone would not only have to get Moonlight working, they'd also have to spoof their user-agent -- which, among other things, tells the DNC that they have no Linux users.
Now, what's the alternative? sakusha was implying that getting Linux support would mean spending extra money, but you've made it very clear -- it would, instead, be about choosing a vendor who's already implemented Linux support (or simply Flash support).
I believe it would be worth it, even if there was some cost. But I don't think there would be.
It says you have to install Silverlight to see it.
I hate to say it, but Flash has existed, and been a viable option, for long before Silverlight, and it's got a far greater install base. Why'd they choose Silverlight over Flash?
I'm sure there are valid reasons, I'd just like to hear them.
I do not want the Democratic party wasting its money on a partisan Operating System war by supporting a fringe OS that has less than 1% share of the desktop.
So you'd rather have them spend their money actively blocking it?
Everything we know today developed in a society that was utterly permeated by the bible in every nook and cranny.
That's pretty arrogant. Also very wrong.
Plenty of what we know today came from the ancient Greeks, who predated the bible. And there are plenty of nooks in which the bible is not used -- despite your attempts to turn this country into a stealth theocracy, most of us still embrace the separation of church and state, and other religions do exist.
Everything you are - your clothes, your food (clothes don't grow in the stores), your car, your very thoughts come from others, with a tiny drop of personal impact from yourself.
I don't own a car, first of all.
And I take responsibility for all of it, whatever my own influence is. I am aware enough to be able to make my own choices -- so if these things come from others, they come with my endorsement.
If those people choose what economists call "Nash efficiency" as an ideology (what atheists do),
improving themselves without conscious regard to others (e.g. "piracy is not a crime")
And as an atheist, I can tell you that you're dead wrong about that. What gave you the idea that atheists don't have conscious regard to others?
For that matter, ask a pirate -- I don't think any will try to say it's not a crime. They might occasionally remind you that it's not piracy -- piracy is armed robbery on the high seas; this is copyright infringement -- and they might say that it's not immoral, or that copyright law needs to change.
But I don't think anyone will claim it isn't a crime.
However, if everyone around you (example... your current employer and any other possible employer) behaved atheistically, improving primarily themselves without regard to others, you'd be out of a job,
Unlikely. My current employer likes me as a person, and has more work than he can do himself, so there is plenty that I can do.
What part of that requires belief in a mythical sky-god?
(even the food would disappear from the local supermarket, as it will be more in the personal intrest of the owner to simply keep it himself). You'd die (even if you are said owner, because deliveries would stop).
Disregarding for the moment your misguided assumptions about atheism, consider that owner -- as you said, deliveries would stop.
So, even if the owner was the most horrible person imaginable, and didn't care at all about anyone but himself, he would keep selling food to you, because that way, deliveries continue -- and also, that way, he gets money to spend on some things he wants other than food.
Before the vandals and visigoths started their massive immigration into the Roman Empire, life expectancy for a slave was around 60 years (this is 300-400 B.C. we're talking about). Once Rome fell, life expectancy of a king dropped to 30 years, and most people didn't live long enough to have children (life expectancy : about 10-15 years). That's what "bread and games" ultimately achieved.
What's your evidence that "bread and games" was responsible for this, assuming the rest of your statistics are accurate?
If you follow the Christian credo, and give to others (that are preferentially also Christians) without expecting anything in return,
If you do that, you're a hypocrite -- you're giving to others and expecting faith in return.
Why are they preferentially also Christians?
And for what it's worth, what was included on the Rosetta Disk was the first few chapters of Genesis, which have absolutely nothing to do with "giving to others"
Tons of it can be reproduced - because it is in the public domain due to it's copyright having expired.
And tons more cannot, because it's not in the public domain, due to said animated mouse.
Or are you you arrogant and ignorant as to believe the only things that have so influenced mankind have only been produced within the last century?
Except this is supposed to be a time capsule showing the world the way it is today, not the way it was a hundred years ago. And there is so much we could be showing them, were it not locked down by copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
So you're saying that once a product dominates a particular market, that's it? That product should stay dominant forever?
No, I'm saying that replacing it with an inferior product isn't progress.
Silverlight is simply better technology (as you would expect, since it came later).
It's also just as proprietary as Flash, and seems to be less cross-platform than IE.
It lets you pick your language - its moving towards the DLR (dynamic language runtime - hello Ruby/Python).
Flash, on the other hand, has given us Tamarin, which is already optimized towards dynamic languages. I wouldn't be surprised to see Ruby/Python in Flash very soon.
Its JIT compiled.
Flash is bytecode interpreted.
Its basically flash done properly.
Except for the part where Flash at least has a working closed solution on Linux, and a few attempts at open solutions. I wonder which is farther along, Gnash or Moonlight?
And no, I would say that the HTML5 Video tag is "flash done properly" -- not Yet Another Proprietary Plugin.
H.264 requires twice as much CPU power to decode,
Which is irrelevant, when you have hardware support. When you don't, just turn down the resolution.
and Flash doesn't support adaptive streaming like Silverlight does.
This might be a good point.
But you've essentially said that the Democrats care more about "adaptive streaming", whatever it is, than about getting their video to everyone.
Well, color me skeptical, homer. Even for Fox News that seems a bit over the top.
I think it's photoshopped, too, but for other reasons.
The "terrorist fist-jab" is about as over the top as it gets, without actually re-branding it "Republican News" -- so nothing they do surprises me anymore, so much as saddens me.
Are you calling these candidates corrupt simply because they've been in the senate for a long time, or do you have some other reason to believe this.
Mostly their voting records.
You see? "Change" is meaningless. It isn't specific. It doesn't tell the people what exactly he will do.
Oh, specifics aren't the problem. He said, specifically, that he would support a filibuster of any bill which contained wiretapping indemnity.
I don't know what you call it in Washington, but here, I would say that a "Yea" vote is the exact fucking opposite of a filibuster.
He actually has plenty of very clear stances on a lot of issues -- just look at his website. More there than on McCain's, last I checked. So the problem isn't that he's afraid to say what he thinks.
The problem is, either he lies, or he changes his mind far too quickly.
Still better than McCain...
Unfortunately, that also makes great fodder for one's political opponents. "Look, he voted against the Ice Cream For Orphans (And Some Other Stuff) Act! Why does he hate children so much?"
You would think that there'd be just as much fodder for you, if they try that.
"Hi, I just want you to know that I support Ice Cream For Orphans. I do not, however, support the Ice Cream For Orphans Act, as it also required daily anal sex for said orphans. Have you stopped to think about why my opponent wants to ass-rape children?"
Folk got way to over-excited about it. Unfortunately the telcos probably had a viable defense that they were acting (1) on government instructions and (2) on government advice that their action was legal.
So let them make that defense...
Regardless, what bothers me are these two facts:
Obama (or, at the very least, a member of his staff) said he would support a filibuster of any bill which granted such indemnity.
He didn't.
I like a lot of Obama's stated positions. I like them better than McCain's stated positions. But I don't like that he's willing to say something so clearly and directly, and go against it only a few months later.
I understand that it's OK for someone to change their mind, but that clear a statement, and that short a time until he did just the opposite (not only did he not filibuster, he voted for the thing) tells me that I can't believe a word he says.
I know you'll tell me I was naive to believe a politician in the first place, but I'm still not happy about it, because with things as they are, I'm going to be voting for someone I can't trust.
I don't recall if you jumped into the teleporter if you'd exit and continue your jump arc,
To some extent, I'd guess. It wouldn't be perfect, but let me put it this way: Duke 3D was a two-and-a-half-D game, not a 3D game.
This implies, among other things, that the engine didn't actually support rooms on top of one another -- that all had to be faked in some way.
So how could you swim underwater? The simple answer is, the surface of the water was a silent teleporter -- it might even have to be marked "water" -- and the "underwater" was actually a completely different place in the map.
Going upstairs was a different trick -- the fact that the game could handle two rooms, or "sectors", occupying the same space, so long as you couldn't see both at once. There was a lot of really creative level design involving staircases and the like to make it seem as though you had a two-story building, while never actually letting you see both stories at once.
If you want to get a really good idea of what the Duke3D engine was, find one of the secret levels -- the one with a big room in the middle, and a hallway ringing around the outside (kind of a donut shape) -- don't remember what it was called. I do remember that you could turn right three times, and end up in a different room -- there were four separate rooms (or "sectors") set in the same physical space.
they just want DRM so we can't post embarrassing video on youtube
If true, that's interesting, because it's pretty much the opposite of what his platform says -- doesn't sound like a "transparent democracy" to me.
That's the trouble, then: Will Biden as VP be worse than McCain as POTUS?
Every database interface I've seen can import a tab or comma delimited file.
Which is great, if you want to use MySQL as a mail client.
Every email app that wants to can build a parser to do so. It's not like it's hard to import tab or comma delimited files.
If it's that easy, Thunderbird is open source. Go for it.
The fault lies with other programs that don't support a fully compatible and importable format like csv's.
Or, I don't know, mbox -- which actually is supported by far more things than CSVs. Which Thunderbird uses internally.
And you know what? That's in the FAQ. Something for you to try: Before flaming something, at least have the decency to check the FAQ to see if your accusation is actually true.
Ever try exporting messages from Thunderbird to anything else?
Actually, I've found a solution -- not a particularly easy one, but a solution -- to the problem of moving email between any two clients:
IMAP.
No, you don't have to have an IMAP server running all the time. Just bring one up for long enough to copy the mail to it, and then back.
At least in any MS product that I've ever seen, there's ALWAYS an option to export data out as a lowest common denominator (ie: flat file).
Erm, not really. Certainly not for email. (Do you know what a "flat file" of an email looks like?)
At least I know that if I don't like using Outlook, I can export my data in about a dozen different formats.
Which of these is supported by Thunderbird? Or by Apple's Mail? Or even by fscking Eudora?
It's much easier for either of them to only have to compete with one opponent rather than the plethora of actual opinions out there.
If I may don my tinfoil hat for a moment... Eurasia and/or Eastasia.
But, more seriously, it does make sense -- more and more, Apple is becoming who people run to when they're sick of Windows. And they're left with something every bit as proprietary (more so, even), and still frequently bound to Microsoft (still need an XP license to run it in a virtual machine)...
I think Linux scares both of them more than each other.
And, even more seriously, I doubt this was a conscious decision to lock out Linux. I suspect, rather, that it was a boneheaded decision by someone who doesn't understand the way the Internet is supposed to work.
Perhaps it is time the browser can 'render' video natively as well, with standard codecs.
Take a look at the HTM5 video tag, which is already supported in Safari and coming to Firefox.
What 'standards' to support, and are supportable, is the catch.
Right. The state of various codecs is pretty sad right now.
That is: Apple is likely to just support whatever QuickTime does, but QuickTime will only include formats that Apple has licensed. They haven't had their lawyers look over the open formats (Theora, Vorbis, Dirac) to make sure that there's no risk of some submarine patent -- of some company just waiting for one of these formats to get popular, so they can start trolling.
On the other hand, Firefox really can't afford to license anything, so they'll probably only support open formats. Hopefully, they'll make it easy to plug things in, and on Medibuntu, I hope to see proper x264 support.
But the net result is, with the video tag as is, you're still going to be forcing people to install some sort of plugin, unless Apple does something really surprising.
I'd not adopt CVS these days, or SVN.
I'd advocate Bazaar
First of all: I agree with you. I use Bazaar for my own personal projects.
But I think it's important to remember that any version control is better than none. Here's what I'd suggest as an order of importance:
Get onto version control, if you're not. If the VCS you choose sucks, you can change later, but anything's better than simple shared network storage -- or worse, emailing files (or patches) back and forth.
Next, make sure it's open source, if you can. Your source code and version history are probably your most important assets, as a developer -- the last thing you need is to lock them up in some proprietary format. It's probably easier to migrate from SVN to Git than from Visual SourceSafe to SVN.
Next, make sure it's distributed. At the very least, the distributed nature of Git, Bazaar, Mercurial, etc, all mean they've at least been forced to implement good merging. (SVN 1.5 merging is better than 1.4, but let's be honest -- it's still a joke.)
If you can go all the way to Git in one step, great. But those are the steps I'd suggest. And if you're going to go with a gigantic, monolithic open source repository, SVN is an order of magnitude better than CVS, yet behaves mostly the same.
The DNC didn't build anything themselves, nor should they... They chose a vendor....
First, we do agree that they chose this vendor -- so they probably should have gone with a different vendor, right?
Second, whether it's the DNC, some vendor, or Microsoft itself, there was, at some point, someone who made a choice to spend a bit of extra work on "choosing an OS"... which implies that money was spent (somewhere, somehow) to block that OS, instead of letting the site fail (or succeed!) on that OS.
Silverlight does exist for Linux. Perhaps not in a usable form, but it does exist. Because of the user-agent detection here, someone would not only have to get Moonlight working, they'd also have to spoof their user-agent -- which, among other things, tells the DNC that they have no Linux users.
Now, what's the alternative? sakusha was implying that getting Linux support would mean spending extra money, but you've made it very clear -- it would, instead, be about choosing a vendor who's already implemented Linux support (or simply Flash support).
I believe it would be worth it, even if there was some cost. But I don't think there would be.
There's Flash, Silverlight, QuickTime, RealPlayer, and Windows Media Player to choose from.
I'd suggest h.264 in an mp4 container. Quicktime will play it, Media Player should play it, and Linux (totem/kaffeine/xine/etc) will play it.
Flash is the known quantity -- it works on Linux, just not very well.
But I think pretty much all of the ones you suggested are a better choice than Silverlight, in its current state.
Any chance this works with Moonlight? Or is that plug-in a Window-only plugin, rather than some sort of Silverlight plugin?
Since invention of flash video we are free from unnecessary plugins
Plugins like, oh, I don't know, maybe, FLASH?!
It says you have to install Silverlight to see it.
I hate to say it, but Flash has existed, and been a viable option, for long before Silverlight, and it's got a far greater install base. Why'd they choose Silverlight over Flash?
I'm sure there are valid reasons, I'd just like to hear them.
Does silverlight for linux exist?
Short answer: Yes.
McCain hates Net Neutrality.
There really isn't a win here.
I do not want the Democratic party wasting its money on a partisan Operating System war by supporting a fringe OS that has less than 1% share of the desktop.
So you'd rather have them spend their money actively blocking it?
Everything we know today developed in a society that was utterly permeated by the bible in every nook and cranny.
That's pretty arrogant. Also very wrong.
Plenty of what we know today came from the ancient Greeks, who predated the bible. And there are plenty of nooks in which the bible is not used -- despite your attempts to turn this country into a stealth theocracy, most of us still embrace the separation of church and state, and other religions do exist.
Everything you are - your clothes, your food (clothes don't grow in the stores), your car, your very thoughts come from others, with a tiny drop of personal impact from yourself.
I don't own a car, first of all.
And I take responsibility for all of it, whatever my own influence is. I am aware enough to be able to make my own choices -- so if these things come from others, they come with my endorsement.
If those people choose what economists call "Nash efficiency" as an ideology (what atheists do),
It would help if you cited something specific -- all I can find on Nash Efficiency tells me it's a chunk of math, not an ideology.
improving themselves without conscious regard to others (e.g. "piracy is not a crime")
And as an atheist, I can tell you that you're dead wrong about that. What gave you the idea that atheists don't have conscious regard to others?
For that matter, ask a pirate -- I don't think any will try to say it's not a crime. They might occasionally remind you that it's not piracy -- piracy is armed robbery on the high seas; this is copyright infringement -- and they might say that it's not immoral, or that copyright law needs to change.
But I don't think anyone will claim it isn't a crime.
However, if everyone around you (example ... your current employer and any other possible employer) behaved atheistically, improving primarily themselves without regard to others, you'd be out of a job,
Unlikely. My current employer likes me as a person, and has more work than he can do himself, so there is plenty that I can do.
What part of that requires belief in a mythical sky-god?
(even the food would disappear from the local supermarket, as it will be more in the personal intrest of the owner to simply keep it himself). You'd die (even if you are said owner, because deliveries would stop).
Disregarding for the moment your misguided assumptions about atheism, consider that owner -- as you said, deliveries would stop.
So, even if the owner was the most horrible person imaginable, and didn't care at all about anyone but himself, he would keep selling food to you, because that way, deliveries continue -- and also, that way, he gets money to spend on some things he wants other than food.
Before the vandals and visigoths started their massive immigration into the Roman Empire, life expectancy for a slave was around 60 years (this is 300-400 B.C. we're talking about). Once Rome fell, life expectancy of a king dropped to 30 years, and most people didn't live long enough to have children (life expectancy : about 10-15 years). That's what "bread and games" ultimately achieved.
What's your evidence that "bread and games" was responsible for this, assuming the rest of your statistics are accurate?
If you follow the Christian credo, and give to others (that are preferentially also Christians) without expecting anything in return,
If you do that, you're a hypocrite -- you're giving to others and expecting faith in return.
Why are they preferentially also Christians?
And for what it's worth, what was included on the Rosetta Disk was the first few chapters of Genesis, which have absolutely nothing to do with "giving to others"
Tons of it can be reproduced - because it is in the public domain due to it's copyright having expired.
And tons more cannot, because it's not in the public domain, due to said animated mouse.
Or are you you arrogant and ignorant as to believe the only things that have so influenced mankind have only been produced within the last century?
Except this is supposed to be a time capsule showing the world the way it is today, not the way it was a hundred years ago. And there is so much we could be showing them, were it not locked down by copyright.