A lot of classes don't teach for understanding. They may try it but if you memorize it enough you can fake understanding by simply reciting everything.
It's true, you have to do a bit more work yourself, but a lot of classes cover things which can be understood in an integrated way. It's just that it sometimes takes a lot of random fact-memorizing to get to that point. You may think you understand integral calculus because you get the concepts, but you don't really understand it until you've been forced to memorize a dozen or so techniques of integration. You need to have them memorized and practiced because, if you don't, no formula sheet is going to help you identify which one is relevant to the given formula.
Now, whether classes do a good job of measuring understanding is another thing, and it could certainly be improved. But I've never let a bad class or a bad instructor get in the way of learning something I need to know.
Perhaps if failing didn't mean we students would have to change majors or drop out with nothing to show for our $50k in debt things might change.
So change majors, or don't fail. I don't really see what this has to do with the school, though. It sucks, but speaking from experience, it's far better than lowering standards.
I speak from experience. I wasn't really ready for college, and managed to fail all but one class my freshman year. I dropped out, and my parents made it very clear: They'd support me if I was getting an education, but if I wasn't, they wouldn't. I got a job and moved out.
A few years supporting myself in the Real World has given me a lot of perspective.
So when my last job evaporated (entire company went under, crushed by the economy), I collected unemployment for awhile, then decided I may as well be doing something useful while I collect unemployment, so I went to a local community college. I took a full term (trimester), participated in a competition and a club, had plenty of time to relax, and got straight A's.
Then I petitioned to get back into my original four-year university. It's much harder to get back if you've been dismissed for academic reasons than to get in the first time, but my awesome time at the community college probably said something. My first semester back, I was in four clubs, including a martial art (Hapkido). I moved from white belt to orange belt, and got straight A's.
That was last spring.
I had an internship last summer (still technically a freshman!), and last semester (also still technically a freshman!), I did pretty much all of the same things, plus I was a TA for a course I'd taken the semester before. Only two bad things happened: I got too busy for Hapkido for awhile, and I got one A-. The other three courses, I got A's. That brings me from a 0.6 GPA when I first came back to above 3.0.
I am loving every minute of it. I'm actually understanding stuff. I'm actually putting the work in. I'm being challenged, and I'm rising to the challenge. (I'm not really learning humility particularly well, at least not tonight...) I can actually appreciate what I'm being taught -- I can cut through the bullshit, I can do the tedious grunt work (and quickly!), and I can get at the heart of what I'm supposed to be learning, and it's beautiful.
If I had been allowed to pass with how badly I did? I'd have sat on my ass and played video games. I'd have coasted through as long as I could manage, then end up at some cushy sysadmin job, at least as long as those last. In fact, that's more or less the trajectory I was on throughout high school, but high school let me get away with it -- which is why I was so fucked up my first year of college.
As it is, I'm seriously considering grad school. Even if I don't, I'm setting myself up to have pretty much any tech job I want when I graduate -- and even the bad classes are fun while I'm here. It's not easy to describe how dramatically different my life is because
I have a couple Muslim friends that love pepperoni, but avoid eating it... except when they get drunk. So religion, yeah, definitely makes a difference, more than just a food preference.
It's a food preference for a reason other than taste. It's not really more substantial than the same people choosing not to eat pepperoni because they suddenly care about the animals, or because the pizza it's on is too unhealthy.
Another interesting thing to think about is what the role of government is. From your posts, I'd guess you're of the school of thought that the government should leave well enough alone, and that in practice, the government's main interest is in acquiring and distributing power...
Not quite. I'm all for government regulation when necessary, and I'm by no means a libertarian. With apologies to Einstein, I think we should have the smallest government we can, but no smaller -- that is, we should have exactly as much government as we need in order for it to serve the purpose we've assigned to it.
So, for instance:
...the Greeks thought that the role of government should be to make people better.
If we can come up with common measures by which to do so, and if they aren't adequately served by other means, then I'd agree with that. Schools are an example of this. (I actually wrote the preceding sentence before I read your mention of education.) Religion is generally not -- we'd have a hard time agreeing that it's a good idea in the first place, let alone finding a common measure by which to do so, and it does seem to be adequately served somehow -- I doubt anyone would claim they didn't go to church because it was too expensive.
Of course, what we're talking about now is yet another branch of philosophy which, while it still exists as philosophy, has also split off into another field: Politics. Most people don't think of politics and philosophy as being at all related, and the political philosophers tend to be those who publish interesting papers about how politics might work (or might not), and are never really able to do something about it.
After all, where they're able to make verifiable predictions, it would be political science, not philosophy. If they took these predictions and their best theories, and formed a political party and ran with it, that'd be political technology. Again we end up with philosophy as the root of something very important, but split into the not-really-philosophy part which goes by any other name and the hardcore philosophy part which seems to steadily become less relevant and more opaque.
Here, I'm using the "seems to" qualifier deliberately. Maybe it's not.
So if I had to guess...
I doubt we'll have many stories like William James or Alexander the Great any more, whose lives were profoundly impacted by philosophy.
...I'd say that a lot of what they loved about philosophy, while it may still be there as philosophy, much of it is better known by other names -- Logic, Mathematics, Sociology, etc.
These are all true, but endlessly frustrating to me. For example:
Some genres don't work well on the PC because the PC is traditionally associated with single-player or networked multiplayer.
I suspect those games still work decently well with networked multiplayer, but PCs are no less capable of this than consoles. The only limiting factor is what other hardware they're connected to -- monitor, controllers, etc.
There just aren't enough home theater PCs
Why the hell not?
Apparently, people have this impression that it's complicated or expensive to build one, which is why convergence is going in a perverse direction, with computers capable of playing YouTube built in to newer TVs. Controllers aren't exactly hard to find, either, with all three of the major consoles using exclusively standard cables and technologies (USB and Bluetooth) such that they can pretty trivially be connected to a PC.
I understand the reasons for all of these, but it's still frustrating. Every now and then, I consider getting in the business of selling pre-built home theater PCs, ready to game with. Then I file that away with the idea of selling computers with Linux pre-installed, maybe even with options for Wine, virtualization, or dual boot already set up.
However, sometimes, I'm forced to write actual Java code, and other JVM languages aren't a substitute. The most obvious example is when taking a Java-based CS course. A more recent example was a job using a Java-based web development platform with a giant pile of tools -- using anything other than Java wouldn't really have saved much time in the end, so long as I was tied to that platform.
Ah, I didn't know that... weird. I wonder if it's the same for XNA.
Regardless, my response is still the same -- that the platform is proprietary is already a reason I wouldn't want to touch it. That it controls distribution is worse. That it dictates a single language for no good reason, in addition to the other two, makes me want to avoid it like the plague.
Of course, I still wish browsers had some sort of standard VM, to make it easier to run other languages on them, but JavaScript might even be fast enough. There was a proof-of-concept Ruby VM implemented in JavaScript, which ripped Ruby bytecode out of a server-side interpreter and interpreted it in JavaScript, and it ran faster than on the native Ruby interpreter.
Yes, Ruby seems to use 64-bit integers on a 64-bit system. I'm not sure what it uses on 32-bit systems. I'm also not sure whether it uses them all the time or scales to them -- for instance, it automagically converts to Bignum as needed, rather than overflowing.
It does not, however, catch that precision issue when converting to a "Float" (not sure if that's 32-bit or 64-bit).
Maybe I've just been using it so long that "integer + float = float" is intuitive to me...
This got modded up? This is just completely wrong on all levels.
Well, sure, when you strawman it.
Two if you're willing to put up with Theora, but Theora looks like ass.
So I'm right -- only two encodes are required. I never claimed they'd look good.
What's more, Firefox and Chrome both support Theora, and Safari does with a plugin, if you're insisting on what's available right now -- so it's possible to do exactly one encode. Sure, "it looks like ass" according to you, but so did Flash video when it first emerged -- I remember FLV being much worse than Theora.
Flash forbids allowing ActionScript to fullscreen, either.
But it doesn't forbid fullscreen entirely.
But it doesn't allow scriptable fullscreen -- in other words, my post was still correct, and yours wasn't, again. What HTML5 clearly needs is a fullscreen button which can't be activated by a script, but which maybe can be styled with CSS.
That is a shortcoming, but you suggested the problem is that you can't do it with JavaScript. If we're going to bitch about mods, I don't know how you got to +4 with a post containing that suggestion.
And F11 doesn't work for all browsers on all OSes.
Where doesn't it work?
Since hardware decoding in Linux is a complete mess, who knows when it'll be available under Linux.
If by "complete mess" you mean "usable today", sure. Exactly which part of it is a mess?
Unless there's a hidden "--suck=no" option in ffmpeg2theora, creating a Theora file at equivalent bitrate from the same source to either WebM or H.264 looks horrid.
And which source would that be? Is it actually a raw source?
It also seems very likely that there are many options which could be applied to improve things. Professional encoding still involves some amount of human tuning, per-scene, though it seems this is becoming less relevant.
Regardless, from the comparisons I've seen, Theora is worse than H.264, but not significantly, certainly not enough to justify "crappy, blurry" as a description.
In fact, the only way in which your reply seems to be correct is pointing out that hardware acceleration exists in Flash 10 (except for Linux, of course), although it doesn't seem to be entirely reliable for everyone. The "except for Linux" part is another reason Flash is so obnoxious...
And no, I don't consider the situation on Linux or Mac OS X that much better.
Citation needed, especially seeing as all three platforms use native codecs to stream video to standalone players -- why is a browser less secure than a standalone player? Why hasn't this been an issue for Safari, which does exactly what I suggest here?
Yes, sure, what could go wrong with directly passing data out of the internet directly into a system where the average user has code that was updated 5 years ago the last time,
Then it's the average user's fault. Why should the browser be responsible for duplicating code already in the OS just so the browser can do its own audit? Why are we assuming users update their browsers more frequently than they apply OS updates?
By that logic, the only secure way to ship Firefox is as its own bootable OS.
Never mind that this is just as exploitable through the inevitable Windows Media Player plugin, or QuickTime plugin -- if they know how to exploit a specific codec, surely exploiting a plugin will be trivial! Never mind that it would be trivial to provide options for the more paranoid among you to disable any codecs you don't trust, just as you must currently be frantically disabling Windows Media Player as you read this. Never mind that OS-provided patches to those codecs would instantly apply to all browsers, so it may actually be more secure.
Never mind that it'd dramatically speed up video playback, instantly resolve the H.264 codec debate, and be a technically better architecture in every way.
No, clearly ChromeOS is only the secure browser...
you're right about html5 - devs don't want the mess of encoding stuff for each browser - thats why flash took off in the first place ***REMEMBER...?
Apparently, you don't. It wasn't "each browser" that was the problem, it was the third-party media plugins. It wasn't encoding that was the issue, it was support -- you can do stuff with both Flash and HTML5 that you can't do with a QuickTime plugin, and even what you can, you'll need different code to do the same thing in Windows Media Player.
To everyone whining about codecs: Storage is cheap. Software development is expensive.
when will people tire of spouting html5 hype...?
When HTML5 is actually used.
isn't it obvious that its all over, already?
It's neither obvious nor desirable. Why on earth would you want Flash to win this?
in a way its great that html5's weaknesses are being brought out into the open now...
So they can be fixed?
if you know anything about the history of the web you will know that it never was.
Clearly you don't. The Web was born and lived as a free and open spec, open to anyone to implement. Everyone uses HTML4 at least as a base, if not XHTML or HTML5. Everyone uses CSS as a base, at least CSS2 if not CSS3. Everyone uses JavaScript as a base, which is standardized as EcmaScript.
Unless you code your entire site in Flash, you use these technologies -- and if you do use Flash "all the way", your site is going to suck -- everything from middle-click-to-open-in-a-new-tab to bookmarking is going to be broken by default, and it's likely to take a significant amount of HTML/JavaScript/CSS work to fix it.
In other words, the free and open Web has won pretty much everywhere other than media (video) and a few niche apps, which get away with it by calling themselves "RIAs" and pretending that Flash adds something that wasn't there in a dozen actual standards already. I currently use a website which uses Flash for such trivial things as an equation editor and a drag-and-drop.
Even if you do use purely Flash, you're also going to use HTTP, TCP, IP, and DNS -- all open standards -- and chances are, your TCP stack is based on the one in BSD, so it's even using code borrowed from an open source project.
And even in video, Flash is losing ground, partly because people won't just "forget ios".
Now, will HTML5 happen? I don't know, I hope so. But to claim that there's historical precedent for Flash just winning is just factually wrong. The only precedent you could appeal to is Flash itself, and the only reason it took off is because of how fragmented, broken, and unstandardized video was at the time. Guess what HTML5 does?
The "Don't use GIFs" debate became irrelevant when the relevant patents lapsed.
Precisely.
But I for one am not willing to wait 20 years to be able to assume that the codecs I need for viewing video on the web are available in my Linux distribution's default repositories.
20 years from when? How much life is left in these patents? My impression was less than ten. At the rate HTML5 standardization is going, it'll take that long before we get people to use a standard format and to migrate people to HTML5 -- except it moves so slowly that people will use Flash instead, or even Silverlight.
Trying to move towards having a patent-unencumbered video standard as the lowest-common-denominator choice for web video seems to be an option that makes good sense.
Indeed -- and most people do have hardware H.264 decoders, and free-as-in-beer decoders that came with their OS. There's a robust open-source implementation (x264). The only reason this is an issue is because we're impatient. Understandably so, but I would hate to see Flash win because we couldn't wait a few years.
The Greeks' Big Questions involved a number of things, most importantly perhaps, "What does it take to live a Good Life?"
Ah, now we're getting somewhere. But isn't this necessarily subjective? Whether I lived a good life is entirely determined by what I accept as the definition of a good life, and I don't particularly care what anyone else thinks is a good life. In particular, what I might see as a good life, others might see as a terrible life, and vice versa.
Utterly untrue. If you profoundly believe that not eating pork / not porking your neighbor / etc is mandated by your code of ethics or religion, whatever it is, then you will (tend to) not do those things.
Not eating pork is, when you get right down to it, a food preference. I don't particularly like duck or avocado.
If by "Not porking your neighbor" you're referring to adultery, we don't need religion to come up with that -- it's much more closely related to ethics. But it's not at all related to what happens when you die. How many people were honestly stopped from doing that by the fear of Hell?
That's why I used the qualifier "most">
Christianity motivates its followers to be more charitable, as charity is a core tenet of the Christian faith.
More charitable than what? If the claim is that Christians are more charitable than non-Christians, I'd like to see some evidence.
And even on the death front, while you're right that all people worry about dying, religious people have been found to stress about it a lot less.
Do you know a lot of atheists who are more stressed about dying than their Christian friends?
There's few things in life that matter more than one's religion or code of ethics,
But see, that's just it. You seem to be assuming that religion and ethics are intrinsically related. I'm not sure that's the case.
You do make a good point -- ethics is a branch of philosophy which does have real implications in the real world, so I think you've successfully countered my argument that philosophy is mostly useless -- ethics is also a big part of philosophy. But none of this has anything to do with religion.
The Big Questions are common to everyone, as they are all questions that have to be answered by everyone, even if it is in the negative.
Not really, no.
"Does God exist?" One frequent answer is the apathetic atheist -- "I don't know, and I don't care." The typical atheist response isn't much better: "I don't know."
"What does it take to live a Good Life?" Typical circular response: "Be a good person," or more religiously framed, "What would Jesus do?" (Just as circular, because it really means, "What do I think Jesus would do, based on my idea of Jesus as the perfect person, so what would be the good thing to do?" It's the same thing, rephrased and anthropomorphized.)
But the thing is, most people don't feel the need for good answers to these questions. "Be a good person." Good enough. How often do you actually have to break out the philosophy to decide what would and wouldn't be a good thing to do? In fact, my philosophical tendency would be to start off saying, "Why do I want to be a good person or live a good life?"
It's also common for people to think they've discovered a "Big Question" that, if other people haven't thought of on their own, they really can't avoid providing a real, solid answer to. This leads to theists asking atheists incessantly, "Why is there something rather than nothing? Where did everything come from?" My answer to both of these is, "Beyond that the Big Bang happened, I don't know, and those aren't particularly profound or necessarily coherent."
Strawmen? No, I could show you those exact questions being asked over and over again, as if on a script, as if they expect the atheist will have a sudden epiphany because they never thought of that
I don't mind exceptions in an unmanaged runtime environment -- in fact, I prefer them to the alternative. (Of course, I'd rather not have an unmanaged runtime environment in the first place.)
But it seems to be because of how C++ did exceptions. Let's compare languages for just a moment:
In C++, there are at least two places to define each operator, and, what, 20 or 30 operators? In Ruby, there are 5 or 10 operators, all sanely enough defined that you can probably _guess_ how to implement them, and one canonical place to define them if you want a certain effect.
Part of this, I'm sure, comes from C++'s static typing and operator overloading. Defining an operator in the global scope, outside of any of the types it operates on, is a sane thing to do in C++, and maybe even a nice feature, but it just means that much more to keep track of. That kind of thing would make no sense in Ruby.
But anyhow, I don't think either of these things are necessarily bad or complicated, at least not by themselves. I think it's C++ that makes them bad and complicated. I definitely miss overloaded operators in Java, which deliberately left them out (probably horrified by C++), but this led to its own problems -- why, in Java, does == do one thing for primitives and a completely different thing for objects? Why the need for.equals and.compareTo?
Maybe I'm just opinionated about what "sane" means, then...
Perl is loosely typed enough that it might decide to treat the string as an integer, leading to your first interpretation, but I don't consider this to be sane. Having an actual object magically change types such that its behavior is radically different is a bit too "dynamic" for me -- give me dynamically but strongly typed languages.
Your second option only makes sense in C, and only really because in C, strings are arrays and arrays are pointers, and you use pointers as iterators. Saner languages make distinctions between these things -- why should I assume that a string is an array at all, and not a rope or some raw binary UTF-8? Wrap it all in an object and let the implementation decide.
In Ruby, JavaScript, even Java, adding a number to a string always yields your third option -- in fact, in my experience, Ruby does the sanest thing and automatically typecasts only in lossless directions, so ints can become floats, and either can become strings, but not the other way around.
Furthermore it's not necessary to adopt WebM since MPEG4 is only a few years from being public domain/open source itself.
How many years?
I don't have a website but if I did, I would no longer support Chrome..... at least not for video. Everything would be encoded as either Flash or H264/MPEG4, and Chrome would just have to display a broken link.
Despite Chrome supporting Flash? And despite you using Flash? Do you just enjoy antagonizing your users?
I mean, I'd provide a similar link for IE users, or at least users of older versions of IE, but I wouldn't deliberately break the site, I'd just gently remind them that stuff might be broken.
Users would need to go get themselves a REAL browser (such as Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla/Seamonkey, or Opera) that doesn't ignore the MPEG4 standard virtually everyone else in the world uses.
Not a single browser you mentioned currently supports H.264 in HTML5 video. They only support it in Flash, just as Chrome does.
Is there a single true thing you said here? Maybe H.264 will actually expire in a few years...
I think if the issue is that, even if there are no royalties paid, h.264 isn't really "free" in that it takes developer time away from other projects that they might work on,
Even if H.264 were Free tomorrow, even if there were no problem with bundling everything in Firefox, that's still the dumbest thing I've ever heard, and it's still far better to use the native video system.
besides, h.264 plugins sort of defeat the point of , since the idea was to enable video playback WITHOUT plugins.
I have no idea why people are selling it as that.
No, the idea is to enable the sort of video playback people have now with Flash. It's not just that the browser is ready to play right away, it's that you can do all sorts of things with a Flash video that you can't with a QuickTime-ish embed/object tag -- not to mention that QuickTime and such include a lot of baggage you don't need.
The idea is to be able to integrate videos into your page as easily as you currently integrate images. Note that the img tag doesn't specify which image formats are supported, and there's no good reason for the browser to implement them itself when it can call out to native image libraries. The idea is that anyone can implement the standard any way they like. For example, an H.264 decoder plugin could potentially use the H.264 decoder hardware in most video cards (supported under Linux, too), whereas with Flash, we'd have to wait for Adobe to do that.
The point isn't that plugins are bad. It's that Flash is bad, and a nonstandard Internet is bad. A plugin architecture is in general a Good Thing, so long as it isn't abused.
Also, note that Opera, which is a proprietary project doesn't want to support h.264 either. presumably because of malaise regarding royalties (Opera's creators aren't exactly rolling in dough).
And they're making exactly the same mistake. How much would it cost them to simply wire up to the same stuff IE does, the same video playback API that any Windows program can?
I think that Microsoft, Opera, and Firefox are all sort-of waiting for the dust to settle in the codec dispute.
Maybe Microsoft and Opera are, but Firefox is right there in the dispute. I've spoken to more than one Firefox developer who is actively opposed to the idea on near-religious grounds. "I don't want a proprietary codec to become a defacto Internet standard." As if a proprietary plugin (Flash) is better.
If Firefox did that too, then you'd end up with the situation where Firefox users running on Windows would be able to view H.264 and Firefox users on a Free operating system would not.
If by "Free" you mean "Absolutely pure and also legal", sure.
I have at least one copy of x264 on my system, as well as a hardware decoder in my video card. While x264 may not be legal in the US, the hardware decoder certainly is, and the native Linux nVidia drivers support it.
In fact, I don't know of a modern OS on which I'd want a modern web browser for which I don't pretty much get a legal H.264 decoder for free, and illegal-but-Free ones if I want them.
And all the websites with "Firefox" as a tick box on their compatibility checklist would happily tick it and be on their merry way.
They already do this with Flash, and worse, Silverlight. I currently have to boot Windows because Moonlight won't run a presentation I am required to watch for a class, three times a week.
I don't like this any more than you do, but I would very much rather have to install an x264 decoder and be able to watch this presentation on Linux, than have to fuck with Moonlight for over an hour before giving up and booting Windows just to watch a fifteen minute webcam + powerpoint.
The h.264 patents will eventually die, and we'll eventually have a select few codecs which are supported everywhere, and the video tag will thus become like the img tag, and all of these debates will become as irrelevant as the "Don't use GIFs" debates back when the FSF was using JPEGs for everything (since PNG hadn't been invented).
But if we miss this opportunity, if people continue to back away from HTML5 video because they have the (correct or not) impression that you need to encode things three times just to make sure they play in every browser -- you realize we're already at a disadvantage even if h.264 was Free tomorrow, right? -- then we're stuck with what we've got now, which is Flash for everything but iOS, and H.264 for iOS, with browser detection to choose which.
Yes the browser has a FS option, but it requires users to take a two-step option (first blow video to fill the browser; then make the browser full screen).
Right-click the video, fullscreen. Exactly the way several standalone, native players do it.
The old way was better (a single click via javascript).
That has never been the case, and if it were, it'd be a massive security bug. No, it was a single click on a Flash control which scripts weren't allowed to touch, because scripts aren't allowed to make things go fullscreen, for very obvious reasons. (If you thought popup ads were bad...)
Have you ever tried using HTML5 video? It's completely fucking useless.
Impressive fucking hyperbole.
OK, first off, we have the codec issue. If you want to support all browsers, you need to encode to the following formats: H.264+AAC, VP8+Vorbis, and Theora+Vorbis. You're stuck with all three if you want to hit all browsers.
Bullshit. Chrome has always supported Theora, as far as I can tell, and Firefox is about to support WebM. In fact, IE is going to support WebM soon, which means by this time next year, Safari will be the only HTML5-compliant browser without H.264.
How did you get to +5 with that blatant of a factual error? Did you bother to Google it?
Then there's the part where the HTML5 spec forbids allowing JavaScript to fullscreen the video.
Hey, guess what? Flash forbids allowing ActionScript to fullscreen, either. Of course, it'd be nice if there could be a fullscreen control somewhere...
Which means that you're stuck with either using the lousy solution YouTube uses (blow up the video to screen size, and assume the user can figure out how to fullscreen their browser on their own), or just dropping the feature all together.
Or right-click + fullscreen.
Of course, most browsers allow the user to fullscreen the video on the context menu. But that's still really a two-step process: right click on the video, and then click on "Full screen."
So, um, how many steps would you count the other one as? I realize it's click+F11 for you and me, but it's likely to be many clicks for an ordinary user, and at least three once they figure it out.
Really, it's a one-step process.
And to add insult to injury, most HTML5 video toolkits manage to block this option anyway by the way they generate their UI. (Including YouTube, in fact.)
Which is their fault, not the spec's. I'm used to being able to download videos and play them when I want, in an external player if I want. Speaking of H.264, I've got an H.264 decoder in hardware, in my fucking video card. Where is that feature in Flash?
To be fair, most browsers don't use hardware H.264 decoders, but the fact that it's an open standard means we can fix this. In Flash, we can't.
So all this does is mean that Chrome will now be stuck with the same crappy, blurry Theora video you already had to encode to anyway to support Firefox.
Programmers who have used these languages normally understand why you don't want your browser to automatically execute code downloaded from strangers,
Actually, I understand why I not only want to do so, but I would much rather do so in a browser than in a plugin, or manually in a native executable. I also want to tell others to do so, so that when I design something which requires it, I know it'll work.
Very rarely do we see a true design flaw in JavaScript. Much more often are security holes, but these can also affect pure HTML, CSS, external plugins, etc.
You'd know if they didn't. I don't know about other browsers, but Firefox and Chrome both throw up a giant red page warning you that someone might be listening whenever it encounters an unsigned certificate.
I'm the type to make it easier, or switch to a language where it is easier.
Until you end up on a platform that only runs one language.
How would I "end up" on such a platform? The only time I've ever done so was HD-DVD, and that was JavaScript and XML. Could've done without the XML, but its DOM wasn't bad, and JavaScript wasn't bad.
For example, Xbox 360 XNA and Windows Phone 7 run only C# (or other languages isomorphic to C#), and BlackBerry runs only Java.
Are you talking about languages or platforms?
If you mean languages, don't both of those platforms support any CLI language? Doesn't BlackBerry support any JVM language?
For a few months, while Apple and Adobe were feuding over AIR, iPhone and iPod touch ran only Objective-C and C++ in apps and JavaScript in web pages.
Which is why I'll never target a native app at iOS.
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A lot of classes don't teach for understanding. They may try it but if you memorize it enough you can fake understanding by simply reciting everything.
It's true, you have to do a bit more work yourself, but a lot of classes cover things which can be understood in an integrated way. It's just that it sometimes takes a lot of random fact-memorizing to get to that point. You may think you understand integral calculus because you get the concepts, but you don't really understand it until you've been forced to memorize a dozen or so techniques of integration. You need to have them memorized and practiced because, if you don't, no formula sheet is going to help you identify which one is relevant to the given formula.
Now, whether classes do a good job of measuring understanding is another thing, and it could certainly be improved. But I've never let a bad class or a bad instructor get in the way of learning something I need to know.
Perhaps if failing didn't mean we students would have to change majors or drop out with nothing to show for our $50k in debt things might change.
So change majors, or don't fail. I don't really see what this has to do with the school, though. It sucks, but speaking from experience, it's far better than lowering standards.
I speak from experience. I wasn't really ready for college, and managed to fail all but one class my freshman year. I dropped out, and my parents made it very clear: They'd support me if I was getting an education, but if I wasn't, they wouldn't. I got a job and moved out.
A few years supporting myself in the Real World has given me a lot of perspective.
So when my last job evaporated (entire company went under, crushed by the economy), I collected unemployment for awhile, then decided I may as well be doing something useful while I collect unemployment, so I went to a local community college. I took a full term (trimester), participated in a competition and a club, had plenty of time to relax, and got straight A's.
Then I petitioned to get back into my original four-year university. It's much harder to get back if you've been dismissed for academic reasons than to get in the first time, but my awesome time at the community college probably said something. My first semester back, I was in four clubs, including a martial art (Hapkido). I moved from white belt to orange belt, and got straight A's.
That was last spring.
I had an internship last summer (still technically a freshman!), and last semester (also still technically a freshman!), I did pretty much all of the same things, plus I was a TA for a course I'd taken the semester before. Only two bad things happened: I got too busy for Hapkido for awhile, and I got one A-. The other three courses, I got A's. That brings me from a 0.6 GPA when I first came back to above 3.0.
I am loving every minute of it. I'm actually understanding stuff. I'm actually putting the work in. I'm being challenged, and I'm rising to the challenge. (I'm not really learning humility particularly well, at least not tonight...) I can actually appreciate what I'm being taught -- I can cut through the bullshit, I can do the tedious grunt work (and quickly!), and I can get at the heart of what I'm supposed to be learning, and it's beautiful.
If I had been allowed to pass with how badly I did? I'd have sat on my ass and played video games. I'd have coasted through as long as I could manage, then end up at some cushy sysadmin job, at least as long as those last. In fact, that's more or less the trajectory I was on throughout high school, but high school let me get away with it -- which is why I was so fucked up my first year of college.
As it is, I'm seriously considering grad school. Even if I don't, I'm setting myself up to have pretty much any tech job I want when I graduate -- and even the bad classes are fun while I'm here. It's not easy to describe how dramatically different my life is because
I have a couple Muslim friends that love pepperoni, but avoid eating it... except when they get drunk. So religion, yeah, definitely makes a difference, more than just a food preference.
It's a food preference for a reason other than taste. It's not really more substantial than the same people choosing not to eat pepperoni because they suddenly care about the animals, or because the pizza it's on is too unhealthy.
Another interesting thing to think about is what the role of government is. From your posts, I'd guess you're of the school of thought that the government should leave well enough alone, and that in practice, the government's main interest is in acquiring and distributing power...
Not quite. I'm all for government regulation when necessary, and I'm by no means a libertarian. With apologies to Einstein, I think we should have the smallest government we can, but no smaller -- that is, we should have exactly as much government as we need in order for it to serve the purpose we've assigned to it.
So, for instance:
...the Greeks thought that the role of government should be to make people better.
If we can come up with common measures by which to do so, and if they aren't adequately served by other means, then I'd agree with that. Schools are an example of this. (I actually wrote the preceding sentence before I read your mention of education.) Religion is generally not -- we'd have a hard time agreeing that it's a good idea in the first place, let alone finding a common measure by which to do so, and it does seem to be adequately served somehow -- I doubt anyone would claim they didn't go to church because it was too expensive.
Of course, what we're talking about now is yet another branch of philosophy which, while it still exists as philosophy, has also split off into another field: Politics. Most people don't think of politics and philosophy as being at all related, and the political philosophers tend to be those who publish interesting papers about how politics might work (or might not), and are never really able to do something about it.
After all, where they're able to make verifiable predictions, it would be political science, not philosophy. If they took these predictions and their best theories, and formed a political party and ran with it, that'd be political technology. Again we end up with philosophy as the root of something very important, but split into the not-really-philosophy part which goes by any other name and the hardcore philosophy part which seems to steadily become less relevant and more opaque.
Here, I'm using the "seems to" qualifier deliberately. Maybe it's not.
So if I had to guess...
I doubt we'll have many stories like William James or Alexander the Great any more, whose lives were profoundly impacted by philosophy.
...I'd say that a lot of what they loved about philosophy, while it may still be there as philosophy, much of it is better known by other names -- Logic, Mathematics, Sociology, etc.
These are all true, but endlessly frustrating to me. For example:
Some genres don't work well on the PC because the PC is traditionally associated with single-player or networked multiplayer.
I suspect those games still work decently well with networked multiplayer, but PCs are no less capable of this than consoles. The only limiting factor is what other hardware they're connected to -- monitor, controllers, etc.
There just aren't enough home theater PCs
Why the hell not?
Apparently, people have this impression that it's complicated or expensive to build one, which is why convergence is going in a perverse direction, with computers capable of playing YouTube built in to newer TVs. Controllers aren't exactly hard to find, either, with all three of the major consoles using exclusively standard cables and technologies (USB and Bluetooth) such that they can pretty trivially be connected to a PC.
I understand the reasons for all of these, but it's still frustrating. Every now and then, I consider getting in the business of selling pre-built home theater PCs, ready to game with. Then I file that away with the idea of selling computers with Linux pre-installed, maybe even with options for Wine, virtualization, or dual boot already set up.
So does JRuby.
However, sometimes, I'm forced to write actual Java code, and other JVM languages aren't a substitute. The most obvious example is when taking a Java-based CS course. A more recent example was a job using a Java-based web development platform with a giant pile of tools -- using anything other than Java wouldn't really have saved much time in the end, so long as I was tied to that platform.
Ah, I didn't know that... weird. I wonder if it's the same for XNA.
Regardless, my response is still the same -- that the platform is proprietary is already a reason I wouldn't want to touch it. That it controls distribution is worse. That it dictates a single language for no good reason, in addition to the other two, makes me want to avoid it like the plague.
Of course, I still wish browsers had some sort of standard VM, to make it easier to run other languages on them, but JavaScript might even be fast enough. There was a proof-of-concept Ruby VM implemented in JavaScript, which ripped Ruby bytecode out of a server-side interpreter and interpreted it in JavaScript, and it ran faster than on the native Ruby interpreter.
Wow, good to know. Thanks! ...I had no idea.
Yes, Ruby seems to use 64-bit integers on a 64-bit system. I'm not sure what it uses on 32-bit systems. I'm also not sure whether it uses them all the time or scales to them -- for instance, it automagically converts to Bignum as needed, rather than overflowing.
It does not, however, catch that precision issue when converting to a "Float" (not sure if that's 32-bit or 64-bit).
Maybe I've just been using it so long that "integer + float = float" is intuitive to me...
This got modded up? This is just completely wrong on all levels.
Well, sure, when you strawman it.
Two if you're willing to put up with Theora, but Theora looks like ass.
So I'm right -- only two encodes are required. I never claimed they'd look good.
What's more, Firefox and Chrome both support Theora, and Safari does with a plugin, if you're insisting on what's available right now -- so it's possible to do exactly one encode. Sure, "it looks like ass" according to you, but so did Flash video when it first emerged -- I remember FLV being much worse than Theora.
Flash forbids allowing ActionScript to fullscreen, either.
But it doesn't forbid fullscreen entirely.
But it doesn't allow scriptable fullscreen -- in other words, my post was still correct, and yours wasn't, again. What HTML5 clearly needs is a fullscreen button which can't be activated by a script, but which maybe can be styled with CSS.
That is a shortcoming, but you suggested the problem is that you can't do it with JavaScript. If we're going to bitch about mods, I don't know how you got to +4 with a post containing that suggestion.
And F11 doesn't work for all browsers on all OSes.
Where doesn't it work?
Since hardware decoding in Linux is a complete mess, who knows when it'll be available under Linux.
If by "complete mess" you mean "usable today", sure. Exactly which part of it is a mess?
Unless there's a hidden "--suck=no" option in ffmpeg2theora, creating a Theora file at equivalent bitrate from the same source to either WebM or H.264 looks horrid.
And which source would that be? Is it actually a raw source?
It also seems very likely that there are many options which could be applied to improve things. Professional encoding still involves some amount of human tuning, per-scene, though it seems this is becoming less relevant.
Regardless, from the comparisons I've seen, Theora is worse than H.264, but not significantly, certainly not enough to justify "crappy, blurry" as a description.
In fact, the only way in which your reply seems to be correct is pointing out that hardware acceleration exists in Flash 10 (except for Linux, of course), although it doesn't seem to be entirely reliable for everyone. The "except for Linux" part is another reason Flash is so obnoxious...
And no, I don't consider the situation on Linux or Mac OS X that much better.
Citation needed, especially seeing as all three platforms use native codecs to stream video to standalone players -- why is a browser less secure than a standalone player? Why hasn't this been an issue for Safari, which does exactly what I suggest here?
Yes, sure, what could go wrong with directly passing data out of the internet directly into a system where the average user has code that was updated 5 years ago the last time,
Then it's the average user's fault. Why should the browser be responsible for duplicating code already in the OS just so the browser can do its own audit? Why are we assuming users update their browsers more frequently than they apply OS updates?
By that logic, the only secure way to ship Firefox is as its own bootable OS.
Never mind that this is just as exploitable through the inevitable Windows Media Player plugin, or QuickTime plugin -- if they know how to exploit a specific codec, surely exploiting a plugin will be trivial! Never mind that it would be trivial to provide options for the more paranoid among you to disable any codecs you don't trust, just as you must currently be frantically disabling Windows Media Player as you read this. Never mind that OS-provided patches to those codecs would instantly apply to all browsers, so it may actually be more secure.
Never mind that it'd dramatically speed up video playback, instantly resolve the H.264 codec debate, and be a technically better architecture in every way.
No, clearly ChromeOS is only the secure browser...
you're right about html5 - devs don't want the mess of encoding stuff for each browser - thats why flash took off in the first place ***REMEMBER...?
Apparently, you don't. It wasn't "each browser" that was the problem, it was the third-party media plugins. It wasn't encoding that was the issue, it was support -- you can do stuff with both Flash and HTML5 that you can't do with a QuickTime plugin, and even what you can, you'll need different code to do the same thing in Windows Media Player.
To everyone whining about codecs: Storage is cheap. Software development is expensive.
when will people tire of spouting html5 hype...?
When HTML5 is actually used.
isn't it obvious that its all over, already?
It's neither obvious nor desirable. Why on earth would you want Flash to win this?
in a way its great that html5's weaknesses are being brought out into the open now...
So they can be fixed?
if you know anything about the history of the web you will know that it never was.
Clearly you don't. The Web was born and lived as a free and open spec, open to anyone to implement. Everyone uses HTML4 at least as a base, if not XHTML or HTML5. Everyone uses CSS as a base, at least CSS2 if not CSS3. Everyone uses JavaScript as a base, which is standardized as EcmaScript.
Unless you code your entire site in Flash, you use these technologies -- and if you do use Flash "all the way", your site is going to suck -- everything from middle-click-to-open-in-a-new-tab to bookmarking is going to be broken by default, and it's likely to take a significant amount of HTML/JavaScript/CSS work to fix it.
In other words, the free and open Web has won pretty much everywhere other than media (video) and a few niche apps, which get away with it by calling themselves "RIAs" and pretending that Flash adds something that wasn't there in a dozen actual standards already. I currently use a website which uses Flash for such trivial things as an equation editor and a drag-and-drop.
Even if you do use purely Flash, you're also going to use HTTP, TCP, IP, and DNS -- all open standards -- and chances are, your TCP stack is based on the one in BSD, so it's even using code borrowed from an open source project.
And even in video, Flash is losing ground, partly because people won't just "forget ios".
Now, will HTML5 happen? I don't know, I hope so. But to claim that there's historical precedent for Flash just winning is just factually wrong. The only precedent you could appeal to is Flash itself, and the only reason it took off is because of how fragmented, broken, and unstandardized video was at the time. Guess what HTML5 does?
The "Don't use GIFs" debate became irrelevant when the relevant patents lapsed.
Precisely.
But I for one am not willing to wait 20 years to be able to assume that the codecs I need for viewing video on the web are available in my Linux distribution's default repositories.
20 years from when? How much life is left in these patents? My impression was less than ten. At the rate HTML5 standardization is going, it'll take that long before we get people to use a standard format and to migrate people to HTML5 -- except it moves so slowly that people will use Flash instead, or even Silverlight.
Trying to move towards having a patent-unencumbered video standard as the lowest-common-denominator choice for web video seems to be an option that makes good sense.
Indeed -- and most people do have hardware H.264 decoders, and free-as-in-beer decoders that came with their OS. There's a robust open-source implementation (x264). The only reason this is an issue is because we're impatient. Understandably so, but I would hate to see Flash win because we couldn't wait a few years.
The Greeks' Big Questions involved a number of things, most importantly perhaps, "What does it take to live a Good Life?"
Ah, now we're getting somewhere. But isn't this necessarily subjective? Whether I lived a good life is entirely determined by what I accept as the definition of a good life, and I don't particularly care what anyone else thinks is a good life. In particular, what I might see as a good life, others might see as a terrible life, and vice versa.
Utterly untrue. If you profoundly believe that not eating pork / not porking your neighbor / etc is mandated by your code of ethics or religion, whatever it is, then you will (tend to) not do those things.
Not eating pork is, when you get right down to it, a food preference. I don't particularly like duck or avocado.
If by "Not porking your neighbor" you're referring to adultery, we don't need religion to come up with that -- it's much more closely related to ethics. But it's not at all related to what happens when you die. How many people were honestly stopped from doing that by the fear of Hell?
That's why I used the qualifier "most">
Christianity motivates its followers to be more charitable, as charity is a core tenet of the Christian faith.
More charitable than what? If the claim is that Christians are more charitable than non-Christians, I'd like to see some evidence.
And even on the death front, while you're right that all people worry about dying, religious people have been found to stress about it a lot less.
Do you know a lot of atheists who are more stressed about dying than their Christian friends?
There's few things in life that matter more than one's religion or code of ethics,
But see, that's just it. You seem to be assuming that religion and ethics are intrinsically related. I'm not sure that's the case.
You do make a good point -- ethics is a branch of philosophy which does have real implications in the real world, so I think you've successfully countered my argument that philosophy is mostly useless -- ethics is also a big part of philosophy. But none of this has anything to do with religion.
The Big Questions are common to everyone, as they are all questions that have to be answered by everyone, even if it is in the negative.
Not really, no.
"Does God exist?" One frequent answer is the apathetic atheist -- "I don't know, and I don't care." The typical atheist response isn't much better: "I don't know."
"What does it take to live a Good Life?" Typical circular response: "Be a good person," or more religiously framed, "What would Jesus do?" (Just as circular, because it really means, "What do I think Jesus would do, based on my idea of Jesus as the perfect person, so what would be the good thing to do?" It's the same thing, rephrased and anthropomorphized.)
But the thing is, most people don't feel the need for good answers to these questions. "Be a good person." Good enough. How often do you actually have to break out the philosophy to decide what would and wouldn't be a good thing to do? In fact, my philosophical tendency would be to start off saying, "Why do I want to be a good person or live a good life?"
It's also common for people to think they've discovered a "Big Question" that, if other people haven't thought of on their own, they really can't avoid providing a real, solid answer to. This leads to theists asking atheists incessantly, "Why is there something rather than nothing? Where did everything come from?" My answer to both of these is, "Beyond that the Big Bang happened, I don't know, and those aren't particularly profound or necessarily coherent."
Strawmen? No, I could show you those exact questions being asked over and over again, as if on a script, as if they expect the atheist will have a sudden epiphany because they never thought of that
I don't mind exceptions in an unmanaged runtime environment -- in fact, I prefer them to the alternative. (Of course, I'd rather not have an unmanaged runtime environment in the first place.)
But it seems to be because of how C++ did exceptions. Let's compare languages for just a moment:
In C++, there are at least two places to define each operator, and, what, 20 or 30 operators? In Ruby, there are 5 or 10 operators, all sanely enough defined that you can probably _guess_ how to implement them, and one canonical place to define them if you want a certain effect.
Part of this, I'm sure, comes from C++'s static typing and operator overloading. Defining an operator in the global scope, outside of any of the types it operates on, is a sane thing to do in C++, and maybe even a nice feature, but it just means that much more to keep track of. That kind of thing would make no sense in Ruby.
But anyhow, I don't think either of these things are necessarily bad or complicated, at least not by themselves. I think it's C++ that makes them bad and complicated. I definitely miss overloaded operators in Java, which deliberately left them out (probably horrified by C++), but this led to its own problems -- why, in Java, does == do one thing for primitives and a completely different thing for objects? Why the need for .equals and .compareTo?
And no, XNA and Silverlight can't run dynamic languages (DLR) because their CLR lacks Reflection.Emit.
Really?
Doesn't BlackBerry support any JVM language?
It would, as far as I know. I've never had a chance to use let alone program for a BlackBerry device.
I'm not sure if it's relevant anymore, but for the record, JRuby exists for Android -- and Android isn't even a proper JVM.
Maybe I'm just opinionated about what "sane" means, then...
Perl is loosely typed enough that it might decide to treat the string as an integer, leading to your first interpretation, but I don't consider this to be sane. Having an actual object magically change types such that its behavior is radically different is a bit too "dynamic" for me -- give me dynamically but strongly typed languages.
Your second option only makes sense in C, and only really because in C, strings are arrays and arrays are pointers, and you use pointers as iterators. Saner languages make distinctions between these things -- why should I assume that a string is an array at all, and not a rope or some raw binary UTF-8? Wrap it all in an object and let the implementation decide.
In Ruby, JavaScript, even Java, adding a number to a string always yields your third option -- in fact, in my experience, Ruby does the sanest thing and automatically typecasts only in lossless directions, so ints can become floats, and either can become strings, but not the other way around.
Still, that means someone is signing Google's certs. It just might not be someone we should be trusting to sign them.
Are you trolling, or are you actually this ignorant of the topic at hand?
WebM is inferior shit compared to MPEG4 video. WebM is almost as ugly as MPEG2 video.
Really?
Furthermore it's not necessary to adopt WebM since MPEG4 is only a few years from being public domain/open source itself.
How many years?
I don't have a website but if I did, I would no longer support Chrome..... at least not for video. Everything would be encoded as either Flash or H264/MPEG4, and Chrome would just have to display a broken link.
Despite Chrome supporting Flash? And despite you using Flash? Do you just enjoy antagonizing your users?
I mean, I'd provide a similar link for IE users, or at least users of older versions of IE, but I wouldn't deliberately break the site, I'd just gently remind them that stuff might be broken.
Users would need to go get themselves a REAL browser (such as Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla/Seamonkey, or Opera) that doesn't ignore the MPEG4 standard virtually everyone else in the world uses.
Not a single browser you mentioned currently supports H.264 in HTML5 video. They only support it in Flash, just as Chrome does.
Is there a single true thing you said here? Maybe H.264 will actually expire in a few years...
I think if the issue is that, even if there are no royalties paid, h.264 isn't really "free" in that it takes developer time away from other projects that they might work on,
Even if H.264 were Free tomorrow, even if there were no problem with bundling everything in Firefox, that's still the dumbest thing I've ever heard, and it's still far better to use the native video system.
besides, h.264 plugins sort of defeat the point of , since the idea was to enable video playback WITHOUT plugins.
I have no idea why people are selling it as that.
No, the idea is to enable the sort of video playback people have now with Flash. It's not just that the browser is ready to play right away, it's that you can do all sorts of things with a Flash video that you can't with a QuickTime-ish embed/object tag -- not to mention that QuickTime and such include a lot of baggage you don't need.
The idea is to be able to integrate videos into your page as easily as you currently integrate images. Note that the img tag doesn't specify which image formats are supported, and there's no good reason for the browser to implement them itself when it can call out to native image libraries. The idea is that anyone can implement the standard any way they like. For example, an H.264 decoder plugin could potentially use the H.264 decoder hardware in most video cards (supported under Linux, too), whereas with Flash, we'd have to wait for Adobe to do that.
The point isn't that plugins are bad. It's that Flash is bad, and a nonstandard Internet is bad. A plugin architecture is in general a Good Thing, so long as it isn't abused.
Also, note that Opera, which is a proprietary project doesn't want to support h.264 either. presumably because of malaise regarding royalties (Opera's creators aren't exactly rolling in dough).
And they're making exactly the same mistake. How much would it cost them to simply wire up to the same stuff IE does, the same video playback API that any Windows program can?
I think that Microsoft, Opera, and Firefox are all sort-of waiting for the dust to settle in the codec dispute.
Maybe Microsoft and Opera are, but Firefox is right there in the dispute. I've spoken to more than one Firefox developer who is actively opposed to the idea on near-religious grounds. "I don't want a proprietary codec to become a defacto Internet standard." As if a proprietary plugin (Flash) is better.
If Firefox did that too, then you'd end up with the situation where Firefox users running on Windows would be able to view H.264 and Firefox users on a Free operating system would not.
If by "Free" you mean "Absolutely pure and also legal", sure.
I have at least one copy of x264 on my system, as well as a hardware decoder in my video card. While x264 may not be legal in the US, the hardware decoder certainly is, and the native Linux nVidia drivers support it.
In fact, I don't know of a modern OS on which I'd want a modern web browser for which I don't pretty much get a legal H.264 decoder for free, and illegal-but-Free ones if I want them.
And all the websites with "Firefox" as a tick box on their compatibility checklist would happily tick it and be on their merry way.
They already do this with Flash, and worse, Silverlight. I currently have to boot Windows because Moonlight won't run a presentation I am required to watch for a class, three times a week.
I don't like this any more than you do, but I would very much rather have to install an x264 decoder and be able to watch this presentation on Linux, than have to fuck with Moonlight for over an hour before giving up and booting Windows just to watch a fifteen minute webcam + powerpoint.
The h.264 patents will eventually die, and we'll eventually have a select few codecs which are supported everywhere, and the video tag will thus become like the img tag, and all of these debates will become as irrelevant as the "Don't use GIFs" debates back when the FSF was using JPEGs for everything (since PNG hadn't been invented).
But if we miss this opportunity, if people continue to back away from HTML5 video because they have the (correct or not) impression that you need to encode things three times just to make sure they play in every browser -- you realize we're already at a disadvantage even if h.264 was Free tomorrow, right? -- then we're stuck with what we've got now, which is Flash for everything but iOS, and H.264 for iOS, with browser detection to choose which.
Hang on, doesn't Safari support anything you install as a QuickTime codec?
By that measure, all major browsers support it.
Yes the browser has a FS option, but it requires users to take a two-step option (first blow video to fill the browser; then make the browser full screen).
Right-click the video, fullscreen. Exactly the way several standalone, native players do it.
The old way was better (a single click via javascript).
That has never been the case, and if it were, it'd be a massive security bug. No, it was a single click on a Flash control which scripts weren't allowed to touch, because scripts aren't allowed to make things go fullscreen, for very obvious reasons. (If you thought popup ads were bad...)
Have you ever tried using HTML5 video? It's completely fucking useless.
Impressive fucking hyperbole.
OK, first off, we have the codec issue. If you want to support all browsers, you need to encode to the following formats: H.264+AAC, VP8+Vorbis, and Theora+Vorbis. You're stuck with all three if you want to hit all browsers.
Bullshit. Chrome has always supported Theora, as far as I can tell, and Firefox is about to support WebM. In fact, IE is going to support WebM soon, which means by this time next year, Safari will be the only HTML5-compliant browser without H.264.
How did you get to +5 with that blatant of a factual error? Did you bother to Google it?
Then there's the part where the HTML5 spec forbids allowing JavaScript to fullscreen the video.
Hey, guess what? Flash forbids allowing ActionScript to fullscreen, either. Of course, it'd be nice if there could be a fullscreen control somewhere...
Which means that you're stuck with either using the lousy solution YouTube uses (blow up the video to screen size, and assume the user can figure out how to fullscreen their browser on their own), or just dropping the feature all together.
Or right-click + fullscreen.
Of course, most browsers allow the user to fullscreen the video on the context menu. But that's still really a two-step process: right click on the video, and then click on "Full screen."
So, um, how many steps would you count the other one as? I realize it's click+F11 for you and me, but it's likely to be many clicks for an ordinary user, and at least three once they figure it out.
Really, it's a one-step process.
And to add insult to injury, most HTML5 video toolkits manage to block this option anyway by the way they generate their UI. (Including YouTube, in fact.)
Which is their fault, not the spec's. I'm used to being able to download videos and play them when I want, in an external player if I want. Speaking of H.264, I've got an H.264 decoder in hardware, in my fucking video card. Where is that feature in Flash?
To be fair, most browsers don't use hardware H.264 decoders, but the fact that it's an open standard means we can fix this. In Flash, we can't.
So all this does is mean that Chrome will now be stuck with the same crappy, blurry Theora video you already had to encode to anyway to support Firefox.
So what you're saying is you suck at encoding?
Programmers who have used these languages normally understand why you don't want your browser to automatically execute code downloaded from strangers,
Actually, I understand why I not only want to do so, but I would much rather do so in a browser than in a plugin, or manually in a native executable. I also want to tell others to do so, so that when I design something which requires it, I know it'll work.
Very rarely do we see a true design flaw in JavaScript. Much more often are security holes, but these can also affect pure HTML, CSS, external plugins, etc.
Does anyone really sign Google's certificates?
You'd know if they didn't. I don't know about other browsers, but Firefox and Chrome both throw up a giant red page warning you that someone might be listening whenever it encounters an unsigned certificate.
And as far as I know, Google isn't a CA.
I'm the type to make it easier, or switch to a language where it is easier.
Until you end up on a platform that only runs one language.
How would I "end up" on such a platform? The only time I've ever done so was HD-DVD, and that was JavaScript and XML. Could've done without the XML, but its DOM wasn't bad, and JavaScript wasn't bad.
For example, Xbox 360 XNA and Windows Phone 7 run only C# (or other languages isomorphic to C#), and BlackBerry runs only Java.
Are you talking about languages or platforms?
If you mean languages, don't both of those platforms support any CLI language? Doesn't BlackBerry support any JVM language?
For a few months, while Apple and Adobe were feuding over AIR, iPhone and iPod touch ran only Objective-C and C++ in apps and JavaScript in web pages.
Which is why I'll never target a native app at iOS.