Chrome extensions are entirely HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and so are many Chrome pages (the New Tab Page, the Downloads Tab, etc). I'd tag this badsummary, because it's not the idea of Jetpack that's the problem here, it's the implementation. From the first article, which is the only one that seems to be seriously concerned:
I like its power, I dislike its syntax. I _really_ dislike its syntax.... images are inline as data URLs because Jetpacks misses offline support and packaging; the HTML element inserted into the statusbar has to be precisely positioned and that will suck depending on the preferred user's font size;
Contrast to Chrome's extension API, which is fairly clean where it isn't strictly what's already available to any webpage. In particular, those two issues are addressed: Chrome extensions are packaged (more or less) as a cryptographically signed zipfile, so you can have separate images, scripts, etc; there are currently very well-defined ways to add a button either to the URL bar or to the browser itself, and when toolstrips were available (I don't think they are anymore), they were exposed as HTML pages with most of the work done for you in predefined CSS, so no absolute positioning (at least not that you have to do yourself).
integration with native or native-alike (hear xul) UI and cross-platform issues, a major concern
Basically, the article seems to be assuming there are (and will always be) advantages to XUL. To me, the answer to this is not to expose XUL, but to fix/extend the HTML used. In a way, I think Chrome proves that users really don't care that much about the UI looking and feeling "native", but care much more about it being themable.
You would be amazed how FEW samples you need with good sampling to get a good estimate,
Well, actually, I'm counting on that when I just use a "power of ten".
Sampling and results is a classic garbage in garbage out scenario. If you don't sample right your results are at best meaningless at worst they give you a completely wrong impression.
That's why it's important to record as much information as possible from each sample -- at the very least, we'd know whether it's garbage. For example:
If you wanted to know the average income of a household in the US you wouldn't just sample from people in Silicon valley just before the bust, if you did that it wouldn't matter what kind of tricks you did to your data your results would be bad.
Well, no, one obvious trick is to say, "Hey, all of this is from people in Silicon Valley just before the bust." The next obvious trick is to then combine those samples with the same people after the bust, and with other people elsewhere -- then you not only correct the error, but you get a sense of the difference between Silicon Valley and elsewhere.
My point here is that it's a hack for a programmer like me, who doesn't understand statistics (much), to make it easier to work with someone who does.
I believe the general principle here is called "data porn".
But that does kind of start to get expensive -- even just the per-use cost of a RealDoll is probably lower. Still, why would you spend thousands of dollars for simulated sex (albeit more often) when you can spend those thousands of dollars for real sex?
Granted, the fleshlight is a little over twice as expensive, but it's still in about the same range, and it is (more or less) the same kind of toy -- a disembodied genital.
Now, the TrueCompanion website doesn't list a price, and I assume it would be much higher. For comparison, it looks like the Female RealDoll runs around $5k or $6k... But they have Male ones, too, and they aren't cheaper, unless you go for the disembodied torso.
So no, I don't think it really says all that much. I mean, I do agree with you about this:
Why anyone would spend hundreds of dollars on a sex toy is beyond me.
...though probably for a reason you wouldn't like: If I was that desperate, a prostitute is probably more cost-effective and convenient, and I'd rather not do either. But I don't really see anything about this to make one gender better or worse......though I suspect that far more women own vibrators than men own any sex toy. Maybe we make up for it in pornography?
So, since so many people don't seem to want to actually read Zed's stuff -- and I honestly don't blame you -- I'll try to summarize:
Eventually, every major science adopted an empiricist view of the world. Except Computer Science of course.
He tends to bitch a lot about computer scientists. I'm just starting a CS degree, and there is a Statistics class in the curriculum. Is he working with people with good degrees, people from a technical college with a "programming" degree, people from a diploma mill, or high school students with no degree at all?
Of course, he seems to be implying it's everyone, and doing so in a typically Zed-like way.
"All you need to do is run that test [insert power-of-ten] times and then do an average." Usually the power-of-ten is 1000...
I don't know that I've ever heard that particular statement. But it's a good point:
How do you know that 1000 is the correct number of iterations to improve the power of the experiment?
Generally because it was probably closer to a million, so I'm erring on the side of taking more, rather than fewer, measurements. But without careful consideration, I could be way off.
How are you performing the samplings?
I think this is vastly less important than how you are dealing with the data, but it is also a good point. For example, his complaint is that an average isn't enough; with detailed enough logging, he could easily go back into my data and figure out min, max, standard deviation, histograms...
How do you know that 1000 is enough to get the process into a steady state after the ramp-up period?
Not a huge deal -- the "steady state" will almost certainly be faster than the "ramp-up" period. Worst case, I'm over-optimizing.
What will you do if the 1000 tests takes 10 hours?
Either ctrl+c, or try it 10 times.
How does 1000 sequential requests help you determine the performance under load?
Very good point here. It's still a useful statistic, but you still need to measure things like 1000 simultaneous requests, not just 1000 all in sequence.
On the other hand, if your performance is acceptable with them all in sequence, you could just run it through something like Event Machine, so it's all sequential on production, too.
The most troubling problem with these single number “averages” is that there’s two common averages and that without some form of range or variance error they are useless. If you take a look at the previous graphs you can see visually why this is a problem. Two averages can be the same, but hide massive differences in behavior...
So yes, always make sure you can record enough statistics so that someone else can come along and use your data to give you something meaningful.
The moral of the story is that if you give an average without standard deviations then you’re totally missing the entire point of even trying to measure something. A major goal of measurement is to develop a succinct and accurate picture of what’s going on...
It doesn't have to be statistically accurate. It just has to be close enough.
Ah, confounding. The most difficult thing to explain to a programmer, yet the most elementary part of all scientific experimentation. It’s pretty simple: If you want to measure something, then don’t measure other shit.
This is both a very good and a very bad idea. It ties into the peeve he had before -- ramp-up time. For example:
If we want to take one single line of code and test it then we can. If we want to only verify one single query on a database then what’s stopping us?
What's stopping us is that our applications don't actually work like that.
Erm... It is superior. Direct3D exists on Windows and Xbox 360. OpenGL exists everywhere except Xbox 360, including newer web browsers.
ignoring the tons of games that are currently running on xbox 360 AND ps3
Well, it also "ignores" the games that actually have both a Direct3D and OpenGL renderer. Yes, you can make the game cross-platform beyond the library. But if you do it with OpenGL, you get a lot of platforms for free.
It's a bit like saying cross-platform C++ apps disprove the effectiveness of Java, or cross-platform-but-native C++ apps disprove the effectiveness of Qt.
These things make it easier to port your game, because OpenGL is already a cross-platform graphics library. If you have to build an abstraction layer on top of OpenGL and Direct3D both, you're basically implementing a cross-platform library yourself -- much like, say, Qt. It's do-able, but you're reinventing the wheel.
I mean, to put it another way, does the fact that Quake 1 runs very well in software mode disprove the alleged superior rendering capabilities of modern graphics cards? Or maybe all it means is that people can do things the hard way?
And that is why this argument is largely irrelevant. Games cost so much to produce now
The author is a successful indie developer, who employs all of five people. Lugaru is cross-platform, very good, and relatively well-known, and he credits a lot of that to their Mac and Linux support.
The point is that any game dev is probably going to have to support both DirectX and OpenGL/PS3 libraries.
Yet the argument is still quite relevant, in that if your engine abstracts properly, you should be using OpenGL on Windows, Mac, and Linux. The only platform where DirectX makes any sense is the 360, and that's because it doesn't really have OpenGL.
Yes, there are extensions and with vendor specific extensions, OpenGL can do everything Direct3D can today. But after how many GL_NV_* extensions does OpenGL stop being a cohesive API?
After enough that you can't also use GL_ATI_* extensions to accomplish roughly the same thing.
technical features alone do not make for a better product.
That's true, and I'd suggest you read an article (by the same developer) about why you should support Mac, and even Linux. Lugaru arguably wouldn't be the success it is without its Linux fanbase.
So the only real answer there is to either use GL, or wrap it all in enough abstraction that you can actually port it. TFA makes that point, too -- that in any decent engine, you're already abstracting it to the point where it really doesn't matter what the low-level API looks like, any more than I care what ATA calls look like -- I hardly care how my filesystem works.
And if that's the case, technical superiority wins -- if it runs at a higher framerate on GL, without being significantly more difficult, that's a win.
This is inccorect. DirectX 10 does work on Windows XP, it is just not officially supported by Microsoft.
I find it interesting you'd make this argument, after you were just talking about how great the community, development environment, etc is.
However, as I understand it, it's useless for a game -- in order to actually get dx10 in your game, you'd have to do some questionable registry hacks and such, and it's quite possibly illegal. So you're not going to ship a game that supports XP, nor will you put time, effort, or community resources into supporting XP.
According to Zephiris, there are actually significant technical problems, also.
Compare that to OpenGL, which will Just Work on XP, with all modern features, and any future ones a manufacturer cares to support.
The best use case for twitter to me really sounded like machine updates. Mostly because its the only application that seemed sustainable.
I'm not sure what you mean by that.
A person twittering sounds great and all, until that person suddenly is too busy to update and then its worthless to any followers.
I think you just missed my point, though -- take the imaginary cocktail party again. Some people will have to go to the bathroom, some will get sick or tired and go home. That doesn't mean the conversation ends, unless you have such a sad social life that you're only talking to that one person.
Again, think of it not as microblogging, but as a slightly slower but MUCH bigger IRC.
Technologically, I actually despise Twitter. There have got to be a dozen different ways it could be done better, relying on existing standards and properly distributed. Socially, I despise the fact that people seem to have picked up on it as the Next Big Thing, much like Facebook, Myspace, blogging, or the Internet itself. Think about it -- "ExecTweets" is a real thing, and it's completely missing the point.
Oddly enough, the bestdemonstrationofTwitterIhaveseen is fictional. Just remember, it's not a blog, it's a conversation -- you have to actually pick apart the threads to get some of the humor.
let's just take Linux for example, drivers that work in one distro don't always work in another
If done right, they absolutely do. If you're talking about the 3D market, nVidia has one download per OS per CPU architecture. So the same 64-bit (or 32-bit) driver will work across all distros.
Having a stable/typical setup helps, as you can focus in more on your product than worrying about whether or not it will work on all these different platforms/drivers/whatever.
Yeah, it's great, until you want to do something that stable/typical setup won't support.
Sure, you could have an "open standard," but someone is controlling that, too.
That "someone" is a group of people from many companies, not just one. And while it's "controlled", it is much more freely licensed -- contrast to DirectX. How likely is Microsoft to license the DirectX APIs for Linux or OS X -- or worse yet, PS3 or Wii? How much would they charge for it?
DirectX is a combination of several not-entirely-related technologies. The graphics component is Direct3D, and the stupidly obvious competitor is OpenGL.
why are you complaining about it instead of actually working to make it go away?
Because OpenGL is already better, as TFA explains. The problem is purely a marketing one, and requires a marketing response. The marketing response sounds like "complaining", but is actually encouraging people to think and explore their options.
DirectX has networking/input/graphics drivers? Then write those and attach them to OpenGL.
The result is called SDL. Again, these have already been done, they just aren't part of one giant marketing package, largely because they don't necessarily have anything to do with each other. For example, OpenGL powers my compositing window manager at the moment, but it really doesn't need to make any sound.
DirectX has better documentation/examples? Then create them for your OpenGL solution!
Fair enough.
DirectX can be ported to Xbox? Fine; then get off your bony butt and go talk to Sony and Nintendo about enabling trivial porting of OpenGL apps.
What makes you think the author of TFA hasn't done so? Indeed, what makes you think they would listen to the GP at all?
But FYI, PS3 and Wii both include a form of OpenGL, though there are differences.
Sorry, I just get sick of the whining by anti-Microsoft goons who don't have the cojones to actually compete with Microsoft-- stop passing the buck and do it already.
I understand what you're saying, but if it was that easy, we'd have done it already.
Whining is not mutually exclusive with doing something about it.
it's a web site and you can put small messages on it that other people can read. That's all it is and ever was.
I share your sentiment, but realize, HTTP is a method of transferring files. That's all it is and ever was.
HTML is a method of marking up content. That's all it is and ever was.
Instant Messaging is just email, but faster. That's all it is and ever was....until you realize that it's not the technology behind it, but how people use it, that make it what it is. When Twitter is used as a blog site, it's exactly as useless as you suggest. When it's used as a conversation, that's somewhat different.
So no, I don't use it, but I think I'm starting to get what it's about.
the end result is always the same: the most optimized solution for survival, tool making, etc.
I'd strongly disagree here. It will be "optimal" in some sense, but there's still a lot of baggage (vestigal stuff) from evolving, rather than being "designed". The human eye is a great example of this, interestingly.
Coding languages VS visual coding is very bad analogy, they are inherently different and targeted to different audiences.
On the contrary, they were targeted at exactly the same audience which now uses langages like PHP and Ruby -- either professionals (well, in Ruby) who value programmer productivity over raw performance, or casual users who need a shallow learning curve.
A lot of these are clear: They are different level languages.
I don't think so.
PHP vs Perl PHP vs Ruby Perl VS Python
These all attempt to fill the same niche of web development, and only PHP doesn't seem to be trying to take over as an admin/scripting language. Ruby, Perl, and Python all attempt to be general-purpose langages -- all of them have things like OpenGL bindings.
C vs ASM
C is exactly what I'm talking about -- when it was developed, a lot of real application and systems development was taking place in ASM. One of the things that made Unix revolutionary was that it was written in C, not ASM, which made it portable -- other OSes at the time were written in ASM for performance, but they died with the hardware they were written for.
ASM is way more complex than C despite having way smaller list of commands to use
In other words, ASM is way simpler than C, but more difficult to use, because C has more features. I bet it's much quicker to learn to use ASM, it's just much slower to get anything done.
C vs C/C++
Here, it's exactly the same thing. C++ is absolutely targeted at replacing C, and it has done so in a lot of places -- particularly as an application development language. It currently competes with C on Linux -- a lot of GNOME/GTK+ stuff is in C, and a lot of KDE/Qt stuff is in C++.
It's clear that C/C++ is way more powerfull than plain old C
First, I think you're confused -- "C/C++" should probably just be called C++, because C++ is a superset of C.
But no, it's not clear. C++ is insanely more complex, with all kinds of bizarre little edge cases -- even the syntax has some perverse ambiguities. For example, templates use angle brackets for a kind of scope, but the shift operators (<< and >>) take precedence over the angle brackets used as templates. So you have things like this:
template <class ElementOfCommutativeRingWithIdentity, template<typename RingElementMonomial> class TemplateMonomial> class TemplatePolynomial: public HashedListBasicObjects <TemplateMonomial<ElementOfCommutativeRingWithIdentity> > {};
Aside from the wall of text you have to go through just to keep your types straight, look at the end of the last line. Yes, they had to put a space between those closing angle brackets, or it'd be interpreted as a >> operator.
And the language is full of crap like that. No one can hold the entire language in their head. It's no wonder people prefer C...
But the thing is, C has structs. C has function pointers. That's really all you need to make an object-oriented interface -- and in fact, early C++ compilers simply turned it into C and fed it to a C compiler.
So while I've actually enjoyed getting my feet wet with C++ again lately, I'm not convinced it's better than C.
There are non-techie targeted software out there using MySQL backend... Bottomline is, there is scenarios where non-techies as well might be use a database.
And in those scenarios, that's really a bug in the design of that software. I will never understand why AmaroK chose to move to an embedded MySQL...
But this is a case of using the right tool for the job. In this case, the right tool is staring you in the face: SQLite.
But even SQLite needs maintenance, and it's up to your app to cal
My brain rebels at trying to actually read that paragraph.
Thinking Screen Media, Inc. (formerly Frame Media, Inc.) is the leader in content delivery to connected screens worldwide. Founded in 2007, Thinking Screen enhances the value proposition of connected screens...
...and I just stop. I have to, or I'll black out from the stupidity. "Enhances the value proposition"... gah!
Even when I force myself (with some considerable effort) to read the entire thing, that's got to be one of the most empty bits of marketing fluff I've ever seen.
I actually wrote a custom one, which ties in to the onDocumentReady handler.
That means the ads will most likely have started downloading, but I'll knock them out as soon as 100% of the HTML is done. It also means that since I'm on fiber, the ad servers shouldn't really slow me down, as they are separate domains, and thus separate connections.
Unfortunately, it's not really generally useful, as it uses CouchDB to store the rules. That was a fun experiment, but you're not going to install CouchDB just to use my adblocker.
But yes, I'm pretty sure there's a plan to eventually deal with this, it's just not done yet.
What? The beta is pretty rock solid for me. There's one annoying, persistent bug in HTML5, which I haven't bothered to get annoyed about since I don't really see enough HTML5 video to care.
But until fairly recently, Flash was crashing a lot for me. That meant I ran Konqueror a lot, because crashing an entire window full of tabs is still better than crashing all windows full of tabs.
I ran the Chrome nightly builds until there was a stable beta. There were occasional and annoying bugs, but I would often go for weeks without problems. Worst case, a tab crashes, you hit refresh -- but days and weeks pass between those. Honestly, the released version of Firefox was less stable overall, at the time.
had all the addons/themes
I'm not sure how good it's going to be, or how likely it is to work at all, but I did hear people proposing ways for Chrome to run Firefox extensions. However, it does have plenty of its own.
along with the ability to customize absolutely everything
I'll definitely give you that. There are things I've seen Firefox extensions do that Chrome extensions can't touch, yet. But that's actually a nice tradeoff -- Chrome extensions are somewhat limited, but it means that if you try to install, say, the YouTube downloader, it'll only touch your data on Youtube.com, it'll say so, and Chrome will enforce it.
Still, I think it's possible to have our cake and eat it, too.
the fact that its available in Ubuntu without needing extra repos
Why is this a blocker?
I guess, from a privacy/security standpoint, I could see an argument, but from sheer usability, you can actually point and click on a deb to both download Chrome and automagically enable the extra repos.
Google is, however, one way to understand what the patent is saying, at least enough to examine whether there might be prior art.
I suppose in an ideal world, they'd at least skim the summary, then fire an email off to whoever filed the patent asking "How is this different than <list of patents>?"
I think this is the first time I've heard of WikiPatents at all, and I don't think it's been featured on the front page yet.
I'm thinking this would be very useful in the patent approval process, not just after the fact. Suppose it worked like this: The second you file a patent, it would be published. Before it could be approved, it would have to be public for some length of time, during which anyone could present prior art or arguments for "obviousness".
On the other hand, I think they're being entirely too kind. From their FAQ:
Patent Examiners do an excellent job reviewing patents in the limited amount of time they are allotted to review patents. However, no single individual can accumulate all of the most relevant information to review a patent within 10 hours, 100 hours, or even 1,000 hours.
On the other hand, based on the "quality" of the patents which get through (like this one!), it really doesn't seem like Patent Examiners even bother to Google it before approving.
Slashdot Mirror
Chrome extensions are entirely HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and so are many Chrome pages (the New Tab Page, the Downloads Tab, etc). I'd tag this badsummary, because it's not the idea of Jetpack that's the problem here, it's the implementation. From the first article, which is the only one that seems to be seriously concerned:
I like its power, I dislike its syntax. I _really_ dislike its syntax.... images are inline as data URLs because Jetpacks misses offline support and packaging; the HTML element inserted into the statusbar has to be precisely positioned and that will suck depending on the preferred user's font size;
Contrast to Chrome's extension API, which is fairly clean where it isn't strictly what's already available to any webpage. In particular, those two issues are addressed: Chrome extensions are packaged (more or less) as a cryptographically signed zipfile, so you can have separate images, scripts, etc; there are currently very well-defined ways to add a button either to the URL bar or to the browser itself, and when toolstrips were available (I don't think they are anymore), they were exposed as HTML pages with most of the work done for you in predefined CSS, so no absolute positioning (at least not that you have to do yourself).
integration with native or native-alike (hear xul) UI and cross-platform issues, a major concern
Basically, the article seems to be assuming there are (and will always be) advantages to XUL. To me, the answer to this is not to expose XUL, but to fix/extend the HTML used. In a way, I think Chrome proves that users really don't care that much about the UI looking and feeling "native", but care much more about it being themable.
You would be amazed how FEW samples you need with good sampling to get a good estimate,
Well, actually, I'm counting on that when I just use a "power of ten".
Sampling and results is a classic garbage in garbage out scenario. If you don't sample right your results are at best meaningless at worst they give you a completely wrong impression.
That's why it's important to record as much information as possible from each sample -- at the very least, we'd know whether it's garbage. For example:
If you wanted to know the average income of a household in the US you wouldn't just sample from people in Silicon valley just before the bust, if you did that it wouldn't matter what kind of tricks you did to your data your results would be bad.
Well, no, one obvious trick is to say, "Hey, all of this is from people in Silicon Valley just before the bust." The next obvious trick is to then combine those samples with the same people after the bust, and with other people elsewhere -- then you not only correct the error, but you get a sense of the difference between Silicon Valley and elsewhere.
My point here is that it's a hack for a programmer like me, who doesn't understand statistics (much), to make it easier to work with someone who does.
I believe the general principle here is called "data porn".
Well, for the right price...
But that does kind of start to get expensive -- even just the per-use cost of a RealDoll is probably lower. Still, why would you spend thousands of dollars for simulated sex (albeit more often) when you can spend those thousands of dollars for real sex?
Granted, the fleshlight is a little over twice as expensive, but it's still in about the same range, and it is (more or less) the same kind of toy -- a disembodied genital.
Now, the TrueCompanion website doesn't list a price, and I assume it would be much higher. For comparison, it looks like the Female RealDoll runs around $5k or $6k... But they have Male ones, too, and they aren't cheaper, unless you go for the disembodied torso.
And a Sybian is a little over $1k.
So no, I don't think it really says all that much. I mean, I do agree with you about this:
Why anyone would spend hundreds of dollars on a sex toy is beyond me.
...though probably for a reason you wouldn't like: If I was that desperate, a prostitute is probably more cost-effective and convenient, and I'd rather not do either. But I don't really see anything about this to make one gender better or worse... ...though I suspect that far more women own vibrators than men own any sex toy. Maybe we make up for it in pornography?
Would your conclusion then be that my computer has a disk capable of copying files at 1060MB/s?
No, because you're not measuring disk at that point. That's confounding.
But it's a good point -- I suppose "ramp up" is a kind of confounding, anyway. I was just considering it mostly in terms like VM warm-up.
So, since so many people don't seem to want to actually read Zed's stuff -- and I honestly don't blame you -- I'll try to summarize:
Eventually, every major science adopted an empiricist view of the world. Except Computer Science of course.
He tends to bitch a lot about computer scientists. I'm just starting a CS degree, and there is a Statistics class in the curriculum. Is he working with people with good degrees, people from a technical college with a "programming" degree, people from a diploma mill, or high school students with no degree at all?
Of course, he seems to be implying it's everyone, and doing so in a typically Zed-like way.
"All you need to do is run that test [insert power-of-ten] times and then do an average." Usually the power-of-ten is 1000...
I don't know that I've ever heard that particular statement. But it's a good point:
How do you know that 1000 is the correct number of iterations to improve the power of the experiment?
Generally because it was probably closer to a million, so I'm erring on the side of taking more, rather than fewer, measurements. But without careful consideration, I could be way off.
How are you performing the samplings?
I think this is vastly less important than how you are dealing with the data, but it is also a good point. For example, his complaint is that an average isn't enough; with detailed enough logging, he could easily go back into my data and figure out min, max, standard deviation, histograms...
How do you know that 1000 is enough to get the process into a steady state after the ramp-up period?
Not a huge deal -- the "steady state" will almost certainly be faster than the "ramp-up" period. Worst case, I'm over-optimizing.
What will you do if the 1000 tests takes 10 hours?
Either ctrl+c, or try it 10 times.
How does 1000 sequential requests help you determine the performance under load?
Very good point here. It's still a useful statistic, but you still need to measure things like 1000 simultaneous requests, not just 1000 all in sequence.
On the other hand, if your performance is acceptable with them all in sequence, you could just run it through something like Event Machine, so it's all sequential on production, too.
The most troubling problem with these single number “averages” is that there’s two common averages and that without some form of range or variance error they are useless. If you take a look at the previous graphs you can see visually why this is a problem. Two averages can be the same, but hide massive differences in behavior...
So yes, always make sure you can record enough statistics so that someone else can come along and use your data to give you something meaningful.
The moral of the story is that if you give an average without standard deviations then you’re totally missing the entire point of even trying to measure something. A major goal of measurement is to develop a succinct and accurate picture of what’s going on...
It doesn't have to be statistically accurate. It just has to be close enough.
Ah, confounding. The most difficult thing to explain to a programmer, yet the most elementary part of all scientific experimentation. It’s pretty simple: If you want to measure something, then don’t measure other shit.
This is both a very good and a very bad idea. It ties into the peeve he had before -- ramp-up time. For example:
If we want to take one single line of code and test it then we can. If we want to only verify one single query on a database then what’s stopping us?
What's stopping us is that our applications don't actually work like that.
...unfortunately, they are mostly lost in the irony of statements like this:
I think women are better programmers because they have less ego and are typically more interested in the gear rather than the pissing contest.
I doubt I've seen anyone more thoroughly entrenched in a pissing contest than Zed Shaw, of the website formerly known as "Zed's So Fucking Awesome".
What dream world are you living in? Can I warp over?
Maybe, if I can visit the one where calling someone's opinion a "dream world" is a valid argument.
Show me why I'm wrong, not just that I'm wrong.
alleged superior cross platform support
Erm... It is superior. Direct3D exists on Windows and Xbox 360. OpenGL exists everywhere except Xbox 360, including newer web browsers.
ignoring the tons of games that are currently running on xbox 360 AND ps3
Well, it also "ignores" the games that actually have both a Direct3D and OpenGL renderer. Yes, you can make the game cross-platform beyond the library. But if you do it with OpenGL, you get a lot of platforms for free.
It's a bit like saying cross-platform C++ apps disprove the effectiveness of Java, or cross-platform-but-native C++ apps disprove the effectiveness of Qt.
These things make it easier to port your game, because OpenGL is already a cross-platform graphics library. If you have to build an abstraction layer on top of OpenGL and Direct3D both, you're basically implementing a cross-platform library yourself -- much like, say, Qt. It's do-able, but you're reinventing the wheel.
I mean, to put it another way, does the fact that Quake 1 runs very well in software mode disprove the alleged superior rendering capabilities of modern graphics cards? Or maybe all it means is that people can do things the hard way?
And that is why this argument is largely irrelevant. Games cost so much to produce now
The author is a successful indie developer, who employs all of five people. Lugaru is cross-platform, very good, and relatively well-known, and he credits a lot of that to their Mac and Linux support.
The point is that any game dev is probably going to have to support both DirectX and OpenGL/PS3 libraries.
Yet the argument is still quite relevant, in that if your engine abstracts properly, you should be using OpenGL on Windows, Mac, and Linux. The only platform where DirectX makes any sense is the 360, and that's because it doesn't really have OpenGL.
Yes, there are extensions and with vendor specific extensions, OpenGL can do everything Direct3D can today. But after how many GL_NV_* extensions does OpenGL stop being a cohesive API?
After enough that you can't also use GL_ATI_* extensions to accomplish roughly the same thing.
technical features alone do not make for a better product.
That's true, and I'd suggest you read an article (by the same developer) about why you should support Mac, and even Linux. Lugaru arguably wouldn't be the success it is without its Linux fanbase.
So the only real answer there is to either use GL, or wrap it all in enough abstraction that you can actually port it. TFA makes that point, too -- that in any decent engine, you're already abstracting it to the point where it really doesn't matter what the low-level API looks like, any more than I care what ATA calls look like -- I hardly care how my filesystem works.
And if that's the case, technical superiority wins -- if it runs at a higher framerate on GL, without being significantly more difficult, that's a win.
This is inccorect. DirectX 10 does work on Windows XP, it is just not officially supported by Microsoft.
I find it interesting you'd make this argument, after you were just talking about how great the community, development environment, etc is.
However, as I understand it, it's useless for a game -- in order to actually get dx10 in your game, you'd have to do some questionable registry hacks and such, and it's quite possibly illegal. So you're not going to ship a game that supports XP, nor will you put time, effort, or community resources into supporting XP.
According to Zephiris, there are actually significant technical problems, also.
Compare that to OpenGL, which will Just Work on XP, with all modern features, and any future ones a manufacturer cares to support.
The best use case for twitter to me really sounded like machine updates. Mostly because its the only application that seemed sustainable.
I'm not sure what you mean by that.
A person twittering sounds great and all, until that person suddenly is too busy to update and then its worthless to any followers.
I think you just missed my point, though -- take the imaginary cocktail party again. Some people will have to go to the bathroom, some will get sick or tired and go home. That doesn't mean the conversation ends, unless you have such a sad social life that you're only talking to that one person.
Again, think of it not as microblogging, but as a slightly slower but MUCH bigger IRC.
Technologically, I actually despise Twitter. There have got to be a dozen different ways it could be done better, relying on existing standards and properly distributed. Socially, I despise the fact that people seem to have picked up on it as the Next Big Thing, much like Facebook, Myspace, blogging, or the Internet itself. Think about it -- "ExecTweets" is a real thing, and it's completely missing the point.
Oddly enough, the best demonstration of Twitter I have seen is fictional. Just remember, it's not a blog, it's a conversation -- you have to actually pick apart the threads to get some of the humor.
let's just take Linux for example, drivers that work in one distro don't always work in another
If done right, they absolutely do. If you're talking about the 3D market, nVidia has one download per OS per CPU architecture. So the same 64-bit (or 32-bit) driver will work across all distros.
Having a stable/typical setup helps, as you can focus in more on your product than worrying about whether or not it will work on all these different platforms/drivers/whatever.
Yeah, it's great, until you want to do something that stable/typical setup won't support.
Sure, you could have an "open standard," but someone is controlling that, too.
That "someone" is a group of people from many companies, not just one. And while it's "controlled", it is much more freely licensed -- contrast to DirectX. How likely is Microsoft to license the DirectX APIs for Linux or OS X -- or worse yet, PS3 or Wii? How much would they charge for it?
make a competitor for DirectX?
DirectX is a combination of several not-entirely-related technologies. The graphics component is Direct3D, and the stupidly obvious competitor is OpenGL.
why are you complaining about it instead of actually working to make it go away?
Because OpenGL is already better, as TFA explains. The problem is purely a marketing one, and requires a marketing response. The marketing response sounds like "complaining", but is actually encouraging people to think and explore their options.
DirectX has networking/input/graphics drivers? Then write those and attach them to OpenGL.
The result is called SDL. Again, these have already been done, they just aren't part of one giant marketing package, largely because they don't necessarily have anything to do with each other. For example, OpenGL powers my compositing window manager at the moment, but it really doesn't need to make any sound.
DirectX has better documentation/examples? Then create them for your OpenGL solution!
Fair enough.
DirectX can be ported to Xbox? Fine; then get off your bony butt and go talk to Sony and Nintendo about enabling trivial porting of OpenGL apps.
What makes you think the author of TFA hasn't done so? Indeed, what makes you think they would listen to the GP at all?
But FYI, PS3 and Wii both include a form of OpenGL, though there are differences.
Sorry, I just get sick of the whining by anti-Microsoft goons who don't have the cojones to actually compete with Microsoft-- stop passing the buck and do it already.
I understand what you're saying, but if it was that easy, we'd have done it already.
Whining is not mutually exclusive with doing something about it.
it's a web site and you can put small messages on it that other people can read. That's all it is and ever was.
I share your sentiment, but realize, HTTP is a method of transferring files. That's all it is and ever was.
HTML is a method of marking up content. That's all it is and ever was.
Instant Messaging is just email, but faster. That's all it is and ever was. ...until you realize that it's not the technology behind it, but how people use it, that make it what it is. When Twitter is used as a blog site, it's exactly as useless as you suggest. When it's used as a conversation, that's somewhat different.
So no, I don't use it, but I think I'm starting to get what it's about.
the end result is always the same: the most optimized solution for survival, tool making, etc.
I'd strongly disagree here. It will be "optimal" in some sense, but there's still a lot of baggage (vestigal stuff) from evolving, rather than being "designed". The human eye is a great example of this, interestingly.
Coding languages VS visual coding is very bad analogy, they are inherently different and targeted to different audiences.
On the contrary, they were targeted at exactly the same audience which now uses langages like PHP and Ruby -- either professionals (well, in Ruby) who value programmer productivity over raw performance, or casual users who need a shallow learning curve.
A lot of these are clear: They are different level languages.
I don't think so.
PHP vs Perl
PHP vs Ruby
Perl VS Python
These all attempt to fill the same niche of web development, and only PHP doesn't seem to be trying to take over as an admin/scripting language. Ruby, Perl, and Python all attempt to be general-purpose langages -- all of them have things like OpenGL bindings.
C vs ASM
C is exactly what I'm talking about -- when it was developed, a lot of real application and systems development was taking place in ASM. One of the things that made Unix revolutionary was that it was written in C, not ASM, which made it portable -- other OSes at the time were written in ASM for performance, but they died with the hardware they were written for.
ASM is way more complex than C despite having way smaller list of commands to use
In other words, ASM is way simpler than C, but more difficult to use, because C has more features. I bet it's much quicker to learn to use ASM, it's just much slower to get anything done.
C vs C/C++
Here, it's exactly the same thing. C++ is absolutely targeted at replacing C, and it has done so in a lot of places -- particularly as an application development language. It currently competes with C on Linux -- a lot of GNOME/GTK+ stuff is in C, and a lot of KDE/Qt stuff is in C++.
It's clear that C/C++ is way more powerfull than plain old C
First, I think you're confused -- "C/C++" should probably just be called C++, because C++ is a superset of C.
But no, it's not clear. C++ is insanely more complex, with all kinds of bizarre little edge cases -- even the syntax has some perverse ambiguities. For example, templates use angle brackets for a kind of scope, but the shift operators (<< and >>) take precedence over the angle brackets used as templates. So you have things like this:
Aside from the wall of text you have to go through just to keep your types straight, look at the end of the last line. Yes, they had to put a space between those closing angle brackets, or it'd be interpreted as a >> operator.
And the language is full of crap like that. No one can hold the entire language in their head. It's no wonder people prefer C...
But the thing is, C has structs. C has function pointers. That's really all you need to make an object-oriented interface -- and in fact, early C++ compilers simply turned it into C and fed it to a C compiler.
So while I've actually enjoyed getting my feet wet with C++ again lately, I'm not convinced it's better than C.
There are non-techie targeted software out there using MySQL backend... Bottomline is, there is scenarios where non-techies as well might be use a database.
And in those scenarios, that's really a bug in the design of that software. I will never understand why AmaroK chose to move to an embedded MySQL...
But this is a case of using the right tool for the job. In this case, the right tool is staring you in the face: SQLite.
But even SQLite needs maintenance, and it's up to your app to cal
Actually, yeah. American consumers do pretty much need that kind of a kick in the balls before they'll take action.
My brain rebels at trying to actually read that paragraph.
Thinking Screen Media, Inc. (formerly Frame Media, Inc.) is the leader in content delivery to connected screens worldwide. Founded in 2007, Thinking Screen enhances the value proposition of connected screens...
...and I just stop. I have to, or I'll black out from the stupidity. "Enhances the value proposition"... gah!
Even when I force myself (with some considerable effort) to read the entire thing, that's got to be one of the most empty bits of marketing fluff I've ever seen.
I actually wrote a custom one, which ties in to the onDocumentReady handler.
That means the ads will most likely have started downloading, but I'll knock them out as soon as 100% of the HTML is done. It also means that since I'm on fiber, the ad servers shouldn't really slow me down, as they are separate domains, and thus separate connections.
Unfortunately, it's not really generally useful, as it uses CouchDB to store the rules. That was a fun experiment, but you're not going to install CouchDB just to use my adblocker.
But yes, I'm pretty sure there's a plan to eventually deal with this, it's just not done yet.
It's pretty different from an URI if it doesn't include a location.
No it's not.
You're confusing a URI with a URL. A URL is a URI, and a URN is a URI, but a URN is not a URL.
This sounds more like a freenet hash.
Indeed it does, but there's nothing stopping a Freenet hash from being represented as a URI.
If it had a more stable Linux version
What? The beta is pretty rock solid for me. There's one annoying, persistent bug in HTML5, which I haven't bothered to get annoyed about since I don't really see enough HTML5 video to care.
But until fairly recently, Flash was crashing a lot for me. That meant I ran Konqueror a lot, because crashing an entire window full of tabs is still better than crashing all windows full of tabs.
I ran the Chrome nightly builds until there was a stable beta. There were occasional and annoying bugs, but I would often go for weeks without problems. Worst case, a tab crashes, you hit refresh -- but days and weeks pass between those. Honestly, the released version of Firefox was less stable overall, at the time.
had all the addons/themes
I'm not sure how good it's going to be, or how likely it is to work at all, but I did hear people proposing ways for Chrome to run Firefox extensions. However, it does have plenty of its own.
along with the ability to customize absolutely everything
I'll definitely give you that. There are things I've seen Firefox extensions do that Chrome extensions can't touch, yet. But that's actually a nice tradeoff -- Chrome extensions are somewhat limited, but it means that if you try to install, say, the YouTube downloader, it'll only touch your data on Youtube.com, it'll say so, and Chrome will enforce it.
Still, I think it's possible to have our cake and eat it, too.
the fact that its available in Ubuntu without needing extra repos
Why is this a blocker?
I guess, from a privacy/security standpoint, I could see an argument, but from sheer usability, you can actually point and click on a deb to both download Chrome and automagically enable the extra repos.
Google is, however, one way to understand what the patent is saying, at least enough to examine whether there might be prior art.
I suppose in an ideal world, they'd at least skim the summary, then fire an email off to whoever filed the patent asking "How is this different than <list of patents>?"
I think this is the first time I've heard of WikiPatents at all, and I don't think it's been featured on the front page yet.
I'm thinking this would be very useful in the patent approval process, not just after the fact. Suppose it worked like this: The second you file a patent, it would be published. Before it could be approved, it would have to be public for some length of time, during which anyone could present prior art or arguments for "obviousness".
On the other hand, I think they're being entirely too kind. From their FAQ:
Patent Examiners do an excellent job reviewing patents in the limited amount of time they are allotted to review patents. However, no single individual can accumulate all of the most relevant information to review a patent within 10 hours, 100 hours, or even 1,000 hours.
On the other hand, based on the "quality" of the patents which get through (like this one!), it really doesn't seem like Patent Examiners even bother to Google it before approving.