The game is a single-player and multi-player first-person shooter, built as a total conversion of Cube Engine 2
That alone adds a dimension that simply won't be there in Quake 3: real-time, multiplayer map editing, on the server, while others are still shooting each other.
A computer is going to be more accurate and faster than a person with the same data.
If you've actually got the algorithms to back that up, you'd be a pioneer in AI.
Want to prove it? Dial Goog-411. That's right, that's Google doing voice-recognition. And their massive cluster still sometimes has to make you wait a few seconds while they try to figure out what the hell you said.
So, getting back to what you said:
Think about an aim-bot.
There are generally going to be two things happening here:
Either you've discovered a surefire way to distinguish real targets from noise, in which case, the army probably wants to talk to you......or your aimbot is going to both be too perfect at headshotting people, and it'll make stupid mistakes that only a bot would. This is where it becomes painfully obvious to a good admin and/or good server-side passive anti-cheat what's going on.
I'd also suggest you look into the Robo-Olympics, and various programming competitions, and the general failure of AI in single-player games. Again, it is in general either not possible to do better than a human, or it's so obviously better than a human that you get banned.
Because the issue is politicized. It is not simply about religion but also about the highly political issue of education.
Sorry, I think you have your cause and effect mixed up. Politics has to do with whether people care, not necessarily whether they've arrived at the right answer.
I'll grant you, the move vocal creationists have tried to spin it this way -- many Godwin themselves immediately by trying to show a link between Darwin and Hitler, and of course they link it to everything else scary, especially other political ideas they can lump into the idea of "that crowd". For example:
They don't want that crowd teaching "Suzy Has Two Daddys" either.
I really don't see what one has to do with the other.
All evolution has to say on the matter is that homosexuality exists in nature, and may well be an inborn trait in humans. It says nothing about what homosexuals should do about it, or what we should do about them (if anything).
Now, if you actually tie it back to religion, it starts to make sense. Your religion might claim that homosexuality is wrong, and it might claim that evolution is wrong. You might be afraid of evolution challenging your religion, and thus, your basis for whatever other political ideas you have.
But take away the religion, and the politics become irrelevant.
Because the issues is inaccurately described. Too often, evolution is described as 'we descended from apes' or 'we evolved from monkies'. It just is not true. The creatures from which we evolved don't walk the earth and apes/monkies will never - by nature - evolve into humans.
Ok, first of all, I'm not sure where you get that an ape will never evolve into a human. It's possible, though very unlikely. But you are correct in that evolution doesn't predict or imply this.
However, if you want to play a game of correctness, you could start by remembering that we are apes, by any sane classification.
That are common answers are primates is irrelevant.
Not to be a Nazi, but...
Because people aren't paid for the 'right' answer.
Are you honestly suggesting that it is normal for people to willingly lie on a study unless paid?
If you are afraid about diversity in thought and political opinion then you are a big giant pussy. Stupid too.
Well, since you've called me stupid, I think your "common answers" is fair game.
No, I am not afraid of diversity. In particular, while I have some strong opinions about abortion, I also realize that it's not a question to which there is an easy answer. While I would rather people think about it a bit more, there are intelligent arguments on each side.
What I am afraid of is ignorance and fanaticism.
I am frustrated and angry when I see that the most basic measure of intelligence, knowledge, and critical thinking is missing in the population -- which is then, very quickly, reflected in those we elect. And I am afraid when I see the results of that.
I am not afraid of pro-life or pro-choice, as an idea. I am happy to discuss and debate them.
No, I am afraid when the pro-life people insist that all abortion is murder, without even considering rape victims, and when these so-called "pro-life" people kill doctors to make their point about how sacred life is.
I am afraid when I hear that the majority of the population, and many in power, believe that the Rapture is upon us, that the end of the world will happen very soon. What incentive do they have to take care of the environment, or even to attempt to negotiate peace in our time?
For people like these, a mushroom cloud over every major city in the world would very likely be a blessing -- the Second Coming.
If this doesn't worry you, well, there's a difference between having balls and being insanely reckless.
You're assuming that everyone who has an opinion about this will actually be informed, will take the time to look through those proofs, reproduce those experiments, etc.
In particular, look at that graph. Are you frightened yet?
Evolution is one of the crowing triumphs of modern science. It has more evidence than any other theory I know of, from many branches of science -- the "tree of life" is repeated, exactly, in genetics, in the fossil record, in the geologic record, everywhere we care to look for it. It informs pretty much all of modern medicine and biology, and it is a humbling look at our origins and our true status with respect to other life on the planet. It is beautiful, important, and solidly supported by fact.
Even the Catholic Church has officially embraced evolution, and the big bang theory, as truth.
And a third of Americans reject evolution outright. These aren't people who just aren't sure -- they say it is definitely false.
Want to guess why?
Because they feel it threatens their religion. Because if evolution is true, the Earth (and certainly the Universe) cannot be six thousand years old, and they must accept that they are descended from apes -- or that, by any honest classification, humans are still a species of ape. Because they cannot accept the fact that at least some part of that religion is a fairy tale, or at least a metaphor.
The problem is, in order to reject evolution, they find they have to doubt just about every legitimate scientist who has an opinion on the subject, and keep themselves willfully ignorant. Furthermore, in order to believe the earth is six thousand years old, they pretty nearly have to stick their fingers in their ear and go "la la la la" in order to avoid pretty much every branch of science that has anything to say about the subject.
That is, if they are right, even the most basic grade-school cosmology must be wrong -- there are objects more than six thousand light years away from us. Geology must also be wrong -- not merely carbon-dating (which is already quite rigorous), but the kind of time scales modern geology suggests. And of course, modern medicine must be wrong -- our understanding of things like antibiotics relies on evolution to work.
And yet, they will feel qualified to address these issues, to challenge real scientists with such arguments as, "That's microevolution. Show me one 'kind' turning into another, and I'll believe it." When this fails to get them anywhere, they again close their eyes, ears, and minds, and ultimately turn to the very simplistic, reassuring, and ultimately wrong words of Ken Ham: "Who should you believe -- God or the scientists?"
The problem here is not just the validity of evolution. It is that in order to believe what the creationist wants to believe, they have to reject huge chunks of modern science. In order to continue to be relevant, they have consistently attempted to get their strange ideas taught in school -- not just as a philosophy, or a class in its own right, but as part of science.
And it's not just america -- 22% of Canadians are creationists. Something like a third of Americans are.
So, the short answer is, yes, laypeople absolutely will doubt whatever they feel they have a problem with. If they doubt evolution, cosmology, Einsteinian relativity, geology, archeology, paleontology, etc, just so they can believe a certain way, it's certainly not a stretch that they would doubt anything that conflicts with their actual (polluting, wasteful) lifestyle.
And unfortunately, even when 99.9% of scientists agree on something, it doesn't help if they can't convince the public -- because laypeople are also voters.
There are other safe places to get win32 software... for example, Sourceforge has a great deal of what's available in your distro's repositories.
And how does SourceForge sign the Windows binaries? If nothing else, packages from a repository are all signed and approved by the people running the repository.
For that matter, does SourceForge actually police its hosted files with anywhere near the rigor with which a public repository is managed? What's stopping someone from putting up a Linux version of BonziBuddy on SourceForge? It could even be open source!
If they need more "room" for ships in a zone/quadrant/whatever (I don't play the game), they just make a zone that's 100,000x100,000 instead of 10,000x10,000 and insert some more stock items for asteroids and planets to populate the area.
I don't play either, but I have a feeling that would get boring fast, if that was all. However, you are right that they could probably add a few asteroids and planets.
However, you seem to be implying that Eve has less need for artwork, and I'm not convinced of that.
While it would be entirely possible to have procedurally-generated areas of land, it really *wouldn't* be possible to have procedurally-generated cities that weren't bland and uninteresting.
And you base this on...?
I would argue that it would be quite possible, though as you imply, there would still need to be a fair amount done by hand.
If they were to consolidate every player into one server, Dalaran would be a sea of characters.
They'd have to create more space, and they'd have a bit more civil engineering to do, yes.
For world bosses,
So you add more world bosses, even duplicates of the current ones.
There's a reason that Blizzard "doesn't seem to care" about consolidating everyone onto a single server. It's because it's a terrible idea,
"It's hard" doesn't make it a terrible idea. It may make it an unsound business plan, however.
Nor would it necessarily have to be a single server, all at once. But it really does seem like the WoW approach to this problem has generally been still more sharding and instancing, making it less "massive" of a game.
Repositories won't help with that, because people want 3rd party programs and games.
As phantomcircuit says, that's a reason to put more software in repositories, or provide sane sandboxing for it. Speaking of which, when have you bought a game at the store, and found it pre-infected with malware?
However, at least the option exists. Show me where I can have an even halfway decent experience on Windows while sticking to trusted sources. Seriously, try to live with only what's available on Microsoft Update. Contrast this with the tens, even hundreds of thousands of packages for your typical Linux distribution.
All of the zealots yelling that Linux/Mac OSX are secure about malware, which results in normal people thinking they can run whatever downloaded "because my OS is secure!".
That's true, and I agree with you that this could be a problem. The solution to security is not merely to put people on another OS, it's to actually educate them about security.
That's also why you want to look at what tech-savvy people do for security, and how easy it is for them. If tech-savvy people on Linux get most of their software from repositories, and Windows and OS X don't have package management, that should tell you something.
However, I don't think it's harmful or incorrect to say that Linux is more secure than Windows, and that antivirus doesn't do much on either, other than protect you from yourself.
And before everyone jumps on the "but you can't get infected by just browsing on porn sites on linux!", why not? What was the last time you got infected by Windows vulnerability?
On Windows, there are still significant browser vulnerabilities which would be problematic. Additionally, they've only even tried to start reducing user privileges with Vista -- before that, surfing porn sites would likely get your machine completely rooted, as opposed to just having access as an ordinary user.
Now consider browsers like Chrome, which actually sandbox the browser process, chroot it, and run it as a separate user.
That brings up another point: IE has historically been swiss cheese, as far as security is concerned, yet it is still the default browser on Windows. The default browser on most Linux distributions is Firefox.
Those attacks are usually against 3rd party programs like PDF or Flash. And guess what, those apps are on Linux too and are just as well exploitable.
Flash? Maybe. All the more reason to get rid of it, and promote standards for which there are actually alternate implementations, like html5. Or just use Gnash -- though admittedly, this significantly limits what will work for you, so far.
PDF? PDF is a file format, not a program. I don't view them with Adobe Reader -- on KDE, I use a program called Okular, and it's something else on GNOME. Good luck finding something that exploits all of these at once. And hey, if you do find an exploit in Okular, go ahead and fix it -- can't do that with Acrobat.
This just shows that if Linux had 95% marketshare on desktop, and Windows 0.5%, it would be the same thing but just turned around.
I don't think we can actually make that call.
First of all, Linux is not "one thing", even less so than Windows is. If Linux had 95% of the desktop marketshare, that would be Linux, and probably not even strictly Linux, but free Unix. You'd still have some people running FreeBSD, some people running OpenSolaris, some people running Ubuntu, some people running a custom-complied Gentoo, and so on. The same things which make people imagine that porting proprietary software on Linux is hard (it really isn't), would make it much more difficult for an exploit to work.
Granted, most versions would probably have the vulnerability, but each version would have to be exploited slightly differently, since exploiting a buffer overflow (for example) requires intimate knowledg
It wasn't the industry standard until they did it.
So innovation only counts if you get the entire industry to adopt it?
I guess Microsoft "innovated" the GUI after all.
Don't point to some obscure 2d game and tell me that -it- changed the genre.
I never said that. All I'm saying is that it was clearly not a new idea, nor even the first implementation of it, so it's not something you can give Blizzard credit for "innovating".
But now that you mention it, I'd suggest looking at the role it had in the history of the genre before you write it off as "some obscure game":
Ultima Online, released in 1997, may be credited with first popularizing the genre, though Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds, released in 1996, was primarily responsible for mainstream attention in Asia, and EverQuest for the West.
Ah, it looks as though my post wasn't worded clearly enough. Sorry.
You say in one post Eve is trying to become WoW, but WoW isn't trying.
Nope. Here's what I said:
I'm not saying they could become WoW overnight. I'm saying they're at least trying, whereas Blizzard doesn't seem to care.
What I mean here is, I'm not saying Eve could handle the WoW player base overnight -- but at least they are trying to scale within a single shard, whereas WoW isn't.
Then you say it doesn't matter because it would be a bad idea anyway for WoW to be like Eve?
Where did I say that? I can't find it at all.
Do you even know what you're trying to say?
Absolutely, but judging by my typo, I probably shouldn't be posting at that time of night.
Actually, I did try to imply procedural content and other similar methods with with "you can duplicate the same content with slight changes". Now in hindsight, "slight changes" may have been somewhat badly worde
That's an understatement.
All such attempts ends up with everything feeling generic and unsatisfying.
Go play with a fractal.
without a great amount of work by actual artists/designers, you simply don't get something worthwhile.
I agree. However, the point is to amplify and augment that work.
In particular, there's nothing stopping you from procedurally-generating a landscape (something it can be quite good at) and then placing manually-constructed things in the way. Space seems like the perfect place for this -- most of it's empty space, there's a few asteroids and planets and things (easy to generate), and then you manually add things like space stations and ships, allowing a fair amount of player customization -- but then again, it makes sense that things like ships and space stations would be manufactured, and thus, you'd have a lot of the same.
They've worked on cutting out the boring parts of MMOs (grinding mobs, long travel times, waiting on health/mana, spending an hour looking for a group) so that focus can be on actual play.
I play a 2D MMO -- it's been going for over ten years. The only one of those problems that exists for me is "grinding mobs". There's a huge amount of soloing possible, everything's in the same server so it's not usually difficult to find a group, there's teleportation, and if I can't find a player, there are still NPCs (or, hell, potions) I can use to restore full health/mana.
I doubt very much that WoW "innovated" these things.
Blizzard doesn't care about what? Becoming what they already are?
I'm sorry, do they already support their entire player base in a single continuous world? Or are they still sharded to maybe a thousand players per "server"?
People love throwing around the "they don't care" rhetoric.
I never said they have to care, nor do I mean to imply they don't care about anything. In this context, all I mean to say is they don't care about this particular aspect of getting everyone into the same world, whereas Eve clearly does.
Again, they don't have to care -- especially given not all players even agree it's a good idea. I'm simply stating a fact here.
All single server, single instance, MMO games (Eve, Second Life, Muds) lack producer created non-generic content. When there is only a single instance of everything, there simply isn't enough producer time in the world to make up the content needed for everyone. At best, you can duplicate the same content with slight changes...
So, I've read this several times, and I can't find you even examining procedural content long enough to dismiss it. I don't know if Eve uses it -- in fact, I very much doubt it -- but it also seems like Eve would be the perfect game for it.
Not in the current design, unless there's something I'm missing. At least, not necessarily.
The problem is that Chrome provides no way to filter content before it gets to the renderer. So by the time I remove a Flash ad, Flash is already loaded. By the time I remove a script tag, the script has already run. By the time I remove an image, a connection has probably been opened to download the image, and there's a chance it's already here.
With the current extension framework, noscript and flashblock are impossible. You can fake it, but that's faking it -- a script will still have time to do some damage.
Now, it still has a chance to kill the image/flash before it does too much. It's still going to be faster once the page is loaded. But it's never going to be as slick as it would be with Firefox, unless the extension API changes.
I'm tempted to take my existing adblocker and migrate it to something like privoxy. There is something to be said for letting the browser parse the page first, but there's enough HTML parsing libraries out there. Plus, it would mean ad blocking for all browsers, forever.
You are limited to one background page per extension. There is no need for more than one.
Fair enough. However, you're also limited to one PageAction and one BrowserAction per extension. I can see why they did that, but it annoys me -- it's quite possible an extension will have a lot of related possible actions, but for that to work, you either have to make the pageaction pop up a menu, or you have to write separate extensions that mostly do the same thing.
Also, while I'm at it, why can't I use SVG for icons? The docs say I can use anything Webkit supports, and Webkit supports SVG.
Well, I've just dealt with Adblock in another post -- there are several adblocking extensions, and I wrote one myself in an afternoon. Trust me, adblock will happen, whether Google wants it or not.
So now let's talk about bloat...
First, I won't lie. It's a very real possibility. Take something like an adblocker -- in Chrome, that would be implemented as at least a "content script", a script which runs on every page. Every content script is adding some finite but real cost to the pages it effects. And of course, poor extension design would lead to a bloated browser.
On the other hand, no one's forcing you to install extensions, and a bare Chrome is much lighter than a bare Firefox.
Also, consider a properly designed extension -- you're going to have some of it running in the page as a content script, you might have some buttons in the toolbar, but chances are, you're also going to have a bunch of logic in a "background page", doing things like making HTTP requests, talking to your local sqlite database, messing with your bookmarks and tabs, and so on. A background page is essentially an HTML page that gets loaded in the background, and is completely invisible, except that scripts on it can talk to other parts of your extension. Add to that the fact that every popup, even configuration, is a separate HTML page, and communication between all of these happens through a message-passing API.
What does all of that mean?
It means that a fair chunk of every extension, including the glue that ties it together, is happening in a Background Page, which could very well be a separate process. I'm also fairly sure you can have more than one background page per extension. This means that almost by default, you have a certain amount of concurrency built in. So it might bloat, maybe, but it's certainly going to mean less chance for extensions to directly lag you, if they're all in a separate process -- possibly using a separate core.
It took about an afternoon. There are a few downsides, however:
First, it's not actually adblock. It uses jQuery queries. This means it doesn't work at all with your existing filtersets. That's fine with me, since I don't want to block all ads, only the annoying ones -- animations, flash, etc.
Second, it's really cumbersome to use. SQL storage didn't work at the time, so I used CouchDB, which means you need to run a CouchDB server on localhost. I've also been entirely too lazy to add any sort of GUI.
Finally, the filters are applied after the DOM is loaded. They're a bit unreliable in the face of javascript ads, but on slow sites, there can be a noticeable lag. However, it doesn't slow my browsing down noticeably.
The point, though, is that this took me less than an afternoon -- cold, from knowing nothing about Chrome extensions, to having a functional adblocker. In other words: Calm down, people, it really isn't that hard. I'm seeing posts that say things like "if this doesn't get adblock" -- it will.
The point is, IE8 is not as far behind in standards OR performance as web developers like to whine about w.r.t. the majority of mainstream websites. Yes it doesn't work with the newer toy websites that little to no people use.
In other words, it sucks for the majority of the future of the Internet, but it's fine for existing sites which have been painstakingly tuned for it.
Who cares about a buggy web site that nobody uses?
That shows both profound ignorance and a profound lack of imagination.
Ignorance: There are hundreds of public waves, and that's just what's public. Certainly not an indication of "nobody using it".
Lack of imagination: Wave could, in fact, be the Next Big Thing. It could replace email, IM, forums, IRC, wikis, digital whiteboards, and other things.
I realize it isn't yet. Point is, IE in its current state cannot run Wave decently, partly because it's not fast enough. Now, whether or not Wave is the next big thing, it's one example among many of the things that are possible when you leave IE behind.
Besides, since you're giving so much weight to direct comments by competitors of IE against IE
Google is in the business of building websites.
They noticed a serious problem with existing browsers. Problems with browsers are their problem, as it makes their websites less useful.
They released a new browser, and an IE plugin, to address these problems.
Really, what motivation would they have to lie about IE to drive adoption of Chrome? If you're right, and it really isn't that bad, why would they spend the amount of R&D they did on Chrome, and donate to Firefox, for that matter?
Notice, also, that Wave works in Firefox. It also works in Safari. By any measure, these are every bit as much competitors to Chrome as IE is. Why would Google exclude IE, but not these other browsers?
I'm sure you would welcome the comments against other browsers by MS. Or is that FUD?
It's not FUD when it's backed up by facts, and by my own personal experience. But since you like to appeal to (or against?) authority so much, I thought it would be a fair start.
So no, I am not simply taking Google's word for this. I actually agree with them.
Not 100%? That is a nice way of putting NOWHERE NEAR 100%.
Your point?
"While at the time of Acid2's release no web browser passed the test, Acid2 was designed with Microsoft Internet Explorer particularly in mind" - Or, to put in in technical terms, to generate FUD against Microsoft.
That's one way of looking at it. Another way is because someone noticed what I've noticed, what is blindingly obvious to anyone who has actually worked in this field, which is that IE's non-compliance is a huge problem.
This is, in fact, what we find when we put that quote in context:
The creators of Acid2 were dismayed that Internet Explorer did not follow web standards, and that because of this, Internet Explorer was prone to display web pages differently from other browsers. When such a discrepancy between browsers is encountered, web developers spend time tweaking their web pages in order to make the pages be displayed correctly across different browsers. Acid2 represented a challenge to Microsoft to bring Internet Explorer into compliance with web standards, making it easier to design web pages that work as intended in any web browser.
Emphasis mine.
(ACID3) "Controversially, it includes several elements from the CSS2 recommendation that were later removed in CSS2.1 but reintroduced in W3C CSS3 working drafts that have not made it to candidate recommendations yet." - Gee sounds like its testing non-standard standards. I wonder why.
Given that these standards are actually implemented in places other t
No. I write cross platform developer tools that ship on windows, mac and Linux. I go through much pain making our product work well on those 3 platforms. I can't help but laugh at the level of triviality that you people get upset about.
So, what qualifies you to comment on the state of web browsers?
You do understand that the Web is meant to be platform-independent, right?
You can deride them or call them stupid if that makes you feel better about your opinion. But remember, you're relying on them for business, not the other way round.
I don't see what relevance that has to the current discussion. The point wasn't to deride them, it was to point out that whether these things matter has nothing at all to do with what the majority of people think.
This was countering your point, which seemed to be implying that people "not giving a shit" was a reason that this wasn't an issue.
Performance is a vague term. I assume you mean JS performance tested with something like sunspider.
Yes, that would be one way.
Which FWIW is not a real world test.
Can you suggest a "real-world test" which shows IE having better performance?
So, take the 10000 most popular websites and compare the time it takes to load the page.
Yes, because page load time is the only relevant metric.
I could point to Google Wave, the reason behind Google Chrome Frame. IIRC, it was the Javascript performance which drove them to this -- even Google can't ignore IE users, but IE was too slow to make Wave work properly. From the Wave developer blog:
Google Wave depends on strong JS and DOM rendering performance to provide a desktop-like experience in the browser. HTML5's offline storage and web workers will enable us to add great features without having to compromise on performance. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer, still used by the majority of the Web's users, has not kept up with such fairly recent developments in Web technology...
In the past, the Google Wave team has spent countless hours solely on improving the experience of running Google Wave in Internet Explorer. We could continue in this fashion, but using Google Chrome Frame instead lets us invest all that engineering time in more features for all our users, without leaving Internet Explorer users behind.
As a developer, that sounds all too familiar to me.
But note that Wave is one of many web applications, for which page load time isn't nearly as relevant as actual performance once the page is loaded.
You seem convinced that somehow IE users are unhappy and miserable with their experience.
No, I'm convinced that I am unhappy and miserable at having to develop for it, and at the number of cool things that I could develop which are either impossible on IE, or are nightmarishly difficult to make work (CSS), certainly if I want them to be fast (Javascript).
Thats not even getting into the fact that other benchmarks such as HTML parsing, rendering, network perf, etc are all valid performance benchmarks.
Good point. Does IE do significantly better on this? I remember it being worse, last I checked.
And neither of these are relevant to app performance -- DOM manipulation is much more important. I expect any decent Javascript benchmark would include that.
That said, IE8's protected mode and chromes process/tab isolation wins against any performance that the safari or FF can bring to the table for average users that aren't spending their day playing games written w/ CANVAS.
Except that Chrome also supports canvas and is as fast (and often faster) at Javascript than Firefox or Safari. The one edge IE has over Firefox (isolate
The first time I heard that rant, I was kind of, meh. I wouldn't want to watch a movie on an iPhone, but it sounds kind of like a musician complaining about their art being ruined by people listening to it on iPods -- technology marches on, with or without you.
But... now I absolutely sympathize.
It's such a sadness that you think you need virtualization on your... fucking telephone.
The problem with that is that Firefox, Chrome, and Konqueror all are moving targets, and most of them are implementing draft standards that can change at any time.
IE even breaks the existing standards. Even if I stick to stuff that's been officially rubberstamped, I'm still likely to have tons of headaches on IE. On the other hand, even if I use some very strange and wacky, nonstandard stuff, I can get it working everywhere except IE without much trouble.
CSS3 is still nowhere near being finalized, and HTML5 won't be final, by their own admission, for at least another 10 years.
That seems plausible, but I'd still like a citation for it. I've never head anyone from HTML5 make such a claim.
Meahwhile, we have browser vendors implementing their own standards that they hope to have included in HTML5 (Canvas anyone?),
The canvas element is part of HTML 5 and allows for dynamic scriptable rendering of bitmap images.
Whatever happened to the days when standards weren't implemented until they were ratified?
In the case of HTML specifically, Flash happened -- if you want to do something that's not implemented in browsers, isn't standard, and isn't likely to be ratified for awhile, chances are Flash can do it already. But is that really the route we want to go?
More generally, we're seeing things like PDF standardized, which makes sense. At least if you've got a working implementation, you've got a proof of concept -- you know that this can be implemented. If you've got an open source implementation, you can even use that as a means of arbitrating ambiguities in the standard, by pointing to how the open source project does it. And if you've got multiple competing implementations, you've got a good case for something to be a standard.
In other words, we're moving from the Cathedral to the Bazaar.
And I should mention: Firefox, Chrome, and Konqueror may be moving targets, but when I develop an app for them, it generally also works in Safari and Opera. It's only when I get to IE that things break in a major way.
Slashdot Mirror
From the wiki:
The game is a single-player and multi-player first-person shooter, built as a total conversion of Cube Engine 2
That alone adds a dimension that simply won't be there in Quake 3: real-time, multiplayer map editing, on the server, while others are still shooting each other.
A computer is going to be more accurate and faster than a person with the same data.
If you've actually got the algorithms to back that up, you'd be a pioneer in AI.
Want to prove it? Dial Goog-411. That's right, that's Google doing voice-recognition. And their massive cluster still sometimes has to make you wait a few seconds while they try to figure out what the hell you said.
So, getting back to what you said:
Think about an aim-bot.
There are generally going to be two things happening here:
Either you've discovered a surefire way to distinguish real targets from noise, in which case, the army probably wants to talk to you... ...or your aimbot is going to both be too perfect at headshotting people, and it'll make stupid mistakes that only a bot would. This is where it becomes painfully obvious to a good admin and/or good server-side passive anti-cheat what's going on.
I'd also suggest you look into the Robo-Olympics, and various programming competitions, and the general failure of AI in single-player games. Again, it is in general either not possible to do better than a human, or it's so obviously better than a human that you get banned.
Because the issue is politicized. It is not simply about religion but also about the highly political issue of education.
Sorry, I think you have your cause and effect mixed up. Politics has to do with whether people care, not necessarily whether they've arrived at the right answer.
I'll grant you, the move vocal creationists have tried to spin it this way -- many Godwin themselves immediately by trying to show a link between Darwin and Hitler, and of course they link it to everything else scary, especially other political ideas they can lump into the idea of "that crowd". For example:
They don't want that crowd teaching "Suzy Has Two Daddys" either.
I really don't see what one has to do with the other.
All evolution has to say on the matter is that homosexuality exists in nature, and may well be an inborn trait in humans. It says nothing about what homosexuals should do about it, or what we should do about them (if anything).
Now, if you actually tie it back to religion, it starts to make sense. Your religion might claim that homosexuality is wrong, and it might claim that evolution is wrong. You might be afraid of evolution challenging your religion, and thus, your basis for whatever other political ideas you have.
But take away the religion, and the politics become irrelevant.
Because the issues is inaccurately described. Too often, evolution is described as 'we descended from apes' or 'we evolved from monkies'. It just is not true. The creatures from which we evolved don't walk the earth and apes/monkies will never - by nature - evolve into humans.
Ok, first of all, I'm not sure where you get that an ape will never evolve into a human. It's possible, though very unlikely. But you are correct in that evolution doesn't predict or imply this.
However, if you want to play a game of correctness, you could start by remembering that we are apes, by any sane classification.
That are common answers are primates is irrelevant.
Not to be a Nazi, but...
Because people aren't paid for the 'right' answer.
Are you honestly suggesting that it is normal for people to willingly lie on a study unless paid?
If you are afraid about diversity in thought and political opinion then you are a big giant pussy. Stupid too.
Well, since you've called me stupid, I think your "common answers" is fair game.
No, I am not afraid of diversity. In particular, while I have some strong opinions about abortion, I also realize that it's not a question to which there is an easy answer. While I would rather people think about it a bit more, there are intelligent arguments on each side.
What I am afraid of is ignorance and fanaticism.
I am frustrated and angry when I see that the most basic measure of intelligence, knowledge, and critical thinking is missing in the population -- which is then, very quickly, reflected in those we elect. And I am afraid when I see the results of that.
I am not afraid of pro-life or pro-choice, as an idea. I am happy to discuss and debate them.
No, I am afraid when the pro-life people insist that all abortion is murder, without even considering rape victims, and when these so-called "pro-life" people kill doctors to make their point about how sacred life is.
I am afraid when I hear that the majority of the population, and many in power, believe that the Rapture is upon us, that the end of the world will happen very soon. What incentive do they have to take care of the environment, or even to attempt to negotiate peace in our time?
For people like these, a mushroom cloud over every major city in the world would very likely be a blessing -- the Second Coming.
If this doesn't worry you, well, there's a difference between having balls and being insanely reckless.
2:45. The singing... I can feel brain cells dying.
You're assuming that everyone who has an opinion about this will actually be informed, will take the time to look through those proofs, reproduce those experiments, etc.
Read this.
In particular, look at that graph. Are you frightened yet?
Evolution is one of the crowing triumphs of modern science. It has more evidence than any other theory I know of, from many branches of science -- the "tree of life" is repeated, exactly, in genetics, in the fossil record, in the geologic record, everywhere we care to look for it. It informs pretty much all of modern medicine and biology, and it is a humbling look at our origins and our true status with respect to other life on the planet. It is beautiful, important, and solidly supported by fact.
Even the Catholic Church has officially embraced evolution, and the big bang theory, as truth.
And a third of Americans reject evolution outright. These aren't people who just aren't sure -- they say it is definitely false.
Want to guess why?
Because they feel it threatens their religion. Because if evolution is true, the Earth (and certainly the Universe) cannot be six thousand years old, and they must accept that they are descended from apes -- or that, by any honest classification, humans are still a species of ape. Because they cannot accept the fact that at least some part of that religion is a fairy tale, or at least a metaphor.
The problem is, in order to reject evolution, they find they have to doubt just about every legitimate scientist who has an opinion on the subject, and keep themselves willfully ignorant. Furthermore, in order to believe the earth is six thousand years old, they pretty nearly have to stick their fingers in their ear and go "la la la la" in order to avoid pretty much every branch of science that has anything to say about the subject.
That is, if they are right, even the most basic grade-school cosmology must be wrong -- there are objects more than six thousand light years away from us. Geology must also be wrong -- not merely carbon-dating (which is already quite rigorous), but the kind of time scales modern geology suggests. And of course, modern medicine must be wrong -- our understanding of things like antibiotics relies on evolution to work.
And yet, they will feel qualified to address these issues, to challenge real scientists with such arguments as, "That's microevolution. Show me one 'kind' turning into another, and I'll believe it." When this fails to get them anywhere, they again close their eyes, ears, and minds, and ultimately turn to the very simplistic, reassuring, and ultimately wrong words of Ken Ham: "Who should you believe -- God or the scientists?"
The problem here is not just the validity of evolution. It is that in order to believe what the creationist wants to believe, they have to reject huge chunks of modern science. In order to continue to be relevant, they have consistently attempted to get their strange ideas taught in school -- not just as a philosophy, or a class in its own right, but as part of science.
And it's not just america -- 22% of Canadians are creationists. Something like a third of Americans are.
So, the short answer is, yes, laypeople absolutely will doubt whatever they feel they have a problem with. If they doubt evolution, cosmology, Einsteinian relativity, geology, archeology, paleontology, etc, just so they can believe a certain way, it's certainly not a stretch that they would doubt anything that conflicts with their actual (polluting, wasteful) lifestyle.
And unfortunately, even when 99.9% of scientists agree on something, it doesn't help if they can't convince the public -- because laypeople are also voters.
We need another Carl Sagan.
There are other safe places to get win32 software... for example, Sourceforge has a great deal of what's available in your distro's repositories.
And how does SourceForge sign the Windows binaries? If nothing else, packages from a repository are all signed and approved by the people running the repository.
For that matter, does SourceForge actually police its hosted files with anywhere near the rigor with which a public repository is managed? What's stopping someone from putting up a Linux version of BonziBuddy on SourceForge? It could even be open source!
The funny part is that I have heard of this happening with hardware -- wasn't there something about iPods having Windows viruses?
But I've still never seen it done in software.
If they need more "room" for ships in a zone/quadrant/whatever (I don't play the game), they just make a zone that's 100,000x100,000 instead of 10,000x10,000 and insert some more stock items for asteroids and planets to populate the area.
I don't play either, but I have a feeling that would get boring fast, if that was all. However, you are right that they could probably add a few asteroids and planets.
However, you seem to be implying that Eve has less need for artwork, and I'm not convinced of that.
While it would be entirely possible to have procedurally-generated areas of land, it really *wouldn't* be possible to have procedurally-generated cities that weren't bland and uninteresting.
And you base this on...?
I would argue that it would be quite possible, though as you imply, there would still need to be a fair amount done by hand.
If they were to consolidate every player into one server, Dalaran would be a sea of characters.
They'd have to create more space, and they'd have a bit more civil engineering to do, yes.
For world bosses,
So you add more world bosses, even duplicates of the current ones.
There's a reason that Blizzard "doesn't seem to care" about consolidating everyone onto a single server. It's because it's a terrible idea,
"It's hard" doesn't make it a terrible idea. It may make it an unsound business plan, however.
Nor would it necessarily have to be a single server, all at once. But it really does seem like the WoW approach to this problem has generally been still more sharding and instancing, making it less "massive" of a game.
Repositories won't help with that, because people want 3rd party programs and games.
As phantomcircuit says, that's a reason to put more software in repositories, or provide sane sandboxing for it. Speaking of which, when have you bought a game at the store, and found it pre-infected with malware?
However, at least the option exists. Show me where I can have an even halfway decent experience on Windows while sticking to trusted sources. Seriously, try to live with only what's available on Microsoft Update. Contrast this with the tens, even hundreds of thousands of packages for your typical Linux distribution.
All of the zealots yelling that Linux/Mac OSX are secure about malware, which results in normal people thinking they can run whatever downloaded "because my OS is secure!".
That's true, and I agree with you that this could be a problem. The solution to security is not merely to put people on another OS, it's to actually educate them about security.
That's also why you want to look at what tech-savvy people do for security, and how easy it is for them. If tech-savvy people on Linux get most of their software from repositories, and Windows and OS X don't have package management, that should tell you something.
However, I don't think it's harmful or incorrect to say that Linux is more secure than Windows, and that antivirus doesn't do much on either, other than protect you from yourself.
And before everyone jumps on the "but you can't get infected by just browsing on porn sites on linux!", why not? What was the last time you got infected by Windows vulnerability?
On Windows, there are still significant browser vulnerabilities which would be problematic. Additionally, they've only even tried to start reducing user privileges with Vista -- before that, surfing porn sites would likely get your machine completely rooted, as opposed to just having access as an ordinary user.
Now consider browsers like Chrome, which actually sandbox the browser process, chroot it, and run it as a separate user.
That brings up another point: IE has historically been swiss cheese, as far as security is concerned, yet it is still the default browser on Windows. The default browser on most Linux distributions is Firefox.
Those attacks are usually against 3rd party programs like PDF or Flash. And guess what, those apps are on Linux too and are just as well exploitable.
Flash? Maybe. All the more reason to get rid of it, and promote standards for which there are actually alternate implementations, like html5. Or just use Gnash -- though admittedly, this significantly limits what will work for you, so far.
PDF? PDF is a file format, not a program. I don't view them with Adobe Reader -- on KDE, I use a program called Okular, and it's something else on GNOME. Good luck finding something that exploits all of these at once. And hey, if you do find an exploit in Okular, go ahead and fix it -- can't do that with Acrobat.
This just shows that if Linux had 95% marketshare on desktop, and Windows 0.5%, it would be the same thing but just turned around.
I don't think we can actually make that call.
First of all, Linux is not "one thing", even less so than Windows is. If Linux had 95% of the desktop marketshare, that would be Linux, and probably not even strictly Linux, but free Unix. You'd still have some people running FreeBSD, some people running OpenSolaris, some people running Ubuntu, some people running a custom-complied Gentoo, and so on. The same things which make people imagine that porting proprietary software on Linux is hard (it really isn't), would make it much more difficult for an exploit to work.
Granted, most versions would probably have the vulnerability, but each version would have to be exploited slightly differently, since exploiting a buffer overflow (for example) requires intimate knowledg
It wasn't the industry standard until they did it.
So innovation only counts if you get the entire industry to adopt it?
I guess Microsoft "innovated" the GUI after all.
Don't point to some obscure 2d game and tell me that -it- changed the genre.
I never said that. All I'm saying is that it was clearly not a new idea, nor even the first implementation of it, so it's not something you can give Blizzard credit for "innovating".
But now that you mention it, I'd suggest looking at the role it had in the history of the genre before you write it off as "some obscure game":
Ultima Online, released in 1997, may be credited with first popularizing the genre, though Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds, released in 1996, was primarily responsible for mainstream attention in Asia, and EverQuest for the West.
Dude, try learning how to make a coherent point.
Ah, it looks as though my post wasn't worded clearly enough. Sorry.
You say in one post Eve is trying to become WoW, but WoW isn't trying.
Nope. Here's what I said:
I'm not saying they could become WoW overnight. I'm saying they're at least trying, whereas Blizzard doesn't seem to care.
What I mean here is, I'm not saying Eve could handle the WoW player base overnight -- but at least they are trying to scale within a single shard, whereas WoW isn't.
Then you say it doesn't matter because it would be a bad idea anyway for WoW to be like Eve?
Where did I say that? I can't find it at all.
Do you even know what you're trying to say?
Absolutely, but judging by my typo, I probably shouldn't be posting at that time of night.
Actually, I did try to imply procedural content and other similar methods with with "you can duplicate the same content with slight changes". Now in hindsight, "slight changes" may have been somewhat badly worde
That's an understatement.
All such attempts ends up with everything feeling generic and unsatisfying.
Go play with a fractal.
without a great amount of work by actual artists/designers, you simply don't get something worthwhile.
I agree. However, the point is to amplify and augment that work.
In particular, there's nothing stopping you from procedurally-generating a landscape (something it can be quite good at) and then placing manually-constructed things in the way. Space seems like the perfect place for this -- most of it's empty space, there's a few asteroids and planets and things (easy to generate), and then you manually add things like space stations and ships, allowing a fair amount of player customization -- but then again, it makes sense that things like ships and space stations would be manufactured, and thus, you'd have a lot of the same.
They've worked on cutting out the boring parts of MMOs (grinding mobs, long travel times, waiting on health/mana, spending an hour looking for a group) so that focus can be on actual play.
I play a 2D MMO -- it's been going for over ten years. The only one of those problems that exists for me is "grinding mobs". There's a huge amount of soloing possible, everything's in the same server so it's not usually difficult to find a group, there's teleportation, and if I can't find a player, there are still NPCs (or, hell, potions) I can use to restore full health/mana.
I doubt very much that WoW "innovated" these things.
Blizzard doesn't care about what? Becoming what they already are?
I'm sorry, do they already support their entire player base in a single continuous world? Or are they still sharded to maybe a thousand players per "server"?
People love throwing around the "they don't care" rhetoric.
I never said they have to care, nor do I mean to imply they don't care about anything. In this context, all I mean to say is they don't care about this particular aspect of getting everyone into the same world, whereas Eve clearly does.
Again, they don't have to care -- especially given not all players even agree it's a good idea. I'm simply stating a fact here.
All single server, single instance, MMO games (Eve, Second Life, Muds) lack producer created non-generic content. When there is only a single instance of everything, there simply isn't enough producer time in the world to make up the content needed for everyone. At best, you can duplicate the same content with slight changes...
So, I've read this several times, and I can't find you even examining procedural content long enough to dismiss it. I don't know if Eve uses it -- in fact, I very much doubt it -- but it also seems like Eve would be the perfect game for it.
Eve would burn to the ground if even half that number tried to use it.
I wouldn't count on that. In particular, I'd look into how they've managed (with some success) to support what they have.
Eve would've burned to the ground a long time ago if they couldn't scale.
I'm not laying they could become WoW overnight. I'm saying they're at least trying, whereas Blizzard doesn't seem to care.
Not in the current design, unless there's something I'm missing. At least, not necessarily.
The problem is that Chrome provides no way to filter content before it gets to the renderer. So by the time I remove a Flash ad, Flash is already loaded. By the time I remove a script tag, the script has already run. By the time I remove an image, a connection has probably been opened to download the image, and there's a chance it's already here.
With the current extension framework, noscript and flashblock are impossible. You can fake it, but that's faking it -- a script will still have time to do some damage.
Now, it still has a chance to kill the image/flash before it does too much. It's still going to be faster once the page is loaded. But it's never going to be as slick as it would be with Firefox, unless the extension API changes.
I'm tempted to take my existing adblocker and migrate it to something like privoxy. There is something to be said for letting the browser parse the page first, but there's enough HTML parsing libraries out there. Plus, it would mean ad blocking for all browsers, forever.
You are limited to one background page per extension. There is no need for more than one.
Fair enough. However, you're also limited to one PageAction and one BrowserAction per extension. I can see why they did that, but it annoys me -- it's quite possible an extension will have a lot of related possible actions, but for that to work, you either have to make the pageaction pop up a menu, or you have to write separate extensions that mostly do the same thing.
Also, while I'm at it, why can't I use SVG for icons? The docs say I can use anything Webkit supports, and Webkit supports SVG.
Except that Chrome includes the "awesome bar" by default, yet manages to be far less bloated than Firefox.
Well, I've just dealt with Adblock in another post -- there are several adblocking extensions, and I wrote one myself in an afternoon. Trust me, adblock will happen, whether Google wants it or not.
So now let's talk about bloat...
First, I won't lie. It's a very real possibility. Take something like an adblocker -- in Chrome, that would be implemented as at least a "content script", a script which runs on every page. Every content script is adding some finite but real cost to the pages it effects. And of course, poor extension design would lead to a bloated browser.
On the other hand, no one's forcing you to install extensions, and a bare Chrome is much lighter than a bare Firefox.
Also, consider a properly designed extension -- you're going to have some of it running in the page as a content script, you might have some buttons in the toolbar, but chances are, you're also going to have a bunch of logic in a "background page", doing things like making HTTP requests, talking to your local sqlite database, messing with your bookmarks and tabs, and so on. A background page is essentially an HTML page that gets loaded in the background, and is completely invisible, except that scripts on it can talk to other parts of your extension. Add to that the fact that every popup, even configuration, is a separate HTML page, and communication between all of these happens through a message-passing API.
What does all of that mean?
It means that a fair chunk of every extension, including the glue that ties it together, is happening in a Background Page, which could very well be a separate process. I'm also fairly sure you can have more than one background page per extension. This means that almost by default, you have a certain amount of concurrency built in. So it might bloat, maybe, but it's certainly going to mean less chance for extensions to directly lag you, if they're all in a separate process -- possibly using a separate core.
Plus, v8 just screams.
It took about an afternoon. There are a few downsides, however:
First, it's not actually adblock. It uses jQuery queries. This means it doesn't work at all with your existing filtersets. That's fine with me, since I don't want to block all ads, only the annoying ones -- animations, flash, etc.
Second, it's really cumbersome to use. SQL storage didn't work at the time, so I used CouchDB, which means you need to run a CouchDB server on localhost. I've also been entirely too lazy to add any sort of GUI.
Finally, the filters are applied after the DOM is loaded. They're a bit unreliable in the face of javascript ads, but on slow sites, there can be a noticeable lag. However, it doesn't slow my browsing down noticeably.
If people are still curious, the source is here.
The point, though, is that this took me less than an afternoon -- cold, from knowing nothing about Chrome extensions, to having a functional adblocker. In other words: Calm down, people, it really isn't that hard. I'm seeing posts that say things like "if this doesn't get adblock" -- it will.
The point is, IE8 is not as far behind in standards OR performance as web developers like to whine about w.r.t. the majority of mainstream websites. Yes it doesn't work with the newer toy websites that little to no people use.
In other words, it sucks for the majority of the future of the Internet, but it's fine for existing sites which have been painstakingly tuned for it.
Who cares about a buggy web site that nobody uses?
That shows both profound ignorance and a profound lack of imagination.
Ignorance: There are hundreds of public waves, and that's just what's public. Certainly not an indication of "nobody using it".
Lack of imagination: Wave could, in fact, be the Next Big Thing. It could replace email, IM, forums, IRC, wikis, digital whiteboards, and other things.
I realize it isn't yet. Point is, IE in its current state cannot run Wave decently, partly because it's not fast enough. Now, whether or not Wave is the next big thing, it's one example among many of the things that are possible when you leave IE behind.
Besides, since you're giving so much weight to direct comments by competitors of IE against IE
Google is in the business of building websites.
They noticed a serious problem with existing browsers. Problems with browsers are their problem, as it makes their websites less useful.
They released a new browser, and an IE plugin, to address these problems.
Really, what motivation would they have to lie about IE to drive adoption of Chrome? If you're right, and it really isn't that bad, why would they spend the amount of R&D they did on Chrome, and donate to Firefox, for that matter?
Notice, also, that Wave works in Firefox. It also works in Safari. By any measure, these are every bit as much competitors to Chrome as IE is. Why would Google exclude IE, but not these other browsers?
I'm sure you would welcome the comments against other browsers by MS. Or is that FUD?
It's not FUD when it's backed up by facts, and by my own personal experience. But since you like to appeal to (or against?) authority so much, I thought it would be a fair start.
So no, I am not simply taking Google's word for this. I actually agree with them.
Not 100%? That is a nice way of putting NOWHERE NEAR 100%.
Your point?
"While at the time of Acid2's release no web browser passed the test, Acid2 was designed with Microsoft Internet Explorer particularly in mind" - Or, to put in in technical terms, to generate FUD against Microsoft.
That's one way of looking at it. Another way is because someone noticed what I've noticed, what is blindingly obvious to anyone who has actually worked in this field, which is that IE's non-compliance is a huge problem.
This is, in fact, what we find when we put that quote in context:
The creators of Acid2 were dismayed that Internet Explorer did not follow web standards, and that because of this, Internet Explorer was prone to display web pages differently from other browsers. When such a discrepancy between browsers is encountered, web developers spend time tweaking their web pages in order to make the pages be displayed correctly across different browsers. Acid2 represented a challenge to Microsoft to bring Internet Explorer into compliance with web standards, making it easier to design web pages that work as intended in any web browser.
Emphasis mine.
(ACID3) "Controversially, it includes several elements from the CSS2 recommendation that were later removed in CSS2.1 but reintroduced in W3C CSS3 working drafts that have not made it to candidate recommendations yet." - Gee sounds like its testing non-standard standards. I wonder why.
Given that these standards are actually implemented in places other t
No. I write cross platform developer tools that ship on windows, mac and Linux. I go through much pain making our product work well on those 3 platforms. I can't help but laugh at the level of triviality that you people get upset about.
So, what qualifies you to comment on the state of web browsers?
You do understand that the Web is meant to be platform-independent, right?
You can deride them or call them stupid if that makes you feel better about your opinion. But remember, you're relying on them for business, not the other way round.
I don't see what relevance that has to the current discussion. The point wasn't to deride them, it was to point out that whether these things matter has nothing at all to do with what the majority of people think.
This was countering your point, which seemed to be implying that people "not giving a shit" was a reason that this wasn't an issue.
Performance is a vague term. I assume you mean JS performance tested with something like sunspider.
Yes, that would be one way.
Which FWIW is not a real world test.
Can you suggest a "real-world test" which shows IE having better performance?
So, take the 10000 most popular websites and compare the time it takes to load the page.
Yes, because page load time is the only relevant metric.
I could point to Google Wave, the reason behind Google Chrome Frame. IIRC, it was the Javascript performance which drove them to this -- even Google can't ignore IE users, but IE was too slow to make Wave work properly. From the Wave developer blog:
Google Wave depends on strong JS and DOM rendering performance to provide a desktop-like experience in the browser. HTML5's offline storage and web workers will enable us to add great features without having to compromise on performance. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer, still used by the majority of the Web's users, has not kept up with such fairly recent developments in Web technology...
In the past, the Google Wave team has spent countless hours solely on improving the experience of running Google Wave in Internet Explorer. We could continue in this fashion, but using Google Chrome Frame instead lets us invest all that engineering time in more features for all our users, without leaving Internet Explorer users behind.
As a developer, that sounds all too familiar to me.
But note that Wave is one of many web applications, for which page load time isn't nearly as relevant as actual performance once the page is loaded.
You seem convinced that somehow IE users are unhappy and miserable with their experience.
No, I'm convinced that I am unhappy and miserable at having to develop for it, and at the number of cool things that I could develop which are either impossible on IE, or are nightmarishly difficult to make work (CSS), certainly if I want them to be fast (Javascript).
Thats not even getting into the fact that other benchmarks such as HTML parsing, rendering, network perf, etc are all valid performance benchmarks.
Good point. Does IE do significantly better on this? I remember it being worse, last I checked.
And neither of these are relevant to app performance -- DOM manipulation is much more important. I expect any decent Javascript benchmark would include that.
That said, IE8's protected mode and chromes process/tab isolation wins against any performance that the safari or FF can bring to the table for average users that aren't spending their day playing games written w/ CANVAS.
Except that Chrome also supports canvas and is as fast (and often faster) at Javascript than Firefox or Safari. The one edge IE has over Firefox (isolate
Get Off My Lawn!
The first time I heard that rant, I was kind of, meh. I wouldn't want to watch a movie on an iPhone, but it sounds kind of like a musician complaining about their art being ruined by people listening to it on iPods -- technology marches on, with or without you.
But... now I absolutely sympathize.
It's such a sadness that you think you need virtualization on your... fucking telephone.
The problem with that is that Firefox, Chrome, and Konqueror all are moving targets, and most of them are implementing draft standards that can change at any time.
IE even breaks the existing standards. Even if I stick to stuff that's been officially rubberstamped, I'm still likely to have tons of headaches on IE. On the other hand, even if I use some very strange and wacky, nonstandard stuff, I can get it working everywhere except IE without much trouble.
CSS3 is still nowhere near being finalized, and HTML5 won't be final, by their own admission, for at least another 10 years.
That seems plausible, but I'd still like a citation for it. I've never head anyone from HTML5 make such a claim.
Meahwhile, we have browser vendors implementing their own standards that they hope to have included in HTML5 (Canvas anyone?),
According to Wikipedia, Canvas is included:
The canvas element is part of HTML 5 and allows for dynamic scriptable rendering of bitmap images.
Whatever happened to the days when standards weren't implemented until they were ratified?
In the case of HTML specifically, Flash happened -- if you want to do something that's not implemented in browsers, isn't standard, and isn't likely to be ratified for awhile, chances are Flash can do it already. But is that really the route we want to go?
More generally, we're seeing things like PDF standardized, which makes sense. At least if you've got a working implementation, you've got a proof of concept -- you know that this can be implemented. If you've got an open source implementation, you can even use that as a means of arbitrating ambiguities in the standard, by pointing to how the open source project does it. And if you've got multiple competing implementations, you've got a good case for something to be a standard.
In other words, we're moving from the Cathedral to the Bazaar.
And I should mention: Firefox, Chrome, and Konqueror may be moving targets, but when I develop an app for them, it generally also works in Safari and Opera. It's only when I get to IE that things break in a major way.