Sure, Apple has done a lot of nonsense and/or evil. This is not an example of that, however. As many posts and indeed TFA itself point out, this is neither evil nor even secret. It's a Webkit-internal hack to reproduce what a public API does for legacy apps that don't use that API but link to Webkit, because otherwise those apps could get performance issues. The Firefox team has already implemented the public API and Firefox is blazing fast now. TFA itself even comments on how/. overreacted.
WebKit makes use of beam sync on/off, but uses a call into the system to turn it off only at certain times (this is my understanding of Hyatt's explanation). Hyatt, a former Firefox dev himself we might add, himself says this is a hack, and that if you actually expose this functionality to vendors you're totally going to be loading the gun and pointing it at peoples feet.
Actually, from what I've gathered it seems that WebKit always turns off coalesced updates in any application that uses it. The system call seems to replicate what the plist setting does, just without the plist.
They use the public one*, which actually do exactly the same. The "hidden API" is actually just a hack to allow Webkit to be used in legacy applications that don't support the proper way of disabling coalesced updates. Apple doesn't support it because it's prone to break whenever they change anything in the lower-level rendering code.
It's quite sane and not malicious. The submitter overreacted (as even TFA points out in an update).
* Actually, there is no public API per se - it's a setting you make in the app's Info.plist. Any app can have coalesced updates turned off by having the setting made.
Sometimes I wonder whether Microsoft could pull an Apple - throw away Windows and its entire codebase and develop something new, then add Windows support through a VM that runs a specially modified version of the last Windows (á la OS X's Clasic). That way they could solve compatibility and attitude issues while maing clear to everyone that the new OS is not Windows and it doesn't work like Windows, so if you keep writing for Windows you're not going very far, thankyouverymuch. Given the fact that many of the more ugly hacks in Windows come from backwards compatibility issues and that past reputation is still hurting Vista, this could solve a lot of problems.
Of course Apple had some things going for this approach that Microsoft doesn't - they could afford radical change because they didn't have market dominance to defend; also, it was the logical thing to do after effectively being bought out by NeXT. Still, I think that screwing compatibility and suporting vintage applications through a very well-integrated VM could actually turn Microsoft's offering from a polished, well-designed turd into a polished, well-designed operating system that geeks can actually univocally express respect for.
On the other hand, polished turds still sell well enough that "a completely new OS might lower our profits for a quarter or two compared to a new Windows" is a killer argument that will probably keep Microsoft's OS offering haunted by the past for perpetuity.
WINDOWS VISTA: The Great Wow Experience
Copyright (c) 2006, 2007, 2008 Microsoft, Inc. All rights reserved.
WINDOWS is a registered trademark of Microsoft, Inc.
Revision 6093 / Serial number FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8
West of Desktop
You are standing in an open field west of a desktop, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
>open mailbox
Opening the small mailbox reveals a leaflet.
>read leaflet
(Taken)
"WELCOME TO VISTA!
VISTA is an operating system of adventure, danger, and low cunning. In it you will explore some of the most amazing window decorations ever seen by mortals. No computer should be without one!"
That's what Windows is all about: Momentum. Momentum ensures its position at the top even if other OSes are just as capable - Windows has most apps the average user will ever need and other OSes don't have all the stuff. We all know how this continues; positive feedback stabilized Windows' position.
On the other hand, Windows started as a single-user OS and until very recently virtually everyone used it liek that at home. Thus, no need for fancy separated privileges; multi-user capabilities just meant that people had to make sure the "has administrative rights" box in the user control panel is ticked off. This mindset has carried on and it will carry on until Microsoft forces everyone to abandon their base sspumtion of having administrative rights, for example by denying programs run under an admin account access to DirectX (Aero excluded), thus forcing everyone who works with accelerated graphics to behave.
Compared to that, the *nix world has always been very strict about separating users from admins and pretty much no program insists on administrative rights unless they really are neccessary. You barely find programs trying to store user-changable settings outside of ~. That's momentum, as well - everyone is used to restricted privileges, thus everyone expects them.
Just goes to show how much an OS's lineage can reflect on it - even if it had military-grade role-based mandatory access control everywhere, if its successors were single-user systems then people will continue to assume that every user can do everything and code correspondingly. If you want to change that image you need at least lots of time.
remember the prohibition, when a layman could make a fair bit higher salary rum running, than doing decent work, crime spiraled out of control.
Remember when drugs were illegal and a layman could make a fair bit higher salary trafficking drugs? Crime spiraled out of control.
The prohibition didn't breed crime because of lack of governmental oversight, it bred crime because an entire very profitable industry was criminalized. The internet isn't going to single-handedly breed the new Al Capone.
Heh. That'd be a nice scene for an Office Space-like series - the top manager discovers Feng Shui ("Why wasn't I told about this?") and does show up with a velcro suit. Then during a meeting he prances up and down the room, waiting after every turn for the interns to realign his wardrobe extensions.
Bonus points if external execs copying the concept becomes a running gag.
In Germany, they'd probably just get Stiftung Warentest to compare those offers or include them as a testing criterium in their next ISP comparison. Stiftung Warentest is THE product tester in Germany. As far as public perception of product qulity goes, their word is law and good grades (and especially being the winner of a comparison) are prominently featured in ads. So if StiWa compares hypothetical censorship filters in German ISPs and finds that 1&1 is much better than the other ISPs at filtering even relatively obscure adult sites while leaving even relatively obscure child-safe sites alone, concerned parents will be sure that 1&1 has the best such offer.
Of course the USA don't have an equivalent and it takes decades to build up a reputation as good as that of StiWa. However, even a state-issued seal of approval could be done without too much hassle. I'm thinking of unit tests here; build a portfolio of sites that match filter criteria you want to give out seals for, purchase a connection and a filter from one of the ISPs (ideally as a regular citizen without telling them of the test) and automatically connect to the sites in question.
If you shift around the test suite after you release the test results you can avoid having them adapt to it. Re-issue the seals every three months and work with a large pregenerated pool of sites from which the test suite is randomly generated (of course checkd for being actually live before tunning the test) and you can test with relatively little expensive work involved. Once the infrastructure is up it should'nt be too expensive to maintain.
You can cut down on red tape by not giving out seals of approval but rather just comparing the ISPs' offers and generating a ranking without any formal definition of "good enough filtering". That is essentially what StiWa does.
It's a shallow swipe at some IT stereotypes, nothing more.
Well at one point he's right: I'm pretty sure most geeks don't apply Feng Shui to their clothing. I mean, how the hell is the whole cardinal direction thing applied to a moving, rotating person? Perhaps with a shirt with built-in TFT monitor so the appropriate symbols for water, air etc. can be displayed at the right cardinal direction at all times? Do successful execs wear TFT shirts or do they maybe use velcro and just reattach the stuff everytime they move?
Admittedly, I didn't read TFA, but this would make or a great opt-in service (and not general ISP behavior like the summary suggests). You order internet service, then you call your ISP and request one or more of several censorship filters. By default all filters are off. ISP can publicly advertise their filtering offers.
I think that way everyone gets what they want, unlike with mandatory filtering (people who don't want filtering have to choose a different ISP or live with half an internet) or no filtering at all (people who want filtering have to set it up themselves).
The European Union should adopt a pair of breasts as their new flag. Just so the US Americans can't avoid having depictions of breasts on full display in prime-time TV whenever something regarding the EU happens. Those 3% of the US Americans that survive the trauma might end up slightly less erotophobic.
Of course they still can't talk about sex because in order to lift the sex talk censorship one would have to talk about censorship, which is illegal. But they would be willing to theoretically being able to talk about it.
Re:Actually, they're going quint-core.
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
·
· Score: 1
Firstly, Slashdot humor has pretty much always involved modification of existing texts or memes to fit the current topic. I might as well have written a filk song; that would be the same.
Secondly, I think that increasing the number of cores, despite being the obvious way to go forward with processors, is a bit overrated. Two cores are good and some home users can even profit from having four, but unless we have a major paradigm shift in application development I doubt that anything beyond four cores will be that useful in the near future, especially not Intel's magic number of eighty. Perhaps if Erlang completely displaces C and C++, but somehow I doubt that's going to happen anytime soon.
If you want an improvement in CPU technology that' actually interesting, look at the Intel U2200. 1.2 GHz at 5.5 Watt, that's interesting. (I would have quoted the number for the C2D counterpart, but Intel doesn't sem to release such data for their multicore processors.)
Re:One potential future advantage of AMD's technol
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
·
· Score: 1
How the hell was I supposed to know that "to realize" can mean "to make real"? That's completely unintuitive!
Yes. Water is transmuted into chlorine. This stuff is also an integral part of the machine that transmutes water vapor into gold that I have for sale...
Because not many women are okay with being used to illustrate bondage topics on Wikipedia. As was already pointed out, the WP pictures she's usually found in accompany bondage articles. The bikini pic probably just happened to be available to the uploader and was edited to keep the article child-safe.
Of course, responding to an AC troll is pointless, but still... Bikini models tend to look good because there are enough women applying for the job to allow one to select the best-looking ones. "Wikipedia bondage illustration model" is much less prestigious and well-paid, so you get fewer applicants and have to work with what you've got.
Why, with an internet full of pictures of women in swimsuits (or whatever you like), would someone go to the trouble of photoshopping out the cuffs just to use it in a wiki article?
Because Wikipedia is a stickler for properly licensed images. Taking a random image from the web might open them up for litigation, so it's a no-no. The uploader probably thought: "Hey, I have this nice pic of Jassi in a bikini and chains. I'll just edit out the chains and Wikipedia gets a picture for their swimsuit article."
Note that the model is also found in other WP pictures, most illustrating some form of bondage. They definitely didn't edit out the chains to make her look normal, they probably did it so the article stays child-safe.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, nowadays they can't even stick to their own standards anymore. (cf. MSOOXML)
Remember, this was the man that tried to get the public to associate MP3 players with squirting.
Sure, Apple has done a lot of nonsense and/or evil. This is not an example of that, however. As many posts and indeed TFA itself point out, this is neither evil nor even secret. It's a Webkit-internal hack to reproduce what a public API does for legacy apps that don't use that API but link to Webkit, because otherwise those apps could get performance issues. The Firefox team has already implemented the public API and Firefox is blazing fast now. TFA itself even comments on how /. overreacted.
Sorry, but this one doesn't go to you.
Well, Slashdot doesn't take down articles, but sometimes atricles are updated to reflect new information. I wonder why it hasn't happened here yet.
They use the public one*, which actually do exactly the same. The "hidden API" is actually just a hack to allow Webkit to be used in legacy applications that don't support the proper way of disabling coalesced updates. Apple doesn't support it because it's prone to break whenever they change anything in the lower-level rendering code.
It's quite sane and not malicious. The submitter overreacted (as even TFA points out in an update).
* Actually, there is no public API per se - it's a setting you make in the app's Info.plist. Any app can have coalesced updates turned off by having the setting made.
Actually, wasn't this pretty much how Apple handled the kernel module interface prior to Tiger?
Sometimes I wonder whether Microsoft could pull an Apple - throw away Windows and its entire codebase and develop something new, then add Windows support through a VM that runs a specially modified version of the last Windows (á la OS X's Clasic). That way they could solve compatibility and attitude issues while maing clear to everyone that the new OS is not Windows and it doesn't work like Windows, so if you keep writing for Windows you're not going very far, thankyouverymuch. Given the fact that many of the more ugly hacks in Windows come from backwards compatibility issues and that past reputation is still hurting Vista, this could solve a lot of problems.
Of course Apple had some things going for this approach that Microsoft doesn't - they could afford radical change because they didn't have market dominance to defend; also, it was the logical thing to do after effectively being bought out by NeXT. Still, I think that screwing compatibility and suporting vintage applications through a very well-integrated VM could actually turn Microsoft's offering from a polished, well-designed turd into a polished, well-designed operating system that geeks can actually univocally express respect for.
On the other hand, polished turds still sell well enough that "a completely new OS might lower our profits for a quarter or two compared to a new Windows" is a killer argument that will probably keep Microsoft's OS offering haunted by the past for perpetuity.
WINDOWS VISTA: The Great Wow Experience
Copyright (c) 2006, 2007, 2008 Microsoft, Inc. All rights reserved.
WINDOWS is a registered trademark of Microsoft, Inc.
Revision 6093 / Serial number FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8
West of Desktop
You are standing in an open field west of a desktop, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
>open mailbox
Opening the small mailbox reveals a leaflet.
>read leaflet
(Taken)
"WELCOME TO VISTA!
VISTA is an operating system of adventure, danger, and low cunning. In it you will explore some of the most amazing window decorations ever seen by mortals. No computer should be without one!"
>photoshop.exe
I don't know the word "photoshop".
>help
I don't know the word "help".
>reboot
I don't know the word "reboot".
>dir
I don't know the word "dir".
>C:\ I don't know the word "c:\".
>
That's what Windows is all about: Momentum. Momentum ensures its position at the top even if other OSes are just as capable - Windows has most apps the average user will ever need and other OSes don't have all the stuff. We all know how this continues; positive feedback stabilized Windows' position.
On the other hand, Windows started as a single-user OS and until very recently virtually everyone used it liek that at home. Thus, no need for fancy separated privileges; multi-user capabilities just meant that people had to make sure the "has administrative rights" box in the user control panel is ticked off. This mindset has carried on and it will carry on until Microsoft forces everyone to abandon their base sspumtion of having administrative rights, for example by denying programs run under an admin account access to DirectX (Aero excluded), thus forcing everyone who works with accelerated graphics to behave.
Compared to that, the *nix world has always been very strict about separating users from admins and pretty much no program insists on administrative rights unless they really are neccessary. You barely find programs trying to store user-changable settings outside of ~. That's momentum, as well - everyone is used to restricted privileges, thus everyone expects them.
Just goes to show how much an OS's lineage can reflect on it - even if it had military-grade role-based mandatory access control everywhere, if its successors were single-user systems then people will continue to assume that every user can do everything and code correspondingly. If you want to change that image you need at least lots of time.
The prohibition didn't breed crime because of lack of governmental oversight, it bred crime because an entire very profitable industry was criminalized. The internet isn't going to single-handedly breed the new Al Capone.
Er, yes. Oops.
Heh. That'd be a nice scene for an Office Space-like series - the top manager discovers Feng Shui ("Why wasn't I told about this?") and does show up with a velcro suit. Then during a meeting he prances up and down the room, waiting after every turn for the interns to realign his wardrobe extensions.
Bonus points if external execs copying the concept becomes a running gag.
In Germany, they'd probably just get Stiftung Warentest to compare those offers or include them as a testing criterium in their next ISP comparison. Stiftung Warentest is THE product tester in Germany. As far as public perception of product qulity goes, their word is law and good grades (and especially being the winner of a comparison) are prominently featured in ads. So if StiWa compares hypothetical censorship filters in German ISPs and finds that 1&1 is much better than the other ISPs at filtering even relatively obscure adult sites while leaving even relatively obscure child-safe sites alone, concerned parents will be sure that 1&1 has the best such offer.
Of course the USA don't have an equivalent and it takes decades to build up a reputation as good as that of StiWa. However, even a state-issued seal of approval could be done without too much hassle. I'm thinking of unit tests here; build a portfolio of sites that match filter criteria you want to give out seals for, purchase a connection and a filter from one of the ISPs (ideally as a regular citizen without telling them of the test) and automatically connect to the sites in question.
If you shift around the test suite after you release the test results you can avoid having them adapt to it. Re-issue the seals every three months and work with a large pregenerated pool of sites from which the test suite is randomly generated (of course checkd for being actually live before tunning the test) and you can test with relatively little expensive work involved. Once the infrastructure is up it should'nt be too expensive to maintain.
You can cut down on red tape by not giving out seals of approval but rather just comparing the ISPs' offers and generating a ranking without any formal definition of "good enough filtering". That is essentially what StiWa does.
This is all very confusing.
Admittedly, I didn't read TFA, but this would make or a great opt-in service (and not general ISP behavior like the summary suggests). You order internet service, then you call your ISP and request one or more of several censorship filters. By default all filters are off. ISP can publicly advertise their filtering offers.
I think that way everyone gets what they want, unlike with mandatory filtering (people who don't want filtering have to choose a different ISP or live with half an internet) or no filtering at all (people who want filtering have to set it up themselves).
The European Union should adopt a pair of breasts as their new flag. Just so the US Americans can't avoid having depictions of breasts on full display in prime-time TV whenever something regarding the EU happens. Those 3% of the US Americans that survive the trauma might end up slightly less erotophobic.
Of course they still can't talk about sex because in order to lift the sex talk censorship one would have to talk about censorship, which is illegal. But they would be willing to theoretically being able to talk about it.
Firstly, Slashdot humor has pretty much always involved modification of existing texts or memes to fit the current topic. I might as well have written a filk song; that would be the same.
Secondly, I think that increasing the number of cores, despite being the obvious way to go forward with processors, is a bit overrated. Two cores are good and some home users can even profit from having four, but unless we have a major paradigm shift in application development I doubt that anything beyond four cores will be that useful in the near future, especially not Intel's magic number of eighty. Perhaps if Erlang completely displaces C and C++, but somehow I doubt that's going to happen anytime soon.
If you want an improvement in CPU technology that' actually interesting, look at the Intel U2200. 1.2 GHz at 5.5 Watt, that's interesting. (I would have quoted the number for the C2D counterpart, but Intel doesn't sem to release such data for their multicore processors.)
How the hell was I supposed to know that "to realize" can mean "to make real"? That's completely unintuitive!
Yes. Water is transmuted into chlorine. This stuff is also an integral part of the machine that transmutes water vapor into gold that I have for sale...
Because not many women are okay with being used to illustrate bondage topics on Wikipedia. As was already pointed out, the WP pictures she's usually found in accompany bondage articles. The bikini pic probably just happened to be available to the uploader and was edited to keep the article child-safe.
Of course, responding to an AC troll is pointless, but still... Bikini models tend to look good because there are enough women applying for the job to allow one to select the best-looking ones. "Wikipedia bondage illustration model" is much less prestigious and well-paid, so you get fewer applicants and have to work with what you've got.
Note that the model is also found in other WP pictures, most illustrating some form of bondage. They definitely didn't edit out the chains to make her look normal, they probably did it so the article stays child-safe.
This is going to make for very interesting server logs over at Wikimedia. "What the hell were they talking about on Slashdot?!"