Also, I'm not sure about the GP correctness. The European-style copyright was harmonized among many countries via Berne convention, and I'm pretty sure Germany was part of it too.
Just about any halfway decent receiver these days with a S/PDIF jack also has HDMI decode ability.
Barring that, most TV's with HDMI also have S/PDIF audio out that you can use to feed the audio into your older receiver. (I just went to the Vizio website and looked at a crap 20" model, and even it had S/PDIF out.)
That's if your receiver has HDMI or you have receiver at all.
I'm totally niche at the moment: I keep the A/V trunk separate from my stereo trunk. My A/V is a plain hi-fi, but for stereo I went with tad bit more expensive components. Most DACs (and my is not exception) have S/PDIF, coaxial and sometimes USB - but no HDMI.
Advantage of S/PDIF is that it's optical. That adds a degree of (desirable) electrical separation between components. Probably my current setup would be also OK with coax or USB - I have no way to test it at the moment. But in past I already have experienced the problems with e.g. noise coming via line-in from the PC/via HDMI from HDTV cable receiver and audible even when another input is selected on receiver. Pure electrical compatibility problem (when lots of hardware is attached to one receiver; or so I was told) - but non-existent with the optical connections.
Assuming that a dose of ugly doesn't necessarily break the deal, your best bet will probably be one of the android tablets with USB host support(and a degree of hack support). S/PDIF output in USB audio class devices is substantially cheaper than HDMI ->S/PDIF...
That seems to be the only sensible solution I can think would work. Searching the intrawebs also give few hits on Android developer forums for USB host and audio. But as usually, there is an alarming absence of the hits to Android device manufacturers. Nevertheless, I'm glad that you suggested the USB as an potential solution and in fact I'm not alone who wants to have a decent touchscreen device commanding my stereo.
But we already did and it is widely accepted: anti-virus software.
which hasn't shown a brilliant track record of protecting people from the things they run,
But that the point of the responsibility separation. If user explicitly wants it, then you can't do anything against it - against the will of user. After all, computer exists to fulfill the commands given by the user.
You are sending us back to the old Outlook dilemma: how to send installer of a hot fix to a customer who urgently needs it? Because Outlook too can police attachments and instead of giving AV software a chance, simply drops anything with extension.exe. Or any archive which contains an.exe file. Or anything what looks to Outlook even remotely suspicious.
But you are sort of suggested solution: this Google's effort should be concerted with the AV vendors. Or the effort would go either the way of ActiveX (permanently disabled) or the way of Outlook (let's be smarter than user, making software in the end even more useless than it was to begin with).
Anyway I look at the Apple's patent, it is a plain good engineering in response to market's demands. Not something I would call an invention or an innovation.
It is. I'm not aware of the breakages you speak of. Our tests (using several web based products we sell) do not indicate anything of the sorts
Move from IE8 to IE9 and watch in amazement as 3rd party OS apps break.
Oh. That's a great point: MS doesn't forces you to update to IE9. And IE8 (likewise the IE7) are still supported and receive patches.
Its a good tradeoff for me, since IE means I need to constantly watch acrobat and java and flash versions for vulnerabilities; chrome takes care of that and blocks insecure plugins. I would far rather deal with the odd incompatible website than the odd userland rootkit.
ActiveX is a pain - despite the fact that it is more or less not used this days. Developers moved to Web-only tech, and throw the shit at fans this days.
In the end, the problem is that "odd incompatible websites" often end-up being the favorite sites of a manager. Or crappy corpo-crapo-ware portal. You can't argue against neither.
And when one tries to pitch security, managers act surprised - "we do not care, we already pay $$$$$ to AV company!"
Best our IT could manage is to add FireFox to list of supported apps and allow to install it (via some proprietary enterprise deployment/update system). But we are still (and I wholeheartedly support it) on FireFox 3.6 as our IT is totally freaked out (as many others) about new Mozilla release strategy. (I doubt it is a sign of anything, but they have added Opera too few month ago.)
Thanks. I have seen something similar, but this is more straightforward. Gotta bookmark it.
The problem is that I need browser in office - on Windows. At home on Linux yes, I can write a script to automatically patch the extensions. But on the office PC, where I need, where are my 95% of web browser requirements, I simply lack the tools and environment to run such scripts.
Yes, which just goes to show that Asa Dotzler is unfamiliar with his own product [...]
Like everybody else, he's still on 3.6 probably.
.
P.S. This might be one of the symptoms of ADHD in software development: software being changed so often that developers themselves can't remember what/where/how works or not. Most commonly observed when developers have to work in several branches in parallel, e.g. FF4, FF5, FF6, FF7, FF8, FF9, FF10, FF11 and so on.
But unfortunately, few extension writers bother adding support for it. This is similar to Thunderbird and Sunbird: they are both built on the same core and have the same extension API, but simply require few lines in the extension's manifest to declare it as compatible with them. But very few extension writers bother with it.
Meaning that if one wants stability,... Chrome is probably not for them.
Yea, citation needed.
A) Whens the last time an addon or plugin has stopped working, even in bleeding edge dev versions of chrome? MAYBE back at v4 or 5 when they were still hammering out extensions.
Extensions are irrelevant to stability as enterprise deployments go. What matters is that one can rely on release schedule.
Simple truth: you can't say "this website was tested and guaranteed to work with version NNN of Chrome/FireFox". Because the versions become obsolete by the time users get around to start using it.
And more users are forced to use IE in the office, more would switch to IE at home.
B) IE is most definately not "more stable". Upgrading it is likely to break a zillion things, not just webpages or plugins either. And its silly to talk about addon stability in a browser that doesnt even support addons.
It is. I'm not aware of the breakages you speak of. Our tests (using several web based products we sell) do not indicate anything of the sorts. (Yes, IE sucks, but it sucks in a backward-compatible fashion.) Otherwise, (1) MS doesn't release all-changing radical updates with minor versions; (2) MS supports old IE versions for very long time after release.
C) Opera has like a 2% market share. Telling mozilla with its 25% share "you need to emulate this guy who has never been relevant in the desktop sphere" is kind of counterintuitive.
Yes. I sort of agree. But you forget about the elephant in the room - IE.
The problem is that now we have two nearly identical browsers on the market - Chrome and FireFox. Competition has decreased and we have lost the only IE's viable alternative, leaving us with not so viable alternative - the Opera. And the decrease in competition is what I'm against of.
On the other hand, the alternative is to continue with a slow release schedule, which we feel has bigger problems and would annoy more users.
And how is all the nifty features are related to fsckups of the user interface? Right...
Why can't you accumulate features and make a major release, say once a year? Many people are boasting here constantly that they are using alphas/betas, like before they have used NBs. There was never problem of getting latest and greatest FireFox in hands of users - except for slightly fscked up handling of profiles. Which you surely could have fixed instead.
As one example, both support the new (safe) version of web sockets.
You operate on false presumption that users are after latest and greatest features - the features which are totally invisible to them. They are not.
How a user who mostly visits Facebook and Wikipedia and probably corporate Intranet profits from WebSockets? (Or the WebSockets had UI fsckup as a prerequisite?)
[...] Chrome and Firefox. Both are probably not seen very favorably among enterprise users.
No, simply "unsupported," what equals "use at your own risk; if stuff breaks royally - you're on your own." We recommend IE. There were plans to certify FireFox 3, but it became outdated in mean time (even security updates are broken now; we had to download 3.6.19 manually). With new release strategy it is simply impossible: we can't certify all versions of Fx as there are too many of them; we can't guarantee that stuff works in future versions (and customers must upgrade obviously to receiving security updates).
But overall I think the fast release schedule of Chrome and Firefox is a good thing.
You totally make no sense. You mix lots of technical and political issues together (akin to religion or corporate brainwashing) thus it is nearly impossible to see any logic in what you say. Frankly, I doubt there is any.
Or why not use unary numeral system for the version numbers? FireFox v111111 would confuse hell out of the competition. After all, Chrome, as of last morning is still at the measly v13.
Using media center's sharing capabilities tend to do that. So in the advanced power option, you expand the Sleep node in the tree, and make sure Allow hybrid sleep is on.
Hybrid Sleep is just a Hibernate, but Sleep instead of shutdown. If I on my PC use the Hybrid Sleep, I have to wait 2-3 minutes extra before (whatever tries to get the PC out of sleep) gives up and does reboot with followed resume from hibernate. IOW, wake up fails (what takes lots of time) and it does plain un-hibernate. Pure Hibernate is faster. Haven't tested it on office's PCs yet - but there I doubt we have permissions to change the power settings.
And thats with a sample size of about 20 computers at home between my wife and I, and a hundred thousand (not all the same) or so at work with none having any issues...
My sample is pretty small: several new W7 laptops and desktops in office and my home PC (built 100% from W7 compatible parts (unintentionally)). As it stands now, I have seen only one PC - a Toshiba laptop owned by a manager (btw against guidelines of corporate IT to use private HW for work) - where W7 could sleep/wake-up properly.
I have missed Vista completely, but on WinXP it was the same: regardless of the price class of the system, Windows either refused to go to sleep or went to sleep and never woke up. Many said sleep works for them, but I again seen it only on few newly installed systems. After some time in useage, and sleep was breaking again. I wonder what I (and others) do wrong.
I just tried to recall how long it takes for my MacBook Pro to boot up. I can't remember. I can't remember when was the last time I did shut it down. It is constantly in sleep mode when I'm not using it.
Boot time is more relevant to my office Windows laptop, but the usual array of corpoware would make even Windows 7 to boot for 10-15 minutes.
P.S. And Windows 7 still fails at sleep. Oops, I'm sorry: yes it goes to sleep real well, but my stats show that only on about 30-40% of laptops it manages to wake up... And the 30-40% group is characterized of being "just out of box." Few month down the road - forget about the sleep. But well never mind, Hibernate works in Windows pretty well. I got used to the fact that for working sleep/wake up I have to pay the Apple tax.
[...] and rewriting stuff in C (like Python fanboys always suggest) is not actually that easy (and brings with it all the problems of writing anything in C -- there's a reason we want to use Python or Java in the first place, right?)
Actually, dismissing writing parts in C is not so simple. The only problem I'm aware of is the portability. And even that is handled by package/module management automatically.
Otherwise, most problem-free C programming I ever done (as C stuff goes) was Perl XS (*). Because you can leave to Perl all the mundane tasks and implement in C only the most performance-critical parts, which often have well defined input and well defined output. Even memory allocation stops being a problem: the objects one allocates in Perl XS come from Perl's GCed pool and managed automatically.
But of course, I'm not disagreeing with you in general: in Python, there are way too many cases where performance is simply unacceptable and everytime dropping into C would be a nightmare for a project of any scale.
(*) Learning Perl XS was a bitch, but I heard Python has much much more straight forward and well documented C interface.
The kinds of organization that choose Java appreciate a number of things it provides that Python, by design, will never provide.
The "number of things" are actually much more trivial this days and is not related to technical side of things: it is the pool of cheap workforce (out-sourceable too) which keeps most organizations addicted to Java.
and performance is not the primary reason why Java is used in those markets.
It is not the primary reason, but performance played its role in Java adoption. Recall why its predecessor Smalltalk never caught up: because it was dog slow and resource hungry.
Slashdot Mirror
Hold the horses!
You probably should learn about GEMA first.
Also, I'm not sure about the GP correctness. The European-style copyright was harmonized among many countries via Berne convention, and I'm pretty sure Germany was part of it too.
Gotta have circuses with your bread.
+1.
Sad but true.
Just about any halfway decent receiver these days with a S/PDIF jack also has HDMI decode ability.
Barring that, most TV's with HDMI also have S/PDIF audio out that you can use to feed the audio into your older receiver. (I just went to the Vizio website and looked at a crap 20" model, and even it had S/PDIF out.)
That's if your receiver has HDMI or you have receiver at all.
I'm totally niche at the moment: I keep the A/V trunk separate from my stereo trunk. My A/V is a plain hi-fi, but for stereo I went with tad bit more expensive components. Most DACs (and my is not exception) have S/PDIF, coaxial and sometimes USB - but no HDMI.
Advantage of S/PDIF is that it's optical. That adds a degree of (desirable) electrical separation between components. Probably my current setup would be also OK with coax or USB - I have no way to test it at the moment. But in past I already have experienced the problems with e.g. noise coming via line-in from the PC/via HDMI from HDTV cable receiver and audible even when another input is selected on receiver. Pure electrical compatibility problem (when lots of hardware is attached to one receiver; or so I was told) - but non-existent with the optical connections.
Assuming that a dose of ugly doesn't necessarily break the deal, your best bet will probably be one of the android tablets with USB host support(and a degree of hack support). S/PDIF output in USB audio class devices is substantially cheaper than HDMI ->S/PDIF...
That seems to be the only sensible solution I can think would work. Searching the intrawebs also give few hits on Android developer forums for USB host and audio. But as usually, there is an alarming absence of the hits to Android device manufacturers. Nevertheless, I'm glad that you suggested the USB as an potential solution and in fact I'm not alone who wants to have a decent touchscreen device commanding my stereo.
Can we have finally a Tablet with S/PDIF output (via dock)?
I want a tablet (largish touch-screen device) for my home stereo, yet all they bother including onto the docks is HDMI.
you just shove it off onto the OS
But we already did and it is widely accepted: anti-virus software.
which hasn't shown a brilliant track record of protecting people from the things they run,
But that the point of the responsibility separation. If user explicitly wants it, then you can't do anything against it - against the will of user. After all, computer exists to fulfill the commands given by the user.
You are sending us back to the old Outlook dilemma: how to send installer of a hot fix to a customer who urgently needs it? Because Outlook too can police attachments and instead of giving AV software a chance, simply drops anything with extension .exe. Or any archive which contains an .exe file. Or anything what looks to Outlook even remotely suspicious.
But you are sort of suggested solution: this Google's effort should be concerted with the AV vendors. Or the effort would go either the way of ActiveX (permanently disabled) or the way of Outlook (let's be smarter than user, making software in the end even more useless than it was to begin with).
Crash in best case. In worst case - a silent exploit of the sandbox and infection of system.
Honestly, do we really need the ActiveX all over again? Or history wouldn't be history without repeating itself?
Next in news: Asa Dotzler proposes to drop keyboard shortcuts support in FireFox.
Anyway I look at the Apple's patent, it is a plain good engineering in response to market's demands. Not something I would call an invention or an innovation.
It is. I'm not aware of the breakages you speak of. Our tests (using several web based products we sell) do not indicate anything of the sorts
Move from IE8 to IE9 and watch in amazement as 3rd party OS apps break.
Oh. That's a great point: MS doesn't forces you to update to IE9. And IE8 (likewise the IE7) are still supported and receive patches.
Its a good tradeoff for me, since IE means I need to constantly watch acrobat and java and flash versions for vulnerabilities; chrome takes care of that and blocks insecure plugins. I would far rather deal with the odd incompatible website than the odd userland rootkit.
ActiveX is a pain - despite the fact that it is more or less not used this days. Developers moved to Web-only tech, and throw the shit at fans this days.
In the end, the problem is that "odd incompatible websites" often end-up being the favorite sites of a manager. Or crappy corpo-crapo-ware portal. You can't argue against neither.
And when one tries to pitch security, managers act surprised - "we do not care, we already pay $$$$$ to AV company!"
Best our IT could manage is to add FireFox to list of supported apps and allow to install it (via some proprietary enterprise deployment/update system). But we are still (and I wholeheartedly support it) on FireFox 3.6 as our IT is totally freaked out (as many others) about new Mozilla release strategy. (I doubt it is a sign of anything, but they have added Opera too few month ago.)
I'll give you the lack of AdBlock+ in Chrome, however there is a suitable NoScript equivalent for Chrome, and I use it myself: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/odjhifogjcknibkahlpidmdajjpkkcfn
Oh irony.
First reviews of the addon: "it is crashing my tabs!", "really really broken after update" and "it is incompatible with Chrome 13!"
Welcome to the wonderful world of silent upgrades!
Thanks. I have seen something similar, but this is more straightforward. Gotta bookmark it.
The problem is that I need browser in office - on Windows. At home on Linux yes, I can write a script to automatically patch the extensions. But on the office PC, where I need, where are my 95% of web browser requirements, I simply lack the tools and environment to run such scripts.
Yes, which just goes to show that Asa Dotzler is unfamiliar with his own product [...]
Like everybody else, he's still on 3.6 probably.
.
P.S. This might be one of the symptoms of ADHD in software development: software being changed so often that developers themselves can't remember what/where/how works or not. Most commonly observed when developers have to work in several branches in parallel, e.g. FF4, FF5, FF6, FF7, FF8, FF9, FF10, FF11 and so on.
If I owned a tech support company I would be strongly in favor of telling the clients to only use IE or I wont support you.
Nothing new. That's actually how it works for a lot of web-based products and commercial companies developing/supporting them.
Give Opera a try. It has its quirks, but I know whole department of end-users who are using Opera for their CMS thingy.
SeaMonkey has sensible UI.
But unfortunately, few extension writers bother adding support for it. This is similar to Thunderbird and Sunbird: they are both built on the same core and have the same extension API, but simply require few lines in the extension's manifest to declare it as compatible with them. But very few extension writers bother with it.
Had no time yet to look deeper into it.
Meaning that if one wants stability, ... Chrome is probably not for them.
Yea, citation needed. A) Whens the last time an addon or plugin has stopped working, even in bleeding edge dev versions of chrome? MAYBE back at v4 or 5 when they were still hammering out extensions.
Extensions are irrelevant to stability as enterprise deployments go. What matters is that one can rely on release schedule.
Simple truth: you can't say "this website was tested and guaranteed to work with version NNN of Chrome/FireFox". Because the versions become obsolete by the time users get around to start using it.
And more users are forced to use IE in the office, more would switch to IE at home.
B) IE is most definately not "more stable". Upgrading it is likely to break a zillion things, not just webpages or plugins either. And its silly to talk about addon stability in a browser that doesnt even support addons.
It is. I'm not aware of the breakages you speak of. Our tests (using several web based products we sell) do not indicate anything of the sorts. (Yes, IE sucks, but it sucks in a backward-compatible fashion.) Otherwise, (1) MS doesn't release all-changing radical updates with minor versions; (2) MS supports old IE versions for very long time after release.
C) Opera has like a 2% market share. Telling mozilla with its 25% share "you need to emulate this guy who has never been relevant in the desktop sphere" is kind of counterintuitive.
Yes. I sort of agree. But you forget about the elephant in the room - IE.
The problem is that now we have two nearly identical browsers on the market - Chrome and FireFox. Competition has decreased and we have lost the only IE's viable alternative, leaving us with not so viable alternative - the Opera. And the decrease in competition is what I'm against of.
On the other hand, the alternative is to continue with a slow release schedule, which we feel has bigger problems and would annoy more users.
And how is all the nifty features are related to fsckups of the user interface? Right...
Why can't you accumulate features and make a major release, say once a year? Many people are boasting here constantly that they are using alphas/betas, like before they have used NBs. There was never problem of getting latest and greatest FireFox in hands of users - except for slightly fscked up handling of profiles. Which you surely could have fixed instead.
As one example, both support the new (safe) version of web sockets.
You operate on false presumption that users are after latest and greatest features - the features which are totally invisible to them. They are not.
How a user who mostly visits Facebook and Wikipedia and probably corporate Intranet profits from WebSockets? (Or the WebSockets had UI fsckup as a prerequisite?)
[...] Chrome and Firefox. Both are probably not seen very favorably among enterprise users.
No, simply "unsupported," what equals "use at your own risk; if stuff breaks royally - you're on your own." We recommend IE. There were plans to certify FireFox 3, but it became outdated in mean time (even security updates are broken now; we had to download 3.6.19 manually). With new release strategy it is simply impossible: we can't certify all versions of Fx as there are too many of them; we can't guarantee that stuff works in future versions (and customers must upgrade obviously to receiving security updates).
But overall I think the fast release schedule of Chrome and Firefox is a good thing.
You totally make no sense. You mix lots of technical and political issues together (akin to religion or corporate brainwashing) thus it is nearly impossible to see any logic in what you say. Frankly, I doubt there is any.
Yep, I totally see how UI fsckup is required - to improve performance and memory consumption. Stick and carrot so to say.
Or why not use unary numeral system for the version numbers? FireFox v111111 would confuse hell out of the competition. After all, Chrome, as of last morning is still at the measly v13.
Exactly. Meaning that if one wants stability, FireFox and Chrome are probably not for them.
IE and Opera started looking so much more attractive now. Even Netscape 4.7...
Using media center's sharing capabilities tend to do that. So in the advanced power option, you expand the Sleep node in the tree, and make sure Allow hybrid sleep is on.
Hybrid Sleep is just a Hibernate, but Sleep instead of shutdown. If I on my PC use the Hybrid Sleep, I have to wait 2-3 minutes extra before (whatever tries to get the PC out of sleep) gives up and does reboot with followed resume from hibernate. IOW, wake up fails (what takes lots of time) and it does plain un-hibernate. Pure Hibernate is faster. Haven't tested it on office's PCs yet - but there I doubt we have permissions to change the power settings.
And thats with a sample size of about 20 computers at home between my wife and I, and a hundred thousand (not all the same) or so at work with none having any issues...
My sample is pretty small: several new W7 laptops and desktops in office and my home PC (built 100% from W7 compatible parts (unintentionally)). As it stands now, I have seen only one PC - a Toshiba laptop owned by a manager (btw against guidelines of corporate IT to use private HW for work) - where W7 could sleep/wake-up properly.
I have missed Vista completely, but on WinXP it was the same: regardless of the price class of the system, Windows either refused to go to sleep or went to sleep and never woke up. Many said sleep works for them, but I again seen it only on few newly installed systems. After some time in useage, and sleep was breaking again. I wonder what I (and others) do wrong.
I just tried to recall how long it takes for my MacBook Pro to boot up. I can't remember. I can't remember when was the last time I did shut it down. It is constantly in sleep mode when I'm not using it.
Boot time is more relevant to my office Windows laptop, but the usual array of corpoware would make even Windows 7 to boot for 10-15 minutes.
P.S. And Windows 7 still fails at sleep. Oops, I'm sorry: yes it goes to sleep real well, but my stats show that only on about 30-40% of laptops it manages to wake up... And the 30-40% group is characterized of being "just out of box." Few month down the road - forget about the sleep. But well never mind, Hibernate works in Windows pretty well. I got used to the fact that for working sleep/wake up I have to pay the Apple tax.
[...] and rewriting stuff in C (like Python fanboys always suggest) is not actually that easy (and brings with it all the problems of writing anything in C -- there's a reason we want to use Python or Java in the first place, right?)
Actually, dismissing writing parts in C is not so simple. The only problem I'm aware of is the portability. And even that is handled by package/module management automatically.
Otherwise, most problem-free C programming I ever done (as C stuff goes) was Perl XS (*). Because you can leave to Perl all the mundane tasks and implement in C only the most performance-critical parts, which often have well defined input and well defined output. Even memory allocation stops being a problem: the objects one allocates in Perl XS come from Perl's GCed pool and managed automatically.
But of course, I'm not disagreeing with you in general: in Python, there are way too many cases where performance is simply unacceptable and everytime dropping into C would be a nightmare for a project of any scale.
(*) Learning Perl XS was a bitch, but I heard Python has much much more straight forward and well documented C interface.
The kinds of organization that choose Java appreciate a number of things it provides that Python, by design, will never provide.
The "number of things" are actually much more trivial this days and is not related to technical side of things: it is the pool of cheap workforce (out-sourceable too) which keeps most organizations addicted to Java.
and performance is not the primary reason why Java is used in those markets.
It is not the primary reason, but performance played its role in Java adoption. Recall why its predecessor Smalltalk never caught up: because it was dog slow and resource hungry.