HTML5 *almost* replaced Flash while having only a subset of the capabilities. Flash was used mostly for video playback. At this point, HTML5 video playback is easier than Flash playback. But Flash is still really nice for animations and video games, and I bet that is the majority of what is left.
Flash had a concept of frames and sprites. It let you make vector drawings on a frame and do automatic "tweening" between them. You could even make a game with almost no coding. Can someone tell me: What toolkits exist today that have the capabilities of Flash, but export to HTML5? I am disappointed tat Flash -> JS+HTML5 converters never matured, and that Adobe didn't adapt their Flash tools to export to JS+HTML5. It really was a great tool.
That's good to know. I suppose it isn't UWP itself that is the problem. It is that the UWP apps are usually not feature-rich when compared to their desktop counterparts. Perrhaps, in the future, UWP apps will start to have power-user functionality.
I have both versions of OneNote on my Windows 10 machine at home. Sometimes it brings up the universal version, and I go "What is this? This isn't onenote is it? oh, it's that crappy version." Then I close it and open the real one. Universal Apps f*ing suck. The only way Windows 10 is useful to a power user is if they turn off all the universal apps and replace them with real Windows applications. Microsoft should have given up on this garbage when Windows 8 bombed. They destroyed what was left of their OS, and now it is only useful for running Visual Studio, Office, legacy applications. Oh, and games.
From the article:
And still, there are OneNote 2016 features that aren’t in OneNote for Windows 10. Microsoft is asking users to help prioritize what to port over by submitting suggestions in Windows 10’s Feedback Hub.
Yess!! This same sad story exists for all their UWP apps. Ex: The Windows XP "Picture and fax viewer" has more features than the "Photos" viewer that comes in Windows 10. It's the same with their new.NET stuff. Entity Framework ".NET Core" doesn't have all the features of Entity Framework 6 for.NET. And they have a page for submitting requests for features, which is full of closed issues for things they won't ever do. The Windows Mail app is functionally inferior to the old Outlook Express app that used to come with Windows. Every time they re-invent themselves, they force themselves to rewrite all their own software, ultimately delivering less and less functionality while offering less and less freedom.
This is why Steambox is exiting: The day most of my games support Linux, a lot of people will be out of reasons to keep using Windows. UWP isn't keeping anybody on the platform.
Wait, so a company that scraped data from public sources, left the data unsecured, and the public could access it?
personal profiles...from sites and social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Zillow, among others - -- without the users' knowledge or consent.
Are you telling me that users of social networks do not know that the public part of their profile is available publicly? What? Hey, there's plenty of privacy violations going around, but this isn't one of them. Save your outrage for any one of the many other examples.
There are services small businesses can subscribe to which will provide a database of sales tax rates for different zip codes and addresses
That's not good enough though:
Baltimore City has a special sales tax called a bottle tax. (Lots of municipalities are doing this - the money goes to cleanup & recycling efforts.) Under that law fruit juices with 10% juice fits the tax. So a Baltimore City resident goes to Amazon.com and orders a case of soda from the Spanish Manufacturing Corporation (SMC) located in Seville, Spain. Who is responsible for determining if the bottles sold in that meet the description of the Baltimore City bottle cap tax? SMC certainly won't know. Amazon doesn't know the relative content of fruit juice in the product being sold, even if the sales tax database had all those details. There's no algorithm that can be automatically applied here.
Solar companies are doing something weird like this too. I'm used to contractors coming by, giving an estimate, maybe a quote, then waiting for me to call them back. But for some reason the Solar contractors who came by our neighborhood (from a few different companies) do it all backwards. They tell you about the product, gather your personal information so they can run a credit check, then select a date, then you sign, THEN they tell you the price of the product and the details. I've sent at least 2 of them packing their bags so far before they got any information from me. Yet I had neighbors sign the contract just to get the estimate! Why???
Tim Cook talks about how he supports his users by not selling their information, by supporting strong encryption, and by standing up to the government. Whenever I hear him talk about this, I pause and almost consider buying an Apple product. But then things like this happen, and I am reminded that Apple provides a walled-garden store, fights interoperability, and uses the intellectual-property stick to harm their own customers. Tim Cook can claim a clean conscience on some fronts, but is downright evil on others. There is hope for Apple, but there is much that needs to change.
FYI: Just because something can be doctored does not mean it is not permitted as evidence. The most common form of evidence is witness testimony, which is inaccurate, easily altered, and degrades over time.
About 6 months ago I bumped the default firefox tracking protection all the way up, and my web browsing experience has been faster and cleaner than it has been. The only downside has been sites that display messages saying "Hey, I see you are using an ad blocker!" I smugly say "No I'm not, you are serving garbage! Nevermind, I'll find another site!" I've had coworkers who poo-pood Firefox for a while asking me for help stopping creepy ads. I hope that other browsers follow suit, it might go a long ways toward advertisers cleaning up their act. If they can't server their ads anymore, they will need to either clean them up so they get whitelisted, or (unfortunately) get sneakier.
The PhoneDog article is just a wrapper for the Wired article. It says:
We found several vendors that didn’t install a single patch but changed the patch date forward by several months," Nohl says. "That’s deliberate deception, and it's not very common."
What exactly does the patch date mean? Does that mean it has all the patches up to that date? Or does it merely mean that it was patched on that date? What if the manufacturer has a patched version of a library or driver, and they haven't merged that patch into their library or driver yet? That might be irresponsible, but it doesn't mean that patch date is wrong or that they are being malicious.
Because odds are that the guy standing behind you taking selfies is a Facebook user, and Facebook data-mined their pictures. That's the trouble: you can't escape the watchful eye of Facebook...
TLDR: Mid-level managers use the word "strategy" to mean BS things that are not strategies. If you groan when you hear the word "leverage" and "synergize" then you aren't one of those people, and there is nothing new in the article.
I found the article confusing because it is clearly aimed at people who can't tell buzzwords from reality. I didn't understand how anyone could use the word "strategy" to mean anything else. It wasn't until I saw the examples and realized "ohhh... THOOOSE kinds of people."
Yup. And the only thing that will let you be able to play all those games you've accumulated is Valve's efforts. So if/when the day comes, I'll be happy they ported all that stuff over.
Oh for crying out loud! Why the heck would anyone give your name, email address, physical addresses, or birthday to Panera bread just to do an online order! These data breaches are bad, but I'm sick and tired of everyone giving away completely unnecessary information! If the cashier says "What's your zip code" you say "no thanks." If the grocery store wants you to give your name and phone number to get a discount card either lie, or don't get the discount. Enough is enough folks! My sympathy has run out.
Large corporations, including Google and Facebook, started open sourcing their own projects because...having them out in the open allowed them to profit from the ecosystems that formed around that.
I'm happy that this has happened, but I'm unclear why. I read the article, and it didn't explain. How did Google profit from open sourcing Angular? How did Twitter profit from Bootstrap?
Reading and re-reading the quote from Tesla, I see I was mislead:
The driver had received several visual and one audible hands-on warning earlier in the drive and the driver's hands were not detected on the wheel for six seconds prior to the collision. The driver had about five seconds and 150 meters of unobstructed view of the concrete divider with the crushed crash attenuator, but the vehicle logs show that no action was taken."
This does not mean that the warning fired during the 6-seconds prior to the collision. It wasn't telling him a collision was imminent. It says that "earlier in the drive" it warned him. So the warning could have been 45 minutes prior. Also, it sounds like the autopilot warning happens any time the user takes their hands off the wheel, not just when it needs help. It might be that autopilot drivers have a tendency to ignore the warning, like a dialog box that comes up so often people just click "OK" to it.
I begin to think that a semi-autopilot is a bad idea. If it is not reliable enough that a person can take their hands off the wheel, and they still must pay full attention to the road in case it makes a mistake, then they might as well drive? It is very hard to pay attention to something you aren't actively involved in. Airline pilots and lifeguards and factory quality inspectors know this. Those industries have specific policies and practices designed to keep people engaged and aware.
Oh good, thanks. The 24-hours option was my favorite, since I didn't have to close the browser every day, and if I closed it in the middle of the day I didn't have to log back in. But that option might have been in Netscape but never in Firefox.
It's amazing how much effort people put into making a broken service usable. Just stop using Facebook.
As for other web sites, just use the browser's privacy mode. It's a minor inconvenience since you lose your browser history, but it isn't worth it. If that really matters, just clear your cookies every day. Years ago, clearing your cookies every time you closed the browser, or every 24 hours, was an option in Firefox. It meant web sites worked but you had to login once a day. Seemed like a good compromise, so it is a shame they removed it.
The problem isn't centralized email/websites, it's Facebook's business model specifically...They should have done what Google does
This is for people who don't trust someone else with their data. You definitely won't want to run your own server if Google's business model is okay with you, and you trust that it will not change over time. I see Google as an advertiser who collects tons of data. I'm glad to know they aren't as blasé about it as Facebook, but that's still not good enough for me.
Except that people don't have the desire, know-how, hardware, stable connection etc.
I think you have the technical issues overstated. People run servers all the time. Desire: If they wan't their data under their own control, then they desire this. Know-how: This argument made sense in 1995, but in 2018 people run servers all the time and don't even know it. Plex Media servers, Bittorrent servers, video games, thermostats, etc. This is no longer a process involving archaic command-lines. Just double-click the app. Stable connection: They must have a stable connection to use Facebook anyway, so the requirement here is no higher. I may be biased since I live in a major US city where this is not a problem. But around here, home internet is more reliable than cell coverage.
A human driver, even 100% attentive, wouldn't have avoided the accident
Not paying attention to the road is a traffic violation even if you *don't* hit someone. And if Uber told the driver to do something that distracted them from the road, then it is a violation of Uber's contract with the state.
Ask the millions of people who use it. It sure sounds like it would be nifty to have a page with a list of recent pictures from friends and family. Email is nice, but the concept of a "log" of recent events sounds cool. Personally, I don't find FaceBook works for that because the signal-to-noise ratio is preposterous. But refusing to accept that millions of people find it useful prevents us from addressing the problem.
Suppose that this was not a self-driving car. You see a video of a driver spending 50% of their time looking down at a (phone, book, video game, etc.) and 50% looking ahead. They look ahead, and suddenly get an OH SH*T look and plow someone down. What would the law say?
1) The pedestrian was negligent. 2) The driver was negligent.
This is contributory negligence, and I don't think the driver would get off with no penalty just because the pedestrian was negligent. This cannot be allowed to continue.
So back to the self-driving part: either the driver thought "Oh, it's a self driving car, I'll play a video game" or Uber said "Monitor this status console here on your lap and just look up every now and then to make sure that you don't plow over someone." The police need to figure that out. If it is the former, the law should do whatever they normally do in cases of contributory negligence. But if it is the latter, then Uber needs to lose their license for testing these cars, and face a big fine.
Lots of people (like me) hate FaceBook because of the business model. But we must understand that FaceBook is a useful service. So any discussion about #DeleteFacebook needs to propose an alternative. The problem is that, in order to get around the "advertiser pays" model, people must be willing to accept some other model. Possibilities are a pay service, or a service where you host the data yourself and control it. The latter has been the way the web worked for decades. My friends and I all had "home pages" on our "web sites." There have been alternatives before, like Diaspora but none have gained critical mass. Oh wait look! Here's a list of them: Distributed social networking.
At the risk of making this a rant: Internet users today seem to have no concept that "web sites" are anything other than things that corporations buy. Some of those nice corporations let you put stuff on those sites, either for a fee or in exchange for intrusive monitoring. That's not how the web works. I've had my own web site for 20 years, and it costs me about $5/month. This idea that we should have our email addresses all at sites that record, monitor, and sell our emails is preposterous. Back in 1998, many of us predicted that everyone would have their own server in their home that ran their web site. And there would be standard protocols for exchanging social information, running something like OwnCloud. I don't know why that model changed. Is the FaceBook backlash enough to get us back onto that model?
Slashdot Mirror
HTML5 *almost* replaced Flash while having only a subset of the capabilities. Flash was used mostly for video playback. At this point, HTML5 video playback is easier than Flash playback. But Flash is still really nice for animations and video games, and I bet that is the majority of what is left.
Flash had a concept of frames and sprites. It let you make vector drawings on a frame and do automatic "tweening" between them. You could even make a game with almost no coding. Can someone tell me: What toolkits exist today that have the capabilities of Flash, but export to HTML5? I am disappointed tat Flash -> JS+HTML5 converters never matured, and that Adobe didn't adapt their Flash tools to export to JS+HTML5. It really was a great tool.
MIT's Scratch still uses Flash. :-(
That's good to know. I suppose it isn't UWP itself that is the problem. It is that the UWP apps are usually not feature-rich when compared to their desktop counterparts. Perrhaps, in the future, UWP apps will start to have power-user functionality.
I have both versions of OneNote on my Windows 10 machine at home. Sometimes it brings up the universal version, and I go "What is this? This isn't onenote is it? oh, it's that crappy version." Then I close it and open the real one. Universal Apps f*ing suck. The only way Windows 10 is useful to a power user is if they turn off all the universal apps and replace them with real Windows applications. Microsoft should have given up on this garbage when Windows 8 bombed. They destroyed what was left of their OS, and now it is only useful for running Visual Studio, Office, legacy applications. Oh, and games.
From the article:
And still, there are OneNote 2016 features that aren’t in OneNote for Windows 10. Microsoft is asking users to help prioritize what to port over by submitting suggestions in Windows 10’s Feedback Hub.
Yess!! This same sad story exists for all their UWP apps. Ex: The Windows XP "Picture and fax viewer" has more features than the "Photos" viewer that comes in Windows 10. It's the same with their new .NET stuff. Entity Framework ".NET Core" doesn't have all the features of Entity Framework 6 for .NET. And they have a page for submitting requests for features, which is full of closed issues for things they won't ever do. The Windows Mail app is functionally inferior to the old Outlook Express app that used to come with Windows. Every time they re-invent themselves, they force themselves to rewrite all their own software, ultimately delivering less and less functionality while offering less and less freedom.
This is why Steambox is exiting: The day most of my games support Linux, a lot of people will be out of reasons to keep using Windows. UWP isn't keeping anybody on the platform.
Wait, so a company that scraped data from public sources, left the data unsecured, and the public could access it?
personal profiles...from sites and social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Zillow, among others - -- without the users' knowledge or consent.
Are you telling me that users of social networks do not know that the public part of their profile is available publicly? What? Hey, there's plenty of privacy violations going around, but this isn't one of them. Save your outrage for any one of the many other examples.
There are services small businesses can subscribe to which will provide a database of sales tax rates for different zip codes and addresses
That's not good enough though:
Baltimore City has a special sales tax called a bottle tax. (Lots of municipalities are doing this - the money goes to cleanup & recycling efforts.) Under that law fruit juices with 10% juice fits the tax. So a Baltimore City resident goes to Amazon.com and orders a case of soda from the Spanish Manufacturing Corporation (SMC) located in Seville, Spain. Who is responsible for determining if the bottles sold in that meet the description of the Baltimore City bottle cap tax? SMC certainly won't know. Amazon doesn't know the relative content of fruit juice in the product being sold, even if the sales tax database had all those details. There's no algorithm that can be automatically applied here.
Solar companies are doing something weird like this too. I'm used to contractors coming by, giving an estimate, maybe a quote, then waiting for me to call them back. But for some reason the Solar contractors who came by our neighborhood (from a few different companies) do it all backwards. They tell you about the product, gather your personal information so they can run a credit check, then select a date, then you sign, THEN they tell you the price of the product and the details. I've sent at least 2 of them packing their bags so far before they got any information from me. Yet I had neighbors sign the contract just to get the estimate! Why???
Tim Cook talks about how he supports his users by not selling their information, by supporting strong encryption, and by standing up to the government. Whenever I hear him talk about this, I pause and almost consider buying an Apple product. But then things like this happen, and I am reminded that Apple provides a walled-garden store, fights interoperability, and uses the intellectual-property stick to harm their own customers. Tim Cook can claim a clean conscience on some fronts, but is downright evil on others. There is hope for Apple, but there is much that needs to change.
FYI: Just because something can be doctored does not mean it is not permitted as evidence. The most common form of evidence is witness testimony, which is inaccurate, easily altered, and degrades over time.
About 6 months ago I bumped the default firefox tracking protection all the way up, and my web browsing experience has been faster and cleaner than it has been. The only downside has been sites that display messages saying "Hey, I see you are using an ad blocker!" I smugly say "No I'm not, you are serving garbage! Nevermind, I'll find another site!" I've had coworkers who poo-pood Firefox for a while asking me for help stopping creepy ads. I hope that other browsers follow suit, it might go a long ways toward advertisers cleaning up their act. If they can't server their ads anymore, they will need to either clean them up so they get whitelisted, or (unfortunately) get sneakier.
The PhoneDog article is just a wrapper for the Wired article. It says:
We found several vendors that didn’t install a single patch but changed the patch date forward by several months," Nohl says. "That’s deliberate deception, and it's not very common."
What exactly does the patch date mean? Does that mean it has all the patches up to that date? Or does it merely mean that it was patched on that date? What if the manufacturer has a patched version of a library or driver, and they haven't merged that patch into their library or driver yet? That might be irresponsible, but it doesn't mean that patch date is wrong or that they are being malicious.
Because odds are that the guy standing behind you taking selfies is a Facebook user, and Facebook data-mined their pictures. That's the trouble: you can't escape the watchful eye of Facebook...
TLDR: Mid-level managers use the word "strategy" to mean BS things that are not strategies. If you groan when you hear the word "leverage" and "synergize" then you aren't one of those people, and there is nothing new in the article.
I found the article confusing because it is clearly aimed at people who can't tell buzzwords from reality. I didn't understand how anyone could use the word "strategy" to mean anything else. It wasn't until I saw the examples and realized "ohhh... THOOOSE kinds of people."
Yup. And the only thing that will let you be able to play all those games you've accumulated is Valve's efforts. So if/when the day comes, I'll be happy they ported all that stuff over.
It's all fun and games until Microsoft drops Windows as a gaming OS to focus on Cloud.
Panera delivers? The ones near me don't. I figured this was for a pick-up order.
Oh for crying out loud! Why the heck would anyone give your name, email address, physical addresses, or birthday to Panera bread just to do an online order! These data breaches are bad, but I'm sick and tired of everyone giving away completely unnecessary information! If the cashier says "What's your zip code" you say "no thanks." If the grocery store wants you to give your name and phone number to get a discount card either lie, or don't get the discount. Enough is enough folks! My sympathy has run out.
Large corporations, including Google and Facebook, started open sourcing their own projects because...having them out in the open allowed them to profit from the ecosystems that formed around that.
I'm happy that this has happened, but I'm unclear why. I read the article, and it didn't explain. How did Google profit from open sourcing Angular? How did Twitter profit from Bootstrap?
Reading and re-reading the quote from Tesla, I see I was mislead:
The driver had received several visual and one audible hands-on warning earlier in the drive and the driver's hands were not detected on the wheel for six seconds prior to the collision. The driver had about five seconds and 150 meters of unobstructed view of the concrete divider with the crushed crash attenuator, but the vehicle logs show that no action was taken."
This does not mean that the warning fired during the 6-seconds prior to the collision. It wasn't telling him a collision was imminent. It says that "earlier in the drive" it warned him. So the warning could have been 45 minutes prior. Also, it sounds like the autopilot warning happens any time the user takes their hands off the wheel, not just when it needs help. It might be that autopilot drivers have a tendency to ignore the warning, like a dialog box that comes up so often people just click "OK" to it.
I begin to think that a semi-autopilot is a bad idea. If it is not reliable enough that a person can take their hands off the wheel, and they still must pay full attention to the road in case it makes a mistake, then they might as well drive? It is very hard to pay attention to something you aren't actively involved in. Airline pilots and lifeguards and factory quality inspectors know this. Those industries have specific policies and practices designed to keep people engaged and aware.
Oh good, thanks. The 24-hours option was my favorite, since I didn't have to close the browser every day, and if I closed it in the middle of the day I didn't have to log back in. But that option might have been in Netscape but never in Firefox.
It's amazing how much effort people put into making a broken service usable. Just stop using Facebook.
As for other web sites, just use the browser's privacy mode. It's a minor inconvenience since you lose your browser history, but it isn't worth it. If that really matters, just clear your cookies every day. Years ago, clearing your cookies every time you closed the browser, or every 24 hours, was an option in Firefox. It meant web sites worked but you had to login once a day. Seemed like a good compromise, so it is a shame they removed it.
The problem isn't centralized email/websites, it's Facebook's business model specifically...They should have done what Google does
This is for people who don't trust someone else with their data. You definitely won't want to run your own server if Google's business model is okay with you, and you trust that it will not change over time. I see Google as an advertiser who collects tons of data. I'm glad to know they aren't as blasé about it as Facebook, but that's still not good enough for me.
Except that people don't have the desire, know-how, hardware, stable connection etc.
I think you have the technical issues overstated. People run servers all the time.
Desire: If they wan't their data under their own control, then they desire this.
Know-how: This argument made sense in 1995, but in 2018 people run servers all the time and don't even know it. Plex Media servers, Bittorrent servers, video games, thermostats, etc. This is no longer a process involving archaic command-lines. Just double-click the app.
Stable connection: They must have a stable connection to use Facebook anyway, so the requirement here is no higher. I may be biased since I live in a major US city where this is not a problem. But around here, home internet is more reliable than cell coverage.
A human driver, even 100% attentive, wouldn't have avoided the accident
Not paying attention to the road is a traffic violation even if you *don't* hit someone. And if Uber told the driver to do something that distracted them from the road, then it is a violation of Uber's contract with the state.
Ask the millions of people who use it. It sure sounds like it would be nifty to have a page with a list of recent pictures from friends and family. Email is nice, but the concept of a "log" of recent events sounds cool. Personally, I don't find FaceBook works for that because the signal-to-noise ratio is preposterous. But refusing to accept that millions of people find it useful prevents us from addressing the problem.
Suppose that this was not a self-driving car. You see a video of a driver spending 50% of their time looking down at a (phone, book, video game, etc.) and 50% looking ahead. They look ahead, and suddenly get an OH SH*T look and plow someone down. What would the law say?
1) The pedestrian was negligent.
2) The driver was negligent.
This is contributory negligence, and I don't think the driver would get off with no penalty just because the pedestrian was negligent. This cannot be allowed to continue.
So back to the self-driving part: either the driver thought "Oh, it's a self driving car, I'll play a video game" or Uber said "Monitor this status console here on your lap and just look up every now and then to make sure that you don't plow over someone." The police need to figure that out. If it is the former, the law should do whatever they normally do in cases of contributory negligence. But if it is the latter, then Uber needs to lose their license for testing these cars, and face a big fine.
Lots of people (like me) hate FaceBook because of the business model. But we must understand that FaceBook is a useful service. So any discussion about #DeleteFacebook needs to propose an alternative. The problem is that, in order to get around the "advertiser pays" model, people must be willing to accept some other model. Possibilities are a pay service, or a service where you host the data yourself and control it. The latter has been the way the web worked for decades. My friends and I all had "home pages" on our "web sites." There have been alternatives before, like Diaspora but none have gained critical mass. Oh wait look! Here's a list of them: Distributed social networking.
At the risk of making this a rant: Internet users today seem to have no concept that "web sites" are anything other than things that corporations buy. Some of those nice corporations let you put stuff on those sites, either for a fee or in exchange for intrusive monitoring. That's not how the web works. I've had my own web site for 20 years, and it costs me about $5/month. This idea that we should have our email addresses all at sites that record, monitor, and sell our emails is preposterous. Back in 1998, many of us predicted that everyone would have their own server in their home that ran their web site. And there would be standard protocols for exchanging social information, running something like OwnCloud. I don't know why that model changed. Is the FaceBook backlash enough to get us back onto that model?