What are you talking about? JavaScript must always necessarily be slower than native code due to its abstracted nature. If it needs an interpreter, or virtual machine, or any other intermediate process between the program code and the CPU, there will be overhead.
Having the CPU execute native code directly will always be faster.
Now, there's an argument to be made that a higher-level, more abstracted language makes people more productive, and by extension, program code more expressive. But this is a different trade-off and objective than building a high-performance application.
You're thinking of OLE (Object Linking & Embedding). COM (Component Object Model) was designed with distributed enterprise applications in mind, complete with a transaction coordinator and language-neutral'ish interfaces. It's the DLL paradigm taken to its natural position in the 7 circles of hell.
It was Microsoft's attempt to steal CORBA's thunder and nearly got away with it.
Our little Timmy has always received a ribbon. If he doesn't get one this time, it may affect his self-esteem. And while we're at it, since little Timmy is getting a ribbon, then they all should get one, lest they feel left out or less capable.
When you say, "back in the day," when exactly do you mean? AltaVista was indeed a great service in the mid-to-late 1990s, until it succumbed to spam, porn, and advertisement corruption, like the rest of them.
That's been a piece of revisionist history, propagated by Google itself during the mid '00s, as a branding tactic. Google was a mere geek's toy during its first couple of years.
People started switching because the other search engines were full of spam, porn, and advertisements, and along came Google with its PageRank algorithm, which proved very effective at the time.
People suffered through all other search engines' "portals" for years and would not have switched if the only thing Google had to offer was a "page free from clutter."
Of course, eventually Google turned into another advertisement-riddled, cluttered portal, full of spam and irrelevant junk. The more things change...
All those people that you claimed replaced their smartphones with tablets when they go to conferences, used to bring laptops before smartphones. Weren't you paying attention?
So it went from paper pads, to tablets, to smartphones, to tablets.
That means that at least some businesses did dump laptops in favor of smartphones for at least some functions.
I know you are trying to be all smarty-pants with your straw-man argument pointing out how tablets are not going to replace laptops completely, in every facet of business--but nobody is claiming that.
What some of us are saying is that, there are some functions for which laptops and desktop computers used to be regarded as the most appropriate tool, and now tablets are taking their place.
Not only that, but tablets are being put to some uses by businesses to which laptops or smartphones weren't even considered.
The trick is providing something that is truly useful without cannibalizing Laptop/Desktop sales.
And therein lies the business problem: the use case for tablets overlaps and even extends beyond that of the traditional PC. Moreover, they seem to fulfill the promises of ease of use, portability, multimedia capabilities, and personal adaptability that PCs have been making for two decades now. As such, the tablet market appears to be bigger than the one for traditional PCs.
If a business insists in ignoring this to avoid the cannibalization of their current PC cash-cow, a competitor will come along and do it for them.
You do know that the iPad supports Multi-Touch, right? You could use both thumbs at the same time. In fact, as someone already answered above, some games offer multiple buttons that when pressed performed different functions--exactly like games such as Defender used to do.
For more complex games such as first-person-shooters, it is not uncommon to have one side of the screen offer a "move" control and the other a "tilt head" control. It's even more versatile than that: some games even make the distinction between a press-and-slide (move) and a tap (fire). And it all works wherever your thumb happens to land.
Clearly you have not tried any of this or you would see how obvious and intuitive it can be, and clearly you have no imagination to even conceive its possibility.
So, go ahead and continue believing that iPads suck at anything other than watching cat videos. I don't think anybody would care too much that you are missing all the fun and cool stuff.
I think he meant it has nothing that anybody wants to pay to watch. It's popular right now because it's free, but cat videos may not pay the hosting service by themselves.
You should wear your fanny pack wit pride, and ignore what we say behind your back. Heck, put on camouflage cargo-pants and a pocket protector. We won't mind, really.
The Mozilla Foundation is desperately looking for new ways of acquiring revenue that does not depend on large grants by fickle corporations. Especially when their core competency is being made largely irrelevant by those grantors. Guess the fastest, most common--and apparently very easy to justify morally--way to monetize user access on the Web?
Yet, they were vehemently opposed to Microsoft's strategy of blocking third-party cookies by default, and wrote some sort of manifesto on how "user choice" meant letting advertisers fleece those naive enough to not know how to change the default.
You know, if you squint your eyes and concentrate a bit, you'll notice that the Internet is bigger than Facebook, Twitter, and has a lot more than blogs and LOLcats (though, granted, porn comprises most of the non-LOLcat content).
I don't agree that the Internet is a perfect environment, or the answer to all or even most of our problems, like some techno-utopians like to think. However, I also do not agree with those who cannot see beyond the banal facade of the fads du jour.
Sorry, I mischaracterized your post after reading so many "Internet? Meh" posts already.
I agree, Gates and Schmidt are not really visionaries, and when they try to look beyond what they know, all they see is "more of the same," but at a more grandiose scale.
We had all that in the 1980s with BBS's (and some may say, better, but that's another argument).
Yet, while dialing up to the local "information utility," reading e-mail from strangers half a world away, and accessing the expansive repository of some digitized library--all the time struck with awe and wonder at the fantastic "future" I found myself in, and dreaming of the things to come--I never EVER imagined it like the way it is now.
I sure would not say that the Internet and the technology we have today is just "more of the same."
Sure, it has its problems, and the Internet is most definitely not the bunnies-and-rainbows paradise envisioned by some utopians (I myself expected a lot less ads and LOLcats), but it is absolutely marvelous and transformative in its own way.
Wake the FUCK UP, man, and look around! We're in the fucking future! We got super-computers in our pockets, home computers on a slab of glass, instant access to the mall at any time or place, telecommuting, telegaming... This is the Jetsons-fan-fucking-tastic future! All we are missing are the jet-packs and flying cars.
I sincerely can't wait to see what else is coming.
Chile is the "other main right-wing product of US neoliberal intervention in South America"? Which is the first one? Or did they move Mexico before I got a chance to visit it?
Slashdot Mirror
What are you talking about? JavaScript must always necessarily be slower than native code due to its abstracted nature. If it needs an interpreter, or virtual machine, or any other intermediate process between the program code and the CPU, there will be overhead.
Having the CPU execute native code directly will always be faster.
Now, there's an argument to be made that a higher-level, more abstracted language makes people more productive, and by extension, program code more expressive. But this is a different trade-off and objective than building a high-performance application.
-dZ.
You're thinking of OLE (Object Linking & Embedding). COM (Component Object Model) was designed with distributed enterprise applications in mind, complete with a transaction coordinator and language-neutral'ish interfaces. It's the DLL paradigm taken to its natural position in the 7 circles of hell.
It was Microsoft's attempt to steal CORBA's thunder and nearly got away with it.
-dZ.
Our little Timmy has always received a ribbon. If he doesn't get one this time, it may affect his self-esteem. And while we're at it, since little Timmy is getting a ribbon, then they all should get one, lest they feel left out or less capable.
So, yes, ribbons.
Don't forget the ribbons! Everyone must get a ribbon.
-dZ.
When you say, "back in the day," when exactly do you mean? AltaVista was indeed a great service in the mid-to-late 1990s, until it succumbed to spam, porn, and advertisement corruption, like the rest of them.
dZ.
That's been a piece of revisionist history, propagated by Google itself during the mid '00s, as a branding tactic. Google was a mere geek's toy during its first couple of years.
People started switching because the other search engines were full of spam, porn, and advertisements, and along came Google with its PageRank algorithm, which proved very effective at the time.
People suffered through all other search engines' "portals" for years and would not have switched if the only thing Google had to offer was a "page free from clutter."
Of course, eventually Google turned into another advertisement-riddled, cluttered portal, full of spam and irrelevant junk. The more things change...
dZ.
LOL! In Slashdot and Reddit, at least.
Plus it's kind of icky.
Well, you can't switch arguments mid-way.
All those people that you claimed replaced their smartphones with tablets when they go to conferences, used to bring laptops before smartphones. Weren't you paying attention?
So it went from paper pads, to tablets, to smartphones, to tablets.
That means that at least some businesses did dump laptops in favor of smartphones for at least some functions.
I know you are trying to be all smarty-pants with your straw-man argument pointing out how tablets are not going to replace laptops completely, in every facet of business--but nobody is claiming that.
What some of us are saying is that, there are some functions for which laptops and desktop computers used to be regarded as the most appropriate tool, and now tablets are taking their place.
Not only that, but tablets are being put to some uses by businesses to which laptops or smartphones weren't even considered.
-dZ.
And therein lies the business problem: the use case for tablets overlaps and even extends beyond that of the traditional PC. Moreover, they seem to fulfill the promises of ease of use, portability, multimedia capabilities, and personal adaptability that PCs have been making for two decades now. As such, the tablet market appears to be bigger than the one for traditional PCs.
If a business insists in ignoring this to avoid the cannibalization of their current PC cash-cow, a competitor will come along and do it for them.
Oops! I guess they already have.
dZ.
You do know that the iPad supports Multi-Touch, right? You could use both thumbs at the same time. In fact, as someone already answered above, some games offer multiple buttons that when pressed performed different functions--exactly like games such as Defender used to do.
For more complex games such as first-person-shooters, it is not uncommon to have one side of the screen offer a "move" control and the other a "tilt head" control. It's even more versatile than that: some games even make the distinction between a press-and-slide (move) and a tap (fire). And it all works wherever your thumb happens to land.
Clearly you have not tried any of this or you would see how obvious and intuitive it can be, and clearly you have no imagination to even conceive its possibility.
So, go ahead and continue believing that iPads suck at anything other than watching cat videos. I don't think anybody would care too much that you are missing all the fun and cool stuff.
dZ.
You mean, the things they used to do on a smartphone that they previously used to do on a Laptop? Do you see how this is going?
You should pay more attention. They're there.
-dZ.
Can AdBlock block the ads embedded in the video? I don't recall that function.
I think he meant it has nothing that anybody wants to pay to watch. It's popular right now because it's free, but cat videos may not pay the hosting service by themselves.
We are also The Exception.
Fanny packs in the mainstream? Not quite. Pocket protectors only "died out" among the nerd population--the mainstream never adopted them.
Pocket protectors. 20-sided dice. Fanny packs. Floppy diskettes.
You should wear your fanny pack wit pride, and ignore what we say behind your back. Heck, put on camouflage cargo-pants and a pocket protector. We won't mind, really.
The Mozilla Foundation is desperately looking for new ways of acquiring revenue that does not depend on large grants by fickle corporations. Especially when their core competency is being made largely irrelevant by those grantors. Guess the fastest, most common--and apparently very easy to justify morally--way to monetize user access on the Web?
Come on, guess...
Yet, they were vehemently opposed to Microsoft's strategy of blocking third-party cookies by default, and wrote some sort of manifesto on how "user choice" meant letting advertisers fleece those naive enough to not know how to change the default.
dZ.
You know, if you squint your eyes and concentrate a bit, you'll notice that the Internet is bigger than Facebook, Twitter, and has a lot more than blogs and LOLcats (though, granted, porn comprises most of the non-LOLcat content).
I don't agree that the Internet is a perfect environment, or the answer to all or even most of our problems, like some techno-utopians like to think. However, I also do not agree with those who cannot see beyond the banal facade of the fads du jour.
Sorry, I mischaracterized your post after reading so many "Internet? Meh" posts already.
I agree, Gates and Schmidt are not really visionaries, and when they try to look beyond what they know, all they see is "more of the same," but at a more grandiose scale.
dZ.
Right.
We had all that in the 1980s with BBS's (and some may say, better, but that's another argument).
Yet, while dialing up to the local "information utility," reading e-mail from strangers half a world away, and accessing the expansive repository of some digitized library--all the time struck with awe and wonder at the fantastic "future" I found myself in, and dreaming of the things to come--I never EVER imagined it like the way it is now.
I sure would not say that the Internet and the technology we have today is just "more of the same."
Sure, it has its problems, and the Internet is most definitely not the bunnies-and-rainbows paradise envisioned by some utopians (I myself expected a lot less ads and LOLcats), but it is absolutely marvelous and transformative in its own way.
Wake the FUCK UP, man, and look around! We're in the fucking future! We got super-computers in our pockets, home computers on a slab of glass, instant access to the mall at any time or place, telecommuting, telegaming... This is the Jetsons-fan-fucking-tastic future! All we are missing are the jet-packs and flying cars.
I sincerely can't wait to see what else is coming.
dZ.
Chile is the "other main right-wing product of US neoliberal intervention in South America"? Which is the first one? Or did they move Mexico before I got a chance to visit it?