One of the whole points of moving audio and video out of plugins like flash, and into native browser implementations is that it'll allow things like volume control or mute per tab, or a firefox setting/plugin which can adjust volume based on the site's domain, etc. It frees up the content for more potential control on the user's end.
As the other reply to you states, Open Platform != Open Source
That being said, the entire source code to WebOS was leaked online before they even publically released the SDK, and the entire thing basically runs on a heavily modified linux backend:P
So's my Pre, and it's smaller and slicker than a G1:P Though I must admit the HTC Hero will probably be the first Android phone that's actually appealing hardware-wise imo:) So basically everyone's evolving and improving... except Apple... who made the first major leap in quite a while, and then began shooting themselves in the foot >.>
For a lot of my points, the reasoning is "If your computer goes down, grab a different one and nothing is lost." Hell, you can ever go to a public terminal like a cyber-cafe and access your data if need be. This is way more versatile than carrying your apps and data around with you.
On a side note, I find it amusing how many of the ones arguing that my points are invalid are GROSSLY overestimating the IT capabilities of many businesses and companies, especially start-ups or small ones, whose business model does not revolve around the internet or tech.
I just returned from a quick side-job of mine where all of the empoyees use old P4 Dell Optiplex machines, with about 256MB of RAM, and all of them sign into a generic account called 'user'. Now, I wasn't the one who set this all up, but they asked me to help maintain their network and do some light desktop support for them. If one of their hard drives fries, it's gone, and no one wants to pay for a backup or even a central server, they all share everything through email, and trying to change a company's method of doing things, especially when you only work for them part-time, because they don't have enough staff to justify a full-time IT guy, can be pretty damn difficult until something disastrous happens.
Oh, and also Google Docs is completely cross-platform, which means it's only competitor in that respect is OO:P
First of all, all of science is 'black box reverse engineering' nature, practically by definition. Mapping the 'inputs' and 'outputs' is the whole experimentation and observation segment of it.
And second, you imply that we only know how to calculate and predict gravity, but lack understanding of how or why it works. Again, this is simply untrue. As I pointed out in my reply to the parent, Einstein's theory of General Relativity is just that, an explanation of what gravity is, and why it behaves the way it does. It works mathematically, makes several observable and testable predictions, many of which are counter-intuitive, but which have proven to be correct, and is amazingly elegant once you understand it to boot. It only begins to fail on the sub-atomic level, but frankly, all sorts of rules fail at that level, and we're really only beginning to understand how the rules change there.
The cliff notes version of what I wrote above is that gravity is a byproduct of the way the universe (or more accurately, space-time), distorts when in the presence of matter/radiation. An analogy which just came to me would be as follows:
Imagine you're watching the surface of a still pond, and you throw a large stone into it. The ripples this creates distorts the shape of the pond's surface, from a flat surface to a wave form, and this distortion on the surface makes objects floating in the water moves as the surface of the water changes shape. Gravity is very similar, but the shape is different and causes objects to move toward the disturbance, rather than move up and down. In fact, if you want to imagine a black hole, just imagine opening the stopper in your bathtub. The water, and the objects in the water, swirl around the drain, in part, because the geometry of the water is altered into a funnel shape, and changing the shape of the surface you're on changes the definition of a straight line (a straight line on a sphere is in fact curved, for instance).
1) Lost productivity when the local ISP or some some intermediate router is down? Multiply by each user. (In a lot of places that's pretty significant. Lots of places suffer multiple hours of network down time / flaky internet every month.)
2) Lost productivity as your employees are clicking on google ads and browsing online when they should be working on that spreadsheet or word document, or simply lost productivity as the ads become insufferably intrusive and distracting.
You forgot the other side of the coin:
Lost productivity due to forgetting the thumb drive with your work at home
Lost productivity due to your company's internal network going down
Lost work due to a hard drive failure
Lost work AND productivity due to computer theft
Lost work AND productivity due to accidental overwrite of a shared file on a network drive
Lost work AND productivity due to malicious code (viruses, trojans, et al)
Lost productivity due to most software's inability to provide a decent collaborative environment
Many people seem to believe that using something like Google Docs is just like using MS Office, but the reality is that it's fundamentally different in many ways. Nearly ubiquitous accessibility, collaborative tools, change history, backups, etc. The amount of productivity and work that saves alone is WAY more than any time you could lose due to advertising in my estimation.
Your comparison is absurd and poorly thought out as well, because "getting toner from Jehovah's Witnesses does not give you any benefit other than getting it for free. Using cloud authoring software compared to personal software is COMPLETELY different for the reasons I listed above and others.
The fact is that neither one is REALLY better than the other, it all depends on the task at hand, as both approches have their strengths and weaknesses. If I'm just writing a quick letter, then I'm going to use Word or OO, but if the file itself is going to be used over an extended period of time, and especially viewed or contributed to by others, I find it makes more sense to use Google Docs.
Plus, I can't count how many times I've worked with a team on something and wound up using a Google Doc as what essentially amounts to a massive whiteboard to outline our plan of attack and add our ideas and solutions to the task at hand, as well as comment on others.
What we know are generalities. We know the Earth revolves around the sun and the moon revolves around the Earth via a mechanism called "gravity." Our knowledge of specifics is incomplete, to unstate the matter. We don't know what "gravity" actually is.
Ummm, yeah, we kinda do. That's what General Relativity is all about, actually. Gravity is a product of the geometry of the universe (or more specifically, space-time) distorting around the presence of mass. This distortion can also occur in the presence of radiation and energy, due to mass-energy equivalency, as well as distorting due to linear momentum as well. It's really a remarkably elegant theory in my opinion, and it works fairly well, though we do encounter problems on the sub-atomic level, but that's why the unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity is such a lofty goal. It'd give us a model of the universe from the smallest components of matter, to the shape of the universe itself. Just because you don't understand, or bother to research something, doesn't make it an unknown. That being said, this is the working model for our concept of gravity. We may find it incomplete in the future, but it's held up remarkably well to experimental evidence thus far, despite many of it's predictions being counter-intuitive. So we know much more than "a few details" but we're not certain yet, because we're still learning
This is a good example of why, when people scoff at alternative medicine as junk because there's no scientific proof, I can only think that they are short-sighted and closed-minded. Certainly, there's a lot of mystical fluff, and it's generally less reliable than scientific medicine (but it's equally as reliable in the hands of a skilled practitioner).
I have to stop you there. No, no it is not. The VAST majority of alternative doctors are swindlers and con-artists, or simply ignorant. Alternative medicines are also commonly psychosomatic, which is where many of the claims of "It works!" originate from. That being said, many modern medicines come from nature, and if the FDA wasn't worthless, they'd regulate the supplement and alternative medicine markets, instead of failing to even regulate just the pharmaceutical market. The problem with alternative medicines though is when people turn down medical care or treatment in favor of alternatives. This can get people killed, or exacerbate their conditions.
I'd have to disagree with you there, at least in part. For relatively simple graphics, SVG is ideal. It's perfect for doing things like replacing what most web programmers and designers do with small gifs and pngs, for many background elements, etc. Coding SVG by hand isn't too difficult at all if you read up on the tag documentation a bit. I think that Canvas certainly has its merits, and it is indeed faster for things like particle effects, having many items moving at once, or for doing work in 3D, but for the vast majority of web animation, SVG is both simpler to use and just as fast.
Have you ever actually USED the SVG animation specs? I have, I've built an entire page using pure SVG and SVG animations as an experiment. To animate something, it's a single line of code. Additionally, writing SVG is about as easier than writing HTML in my opinion, and the animations run very smoothly in Opera. Do tell me how canvas is better see as how it has more overhead, and is more complex?
Did you even RTFA? It's one thing for web apps to be fully functional on a desktop or a notebook, it's quite another on a handset. The specific issue as hand is that it's crippled because it can't run in the background, due to the iPhone's shitty implementation of multi-tasking, whereas as a native app they were hoping it could. If, however, it were the Pre, for example, this would be a non-issue, because Pre users can just keep a background browser open continuously if they want, and open other browsers at the same time, or other apps without having to close it.
He did not really believe there was a God (or he did not care), he was only upset that because he perceived his tribe as being insulted - a bit like an American getting upset about their flag being burned.
Funny you should mention that, as flag burning is also constitutionally protected as free speech, because it's considered "freedom of expression." Granted there are a bunch of Senators who want to outlaw it, they've failed several times though, so it doesn't look like that'll happen, thankfully:)
Since when does speech involve killing people?:P We're talking about SPEECH, as in, saying whatever you want no matter how bigoted or ignorant it is. Killing someone is an entirely different scenario my friend.
Evidence of what? Hating someone else, and being a bigot is not illegal. And how exactly does making hate speech illegal "destroy evidence"? Your comment makes no sense whatsoever...
Ummm, in the US, hate speech IS protected speech. The only time it loses this status is when it is used to directly incite violence, such as getting people to riot, hurt others, etc. That's why the KKK, the New Black Panthers, the Westboro Baptist Church, and other pieces of shit organizations continue to operate legally within the US. I may not agree with them, and hell, I may even think that some of them seriously deserve several hours of pain and suffering, but I will fight to the death to defend their right to free speech.
Ummm, no, it really doesn't. Even if we do have a "soul," it has no known effect on how our bodies function. There are, however, records of people's personalities and memories having changed due to brain trauma and chemical alteration. Additionally, the "soul" has nothing to do with your body's motor control. We KNOW that electrical impulses control our limbs, we can trigger them, it's how a defibrillator works.
So exactly what part of this would the "soul" prevent from taking place?
No smartphone... can be easily read in direct sun while mounted to a motorcycle handlebar.
I wouldn't be sure about that. I found the Palm Pre's screen to be perfectly readable, and even vibrant, in direct sunlight. I've seen dedicated GPS units with much worse screens.
Heh, ironically it's because of commercial air traffic that civilians even have access to GPS (due to Korean Airlines Flight 007). But I'd have to wonder, wouldn't landing be made nearly impossible anyway? Since anything strong enough to knock out GPS would likely kill tower communications too. Though I suppose there's some sort of procedure to follow in such events. If you read this, let us know if there's anything of the sort that you know of, I'm curious now, lol.
Yes but the parent was also trying to say that these disruptions are severe enough that you'd be lost without the GPS. A 10 minute disruption is hardly world shattering, and as I said:
but severe ones powerful enough to interfere with equipment for more than a handful of minutes recur on the order of once every few decades.
Ummm, no, sorry, I don't work in quant, nice failure at assuming while discussing assumptions though.
And the reason we know the frequency of major geomagnetic storms is because of ice core samples whose stratified layers can yield details about Earth's atmosphere going back thousands of years. And unlike you, I don't get my info from a site that looks like something geocities vomited up.
And I picture you as someone too lazy to do any actual research into a subject before making unfounded assumptions, especially since even a 5 second Google search yields more credible sources than yours, which contradicts most of your post, as I've explained. I'm sure I certainly wouldn't want to hire you to help me with anything relating to EMC if you do business the same way you post on Slashdot.
One good solar flare and no GPS and VHF for a while. Did you realise that? Solar storms in the past have gone on for days, which is a long time to be without navigational aids. Your hurrahing for technology is misplaced.
I'm sorry, could you repeat that? I'd partially deaf to bullshit.
Contrary to popular belief, it takes quite a lot to interfere with telecommunications. Not only do geomagnetic storms NOT last days (that'd be a ridiculous amount of energy output, and a days long continuous geomagnetic storm has NEVER been recorded), but severe ones powerful enough to interfere with equipment for more than a handful of minutes recur on the order of once every few decades.
Severe storms, large enough to disrupt half the planet, like the Carrington Event, occur roughly every 500 years, the last one being about 150 years ago, but believe me, if one of those hit us, your GPS would be the least of your concerns. The Carrington Event reportedly lit up the sky at night when the solar wind hit the Earth's magnetosphere, causing aurora as far south as Hawaii, and disrupting telegraph communication over half the world. Nowadays, it'd cause electrical fires all over the place by overloading power lines and blocking pretty much all forms of telecommunication. And bear in mind, this, the largest geomagnetic storm ever recorded, barely lasted a single day.
You do realize that Neuromancer has been published in French too right? Not saying the number's accurate, but you can't just assume that no Quebec Francophone has ever read the book just because it was originally written in English.
Well that's a given. The original commercial GPS units didn't have built in maps, points of interest, or much else. They were used by hikers and people who love in less than accessible terrain mostly. All technology must start somewhere...
Slashdot Mirror
One of the whole points of moving audio and video out of plugins like flash, and into native browser implementations is that it'll allow things like volume control or mute per tab, or a firefox setting/plugin which can adjust volume based on the site's domain, etc. It frees up the content for more potential control on the user's end.
Yes, but he's trapped in said lake, so he never has to go to work :P
As the other reply to you states, Open Platform != Open Source
:P
That being said, the entire source code to WebOS was leaked online before they even publically released the SDK, and the entire thing basically runs on a heavily modified linux backend
So's my Pre, and it's smaller and slicker than a G1 :P Though I must admit the HTC Hero will probably be the first Android phone that's actually appealing hardware-wise imo :) So basically everyone's evolving and improving... except Apple... who made the first major leap in quite a while, and then began shooting themselves in the foot >.>
For a lot of my points, the reasoning is "If your computer goes down, grab a different one and nothing is lost." Hell, you can ever go to a public terminal like a cyber-cafe and access your data if need be. This is way more versatile than carrying your apps and data around with you.
:P
On a side note, I find it amusing how many of the ones arguing that my points are invalid are GROSSLY overestimating the IT capabilities of many businesses and companies, especially start-ups or small ones, whose business model does not revolve around the internet or tech.
I just returned from a quick side-job of mine where all of the empoyees use old P4 Dell Optiplex machines, with about 256MB of RAM, and all of them sign into a generic account called 'user'. Now, I wasn't the one who set this all up, but they asked me to help maintain their network and do some light desktop support for them. If one of their hard drives fries, it's gone, and no one wants to pay for a backup or even a central server, they all share everything through email, and trying to change a company's method of doing things, especially when you only work for them part-time, because they don't have enough staff to justify a full-time IT guy, can be pretty damn difficult until something disastrous happens.
Oh, and also Google Docs is completely cross-platform, which means it's only competitor in that respect is OO
Your analogy is flawed for two reasons:
First of all, all of science is 'black box reverse engineering' nature, practically by definition. Mapping the 'inputs' and 'outputs' is the whole experimentation and observation segment of it.
And second, you imply that we only know how to calculate and predict gravity, but lack understanding of how or why it works. Again, this is simply untrue. As I pointed out in my reply to the parent, Einstein's theory of General Relativity is just that, an explanation of what gravity is, and why it behaves the way it does. It works mathematically, makes several observable and testable predictions, many of which are counter-intuitive, but which have proven to be correct, and is amazingly elegant once you understand it to boot. It only begins to fail on the sub-atomic level, but frankly, all sorts of rules fail at that level, and we're really only beginning to understand how the rules change there.
The cliff notes version of what I wrote above is that gravity is a byproduct of the way the universe (or more accurately, space-time), distorts when in the presence of matter/radiation. An analogy which just came to me would be as follows:
Imagine you're watching the surface of a still pond, and you throw a large stone into it. The ripples this creates distorts the shape of the pond's surface, from a flat surface to a wave form, and this distortion on the surface makes objects floating in the water moves as the surface of the water changes shape. Gravity is very similar, but the shape is different and causes objects to move toward the disturbance, rather than move up and down. In fact, if you want to imagine a black hole, just imagine opening the stopper in your bathtub. The water, and the objects in the water, swirl around the drain, in part, because the geometry of the water is altered into a funnel shape, and changing the shape of the surface you're on changes the definition of a straight line (a straight line on a sphere is in fact curved, for instance).
This is what gravity is.
You forgot the other side of the coin:
Many people seem to believe that using something like Google Docs is just like using MS Office, but the reality is that it's fundamentally different in many ways. Nearly ubiquitous accessibility, collaborative tools, change history, backups, etc. The amount of productivity and work that saves alone is WAY more than any time you could lose due to advertising in my estimation. Your comparison is absurd and poorly thought out as well, because "getting toner from Jehovah's Witnesses does not give you any benefit other than getting it for free. Using cloud authoring software compared to personal software is COMPLETELY different for the reasons I listed above and others.
The fact is that neither one is REALLY better than the other, it all depends on the task at hand, as both approches have their strengths and weaknesses. If I'm just writing a quick letter, then I'm going to use Word or OO, but if the file itself is going to be used over an extended period of time, and especially viewed or contributed to by others, I find it makes more sense to use Google Docs.
Plus, I can't count how many times I've worked with a team on something and wound up using a Google Doc as what essentially amounts to a massive whiteboard to outline our plan of attack and add our ideas and solutions to the task at hand, as well as comment on others.
Ummm, yeah, we kinda do. That's what General Relativity is all about, actually. Gravity is a product of the geometry of the universe (or more specifically, space-time) distorting around the presence of mass. This distortion can also occur in the presence of radiation and energy, due to mass-energy equivalency, as well as distorting due to linear momentum as well. It's really a remarkably elegant theory in my opinion, and it works fairly well, though we do encounter problems on the sub-atomic level, but that's why the unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity is such a lofty goal. It'd give us a model of the universe from the smallest components of matter, to the shape of the universe itself. Just because you don't understand, or bother to research something, doesn't make it an unknown. That being said, this is the working model for our concept of gravity. We may find it incomplete in the future, but it's held up remarkably well to experimental evidence thus far, despite many of it's predictions being counter-intuitive. So we know much more than "a few details" but we're not certain yet, because we're still learning
I have to stop you there. No, no it is not. The VAST majority of alternative doctors are swindlers and con-artists, or simply ignorant. Alternative medicines are also commonly psychosomatic, which is where many of the claims of "It works!" originate from. That being said, many modern medicines come from nature, and if the FDA wasn't worthless, they'd regulate the supplement and alternative medicine markets, instead of failing to even regulate just the pharmaceutical market. The problem with alternative medicines though is when people turn down medical care or treatment in favor of alternatives. This can get people killed, or exacerbate their conditions.
I'd have to disagree with you there, at least in part. For relatively simple graphics, SVG is ideal. It's perfect for doing things like replacing what most web programmers and designers do with small gifs and pngs, for many background elements, etc. Coding SVG by hand isn't too difficult at all if you read up on the tag documentation a bit. I think that Canvas certainly has its merits, and it is indeed faster for things like particle effects, having many items moving at once, or for doing work in 3D, but for the vast majority of web animation, SVG is both simpler to use and just as fast.
Have you ever actually USED the SVG animation specs? I have, I've built an entire page using pure SVG and SVG animations as an experiment. To animate something, it's a single line of code. Additionally, writing SVG is about as easier than writing HTML in my opinion, and the animations run very smoothly in Opera. Do tell me how canvas is better see as how it has more overhead, and is more complex?
Did you even RTFA? It's one thing for web apps to be fully functional on a desktop or a notebook, it's quite another on a handset. The specific issue as hand is that it's crippled because it can't run in the background, due to the iPhone's shitty implementation of multi-tasking, whereas as a native app they were hoping it could. If, however, it were the Pre, for example, this would be a non-issue, because Pre users can just keep a background browser open continuously if they want, and open other browsers at the same time, or other apps without having to close it.
Funny you should mention that, as flag burning is also constitutionally protected as free speech, because it's considered "freedom of expression." Granted there are a bunch of Senators who want to outlaw it, they've failed several times though, so it doesn't look like that'll happen, thankfully :)
Since when does speech involve killing people? :P We're talking about SPEECH, as in, saying whatever you want no matter how bigoted or ignorant it is. Killing someone is an entirely different scenario my friend.
Evidence of what? Hating someone else, and being a bigot is not illegal. And how exactly does making hate speech illegal "destroy evidence"? Your comment makes no sense whatsoever...
Ummm, in the US, hate speech IS protected speech. The only time it loses this status is when it is used to directly incite violence, such as getting people to riot, hurt others, etc. That's why the KKK, the New Black Panthers, the Westboro Baptist Church, and other pieces of shit organizations continue to operate legally within the US. I may not agree with them, and hell, I may even think that some of them seriously deserve several hours of pain and suffering, but I will fight to the death to defend their right to free speech.
The irony is that the replacement for the shuttle is going to be... a rocket >.>
Ummm, no, it really doesn't. Even if we do have a "soul," it has no known effect on how our bodies function. There are, however, records of people's personalities and memories having changed due to brain trauma and chemical alteration. Additionally, the "soul" has nothing to do with your body's motor control. We KNOW that electrical impulses control our limbs, we can trigger them, it's how a defibrillator works.
So exactly what part of this would the "soul" prevent from taking place?
I wouldn't be sure about that. I found the Palm Pre's screen to be perfectly readable, and even vibrant, in direct sunlight. I've seen dedicated GPS units with much worse screens.
*shrug* If he hadn't tried that ad hominem at me in the second half of his post, I wouldn't have added an one against him to mine.
Heh, ironically it's because of commercial air traffic that civilians even have access to GPS (due to Korean Airlines Flight 007). But I'd have to wonder, wouldn't landing be made nearly impossible anyway? Since anything strong enough to knock out GPS would likely kill tower communications too. Though I suppose there's some sort of procedure to follow in such events. If you read this, let us know if there's anything of the sort that you know of, I'm curious now, lol.
Ummm, no, sorry, I don't work in quant, nice failure at assuming while discussing assumptions though.
And the reason we know the frequency of major geomagnetic storms is because of ice core samples whose stratified layers can yield details about Earth's atmosphere going back thousands of years. And unlike you, I don't get my info from a site that looks like something geocities vomited up.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bracing-for-a-solar-superstorm
And I picture you as someone too lazy to do any actual research into a subject before making unfounded assumptions, especially since even a 5 second Google search yields more credible sources than yours, which contradicts most of your post, as I've explained. I'm sure I certainly wouldn't want to hire you to help me with anything relating to EMC if you do business the same way you post on Slashdot.
I'm sorry, could you repeat that? I'd partially deaf to bullshit.
Contrary to popular belief, it takes quite a lot to interfere with telecommunications. Not only do geomagnetic storms NOT last days (that'd be a ridiculous amount of energy output, and a days long continuous geomagnetic storm has NEVER been recorded), but severe ones powerful enough to interfere with equipment for more than a handful of minutes recur on the order of once every few decades.
Severe storms, large enough to disrupt half the planet, like the Carrington Event, occur roughly every 500 years, the last one being about 150 years ago, but believe me, if one of those hit us, your GPS would be the least of your concerns. The Carrington Event reportedly lit up the sky at night when the solar wind hit the Earth's magnetosphere, causing aurora as far south as Hawaii, and disrupting telegraph communication over half the world. Nowadays, it'd cause electrical fires all over the place by overloading power lines and blocking pretty much all forms of telecommunication. And bear in mind, this, the largest geomagnetic storm ever recorded, barely lasted a single day.
You do realize that Neuromancer has been published in French too right? Not saying the number's accurate, but you can't just assume that no Quebec Francophone has ever read the book just because it was originally written in English.
Well that's a given. The original commercial GPS units didn't have built in maps, points of interest, or much else. They were used by hikers and people who love in less than accessible terrain mostly. All technology must start somewhere...