Linux comprises about 1% of the desktop / notebook OS installed base. Even if ALL of that 1% were people that buy and play games regularly, it probably would only account for 10% that of the Windows game user base.
You are correct that install base is a major factor. That said, there are other factors at play:
Microsoft leverages their desktop OS monopoly to lock in game developers with Direct X.
WINE and derivatives are popular on Linux and not too complicated for the user base's average skill level.
There are other, larger market segments that are lower hanging fruit for most developers.
A lot of gaming companies have been purchased by a hardware or OS vendor or contracted to make games exclusively for one platform.
More interestingly, I expect more games will be coming to many more platforms in the future due to current trends. First, the paradigm of gaming value comes from the developers is becoming less and less relevant. Other users create significant value in network play, by creating mods, and by creating social networks in the game. As this trend continues, small install bases can have disproportionate influence on sales. Personally, I saw this 10 years ago when myself and several dozen other people chose to buy a game together and our choice was determined because one game supported multiplayer with Mac OS and one did not. Since two of the members of the group had Macs, including a very popular and attractive female gamer (a rarity then, less so now). Macs probably had about 4% install base at that point, but lack of support for it cost one developer 5 times as many missed sales in our purchase. So saying 4% of gamers are on platform A, thus we'll only miss out on 4% of sales if we don't support that platform is not necessarily true and becomes less true the more networking becomes important.
Given the ideology of a lot of Linux users, a lot of that 1% might never pay for a game or want to use commercial / closed source software.
I don't put a lot of weight on that theory, since I know a lot of Linux users and developers and they have no problem shelling out money for software. Still, it does hold true to some extent, especially as Linux makes gains in poorer places and among budget shoppers. I'm actually waiting for a game developer to put out a FOSS gaming engine and environment, that serves or runs game modules, which are proprietary and copyrighted (much as Apache serves commercial, for-pay Web sites).
Actually, Webkit is a fork of KHTML (Konqueror's rendering engine) and the two codebases have diverged quite a bit.
Haven't they merged back together yet? I know the Konqueror team announced the decision to pull their CSS 3 stuff into Webkit and switch over, many months ago.
...you'll see that Webkit was missing support for some CSS 3 selectors that Konqueror supported.
That was the main item missing from the Webkit fork, but does anyone know if those were tests in Acid3? It seems likely.
you'll see that Webkit was missing support for some CSS 3 selectors that Konqueror supported.
Maybe so, but I generally don't need anything too fancy and even for things that are rarely ever used because IE does not support them (like XHTML) I don't have any real problems with any of the major browsers. For more advanced uses, I could see it being an issue, but I'm not sure how common those uses are (or would be).
Safari development builds are doing well on Acid3, and Safari passed Acid2 quickly, because Safari developers fixed the problems that the Acid tests demonstrate. If you look at the stable release builds of Safari, they do far worse than the stable release builds of Opera and Firefox.
I think your idea here is a bit off. The stable version of Safari does perform more poorly than the stable versions of Firefox and Opera, but I think this is more likely attributable to Apple's more leisurely release schedule. The article referenced here was obviously put together by someone more focused on Windows and OS X. They only tried to test one browser on one version of Linux, compared to the dozen or so for the other OS's. It is, then, understandable that you would get that impression from the data presented. What a lot of people forget is that Safari uses the Webkit rendering engine which is also used in a variety of other browsers whose developers also contribute to it. The stable version of Konquerer 3.5.8 uses the same rendering engine and scores a 52 on the Acid 3 test, better than either Firefox or Opera. So Webkit is being updated and did, in fact, do better than Gecko or Presto for stable release versions when Acid 3 was published. (Note Konquerer 4.0.2 scores a 62, but I don't know if that is considered a "stable" branch.)
Mind you, this is not to imply that the Acid 3 test can really judge the respective compliance of the engines in general. This is not the case. The test was designed with bias in mind, bias against Webkit and Gecko. The criteria for inclusion in the test was that one or the other had to fail it and we don't know how many of the Acid 3 authors were focusing on one engine or another. If anything Opera and IE should be doing better than Firefox or Konquerer or Safari, since there are probably a number of tests those browsers fail, but which were excluded from Acid 3 simply because both the Gecko and Webkit engines passed it.
Safari is doing well on Acid tests because the developers put a lot of effort into making Safari do well on Acid tests, not because Safari is "ahead of the game" on standards.
I know for a fact that developers of both Gecko and Webkit are specifically using these tests as a way to find problems to fix, which is great since that is why the tests were written; not to try to measure "compliance."
There's far too much bickering about which browser is best and which browser is behind the curve. It seems that Safari, Opera, and Firefox are all very good browsers each with their own strengths in standards compliance and user interface, with IE constantly playing catch-up.
This is true enough, well except about IE maybe. In my own personal experience every browser other than IE works just fine for rendering everything I create to the standards. There might be the occasional bug or edge case, but I never run across them. IE, on the other hand, I have to create work arounds every single time. I'm not sure it is "playing catch up" so much as deliberately failing to implement huge portions of many standards as a way to prevent cross platform compatibility and keep Web applications that undermine their platform lock-in from being a real threat.
Why is this modded down to -1? I'm running IE8b1 right now and yes, it runs Acid2 completely.
It was probably modded down because we've already had this discussion in three different articles over the last week. IE8 beta passes the Acid 2 test only when run on webstandards.org, but fails if you run it on almost any mirror. The discussion further continued with speculation that MS had hardcoded a workaround specifically for the test and was "cheating". This turned out to be untrue and the reason was that webstandards.org references a page that exists incorrectly but the mirrors reference a page that doesn't exist. Both cases should be handled, but IE8 beta fails on the latter.
Probably people were modding the post down because it was factually incorrect. A better way to deal with the problem is probably to post a factual response, but several people have done so and those posts have not been modded high enough so that the facts are more easily read than the misleading evidence presented in the post you are asking about. Either that or a dozen people with mod points just groaned and thought, "do we have to go through all this again?"
I'm surprised so few people know what the application signing is in Leopard (well, this is slashdot, so not really surprised at all). You can use ANY certificate you want to sign it.
Yes, I know. So what do you suppose the chances are that the iPhone is using the same signing framework, but restricted to a subset of certificates?
Your post isn't even on topic - this isn't even talking about app signing.
No, this is talking about the iPhone SDK, which happens to be using some signing framework also made by Apple. The way the iPhone handles security is to basically crete a whitelist of applications. This approach is becoming more and more attractive for security on PCs, especially given the added power it hands to OS vendors; power that might be abused if the system is not open.
Perhaps you don't agree that my post is topical. That's fine. I do think a general discussion of signing and what it could be is appropriate in light of the signing being used for software on the iPhone.
I don't want to log in to an AIM account using XMPP. I want to message people who are using AIM, using XMPP from my existing XMPP account.
Right, that was the second set of instructions I gave you. I'll recopy that part....from another Jabber server you can use [screenname]@[transport.dns.name]. For your example that would be username@xmpp.oscar.aol.com or UIN@xmpp.oscar.aol.com.
It is just like everyone on AIM or ICQ has a Jabber account on xmpp.oscar.aol.com with the same username or ICQ# as they have for that account.
Ever since Apple released Leopard, with its application signing framework, the writing has been on the wall. Most people expect Microsoft to make a similar move. I think Apple is missing being innovators on the correct side of an important trend. Application signing could be the best thing to come to PC and mobile security since firewalls. But will it be another walled garden?
One of the things that really strikes home is the ban on pornographic applications hosted by Apple. Historically, porn has been right on the leading edge of the software and networking fields. Apple's arbitrary restriction in this regard highlights a real issue with the way Apple, and probably everyone else will go about this. They're creating a signing system that only they control and thus they have all the responsibility and are a single point of failure (intentional or accidental).
Here is what I really, really would like to see created. How about an open application signing framework and protocol. Anyone can run a server that provides software downloads, manages updates, checksum/verification and assigns levels of trust and ACLs describing what an application should be doing. Combine the software with a good package manager for whatever platform, a good Mandatory Access Control system for a given OS, a registration and purchasing GUI, and a GUI for users to assign trust levels to servers/organizations.
Suppose if you wanted to buy an Adobe application, you could go to your computer and navigate to their Web site, click a link and it would add their server to your package manager. From there you could download packages, pay for them, register them, install them, keep them updated, pay for updates, verify the software on your machine was unmodified, automatically download an ACL to restrict the software from messing with your machine (run in a jail, or with some subset of permissions from running as root to running in a VM that resets itself every use and has no internet access), and decide how much you trust Adobe as a vendor. You could go Symantec's Web page click a link, pay them a fee, and get ACLs and whitelists/blacklists for software from their service, which you could decide if you trust more than Adobe. Any software vendor be it freeware or payware, open or closed could run a server or use a shared server (sourceforge). Ideally these packages you download would be something like GNUStep, expanded to include an ACL, optional source code, binaries for multiple platforms, and a reference to the authoritative server for updating that application. Apple could run their server and Macs and iPhones could subscribe to their server by default, but users could still add other vendors' servers so people could get any applications without Apple being held responsible for the consequences. Projects like ClamAV could host free ACLs and whitlelists/blacklists for those of us who don't want to pay. The best part is, you would not even need to rank servers individually, if you had multiple servers you could allow them to "vote" on how much to trust a given application.
Ahh, well. That is probably just my utopian idealism. In all reality Apple will host a server which has all sorts of restrictions and is completely closed. Microsoft will follow suit with their own closed system, and Linux will have no such system for another decade and will never make real inroads into the desktop space either.
Is this GPL compatible? If I offer a GPL app on this store and provide source, the user can't use that source to modify the app without paying a fee, right?
I don't see why not. They just have to figure out how to get it loaded and running on their iPhone, either by reverse engineering Apple's interface or buying their own cert; niether of which is your responsibility under the GPL.
To understand all the latin words and phrases used throughout legal documents. Ad valorem, adjournment sine die, affidavit, pro bono, pro hac vice, supersedeas, etc. etc. Are you telling me pre-law programs aren't requiring at least a year of latin? Heck, I thought most pharmacists and pre-med students still had to take it.
I realize the days where everyone had to take latin and greek are long past, but I did not realize how sad things have gotten.
I'd love to know how, if that's true. username@aol.com doesn't seem to work. (It says not authorized, but it never asks the AIM user to authorize.)
What you're trying will work if you use AOL's Jabber server. Configure xmpp.oscar.aol.com : port 5222 as your jabber server. Make sure SASL PLAIN is on and StartTLS is enabled.
Alternately from another Jabber server you can use [screenname]@[transport.dns.name]. For your example that would be username@xmpp.oscar.aol.com or UIN@xmpp.oscar.aol.com.
You can use end to end encryption with google's service, just not with their client... Search for off the record messaging, adium has it built in and there are plugins for other clients.
I do use OTR on the AIM network, but as far as I know it has never worked for me over Google's Jabber network. Does it work for you? Also, I haven't tried it using combinations of Jabber and AIM via their federated servers. Can you confirm it actually works in those instances?
Google needs to put more development time into Gtalk. (the stand alone app). The first thing they can do is add this open AIM support so i can dump trillian.
I'm pretty sure AOL has federated their server so any GTalk account user can send messages using their GTalk account to AIM users. So that pretty much solves your problem.
Although dam it, i still use my old icq number since old friends are still on it.
Actually I think it works with ICQ as well, since AIM and ICQ accounts can message each other now too.
I'm guessing I'll be modded down for saying this, but this seems more like they're trying to remain relevant by hopping on the "Open" bandwagon a little too late in the game.
Late in the game implies they're falling behind, but right now AIM has the biggest market share of any of the big ones. Rather, I see this as a mutual assured destruction move. Basically Microsoft and Yahoo teamed up to try to create a walled garden together that they could both use to lock-in users. AOL decided to interoperate with XMPP and Google, basically adding Google and all the privately run Jabber servers to their share of the market. That means they no longer can win big and charge a toll on IM usage if they manage to monopolize it, but it also means MS and Yahoo will probably fail to do so too.
They even provided instructions on how to connect using clients _other_ than Google Talk.
I'd like to note two things about this. First, Google did not have a client for every platform, so they pretty much had to do that. Second, I don't think Google yet allows end to end encryption on their server, which means they get to use it to profile users for targeted marketing (financial incentive). It will be interesting to see what happens with that in the future.
Another player to consider here is Apple. They have about 8% of the US market and their default chat client supports both AIM and XMPP. Their server boxes have negligible market share, but do ship with a Jabber server. Apple is pushing for XMPP to win and it looks like it has a good shot in the next few years.
Hmm, what OS are you using for the ones you don't specify (Firefox, Seamonkey, and Opera)? Linux for all? In any case, your numbers are very close to mine.
I tried the Acid 3 test in Firefox 2.0.0.12 , Firefox 3 (recent nightly build), IE7, Opera 9.26 and Safari 3 (windows beta). The best was Firefox 3 which almost rendered the page correctly. The worst was IE7 (as expected). Safari was probably a little bit better than Opera and Firefox 2 but it's hard to tell.
I ran the tests on a few more browsers and OS's. The results are here. The upshot is Safari+a recent Webkit on OS X is in the lead, followed by Firefox 3 on OS X or Linux.
First, what does a supposed feud between the Safari and Konqueror teams have to do with which is most compliant? Second, you should probably have read the comments from the Konqueror guys before trying to demonize the Safari guys. According to them (KHTML team), several of them were unhappy with the code dump Apple published, and one of them made a forum posting to that affect... but none of them had asked the guys at Apple to give them a more granular version with better documentation and when they did, the guys at Apple went out of their way (read above and beyond the requirements of the license) to provide them with it. Then, the Konquerer guys started rolling in some of the code, but then decided they did not like some of the architectural decisions Apple had made, so they intentionally held off on integrating a lot of them.
Basically, the Konqueror guys were used to owning all the code instead of being one group of contributors. Apple was new to the scene to, and they had not yet established good lines of communication. Eventually, not only Apple, but also Google, Nokia, Adobe and several other players started contributing as well and the Konqueror guys decided there was simply too much good work being done by others for them to maintain a separate fork and jumped back into sharing a code base.
In fact, once a few people involved with Konqueror stopped complaining on forums only read by their team and some KDE people and actually contacted Apple, Dave Hyatt of Apple went through the code base commenting everything that linked to Apple specific libraries as well as calling out all the fixes for the Acid2 test with comments tagged specifically for the Konqueror developers. Several Konqueror developers had already made public statements that even if they never used Apple's code, Apple adopting it was the best thing that had ever happened to the project. They also made a few comments about the "nonsense" on Slashdot that misrepresented their views.
To put it simply, the only people upset at Apple about Webkit are people who are poorly informed.
You do realize preliminary versions of this test have been available for a while now, right?
Yeah, but they did not finalize it until 3 days ago and they were dropping out tests that were not broken in either gecko or webkit. Admittedly both teams probably fixed a few that were initially broken in both.
3b3 gets a 61. Opera 9.5 is the best I tested at 65. Safarai 3.0.4 for Windows got a 39. IE7 got a 12 and also managed to mangle the page the most.
Your numbers are quite different than mine. I scripted all the browsers/OS's I had handy from the sunspider javascript test last week and ran them on Acid3. The results are here.
Where do you get a nightly of Opera? I ran the beta version they have up tonight and got 59/100 on OS X and it crashed on Linux and Windows XP. In any case, the best number I got was Safari 3.0.4 with a week old nightly of Webkit on OS X, which got 86/100. The Firefox 3 beta also did well getting 67/100 on OS X and Linux (but only 59 on Windows for some reason). Other people have gotten slightly better numbers for both using a more recent nightly of Firefox or Webkit.
In that latest development version, Safari scores 90/100, but Firefox scores only 67/100. The Webkit developers are obviously deliberately fixing the bugs that Acid3 demonstrates.
I think they probably are, but I was too lazy to download a new nightly so I used one from a few days before the Acid3 test was published and it scores 87/100, which is still quite a bit better than the Firefox 3 beta nightly from the same day (67/100). That said, you're completely correct that the Acid tests are not a good general metric for adherence to standards.
I've heard several people ask about a Firefox fork using Webkit or both Webkit and Gecko and while the idea has merit, I doubt there is enough interest to sustain a project. Konquerer uses Webkit already on Linux and should be available for other platforms in the near future. It would be nice to have the ability to swap applications and rendering engines as one wished, but I don't see it happening anytime soon.
Umm what did Firefox get on this? What about Opera? If you are going to report something why not report all the facts.
Well, it seems most people are too lazy to run the numbers. I wrote a script to run the sunspider javascript test, so here's Acid3 as well:
Mac OS X 10.5.2
Safari 3.0.4 - 39/100
Safari 3.0.4 with Webkit nightly - 86/100
Opera 9.5 beta - 59/100
Firefox 2.0.0.12 - 50/100
Firefox 3.0 beta - 67/100
Camino 1.5.5 - 50/100
icab - 4.0.1 - 39/100
Shira 2.0 - 26/100 then crashes
Kubuntu 6.0
Konquerer 3.5.2 - crashes
Konquerer 3.5.2 with Webkit nightly- crashes
Firefox 1.5.0 - 50/100
Firefox 3.0 beta - 67/100
Opera 9.5 beta - crashes
Epiphany 2.14.3 - 50/100
Windows XP SP2
Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.11 - 11/100
Firefox 2.0.0.12 - 50/100
Firefox 3.0 beta - 59/100
Safari 3.0.4 - 39/100
Safari 3.0.4 with nightly Webkit - crashes
Opera 9.26 - 46/100
Opera 9.5 beat - 49/100 then crashes
Re:Of Course IE will fail, ACID test is biased...
on
Acid3 Test Released
·
· Score: 1
Not quite. When none of the browsers are getting 100/100 and the only browser to get over a 60 is a safari beta, I think it's safe to say that it's a test designed so that every browser will fail.
...one minor correction for you. Firefox 3.0 beta on both OS X and Kubuntu gets 67.
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct that install base is a major factor. That said, there are other factors at play:
More interestingly, I expect more games will be coming to many more platforms in the future due to current trends. First, the paradigm of gaming value comes from the developers is becoming less and less relevant. Other users create significant value in network play, by creating mods, and by creating social networks in the game. As this trend continues, small install bases can have disproportionate influence on sales. Personally, I saw this 10 years ago when myself and several dozen other people chose to buy a game together and our choice was determined because one game supported multiplayer with Mac OS and one did not. Since two of the members of the group had Macs, including a very popular and attractive female gamer (a rarity then, less so now). Macs probably had about 4% install base at that point, but lack of support for it cost one developer 5 times as many missed sales in our purchase. So saying 4% of gamers are on platform A, thus we'll only miss out on 4% of sales if we don't support that platform is not necessarily true and becomes less true the more networking becomes important.
Given the ideology of a lot of Linux users, a lot of that 1% might never pay for a game or want to use commercial / closed source software.I don't put a lot of weight on that theory, since I know a lot of Linux users and developers and they have no problem shelling out money for software. Still, it does hold true to some extent, especially as Linux makes gains in poorer places and among budget shoppers. I'm actually waiting for a game developer to put out a FOSS gaming engine and environment, that serves or runs game modules, which are proprietary and copyrighted (much as Apache serves commercial, for-pay Web sites).
Haven't they merged back together yet? I know the Konqueror team announced the decision to pull their CSS 3 stuff into Webkit and switch over, many months ago.
...you'll see that Webkit was missing support for some CSS 3 selectors that Konqueror supported.That was the main item missing from the Webkit fork, but does anyone know if those were tests in Acid3? It seems likely.
you'll see that Webkit was missing support for some CSS 3 selectors that Konqueror supported.Maybe so, but I generally don't need anything too fancy and even for things that are rarely ever used because IE does not support them (like XHTML) I don't have any real problems with any of the major browsers. For more advanced uses, I could see it being an issue, but I'm not sure how common those uses are (or would be).
I think your idea here is a bit off. The stable version of Safari does perform more poorly than the stable versions of Firefox and Opera, but I think this is more likely attributable to Apple's more leisurely release schedule. The article referenced here was obviously put together by someone more focused on Windows and OS X. They only tried to test one browser on one version of Linux, compared to the dozen or so for the other OS's. It is, then, understandable that you would get that impression from the data presented. What a lot of people forget is that Safari uses the Webkit rendering engine which is also used in a variety of other browsers whose developers also contribute to it. The stable version of Konquerer 3.5.8 uses the same rendering engine and scores a 52 on the Acid 3 test, better than either Firefox or Opera. So Webkit is being updated and did, in fact, do better than Gecko or Presto for stable release versions when Acid 3 was published. (Note Konquerer 4.0.2 scores a 62, but I don't know if that is considered a "stable" branch.)
Mind you, this is not to imply that the Acid 3 test can really judge the respective compliance of the engines in general. This is not the case. The test was designed with bias in mind, bias against Webkit and Gecko. The criteria for inclusion in the test was that one or the other had to fail it and we don't know how many of the Acid 3 authors were focusing on one engine or another. If anything Opera and IE should be doing better than Firefox or Konquerer or Safari, since there are probably a number of tests those browsers fail, but which were excluded from Acid 3 simply because both the Gecko and Webkit engines passed it.
Safari is doing well on Acid tests because the developers put a lot of effort into making Safari do well on Acid tests, not because Safari is "ahead of the game" on standards.I know for a fact that developers of both Gecko and Webkit are specifically using these tests as a way to find problems to fix, which is great since that is why the tests were written; not to try to measure "compliance."
There's far too much bickering about which browser is best and which browser is behind the curve. It seems that Safari, Opera, and Firefox are all very good browsers each with their own strengths in standards compliance and user interface, with IE constantly playing catch-up.This is true enough, well except about IE maybe. In my own personal experience every browser other than IE works just fine for rendering everything I create to the standards. There might be the occasional bug or edge case, but I never run across them. IE, on the other hand, I have to create work arounds every single time. I'm not sure it is "playing catch up" so much as deliberately failing to implement huge portions of many standards as a way to prevent cross platform compatibility and keep Web applications that undermine their platform lock-in from being a real threat.
It was probably modded down because we've already had this discussion in three different articles over the last week. IE8 beta passes the Acid 2 test only when run on webstandards.org, but fails if you run it on almost any mirror. The discussion further continued with speculation that MS had hardcoded a workaround specifically for the test and was "cheating". This turned out to be untrue and the reason was that webstandards.org references a page that exists incorrectly but the mirrors reference a page that doesn't exist. Both cases should be handled, but IE8 beta fails on the latter.
Probably people were modding the post down because it was factually incorrect. A better way to deal with the problem is probably to post a factual response, but several people have done so and those posts have not been modded high enough so that the facts are more easily read than the misleading evidence presented in the post you are asking about. Either that or a dozen people with mod points just groaned and thought, "do we have to go through all this again?"
Yes, I know. So what do you suppose the chances are that the iPhone is using the same signing framework, but restricted to a subset of certificates?
Your post isn't even on topic - this isn't even talking about app signing.No, this is talking about the iPhone SDK, which happens to be using some signing framework also made by Apple. The way the iPhone handles security is to basically crete a whitelist of applications. This approach is becoming more and more attractive for security on PCs, especially given the added power it hands to OS vendors; power that might be abused if the system is not open.
Perhaps you don't agree that my post is topical. That's fine. I do think a general discussion of signing and what it could be is appropriate in light of the signing being used for software on the iPhone.
Right, that was the second set of instructions I gave you. I'll recopy that part. ...from another Jabber server you can use [screenname]@[transport.dns.name]. For your example that would be username@xmpp.oscar.aol.com or UIN@xmpp.oscar.aol.com.
It is just like everyone on AIM or ICQ has a Jabber account on xmpp.oscar.aol.com with the same username or ICQ# as they have for that account.
Ever since Apple released Leopard, with its application signing framework, the writing has been on the wall. Most people expect Microsoft to make a similar move. I think Apple is missing being innovators on the correct side of an important trend. Application signing could be the best thing to come to PC and mobile security since firewalls. But will it be another walled garden?
One of the things that really strikes home is the ban on pornographic applications hosted by Apple. Historically, porn has been right on the leading edge of the software and networking fields. Apple's arbitrary restriction in this regard highlights a real issue with the way Apple, and probably everyone else will go about this. They're creating a signing system that only they control and thus they have all the responsibility and are a single point of failure (intentional or accidental).
Here is what I really, really would like to see created. How about an open application signing framework and protocol. Anyone can run a server that provides software downloads, manages updates, checksum/verification and assigns levels of trust and ACLs describing what an application should be doing. Combine the software with a good package manager for whatever platform, a good Mandatory Access Control system for a given OS, a registration and purchasing GUI, and a GUI for users to assign trust levels to servers/organizations.
Suppose if you wanted to buy an Adobe application, you could go to your computer and navigate to their Web site, click a link and it would add their server to your package manager. From there you could download packages, pay for them, register them, install them, keep them updated, pay for updates, verify the software on your machine was unmodified, automatically download an ACL to restrict the software from messing with your machine (run in a jail, or with some subset of permissions from running as root to running in a VM that resets itself every use and has no internet access), and decide how much you trust Adobe as a vendor. You could go Symantec's Web page click a link, pay them a fee, and get ACLs and whitelists/blacklists for software from their service, which you could decide if you trust more than Adobe. Any software vendor be it freeware or payware, open or closed could run a server or use a shared server (sourceforge). Ideally these packages you download would be something like GNUStep, expanded to include an ACL, optional source code, binaries for multiple platforms, and a reference to the authoritative server for updating that application. Apple could run their server and Macs and iPhones could subscribe to their server by default, but users could still add other vendors' servers so people could get any applications without Apple being held responsible for the consequences. Projects like ClamAV could host free ACLs and whitlelists/blacklists for those of us who don't want to pay. The best part is, you would not even need to rank servers individually, if you had multiple servers you could allow them to "vote" on how much to trust a given application.
Ahh, well. That is probably just my utopian idealism. In all reality Apple will host a server which has all sorts of restrictions and is completely closed. Microsoft will follow suit with their own closed system, and Linux will have no such system for another decade and will never make real inroads into the desktop space either.
I don't see why not. They just have to figure out how to get it loaded and running on their iPhone, either by reverse engineering Apple's interface or buying their own cert; niether of which is your responsibility under the GPL.
To understand all the latin words and phrases used throughout legal documents. Ad valorem, adjournment sine die, affidavit, pro bono, pro hac vice, supersedeas, etc. etc. Are you telling me pre-law programs aren't requiring at least a year of latin? Heck, I thought most pharmacists and pre-med students still had to take it.
I realize the days where everyone had to take latin and greek are long past, but I did not realize how sad things have gotten.
What you're trying will work if you use AOL's Jabber server. Configure xmpp.oscar.aol.com : port 5222 as your jabber server. Make sure SASL PLAIN is on and StartTLS is enabled.
Alternately from another Jabber server you can use [screenname]@[transport.dns.name]. For your example that would be username@xmpp.oscar.aol.com or UIN@xmpp.oscar.aol.com.
I hope that helps.
I do use OTR on the AIM network, but as far as I know it has never worked for me over Google's Jabber network. Does it work for you? Also, I haven't tried it using combinations of Jabber and AIM via their federated servers. Can you confirm it actually works in those instances?
I'm pretty sure AOL has federated their server so any GTalk account user can send messages using their GTalk account to AIM users. So that pretty much solves your problem.
Although dam it, i still use my old icq number since old friends are still on it.Actually I think it works with ICQ as well, since AIM and ICQ accounts can message each other now too.
Late in the game implies they're falling behind, but right now AIM has the biggest market share of any of the big ones. Rather, I see this as a mutual assured destruction move. Basically Microsoft and Yahoo teamed up to try to create a walled garden together that they could both use to lock-in users. AOL decided to interoperate with XMPP and Google, basically adding Google and all the privately run Jabber servers to their share of the market. That means they no longer can win big and charge a toll on IM usage if they manage to monopolize it, but it also means MS and Yahoo will probably fail to do so too.
They even provided instructions on how to connect using clients _other_ than Google Talk.I'd like to note two things about this. First, Google did not have a client for every platform, so they pretty much had to do that. Second, I don't think Google yet allows end to end encryption on their server, which means they get to use it to profile users for targeted marketing (financial incentive). It will be interesting to see what happens with that in the future.
Another player to consider here is Apple. They have about 8% of the US market and their default chat client supports both AIM and XMPP. Their server boxes have negligible market share, but do ship with a Jabber server. Apple is pushing for XMPP to win and it looks like it has a good shot in the next few years.
Hmm, what OS are you using for the ones you don't specify (Firefox, Seamonkey, and Opera)? Linux for all? In any case, your numbers are very close to mine.
I ran the tests on a few more browsers and OS's. The results are here. The upshot is Safari+a recent Webkit on OS X is in the lead, followed by Firefox 3 on OS X or Linux.
First, what does a supposed feud between the Safari and Konqueror teams have to do with which is most compliant? Second, you should probably have read the comments from the Konqueror guys before trying to demonize the Safari guys. According to them (KHTML team), several of them were unhappy with the code dump Apple published, and one of them made a forum posting to that affect... but none of them had asked the guys at Apple to give them a more granular version with better documentation and when they did, the guys at Apple went out of their way (read above and beyond the requirements of the license) to provide them with it. Then, the Konquerer guys started rolling in some of the code, but then decided they did not like some of the architectural decisions Apple had made, so they intentionally held off on integrating a lot of them.
Basically, the Konqueror guys were used to owning all the code instead of being one group of contributors. Apple was new to the scene to, and they had not yet established good lines of communication. Eventually, not only Apple, but also Google, Nokia, Adobe and several other players started contributing as well and the Konqueror guys decided there was simply too much good work being done by others for them to maintain a separate fork and jumped back into sharing a code base.
In fact, once a few people involved with Konqueror stopped complaining on forums only read by their team and some KDE people and actually contacted Apple, Dave Hyatt of Apple went through the code base commenting everything that linked to Apple specific libraries as well as calling out all the fixes for the Acid2 test with comments tagged specifically for the Konqueror developers. Several Konqueror developers had already made public statements that even if they never used Apple's code, Apple adopting it was the best thing that had ever happened to the project. They also made a few comments about the "nonsense" on Slashdot that misrepresented their views.
To put it simply, the only people upset at Apple about Webkit are people who are poorly informed.
Yeah, but they did not finalize it until 3 days ago and they were dropping out tests that were not broken in either gecko or webkit. Admittedly both teams probably fixed a few that were initially broken in both.
I get 59 on Windows and 67 on OS X and Linux. Some people report a bit better with the nightly's.
Your numbers are quite different than mine. I scripted all the browsers/OS's I had handy from the sunspider javascript test last week and ran them on Acid3. The results are here.
Where do you get a nightly of Opera? I ran the beta version they have up tonight and got 59/100 on OS X and it crashed on Linux and Windows XP. In any case, the best number I got was Safari 3.0.4 with a week old nightly of Webkit on OS X, which got 86/100. The Firefox 3 beta also did well getting 67/100 on OS X and Linux (but only 59 on Windows for some reason). Other people have gotten slightly better numbers for both using a more recent nightly of Firefox or Webkit.
What OS? Under Kubuntu 6.0 and Epiphany 2.14.3 I got a score of 50/100.
By the way, if you're tired of hunting through posts to find a given OS/browser, I ran a bunch with a script and posted it here.
Safari 3.0.4 for both Windows and OS X, get a score of 39/100.
Safari 3.0.4 for OS X with the nightly drop of Webkit (not stable) gets 86/100 (well it is a week old, I'm too lazy to grab the most recent one).
Safari 3.0.4 for Windows with the nightly drop of Webkit crashes on the test.
I think they probably are, but I was too lazy to download a new nightly so I used one from a few days before the Acid3 test was published and it scores 87/100, which is still quite a bit better than the Firefox 3 beta nightly from the same day (67/100). That said, you're completely correct that the Acid tests are not a good general metric for adherence to standards.
I've heard several people ask about a Firefox fork using Webkit or both Webkit and Gecko and while the idea has merit, I doubt there is enough interest to sustain a project. Konquerer uses Webkit already on Linux and should be available for other platforms in the near future. It would be nice to have the ability to swap applications and rendering engines as one wished, but I don't see it happening anytime soon.
Oops, "Opera 9.5 beat - 49/100 then crashes" should obviously be "Opera 9.5 beta 49/100 then crashes."
Well, it seems most people are too lazy to run the numbers. I wrote a script to run the sunspider javascript test, so here's Acid3 as well:
Mac OS X 10.5.2
Kubuntu 6.0
Windows XP SP2
...one minor correction for you. Firefox 3.0 beta on both OS X and Kubuntu gets 67.