No, but we didn't know that Safari had that feature.
I actually think this is a big problem for software development. I often find myself talking to developers who only really use one OS and often only very specific tools on that OS. As such, there is a lack of general knowledge about what cool features have been invented by others and it sometimes takes many years for something really cool to make its way from one app on one platform to other mainstream apps on other platforms.
Nowadays there are plug-ins for Firefox and probably other browsers to do the same thing as the Safari feature, but despite the usefullness, most people have ever heard of them. It's a failing that is hard to remedy. I consider being a multi-OS user useful not only in being more versatile, but because it is informative about what I'm missing the rest of the time, some of which can be solved with a little setup.
I agree that the UI puts things in odd places, and some things are done in un-obvious ways. But basically I disagree with the author's "amateurish" assessment. That is pure Microsoft speak there, which translates into "Not all the things learned from years of swearing at Word translate to either of these packages".
Comical, but fair. User interface design is so often done poorly in the computing world that calling terrible usability amateurish is not really fair. Individual mileage may vary. I'm, perhaps, overly harsh because I use OS X as my default desktop, only resorting to Ubuntu or Windows when I need specific software for that platform or that only runs well on that platform, or when testing on multiple platforms. As such, most of the software I use inherits a lot of good usability defaults from the dev tools and native UI widgets. OpenOffice has always ignored OS X native UI, however, concentrating instead on consistency across platforms and ignoring both the UI issues this causes and the functionality offered by OS X to native programs, which OO and LibreOffice cannot use (system services for example). This makes it seem like a usability disaster on OS X, when in truth it is just another poor to average usability program, badly ported to an OS it was clearly not designed for.
As for OO versus MS Office, I had a fun interaction at work where a co-worker was demanding MS Office because they did not like the supplied OO. When they obtained it, it was the new version with a completely different interface than they were used to and they ended up switching back in short order. Personally, I've used both about the same amount and curse at both equally. Word probably takes the cake for hellish UI design choices, but Calc is pretty close.
I was (snarkily) referring to the feature of the Safari web browser that consolidates multipage articles into a single article automagically. I don't even use Safari all that often, just found it handy in this case. Do you really need a link to download Safari?
Your definition is too vague. What does "self-contained" mean?
It means that the software requires no external processing support to fulfil its particular purpose. N.B. This includes software such as the Skype client, since its purpose is to be a client for voice/video communication and it does so on its own.
But it does nothing at all without Skype run servers to connect to. If there is not a service running on the internet or if that service is unreachable, even if you can get to other parts of the internet, you can do nothing with the client software. Another good example would be an AIM application.
What's a server app, exactly?
A server app is an app that runs on a remote machine, but that you connect to via a client. E.g. MS Word running on a server connected via Citrix.
Web apps?
No. That's just an abuse of HTML to make a document of information look like the UI of a software application.
What about local apps that use HTML as the display format? Are they then, not applications?
My opinion of your definition is that it is wholly inadequate. You're trying to draw a distinction and failing on all fronts that I can think of. From our discussion thus far, you seem to think "application" refers to apps that don't involve HTML because you want to segregate a specific XML subset for some reason? You aren't making sense to me.
This isn't true at all. While their testing was very limited they notes several bugs where the specs claimed a feature would work, but did not actually function or was inaccessible.
Also, OpenOffice had some features written in Java, but they were optional. Did LibreOffice get rid of the Oracle Java parts, replace them with something, or what?
If you had RTFA you'd note the discussion of needing to download the JRE if you used LibreOffice in order to get some features to work. So, no, there is still a dependency. You'd also note the JRE comes bundled with OpenOffice, but is an out of date version.
OpenOffice in its later incarnations isn't bad, although it still, after ten years, has an amateurish feel to it.
Agreed. It really needs some good paid developers from Canonical or Redhat or someone to do proper usability assessment and testing, and then rework the UI and other relevant parts of the code.
application = self-contained software for fulfilling some well-defined task
Your definition is too vague. What does "self-contained" mean? Do server apps count? Web apps? Picasa? What about Skype; without a remote service it is useless. Is it self contained and thus an app? If not, what is it it? If so, how is it qualitatively different from Google Docs?
...they try to blur boundaries between web and apps. Boundaries, which people need, as a sandboxed browser site and an app is not the same thing by a long shot.
So, with more OS's sandboxing local apps and more apps sandboxing themselves, combined with the nearly universal network features of desktop apps, I'm just not seeing the important differences of which you speak. From an end user perspective, most Web apps tend to be more reliant upon network services than desktop apps, but then some desktop apps don't work at all without a specific network service either. The move to Web apps makes a lot of sense to me. I don't like it as an architectural choice, but given that most people's other option is the limitations and expense of Windows, what can you expect?
Ahh, but how does a third party get elected or how do we change the positions of the big parties to fix the problem?
Reform the electoral system, for one thing.
Ahh, but that's a chicken and egg problem. If we reformed the electoral process we'd be able to elect more third parties, but why would the current politicians vote for it? Most individuals don't care about or understand more modern electoral systems and you can bet your ass about 50% of the population would immediately brand it as "foreign socialist fancy math voting" and thereby inferior to what the US is doing (which they probably don't even know).
The next biggest step to a third party getting elected (PROBABLY) is for you and I to vote for them and trust our fellow citizens will vote for who they think is best.
Been there, done that... for decades. It isn't working.
The point of my post was to bring up a topic Americans do strongly care about and agree upon and which can result in real improvement o our society, partly by bringing in third party candidates as a wedge issue and partly by forcing the existing parties to change and act on behalf of the populace by doing the will of the people. I'm strongly in favor of electoral reform, but it doesn't meet those needs. You are unlikely to win significant seats in congress railing to the populace about electoral reform. Telling them about corruption and the influence of corporate and foreign lobbyists, however, will get you the agreement of almost everyone and when you propose specific solutions to your opposition they have to either agree with them, refuse to comment (where you can point out their deception and lack of will), or oppose you thereby pissing off almost all the voters.
We need candidates that engage audiences, rather than ones who give canned answers, like a sports superstar in the locker room. We need actual representatives, not agents of representative bodies.
True, but engaging the constituency on specific topics they care about and actually representing their interests on this specific topic is a lot more likely to yield real results, because it is a topic people care about and agree on and where they aren't being represented. This differentiates it from spending cuts or electoral reform, where we just wish the populace were informed and intelligent and motivated enough to care and have a good consensus.
So, you think we should make it illegal for people to pool their money and hire someone to spend fulltime keeping track of what Congress is doing and then report back to the group.
Nope, just illegal for the group to incorporate then give money to election funds or run politically themed ads.
Additionally, this person will take the opinions of the group and communicate them to various members of Congress, so that the members of Congress will know what those of their constituents who are members of this group think of various laws bills being considered by Congress.
And I personally have no problem with privately funded special interest groups, provided those groups don't provide government employees with bribes in the form of free travel accommodations, meals, etc.
Of course, that would require a Constitutional Amendment...
While I'm thinking of a different set of restrictions than you seem to be, likely there would need to be a constitutional amendment. Currently the Supreme Court precedent interprets the 14th amendment as granting corporations the same rights as citizens despite, them not having the same responsibilities and limitations. I think this is idiotic as corporations are government created entities and the government is supposed to be serving the common good.
In order to resolve this conflict, we'd probably need a constitutional amendment specifically stating that corporations are not citizens and while the individual shareholders have rights, when the corporation acts it cannot exercise the rights on behalf of those shareholders. And it should not be able to because those shareholders are not held responsible for it's acts. (For example, when a corporation profits by an act that kills people, the shareholders benefit but don't go to prison.) This amendment could further forbid corporations (and foreign governments and organizations for that matter) from interfering with the politics of the United States by donating money to campaign funds, running political ads, organizing fundraisers, donating money to political nonprofits, etc. The individual shareholders would be free to do this, just not with corporate funds or organized by the corporation. This prevents any conflict with the first amendment.
While you can interpret it differently, everything lobbyists do can be interpreted as petitioning the Government for redress of grievances. And everything that you can do to petition the Government for redress of grievances can be interpreted as lobbying.
True, but the government is starting new programs that spend billions of dollars buying unneeded junk from me and my personal financial resources are not going to get someone elected who will then turn around and award me more fat contracts. I'm also a US citizen. I'm not a business, legal entity, foreign power, or multinational conglomerate. The problem we have with lobbying is that it is undermining the democratic system by shifting power into the hands of multinational corporations, national corporations, foreign governments, and basically anything that is not a US citizen or nonprofit group of US citizens. I have no problem with individuals or nonprofits (not funded by corporations) lobbying the government. The idea is to remove the for profit influence in our political process.
The O.P. was opining that politicians spend money needlessly because they are "in the pockets" of defense contractors. That seems to be true. So why not ban those defense contractors from funding politics thus making sure there is no legal way for them to give large sums to a politician. Then, what motivation to politicians have to waste money giving it to contractors? A huge motivation for pork goes away and we can reduce the budget by actually removing waste (unlike the million promises to reduce waste that never happen because politicians are still very strongly motivated to keep that waste, because it is getting them elected).
You're conflating two things. The problems with flash are caused by flash being proprietary, not flash being a plugin...
Sort of, except if a technology is widespread and not proprietary it is rarely a plug-in because you suffer performance penalties. Conversely, if a technology is a plug-in it is rarely popular unless there are no open alternatives because bundled open solutions can be built in and thus gain a wider user base.
if MS built flash into IE, we'd still have all the same problems.
Not necessarily because IE's implementation might provide some of the features we need and suddenly there would be competition between IE's implementation and Adobe's for which is best, driving innovation and improvements, including accessibility.
If you display open standard videos using (say) the embed tag, then it would actually be easier for a disabled person to use - because it would just use their system player, which would presumably be already set up for their own preferences, rather than having to configure the browser's player that's completely separated from the player they watch DVDs etc. on.
Whether they configure their browser or a different external player or their OS-wide preferences is fairly immaterial, wouldn't you say? Rarely does the DVD player have the same configuration as a player for internet video, so perhaps the ideal would be to hand all video to the OS and let the OS handle it with a single configuration other apps can tap into.
The key is to realize that we could defend our country just fine on half of the budget.
Unfortunately you'll find neither major party willing to say that because they're all in the pocket of defense contractors. Like most things, third parties and independents are the answer...
Ahh, but how does a third party get elected or how do we change the positions of the big parties to fix the problem? Personally I think the answer is lobbing reform. That should be the swing issue tackled, rather than the level of government spending. Allow me to explain.
Most Americans when polled can't agree on programs where money should be cut that will significantly reduce spending. You'll have a hard time finding any significant area of spending where 50% of citizens want cuts. At the same time polls show something like 80% of Americans in favor of banning lobbying by corporations, more than 90% in favor of banning lobbying by foreign governments. There's even popular support for making it illegally for lobbyists to so much as organize fundraisers. And yet nothing is done. This is because our current elected officials pretty much universally benefit from current laws.
There is popular support to back a reform candidate, third party, or subset of a major party that focuses on the issue of government corruption, and the influence of lobbyists. People get mad about lobbying and corruption and they are right to do so. This just needs to be harnessed to get people elected on promises of doing something about it. If the tea party, for example, focused on that topic they'd be getting a lot more support from the other end of the political spectrum, of course since the tea party is largely run, promoted, and marketed by lobbyists this is unlikely. Still, a real grassroots campaign could be run.
Rather than supporting third parties and hoping they'll help, why not focus on why all congress critters are in the pockets of defense contractors in the first place. It's because the lobbyists of those defense contractors get them elected by supporting their party's coffers, organizing fundraisers, and sometimes directly running media campaigns. The public doesn't want that and making it an issue can get those people to stop relying upon those lobbyists or get them replaced by others not suckling at their teat. A solid strategy is better than throwing your vote behind a losing candidate as a protest. The focus should be on lobbying reform and let the chips fall where they may.
Because plugins are an accessibility nightmare compared to HTML.
How? Idiots using flash for static text content are an accessibility nightmare, but for straight-up video, putting it in a video tag rather than an embed tag isn't going to make any difference.
Let me tackle this. What if you're deaf, but want to have an audio track close captioned for you? Does the Flash player support it? Nope, you're screwed. Does the HTML5 implementation of your browser support it? Find another implementation, like one specifically for the deaf, because it is an open standard third parties can build these solutions.
What if you're blind and want to listen to video but don't want to waste CPU cycles decoding the video stream? See the above.
What if you have very poor vision and need to be able to quickly and easily zoom the video all the way in, possibly with a separate non-zoomed version on another monitor? See above.
What if you're paralyzed and have a palsy and using the controls of Adobe Flash Player are too hard with the little joystick in your mouth with a single click button you use to control the cursor? With HTML, yup you guessed it, anyone can make an implementation and multiple people are doing so, including ones for specialized users.
Contrary to your assertion, using an open standard with video codecs streamed makes an enormous difference for accessibility to the handicapped and for that matter for accessibility to anyone else using a device Adobe doesn't care about, Like Linux desktops or voice controlled systems.
The Flash based game can be as elegant as "Machinarium" and it can be here today and not something we have to wait for until 2014.
And you can build elegant HTML5 games today, although they'll only run properly on a subset of browsers. But then, Try running Machinarium on your iPhone where there is no Flash support, or on your Android, where Flash is a dog, or on Linux, where Flash is buggy and slow and incomplete, or even on your Mac laptop where Flash is poorly implemented and rarely even uses the graphics card. So you might be wondering, "what's the difference?" Either way you only target a subset of platforms. The difference is, with HTML5 it is an open standard with multiple open and closed source implementations and going forward, nothing stops anyone from building it on their platform. With Flash, we're stuck waiting for Adobe to get off their asses and build better players and while we're at it, we're stuck waiting for them to fix all the security holes. With HTML5 if we don't like an implementation we can switch browsers or phones or OS's in many combinations and all the players are competing to be the best because they want the user base. With Flash it is a one company show and if we don't like the crap Adobe makes we can do nothing but hope people move to HTML5.
It also means you can't do what you want with it. Believe it or not, there are some apps I want to stay open all the time.
Absolutely. If you don't have the option of running any and every app in the background your choices are limited. If you are a geek and knowledgable to make an informed choice about battery life versus the desired functionality, it is certainly not ideal to be restricted by what is allowed in the store, so if you want the iPhone hardware you probably will jailbreak it or install a different OS; or more likely buy one of the more open Android phones.
For phone makers and average users, however, it makes more sense to cover the limited multitasking use cases with services (alarms, audio playing, push messaging, etc.). There really aren't that many tasks a non-geek user wants to have running in the background and as has been shown in the Android ecosystem, if it is allowed, developers will code horrible apps that truly destroy battery performance on phones, moreover most users won't understand it is the app causing the problem and will blame the phone maker. They don't know the Facebook app or Handcent is failing to properly suspend or forgoing push messaging and constantly connecting to the internet and pinging remote servers. They just think the HTC EVO is a piece of crap because the battery only lasts 4 hours so they decide to never buy and HTC again. Guess what solution the average user and HTC prefers? Google is working on a solution now, but we don't yet know what it will be.
If the battery life of iPhones is with some significant software led saving then that's the only possible conclusion because iPhones often need charging as frequently as any other equally priced competitor on the market, if not more frequently in some cases.
I did a quick search using the terms "iphone android battery". Try it yourself. Of the top ten hits, eight are comparisons that say the iPhone is winning on battery performance versus a specific Android phone or Android phones in general. One was not a comparison. One claims the Samsung Infuse "should have a better battery life" based upon the hardware but did not perform any actual tests. So where do you get this idea that iPhones don't do better for battery performance than Android phones? Google's own Android blogs have developers talking about the problem regularly with some calling it Android's biggest weakness right now. Maybe you'd care to provide some reference to support your opinion?
I'm just thankful that there also exist phones that not only do simple app switching, but allow the *user* decide if they wish to expend a little extra power on a useful background task...
Oh, I completely agree. For geeks it's much better to have the choice to screw things up. I can run apps to monitor the battery and network usage of each app and do my homework on how those apps perform using some Google-fu. Normal users, on the other hand, cannot or will not do the above. That's why most prefer a curated experience where they get good battery life because Apple forces developers to adhere to strict use of limited APIs connecting to built in devices optimized for battery usage. They don't want to have to try to figure out why their battery life sucks, they want it to "just work".
Oh, and Google recognizes this as well. If you take a look at their Android blogs, you'll see several comments by Google engineers about trying to come up with a solution to this very problem that will allow Android phones to "just work" for battery life without the same restrictions Apple has implemented. Hopefully they'll manage a solution some day.
The problem is, the former is easier to code and the way developers are used to doing things on desktops where they don't have to worry about battery and data nearly as much.
multi-tasking is all about manageing multiple CPU entities and nothing at all to do with battery life or power management.
Thank you for demonstrating my point.
Seriously though, if you're using the term so narrowly WP7 already has multitasking and iOS always did. Clearly you did not RTFA.
Just tell me, how many people would have died in the Arizona attack on Giffords - if the guy had a knife. Perhaps zero.
Way to completely miss the point of the thread. You're working on the idea that the attacker, unable to find a firearm would have used a knife. The point made here is, he could just as easily decide to use a bomb or poison. (You know using recipes from some book like the one we're discussing.) That is certainly the case in some south american countries where drive by pipe bombings are incredibly common.
Making it a little harder to get the "tool" [a gun] and how much damage capability [power] it has goes a long way toward preventing it from being used and useful in a crime of convenience.
True, but it also makes it less likely to be used to prevent a crime. Further it doesn't mean that the overall problem is decreased due to the availably of other suitable tools. By your argument passing a law banning a particular color of gun would be useful. I think you have to actually look at it from a scientific perspective. Show evidence that changes to particular gun ownership laws are likely to result in decreased murder and violent crime in general and you have an argument. Handwave about the obviousness of the truth of your unsupported (and some would say falsified) hypothesis and you're just blowing hot air.
Multitasking on mobile devices is a different problem than multitasking on desktops. With a desktop, the challenges are primarily allocating memory and CPU. With mobile devices, network and battery are the resources that need to be optimized. So with a desktop app, you can shove it int he background, give it limited cpu cycles and memory without any architectural changes. With mobile devices, it is a lot harder to limit because you don't want the CPU running all the time and even if nothing else is using the network connection, letting some background app use it constantly will result in draining the user's battery and potentially costing them data usage fees.
A good example is push based notifications. If applications ping a server regularly to see if they have updates or if there is a message, that uses a lot more of both resources than if it subscribes to a network service that notifies the device when the same event occurs. The problem is, the former is easier to code and the way developers are used to doing things on desktops where they don't have to worry about battery and data nearly as much.
So when Microsoft says they are adding in support for multitasking, does that mean:
They've developed a suite of services, optimized for these resources, that applications can hook into ala the iPhone? This is great for battery life, but limits the functionality of third party apps.
They've built OS level controls that limit resource usage by background apps in order to save battery life and built APIs to make sure the apps will still function as the user expects?
They are letting apps run willy nilly and use any and all resources and are planning on using their store distribution model to get rid of poorly coded resource hogs?
In short, multitasking for mobile devices is a difficult problem, with different challenges from traditional multitasking on desktops. Google engineers have repeatedly stated that they consider multitasking and battery life problems to be one of their greatest challenges and current failings. Microsoft announcing that they're coming out with something is, then interesting, although it may be a poor clone of one of the other vendors' implementations.
IOS STILL doesn't have actual multi-tasking... it just allows certain threads to continue running in the background.. but the app itself is suspended it's basically just fast app switching +
And and iPhone users are very thankful for the battery life that saves.
I'm all for mantaining the number of TLDs low, because it will be a mess to try to remember some address when you have no clue of the TLD, but I just can't see the point in not allowing this or that specific TLD.
Aside from the fact that you clearly haven't read the proposal by the GAC, what makes you think anyone is trying to forbid the creation of TLDs? The proposal is that veto power for what used to be called “Morality and Public Order Objections” and which is now called "Limited Public Interest Objection" be replaced in its entirety such that a group of representatives of at least 100 governments be convened and that any of them could object to a TLD, but then any other member could object to the objection. This replaces the process in place now where TLDs are rejected for moral reasons by the International Chamber of Commerce and another business association no one has ever heard of called ICE. The proposal isn't that governments can block TLDs so much as that moral objections must be put forward by democratically elected governments instead of by business associations.
On the surface, not as bad an idea... but why should any government interference be accepted.
Because governments represent the people through a democratic process.
Isn't the idea of ICANN to be the decision making body?
ICANN mostly represents corporations and has completely failed in their promises to move towards democratic representation of the people from the bottom up. Why the hell do you think sovereign nations from around the world, elected by their people are worse than a completely non-democratic process run by an organization contracted by the US government?
Moreover, from a completely pragmatic view, it is entirely possible that the UN will decide as a group they have had enough at set up alternative root TLD servers and everyone except the US will switch over. China is pushing really hard for this right now. Then most of us will have to deal with the conflicts and worry about multiple root TLD systems.
Whatever else this proposal is, it is a very moderate compromise, allowing other countries some influence, and giving the giant bureaucracy that is the UN less ability and reason to take over the process.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but we didn't know that Safari had that feature.
I actually think this is a big problem for software development. I often find myself talking to developers who only really use one OS and often only very specific tools on that OS. As such, there is a lack of general knowledge about what cool features have been invented by others and it sometimes takes many years for something really cool to make its way from one app on one platform to other mainstream apps on other platforms.
Nowadays there are plug-ins for Firefox and probably other browsers to do the same thing as the Safari feature, but despite the usefullness, most people have ever heard of them. It's a failing that is hard to remedy. I consider being a multi-OS user useful not only in being more versatile, but because it is informative about what I'm missing the rest of the time, some of which can be solved with a little setup.
I agree that the UI puts things in odd places, and some things are done in un-obvious ways. But basically I disagree with the author's "amateurish" assessment. That is pure Microsoft speak there, which translates into "Not all the things learned from years of swearing at Word translate to either of these packages".
Comical, but fair. User interface design is so often done poorly in the computing world that calling terrible usability amateurish is not really fair. Individual mileage may vary. I'm, perhaps, overly harsh because I use OS X as my default desktop, only resorting to Ubuntu or Windows when I need specific software for that platform or that only runs well on that platform, or when testing on multiple platforms. As such, most of the software I use inherits a lot of good usability defaults from the dev tools and native UI widgets. OpenOffice has always ignored OS X native UI, however, concentrating instead on consistency across platforms and ignoring both the UI issues this causes and the functionality offered by OS X to native programs, which OO and LibreOffice cannot use (system services for example). This makes it seem like a usability disaster on OS X, when in truth it is just another poor to average usability program, badly ported to an OS it was clearly not designed for.
As for OO versus MS Office, I had a fun interaction at work where a co-worker was demanding MS Office because they did not like the supplied OO. When they obtained it, it was the new version with a completely different interface than they were used to and they ended up switching back in short order. Personally, I've used both about the same amount and curse at both equally. Word probably takes the cake for hellish UI design choices, but Calc is pretty close.
Can it not run with OpenJDK? IIRC that's what I installed to get it running on my Ubuntu laptop...
I don't know as I haven't tried. Google says there are some fairly serious bugs doing so, but it may depend upon your OS.
I was (snarkily) referring to the feature of the Safari web browser that consolidates multipage articles into a single article automagically. I don't even use Safari all that often, just found it handy in this case. Do you really need a link to download Safari?
Your definition is too vague. What does "self-contained" mean?
It means that the software requires no external processing support to fulfil its particular purpose. N.B. This includes software such as the Skype client, since its purpose is to be a client for voice/video communication and it does so on its own.
But it does nothing at all without Skype run servers to connect to. If there is not a service running on the internet or if that service is unreachable, even if you can get to other parts of the internet, you can do nothing with the client software. Another good example would be an AIM application.
What's a server app, exactly?
A server app is an app that runs on a remote machine, but that you connect to via a client. E.g. MS Word running on a server connected via Citrix.
Web apps?
No. That's just an abuse of HTML to make a document of information look like the UI of a software application.
What about local apps that use HTML as the display format? Are they then, not applications?
My opinion of your definition is that it is wholly inadequate. You're trying to draw a distinction and failing on all fronts that I can think of. From our discussion thus far, you seem to think "application" refers to apps that don't involve HTML because you want to segregate a specific XML subset for some reason? You aren't making sense to me.
The article just compares the feature lists.
This isn't true at all. While their testing was very limited they notes several bugs where the specs claimed a feature would work, but did not actually function or was inaccessible.
Also, OpenOffice had some features written in Java, but they were optional. Did LibreOffice get rid of the Oracle Java parts, replace them with something, or what?
If you had RTFA you'd note the discussion of needing to download the JRE if you used LibreOffice in order to get some features to work. So, no, there is still a dependency. You'd also note the JRE comes bundled with OpenOffice, but is an out of date version.
OpenOffice in its later incarnations isn't bad, although it still, after ten years, has an amateurish feel to it.
Agreed. It really needs some good paid developers from Canonical or Redhat or someone to do proper usability assessment and testing, and then rework the UI and other relevant parts of the code.
Depends
What, you mean your browser doesn't consolidate multi-page articles for you? How 2010. :)
application = self-contained software for fulfilling some well-defined task
Your definition is too vague. What does "self-contained" mean? Do server apps count? Web apps? Picasa? What about Skype; without a remote service it is useless. Is it self contained and thus an app? If not, what is it it? If so, how is it qualitatively different from Google Docs?
...they try to blur boundaries between web and apps. Boundaries, which people need, as a sandboxed browser site and an app is not the same thing by a long shot.
So, with more OS's sandboxing local apps and more apps sandboxing themselves, combined with the nearly universal network features of desktop apps, I'm just not seeing the important differences of which you speak. From an end user perspective, most Web apps tend to be more reliant upon network services than desktop apps, but then some desktop apps don't work at all without a specific network service either. The move to Web apps makes a lot of sense to me. I don't like it as an architectural choice, but given that most people's other option is the limitations and expense of Windows, what can you expect?
Ahh, but how does a third party get elected or how do we change the positions of the big parties to fix the problem?
Reform the electoral system, for one thing.
Ahh, but that's a chicken and egg problem. If we reformed the electoral process we'd be able to elect more third parties, but why would the current politicians vote for it? Most individuals don't care about or understand more modern electoral systems and you can bet your ass about 50% of the population would immediately brand it as "foreign socialist fancy math voting" and thereby inferior to what the US is doing (which they probably don't even know).
The next biggest step to a third party getting elected (PROBABLY) is for you and I to vote for them and trust our fellow citizens will vote for who they think is best.
Been there, done that... for decades. It isn't working.
The point of my post was to bring up a topic Americans do strongly care about and agree upon and which can result in real improvement o our society, partly by bringing in third party candidates as a wedge issue and partly by forcing the existing parties to change and act on behalf of the populace by doing the will of the people. I'm strongly in favor of electoral reform, but it doesn't meet those needs. You are unlikely to win significant seats in congress railing to the populace about electoral reform. Telling them about corruption and the influence of corporate and foreign lobbyists, however, will get you the agreement of almost everyone and when you propose specific solutions to your opposition they have to either agree with them, refuse to comment (where you can point out their deception and lack of will), or oppose you thereby pissing off almost all the voters.
We need candidates that engage audiences, rather than ones who give canned answers, like a sports superstar in the locker room. We need actual representatives, not agents of representative bodies.
True, but engaging the constituency on specific topics they care about and actually representing their interests on this specific topic is a lot more likely to yield real results, because it is a topic people care about and agree on and where they aren't being represented. This differentiates it from spending cuts or electoral reform, where we just wish the populace were informed and intelligent and motivated enough to care and have a good consensus.
So, you think we should make it illegal for people to pool their money and hire someone to spend fulltime keeping track of what Congress is doing and then report back to the group.
Nope, just illegal for the group to incorporate then give money to election funds or run politically themed ads.
Additionally, this person will take the opinions of the group and communicate them to various members of Congress, so that the members of Congress will know what those of their constituents who are members of this group think of various laws bills being considered by Congress.
And I personally have no problem with privately funded special interest groups, provided those groups don't provide government employees with bribes in the form of free travel accommodations, meals, etc.
Of course, that would require a Constitutional Amendment...
While I'm thinking of a different set of restrictions than you seem to be, likely there would need to be a constitutional amendment. Currently the Supreme Court precedent interprets the 14th amendment as granting corporations the same rights as citizens despite, them not having the same responsibilities and limitations. I think this is idiotic as corporations are government created entities and the government is supposed to be serving the common good.
In order to resolve this conflict, we'd probably need a constitutional amendment specifically stating that corporations are not citizens and while the individual shareholders have rights, when the corporation acts it cannot exercise the rights on behalf of those shareholders. And it should not be able to because those shareholders are not held responsible for it's acts. (For example, when a corporation profits by an act that kills people, the shareholders benefit but don't go to prison.) This amendment could further forbid corporations (and foreign governments and organizations for that matter) from interfering with the politics of the United States by donating money to campaign funds, running political ads, organizing fundraisers, donating money to political nonprofits, etc. The individual shareholders would be free to do this, just not with corporate funds or organized by the corporation. This prevents any conflict with the first amendment.
While you can interpret it differently, everything lobbyists do can be interpreted as petitioning the Government for redress of grievances. And everything that you can do to petition the Government for redress of grievances can be interpreted as lobbying.
True, but the government is starting new programs that spend billions of dollars buying unneeded junk from me and my personal financial resources are not going to get someone elected who will then turn around and award me more fat contracts. I'm also a US citizen. I'm not a business, legal entity, foreign power, or multinational conglomerate. The problem we have with lobbying is that it is undermining the democratic system by shifting power into the hands of multinational corporations, national corporations, foreign governments, and basically anything that is not a US citizen or nonprofit group of US citizens. I have no problem with individuals or nonprofits (not funded by corporations) lobbying the government. The idea is to remove the for profit influence in our political process.
The O.P. was opining that politicians spend money needlessly because they are "in the pockets" of defense contractors. That seems to be true. So why not ban those defense contractors from funding politics thus making sure there is no legal way for them to give large sums to a politician. Then, what motivation to politicians have to waste money giving it to contractors? A huge motivation for pork goes away and we can reduce the budget by actually removing waste (unlike the million promises to reduce waste that never happen because politicians are still very strongly motivated to keep that waste, because it is getting them elected).
You're conflating two things. The problems with flash are caused by flash being proprietary, not flash being a plugin...
Sort of, except if a technology is widespread and not proprietary it is rarely a plug-in because you suffer performance penalties. Conversely, if a technology is a plug-in it is rarely popular unless there are no open alternatives because bundled open solutions can be built in and thus gain a wider user base.
if MS built flash into IE, we'd still have all the same problems.
Not necessarily because IE's implementation might provide some of the features we need and suddenly there would be competition between IE's implementation and Adobe's for which is best, driving innovation and improvements, including accessibility.
If you display open standard videos using (say) the embed tag, then it would actually be easier for a disabled person to use - because it would just use their system player, which would presumably be already set up for their own preferences, rather than having to configure the browser's player that's completely separated from the player they watch DVDs etc. on.
Whether they configure their browser or a different external player or their OS-wide preferences is fairly immaterial, wouldn't you say? Rarely does the DVD player have the same configuration as a player for internet video, so perhaps the ideal would be to hand all video to the OS and let the OS handle it with a single configuration other apps can tap into.
The key is to realize that we could defend our country just fine on half of the budget.
Unfortunately you'll find neither major party willing to say that because they're all in the pocket of defense contractors. Like most things, third parties and independents are the answer...
Ahh, but how does a third party get elected or how do we change the positions of the big parties to fix the problem? Personally I think the answer is lobbing reform. That should be the swing issue tackled, rather than the level of government spending. Allow me to explain.
Most Americans when polled can't agree on programs where money should be cut that will significantly reduce spending. You'll have a hard time finding any significant area of spending where 50% of citizens want cuts. At the same time polls show something like 80% of Americans in favor of banning lobbying by corporations, more than 90% in favor of banning lobbying by foreign governments. There's even popular support for making it illegally for lobbyists to so much as organize fundraisers. And yet nothing is done. This is because our current elected officials pretty much universally benefit from current laws.
There is popular support to back a reform candidate, third party, or subset of a major party that focuses on the issue of government corruption, and the influence of lobbyists. People get mad about lobbying and corruption and they are right to do so. This just needs to be harnessed to get people elected on promises of doing something about it. If the tea party, for example, focused on that topic they'd be getting a lot more support from the other end of the political spectrum, of course since the tea party is largely run, promoted, and marketed by lobbyists this is unlikely. Still, a real grassroots campaign could be run.
Rather than supporting third parties and hoping they'll help, why not focus on why all congress critters are in the pockets of defense contractors in the first place. It's because the lobbyists of those defense contractors get them elected by supporting their party's coffers, organizing fundraisers, and sometimes directly running media campaigns. The public doesn't want that and making it an issue can get those people to stop relying upon those lobbyists or get them replaced by others not suckling at their teat. A solid strategy is better than throwing your vote behind a losing candidate as a protest. The focus should be on lobbying reform and let the chips fall where they may.
Because plugins are an accessibility nightmare compared to HTML.
How? Idiots using flash for static text content are an accessibility nightmare, but for straight-up video, putting it in a video tag rather than an embed tag isn't going to make any difference.
Let me tackle this. What if you're deaf, but want to have an audio track close captioned for you? Does the Flash player support it? Nope, you're screwed. Does the HTML5 implementation of your browser support it? Find another implementation, like one specifically for the deaf, because it is an open standard third parties can build these solutions.
What if you're blind and want to listen to video but don't want to waste CPU cycles decoding the video stream? See the above.
What if you have very poor vision and need to be able to quickly and easily zoom the video all the way in, possibly with a separate non-zoomed version on another monitor? See above.
What if you're paralyzed and have a palsy and using the controls of Adobe Flash Player are too hard with the little joystick in your mouth with a single click button you use to control the cursor? With HTML, yup you guessed it, anyone can make an implementation and multiple people are doing so, including ones for specialized users.
Contrary to your assertion, using an open standard with video codecs streamed makes an enormous difference for accessibility to the handicapped and for that matter for accessibility to anyone else using a device Adobe doesn't care about, Like Linux desktops or voice controlled systems.
The Flash based game can be as elegant as "Machinarium" and it can be here today and not something we have to wait for until 2014.
And you can build elegant HTML5 games today, although they'll only run properly on a subset of browsers. But then, Try running Machinarium on your iPhone where there is no Flash support, or on your Android, where Flash is a dog, or on Linux, where Flash is buggy and slow and incomplete, or even on your Mac laptop where Flash is poorly implemented and rarely even uses the graphics card. So you might be wondering, "what's the difference?" Either way you only target a subset of platforms. The difference is, with HTML5 it is an open standard with multiple open and closed source implementations and going forward, nothing stops anyone from building it on their platform. With Flash, we're stuck waiting for Adobe to get off their asses and build better players and while we're at it, we're stuck waiting for them to fix all the security holes. With HTML5 if we don't like an implementation we can switch browsers or phones or OS's in many combinations and all the players are competing to be the best because they want the user base. With Flash it is a one company show and if we don't like the crap Adobe makes we can do nothing but hope people move to HTML5.
It also means you can't do what you want with it. Believe it or not, there are some apps I want to stay open all the time.
Absolutely. If you don't have the option of running any and every app in the background your choices are limited. If you are a geek and knowledgable to make an informed choice about battery life versus the desired functionality, it is certainly not ideal to be restricted by what is allowed in the store, so if you want the iPhone hardware you probably will jailbreak it or install a different OS; or more likely buy one of the more open Android phones.
For phone makers and average users, however, it makes more sense to cover the limited multitasking use cases with services (alarms, audio playing, push messaging, etc.). There really aren't that many tasks a non-geek user wants to have running in the background and as has been shown in the Android ecosystem, if it is allowed, developers will code horrible apps that truly destroy battery performance on phones, moreover most users won't understand it is the app causing the problem and will blame the phone maker. They don't know the Facebook app or Handcent is failing to properly suspend or forgoing push messaging and constantly connecting to the internet and pinging remote servers. They just think the HTC EVO is a piece of crap because the battery only lasts 4 hours so they decide to never buy and HTC again. Guess what solution the average user and HTC prefers? Google is working on a solution now, but we don't yet know what it will be.
If the battery life of iPhones is with some significant software led saving then that's the only possible conclusion because iPhones often need charging as frequently as any other equally priced competitor on the market, if not more frequently in some cases.
I did a quick search using the terms "iphone android battery". Try it yourself. Of the top ten hits, eight are comparisons that say the iPhone is winning on battery performance versus a specific Android phone or Android phones in general. One was not a comparison. One claims the Samsung Infuse "should have a better battery life" based upon the hardware but did not perform any actual tests. So where do you get this idea that iPhones don't do better for battery performance than Android phones? Google's own Android blogs have developers talking about the problem regularly with some calling it Android's biggest weakness right now. Maybe you'd care to provide some reference to support your opinion?
I'm just thankful that there also exist phones that not only do simple app switching, but allow the *user* decide if they wish to expend a little extra power on a useful background task...
Oh, I completely agree. For geeks it's much better to have the choice to screw things up. I can run apps to monitor the battery and network usage of each app and do my homework on how those apps perform using some Google-fu. Normal users, on the other hand, cannot or will not do the above. That's why most prefer a curated experience where they get good battery life because Apple forces developers to adhere to strict use of limited APIs connecting to built in devices optimized for battery usage. They don't want to have to try to figure out why their battery life sucks, they want it to "just work".
Oh, and Google recognizes this as well. If you take a look at their Android blogs, you'll see several comments by Google engineers about trying to come up with a solution to this very problem that will allow Android phones to "just work" for battery life without the same restrictions Apple has implemented. Hopefully they'll manage a solution some day.
The problem is, the former is easier to code and the way developers are used to doing things on desktops where they don't have to worry about battery and data nearly as much.
multi-tasking is all about manageing multiple CPU entities and nothing at all to do with battery life or power management.
Thank you for demonstrating my point.
Seriously though, if you're using the term so narrowly WP7 already has multitasking and iOS always did. Clearly you did not RTFA.
Just tell me, how many people would have died in the Arizona attack on Giffords - if the guy had a knife. Perhaps zero.
Way to completely miss the point of the thread. You're working on the idea that the attacker, unable to find a firearm would have used a knife. The point made here is, he could just as easily decide to use a bomb or poison. (You know using recipes from some book like the one we're discussing.) That is certainly the case in some south american countries where drive by pipe bombings are incredibly common.
Making it a little harder to get the "tool" [a gun] and how much damage capability [power] it has goes a long way toward preventing it from being used and useful in a crime of convenience.
True, but it also makes it less likely to be used to prevent a crime. Further it doesn't mean that the overall problem is decreased due to the availably of other suitable tools. By your argument passing a law banning a particular color of gun would be useful. I think you have to actually look at it from a scientific perspective. Show evidence that changes to particular gun ownership laws are likely to result in decreased murder and violent crime in general and you have an argument. Handwave about the obviousness of the truth of your unsupported (and some would say falsified) hypothesis and you're just blowing hot air.
Multitasking on mobile devices is a different problem than multitasking on desktops. With a desktop, the challenges are primarily allocating memory and CPU. With mobile devices, network and battery are the resources that need to be optimized. So with a desktop app, you can shove it int he background, give it limited cpu cycles and memory without any architectural changes. With mobile devices, it is a lot harder to limit because you don't want the CPU running all the time and even if nothing else is using the network connection, letting some background app use it constantly will result in draining the user's battery and potentially costing them data usage fees.
A good example is push based notifications. If applications ping a server regularly to see if they have updates or if there is a message, that uses a lot more of both resources than if it subscribes to a network service that notifies the device when the same event occurs. The problem is, the former is easier to code and the way developers are used to doing things on desktops where they don't have to worry about battery and data nearly as much.
So when Microsoft says they are adding in support for multitasking, does that mean:
In short, multitasking for mobile devices is a difficult problem, with different challenges from traditional multitasking on desktops. Google engineers have repeatedly stated that they consider multitasking and battery life problems to be one of their greatest challenges and current failings. Microsoft announcing that they're coming out with something is, then interesting, although it may be a poor clone of one of the other vendors' implementations.
IOS STILL doesn't have actual multi-tasking... it just allows certain threads to continue running in the background.. but the app itself is suspended it's basically just fast app switching +
And and iPhone users are very thankful for the battery life that saves.
I'm all for mantaining the number of TLDs low, because it will be a mess to try to remember some address when you have no clue of the TLD, but I just can't see the point in not allowing this or that specific TLD.
Aside from the fact that you clearly haven't read the proposal by the GAC, what makes you think anyone is trying to forbid the creation of TLDs? The proposal is that veto power for what used to be called “Morality and Public Order Objections” and which is now called "Limited Public Interest Objection" be replaced in its entirety such that a group of representatives of at least 100 governments be convened and that any of them could object to a TLD, but then any other member could object to the objection. This replaces the process in place now where TLDs are rejected for moral reasons by the International Chamber of Commerce and another business association no one has ever heard of called ICE. The proposal isn't that governments can block TLDs so much as that moral objections must be put forward by democratically elected governments instead of by business associations.
On the surface, not as bad an idea... but why should any government interference be accepted.
Because governments represent the people through a democratic process.
Isn't the idea of ICANN to be the decision making body?
ICANN mostly represents corporations and has completely failed in their promises to move towards democratic representation of the people from the bottom up. Why the hell do you think sovereign nations from around the world, elected by their people are worse than a completely non-democratic process run by an organization contracted by the US government?
Moreover, from a completely pragmatic view, it is entirely possible that the UN will decide as a group they have had enough at set up alternative root TLD servers and everyone except the US will switch over. China is pushing really hard for this right now. Then most of us will have to deal with the conflicts and worry about multiple root TLD systems.
Whatever else this proposal is, it is a very moderate compromise, allowing other countries some influence, and giving the giant bureaucracy that is the UN less ability and reason to take over the process.