Jazelle has been gone for years. None of the Cortex series include it. It gave worse performance to a modern JIT, but in a lower memory footprint. It's only useful when you want to run Java apps in 4MB of RAM.
Getting back on topic: the last ARM architecture, ARMv8, is far from what was called "RISC" back in the '70s. E.g. it can run instructions of different sizes (16 vs 32 bit), it has 4 specialized instructions for AES, registers with different sizes (32, 64 and 128 bits), instructions for running a subset of the Java bytecode, a rich set of SIMD operations and specialized instructions for SHA-1 and SHA-256.
Similarily the architecture supported by the new Atom chips (which is AMD64/x86-64 BTW, IA32 is only present for backward compatibility) is almost universally run on RISC-like processors that have instruction translators. Considering that the increased density of the x86-64 instructions usually allows to save more cache transistors than the ones required for decoding the instructions themselves, I think that the power consumption differences that we see are more due to the implementation and different traditional focus areas of ARM vs Intel/AMD than inherent differences in the instruction sets.
You seem to think that HTML 4.01 is a subset of the HTML (a.k.a. "the standard formerly known as HTML5"). That's not the case, HTML 4.01 is a completely different and incompatible HTML dialect. When I say incompatible I mean that 4.01-compliant browsers (which obviously don't exist and never did) would not be able to correctly display ANY of the following website: slashdot, Wikipedia, Google, Yahoo, BBC, CNN, eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and many, many others. If you want an HTML 4.01 browser, you can't just limit existing browsers to a subset of their functionality, you have to write one yourself because 4.01 was so utterly broken and incompatible with the actual web that exists in this reality that no browser vendor ever implemented it. Even lynx is more similar to HTML than to HTML 4.01 when it comes to parsing web pages, otherwise it would be completely unusable. HTML 4.01 was promoted to a "standard" only because the W3C rules at the time were very lax, with the current rules that require two independent complete implementations, it would still be a "working draft".
The web browser interoperability in the last few years (after IE6) is a product of the WHATWG standard, that started in 2004 (it wasn't called HTML back then). Just an example: HTML 4.01 doesn't specify a way to parse HTML that actually works and doesn't specify at all how to handle errors. The result is that every browser had a slightly different and incompatible parsing algorithm. Let me make this clear: no browser ever implemented HTML 4.01. Not a single one of them. Because HTML 4.01 was extremely buggy and unmaintained. It caused the IE6 era. The HTML5 draft on W3C is less buggy but still severely incomplete, stopping making major changes just means that all browsers vendors are completely ignoring the HTML5 from W3C and going instead for the HTML standard that's actively maintained and updated.
Ian Hickson is the editor of both docs (he's actually the editor of the main HTML standard, the WHATWG one; the draft hosted by the W3C is really nothing more that an old and incomplete copy that nobody among browser vendors takes seriously).
And, yes, the WHATWG has done an excellent job so far, bringing much needed features to the web and creating an era of faster and more interoperable browsers. If they had just waited for the W3C we would still be stuck with HTML 4.01, IE6, Flash and other plugins.
Also this is not a new development, HTML (from WHATWG) has started gradually leaving the HTML5 (from W3C) behind a long time ago. Where the two differ, all major browsers (including IE) either already follow HTML or plan to. See this post from more than a year ago: http://blog.whatwg.org/html-is-the-new-html5
When people talk about HTML5 features in browsers and websites, they actually refer to the HTML standard. The HTML5 "working draft" on the W3C website doesn't even support the old 2D canvas API, which is implemented by all browsers!
Look, I love equality for everyone and I think prejudice is stupid. But can we please stop pretending that Muslims are a "race" or an ethnic group? They are the followers of a religion, Islam.
Some religious extremists love spreading this lie because it allows them to stop any criticism (legitimate or not) of their actions by labeling it as "discrimination" or even "racism".
Please don't fall for it: there's a very important difference between attributes like ethnicity, skin color, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, place of birth and other characteristics like religion or political ideas.
Everything in the first group is something that people get assigned at birth and cannot change, so discrimination based on them must be strongly opposed. But the stuff in the second group is something that people can change at any time if they want to, so criticizing people for their religion or political ideas should always be fair game.
Funny how the phones designed directly by Google or in strict collaboration with Google (the Nexus series) all have an unlockable booloader and support Google Videos.
I realize you guys are just kidding, but there's a very important and overlooked part of the SPDY protocol. Hopefully TPTB won't understand its implications before it's too late to stop SPDY adoption.
You see, the way I read the spec and the way it's currently implemented, SPDY requires every single connection to be encrypted. It's not optional.
Imagine that, a world where MITM attacks suddenly become much much harder, where your ISP doesn't inject ads in your search results, where your mobile provider cannot "help" you screwing up your HTTP connections with a transparent proxy, where the British government cannot censor a Wikipedia page, where even the small sites can be encrypted because web hosts save bandwidth money by offering this option to everyone.
Imagine a world where net neutrality becomes much harder to break because all big protocols are encrypted all (or at least most) of the time and the deep packet inspection shit that's used much more widely than people think just doesn't work anymore.
SSH, Freenet, Skype BitTorrent and other P2P protocols are already there. This is the chance to do it for HTTP.
Disclaimer: I speak only for myself and not anyone else. IANARE.
FYI, the second "f" is lowercase: the name is Firefox, not "FireFox". While we are on the topic the official abbreviation is FX, despite most people using FF.
You can e.g. mount an ext3 filesystem using the ext2 driver, and ext4 FS using the ext3 module or an ext2 filesystem (as-is, without converting it) using the ext4 module. In fact on current kernels the ext4 module is the preferred way to mount any ext* partition: you get a speed boost even without on-disk changes.
And, BTW, NTFS is not a filesystem, it's a commercial brand for a family of filesystems with frequent small incompatible changes. Try reading a disk formatted on a recent Windows on an older version...
Not everyone searches "who is better republicans or democrats" on Google.:-) (BTW, the first result for me suggests that the "Democrats are better for the economy").
When I search for "cookies" I very much appreciate that the first result is the Wikipedia page for HTTP cookies and the second one is the documentation for the cookielib module in the Python standard library. Both are very relevant results for me.
My grandmother, on the other hand, is probably happier to get a website with recipes.
People in the US searching for "United" probably want an airline website, in the UK some people might be more interested in a soccer team.
Disclaimer: I speak only for myself and not anyone else. IANARE.
IMHO certainly it has not installed the backdoor, but if you wanna be sure I suggest to buy a compatible phone, wipe everything on it, recompile and install Android from source avoiding any proprietary program. We probably agree that's very unlikely that any backdoor would be present in any free/open source program, much less one with such high visibility.
Yes, some Google apps are proprietary (Market, Maps, Videos...), you may want to use open source alternatives if you really don't trust Google.
The latest version (4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich) of the Android source code is available at: http://source.android.com/
Disclaimer: I speak only for myself and not anyone else. IANARE.
Even if they're not mentioned in the Qur'an, they're an integral part of the official Islam in many parts of the world. See the Surah Quran 55:72:
""" It was mentioned by Daraj Ibn Abi Hatim, that Abu al-Haytham 'Adullah Ibn Wahb narrated from Abu Sa'id al-Khudhri, who heard Muhammad saying, 'The smallest reward for the people of Heaven is an abode where there are eighty thousand servants and seventy-two houri, over which stands a dome decorated with pearls, aquamarine and ruby, as wide as the distance from al-Jabiyyah to San'a. """
[...] used to make saboteurs into religious fanatics they aren't.
Look, I love being politically correct as much as most left-wing Europeans, but anyone who yells "Allahu Akbar" ("God is great") and then presses the button counts as a religious fanatic in my book.
At this point I suspect it would be more cost-effective for the rest of the world to pay a one-time contribute to relocate the entirety of Thailand somewhere less affected by natural disasters.
I get your point, but please note that WebGL is a web standard (implemented in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer) and VP8 (I assume you mean VP8, the video codec used in WebM, and not literally VP6 that's obsolete) has multiple free/open source implementations and even its patents are available with very liberal conditions that make them compatible with free software licences.
WebM unfortunately is not (yet?) part of the HTML standard due to strong opposition from Apple and Microsoft, but it's interoperably implemented in Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer (the latter two require the installation of the WebM codec in the OS, all other browsers just work out-of-the-box). It's also the thing that allowed me to not install a proprietary Flash plugin on my last two computers, so I kinda like it.
Avoiding lock-in and proprietary techs on the intertubes is a very good thing, but neither WebGL nor WebM are a problem here, IMO.
It's now possible to make a native client of MAME...which...already was native... uhhh, hmm.
It's not immediately obvious, but there are two advantages in having a program running in NaCl rather than directly on top of the OS:
1) portability: exactly the same code runs in any OS that has a browsers that supports NaCl (right now this means Linux, Mac OS X and Windows);
2) security: users can safely try running it even without knowing if MAME can be trusted (users often are not good at making security decisions); obviously this is not terribly important in this particular case since MAME is free software and is very unlikely to contain any malicious code, but even code written by the good guys can have security bugs that can be exploited if the thing is run directly on top of the OS. With NaCl you only need to keep a single program secure (the browser) to be protected.
Two BIG differences between NaCl and ActiveX
on
MAME Running In Chrome
·
· Score: 5, Informative
1) NaCl is free/open source software, both the SDK and the client implementation in Chromium; ActiveX was proprietary and every program required to be signed by Microsoft to run by default;
2) NaCl is secure (see this IEEE article, it's very interesting) and designed to be portable to different browsers and OSes; you can safely run untrusted code, just like you would do with JavaScript; ActiveX required not only to trust that the controls weren't malicious, but also to trust that they all were free of security bugs: if only a single signed ActiveX control somewhere had a security bug, it could be exploited to p0wn Windows PCs (that's why Microsoft had a growing list of signed controls and another growing list of signed-but-blacklisted controls).
Native Client is certainly not perfect, but please don't compare it to ActiveX. Entirely different beast.
Disclaimer: I speak only for myself and not anyone else. IANARE.
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Jazelle has been gone for years. None of the Cortex series include it. It gave worse performance to a modern JIT, but in a lower memory footprint. It's only useful when you want to run Java apps in 4MB of RAM.
Are you sure? ARM advertises it as part of all architectures from ARMv5 to ARMv8: http://www.arm.com/files/downloads/ARMv8_Architecture.pdf.
Getting back on topic: the last ARM architecture, ARMv8, is far from what was called "RISC" back in the '70s. E.g. it can run instructions of different sizes (16 vs 32 bit), it has 4 specialized instructions for AES, registers with different sizes (32, 64 and 128 bits), instructions for running a subset of the Java bytecode, a rich set of SIMD operations and specialized instructions for SHA-1 and SHA-256.
Similarily the architecture supported by the new Atom chips (which is AMD64/x86-64 BTW, IA32 is only present for backward compatibility) is almost universally run on RISC-like processors that have instruction translators. Considering that the increased density of the x86-64 instructions usually allows to save more cache transistors than the ones required for decoding the instructions themselves, I think that the power consumption differences that we see are more due to the implementation and different traditional focus areas of ARM vs Intel/AMD than inherent differences in the instruction sets.
You seem to think that HTML 4.01 is a subset of the HTML (a.k.a. "the standard formerly known as HTML5"). That's not the case, HTML 4.01 is a completely different and incompatible HTML dialect. When I say incompatible I mean that 4.01-compliant browsers (which obviously don't exist and never did) would not be able to correctly display ANY of the following website: slashdot, Wikipedia, Google, Yahoo, BBC, CNN, eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and many, many others. If you want an HTML 4.01 browser, you can't just limit existing browsers to a subset of their functionality, you have to write one yourself because 4.01 was so utterly broken and incompatible with the actual web that exists in this reality that no browser vendor ever implemented it. Even lynx is more similar to HTML than to HTML 4.01 when it comes to parsing web pages, otherwise it would be completely unusable. HTML 4.01 was promoted to a "standard" only because the W3C rules at the time were very lax, with the current rules that require two independent complete implementations, it would still be a "working draft".
The web browser interoperability in the last few years (after IE6) is a product of the WHATWG standard, that started in 2004 (it wasn't called HTML back then). Just an example: HTML 4.01 doesn't specify a way to parse HTML that actually works and doesn't specify at all how to handle errors. The result is that every browser had a slightly different and incompatible parsing algorithm. Let me make this clear: no browser ever implemented HTML 4.01. Not a single one of them. Because HTML 4.01 was extremely buggy and unmaintained. It caused the IE6 era. The HTML5 draft on W3C is less buggy but still severely incomplete, stopping making major changes just means that all browsers vendors are completely ignoring the HTML5 from W3C and going instead for the HTML standard that's actively maintained and updated.
Ian Hickson is the editor of both docs (he's actually the editor of the main HTML standard, the WHATWG one; the draft hosted by the W3C is really nothing more that an old and incomplete copy that nobody among browser vendors takes seriously).
He explained very clearly the past and current situation: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-archive/2012Jul/0119.html
And, yes, the WHATWG has done an excellent job so far, bringing much needed features to the web and creating an era of faster and more interoperable browsers. If they had just waited for the W3C we would still be stuck with HTML 4.01, IE6, Flash and other plugins.
Also this is not a new development, HTML (from WHATWG) has started gradually leaving the HTML5 (from W3C) behind a long time ago. Where the two differ, all major browsers (including IE) either already follow HTML or plan to. See this post from more than a year ago: http://blog.whatwg.org/html-is-the-new-html5
When people talk about HTML5 features in browsers and websites, they actually refer to the HTML standard. The HTML5 "working draft" on the W3C website doesn't even support the old 2D canvas API, which is implemented by all browsers!
They tried with an atheist but she left the blacklist empty.
We have so much evidence about the existence of the dark matter that's not even funny: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#Observational_evidence
But why do get the strong feeling they meant to say 'after PCs now consoles too'? Am I reading too much between the lines here?
Quite the opposite: you're reading too little.
They're interested in game consoles because they already have the capability to hack into PCs, just like every other script kiddie on this planet.
Also, Adblock Plus is a must.
FYI, it works much better on a dual core and most importantly at least 1 GB of RAM. It's very usable on my Galaxy Nexus.
... LLVM bitcode is not actually architecture-independent...
This surprises me. Could you please explain why?
Look, I love equality for everyone and I think prejudice is stupid. But can we please stop pretending that Muslims are a "race" or an ethnic group? They are the followers of a religion, Islam.
Some religious extremists love spreading this lie because it allows them to stop any criticism (legitimate or not) of their actions by labeling it as "discrimination" or even "racism".
Please don't fall for it: there's a very important difference between attributes like ethnicity, skin color, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, place of birth and other characteristics like religion or political ideas.
Everything in the first group is something that people get assigned at birth and cannot change, so discrimination based on them must be strongly opposed. But the stuff in the second group is something that people can change at any time if they want to, so criticizing people for their religion or political ideas should always be fair game.
Funny how the phones designed directly by Google or in strict collaboration with Google (the Nexus series) all have an unlockable booloader and support Google Videos.
I realize you guys are just kidding, but there's a very important and overlooked part of the SPDY protocol. Hopefully TPTB won't understand its implications before it's too late to stop SPDY adoption.
You see, the way I read the spec and the way it's currently implemented, SPDY requires every single connection to be encrypted. It's not optional.
Imagine that, a world where MITM attacks suddenly become much much harder, where your ISP doesn't inject ads in your search results, where your mobile provider cannot "help" you screwing up your HTTP connections with a transparent proxy, where the British government cannot censor a Wikipedia page, where even the small sites can be encrypted because web hosts save bandwidth money by offering this option to everyone.
Imagine a world where net neutrality becomes much harder to break because all big protocols are encrypted all (or at least most) of the time and the deep packet inspection shit that's used much more widely than people think just doesn't work anymore.
SSH, Freenet, Skype BitTorrent and other P2P protocols are already there. This is the chance to do it for HTTP.
Disclaimer: I speak only for myself and not anyone else. IANARE.
FYI, the second "f" is lowercase: the name is Firefox, not "FireFox". While we are on the topic the official abbreviation is FX, despite most people using FF.
You can e.g. mount an ext3 filesystem using the ext2 driver, and ext4 FS using the ext3 module or an ext2 filesystem (as-is, without converting it) using the ext4 module. In fact on current kernels the ext4 module is the preferred way to mount any ext* partition: you get a speed boost even without on-disk changes.
And, BTW, NTFS is not a filesystem, it's a commercial brand for a family of filesystems with frequent small incompatible changes. Try reading a disk formatted on a recent Windows on an older version...
Not everyone searches "who is better republicans or democrats" on Google. :-) (BTW, the first result for me suggests that the "Democrats are better for the economy").
When I search for "cookies" I very much appreciate that the first result is the Wikipedia page for HTTP cookies and the second one is the documentation for the cookielib module in the Python standard library. Both are very relevant results for me.
My grandmother, on the other hand, is probably happier to get a website with recipes.
People in the US searching for "United" probably want an airline website, in the UK some people might be more interested in a soccer team.
Disclaimer: I speak only for myself and not anyone else. IANARE.
You may have missed the important "then presses the button" part of my comment.
Having sex or making porn (consenting adults): GOOD
Killing people: BAD
The big question is: What has google done?
IMHO certainly it has not installed the backdoor, but if you wanna be sure I suggest to buy a compatible phone, wipe everything on it, recompile and install Android from source avoiding any proprietary program. We probably agree that's very unlikely that any backdoor would be present in any free/open source program, much less one with such high visibility.
Yes, some Google apps are proprietary (Market, Maps, Videos...), you may want to use open source alternatives if you really don't trust Google.
The latest version (4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich) of the Android source code is available at: http://source.android.com/
Disclaimer: I speak only for myself and not anyone else. IANARE.
And those 72 virgins are an urban legend
No they are not.
Even if they're not mentioned in the Qur'an, they're an integral part of the official Islam in many parts of the world. See the Surah Quran 55:72:
""" It was mentioned by Daraj Ibn Abi Hatim, that Abu al-Haytham 'Adullah Ibn Wahb narrated from Abu Sa'id al-Khudhri, who heard Muhammad saying, 'The smallest reward for the people of Heaven is an abode where there are eighty thousand servants and seventy-two houri, over which stands a dome decorated with pearls, aquamarine and ruby, as wide as the distance from al-Jabiyyah to San'a. """
See also: http://wikiislam.net/wiki/72_Virgins
[...] used to make saboteurs into religious fanatics they aren't.
Look, I love being politically correct as much as most left-wing Europeans, but anyone who yells "Allahu Akbar" ("God is great") and then presses the button counts as a religious fanatic in my book.
At this point I suspect it would be more cost-effective for the rest of the world to pay a one-time contribute to relocate the entirety of Thailand somewhere less affected by natural disasters.
I get your point, but please note that WebGL is a web standard (implemented in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer) and VP8 (I assume you mean VP8, the video codec used in WebM, and not literally VP6 that's obsolete) has multiple free/open source implementations and even its patents are available with very liberal conditions that make them compatible with free software licences.
WebM unfortunately is not (yet?) part of the HTML standard due to strong opposition from Apple and Microsoft, but it's interoperably implemented in Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer (the latter two require the installation of the WebM codec in the OS, all other browsers just work out-of-the-box). It's also the thing that allowed me to not install a proprietary Flash plugin on my last two computers, so I kinda like it.
Avoiding lock-in and proprietary techs on the intertubes is a very good thing, but neither WebGL nor WebM are a problem here, IMO.
It's now possible to make a native client of MAME...which...already was native... uhhh, hmm.
It's not immediately obvious, but there are two advantages in having a program running in NaCl rather than directly on top of the OS:
1) portability: exactly the same code runs in any OS that has a browsers that supports NaCl (right now this means Linux, Mac OS X and Windows);
2) security: users can safely try running it even without knowing if MAME can be trusted (users often are not good at making security decisions); obviously this is not terribly important in this particular case since MAME is free software and is very unlikely to contain any malicious code, but even code written by the good guys can have security bugs that can be exploited if the thing is run directly on top of the OS. With NaCl you only need to keep a single program secure (the browser) to be protected.
1) NaCl is free/open source software, both the SDK and the client implementation in Chromium; ActiveX was proprietary and every program required to be signed by Microsoft to run by default;
2) NaCl is secure (see this IEEE article, it's very interesting) and designed to be portable to different browsers and OSes; you can safely run untrusted code, just like you would do with JavaScript; ActiveX required not only to trust that the controls weren't malicious, but also to trust that they all were free of security bugs: if only a single signed ActiveX control somewhere had a security bug, it could be exploited to p0wn Windows PCs (that's why Microsoft had a growing list of signed controls and another growing list of signed-but-blacklisted controls).
Native Client is certainly not perfect, but please don't compare it to ActiveX. Entirely different beast.
Disclaimer: I speak only for myself and not anyone else. IANARE.
It's called capitalism, here's how it works:
1) download the Android 4.0 ICS source code from http://source.android.com/
2) integrate any missing driver from the WebOS Linux kernel to the Android Linux kernel;
3) compile & install;
4) sell the damn thing at $250-300;
5) profit!!!
You're welcome.