Dunno if it supports IE9, but Chrome Experiments does allow Firefox (well, IceWeasel if it matters), Opera and Midori just fine, not just Chrome. Meanwhile, all of the above give an "You'll need to download Safari to view this demo." message on Apple's HTML5 website, all with the default UA.
Yeah. With their desire to subvert industry standards for their own gain, their love for releasing overpriced, crippled and locked-in products and their ability to convince their fanboys that Big Brother Knows Better(tm), Apple is more like the v2.0 of the '80s IBM than Microsoft or Adobe.
They could have made a demo that only uses those features which are already widely supported, but it wouldn't have been as impressive. Or they could have made a demo that uses the latest bleeding-edge proposals for HTML5, and let it fail on most people's browsers - perhaps even worse.
The problem of using the "latest bleeding-edge proposals" is that there's no certainity that they'll be approved, so showcasing them to developers in hopes of getting them to use them is extremely irresponsible if not downright 'evil', as if the devs use them and the proposal falls through your browser would be the only one their websites works in without rewriting potentially substantial parts of it.
Because they haven't been shown to be beneficial to society at large versus not granting anything to begin with, particularly when in the time it took you to narrow down a single patent to a not-so-harmful form a thousand others have slipped you by.
It's not the format that's insecure, only Adobe's particularly shitty implementation of it. Now, if you *want* Javascript and Flash on your document format you're screwed, but I'd say in that case you are really Doing It Wrong(tm).
The problem of central update mechanisms is when they fail. More specifically, when the one maintaining it decides that fixing bugs is too boring a job and goes off to work elsewhere.
For an example of that, see Java on OSX and its terrible, terrible security record with respect to Linux and Windows all because the latter ports were maintained by Sun themselves rather than our favorite fruit-flavored company.
Because they're already exposed to risks of the sort by every other piece of software they've ever used. If you don't want that then you should be campaigning to abolish software patents, not be spreading FUD against Google.
Must you post that FUD in every single Theora- and WebM-related topic *ever*? what you're asking for is something that, quite honestly, would be so fucking dangerous to Google that no company, I repeat, NO company in the industry would even dare *suggest* something of the sort.
And that's without comparing them to MPEG-LA, whose licensing terms are so fucking shallow that they don't even protect you from *them* if you happen to use a patent of theirs not included in the tiny list your MPEG4 license pays for, or you do use one of those but in a manner they don't approve of.
By what measure? if by "popularity of an app written in it" then C is king by virtue of most OSes being written in it, pretty much all drivers and so on. If by "number of developers writing code in it" then Javascript would almost surely rank below Java and C++, there's a lot of Javascript on the 'net but I'd say most of it is simply copy&paste'd from somewhere else or automagically written by a framework the admin installed. And if by "popularity of its interpreter" then Javascript would be first only if you disregard the bare metal as being an "interpreter" of sorts for compiled C/C++/Pascal/etc, an unfair comparison by most standards.
You know, I've been learning Ada these past couple months and I find it to be a thing of beauty, one of the most elegant languages I've ever had the pleasure to use. And besides, its F/OSS support is incredible for such a non-mainstream language.
So yeah, this post is off-topic as hell but, for anyone interested in learning a new language, don't be discouraged by the above poster putting Ada besides the attrocity inflicted upon mankind under the name of Cobol and do give it a try.
That's idiotic, sorry. Unlike the majority of Slashdot's population I *do* have a girlfriend, and yet (as a programmer) I'm able to find elegant designs and code "beautiful". It is not unthinkable, therefore, that there are designers out there that are able to find elegant websites similarly so, though I'd dispute the fact that they can be both beautiful and made in Flash;)
Programming and web design are art, much like photography, music and dance. Art can be beautiful, therefore, art can potentially be considered "drop-dead gorgeous" even if you're not a shut-in nerd virgin stuck in their mother's basement.
It's not aimed at the mass market, it's aimed at students and business users. To make an analogy, if the iPad is a big-ass iPhone then this is a big-ass Palm III, which may not have been popular on the mass market either but did well enough in the corporate world to sustain Palm for years.
Now I don't blame you if you're not in the target market for this device, it *is* a fairly restricted market compared to the whole (or even the iPad's), but there is a need for a low-cost tablet that can double as an eReader in both universities and businesses, and this looks like a pretty good fit for that market IMHO. And as part of that market (being a student), I'm excited about this;)
Am I out of line by whining that we all should be well over the use of monochrome displays in these devices?
Well, yeah.
When I see an eReader using a monochrome display I think "that looks so last decade..."
What matters isn't how something looks, but how it works and, unless you're interested in photographs and videos (ie, not in the target market for this device) monochrome works perfectly fine as it is. Plus if it reduces costs so much that they can sell it for only $199, I'm all for it.
and the strange thing to me is that it takes Apple and its iPad to deliver full color output?
No, we've had color tablets for *years*, Apple's only "invention" was giving theirs a sane price.
At first I was fairly skeptical of this eee-Pad or whatever, I thought it was gonna be little more than an iPad clone with the Apple logo switched by an Asus one, and retail for about as much. But this actually looks like an interesting device, not one aimed at the "rich hipster" who wants to watch Blu-Ray movies on his living room, but one aimed at students and workers which likely thought about getting a Tablet PC to do their work, but found the iPad too limited and the others too expensive.
Monochrome? so are my notes. Small? so much the better. Camera on the back? I'm not interested in chatting up with it, I want it to document stuff. And to top it off it's only $199. Just genius.
I don't, I'm getting tired of people responding to any criticism of Apple as a "why do you hate freedom!?". Yes, they're free to change their terms for new customers, just as we're free to say they're greedy fucks for doing so.
Or, to paraphrase the GP... how terrible that we have dared use our freedom of speech to criticize Apple's move. Vile, just vile.
Meanwhile, these vendors seem totally oblivious to the all the things Apple got exactly right with the iPad (form factor, battery life, consistent touch-optimized UI, integration with the existing iTunes ecosystem, revenue generation features for third-party developers built into the system, ability to draw on existing iPhone/Mac developer pool obsessed with user experience, etc.). The companies doing this are going to end up with buggy, slow, awkward devices that consumers won't touch, and they'll be scratching their head saying "But we have more features! It makes no sense!"
You mean like it happened with Android?
To paraphrase the words of the Apple loyalists... maybe it's just you're not in the target market for these tablets.
Disregard any tablet running a desktop OS; they've been on the market for years and nobody wants them.
Nobody wants them for $1500, this one is gonna be $500. If you ask people around on whether they'd like a Tablet PC or not, the most common response you'd have gotten was "no, they're too expensive", not "no, they're running the same OS as my computer". This one addresses that issue, it remains to be seen whether it'll be enough or not, but I don't think you're justified in dismissing it outright.
Now, I'm not in the market for this product either as I find the idea of Windows on a tablet to be dumb as bricks, but I hate this idea circulating around, that unless you don't copy Apple's designs 100% you can't succeed in today's market when reality has proven that wrong again and again for the last quarter of a century.
What these "controversal" scie... crackpots do is they present a theory, then try to morph and fudge the result of their "research" to match those theories. Wrong order of procedure.
for the FOSS world, it's a tremendous lost opportunity that appears to have been driven by little more than a desire to emulate corporate software development, which many FOSS developers admire for reasons known only to them and God.
You yourself stated that high-level languages allow for a much faster rate of development, yet you dismiss the idea of using them in the F/OSS world as a mere "desire to emulate corporate software development"?
Hell, you also forgot another big reason: high-level code is almost always *far* more readable than its equivalent set of low-level instructions, the appeal of which for F/OSS ought to be similarly obvious.
Sorry but no, the reason practically the whole industry has been moving towards high-level languages isn't because we're all lazy, and if you worked in the field you'd probably know why.
Scientists really have to do a better job at communicating clearly with less jargon
No, what we need is linguists developing a better (ie, more formal) way to communicate ideas clearly, after that making scientists translate their formal languages to this new language ought to be trivial, but not before. Otherwise, the informality of human languages will mean that people can derive wildly different meanings from your statements, which they *will* use to "prove" you wrong and, therefore, justify their refusal of science.
Take, for instance, the statement: "the square of all numbers is positive or zero". Relatively simple and jargon-free, and for most intents and purposes "correct". Yet here comes Random Nerd and proudly proclaims "but the square of i is -1, which is negative!". Cue expressions of disgust from the audience towards the statement, and the one that made it. So now here comes along *another* scientist, and trying to fix the original presenter's "mistake", proclaims "for all n belonging to the set of real numbers or any subset thereof, the square of n is c, with c greater than or equal to zero". Cue expressions of disgust from the audience towards such jargon-filled scientific "explanations" that leave Joe Average knowing even less than he did before.
Of course the example itself is fairly basic and even the "jargon-filled" explanation wouldn't take *that* long for Joe Average to understand, but I think my basic point should be clear. When making refutals in front of an ignorant audience, people don't care *why* you're wrong, under which conditions is your statement ineffective and under which ones it serves as a good enough generalization, all they'll know afterwards is that you were *wrong*, as in *not right*, as in *not worth listening to*, because hey! you were wrong, and that's cuz you're dumb.
And the saddest thing is, to give examples all I'd need to do is to post links to recent Slashdot discussions on Mathematics or Physics. We do have plenty of PhDs around here, but there's far, *far* too many "I don't need a PhD to understand that you're wrong!" people around here too. Me? I know enough to know that I do not know;)
In my own observation, Science is following in these exact same footsteps.
As per TFA?
And lest you disagree, pause and see if you can think of any science that is (or should be) in debate, yet any doubt triggers 'blasphemy' reflexes from within the faithful. If we're talking about a path to truth, rather than dogma, then this would not occur. People would be instead encouraged to do their own research and come to their own conclusions.
Wrong. The problem here is that, for many scientific topics, any and all research is flooded by questions from ignorant people, which scientists aren't responding to and aren't expected to.
If you, as a mathematician, are discussing your work on the Riemann Hypothesis, you can't be expected to give a serious reply if somebody on the audience asks "why is i the square root of -1?", as obviously anybody incapable of answering that lacks the ability to judge your work fairly and accurately. Yet that's exactly what happens in many scientific fields, and so when the requisite (and appropiate) RTFM response comes, it's dismissed by the ignorant as a "'blasphemy' reflex" from a "faithful" rather than a heartfelt plea for the audience to RTFM before asking dumb questions.
It's like when Gabe Newell at Valve goes on about how he hates DRM and thinks it's useless, all the time whilst peddling the most restrictive gaming DRM on the planet via Steam until Ubisoft managed to outdo them for that title.
Actually, even before Ubisoft we had TAGES and SecuROM with limited activations so Steam still wasn't the most restrictive. But your general point still stands.
Well, there's also the fact that XP is an Operating System and Starcraft II is just a game. If a game refuses to run it's $50 down the drain, but if your OS stops working and you're unable to do your work because of it, it's your whole salary that's going up in flames not just the cost of the WinXP license.
Slashdot Mirror
Dunno if it supports IE9, but Chrome Experiments does allow Firefox (well, IceWeasel if it matters), Opera and Midori just fine, not just Chrome. Meanwhile, all of the above give an "You'll need to download Safari to view this demo." message on Apple's HTML5 website, all with the default UA.
Yeah. With their desire to subvert industry standards for their own gain, their love for releasing overpriced, crippled and locked-in products and their ability to convince their fanboys that Big Brother Knows Better(tm), Apple is more like the v2.0 of the '80s IBM than Microsoft or Adobe.
They could have made a demo that only uses those features which are already widely supported, but it wouldn't have been as impressive. Or they could have made a demo that uses the latest bleeding-edge proposals for HTML5, and let it fail on most people's browsers - perhaps even worse.
The problem of using the "latest bleeding-edge proposals" is that there's no certainity that they'll be approved, so showcasing them to developers in hopes of getting them to use them is extremely irresponsible if not downright 'evil', as if the devs use them and the proposal falls through your browser would be the only one their websites works in without rewriting potentially substantial parts of it.
Because they haven't been shown to be beneficial to society at large versus not granting anything to begin with, particularly when in the time it took you to narrow down a single patent to a not-so-harmful form a thousand others have slipped you by.
It's not the format that's insecure, only Adobe's particularly shitty implementation of it. Now, if you *want* Javascript and Flash on your document format you're screwed, but I'd say in that case you are really Doing It Wrong(tm).
The problem of central update mechanisms is when they fail. More specifically, when the one maintaining it decides that fixing bugs is too boring a job and goes off to work elsewhere.
For an example of that, see Java on OSX and its terrible, terrible security record with respect to Linux and Windows all because the latter ports were maintained by Sun themselves rather than our favorite fruit-flavored company.
Because they're already exposed to risks of the sort by every other piece of software they've ever used. If you don't want that then you should be campaigning to abolish software patents, not be spreading FUD against Google.
Must you post that FUD in every single Theora- and WebM-related topic *ever*? what you're asking for is something that, quite honestly, would be so fucking dangerous to Google that no company, I repeat, NO company in the industry would even dare *suggest* something of the sort.
And that's without comparing them to MPEG-LA, whose licensing terms are so fucking shallow that they don't even protect you from *them* if you happen to use a patent of theirs not included in the tiny list your MPEG4 license pays for, or you do use one of those but in a manner they don't approve of.
Rule number one is, you do not talk about the rules.
C'mon, you were asking for it.
Not that it'll stop people from trying, though ;)
By what measure? if by "popularity of an app written in it" then C is king by virtue of most OSes being written in it, pretty much all drivers and so on. If by "number of developers writing code in it" then Javascript would almost surely rank below Java and C++, there's a lot of Javascript on the 'net but I'd say most of it is simply copy&paste'd from somewhere else or automagically written by a framework the admin installed. And if by "popularity of its interpreter" then Javascript would be first only if you disregard the bare metal as being an "interpreter" of sorts for compiled C/C++/Pascal/etc, an unfair comparison by most standards.
You know, I've been learning Ada these past couple months and I find it to be a thing of beauty, one of the most elegant languages I've ever had the pleasure to use. And besides, its F/OSS support is incredible for such a non-mainstream language.
So yeah, this post is off-topic as hell but, for anyone interested in learning a new language, don't be discouraged by the above poster putting Ada besides the attrocity inflicted upon mankind under the name of Cobol and do give it a try.
That's idiotic, sorry. Unlike the majority of Slashdot's population I *do* have a girlfriend, and yet (as a programmer) I'm able to find elegant designs and code "beautiful". It is not unthinkable, therefore, that there are designers out there that are able to find elegant websites similarly so, though I'd dispute the fact that they can be both beautiful and made in Flash ;)
Programming and web design are art, much like photography, music and dance. Art can be beautiful, therefore, art can potentially be considered "drop-dead gorgeous" even if you're not a shut-in nerd virgin stuck in their mother's basement.
It's not aimed at the mass market, it's aimed at students and business users. To make an analogy, if the iPad is a big-ass iPhone then this is a big-ass Palm III, which may not have been popular on the mass market either but did well enough in the corporate world to sustain Palm for years.
Now I don't blame you if you're not in the target market for this device, it *is* a fairly restricted market compared to the whole (or even the iPad's), but there is a need for a low-cost tablet that can double as an eReader in both universities and businesses, and this looks like a pretty good fit for that market IMHO. And as part of that market (being a student), I'm excited about this ;)
Am I out of line by whining that we all should be well over the use of monochrome displays in these devices?
Well, yeah.
When I see an eReader using a monochrome display I think "that looks so last decade..."
What matters isn't how something looks, but how it works and, unless you're interested in photographs and videos (ie, not in the target market for this device) monochrome works perfectly fine as it is. Plus if it reduces costs so much that they can sell it for only $199, I'm all for it.
and the strange thing to me is that it takes Apple and its iPad to deliver full color output?
No, we've had color tablets for *years*, Apple's only "invention" was giving theirs a sane price.
At first I was fairly skeptical of this eee-Pad or whatever, I thought it was gonna be little more than an iPad clone with the Apple logo switched by an Asus one, and retail for about as much. But this actually looks like an interesting device, not one aimed at the "rich hipster" who wants to watch Blu-Ray movies on his living room, but one aimed at students and workers which likely thought about getting a Tablet PC to do their work, but found the iPad too limited and the others too expensive.
Monochrome? so are my notes. Small? so much the better. Camera on the back? I'm not interested in chatting up with it, I want it to document stuff. And to top it off it's only $199. Just genius.
I don't, I'm getting tired of people responding to any criticism of Apple as a "why do you hate freedom!?". Yes, they're free to change their terms for new customers, just as we're free to say they're greedy fucks for doing so.
Or, to paraphrase the GP... how terrible that we have dared use our freedom of speech to criticize Apple's move. Vile, just vile.
So, still using abacus, huh?
Meanwhile, these vendors seem totally oblivious to the all the things Apple got exactly right with the iPad (form factor, battery life, consistent touch-optimized UI, integration with the existing iTunes ecosystem, revenue generation features for third-party developers built into the system, ability to draw on existing iPhone/Mac developer pool obsessed with user experience, etc.). The companies doing this are going to end up with buggy, slow, awkward devices that consumers won't touch, and they'll be scratching their head saying "But we have more features! It makes no sense!"
You mean like it happened with Android?
To paraphrase the words of the Apple loyalists... maybe it's just you're not in the target market for these tablets.
Disregard any tablet running a desktop OS; they've been on the market for years and nobody wants them.
Nobody wants them for $1500, this one is gonna be $500. If you ask people around on whether they'd like a Tablet PC or not, the most common response you'd have gotten was "no, they're too expensive", not "no, they're running the same OS as my computer". This one addresses that issue, it remains to be seen whether it'll be enough or not, but I don't think you're justified in dismissing it outright.
Now, I'm not in the market for this product either as I find the idea of Windows on a tablet to be dumb as bricks, but I hate this idea circulating around, that unless you don't copy Apple's designs 100% you can't succeed in today's market when reality has proven that wrong again and again for the last quarter of a century.
What these "controversal" scie... crackpots do is they present a theory, then try to morph and fudge the result of their "research" to match those theories. Wrong order of procedure.
Do you have proof of that?
for the FOSS world, it's a tremendous lost opportunity that appears to have been driven by little more than a desire to emulate corporate software development, which many FOSS developers admire for reasons known only to them and God.
You yourself stated that high-level languages allow for a much faster rate of development, yet you dismiss the idea of using them in the F/OSS world as a mere "desire to emulate corporate software development"?
Hell, you also forgot another big reason: high-level code is almost always *far* more readable than its equivalent set of low-level instructions, the appeal of which for F/OSS ought to be similarly obvious.
Sorry but no, the reason practically the whole industry has been moving towards high-level languages isn't because we're all lazy, and if you worked in the field you'd probably know why.
About Mathematics and Physics I meant. Guess that's only further proof of the problems of informal languages, isn't it?
Scientists really have to do a better job at communicating clearly with less jargon
No, what we need is linguists developing a better (ie, more formal) way to communicate ideas clearly, after that making scientists translate their formal languages to this new language ought to be trivial, but not before. Otherwise, the informality of human languages will mean that people can derive wildly different meanings from your statements, which they *will* use to "prove" you wrong and, therefore, justify their refusal of science.
Take, for instance, the statement: "the square of all numbers is positive or zero". Relatively simple and jargon-free, and for most intents and purposes "correct". Yet here comes Random Nerd and proudly proclaims "but the square of i is -1, which is negative!". Cue expressions of disgust from the audience towards the statement, and the one that made it. So now here comes along *another* scientist, and trying to fix the original presenter's "mistake", proclaims "for all n belonging to the set of real numbers or any subset thereof, the square of n is c, with c greater than or equal to zero". Cue expressions of disgust from the audience towards such jargon-filled scientific "explanations" that leave Joe Average knowing even less than he did before.
Of course the example itself is fairly basic and even the "jargon-filled" explanation wouldn't take *that* long for Joe Average to understand, but I think my basic point should be clear. When making refutals in front of an ignorant audience, people don't care *why* you're wrong, under which conditions is your statement ineffective and under which ones it serves as a good enough generalization, all they'll know afterwards is that you were *wrong*, as in *not right*, as in *not worth listening to*, because hey! you were wrong, and that's cuz you're dumb.
And the saddest thing is, to give examples all I'd need to do is to post links to recent Slashdot discussions on Mathematics or Physics. We do have plenty of PhDs around here, but there's far, *far* too many "I don't need a PhD to understand that you're wrong!" people around here too. Me? I know enough to know that I do not know ;)
In my own observation, Science is following in these exact same footsteps.
As per TFA?
And lest you disagree, pause and see if you can think of any science that is (or should be) in debate, yet any doubt triggers 'blasphemy' reflexes from within the faithful. If we're talking about a path to truth, rather than dogma, then this would not occur. People would be instead encouraged to do their own research and come to their own conclusions.
Wrong. The problem here is that, for many scientific topics, any and all research is flooded by questions from ignorant people, which scientists aren't responding to and aren't expected to.
If you, as a mathematician, are discussing your work on the Riemann Hypothesis, you can't be expected to give a serious reply if somebody on the audience asks "why is i the square root of -1?", as obviously anybody incapable of answering that lacks the ability to judge your work fairly and accurately. Yet that's exactly what happens in many scientific fields, and so when the requisite (and appropiate) RTFM response comes, it's dismissed by the ignorant as a "'blasphemy' reflex" from a "faithful" rather than a heartfelt plea for the audience to RTFM before asking dumb questions.
It's like when Gabe Newell at Valve goes on about how he hates DRM and thinks it's useless, all the time whilst peddling the most restrictive gaming DRM on the planet via Steam until Ubisoft managed to outdo them for that title.
Actually, even before Ubisoft we had TAGES and SecuROM with limited activations so Steam still wasn't the most restrictive. But your general point still stands.
Well, there's also the fact that XP is an Operating System and Starcraft II is just a game. If a game refuses to run it's $50 down the drain, but if your OS stops working and you're unable to do your work because of it, it's your whole salary that's going up in flames not just the cost of the WinXP license.