The name. They couldn't figure out how to salvage Vista trademark, so they're just making some relatively minor changes, and releasing it with a new name.
So let me ask you, what would you, in all your wisdom, do if you woke up tommorow as the product manager of Windows tommorow?
If you would "shut down and give the money to the shareholders", or you would "drop all code and start over", you'd be the lousiest product manager in the history of software development.
Everyone knows 'Leak' is Public-Relations-Speak for 'Released'. Now if someone uploaded Windows 7, *THAT* would be a leak. But for anything else than that, why can't we call it what it is?
No one said "leaked" in the original blog where the screenshots are. This came from reposts on other blogs and from the Slashdot summary. So if it's "PR" speak, I guess Slashdot's doing the PR work for Microsoft here.
If you want a piece of real news for Windows 7, let me "leak" two your way:
1) Windows 7 will unbundle many bundled apps it used to come with, such as Windows Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker. They will be now offered separately as free downloads on live.com. This means if you use Thunderbird, you never have to install Windows Mail (former Outlook Express) anymore.
2) Windows 2008 and Vista SP1 were based on the same exact source code, packaged with different modules and configuration. Windows 7 will continue this approach, as it will share the exact same source with Windows 2008 R2.
It's for rpm based commercial distros. Debian doesn't fit, and the "alien" program doesn't work on everything.
I've always known it: if Linux eventually kills Windows (somehow), Linux users will just turn "against their own" and start attacking other Linux distros than their current favorite, starting with the big companies that maintain a distro on their own.
But I have to say it's scary to see the symptoms of this so early when Linux doesn't even have some respectable % of the desktop market. This is not a winning behavior for sure.
They happen to be in active (furious, really) development, so the relative speeds change daily if not more often. Especially if you pick a particular test.
If I picked a "particular test" it'd be a very useless benchmark, which is what I said originally.
According to comparative benchmarks, the new engine is around 35% faster than the V8 engine recently introduced in Google Chrome, and 55% faster than Mozilla's TraceMonkey.
If you remember, TraceMonkey was benched to be faster than V8, Brendan Eich said: "We win by 1.28x and 1.19x, respectively. Maybe we should rename TraceMonkey "V10";-)."
And now somehow Safari beats TraceMonkey by 20% more than it beats V8. Funny that.
> you can do anything on the PC that you can do on the Mac.
Huh, I can modify and compile my own Windows kernel?... no? Can I boot up my PC into a target disk mode that lets other computers access it as an external hard drive via firewire?... no? Mount a ZFS filesystem?...no? Write programs that use a POSIX API?... only if I use a fairly slow, buggy middle layer?
That's a surprising laundry list of features completely irrelevant to the needs of an average desktop computer user, and not a very accurate one.
And still, there remains that one thing that PC users can do that Mac users can't: shut the fuck up.
What Tim Sweeney predicted back in the 90-s was that by 2006-7 CPU's would overpower GPU-s. It's the end of 2008, and we're at least 5 years away from CPU-s catching up with the future GPU hardware, and at least 10 years away from standards and engines emerging on mainstream hardware, which will challenge DirectX+OpenGL.
Now he's at it again, and I could understand him, as we often get caught predicting what we want to happen, for what we think will happen. General purpose vector computing power is far better and more interesting for a game engine developer, but he doesn't take any of the remaining economics into account.
For a new piece of technology to be picked up by most people, it has to provide substantial improvement over the current status-quo in some area that matters, while providing good DirectX/OpenGL drivers that people can run (at that point) over two decades of CAD/games/rendering software that uses those technologies.
Not to mention that those CPU-s with general purpose instruction sets, should somehow match the efficiency, cost and performance of GPU-s with fixed pipelines and limited instruction sets. Not a trivial task by any means.
Don't forget where the current growth is: smart phones, ultra mobile laptops, and laptops. Those devices tend to use far more dedicated hardware than desktops, because it's far more efficient (for ex. video/audio playback on smart phones is hardware accelerated).
I don't want to put down their effort, but this is the fifth "first" portable projector I'm hearing about in the last 3-4 years and they all suffer from the same problems: low resolution and extremely low brightness.
One of the pocket projectors was even built into some models of cellphones (the fact we don't hear about such cellphones is a testament about the success of this feature).
The pricetag isn't way too high, but you have to consider that at this low res/lumen, it does perform worse than the screen of a cheap laptop, which costs only $100-200 more, and you already need a laptop to run this projector anyway.
A big, powerful, arrogant company is telling me that their very iffy handling of my personal data is "OK" because some other big, powerful and arrogant company is already doing pretty much the same?
Spinning things against Microsoft/Google even if there's no basis for your statements, is just as bad as Microsoft/Google spinning things in their favor when there IS basis.
In both cases, it's disinformation which promotes acting on "gut feelings" and ignorance.
The feature is quite innocent and handy, as it's apparent that anything less would be torn apart from the community.
Last couple of years Microsoft is showing some signs of listening to their customers and they're well on track repairing their IE/Vista fiascos. If all they get in return is the same overly negative responses, they'll just stop trying.
Windows Vista Guru = salesperson. Good grief Vista must suck.
So I guess Apple Geniuses mean OSX sucks too.
The thing is, Microsoft has played low for many years now, thinking that not replying to the attacks by Linux/Apple is the winning strategy, but it's not.
Just like any defendant has right to a lawyer no matter how quilty you may think he is, Microsoft has stepped up to level the playing field by boosting their marketing to counter the claims by their competition.
I'm not saying anything about the quality of Linux/OSX/Windows, the three of which I use happily, and will continue to. But I think you all need to tone down the drama a bit.
Depending on how those Windows Gurus are trained, they can be in fact helpful for getting an informed opinion on your question, even if it comes with an inevitable bias (there's no such thing as unbiased opinion, if there is, go and ask an Apple Genius which makes a better web server: Linux or OSX. Guess what the answer will be).
Eich disagreed. Although he called V8 "great work, very well engineered," Eich said TraceMonkey has more potential than Google's interpreter for additional, and dramatic, speed improvements. "We've only been working on TraceMonkey for, what, three months now," he said in an interview today. Google has said its Danish engineers had been working on V8 for approximately two years.
TraceMonkey was possible in three months only thanks to the efforts of Adobe on developing the AVM2 engine (aka Tamarin), which took over 2 years to complete and release. Tamarin's Micro JIT engine is what powers the heart of TraceMonkey and is a significant part of the update we'll see in Firefox 3.1.
I don't like that Eich seems to not give any credit to Adobe at all for their contribution, and on top of that tries to belittle the effort of Google, who are technically paying their sallaries at Mozilla Corp.
We win by 1.28x and 1.19x, respectively. Maybe we should rename TraceMonkey "V10";-).
Apart from getting the "asshat" award for this comment, Brendan seems to ignore Firefox currently has the slowest DOM manipulation of any of the major browsers.
And it's that DOM which is the bottleneck in most web applications (as I can testify as a web developer), as JS is mostly used to modify the document in some way, not to compute cryptographic hashes of huge datasets or the like.
I am noticing a consistent trend in Mozilla trying to one-up the competition in their benchmarks, while ignoring the real-world problems of their products. Bad for their users, but in the long run, bad for Mozilla as a company and initiative as well.
"Magpies can recognize themselves in a mirror, confounding the notion that self-awareness is the exclusive preserve of humans and a few higher mammals.
Amazing! Of course:
- There's no such notion that self-awareness is the exclusive preserve of humans and a few higher mammals. - Self awareness and recognizing yourself in a mirror is not the same thing. - You can find specimens of the same species to recognize themselves or not in a mirror based on their past experiences. - Scientists have known for years that magpies have developed higher intelligence without having differentiated cerebral cortex "brain layer".
Given that you can do all this with AJAX, I have one word for you: iframe.
You can use iframe to make clicking the video go to youtube and show transparent interactive overlay interactive advertisements? you gotta know some serious iframe kung-fu.
No, thanks to embedded video, which existed long before Flash, and is finally being done in a standard way with the HTML5 video tag. YouTube never needed Flash, and still doesn't.
Actually it does. Have you noticed in the ToS of YouTube that it's illegal to play and embed their videos in other players than their own?
Do you know why that is? Flash is a full runtime, the player is their own. They can make the embeded player link to their site when you click on it, they can show branding on the UI, they can show related videos, or insert overlayed ads.
A vanilla media player would in fact wreck YouTube's model of embedding videos and they'll have to retract it.
What matters is whether the future is absolutely predetermined or not, and whether our actions are just as absolutely predetermined, us being part of the physical world and made of matter, our thoughts determined by physical phenomena.
Let me ask you this: why does it matter either way. We can't predict it, chances are no one can. Whether on a technical level truly random events occur, or not, is absolutely irrelevant in the big picture.
Notice that in pseudo random generators in computers, the only benefit to using external units that generate randomness based on physical phenomena, is better entropy, hence better distribution and less bias, than more artificial methods.
The outcome on macro-level is exactly the same, whether "down under" we used a "real randomness" or a "damn good almost close to the real thing randomness". The macro level evens out small irregularities, so the subtleties of the mechanics of the quantum events are entirely irrelevant to how our future overall develops anyway.
Oh and I do think there's a deterministic model on a lower level, but I think it's irrelevant for the particular question.
If we hadn't have quantum mechanical phenomena, there would be no room for free will whatsoever, and we'd be all living a predetermined life.
I find it hilarious that people are afraid their choices may be predetermined by the interaction of the sum of their parts and their environment.
Hell, I do hope that this is the case. And I do hope the matter that constitutes me as a human being has a sufficiently good and predictable apparatus that results in consistently good decisions for me. I certainly do not hope that I'm random.
Exhibiting random-like Brownian motion behavior isn't something to be particularly proud of, in fact the simpler an organism is, the more random their decisions. Do you know why? Because they are worse decisions. The worst decision possible out there is a purely random decision, one that isn't predetermined by anything at all, because the being in question is so dumb, it can't factor any information at all into their decision. So why the heck do we seek that?
When we solve a math problem, for example sum two number, the outcome is already predetermined by the numbers we sum, and that's fine, which result would you prefer to produce:
2 + 2 = 4 -- crap I have no free will
2 + 2 = 9929782 -- LOL!! I cheated teh universe!! Free will FTW!
Essentially the fear is that if an unknown to mankind uber-being could magically freeze the universe and analyze sufficiently well every single particle you're made of, and every particle that's about to make contact with you in the next moment, then the uber-being knows what you're about to do next.
Good news and bad news:
1) Good news: there's no such uber-being, and if there was, it wouldn't be constrained to known physical laws, or be made of matter that could interact with our world, and hence be detectable. So what do we care?
2) Bad news: we already know that the majority of people are overall easily predictable with far less than complete information. What worries me more is the quality of their decisions, more than the theory that if I had infinite resources, I could predict them.
Free will doesn't mean "hey I can be random!". That's a shallow, sad definition of free will. If you grab a stone with highly irregular shape and throw it, can you casually predict on which side it'll fall? No? Oh my, that stone's got free will!
Essentially people are concerned whether they possess a random quality or not, that would be also inherent to any piece of inanimate matter around us, if this happens on the quantum level.
Doesn't help us push that "we're special" agenda, does it.
Re:Establishing de facto (open source) standard ?
on
ECMAScript 4.0 Is Dead
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· Score: 1
Mozilla and Google are both on board with abandoning the current work called ES4.
In particular a very curious choice on Google's part, whose GWT implements Java on browsers.
The current decision is that we don't need ES4 as we don't need packages, namespaces, classes, early binding and types on a web language.
Such a damn shame to let ECMAScript edition 4 go in this way.
The small shame is for Adobe's efforts, who entered the ECMA standards body to contribute, donated the entire engine to Mozilla and plenty of other efforts to get this going. But AS3/Flash will not be affected in a big way from this.
The web community as a whole will be. That's where the big shame is: for all of us, web developers. I see that packages, namespaces, classes and early binding are out, likely forever.
Classes are not "sugar", we do need those paradigms when creating bigger applications, because they are more rigid, more readable, more maintainable, understandable. I love lambdas, prototypes and all that, but that's the lower level, the implementation inside a class, inside a package. Those are not interchangable paradigms.
ES4 and AS3 have managed to add those higher constructs to the language, while maintaining full compatibility with all flexible features of ES3 (the JavaScript currently used in browsers).
The reasoning behind dropping all constructs appears to be the preconceived notion that JavaScript must exist in the form of disparate text files loosely connected to each other, something that doesn't scale to bigger efforts at all (and which makes Flash much more viable for such deployment), hence packages and early binding are out. What a mistake.
Who's to say we won't see JAR-like environment where bigger libraries can be compressed together, and some preprocessing can be done to ease the load on the client CPU/bandwidth? I've been praying we get such deployment option soon as a modern web application typically has to download a ton of CSS/JS/image files to build an average GUI nowadays. Why isn't this the focus of ECMA's efforts, but instead the focus is to maintain the status quo and reject us basics that have proven themselves in time to work well in all environments out there.
If you doubt this would work, look no further than Java/Flash applets distributed over the web in this fashion (and Flash is very widely used nowadays).
What ECMA has achieved with their decision, is to basically stagnate the browser environment, and empower third-party cross-browser plugins to eat more from the advanced web application market share, because Adobe's Flash, Microsoft's Silverlight are not even thinking of dropping their mature OOP features, just because ECMA said we don't need them.
I feel like this is only even a story at all because valid PHP 4 code isn't necessarily valid PHP 5 code.
Curious choices by the PHP folks to me, but I'm not really deeply invested enough in PHP to fairly call them good or bad.
The reason for those curious choices was the even more curious choices in the languages design in earlier versions. I would say however, that even the best design gets outdated in time, and it's better to sacrafice compatibility at some point.
Key web-related technologies have reinvented themselves and it's hard to say where they would be if they didn't do so. ASP.NET (vs. old ASP) comes to mind, which was a radical rearchitecture. Flash is another example (on the client side), which almost completely rewrote their rendering stack in version 8, and completely rewrote their script runtime stack in Flash 9.
PHP 4 was released in 2000 and is finally getting an EOL date but is still going to receive patches. Microsoft XP was released in 2001 and its EOL date is 2009, with security patches until 2014.
Technically the EOL was announced in 2007, and it was the beginning of 2008. What ends today is official security patch support.
The patches offered by Mr. Esser are not official, though I'd say he's more than qualified for the job.
Overall, especially for an open source project, I'd say the transition was handled pretty well. What's worrying me more is where the new versions are heading, but that's another discussion.
Even if I was Bill gates, I would NEVER just throw $1000 away on something silly. Because I know the opportunity cost of that is $1,000 donated to some charity. That probably saves 20 kids eyesight in Africa for fucks sake.
You have to be pretty amazingly selfish or stupid to throw that kind of cash away, no matter how much you have. It's just an insult to those living on a pittance.
Have you stopped for a minute to realize spending $1000 on something stupid doesn't make those $1000 disappear. They just end up elsewhere, and are then spent for something else.
The effect of this is entirely local between the stupid guy with the $1000 and the smart guy receiving them. Maybe the smart guy has a smart use for those $1000.
Cuil is not even as good as Yahoo's search or Microsoft's search.
I have to say, I have newly found respect for Yahoo and Microsoft's search after seeing Cuil. The search relevance, image search, news search, maps, localization/i18n search etc.
It's not as easy as it often looks.
And Yahoo/Microsoft are doing a pretty good job. If Google just mysteriously disappears tommorow, I could use Yahoo/Microsoft's search to do my job, but if we're left with something like Cuil, we're all screwed.
How do you spot a company that's more interested in their image than their product?
Many blogs noted that cuil.com can't find itself if you search for "cuil" (without quotes). Few days later, apparently something changed and the first two results for "cuil" are suddenly relevant:
121,578 results for cuil
1. cuil.com (Cuil) 2. cuil.com/info/ (Cuil - The World's Biggest Search Engine) 3. www.properazzi.com/Cuil-Mhuine+Irel... (Properties for sale in Cuil Mhuine, Ireland - Properazzi) 4. cdrom.launch.com/track/504676 (Chase Around The Windmill: Toss The Feathers/Ballinasloe...) 5. topsecretmp3.com/track/159/112152/1... (Download Legal &Chase Around The Windmill: Toss The...)...
Hmm, but result 3 and onward are totally irrelevant, those are the same exact old results we had couple of days ago, where are the reviews, all the press cuil got last few days? Try this, now, search for "cuil " (without quotes, just add a space):
121,578 results for cuil
1. www.properazzi.com/Cuil-Mhuine+Irel... (Properties for sale in Cuil Mhuine, Ireland - Properazzi) 2. cdrom.launch.com/track/504676 (Chase Around The Windmill: Toss The Feathers/Ballinasloe...) 3. topsecretmp3.com/track/159/112152/1... (Download Legal &Chase Around The Windmill: Toss The...)...
Same results, without the first 2 relevant results. I guess someone hand-edited the results for "cuil" but unfortunately forgot to trim the spaces first. Notice it shows 121,578 results in both cases, although the results are apparently different.
Embarassing. I bet if they see this post they'll fix that too. Well, that's one resultset fixed, couple of hundred billion more to go!
I mean, I'm upset with the warrantless eavesdropping issue as much as the next guy. I have gone so far as to rent my own dedicated server and ran all my traffic through thor.
Good job, you replaced the government eavesdropping you, with some random guy with possibly far more malicious intent, eavesdropping you (and if he's in US or Europe, a government still monitors you).
When you run thor, you've handed your ass to the exit node that thor has selected randomly for you: all emails, passwords, sites, everything you do, is available to the exit node in an unencrypted form. Exit nodes on thor are frequently rogue.
Only use thor to anonymize, and never pass sensitive information about yourself (such as logging to your bank site) through it.
Slashdot Mirror
The name. They couldn't figure out how to salvage Vista trademark, so they're just making some relatively minor changes, and releasing it with a new name.
So let me ask you, what would you, in all your wisdom, do if you woke up tommorow as the product manager of Windows tommorow?
If you would "shut down and give the money to the shareholders", or you would "drop all code and start over", you'd be the lousiest product manager in the history of software development.
Everyone knows 'Leak' is Public-Relations-Speak for 'Released'. Now if someone uploaded Windows 7, *THAT* would be a leak. But for anything else than that, why can't we call it what it is?
No one said "leaked" in the original blog where the screenshots are. This came from reposts on other blogs and from the Slashdot summary. So if it's "PR" speak, I guess Slashdot's doing the PR work for Microsoft here.
If you want a piece of real news for Windows 7, let me "leak" two your way:
1) Windows 7 will unbundle many bundled apps it used to come with, such as Windows Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker. They will be now offered separately as free downloads on live.com. This means if you use Thunderbird, you never have to install Windows Mail (former Outlook Express) anymore.
2) Windows 2008 and Vista SP1 were based on the same exact source code, packaged with different modules and configuration. Windows 7 will continue this approach, as it will share the exact same source with Windows 2008 R2.
It's for rpm based commercial distros. Debian doesn't fit, and the "alien" program doesn't work on everything.
I've always known it: if Linux eventually kills Windows (somehow), Linux users will just turn "against their own" and start attacking other Linux distros than their current favorite, starting with the big companies that maintain a distro on their own.
But I have to say it's scary to see the symptoms of this so early when Linux doesn't even have some respectable % of the desktop market. This is not a winning behavior for sure.
<teary_eyes>Can't we just get along?</teary_eyes>
They happen to be in active (furious, really) development, so the relative speeds change daily if not more often. Especially if you pick a particular test.
If I picked a "particular test" it'd be a very useless benchmark, which is what I said originally.
According to comparative benchmarks, the new engine is around 35% faster than the V8 engine recently introduced in Google Chrome, and 55% faster than Mozilla's TraceMonkey.
If you remember, TraceMonkey was benched to be faster than V8, Brendan Eich said: "We win by 1.28x and 1.19x, respectively. Maybe we should rename TraceMonkey "V10" ;-)."
And now somehow Safari beats TraceMonkey by 20% more than it beats V8. Funny that.
Those benchmarks are useless.
> you can do anything on the PC that you can do on the Mac.
Huh, I can modify and compile my own Windows kernel? ... no? Can I boot up my PC into a target disk mode that lets other computers access it as an external hard drive via firewire? ... no? Mount a ZFS filesystem? ...no? Write programs that use a POSIX API? ... only if I use a fairly slow, buggy middle layer?
That's a surprising laundry list of features completely irrelevant to the needs of an average desktop computer user, and not a very accurate one.
And still, there remains that one thing that PC users can do that Mac users can't: shut the fuck up.
What Tim Sweeney predicted back in the 90-s was that by 2006-7 CPU's would overpower GPU-s. It's the end of 2008, and we're at least 5 years away from CPU-s catching up with the future GPU hardware, and at least 10 years away from standards and engines emerging on mainstream hardware, which will challenge DirectX+OpenGL.
Now he's at it again, and I could understand him, as we often get caught predicting what we want to happen, for what we think will happen. General purpose vector computing power is far better and more interesting for a game engine developer, but he doesn't take any of the remaining economics into account.
For a new piece of technology to be picked up by most people, it has to provide substantial improvement over the current status-quo in some area that matters, while providing good DirectX/OpenGL drivers that people can run (at that point) over two decades of CAD/games/rendering software that uses those technologies.
Not to mention that those CPU-s with general purpose instruction sets, should somehow match the efficiency, cost and performance of GPU-s with fixed pipelines and limited instruction sets. Not a trivial task by any means.
Don't forget where the current growth is: smart phones, ultra mobile laptops, and laptops. Those devices tend to use far more dedicated hardware than desktops, because it's far more efficient (for ex. video/audio playback on smart phones is hardware accelerated).
I don't want to put down their effort, but this is the fifth "first" portable projector I'm hearing about in the last 3-4 years and they all suffer from the same problems: low resolution and extremely low brightness.
One of the pocket projectors was even built into some models of cellphones (the fact we don't hear about such cellphones is a testament about the success of this feature).
The pricetag isn't way too high, but you have to consider that at this low res/lumen, it does perform worse than the screen of a cheap laptop, which costs only $100-200 more, and you already need a laptop to run this projector anyway.
A big, powerful, arrogant company is telling me that their very iffy handling of my personal data is "OK" because some other big, powerful and arrogant company is already doing pretty much the same?
Spinning things against Microsoft/Google even if there's no basis for your statements, is just as bad as Microsoft/Google spinning things in their favor when there IS basis.
In both cases, it's disinformation which promotes acting on "gut feelings" and ignorance.
The feature is quite innocent and handy, as it's apparent that anything less would be torn apart from the community.
Last couple of years Microsoft is showing some signs of listening to their customers and they're well on track repairing their IE/Vista fiascos. If all they get in return is the same overly negative responses, they'll just stop trying.
Windows Vista Guru = salesperson.
Good grief Vista must suck.
So I guess Apple Geniuses mean OSX sucks too.
The thing is, Microsoft has played low for many years now, thinking that not replying to the attacks by Linux/Apple is the winning strategy, but it's not.
Just like any defendant has right to a lawyer no matter how quilty you may think he is, Microsoft has stepped up to level the playing field by boosting their marketing to counter the claims by their competition.
I'm not saying anything about the quality of Linux/OSX/Windows, the three of which I use happily, and will continue to. But I think you all need to tone down the drama a bit.
Depending on how those Windows Gurus are trained, they can be in fact helpful for getting an informed opinion on your question, even if it comes with an inevitable bias (there's no such thing as unbiased opinion, if there is, go and ask an Apple Genius which makes a better web server: Linux or OSX. Guess what the answer will be).
From Eich's interview:
Eich disagreed. Although he called V8 "great work, very well engineered," Eich said TraceMonkey has more potential than Google's interpreter for additional, and dramatic, speed improvements. "We've only been working on TraceMonkey for, what, three months now," he said in an interview today. Google has said its Danish engineers had been working on V8 for approximately two years.
TraceMonkey was possible in three months only thanks to the efforts of Adobe on developing the AVM2 engine (aka Tamarin), which took over 2 years to complete and release. Tamarin's Micro JIT engine is what powers the heart of TraceMonkey and is a significant part of the update we'll see in Firefox 3.1.
I don't like that Eich seems to not give any credit to Adobe at all for their contribution, and on top of that tries to belittle the effort of Google, who are technically paying their sallaries at Mozilla Corp.
From Brendan's JS benchmarks:
We win by 1.28x and 1.19x, respectively. Maybe we should rename TraceMonkey "V10" ;-).
Apart from getting the "asshat" award for this comment, Brendan seems to ignore Firefox currently has the slowest DOM manipulation of any of the major browsers.
And it's that DOM which is the bottleneck in most web applications (as I can testify as a web developer), as JS is mostly used to modify the document in some way, not to compute cryptographic hashes of huge datasets or the like.
I am noticing a consistent trend in Mozilla trying to one-up the competition in their benchmarks, while ignoring the real-world problems of their products. Bad for their users, but in the long run, bad for Mozilla as a company and initiative as well.
"Magpies can recognize themselves in a mirror, confounding the notion that self-awareness is the exclusive preserve of humans and a few higher mammals.
Amazing! Of course:
- There's no such notion that self-awareness is the exclusive preserve of humans and a few higher mammals.
- Self awareness and recognizing yourself in a mirror is not the same thing.
- You can find specimens of the same species to recognize themselves or not in a mirror based on their past experiences.
- Scientists have known for years that magpies have developed higher intelligence without having differentiated cerebral cortex "brain layer".
Given that you can do all this with AJAX, I have one word for you: iframe.
You can use iframe to make clicking the video go to youtube and show transparent interactive overlay interactive advertisements? you gotta know some serious iframe kung-fu.
No, thanks to embedded video, which existed long before Flash, and is finally being done in a standard way with the HTML5 video tag. YouTube never needed Flash, and still doesn't.
Actually it does. Have you noticed in the ToS of YouTube that it's illegal to play and embed their videos in other players than their own?
Do you know why that is? Flash is a full runtime, the player is their own. They can make the embeded player link to their site when you click on it, they can show branding on the UI, they can show related videos, or insert overlayed ads.
A vanilla media player would in fact wreck YouTube's model of embedding videos and they'll have to retract it.
What matters is whether the future is absolutely predetermined or not, and whether our actions are just as absolutely predetermined, us being part of the physical world and made of matter, our thoughts determined by physical phenomena.
Let me ask you this: why does it matter either way. We can't predict it, chances are no one can. Whether on a technical level truly random events occur, or not, is absolutely irrelevant in the big picture.
Notice that in pseudo random generators in computers, the only benefit to using external units that generate randomness based on physical phenomena, is better entropy, hence better distribution and less bias, than more artificial methods.
The outcome on macro-level is exactly the same, whether "down under" we used a "real randomness" or a "damn good almost close to the real thing randomness". The macro level evens out small irregularities, so the subtleties of the mechanics of the quantum events are entirely irrelevant to how our future overall develops anyway.
Oh and I do think there's a deterministic model on a lower level, but I think it's irrelevant for the particular question.
If we hadn't have quantum mechanical phenomena, there would be no room for free will whatsoever, and we'd be all living a predetermined life.
I find it hilarious that people are afraid their choices may be predetermined by the interaction of the sum of their parts and their environment.
Hell, I do hope that this is the case. And I do hope the matter that constitutes me as a human being has a sufficiently good and predictable apparatus that results in consistently good decisions for me. I certainly do not hope that I'm random.
Exhibiting random-like Brownian motion behavior isn't something to be particularly proud of, in fact the simpler an organism is, the more random their decisions. Do you know why? Because they are worse decisions. The worst decision possible out there is a purely random decision, one that isn't predetermined by anything at all, because the being in question is so dumb, it can't factor any information at all into their decision. So why the heck do we seek that?
When we solve a math problem, for example sum two number, the outcome is already predetermined by the numbers we sum, and that's fine, which result would you prefer to produce:
2 + 2 = 4 -- crap I have no free will
2 + 2 = 9929782 -- LOL!! I cheated teh universe!! Free will FTW!
Essentially the fear is that if an unknown to mankind uber-being could magically freeze the universe and analyze sufficiently well every single particle you're made of, and every particle that's about to make contact with you in the next moment, then the uber-being knows what you're about to do next.
Good news and bad news:
1) Good news: there's no such uber-being, and if there was, it wouldn't be constrained to known physical laws, or be made of matter that could interact with our world, and hence be detectable. So what do we care?
2) Bad news: we already know that the majority of people are overall easily predictable with far less than complete information. What worries me more is the quality of their decisions, more than the theory that if I had infinite resources, I could predict them.
Free will doesn't mean "hey I can be random!". That's a shallow, sad definition of free will. If you grab a stone with highly irregular shape and throw it, can you casually predict on which side it'll fall? No? Oh my, that stone's got free will!
Essentially people are concerned whether they possess a random quality or not, that would be also inherent to any piece of inanimate matter around us, if this happens on the quantum level.
Doesn't help us push that "we're special" agenda, does it.
Mozilla and Google are both on board with abandoning the current work called ES4.
In particular a very curious choice on Google's part, whose GWT implements Java on browsers.
The current decision is that we don't need ES4 as we don't need packages, namespaces, classes, early binding and types on a web language.
Makes you wonder how GWT happened then.
Such a damn shame to let ECMAScript edition 4 go in this way.
The small shame is for Adobe's efforts, who entered the ECMA standards body to contribute, donated the entire engine to Mozilla and plenty of other efforts to get this going. But AS3/Flash will not be affected in a big way from this.
The web community as a whole will be. That's where the big shame is: for all of us, web developers. I see that packages, namespaces, classes and early binding are out, likely forever.
Classes are not "sugar", we do need those paradigms when creating bigger applications, because they are more rigid, more readable, more maintainable, understandable. I love lambdas, prototypes and all that, but that's the lower level, the implementation inside a class, inside a package. Those are not interchangable paradigms.
ES4 and AS3 have managed to add those higher constructs to the language, while maintaining full compatibility with all flexible features of ES3 (the JavaScript currently used in browsers).
The reasoning behind dropping all constructs appears to be the preconceived notion that JavaScript must exist in the form of disparate text files loosely connected to each other, something that doesn't scale to bigger efforts at all (and which makes Flash much more viable for such deployment), hence packages and early binding are out. What a mistake.
Who's to say we won't see JAR-like environment where bigger libraries can be compressed together, and some preprocessing can be done to ease the load on the client CPU/bandwidth? I've been praying we get such deployment option soon as a modern web application typically has to download a ton of CSS/JS/image files to build an average GUI nowadays. Why isn't this the focus of ECMA's efforts, but instead the focus is to maintain the status quo and reject us basics that have proven themselves in time to work well in all environments out there.
If you doubt this would work, look no further than Java/Flash applets distributed over the web in this fashion (and Flash is very widely used nowadays).
What ECMA has achieved with their decision, is to basically stagnate the browser environment, and empower third-party cross-browser plugins to eat more from the advanced web application market share, because Adobe's Flash, Microsoft's Silverlight are not even thinking of dropping their mature OOP features, just because ECMA said we don't need them.
I feel like this is only even a story at all because valid PHP 4 code isn't necessarily valid PHP 5 code.
Curious choices by the PHP folks to me, but I'm not really deeply invested enough in PHP to fairly call them good or bad.
The reason for those curious choices was the even more curious choices in the languages design in earlier versions. I would say however, that even the best design gets outdated in time, and it's better to sacrafice compatibility at some point.
Key web-related technologies have reinvented themselves and it's hard to say where they would be if they didn't do so. ASP.NET (vs. old ASP) comes to mind, which was a radical rearchitecture. Flash is another example (on the client side), which almost completely rewrote their rendering stack in version 8, and completely rewrote their script runtime stack in Flash 9.
PHP 4 was released in 2000 and is finally getting an EOL date but is still going to receive patches. Microsoft XP was released in 2001 and its EOL date is 2009, with security patches until 2014.
Technically the EOL was announced in 2007, and it was the beginning of 2008. What ends today is official security patch support.
The patches offered by Mr. Esser are not official, though I'd say he's more than qualified for the job.
Overall, especially for an open source project, I'd say the transition was handled pretty well. What's worrying me more is where the new versions are heading, but that's another discussion.
Even if I was Bill gates, I would NEVER just throw $1000 away on something silly. Because I know the opportunity cost of that is $1,000 donated to some charity. That probably saves 20 kids eyesight in Africa for fucks sake.
You have to be pretty amazingly selfish or stupid to throw that kind of cash away, no matter how much you have. It's just an insult to those living on a pittance.
Have you stopped for a minute to realize spending $1000 on something stupid doesn't make those $1000 disappear. They just end up elsewhere, and are then spent for something else.
The effect of this is entirely local between the stupid guy with the $1000 and the smart guy receiving them. Maybe the smart guy has a smart use for those $1000.
Cuil is not even as good as Yahoo's search or Microsoft's search.
I have to say, I have newly found respect for Yahoo and Microsoft's search after seeing Cuil. The search relevance, image search, news search, maps, localization/i18n search etc.
It's not as easy as it often looks.
And Yahoo/Microsoft are doing a pretty good job. If Google just mysteriously disappears tommorow, I could use Yahoo/Microsoft's search to do my job, but if we're left with something like Cuil, we're all screwed.
How do you spot a company that's more interested in their image than their product?
Many blogs noted that cuil.com can't find itself if you search for "cuil" (without quotes). Few days later, apparently something changed and the first two results for "cuil" are suddenly relevant:
121,578 results for cuil
1. cuil.com (Cuil) ...) ...) ...
2. cuil.com/info/ (Cuil - The World's Biggest Search Engine)
3. www.properazzi.com/Cuil-Mhuine+Irel... (Properties for sale in Cuil Mhuine, Ireland - Properazzi)
4. cdrom.launch.com/track/504676 (Chase Around The Windmill: Toss The Feathers/Ballinasloe
5. topsecretmp3.com/track/159/112152/1... (Download Legal &Chase Around The Windmill: Toss The
Hmm, but result 3 and onward are totally irrelevant, those are the same exact old results we had couple of days ago, where are the reviews, all the press cuil got last few days? Try this, now, search for "cuil " (without quotes, just add a space):
121,578 results for cuil
1. www.properazzi.com/Cuil-Mhuine+Irel... (Properties for sale in Cuil Mhuine, Ireland - Properazzi) ...) ...) ...
2. cdrom.launch.com/track/504676 (Chase Around The Windmill: Toss The Feathers/Ballinasloe
3. topsecretmp3.com/track/159/112152/1... (Download Legal &Chase Around The Windmill: Toss The
Same results, without the first 2 relevant results. I guess someone hand-edited the results for "cuil" but unfortunately forgot to trim the spaces first. Notice it shows 121,578 results in both cases, although the results are apparently different.
Embarassing. I bet if they see this post they'll fix that too. Well, that's one resultset fixed, couple of hundred billion more to go!
I mean, I'm upset with the warrantless eavesdropping issue as much as the next guy. I have gone so far as to rent my own dedicated server and ran all my traffic through thor.
Good job, you replaced the government eavesdropping you, with some random guy with possibly far more malicious intent, eavesdropping you (and if he's in US or Europe, a government still monitors you).
When you run thor, you've handed your ass to the exit node that thor has selected randomly for you: all emails, passwords, sites, everything you do, is available to the exit node in an unencrypted form. Exit nodes on thor are frequently rogue.
Only use thor to anonymize, and never pass sensitive information about yourself (such as logging to your bank site) through it.