It looks like Mr. Jobs succeeded. The entire thing was full of misleading "facts." Look up at other discussions in this thread.
To quote Wikipedia on "disinformation":
Unlike traditional propaganda and Big Lie techniques designed to engage emotional support, disinformation is designed to manipulate the audience at the rational level by either discrediting conflicting information or supporting false conclusions.
Jobs hit all the right notes on both disinformation, and traditional propaganda in the span of one short presentation.
Emotional support: [talking to the press] "we make so many great products, I thought you guys trust us"; "we maybe shouldn't take it personally, but we do, and it really hurts us"; "we have worked out asses off to satisfy every last customer"
At rational level he tweaked and made those antenna video demos (also see http://www.apple.com/antenna/. He used reframing techniques to make the problem appear common in the industry, blurring the differences between the iPhone specific antenna issues and general signal attenuation.
I don't believe a word Jobs says. He has a long history of using these techniques to sell and brand his company, it's how the "reality distortion field" joke came to be.
But you gotta admit: he's so good at it, even when it's apparent he's tweaking facts and inserting little lies here and there, it's hard not to be sympathetic to his side. Which may be largely why he succeeds, even if many won't take his presentations at face value.
Sounds easy. Since the researchers apparently said Python/Perl/scripts and so on are easier to hack than C++, let's take typical factors in script execution.
You have an ASM-level operation that takes nanoseconds, and you have the following factors that take a random amount of milliseconds (millions of nanoseconds):
1) garbage collection 'jitter' 2) dynamic optimization of runtime (tracing, JIT, caching) and so on 'jitter' 3) parallel execution of thousands of tasks per second jitter (you measure just one random call of these at a time, you have no idea how loaded the server is or what's the structure of the tasks queue) 4) I/O calls in parallel delays jitter (same as 2. except much slower) 5) network jitter
Also I'm probably missing another 10 to 20 factors I could list above.
So, how many millions or billion of calls would I have to make to be able to "average" all those, factor them out and time some ASM-level operation in there?
And even once that's done, all I have is whether one character possibility I sent is wrong or not. Repeat for every printable ASCII character, and every single character of the password.
And still, you say, it's possible, though it'll take billions of calls.
Well, most services would deny you further checks after the 10 or so wrong logins and lock the account. Good luck using a timing attack on that service.
The researchers also found that queries made to programs written in interpreted languages such as Python or Ruby -- both very popular on the Web -- generated responses much more slowly than other types of languages such as C or assembly language, making timing attacks more feasible. "For languages that are interpreted, you end up with a much greater timing difference than people thought," Lawson said.
Sure, scripts are slower than C. They're slower in general, but when you compare two binary strings, it's still mostly the same C memcmp call that's being called. You also have semi-random events like mark and swipe garbage collection, dynamic optimizations, I/O delays.
This means scripts may be slower and more random, while the password check call still isn't, how the heck would that make is easier to hack scripted sites?
I'm not even mentioning the fact most web apps don't have passwords hardcoded, but actually do the check in an external agent, say SQL database, making his observation even less logical.
He claims he can filter out all those variables, including network jitter and pinpoint the exact time of some ASM-level operation on a string. I say, show us.
I hope Motorola get's a nice class-action suit out of this.
Imagine a nice little virus, designed to trigger the 'self-destruct' and some innocent users getting infected.
Markus
Ok, I'll use my vast imagination to imagine a bunch of geeks group together to sue Motorola because they can't root their phone. As if it was listed in the bullet list of features. But anyway.
Motorola allows rooting and now you imagine 4 months later a nice little virus, designed to root the phone and steal vasts amounts of private and business data off innocent users' phones.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. But.. I forgot I'm imagining all this. People are just fine not being able to root their phone, so none of the above actually is about to happen.
And since Opera is not open source, we'd have to rely on the Opera developers themselves to find the issue. An open source model means that basically anyone with the time/inclination/skills can go in and take a look at the code.
So, wait, are you saying Opera is more secure? It's hard to imagine too many people with the time, inclination and skills, would volunteer to sift through the thousands of boring bad code on the Mozilla Addons site.
I'm thinking of a contest. What can you turn him into? Does he cut himself? Does he start fires? How about racist, given that he can recognize faces on a web cam.
Dunno about what you said, but every time Bill Gates showed up in front of the camera, Milo would run and cry. Must be some bug.
If I had the game, first thing that pops to mind, is shooting a "Milo switches to Mac" ad.
Also, given Milo can apparently do homework, I'll just teach him C++ and let him work for me under threat of cutting the power off.
Staged demos aside, though.
I wonder how easy it'd be to interact with that thing in real life. If I asked him "How was your day" and all it can say back (in a distinct Stephen Hawking voice) is: "Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all"... that'll be just plain disappointing.
Honestly, I don't know whether this is the Uncanny Valley manifesting, but that kid just creeps me out.
That's not the Uncanny Valley causing it. It's your basic animal fear that your own species has just been made obsolete by some basic gaming software.
But I might be wrong. You can test it. Get the DVD of Pixar's "The Incredibles" and play some. Do you feel the impending doom, or you're entertained? If the former, it's the Uncanny Valley (also check that with your doctor).
As for the fear-inducing-AI in the demo: it's fake, so you'll be able to sleep well tonight.
I love the detective work on detecting the subtle visual clues that it's fake.
I guess Microsoft (or anyone in the world at all) having casually developed this AI, speech recognition and a virtually flawless speech synth, solely for the purpose of making a casual role-playing console game, doesn't seem suspicious to anyone.
Let's see... what kind of horrible things to people do to Sims? Put them in a house with no toilet? Strand them in pool without a ladder? etc... I shudder at the abuse we'll see attempted and if this thing learns from it's interactions. Ick.
That demo looks cooked. Microsoft couldn't get basic speech to text to work reliably, they'll need to work harder to convince people that are sitting on a working AI that'll also interact freely with people as was demoed.
Also, I almost can imagine you eating delicious tortured and slaughtered animal stake while you were writing about the human rights of basic software programs.
They are dreaming. Sure some hardware is relatively easy to develop on your own on a small budget. But most of it needs expensive equipment, fab facilities, testing systems etc. If you think a group of disperse individuals will each have the same equipment to collaborate you're dreaming. If you think a company is going to by the hardware and then let anyone manufacture it again you are dreaming.
So, they have a dream, huh:P? Very dramatic, but you're confusing two orthogonal ideas: free/make-it-yourself hardware and open source hardware.
Open source hardware means the spec is open, and any (suffiently rich) person or a company could manufacture clones of the hardware piece free of fees and obligations. The PC architecture is a fine example of mostly open source hardware, that has had wild success.
Sure, PCs aren't free, but the fact anyone could enter the market and make PC clones have significantly brought prices down and have allowed free exchange of compatible parts and a platform that has remained independent contrary to the interests of some of the manufacturing agents.
So these guys just want to create a clear definition of what "open source hardware" actually is, so when you say it, you know what you're getting. However, why the heck it's taking them so much time to write the damn thing... another story.
It really blows my mind that there is such fierce competition between internet browsers. It's rare to see this level of intense drive and innovation for a free product.
Have you used a search engine or watched over-the-air TV lately? They compete quite fiercely, so how much did you pay for the privilege?
Money is just an expression of a resource or service you have to offer, which is valuable for the opposing side. The average person tends to see additional "phantom" value in giving actual money for something, versus giving his time, or willing to be persuaded to buy a product he doesn't need, for example. However it's really an economic exchange in the end. The money Firefox makes out of people "googling" on it is very real as well.
If it was really free and they had no revenues, then, no, you wouldn't see such a fierce competition, in fact, you'd barely see any semblance of structured effort, strategy or looking at the big picture. For a reference, check any of the millions languishing or dead OSS projects, which were not fortunate enough to have corporate funding or a revenue model.
Is there a reason they can't go above the artificial limit of 192 GB? 64 bit CPUs should be able to access up to 18,446,000,000 GB of memory space, so I see no reason for the arbitrary limit.
Windows 7 Home Premium works fine with 18446000000 GB, I've just tried it on my desktop.
Why wait? I use HTML5 today. I start documents with <!DOCTYPE html> and code away. The W3C validator even validates HTML5 documents. What are you waiting for? Maybe for Internet Explorer, but that's Microsoft's responsibility to update.
By writing that you don't use "HTML5", you only use the HTML5 recommended doctype. As you know, it largely does nothing, except kick in "standards" mode in all browsers, and yes, including Microsoft browsers as well, so you've proactively blamed them for nothing.
That doctype working doesn't mean all in the HTML5 recommendations will work, including even in browsers like Safari, Opera and Firefox, given HTML5 is still a spec in progress, and it's highly modular, meaning we may not see the entirety of it for decades to come.
SVG was designed from the bottom up as a text format, where visible text is exactly that, and while some SVGs don't contain any text or metadata, many do have a significant percentage of relevant textual data.
Flash not being readable in Notepad, because it's binary, isn't the primary reason it's less indexable than HTML.
Yes, SVG's official serialization format is text-based (XML-based), but that that's just an implementation detail. The internal structure of Flash is actually quite simple, and also a tree of (binary) tags, and you can easily serialize a SWF to XML and back with no loss, and you'll notice they are very similar, the only difference - Flash is somewhat wider in scope than SVG currently is (audio, timelines etc).
I see repeatedly in this topic people talking about mark-up text and marked-up text as if these are interchangeable concepts. However, the first is the format you use to describe an arbitrary problem, and the second is a particular problem you want to describe. SVG uses mark-up text, but it describes graphics, and that's the information you get out of it.
Having string resources in SVG only play the support role of an accessory in your graphics, say, adding labels for your pie-chart. Using SVG's text abilities for anything more than is abuse of the format. And since the context of the labels in that example is the pie-chart, Google would need to literally understand that image-based context, to extract any useful meaning of the bits of text scattered around it.
I think we would benefit from establishing some best practices, and maybe even changing the format a bit, to make SVG files more indexible, where it makes sense to do so... for static, information-rich graphics and so forth.
I see your point, but we already have a format for describing information-rich structured data, and that's HTML. With HTML you can style text and data using basics, and SVG is intended to display arbitrary graphics, without concerning yourself with semantically mapping every bit of visual content. Attempting to combine both in some uberstandard that's both 100% flexible and 100% indexable would be completely unachievable.
[animal]
[head]
[eyes]
[pupil]...20k of vector tags...[/pupil]
[/eyes]
[/head] [/animal]... no thanks.
There's something wrong there then, if, you want the greatest exposure possible for those sites.
Exposing dyanmic SWF's which just have 50 times repeated "loading... loading..." in them is hardly a good exposure.
The correct way is to have all relevant content in your HTML fallback, which Google will find and index, and thus expose you. Flash is for making the same info more functional, and (let's face it) prettier. Works as it should.
You raise a good point, but I'm not actually talking about the actual amount of content on the web, I'm talking about how it is indexed and searchable (in this case, by Google). I'm sure that there is a lot more Flash content than my rough study indicates, and I could be clearer about that in my blog post, but for the purposes of discussing the relative representation in search results, I think it's fair to say that the presence (or lack of presence) of content is distorted by how easy it is to find it through the search engine.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter how much Flash or SVG content is on the web... both should be indexed and represented in search results. How we get to that point, and how we can make is fruitful for people searching for the content, is the interesting question.
This has been attempted before, which, in the case of Flash, resulted of pages and pages of SERP like these.
It's probably understandable why Google lowered the "rank" of Flash content in their SERP.
Indexing SVG is also of dubious benefits. Flat images may be a nice addition to the images section, if search engines have a good way of recognizing those from SVG-based interactive apps, but that's about it.
However, not all SVG files work outside the page they are embedded in, especially if they depend on related scripts. This is even more so the case with Flash, which often has its data sources loaded externally, based on parameters passed in-page. That's one more reason why people use JS for Flash embedding: it doesn't produce naked SWF files in search results, which rarely works anyway.
Searching is about keywords and phrases, so it works best with HTML, where the majority of text is. Image search is based on the text around the image, and SVG static image search will likely work best that way as well, so there's no pressing need to try to find couple of irrelevant words in a SVG file lost among thousands of vector/color data items.
In other words, indexing Flash/SVG seems to be a solution in search of a problem.
I don't know why this guy is using filetype Google searches to find out how common SVG and Flash content is.
SVG content makes up just 0.106% of all Web content, by my rough estimation. Flash is almost 5 times as common as SVG. That's pretty grim for SVG.... But wait, let's put that into perspective. Flash is about 4.8 times more common than SVG. HTML is roughly 838 times more common than SVG. 838 times. Flash content comprises approximately 0.52% of all Web content, and HTML is roughly 189 times more common than Flash.
Let *me* put that into perspective. Most Flash content is deployed via JavaScript, so it won't show in a Google filetype search. None of the sites with Flash I've worked on would pop SWF filetype results in Google. Saying that Flash to SVG are 5 to 1 is hilarious, given the-still-leading browser on the market, IE, supports zero SVG content (to change with IE9 which is in alpha right now).
Saying that Flash is 0.52% of the content of the web is also hilarious. Even just counting the countless embedded YouTube players in blogs would change those numbers drastically.
To that end, what do you think a Lady Gaga CD will go for in (roughly) 2070, do you think? More importantly, how widely do you think her songs would be played by then? Would anyone still alive then even know or care who she was? That my friend is the big metric of success or failure concerning creative works.
I like that romantic view of the world, where people get famous solely based on their unquestioned and provable talents, but older artists are considered valuable as they created arts in great scarcity, or in a period where they were considered pioneers in their often niche (at the time) craft to a niche (at the time) public. Humanity has also historically had the habit of forgetting things through the ages and then calling them "new" as they show up again.
Today, in a global economy, instant point to point communication, and easy digital replication, we realize we're no longer as unique as we once thought. We're definitely no less talented, but we're oversaturated with products and art, it puts everything in a different perspective. The world is full of singers, painters, writers, compositors, designers, thinkers... who may very well be more talented than the legends of yesteryear, but they will work at some local pub, a small company, or if they get a great producer and manager, you may hear about them a little bit, for a little while, like is the case with Lady Gaga.
As for how valuable her CD is gonna be. Digital has been proven more flexible than anything we've had, but also it's hard to put antique value on it. In a few decades people will simply stop making CDs as well and it'll be all over-the-wire files. It's hard to imagine trading "a rare mp3" for thousands of dollars, never mind how talented the author of said mp3 really is.
In this manner he makes the channel mods look like immature jerks, but I talked to the mod that actually kicked him not long after the story broke. Evidently the guy was typing like an idiot (multiple messages per sentence) and acting in a rather unprofessional manner.
The mods banned the guy who has all their user data because he hit Enter too much. Not sure how that supports your premise?
They proved a newspaper can successfully be made using only F/OSS. One day? Imagine one year with a programmer or two tweaking the software to work just how they want it. It could blow away the existing stuff and enable a resurgence in amateur newspapers.
That's a pretty low bar. Newspapers have been made without computers or software for decades, so of course you might as well use F/OSS.
Also maybe you're right, of only every paper had a programmer or two to work on that software... Let's do the math with a programmer and a half as an average. Let's assume they're foreign students out of college, so they're super cheap, say $2000/month. For one year, that's $24000, not counting taxes, benefits, office and office related expenses, but if I do, it can easily go $30-40000.
Wait, how much was the license for Photoshop? $699. Wow, in retrospect, that's pretty damn cheap compared, huh?
Why buy a dedicated handheld gaming device, when you can get smart phone, pda, or tablet like the iPhone/iTouch/iPad, Zune/WM7, Android, or WebOS device that is just as portable, will do a decent job playing games, plus let you surf the net, do your e-mail, and hold your media (music, videos, etc.)?
I've heard that argument before...
Why buy a dedicated iOS tablet, when you can have a fully featured laptop that is just as portable, will let you run Flash, Photoshop...
And yet, iPads sell. So here you are, using the same argument, this time in favor of buying an iPad. People like a simpler, dedicated device, that does more than a "decent job" at the things they want.
Note that we're talking about ads in third-party applications. Meaning as a third-party application developer, Apple has now said "Oh, and by the way if you want to advertise, your only real choice is us." How is that defensible?
You have to opt-in to iAd and other ad networks are still running today in third party iPhone apps, Apple has not banned third party networks, and the limitation on the third party networks equally apply also for Apple's own iAd.
But yeah, other than that have a point. Just kidding.
Slashdot Mirror
It looks like Mr. Jobs succeeded. The entire thing was full of misleading "facts." Look up at other discussions in this thread.
To quote Wikipedia on "disinformation":
Unlike traditional propaganda and Big Lie techniques designed to engage emotional support, disinformation is designed to manipulate the audience at the rational level by either discrediting conflicting information or supporting false conclusions.
Jobs hit all the right notes on both disinformation, and traditional propaganda in the span of one short presentation.
Emotional support: [talking to the press] "we make so many great products, I thought you guys trust us"; "we maybe shouldn't take it personally, but we do, and it really hurts us"; "we have worked out asses off to satisfy every last customer"
At rational level he tweaked and made those antenna video demos (also see http://www.apple.com/antenna/. He used reframing techniques to make the problem appear common in the industry, blurring the differences between the iPhone specific antenna issues and general signal attenuation.
I don't believe a word Jobs says. He has a long history of using these techniques to sell and brand his company, it's how the "reality distortion field" joke came to be.
But you gotta admit: he's so good at it, even when it's apparent he's tweaking facts and inserting little lies here and there, it's hard not to be sympathetic to his side. Which may be largely why he succeeds, even if many won't take his presentations at face value.
Take a bunch of samples, average them.
Sounds easy. Since the researchers apparently said Python/Perl/scripts and so on are easier to hack than C++, let's take typical factors in script execution.
You have an ASM-level operation that takes nanoseconds, and you have the following factors that take a random amount of milliseconds (millions of nanoseconds):
1) garbage collection 'jitter'
2) dynamic optimization of runtime (tracing, JIT, caching) and so on 'jitter'
3) parallel execution of thousands of tasks per second jitter (you measure just one random call of these at a time, you have no idea how loaded the server is or what's the structure of the tasks queue)
4) I/O calls in parallel delays jitter (same as 2. except much slower)
5) network jitter
Also I'm probably missing another 10 to 20 factors I could list above.
So, how many millions or billion of calls would I have to make to be able to "average" all those, factor them out and time some ASM-level operation in there?
And even once that's done, all I have is whether one character possibility I sent is wrong or not. Repeat for every printable ASCII character, and every single character of the password.
And still, you say, it's possible, though it'll take billions of calls.
Well, most services would deny you further checks after the 10 or so wrong logins and lock the account. Good luck using a timing attack on that service.
The researchers also found that queries made to programs written in interpreted languages such as Python or Ruby -- both very popular on the Web -- generated responses much more slowly than other types of languages such as C or assembly language, making timing attacks more feasible. "For languages that are interpreted, you end up with a much greater timing difference than people thought," Lawson said.
Sure, scripts are slower than C. They're slower in general, but when you compare two binary strings, it's still mostly the same C memcmp call that's being called. You also have semi-random events like mark and swipe garbage collection, dynamic optimizations, I/O delays.
This means scripts may be slower and more random, while the password check call still isn't, how the heck would that make is easier to hack scripted sites?
I'm not even mentioning the fact most web apps don't have passwords hardcoded, but actually do the check in an external agent, say SQL database, making his observation even less logical.
He claims he can filter out all those variables, including network jitter and pinpoint the exact time of some ASM-level operation on a string. I say, show us.
Someone is taking the phrase "Money talks" a bit too literally, huh.
Although, I've always wanted every time someone says "that's my 2 cents", that he's charged 2 real cents.
I hope Motorola get's a nice class-action suit out of this.
Imagine a nice little virus, designed to trigger the 'self-destruct' and some innocent users getting infected.
Markus
Ok, I'll use my vast imagination to imagine a bunch of geeks group together to sue Motorola because they can't root their phone. As if it was listed in the bullet list of features. But anyway.
Motorola allows rooting and now you imagine 4 months later a nice little virus, designed to root the phone and steal vasts amounts of private and business data off innocent users' phones.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. But.. I forgot I'm imagining all this. People are just fine not being able to root their phone, so none of the above actually is about to happen.
And since Opera is not open source, we'd have to rely on the Opera developers themselves to find the issue. An open source model means that basically anyone with the time/inclination/skills can go in and take a look at the code.
So, wait, are you saying Opera is more secure? It's hard to imagine too many people with the time, inclination and skills, would volunteer to sift through the thousands of boring bad code on the Mozilla Addons site.
I'm thinking of a contest. What can you turn him into? Does he cut himself? Does he start fires? How about racist, given that he can recognize faces on a web cam.
Dunno about what you said, but every time Bill Gates showed up in front of the camera, Milo would run and cry. Must be some bug.
If I had the game, first thing that pops to mind, is shooting a "Milo switches to Mac" ad.
Also, given Milo can apparently do homework, I'll just teach him C++ and let him work for me under threat of cutting the power off.
Staged demos aside, though.
I wonder how easy it'd be to interact with that thing in real life. If I asked him "How was your day" and all it can say back (in a distinct Stephen Hawking voice) is: "Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all"... that'll be just plain disappointing.
Honestly, I don't know whether this is the Uncanny Valley manifesting, but that kid just creeps me out.
That's not the Uncanny Valley causing it. It's your basic animal fear that your own species has just been made obsolete by some basic gaming software.
But I might be wrong. You can test it. Get the DVD of Pixar's "The Incredibles" and play some. Do you feel the impending doom, or you're entertained? If the former, it's the Uncanny Valley (also check that with your doctor).
As for the fear-inducing-AI in the demo: it's fake, so you'll be able to sleep well tonight.
Not only is it cheesy (and INCREDIBLY old news), the video in TFA is a fake. Proof: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFAK8ubYtZE
I love the detective work on detecting the subtle visual clues that it's fake.
I guess Microsoft (or anyone in the world at all) having casually developed this AI, speech recognition and a virtually flawless speech synth, solely for the purpose of making a casual role-playing console game, doesn't seem suspicious to anyone.
Let's see... what kind of horrible things to people do to Sims? Put them in a house with no toilet? Strand them in pool without a ladder? etc... I shudder at the abuse we'll see attempted and if this thing learns from it's interactions. Ick.
That demo looks cooked. Microsoft couldn't get basic speech to text to work reliably, they'll need to work harder to convince people that are sitting on a working AI that'll also interact freely with people as was demoed.
Also, I almost can imagine you eating delicious tortured and slaughtered animal stake while you were writing about the human rights of basic software programs.
People have no perspective on things at all.
[...] worked as an entry-level software tester [...] I'm thinking that MS had better take a really good [look] at their logs for that time.
Wow, thinking is hard, huh.
They are dreaming. Sure some hardware is relatively easy to develop on your own on a small budget. But most of it needs expensive equipment, fab facilities, testing systems etc. If you think a group of disperse individuals will each have the same equipment to collaborate you're dreaming. If you think a company is going to by the hardware and then let anyone manufacture it again you are dreaming.
So, they have a dream, huh :P? Very dramatic, but you're confusing two orthogonal ideas: free/make-it-yourself hardware and open source hardware.
Open source hardware means the spec is open, and any (suffiently rich) person or a company could manufacture clones of the hardware piece free of fees and obligations. The PC architecture is a fine example of mostly open source hardware, that has had wild success.
Sure, PCs aren't free, but the fact anyone could enter the market and make PC clones have significantly brought prices down and have allowed free exchange of compatible parts and a platform that has remained independent contrary to the interests of some of the manufacturing agents.
So these guys just want to create a clear definition of what "open source hardware" actually is, so when you say it, you know what you're getting. However, why the heck it's taking them so much time to write the damn thing... another story.
It really blows my mind that there is such fierce competition between internet browsers. It's rare to see this level of intense drive and innovation for a free product.
Have you used a search engine or watched over-the-air TV lately? They compete quite fiercely, so how much did you pay for the privilege?
Money is just an expression of a resource or service you have to offer, which is valuable for the opposing side. The average person tends to see additional "phantom" value in giving actual money for something, versus giving his time, or willing to be persuaded to buy a product he doesn't need, for example. However it's really an economic exchange in the end. The money Firefox makes out of people "googling" on it is very real as well.
If it was really free and they had no revenues, then, no, you wouldn't see such a fierce competition, in fact, you'd barely see any semblance of structured effort, strategy or looking at the big picture. For a reference, check any of the millions languishing or dead OSS projects, which were not fortunate enough to have corporate funding or a revenue model.
Is there a reason they can't go above the artificial limit of 192 GB?
64 bit CPUs should be able to access up to 18,446,000,000 GB of memory space, so I see no reason for the arbitrary limit.
Windows 7 Home Premium works fine with 18446000000 GB, I've just tried it on my desktop.
Hope this helps.
Stan
Why wait? I use HTML5 today. I start documents with <!DOCTYPE html> and code away. The W3C validator even validates HTML5 documents. What are you waiting for? Maybe for Internet Explorer, but that's Microsoft's responsibility to update.
By writing that you don't use "HTML5", you only use the HTML5 recommended doctype. As you know, it largely does nothing, except kick in "standards" mode in all browsers, and yes, including Microsoft browsers as well, so you've proactively blamed them for nothing.
That doctype working doesn't mean all in the HTML5 recommendations will work, including even in browsers like Safari, Opera and Firefox, given HTML5 is still a spec in progress, and it's highly modular, meaning we may not see the entirety of it for decades to come.
SVG was designed from the bottom up as a text format, where visible text is exactly that, and while some SVGs don't contain any text or metadata, many do have a significant percentage of relevant textual data.
Flash not being readable in Notepad, because it's binary, isn't the primary reason it's less indexable than HTML.
Yes, SVG's official serialization format is text-based (XML-based), but that that's just an implementation detail. The internal structure of Flash is actually quite simple, and also a tree of (binary) tags, and you can easily serialize a SWF to XML and back with no loss, and you'll notice they are very similar, the only difference - Flash is somewhat wider in scope than SVG currently is (audio, timelines etc).
I see repeatedly in this topic people talking about mark-up text and marked-up text as if these are interchangeable concepts. However, the first is the format you use to describe an arbitrary problem, and the second is a particular problem you want to describe. SVG uses mark-up text, but it describes graphics, and that's the information you get out of it.
Having string resources in SVG only play the support role of an accessory in your graphics, say, adding labels for your pie-chart. Using SVG's text abilities for anything more than is abuse of the format. And since the context of the labels in that example is the pie-chart, Google would need to literally understand that image-based context, to extract any useful meaning of the bits of text scattered around it.
I think we would benefit from establishing some best practices, and maybe even changing the format a bit, to make SVG files more indexible, where it makes sense to do so... for static, information-rich graphics and so forth.
I see your point, but we already have a format for describing information-rich structured data, and that's HTML. With HTML you can style text and data using basics, and SVG is intended to display arbitrary graphics, without concerning yourself with semantically mapping every bit of visual content. Attempting to combine both in some uberstandard that's both 100% flexible and 100% indexable would be completely unachievable.
[animal] ... no thanks.
[head]
[eyes]
[pupil]...20k of vector tags...[/pupil]
[/eyes]
[/head]
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There's something wrong there then, if, you want the greatest exposure possible for those sites.
Exposing dyanmic SWF's which just have 50 times repeated "loading... loading..." in them is hardly a good exposure.
The correct way is to have all relevant content in your HTML fallback, which Google will find and index, and thus expose you. Flash is for making the same info more functional, and (let's face it) prettier. Works as it should.
You raise a good point, but I'm not actually talking about the actual amount of content on the web, I'm talking about how it is indexed and searchable (in this case, by Google). I'm sure that there is a lot more Flash content than my rough study indicates, and I could be clearer about that in my blog post, but for the purposes of discussing the relative representation in search results, I think it's fair to say that the presence (or lack of presence) of content is distorted by how easy it is to find it through the search engine.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter how much Flash or SVG content is on the web... both should be indexed and represented in search results. How we get to that point, and how we can make is fruitful for people searching for the content, is the interesting question.
This has been attempted before, which, in the case of Flash, resulted of pages and pages of SERP like these.
It's probably understandable why Google lowered the "rank" of Flash content in their SERP.
Indexing SVG is also of dubious benefits. Flat images may be a nice addition to the images section, if search engines have a good way of recognizing those from SVG-based interactive apps, but that's about it.
However, not all SVG files work outside the page they are embedded in, especially if they depend on related scripts. This is even more so the case with Flash, which often has its data sources loaded externally, based on parameters passed in-page. That's one more reason why people use JS for Flash embedding: it doesn't produce naked SWF files in search results, which rarely works anyway.
Searching is about keywords and phrases, so it works best with HTML, where the majority of text is. Image search is based on the text around the image, and SVG static image search will likely work best that way as well, so there's no pressing need to try to find couple of irrelevant words in a SVG file lost among thousands of vector/color data items.
In other words, indexing Flash/SVG seems to be a solution in search of a problem.
I don't know why this guy is using filetype Google searches to find out how common SVG and Flash content is.
SVG content makes up just 0.106% of all Web content, by my rough estimation. Flash is almost 5 times as common as SVG. That's pretty grim for SVG. ... But wait, let's put that into perspective. Flash is about 4.8 times more common than SVG. HTML is roughly 838 times more common than SVG. 838 times. Flash content comprises approximately 0.52% of all Web content, and HTML is roughly 189 times more common than Flash.
Let *me* put that into perspective. Most Flash content is deployed via JavaScript, so it won't show in a Google filetype search. None of the sites with Flash I've worked on would pop SWF filetype results in Google. Saying that Flash to SVG are 5 to 1 is hilarious, given the-still-leading browser on the market, IE, supports zero SVG content (to change with IE9 which is in alpha right now).
Saying that Flash is 0.52% of the content of the web is also hilarious. Even just counting the countless embedded YouTube players in blogs would change those numbers drastically.
To that end, what do you think a Lady Gaga CD will go for in (roughly) 2070, do you think? More importantly, how widely do you think her songs would be played by then? Would anyone still alive then even know or care who she was? That my friend is the big metric of success or failure concerning creative works.
I like that romantic view of the world, where people get famous solely based on their unquestioned and provable talents, but older artists are considered valuable as they created arts in great scarcity, or in a period where they were considered pioneers in their often niche (at the time) craft to a niche (at the time) public. Humanity has also historically had the habit of forgetting things through the ages and then calling them "new" as they show up again.
Today, in a global economy, instant point to point communication, and easy digital replication, we realize we're no longer as unique as we once thought. We're definitely no less talented, but we're oversaturated with products and art, it puts everything in a different perspective. The world is full of singers, painters, writers, compositors, designers, thinkers... who may very well be more talented than the legends of yesteryear, but they will work at some local pub, a small company, or if they get a great producer and manager, you may hear about them a little bit, for a little while, like is the case with Lady Gaga.
As for how valuable her CD is gonna be. Digital has been proven more flexible than anything we've had, but also it's hard to put antique value on it. In a few decades people will simply stop making CDs as well and it'll be all over-the-wire files. It's hard to imagine trading "a rare mp3" for thousands of dollars, never mind how talented the author of said mp3 really is.
Welcome to the 21st century.
In this manner he makes the channel mods look like immature jerks, but I talked to the mod that actually kicked him not long after the story broke. Evidently the guy was typing like an idiot (multiple messages per sentence) and acting in a rather unprofessional manner.
The mods banned the guy who has all their user data because he hit Enter too much. Not sure how that supports your premise?
They proved a newspaper can successfully be made using only F/OSS. One day? Imagine one year with a programmer or two tweaking the software to work just how they want it. It could blow away the existing stuff and enable a resurgence in amateur newspapers.
That's a pretty low bar. Newspapers have been made without computers or software for decades, so of course you might as well use F/OSS.
Also maybe you're right, of only every paper had a programmer or two to work on that software... Let's do the math with a programmer and a half as an average. Let's assume they're foreign students out of college, so they're super cheap, say $2000/month. For one year, that's $24000, not counting taxes, benefits, office and office related expenses, but if I do, it can easily go $30-40000.
Wait, how much was the license for Photoshop? $699. Wow, in retrospect, that's pretty damn cheap compared, huh?
Why buy a dedicated handheld gaming device, when you can get smart phone, pda, or tablet like the iPhone/iTouch/iPad, Zune/WM7, Android, or WebOS device that is just as portable, will do a decent job playing games, plus let you surf the net, do your e-mail, and hold your media (music, videos, etc.)?
I've heard that argument before...
Why buy a dedicated iOS tablet, when you can have a fully featured laptop that is just as portable, will let you run Flash, Photoshop...
And yet, iPads sell. So here you are, using the same argument, this time in favor of buying an iPad. People like a simpler, dedicated device, that does more than a "decent job" at the things they want.
Note that we're talking about ads in third-party applications. Meaning as a third-party application developer, Apple has now said "Oh, and by the way if you want to advertise, your only real choice is us." How is that defensible?
You have to opt-in to iAd and other ad networks are still running today in third party iPhone apps, Apple has not banned third party networks, and the limitation on the third party networks equally apply also for Apple's own iAd.
But yeah, other than that have a point. Just kidding.
So if my mother is slow to learn new applications and she is so used to IE's look and feel but I want her to be more secure
Chrome Frame is "opt-in". She won't be more secure as Chrome Frame will never run, unless the site owner asks it to.