That's correct (and easily verified by visiting those sites w/o either installed). Saying "DRM" is a bit like saying "audio" or "video" --- there's more than a bit of nuance that makes it painful for everyone. Often the pain isn't JUST technical --- it may be contractual (with the content owners) or cost (with the DRM provider). In general though, it is just pain.
This is a shill article because the lie is so fucking obvious to detect. First of all, Android is made by the Open Handset Alliance. Google is of course a very major player in it same as Nokia was a major player in Symbian BUT it is called an alliance for a reason. Google doesn't work on it alone.
So basically Google and a LOT of other players pooled their resources to create a product they could all benefit from and made it available for "free". So? MS used its monopoly resources to create a product nobody else can use for free. Apple used it fast wealth to create a product nobody else can use or even create gadgets for without paying them and they often just refuse to license stuff.
Who is being the bad guy again? Oh of course, Google for being less evil. What people forget about Googles "Don't be evil" slogan is that doesn't say "Be good" it just means don't be as evil as the rest... and in American Business, that is a pretty low standard.
While the parallels between MS of the 90's and Google are exxxxtremely thin --- it works only if you squint REAAAALLLY hard and use a sarcastic dismissive voice:) --- its not a huge stretch to say that Google, and Google alone, controls the features, look&feel, and direction of Android, leveraging close source applications through which they acquire customers, usage, and derive monetization.
From Ars Technica, "In fact, development of the Android private branch and the roadmap is controlled by Google, with little input from external parties or the Open Handset Alliance members" http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/08/study-android-is-least-open-of-open-source-mobile-platforms.ars
And from Droid Life: "Google has really started to enforce 'non-fragmentation clauses', giving the Android team the final say on how much can be tweaked on their stock code" http://www.droid-life.com/2011/03/31/google-tightens-the-android-reigns-time-to-start-controlling-fragmentation/
This enforcement, allegedly, is through access to the very valuable closed-source Google suite of applications -- without which the Android device doesn't do much more than boot. See http://www.gomonews.com/the-android-vs-cyanogen-story-has-google-shot-itself-in-the-foot-by-shooting-down-developer/
That said, no question that its been good (to date) for consumers - it just seems like the contrast between the public stance of Android and the behind-the-scenes shenanigans is... interesting.
That was historically true, but is no longer the case (I believe they changed the license coincident with the Open Screen Project release). See here. There are still the H.264 and On2 (as well as Nellymoser and other specific media codec) issues, but not any with open implementations of Flash itself.
In addition to what Hedward replied, I was mostly saying that the "working set" makes it difficult to compare apples-to-apples because you don't know the "real" state of the memory for one app vs. another: allocated and actively in use, allocated, but safey "page-able", or freed, but not reclaimed by the OS
They should add the "Virtual Memory Size" column in Task Manager and use that for comparison. It better reflects actual memory consumption.
The "regular" "Memory Size" column is the "working set" - so its possible that IE or FF 2/3 took more during page loads that hasn't been reclaimed by the OS because no one neededed it.
To see how this can be bogus, try minimizing all the windows for an app and watch "Memory Size" shrink as the working set is paged to disk. "Virtual Memory Size" won't change. See here for more info.
Additionally, one (probably) should disable toolbars/extensions - depends on what you're trying to test, of course, but IE's more likely to have some bogus BHO or toolbar installed by third parties (like Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc.) that are actively sucking RAM; which affects the steady state.
One could argue that's just the real world - but the intent is to compare *browser* efficiency?
---- graphically speaking
Makes sense. Brendan invented the language, so his changes must be in the right?...Sounds suspiciously like one of the "elephant in the room" undertones on the Mozilla mailing list... --------- graphically speaking
Its not a technical battle, exactly - ES4 takes a lot of what's good about JS, from an advanced lanaguage perspective, but loses a lot of some of what makes it good as a lightweight language (IMHO). Which is fine - its increasingly not used as simple glue...
I say not a "technical battle" though, in that Yahoo and MS (or at least their reps on the working group) just seem to believe its not Javascript anymore: The analogy here would be if the there was an attempt in Java's early life to call it "C++ Edition 2". I kind of agree on the merits of that argument, but (though I might change some of the, well, changes in ES4) think that the "open web standards" coalition really needs to go this way *directionally* to compete... more thoughts on this in my JS flame war blog post from a few days ago.
In theory a problem for all the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em (*ahem* confuse 'em?)" school of search destinations, but.. Google will never enforce the patent, so its probably moot... ---- graphically speaking
On the desktop - sure, non-existent - but on the server side, I see more and more developers building, from large scale application deployments to startups, doing their apps with.NET - productivity out-weighing other factors (in their opinion, which they back up with their work:)). --- graphically speaking
Despite all the harping,.NET has been a huge success for Microsoft in Corporate/Server development. On the desktop, just as MS is afraid of Flash and Firefox (not coincidental or surprising they linked up) obviating the need for , I think Adobe, et al have been concerned about the potential impact of WPF, etc. for what they call the RIA space.
Some early benchmarks comparing SpiderMonkey, what would become Tamarin, and JScript.NET. are on my site... interesting is that neither CLR, nor Tamarin provide a big boost when you use the features of JavaScript that make it more interesting than just plain old C. Wonder how much a real world boost this will be for the integration complexity? (i.e. is this another Netscape 6? Perhaps buckling down and fixing SpiderMonkey might serve better...) -- graphically speaking
I think this really boils down to an application distribution question, not a "client/server" vs. "Web app" vs. "desktop app" discussion. Most apps are really all 3 these days (even those "web apps" are running local "code" with Javascript in a browser). There are some nice qualities to "content" and I think the toolset for development and distribution, as well as the context for execution of the next gen of apps is what the discussion is about in the article... --- graphically speaking
Desktop power is still scaling faster than network speed, but I think the approaces Microsoft, Adobe, and Mozilla are all pursuing are of "content runtime" approach - where quite a bit of the work really does happen on the desktop. That's (more or less) the specific "convergence" the author is referring to... -- graphicallyspeaking
Not sure its so much confirmation bias (alone at least), as it is that the odds of NOT playing a song from the same artists over the next X songs shrinks more rapidly than intuition suggests. That is, for example the odds of NOT having a run of X heads or Y tails when flipping Z coins is very, very small.
The article mentions the "how many people does it take to get to a shared birthday thing" - and the point there is that its not that it takes 40 people to get to one with a SPECIFIC birthday but only 40 or so to find two that SHARE a birthday. ----- graphically speaking
Mixing presentation and data - good... bad... good. But it gets better a little, each time (maybe more of a spiral than a wheel).
We're using them on aim pages for module development (I cover it a bit here). Its a nice simple standard, and the idea needed SOME name - don't make more of it than it its. ----- graphically speaking
The idea is basically a way to continue to extend Moore's Law with current Comp Sci paradigms. Multi-core (and multi-CPUs generally) is the same idea, but requires software re-thinking to really be advantaged.
More units don't help things go much faster unless you can figure out how to feed them.
Like multi-CPU tech, there's probably a big diminishing return, so this seems like a 2 to 4-ish X multiplier - or about 18 to 36 months more of Moore. -- graphicallyspeaking
I think the secret sauce is still that if you build the OS, you can build the best apps for that OS (where best is certainly subjective - but let's drive it by "most used"). Microsoft->Office, Apple->iLife.
No, this is exactly the problem with the system being date and prior art obsessed - patents are supposed to be about INNOVATION, not discovery (i.e. Einstein, not Columbus).
Burst may have been the first to suggest those ideas, but mostly because they were (among) the first to LOOK at those problems - that does NOT make it novel Intellectual Property. When *everyone* else looked at the same problems, they arrive at (basically) the same solutions. -- graphicallyspeaking
lol - uh, yeah, don't get TOO serious about slashdot etiquette or anything... perhaps you could translate my offense into bandwidth wasted X degrees of separation?
(I didn't realize where my first post went - my bad - patience isn't a virtue I've mastered - apologies) -- graphicallyspeaking
Perhaps its the old "wisdom of croweds" thing, ala Google's "Did you mean ____?"
That almost always crushes standard spell checker results (pretty sure its heavily augmented with some kind of distance metric thing based on LOTS of mistyped input and follow-up for real users) - don't see a reason why that couldn't apply to voice search...
My first read (after reading the ARTICLE:P) is that this isn't voice recognition - its the old "wisdom of croweds" thing.
I always found Google's "Did you mean ____?" to be better than any spell checker (pretty sure its a distance metric thing based on LOTS of mistyped input and follow-up for real users) - don't see a reason why that couldn't apply to voice...
I think we will (are) seeing a move to more "content runtime" systems like the Browser, Flash, Avalon/XAML, XULRunner, etc. Even virtualization solutions (VMWare, et al) are in that category - Not only is this about sandboxing and security, I think its about deployment, maintenance and "everywhere" access.
An unanswered question is what form that will take: RISC-like (content-driven: browsers, markup, scripting, et. al.) or CISC-like (application-driven: VMWare, J2ME, dot NET), to use an old analogy. Likely, it'll be somewhere in the middle, but I expect the bias will be toward a content model (as opposed to an application one) - which will blur the line about what concepts like "installation" mean anymore (which in turn I think will upend some DRM models). -- graphicallyspeaking
Slashdot Mirror
That's correct (and easily verified by visiting those sites w/o either installed). Saying "DRM" is a bit like saying "audio" or "video" --- there's more than a bit of nuance that makes it painful for everyone. Often the pain isn't JUST technical --- it may be contractual (with the content owners) or cost (with the DRM provider). In general though, it is just pain.
This is a shill article because the lie is so fucking obvious to detect. First of all, Android is made by the Open Handset Alliance. Google is of course a very major player in it same as Nokia was a major player in Symbian BUT it is called an alliance for a reason. Google doesn't work on it alone.
So basically Google and a LOT of other players pooled their resources to create a product they could all benefit from and made it available for "free". So? MS used its monopoly resources to create a product nobody else can use for free. Apple used it fast wealth to create a product nobody else can use or even create gadgets for without paying them and they often just refuse to license stuff.
Who is being the bad guy again? Oh of course, Google for being less evil. What people forget about Googles "Don't be evil" slogan is that doesn't say "Be good" it just means don't be as evil as the rest... and in American Business, that is a pretty low standard.
While the parallels between MS of the 90's and Google are exxxxtremely thin --- it works only if you squint REAAAALLLY hard and use a sarcastic dismissive voice :) --- its not a huge stretch to say that Google, and Google alone, controls the features, look&feel, and direction of Android, leveraging close source applications through which they acquire customers, usage, and derive monetization.
From Ars Technica, "In fact, development of the Android private branch and the roadmap is controlled by Google, with little input from external parties or the Open Handset Alliance members" http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/08/study-android-is-least-open-of-open-source-mobile-platforms.ars
And from Droid Life: "Google has really started to enforce 'non-fragmentation clauses', giving the Android team the final say on how much can be tweaked on their stock code" http://www.droid-life.com/2011/03/31/google-tightens-the-android-reigns-time-to-start-controlling-fragmentation/
This enforcement, allegedly, is through access to the very valuable closed-source Google suite of applications -- without which the Android device doesn't do much more than boot. See http://www.gomonews.com/the-android-vs-cyanogen-story-has-google-shot-itself-in-the-foot-by-shooting-down-developer/
That said, no question that its been good (to date) for consumers - it just seems like the contrast between the public stance of Android and the behind-the-scenes shenanigans is... interesting.
That was historically true, but is no longer the case (I believe they changed the license coincident with the Open Screen Project release). See here. There are still the H.264 and On2 (as well as Nellymoser and other specific media codec) issues, but not any with open implementations of Flash itself.
Surprised to see v8 slower than lua, especially on recursive function calls - can you post a sample in either lua or JS? Thanks.
In addition to what Hedward replied, I was mostly saying that the "working set" makes it difficult to compare apples-to-apples because you don't know the "real" state of the memory for one app vs. another: allocated and actively in use, allocated, but safey "page-able", or freed, but not reclaimed by the OS
oops - yes, and yes...
They should add the "Virtual Memory Size" column in Task Manager and use that for comparison. It better reflects actual memory consumption.
The "regular" "Memory Size" column is the "working set" - so its possible that IE or FF 2/3 took more during page loads that hasn't been reclaimed by the OS because no one neededed it.
To see how this can be bogus, try minimizing all the windows for an app and watch "Memory Size" shrink as the working set is paged to disk. "Virtual Memory Size" won't change. See here for more info.
Additionally, one (probably) should disable toolbars/extensions - depends on what you're trying to test, of course, but IE's more likely to have some bogus BHO or toolbar installed by third parties (like Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc.) that are actively sucking RAM; which affects the steady state.
One could argue that's just the real world - but the intent is to compare *browser* efficiency?
----
graphically speaking
Makes sense. Brendan invented the language, so his changes must be in the right? ...Sounds suspiciously like one of the "elephant in the room" undertones on the Mozilla mailing list...
---------
graphically speaking
Its not a technical battle, exactly - ES4 takes a lot of what's good about JS, from an advanced lanaguage perspective, but loses a lot of some of what makes it good as a lightweight language (IMHO). Which is fine - its increasingly not used as simple glue...
I say not a "technical battle" though, in that Yahoo and MS (or at least their reps on the working group) just seem to believe its not Javascript anymore: The analogy here would be if the there was an attempt in Java's early life to call it "C++ Edition 2". I kind of agree on the merits of that argument, but (though I might change some of the, well, changes in ES4) think that the "open web standards" coalition really needs to go this way *directionally* to compete... more thoughts on this in my JS flame war blog post from a few days ago.
Uh Oh... too bad
In theory a problem for all the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em (*ahem* confuse 'em?)" school of search destinations, but.. Google will never enforce the patent, so its probably moot...
----
graphically speaking
On the desktop - sure, non-existent - but on the server side, I see more and more developers building, from large scale application deployments to startups, doing their apps with .NET - productivity out-weighing other factors (in their opinion, which they back up with their work :)).
---
graphically speaking
Despite all the harping, .NET has been a huge success for Microsoft in Corporate/Server development. On the desktop, just as MS is afraid of Flash and Firefox (not coincidental or surprising they linked up) obviating the need for , I think Adobe, et al have been concerned about the potential impact of WPF, etc. for what they call the RIA space.
Some early benchmarks comparing SpiderMonkey, what would become Tamarin, and JScript.NET. are on my site... interesting is that neither CLR, nor Tamarin provide a big boost when you use the features of JavaScript that make it more interesting than just plain old C. Wonder how much a real world boost this will be for the integration complexity? (i.e. is this another Netscape 6? Perhaps buckling down and fixing SpiderMonkey might serve better...)
--
graphically speaking
I think this really boils down to an application distribution question, not a "client/server" vs. "Web app" vs. "desktop app" discussion. Most apps are really all 3 these days (even those "web apps" are running local "code" with Javascript in a browser). There are some nice qualities to "content" and I think the toolset for development and distribution, as well as the context for execution of the next gen of apps is what the discussion is about in the article...
---
graphically speaking
Desktop power is still scaling faster than network speed, but I think the approaces Microsoft, Adobe, and Mozilla are all pursuing are of "content runtime" approach - where quite a bit of the work really does happen on the desktop. That's (more or less) the specific "convergence" the author is referring to...
--
graphicallyspeaking
Not sure its so much confirmation bias (alone at least), as it is that the odds of NOT playing a song from the same artists over the next X songs shrinks more rapidly than intuition suggests. That is, for example the odds of NOT having a run of X heads or Y tails when flipping Z coins is very, very small.
The article mentions the "how many people does it take to get to a shared birthday thing" - and the point there is that its not that it takes 40 people to get to one with a SPECIFIC birthday but only 40 or so to find two that SHARE a birthday.
-----
graphically speaking
Mixing presentation and data - good... bad... good. But it gets better a little, each time (maybe more of a spiral than a wheel).
We're using them on aim pages for module development (I cover it a bit here). Its a nice simple standard, and the idea needed SOME name - don't make more of it than it its.
-----
graphically speaking
Space.com and LiveScience found out that 40% of their test population likes SCIENCE and SPACE related stuff?
That *is* curious.
Thank you, that is brand new, surprising information.
--
graphicallyspeaking
The idea is basically a way to continue to extend Moore's Law with current Comp Sci paradigms. Multi-core (and multi-CPUs generally) is the same idea, but requires software re-thinking to really be advantaged.
More units don't help things go much faster unless you can figure out how to feed them.
Like multi-CPU tech, there's probably a big diminishing return, so this seems like a 2 to 4-ish X multiplier - or about 18 to 36 months more of Moore.
--
graphicallyspeaking
I think the secret sauce is still that if you build the OS, you can build the best apps for that OS (where best is certainly subjective - but let's drive it by "most used"). Microsoft->Office, Apple->iLife.
In other words, he who smelt it, dealt it.
--
graphicallyspeaking
No, this is exactly the problem with the system being date and prior art obsessed - patents are supposed to be about INNOVATION, not discovery (i.e. Einstein, not Columbus).
Burst may have been the first to suggest those ideas, but mostly because they were (among) the first to LOOK at those problems - that does NOT make it novel Intellectual Property. When *everyone* else looked at the same problems, they arrive at (basically) the same solutions.
--
graphicallyspeaking
I blame Microsoft. They invented Open Source - and GPL v3 is the Rootkit of OSS IP Viruses. Thanks A LOT billg.
--
graphicallyspeaking
lol - uh, yeah, don't get TOO serious about slashdot etiquette or anything... perhaps you could translate my offense into bandwidth wasted X degrees of separation?
(I didn't realize where my first post went - my bad - patience isn't a virtue I've mastered - apologies)
--
graphicallyspeaking
Perhaps its the old "wisdom of croweds" thing, ala Google's "Did you mean ____?"
That almost always crushes standard spell checker results (pretty sure its heavily augmented with some kind of distance metric thing based on LOTS of mistyped input and follow-up for real users) - don't see a reason why that couldn't apply to voice search...
(non-trivially, probably, but still)
--
graphicallyspeaking
My first read (after reading the ARTICLE :P) is that this isn't voice recognition - its the old "wisdom of croweds" thing.
I always found Google's "Did you mean ____?" to be better than any spell checker (pretty sure its a distance metric thing based on LOTS of mistyped input and follow-up for real users) - don't see a reason why that couldn't apply to voice...
(non-trivially, probably, but still)
--
graphicallyspeaking
I think we will (are) seeing a move to more "content runtime" systems like the Browser, Flash, Avalon/XAML, XULRunner, etc. Even virtualization solutions (VMWare, et al) are in that category - Not only is this about sandboxing and security, I think its about deployment, maintenance and "everywhere" access.
An unanswered question is what form that will take: RISC-like (content-driven: browsers, markup, scripting, et. al.) or CISC-like (application-driven: VMWare, J2ME, dot NET), to use an old analogy. Likely, it'll be somewhere in the middle, but I expect the bias will be toward a content model (as opposed to an application one) - which will blur the line about what concepts like "installation" mean anymore (which in turn I think will upend some DRM models).
--
graphicallyspeaking