Why do you say that Flex 2 applications run much faster? They're both running on the same Flash player. The main overhead is rendering graphics on the screen, followed by interpreting the SWF byte codes. Why should FLEX applications be any faster then OpenLaszlo applications? What do you mean by "the programming model is better"?
Totally incorrect. FLEX 1 creates Flash 7 apps, and thus is limited to what Flash 7 offers. FLEX 2 targets the upcoming Flash 9 player (currently in public beta).
The features Flash 9 has over Flash 7 (including the innovations of Flash8) which affect the speed of FLEX2:
- First and foremost a totally new rebuilt JIT runtime. It's from 10x - 20x and in limited cases up to 100x times faster than the old, poorly designed interpreter. E4X support, true typing support (helps avoid plenty of pointless casts and memory on typeless "atom" variables), true ECMA4 compliant, true class support (classes in Flash 7 were hacks). I'm testing Flex 9 for a long time, and it's indeed that much faster in code execution.
- The new runtime has also completely rebuilt, elegant programming model. Flex 1 was full of hacks, since the old engine had to keep compatibility with Flash 4 SWF-s. Now since that engine is "frozen" and kept in the player for compatibility with existing content only, the new model is consistent, clean, and the new event model is very fast, the mouse and kb events bubble as they should, and a lot of what was before script implementations now run natively in the runtime.
- From Flash8 and implemented in the new components framework of Flex8 comes bitmap caching and the full bitmap API-s support. In Flash 7, when a window covers another window and moves away, everything is rerendered as vectors from scratch. This is similar to how Windows renders windows today, except that Flash uses no hardware and has antialiasing, so it's more CPU intensive. In Flash8 and later, you get to cache a 1:1 bitmaps that are quickly redrawn as memory copy operations back to the screen for elements that don't change every frame (you can also move cached controls/windows/graphics without regenerating). This is more similar to how Vista renders windows, since it also caches the representation of Windows.
So, caching makes a huge improvement in graphics rendering speed, and the new engine makes a huge difference in code clarity, and code speed (and the components have a lot of code so *it does matter* for speed a lot, tested and verified), and this is why Flex 2 is so different.
As a last point, Flex doesn't "lock you in Flash". It's just a environment and framework for taking advantage of the Flash runtime. If you don't like using Flash, you don't have to use it.
This is a really interesting situation. If they use the flag now, they will hinder early adoption and not be able to use the installed base of non-HDMI TV-s.
But here's the deal: the average consumer doesn't know or care what the hell that flag is, and does it exist on this disk or the other, or whether his player is supporting it. He goes to the shop and buys a HD DVD player and has a HDTV. That's it.
People will buy non-HDMI players and tv sets now since they'll work *NOW*. And this pretty much sets up post-2010 disks for a failure. Imagine a crowd returning their disks and players since they are blurred or not working. Why they don't work? People don't care.
Not to mention the whole "protection" has zero value. I live in a small Eastern European country. I have a good income, so when I want to see a movie I happily rent the DVD and enjoy crisp quality and the extra features. If I really want to see the movie I also go to the cinema or buy the DVD.
Thing is, most of the movies (even the bigger movies) don't reach smaller countries, even if they are in some cases blockbusters. I'm pretty much left in the dark unable to legally purchase the movie locally or online (all online movie stores "USA only"). At the same time I'm a frequent Internet user and follow what movies come out, and watch their trailers on apple.com .
So what do I do? I get a crappy camcorder 320x240 copy off bittorent or P2P, just so I know what's up. The quality is crappy the sound is full of noise and there's some Chinese subtitles on it or something.
But that's still working for me since it's better than nothing. So when non-HDMI devices downsample the picture to regular NTSC signal, does it matter for pirating?
Hell no, we're happy to get 1/2 of the NTSC, let alone downloading 30GB HD copy. It's all non-sense.
I'm puzzled, there has been some speculation of Google working on Flash ads support, but I didn't expect videos to make it before Flash.
Of course, the video player of Google (the online one) is working inside Flash, and uses Flash video, but why not allow *any* Flash content as an ad?
For once, what would be a 1MB video could easily fit into less than 100k vector and procedural (scripting enhanced) animation using the full toolset of Flash.
---
Of course, last but not least, I wonder where is the promise of Google to always deliver light non-intrusive ads. Text-only ads were so great, but soon polluted by big image banner ads (not on the Google's site yet, but on google ad enhanced sites), and now... videos.
It's trivial to cut down anything that you want. Holes can be picked in anything. I don't listen to reviewers who spend their time finding flaws to complain about.
As I hinted you above, you all can go read the interview these guys made in wikinews. Over there you'll see most of the people found the same flaws as I did (some of them experienced animators doing this to put food on the table): character animation is crude, voice acting bad, dialog makes no sense, and description is wrong.
That's it about the flaws. I also pointed out the strong sides of the project, and I'm getting really tired of repeating myself.
Lying to someone about his product so he can feel good, instead of telling him where he has to improve his skills is a really really bad favor. If all people were like you, we'd be in the Stone Age.
And how popular was your open source movie? It's always trivial to cut down the work of another, but if you can't do better, is there really any point?
This is a ridiculous, worn out, cliche argument. You can slap that at any critic if you're out of real arguments, except it doesn't really make sense.
You're walking out of a bad movie at the cinema. What are your thoughts? "Sheesh I wish I had a moviemaking studio so I could post on my blog how bad this movie was."
You ate a bad burger. "I'll tell my friends the burger was great, since, after all, I don't have my own fast food restaurant."
Movies are targeted to general public, not to moviemakers. You know, those guys who generally aren't making movies themselves, but are perfectly capable to tell you if the product was good nevertheless.
I don't need to know how the vertices weight and IK joints on the character skeletons were setup, or did they use NURBS, patches or box modeling, did they use global illumination or lots of fill lights to fake it, how did they map the textures to the model's UV. Those are technical details I don't care about. I just see the end result and judge it based on that. I'm in my right.
Moviemaking is extremely hard, the results are extremely sophisticated, and you can expect to be judged on a much higher and tougher standards than if you were making a mere flash cartoon parody for the web.
Should've they called it "Tech Demo demonstrates the power of open source" and didn't write up that fake description of stuff that doesn't even happen in the movie, I wouldn't comment on the voice acting or script (though they'd still be annoying). As I said, the scenery and modeling were superb. It's basically them to blame for trying to make it as if their product was a complete movie with some kind of deeply thought through phylosophical message.
Even worse, in their interview later they tried to explain the confusion with the script as a "they don't get it" issue, which is about the worst way to react to weaknesses in your product (in software products also known as "it's not a bug, it's a feature").
So they have a long way to go from impressive 3D demo makers to the point where they become true moviemakers.
You just pay a flat monthly fee and you always have the latest software, and the latest hardware including GPU's RAM, HD, whatever.
I'm a bad target for such a question. I'm a web developer and thus run a dozen of machines with Linux, OSX and Windows, starting with Celeron 300MHz/64RAM up to P4 3.4GHz / 1 GB RAM.
All of them are painstakingly tuned for testing and development purposes, so this wouldn't work for me at all.
But surprisingly the web devs are not a majority in the total amount of web users:)
Apparently those who drive SUV's and are so proud of this they use same for their username...
Where you masturbating while writing the above piece of art? Hope you had your fun, since, it turns out you can have a username suv4x4 and not drive a SUV.
Also a misunderstanding is not an indicator of how smart you are, the summary never mentions who did the product, and I'm short on time. So I assumed Apple did, since Macs are historically pretty short on 3rd party software.
How long would it be before you actually pay the amount that a new PC/Windows would cost for this? I... heh, bad idea I say.... he said, in the hope of being modded up, as he prepared to go pay his room rent.
This makes me giggle, because it's basically the return of time-sharing; in the past it was for for mainframe systems
When you stop giggling you may as well notice both have nothing in common.
One is a payment model for using licensed software (but time is not limited by demand, just by your money), and the other is an early form of multitasking, allowing more efficient use of the mainframe resources.
Netscape fell victim if an aging code base and poorly implemented standards support (next to none...).
Instead of making a quick series of patch fixing the standards support, speed and so on, they decided to drop everything and spend few years rewriting everything from scratch. Their first releases (Netscape 6, 6.2x, 7.x) were bloated, slow to start, slow to render, buggy and damn, they were ugly.
The company's been sold, resold, split, merged, reorganised and what not, and after so many years we got Firefox, which was able to compete again with its 1.0 release.
Was the inclusion of IE Windows important in this development of history? Certainly! However the fact IE4 was a significantly better browser than NS4 and all the crap NS did to themselves was what made the crucial difference.
(yes IE4 was better than NS4, it's hard to comprehend it today, when IE6 is the worst browser of the bunch, but back then the situation was pretty different)
There will be always someone to whine about something. ALWAYS.
The modern culture has imprinted on us this concept of "justice" and how if everything is "justified" and "proper" everyone should be happy.
What a damn outright lie!
If Windows doesn't include tools to protect us from malware (part security improvements, part signature based detectors), you can bet people will whine why Windows leaves them more vulnerable than if they bundle something.
But if they bundle, busineses cry fowl about their business being broken.
What can be done so all are happy? Nothing. And that's the full story.
You can all reply with your little stories about competition and monopoly abuse, but as operational systems grow, they naturally include more essential features and will naturaly hit someone's business.
Just like we experienced mass bankrupts of the thousands companies releasing simple text editors and calculators with the release of Calculator and Notepad (it's a joke, don't reply with historical references please...), it's just a fact of life: it's a demanded feature and got included.
You can still disable it and install something else.
Believe it or not, everyone that you speak to here is a real person. Being offensive does offend. Being nice does make you friends. That you assume that I mean Slashdot functionality when i mention friends is quite sad.
Look: I believe you and some of the other folks that replied here are taking all this way too seriously, which is why you may get offended in which case I'm sorry.
But what I said remains true: there's no reason to limit the download availability to May 24 (to create artificial demand), the provided "masters" are of low quality.
The 30 MB AVI that was mentioned isn't even CLOSE to NTSC, let alone PAL, EDTV or NTSC, neither is it in format that is suitable for editing... it doesn't even play in WMP and requires VLC or MPlayer), and the whole deal with the Creative Commons License is just a trick to get geeks and Slashdot interested.
Think a bit, it costs them $0 to keep it there on Google forever, but in 2 days, they will make the video paid (I guess you noticed that on May 24-th the Google video will be *sold*, i.e. this is why it's not free in that sense, although it's free to share under the license).
I bet most of the audience here doesn't even like the clip or even the music, but since they do the opposite of what RIAA/MPAA is doing, they all feel they gotta pat the band on the band for the bravery they had releasing their video under the license.
We've all the freedom to express our opinion here. I do believe it's a publicity stunt, to which I got replied to "get a clue asshole" and the sort, it's normal I got somewhat upset, just like you are.
Except that's no solution at all, because the whole point of the Internet is to be a single unified network where you can conveniently access all the data that is out there.
Yup, you'll lose access to MySpace, but it's all about making the right sacrifices!
Slashdot Mirror
Given the generally awful text input systems on mobile devices, why create a TLD that is four characters long? It's still easier to type .com!
What should they call it? "mob"? The top-level domain for all organised crime organisations in need of a site.
Big corporations: pissing on our constitutions.
If Microsoft doesn't think Vista's user accounts are usable how did it end up as one of the top features of the whole product :P?
The actual fact they are thinking whether to use it or not makes me fill with doubt. And I really thought they had it right this time (honestly).
Why do you say that Flex 2 applications run much faster? They're both running on the same Flash player. The main overhead is rendering graphics on the screen, followed by interpreting the SWF byte codes. Why should FLEX applications be any faster then OpenLaszlo applications? What do you mean by "the programming model is better"?
Totally incorrect. FLEX 1 creates Flash 7 apps, and thus is limited to what Flash 7 offers. FLEX 2 targets the upcoming Flash 9 player (currently in public beta).
The features Flash 9 has over Flash 7 (including the innovations of Flash8) which affect the speed of FLEX2:
- First and foremost a totally new rebuilt JIT runtime. It's from 10x - 20x and in limited cases up to 100x times faster than the old, poorly designed interpreter. E4X support, true typing support (helps avoid plenty of pointless casts and memory on typeless "atom" variables), true ECMA4 compliant, true class support (classes in Flash 7 were hacks). I'm testing Flex 9 for a long time, and it's indeed that much faster in code execution.
- The new runtime has also completely rebuilt, elegant programming model. Flex 1 was full of hacks, since the old engine had to keep compatibility with Flash 4 SWF-s. Now since that engine is "frozen" and kept in the player for compatibility with existing content only, the new model is consistent, clean, and the new event model is very fast, the mouse and kb events bubble as they should, and a lot of what was before script implementations now run natively in the runtime.
- From Flash8 and implemented in the new components framework of Flex8 comes bitmap caching and the full bitmap API-s support. In Flash 7, when a window covers another window and moves away, everything is rerendered as vectors from scratch. This is similar to how Windows renders windows today, except that Flash uses no hardware and has antialiasing, so it's more CPU intensive. In Flash8 and later, you get to cache a 1:1 bitmaps that are quickly redrawn as memory copy operations back to the screen for elements that don't change every frame (you can also move cached controls/windows/graphics without regenerating). This is more similar to how Vista renders windows, since it also caches the representation of Windows.
So, caching makes a huge improvement in graphics rendering speed, and the new engine makes a huge difference in code clarity, and code speed (and the components have a lot of code so *it does matter* for speed a lot, tested and verified), and this is why Flex 2 is so different.
As a last point, Flex doesn't "lock you in Flash". It's just a environment and framework for taking advantage of the Flash runtime. If you don't like using Flash, you don't have to use it.
The Flex 2 compiler and framework are *FREE*.
This is a really interesting situation. If they use the flag now, they will hinder early adoption and not be able to use the installed base of non-HDMI TV-s.
But here's the deal: the average consumer doesn't know or care what the hell that flag is, and does it exist on this disk or the other, or whether his player is supporting it. He goes to the shop and buys a HD DVD player and has a HDTV. That's it.
People will buy non-HDMI players and tv sets now since they'll work *NOW*. And this pretty much sets up post-2010 disks for a failure. Imagine a crowd returning their disks and players since they are blurred or not working. Why they don't work? People don't care.
Not to mention the whole "protection" has zero value. I live in a small Eastern European country. I have a good income, so when I want to see a movie I happily rent the DVD and enjoy crisp quality and the extra features. If I really want to see the movie I also go to the cinema or buy the DVD.
Thing is, most of the movies (even the bigger movies) don't reach smaller countries, even if they are in some cases blockbusters. I'm pretty much left in the dark unable to legally purchase the movie locally or online (all online movie stores "USA only"). At the same time I'm a frequent Internet user and follow what movies come out, and watch their trailers on apple.com .
So what do I do? I get a crappy camcorder 320x240 copy off bittorent or P2P, just so I know what's up. The quality is crappy the sound is full of noise and there's some Chinese subtitles on it or something.
But that's still working for me since it's better than nothing. So when non-HDMI devices downsample the picture to regular NTSC signal, does it matter for pirating?
Hell no, we're happy to get 1/2 of the NTSC, let alone downloading 30GB HD copy. It's all non-sense.
I'm puzzled, there has been some speculation of Google working on Flash ads support, but I didn't expect videos to make it before Flash.
Of course, the video player of Google (the online one) is working inside Flash, and uses Flash video, but why not allow *any* Flash content as an ad?
For once, what would be a 1MB video could easily fit into less than 100k vector and procedural (scripting enhanced) animation using the full toolset of Flash.
---
Of course, last but not least, I wonder where is the promise of Google to always deliver light non-intrusive ads. Text-only ads were so great, but soon polluted by big image banner ads (not on the Google's site yet, but on google ad enhanced sites), and now... videos.
Google is walking on a thin line right now.
It's trivial to cut down anything that you want. Holes can be picked in anything. I don't listen to reviewers who spend their time finding flaws to complain about.
As I hinted you above, you all can go read the interview these guys made in wikinews. Over there you'll see most of the people found the same flaws as I did (some of them experienced animators doing this to put food on the table): character animation is crude, voice acting bad, dialog makes no sense, and description is wrong.
That's it about the flaws. I also pointed out the strong sides of the project, and I'm getting really tired of repeating myself.
Lying to someone about his product so he can feel good, instead of telling him where he has to improve his skills is a really really bad favor. If all people were like you, we'd be in the Stone Age.
And how popular was your open source movie? It's always trivial to cut down the work of another, but if you can't do better, is there really any point?
This is a ridiculous, worn out, cliche argument. You can slap that at any critic if you're out of real arguments, except it doesn't really make sense.
You're walking out of a bad movie at the cinema. What are your thoughts? "Sheesh I wish I had a moviemaking studio so I could post on my blog how bad this movie was."
You ate a bad burger. "I'll tell my friends the burger was great, since, after all, I don't have my own fast food restaurant."
Movies are targeted to general public, not to moviemakers. You know, those guys who generally aren't making movies themselves, but are perfectly capable to tell you if the product was good nevertheless.
I don't need to know how the vertices weight and IK joints on the character skeletons were setup, or did they use NURBS, patches or box modeling, did they use global illumination or lots of fill lights to fake it, how did they map the textures to the model's UV. Those are technical details I don't care about. I just see the end result and judge it based on that. I'm in my right.
Moviemaking is extremely hard, the results are extremely sophisticated, and you can expect to be judged on a much higher and tougher standards than if you were making a mere flash cartoon parody for the web.
Should've they called it "Tech Demo demonstrates the power of open source" and didn't write up that fake description of stuff that doesn't even happen in the movie, I wouldn't comment on the voice acting or script (though they'd still be annoying). As I said, the scenery and modeling were superb. It's basically them to blame for trying to make it as if their product was a complete movie with some kind of deeply thought through phylosophical message.
Even worse, in their interview later they tried to explain the confusion with the script as a "they don't get it" issue, which is about the worst way to react to weaknesses in your product (in software products also known as "it's not a bug, it's a feature").
So they have a long way to go from impressive 3D demo makers to the point where they become true moviemakers.
You've just realised that you didn't RTFA, right?
No, now I did.
I've been always amazed how quickly registered users drop to AC's if they doubt it'll be good for their karma though.
You just pay a flat monthly fee and you always have the latest software, and the latest hardware including GPU's RAM, HD, whatever.
:)
I'm a bad target for such a question. I'm a web developer and thus run a dozen of machines with Linux, OSX and Windows, starting with Celeron 300MHz/64RAM up to P4 3.4GHz / 1 GB RAM.
All of them are painstakingly tuned for testing and development purposes, so this wouldn't work for me at all.
But surprisingly the web devs are not a majority in the total amount of web users
Apparently those who drive SUV's and are so proud of this they use same for their username...
Where you masturbating while writing the above piece of art? Hope you had your fun, since, it turns out you can have a username suv4x4 and not drive a SUV.
Also a misunderstanding is not an indicator of how smart you are, the summary never mentions who did the product, and I'm short on time. So I assumed Apple did, since Macs are historically pretty short on 3rd party software.
Sorry, but I really don't understand your post.
You're not required to, nor am I required to explain it to you.
You can lie how fast your machine is, you can lie how good your OS is, you can lie how bright your screen is.
But if you try to sell false security and lie it's real, you're up for a great surprise.
How long would it be before you actually pay the amount that a new PC/Windows would cost for this? I ... heh, bad idea I say. ... he said, in the hope of being modded up, as he prepared to go pay his room rent.
What happens if a would-be thief reports your PC as stolen so he can find out when to steal your car :)?
This makes me giggle, because it's basically the return of time-sharing; in the past it was for for mainframe systems
When you stop giggling you may as well notice both have nothing in common.
One is a payment model for using licensed software (but time is not limited by demand, just by your money), and the other is an early form of multitasking, allowing more efficient use of the mainframe resources.
It was a very thought-provoking piece, however.
And what thoughts did it produce? "Gosh this doesn't make any sense"?
Netscape fell victim if an aging code base and poorly implemented standards support (next to none...).
Instead of making a quick series of patch fixing the standards support, speed and so on, they decided to drop everything and spend few years rewriting everything from scratch. Their first releases (Netscape 6, 6.2x, 7.x) were bloated, slow to start, slow to render, buggy and damn, they were ugly.
The company's been sold, resold, split, merged, reorganised and what not, and after so many years we got Firefox, which was able to compete again with its 1.0 release.
Was the inclusion of IE Windows important in this development of history? Certainly! However the fact IE4 was a significantly better browser than NS4 and all the crap NS did to themselves was what made the crucial difference.
(yes IE4 was better than NS4, it's hard to comprehend it today, when IE6 is the worst browser of the bunch, but back then the situation was pretty different)
this new, Windows XP-only software promote Urge to the exclusion of other retailers
It's safe to say that WMP will start promoting iTunes about the same time OSX starts promoting URGE.
Don't give me the crap about market share, it's noone's fault that Apple has a low market share but Apple's.
There will be always someone to whine about something. ALWAYS.
The modern culture has imprinted on us this concept of "justice" and how if everything is "justified" and "proper" everyone should be happy.
What a damn outright lie!
If Windows doesn't include tools to protect us from malware (part security improvements, part signature based detectors), you can bet people will whine why Windows leaves them more vulnerable than if they bundle something.
But if they bundle, busineses cry fowl about their business being broken.
What can be done so all are happy? Nothing. And that's the full story.
You can all reply with your little stories about competition and monopoly abuse, but as operational systems grow, they naturally include more essential features and will naturaly hit someone's business.
Just like we experienced mass bankrupts of the thousands companies releasing simple text editors and calculators with the release of Calculator and Notepad (it's a joke, don't reply with historical references please...), it's just a fact of life: it's a demanded feature and got included.
You can still disable it and install something else.
Believe it or not, everyone that you speak to here is a real person. Being offensive does offend. Being nice does make you friends.
That you assume that I mean Slashdot functionality when i mention friends is quite sad.
Look: I believe you and some of the other folks that replied here are taking all this way too seriously, which is why you may get offended in which case I'm sorry.
But what I said remains true: there's no reason to limit the download availability to May 24 (to create artificial demand), the provided "masters" are of low quality.
The 30 MB AVI that was mentioned isn't even CLOSE to NTSC, let alone PAL, EDTV or NTSC, neither is it in format that is suitable for editing... it doesn't even play in WMP and requires VLC or MPlayer), and the whole deal with the Creative Commons License is just a trick to get geeks and Slashdot interested.
Think a bit, it costs them $0 to keep it there on Google forever, but in 2 days, they will make the video paid (I guess you noticed that on May 24-th the Google video will be *sold*, i.e. this is why it's not free in that sense, although it's free to share under the license).
I bet most of the audience here doesn't even like the clip or even the music, but since they do the opposite of what RIAA/MPAA is doing, they all feel they gotta pat the band on the band for the bravery they had releasing their video under the license.
We've all the freedom to express our opinion here. I do believe it's a publicity stunt, to which I got replied to "get a clue asshole" and the sort, it's normal I got somewhat upset, just like you are.
Solution: make our own g33ks only Internet
Except that's no solution at all, because the whole point of the Internet is to be a single unified network where you can conveniently access all the data that is out there.
Yup, you'll lose access to MySpace, but it's all about making the right sacrifices!
What would LCD monitors use it for? It's you that focuses your eyes on them, not them that need to focus on you.
Yes, but in Soviet Russia...
One thing is damned sure: You attitude is not making you any friends in this thread.
We're just two nicks, and having "friends" or "enemies" is just a colored circle right there next to our nicks, it's safe to say I don't care.
we can't just say "to hell with the n00bs", because we still have to live on the same Internet as them.
Solution: make our own g33ks only Internet.