Communism is a great many things, it is a social and an economic model first and foremost, but communism, as opposed to social democracy, is the idea that the sum [or a random selection, similar to a jury] of the population set government policy.
No, please, I asked you to get your facts straight.
There's difference between the way most communistic countries developed in practice, the way it's described by ideologists, and the way it's described to the citizens in the the propaganda communist governments spread out.
It's perfectly possible to have both democracy and communism at the same time. They are not mutually exclusive.
You could ask: then why virtually any known communist government I know uses the totalitarian model, well this is because this is the model that develops when you overthrow the previous government with force. After revolution, it's always totalitarian regime.
Many modern democratic countries have implemented and running ideas from communism in SOME sectors of their economy, but they just don't call it that way (historical burden on the term itself).
As I've said many times before, we'll see ideas we thought mutually exclusive before (like libertarian ideas and communism) play together in an increasingly complex landscape of our national and international economies. It's just the result of increased complexity and the need to handle plenty of "special cases" in the interest of society (and various other interests...).
"People are calling it 'extreme democracy' and perhaps it is." Actually, we've had a word for it for a long time: Communism.
Communism and democracy is apples and oranges. Get your fact straight.
Communism corresponds to centralised economic model, versus free market. Democracy corresponds to the model of law regulation and separation of powers in the country. Versus, say totalitarian regime.
Well why tax anything? Why tax income, or sales, or gasoline, or any of the other million categories of items that are taxed? The bottom line is, the government needs money, and it's probably a lot easier to get it by nickel-and-diming people with taxes on everything they pay for than by raising income taxes or some other high-profile tax. Of course this simplistically assumes that all tax revenue just goes into a big pile to be used for anything, but...
Maybe you don't understand my intention. If you tax all of this above you mentioned, the internet is already implicitly taxed.
One would think taxing corporate and private income once is sufficient. The complication of taxes is just a way to hide how big taxes are in fact.
Taking 60% of your income? Outrageous! But split those 50% in various insurances and other tax types, and there we go.
I hope the ban is extended. I'd prefer permanently, but I'd be content with a 4 year extension...for 4 years anyway. If it's not the internet is gonna become just like cell phones. Sign up for a $40/month plan and end up paying $55 after all the taxes. C'mon congress!
In EU we pay VAT on services and products, so we do sign up for $40/month plan and pay $55 after the taxes. But somehow our Internet is still faster and cheaper than the US one.
Internet tax definitely won't ruin teh Internet. The question is rather: why on Earth tax it in the first place.
Either they let us SIGN a contract BEFORE we buy explaining how they want to deliver their product (lend it, lease it), or if they don't do that, we can consider it BOUGHT and our property.
In Fantasy Land it may be yours, but just because a piece of software is out for licensing doesn't mean you can just imagine yourself owning it, since you feel more comfortable this way.
You want a contract? Where were you looking during installation? The EULA is called EULA for a reason (license agreement). It IS your contract. If you don't agree to the contract, you don't use the software, period.
Yes, some EULA-s are ridiculous, but then don't use the software, period.
If you "owned" a piece of software, you could resell it. Not just once, you could start your own CD printing factory and sell million of copies.
That's what ownership means. And yup, it used to work great for physical goods, but for digital works, the only thing that works in a commercial industry, is the license.
Again, if you don't like that, don't use the software, period.
While I agree that this guy does seem like an arse, I have a thought experiment: What if someone were to make up a story like "I found out that John Howard was taking bribes from George Bush to influence Australian lawmaking -- but when I blogged about it, the AFP had my webhost pull my blog!"? They could manipulate this phenomenon to spread misinformation and people would end up believing it.
You're underestimating "mob intelligence". Even if 99.99% of the bloggers were muppets, someone would try to find proof of this guy's claims, and if it finds claims to the contrary, the truth will come out quick.
A recent example of this mechanism was the $150 Medison Celebrity laptop. The bloggers and media quickly picked up the "good news" about the cheapest laptop in the world (including Slashdot). But thanks to few individuals which raised few problems questioning the legitimacy of the deal, all those media published updates that the deal is most likely a scam.
Worse even, now the dominating information you can find if you search around, is that the deal is a scam, it totally overshadowed the initial positive reports.
Now, when does this not work? When there's no conclusive enough proof to either case. You'll find plenty of myths and legends carried around on the Internet, starting from the usual who killed Kenedy, and did we land on the Moon, to the more exotic ones.
Still you'll find most people stick to facts, and if you point them to a problem in a claim, they'll take on it. If there's an active source of information they can tap, they will.
In other words, on the Internet, when someone claims "your sister is a whore", "I have no sister" sometimes IS a sufficient answer, if it's correct.
Give us an example of this hard case. The thing is, this litigious and tortuous behavior is mostly characteristic for people who want to take down information they don't want anyone to HEAR or SEE about, mostly because knowledge would bring on other worse predictions and conclusions.
They're rarely interested in rebuttal since they have none.
Also if you were the main star in a recent lie spread throughout the Internet like a wildfire, you can imagine your answer/rebuttal would spread across the Internet like a wildfire too.
In either case, censorship ensures far more truths will be hidden, than lies. Truth hurts more, you know.
You know a frequently exploited theme in science fiction, which actually comes fromt he real world: all together we're worth more than just the sum of us.
Just like none of the nerve cells in our brain knows exactly what effect it has on the big picture, they all together create complicated intelligence machine.
Then I read this:
"The Internet still seems to regard censorship as damage and route around it."
I know it's not the context they used it in, but ponder this: Internet has enabled million of people worldwide to communicate instantly.
In this case people came together to show some rich loser he can't mess with their blogger buddy. The result is an information network that quickly provides redundant copies of information under attack and makes the information virtually impossible to erase ever.
The resulting intelligence, behavior and outcome probably escapes the mind of each one of the participators that form it.
Wrong as far as Bohr and Heisenberg argued in the "Official" Copenhagen interpretation it the act of observation by an observer i.e. a human mind that causes the wave function to collapse.
It still makes no sense. What is "observer". When is a system complex enough to be called observer. If I shoot the observation with a camera, the "interpretation" says this video is undefined until I see it. But if someone else sees it and I don't see it, is it collapsed? What if he dies after he observed and before he told me.
You see where this is heading. Mind has nothing to do with this. Macro and micro systems is where it's at.
It means that they can't put a clause which says "Use of any brand fuzzy dice other than ACME brand fuzzy dice will void the engine warranty."
Funny how this doesn't apply to ink printer cartridges, doesn't it.
I interpret the law a bit differently, since the law says it's not illegal to unlock a phone, but this doesn't mean it's illegal to void warranty on unlocked phones.
You won't end up in jail, but you'll have no warranty..
Apple made a terrible choice in its partner, and seems incapable of realizing the potential of the iPhone.
He's out to maximize the monetary potential of the iPhone, and not its humanitarian or science advancement purpose.
And he's doing well, more or less. As you see, people keep buying it and they kiss his feet when he introduces little feats like said iTunes wifi store.
If he just opens it up, he's no longer the boss of it, he will no longer be able to wow everyone by introducing some sort of crappy iPhone game next MacExpo. And Apple won't be in the media so much.
If you're honestly concerned about the medical profession, law and so on, how about consider the OpenMoko platform. Yes it's not as polished, it doesn't have the Apple logo on it, the cool factor isn't so high on a mobile Linux device. But it's open, you can do what you crave.
Now's the time to decide what you want: open mobile platform, or just cool factor mobile phone with wireless music store.
If you're ending up with a load of 'display: none' then it begs the question of what value that content had in the first place if you can omit it and still have a useful site. Most of that would be decorative graphics I guess.
You know it's not just decorative graphics. Comments, related articles, breaking news index, search with advanced filters, videos, photos, lots of things.
Those things ARE useful if you have the place for them, and make the site easier to browse and more accessible, but just not on a mobile device where you barely have place to show the main article.
In most cases, we'll have to face it: a site for mobile device should be a site made for mobile device, not just a CSS hack of the desktop site.
The site content shouldn't need to change - only the presentation. All that needs to be done is to serve up a different style sheet depending on the user agent, or a default 'safe' stylesheet, or none at all.
As someone who's been through that: it doesn't work.
You see, the mobile stylesheet has suspiciously many entries of "display:none" if you go this way. Which means you discard many of the non-essential elements for the mobile version and reorder the rest to fit a mobile screen, but the mobile users still download the entire damn thing.
And downloading things you don't even SEE is far from perfect for the expensive/slow access points on a mobile device.
Certainly nice that CSS has the feature, but it's not the ultimate solution.
1. Microsoft knew the minimum specs are worthless 2. OEMs knew the minimum specs are worthless 3. Microsoft didn't want to up the specs since that would drive Vista in a tight niche only with the most expensive computers 4. OEMs didn't want to skip on the minimum spec machines, since they believed their competitors will do and steal their business
So this is how we ended up with Vista machines that can't run Vista. Still, the major fault lies at Microsoft for producing an elephant of an OS. You know, they could:
- polish up XP - introduce.NET and WPF in it (there's XP version you know) - improve the UI some - include the DVD/Calendar apps - release it within 2 years after XP, calling it XP2 (for example)
But they probably got caught in their own Longhorn revolution hype, and now suffering with us for it.
Don't demonize them in that fashion. Of course they want to be innovative. Of course they want their OS to be fast, compatible and cool looking.
Their real problem is, they can no longer do it, like they did it with 95/98/2000/XP before it. That puts Microsoft more in a sad light, than evil light.
Being as big as they are, and all the momentum they have, they have one more shot at it to get it right. We'll see.
Microsoft said: "We understand that our [original equipment manufacturer] partners are responding appropriately to a small minority of customers that have this specific request. But, as they have said before, the vast majority of consumers want the latest and greatest technology and that includes Windows Vista."
(emphasis mine)
That sounds horrible. Aside from their attempt on every second word to scale back the perceived failure of Vista, they know very well what they say isn't true.
To get mammoths like DELL and Lenovo to consider a "small minority" of customers so quickly, at the potential to sell overspecced machines loaded with Vista (something they waited patiently for over 5 years), then they're not a small minority at all.
They'll just require you to be interactively conversing. (Which could be useful in case someone is planning to fly a predator through your window.) They'll require you to enter --at random intervals-- the captchas on your screen.
That's not a phone call you described, it's torture. Even the most miserable schmuck out there wouldn't submit to this.
Tamarin will run javascript 2, which will to do javascript what the move from actionscript 2 to 3 did for flash/flex. In short: it will make non-toy applications easily done, instead of just marginally feasible. They plan to migrate the firefox UI and extensions to javascript 2, which should negate the performance issues.
I'm aware of Tamarin but it won't help them, since interpretation speed isn't their bottleneck.
Firefox responsiveness feels bad because the entire application is rolled up into a single thread, where the UI keeps stalling waiting for something not directly related to happen in the backend.
Unless this is fixed, Firefox will keep stalling. It'll stall "faster" but it'll stall for the same time. I leave it to you if this helps much.
Reality consists of particles in quantum waves of superimposed states. Period. When we observe a particles state, it's state becomes entangled with the state of the particles in our mind, and hence we observe the particle as collapsing to a single state "in each world".
Many people mix those up. Our "mind" doesn't have anything to do with it.
The wave function collapses when a particle interacts with a macrosystem. When two macrosystems are separate from each other, we have to assume the other macrosystem is not coherent with us until contact.
And remember contact *includes* photons reflected off the other macrosystem, so if we see it, otherwise put "observe" it, we're already in contact.
This is why "observation" causes collapse. Not because we're smart.
Leopard is as great of a jump from Tiger as Tiger was from Panther. Nice refinements everywhere, significant new apps and features like Spaces/Time Machine, major improvements to Mail/iCal/Safari/Quicktime/iChat, lots of major improvements under the hood that will propel third party development, including Core Animation.
Vista is XP with a new theme, plus DRM support for the dying HD-DVD, and a bolted on version of Apple's Quartz (WPF) and Cocoa (.Net).
Vista isn't something I'll touch unless Microsoft releases huge revisions to it to fix performance, consistency, bugs etc.
That said, your bias is hilarious. The brand new rendering engine is a new "theme" as much as the OSX interface is a new "theme" for OS9. They're quite analogous in terms of changes made. Feel free to complain how MS ripped Apple on that one, at least it'll be more accurate.
You also forgot Shadow Copy, Vista's Time Machine (which existed before Mac's Time Machine on server editions).
Also please let programmers who have a clue comment on the developer technologies. Calling WPF a version of Apple's Quarts and.NET a version of Cocoa... was really painful, in a similar way to watching Miss Teen South Carolina 2007 answer a simple question.
Vista has huge and very powerful technologies in its backpack. Bulletlist-wise it can outdo Leopard at any given moment. This is why you DO NOT do feature comparisons of latest OSX and latest Windows. It'll fail by definition.
It's more about how Vista assembled those technologies in a final product, and how OSX did it. OSX did it as close to perfect from all popular desktop OS-es today. And Vista is just plain horrible.
Nobody forces you to use Firefox. You can use Opera, Konqueror, links or IE, or any other browser out there...
Firefox was supposed to be able to withstand popularity, unlike IE. Look at it now: people say it's slow, RAM hog, and hackers have started attacking it successfully just as much as IE.
At least we see it for what it is: the stick in Microsoft's eye that made them resume IE development.
If you can't code without hand-holding tools like automatic garbage collection, perhaps you belong in a different profession!
Firefox's problem is architectural and not one of garbage collection.
XUL is inherently single-threaded and JavaScript based. Try out any XUL application out there and you'll see how you get the same poor performance, speed and resource usage as with Firefox (try Miro Player and Joost).
The Firefox developers are literally throwing out more C code with every release, replacing it with JavaScript code.
Leaks (in the classical sense) aren't what's causing Firefox's abysmal performance, and this is why Firefox 2 performs worse than Firefox 1.5, despite one of the "features" of Firefox 2 was supposedly plenty of fixed memory leaks.
Actually I'm pretty sure they're in denial as to the cause of their problems. Announcing they're working on fixing "memory leaks" just supports their ability to continue their delusion.
Slashdot Mirror
Communism is a great many things, it is a social and an economic model first and foremost, but communism, as opposed to social democracy, is the idea that the sum [or a random selection, similar to a jury] of the population set government policy.
No, please, I asked you to get your facts straight.
There's difference between the way most communistic countries developed in practice, the way it's described by ideologists, and the way it's described to the citizens in the the propaganda communist governments spread out.
It's perfectly possible to have both democracy and communism at the same time. They are not mutually exclusive.
You could ask: then why virtually any known communist government I know uses the totalitarian model, well this is because this is the model that develops when you overthrow the previous government with force. After revolution, it's always totalitarian regime.
Many modern democratic countries have implemented and running ideas from communism in SOME sectors of their economy, but they just don't call it that way (historical burden on the term itself).
As I've said many times before, we'll see ideas we thought mutually exclusive before (like libertarian ideas and communism) play together in an increasingly complex landscape of our national and international economies. It's just the result of increased complexity and the need to handle plenty of "special cases" in the interest of society (and various other interests...).
"People are calling it 'extreme democracy' and perhaps it is." Actually, we've had a word for it for a long time: Communism.
Communism and democracy is apples and oranges. Get your fact straight.
Communism corresponds to centralised economic model, versus free market. Democracy corresponds to the model of law regulation and separation of powers in the country. Versus, say totalitarian regime.
Well why tax anything? Why tax income, or sales, or gasoline, or any of the other million categories of items that are taxed? The bottom line is, the government needs money, and it's probably a lot easier to get it by nickel-and-diming people with taxes on everything they pay for than by raising income taxes or some other high-profile tax. Of course this simplistically assumes that all tax revenue just goes into a big pile to be used for anything, but...
Maybe you don't understand my intention. If you tax all of this above you mentioned, the internet is already implicitly taxed.
One would think taxing corporate and private income once is sufficient. The complication of taxes is just a way to hide how big taxes are in fact.
Taking 60% of your income? Outrageous! But split those 50% in various insurances and other tax types, and there we go.
I hope the ban is extended. I'd prefer permanently, but I'd be content with a 4 year extension...for 4 years anyway. If it's not the internet is gonna become just like cell phones. Sign up for a $40/month plan and end up paying $55 after all the taxes. C'mon congress!
In EU we pay VAT on services and products, so we do sign up for $40/month plan and pay $55 after the taxes. But somehow our Internet is still faster and cheaper than the US one.
Internet tax definitely won't ruin teh Internet. The question is rather: why on Earth tax it in the first place.
Either they let us SIGN a contract BEFORE we buy explaining how they want to deliver their product (lend it, lease it), or if they don't do that, we can consider it BOUGHT and our property.
In Fantasy Land it may be yours, but just because a piece of software is out for licensing doesn't mean you can just imagine yourself owning it, since you feel more comfortable this way.
You want a contract? Where were you looking during installation? The EULA is called EULA for a reason (license agreement). It IS your contract. If you don't agree to the contract, you don't use the software, period.
Yes, some EULA-s are ridiculous, but then don't use the software, period.
If you "owned" a piece of software, you could resell it. Not just once, you could start your own CD printing factory and sell million of copies.
That's what ownership means. And yup, it used to work great for physical goods, but for digital works, the only thing that works in a commercial industry, is the license.
Again, if you don't like that, don't use the software, period.
While I agree that this guy does seem like an arse, I have a thought experiment: What if someone were to make up a story like "I found out that John Howard was taking bribes from George Bush to influence Australian lawmaking -- but when I blogged about it, the AFP had my webhost pull my blog!"? They could manipulate this phenomenon to spread misinformation and people would end up believing it.
You're underestimating "mob intelligence". Even if 99.99% of the bloggers were muppets, someone would try to find proof of this guy's claims, and if it finds claims to the contrary, the truth will come out quick.
A recent example of this mechanism was the $150 Medison Celebrity laptop. The bloggers and media quickly picked up the "good news" about the cheapest laptop in the world (including Slashdot). But thanks to few individuals which raised few problems questioning the legitimacy of the deal, all those media published updates that the deal is most likely a scam.
Worse even, now the dominating information you can find if you search around, is that the deal is a scam, it totally overshadowed the initial positive reports.
Now, when does this not work? When there's no conclusive enough proof to either case. You'll find plenty of myths and legends carried around on the Internet, starting from the usual who killed Kenedy, and did we land on the Moon, to the more exotic ones.
Still you'll find most people stick to facts, and if you point them to a problem in a claim, they'll take on it. If there's an active source of information they can tap, they will.
In other words, on the Internet, when someone claims "your sister is a whore", "I have no sister" sometimes IS a sufficient answer, if it's correct.
That's the hard case. Think it over.
Give us an example of this hard case. The thing is, this litigious and tortuous behavior is mostly characteristic for people who want to take down information they don't want anyone to HEAR or SEE about, mostly because knowledge would bring on other worse predictions and conclusions.
They're rarely interested in rebuttal since they have none.
Also if you were the main star in a recent lie spread throughout the Internet like a wildfire, you can imagine your answer/rebuttal would spread across the Internet like a wildfire too.
In either case, censorship ensures far more truths will be hidden, than lies. Truth hurts more, you know.
You know a frequently exploited theme in science fiction, which actually comes fromt he real world: all together we're worth more than just the sum of us.
Just like none of the nerve cells in our brain knows exactly what effect it has on the big picture, they all together create complicated intelligence machine.
Then I read this:
"The Internet still seems to regard censorship as damage and route around it."
I know it's not the context they used it in, but ponder this: Internet has enabled million of people worldwide to communicate instantly.
In this case people came together to show some rich loser he can't mess with their blogger buddy. The result is an information network that quickly provides redundant copies of information under attack and makes the information virtually impossible to erase ever.
The resulting intelligence, behavior and outcome probably escapes the mind of each one of the participators that form it.
Does the Internet have a mind on its own already?
Wrong as far as Bohr and Heisenberg argued in the "Official" Copenhagen interpretation it the act of observation by an observer i.e. a human mind that causes the wave function to collapse.
It still makes no sense. What is "observer". When is a system complex enough to be called observer. If I shoot the observation with a camera, the "interpretation" says this video is undefined until I see it. But if someone else sees it and I don't see it, is it collapsed? What if he dies after he observed and before he told me.
You see where this is heading. Mind has nothing to do with this. Macro and micro systems is where it's at.
It means that they can't put a clause which says "Use of any brand fuzzy dice other than ACME brand fuzzy dice will void the engine warranty."
Funny how this doesn't apply to ink printer cartridges, doesn't it.
I interpret the law a bit differently, since the law says it's not illegal to unlock a phone, but this doesn't mean it's illegal to void warranty on unlocked phones.
You won't end up in jail, but you'll have no warranty..
Apple made a terrible choice in its partner, and seems incapable of realizing the potential of the iPhone.
He's out to maximize the monetary potential of the iPhone, and not its humanitarian or science advancement purpose.
And he's doing well, more or less. As you see, people keep buying it and they kiss his feet when he introduces little feats like said iTunes wifi store.
If he just opens it up, he's no longer the boss of it, he will no longer be able to wow everyone by introducing some sort of crappy iPhone game next MacExpo. And Apple won't be in the media so much.
If you're honestly concerned about the medical profession, law and so on, how about consider the OpenMoko platform. Yes it's not as polished, it doesn't have the Apple logo on it, the cool factor isn't so high on a mobile Linux device. But it's open, you can do what you crave.
Now's the time to decide what you want: open mobile platform, or just cool factor mobile phone with wireless music store.
If you're ending up with a load of 'display: none' then it begs the question of what value that content had in the first place if you can omit it and still have a useful site. Most of that would be decorative graphics I guess.
You know it's not just decorative graphics. Comments, related articles, breaking news index, search with advanced filters, videos, photos, lots of things.
Those things ARE useful if you have the place for them, and make the site easier to browse and more accessible, but just not on a mobile device where you barely have place to show the main article.
In most cases, we'll have to face it: a site for mobile device should be a site made for mobile device, not just a CSS hack of the desktop site.
Are you telling me it's impossible to reinstall/reset the software on an iPhone?
Anyway what are they to do: sell their iPhones and buy iPod Touch, this is what they wanted right?
The site content shouldn't need to change - only the presentation. All that needs to be done is to serve up a different style sheet depending on the user agent, or a default 'safe' stylesheet, or none at all.
As someone who's been through that: it doesn't work.
You see, the mobile stylesheet has suspiciously many entries of "display:none" if you go this way. Which means you discard many of the non-essential elements for the mobile version and reorder the rest to fit a mobile screen, but the mobile users still download the entire damn thing.
And downloading things you don't even SEE is far from perfect for the expensive/slow access points on a mobile device.
Certainly nice that CSS has the feature, but it's not the ultimate solution.
I'm a web developer and I don't whine about chaos when someone's trying to work on my problems.
It's a simple one liner to set the right flag in your code if either the right URL or user agent is detected.
Given the mess we're used to when doing web dev work, panicking about this is laughable.
Vista on basic machines is unusable
.NET and WPF in it (there's XP version you know)
You can imagine how the game played out there:
1. Microsoft knew the minimum specs are worthless
2. OEMs knew the minimum specs are worthless
3. Microsoft didn't want to up the specs since that would drive Vista in a tight niche only with the most expensive computers
4. OEMs didn't want to skip on the minimum spec machines, since they believed their competitors will do and steal their business
So this is how we ended up with Vista machines that can't run Vista. Still, the major fault lies at Microsoft for producing an elephant of an OS. You know, they could:
- polish up XP
- introduce
- improve the UI some
- include the DVD/Calendar apps
- release it within 2 years after XP, calling it XP2 (for example)
But they probably got caught in their own Longhorn revolution hype, and now suffering with us for it.
They sort of notice it, but why bother?
Don't demonize them in that fashion. Of course they want to be innovative. Of course they want their OS to be fast, compatible and cool looking.
Their real problem is, they can no longer do it, like they did it with 95/98/2000/XP before it. That puts Microsoft more in a sad light, than evil light.
Being as big as they are, and all the momentum they have, they have one more shot at it to get it right. We'll see.
Microsoft said: "We understand that our [original equipment manufacturer] partners are responding appropriately to a small minority of customers that have this specific request. But, as they have said before, the vast majority of consumers want the latest and greatest technology and that includes Windows Vista."
(emphasis mine)
That sounds horrible. Aside from their attempt on every second word to scale back the perceived failure of Vista, they know very well what they say isn't true.
To get mammoths like DELL and Lenovo to consider a "small minority" of customers so quickly, at the potential to sell overspecced machines loaded with Vista (something they waited patiently for over 5 years), then they're not a small minority at all.
Honestly dude, re-read this last post of yours. It's hilarious.
They'll just require you to be interactively conversing. (Which could be useful in case someone is planning to fly a predator through your window.) They'll require you to enter --at random intervals-- the captchas on your screen.
That's not a phone call you described, it's torture. Even the most miserable schmuck out there wouldn't submit to this.
Tamarin will run javascript 2, which will to do javascript what the move from actionscript 2 to 3 did for flash/flex. In short: it will make non-toy applications easily done, instead of just marginally feasible. They plan to migrate the firefox UI and extensions to javascript 2, which should negate the performance issues.
I'm aware of Tamarin but it won't help them, since interpretation speed isn't their bottleneck.
Firefox responsiveness feels bad because the entire application is rolled up into a single thread, where the UI keeps stalling waiting for something not directly related to happen in the backend.
Unless this is fixed, Firefox will keep stalling. It'll stall "faster" but it'll stall for the same time. I leave it to you if this helps much.
Reality consists of particles in quantum waves of superimposed states. Period. When we observe a particles state, it's state becomes entangled with the state of the particles in our mind, and hence we observe the particle as collapsing to a single state "in each world".
Many people mix those up. Our "mind" doesn't have anything to do with it.
The wave function collapses when a particle interacts with a macrosystem. When two macrosystems are separate from each other, we have to assume the other macrosystem is not coherent with us until contact.
And remember contact *includes* photons reflected off the other macrosystem, so if we see it, otherwise put "observe" it, we're already in contact.
This is why "observation" causes collapse. Not because we're smart.
Leopard is as great of a jump from Tiger as Tiger was from Panther. Nice refinements everywhere, significant new apps and features like Spaces/Time Machine, major improvements to Mail/iCal/Safari/Quicktime/iChat, lots of major improvements under the hood that will propel third party development, including Core Animation.
.NET a version of Cocoa ... was really painful, in a similar way to watching Miss Teen South Carolina 2007 answer a simple question.
Vista is XP with a new theme, plus DRM support for the dying HD-DVD, and a bolted on version of Apple's Quartz (WPF) and Cocoa (.Net).
Vista isn't something I'll touch unless Microsoft releases huge revisions to it to fix performance, consistency, bugs etc.
That said, your bias is hilarious. The brand new rendering engine is a new "theme" as much as the OSX interface is a new "theme" for OS9. They're quite analogous in terms of changes made. Feel free to complain how MS ripped Apple on that one, at least it'll be more accurate.
You also forgot Shadow Copy, Vista's Time Machine (which existed before Mac's Time Machine on server editions).
Also please let programmers who have a clue comment on the developer technologies. Calling WPF a version of Apple's Quarts and
Vista has huge and very powerful technologies in its backpack. Bulletlist-wise it can outdo Leopard at any given moment. This is why you DO NOT do feature comparisons of latest OSX and latest Windows. It'll fail by definition.
It's more about how Vista assembled those technologies in a final product, and how OSX did it. OSX did it as close to perfect from all popular desktop OS-es today. And Vista is just plain horrible.
Nobody forces you to use Firefox. You can use Opera, Konqueror, links or IE, or any other browser out there...
Firefox was supposed to be able to withstand popularity, unlike IE. Look at it now: people say it's slow, RAM hog, and hackers have started attacking it successfully just as much as IE.
At least we see it for what it is: the stick in Microsoft's eye that made them resume IE development.
If you can't code without hand-holding tools like automatic garbage collection, perhaps you belong in a different profession!
Firefox's problem is architectural and not one of garbage collection.
XUL is inherently single-threaded and JavaScript based. Try out any XUL application out there and you'll see how you get the same poor performance, speed and resource usage as with Firefox (try Miro Player and Joost).
The Firefox developers are literally throwing out more C code with every release, replacing it with JavaScript code.
Leaks (in the classical sense) aren't what's causing Firefox's abysmal performance, and this is why Firefox 2 performs worse than Firefox 1.5, despite one of the "features" of Firefox 2 was supposedly plenty of fixed memory leaks.
Actually I'm pretty sure they're in denial as to the cause of their problems. Announcing they're working on fixing "memory leaks" just supports their ability to continue their delusion.