Think about it. Would Google, which already has Google Video, go and spend 1.6 billion on a virtually equivalent service, only to end up "vulnerable" and sued?
Somehow I feel this was discussed behind closed doors, risks assessed and measured, strategy outlined. The deal proceeded despite all this.
There's simply a lot we just don't know to start discussing if YouTube leaves "Google vulnerable". And when you don't know something, it's best to wait and see, versus flap your mouth, outputting unmitigated BS in your articles.
Have You ever used the Mac Word? I was really looking forward to it as I bought my Mac Mini, but it is a scary application that has nothing to do with the Windows version.
Do I sense lame excuses coming my way?
Mac Word operates like any other Mac app. If you find it scary, maybe Windows is still more relevant than some think.
Words about Windows relevance or irrelevance are easily thrown out in the plublic without thinking of what they really mean.
I imagine a world where Windows is banned and replaced with Ubuntu (for the sake of argument). Imagine your family installing and updating software from CLI or giving up your favorite software or games.
Imagine relearning all they know about their desktop in a Linux environment.
Windows also has a lot of software not offered on other platforms, such as Photoshop, Flash (the IDE), Dreamweaver, 3DSMax and so on.
The Linux alternatives for a designer are mostly jokes (like Gimp, where you can't even draw a rounded rectangle without installing specially crafted Script-Fu commands).
The Mac platform is a lot worse than Windows where I'm locked not only into proprietary OS (which is outdated every year and you have to re-buy it), but also proprietary hardware which you can't upgrade any better than a laptop (add some RAM, a DVD.. and that's it.. wanna faster processor on your iMac? throw away the whole machine and buy a new one).
For my friends and family Windows are relevant, because Office is relevant. It's sad, because otherwise many of them would strongly consider buying a Mac. (Which would be a huge win both for them and for me, for I would no longer have to fix the broken Windows XP boxes...)
So now that you're out of reasons, when can we expect that you throw out your Windows boxes, and buy Macs for your family and friends?
The chip in question has unique features that no other chip on the market has. Mesh networks and extremely low power consumption.
In other words, good or bad, the part is NOT replaceable without harming the end product significantly.
If there's concern that Marvell (the chip maker) will randomly drop support for their product at one point of time, things should not be left to guesses but this should simply and plainly be covered in the contracts.
I also am susprised at the opinion that OLPC is targeted at OSS community. It has never been isn't and won't be. The goal is efficient, capable product using efficient solutions to solve a concrete proplem, of children having laptops with network connectivity for education, discussions, information exchange, communication and so on.
Don't forget: not everything proprietary is evil. If WindowsCE would provide much better and cheaper solution, OLPC would use it without thinking twice about it. Windows CE in fact *was* considered briefly at a point.
Well, Windows 98 had a much longer life! Was it a better... ehm... operating system?
In fact yes, for the time it was a very good OS. It still working great on a number of second hand machines I've equipped for children learning centers.
You'll be surprised how fine it works on a 24MB system where modern versions of KDE or Gnome would choke and die an ugly death.
Of course, Internet shortened the relevenacy and life of products very fast (at the speed of a zero day exploit, one might say), so don't expect Microsoft to support unpatches OS-es for years like before.
The problem with Microsoft is that they never separate bug fixes from feature additions. So either you stay vulnerable or you eat more and more of their junk.
I didn't want to move to Firefox 1.5. It worked slower and ate far mre RAM on my machines. But alas, few exploits later, I updated.
Because Firefox 1.0 support ended the moment 1.5 was out. Let's see for how long Firefox 1.5 will be supported when the official 2.0 release is out.
JavaScript is a prototype-based language. If you are trying to write class-like code (extends) in a prototyped language, maybe you should rethink your designs? Between prototypes and lexical closures, JavaScript currently has great support for object-oriented programming; you just have to use it the way it was meant to be used, not the way you'd use Java or C++.
Tell me how am I supposed to write base functionality and then implement concrete functionality on top of it then, "the way it's meant to be used" versus using extends.
There's no replacement for basic logic that I know of, and prototypes are certainly not self-sufficient for the task, hence all the frameworks extending them to achieve class-like functionality.
Screwing up USB support which meant that our mission critical application (developing embedded software) was not working until we eventually got a new IDE (compiler etc) from our taiwanese suppliers.
That's funny. Over here I had the opposite experience: external USB hard drive was dead slow (USB 1.0 backcompact mode) in XP without service packs. I'm talking like, 1.5 MB average bandwidth per second. Then I just install SP2 and BAM: 20MB/sec.
So what was screwed up in USB support, specifically?
This is so ungoogle. Google builds, not buys. Google indexes, not serves. Google already had a video service.
Google is jumping the shark.
You're confusing the image of Google with what Google is doing.
Picassa, Writely, Google Earth, YouTube, Google Statistics, Google Video Player and a good number of algorithms and technologies built into their search engine: it's all purchased companies (or open source software in the case of Google Video Player).
Every big company ends up buying smaller companies that have what the big company needs. This is the main way a big company grows anyway.
I've told you all few years ago that Google will grow and start losing their geeky "we make stuff" non-commercial image and turn into yet another corporation, just like it happened with Yahoo. We're on the verge of that, or even maybe past that.
We gotta get over it: Google is huge, and two guys alone can't control all Google is anymore, let alone argue with their shareholders.
The problem with Microsoft is that they never separate bug fixes from feature additions. So either you stay vulnerable or you eat more and more of their junk.
Name a feature addition in SP2 that's a showstopper for you. For all time I used SP2, I never found a problem with it, and I use and test a lot of software almost every day.
Probably the most interesting features to programmers are the addition of the SQLite engine [mozilla.org], and significant JavaScript enhancements [mozilla.org] heavily borrowed from Perl and Python. You can use generators (yield statement), Pythonic iterators, array comprehensions, and what the Mozilla people call "destructuring assignment". Some examples from the article for the curious.
Good stuff.
Of course it's good stuff! Mozilla did it, and they invented JavaScript! Screw ECMA! Right? Wrong.
First of all those extensions make JS incredibly obscure. Take yield for example. everything in the function format is the same, but if anywhere inside it you used "yield", well.. then the whole function is totally not a function anymore and works in a completely different manner. I hope you comment your code well, such as:
// NOT A GENERATOR BEEP BEEP BEEP function abc() {...}// ***GENERATOR** ***GENERATOR*** function abc2() {...}
If Microsoft introduced the same (obscure and mostly useless) extensions to JS without having them in the official ECMA draft or standard, all of you little fanboys would be screaming to hell and back.
And to those that wanna counterpoint me and link me to the proposals Mozilla made at ECMA, well flashnews: proposal is NOT a standard.
A lot of stuff, including Microsoft's VML, has a proposal status at W3C. Never accepted though.
Am I against progress? Waiting for obscure standards bodies to let us go on? No, in fact there's plenty of things that are almost in final draft state that Mozilla could implement that would make a difference in the web world:
typing and OOP
Those are pretty much finalized and sorely needed for any webdeveloper who had to hack up their own "extends" or "private/public/protected" conventions (i.e. any JS developer working on more than 30-40 lines of code).
There really are no good solutions for an anti-spyware vendor in this case, since detecting it could be considered as hindering law enforcement, which would be illegal in many jurisdictions.
You could've said that for Sony's DRM too (DMCA law), but still antivirus companies reacted appropriately.
I guess we need 20-30 more years until politicians who have a clue what the net is, come to power.
I doubt they've got everything, but 2.0 should have less of a memory problem than 1.5.
Makes you wonder why are they even going to release 2.0 just yet.
To me 2.0 is Firefox 1.6 + some hardcoded Luna skin elements (that look ridiculous in other modes on Windows, Mac or Linux).
Pure reason: marketing. They dropped half the stuff they planned for Firefox 2.0 and kept calling it a major release only to save face. If you thought Vista dropping WinFS was bad, Firefox 2.0 is uniquely bad.
Firefox is quickly becoming a think of the past. I do think only web developers will stick to it because of a small core of developer extensions.
I've already started recommending Opera 9 to anyone that complained about Firefox memory/cpu/performance issues. When IE7 comes out, I might as well just ask them to move back to it versus looking for 3rd party browsers.
Even worse; The ISP my brother has, uses a software/hardware combination that they acknowledge won't work with SP2. They refuse to upgrade either, so he's stuck with SP1. The thing is; it's a pretty big ADSL supplier in Holland and he's not the only one in this situation. I can only assume there are many similar situations in which people really are forced to stick with SP1.
Well you know, I also have ADSL Internet and oddly the only thing I need is having Ethernet port.
Noone denied that there's a possibility for ISP's to do ridiculous things, but that's hardly a reason to say "see, we need to stay with SP1". If a sufficient number of customers call to their ISP, or give up on their services, watch them quickly support SP2 in a matter of weeks.
The reason they are not funny is because you all are overdoing it, tripping over each other to tell us how funny it is that swamp gas might be related to a fart.
Apparently the belief is that immense mental power is required to produce a fart joke, hence we should be roflmaoing and lolling choking with our own spit at you.
Flashnews: fart jokes, just like farts themselves, are only funny in moderation. And since they're only funny in moderation, I urge all moderators to mod them down versus mod them funny, and see where the discussion takes us on this, otherwise intesting, article.
I'm afraid that while the new consoles brag how adaptable and updateable they are, they'll lose the very advantage of being a console (no need to reiterate, you know the story).
At the same time Vista is going full-speed into unification and standardization of game interfaces, technologies, ratings and even unification of the hardware (you know DX10 is much stricter and there's no "we support 80% of DX10" - you either support all or none).
Xbox 360 has for it media center hub functionality, slick integration with Windows CE mobiles and XP/Vista (Live Anywhere), and sane price.
Wii has a unique approach to gaming and control interfaces.
I wonder what PS3 has. Fast processor and updateable OS? Well I have this on my PC. The thing that keeps PS3 going (I hope) will be the brand loyalty, and, with some luck, some good exclusive games. Tough call for Sony, but I wish them good luck with it, if even only for the good old times.
Linux gurus are often pompous jerks, so are win2000 admins. Neither group has any effect on sales.
The difference is that Linux users translate their attitude in Linux as a community product, while Win2000 admins can't do it even if they wanted (Microsoft would never produce a product with totally up-side-down commands, like vim for ex.)
Rather that testing everything in browsers that aren't on the radar, test against W3C.
If you can run your sites against text specifications, more power to ya. The rest of the world uses good ol' fashioned browsers, and check against them to confirm they work.
If you need help to install Ubuntu then you shouldn't be in front of a PC:P Honestly, I believe that Ubuntu's online resources, wikis and forum, are extremely well maintained, which makes the book a little bit useless. I guess he's catering to those people who just can't do anything without having a hard book next to them to explain everything with pretty pictures. 1- download ISO. 2- Reboot from CD, and click on install 3- Run Automatix. The next time somebody tells you that they use Windows because it's easier to install, slap them with some humanity towards others:D
Well, I have a good news for you: you're not alone in thinking this. In fact most techies and linux users are firm believers that if you can't install, for example, Ubuntu alone, or do XYZ alone, you should never approach a computer.
I have also bad news for you: attitude like yours is one of the major reasons Linux is just about nowhere in desktop adoption right now.
Most of those "attack vectors" boil down to injections and non-validated data, AKA "don't trust the user input". I don't know how they managed to multiply one single flaw into so many "vectors".
And there's also this "attacking scripts in RSS": what was this supposed to mean? My RSS readers don't execute script in RSS. No examples, no links.
One more talked about hijacking confidential information from a bank cookie. No example how this is done, just the author assumes we know how to automatically sniff the cookie, and that the bank doesn't use server-side sessions like 99% of them out there, but stores it all in a plain cookie.
Basically the article is not as fun or informative as the title suggests.
For a company that didn't produce anything, ever, EVER! It's surprising they are still around.
Yet as they refuse to die for so long, they refuse to learn with a decent speed as well.
It took them 5 years (or more) to create a product that exists (the lapboard exists, it's been demoed, tested etc.), but now they may need another 5-10 years to realize people don't just buy whatever you throw at them, especially if it has outrageous prices and dubious practical qualities.
They simply have no the finances or image to hype this up. They're lost.
Slashdot Mirror
People also invested insane amounts of money in offshore online casinos. Vide insane amounts of market cap vaporize with one unexpected law.
I think your example is not of the best ones, unless you mean that in the case of Google, copyright is one "unexpected law".
Think about it. Would Google, which already has Google Video, go and spend 1.6 billion on a virtually equivalent service, only to end up "vulnerable" and sued?
Somehow I feel this was discussed behind closed doors, risks assessed and measured, strategy outlined. The deal proceeded despite all this.
There's simply a lot we just don't know to start discussing if YouTube leaves "Google vulnerable". And when you don't know something, it's best to wait and see, versus flap your mouth, outputting unmitigated BS in your articles.
Have You ever used the Mac Word? I was really looking forward to it as I bought my Mac Mini, but it is a scary application that has nothing to do with the Windows version.
Do I sense lame excuses coming my way?
Mac Word operates like any other Mac app. If you find it scary, maybe Windows is still more relevant than some think.
Words about Windows relevance or irrelevance are easily thrown out in the plublic without thinking of what they really mean.
I imagine a world where Windows is banned and replaced with Ubuntu (for the sake of argument). Imagine your family installing and updating software from CLI or giving up your favorite software or games.
Imagine relearning all they know about their desktop in a Linux environment.
Windows also has a lot of software not offered on other platforms, such as Photoshop, Flash (the IDE), Dreamweaver, 3DSMax and so on.
The Linux alternatives for a designer are mostly jokes (like Gimp, where you can't even draw a rounded rectangle without installing specially crafted Script-Fu commands).
The Mac platform is a lot worse than Windows where I'm locked not only into proprietary OS (which is outdated every year and you have to re-buy it), but also proprietary hardware which you can't upgrade any better than a laptop (add some RAM, a DVD.. and that's it.. wanna faster processor on your iMac? throw away the whole machine and buy a new one).
So now that you're out of reasons, when can we expect that you throw out your Windows boxes, and buy Macs for your family and friends?
The chip in question has unique features that no other chip on the market has. Mesh networks and extremely low power consumption.
In other words, good or bad, the part is NOT replaceable without harming the end product significantly.
If there's concern that Marvell (the chip maker) will randomly drop support for their product at one point of time, things should not be left to guesses but this should simply and plainly be covered in the contracts.
I also am susprised at the opinion that OLPC is targeted at OSS community. It has never been isn't and won't be. The goal is efficient, capable product using efficient solutions to solve a concrete proplem, of children having laptops with network connectivity for education, discussions, information exchange, communication and so on.
Don't forget: not everything proprietary is evil. If WindowsCE would provide much better and cheaper solution, OLPC would use it without thinking twice about it. Windows CE in fact *was* considered briefly at a point.
Jarosaw "sztywny" Rzeszótko
That's it... I resign!!
- suv4x4's spellchecker.
Well, Windows 98 had a much longer life! ... ehm ... operating system?
Was it a better
In fact yes, for the time it was a very good OS. It still working great on a number of second hand machines I've equipped for children learning centers.
You'll be surprised how fine it works on a 24MB system where modern versions of KDE or Gnome would choke and die an ugly death.
Of course, Internet shortened the relevenacy and life of products very fast (at the speed of a zero day exploit, one might say), so don't expect Microsoft to support unpatches OS-es for years like before.
The problem with Microsoft is that they never separate bug fixes from feature additions. So either you stay vulnerable or you eat more and more of their junk.
I didn't want to move to Firefox 1.5. It worked slower and ate far mre RAM on my machines.
But alas, few exploits later, I updated.
Because Firefox 1.0 support ended the moment 1.5 was out. Let's see for how long Firefox 1.5 will be supported when the official 2.0 release is out.
Let me guess: 0 days.
JavaScript is a prototype-based language. If you are trying to write class-like code (extends) in a prototyped language, maybe you should rethink your designs? Between prototypes and lexical closures, JavaScript currently has great support for object-oriented programming; you just have to use it the way it was meant to be used, not the way you'd use Java or C++.
Tell me how am I supposed to write base functionality and then implement concrete functionality on top of it then, "the way it's meant to be used" versus using extends.
There's no replacement for basic logic that I know of, and prototypes are certainly not self-sufficient for the task, hence all the frameworks extending them to achieve class-like functionality.
Screwing up USB support which meant that our mission critical application (developing embedded software) was not working until we eventually got a new IDE (compiler etc) from our taiwanese suppliers.
That's funny. Over here I had the opposite experience: external USB hard drive was dead slow (USB 1.0 backcompact mode) in XP without service packs. I'm talking like, 1.5 MB average bandwidth per second. Then I just install SP2 and BAM: 20MB/sec.
So what was screwed up in USB support, specifically?
This is not linux.com why start the article with "Linux was used to create XYZ" versus "XYZ was created .. it uses Linux".
Or should we still be wowed by the ability of Linux to act as an OS.
This is so ungoogle. Google builds, not buys. Google indexes, not serves. Google already had a video service.
Google is jumping the shark.
You're confusing the image of Google with what Google is doing.
Picassa, Writely, Google Earth, YouTube, Google Statistics, Google Video Player and a good number of algorithms and technologies built into their search engine: it's all purchased companies (or open source software in the case of Google Video Player).
Every big company ends up buying smaller companies that have what the big company needs. This is the main way a big company grows anyway.
I've told you all few years ago that Google will grow and start losing their geeky "we make stuff" non-commercial image and turn into yet another corporation, just like it happened with Yahoo. We're on the verge of that, or even maybe past that.
We gotta get over it: Google is huge, and two guys alone can't control all Google is anymore, let alone argue with their shareholders.
The problem with Microsoft is that they never separate bug fixes from feature additions. So either you stay vulnerable or you eat more and more of their junk.
Name a feature addition in SP2 that's a showstopper for you. For all time I used SP2, I never found a problem with it, and I use and test a lot of software almost every day.
Of course it's good stuff! Mozilla did it, and they invented JavaScript! Screw ECMA! Right? Wrong.
First of all those extensions make JS incredibly obscure. Take yield for example. everything in the function format is the same, but if anywhere inside it you used "yield", well.. then the whole function is totally not a function anymore and works in a completely different manner. I hope you comment your code well, such as:
function abc() {...}
function abc2() {...}
If Microsoft introduced the same (obscure and mostly useless) extensions to JS without having them in the official ECMA draft or standard, all of you little fanboys would be screaming to hell and back.
And to those that wanna counterpoint me and link me to the proposals Mozilla made at ECMA, well flashnews: proposal is NOT a standard.
A lot of stuff, including Microsoft's VML, has a proposal status at W3C. Never accepted though.
Am I against progress? Waiting for obscure standards bodies to let us go on? No, in fact there's plenty of things that are almost in final draft state that Mozilla could implement that would make a difference in the web world:
typing and OOP
Those are pretty much finalized and sorely needed for any webdeveloper who had to hack up their own "extends" or "private/public/protected" conventions (i.e. any JS developer working on more than 30-40 lines of code).
There really are no good solutions for an anti-spyware vendor in this case, since detecting it could be considered as hindering law enforcement, which would be illegal in many jurisdictions.
You could've said that for Sony's DRM too (DMCA law), but still antivirus companies reacted appropriately.
I guess we need 20-30 more years until politicians who have a clue what the net is, come to power.
I doubt they've got everything, but 2.0 should have less of a memory problem than 1.5.
Makes you wonder why are they even going to release 2.0 just yet.
To me 2.0 is Firefox 1.6 + some hardcoded Luna skin elements (that look ridiculous in other modes on Windows, Mac or Linux).
Pure reason: marketing. They dropped half the stuff they planned for Firefox 2.0 and kept calling it a major release only to save face. If you thought Vista dropping WinFS was bad, Firefox 2.0 is uniquely bad.
Firefox is quickly becoming a think of the past. I do think only web developers will stick to it because of a small core of developer extensions.
I've already started recommending Opera 9 to anyone that complained about Firefox memory/cpu/performance issues. When IE7 comes out, I might as well just ask them to move back to it versus looking for 3rd party browsers.
Bad, Firefox, really bad.
Even worse; The ISP my brother has, uses a software/hardware combination that they acknowledge won't work with SP2. They refuse to upgrade either, so he's stuck with SP1. The thing is; it's a pretty big ADSL supplier in Holland and he's not the only one in this situation. I can only assume there are many similar situations in which people really are forced to stick with SP1.
Well you know, I also have ADSL Internet and oddly the only thing I need is having Ethernet port.
Noone denied that there's a possibility for ISP's to do ridiculous things, but that's hardly a reason to say "see, we need to stay with SP1". If a sufficient number of customers call to their ISP, or give up on their services, watch them quickly support SP2 in a matter of weeks.
The reason they are not funny is because you all are overdoing it, tripping over each other to tell us how funny it is that swamp gas might be related to a fart.
Apparently the belief is that immense mental power is required to produce a fart joke, hence we should be roflmaoing and lolling choking with our own spit at you.
Flashnews: fart jokes, just like farts themselves, are only funny in moderation. And since they're only funny in moderation, I urge all moderators to mod them down versus mod them funny, and see where the discussion takes us on this, otherwise intesting, article.
I'm afraid that while the new consoles brag how adaptable and updateable they are, they'll lose the very advantage of being a console (no need to reiterate, you know the story).
At the same time Vista is going full-speed into unification and standardization of game interfaces, technologies, ratings and even unification of the hardware (you know DX10 is much stricter and there's no "we support 80% of DX10" - you either support all or none).
Xbox 360 has for it media center hub functionality, slick integration with Windows CE mobiles and XP/Vista (Live Anywhere), and sane price.
Wii has a unique approach to gaming and control interfaces.
I wonder what PS3 has. Fast processor and updateable OS? Well I have this on my PC.
The thing that keeps PS3 going (I hope) will be the brand loyalty, and, with some luck, some good exclusive games.
Tough call for Sony, but I wish them good luck with it, if even only for the good old times.
Linux gurus are often pompous jerks, so are win2000 admins. Neither group has any effect on sales.
The difference is that Linux users translate their attitude in Linux as a community product, while Win2000 admins can't do it even if they wanted (Microsoft would never produce a product with totally up-side-down commands, like vim for ex.)
Rather that testing everything in browsers that aren't on the radar, test against W3C.
If you can run your sites against text specifications, more power to ya. The rest of the world uses good ol' fashioned browsers, and check against them to confirm they work.
Well, I have a good news for you: you're not alone in thinking this. In fact most techies and linux users are firm believers that if you can't install, for example, Ubuntu alone, or do XYZ alone, you should never approach a computer.
I have also bad news for you: attitude like yours is one of the major reasons Linux is just about nowhere in desktop adoption right now.
Most of those "attack vectors" boil down to injections and non-validated data, AKA "don't trust the user input". I don't know how they managed to multiply one single flaw into so many "vectors".
And there's also this "attacking scripts in RSS": what was this supposed to mean? My RSS readers don't execute script in RSS. No examples, no links.
One more talked about hijacking confidential information from a bank cookie. No example how this is done, just the author assumes we know how to automatically sniff the cookie, and that the bank doesn't use server-side sessions like 99% of them out there, but stores it all in a plain cookie.
Basically the article is not as fun or informative as the title suggests.
For a company that didn't produce anything, ever, EVER! It's surprising they are still around.
Yet as they refuse to die for so long, they refuse to learn with a decent speed as well.
It took them 5 years (or more) to create a product that exists (the lapboard exists, it's been demoed, tested etc.), but now they may need another 5-10 years to realize people don't just buy whatever you throw at them, especially if it has outrageous prices and dubious practical qualities.
They simply have no the finances or image to hype this up. They're lost.