I am a little uneasy of making a web browser a proprietary platform.
There's two different uses of "proprietary" that are common, one is in contrast to FOSS (which Native Client is), and one is in contrast to "standard" (with regard to which, per the Native Client FAQ, Google thinks Native Client is too immature to consider trying to standardize at this time.)
Lots of technology gets integrated into browsers to be proven before being submitted for standardization.
Dart is chrome only
No, its not. The VM isn't integrated into Chrome yet, the only way to run it in a browser is compiling to JS that runs on any modern browser, so its not even runs-better-on-Chrome, much less Chrome-only.
Its possible that the when the VM is integrated in Chrome it will be runs-better-on-Chrome.
the javascript libraries are Chrome only or particulary run much better on Chrome (google ones like V8)
V8 isn't a javascript library, its the JavaScript engine that Chrome uses, parallel to SpiderMonkey or whatever the engine is that Firefox uses now.
[...] proprietary HTML 5 code [...]
You are misusing either "proprietary" or "HTML 5" here.
The TSA is a bureaucratic, money-sucking nightmare that entirely fails to live up to the promises of the politicians who created it.
That's not entirely fair; its lived up to the promise of relieving private entities formerly providing and contracting for airport security of the risk of future liability for failures by moving the function to a government law-enforcement agency, which was one of the promises politicians made to the air transport industry (in response, as I recall, to the air transport industry begging for it in the wake of 9/11.)
Sure, there are frameworks that might simplify this stuff, but, for artistic and creative people(read: largely bad at math), this is problematic.
That's pretty true of programming generally, not JavaScript or DOM manipulation particularly. That's why you have designers do design, content people develop content, and programmers doing programming.
Not to mention, if we just phase out these languages in place of new languages then what happens after you've learned your nth new language and now you have to maintain some code written in an "old" language?
McAllister doesn't argue for phasing out languages, and, IME, once you've learned a couple languages using a particular broad paradigm, its pretty easy to pick up other languages using a similar paradigm, and it improves your ability with programming even with the languages you learned earlier.
If a concept is good, it will appear in whatever the languages the industry is actually using, regardless of whether or not a trendy new language implemented it first.
No, it won't. Because if it hasn't been proven good someplace that has the freedom to implement new things without the legacy concerns that -- for very good reasons -- established languages carry, maintainers of established languages won't take the risk associated with implementing it.
While algorithms -- which can be analytically and quantitatively shown to be superior to others in specified circumstances -- will certainly be adopted when discovered if they are are analytically shown to be good, the quality of programming constructs isn't usually something that can be analytically quantified (at least, in an unambiguous way), but instead must be demonstrated through practical application.
The reason popular languages move more slowly is because established codebases use them. Backwards compatibility is a good thing.
I don't think anyone is arguing against that. I think the point McAllister is making is that without new languages, progress would stall. I don't think McAllister is saying that the conservatism of well-established languages is a bad thing in and of itself, just that it means that progress requires new languages. McAllister explains that this is because newer languages are freer to innovate than slow-changing established languages, but I'd go further and note that most of the changes that do make it into established languages are generally the results of those elements being proven in less conservative languages and then bubbling up to the slower-moving languages. Without newer languages as a source of innovation, there wouldn't even be the progress there is in established languages.
The app store isn't just for Windows Mobile. It's for all of Windows 8. Which means that the summary missed the big ramification: as of Windows 8, you will absolutely no longer exclusively have root for your hardware.
And I'm guessing that the majority of folks here have at least one windows box.
Sure, I've got two XP boxes and a W7 box. Vista, like Me before it, got a big "do not want", and it looks like W8 will as well.
What is the business sense for IBM to do so, or the patent department ?
For IBM, there's plenty of incentive for them to do find grounds for challenging every patent that isn't held by IBM (though little incentive for them to reveal those grounds until the patent is used in way which hurts IBMs business.)
For the patent office, determining what is and isn't patentable under the law and only approving applications for the former category is their job, so an automated tool that makes it easier to make that determination correctly would be in their interest.
funded in part by Google and the U.S. Energy Department
I wonder what's the interest of these two in this.
FTFA:
Google's interest in this technology springs from the company's efforts in cloud computing, where it must automate operations across a wide range of networking gear, Weaver said. The DOE foresees that this sort of software could play a vital role in smart grids, in which millions of energy consuming end-devices would have connectivity of some sort. The software would help "make sense of all the log files and the configurations of the power control networks," Weaver said.
GENEVA—Gamers worried their actions on the virtual battlefield could land them at the Hague war crimes tribunal can relax.
The International Committee of the Red Cross says media reports that it is investigating whether the Geneva Conventions apply to video games are false.
The Swiss-based humanitarian group assured gamers Thursday that “serious violations of the laws of war can only be committed in real-life situations.”
and that should not take up 100 fucking million dollars.
It doesn't. Their expenses for 2010 were $87 million. Revenue of $123 million, sure, but there is a difference between spending money and bringing it in.
i bet google's chrome dept doesn't spend that much.
Possibly not, but Chrome depends on WebKit, a project Google doesn't run, for its engine. The Mozilla Foundation develops a lot more of the browser they distribute than Google does.
100 million dollars is way too much for developing a web browser.
Based on...what, exactly?
And the Mozilla Foundation had $123 million in revenue in 2010, but only $87 million in expenses, and while most of the expenses were software development, not all of them were. Mozilla Foundation isn't spending $100 million per year developing a web browser, because, first of all, Mozilla Foundation isn't spending $100 million a year.
So in 2009 when it was clear that Google was building its own non-Gecko browser, why didn't the Mozilla Foundation start squirreling a lot of that money into an endowment to help pay for operations when Google inevitably pulled the plug?
The Mozilla Foundation had, in 2010, $123 million in revenue and $87 million in expenses. They bring in a lot more money than they are spending, and as of the end of 2010 had about a year and half of expenses at the current rate in cash + investments.
So, perhaps next time you ask why people haven't done something in a manner which implies that it was an obvious course of action that they neglected to pursue, you should check the readily available public information and make sure that they have, in fact, failed to do the thing you are complaining about.
I'm using Firefox now... its pretty good, but it doesn't feel like I'm using a product that gets over $100 million a year in funding.
The Mozilla Foundation is not the same thing as Firefox.
I wonder how much goes into development and how much goes into web hosting.
Software development consumes the majority of the Mozilla Foundation's annual expenses (by a wide margin). Website hosting is, comparatively, irrelevant.
Uki, Mozilla loosing funding is bad and all, but what the heck have they been spending 100M+ USD a year on?
Well, "revenue" is income, not expenses, but most of their expenses (over $60 million in 2010) were, unsurprisingly enough, spent on software development.
Does anyone know where the money they get from Google goes?
Anyone who can read, use the web, and cares probably does, since they publish their audited financial statement on their website.
Aren't they a non-profit that's freely distributing a community-developed piece of software?
From the information in the report cited below, they are a non-profit "that exists to provide organizational, legal, and financial support for the Mozilla open-source software project", and whose "purpose is to develop open source, standards compliant, free Internet applications that will be useable free of charge to tens of millions of users" and "to develop foundational technologies that will be used by content and software developers to develop standards compliant online content and open source internet software."
That's what their financial statements from 2009 (latest available from their website) talk about: 10 people and ~ $1.5M in budget.
The latest financial statement available on their website is the consoldiated report for 2010 on 2009. And it has, for 2010 (2009 in parens) $123M ($104M) in revenue and $87M ($61M) in expenses, $63M ($40M) of which is software development, $12M ($13M) of which is general and administrative expense, $10M ($7M) of which is branding and marketing, and $2M ($1M) of which is program services (all figures rounded to the nearest million.)
I have no idea where you got the $1.5M in 2009 budget from.
But $100M??? Assuming an average salary of $100K, that's 1000 people.
First, they don't have $100M in expenses, they have $123M in revenue and only $87M in expenses. Expenses include things besides just personnel costs, and personnel costs themselves include more than just salary (if you estimated personnel costs as twice salary, you'd be a lot closer than if you estimated, as you have, at the salary itself.)
Or are they really spending as much as Nike and Coke on marketing?
Unless Nike and Coke spend $10M or less per year on marketing, no.
Considering they have a browser of their own, would it really be beneficial to Microsoft to sign with Firefox?
Microsoft, IIRC, already has, though they pay vastly less than Google and get vastly less for it.
If the Mozilla-Google deal was actually ending or ended (and the weakly-supported inference in the blog post that the deal had apparently ended that is the basis of the statement in TFS that it is ending has already been explicitly denied by Google, so there is little reason to believe that the deal will end), there'd be little incentive for MS to replace Google with a similar level of funding (there might be a reason for Microsoft to outbid Google if the deal wasn't ending on its own.)
The summary states as a fact that the Mozilla-Google deal is ending, based on a blog post that inferred that the deal was apparently ending based on Mozilla continuing to make the same kind of vague statements about deals with search engine providers that they have for most of the last several years without any specific updates on the Google deal, which is a pretty flimsy basis for the inferrence, but at least that source (unlike TFS) only stated that the deal had "apparently" ended, not stating that it was ending as a fact.
But, Google has since explicitly denied that their agreement with Mozilla has ended. (See, for instance, this CNET article.)
he USPS needs to get rid of it's bad, underutilised services and focus on it's core, money making units.
Why? Specifically, why shouldn't a Constitutional function of the US government be subsidized out of tax revenues? The whole purpose of having a government is to provide services that provide indirect social benefits aside from the direct benefits to their participants; if the benefits of a service are entirely internalized, there's no reason for it to exist as a government service in the first place. But if the benefits aren't internalized, there is no logic to demanding the service be self-supporting.
As society gets larger and more spread out there are certain services such as the USPS/Fire dept that will become a nesesity reagrdless of their bottom line.
Not all the case in the US of something that will beceome a necessity as society gets larger and more spread out -- its something that's always been necessary, in part because of how large and spread out society was, and was recognized as such by the founders. For quite some time the political Right has advanced the idea that "government should be run like a business", and one of their big "successes" there has been the semi-privatization of the USPS into an entity that is, rather than operated like a public service, operated like a self-supporting business. The objective has always been to kill the USPS, and, even though it took a long time, they've finally reached the point where they've almost been successful.
(Perhaps ironically, the USPS's main opponents are the same people that talk about limiting government to performing its constitutional roles -- and operating a postal service and postal roads is one of those constitutional roles.)
Youre blaming a foreign country's problem with militant cartels on a US decision on what to make legal or illegal within OUR borders?
Sure. Certainly, the more proximate cause of Mexico's problems is what is illegal within their borders, but the U.S. actively bribes (and implicitly threatens punishments that go beyond withholding the bribes) Mexico to maintain and escalate its existing policies as part of the U.S.'s own War on Selected Drugs.
I get that legalizing might put an end to it, but its hardly our fault that smugglers exist.
These two statements can only be reconciled by arguing that people are not responsible for the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their actions.
Are you going to blame governments for violence in human trafficking, because they have laws making such trafficking illegal?
Human trafficking is, in and of itself, violent coercion of people. While there may be particular instances of violence surrounding human trafficking that are products of the illegality of human trafficking, they are, at least arguably, more than offset by the reduction in violence against persons caused by the reduction of actual human trafficking that results from prohibition. So there is a case that if you "blame" governments for the increase in violence resulting from prohibiting human trafficking and enforcing those prohibitions, you have negative blame to assign.
OTOH, drug trafficking is inherently no different than the trade in any other inanimate consumer product; the only violence associated with drug trafficking is the violence produced by illegality of the drug itself.
This is the easy way to deal with it. You have a "PAYT" (Pay As You Throw) system with recyclables and compost taken for free. You incentivize the behavior you want, instead of mandating it.
Mandates and incentives are substantively equivalent. Both are the government stating "we believe that behavior X is socially desirable compared to behavior Y, so those who engage in behavior Y will be compelled to bear addition cost C".
The machine wouldn't be able to tell any particular observer what they will observe in the future, because they will "split" into as many observers as there are possible observations, so the question is sort of meaningless.
The question is only meaningless insofar as the assertion it challenges, to wit that there is nothing that isn't computable in our universe, is itself meaningless.
and there is no indication that anything at all in the universe is not computable.
So, you're saying, that given enough input data, a Turing machine or equivalent computer can predict, with perfect accuracy, specific instances of radioactive decay, since specific instances of radioactive decay are "in the universe", and everything in the universe is, per your description, computable?
Slashdot Mirror
There's two different uses of "proprietary" that are common, one is in contrast to FOSS (which Native Client is), and one is in contrast to "standard" (with regard to which, per the Native Client FAQ, Google thinks Native Client is too immature to consider trying to standardize at this time.)
Lots of technology gets integrated into browsers to be proven before being submitted for standardization.
No, its not. The VM isn't integrated into Chrome yet, the only way to run it in a browser is compiling to JS that runs on any modern browser, so its not even runs-better-on-Chrome, much less Chrome-only.
Its possible that the when the VM is integrated in Chrome it will be runs-better-on-Chrome.
V8 isn't a javascript library, its the JavaScript engine that Chrome uses, parallel to SpiderMonkey or whatever the engine is that Firefox uses now.
You are misusing either "proprietary" or "HTML 5" here.
That's not entirely fair; its lived up to the promise of relieving private entities formerly providing and contracting for airport security of the risk of future liability for failures by moving the function to a government law-enforcement agency, which was one of the promises politicians made to the air transport industry (in response, as I recall, to the air transport industry begging for it in the wake of 9/11.)
That's pretty true of programming generally, not JavaScript or DOM manipulation particularly. That's why you have designers do design, content people develop content, and programmers doing programming.
McAllister doesn't argue for phasing out languages, and, IME, once you've learned a couple languages using a particular broad paradigm, its pretty easy to pick up other languages using a similar paradigm, and it improves your ability with programming even with the languages you learned earlier.
So I don't think this is really a problem.
No, it won't. Because if it hasn't been proven good someplace that has the freedom to implement new things without the legacy concerns that -- for very good reasons -- established languages carry, maintainers of established languages won't take the risk associated with implementing it.
While algorithms -- which can be analytically and quantitatively shown to be superior to others in specified circumstances -- will certainly be adopted when discovered if they are are analytically shown to be good, the quality of programming constructs isn't usually something that can be analytically quantified (at least, in an unambiguous way), but instead must be demonstrated through practical application.
I don't think anyone is arguing against that. I think the point McAllister is making is that without new languages, progress would stall. I don't think McAllister is saying that the conservatism of well-established languages is a bad thing in and of itself, just that it means that progress requires new languages. McAllister explains that this is because newer languages are freer to innovate than slow-changing established languages, but I'd go further and note that most of the changes that do make it into established languages are generally the results of those elements being proven in less conservative languages and then bubbling up to the slower-moving languages. Without newer languages as a source of innovation, there wouldn't even be the progress there is in established languages.
Sure, I've got two XP boxes and a W7 box. Vista, like Me before it, got a big "do not want", and it looks like W8 will as well.
For IBM, there's plenty of incentive for them to do find grounds for challenging every patent that isn't held by IBM (though little incentive for them to reveal those grounds until the patent is used in way which hurts IBMs business.)
For the patent office, determining what is and isn't patentable under the law and only approving applications for the former category is their job, so an automated tool that makes it easier to make that determination correctly would be in their interest.
FTFA:
Google's interest in this technology springs from the company's efforts in cloud computing, where it must automate operations across a wide range of networking gear, Weaver said. The DOE foresees that this sort of software could play a vital role in smart grids, in which millions of energy consuming end-devices would have connectivity of some sort. The software would help "make sense of all the log files and the configurations of the power control networks," Weaver said.
See here
It doesn't. Their expenses for 2010 were $87 million. Revenue of $123 million, sure, but there is a difference between spending money and bringing it in.
Possibly not, but Chrome depends on WebKit, a project Google doesn't run, for its engine. The Mozilla Foundation develops a lot more of the browser they distribute than Google does.
Based on...what, exactly?
And the Mozilla Foundation had $123 million in revenue in 2010, but only $87 million in expenses, and while most of the expenses were software development, not all of them were. Mozilla Foundation isn't spending $100 million per year developing a web browser, because, first of all, Mozilla Foundation isn't spending $100 million a year.
The Mozilla Foundation had, in 2010, $123 million in revenue and $87 million in expenses. They bring in a lot more money than they are spending, and as of the end of 2010 had about a year and half of expenses at the current rate in cash + investments.
So, perhaps next time you ask why people haven't done something in a manner which implies that it was an obvious course of action that they neglected to pursue, you should check the readily available public information and make sure that they have, in fact, failed to do the thing you are complaining about.
The Mozilla Foundation is not the same thing as Firefox.
Software development consumes the majority of the Mozilla Foundation's annual expenses (by a wide margin). Website hosting is, comparatively, irrelevant.
Well, "revenue" is income, not expenses, but most of their expenses (over $60 million in 2010) were, unsurprisingly enough, spent on software development.
The Mozilla Foundation is not "a company that just makes a browser".
Plus, I think you probably underestimate, considerably, the cost in just making a (modern, standards compliant, consumer-ready) browser.
Anyone who can read, use the web, and cares probably does, since they publish their audited financial statement on their website.
From the information in the report cited below, they are a non-profit "that exists to provide organizational, legal, and financial support for the Mozilla open-source software project", and whose "purpose is to develop open source, standards compliant, free Internet applications that will be useable free of charge to tens of millions of users" and "to develop foundational technologies that will be used by content and software developers to develop standards compliant online content and open source internet software."
The latest financial statement available on their website is the consoldiated report for 2010 on 2009. And it has, for 2010 (2009 in parens) $123M ($104M) in revenue and $87M ($61M) in expenses, $63M ($40M) of which is software development, $12M ($13M) of which is general and administrative expense, $10M ($7M) of which is branding and marketing, and $2M ($1M) of which is program services (all figures rounded to the nearest million.)
I have no idea where you got the $1.5M in 2009 budget from.
First, they don't have $100M in expenses, they have $123M in revenue and only $87M in expenses. Expenses include things besides just personnel costs, and personnel costs themselves include more than just salary (if you estimated personnel costs as twice salary, you'd be a lot closer than if you estimated, as you have, at the salary itself.)
Unless Nike and Coke spend $10M or less per year on marketing, no.
Microsoft, IIRC, already has, though they pay vastly less than Google and get vastly less for it.
If the Mozilla-Google deal was actually ending or ended (and the weakly-supported inference in the blog post that the deal had apparently ended that is the basis of the statement in TFS that it is ending has already been explicitly denied by Google, so there is little reason to believe that the deal will end), there'd be little incentive for MS to replace Google with a similar level of funding (there might be a reason for Microsoft to outbid Google if the deal wasn't ending on its own.)
The summary states as a fact that the Mozilla-Google deal is ending, based on a blog post that inferred that the deal was apparently ending based on Mozilla continuing to make the same kind of vague statements about deals with search engine providers that they have for most of the last several years without any specific updates on the Google deal, which is a pretty flimsy basis for the inferrence, but at least that source (unlike TFS) only stated that the deal had "apparently" ended, not stating that it was ending as a fact.
But, Google has since explicitly denied that their agreement with Mozilla has ended. (See, for instance, this CNET article.)
Why? Specifically, why shouldn't a Constitutional function of the US government be subsidized out of tax revenues? The whole purpose of having a government is to provide services that provide indirect social benefits aside from the direct benefits to their participants; if the benefits of a service are entirely internalized, there's no reason for it to exist as a government service in the first place. But if the benefits aren't internalized, there is no logic to demanding the service be self-supporting.
Not all the case in the US of something that will beceome a necessity as society gets larger and more spread out -- its something that's always been necessary, in part because of how large and spread out society was, and was recognized as such by the founders. For quite some time the political Right has advanced the idea that "government should be run like a business", and one of their big "successes" there has been the semi-privatization of the USPS into an entity that is, rather than operated like a public service, operated like a self-supporting business. The objective has always been to kill the USPS, and, even though it took a long time, they've finally reached the point where they've almost been successful.
(Perhaps ironically, the USPS's main opponents are the same people that talk about limiting government to performing its constitutional roles -- and operating a postal service and postal roads is one of those constitutional roles.)
Sure. Certainly, the more proximate cause of Mexico's problems is what is illegal within their borders, but the U.S. actively bribes (and implicitly threatens punishments that go beyond withholding the bribes) Mexico to maintain and escalate its existing policies as part of the U.S.'s own War on Selected Drugs.
These two statements can only be reconciled by arguing that people are not responsible for the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their actions.
Human trafficking is, in and of itself, violent coercion of people. While there may be particular instances of violence surrounding human trafficking that are products of the illegality of human trafficking, they are, at least arguably, more than offset by the reduction in violence against persons caused by the reduction of actual human trafficking that results from prohibition. So there is a case that if you "blame" governments for the increase in violence resulting from prohibiting human trafficking and enforcing those prohibitions, you have negative blame to assign.
OTOH, drug trafficking is inherently no different than the trade in any other inanimate consumer product; the only violence associated with drug trafficking is the violence produced by illegality of the drug itself.
Mandates and incentives are substantively equivalent. Both are the government stating "we believe that behavior X is socially desirable compared to behavior Y, so those who engage in behavior Y will be compelled to bear addition cost C".
The question is only meaningless insofar as the assertion it challenges, to wit that there is nothing that isn't computable in our universe, is itself meaningless.
So, you're saying, that given enough input data, a Turing machine or equivalent computer can predict, with perfect accuracy, specific instances of radioactive decay, since specific instances of radioactive decay are "in the universe", and everything in the universe is, per your description, computable?