Hum. I've never heard of that. It sounds goofy as hell to make 500 customers all go through this annoying process instead of training 10 checkers to just type in the product code, but whatever.
Wow, you managed to type a whole post without claiming I said something I didn't say. Congratulations.
No, I did not say we had no audio, you seem to be confusing the issue deliberately, just that it needed a Java applet, which is not a plug in any more than a jpeg is a plug in.
On what planet?
Java's a plugin. I know, because all of my browsers won't run it because I purposefully don't install that bloated piece of shit plugin.
A plug in is a piece of code you have to download that becomes part of the browser in order to implement some functionality, the most used method is a dynamically linked piece of object code (dll on windows) that you can download and install, either manually or through some kind of browser assisted process.
Thanks, Dr. Science. I'm such a retard I didn't even know that!
Java applets do not qualify as such.
Well, der. No more than SWF Object tags qualify as a plugin. That doesn't change the fact that your browser needs a plugin to make sense of a Java applet, or of a SWF file.
And lousy audio it was (gsm quality) but for the time it was pretty impressive:)
That's before the 'big guns' jumped into the market (Xing, later Realnetworks, and an Israeli startup called vdolive).
I hate to tell you this, but if RealNetworks beat you with their crap technology, your technology must have been crappier than theirs.
As for the XMLHttprequest stuff, the current working set is a subset of the functionality supported across several platforms because Microsoft decided to try to establish a de-facto incompatible standard before the standards bodies had made up their mind in order to allow Outlook web access ('owa').
Good! The standards bodies are useless, they just talk and talk and never actually get anything done until someone basically forces them into it. They also live in some kind of ivory palace fantasy-land where they have no clue how the web is actually used by actual human beings here in reality. (It took CSS until version 3 to get columns. Columns? Really?)
I'm all for anybody who can shake things up and get their asses moving.
While I agree with Microsoft that the feature was needed (the need for it was apparent to quite a few developers using javascript for all kinds of advanced uses) it would have been nice of them to wait for a standard to implement (or to help accelerate that process instead of stalling it so they could upstage Netscape).
Well, considering Netscape is dead and Microsoft's OWA is alive and well, I think maybe history has kind of verified their decision.
The first real XMLHttprequest implementation was done by Mozilla, Explorer has only had it since IE 7, before then you had to switch your code depending on which browser you were seeing on the client side.
No, the first real implementation was done by IE 5. Or maybe 4.5, I can't remember anymore. The first standards-compliant version was done by Mozilla, probably. But you'd be really stretching to say the implementation in IE5 was, apparently, imaginary.
As the inventor of live video on the web I think I know what I'm talking about, and it used no plug ins (just multipart/replace encoding). Later versions used javascript to achieve the same effect, still no plug ins needed.
That's great, but...
Audio was initially done using a small java applet.
You had no audio! (Without a huge annoyingly-crashy plugin.) You can't sit here and tell me you had the problem of video on the web solved without using plugins when you didn't have sound working. Come on! When people say the word "video" they don't mean "just the moving images, nothing else." Except for you, perhaps.
Congrats on the messy hack to get (silent) video working without a plug-in. The plug-in is just required to watch any movie made after 1927. (BTW is it still online? I can't wait to see what kind of framerate you're getting from that.)
XMLHttpRequest is used for 'under water' connections to the server to update a page that is already there, try switching off javascript for a while and see how many websites will break, the majority of them (including the one we are writing all this on) will have a non-js fallback. So, that's definitely not what 'drove the popularity of the internet'. That's just FUD.
I never claimed it "drove the popularity of the Internet." I'm pretty sure I've never even typed that phrase until a second ago. I have a word for what you're doing, better than "FUD": Lies. How about bashing me on points I actually made, instead of pulling "my" words out of your ass?
In any case, you're confusing a bad implementation for a bad idea. Sure, a lot of sites using XMLHttpRequest don't correctly handle clients without Javascript; but that doesn't say anything about the merits of XMLHttpRequest, that just makes the web developer who made the site bad at his job.
XMLHttpRequest is a classic example of Microsofts embrace and extend strategy
Actually, Microsoft needed it to make Exchange's webmail system work. It wasn't part of any "strategy," they just had an itch and scratched it. You know, like open source developers do all the time.
and it is to this day carrying the baggage of that.
What does that even mean? What's "the baggage?" What does "carrying" mean, in the context of a inanimate piece of code?
XMLHttpRequest is a standard, with syntax nearly identical to Microsoft's version. If anything, it's an example of Microsoft scratching their own itch, then a ton of other people finding it useful enough that they proposed it become part of a standard.
I'd ask you to explain that last point, but you'd probably start claiming I said some other bullshit I never said, so I'd rather you just not respond at all. At least, until you figure out how to do it without the blatant lies.
but there are plenty of ways to present video via JavaScript without using a plugin monster like Flash or Silverlight. That's what Apple does
No. Apple uses Quicktime, which is a plug-in. Are you being purposefully dense?
It's pretty monstrous, too. Flash is, what, 1.4 MB download? Silverlight is like 4.5 MB or so... the old 1.0 version less. Quicktime is somewhere around 23 MB.
Using the presentation of web video as a killer app for browser middleware is absurdly ridiculous.
Ok; so how do you do it without using "browser middleware?" The only browser with any form of video support at the moment is Safari, since they're already starting to implement HTML5. Hey, maybe HTML5 will be super successful and using plug-ins like Quicktime and Flash to present video will be seen as quaint. But that doesn't change the fact that, right now for the majority of users, a browser plug-in is the only way to view video on the web.
So let's take the third application of Flash/Silverlight beyond animated ads and framing video: rich apps. Apple is also proving that this can be done just as well using a JavaScript framework with MobileMe. Yes, Apple had problems getting their servers up to serve the few million upgrading.Mac users and an an influx of new iPhone MM subscribers, but the apps work pretty well, and they outclass anything I've seen built in Flash/Flex/AIR.
I can't drag a file from my desktop and drop it on a Javascript application. I can't have a Javascript application ask me where to save a file to my computer, then save it. There's no such thing as a Javascript runtime (although I hear Mozilla is working on one) so that I can use the JS app like a local application, without requiring a browser.
There are tons of things Flash/Flex/AIR can do that Javascript can't. Remember the concepts there were cribbed from Shockwave, and Shockwave has a track record of making functional cross-platform applications that don't require a browser.
You don't even have to like Apple's hardware to appreciate what its doing for open source.
I don't really give a crap about what license a particular piece of code is under. I do, however, care that you're so busy giving your Steve Jobs collector's doll a blowjob to realize that Quicktime is actually a browser plugin... seriously, man, get a grip.
Many, many websites now are driven by XMLHttpRequest, which was a proprietary addition to DOM (I believe; maybe it's in JS) by Microsoft. It's not a "format", but it demonstrates the grandparent's point.
And the fact is, that video on the web started as browser plug-ins. Real, Quicktime, Windows Media Player, Flash are all plug-ins now.
Silverlight is a much better technology. Javascript on the page can dive directly into the Silverlight DOM and dink around. Flash is still a gigantic blackhole as far as scripting is concerned. You can't even count on mouse clicks on Flash being bubbled up to the webpage.
I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that Microsoft can get good plug-in penetration for it, because I'd really, really love Adobe to have some real competition in the market, and I'd like to be able to use it for my own projects.
Are you even close to aware of what Flash and Silverlight actually *do?!* Can you show me an implementation of a YouTube like player using SVG? Here's one using Flash: http://www.hulu.com/ and here's one using Silverlight: http://windowslive.com/Experience/ShareMemories
For example, the 4th amendment pretty much ceased to exist once people needed to piss in a cup to get a job.
Federal Law doesn't apply to companies.
If you don't want to piss in a cup to get a job, don't... work somewhere else, or work for yourself, or become a hermit. But don't claim it has anything to do with the law.
But unfortunately, that's the philosophy of Linux - loads of neat little tools that do a small task, you decide how you want to put them together in order to create one of an infinite number of combinations.
But that philosophy breaks down if nothing's standardized. You could develop a million little tools to change settings for applications, but since all applications store their settings in different places and different formats, practically, none of them will work all the time.
Now that's true on Windows, also, partially because a lot of apps (like you said, open source apps included/featured) don't follow Microsoft's recommendations and put their settings in the wrong place. If I were paranoid, I'd say that's open source developers purposefully trying to sabotage the usefulness of Windows, but I think they're simply ignorant of how Windows works when used as a workstation/multi-user environment.
In any case, sure it *can* be done in Linux, but it's a hundred times harder and probably not as powerful, either. (The registry has per-key permissions, meaning you can "disable" a particular application option by setting it to read only. In Linux, the best you can do is disabling the whole settings file.)
Okay, I take your point on that and it's useful to know about Mozy. I won't claim to be anywhere near as knowlegeable on Windows administration than I am on Linux.
Then please don't claim you can't do something unless you know for sure. It's not just Mozy, BTW, it's every non-crap backup utility. I just name-dropped Mozy because it's in my system tray right now.
To be fair, I think that's a very extreme example.
Perhaps; it's also something most Linux developers don't understand because they don't deal with network administration. But the fact is that Windows does it very, very well, and Linux and OS X do not, and as a result Windows is on a very high percentage of corporate desktops. If Linux wants to crack that market, they'll have to figure this stuff out.
I accept that in a corporate environment there may be a need to do something like this but no matter what OS you use, you're going to test and restest a change like this in a pre-prod environment before you do it live!
Duh, you do that in Windows, too. The requirement to test doesn't go away when you change OSes.
I disagree with you entirely on this because I do this just about every day. In my distro of choice, Gentoo, I just "emerge" the package I want to the second machine and copy the config file under/home on the first machine to the second - job done, the new machine has config settings that are identical to the old machine.
I said without using installers/repositories, cheater.:) If you simply copied the application files over without using "emerge", you'd be in a nightmare of changes and I stand by that statement. (I also thought that was what you were referring to.)
Any Windows app with more than a trivial amount of settings is able to export/import settings, in any case. It's not an ideal solution, but like I said, I don't think *any* OS since Mac Classic has had a very good solution to this problem. And the Mac Classic solution wasn't remotely administrable, either. So there's that.
Again, I bow to your greater knowledge of Windows administration than me. But what I will say is that local human-readable configuration files does make the portability of applications (like Firefox) easier across multiple OSes. Yes, it's a trade-off, agreed.
How often does that come up? Seriously? I can think of... once... ever... maybe.
So please don't view me as some kind of zealot, because I'm not. I love using Linux but I do quite like XP and use that as well. And if people ask me about Linux, I tell them it's free, pretty stable and getting easier to install all of the time but as a newbie you shouldn't use it unless you've got a definite reason to do it. It's not for me to dictate what someone else
I don't know what "the randomizing directory scheme" is, but it doesn't count as a fix if you break another feature in the process. In any case, Firefox could have easily done its "randomizing directory scheme" in the CORRECT DIRECTORY (the Local Data for the cache, Application Support for settings) and never had the problem in the first place.
The real problem is that the developers of Firefox don't know enough about how Windows works, and when they ported to Windows they screwed up because of it. Linux (AFAIK) doesn't have a concept of "this is local data that can roam to other workstations" as opposed to "this is local data that doesn't need to roam; it can be recreated", and Linux developers blithely assumed that Windows works the same way Linux does.
Needless-to-say, being an open source project, they also didn't actually go out and interview any network administrators, or respond to the bug reports entered about it. Because both of those involve actually interaction with human beings.
- Usability: will be one of main objectives for developing things for it, including new widely available devices like multitouch screens. - Mobility: cheap and powerful for today standards cellphones based on linux (Android, LiMo, whatever) probably will be the most used. Not sure if will be market for tablets/subnotebooks/etc or cellphones will take that role, in any case, probably linux will be the most used core OS for those devices.
Sadly, Linux is way, way behind on these two fronts. Compare Vista on a Tablet PC to Linux on a -- well, when you install Linux it just turns back into a laptop. Oops.
Even Apple has pretty good tablet support, and Apple doesn't even make a tablet! (You can simulate one with a Wacom tablet.)
Compositing is a bit iffy - compiz and multi screens is flaky as hell - but it's better than no compositing WM at all in windows.
I know this is Slashdot, but... you could install Vista. Windows does have one, it'd had for, what, almost two years now?
It's no fair comparing a OS released in 2001 with one released, what, late last year and claim that Windows "doesn't have it." Try an apples-to-apples comparison, the version of Ubuntu (for instance) with compositing compared to Vista with compositing.
Network adaptors are one of the best supported classes of hardware in Linux. Most hardware vendors have their own drivers in the tree. What, exactly, is the problem with support for network cards?
Linux has engineers, right? Figure it out.:P Make something better in the process.
I've never done development for OS X, but as far as my tinkering with XCode goes, each application doesn't manually put (for instance) an Edit menu on the screen, instead you just put a placeholder that says "edit menu items go here" then add whatever additional stuff your application needs. Then when you add a spell checker service, OS X can find that placeholder and instantly add a "Spelling ->" submenu to every single application that edits text.
Text areas are the same way, so the service can also do the red squiggly underlining which is super-useful. They also explicitly appear in a Services menu, maintained by the OS in the Application menu. And contextual menus, etc.
The reason this all exists in OS X, at least the spell-checker specifically, is that there was a shareware company that basically wrote the same function in Mac Classic, by intercepting the standard API textarea calls and re-writing them. This was possible because Mac Classic didn't have any real memory protection, but of course it had to be engineered from scratch for OS X.
For starters, the configuration of a user's applications is usually held in the combination of a folder under "Documents and Settings" and the user's own chunk of the registry which is, to say the least, not the *easiest* place to pull configuration settings out of.
True; but it also has a lot of features that text-based configuration systems do not. For example, multiple users can edit a single app's configuration at once without stomping all over each other, and it's dead simple (compared to other OSes) to remote-administer (which is a huge feature Windows over virtually all other OSes, and I think the number one reason it's so popular among corporations.)
So it's more usable in some ways, and less in others.
Half the time, when you try to copy the Applications folder somewhere else to back them up, the folder is protected & you then have to boot to "Safe Mode" to do it.
There's an API to get past the protection and "snapshot" the contents to back the files up. That's what Microsoft's own Backup utility uses, as well as third-party programs like Mozy. It would be kind of nice if you could just drag&drop the files, but you haven't realistically been able to do that on ANY OS since Mac Classic went kaput. (Which is a shame; IMHO I think Mac Classic got nearly everything right, usability and filesystem-wise and OS X is a huge step down.)
By comparison, knowing on Linux that your configuration file is likely to be a text file somewhere in/etc or in your home directory and maybe having to read the man page to find out precisely the name and location of the file, is infinitely easier.
Not if you're a sysadmin and you want to change, or disable, a setting across 30,000 computers at once.
Unfortunately, Windows suffers from the *MY* mentality ("My Documents", "My Pictures")
Changed in Vista.
without thinking that there might be the remotest possibility you might want to move an application to another machine without having to reinstall it.
Again, NO OS ever realistically supported this other than Mac Classic, and arguably Mac OS X. Linux is the same way; try moving an application from one Linux machine to another without using a repository or installer, and you'll spend at least as much time fiddling with config files and changing library versions as you would registring DLLs and editing the registry on Windows.
You seem to be quick enough to diss FOSS without considering the fact that, by it's very nature, FOSS software at least makes a good attempt at storing configs in an easy to read text or XML file which you can easily back up and put somewhere else very easily - even on Windows.
It shouldn't do that on Windows, as it then breaks many, many other features that Windows has. For instance, a user with Fast-User Switching turned on could overwrite his friend's application settings if they both have the application running at the same time. And it makes that software "invisible" to remote administration features.
This was a huge complaint levied against Firefox for a long time, although I think they've finally gotten around to fixing it. Because Firefox used incorrect folders on Windows, and didn't use a standardized MSI installer, it broke roaming profiles, was hard to remotely install, was impossible to remotely administer (for instance, adding a bookmark to the company's intranet, something which is trivial in IE, was and possibly still is impossible in Firefox.)
In short, before you dismiss features like the registry so quickly, you should first determine: 1) What exactly it does 2) What (other than your application) is affected by it 3) That you should *probably* be doing all the things the maker of the OS recommends you do-- whether that be Microsoft, Apple, or Red Hat.
Don't just dismiss the registry out-of-hand because "we've never done it this way before" or "I don't like anything Microsoft invented" without considering how you could be hurting your users.
The USB logo is always supposed to be on the top of the plug. I have several with no logo, though, or a logo that's printed and so you can't feel it with your thumb while plugging.
The real problem is when the USB ports are vertical, then all bets are off. Or if you're using a USB hub, many/most of those don't really have an "up" or "down" and then all bets are off. It's just a crappy plug design; they should have done what Firewire did and keyed it in a very obvious and impossible-to-jam way.
Seriously, how many connectors out there do you know of that let you plug it in any way you feel like? All connectors have to be oriented so that the signals and power goes to the right place.
Never used headphones? Or coax? Or component cables?
What they should have done, from the beginning of USB, was to have the connector truly symmetric, so that you could plug it in either way.
That would have been best. Second-best would have been keying it with a sturdy key (not just a single pin that gets in the way) like Firewire cables are. Or like the mini-USB connectors on cellphones are. I was blown away when they came out with USB that the connector wasn't keyed or reversible-- I mean, seriously, have the guys who designed it NEVER had to plug-in a PS/2 cable in a dark room?
In fact, looking at my computer, the only ports that aren't either symmetric or keyed are the USB ports and the memory card reader; and the memory cards have an excuse that they're too thin to key properly.
Do you really think they've gone to enough trouble to actually work those numbers out?
Yes; do you have evidence that they haven't?
The goal of a business is to make money, I can guarantee that any decision that made that costs money (i.e. paying for a DRM solution or developing their own) goes through at least a half-dozen reviews before it's signed-off on. Every business does that, because the businesses that didn't are all no longer in business.
Consumers are PEOPLE, first and foremost. They have a sense of right and wrong, and most importantly, fairness. There are outliers, but the majority of people want to play fair. If a lot of people are pirating your stuff, more than about 5%, then you're doing SOMETHING to make them feel that they aren't being treated fairly.
Where'd you get the number 5%? Did you actually go through trouble to work that number out?
You aren't entitled to obscene profits. You aren't entitled to ANY profit. As a business owner, your raison d'etre is to make a product at a price you can sell it at and still make a profit.
Yes, but if you're a consumer, you're *not* entitled to take somebody else's property without their permission. Physical, or intellectual property.
You can argue that copyright law is "wrong," but until the law is changed, that's simply the way it is. Cope.
(There are a lot of good arguments for changing the law, but the reason is never happens is that most supporters are just in it to freeload off everybody else. Kind of like legalizing pot in that respect; you claim that it's a great medical drug, but the real reason you want it legal is so you can get high.)
If people feel taken advantage of by the only gas station in town selling it at $10/gallon, you can bet your ass thefts will go up.
Then stop buying EA games, so they don't turn into the "one gas station."
But claiming that there's (currently) only one choice for video games is ridiculous. There's something like 5 or 6 healthy video game platforms alone: WWW (Flash games), PC, Xbox, Wii, PS3, DS, PSP... and each of those platforms has hundreds of titles available.
You're seriously saying that there's only one gas station in town? If you truly believe that, you're delusional. (I mean, I agree with your thesis, but I don't agree that it applies to this particular issue.)
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Hum. I've never heard of that. It sounds goofy as hell to make 500 customers all go through this annoying process instead of training 10 checkers to just type in the product code, but whatever.
The price tag is sitting right next to the thing you're weighing, which is right next to the scale. I still don't get the point.
Wow, you managed to type a whole post without claiming I said something I didn't say. Congratulations.
No, I did not say we had no audio, you seem to be confusing the issue deliberately, just that it needed a Java applet, which is not a plug in any more than a jpeg is a plug in.
On what planet?
Java's a plugin. I know, because all of my browsers won't run it because I purposefully don't install that bloated piece of shit plugin.
A plug in is a piece of code you have to download that becomes part of the browser in order to implement some functionality, the most used method is a dynamically linked piece of object code (dll on windows) that you can download and install, either manually or through some kind of browser assisted process.
Thanks, Dr. Science. I'm such a retard I didn't even know that!
Java applets do not qualify as such.
Well, der. No more than SWF Object tags qualify as a plugin. That doesn't change the fact that your browser needs a plugin to make sense of a Java applet, or of a SWF file.
And lousy audio it was (gsm quality) but for the time it was pretty impressive :)
That's before the 'big guns' jumped into the market (Xing, later Realnetworks, and an Israeli startup called vdolive).
I hate to tell you this, but if RealNetworks beat you with their crap technology, your technology must have been crappier than theirs.
As for the XMLHttprequest stuff, the current working set is a subset of the functionality supported across several platforms because Microsoft decided to try to establish a de-facto incompatible standard before the standards bodies had made up their mind in order to allow Outlook web access ('owa').
Good! The standards bodies are useless, they just talk and talk and never actually get anything done until someone basically forces them into it. They also live in some kind of ivory palace fantasy-land where they have no clue how the web is actually used by actual human beings here in reality. (It took CSS until version 3 to get columns. Columns? Really?)
I'm all for anybody who can shake things up and get their asses moving.
While I agree with Microsoft that the feature was needed (the need for it was apparent to quite a few developers using javascript for all kinds of advanced uses) it would have been nice of them to wait for a standard to implement (or to help accelerate that process instead of stalling it so they could upstage Netscape).
Well, considering Netscape is dead and Microsoft's OWA is alive and well, I think maybe history has kind of verified their decision.
The first real XMLHttprequest implementation was done by Mozilla, Explorer has only had it since IE 7, before then you had to switch your code depending on which browser you were seeing on the client side.
No, the first real implementation was done by IE 5. Or maybe 4.5, I can't remember anymore. The first standards-compliant version was done by Mozilla, probably. But you'd be really stretching to say the implementation in IE5 was, apparently, imaginary.
How is it a great idea? What's the point at all?
Why does it matter if the scale "knows" what's being weighed? Is a pound of grapes heavier than a pound of potatoes?
Wow, just wow.
As the inventor of live video on the web I think I know what I'm talking about, and it used no plug ins (just multipart/replace encoding). Later versions used javascript to achieve the same effect, still no plug ins needed.
That's great, but...
Audio was initially done using a small java applet.
You had no audio! (Without a huge annoyingly-crashy plugin.) You can't sit here and tell me you had the problem of video on the web solved without using plugins when you didn't have sound working. Come on! When people say the word "video" they don't mean "just the moving images, nothing else." Except for you, perhaps.
Congrats on the messy hack to get (silent) video working without a plug-in. The plug-in is just required to watch any movie made after 1927. (BTW is it still online? I can't wait to see what kind of framerate you're getting from that.)
XMLHttpRequest is used for 'under water' connections to the server to update a page that is already there, try switching off javascript for a while and see how many websites will break, the majority of them (including the one we are writing all this on) will have a non-js fallback. So, that's definitely not what 'drove the popularity of the internet'. That's just FUD.
I never claimed it "drove the popularity of the Internet." I'm pretty sure I've never even typed that phrase until a second ago. I have a word for what you're doing, better than "FUD": Lies. How about bashing me on points I actually made, instead of pulling "my" words out of your ass?
In any case, you're confusing a bad implementation for a bad idea. Sure, a lot of sites using XMLHttpRequest don't correctly handle clients without Javascript; but that doesn't say anything about the merits of XMLHttpRequest, that just makes the web developer who made the site bad at his job.
XMLHttpRequest is a classic example of Microsofts embrace and extend strategy
Actually, Microsoft needed it to make Exchange's webmail system work. It wasn't part of any "strategy," they just had an itch and scratched it. You know, like open source developers do all the time.
and it is to this day carrying the baggage of that.
What does that even mean? What's "the baggage?" What does "carrying" mean, in the context of a inanimate piece of code?
XMLHttpRequest is a standard, with syntax nearly identical to Microsoft's version. If anything, it's an example of Microsoft scratching their own itch, then a ton of other people finding it useful enough that they proposed it become part of a standard.
I'd ask you to explain that last point, but you'd probably start claiming I said some other bullshit I never said, so I'd rather you just not respond at all. At least, until you figure out how to do it without the blatant lies.
but there are plenty of ways to present video via JavaScript without using a plugin monster like Flash or Silverlight. That's what Apple does
No. Apple uses Quicktime, which is a plug-in. Are you being purposefully dense?
It's pretty monstrous, too. Flash is, what, 1.4 MB download? Silverlight is like 4.5 MB or so... the old 1.0 version less. Quicktime is somewhere around 23 MB.
Using the presentation of web video as a killer app for browser middleware is absurdly ridiculous.
Ok; so how do you do it without using "browser middleware?" The only browser with any form of video support at the moment is Safari, since they're already starting to implement HTML5. Hey, maybe HTML5 will be super successful and using plug-ins like Quicktime and Flash to present video will be seen as quaint. But that doesn't change the fact that, right now for the majority of users, a browser plug-in is the only way to view video on the web.
So let's take the third application of Flash/Silverlight beyond animated ads and framing video: rich apps. Apple is also proving that this can be done just as well using a JavaScript framework with MobileMe. Yes, Apple had problems getting their servers up to serve the few million upgrading .Mac users and an an influx of new iPhone MM subscribers, but the apps work pretty well, and they outclass anything I've seen built in Flash/Flex/AIR.
I can't drag a file from my desktop and drop it on a Javascript application. I can't have a Javascript application ask me where to save a file to my computer, then save it. There's no such thing as a Javascript runtime (although I hear Mozilla is working on one) so that I can use the JS app like a local application, without requiring a browser.
There are tons of things Flash/Flex/AIR can do that Javascript can't. Remember the concepts there were cribbed from Shockwave, and Shockwave has a track record of making functional cross-platform applications that don't require a browser.
You don't even have to like Apple's hardware to appreciate what its doing for open source.
I don't really give a crap about what license a particular piece of code is under. I do, however, care that you're so busy giving your Steve Jobs collector's doll a blowjob to realize that Quicktime is actually a browser plugin... seriously, man, get a grip.
yes, there are tools for SVG: inkscape.org and both audio and video tags will be in SVG spec version 1.2
Yes, but see the difference? In my browser, right now this instant, I can click those two links above and see video. Right now. The instant.
Call me crazy, but I assign more value to things that actually, demonstrably, exist.
Many, many websites now are driven by XMLHttpRequest, which was a proprietary addition to DOM (I believe; maybe it's in JS) by Microsoft. It's not a "format", but it demonstrates the grandparent's point.
And the fact is, that video on the web started as browser plug-ins. Real, Quicktime, Windows Media Player, Flash are all plug-ins now.
Silverlight is a much better technology. Javascript on the page can dive directly into the Silverlight DOM and dink around. Flash is still a gigantic blackhole as far as scripting is concerned. You can't even count on mouse clicks on Flash being bubbled up to the webpage.
I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that Microsoft can get good plug-in penetration for it, because I'd really, really love Adobe to have some real competition in the market, and I'd like to be able to use it for my own projects.
SVG? Seriously?
Are you even close to aware of what Flash and Silverlight actually *do?!* Can you show me an implementation of a YouTube like player using SVG? Here's one using Flash: http://www.hulu.com/ and here's one using Silverlight: http://windowslive.com/Experience/ShareMemories
Show me that in SVG. I'll wait.
For example, the 4th amendment pretty much ceased to exist once people needed to piss in a cup to get a job.
Federal Law doesn't apply to companies.
If you don't want to piss in a cup to get a job, don't... work somewhere else, or work for yourself, or become a hermit. But don't claim it has anything to do with the law.
But unfortunately, that's the philosophy of Linux - loads of neat little tools that do a small task, you decide how you want to put them together in order to create one of an infinite number of combinations.
But that philosophy breaks down if nothing's standardized. You could develop a million little tools to change settings for applications, but since all applications store their settings in different places and different formats, practically, none of them will work all the time.
Now that's true on Windows, also, partially because a lot of apps (like you said, open source apps included/featured) don't follow Microsoft's recommendations and put their settings in the wrong place. If I were paranoid, I'd say that's open source developers purposefully trying to sabotage the usefulness of Windows, but I think they're simply ignorant of how Windows works when used as a workstation/multi-user environment.
In any case, sure it *can* be done in Linux, but it's a hundred times harder and probably not as powerful, either. (The registry has per-key permissions, meaning you can "disable" a particular application option by setting it to read only. In Linux, the best you can do is disabling the whole settings file.)
Okay, I take your point on that and it's useful to know about Mozy. I won't claim to be anywhere near as knowlegeable on Windows administration than I am on Linux.
Then please don't claim you can't do something unless you know for sure. It's not just Mozy, BTW, it's every non-crap backup utility. I just name-dropped Mozy because it's in my system tray right now.
To be fair, I think that's a very extreme example.
Perhaps; it's also something most Linux developers don't understand because they don't deal with network administration. But the fact is that Windows does it very, very well, and Linux and OS X do not, and as a result Windows is on a very high percentage of corporate desktops. If Linux wants to crack that market, they'll have to figure this stuff out.
I accept that in a corporate environment there may be a need to do something like this but no matter what OS you use, you're going to test and restest a change like this in a pre-prod environment before you do it live!
Duh, you do that in Windows, too. The requirement to test doesn't go away when you change OSes.
I disagree with you entirely on this because I do this just about every day. In my distro of choice, Gentoo, I just "emerge" the package I want to the second machine and copy the config file under /home on the first machine to the second - job done, the new machine has config settings that are identical to the old machine.
I said without using installers/repositories, cheater. :) If you simply copied the application files over without using "emerge", you'd be in a nightmare of changes and I stand by that statement. (I also thought that was what you were referring to.)
Any Windows app with more than a trivial amount of settings is able to export/import settings, in any case. It's not an ideal solution, but like I said, I don't think *any* OS since Mac Classic has had a very good solution to this problem. And the Mac Classic solution wasn't remotely administrable, either. So there's that.
Again, I bow to your greater knowledge of Windows administration than me. But what I will say is that local human-readable configuration files does make the portability of applications (like Firefox) easier across multiple OSes. Yes, it's a trade-off, agreed.
How often does that come up? Seriously? I can think of... once... ever... maybe.
So please don't view me as some kind of zealot, because I'm not. I love using Linux but I do quite like XP and use that as well. And if people ask me about Linux, I tell them it's free, pretty stable and getting easier to install all of the time but as a newbie you shouldn't use it unless you've got a definite reason to do it. It's not for me to dictate what someone else
Install some analytics tags and look at the data. How many people are using it? How many pages are accessed every day/week/month? etc.
If it's public-facing, put ads on it and see how much money you make. :) Can't beat that for a "how much is this worth?" question.
I don't know what "the randomizing directory scheme" is, but it doesn't count as a fix if you break another feature in the process. In any case, Firefox could have easily done its "randomizing directory scheme" in the CORRECT DIRECTORY (the Local Data for the cache, Application Support for settings) and never had the problem in the first place.
The real problem is that the developers of Firefox don't know enough about how Windows works, and when they ported to Windows they screwed up because of it. Linux (AFAIK) doesn't have a concept of "this is local data that can roam to other workstations" as opposed to "this is local data that doesn't need to roam; it can be recreated", and Linux developers blithely assumed that Windows works the same way Linux does.
Needless-to-say, being an open source project, they also didn't actually go out and interview any network administrators, or respond to the bug reports entered about it. Because both of those involve actually interaction with human beings.
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=1973248&group_id=4421&atid=104421
^- posted ages ago. Maybe Slashdot should lay off laughing at emails and actually look at their bug tracker more than once a year.
- Usability: will be one of main objectives for developing things for it, including new widely available devices like multitouch screens.
- Mobility: cheap and powerful for today standards cellphones based on linux (Android, LiMo, whatever) probably will be the most used. Not sure if will be market for tablets/subnotebooks/etc or cellphones will take that role, in any case, probably linux will be the most used core OS for those devices.
Sadly, Linux is way, way behind on these two fronts. Compare Vista on a Tablet PC to Linux on a -- well, when you install Linux it just turns back into a laptop. Oops.
Even Apple has pretty good tablet support, and Apple doesn't even make a tablet! (You can simulate one with a Wacom tablet.)
Compositing is a bit iffy - compiz and multi screens is flaky as hell - but it's better than no compositing WM at all in windows.
I know this is Slashdot, but... you could install Vista. Windows does have one, it'd had for, what, almost two years now?
It's no fair comparing a OS released in 2001 with one released, what, late last year and claim that Windows "doesn't have it." Try an apples-to-apples comparison, the version of Ubuntu (for instance) with compositing compared to Vista with compositing.
Network adaptors are one of the best supported classes of hardware in Linux. Most hardware vendors have their own drivers in the tree. What, exactly, is the problem with support for network cards?
Hah! Tell that to my iBook.
Linux has engineers, right? Figure it out. :P Make something better in the process.
I've never done development for OS X, but as far as my tinkering with XCode goes, each application doesn't manually put (for instance) an Edit menu on the screen, instead you just put a placeholder that says "edit menu items go here" then add whatever additional stuff your application needs. Then when you add a spell checker service, OS X can find that placeholder and instantly add a "Spelling ->" submenu to every single application that edits text.
Text areas are the same way, so the service can also do the red squiggly underlining which is super-useful. They also explicitly appear in a Services menu, maintained by the OS in the Application menu. And contextual menus, etc.
The reason this all exists in OS X, at least the spell-checker specifically, is that there was a shareware company that basically wrote the same function in Mac Classic, by intercepting the standard API textarea calls and re-writing them. This was possible because Mac Classic didn't have any real memory protection, but of course it had to be engineered from scratch for OS X.
For starters, the configuration of a user's applications is usually held in the combination of a folder under "Documents and Settings" and the user's own chunk of the registry which is, to say the least, not the *easiest* place to pull configuration settings out of.
True; but it also has a lot of features that text-based configuration systems do not. For example, multiple users can edit a single app's configuration at once without stomping all over each other, and it's dead simple (compared to other OSes) to remote-administer (which is a huge feature Windows over virtually all other OSes, and I think the number one reason it's so popular among corporations.)
So it's more usable in some ways, and less in others.
Half the time, when you try to copy the Applications folder somewhere else to back them up, the folder is protected & you then have to boot to "Safe Mode" to do it.
There's an API to get past the protection and "snapshot" the contents to back the files up. That's what Microsoft's own Backup utility uses, as well as third-party programs like Mozy. It would be kind of nice if you could just drag&drop the files, but you haven't realistically been able to do that on ANY OS since Mac Classic went kaput. (Which is a shame; IMHO I think Mac Classic got nearly everything right, usability and filesystem-wise and OS X is a huge step down.)
By comparison, knowing on Linux that your configuration file is likely to be a text file somewhere in /etc or in your home directory and maybe having to read the man page to find out precisely the name and location of the file, is infinitely easier.
Not if you're a sysadmin and you want to change, or disable, a setting across 30,000 computers at once.
Unfortunately, Windows suffers from the *MY* mentality ("My Documents", "My Pictures")
Changed in Vista.
without thinking that there might be the remotest possibility you might want to move an application to another machine without having to reinstall it.
Again, NO OS ever realistically supported this other than Mac Classic, and arguably Mac OS X. Linux is the same way; try moving an application from one Linux machine to another without using a repository or installer, and you'll spend at least as much time fiddling with config files and changing library versions as you would registring DLLs and editing the registry on Windows.
You seem to be quick enough to diss FOSS without considering the fact that, by it's very nature, FOSS software at least makes a good attempt at storing configs in an easy to read text or XML file which you can easily back up and put somewhere else very easily - even on Windows.
It shouldn't do that on Windows, as it then breaks many, many other features that Windows has. For instance, a user with Fast-User Switching turned on could overwrite his friend's application settings if they both have the application running at the same time. And it makes that software "invisible" to remote administration features.
This was a huge complaint levied against Firefox for a long time, although I think they've finally gotten around to fixing it. Because Firefox used incorrect folders on Windows, and didn't use a standardized MSI installer, it broke roaming profiles, was hard to remotely install, was impossible to remotely administer (for instance, adding a bookmark to the company's intranet, something which is trivial in IE, was and possibly still is impossible in Firefox.)
In short, before you dismiss features like the registry so quickly, you should first determine:
1) What exactly it does
2) What (other than your application) is affected by it
3) That you should *probably* be doing all the things the maker of the OS recommends you do-- whether that be Microsoft, Apple, or Red Hat.
Don't just dismiss the registry out-of-hand because "we've never done it this way before" or "I don't like anything Microsoft invented" without considering how you could be hurting your users.
It could be streaming video, or something else that doesn't necessarily need to even be stored at all.
The USB logo is always supposed to be on the top of the plug. I have several with no logo, though, or a logo that's printed and so you can't feel it with your thumb while plugging.
The real problem is when the USB ports are vertical, then all bets are off. Or if you're using a USB hub, many/most of those don't really have an "up" or "down" and then all bets are off. It's just a crappy plug design; they should have done what Firewire did and keyed it in a very obvious and impossible-to-jam way.
Seriously, how many connectors out there do you know of that let you plug it in any way you feel like? All connectors have to be oriented so that the signals and power goes to the right place.
Never used headphones? Or coax? Or component cables?
What they should have done, from the beginning of USB, was to have the connector truly symmetric, so that you could plug it in either way.
That would have been best. Second-best would have been keying it with a sturdy key (not just a single pin that gets in the way) like Firewire cables are. Or like the mini-USB connectors on cellphones are. I was blown away when they came out with USB that the connector wasn't keyed or reversible-- I mean, seriously, have the guys who designed it NEVER had to plug-in a PS/2 cable in a dark room?
In fact, looking at my computer, the only ports that aren't either symmetric or keyed are the USB ports and the memory card reader; and the memory cards have an excuse that they're too thin to key properly.
Do you really think they've gone to enough trouble to actually work those numbers out?
Yes; do you have evidence that they haven't?
The goal of a business is to make money, I can guarantee that any decision that made that costs money (i.e. paying for a DRM solution or developing their own) goes through at least a half-dozen reviews before it's signed-off on. Every business does that, because the businesses that didn't are all no longer in business.
Consumers are PEOPLE, first and foremost. They have a sense of right and wrong, and most importantly, fairness. There are outliers, but the majority of people want to play fair. If a lot of people are pirating your stuff, more than about 5%, then you're doing SOMETHING to make them feel that they aren't being treated fairly.
Where'd you get the number 5%? Did you actually go through trouble to work that number out?
You aren't entitled to obscene profits. You aren't entitled to ANY profit. As a business owner, your raison d'etre is to make a product at a price you can sell it at and still make a profit.
Yes, but if you're a consumer, you're *not* entitled to take somebody else's property without their permission. Physical, or intellectual property.
You can argue that copyright law is "wrong," but until the law is changed, that's simply the way it is. Cope.
(There are a lot of good arguments for changing the law, but the reason is never happens is that most supporters are just in it to freeload off everybody else. Kind of like legalizing pot in that respect; you claim that it's a great medical drug, but the real reason you want it legal is so you can get high.)
If people feel taken advantage of by the only gas station in town selling it at $10/gallon, you can bet your ass thefts will go up.
Then stop buying EA games, so they don't turn into the "one gas station."
But claiming that there's (currently) only one choice for video games is ridiculous. There's something like 5 or 6 healthy video game platforms alone: WWW (Flash games), PC, Xbox, Wii, PS3, DS, PSP... and each of those platforms has hundreds of titles available.
You're seriously saying that there's only one gas station in town? If you truly believe that, you're delusional. (I mean, I agree with your thesis, but I don't agree that it applies to this particular issue.)