File open is/was different -- as late as XP (dunno about vista). Network files are accessed differently, preventing you from, for example, executing files.
That's a security feature *added* to Windows. Windows 95 would execute anything over the network, no problem. Because of real, or perceived, security threats, Microsoft locked down that functionality.
Various apps struggled to open data files too. Playing mp3s over a network was a frequent headache, regardless of bandwidth.
Those are probably bugs in those apps. Microsoft's own Zune software has issues playing MP4s over a network, I think because it's making an assumption that all those files are local files and not bothering to do any kind of caching or look-ahead on them. iTunes, on the other hand, does some amount of caching so that MP4 playback is smooth even on wireless networks.
That doesn't say anything about *Windows*, that just says the Zune software is slightly buggy and iTunes isn't buggy in the same way.
I am used to Linux. It was a headache when going to explorer and finding you simply couldn't do stuff because it's over a network. It's a shocker. I guess if you never worked like that you might think Windows has good file shares, and has no problems.
Except Windows did everything over a network too, until they started locking it down. Windows does have good file shares, and copes with bad networks a hell of a lot better than Mac OS does. (I can't speak for Linux in that area.)
You're also saying stuff counter to my personal experience. I spent a 5 year IT career doing practically nothing but installing software over network shares.
The fact that it doesn't work in some apps, means that the OS doesn't abstract it correctly.
I like how you discount the possibility of buggy applications out-of-hand? No, the real problem is that media player apps like Zune and whatever MP3 player you were using make *assumptions* they shouldn't; they assume the media is stored on a low-latency HD attached to the computer, and never stepped back to think "hey wait, what if this media is over a network?" Software that (rightly) makes no assumptions about the location of the media (like iTunes) work just fine in this situation.
Your problem is BUGGY SOFTWARE. It has nothing to do with the OS.
Napster tried that defense, remember? The obvious counter-example is, "well, if Napster is designed to discover new artists, how come there isn't a 'random artist' or 'recommend an artist' feature?" Last time I used Limewire, it had zero features dedicated to helping you find new artists, but tons of features based around stealing movies and TV shows. Go figure.
MS-DOS and Windows users seem to take it for granted that a file that is across the network is accessed via different APIs,
I can't speak for MS-DOS (are there any MS-DOS users left?), in Windows you don't use a different API for a network files. Any differences are taken care of far below the application level.
different user interfaces,
Really? On my Windows machine, networked files show up in Windows Explorer just like local files. If anything, it's not different *enough*-- i.e. it would be nice to have a mark in the icon to tell me if a file is on a network drive, especially when I'm on unreliable wifi networks.
It isn't so long ago that most Windows programs couldn't even reference cross-network files in a straightforward way in a file open dialog. You first had to assign a "drive letter" and "map a network drive."
You never *had* to do that. Well, ok, maybe pre-95 versions of Windows. But Windows 95 would work just fine if you typed \\network\path into an Open dialog. I did that just a couple years ago at a hospital I was working at with some ancient machines still in use.
Of course you have the option to map a drive letter if you want, and there may be some buggy applications that didn't work unless they had a drive letter to work with, but you can't blame Microsoft for buggy third party apps.
The assumption that files across the network are totally differents sorts of thing from local files appeared to be so ingrained in the Windows culture that Windows people don't even understand why it is a criticism of Windows to mention this.
Maybe they just think you're crazy for "criticizing" Windows for something you basically made-up.
I'm not a huge Microsoft fan, but most of your post is just plain wrong. I know this is Slashdot and thus you were +5 Insightful, but please make some effort to at least be a little accurate next time you post. Let's reduce the amount of bullcrap here, not increase it.
Everyone else uses/, so of course MS has to try and be different.
Macintosh uses (or used, before it was Unix) a colon as a path separator. So there.
But the part you're missing, none of these systems (NONE of them) were designed to inter-operate with each other. It just simply was not part of the spec they were building from. Considering that, the path separator *is* entirely arbitrary. (Sure, it can cause problems *now* that systems inter-operate, but the design of DOS couldn't have anticipated that back when it was built.)
In both cases, you have to mount a partition in order to access it. Hiding the idea of mounting is another stupid move from MS -- the assumption that you always mount something that's plugged in. The problem comes up with removable drives, which need to be unmounted before ejecting. There are various workarounds now, but it was worse with floppy drives. Basically Windows would try to write a disk as soon as possible, disabling all multitasking, so that you could see when it was done.
I like how the concept of "user friendliness" doesn't exist in your world. Telling people they have to "mount" and "dismount" drives is idiotic, because nobody other than Slashdot nerds will understand why, or for that matter care. If it was a setting, they'd just set everything to automatically mount anyway. If it wasn't a setting, they'd know you have to do the magic "mount" command before their CD works, and they'd do it by habit every time anyway. Having the OS automatically do it by default is the only logical way.
Apple's solution of physically locking the disk in the drive until it was "unmounted" is a better solution, of course, but Microsoft had to work with the hardware that was available to them.
Yet a case where someome may want to do just one of them, but MS assumes you want to do both at once.
When? Why? What would be the point of creating a partition with no filesystem on it?
You're complaining that Microsoft doesn't support an edge-case that perhaps one in ten thousand people would ever want to do? Seriously?
Do you mean, "Using the C-language escape character as a path separator cool" or "Merging disk partitions and formats in a way that keeps people stupid (c:) cool" ? But your point is well taken. Can't let the bugbear-as-messenger become a distractor, for all the idea of "shooting the messenger" never seemed more appropriate.
Does anybody have any clue what this guy is talking about? Microsoft is making people dumber by using disk partitions? I've never been so confused, and I've seen every David Lynch film!
Once I saw an ad for a Burger King BBQ sauce burger and I went out and bought one on a whim. It sounded good, and I guess I was hungry. The irony is that I didn't actually click the ad, I just closed the window.
Fortunately, there are still vast tracts of barren forests for you. Why don't you just check out, burn all your artificially-created clothes, and live the hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the great Canadian north?
I'm all for the concept, but right now my DishNetwork receiver box can't even talk to my DVR, which can't even talk to my TV, not even to ask simple questions like "are you turned on?" "What channel are you on?"
And that's a field where the benefits to the average consumer are obvious and immediate. Getting appliances to talk to each other is a pipe dream.
Either this summary is highly misleading, or I completely misunderstand the feature in question. The feature is a news (RSS) reader with a "share" button... Google shows articles you "share" to all your Gmail contacts.
In what way is "shared" RSS articles "private information?" Moreover, in what way is ANY RSS feed "private information?" They're all publically-available, that's kind of the point of RSS.
So does this headline boil down to: "Information you told Google to share actually got shared; retards complain?"
Java's over; 90%+ of computers no longer have it installed Talk about a vague stat - since you asked for citations, I must insist as well. I can't find any numbers that even remotely resemble your statement.
Touche.
Sun doesn't publish any numbers (which, I think, says something about it!) I've been Googling for a few minutes now, and I got nothing... none of the data I've seen: 1) Tells whether it was measured via JS or by actually attempting to load an applet. (The JS detection defaults to "on" if Java isn't installed; great implementation there!) 2) Doesn't distinguish between Microsoft's JVM or Sun's JVM. In theory it doesn't matter, but in reality there are compatibility differences between the two so it does. Also, for pre-XP computers, Microsoft's JVM was installed by default. 3) Doesn't link to the source of the data.
I think all of his numbers are high (RealPlayer on 55% of browsers? No effing way!) But his Java number is clearly insane. He doesn't, of course, link to the source of this data, what version of Java it's supposed to be measuring, or what detection method was used. He doesn't even say what date range was used. (He says the data is "from 2007", but the post was made-- oh wait there's not even a date on the post! The first comment is from June.)
It's telling that one of the blog readers posts: "These figures are not correct. Internet Explorer comes with an embedded Java Plugin. Therefore the percent of the Java Plugin is almost 100%." Uh, IE hasn't shipped with an embedded Java plugin since late 2001 or so when Windows XP came out. Way to keep up, blog poster!
So in short, I concede I have no data to support my assertion that a large number of browsers do not have Java installed. Considering no version of IE or Firefox has shipped with Java for a number of years, very very few websites require Java, and the Java download (until recently) was monumentally huge, and that Sun is apparently too embarrassed to publish the number, I still believe it's a low number.
Pretty vague again - that depends on what you're trying to accomplish. Flash is used for many things, and many of the things it's used for are better done with a different tool or better not done at all. Example - flash based navigation. I cringe when I see things like this. There is absolutely no need for that, dynamic menus with DHTML or CSS is a better tool in this case. Agreed? And things like this shouldn't be done at all.
Yup, you're right. 100% right.
But guess what? I can use a truck to send emergency medical supplies to starving kids, or I can use a truck to run down innocent people at a shopping mall! By your logic, trucks are "never" the best solution to any problem.
Tools magnify human ability. Flash magnifies a web developer's ability to be very, very annoying. Without Flash, that jerk's speech about imagic would probably be in an embedded.wav file, though-- Flash isn't the cause of that problem.
I'll also expand on that some more and say that some interactive applications using Flash seem to be an interesting way of doing things (though the environment for programmers sucks),
Moreso than Java environments for applets?
I agree that Flash's IDE sucks, but, dude, you were saying a couple posts ago that Java was an appropriate replacement. Show me how to do a Homestarrunner cartoon in Java, and then come back and tell me how great Java IDEs are for that type of work.
I wish content creators were more familiar with alternatives, and they're not. To a designer, Flash is a hammer, and so they see every problem as a nail. But there is almost always a better tool for the job.
The menu on the Airsoft site, the one done in Flash, took a
Java is not a 150 MB download. Just checking download sizes for my platform now, Flash player is 3MB and Java is 18MB. Yes, it is much larger (again - it does much more).
Fair point; it looks like Sun fixed that. Last time I used Java, the installer was over 50 MB. (Looking at Sun's "older version" page, it looks like the last version of Java was a 95 MB download.) While it's great that Sun has finally fixed this problem with Java, it's still too late for the web... Java's over; 90%+ of computers no longer have it installed, and no popular sites use it or would dare to use it. The boat has been missed.
Flash player has had its share of browser-crashing, so I don't think the argument that Java crashed browsers is valid. In fact Flash still has crashing / hanging issues on many browsers (recent IE7 and Firefox issues come to mind).
I've never had Flash crash a browser newer than Netscape 4. Can you cite any "recent IE7 and Firefox" issues perchance? I'm not satisfied with vagueness.
DHTML has been around for a long, long time - animations in web pages using javascript and HTML has been possible since before Flash was a de-facto standard.
Yes, but transparency in DHTML was extremely impractical, if not impossible, to do cross-browser until about IE 6, and by that time Flash had a firm foothold. Without transparency effects, you can't do most of what Flash is used to do.
I do know that designers are a finicky bunch and will stick with Adobe until the world's end even if there are better/cheaper/easier tools out there for some reason.
That remains to be seen; we can come back to that point when there's a better, cheaper and easier tool. Right now, there's not. Well, maybe in a year, Silverlight will be that solution, but for now there sure isn't. (And Silverlight is, if anything, less open source than Flash is.)
Just because something is the most popular solution / product, doesn't mean it's the best. Keep an open mind.
It does in the web world. If you find a better plug-in, one that does everything better and faster, but none of your customers have it installed already, it's utterly useless to you. That's why Java is useless on the modern web. You go to war with the army you got, not the army you want.
This "service" allows you to get away with pirating movies and music. (Otherwise, if it were legal downloads, why would you need to be anonymous?) And to receive this protection, you have to pay this guy to use it?
How is this any different from Kazaa charging for pirating media? Except that with this service you're slightly less likely to get caught.
gnash does exist, it's a flash clone. So yes, an open-source 'solution' exists, that sn't mature. I can't tell whether you were being satirical in saying it doesn't exist, but just in case..
I've never heard of it before. I just invented a fake name which sounded terrible, since all open source projects tend to have terrible-sounding names.
My main point in posting that is that there's absolutely no (practical!) difference in this case between the proprietary solution and an open source solution. My secondary point is since open source doesn't have anything that can do what Flash can do, whining about how bad Flash is is particularly idiotic. I think most people ignored the actual point of my post while instead obsessing over the name I made up.
While I'm pretty sure you know that Gnash exists and for some reason you're taking a stab at the open-source implementation for being 1/2 version behind Flash (yes, Gnash supports video), your entire argument is wrong.
Actually, I had no clue. I just made-up a likely name. (You know, adding GN to it and making it extraordinarily moronic at the same time... not as bad as GIMP, but who wants to use Gnash?)
First of all, excluding Gnash, Java does everything that Flash does and much, much more.
Yeah; one of the things it does "more" is suck-ass.
Sun had a chance to make Java work; they failed. Instead of a 150k download, Java's a 150 MB download. Java crashed browsers all the time, back when they had a chance to make it work. It also wasn't cross-platform (despite Sun's propaganda), and Flash has always been.
Oh yeah and it's open source.
It wasn't at the time this market segment was being conquered by Macromedia.
Of course it's not made by Adobe so designers have no clue how to do anything with it, but that's a different problem.
Yes it is, but it's a huge problem. Why *should* designers have to learn an entire programming language, one that's particularly pedantic and clunky, to make some neat flying text effects? That's a different problem, but it's probably the number one reason Flash is used now and Java is a memory. (On the web at least.)
Of course, now there's another huge problem: Since Sun screwed up Java, most browsers no longer have it installed. It's too late to switch from Flash to Java, you'll never get consumers to download a 150MB Java runtime to run cute little web animations. Sorry, Sun lost this race years ago and you're just stuck in the past.
(Actually, you're stuck in some weird parallel alternate-timeline where Java was open source while it was still relevant on browsers; do people call you The Doctor by chance?)
And much of the animation you see with Flash can be done with standard web technologies like HTML and JavaScript.
Some of it can be, now. At the time this market segment was being dominated by Macromedia, it couldn't. Another window into your strange alternate chronology.
The second problem with your argument is inferring that Flash actually does anything useful, that even SHOULD be used on websites. It doesn't.
This is the reply of every open source geek when you point out something open source doesn't do well: "open source doesn't do it well because nobody needs to do it." I'm sick of that BS excuse.
Look, you don't like Flash movie sites. I don't like Flash movie sites. That doesn't change the fact that movie studios spent millions of dollars developing movie sites in Flash. If someone's going to send me $100 grand to develop a movie site, and they want me to use Flash, I'm not going to debate with them about how "useless" Flash is, I'm going to develop the site and make 'cha-ching' noises under my breath.
If the general populace thought Flash was useless, it'd go away. It would have years ago. But they don't, and it hasn't, so you're not fooling me or anybody other than yourself.
What about Intuit? Surely Intuit is a lot more terrible than Apple; they embrace horrible product activation, their products are bloated and buggy, and they recently released a update that erased tons of Mac users' Desktop folders.
Say for example there was an open-source solution to do Flash-like animation and multimedia on websites (there isn't.) Let's call it Gnash.
Now let's say that Gnash works approximately like Flash does; do you your design in a 'source' file called a.gla which you then compile into a 'runtime' file called a.gwf. And version 5.0 of Gnash is buggy in such a way that.gwf files have a security vulnerability, based off legitimate Gnash features (so that the Gnash runtime can't just blanket disable the feature that causes the vulnerability). The only way to fix this problem is to individually inspect every.gwf file to see if they use the functions in question.
Furthermore, let's say for argument's sake that Gnash is hugely popular and millions of these.gwf files exist on the web, some on sites that no longer have access to the original.gla files.
How would the fictional Gnash open-source solution be any different or better than the proprietary Flash solution? Show your work.
All of this, of course, is assuming that there is an open source package that does what Flash does, and there isn't. So if you really think open source is really all that superior, why don't you make open source versions of things that people obviously want? Like Flash, for instance. Instead of just complaining that the proprietary solutions suck.
This comment makes no sense. Microsoft's been pushing 64-bit for ages-- there was a 64-bit version of Windows 2000, and I believe NT4 as well.
The problem with running a PC in 64-bit is the same source as most other PC problems: third-party Windows developers *suck ass*. People don't use 64-bit Windows because device drivers generally don't support it. (Although MS-certified Vista drivers are required to, so thank God, maybe that will finally change.) Also, 64-bit Windows won't run 16-bit applications; the fact that 16-bit applications still exist in the year 2007 is a testiment to how much Windows developers suck ass.
I've always said that Apple's key to success isn't the quality of their OS, but the quality of their third-party developers. Apple's developers actually read and follow GUI guidelines, actually made their apps multi-user-aware in a reasonable amount of time (it took Lotus Notes on Windows a full decade before it was multi-user-aware), etc. I don't know how they do it, but that's what Microsoft needs to work on.
Flight Simulator - bought from SubLogic. (You said this yourself!)
Considering they've pushed all other non-military flight sims out of the market, they must be doing something right with Flight Sim.
Outlook/Exchange - Lotus Notes was a groupware product well before then.
I guess Microsoft innovated the concept of a groupware product that doesn't suck ass.
Excel - Plagiarised from Lotus 1-2-3. The two were basically playing leapfrog in feature sets before 1-2-3 bit the dust.
Actually, Excel's innovation was realizing that most people use spreadsheet programs to make lists and not necessarily to calculate huge financial spreadsheets. Thus, while Lotus 1-2-3 was adding in all kinds of crazy data features that hardly anybody used, Excel was adding in auto-fill, auto-formatting and all those other features that make it really good at making lists.
Maybe not an "innovation," but that's what got Excel a lot of the market it has now.
XBox Live - the PS2 offered online play, but Sony never really exploited this. Frankly, it was a little early because it predated ubiquitous broadband.
Sony? What about the Dreamcast?
In any case, you have to admit that Gamer Points are pretty innovative. A pointless, useless number that increases the amount of time (some) people play your video game with nearly no effort. Microsoft gave those insane game completionists exactly what they wanted, in a publically-visible system-wide form. That's never been done before.
As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. -- Commissioner Pravin Lal, "U.N. Declaration of Rights"
WTF? Is that quote from a sci-fi movie, or do you know something about the destruction of Earth that the rest of us don't? (Also, why does it single out Americans in particular?)
Pisses off Microsoft? Microsoft was able to acquire Aquantive, a company about the same size (and in the same business) as DoubleClick in record time. (Both acquisition deals started about the same time.) Microsoft's laughing all the way to the bank, just because Aquantive kept a low profile in the press and DoubleClick didn't.
Slashdot Mirror
File open is/was different -- as late as XP (dunno about vista). Network files are accessed differently, preventing you from, for example, executing files.
That's a security feature *added* to Windows. Windows 95 would execute anything over the network, no problem. Because of real, or perceived, security threats, Microsoft locked down that functionality.
Various apps struggled to open data files too. Playing mp3s over a network was a frequent headache, regardless of bandwidth.
Those are probably bugs in those apps. Microsoft's own Zune software has issues playing MP4s over a network, I think because it's making an assumption that all those files are local files and not bothering to do any kind of caching or look-ahead on them. iTunes, on the other hand, does some amount of caching so that MP4 playback is smooth even on wireless networks.
That doesn't say anything about *Windows*, that just says the Zune software is slightly buggy and iTunes isn't buggy in the same way.
I am used to Linux. It was a headache when going to explorer and finding you simply couldn't do stuff because it's over a network. It's a shocker. I guess if you never worked like that you might think Windows has good file shares, and has no problems.
Except Windows did everything over a network too, until they started locking it down. Windows does have good file shares, and copes with bad networks a hell of a lot better than Mac OS does. (I can't speak for Linux in that area.)
You're also saying stuff counter to my personal experience. I spent a 5 year IT career doing practically nothing but installing software over network shares.
The fact that it doesn't work in some apps, means that the OS doesn't abstract it correctly.
I like how you discount the possibility of buggy applications out-of-hand? No, the real problem is that media player apps like Zune and whatever MP3 player you were using make *assumptions* they shouldn't; they assume the media is stored on a low-latency HD attached to the computer, and never stepped back to think "hey wait, what if this media is over a network?" Software that (rightly) makes no assumptions about the location of the media (like iTunes) work just fine in this situation.
Your problem is BUGGY SOFTWARE. It has nothing to do with the OS.
Napster tried that defense, remember? The obvious counter-example is, "well, if Napster is designed to discover new artists, how come there isn't a 'random artist' or 'recommend an artist' feature?" Last time I used Limewire, it had zero features dedicated to helping you find new artists, but tons of features based around stealing movies and TV shows. Go figure.
MS-DOS and Windows users seem to take it for granted that a file that is across the network is accessed via different APIs,
I can't speak for MS-DOS (are there any MS-DOS users left?), in Windows you don't use a different API for a network files. Any differences are taken care of far below the application level.
different user interfaces,
Really? On my Windows machine, networked files show up in Windows Explorer just like local files. If anything, it's not different *enough*-- i.e. it would be nice to have a mark in the icon to tell me if a file is on a network drive, especially when I'm on unreliable wifi networks.
It isn't so long ago that most Windows programs couldn't even reference cross-network files in a straightforward way in a file open dialog. You first had to assign a "drive letter" and "map a network drive."
You never *had* to do that. Well, ok, maybe pre-95 versions of Windows. But Windows 95 would work just fine if you typed \\network\path into an Open dialog. I did that just a couple years ago at a hospital I was working at with some ancient machines still in use.
Of course you have the option to map a drive letter if you want, and there may be some buggy applications that didn't work unless they had a drive letter to work with, but you can't blame Microsoft for buggy third party apps.
The assumption that files across the network are totally differents sorts of thing from local files appeared to be so ingrained in the Windows culture that Windows people don't even understand why it is a criticism of Windows to mention this.
Maybe they just think you're crazy for "criticizing" Windows for something you basically made-up.
I'm not a huge Microsoft fan, but most of your post is just plain wrong. I know this is Slashdot and thus you were +5 Insightful, but please make some effort to at least be a little accurate next time you post. Let's reduce the amount of bullcrap here, not increase it.
If you're going to make 1984 jokes, you gotta at least read the book first.
"when do these billboards start displaying the latest English Socialism?"
That doesn't even slightly make sense.
Everyone else uses /, so of course MS has to try and be different.
Macintosh uses (or used, before it was Unix) a colon as a path separator. So there.
But the part you're missing, none of these systems (NONE of them) were designed to inter-operate with each other. It just simply was not part of the spec they were building from. Considering that, the path separator *is* entirely arbitrary. (Sure, it can cause problems *now* that systems inter-operate, but the design of DOS couldn't have anticipated that back when it was built.)
In both cases, you have to mount a partition in order to access it. Hiding the idea of mounting is another stupid move from MS -- the assumption that you always mount something that's plugged in. The problem comes up with removable drives, which need to be unmounted before ejecting. There are various workarounds now, but it was worse with floppy drives. Basically Windows would try to write a disk as soon as possible, disabling all multitasking, so that you could see when it was done.
I like how the concept of "user friendliness" doesn't exist in your world. Telling people they have to "mount" and "dismount" drives is idiotic, because nobody other than Slashdot nerds will understand why, or for that matter care. If it was a setting, they'd just set everything to automatically mount anyway. If it wasn't a setting, they'd know you have to do the magic "mount" command before their CD works, and they'd do it by habit every time anyway. Having the OS automatically do it by default is the only logical way.
Apple's solution of physically locking the disk in the drive until it was "unmounted" is a better solution, of course, but Microsoft had to work with the hardware that was available to them.
Yet a case where someome may want to do just one of them, but MS assumes you want to do both at once.
When? Why? What would be the point of creating a partition with no filesystem on it?
You're complaining that Microsoft doesn't support an edge-case that perhaps one in ten thousand people would ever want to do? Seriously?
Ummm...Ayn Rand wrote fiction, you know. You can't judge the court system by non-real happenings in it.
Yes you can! Abraham Lincoln's disembodied head told me so in a dream!
Do you mean, "Using the C-language escape character as a path separator cool"
or
"Merging disk partitions and formats in a way that keeps people stupid (c:) cool" ?
But your point is well taken.
Can't let the bugbear-as-messenger become a distractor, for all the idea of "shooting the messenger" never seemed more appropriate.
Does anybody have any clue what this guy is talking about? Microsoft is making people dumber by using disk partitions? I've never been so confused, and I've seen every David Lynch film!
Once I saw an ad for a Burger King BBQ sauce burger and I went out and bought one on a whim. It sounded good, and I guess I was hungry. The irony is that I didn't actually click the ad, I just closed the window.
Fortunately, there are still vast tracts of barren forests for you. Why don't you just check out, burn all your artificially-created clothes, and live the hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the great Canadian north?
I'm all for the concept, but right now my DishNetwork receiver box can't even talk to my DVR, which can't even talk to my TV, not even to ask simple questions like "are you turned on?" "What channel are you on?"
And that's a field where the benefits to the average consumer are obvious and immediate. Getting appliances to talk to each other is a pipe dream.
Either this summary is highly misleading, or I completely misunderstand the feature in question. The feature is a news (RSS) reader with a "share" button... Google shows articles you "share" to all your Gmail contacts.
In what way is "shared" RSS articles "private information?" Moreover, in what way is ANY RSS feed "private information?" They're all publically-available, that's kind of the point of RSS.
So does this headline boil down to: "Information you told Google to share actually got shared; retards complain?"
Java's over; 90%+ of computers no longer have it installed
.wav file, though-- Flash isn't the cause of that problem.
Talk about a vague stat - since you asked for citations, I must insist as well. I can't find any numbers that even remotely resemble your statement.
Touche.
Sun doesn't publish any numbers (which, I think, says something about it!) I've been Googling for a few minutes now, and I got nothing... none of the data I've seen:
1) Tells whether it was measured via JS or by actually attempting to load an applet. (The JS detection defaults to "on" if Java isn't installed; great implementation there!)
2) Doesn't distinguish between Microsoft's JVM or Sun's JVM. In theory it doesn't matter, but in reality there are compatibility differences between the two so it does. Also, for pre-XP computers, Microsoft's JVM was installed by default.
3) Doesn't link to the source of the data.
Here's a typical site:
http://www.adrianblog.com/web-development/flash-player-installed-on-987-percent-of-online-computers.html
I think all of his numbers are high (RealPlayer on 55% of browsers? No effing way!) But his Java number is clearly insane. He doesn't, of course, link to the source of this data, what version of Java it's supposed to be measuring, or what detection method was used. He doesn't even say what date range was used. (He says the data is "from 2007", but the post was made-- oh wait there's not even a date on the post! The first comment is from June.)
It's telling that one of the blog readers posts: "These figures are not correct. Internet Explorer comes with an embedded Java Plugin. Therefore the percent of the Java Plugin is almost 100%." Uh, IE hasn't shipped with an embedded Java plugin since late 2001 or so when Windows XP came out. Way to keep up, blog poster!
So in short, I concede I have no data to support my assertion that a large number of browsers do not have Java installed. Considering no version of IE or Firefox has shipped with Java for a number of years, very very few websites require Java, and the Java download (until recently) was monumentally huge, and that Sun is apparently too embarrassed to publish the number, I still believe it's a low number.
Pretty vague again - that depends on what you're trying to accomplish. Flash is used for many things, and many of the things it's used for are better done with a different tool or better not done at all. Example - flash based navigation. I cringe when I see things like this. There is absolutely no need for that, dynamic menus with DHTML or CSS is a better tool in this case. Agreed? And things like this shouldn't be done at all.
Yup, you're right. 100% right.
But guess what? I can use a truck to send emergency medical supplies to starving kids, or I can use a truck to run down innocent people at a shopping mall! By your logic, trucks are "never" the best solution to any problem.
Tools magnify human ability. Flash magnifies a web developer's ability to be very, very annoying. Without Flash, that jerk's speech about imagic would probably be in an embedded
I'll also expand on that some more and say that some interactive applications using Flash seem to be an interesting way of doing things (though the environment for programmers sucks),
Moreso than Java environments for applets?
I agree that Flash's IDE sucks, but, dude, you were saying a couple posts ago that Java was an appropriate replacement. Show me how to do a Homestarrunner cartoon in Java, and then come back and tell me how great Java IDEs are for that type of work.
I wish content creators were more familiar with alternatives, and they're not. To a designer, Flash is a hammer, and so they see every problem as a nail. But there is almost always a better tool for the job.
The menu on the Airsoft site, the one done in Flash, took a
Java is not a 150 MB download. Just checking download sizes for my platform now, Flash player is 3MB and Java is 18MB. Yes, it is much larger (again - it does much more).
Fair point; it looks like Sun fixed that. Last time I used Java, the installer was over 50 MB. (Looking at Sun's "older version" page, it looks like the last version of Java was a 95 MB download.) While it's great that Sun has finally fixed this problem with Java, it's still too late for the web... Java's over; 90%+ of computers no longer have it installed, and no popular sites use it or would dare to use it. The boat has been missed.
Flash player has had its share of browser-crashing, so I don't think the argument that Java crashed browsers is valid. In fact Flash still has crashing / hanging issues on many browsers (recent IE7 and Firefox issues come to mind).
I've never had Flash crash a browser newer than Netscape 4. Can you cite any "recent IE7 and Firefox" issues perchance? I'm not satisfied with vagueness.
DHTML has been around for a long, long time - animations in web pages using javascript and HTML has been possible since before Flash was a de-facto standard.
Yes, but transparency in DHTML was extremely impractical, if not impossible, to do cross-browser until about IE 6, and by that time Flash had a firm foothold. Without transparency effects, you can't do most of what Flash is used to do.
I do know that designers are a finicky bunch and will stick with Adobe until the world's end even if there are better/cheaper/easier tools out there for some reason.
That remains to be seen; we can come back to that point when there's a better, cheaper and easier tool. Right now, there's not. Well, maybe in a year, Silverlight will be that solution, but for now there sure isn't. (And Silverlight is, if anything, less open source than Flash is.)
Just because something is the most popular solution / product, doesn't mean it's the best. Keep an open mind.
It does in the web world. If you find a better plug-in, one that does everything better and faster, but none of your customers have it installed already, it's utterly useless to you. That's why Java is useless on the modern web. You go to war with the army you got, not the army you want.
This software is intended only for "take, take, take" movie and music pirates. Why would you expect any different response?
Wait, so let me get this straight.
This "service" allows you to get away with pirating movies and music. (Otherwise, if it were legal downloads, why would you need to be anonymous?) And to receive this protection, you have to pay this guy to use it?
How is this any different from Kazaa charging for pirating media? Except that with this service you're slightly less likely to get caught.
gnash does exist, it's a flash clone. So yes, an open-source 'solution' exists, that sn't mature. I can't tell whether you were being satirical in saying it doesn't exist, but just in case..
I've never heard of it before. I just invented a fake name which sounded terrible, since all open source projects tend to have terrible-sounding names.
My main point in posting that is that there's absolutely no (practical!) difference in this case between the proprietary solution and an open source solution. My secondary point is since open source doesn't have anything that can do what Flash can do, whining about how bad Flash is is particularly idiotic. I think most people ignored the actual point of my post while instead obsessing over the name I made up.
While I'm pretty sure you know that Gnash exists and for some reason you're taking a stab at the open-source implementation for being 1/2 version behind Flash (yes, Gnash supports video), your entire argument is wrong.
Actually, I had no clue. I just made-up a likely name. (You know, adding GN to it and making it extraordinarily moronic at the same time... not as bad as GIMP, but who wants to use Gnash?)
First of all, excluding Gnash, Java does everything that Flash does and much, much more.
Yeah; one of the things it does "more" is suck-ass.
Sun had a chance to make Java work; they failed. Instead of a 150k download, Java's a 150 MB download. Java crashed browsers all the time, back when they had a chance to make it work. It also wasn't cross-platform (despite Sun's propaganda), and Flash has always been.
Oh yeah and it's open source.
It wasn't at the time this market segment was being conquered by Macromedia.
Of course it's not made by Adobe so designers have no clue how to do anything with it, but that's a different problem.
Yes it is, but it's a huge problem. Why *should* designers have to learn an entire programming language, one that's particularly pedantic and clunky, to make some neat flying text effects? That's a different problem, but it's probably the number one reason Flash is used now and Java is a memory. (On the web at least.)
Of course, now there's another huge problem: Since Sun screwed up Java, most browsers no longer have it installed. It's too late to switch from Flash to Java, you'll never get consumers to download a 150MB Java runtime to run cute little web animations. Sorry, Sun lost this race years ago and you're just stuck in the past.
(Actually, you're stuck in some weird parallel alternate-timeline where Java was open source while it was still relevant on browsers; do people call you The Doctor by chance?)
And much of the animation you see with Flash can be done with standard web technologies like HTML and JavaScript.
Some of it can be, now. At the time this market segment was being dominated by Macromedia, it couldn't. Another window into your strange alternate chronology.
The second problem with your argument is inferring that Flash actually does anything useful, that even SHOULD be used on websites. It doesn't.
This is the reply of every open source geek when you point out something open source doesn't do well: "open source doesn't do it well because nobody needs to do it." I'm sick of that BS excuse.
Look, you don't like Flash movie sites. I don't like Flash movie sites. That doesn't change the fact that movie studios spent millions of dollars developing movie sites in Flash. If someone's going to send me $100 grand to develop a movie site, and they want me to use Flash, I'm not going to debate with them about how "useless" Flash is, I'm going to develop the site and make 'cha-ching' noises under my breath.
If the general populace thought Flash was useless, it'd go away. It would have years ago. But they don't, and it hasn't, so you're not fooling me or anybody other than yourself.
What about Intuit? Surely Intuit is a lot more terrible than Apple; they embrace horrible product activation, their products are bloated and buggy, and they recently released a update that erased tons of Mac users' Desktop folders.
Say for example there was an open-source solution to do Flash-like animation and multimedia on websites (there isn't.) Let's call it Gnash.
.gla which you then compile into a 'runtime' file called a .gwf. And version 5.0 of Gnash is buggy in such a way that .gwf files have a security vulnerability, based off legitimate Gnash features (so that the Gnash runtime can't just blanket disable the feature that causes the vulnerability). The only way to fix this problem is to individually inspect every .gwf file to see if they use the functions in question.
.gwf files exist on the web, some on sites that no longer have access to the original .gla files.
Now let's say that Gnash works approximately like Flash does; do you your design in a 'source' file called a
Furthermore, let's say for argument's sake that Gnash is hugely popular and millions of these
How would the fictional Gnash open-source solution be any different or better than the proprietary Flash solution? Show your work.
All of this, of course, is assuming that there is an open source package that does what Flash does, and there isn't. So if you really think open source is really all that superior, why don't you make open source versions of things that people obviously want? Like Flash, for instance. Instead of just complaining that the proprietary solutions suck.
This comment makes no sense. Microsoft's been pushing 64-bit for ages-- there was a 64-bit version of Windows 2000, and I believe NT4 as well.
The problem with running a PC in 64-bit is the same source as most other PC problems: third-party Windows developers *suck ass*. People don't use 64-bit Windows because device drivers generally don't support it. (Although MS-certified Vista drivers are required to, so thank God, maybe that will finally change.) Also, 64-bit Windows won't run 16-bit applications; the fact that 16-bit applications still exist in the year 2007 is a testiment to how much Windows developers suck ass.
I've always said that Apple's key to success isn't the quality of their OS, but the quality of their third-party developers. Apple's developers actually read and follow GUI guidelines, actually made their apps multi-user-aware in a reasonable amount of time (it took Lotus Notes on Windows a full decade before it was multi-user-aware), etc. I don't know how they do it, but that's what Microsoft needs to work on.
Meanwhile I was doing saki bombs at a bar with some women from work.
Flight Simulator - bought from SubLogic. (You said this yourself!)
Considering they've pushed all other non-military flight sims out of the market, they must be doing something right with Flight Sim.
Outlook/Exchange - Lotus Notes was a groupware product well before then.
I guess Microsoft innovated the concept of a groupware product that doesn't suck ass.
Excel - Plagiarised from Lotus 1-2-3. The two were basically playing leapfrog in feature sets before 1-2-3 bit the dust.
Actually, Excel's innovation was realizing that most people use spreadsheet programs to make lists and not necessarily to calculate huge financial spreadsheets. Thus, while Lotus 1-2-3 was adding in all kinds of crazy data features that hardly anybody used, Excel was adding in auto-fill, auto-formatting and all those other features that make it really good at making lists.
Maybe not an "innovation," but that's what got Excel a lot of the market it has now.
XBox Live - the PS2 offered online play, but Sony never really exploited this. Frankly, it was a little early because it predated ubiquitous broadband.
Sony? What about the Dreamcast?
In any case, you have to admit that Gamer Points are pretty innovative. A pointless, useless number that increases the amount of time (some) people play your video game with nearly no effort. Microsoft gave those insane game completionists exactly what they wanted, in a publically-visible system-wide form. That's never been done before.
As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. -- Commissioner Pravin Lal, "U.N. Declaration of Rights"
WTF? Is that quote from a sci-fi movie, or do you know something about the destruction of Earth that the rest of us don't? (Also, why does it single out Americans in particular?)
Words describing the article: 61
Words bashing Microsoft: 74
Pisses off Microsoft? Microsoft was able to acquire Aquantive, a company about the same size (and in the same business) as DoubleClick in record time. (Both acquisition deals started about the same time.) Microsoft's laughing all the way to the bank, just because Aquantive kept a low profile in the press and DoubleClick didn't.