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Nick Lothian › Likes
The Warring Visions of the Religious Right - 95.11 - http://www.theatlantic.com/issues...
Myrna, Joel Webber, Jessie and 2 other people liked this
"Regent University is the intellectual and theological center of the Christian Coalition. What is it like there? Does an inverse political correctness rule? What theology is taught, and what are its political implications? On a recent visit the author, a noted Harvard theologian, found some surprising answers -- among them, that the "Christian right" is no monolith"
- Jim Norris
from Bookmarklet
I suspect the next 10 years are going to see major advances in medicine. The last 10 years have built an amazing array of genetic knowledge
RAPatton, Joel Webber, Nick Lothian and 4 other people liked this
Matt - I'm sure you're well aware of the Kurzweil and Venter talks regarding now medicine will become an information technology -- this may be the big story in medicine of the next decade.
- Kurt Starnes
Agreed, Kurt. It's fascinating to see how those predictions are coming true so quickly. Biostatistical reverse engineering and other various analyses are going to propel medicine so far ahead of where we are today.
- Matt Mastracci
from iPhone
I sure hope you're right about that. For so many medical issues, though, better mechanical solutions would make a huge difference. Think about what laparoscopy did in the 90s.
- Joel Webber
from BuddyFeed
Beti & I just came up with a cool idea. Start singing a song, an app finds the song, and starts playing on your iPod, phone, or home sound system.
Jérôme Flipo, Nick Lothian, Ethan Gahng and 3 other people liked this
Kind of a voice recognition version of Shazam + mp3 controller.
- Cristo
And if you sing very off-key?
- Anne Bouey
Reverse karaoke.
- Louis Gray
Anne, I assume the better the system, the better the recognition capability. It's all about competition. :)
- Cristo
Beti is singing songs in the kitchen, and I'm finding them and playing them from the office through Sonos. I'm kind of the human prototype for this technology right now. ;)
- Cristo
And will it include automatically billing you for ASCAP licensing fees for the live performance - the 3 Ms: Monetize, monetize, monetize. ;)
- Micah Wittman
Midomi does the first part very well, but the second part is not automated for obvious reasons :)
- Ethan Gahng
Ethan, what are the obvious reasons?
- Cristo
Well, first of all you can't automate the purchase part. Midomi lets you buy the discovered song directly from their app though. And, even if the purchase part is resolved--assuming that all the songs you hum or sing is in your iTunes library--you would still want to choose from several discovered songs with similar traits. For example, I just hummed the music "Desafinado" into my midomi, and it brings me several versions. I wouldn't like it if it just started playing the first one on their list.
- Ethan Gahng
And yet somehow I know which one to play even though I'm not the one humming.
- Cristo
Interesting to notice that I have over 57% as many subscribers on FriendFeed as I do on Twitter. Especially since there are hardly any bots or spam accounts on FriendFeed. Audience engagement here is still better, too.
David Recordon, Benjamin Golub, A.T. and 54 other people liked this
And we appreciate you a lot more here.
- Louis Gray
What Mr. Gray said.
- imabonehead
Since July I've gotten 14,000 new followers on Twitter and 7,000 new ones here. Not sure why you aren't getting your fair share of Twitter followers. :-) But I think you are better engaged here than on Twitter, which brings you love in return, as Louis demonstrates.
- Robert Scoble
Aww, shucks, all. @Robert - I already have plenty of subscribers*, thanks. I'd much rather the current situation -- highly engaged people to chat with, many of whom have a gazillion subscribers themselves and can filter for me in the off chance I say something interesting -- than end up on something like the SUL with millions of people who couldn't care less being bombarded with my inanity.
- DeWitt Clinton
*Call me old school, but isn't "subscribers" just such a better word than "followers"?
- DeWitt Clinton
My first thought is that "subscribers" sounds so passive, one-directional. Like the recipients of a magazine. "Followers" doesn't sound any better, to be honest. I don't know if "followers" sounds passive, or like a stalker. "Trackers" sounds very disturbing. Is there a phrase that has a bi-directional quality, doesn't sound passive, and yet isn't creepy.
- Carl Setzer
By the way, I've never been on the SUL and if added would ask them to remove me. I agree it's a bad thing. Lists are a lot more interesting, because that's how you find an audience that actually cares what you have to say http://listorious.com
- Robert Scoble
Robert, you are on the SUL for Cliqset, though.
- April Russo (app103)
April: I just looked for an SUL on Cliqset and can't find one. Do you have a URL for it?
- Robert Scoble
I don't have a URL for it, but you are on the short SUL they show you when setting up a new account. Could make a new one just for the purpose of seeing who they suggest. ;-)
- April Russo (app103)
Robert: Here's a screenshot: http://dl.dropbox.com/u... And they are all checked, by default when you get to that page.
- April Russo (app103)
April: hmm, I didn't see that. So that's why I am getting added by a few people. Thanks for letting me know.
- Robert Scoble
Of course you wouldn't have seen it when you signed up, as you didn't have an account there yet and couldn't be on that list...lol. But if you were to make a new account now, you'd see that.
- April Russo (app103)
Re: subscribers vs followers... Meh. Now "minions," _that_ is a term I could endorse.
- DGentry
I have 384 subscribers on FF vs. 200 on Twitter. There's very little profound/useful stuff I can say in 140 or less, sorry
- LANjackal
it's good to see a lot of great people not great people but people with good content coming back to friendfeed again
- testbeta
LANjackal: that comment was 123 characters =D
- Mike Chelen
Hence the "very little" part of what I said, hahaha. That rarely happens. I don't consider most of what I tweet to be "profound", though it may be entertaining. It's certainly not informati- WHY IS THE CLOUD IN THE BACKGROUND MOVING ON THIS PAGE #shortattentionspan
- LANjackal
Can you recommend a good FriendFeed client? Would love something like TweetDeck for FF.
- Michael Brown
Michael, there's http://www.frienddeck.com/ , but I never much took to it. I should try it again. The native friendfeed.com web interface works well enough for me (well, I did write some hacks to effect a few enhancements http://friendfeed.com/ffhacks ).
- Micah Wittman
OK, managed to get the GWT-for-firefox-extensions code out (http://code.google.com/p...). Time to switch gears and bury myself in server code.
Chi Hoang and Nick Lothian liked this
HTML5 FileAPI adds XHR.sendAsBinary(), but WebSockets API lacks a binary option. Something is wrong with this picture.
Joel Webber, Nick Lothian and Brian Hendrickson liked this
(I think @mmastracci said this before) Somebody really needs to go through this stuff, along with the WebGL and WebSockets APIs, and normalize all the weird methods for handling binary streams. It all smells kind of like java.nio, but for some reason everyone keeps wandering along in their own little worlds.
- Joel Webber
fuse-gae is a "drive in the cloud" using App Engine's Blobstore API. The goal is maximum rsync performance. Open source: Contributions welcome! - http://www.onebigfluke.com/2009...
Vlado Handziski, Louis Gray, Joe Beda () and 5 other people liked this
That was fast.
- Scott Ludwig
from iPhone
Nick Lothian and Matt Mastracci liked this
Beta Testing the Sun Grid Engine Hadoop Integration http://blogs.sun.com/templed... http://blogs.sun.com/ravee...
Nick Lothian and Deepak Singh liked this
Kids & the Marshmallow Test - http://www.youtube.com/watch...
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Katie B, Stephen Mack, vovasty and 25 other people liked this
This is another version of Walter Mischel's marshmallow experiment-- in the 1960s, a group of four-year olds were given a marshmallow and promised another, only if they could wait 20 minutes before eating the first one. The researchers then followed the progress of each child into adolescence and demonstrated that those with the ability to wait were better adjusted and more dependable (determined via surveys of their parents and teachers), and scored an average of 210 points higher on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.
- Tom Stocky
There was an article about this in the New Yorker a few months ago: http://www.newyorker.com/reporti...
- Tom Stocky
Very telling. I heard a wise piece of advice once that said (paraphrasing) - The key to living a happy, content life is to delay gratification.
- Shey, Jamaican of FF
But how can I live a gratified life?
- Andrew C
Delay gratification. Not indulge or forgo gratification.
- Shey, Jamaican of FF
TED talk -http://www.ted.com/talks...
- Mustafa Burak Su
Torture?
- Bülent Kıyışkan
What if you think marshmallows are kind of gross? Does that make you really smart? I hope so :)
- Joel Webber
You thought at age 6 that marshmallows were kind of gross?
- Melinda Owens
The girl in the TED Talk is hilarious.
- Ruchira S. Datta
@Ruchira - This girl was hilarious, I was laughing so hard that I had tears in my eyes ;-)
- joergkurtwegner
EtherPad Open Source Release - http://etherpad.com/ep...
ORiGO, "Serhat Ozan", Jim Norris and 69 other people liked this
Awesome.
- Paul Buchheit
from Bookmarklet
Yay, +1 for Scala
- Ray Cromwell
Thanks Google! It's beautiful example for realtime web application.
- Hasan Ozgan
Yeah, I noticed all the Scala, too. Nice.
- Joel Webber
thanks... now it might only be me but not really clear where I should go and what is it I should do to download the source.
- lelapin
To download source you have to get mercurial (similar to git) http://hgbook.red-bean.com/read... then you can run: hg clone https://etherpad.googlecode.com/hg... etherpad
- Jeremy Heslop
JDJ: A Light Java Runtime to Bundle with Applications - http://java7.tumblr.com/post...
Tracy and Nick Lothian liked this
Sucessfully finished my Google Campfire presentation with zero loss of life!
Michal Cierniak, Itachi, Joel Webber and 9 other people liked this
You did great. Thanks for flying all the way out to MTV to represent!
- Joel Webber
Loads of fun. Got some cool schwag now as well. MTV campus is really slick.
- Matt Mastracci
Awesome presentation, Matt.
- Bruce Johnson
from BuddyFeed
Thanks guys
- Matt Mastracci
from iPhone
Thanks for coming and helping out!
- Andrew Bowers
Really well done, Matt. You're a natural at it.
- DeWitt Clinton
Just saw your presentation - thank you for that, Matt!
- Micah Wittman
#GWT 2.0 finally shipped. Tired but happy.
Daniel Schildt, Adam Schuck, Tom Stocky and 13 other people liked this
GWT foreva! You never forget your first...eng team that is.
- EricaJoy
Actually used this command tonight to get a SOCKS5 proxy behind a firewall where my sshd box had crashed: ssh -D 9998 -oProxyCommand="nc -l 9999" matthew@blah
Nick Lothian, Roberto Bonini and Mark Trapp liked this
Could run commands on the Hudson build machine still, so I used a groovy script to push the SSH connection to another machine via FIFO: command = ["sh", "-c", "nc otherbox port </tmp/shellpipe |nc internalbox port &>/tmp/shellpipe"] Runtime.getRuntime().exec((String[]) command.toArray())
- Matt Mastracci
RT @memoryboxbackup: We've opened up the beta now for everybody! Please visit http://www.memoryboxbackup.com/ and register. [Help please!]
Nick Lothian liked this
Revolutionary Espresso Book Machine launches in London | http://www.guardian.co.uk/books...
frinkle, Sean McBride, starwalker and 41 other people liked this
"It's not elegant and it's not sexy – it looks like a large photocopier – but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than 500 years ago and made the mass production of books possible. Launching today at Blackwell's Charing Cross Road branch in London, the machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait. Signalling the end, says Blackwell, to the frustration of being told by a bookseller that a title is out of print, or not in stock, the Espresso offers access to almost half a million books, from a facsimile of Lewis Carroll's original manuscript for Alice in Wonderland to Mrs Beeton's Book of Needlework. [...]"
- ianf ⌘
from Bookmarklet
Right now these machines cost a bundle, but, with economies of scale, can "One Hour Bookstores" be far behind? Goodbye print-on-demand, welcome print-on-a-whimsy cottage industry!
- ianf ⌘
The great question is why order from Amazon, when you could pop in and have it made up for you, whilst you wait.
- zeroinfluencer
Perhaps. It rather depends on the range (breadth) of genres and back-order titles in each venue. Traditional publishing is in many senses a license to print money, and so the industry isn't too keen on giving it up. If "Expressoed" copies turn out to be as costly as traditional ones, prospective buyers may opt for better "offline" quality from the big A. Then again, they may not... book...
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- ianf ⌘
Amazon has been using print-on-demand at their processing centers for a while to handle low-volume titles, the logical next step is for it to move out even closer to the end users. Its very similar to the fax machine actually: initially FedEx installed fax machines at their local offices and offered fax as a premium service, sending the fax across the country to the nearest FedEx office...
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- DGentry
Denton, indeed. Thus on-demand is not a product; imagine the use case: I'm about to take a journey. book a flight, it's long haul, so I order a book (profile & recommendations); the book stand at the airport prints it up for me ready for collection on the way through to departure lounge (or collect at departure as business service).
- zeroinfluencer
moo cards are another example.
- zeroinfluencer
Yes, Denton, but there always will be that £175.000 threshold such a machine costs, which will limit frequency of their occurrence. Amazon may yet end up the winner, because of the economies of scale in distrubution, esp. if/ when beleaguered traditionals elect to lower their prices to stay afloat. It's tricky business really.
- ianf ⌘
Think of the remix capabilities too. Selection of chapters from different books. Pick and Mix editorial in a book format, lovely. Just in time + bespoke = everyone's happy.
- zeroinfluencer
You can dream, David, but this won't be happening for a long time yet. Simple reason, copyrights. As with daily newspapers where you have to buy it all, but nobody expects you to read it cover to cover, so books are largely made up of parts you will read, those that you might, and those you'll perhaps browse through (all too often, I am afraid). Publishers will not permit selling of just some topical chapters of interest to you, you'll have to buy all the "superfluous" ones as well. Alas.
- ianf ⌘
Think of it as Tivo for Books.
- zeroinfluencer
Bad analogy, also American-parochial one I'm afraid. You do not "subscribe" to chapters of books floating by, you buy a book whether you only intend to read the tasty bits on pages 92-101.
- ianf ⌘
I've been playing around with FriendFeed and this http://www.tabbloid.com/, to get nice productions as PDFs. The source of 'content' will depend on the open licence of creative commons BY-SA, and artists are getting to understand that. Stephen Fry on Twitter for example.
- zeroinfluencer
Consumption/use habits are based upon what the technology of the time allows/affords. DRM tried to play havoc with the watching experience.
- zeroinfluencer
Good concept but, unless you can freely mix-and-match, and you'll never be able to provide just that to general public, a niche product. Even if well executed one, as this seems to me. That said, I dislike PDFs just for the reason that they make potentially dynamic information static, and kowtow to absolute page extent aesthetics even on a screen.
- ianf ⌘
kowtow = good word ;-)
- zeroinfluencer
Here's an example of what I'm thinking about, or as from the comments "The internet made better by the paper, and now the paper made better by the internet." http://noisydecentgraphics.typepad.com/design...
- zeroinfluencer
I've read about these "Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet 2008" which is a niche product with an enormous production cost-to-distribution ratio. Author never says what they charged for the 1000 numbered copies, but I bet it was a bundle, £39.95? Only when there are fully automated tools to do that (perhaps a suitable application for Wolfram/Alpha?) could this become of use for the public @large...
- ianf ⌘
They never charged for the paper - it was an experiment / proof of concept - I've got a copy - it's lovely. Yes, nice inclusion for Alpha.
- zeroinfluencer
Nice (badly hidden envy), but it makes it even more of a vanity project. Tried to look it up on ebay (0 items found), and google for a copy for sale, without much success <http://google.com/search...>
- ianf ⌘
This is cooler than a kindle
- Matthew DeVries
I live VERY CLOSE to this store. If I try it out, I'll take pictures and post!
- Zach Landes
Here's a movie of the EBM 2.0 in action <http://www.youtube.com/watch...>. Perhaps, for a change, you should just walk in, cup in hand, and ask for an "Espresso"? (refill optional). Then curse them loudly for misinforming the public (and photograph that instead!)
- ianf ⌘
I am actually seriously considering doing that. Good idea, ian
- Zach Landes
What would make this a real bonus is when they can come out with the color edition. Ok, so I am thinking comic books here, but what an awesome way for a small comic artist to do on demand comics.
- Dan Morrill AKA Techwag
Dan, all dandy, except it won't be happening, not in this iteration of EBM. It's strictly publisher-controlled selective-backlist only, no option to come in from the street with print-ready manuscript in hand and do a small print run. Or, should that eventually be on offer, it will be prohibitively expensive.
- ianf ⌘
Hold on, I need to amend the above. In the video at around 50 secs mark, it is claimed that the client CAN upload own file, either electronically or from a CD. That information hasn't been mentioned in any press report about it that I've read - so the EBM can be made to accept non-list matter, but perhaps it is up to the actual machine's owner (in this case either Blackwell's or some...
more...
- ianf ⌘
Meanwhile, there's a better quality (same as above promotional) video here <http://www.boston.com/video...> and a Boston Globe report of a local Espresso installation says this: »[the bookstore] wanted the new machine to connect the store’s customers to millions of book titles. That part of the business has developed slowly,...
more...
- ianf ⌘
[^*] an euphemism for "the publishers are demanding extraordinary sums for us making it possible for them to make money off their back catalogs. In effect they want us, the franchiser of the EBM, to commit to sell a minimum # copies/year of each title @ current in-print prices (or some such)."
- ianf ⌘
ianf ⌘ - http://blog.newspaperclub.co.uk/ (as mentioned above, it's now in development)
- zeroinfluencer
David, thanks for keeping me posted. It's not a light read though, so, before I embark on it later in the week (alas), could you please express it in High-Concept terms, e.g. what [physical size/ quality] "newspapers" you have in mind; and what this your "service to help people make their own newspapers" will be servicing: a single-point electronic drop-off box perhaps for client material - out comes a pack of 20-or-so 16-page tabloid papers prewrapped for dropping off a van at a stand?
- ianf ⌘
Hey Ian, It's not my project, I just know the guys behind it. (Sorry for the confusion - I mentioned it above as an example of what I was talking about - the process is dissimilar from Purefold). No idea how it's going to roll out - but it's a fine experiment to follow via their blog.
- zeroinfluencer
[December 2] Following up on a post from 27th of April—the Expresso Book Machine [aka #EBM] is prominently featured in this week's BBC World Click programme, a video of which is available for international online viewing, all 11m40s of it: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2... “[Click: 27 November] How printing on demand services and the internet have enabled anyone to publish their books. Plus, a look at the latest eBook readers.”
- ianf ⌘
Thanks! Weirdly, I was thinking about this thread last night. How are you Ian?
- zeroinfluencer
David, thinking is overrated. I hear doing's all the rage nowadays. Also see: http://friendfeed.com/the-fut...
- ianf ⌘
I had a night off.
- zeroinfluencer
#wearehunted has released an API, check it out http://wah.fm/api/
Itachi and Nick Lothian liked this
How about a callback so it can be used from JS? Eg http://developer.yahoo.com/common...
- Nick Lothian
@Nick - sound good mate, thanks for the feedback. We are releasing this early to get exactly this kind of feedback. I think a callback is a must have feature.
- David Petar Novakovic
Superfeedr real-time method stats: 73% polling, 26% PubSubHubHub, 1% RSSCloud, 0% SUP: http://blog.superfeedr.com/Real-ti... /via @arjunram
Pierre Arlais, Wayne Sutton, Ken Sheppardson and 18 other people liked this
poor RSSCloud, its almost a rounding error
- Mark
Dave's response http://blog.rsscloud.org/post... (he claims they made the numbers up)
- Mark
Knowing Julien, he didn't make these numbers up.
- David Recordon
The numbers obviously depend on what feeds you're consuming. For example, SUP is enabled on YouTube and Reddit, which are a significant fraction of the feeds on on FriendFeed, but are presumably less common on superfeedr.
- Paul Buchheit
Paul's comment is totally right. I think all this proves that we need to improve our 'communication' around these numbers and how they have been calculated. I will emphasize more on that in the future.
- Julien
And if someone were pulling a lot of WordPress.com feeds then they'd be using RSSCloud (unless of course they were using Superfeedr's PSHB proxy: http://wordpress.superfeedr.com/).
- David Recordon
In a that case, we'd be using RSSCloud to poll... As we actually do for the few wp feeds that we have.
- Julien
Unfortunately PSHB is using Feedeburner numbers and Feedburner enabled PSHB feeds are NOT realtime (for the most part), because of the latency from blog to Feedburner updating. No one cares about the technology, just whether it's realtime or not. And a vast majority of that 26% are not realtime, I'd say.
- Matt Terenzio
I'd also like to see some other aggregators (like Gnip) publish their numbers. Uncorroborated and without volume, it's hard to judge these, even if they are accurate.
- Chris Messina
What matters is how much faster the web is. Not which protcol is a rounding error. Paul and Matt, thanks for bringing this back to reality. And btw, there are millions of sites that achieve their realtime-ness through rssCloud. As Matt says, the Feedburner feeds have a delay built into them that the rssCloud ones don't have. So it's a good question whether or not the really are realtime. The whole point is updating quickly, and they could take as much as 1/2 hour to update.
- Dave Winer
Dave: Generally as long as the web is getting faster and more responsive, I don't care what protocols are used to do it. I worry, however, that if RSSCloud and PubSubHubBub were reversed in Julien's chart, that you wouldn't be discounting his findings. If so, that seems intellectually dishonest to me. Are you more upset about what Julien's numbers show or about his data collection method?
- Chris Messina
Here's what I wrote about this for the community in October. "I see adoption of PubSubHubBub as a win for the Internet, and believe strongly their advocates should see adoption of rssCloud the same way. If they feel pressure from rssCloud, it should result in them more fully embracing RSS, which I felt they weren't doing when I first reviewed their efforts. Once that happens the...
more...
- Dave Winer
Julien, perhaps if you're publishing data like this in the future, you might want to drop the step where you "try to determine what is the best way to get [a feed's] content" and simply publish the raw stats. That is, looking at the feeds you're dealing with, which ones support which protocols? Some might support more than one, and you could illustrate that in some sort of (non-pie) chart. It seems like determining the "best" way is what opens you up to accusations of bias, etc.
- Ken Sheppardson
The raw numbers do have value, IMHO, simply because as a developer I have to make choices about which protocol(s) to support. It's nice to have adoption data to feed the decision process.
- Ken Sheppardson
Ken, if it would help you, let's get the adoption data. Start from the other end, what numbers do you want? Let's see if we can get them.
- Dave Winer
Hopefully not data like this: http://friendfeed.com/kshep...
- Dave Winer
Heh. Yeah, that's the chart I was imagining when I wrote "(non-pie) chart" above. :-) What numbers do I want? Well, I've seen the announcement-based stats, e.g. "Service X has now enabled Protocol Y on N feeds" and while I suppose those have value from a marketing standpoint, I don't think it translates directly into real, meaningful usage. The fact that some blog somebody started on some blog hosting service in 2005 that only had one post is now "real time" enabled doesn't really mean anything to me...
- Ken Sheppardson
... Looking at something like Superfeedr considers a sample of feeds that people really want to follow in real time. That is, the fact that someone has said "Please tell me when Feed X updates as soon as possible" is important to me. Given a sample like that, I'd like to know which feeds support which protocols.
- Ken Sheppardson
Right on. I think the fact that CNN, GigaOm and TechCrunch have realtime feeds is important (they do). And with all possible humility I think it matters that Scripting News does as well. (They all support rssCloud, btw.) I'd like to know if Chris Messina's blog is realtime. I don't care how it got to be realtime, btw. And I'd like to see FF support all the popular protocols. These things will all help boost adoption adn that's what I want to see.
- Dave Winer
I hope it is! I installed the PubSubHubBub WordPress plugin (since I self-host) and seems to be working!
- Chris Messina
Good for you.
- Dave Winer
Again, I think the main point of the blog post was : real-time feeds (in general) are gaining traction. I will publish more details on how we measure the (raw) numbers in our December status.
- Julien
RT @virtualbox: VirtualBox 3.1! Teleportation ,performance ,snapshots 2.0 and more. Read it http://www.sun.com/aboutsu..., get it http://dlc.sun.com/virtual...
Nick Lothian liked this
The years pass and here I am once again using Rome for RSS/Atom parsing
Nick Lothian liked this
Rome?
- Michael R. Bernstein
Sun Micro ROME. https://rome.dev.java.net/ Amazing that it's the best and only java library for handling both RSS and Atom.
- Bill Strathearn
I keep coming back to this library as well. It does what it does very well, though its API could use a bit of decrufting.
- Matt Mastracci
For a long time there were two competing parsers. Rome (started by Patrick Chanezon et al) and Informa: http://informa.sourceforge.net/ Somewhere along the way Informa stopped being updated.
- Adewale Oshineye
:/ There are many proposals for a decrufted ROME 2. Sometimes it seems there are more proposals than there are people who work on it. Someday I hope to put out a version with an API which uses generics. I think that would make the easy use-cases easier, and is somewhat achievable.
- Nick Lothian
I always tend to struggle to remember the difference between SyndFeed and WireFeed.
- Adewale Oshineye
I do too
- Nick Lothian
If you use Informa, it's probably good to be aware of the security issue linked to from http://nicklothian.com/blog.... I fixed ROME and got a fix committed for Jakarta feedparser, but didn't get around to doing Informa.
- Nick Lothian
WebSID: HTML5 Audio + GWT 2.0 -> Commodore 64 emulator SID music playback on Safari 4 (http://cromwellian.appspot.com/websid...)
mikepk, Nick Lothian, Bruce Johnson and 7 other people liked this
Note, I tried it with web workers and other optimizations (window.btoa for base64 encoding), still too slow. It needs a lot of optimization work, and surprisingly, Chrome is slower than Safari 4.
- Ray Cromwell
Holy crap, that's cool. Do you have any sense for where most of the time's going? I assume it's in the emulation, but that base-64 encoding part sounds nasty. Why can't the web standards ever specify sensible low-level interfaces to these things?
- Joel Webber
data: urls have a non-encoded version as well, but I've never done any tests to see how transparent they are to binary data. I've used that mode for HTML before. Maybe something to experiment with (if b64 turns out to be the issue).
- Matt Mastracci
Most of the time is spent in emulation, even if I comment out the audio dataURL part, it's still 2x too slow. The main loop is a giant switch/case which dispatches to other switch/cases (IO register writes). Perhaps changing these to functions, so instead of switch(op) { case FOO }, you have dispatch[op].exec() would be faster? Of course, that would mean using lots of JSNI to set this up to avoid anonymous classes/double indirection
- Ray Cromwell
Or perhaps you could cross-compile the opcodes to something more direct? Are we talking about actual 6502 emulation here, or just the SID chip?
- Joel Webber
6502 emulation, SID emulation of 3 waveform oscillators, two CIA timer chips. To sound identical to the SID, you have to do cycle accurate emulation. You could theoretically pre-compile the ROM/ASM code stuff, but it would still end up gated by a clock-driven loop. It would probably run faster, but I think the fact that V8 is a factor of 2X slower, whiles the JVM eats this for breakfast really shows a) how slow still really is and b) how terrible JS is at manipulating byte oriented data :)
- Ray Cromwell
BTW, did it work for you in your Safari?
- Ray Cromwell
Yup. It worked precisely as you described (about half-speed). So you're having to emulate basically the whole bloody machine minus the video chips. Wow. I'm surprised that works at all. When you say v8 is 2x slower, do you mean than nitro in safari, or than the jvm?
- Joel Webber
2x slower than real time. Probably 6-10x slower than JVM, and maybe 20% slower than Safari. I don't think pre-compilation will work due to self-modifying 6502 code, so you'd need to do JIT translation, and invalidate any address range written to. I'm not even sure it would be that big of a win. Javascript is awesome.
- Ray Cromwell
Oh, right. Ah, the joys of self-modifying code. With the exception of people who get off on bytecode rewriting tricks, I thought we had mostly left that world behind. 6-10x slower then the JVM is about what I'd expect. I've noticed a few cases lately (there was a js jpeg encoder on Ajaxian earlier) where V8 was coming out slower than Nitro on byte manipulation stuff. Oddly, my experience has been the opposite on more "normal" js code.
- Joel Webber
Is self-modifying code a large majority of the code emulated here? If not, you might be able to borrow some of the tricks from QEmu: it translates code at a basic block level (ie: atomic assembly sequences without jumps in or out). As code is modified, you translate the dirtied basic blocks again (which would happen in a worker potentially).
- Matt Mastracci
from iPhone
This is all gated by the fact that I did this in a few hours Thanksgiving night so there's a limit to how much I'm going to do to fix it. I'll put up the source code in github for anyone who wants to contribute. :)
- Ray Cromwell
Get this into the Sunspider benchmark and it'll quickly become a priority for browser vendors. :)
- Matt Mastracci
Worker<->main page communication can be slower in Chrome than Safari (workers are out of process) - but otherwise Chrome should be just as fast. Would you happen to have some code that I could do isolated side-by-side comparisons with to see where the slowdown is? I would be surprised (but not completely shocked) if it was a pure V8 vs Nitro issue.
- James Robinson
@James: have a look at the js jpeg encoder posted on Ajaxian the other day. It was also about 20% slower on v8, with no worker threads. I'm guessing Nitro has implemented some special cases for this kind of byte array code. Js semantics are terrible for this kind of stuff. I bet if you put this in the v8 benchmarks, Lars & co will make it a lot faster :)
- Joel Webber
I'll put the source up in a few days. For Chrome benchmarks, I just have the Audio output part log a timestamp and size of the buffer, you can then compute throughput for both Safari and Chrome (# samples output/time). Right now, the Audio driver I wrote for it will dump the buffer whenever 2 seconds worth of samples fill up (@44Khz 16-bit, this is 176k array. Too much larger and data URIs choke on some platforms)
- Ray Cromwell
@James Question: does postMessage() from within a worker thread run on the event queue? That is, if you've got a CPU heavy worker loop that is not yielding the CPU and its invoking postMessage(), can the browser onmessage() handler run and process these messages while the worker is pegging the CPU?
- Ray Cromwell
@Matt - data urls have a non-encoded form? Any references? (I know the encoding parameter is optional, but I've never seen non-base64 examples)
- Nick Lothian
Nick, this is what it looks like for HTML: data:text/html,hi<b>there. If you are just encoding HTML, it's far less wordy than the base-64 version. I'm not sure how browsers treat embedded NUL and binary in there, however.
- Matt Mastracci
Is � allowed in XML/HTML? It's weird, but if they handled 8-bit MIME encoding, that would be pretty cool. Still, I'd like new Audio(array or object)
- Ray Cromwell
Looks like chrome filters NUL out from unencoded data URLs. Unless you can represent an audio sample without it, I guess it isn't possible.
- Matt Mastracci
A high-performance AudioData analogue of some of the low-level canvas stuff keeps coming up. I hope that makes it into the spec soon.
- Matt Mastracci
I haven't been following that stuff too closely -- it would seem like things like CanvasFloatArray, et al should be used for both Audio and WebGL. FloatBuffer, anyone?
- Joel Webber
What sort of performance advantage do those canvas arrays have? Is it a good idea to use these in standard code instead of JS arrays? Might be a good experiment. Neither FF3.5 nor Safari 4 supports them right now, so it might be a bit premature (Chrome does in the dev channel, Safari in the nightlies).
- Matt Mastracci
from iPhone
Ran an experiment to test performance of canvas arrays. After some false hope from a bad benchmark, it turns out that WebGL buffers are slower than JS arrays by about 50% on Chrome and 300% on Safari. I guess neither engine is properly JITing those things right now.
- Matt Mastracci
Reminds me of the initial DirectByteBuffer vs arrays[] vs HeapByteBuffer() benchmarks. First problem was, ByteBuffers were always inherently polymorphic thanks to bad API design (casting to MappedByteBuffer works). Second, HotSpot didn't have enough 'semantic inlining', which was added later, so that bb.put() essentially becomes *ptr++ = val. Now DirectBuffers are very speedy for...
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- Ray Cromwell
After playing with those arrays for a bit, I really like them. It's a bit annoying that they are named WebGL*Array rather than being a set of objects in JS itself. Not sure if these will be available in the worker thread context, for example.
- Matt Mastracci
Even worse, they're being changed to Canvas*Array now, which is no less specific, but at least it's a breaking change :)
- Joel Webber
Also, the fact that they're 50% slower on Chrome and 300% on Safari likely explains the 20% difference in V8 vs. Nitro -- that pretty strongly indicates a very fast byte[] implementation in the latter.
- Joel Webber
Apparently the new name is actually WebGL* after all (http://twitter.com/ohunt...), but of course you won't find that anywhere outside of random blog posts and tweets. The whole situation is annoying because there is basically no public spec right now. I couldn't figure out why WebKit browsers didn't have the Canvas* types until I happened across a 3rd-party wiki entry...
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- Matt Mastracci
Things seemed better when the HTML5 spec was a giant dumping ground for in-progress stuff. After they decided to move lots of stuff to separate specs, those seem updated less.
- Ray Cromwell
Web+HTML5 is destined to win because it is the default platform available on every device. Every new device will have it.
Joel Webber, Mark Trapp, Jimminy Fuller and 2 other people liked this
I like dreams too :D
- Mo Kargas
Ya gotta believe!
- Matt Mastracci
Hate it though I do sometimes, I still know you're right. It's a testament to the overwhelming power of (a) having solved the zero-friction deployment problem, and (b) having achieved ubiquity. All platforms that are functionally more powerful suffer from not having solved one of these two problems.
- Joel Webber
Exactly. Everything that doesn't ship in WebKit today is fighting an uphill battle for acceptance. Adobe and Microsoft have to go out and convince manufacturers to ship Flash and Silverlight. Not every manufacturer will, so as a developer I can't count on those if I hope to target a large % of modern mobile browser users.
- Matt Mastracci
5 Must Have Google Chrome Extensions - http://thenextweb.com/appetit...
Jonathan, LouCypher, imabonehead and 7 other people liked this
bradfitz: Google Profiles are now OpenIDs. Also, gmail webfinger declares that now too. #openid #webfinger - http://twitter.com/bradfit...
rob friedman, Kol Tregaskes, Lode Nachtergaele and 21 other people liked this
Any chance you guys can support Information Cards with this? OpenID support is good, but it always works best when you can pull those OpenIDs to the client.
- Jesse Stay
Otherwise you're still reliant on BigCos like Google to store your identity.
- Jesse Stay
Nevermind - I guess since they're OpenID apps like Azigo that create information cards can just pull this information.
- Jesse Stay
Still trying to get my head around all this, but I love where it's going.
- Jesse Stay
I'm starting to loose count of the number of openID's i have....
- Roberto Bonini
Roberto, use a program like Azigo (I can't until they support Snow Leopard) to manage them all as Information Cards. You can do some interesting stuff with that.
- Jesse Stay
Thanks jesse. I knew there was somthing like that around, just couldn't remember the name.
- Roberto Bonini
Roberto, after you install it be sure to check out http://appdirectory.kynetx.com (it's still very much in its infancy) and try adding some selectors as well. There's some pretty cool things you can do with Context on top of those IDs. This is all the beginning for ID, and the future for much of the Web.
- Jesse Stay
I would love to see SideWiki work as a Selector in apps like Azigo. :-)
- Jesse Stay
Hopefully you won't need Azigo in the future and all this just integrates into the browser. Mozilla's kinda trying to do that with Weave (although it appears they're reinventing the wheel with their own form of "Information Cards")
- Jesse Stay
Also for the curious, I set up my vanity URL at http://dewitt.unto.net/ to delegate to Google as my IDP. Tested on several OpenID2 compliant RP's and it seems to work pretty well. View the source of that page to see how I did it. Note that I'm not 100% sure I'm doing it right, and I still haven't made quite figured out how to make openid1.1 delegation work, but it's a start.
- DeWitt Clinton
I'm curious if your rank will be higher if you point to a Google profile vs. another IDP. Matt Cutts???
- Jesse Stay
@Jesse -- wait, do you mean would my vanity URL rank differently depending on what IDP it points to? I highly doubt that!
- DeWitt Clinton
DeWitt, me too - I'm just curious.
- Jesse Stay
@Jesse - but that's how crazy rumors get started. Consider this a preemptive debunking.
- DeWitt Clinton
DeWitt, good to know
- Jesse Stay
I highly doubt -> no no and definitely no. :-)
- Daniel Dulitz
from iPhone
Here come Chrome extensions! http://blog.chromium.org/2009... I want one to share on FriendFeed & bit.ly to save bookmark bar space. :)
Alexander Rode, Tomonori Murakami, Charlie Anzman and 26 other people liked this
Will there be an extension that can put the tabs down below the menus?
- SuezanneC Baskerville
@SuezanneC Baskerville - you can't do that with the way Chrome extensions currently work.
- Nick Lothian
My first extension: https://chrome.google.com/extensi...
- Nick Lothian
If anyone is interested I made a FF Room for Chrome Extensions: http://friendfeed.com/chrome-...
- Mark Layton
I use the bookmarklet to share on FF in Chrome.
- Kol Tregaskes
bookmarklet
- Jeremy (cropmarks)
I don't think Murdoch is gonna make it but at least he's got balls. "Better to burn out than to fade away"-ish.
Nick Lothian liked this
Chrome OS will help kill Silverlight and other non-open tech, preventing msft and others from recapturing the web. (though I expect that it will support Flash by necessity)
ElijahBailey-Zu of FF <0,, Charles Frith, Vladimir Yashnikov and 149 other people liked this
Good point.
- Robert Scoble
I hope it doesn't. After all we need good media delivery platforms.
- Swaroop
Including GNASH - the open source alternative - would solve that problem
- Bogdan Costea
yeah, nobody really needs flash. kill it.
- Zio Bonino
Chrome OS might be a compelling case for SVG/<canvas> + <audio> tag replacements for flash. Dunno what SVG's perf is like on WebKit tho.
- Matt Mastracci
Microsoft will port it. It's all about codecs & DRM. Ogg Theora isn't all that great.
- Rodfather
Is that Steve Jobs disguised as Zio ?
- Swaroop
@Swaroop Yes, we do. Like HTML5.
- Benjamin Dobson
@Swaroop eh eh, I've got flash disabled on all my systems :)
- Zio Bonino
@Benjamin I'd prefer HTML web apps over native apps anyday. But it'll take time for it to mature
- Swaroop
Rodfather, I don't think that will be an option for msft :). If Chrome is built the way I would do it, there is no installation per-se -- everything runs in the browser and the config in stored in the cloud (and cached locally). The computer is a pure appliance.
- Paul Buchheit
@Zio You're the real Steve Jobs
- Swaroop
Microsoft moves much too slow to force new standards these days.
- Louis Gray
@Louis: IE8 flunking ACID test :)
- Swaroop
What about more standard codecs like h.264? That isn't open and is in hardware already.
- Rodfather
h.264 is established and must be in there, but it's not a platform like Silverlight is.
- Paul Buchheit
I know some of the guys behind silverlight. It is some great technology. Too bad it's from Microsoft and is closed.
- Joe Beda ()
from iPhone
A world with no Flash and Silverlight. I can't wait.
- Paul Grav
Yeah, it's too bad they didn't open-source it. This stuff with Mono is silly -- if you want to make a real standard you need to make the real implementation be open.
- Paul Buchheit
MS are about 10 years too late with Silverlight. And they'll most likely be dragged kicking and screaming into supporting HTML5.
- Paul Grav
Zio sez (hopefully humorously): "yeah, nobody really needs flash. kill it" -- have you ever watched a single YouTube video in your life? Like seventeen gazillion other people across the wired world. yeah, you're right, nobody needs Flash. ha!
- .LAG liked that
Remember Dave Clark in 1992, "We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code."
- Guy Vander Heyden
.LAG: most YouTube videos are playable without Flash now. My iPhone plays most of them and it doesn't have Flash. Certainly by the time the Google OS came out YouTube would be converted completely to non-Flash capability.
- Robert Scoble
Robert: The youtube flash application helps read the flv files on Youtube's servers and provides a UI (decoder too).
- Swaroop
Even Google admits they're not sure I'd bit for bit html5 video is less bandwitj consuming than flash. And flash isn't just media delivery, also interesting games and apps like tonepad, splicemusic.com's online sequencer, etc (I'm musically inclined, so most of my examples will be along that line) and please don't suggest we redo it all in java
- Ed F
from Nambu
Does this mean the next Silverlight release is codename Seppuku?
- Jay Cuthrell
Maybe we'll see commercials encoded in movies if everything is open.
- Rodfather
Flash is too established to kill off right now, so I'd be surprised if Chrome didn't include flash support. It will take many years to get rid of that thing. First they need to fix the standard browser to not be so broken (lack of video, multi-file upload, etc), then they need everyone to switch to the new html5 solutions.
- Paul Buchheit
Scoble ...that may be true, and YouTube plays on my Pre without Flash (yet)...but that doesn't mean that "nobody needs Flash." really? what would replace it?
- .LAG liked that
So Google's NaCl http://code.google.com/p... (now integrated within Chrome/Chromium) was just a temporary workaround, right?
- Jérôme Flipo
Use HTML 5 instead!
- Minh Bui
Is it just me or does Native Client (NaCl) remind you of the Microsoft Active X approach?
- Daniel Chow
But who prevents Google from taking over the net?
- Andreas
youtube videos play on iPhone/iPod Touch as they are higher res mp4 files NOT flv files. It was a big deal when Steve negotiated that deal with youtube.
- vijay
You have Moonlight to run Silverlight applications in Linux. Not perfect, but then an application made on Silverlight is "not perfect" by definition
- Marcos Marado
The point here is that Google has no motivation to include Silverlight on these machines, and installing software likely won't be an option (it's a web appliance), so it will be absent from a lot of netbooks, just as it is absent from iPhones. That cuts into market share, which is a bad thing for a platform that is trying to compete with more universal tech like Flash and HTML....
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- Paul Buchheit
@DanielChow: NaCl has very little overlap with ActiveX, apart from running native code. It runs in a provably safe way, and explicitly does *not* allow it to access arbitrary host APIs. But it can be quite useful when you need to run code that would be too slow in Javascript (even on v8): e.g., heavy encryption/decryption, possibly codecs, definitely game physics, and so forth.
- Joel Webber
There is a time and a place for Flash and Silverlight so I hope it will run it. There are simply some things you can do which aren't possible, or practical in html/css/javascript.
- Steve Temple
Paul: why wouldn't Chrome OS come with Moonlight? And if not, why wouldn't you be able to just install it? And third, why the hell would people want Moonlight for? I never installed it and not even once felt the need to!
- Marcos Marado
from fftogo
because of moonlight http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlig... the potential userbase of silverlight is greatly improved, agree that projects which don't consider compatibility are limiting their potential
- Mike Chelen
@mindboosternoori Ryanair site uses silverlight: http://www.ryanair.com/site... that's the only website I know that uses it - for this you would need moonlight :)
- Ihar Mahaniok
Flash is needed for the google os to be useful in education. Many education based websites are flash based.
- Willowdale
@Paul "Google is probably paying OEMs to ship with this OS, so instead of paying $x/machine to include windows XP, they will get paid $y/machine to include Chrome." - paying present tense, already? Isn't it enough for OEMs not to have to pay hefty licenses to Redmond, etc., while being able to ship with a free, stable OS+browser combo; they need to be paid to do that as well?
- ianf ⌘
I sure hope so. I think the wide array of JavaScript libraries have been killing Flash for years. Silverlight was never really a player. The only think keeping Flash afloat is video
- Scott Radcliff
I don't know what's under the hood of Silverlight (nobody knows), but Flash is basically a sprite engine controlled by Actionscript, which is basically an adapted version of Javascript anyway. It's nicely packaged though, and has an army of developers, so it won't go away that easily, at least not until there are Flash-to-Canvas/ HTML5 porting tools/ translators and the like.
- ianf ⌘
to follow that logic...photoshop is needed as well
- Chris Hofmann
somebody call me when http://playboyarchive.com is working in Chrome OS (it's currently implemented in Silverlight)
- Karim
If it gains any traction at all, MS will just make Silverlight version that will run on Google OS. Sure google could block it, but they haven't done so with the Chrome browser.
- Jeff Weber
Interesting. I doubt the Google OS will get that big anytime soon though.
- Scott Radcliff
from email
Silverlight doesn't have a chance now...I wonder what would Adobe Air do.
- Saad Kamal
not really, if google want to be open then they will need a plugin architecture for it and then MS could just port for it. I really don't see this troubling mainstream users any time soon.
- Darren Stuart
Though I agree with the view that MS monopoly may erode as alternative devices get adoption over PC/Notebook, and these devices will mostly run on open source OS, but it may take years to create a significant change in every day usage of normal users. In the end, OS choice is mostly done by manufacturers, and they would be happy to get paid by open source vendors for putting their OS on...
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- Kaan Bingol
People want media. Hulu, Netflix, Kindle, iTunes, etc. They need to address that or they are DOA.
- Hayes Haugen
Hayes, what makes you think it will lack media support?
- Paul Buchheit
I don't think it will lack licensed media support but what deals they are able to make will be crucial.
- Hayes Haugen
Hayes, i thought you were going to say that Netflix was using Silverlight. ;-)
- Karim
Yes, they are, what is their deal with MSFT? Can they do non Silverlight distribution?
- Hayes Haugen
i believe the Netflix non-Silverlight distribution is a format called "DVD" that works over the "Snail Mail" protocol. ;-) but clearly if Google is paying OEMs to install Chrome OS, they can pay Netflix to go back to Flash which Chrome OS will probably support "by necessity" ;-)
- Karim
How can Google make money from Chrome OS? Or does it want to make money from it except through advertisement? I still can not imagine that all software and service are free and sponsored by advertisements.
- Derek Wei
All Chrome OS questions are answered by today's Fake Steve Jobs ;)
- Hayes Haugen
Is there a need to make money? If more and more people eschew desktop offline applications in favor of online web based apps, it means more pageviews, more eyeballs, more advertising inventory, plus has the side effect of undermining a big competitor's cash cow.
- Ray Cromwell
That's the key, Google wants everything online. They figure the more people online, the stronger they become, and the more money they make. At least that what was said at the Chrome launch.
- Scott Radcliff
from email
I'm amused that the "backwards compatibility" argument against alternative operating systems has slowly turned into "does it support flash", and when you unpack that it really means "does it play YouTube". I suspect Google will make sure ChromeOS cna play YouTube and they don't need Flash to make sure of it.
- Nick Lothian
Is it possible that Microsoft will write Office for the Web using Volta instead of Silverlight? Could be a showcase announcement for their attack on GWT
- Ray Cromwell
I think Microsoft is going to focus less on the front-end of the web and more on the back-end, middle tier and database sides. Azure is a big deal that consumers aren't talking about because it's not flashy but will be pretty important to developers (and especially enterprise-level applications) when it's finally ready because everything becomes an interface to the cloud. Microsoft is...
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- Lindsay is in 20-ten
Azure looks really cool. Hint: so did Blackbird.
- Michael R. Bernstein
lol blackbird (scary redmond flashback) - a good example of azure platform utilization can be seen via jon udell's elmcity project - http://blog.jonudell.net/elmcity...
- mike "glemak" dunn
Nosense, I want silverlight, flash, html and any other technology in my desktop & mobile phone. Silverlight? yes, there you can develop under Python, Ruby et al, instead of the outdated javascript.
- Sebastian Wain
It looks like with Native Client, you should be able to write your Chrome OS app in any language you feel like. So far, they have some examples in C/C++, but one of the things they ported is a Lua interpreter. If Adobe isn't going to invest heavily in fixing the show-stopping bugs on non-Windows versions of Flash, it's inevitably going to die, and there's really nothing either Google or Apple can do even if they wanted to support Flash better.
- Victor Ganata
...ActionScript3 is ECMASCript-compliant. I know nothing about standards bodies, and shii like that, but what if Adobe dropped ActionScript and said, "You can now use pure Javascript to build Flash applications..." It wouldn't be a big leap. I'm pretty sure that would shut-up all the Flash haters. And to the folks who say Flash is hanging around just because of video...well, video is...
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- .LAG liked that
Actionscript is just the glue for the more advanced what-iffy graphic functionality of Flash. They can not drop it for Javascript, because it contains additional graphic primitives that JS lacks. But it's not the JS-or-Actionscript that makes it a target for hate, it's other things. Nobody denies that it's pretty capable, but it is also badly written, eats up memory like no other, makes...
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- ianf ⌘
I like this post!
- Mohammad Abdurraafay
from iPhone
I honestly don't know how necessary Flash is. Apple seems to be doing fine without supporting it. But certainly Gnash and Swfdec should be implementable on Chrome OS. The fact is that without Adobe's full support on a given platform, Flash apps will always be second class citizens on alternate platforms, and so far, there's no indication that Adobe is interested in fully supporting any platform other than Windows.
- Victor Ganata
ianf ...you bring up great points about Flash's detriments, as does Victor, but until there's a better way to bring video to the Web, I can't see it disappearing. Adobe seems to keep improving the Flash VM, hopefully they'll address those CPU-hogging issues and make a more efficent runtime. Yeah, I hate hearing the fans kick-in when visiting a Flash-heavy site too. <sigh>
- .LAG liked that
alternative to flash video such as ... html5 :) (requires ff3.5) http://www.dailymotion.com/openvid...
- Mike Chelen
from IM
Ed, only??? thats one of the main reasons cited for the continued requirement of flash on popular sites like youtube
- Mike Chelen
Ed, those other uses can be accomplished through pure Javascript, video was the last remaining stumbling block
- Mike Chelen
Still waiting on non-Flash recreations of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch... or this: http://www.youtube.com/watch... Well aware of how someone mentioned higher up how you can combine javascript and svg to get nifty flash-like effects. I want apps like that though ^ Only real alternatives I've seen are Java-based ones, and those runs even slower than Flash.
- Ed F
Pardon me, but the OP is a ridiculous conclusion. For that to be the case, Chrome OS would have to kill Windows, OS X, etc altogether. Paul, I understand your viewpoint as being an ex-Google person, but that's just NOT going to happen. Right now the video specification from HTML5 has been dropped because of an impasse, meaning that we may be transitioning from 1 closed-source boss - Flash - to another - H264. Good luck.
- LANjackal
But why do these type of apps have to be written in Flash at all? You can easily do the same thing in C, C++, ObjC, Python, Ruby, etc., with the Native Client API that they're building for Chrome. http://code.google.com/p...
- Victor Ganata
I'm just saying, it's not like Flash is the end-all/be-all. As Apple well demonstrates, some people can live quite well without it.
- Victor Ganata
Victor ...i think the answer to the 'why do these have to be written in Flash at all' question is because Flash is installed on such a significant portion of Web browsers. But I recall that Adobe Flex had a competitor, Laszlo/OpenLaszlo, which compiled apps to SWF or to Javascript. Who's to say that Adobe doesn't have the same capability of making SWF apps into JS ones? On one hand, it...
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- .LAG liked that
Ed, such apps are possible with Javascript and HTML5 multimedia features, the question will be how difficult developers find it, and whether the performance is fast enough
- Mike Chelen
LANjackal, there is a question of degree in that Flash + H264 uses proprietary software and codec, while HTML5 + H264 requires only the codec. while OGV is no longer part of the spec, it can certainly still be used to have completely open video formats, and recent comparisons have shown it performs well http://people.xiph.org/~maikme...
- Mike Chelen
Silverlight's 3 is looking pretty impressive today but tend to agree
- Charlie Anzman
What everybody seems to be missing about Flash is that it works because there is one implementation which is mostly backwards-compatible and the same across platforms. It beat Java because, among other reasons, Java just didn't work the same across JVMs and platforms. The problem with HTML5 is that it will have a different implementation for every browser, and that means your app/game...
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- Gabe
Paul, don't you prefer brutal competition SL vs. Flash vs. standards bring to the table by definition? Or are you more into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - 2020 Google Union - type of ideology?
- Kari Honkanen
Kari, I don't understand your question. Competition is good, but with open-source we get that -- no need for flash or SL.
- Paul Buchheit
Paul, no, we don't get the same level of competition with open-source only. As long as there's an opportunity for big gains (like in this case to bridge the gap before html 5 era...to satisfy demand), there will be innovations driven by that. I believe we all benefit from a free market economy that includes commercial, closed source, innovations. I am more scared of the possible future...
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- Kari Honkanen
I wouldn't worry too much amount multimedia. By exposing WebGL, (and hopefully OpenCL), you can offload a lot of compute intensive stuff onto the GPU via GPGPU techniques, and NativeClient is there to take up the rest of the slack, but the for the vast majority of iPhone-like games, I'm willing to bet V8 Javascript on a modern processor is more than enough. That leaves licensing issues...
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- Ray Cromwell
Paul, so are you saying that Google will block both Flash and Silverlight from ChromeOS? That's a new take on 'open.'
- Cliff Gerrish
MSFT next smart move: get Chrome OS (it's BSD licensed), inject IE9 and Silverlight into it and go benchmark against Chrome :)
- Claudio Cicali ♋
MSFT sucks Claudio :)
- Orlando Pozo
Something feels contradictory about a system touted to 'kill' competitors being 'open'. Sounds almost predatory to me.
- Karoli
I'm not opposed to non-open software, but for OS, browser, etc I prefer that it be open. Cliff, Google isn't going to "block" anything, but they can certainly choose what to include, and my guess is that they won't include SL. As Claudio points out, MSFT can make their own version of ChromeOS that includes SL, which is why open source software is nice (it can't be crippled too much or else someone will fork it).
- Paul Buchheit
I have heard somewhere that Fash uses it's own port where Silverlight works over the HTTP port. That's why Netflix works so well. To that, Flash costs more on a sever side because providers can charge more for that port traffic. Could it come down to who is cheaper? (I am fully prepared to be wrong).
- Johnny Worthington
Johnny, they both use HTTP -- there's no difference there.
- Paul Buchheit
Is Chrome OS BSD-licensed? I thought it was using a Linux kernel.
- Victor Ganata
@Paul - well, Flash can do P2P stuff over non-HTTP posts, but that is very new (Flash 10 I think). The cost isn't affected anyway.
- Nick Lothian
My understanding is that netbooks would have to be absurdly popular for Chrome OS to make a dent in the popularity of Flash or SL.
- Gabe
it is possible to have smaller groups for open source software, such as google's own gears api http://code.google.com/apis...
- Mike Chelen
How is HTML 5 going to defeat Flash and SL? I haven't used it, but I don't see anything in the spec that looks like it could compare.
- Gabe
@Gabe - what do you think HTML5 is missing? It does video, drawing, local storage, "threading" via WebWorkers. The biggest hole I'm aware of is the lack of access to webcams & microphones. What have I missed?
- Nick Lothian
Nick: When you say HTML 5 has "drawing", are you refering to the Canvas element? I would not consider an immediate-mode procedural raster drawing library to be much of a competitor to retained-mode declarative vector libraries like SVG or Silverlight. Programming with the Canvas tag is sort of the equivalent of programming in assembly language for bitmaps.
- Gabe
@Gabe: I think you've got it upside-down. A Canvas-style API is the fundamental basis on which you can build a retained mode structure like SVG, et al. If a platform includes a retained-mode library as a convenience, so be it. You can build SVG on Canvas, but not the other way around (hacks like IECanvas notwithstanding -- they have horrible performance characteristics and are a nasty abstraction inversion).
- Joel Webber
So, if Moonlight (Mono) runs on linux -- Will google make sure it doesn't work on Chrome OS?
- Cliff Gerrish
Joel: I don't think you said anything contrary to what I said. I just don't understand why any programmer would want to waste time writing an app using a low-level library when I could use a high-level library that implements everything for me.
- Gabe
@Gabe - I agree, and people are implementing those libraries now. See http://raphaeljs.com/ for example. Also, don't underestimate the convenience factor. I don't own any Flash development tools, but my text editor works pretty well for Canvas+JS based stuff.
- Nick Lothian
Nick: Didn't the author of raphael have some massive rant about how bad the Canvas element is? And I don't have any Flash dev tools either, but I use a text editor for most of my Silverlight development. It is incredibly convenient to be able to type something like <DataGrid ItemsSource="{Binding tabledata}"/> into a text editor and not have to create the data grid myself.
- Gabe
Why is Flash a "necessity" for an OS? I enjoy what flash can do, but it is like putting pimped out leather Oldsmobile seats in a Ferrari. It would definitely be nice, but certainly not a necessity.
- Dan Douglass
Early post goof up. To your original point, I agree. I like how Google is approaching the internet space with web apps that can be run with out a bloated browser.
- Dan Douglass
Dan Douglass: Flash is necessary because so many web sites rely on it. How many people would want to get a netbook that couldn't play FaceBook games or watch YouTube videos? Of course Google is in the unique position of being able to make YouTube work on ChromeOS without Flash, but they probably can't do anything about Hulu, Vimeo, or any of the other video sites out there that require Flash.
- Gabe
Anyone else think Joy is Spam?
- Chris Myles
already reported it yesterday :)
- Ⓐ ☠ slayerboy ☠ Ⓐ
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Fancy an augmented virtual keyboard of awesomess? @nlothian ha the goods! (FF3.5 atm) http://nicklothian.com/blog...
Mike Chelen and Nick Lothian liked this
Thanks
- Nick Lothian
Say Cheese! Flash Mob On Bondi Beach [OFFICIAL] - http://www.youtube.com/watch...
![Say Cheese! Flash Mob On Bondi Beach [OFFICIAL]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Ao4DkbGbxl0/default.jpg "Say Cheese! Flash Mob On Bondi Beach [OFFICIAL]") |
Yasin Müderrisoğlu, asli subasi, Alemsah Ozturk and Nick Lothian liked this
that was amazing :)
- asli subasi
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