HardyLeung

Years ago the web was not powerful enough, hence Macromedia/Adobe Flash. Adobe got complacent, thought it was the king of the world.

Then Microsoft joined the RIA fray with Silverlight, battling for control of the web. Flash was everywhere, SL up-and-coming. It was meant to be a spectacular battle, but both companies were blind-sided by this little web standard thing which was about to crash the party...

Except that it didn't. The war didn't end because someone won, but because Steve Jobs said so. It was only an illusion that HTML5 renders the RIA plugins irrelevant. In reality, it was the emergence of native apps. First iPhone, then Android, iPad, and now even Windows/Metro. Who cares about rich cross-browser apps?

So instead of developing a rich application that runs on all platforms, you either use HTML5/Javascript (if your application is not as hard), or implement the same thing on 3 platforms with 3 different languages on using 3 different toolsets. Wanna do something very rich/powerful cross-browser? Forget it! Everybody happy now?

I am possibly very biased about this. My opinion is that Silverlight is strictly superior to Java as a CLIENT-SIDE technology in terms of speed (runtime and startup time), memory, penetration (see http://riastats.com), supporting and tooling, language support, feature set (GPU, out-of-browser, etc), and deployment. If SL and Flash cannot survive, client-side Java browser plugin has no chance.

This is NOT a build specific limitation. This is a decision already made (of course can be reversed).

See this: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/14/metro-style-br...

"For the web to move forward and for consumers to get the most out of touch-first browsing, the Metro style browser in Windows 8 is as HTML5-only as possible, and plug-in free. The experience that plug-ins provide today is not a good match with Metro style browsing and the modern HTML5 web.

Running Metro style IE plug-in free improves battery life as well as security, reliability, and privacy for consumers. Plug-ins were important early on in the web’s history. But the web has come a long way since then with HTML5. Providing compatibility with legacy plug-in technologies would detract from, rather than improve, the consumer experience of browsing in the Metro style UI."

You mean accelerate the push to native APP development, where anything nontrivial requires the development of the same program in 3 different platforms (iOS, Android, Windows/Metro).

I don't know how Metro IE and Desktop IE are separate or one and the same, but from what I read, only Metro IE would be available to some devices, most notably ARM tablets.

Creative! "I worry we didn't think about investors' intentions so we'd be replaced by its opponents."

I thought sendoid.com is the solution, but for some reason it no longer works for me.

Congrats to CMU!

Everyone has an opinion of what Yahoo should do, the union of which is the entire spectrum of possibilities. Perhaps this is even the cause of the downfall of Yahoo, as its vision seems to be to do most everything others have already done, but poorly. It takes a true visionary to see through the vast majority of these so-called potentials, say no to short-sighted revenue temptations, and make painful decisions. You simply can't crowd-source a Steve Jobs.

This is my take. Microsoft is known to be evil, led by incompetent leaders, etc. I get it. They intent to use patents to screw Google to the fullest extent possible, and like anyone would/should be surprised.

On the other hand, Google took the high road and built on their feel-good "Do No Evil" mantra. So I hold them to their words, and whenever a screw-up like this happens, where Googlers were exposed to be liars no different than others, shouldn't they be "punished" at least by their own pie in the face a bit more?

In case you don't know, this is the appropriate title for this story because this is how Michael Arrington titled his. In most cases, using the original title is the way to go.

In his own forum, unprovoked, PG called MA "bullshit", "in typical Arrington fashion", "not cool".

In his own forum, MA responded and made a big deal of out this comment.

I think it is a fair response. Not to mention, why would anyone expect MA to not jump on it?

Wow that's embarrassing!

I agree. It works quite well! If it can be formatted to look like Readability's default (which is really quite plesant to read) it would be nice.

It's almost embarrassing to watch... the City Council's questions to Steve Jobs.

Q: Can we, like, get some freebies such as free wifi?

Amazing!

I think it is a neat idea, but why do you choose a name (and the tone) to irritate people? I would like to use STFU sometime but I love Visual Studio most of the time. Why put me in an irritable/angry/frustrated state? I hope you come up with a better name.

I admire Bill Gates but I think bringing him back is a bad idea. He's so much more valuable being outside of Microsoft.

Stay away from Comic Sans. Too colorful (to the point of being amateurish). I wouldn't say I'm impressed.

I think let's just agree that Jpeg has a lot of problems and we'd like to seek the best replacement. Obviously high-compression rate is important or else everything should migrate to PNG, but the current Jpeg tradeoff between quality and size is not just not very good. Also interestingly, there seems to be a very wide spectrum of Jpeg lib quality from decent to very bad, and I found out about that while experimenting with WebP.

WebP is different from WebM in that there are IP issues. I think WebP is more like SVG/Canvas in that vendors don't see any "hurt" in supporting them once there is enough momentum behind. Of course, your point about making sure that we don't want to support any half-baked image format. I think WebP is beyond half-baked, and an initial pledge of experimental support -- instead of an outright rejection which seems to be tone -- doesn't hurt.

My apology for not being clear. The five points are summary of what you said and I hope there is no confusion.

Right after the five points, I object to your "surgical arguments" which is along the line of "Jpeg is not too bad, and even if it is bad, there are ways to fix them". The truth is that Jpeg is actually a very poor format. Image artifact is very poor at low quality, and compression is very poor at high quality. While I don't know for sure whether WebP is really that much better at high quality (my limited experience showed that it is), I disagree with your arguments that there is "nothing wrong or unfixable about Jpeg". Our eyes are accustomed to poor web Jpeg quality but I think if something better comes along people will see it.

Also, given Opera and Chrome already support WebP, if Mozilla throws its weight behind it, I think Safari and IE will oblige in short order. The browser landscape is very different from the days of early PNG, and adoption will be quick. Just look at how quickly Microsoft transforms into the "#1" advocate of HTML5.

Not meant to.

I find that Jeff Muizelaar's argument (not Arstechnica but what they talked about) very weak. He said WebP is not good because:

* Jpeg has some fancy features not seen in WebP (4:4:4 YCrCb, CMYK support, etc)

* Jpeg's compression is "good enough", and nobody cares about diskspace (cited Facebook 85%, Flickr 96% quality level)

* If WebP, why not Jpeg XR?

* WebP has no alpha channel support!

* There are "low hanging fruit" in Jpeg optimization such as progressive encoding.

Each of these points in isolation may be valid, but together they give me the feeling that he was arguing surgically. He said Jpeg is already very good, Jpeg is actually bad but there are low hanging fruit to improve it, and whether Jpeg is good or bad doesn't matter because nobody cares.

Personally I feel the "75% is already very good" argument to be the weakness. Facebook pictures are very poor compared to the original, and if diskspace is not a problem they would have increased it to 96% like Flickr.

I hope Mozilla supports the format and let the users decide.

You can always buy a mug instead...

A fair use of a copyright piece of material.

Appreciate. I agree that anytime I sell something I need to face the legal ramification, no matter how small the profit (or the nature of the profit). Any time a person uses someone else's property, even if it is fair use, there is the chance that it'll get messy. In fact the US copyright law almost answers the question of fair use by saying "it depends".

So I understood what you said and thanks for your feedback.

You can actually change to other styles (sweetshirt, baby apparel, etc). Not sure V-neck is an option though.

| Plain and simple, would you want to create a startup and someone make tshirts and make money off your brand or logo?

On second thought, actually this is not a bad idea. If you are a startup and you want to make cool T-shirts or posters about your company, Tagxedo would be a great option. It would be a form of marketing. Anyone interested please contact me. Examples of company logos as Tagxedoes (all from Daily Tagxedo):

LinkedIn http://daily.tagxedo.com/may-20-linkedin-rockets-skyward-in-...

Skype http://daily.tagxedo.com/may-11-microsoft-buys-skype-for-85b

Intel http://daily.tagxedo.com/may-5-intel-unveils-impressive-3d-t...

Color http://daily.tagxedo.com/march-25-prelaunched-social-app-col...

Of course I can't arbitrarily "profit" off brands - I do need to honor various rights.

Thanks!

I use Tagxedo to make this.

http://www.tagxedo.com

Perhaps I should rephrase:

I made Tagxedo so I can make this :D