A bit of a shameless plug, the company I am contracting for at the moment put this video/map tour of the World Cup stadia together.

http://www.theworldcupmap.com/

(requires Silverlight, a fast machine and a decent network connection)

Silverlight. Proprietary. Too bad.

I'm not sure why something with heavy requirements needs to be on the web. Just make it a stand-alone application if it has such dependencies. Everyone seems to be in round two of being crazy for the web.

I'd actually like to see the results, but I'm not going to install Silverlight either.

EDIT: Here's my litmus test. If it doesn't work on multiple (different) browsers on different OSes without installing additional support plugins or programs, it shouldn't be a "web app."

Uhhh... yeah. What he said.

tanstaafl.

Really.

Flash wasn't proprietary enough for your employer/contractee?

One of our clients is Microsoft, so no

True and I suspect that moonlight isn't up to running it on Linux yet, as I don't think they've caught up with the latest version of Silverlight yet.

Yeah, I was getting ready to post that there is an open source implementation that has the one minor problem of not working. Oh, and the larger one of crashing Firefox while it's busy not working.

I can't say I'm the greatest fan of Silverlight either, especially as a committed iPhone user. What the "app" is doing isn't quite possible/practical with HTML cross browser just yet. As such Silverlight lets us do things that we can't pull off cross-browser without it.

Of course taking your stance firmly you'd have to put up with a web without video, until the last few months at least

Many of our clients, not just Microsoft, are keen on Silverlight and some times you have to give the client what they ask for to make a living. For the record we do plenty of cross browser work that doesn't involve either Flash or Silverlight.

It wouldn't make sense to do it as a stand-alone app (even though that would be easy to do still using Silverlight), given that the whole point was for Microsoft to show off what Silverlight could do in the browser...

That doesn't sound promising. As it is the demo requires Silverlight 3.0 and the released version of moonlight only implements 2.0

Well, technically speaking, videos are content, not apps and they can be downloaded and played offline. Multiple browsers on multiple platforms have also had their own support for playing video within the browser for 10+ years. But I do understand where you're coming from. Even today with new video tags you're still going to want a nice Javascript player to properly enjoy embedded video.



Actually, you should probably always give the client what they ask for, or don't take them on as clients. It's understood that this is more a showpiece for the technology rather than a general WC resource. And using Flash probably wouldn't help Microsoft at all...

There are a lot of proprietary web-based tools that should just be implemented as stand-alone applications, which can still be built using the resources of the specific browser they're intended to run on. Lots of intranet stuff for instance. A lot of stuff that would do far better not to be encumbered with the generic browser controls that can mess up their usage anyway.

Quite. I spent 8 years working on complex Intranet apps that not only targeted just IE, but also typically targeted a single version of IE.

That sounds horrible at first, but it did mean we got to write lots of rich AJAXy Intranet web apps before AJAX as a concept even existed, because we got to use XML, XSLT and XMLHTTP for years before they arrived in the other browsers.

That situation isn't going to change over time, either, as it is the whole point of Microsoft "helping" with Silverlight on Linux: Keep it one version out of date.

-ml

I'm not sure I agree with that, at least in the bits of Microsoft that actually write/design things like Silverlight. Those teams seem to be packed full of people who are keen to help get moonlight as up to date as quickly as they can. Short of actually releasing a version of Silverlight for Linux themselves I'm not sure what more they could do.

As as we know if they released Silverlight for Linux themselves no one would want to use it...

Thats the problem with Microsoft. So big and unfocused, it's hard to know what their intent is. Take for example IE 9. It's awesome that they are finally seeing the value of standards, and I'm sure some of the engineers on that team get it. And then marketing gets involved with a page like this, and their good old "must crush competition by digging up FUD" spirit is right there again.

Oh, and I did take a look at it on my work Windows machine. Sadly it seems a combination of the following hardware, software, and connection wasn't good enough:

Windows 7 64 bit
Quad Core Xeon 5450 running at 3GHz (7.3 Windows Experience score)
4.0GB RAM
IE 8
Silverlight 4
45mbit internet connection
1680x1050 resolution

It looked cool, but the video was chugging from time to time and the sound was hiccuping quite a bit. It was a little better when I tried it full screen.

It is a good job Apple didn't recently get up to anything like that recently, like releasing a load of HTML5 demos that sniffed for the user agent to stop other HTML5 capable browsers from running them

But yeah, I'd never attempt to defend Microsoft's marketing people. I never forgave them for tacking .Net on the name of all their server products that had nothing to do with .Net, just so everything looked pretty. Idiots.

When I first looked at that page, like you I thought "good old FUD". However when looking back again, I'm not sure it is quite that simple.

If we assume for a moment that those test cases aren't just lies and they really do test tricky bits of those standards then that set of pages, complete with interactive test cases, is actually quite a useful thing for the browser community.

Of course the fact that IE9 passes all the tests makes it look very bad. I suspect how it happened is:

- MSFT looked at IE9 to see how well it fared against the standards
- they found some places were it didn't match the standards
- they wrote a bunch of test cases to highlight the places where IE9 failed
- they then fixed a bunch of the cases
- they then released just the tests for the cases that they had fixed

If only they had also released the test cases that they no doubt have that IE9 (and probably some/all of the other browsers) doesn't yet pass.

I'm curious, do Google and Apple make their test suites (or parts of them) public ?

4? Moonlight still doesn't have a final for 3. (I assume the version numbers are equivalent.)

Also, it appears that when that page was first published IE9 did not pass 100% of the test cases, I really do believe that that page is an honest effort from the IE test team to highlight parts of the standards that are ambiguous or tricky to get right. I don't think it is the FUD that it at first appears to be.

For the record my main browsers are Chrome and mobile Safari, I only use IE when I need to test that something works properly in it.

I updated video drivers (for a Nvidia Quadro 3800) and did a clean reboot. Second time around worked better, though the framerate on the video would dip still from time to time. Watching Task Manager, there were moments CPU usage was close to 90%, usually when the map was zooming in or out. I'm guessing my video drivers might have been out of date enough to not accelerate Silverlight 4 causing it to hit the limits of the CPU.


Yeah, stopping other browsers from even trying was a bit odd. The main difference though is Apple isn't calling out other browsers with those demos, trying to paint them in a negative light. They just talk about Safari (on the desktop and on the iProducts).


Agreed. At least they backed off on releasing Windows .Net Server, and renamed it to 2003 before release.


Most of the info for Safari (and the underlying WebKit) is public, at either webkit.org, or developer.apple.com/safari. They are even quite candid on the WebKit blog at times, showing Webkit failing tests while in development. I remember them showing progress on Acid 3 regularly until it hit 100/100(something IE 9 still fails horribly). I'm not certain about Google or Mozilla though, but I assume they are also similarly open with both the good and bad. I'll have to dig up specific test cases, I know they are out there somewhere, but can't find them in a quick search before calling it a day at work.

I know Google released a JavaScript compliance test — Sputnik — and Chromium fails almost as much of it as Firefox, though it does so much faster.

I installed Silverlight in Firefox I must be crazy !!!! In Firefox it was really slow and the videos wouldn't start playing. I tried it in IE8 and it ran much better. In both cases the fan in the computer kicked into high

Is that the thing about football? No thanks, I think I'll pass....

Ironically the Silverlight app actually has GPU acceleration turned off at the moment as we found it was causing issues in some browsers on some machines.

Uh...go USA! Beat those English chaps.

/me ducks and runs

You mean, like Adobe has done with flash and acroreader, or VMware has done with their products, or WordPerfect did, etc.. ?? All closed-source binaries that I'm happy to use here on Linux?


We have no idea what would happen then, since they've never done that for any MS product, and never will.

They may be incredibly dumb and/or criminal at MS, but they're not stupid. For them, it's all about DOS/Windows as The platform. So porting _any_ app to Linux would be suicidal in their teensy minds.

I think the Microsoft Dev team is a lot more forward thinking these than many give them credit for. A lot has changed about MS development tools in the last 10 years.

The whole thing about "it shouldn't be a web page- it should be standalone"- well that's true in a lot of cases- but often it's difficult to get the decision makers to see this. At least the new XAML technologies allow you to esentially build it either way using the same tools and let the client decide how to deliver it. We are currently building a HUGE line of business Silverlight app and we may end up setting it to run out of browser, so it won't even really be much of a web app in the end. Honestly we probably would have been better off doing it as a client app, but they were dead set on a web app.

Microsoft has seemed to be on a long road to decline because they think they're a Windows company and not a software company. Slowly but surely they're going to have to change this mentality or they will eventually lose.

That's my point- the mentality IS changing- at least in the realm of development tools. Listening to speakers from the visual studio dev team is night and day different than it used to be. They are very interested in providing tools that support development on more than just windows and IE- I'm pretty sure they would love to see Silverlight fully supported on every platform- not just windows.

They are getting behind jquery in a big way (for their non Silverlight web solutions, obviously), which already demonstrates a shift in the way they are thinking.

MS has a lot to overcome in this regard, both in their internal culture and external perception. I don't know if they'll be able to do it, but the dramatic shift in their attitude toward dev tools (at least, that's how I perceive it) is a good sign.

Maybe a bit too forward thinking. One of our dev teams hit a bug in Visual Studio 2008, where the /O2 optimization flag wouldn't be passed all the way down to the compiler executable if the solution file was converted from 2003/2005 to 2008. KB958148. Microsoft's answer? Based on this and what our team heard back, it's fixed in 2010, and thats that. No patch to 2008 is expected.

That would all be fine and dandy if our teams could move to 2010. Problem is, they are waiting on a certain company, called Microsoft, to release support for 2010 for some little game console they make. That, and support for Direct X wasn't supported on 2010 until 4 days ago. Every time they pull in an old solution file, potentially from middleware upgrades or whatever, they have to be mindful of this bug until they can move to 2010.

For something like this there is no way I would bother downloading and installing a program but I will click on a link and check it out for five minutes.

Something that I would use repeatedly I would rather install than use in a browser but my attitude to that is changing too. I really like gmail and can't see ever wanting a local email client again.

They've just updated the page with some new unit tests and are back to IE9 not passing 100% of all the tests posted (though that said IE9 passes more than all the other browsers in all but one categories).

Still no IE 8 tests to compare how far Microsoft has come, or tests against Safari 5 and Chrome 5 (both released).

I think thats what gets me the most about that page, they proudly show a preview release of IE 9 against old versions of their competitors. It's not that hard to go find the beta, or even now released versions of Chrome, Firefox or Safari. The tests may be very useful, but Microsoft's presentation of them still shows their bad competitive attitude, one that often tries very hard to taint the competition without telling the full truth.

I'm also not seeing how Microsoft's numbers for SVG line up with this persons tests. It looks like MS is just cherry picking parts of the SVG spec to test against and show, vs actually testing the full spec. That 100% number is quite misleading.

It looks like Microsoft's SVG tests are geared towards SVG 1.1 (Second Edition), which is currently a proposal, not a recommendation, and Firefox doesn't claim to support it, only 1.1. I'd imagine that the other browsers are the same.

So, yeah, it's pretty misleading.

See, I'm the opposite. I feel Google designs and implements crappy software, including GMAIL which I think is atrocious both through the Web interface and their extremely bastardized POP implementation - I haven't tried IMAP yet.

They may put together amazing load balanced systems and server farms, but on the front end, Google doesn't know jack. Another long-time hate-on is for their image search. Ugh.

Bastardized POP implementation? What's to bastardize? POP does nothing more than transfer emails in a flat structure. (I haven't used Gmail's POP because I haven't used POP in, like, 15 years, so maybe I'm wrong.)

Not sure what is wrong with the gmail POP3 service. It did what I wanted it to do when I used to use it. You can configure it to leave the gmail copy, mark the gmail copy as read, archive the gmail copy or delete the gmail copy.

For starters, it tries to do one of the things you do with IMAP over POP, which is to save a copy of your sent mail - mail you send via SMTP goes into your INBOX. SO you end up downloading back to your client a copy of all mail you send. That's just bloody stupid and a piss-poor design.

The mail client can't delete mail from the POP server. I haven't read the POP RFC in years, but I've never connected to any other POP server where the mail client was prevented from deleting mail on its own accord.

Yeah, there's more... Anyway, I'm traveling and currently in Nova Scotia so I'm trying not to spend too much time online. Just enough to deal customers mostly.

I've never noticed it trying to download something I had just sent.


Its a setting as I previously mentioned.


More? The first problem I've never experienced and I would have expected Google not to have done that. The second one is because you've not configured it properly.

If you want better management then use IMAP like you're supposed to.

Does anyone else think that the vuvuzela is the most annoying sound on earth [edit: specifically a group of them]? Yes, more annoying than this.

It's enough to make me refuse to watch any matches where these things are prevalent. I understand that it's part of the South African culture, but that doesn't mean you have to allow it in the World Cup.

Ugh, I freaking HATE those things...

Fortunately, others hate them too.

Okay, that's weird. I see where they're coming from, sorta, but that's awkward.


Okay, the POP client can't delete mail out of the Gmail inbox. I'll give you that. But that isn't a violation of POP. It deletes it out of the POP box, though. Effectively, the web interface and the IMAP interface are synchronized, and the POP interface is really just a copy of everything that's sent to the "real" account. The POP RFC explicitly states that it has no interest in what goes on behind the scenes.

Yes.

I do take issue with the article though, the atmos soundtrack will have been provided by the host broadcaster, then the other broadcasters stick their own commentary over. So notching out them out of the atmos feed is really quite simple.

Oh, I know there are people out there who hate them, I was just curious about people on here

If you thought a regular plastic vuvuzela was annoying then be glad this isn't outside where you are.

An individual vuvuzela doesn't seem to be that obnoxious but I guess when you've got thousands of them all being used then it gets a little bit more annoying.

I've been using email longer than some gmail engineers have been alive. I have everything configured properly. Their server side prefs allow gmail itself to delete mail, but your client has no control over this action - your client cannot delete content from gmail, period. Their pop interface simply doesn't map 1:1 to what you're presented with in their web mail system, which is unlike every other web mail system I've ever used in the past 15+ years.



But I don't have a desire to use IMAP with gmail. I'm not "supposed" to do anything. Their system is supposed to work with established standards and it doesn't.

Both the problems I mentioned are well known and can't be worked around without using multiple email addresses - as I've mentioned in another thread.

The simple mater of fact is that Google simply sucks at design. I mean, they've got some architectural prowess when it coms to search, but even that's been going down hill for years. I'm sorry, but most of what I've seen from them, or technologies they've touched since acquisition, have just gone to crap. Sketchup another prime example. Bag of hurt.

I guess the option in the settings is just for show then and doesn't do anything if you're named Bruno.

2. When messages are accessed with POP

keep Gmail's copy in the Inbox
mark Gmail's copy as read
archive Gmail's copy
delete Gmail's copy

If you want the ability to mess with email that isn't in your Inbox then you can't use POP3 since that is designed to only handle 1 mailbox.


It does follow the standards. They're just not doing what you want it to do.

Don't use gmail if you don't like it.

Trevor, you're not reading. Like I said, my email expertise, including with IMAP and POP predates GMAIL. I know how its options work, I know what they do, and I know that they don't give you the ability I mentioned. Your pop client cannot delete mail from gmail, period. It doesn't matter whether you use that setting or not, only gmail deletes mail from gmail.

POP has never worked when accessing mail from multiple computers. The best you could do is leave everything on the server. Point being, if you want to access your mail two different ways and have it be consistent between them, POP has never been a possibility. POP was only ever designed to transport mail from a server to a client. It's the final level of delivery.

If you don't like the way that Gmail runs its POP backend, don't use it.

At least it isn't as bad as it was at the Confederations Cup last year. Holy crap, it was drowning out the broadcasts. It really does seem like they added some filters to the audio already when compared to that bleeding ear festival.

http://i.imgur.com/CGbjS.png
(not included inline due to width)

HAHA

This would have been better, though.

Is it just me or does the word "vuvuzela" look and sound like it ought to be a euphemism for something quite unbelievably rude? It's still a staggering thought to me that at these football matches thousands of blokes get their vuvuzelas out, many of them even get blown -- quite loudly -- and nobody even gets arrested.

Peter

Vuvuzela Hero

The first Vuvuzela Heroes pic I saw had notes like an actual song. I made the comment that you could tell it was fake because it would just be all the notes playing at the same time continuously.

This one is the real deal.

God how I hate those damn horns. A friend's family had plans to go to the World Cup this year and invited me along with them. I'm glad I decided not to go, I probably would've murdered somebody over those things.

Happy I still have not heard the noise, and I don't anticipate hearing it at all. I have seen a spectral plot on a clever science site which showed a nice set of fourier transforms for removing the drones, but have no intention of listening to the things after all I have seen said about them.

:-)

They're absolutely evil.
Well, okay, not evil, but not good either.

The best thing about football is the crowd-participation factor. But those plastic and tin horns just kill it, dumbing it down to the dumbest level.

Drowning out clever chants, discouraging singing, etc.

Ugh!