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Kurt Cagle's OpenSVG Keynote 137

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the magnitude-with-direction dept.
Metaphorically writes "Kurt Cagle has posted a summary of his keynote speech from the SVG Open 2005. Inspiring for an SVG enthusiast, informative for any geek. He covers a lot of ground on XML and the next generation of GUI. It connects a lot of technologies that people might otherwise not totally grasp. If you haven't been following the development of XForms, E4X, SVG and XAML then this is a great way to catch up."
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Kurt Cagle's OpenSVG Keynote More

Kurt Cagle's OpenSVG Keynote

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  • Kevin Clarke writes about his thoughts on Evolgrafix' Renesis presentation here [kevinclarke.info]

  • Raped (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The site got raped. Mirror?

    Slashdot requires you to wait longer between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.

    It's been 11 seconds since you hit 'reply'.

    Chances are, you're typing with more both hands. Slashdot really isn't supposed to be used that way. Please put your right hand down your pants and try again. If the problem persists, and all other options have been tried, contact the site administrator.

  • How to get rich from XML... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 17, 2005 @04:32PM (#13342918)
    <?xml version="1.0" ?>
    <plan>
      <step>Learn XML</step>
      <step>Give keynote speech about XML subset</step>
      <step>Profit!</step>
    </plan>

  • one of the few times.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by KillShill ( 877105 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2005 @04:32PM (#13342926)
    i'm really tempted to read the article and it isn't available.

    www.understandingxmlandtheslashdoteffect.com

  • Que? No Explaino! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Orion Blastar ( 457579 ) <(moc.liamg) (ta) (ratsalbnoiro)> on Wednesday August 17, 2005 @04:35PM (#13342946) Homepage Journal
    What is this new technology and why should I care about it? The article link does not work, Slashdot effect.

    As a computer expert of 20 years and programmer of 15 years, how will this effect me? Will I have to learn totally new things, or does it build on the old ones? Who owns the patents to this new technology? Will Microsoft release their own version of it and crush everyone?
    • As a computer expert of 20 years and programmer of 15 years, how will this effect me? Will I have to learn totally new things, or does it build on the old ones?

      This is a new (not even that new) graphics format. How much totally new stuff could you possibly have to learn?

      • This is a new (not even that new) graphics format. How much totally new stuff could you possibly have to learn?

        It's a bit more than that. There is support for interactivity. There is support for pulling in content over HTTP. For example, the SVGs generated by GPS Visualizer [gpsvisualizer.com] pull in maps layers from various bitmap sources, allow you to drag labels around and adjust the opacity of layers using a slider.

        Also, Javascript can access SVG DOM. Imagine Google Maps implemented on that kind of technology.

    • Re:Que? No Explaino! (Score:4, Informative)

      by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) * <akaimbatman&gmail,com> on Wednesday August 17, 2005 @04:49PM (#13343055) Homepage Journal
      What is this new technology

      SVG? New? Not that is news! SVG 1.1 was ratified on the 14th of January, 2003. Most SVG users either view the files in the Adobe Plugin [adobe.com], or translate to raster images [apache.org] for vector charting and the like. (I actually had a pretty cool 3D pie chart program for awhile there. SVG came out of one end, translated by Batik, then viewed as a PNG.)

      why should I care about it

      You shouldn't. It's just technology marching on. If you need to do vector graphics, you'll find it far more up-to-date and better supported than PostScript. If you don't need to do Vector graphics (or don't even know what vector graphics ARE) then you definitely don't care.

      As a computer expert of 20 years and programmer of 15 years, how will this effect me?

      You'll need a new bullet-point on your resume in a few years?

      Will I have to learn totally new things, or does it build on the old ones?

      You know XML? You know PostScript? How about ECMAScript? Yes? You're good to go then.

      Who owns the patents to this new technology?

      It's older than the hills technology. I dunno, maybe my great grandmother had a patent at some point, but there are none now. (Unless someone invents a stupid one like "Method for storing Vector graphics in XML." Hmm... maybe it is patented.)

      Will Microsoft release their own version of it and crush everyone?

      Microsoft Internet Explorer (Exploder in my book) needs the Adobe plugin. AFAIK, Microsoft is mostly ignoring it.
      • New? Not that is news! SVG 1.1 was ratified on the 14th of January, 2003.

        Actually, that's pretty damned new. Some of us are old enough to remember the days when two weeks ago wasn't ancient history.
      • >>> "AFAIK, Microsoft is mostly ignoring it."

        Well you clearly haven't come across the beta for Acrylic - http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/ [microsoft.com] - which merges vector graphics (SVG, yee-haw) and raster.

        I use Inkscape still as my download of Acrylic didn't even get past the install stage (I'm using Inkscape on Slack and WinXP - if you haven't got the latest install get it now, it's awesome). I've read good things about Acrylic(some whilst stood in my local news agents!).

        I'd be prepared to bet

      • Re:Que? No Explaino! (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ookaze ( 227977 )
        Most SVG users either view the files in the Adobe Plugin, or translate to raster images for vector charting and the like

        Actually, some users use a subset of SVG on their desktop, especially some Gnome users on Linux for their icons (not for all the GUI yet), with SVG themes like Nuvola.
    • Scalable Vector Graphics. It's open vector graphic in XML.

      Maybe. Yes and no. It's a W3C thang. They'll try, and these chicken entrails indicate they'll fail.

      Hope this helps.
      • They'll try, and these chicken entrails indicate they'll fail. Ah, my boy Will, sixteenth century pimp. Of course, if you're talking about the actual Romans, well "quid haruspex dixit?" Very clever, my boy. The "entrails from an offering forth" happened to be correct in that case. Just a few questions. Who's Brutus in this case? Marcus Antonius? Cassius? "Et tu, Kai-Fu(e)?! Then fall Microshaft."

    • Re:Que? No Explaino! (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Microsoft already has a full implementation of a similar technology in beta within the Longhorn codebase. The idea of raster independent graphics is nothing new (postscript in 1985 for example), but having the underlying data driving the drawing an XML-based structure is. The real value of these solutions is a simplistic platform and technology neutral abstraction of interface output. The MS naysayers would say that the MS implementation is locked to Microsoft, however that just isn't the case. The spee
      • The MS naysayers would say that the MS implementation is locked to Microsoft, however that just isn't the case

        You haven't listened closely enough to the "naysayers" to understand what they've been saying.

        What they've been saying is that MSFT itself seems to have designs on XML subsets, enough so to want to patent some of them, as this [slashdot.org] previous slashdot story points out:

        "News(.com)+ reports that Microsoft has filed for patents in multiple jurisdictions to control the way other applications use Office

    • what to do with svg (Score:2, Informative)

      by allegr0 ( 877978 )

      Practical application:

      when (ahem) "someone I know" wanted to make themself a firefox tshirt (ahem) *they* found themself a copy of the logo in svg, scaled it up to a nice tasty tshirty size, printed it out on iron on transfer paper and poof! beautiful tshirt - thanks to svg.

      Ahhh I love a happy ending.

      and yes, useless w/o pics. Sorry.

    • Re:Que? No Explaino! (Score:5, Funny)

      by starling ( 26204 ) <strayling20@gmail.com> on Wednesday August 17, 2005 @05:04PM (#13343153)
      [...]how will this effect me?

      It won't. Your parents did that.
    • Will Microsoft release their own version of it and crush everyone?

      Of course, the answer is "Yes". And "No".

      Yes, they've got something called XAML.... I've personally not used it, but I hear that writing a script to convert an SVG file to XAML is trivial.

      No, because... well, let's just say that Windows Vista beta seems to be shipping a version of solitaire that seems identical to the one they've been shipping since the early 90's, rather than taking advantage of vector graphics. Meanwhile, other desktops hav [rahga.com]

    • Re:Que? No Explaino! (Score:3, Informative)

      by ajs ( 35943 )
      SVG [wikipedia.org] or "Scalable Vector Graphics" is a way of describing visual information (graphics is perhaps misleading, as it can include text) in a way that is independant of parameters like dimensions of your display, type of display device, etc.

      Some advantages of SVG:
      • For the Web, the browser gets to decide how to render graphical information (so for example, client-side anti-aliasing preferences can be used).
      • because the client has access to the high-level description, you could do something like write a browser
      • > Network bandwidth is reduced for many types of graphical data such as
        > logos, emblems, seals, and other types of data that can be described
        > in relatively few drawing commands

        Actually, for now[1], most logos, on the web, are probably better off delivered in GIF format, bandwidth-wise, because they're not very large and don't have very many colors. However, SVG is better for things like charts, graphs, clip-art that you might want to use at different sizes, and so on. In fact, SVG would be a gre

        • Re:Que? No Explaino! (Score:3, Interesting)

          by ajs ( 35943 )
          The logo at the top of your screen is here: http://images.slashdot.org/title.gif [slashdot.org].

          It is 3473 bytes. As an SVG, it would be something like this (really awful, off the cuff) example: http://www.ajs.com/~ajs/slashdot.svg [ajs.com] which is 3255 bytes uncompressed and I'm sure that that's wasteful in several ways because I'm an SVG newbie. Given compressed HTTP bodies by default, the SVG would save Slashot quite a bit in bandwidth every month.

          SVG is a lot smaller than you think....

          Better, your browser could do the right t

          • Firefox (Score:1, Offtopic)

            by samjam ( 256347 )
            Shame that my Firefox 1.06 fails to displau it.
            [Looks for clues]
            $ GET -UuSsed http://www.ajs.com/~ajs/slashdot.svg [ajs.com]
            GET http://www.ajs.com/~ajs/slashdot.svg [ajs.com]
            User-Agent: lwp-request/2.06

            GET http://www.ajs.com/~ajs/slashdot.svg [ajs.com] --> 200 OK
            Connection: close
            Date: Thu, 18 Aug 2005 06:53:03 GMT
            Accept-Ranges: bytes
            ETag: "76dc6-cb7-f7f7ed00"
            Server: Apache/2.0.53 (Fedora)
            Content-Length: 3255
            Content-Type: text/xml
            Last-Modified: Thu, 18 Aug 2005 03:40:04 GMT
            Client-Date: Thu, 18 Aug 2005 06:53:57 GMT
            Client-Peer: 24.61.7
            • So why did some moderator think that firefox support of SVG was off-topic?

              Maybe because I was dissing the webserver?
              Or maybe they thought I was dissing firefox?
              Or maybe I'm just paranoid?

              I've seen off-topic, I've been off-topic, but that wasn't it.

              THIS one is off topic, though, feel free to mod it down.

              Sam
            • Unless you are running nightlies FF shouldn't be able to display it. It will from version 1.1, though.
            • The intent was to allow people to download and view the SVG, not the image. You can see the image (with correct fonts, even), by just looking up at the stop of your browser window. This document was interesting for purposes of looking at the (somewhat) equivalent SVG.
          • > The logo at the top of your screen is here:
            > http://images.slashdot.org/title.gif.

            That's not a logo. That's a banner. It doesn't even *contain* a logo, just the name of the site. Here are some examples of logos:

            The Nike swoosh:
            http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cf/Nike logotype.png
            The Golden Arches:
            http://www.mckansas.com/images/operators/100000263 7/ArchLogo_small.gif

            > SVG is a lot smaller than you think....

            In theory, maybe. In practice, SVG images can take up quite a bit of space.
            • > For instance, the 0.16 release of the Open Clip Art Library, in .tar.bz2
              > format, is 51M with only the SVG images or 72M with the SVG images plus
              > an 80-pixel-wide PNG thumbnail of each

              Conveniently, it contains some logos, which we could use as examples. If you look in the logos folder, you will see 30 images. For 30 out of 30 of them, the .svg file is larger than the 80-pixel .png thumbnail. In some cases quite a bit larger (as in, orders of magnitude).

            • Re:Que? No Explaino! (Score:3, Informative)

              by ajs ( 35943 )

              > http://images.slashdot.org/title.gif [slashdot.org]

              That's not a logo.

              Yes, it is. Slashdot has (as another poster pointed out) two primary logos. The other is the slash and the dot, and at your suggested 80-pixes, that's 2744 bytes as a PNG [ajs.com] and 2189 as an uncompressed SVG [ajs.com].

              Again, SVG is a lot smaller than you think. When you start trying to display very complicated images (like the classic tiger postscript demo), that's where it becomes larger, and that's really not what SVG is best at, and at lower resolutions, I wo

            • Oh, and since you bring up the Nike logo (which is the pathalogical best case for SVG), that comes to 741 bytes, uncompressed [ajs.com]!

              There's another space/bandwidth-saving feature of SVG that we haven't considered yet. Very often a Web site will need to show a graphic or stylized text at many resolutions. While you can serve the same image everywhere and set width/height in the HTML, that scaling is usually pretty ugly.

              With SVG, you can do this much more reasonably, and it will always look ideal. Thus, you serve u

    • Re:Que? No Explaino! (Score:3, Informative)

      by DrXym ( 126579 )
      Microsoft have already tried to push their own vector markup language called VML (surprise). I think it was proposed as a standard at one point, but it tanked. So I expect that even MS would be enthusiastic about SVG - it's already gotten enough momentum that it would be quite hard and rather pointless trying to go against it.

      If there is a problem with SVG & many other W3C recommendations is that they're getting to be horribly, horrifically difficult to implement and implementing SVG (for example) means

    • Someone is going to have to start a senior citizen version of slashdot soon. :)

  • MirrorDot (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 17, 2005 @04:37PM (#13342967)

    MirrorDot of the Keynote [mirrordot.org]

  • SVG and Mozilla (Score:3, Informative)

    by starwed ( 735423 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2005 @04:44PM (#13343020)
    There's a blog post here [mozillazine.org] with a link to another presentation from the conference.
  • is so old fashioned.

    Anybody got a podcasts of this?

    (err...wait, this is slashdot....)

    Anybody get a torret of this?

    (err...wait, this is slashdot....)

    Where's the torret?!

  • Now I like SVG, but this is like having the Microsoft PDC talk about the future of Windows... its hardly a balanced view on the future. Its like a Windows v Linux review funded by Microsoft.

    Don't get me wrong its interesting stuff... but in general the view here is from the position of SVG being the only answer, and that is currently far from being a certainty.

  • Why SVG Matters (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mpapet ( 761907 )
    1. Postscript is not as open a license as svg.
    2. I believe there's still a postscript tax for printers that really render postscript. (as opposed to emulation) I know I would like to see that go away. SVG is the way to make Postscript go away.
    3. Imagine a desktop/web page that renders itself by percentages. You could effectively write one thing that renders very well on a desktop, PDA, phone, or other mobile devices.

    There are other reasons, but this technology matters a whole lot when it comes to making
    • ``Imagine a desktop/web page that renders itself by percentages.''

      You are aware that PostScript and PDF are also vector formats, right? The only thing that bugs me about PostScript is that, for all the power of the language, I can't seem to find a good way to get text justified nicely (i.e. without using an external program like tex).
    • 2. I believe there's still a postscript tax for printers that really render postscript. (as opposed to emulation) I know I would like to see that go away. SVG is the way to make Postscript go away.

      Really there's no difference between "PostScript" and "PostScript emulation"; in one case you're licensing code from Adobe and in one case you're licensing code from Artifex. And PDF is the replacement for PS.

      3. Imagine a desktop/web page that renders itself by percentages. You could effectively write one thing th
      • CSS works on web pages only and doesn't address images directly. What happens is a pixel-based image (jpg/gif) either gets too small or too large if you set image sizes by %. Ideally, SVG renders beautifully in small (PDA) and large displays.

  • There isn't a single complete SVG viewer anywhere (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ikekrull ( 59661 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2005 @05:20PM (#13343257) Homepage
    It seems to me that any W3C standard needs a complete and free reference implementation before it should be ratified as a W3C standard.

    Even if it is somewhat slow and clunky, at least it shows that it is possible to do.

    At this point, it is such a monumental task to implement all the intricacies of the full SVG specs that *nobody* - Not Microsoft,Adobe,Apache, Sun,Apple of anyone in the open source arena is able to do it, or even come close, it seems.

    Apps like Inkscape are probably the most advanced SVG showcases, but for some reason everybody wants to write their own browser plugin from scratch instead of starting from the authoring tools and extending them to support a 'playback' mode.

    Has nobody noticed Flash and what made it so popular?

    You can publish standards till the cows come home but the only way anything becomes popular is by being useful.

    A reference implementation of a standard is immediately useful, both to users and to developers. Why isn't it there, and if the answer is 'it's too much work' then maybe, just maybe, the overcomplexity of the standard is the problem.

    Standards are a good thing, but standards must be both implementable, and accompanied by an implementation, unless they want to float in limbo for years like SVG.

    • > It seems to me that any W3C standard needs a complete and free reference implementation before it should be ratified as a W3C standard.

      XForms [w3.org] had as exit criteria for becoming a recommendation one complete and two interoperable implementations . One of the complete implementations that served to meet this goal was X-Smiles [x-smiles.org], a GPL implementation of XForms (and co-indcidentally SVG, XHTML 1.0, CSS of various levels, SMIL, etc.).

      The Mozilla XForms [mozilla.org] project also aims to provide a complete XForms 1.0 implem
    • ``At this point, it is such a monumental task to implement all the intricacies of the full SVG specs that *nobody* - Not Microsoft,Adobe,Apache, Sun,Apple of anyone in the open source arena is able to do it, or even come close, it seems.''

      You're damn right. The technicall term for this is Design by Comittee. Get a bunch of people together and design the Great Solution that is going to solve everybody's needs. What you get is something so monstrous and full of inconsistencies that it will take a long time un
      • The other approach is to first let the world sort out what features are actually desirable, then standardize what's there and try to get implementers to converge towards the standard... Common Lisp is an example of this from programming languages.

        Don't, don't, don't follow Common LISP as an example. Common LISP has been a disaster. There are far fewer people earning their living from LISP now than there were before Common LISP standard was introduced, and far fewer programs in regular use written in LISP.

        Common LISP is a very bad standard. As Scott Fahlman [cmu.edu] wrote [google.com]:

        The result is a language that... not even its mother could love. Like the camel, Common Lisp is a horse designed by committee. Camels do have their uses.

        He should know. As he says on his home page [cmu.edu]:

        I was one of the principal designers of the Common Lisp language.

        Common LISP essentially destroyed LISP as a usable, productive language. It made an incredible number of simply wrong technical decisions; and too many of those decisions were made by the smaller companies of the eastern United States - Symbolics, LMI, Franz - trying to write a standard which was as different as possible from InterLISP [wikipedia.org], in order to kill competition from Xerox. I'm not pretending InterLISP was brilliant or the answer to all problems. It wasn't. Like Common LISP, it was a LISP2, making an artificial distinction between data and code; and it was in many ways clumsy and unorthogonal itself. But there was a great deal of creativity coming out of the InterLISP community, which Common LISP effectively killed.

        We would have been so much better with a standard based on Portable Standard Lisp [metu.edu.tr], or on EuLisp [bath.ac.uk], or on Scheme [mit.edu]. We would have been so much better with no standard at all. Instead, we got a LISP2 with a bizarrely complex lambda-list syntax, with a comment syntax which was incompatible with the LISP reader (so that in-core editing and development were effectively impossible), with so many horrible design errors.

        Of course, it succeeded in its primary goal. Xerox was driven out of the LISP marketplace. But the cost for LISP has been horrendous: the language has been effectively destroyed. And for what was and should be the queen of programing languages, that's a disaster.

        Oh, yes - I was during the eighties a very junior member of the British Standards Institution's LISP working group. I was there. I still think LISP is the best possible programming language, but these days I use Java.

    • http://xml.apache.org/batik/ [apache.org]

      Apparently it has pretty much everything in it. Java though, so it's not for the extreme performance peopel.

    • At this point, it is such a monumental task to implement all the intricacies of the full SVG specs that *nobody* - Not Microsoft,Adobe,Apache, Sun,Apple of anyone in the open source arena is able to do it, or even come close, it seems.

      Complete implementation? No. But pretty much every feature has been implemented and tested in some implementation as of the end of last year:
      http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Test/20030813/stat u s/matrix.html [w3.org]

      Apps like Inkscape are probably the most advanced SVG showcases,
      • Complete implementation? No. But pretty much every feature has been implemented and tested in some implementation as of the end of last year

        The page was last updated on 2003/08/12 18:41:23, so it was published two years from now. The problem is that every feature has been implemented and tested in a different implementation. It would be really helpful to have complete implementation(s).

        Not to knock the great work Inkscape has done, but it's not the most advanced. I would guess Adobe SVG Viewer is bett
    • It seems to me that any W3C standard needs a complete and free reference implementation before it should be ratified as a W3C standard.

      This is insightful? Nobody has ever made a full implementation of CSS2, and it's very popular. And the word "standard" doesn't come from the W3C - Their finished documents are called "recommendations".

      IMNSHO: SVG will become popular because it can be used to make tiny, scalable, non-blocky-printable images, which will be popular with the average joes on modem/ISDN, shortsi

      • CSS2 sure isn't as popular as it could be - Half the web designers I know still only trust HTML TABLEs for their layout, and while they grudgingly use CSS font specs because the '' solution is just so unwieldy, CSS2's advanced features are ignored because of compatibilty concerns (and when they are used, they are usually the source of compatibility problems).

        Personally I don't regard the current state of the CSS2 support in browsers as 'good' - CSS2 is another great example of a standard that is too difficu
        • Half the web designers I know still only trust HTML TABLEs for their layout, and while they grudgingly use CSS font specs because the '' solution is just so unwieldy

          What a coincidence - Most web designers* I know haven't a clue how CSS should be used in real world situations today. Check out e.g. Designing with web standards [zeldman.com] by Jeffrey Zeldman - IIRC, he argues that as long as CSS support is as broken as it is today, the transitional approach of tables for layout and CSS for other styles is perfectly justi

      • Nobody has ever made a full implementation of CSS2, and it's very popular.

        This is a very different story. CSS had to compete with unstructured HTML code full of font and color tags, and it was clearly a technically better solution (although complex). Everybody is using CSS because it is the only way to separate the content of a web page, from its presentation. And because CSS is extremely popular CSS2 has a clear road ahead.

        The situation of SVG is very different. Macromedia Flash is already a very m

        • To rephrase:

          This is a very similar story. SVG has to compete with semantically void images, and it was clearly a technically better solution (although complex if written by hand). Everybody will be using SVG because it is the only way to separate the content of images from their presentation, and to make them properly scalable.

          The situation of CSS was very similar. (Presentational) HTML was already a very mature platform which did almost everything that CSS does now years ago and it did this in a very coh

          • If SVG was released when CSS was (i.e. ten years ago), maybe your argument would have made sense. You say that "SVG is the only way to separate the content of images from their presentation, and to make them properly scalable" and you are wrong. Flash has allowed this for many years now. No, it is not a standard, but it seems that nobody other than you and me cares about it. And, well ... why should they?
            • Have you ever tried viewing the source of a Flash file? That should give an indication of how easy it is to use a piece of it inside another file, or how easy a screen reader or non-textual browser would display the contents. SVG with XHTML embedded can easily be stripped down to just the contents.

  • SVG, best way to draw with perl (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Soong ( 7225 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2005 @05:22PM (#13343273) Homepage Journal
    I had some data, I wanted to lay it out graphically, a little perl script to transform it and *poof!* there it was!

    Although, batik [apache.org] is a little bit slow. Hmpf. The Adobe plugin is nice though.
  • I'm not usually one to complain about sentence structure, but this is just silly:

    <quote>
    Inspiring for an SVG enthusiast, informative for any geek.
    </quote>
  • The OpenSVG talks are being streamed live over the MBONE. How come the MBONE is still experimental? How come it hasn't been replaced by a standard tech in all routers? Does IPv6 do multicast? The version being rolled out in some routers today?
    • The Internet does not support multicast, because multicast requires routers to carry lots of routing table entries, and those aren't free. So far I haven't seen any good solutions to this problem.
    • IPv6 does do multicast. The mutlicast join protocol is different (MLDv2, as opposed to IGMPv3) and you get a few trillion addresses (multicast gets a 120-bit range of addresses) but otherwise it is the same.

      The MBONE was technically disbanded a decade ago - the Internet backbone has been carrying native multicast (as opposed to tunnels) for a long time. It is ISPs that are the problem, refusing to enable it.

      Virtually all modern routers support multicasting - IGMPv2 and DVMRP at the very least, with more mod

      • Time Warner (through RoadRunner) is a big ISP. They have a huge market for multicast TV programming, which would seem to be much cheaper and easier to deliver over multicast. Other big ISPs, including DSL/telcos, are in the same position. Why do you think they haven't already jumped on this? Wouldn't they also be trumping their independent ISP competition (such as it is, like Earthlink and some mom & pops) with their superior service? Especially as it would be multiplying the value of their content, whi
        • It would be infinitely cheaper, easier and more reliable. (Fewer streams = fewer packets dropped = more bandwidth usable = more channels + higher quality MPEGs) I have absolutely zero idea on why they've not jumped on this - UUnet/MCI is the only big ISP I know of that supplies multicast to the home, the others I've asked simply say "we don't do that" and decline to say why.

          It would certainly multiply the value of their content. It would also multiply the value of their service, as it would reduce the start

          • The only "good" reason I can think of is that they're afraid of multiplying the downloaders, and therefore losing more of their content to piracy. It's idiotic, but the copyright owners have relied on bandwidth being too scarce to "email movies" among friends, rather than take any constructive action. It's one reason why they've let the RIAA fight it out over such small potatoes as the piracy share of a merely $14B:y industry: they want to study the "lab" before doing anything, and bandwidth scarcity buys t
        • Time Warner (through RoadRunner) is a big ISP. They have a huge market for multicast TV programming, which would seem to be much cheaper and easier to deliver over multicast.

          If you have RoadRunner, you probably have cable. It's cheaper to deliver TV over cable than over IP multicast over DOCSIS.

          Other big ISPs, including DSL/telcos, are in the same position. Why do you think they haven't already jumped on this?

          Telcos are starting to get into IPTV, but the equipment is still new and expensive. Presumably they
      • "But unless it [multicast] has been hibernating somewhere without me knowing about it, the project died when I wasn't at Yahoo to champion it any longer."

        Not a lot of insights there. Possibly just egotism, even if Cuban is accurate in pronouncing it dead. Unfortunately, he doesn't talk about why *he* was the only guy, and only while he was at Yahoo, who could have made it happen. Because Cuban was no great genius, except to be at the right place at the right time (creditworthy), it strikes me as mostly egot
  • I'm waiting for the day that I don't have to mockup pages in SVG using Inkscape, exporting it to the Gimp for slicing, then wrapping css around the slices. I want to be able to go straight from mockup in SVG to final design in SVG.
  • Here is my open source solution of next generation GUI: http://opentheme.sourceforge.net/OpenThemeTutorial .html [sourceforge.net]

  • the future looks bright (Score:3, Informative)

    by michaelbuddy ( 751237 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2005 @06:59PM (#13343820)
    What is so cool about SVG is talked about in this keynote. SVG, is vector graphics AND text, AND placed raster images, AND animation described in an open, easy to read format.

    One advantage is that you can design a webpage the same way you design a printed piece. Where you have just as much control over it. MS explorer requires an adobe plugin to display it, similarly to how it displays flash. Firefox is going to display SVG natively in the 1.1 browser (actually already does with the deerpark alphas.

    The code is easily visible like HTML. The desktops that use SVG for the gui, I don't know much about, but it's fantastic. Nice icons, or buttons or any visual element that is smaller in file size, breaks out of the square we are used to, and the elements can be enlarged or reduced and still be rendered beautifully.

    check out inkscape if you want to experiment with svg, or the open clipart library to see some cool examples. of SVG.

    http://inkscape.org/ [inkscape.org]
    http://openclipart.org/ [openclipart.org]

    Here's what mozilla is doing with SVG:
    http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/ [mozilla.org]
    • One thing to realise is that SVG isn't as accessible as HTML, and when you put information in SVG you don't get the semantics of HTML. Using it for laying out a page probably isn't the way to go. :(

  • Xaml is .NET (Score:2, Informative)

    by ZackThom ( 908419 )
    I am sorry, but it does not seem that the presenters know what they are talking about.
    Xaml [xaml.net] is NOT the same as XUL. It is Microsoft trying to keep everyone using .NET and thus Windows
    Also XaMLaN is the exact opposite of true Xaml - it converts C# code to FLASH.
    I have programmed in XAML for months, and it really is just another abstraction layer - sort of a way to build applications like a Web AND like a rich GUI
    You can do this today with some free frameworks out there - this just has a standard meth

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