5 ms·

No Formats, no Format Wars

40 points by duck 16y ago

cageface 16y ago
Yeah, replacing all data formats with a new, dynamic, "meta" format is going to make everything simpler and more compatible. Pass the pipe, please!
- alnayyir 16y ago
  Classic crackpot formula.
  - asciilifeform 16y ago
    Yes, because even to hint at how we might climb out of a local-maximum optimization valley is the act of a raving lunatic.
    - RodgerTheGreat 16y ago
      There's a pretty serious difference between arguing for reduced abstraction in software (which can be quite reasonable, and is probably more like what the author actually envisions) and arguing for no abstraction in software. The latter comes across as ignorance of the purpose of layers of abstraction. The author points to Alan Kay's anecdote about a simple, standardized way for formatting data on cards in 1961 and then immediately turns around and uses it to argue that standardized formats do not improve interoperability. Sounds hypocritical to me.
      - jmillikin 16y ago
        The user you are replying to is the author.
    - leoc 16y ago
      I'd quote from the Unix Haters' Handbook http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/handbook.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/handbook.html > "I liken starting one's computing career with Unix, say as an undergraduate, to being born in East Africa. It is intolerably hot, your body is covered with lice and flies, you are malnourished and you suffer from numerous curable diseases. But, as far as young East Africans can tell, this is simply the natural condition and they live within it. By the time they find out differently, it is too late. They already think that the writing of shell scripts is a natural act." > Ken Pier, Xerox PARC but while that jab illustrates the Everything Is Fine; Nothing Can Be Done mentality in computing very clearly, it's probably unfairly disrespectful to East African people.
jb3 16y ago
Could Native Client be the way forward for this approach? Link: http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient-sdk/ http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient-sdk/
- leoc 16y ago
  Yes. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1056391 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1056391 (later update: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2010/06/25/qt-for-google-native-client-preview/ http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2010/06/25/qt-for-google-native-cli... , transcript of Kay talk: http://blog.moryton.net/2007/12/computer-revolution-hasnt-happened-yet.html http://blog.moryton.net/2007/12/computer-revolution-hasnt-ha... ) WebGL wouldn't hurt either.
- Detrus 16y ago
  The development team proposed NaCl as a potential solution to many of the format problems. We could make a lot of custom compression formats that would be better than gzip. A multitude of image formats tuned for various categories of images or videos. Fast JavaScript could go a long way in that direction too https://github.com/antimatter15/weppy https://github.com/antimatter15/weppy With types and WebGL hardware access who knows. NaCl project has social forces going against it. People want a homogenous platform. Platforms solve a social problem, developers become familiar with the same API, make libraries for it, make development easier, etc.. NaCl would have to play that game and it takes a long time. By the time it's done it won't be a good fit for problems of the day, just like high level VMs today.
zdw 16y ago
The writer obviously hasn't had to deal with input validation of anything ever. Formats exist so that programs can make good assumptions based on content. Given a good format, the content can be transformed or fitted to the device - for example, web pages on smartphones vs computers. Also, given a format, the programmer is freed to make performance enhancements that aren't dictated by a specific platform or set of technologies. Want to write a CSV parer in Ruby? Go right ahead! Need to rewrite it in assembler for speed? Sure! You can't easily do that with a closed platform/tech like Flash or MS's binary formats.
- asciilifeform 16y ago
  What input-validated your PC's operating system when you booted it?
  - zdw 16y ago
    Last I checked, CPU's generally don't react well to executing random data as instructions.
    - asciilifeform 16y ago
      Mine is perfectly well-behaved in response to random/mistaken instructions. Executed under VmWare, where they belong. (during OS prototyping, etc.)
      - alnayyir 16y ago
        And I bet you just have all the answers don't you? I'll even bet that you think everyone else is stupid for not seeing the OBVIOUS solutions that you're presenting! Damn those corporate conspiracies to keep programmers down!
        asciilifeform 16y ago
        I haven't many answers; only questions. And someone appears to think they are interesting, as I do not submit my articles to this site, and have tried to discourage others from doing so: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=91 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=91 And to explain the present status quo, we need no conspiracies. Only people who laugh off the very idea of re-thinking foundations. No one is asking you to throw out your PC. I only ask that you think.
RodgerTheGreat 16y ago
This is ridiculous. Even if you handwave away security concerns of running arbitrary native code fetched from the web as the operating system's problem, you have locked yourself into a single hardware architecture with (presumably) a single API for those binaries to run against. Even if you expect these things to run on metal you need a standard hardware configuration that exposes known I/O devices, etc. In a world where x86 coexists with ARM, PPC-derivatives and the occasional MIPS machine (not to mention dozens of other variations) native executables are not a sensible option unless you pass that buck to the server and have it spin off a custom binary for any client that may come along. Ok, ok- so we use a VM that everyone agrees on and- wait, we're back where we started, aren't we? Except, of course, we have a ton of mandatory overhead because browsers are no longer specialized to deal with the kinds of media users expect in a browsing experience. Unless you honestly expect that everyone, everywhere will use identical computers for everything, standardized formats will always be necessary.
- defen 16y ago
  Here is a project that is addressing the security and platform-independence issues while running native code: http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/ http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/
- leoc 16y ago
  > Even if you handwave away security concerns of running arbitrary native code fetched from the web as the operating system's problem Between ye olde Java sandboxing, hardware and software OS virtualisation (Qemu, VirtualBox, VMWare etc.), JavaScript, NaCl, and other examples, it seems clear that this is a problem we now know how to manage. > you have locked yourself into a single hardware architecture with (presumably) a single API for those binaries to run against NaCl appears to have a grip on this problem. Write portable code in one of several languages supported by LLVM; compile with LLVM to the native NaCl format that exists for various CPU architectures, and to Portable NaCl ("PNaCl") bytecode. LLVM can be replaced by another compiler that targets NaCl. > In a world where x86 coexists with ARM, PPC-derivatives and the occasional MIPS machine (not to mention dozens of other variations) native executables are not a sensible option unless you pass that buck to the server and have it spin off a custom binary for any client that may come along. All the server really needs to do is to pre-compile (or be given) a set of NaCl binaries for the presently popular archs as well as a PNaCl bytecode executable for everyone else, but yes indeed, it might also dynamically compile native binaries for minority archs it knows how to support in response to client demand. If the compile is too slow to serve the first such request with a native binary, then the server can serve the PNaCl code until the new native code is ready. (As a matter of fact, it wouldn't really be necessary to replace every single HTML file with executables. But that's another story.) > Even if you expect these things to run on metal you need a standard hardware configuration that exposes known I/O devices, etc. It seems that NaCl provides a syscall-like interface with its "service runtime". Something similar could surely be created for a runtime based on hardware VMs (in other words, something like Ethernet emulation in implementation terms but with an API more suitable for a Web-browser plugin). This part of the design is a weak spot of course, as it can break and fork and version and vary across implementations, but compared to the sinking sands of the browser interface it should prove much smaller and more stable. (HTML files which are genuinely documents rather than webapps are relatively robust against some API breakage but, again, it wouldn't actually be necessary to turn every HTML document with an executable blob.) > Ok, ok- so we use a VM that everyone agrees on and- wait, we're back where we started, aren't we? Except, of course, we have a ton of mandatory overhead because browsers are no longer specialized to deal with the kinds of media users expect in a browsing experience. Portable C or C++ compiled to NaCl should be decently fast for almost all purposes. Failing that, there's always the possibility of hand-writing raw NaCl code as an optimisation for popular architectures. (Or writing 100% native assembler if hardware virtualisation is being used instead of NaCl.) Failing that, even if a few high-performance AV formats have to be hardwired into the browser alongside WebGL (or whatever), we're still nowhere near being back where we are - in a madhouse world where a cartel of browser vendors empowers a tin-pot Napoleon to dictate, among many other things, how we will all mark up our documents, down to the minutest details.
rfugger 16y ago
Quick, someone patent the meta-format.
- asciilifeform 16y ago
  Think big! Skip straight to patenting the Turing-complete computing machine.
mindslight 16y ago
You're only thinking about one dimension of the problem. In reality, you will run up against the "expression problem", in that your immediate use will be more apparent, but orthogonal un-thought-of reuses will become harder or impossible. A java/flash applet executes instructions and is a step towards the kind of universal object format you talk about, yet it is harder or impossible to index, style, and adapt to local UI conventions. The primary feature of declarative protocols/formats/languages is to convey a common meaning of data without specifying how it should be interpreted. Try to pull meaning out of imperative code and you'll run up against the halting problem. We could just be happy with our binary blobs, but moving beyond take-it-or-leave-it single-purpose content is exactly what as allowed "the web" the flourish. Programmable logic as a standard PC feature would be great, but there would still be video ASICs for low power decoding or high-quality realtime encoding. also how would you propose to set a standard format for FPGA bitstreams when the balance of topology/block capability/timing is ever-changing. Once again we'd need a common declarative format as a base, and software tailored for the different nodes.
- asciilifeform 16y ago
  Re: FPGA bitstreams: Here’s one attempt at standardization in spite of the hostility of chip vendors: the “MPGA”: http://web.archive.org/web/20050414203105/http://ce.et.tudelft.nl/~reinoud/mpga/README.html http://web.archive.org/web/20050414203105/http://ce.et.tudel...
  - mindslight 16y ago
    Interesting, but seems that even fully developed, it would be limited to cases of when only a (lower requirement) portion of a chip needed online reconfigurability. Even one of the mailing list messages admits the routing is severely limited compared to the host, and timing hadn't been characterized. (that "ascii bitstream" format is quite cute) If one was to flesh this idea out and create a "universal bitstream" -> specific FPGA "compiler", at what layer do we stop and declare that we have reached the proper primitive abstractions? What happens when technology moves on from those primitives, and more performance is demanded by the majority of the applications? An older CPU can go about its business a bit slower while an older FPGA trying to run new code won't even fit the design.
jmillikin 16y ago
e: interesting; HN won't let me post my full comment. It just times out. I'm going to try posting bits of it at a time, as edits. e2: I give up; HN just won't let me post the whole thing. I've moved this comment to a pastebin, at < http://pastebin.com/bVn91ApU http://pastebin.com/bVn91ApU >
- asciilifeform 16y ago
  Computing in general is simply schizophrenia as applied to Arithmometers.
- asciilifeform 16y ago
  > this model is the polar opposite of Free software. Instead of users having absolute control over what runs on their system, they have practically no control at all. They surrender everything to the first webpage they open, and to whatever agent is controlling that page at a time. If you read my "laws of computing" piece: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=284 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=284 do you still believe this? For the impatient: I advocate a switch to direct hardware execution of exclusively high-level (human readable!) code. Does it get more user-modifiable than that? I'd like to know.
  - jmillikin 16y ago
    > I advocate a switch to direct hardware execution of exclusively high-level (human readable!) code. Does it get more user-modifiable than that? What sort of code the hardware executes is irrelevant to whether that code is Free. JavaScript is high-level and mostly human-readable, but it's trivial to obfuscate JavaScript such that modification by the user is difficult or impossible. And JavaScript is a relatively limited language; a LISP-like language executed directly by the hardware could be even more difficult to modify.
    - asciilifeform 16y ago
      > it's trivial to obfuscate JavaScript such that modification by the user is difficult or impossible. This is a moral, rather than technological problem. Anyone writing any kind of code can choose to make life less-pleasant for those who will read it. Under current architectures, you do not even have the option of making life pleasant for those who wish to read the code that is presently running on their machine, at the time it runs. In fact, the very idea sounds like schizophrenic soapbox heresy to most people. Which is a crying shame.
sliverstorm 16y ago
Ah, I understand now. It all makes sense! To get out from under them thumb of the evil Formats, we must subjugate ourselves to an even greater, larger and more complex (but singular) Format! What could possibly go wrong?
jermy 16y ago
What is described is already reality - I see it every day. I work for a company writing its own video codecs, who have a format that downloads a 70KB jar file before streaming the video. It's a Java applet (and still supports Java 1.1 - we've been doing this for a number of years now) and largely allows the model that Stanislav wishes. Is it ideal? Probably not. We can't do fullscreen or hardware-optimised playback. We have to implement our own controls that are out of place of the L&F of the OS and browser. We need people to install the Java VM. On Java versions older than JDK6u18 we still only get to use 64MB of memory (on a 2GB machine? Hah!). Not always going to work on your latest smartphone. On the flip side, I also see a lot of video container formats where people try to standardise something as generic as possible. Particularly OMFI (Bento), Quicktime, AAF. The simplest AAF File which simple refers to a piece of video content elsewhere is 250KB, because it has to define a complete vocabulary of items that it might deal with in the file, and jumps from pointer to pointer to actually get to the data. It's pretty much the closest we have to Stanislav's 1961 Air Force quote example, with everything short of actually including a decoder specification for the audio and video content. It's a minefield to work with. It's too flexible for its own good, and reading or writing it is anything but a trivial task (cue large libraries, larger than video decoders, to do that. Anything but ideal). So, one side involves a virtual machine to standardise hardware, and the other needs large libraries to parse and emit even the simplest of files. I've seen this world, and I think I'd rather have well-implemented standard decoders working on simpler wrappers instead.
eftpotrm 16y ago
> you don’t need anything more complex than something like X Windows I'm not sure X would be my prime example of simplicity...

40 points by duck 16y ago

Yeah, replacing all data formats with a new, dynamic, "meta" format is going to make everything simpler and more compatible. Pass the pipe, please!

alnayyir 16y ago
Classic crackpot formula.
- asciilifeform 16y ago
  Yes, because even to hint at how we might climb out of a local-maximum optimization valley is the act of a raving lunatic.
  - RodgerTheGreat 16y ago
    There's a pretty serious difference between arguing for reduced abstraction in software (which can be quite reasonable, and is probably more like what the author actually envisions) and arguing for no abstraction in software. The latter comes across as ignorance of the purpose of layers of abstraction. The author points to Alan Kay's anecdote about a simple, standardized way for formatting data on cards in 1961 and then immediately turns around and uses it to argue that standardized formats do not improve interoperability. Sounds hypocritical to me.
    - jmillikin 16y ago
      The user you are replying to is the author.
  - leoc 16y ago
    I'd quote from the Unix Haters' Handbook http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/handbook.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/handbook.html > "I liken starting one's computing career with Unix, say as an undergraduate, to being born in East Africa. It is intolerably hot, your body is covered with lice and flies, you are malnourished and you suffer from numerous curable diseases. But, as far as young East Africans can tell, this is simply the natural condition and they live within it. By the time they find out differently, it is too late. They already think that the writing of shell scripts is a natural act." > Ken Pier, Xerox PARC but while that jab illustrates the Everything Is Fine; Nothing Can Be Done mentality in computing very clearly, it's probably unfairly disrespectful to East African people.

jb3 16y ago

Could Native Client be the way forward for this approach? Link: http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient-sdk/ http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient-sdk/

leoc 16y ago
Yes. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1056391 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1056391 (later update: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2010/06/25/qt-for-google-native-client-preview/ http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2010/06/25/qt-for-google-native-cli... , transcript of Kay talk: http://blog.moryton.net/2007/12/computer-revolution-hasnt-happened-yet.html http://blog.moryton.net/2007/12/computer-revolution-hasnt-ha... ) WebGL wouldn't hurt either.
Detrus 16y ago
The development team proposed NaCl as a potential solution to many of the format problems. We could make a lot of custom compression formats that would be better than gzip. A multitude of image formats tuned for various categories of images or videos. Fast JavaScript could go a long way in that direction too https://github.com/antimatter15/weppy https://github.com/antimatter15/weppy With types and WebGL hardware access who knows. NaCl project has social forces going against it. People want a homogenous platform. Platforms solve a social problem, developers become familiar with the same API, make libraries for it, make development easier, etc.. NaCl would have to play that game and it takes a long time. By the time it's done it won't be a good fit for problems of the day, just like high level VMs today.

zdw 16y ago

The writer obviously hasn't had to deal with input validation of anything ever. Formats exist so that programs can make good assumptions based on content. Given a good format, the content can be transformed or fitted to the device - for example, web pages on smartphones vs computers. Also, given a format, the programmer is freed to make performance enhancements that aren't dictated by a specific platform or set of technologies. Want to write a CSV parer in Ruby? Go right ahead! Need to rewrite it in assembler for speed? Sure! You can't easily do that with a closed platform/tech like Flash or MS's binary formats.

asciilifeform 16y ago
What input-validated your PC's operating system when you booted it?
- zdw 16y ago
  Last I checked, CPU's generally don't react well to executing random data as instructions.
  - asciilifeform 16y ago
    Mine is perfectly well-behaved in response to random/mistaken instructions. Executed under VmWare, where they belong. (during OS prototyping, etc.)
    - alnayyir 16y ago
      And I bet you just have all the answers don't you? I'll even bet that you think everyone else is stupid for not seeing the OBVIOUS solutions that you're presenting! Damn those corporate conspiracies to keep programmers down!
      - asciilifeform 16y ago
        I haven't many answers; only questions. And someone appears to think they are interesting, as I do not submit my articles to this site, and have tried to discourage others from doing so: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=91 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=91 And to explain the present status quo, we need no conspiracies. Only people who laugh off the very idea of re-thinking foundations. No one is asking you to throw out your PC. I only ask that you think.

RodgerTheGreat 16y ago

This is ridiculous. Even if you handwave away security concerns of running arbitrary native code fetched from the web as the operating system's problem, you have locked yourself into a single hardware architecture with (presumably) a single API for those binaries to run against. Even if you expect these things to run on metal you need a standard hardware configuration that exposes known I/O devices, etc. In a world where x86 coexists with ARM, PPC-derivatives and the occasional MIPS machine (not to mention dozens of other variations) native executables are not a sensible option unless you pass that buck to the server and have it spin off a custom binary for any client that may come along. Ok, ok- so we use a VM that everyone agrees on and- wait, we're back where we started, aren't we? Except, of course, we have a ton of mandatory overhead because browsers are no longer specialized to deal with the kinds of media users expect in a browsing experience. Unless you honestly expect that everyone, everywhere will use identical computers for everything, standardized formats will always be necessary.

defen 16y ago
Here is a project that is addressing the security and platform-independence issues while running native code: http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/ http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/
leoc 16y ago
> Even if you handwave away security concerns of running arbitrary native code fetched from the web as the operating system's problem Between ye olde Java sandboxing, hardware and software OS virtualisation (Qemu, VirtualBox, VMWare etc.), JavaScript, NaCl, and other examples, it seems clear that this is a problem we now know how to manage. > you have locked yourself into a single hardware architecture with (presumably) a single API for those binaries to run against NaCl appears to have a grip on this problem. Write portable code in one of several languages supported by LLVM; compile with LLVM to the native NaCl format that exists for various CPU architectures, and to Portable NaCl ("PNaCl") bytecode. LLVM can be replaced by another compiler that targets NaCl. > In a world where x86 coexists with ARM, PPC-derivatives and the occasional MIPS machine (not to mention dozens of other variations) native executables are not a sensible option unless you pass that buck to the server and have it spin off a custom binary for any client that may come along. All the server really needs to do is to pre-compile (or be given) a set of NaCl binaries for the presently popular archs as well as a PNaCl bytecode executable for everyone else, but yes indeed, it might also dynamically compile native binaries for minority archs it knows how to support in response to client demand. If the compile is too slow to serve the first such request with a native binary, then the server can serve the PNaCl code until the new native code is ready. (As a matter of fact, it wouldn't really be necessary to replace every single HTML file with executables. But that's another story.) > Even if you expect these things to run on metal you need a standard hardware configuration that exposes known I/O devices, etc. It seems that NaCl provides a syscall-like interface with its "service runtime". Something similar could surely be created for a runtime based on hardware VMs (in other words, something like Ethernet emulation in implementation terms but with an API more suitable for a Web-browser plugin). This part of the design is a weak spot of course, as it can break and fork and version and vary across implementations, but compared to the sinking sands of the browser interface it should prove much smaller and more stable. (HTML files which are genuinely documents rather than webapps are relatively robust against some API breakage but, again, it wouldn't actually be necessary to turn every HTML document with an executable blob.) > Ok, ok- so we use a VM that everyone agrees on and- wait, we're back where we started, aren't we? Except, of course, we have a ton of mandatory overhead because browsers are no longer specialized to deal with the kinds of media users expect in a browsing experience. Portable C or C++ compiled to NaCl should be decently fast for almost all purposes. Failing that, there's always the possibility of hand-writing raw NaCl code as an optimisation for popular architectures. (Or writing 100% native assembler if hardware virtualisation is being used instead of NaCl.) Failing that, even if a few high-performance AV formats have to be hardwired into the browser alongside WebGL (or whatever), we're still nowhere near being back where we are - in a madhouse world where a cartel of browser vendors empowers a tin-pot Napoleon to dictate, among many other things, how we will all mark up our documents, down to the minutest details.

rfugger 16y ago

Quick, someone patent the meta-format.

asciilifeform 16y ago
Think big! Skip straight to patenting the Turing-complete computing machine.

mindslight 16y ago

You're only thinking about one dimension of the problem. In reality, you will run up against the "expression problem", in that your immediate use will be more apparent, but orthogonal un-thought-of reuses will become harder or impossible. A java/flash applet executes instructions and is a step towards the kind of universal object format you talk about, yet it is harder or impossible to index, style, and adapt to local UI conventions. The primary feature of declarative protocols/formats/languages is to convey a common meaning of data without specifying how it should be interpreted. Try to pull meaning out of imperative code and you'll run up against the halting problem. We could just be happy with our binary blobs, but moving beyond take-it-or-leave-it single-purpose content is exactly what as allowed "the web" the flourish. Programmable logic as a standard PC feature would be great, but there would still be video ASICs for low power decoding or high-quality realtime encoding. also how would you propose to set a standard format for FPGA bitstreams when the balance of topology/block capability/timing is ever-changing. Once again we'd need a common declarative format as a base, and software tailored for the different nodes.

asciilifeform 16y ago
Re: FPGA bitstreams: Here’s one attempt at standardization in spite of the hostility of chip vendors: the “MPGA”: http://web.archive.org/web/20050414203105/http://ce.et.tudelft.nl/~reinoud/mpga/README.html http://web.archive.org/web/20050414203105/http://ce.et.tudel...
- mindslight 16y ago
  Interesting, but seems that even fully developed, it would be limited to cases of when only a (lower requirement) portion of a chip needed online reconfigurability. Even one of the mailing list messages admits the routing is severely limited compared to the host, and timing hadn't been characterized. (that "ascii bitstream" format is quite cute) If one was to flesh this idea out and create a "universal bitstream" -> specific FPGA "compiler", at what layer do we stop and declare that we have reached the proper primitive abstractions? What happens when technology moves on from those primitives, and more performance is demanded by the majority of the applications? An older CPU can go about its business a bit slower while an older FPGA trying to run new code won't even fit the design.

jmillikin 16y ago

e: interesting; HN won't let me post my full comment. It just times out. I'm going to try posting bits of it at a time, as edits. e2: I give up; HN just won't let me post the whole thing. I've moved this comment to a pastebin, at < http://pastebin.com/bVn91ApU http://pastebin.com/bVn91ApU >

asciilifeform 16y ago
Computing in general is simply schizophrenia as applied to Arithmometers.
asciilifeform 16y ago
> this model is the polar opposite of Free software. Instead of users having absolute control over what runs on their system, they have practically no control at all. They surrender everything to the first webpage they open, and to whatever agent is controlling that page at a time. If you read my "laws of computing" piece: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=284 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=284 do you still believe this? For the impatient: I advocate a switch to direct hardware execution of exclusively high-level (human readable!) code. Does it get more user-modifiable than that? I'd like to know.
- jmillikin 16y ago
  > I advocate a switch to direct hardware execution of exclusively high-level (human readable!) code. Does it get more user-modifiable than that? What sort of code the hardware executes is irrelevant to whether that code is Free. JavaScript is high-level and mostly human-readable, but it's trivial to obfuscate JavaScript such that modification by the user is difficult or impossible. And JavaScript is a relatively limited language; a LISP-like language executed directly by the hardware could be even more difficult to modify.
  - asciilifeform 16y ago
    > it's trivial to obfuscate JavaScript such that modification by the user is difficult or impossible. This is a moral, rather than technological problem. Anyone writing any kind of code can choose to make life less-pleasant for those who will read it. Under current architectures, you do not even have the option of making life pleasant for those who wish to read the code that is presently running on their machine, at the time it runs. In fact, the very idea sounds like schizophrenic soapbox heresy to most people. Which is a crying shame.

sliverstorm 16y ago

Ah, I understand now. It all makes sense! To get out from under them thumb of the evil Formats, we must subjugate ourselves to an even greater, larger and more complex (but singular) Format! What could possibly go wrong?

jermy 16y ago

What is described is already reality - I see it every day. I work for a company writing its own video codecs, who have a format that downloads a 70KB jar file before streaming the video. It's a Java applet (and still supports Java 1.1 - we've been doing this for a number of years now) and largely allows the model that Stanislav wishes. Is it ideal? Probably not. We can't do fullscreen or hardware-optimised playback. We have to implement our own controls that are out of place of the L&F of the OS and browser. We need people to install the Java VM. On Java versions older than JDK6u18 we still only get to use 64MB of memory (on a 2GB machine? Hah!). Not always going to work on your latest smartphone. On the flip side, I also see a lot of video container formats where people try to standardise something as generic as possible. Particularly OMFI (Bento), Quicktime, AAF. The simplest AAF File which simple refers to a piece of video content elsewhere is 250KB, because it has to define a complete vocabulary of items that it might deal with in the file, and jumps from pointer to pointer to actually get to the data. It's pretty much the closest we have to Stanislav's 1961 Air Force quote example, with everything short of actually including a decoder specification for the audio and video content. It's a minefield to work with. It's too flexible for its own good, and reading or writing it is anything but a trivial task (cue large libraries, larger than video decoders, to do that. Anything but ideal). So, one side involves a virtual machine to standardise hardware, and the other needs large libraries to parse and emit even the simplest of files. I've seen this world, and I think I'd rather have well-implemented standard decoders working on simpler wrappers instead.

eftpotrm 16y ago

> you don’t need anything more complex than something like X Windows I'm not sure X would be my prime example of simplicity...