There are a bunch of DOM differences... I will post them in a bit... FireFox and Moz have gotten a lot better, but it seems silly that it took several years for them to decide to implement the DOM in a way that would make the majority of existing pages work! There is still a bit of room for improvement.
I'm a huge fan of standards, but you're right,... it's the de-facto standard that is important, not the published one, at least if you're trying to promote acceptance of a new browser.
That's a valid theoretical point, but in the case of Javascript, the Microsoft extensions are intuitive and mostly object model improvements. Also, Microsoft spends millions teaching developers to use its approach, and so Moz and FF are better off using Microsoft's momentum for their own benefit (think jujitsu) and not trying to swim upstream in some sort of standards jihad that creates tons of extra work for the few developers who bother writing cross browser code.
not exactly. If Moz had embraced 100% compatibility with IE5.0, it would have gained tremendous market share very easily. Firefox is successful because it just works (mostly) on what's out there on the web without forcing the end user to be a victim in some sort of wacko standards jihad.
why should software developers wait for standards bodies to accomodate new features, particularly if those features are good ideas? If MS and Moz both implement a non-standard feature, it will likely become a standard the next time the standard gets updated. Meanwhile, everyone's life is made easier.
For some reason the Mozilla developers decided to release an implementation of javascript that, while standards compliant, was not compatible with 80% of javascript code on the web.
Note to Mozilla developers: Stop sitting there with your arms crossed insisting on a strict standards compliance! Build it, but don't force everyone to write tons of extra code because an innovative language feature that IE includes is not presently part of the standard!
Firefox has been better on this front, but there is still room for improvement.
mod the parent up. The lawsuit angle is the most valid business justification for Microsoft to open up any source code whatsoever. Imagine, for example, if SCO had pockets as deep as Microsoft how successful its legal attack would have been.
makes sense. I will probably do that using a combination of play frequency and last played date... it hasn't been much of a problem yet, though, since when I "went legal" I deleted all my illegally downloaded music and now only have the few hundred songs I've legally purchased from iTunes.
The one thing that I think PHP needs is optional typing and type checking (like Visual Basic on Objective C) and a consistent exception model (right now only PHP5 classes throw exceptions (the rest just make errors or return false), and there is no way to automatically turn all of the old PHP error situations into handlable exceptions (heck, even a single PHPException type would work!).
PHP is at a crossroads, and the best way to go is to an optional strict typing and exception handling approach such as the one used by Objc and VB. It would retain backward compatability while allowing for significant optimization. It would also prevent a ton of dumb errors that result from variable scope related semantic errors and other semantic errors that should be syntax errors.
1) event handling syntax is more intuitive 2) the absence of "throws" leads to cleaner looking code 3) better and more intuitive organization of api code 4) tons of small language improvements that make code easier to write
With the exception of the messy event handling syntax in Java, the differences are fairly minimal, but C# is simply an evolution of java in a lot of ways that is unencumbered by backward compatibility. Much like MacOS was easier/simpler than Windows 3.x for the same reason,.NET is currently clean and simple where Java has legacy (AWT, etc.) api all over the place and hasn't been able to change aspects of the syntax that have subsequently been found to be sub optimal.
That was just an added benefit. The nice thing about DRM is that it will inevitably be cheaper than lawyers, because if it weren't then nobody would bother to create it. QED.
Once the initial standards are in place, publishing DRM'ed works will become easy for anyone to do, as will distributing them. (My idea is to create an open DRM standard that allows for reselling at owner-determined prices, with a fixed percentage going to the original creator -- you'd end up with something more equivalent to ebay where markets set the price for everything and previously owned items competed with new items just like in the physical world)...
The overwhelming majority of what is created is created by entities that can afford to pay to enforce the copyright.
Technologies like DRM will be helpful in allowing much smaller entities to enjoy the same power as large corporations because it will be much cheaper to enforce. Ultimately, though, copyright law is a benefit to everyone except thieves.
so maybe my conspiracy theory is correct? Of course, mono is building their Windows.Forms api on top of gtk#, but perhaps Microsoft's lawyers consider opening the source to be a good way (as per the lessons learned from SCO) to put a stake in the ground about what is actually Microsoft intellectual property...
I just meant that the lack of skill that the original programmer has may in fact make the code virtually unmaintainable and unusable by anyone. So in effect, writing code and designing an "extensible" architecture is something of an art form.
Interesting thoughts. It would be nice if you coudl download the book from Kazaa, but the author (Mokyr) did such a great job that I would love to see him make some royalties. I mean, the guy must have spent at leat a year writing the book and he started out with tons of knowledge, etc.
Your point about software being something that can always be added to is true some of the time. Consider the situation with the unauthorized sequel that was written to Gone with the Wind. The family members of the author took the author of the unauthorized sequel to court, saying that that person had violated the copyright by borrowing significant themes and chracters from the original work.
I found that argument absurd, since a book is so much more than its themes and charcters.
I think that code is a lot like creative writing in a lot of ways... primarily in that it is an expression of the writer's creativity and ability to present a solution to a problem in a way that is understandable both to other humans and to the machine it will run on. The ability of that code to ever be a work in progress is also largely determined by the skill of the original programmer.
It is only fairly recently that software projects have taken on the massive scale that they currently have. In the past, a team of developers inside a single corporation was typically responsible for everything. That model was not ideal for all situations, however, and so something better was needed. How can companies still retain an incentive to produce great software, but still be able to tackle large projects that are outside of the scope of what they can handle using only their existing resources?
The answer is, creative licensing. The BSD license, the GPL and LGPL, the Apache license, etc., are all examples of the nuanced ways that businesses have been able to cooprate not only with other businesses but with educational institutions and individual developers all over the world.
In fact, some of these licenses specifically define the terms under which the software may be considered owned and when it may be copied.
This solution has solved the problem of the locally optimal state that existed prior, and has allowed for collaboration that helps everyone reach a global optimum.
What solved the problem of the greater good? In this case, it was not a top-down, wholesale change of laws but a simple, bottom-up, 100% voluntary introduction of new licenses into the fray. Nobody forced Sun to open up XFS or its DB software, but Sun did so voluntarily.
Some companies (such as game shops) choose the more restrictive licenses to protect their creative investment, while others choose the more open onces to facilitate the creation of economies of scale around their software platform.
The very problem that led to the creation of the FSF has been solved, but in a far more creative way than Richard Stallman could ever have imagined when he wrote his first rant.
The best part is, there is still a niche for copyrighted software, but as the openness of software increases and the licenses gain widespread use, the companies that stick to the old way of hiding behind their copyright are goinig to lose more and more ground.
Microsoft, the most profitable and successful company in the history of the world, has begun to open up its sources, albeit in a somewhat restrictive way. Sun is opening up sources left and right, as is IBM. IBM is also opening up patents in a huge move that is going to allow the commons to sink its productive teeth into that big pile of great ideas and shake things up even further.
I agree that there are good and bad things about copyright. Just like with patent law, there is the chance for too much regulation or too little. There was a great book that I read a while back called "The Lever of Riches" which talked about various nations' approaches to patent law over the years and how the prosperity of nations has risen and fallen based on having the right or wrong balance.
What are your thoughts on why software copyrights are so overwhelmingly negative, in comparison to others? How is writing a business rules engine or game AI engine, for example, different from writing a textbook or a novella in the context of copyright?
By choosing not to enumerate the rights that you feel are natural rights, you are neglecting to consider the ramifications of your statement. Copyright is a law, and the vast majority of laws are not specifically derived from natural rights, but are the consequences of the evolution of our basic social contract into a legal system capable of handling the needs of a complex society.
Copyright is quite simply the extension of the notion of property to a particular presentation of ideas.
Copyright is a structure that was put in place so that people would take the time to innovate new ways of presenting ideas, since the innovation of such things was valued more than the simple act of copying the ideas.
Copyright came into being in order to promote the activity of creating new innovation. This was based on two very simple observations:
People need to do something productive to put food on the table
People who are busy toiling in fields will have little time to innovate new ideas
Wouldn't it be nice if society could create a structure that would 1) give people an incentive to help everone by creating intellecutal property that is highly valued, and 2) allow people to sell that intellectual property so that they can have enough time to do it full time, since they're good at it.
The advent of structures such as corporations are yet a further advancement on the above structure: Wouldn't it be nice if people who had extra money could pool their resources and hire talented people to create stuff that those talented people couldn't afford to create on their own because they have to keep a day job or becuase the materials or marketing are expensive.
Corporations are just a bunch of folks pooling together talent and money in order to make everyone better off. Were it not for the corporation's initial investors, the talent would have been wasted while those people did other stuff that they weren't as good at and didn't like as much.
The notion that there is no intrinsic right to copyright is like saying that there no intrinsic right to freedom from slavery. I'd like to see a list of what my supposed intrinsic right are before I buy such a statement. Rather than being a notion of some kind of basic right, copyright is simply the terms under which many people invest their time and work.
The problem with your argument is that you are happy to ignore the fact that the people who worked hard to make the software were under the impression that it would be protected by copyright after they finished it.
It's awefully convenient to leach onto a society that has evolved around a system of copyright and as a result has millions of people productively employed creating copyrighted material.
The correct approach would be to challenge the constitutionality of copyright, or start a public awareness campaign about the benefits of an alternative system.
Lots of people use the psudo-philosophical jargon in the FSF documentation to justify their hard drive full of Warez and downloaded music, hence all the talk of the immorality of copyright.
What is more immoral is disregarding the rules that have existed thusfar and instead of trying to change the rules simply violating them.
The entire system that employs people to create copyrighted material is based on the existence of copyright, and so if you don't like copyright, then reverse the current situation in the courts (or through enough theft to make the producers go out of business) and watch the amount of material created slowly dwindle toward zero.
That quote from the FSF is just plain absurd. If the goal is to maximize hte benefit of humanity who is to decide how to do that? Why has the FSF settled on software patents as the main source of harm to humanity instead of, say, disease, famine, illiteracy, infant mortality, etc.?
The notion that there can ever be something that is best for humanity presupposes that some individual or group of individuals is fit to decide what is best (or else one supports anarchy in which software becomes secondary to personal security in most people's daily set of things to deal with)...
So since no single individual can possibly be fit (in a Democracy) to decide what is best for humanity, it makes sense for everyone to decide on his/her own. Again, if you oppose the notion of anarchy, then software license terms that are a condition of purchase must be respected.
Consider the idea that in nearly any business, particular prices come with particular terms. If you want to buy one CD for personal use you pay $14, but if you want to own the right to distribute the CD internationally you'd have to pay a lot more (since it's worth a lot more)... Just because you can distribute something internationally is irrelevant. You can buy some guns and rob a bank, but that does not entitle you to what is inside.
In other words, any argument against software fees is an argument against the social contract and against the rule of law.
True... Though that notion flies in the face of the basic social contract and civilization. When someone agrees to particular terms to provide something, others operating under the rule of law abide by the law if they decide to take the item.
When people download EULA'ed software or copyrighted music and then proceed to ignore the contract under which it was sold, that is theft.
It is fine to disagree with the concept of copyright or to believe that everyone is entitled to all software, but saying that a developer who worked hard on some code to put food on the table must give you that code free (after he spend his time working on it with the expectation that people would pay for it) is coercion and theft.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a bunch of DOM differences... I will post them in a bit... FireFox and Moz have gotten a lot better, but it seems silly that it took several years for them to decide to implement the DOM in a way that would make the majority of existing pages work! There is still a bit of room for improvement.
I'm a huge fan of standards, but you're right,... it's the de-facto standard that is important, not the published one, at least if you're trying to promote acceptance of a new browser.
That's a valid theoretical point, but in the case of Javascript, the Microsoft extensions are intuitive and mostly object model improvements. Also, Microsoft spends millions teaching developers to use its approach, and so Moz and FF are better off using Microsoft's momentum for their own benefit (think jujitsu) and not trying to swim upstream in some sort of standards jihad that creates tons of extra work for the few developers who bother writing cross browser code.
not exactly. If Moz had embraced 100% compatibility with IE5.0, it would have gained tremendous market share very easily. Firefox is successful because it just works (mostly) on what's out there on the web without forcing the end user to be a victim in some sort of wacko standards jihad.
why should software developers wait for standards bodies to accomodate new features, particularly if those features are good ideas? If MS and Moz both implement a non-standard feature, it will likely become a standard the next time the standard gets updated. Meanwhile, everyone's life is made easier.
For some reason the Mozilla developers decided to release an implementation of javascript that, while standards compliant, was not compatible with 80% of javascript code on the web.
Note to Mozilla developers: Stop sitting there with your arms crossed insisting on a strict standards compliance! Build it, but don't force everyone to write tons of extra code because an innovative language feature that IE includes is not presently part of the standard!
Firefox has been better on this front, but there is still room for improvement.
mod the parent up. The lawsuit angle is the most valid business justification for Microsoft to open up any source code whatsoever. Imagine, for example, if SCO had pockets as deep as Microsoft how successful its legal attack would have been.
makes sense. I will probably do that using a combination of play frequency and last played date... it hasn't been much of a problem yet, though, since when I "went legal" I deleted all my illegally downloaded music and now only have the few hundred songs I've legally purchased from iTunes.
Quick question. Does iTunes keep track of which songs you've listened to on the Shuffle and thus generate a fresh smart playlist each time you sync?
The one thing that I think PHP needs is optional typing and type checking (like Visual Basic on Objective C) and a consistent exception model (right now only PHP5 classes throw exceptions (the rest just make errors or return false), and there is no way to automatically turn all of the old PHP error situations into handlable exceptions (heck, even a single PHPException type would work!).
PHP is at a crossroads, and the best way to go is to an optional strict typing and exception handling approach such as the one used by Objc and VB. It would retain backward compatability while allowing for significant optimization. It would also prevent a ton of dumb errors that result from variable scope related semantic errors and other semantic errors that should be syntax errors.
1) event handling syntax is more intuitive
.NET is currently clean and simple where Java has legacy (AWT, etc.) api all over the place and hasn't been able to change aspects of the syntax that have subsequently been found to be sub optimal.
2) the absence of "throws" leads to cleaner looking code
3) better and more intuitive organization of api code
4) tons of small language improvements that make code easier to write
With the exception of the messy event handling syntax in Java, the differences are fairly minimal, but C# is simply an evolution of java in a lot of ways that is unencumbered by backward compatibility. Much like MacOS was easier/simpler than Windows 3.x for the same reason,
That was just an added benefit. The nice thing about DRM is that it will inevitably be cheaper than lawyers, because if it weren't then nobody would bother to create it. QED.
Once the initial standards are in place, publishing DRM'ed works will become easy for anyone to do, as will distributing them. (My idea is to create an open DRM standard that allows for reselling at owner-determined prices, with a fixed percentage going to the original creator -- you'd end up with something more equivalent to ebay where markets set the price for everything and previously owned items competed with new items just like in the physical world)...
this is doubtful...
Mod the parent up. I've been wondering that myself too. In fact, it could probably be done even more quickly using mono and gtk#.
Under what competitive or technological circumstances would Microsoft consider releasing its own linux distribution?
(would it use the minix filesystem? j/k).
The overwhelming majority of what is created is created by entities that can afford to pay to enforce the copyright.
Technologies like DRM will be helpful in allowing much smaller entities to enjoy the same power as large corporations because it will be much cheaper to enforce. Ultimately, though, copyright law is a benefit to everyone except thieves.
so maybe my conspiracy theory is correct? Of course, mono is building their Windows.Forms api on top of gtk#, but perhaps Microsoft's lawyers consider opening the source to be a good way (as per the lessons learned from SCO) to put a stake in the ground about what is actually Microsoft intellectual property...
I just meant that the lack of skill that the original programmer has may in fact make the code virtually unmaintainable and unusable by anyone. So in effect, writing code and designing an "extensible" architecture is something of an art form.
Could this be an attempt to get source code out into public view before Mono finishes its Windows.Forms implementation?
.net on BSD?
Or was this code already available on Microsoft's website for building
Interesting thoughts. It would be nice if you coudl download the book from Kazaa, but the author (Mokyr) did such a great job that I would love to see him make some royalties. I mean, the guy must have spent at leat a year writing the book and he started out with tons of knowledge, etc.
Your point about software being something that can always be added to is true some of the time. Consider the situation with the unauthorized sequel that was written to Gone with the Wind. The family members of the author took the author of the unauthorized sequel to court, saying that that person had violated the copyright by borrowing significant themes and chracters from the original work.
I found that argument absurd, since a book is so much more than its themes and charcters.
I think that code is a lot like creative writing in a lot of ways... primarily in that it is an expression of the writer's creativity and ability to present a solution to a problem in a way that is understandable both to other humans and to the machine it will run on. The ability of that code to ever be a work in progress is also largely determined by the skill of the original programmer.
It is only fairly recently that software projects have taken on the massive scale that they currently have. In the past, a team of developers inside a single corporation was typically responsible for everything. That model was not ideal for all situations, however, and so something better was needed. How can companies still retain an incentive to produce great software, but still be able to tackle large projects that are outside of the scope of what they can handle using only their existing resources?
The answer is, creative licensing. The BSD license, the GPL and LGPL, the Apache license, etc., are all examples of the nuanced ways that businesses have been able to cooprate not only with other businesses but with educational institutions and individual developers all over the world.
In fact, some of these licenses specifically define the terms under which the software may be considered owned and when it may be copied.
This solution has solved the problem of the locally optimal state that existed prior, and has allowed for collaboration that helps everyone reach a global optimum.
What solved the problem of the greater good? In this case, it was not a top-down, wholesale change of laws but a simple, bottom-up, 100% voluntary introduction of new licenses into the fray. Nobody forced Sun to open up XFS or its DB software, but Sun did so voluntarily.
Some companies (such as game shops) choose the more restrictive licenses to protect their creative investment, while others choose the more open onces to facilitate the creation of economies of scale around their software platform.
The very problem that led to the creation of the FSF has been solved, but in a far more creative way than Richard Stallman could ever have imagined when he wrote his first rant.
The best part is, there is still a niche for copyrighted software, but as the openness of software increases and the licenses gain widespread use, the companies that stick to the old way of hiding behind their copyright are goinig to lose more and more ground.
Microsoft, the most profitable and successful company in the history of the world, has begun to open up its sources, albeit in a somewhat restrictive way. Sun is opening up sources left and right, as is IBM. IBM is also opening up patents in a huge move that is going to allow the commons to sink its productive teeth into that big pile of great ideas and shake things up even further.
Interesting comments.
I agree that there are good and bad things about copyright. Just like with patent law, there is the chance for too much regulation or too little. There was a great book that I read a while back called "The Lever of Riches" which talked about various nations' approaches to patent law over the years and how the prosperity of nations has risen and fallen based on having the right or wrong balance.
What are your thoughts on why software copyrights are so overwhelmingly negative, in comparison to others? How is writing a business rules engine or game AI engine, for example, different from writing a textbook or a novella in the context of copyright?
Copyright is quite simply the extension of the notion of property to a particular presentation of ideas.
Copyright is a structure that was put in place so that people would take the time to innovate new ways of presenting ideas, since the innovation of such things was valued more than the simple act of copying the ideas.
Copyright came into being in order to promote the activity of creating new innovation. This was based on two very simple observations:
People need to do something productive to put food on the table
People who are busy toiling in fields will have little time to innovate new ideas
Wouldn't it be nice if society could create a structure that would 1) give people an incentive to help everone by creating intellecutal property that is highly valued, and 2) allow people to sell that intellectual property so that they can have enough time to do it full time, since they're good at it.
The advent of structures such as corporations are yet a further advancement on the above structure: Wouldn't it be nice if people who had extra money could pool their resources and hire talented people to create stuff that those talented people couldn't afford to create on their own because they have to keep a day job or becuase the materials or marketing are expensive.
Corporations are just a bunch of folks pooling together talent and money in order to make everyone better off. Were it not for the corporation's initial investors, the talent would have been wasted while those people did other stuff that they weren't as good at and didn't like as much.
The notion that there is no intrinsic right to copyright is like saying that there no intrinsic right to freedom from slavery. I'd like to see a list of what my supposed intrinsic right are before I buy such a statement. Rather than being a notion of some kind of basic right, copyright is simply the terms under which many people invest their time and work.
The problem with your argument is that you are happy to ignore the fact that the people who worked hard to make the software were under the impression that it would be protected by copyright after they finished it.
It's awefully convenient to leach onto a society that has evolved around a system of copyright and as a result has millions of people productively employed creating copyrighted material.
The correct approach would be to challenge the constitutionality of copyright, or start a public awareness campaign about the benefits of an alternative system.
Lots of people use the psudo-philosophical jargon in the FSF documentation to justify their hard drive full of Warez and downloaded music, hence all the talk of the immorality of copyright.
What is more immoral is disregarding the rules that have existed thusfar and instead of trying to change the rules simply violating them.
The entire system that employs people to create copyrighted material is based on the existence of copyright, and so if you don't like copyright, then reverse the current situation in the courts (or through enough theft to make the producers go out of business) and watch the amount of material created slowly dwindle toward zero.
That quote from the FSF is just plain absurd. If the goal is to maximize hte benefit of humanity who is to decide how to do that? Why has the FSF settled on software patents as the main source of harm to humanity instead of, say, disease, famine, illiteracy, infant mortality, etc.?
The notion that there can ever be something that is best for humanity presupposes that some individual or group of individuals is fit to decide what is best (or else one supports anarchy in which software becomes secondary to personal security in most people's daily set of things to deal with)...
So since no single individual can possibly be fit (in a Democracy) to decide what is best for humanity, it makes sense for everyone to decide on his/her own. Again, if you oppose the notion of anarchy, then software license terms that are a condition of purchase must be respected.
Consider the idea that in nearly any business, particular prices come with particular terms. If you want to buy one CD for personal use you pay $14, but if you want to own the right to distribute the CD internationally you'd have to pay a lot more (since it's worth a lot more)... Just because you can distribute something internationally is irrelevant. You can buy some guns and rob a bank, but that does not entitle you to what is inside.
In other words, any argument against software fees is an argument against the social contract and against the rule of law.
True... Though that notion flies in the face of the basic social contract and civilization. When someone agrees to particular terms to provide something, others operating under the rule of law abide by the law if they decide to take the item.
When people download EULA'ed software or copyrighted music and then proceed to ignore the contract under which it was sold, that is theft.
It is fine to disagree with the concept of copyright or to believe that everyone is entitled to all software, but saying that a developer who worked hard on some code to put food on the table must give you that code free (after he spend his time working on it with the expectation that people would pay for it) is coercion and theft.