Once you have put a page on the Web, you need to keep it there indefinitely.
How is this possible if you happen to lose control of the domain? I wrote a letter to Tim Berners-Lee about this issue.
In "Cool URIs don't change" you wrote that URIs SHOULD never change. However, you left some questions unanswered:
In theory, the domain name space owner owns the domain name space and therefore all URIs in it.
However, what happens when ownership of the domain name is suddenly removed from under a user's feet?
Except insolvency, nothing prevents the domain name owner from keeping the name.
Wrong. A trademark owner in Yakkestonia can drag a domain name owner into WIPO court and have the domain forcibly transferred. Under ICANN's dispute resolution policy, the plaintiff gets to pick the court, and WIPO has shown itself to find for the plaintiff in an overwhelming majority of cases. This is sometimes called "reverse domain name hijacking."
And in theory the URI space under your domain name is totally under your control, so you can make it as stable as you like.
Not if a hosting provider provides only subdomains (or worse yet, subdirectories) and does not offer an affordable hosting package that lets a client use his or her own domain name. Would it be reasonable to construe the "Cool URIs don't change" article as a warning against using such providers?
John doesn't maintain that file any more, Jane does. Whatever was that URI doing with John's name in it? It was in his directory? I see.
What is the alternative to this situation for documents that began their lives hosted on an ISP's or university's server space?
Pretty much the only good reason for a document to disappear from the Web is that the company which owned the domain name went out of business or can no longer afford to keep the server running.
Or that the hosting provider pulled the document under a strained interpretation of its Terms of Service because the company didn't like the document's content.
Is there an official W3C answer to these questions?
The key to making links that don't rot is to design a URI schema that's both independent of any redesigns of your site and independent of any particular way of doing things.
You can't mod_rewrite a domain name that you have lost control over. If you have a popular site hosted on a university's server, and then you graduate, what do you do? If you put up a site, some Yakkestonian trademark holder takes it from you in WIPO court, and you're forced to go to Gandi.net to get a new domain, what do you do?
For now, the PR is that an electronic document is somehow different than a book. But that is not being argued in court. When the time comes, the LEGAL argument will be simple. An electronic document is just like a book.
I'm sure the checkout lady won't mind you holding up a drinking glass to the Thriftway fingerprint reader.
As AC noted previously, it's straightforward to make a mold from such a glass and then cast a glove from that. Then you can go to Thriftway and steal soda, snacks, and petrol.
I have seen many VB apps claim to be under the GPL; but since Visual Basic has no open source compiler, no sir, they are not.
It doesn't need a free compiler to be free software. (Wasn't Emacs GPL'd before GCC was finished?) The GNU GPL, section 3, states that "However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable." So as long as you distribute Visual Basic's runtime separately from the application, it's possible to GPL a VB app. (VB.NET makes this even easier because the.NET runtime is available from Windows Update.) However, a free app that relies on a non-free compiler is still useless to the Free World.
Seems that if Windows 2000 Pro workstations connect to SBS 2000 server, the licenses get gobbled up until no one else can connect, even though there's only 7 computers connecting to a 10-licensed server. The patch still doesn't work properly).
Microsoft typically sells server licenses for a given number of terminals that may access the software. Perhaps the software logged more than 10 MAC addresses in one week.
I thought [Super NES's sound CPU] had a lovely instruction set compared to most 8 bit machines.
IIRC, it was in essence an extended 6502 with the instruction bits permuted.
the real pain was the tiny and seemingly unpredictable ports between the 658C16 and the SPC700 - four ports (one byte each way) but when you poked bytes in one end you didn't know what order they were going to come out the other end in:-(
By "SPC700 processor", I meant "entire SPC700 side of the system". Without any method of debugging the sound loader, there is no way to know why a program isn't working. I gauge difficulty of programming an audio system by how much effort it takes to say "Hello World".
is it so hard for them to give me envelope controls on indivual samples? Pretty please! I had it on the SNES, so why not on the GBA?
GBA music formats are typically MOD-like.
I had it on the SNES, so why not on the GBA? (I think they are mixing them in software so they claim it would cost too much processor power)
Super NES had hardware mixing. GBA audio is essentially the same as a Sound Blaster Pro: two 8-bit sample channels with DMA playback, and some legacy (Ad Lib for SB; DMG audio for GBA) tone generators. Mixing is at least a multiply (volume) and two adds (playback frequency and mixing sum) per voice per channel.
There are several GBA MOD players available for licensing, and one to be released soon is Lesser GPL'd.
every time a browser asks for something from your webserver, it sends a list of formats it understands [w3.org], including picture formats.
I'm aware of HTTP/1.1's Accept: header, but what if the user agent indicates that it doesn't understand any of the transparent image formats, audio formats, or video formats that your web authoring tools can generate? Deny the user the page because the advertisers won't pay for the bandwidth to send it?
I don't think there are too many game dev companies still producing software for the SNES...:)
Several game dev companies are producing software for a handheld system that is a Super NES yet isn't a Super NES. The Game Boy Advance is twice as powerful as the Super NES in almost every aspect of 2D graphics, and about as powerful as a Super NES plus Super FX or an Atari Jaguar for 3D. And it doesn't have that annoying SPC700 coprocessor.
Iexplore still can't render any PNG image with the least bit of transparent decency.
IE 6 on my machine handles indexed PNG images that use binary (not alpha) transparency just fine. This means that it will properly handle almost all PNGs converted from GIF, as GIF supports only binary transparency and only 255 colors per frame. (IE will not be able to handle PNGs converted from transparent high-color GIF images, that is, GIF images that use multiple frames, each with their own palettes, to draw 4,096 colors.)
You're right that IE 6 will screw up any other transparent PNG image though. But why, on a web site with a solid-color background, do you really need a transparent image? Yes, I know about the "PNG on top of JPEG" hack for site logos, but that typically uses an indexed PNG, putting any drop shadow or halo in the JPEG.
Although jpg compression is definitely helpful, the article forgets to mention that two image formats are supported by all browsers. GIF being the second.
In addition, 4.0 and newer browsers support Portable Network Graphics (PNG).
So what happens when there's a simultaneous write and read to the same side of the same platter? [a whole bunch of examples of races between writes on a hard drive] You'd have to do so much checking of the data to see if there's a danger of events happening out of order, and events that affect each other, that you'd end up losing all of the performance gains.
All? Electrons in the controller chip move much faster than the metal head arms of a hard disk. Besides, all you'd really have to do is make sure that both heads don't seek to the same cylinder when one head is writing.
Red Hat would never be able to support the hardware through their installation
Red Hat Linux's installer supports any CD-ROM drive that conforms to the most common ATAPI protocols. Just have your internally cached CD-ROM drive speak these protocols, and it'll still work.
Thank you Sir, my submission to the patent office [for a moving-head CD-ROM reader] is on the way.
Unless you just developed this idea into a workable invention (not likely in 2.5 hours), you can't patent this because you're not the inventor. Only the inventor can file for a patent.
I rarely use my CD-ROM to install software, since 'apt-get' directly off HTTP is almost as fast
"Rarely" meaning "only for games," right? Most PC games are non-free because artists, musicians, and level designers have a tougher time accepting the free software or open source philosophy than coders do. Because they sell their product at retail, they have 700 MB (capacity of a CD) to work in rather than 20 MB (the maximum attention span of a user behind 56K). (The fact that PC games are available primarily for Windows is beside my point, partly because Wine can run the vast majority of 2D Windows games.)
Can you use this thing in conjunction with some other software to bypass the anti-taping measures used such as Macrovision?
Yes you can. It's lawful in the United States to make video clarifier devices that fix the NTSC conformance issues that a Macrovision signal produces because they have substantial uses other than circumvention of fair-use barriers and thus fall under the exception to 17 USC 1201(a)(2) and (b)(1) because 1. Macrovision isn't "effective access control" but merely copy quality degradation, and 2. the right to prohibit fair use isn't "a right of a copyright holder under this title." Subsection (k) does mention Macrovision specifically but gives blanket exemptions to digital video recorders, professional analog VCRs (while potentially defining "professional" to include consumer-grade VCRs used by professional K-12 teachers), and VCRs that can receive signals over fiber (through a suitably stretched interpretation of "camera lens").
Sen. Hollings (D-Di$ney) writes a bill called SSSCA. Technology industry hates it. EFF sounds an alert.
Hollings clarifies SSSCA, renames it CBDTPA, and introduces it in committee. It explicitly prohibits interference with fair use. But the technology industry still hates it. EFF sounds an alert. Some Slashdot readers claim that Hollings renamed it to cause confusion. They begin to refer to Hollings's policeware bills as "The Hollings Bill".
Hollings introduces a new bill that Slashdot readers may like better. EFF likes it. But now the term "Hollings Bill" has become ambiguous, making it harder to talk about future versions of what is now called the CBDTPA.
Or is this new bill part of the CBDTPA family? As Dimensio suggested, does Hollings intend to add the CBDTPA as a rider to this bill?
I am seeing "cable customers" with very interesting browsing patterns that suggests this is already happening. They appear to be normal IE98 browsers, but pick up one page per minute in no particular order. Something like that is more likely done from something like a search engine script list than a human.
If the user agent says MSIECrawler, then it's a browser feature. Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 (packaged with Windows 98) and later have a feature to mirror web sites locally for offline browsing.
The DVD is probably all proprietary stuff - since it supposedly can spin both ways.
This urban legend has been applied to several video game systems. It's probably not true. It originated from the fact that some of the systems start from the outside of the disc and go in, as opposed to regular CDs and DVDs that start from the inside and go out. The PS2 and Xbox both have their boot sectors on the second layer of the DVD, which is typically written starting at the outside.
1. A contribution for the support of a government required of persons, groups, or businesses within the domain of that government.
If the next version of the Hollings bill (0.1 was called SSSCA; 0.2 was called CBDTPA) mandates a digital rights management operating system on all digital media devices, and Microsoft has a government-granted monopoly on such operating systems, then the U.S. government has in effect delegated its power to regulate operating systems to Microsoft Corporation. In effect, Microsoft becomes a semi-government agency like the US Postal Service, with the power to tax computers.
If someone deep links to one of my pages that somehow screwed up navigation
The design of the World Wide Web, indeed the very definition of a URL (which stands for uniform resource locator), requires that each valid URL point to a resource. If you structure your resources (that is, web pages) such that a request for a particular resource produces useless navigation, that's your problem. It's not very hard to write a script to check what frame you're in and open a new window, or to provide a link at the top of a page that sets up the proper frame environment.
And it's not very hard either to redesign your site to use CSS Positioning or <table> layout instead of frames. Which of the top 10 most popular web sites still uses frames? Yahoo! doesn't; CNN.com doesn't; MSN doesn't (except for external links within Hotmail messages); Google doesn't (except to display context for an image search result); Slashdot doesn't.
Yes, I do agree with everyone else that we shouldn't have laws against accessing websites or making collect calls. Or spam!
What about DDOS (distributed denial of service)? Should 13-year-olds have the right to flood you off the network by hammering your connection with thousands of well-formed HTTP requests?
I can't believe the USPTO actually let them trademark the letter I when used in relation to computers and such.
By now, the "I" trademark has little if any legal force left. Unlike with copyrights and patents, if you don't enforce a trademark by suing or licensing, you lose exclusive rights in the mark.
ObDuron: On the other hand, a paint manufacturer doesn't generally have the right to prevent a semiconductor maker from using a similar or identical trademark because paint and semiconductors are considered separate domains, even though the first hard drives' platters were essentially coated with paint.
Slashdot Mirror
Once you have put a page on the Web, you need to keep it there indefinitely.
How is this possible if you happen to lose control of the domain? I wrote a letter to Tim Berners-Lee about this issue.
The key to making links that don't rot is to design a URI schema that's both independent of any redesigns of your site and independent of any particular way of doing things.
You can't mod_rewrite a domain name that you have lost control over. If you have a popular site hosted on a university's server, and then you graduate, what do you do? If you put up a site, some Yakkestonian trademark holder takes it from you in WIPO court, and you're forced to go to Gandi.net to get a new domain, what do you do?
For now, the PR is that an electronic document is somehow different than a book. But that is not being argued in court. When the time comes, the LEGAL argument will be simple. An electronic document is just like a book.
EULAs on documentation, even printed documentation, are extremely commonplace in many industries. See also trade secret law and non-disclosure agreement.
I'm sure the checkout lady won't mind you holding up a drinking glass to the Thriftway fingerprint reader.
As AC noted previously, it's straightforward to make a mold from such a glass and then cast a glove from that. Then you can go to Thriftway and steal soda, snacks, and petrol.
I have seen many VB apps claim to be under the GPL; but since Visual Basic has no open source compiler, no sir, they are not.
It doesn't need a free compiler to be free software. (Wasn't Emacs GPL'd before GCC was finished?) The GNU GPL, section 3, states that "However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable." So as long as you distribute Visual Basic's runtime separately from the application, it's possible to GPL a VB app. (VB.NET makes this even easier because the .NET runtime is available from Windows Update.) However, a free app that relies on a non-free compiler is still useless to the Free World.
Seems that if Windows 2000 Pro workstations connect to SBS 2000 server, the licenses get gobbled up until no one else can connect, even though there's only 7 computers connecting to a 10-licensed server. The patch still doesn't work properly).
Microsoft typically sells server licenses for a given number of terminals that may access the software. Perhaps the software logged more than 10 MAC addresses in one week.
I thought [Super NES's sound CPU] had a lovely instruction set compared to most 8 bit machines.
IIRC, it was in essence an extended 6502 with the instruction bits permuted.
the real pain was the tiny and seemingly unpredictable ports between the 658C16 and the SPC700 - four ports (one byte each way) but when you poked bytes in one end you didn't know what order they were going to come out the other end in :-(
By "SPC700 processor", I meant "entire SPC700 side of the system". Without any method of debugging the sound loader, there is no way to know why a program isn't working. I gauge difficulty of programming an audio system by how much effort it takes to say "Hello World".
is it so hard for them to give me envelope controls on indivual samples? Pretty please! I had it on the SNES, so why not on the GBA?
GBA music formats are typically MOD-like.
I had it on the SNES, so why not on the GBA? (I think they are mixing them in software so they claim it would cost too much processor power)
Super NES had hardware mixing. GBA audio is essentially the same as a Sound Blaster Pro: two 8-bit sample channels with DMA playback, and some legacy (Ad Lib for SB; DMG audio for GBA) tone generators. Mixing is at least a multiply (volume) and two adds (playback frequency and mixing sum) per voice per channel.
There are several GBA MOD players available for licensing, and one to be released soon is Lesser GPL'd.
every time a browser asks for something from your webserver, it sends a list of formats it understands [w3.org], including picture formats.
I'm aware of HTTP/1.1's Accept: header, but what if the user agent indicates that it doesn't understand any of the transparent image formats, audio formats, or video formats that your web authoring tools can generate? Deny the user the page because the advertisers won't pay for the bandwidth to send it?
I don't think there are too many game dev companies still producing software for the SNES... :)
Several game dev companies are producing software for a handheld system that is a Super NES yet isn't a Super NES. The Game Boy Advance is twice as powerful as the Super NES in almost every aspect of 2D graphics, and about as powerful as a Super NES plus Super FX or an Atari Jaguar for 3D. And it doesn't have that annoying SPC700 coprocessor.
Unless you're a multinational corporation with enough money to buy off Congress and the USPTO.
In the case of "inventions for hire," the usual procedure is that the inventors agree to sign the patent over to the company once the USPTO grants it.
Iexplore still can't render any PNG image with the least bit of transparent decency.
IE 6 on my machine handles indexed PNG images that use binary (not alpha) transparency just fine. This means that it will properly handle almost all PNGs converted from GIF, as GIF supports only binary transparency and only 255 colors per frame. (IE will not be able to handle PNGs converted from transparent high-color GIF images, that is, GIF images that use multiple frames, each with their own palettes, to draw 4,096 colors.)
You're right that IE 6 will screw up any other transparent PNG image though. But why, on a web site with a solid-color background, do you really need a transparent image? Yes, I know about the "PNG on top of JPEG" hack for site logos, but that typically uses an indexed PNG, putting any drop shadow or halo in the JPEG.
Although jpg compression is definitely helpful, the article forgets to mention that two image formats are supported by all browsers. GIF being the second.
In addition, 4.0 and newer browsers support Portable Network Graphics (PNG).
GIFs should be used for vector based graphics
No they shouldn't. Use PNG for still images. Use SWF (now an open format) or MNG (not much browser support yet but works in Mozilla and Konqueror) for animations.
and provides a better overall quality/size advantage when done right.
PNG can be 10% smaller than GIF when crushed properly.
So what happens when there's a simultaneous write and read to the same side of the same platter? [a whole bunch of examples of races between writes on a hard drive] You'd have to do so much checking of the data to see if there's a danger of events happening out of order, and events that affect each other, that you'd end up losing all of the performance gains.
All? Electrons in the controller chip move much faster than the metal head arms of a hard disk. Besides, all you'd really have to do is make sure that both heads don't seek to the same cylinder when one head is writing.
Red Hat would never be able to support the hardware through their installation
Red Hat Linux's installer supports any CD-ROM drive that conforms to the most common ATAPI protocols. Just have your internally cached CD-ROM drive speak these protocols, and it'll still work.
Thank you Sir, my submission to the patent office [for a moving-head CD-ROM reader] is on the way.
Unless you just developed this idea into a workable invention (not likely in 2.5 hours), you can't patent this because you're not the inventor. Only the inventor can file for a patent.
Broadband is nice.
Broadband is nice but expensive. What would you rather pay, $60 for a CD-ROM drive plus an install set, or $200,000 for a house in an area served by broadband?
I rarely use my CD-ROM to install software, since 'apt-get' directly off HTTP is almost as fast
"Rarely" meaning "only for games," right? Most PC games are non-free because artists, musicians, and level designers have a tougher time accepting the free software or open source philosophy than coders do. Because they sell their product at retail, they have 700 MB (capacity of a CD) to work in rather than 20 MB (the maximum attention span of a user behind 56K). (The fact that PC games are available primarily for Windows is beside my point, partly because Wine can run the vast majority of 2D Windows games.)
Can you use this thing in conjunction with some other software to bypass the anti-taping measures used such as Macrovision?
Yes you can. It's lawful in the United States to make video clarifier devices that fix the NTSC conformance issues that a Macrovision signal produces because they have substantial uses other than circumvention of fair-use barriers and thus fall under the exception to 17 USC 1201(a)(2) and (b)(1) because 1. Macrovision isn't "effective access control" but merely copy quality degradation, and 2. the right to prohibit fair use isn't "a right of a copyright holder under this title." Subsection (k) does mention Macrovision specifically but gives blanket exemptions to digital video recorders, professional analog VCRs (while potentially defining "professional" to include consumer-grade VCRs used by professional K-12 teachers), and VCRs that can receive signals over fiber (through a suitably stretched interpretation of "camera lens").
Get a lawyer.
Eisner is sweating bullets that someone will access Walt's medical data and find out that he was scheduled for revival in 2001
Myth Busters! Walter Elias Disney wasn't frozen but instead cremated two days after he died.
Sen. Hollings (D-Di$ney) writes a bill called SSSCA. Technology industry hates it. EFF sounds an alert.
Hollings clarifies SSSCA, renames it CBDTPA, and introduces it in committee. It explicitly prohibits interference with fair use. But the technology industry still hates it. EFF sounds an alert. Some Slashdot readers claim that Hollings renamed it to cause confusion. They begin to refer to Hollings's policeware bills as "The Hollings Bill".
Hollings introduces a new bill that Slashdot readers may like better. EFF likes it. But now the term "Hollings Bill" has become ambiguous, making it harder to talk about future versions of what is now called the CBDTPA.
Or is this new bill part of the CBDTPA family? As Dimensio suggested, does Hollings intend to add the CBDTPA as a rider to this bill?
I am seeing "cable customers" with very interesting browsing patterns that suggests this is already happening. They appear to be normal IE98 browsers, but pick up one page per minute in no particular order. Something like that is more likely done from something like a search engine script list than a human.
If the user agent says MSIECrawler, then it's a browser feature. Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 (packaged with Windows 98) and later have a feature to mirror web sites locally for offline browsing.
The DVD is probably all proprietary stuff - since it supposedly can spin both ways.
This urban legend has been applied to several video game systems. It's probably not true. It originated from the fact that some of the systems start from the outside of the disc and go in, as opposed to regular CDs and DVDs that start from the inside and go out. The PS2 and Xbox both have their boot sectors on the second layer of the DVD, which is typically written starting at the outside.
1. A contribution for the support of a government required of persons, groups, or businesses within the domain of that government.
If the next version of the Hollings bill (0.1 was called SSSCA; 0.2 was called CBDTPA) mandates a digital rights management operating system on all digital media devices, and Microsoft has a government-granted monopoly on such operating systems, then the U.S. government has in effect delegated its power to regulate operating systems to Microsoft Corporation. In effect, Microsoft becomes a semi-government agency like the US Postal Service, with the power to tax computers.
If someone deep links to one of my pages that somehow screwed up navigation
The design of the World Wide Web, indeed the very definition of a URL (which stands for uniform resource locator), requires that each valid URL point to a resource. If you structure your resources (that is, web pages) such that a request for a particular resource produces useless navigation, that's your problem. It's not very hard to write a script to check what frame you're in and open a new window, or to provide a link at the top of a page that sets up the proper frame environment.
And it's not very hard either to redesign your site to use CSS Positioning or <table> layout instead of frames. Which of the top 10 most popular web sites still uses frames? Yahoo! doesn't; CNN.com doesn't; MSN doesn't (except for external links within Hotmail messages); Google doesn't (except to display context for an image search result); Slashdot doesn't.
Yes, I do agree with everyone else that we shouldn't have laws against accessing websites or making collect calls. Or spam!
What about DDOS (distributed denial of service)? Should 13-year-olds have the right to flood you off the network by hammering your connection with thousands of well-formed HTTP requests?
I can't believe the USPTO actually let them trademark the letter I when used in relation to computers and such.
By now, the "I" trademark has little if any legal force left. Unlike with copyrights and patents, if you don't enforce a trademark by suing or licensing, you lose exclusive rights in the mark.
ObDuron: On the other hand, a paint manufacturer doesn't generally have the right to prevent a semiconductor maker from using a similar or identical trademark because paint and semiconductors are considered separate domains, even though the first hard drives' platters were essentially coated with paint.