First the ribbon, then the user interface formely known as Metro, and now they've taken Firefox, too! I feel trapped into a nightmare, where every application is becoming WinAmp.
I'm confident, however, that sooner or later this will end - and they'll introduce new revolutionary software products with a uniform appearance, and user interfaces exposing consistent and predictable behaviour. Why, Microsoft have already started, they've reintroduced the Windows 3.1 look-and-feel (flat controls, window title in the middle, system-modal dialog boxes taking up the whole screen) and they're selling it as a novelty. I'm less convinced, though, by the Windows 1.0 features they've been introducing as well (windows can't overlap, but hey, with the upcoming improvements you'll be able to run one application and a half at the same time! Conditions apply.)
You get code without symbol names and types, and that's assuming the authors hadn't outright obfuscated the code, otherwise you also get an entangled code flow.
They aren't focusing on "the script that makes text blink on some random website". They're worrying about the rising importance of Javascript in everyday computing, which should matter a lot for the FSF given that free software enthusiasts generally start coding on the software / hardware platforms that they use at home or at the school.
We're quickly heading into a future where personal computers are merely a frame running applications which actually are web sites residing on a remote host. So pushing for the adoption of free Javascript frameworks is getting just as important as promoting free C libraries and binaries has been until now.
The FSF had long seen this happening and they've been advocating for freedom in Javascript for years; while a lot of people laughed at them with straw men such as "meh, Stallman wants free blinking text", once again their position - which once appeared to many as a paranoid's stance - is reavealing itself to be quite insightful.
Your arguments makes the same level of sense as saying that every software is open source because disassemblers exist. Hint: they don't give you back source code.
In contrast, Islam uses the word "Allah", which comes from "il illah", "The (One) God", which is a title and not a personal name. Also note that despite the claims of the Muslims that Allah is the God of Abraham, this claim must be false when scriptures are compared.
Christian Arabs used the name Allah to designate the christian God long before Islam even existed.
I'm not talking about glasses uploading automatically. I'm talking about them using remote storage on Google servers for anything that they shoot, which is already an option on Android, and will surely be even more important on Glass, even more so if we suppose that the glasses won't have the computing power and storage capacity required for realtime image processing which is going to be an important application for that kind of device.
A dorky headpiece that could soon be worn by millions of people, continuously taking billions of high resolution photos and video clips with precise date/time/gps locations, and sending all of that data to a single commercial entity whose business is to harvest and process personal data, with a track record of privacy stumbles, an extremely high computational capacity and already knowing lots of details about millions of persons including faces, names, email and street address, whole phone books, geographic locations.
My company has an entire office full of people in Italy that do nothing because we have no more use for the facility but the local laws do not allow us to fire them. Instead we make them show up every day, for their 7-8 hours and sit in chairs and do nothing.
Fire your lawyers then. In Italy you can fire people you no longer need, it's called "justified objective reason", and it applies in cases of crisis, downsizing, restructuring, or ceased utility of the job position in general.
So, because one particular design has a problem, you would condemn all nuclear technologies?
Where the hell did I say that? I didn't even qualify the fact as a “problem”, that's just how those things are designed to work. And why should BWR designs be “bad”? They’ve been used successfully for decades.
However, finding faults with a well designed molten salt reactor will be very difficult for an honest person.
We’ll be able to discuss that when molten salt reactors exist on the market.
I'm not against GMOs per se: the hand of man has been improving the unkind nature since the dawn of the times. I know that much of the fruit we have been eating for centuries is "genetically engineered" somehow, that lemons don't grow from lemon seeds.
However, saying that Europe needs genetically engineered crops is hyperbolic at best.
I frequently hear tales of GMOs saving the world and whatnot. But when I ask for a scientific measurement of their effect, all I get is studies - often sponsored by GMO proposers themselves - showing that, in developed countries (as Europe is), they can lead to modest increments in yeld (in the order of magnitude of 10% over ten years), and sometimes they don't (e.g. in Australia).
I can't talk about what happens in the vasty plains of Germany, but here on the terraced slopes of southern Europe tons of fruits are left to rot on the branches because picking them up would cost more than you'd earn by selling them (also because of the european subsidies which transfer money to latifondists no matter what they do with their land), and still no hungry mobs are plundering those fields. We can't compete with China on growing cheaper rice, no matter what seeds we use. What we can do is to promote our centuries-old cultivars, and the traditional foods based on them, and sell them for a premium because they don't taste like shit.
You'll forgive my diffidence, but in the latest years, every single time we've been told to drop a time-honoured habit of us in order to copy some other country's recipe for success, it ended up in grief and hunger (this one scientifically measured) for us. Timeo multinationals et dona ferentes.
First of all, we can make a distinction between security fixes and software upgrades in general. The former don't usually require new drivers.
Then, as I said, none of the reasons you exposed are technical. You've just described the state of the things as it is now, because of disinterest, laziness or intention to control: for example, Google forking stuff instead of working with upstream, manufacturers likewise maintaining their own buggy kernels with secret sauce and leaving them to bitrot as soon as their new SOCs are out, carriers ignoring patches already provided by Google and the manufactureres because they couldn't care less, or delaying them for years just to apply their customizations to the new firmware.
Carriers are public concessionaries. Ask them to provide the customers with secure phones or, if they're not able to, to leave the public spectrum to someone else who claims to be, and see how the supposedly technical reasons vanish quickly all over the chain from carriers up to Google.
By the way, Linux on ARM has flattened device tree support. Discovering devices is the last of the problems now.
Current smartphones are computers and Google / manufacturers / carriers should enable them to be patched or upgraded as one would expect of a computer. There is no strictly technical reason if things don't work this way already - only disinterest, laziness or desire to control. If regulation can push the three to behave, to me it'd be welcome.
However, I wouldn't know exactly what the practical terms of such regulation could be. They certainly can't force manufacturers to support obsolete hardware forever. Perhaps they could prescribe a minimum timespan of guaranteed security fixes.
And what's the difference? They're words of the very same kind that we use to hear when, say, trade agreements put blue collars to compete against slaves in developing countries, effectively forcing them to accept the same working conditions or, more realistically, lose their jobs.
I do believe that competition is good and that its absence leads to disaster. However, after competition has done its thing, people must be able to find a job allowing them to live with dignity: if that doesn't happen, then something's wrong. In the case of skilled workers, “dignity” includes getting back what they've spent to build their competences.
What I wanted to deprecate with my post is the attitude of people who happen to be more or less shielded from the ugly head of competition and then shrug, or even pontificate, in front of the misfortune of those who don't share the same privilege.
Usually, when I read/., I find a lot of people praising unbounded capitalism, the invisible hand, criticising unions because they've destroyed Detroit / they keep bad teachers from being fired / they forced Apple to resort to sweatshops in China.
But when it's turn for the invisible hand to slap the kind of people who usually post here, the comments have a much different tone and the proposals push in another direction.
How did that Google guy say? Perhaps we'd better start running, for the robots have already started.
Encryption standards are being specifically excluded by the EME proposers because they're not in their interest. It's not a first step, it's a final one. Read for yourself W3C's plublic html mailing list archives to hear directly from the protagonists who wants to do what.
Since you keep talking about a "DRM standard" or even a "W3C controlled standard", you haven't read or understood what the EME specification is about. Please do that before commenting.
Look, I don't care if YOU don't want to use DRM'd services like Netflix, but some of us DO, and we'd like to be able to use these sorts of services without proprietary plugins like Silverlight dictating what operating systems we can use it on.
Sorry, but it's YOU who want to use DRM'd services who must not drag other people into paying the price of your DRM. And by paying the price I mean the added complexity which I will pay to develop, the computational overhead which I will pay with my energy bill, and above all, the platform lockdown which is necessary to support a minimally meaningful DRM subsystem which I will find in the devices I bought. Define all the standards you want, but don't put them into HTML.
I'm a realist. DRM is idiotic and useless, but the people holding the cards are too dumb to realize that. If that means that I have to accept unobtrusive and transparent DRM to view content because of that, so be it. DRM done right doesn't get in the user's way, and a standardized form of DRM will help keep it from getting in the way. This needs to happen.
Then as a realist you need to know that EME is nothing like that! EME does not specify a single standard, but rather an unified framework allowing binary-only plugins or incompatible binary-only browser implementations dictate what parts of HTML pages you're allowed to save on your PC, depending on who you are, what you're doing and what operating system you're running. In other words, it's just like the Flash plugin without the presentation layer. And unlike Flash, it won't be possible to implement it with open source code.
1) There is no standard for encryption. It's just the plugin scheme which is being standardized, so you WILL have competing standards. Hint: Adobe is one of the proponents of this standard.
2) DRM can't be implemented by open-source applications, and it can be implemented only weakly on open platforms, so content providers will still have the option to tell you "sorry, you can only watch our site on non-jailbroken iPhones or non-rooted Samsung-branded Android phones" - in a standard way.
3) We're not talking about defining a standard for DRM, we're talking about putting DRM in the standard that EVERYONE has to implement in order to talk "the Web". So everyone is burdened by this proposal.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm confident, however, that sooner or later this will end - and they'll introduce new revolutionary software products with a uniform appearance, and user interfaces exposing consistent and predictable behaviour. Why, Microsoft have already started, they've reintroduced the Windows 3.1 look-and-feel (flat controls, window title in the middle, system-modal dialog boxes taking up the whole screen) and they're selling it as a novelty. I'm less convinced, though, by the Windows 1.0 features they've been introducing as well (windows can't overlap, but hey, with the upcoming improvements you'll be able to run one application and a half at the same time! Conditions apply.)
Do the same people who are responsible for this initiative also get to make choices involving weapons?
For comparison we can paste the minified jQuery code into the excellent deminifier that was suggested in your link and compare the outcome with jQuery's open code; I can't directly paste snippets here because slashdot's lameness filter doesn't want me to.
We're quickly heading into a future where personal computers are merely a frame running applications which actually are web sites residing on a remote host. So pushing for the adoption of free Javascript frameworks is getting just as important as promoting free C libraries and binaries has been until now.
The FSF had long seen this happening and they've been advocating for freedom in Javascript for years; while a lot of people laughed at them with straw men such as "meh, Stallman wants free blinking text", once again their position - which once appeared to many as a paranoid's stance - is reavealing itself to be quite insightful.
Your arguments makes the same level of sense as saying that every software is open source because disassemblers exist. Hint: they don't give you back source code.
In contrast, Islam uses the word "Allah", which comes from "il illah", "The (One) God", which is a title and not a personal name. Also note that despite the claims of the Muslims that Allah is the God of Abraham, this claim must be false when scriptures are compared.
Christian Arabs used the name Allah to designate the christian God long before Islam even existed.
Or, you know, FTP.
I'm not talking about glasses uploading automatically. I'm talking about them using remote storage on Google servers for anything that they shoot, which is already an option on Android, and will surely be even more important on Glass, even more so if we suppose that the glasses won't have the computing power and storage capacity required for realtime image processing which is going to be an important application for that kind of device.
A dorky headpiece that could soon be worn by millions of people, continuously taking billions of high resolution photos and video clips with precise date/time/gps locations, and sending all of that data to a single commercial entity whose business is to harvest and process personal data, with a track record of privacy stumbles, an extremely high computational capacity and already knowing lots of details about millions of persons including faces, names, email and street address, whole phone books, geographic locations.
My company has an entire office full of people in Italy that do nothing because we have no more use for the facility but the local laws do not allow us to fire them. Instead we make them show up every day, for their 7-8 hours and sit in chairs and do nothing.
Fire your lawyers then. In Italy you can fire people you no longer need, it's called "justified objective reason", and it applies in cases of crisis, downsizing, restructuring, or ceased utility of the job position in general.
So, because one particular design has a problem, you would condemn all nuclear technologies?
Where the hell did I say that? I didn't even qualify the fact as a “problem”, that's just how those things are designed to work. And why should BWR designs be “bad”? They’ve been used successfully for decades.
However, finding faults with a well designed molten salt reactor will be very difficult for an honest person.
We’ll be able to discuss that when molten salt reactors exist on the market.
It depends on the design. The turbines of BWRs do become radioactive and must be properly disposed of.
However, saying that Europe needs genetically engineered crops is hyperbolic at best.
I frequently hear tales of GMOs saving the world and whatnot. But when I ask for a scientific measurement of their effect, all I get is studies - often sponsored by GMO proposers themselves - showing that, in developed countries (as Europe is), they can lead to modest increments in yeld (in the order of magnitude of 10% over ten years), and sometimes they don't (e.g. in Australia).
I can't talk about what happens in the vasty plains of Germany, but here on the terraced slopes of southern Europe tons of fruits are left to rot on the branches because picking them up would cost more than you'd earn by selling them (also because of the european subsidies which transfer money to latifondists no matter what they do with their land), and still no hungry mobs are plundering those fields. We can't compete with China on growing cheaper rice, no matter what seeds we use. What we can do is to promote our centuries-old cultivars, and the traditional foods based on them, and sell them for a premium because they don't taste like shit.
You'll forgive my diffidence, but in the latest years, every single time we've been told to drop a time-honoured habit of us in order to copy some other country's recipe for success, it ended up in grief and hunger (this one scientifically measured) for us. Timeo multinationals et dona ferentes.
Also, markets can't be distorted very much by speculators.
Do you mean that AAPL is really worth more than Belgium?
Then, as I said, none of the reasons you exposed are technical. You've just described the state of the things as it is now, because of disinterest, laziness or intention to control: for example, Google forking stuff instead of working with upstream, manufacturers likewise maintaining their own buggy kernels with secret sauce and leaving them to bitrot as soon as their new SOCs are out, carriers ignoring patches already provided by Google and the manufactureres because they couldn't care less, or delaying them for years just to apply their customizations to the new firmware.
Carriers are public concessionaries. Ask them to provide the customers with secure phones or, if they're not able to, to leave the public spectrum to someone else who claims to be, and see how the supposedly technical reasons vanish quickly all over the chain from carriers up to Google.
By the way, Linux on ARM has flattened device tree support. Discovering devices is the last of the problems now.
However, I wouldn't know exactly what the practical terms of such regulation could be. They certainly can't force manufacturers to support obsolete hardware forever. Perhaps they could prescribe a minimum timespan of guaranteed security fixes.
Truth?
Who cares about his motivation? He's done a right thing and now he risks his life, as if he lived in Iran.
I do believe that competition is good and that its absence leads to disaster. However, after competition has done its thing, people must be able to find a job allowing them to live with dignity: if that doesn't happen, then something's wrong. In the case of skilled workers, “dignity” includes getting back what they've spent to build their competences.
What I wanted to deprecate with my post is the attitude of people who happen to be more or less shielded from the ugly head of competition and then shrug, or even pontificate, in front of the misfortune of those who don't share the same privilege.
But when it's turn for the invisible hand to slap the kind of people who usually post here, the comments have a much different tone and the proposals push in another direction.
How did that Google guy say? Perhaps we'd better start running, for the robots have already started.
When we talk about the company's "privacy efforts", we're talking about them fighting privacy?
Encryption standards are being specifically excluded by the EME proposers because they're not in their interest. It's not a first step, it's a final one. Read for yourself W3C's plublic html mailing list archives to hear directly from the protagonists who wants to do what.
Since you keep talking about a "DRM standard" or even a "W3C controlled standard", you haven't read or understood what the EME specification is about. Please do that before commenting.
Look, I don't care if YOU don't want to use DRM'd services like Netflix, but some of us DO, and we'd like to be able to use these sorts of services without proprietary plugins like Silverlight dictating what operating systems we can use it on.
Sorry, but it's YOU who want to use DRM'd services who must not drag other people into paying the price of your DRM. And by paying the price I mean the added complexity which I will pay to develop, the computational overhead which I will pay with my energy bill, and above all, the platform lockdown which is necessary to support a minimally meaningful DRM subsystem which I will find in the devices I bought. Define all the standards you want, but don't put them into HTML.
I'm a realist. DRM is idiotic and useless, but the people holding the cards are too dumb to realize that. If that means that I have to accept unobtrusive and transparent DRM to view content because of that, so be it. DRM done right doesn't get in the user's way, and a standardized form of DRM will help keep it from getting in the way. This needs to happen.
Then as a realist you need to know that EME is nothing like that! EME does not specify a single standard, but rather an unified framework allowing binary-only plugins or incompatible binary-only browser implementations dictate what parts of HTML pages you're allowed to save on your PC, depending on who you are, what you're doing and what operating system you're running. In other words, it's just like the Flash plugin without the presentation layer. And unlike Flash, it won't be possible to implement it with open source code.
1) There is no standard for encryption. It's just the plugin scheme which is being standardized, so you WILL have competing standards. Hint: Adobe is one of the proponents of this standard.
2) DRM can't be implemented by open-source applications, and it can be implemented only weakly on open platforms, so content providers will still have the option to tell you "sorry, you can only watch our site on non-jailbroken iPhones or non-rooted Samsung-branded Android phones" - in a standard way.
3) We're not talking about defining a standard for DRM, we're talking about putting DRM in the standard that EVERYONE has to implement in order to talk "the Web". So everyone is burdened by this proposal.