A full refetch of the page text (whether or not the screen is redrawn) couldn't let the user carry on with field input while a server fetch is pending. Not keeping the user waiting while network round trips are happening makes a much better "responsive" impression.
Plus, with larger pages and/or slower networks a full refetch would become a lot slower than DOM modifications.
In my case the country is New Zealand, but many countries have similar laws. Australia is similar, perhaps many countries with political systems based on Britain's might too (I don't know the details).
Although I enjoy trips to the US, yes I do think it is worth emigrating to NZ for a variety of reasons. If you are a skilled professional or have the means to grow new business here you should qualify under our immigration rules, Mr/Ms "deaddrunk".;-)
However, some of us would appreciate it if you could vote in campaign finance reform first, Thanks.
Ironic that money counts for immigration and this thread was about money counting less in politics.
Anyone else think laws should be open-sourced so that we all, as a community of Americans, can view, revise, and change things as need be?
Before technology made that theoretically possible, having elected representatives was probably supposed to get as close to that as practically possible. Of course there would need to be VERY strong community stability controls to prevent the law swinging wildy with fads. Even something as simple as a slashdot discussion has layers of moderation and meta-moderation, and you still get a ton of junk posts just because they can. Something like the Linux kernel depends on a trusted dictator, which is works when you can have many different software implementations and ignore all but the effective ones. We can't afford to allow that with laws, we have to pick ONE right law for everyone before implementation.
Today, I think the biggest barrier to progress towards the community ideal is that in America campaign contribution money can apparently override logic via blitz advertising for votes. That effectively breaks "one man, one vote". I'm not an American nor do I live in America so I can't directly participate in that process, but it still affects me at home because those policies are exported via political pressure on other countries.
DMCA-like policy is only one of a number of unpopular policies that are being pushed on legislatures worldwide by corporate lobbying. In most countries corporations don't have as much influence over politics, so more and more internationally we are seeing government-to-government pressure from American politicians who are apparently legally allowed to owe big contributors big favors.
Maybe American campaign finance reform is the way to break that barrier down, make American individuals votes count more than dollars again, and other individuals in their own countries too.
Where I live, political campaigning by individual politicians is limited to 6 weeks before the election and must stop the day before the election. Individual electorate politicians have a campaign budget limited to merely thousands of dollars, enough for volunteers to put up posters and local some local media advertising but not enough to blitz the mass media. Penalties for exceeding this spending limit go beyond removal of that individual from office. The budgets for political parties are not as limited, but any party that can prove signed up membership of more than a certain number of people can get government contribution towards equal TV advertising time. This means that campaign money is not essential to a party getting a message publicised. No guarantee people will watch, but still a better chance.
Not having to listen to a two-year run-up to every four-yearly election is one of the minor benefits of fairer campaign finance, the major one is that people's votes would count for more in making the law.
I agree with some of what you've said, especially about vendors working together for a cross-platform API and Sun being hurt by the cancellation of MS's java license... BUT there seems to be a crucial point missing about whether MS's Java license had a provision to carry the latest version. That would better explain why MS and Sun did what they did at each step. The usual provision for violation of a legal contract is automatic cancellation plus optional law suit.
What I've read sounds closer to: 1) MS signs Java agreement ... which includes provisions that they carry the latest version 2) MS produces better runtime ... for Java 1.1... 3) MS adds extensions for Windows only development, which are optional to developers ... but are opt-out rather than opt-in and violate JVM spec unless you specifically turn them off (another reply to the parent has explained that already)
Most importantly, you left out:
3.1) Sun releases enhanced JVM 1.2 with better enterprise networking features etc and the JNI for interfacing native code with Java. At a low level the JNI doesn't work the same way MS's native windows extentions do (although another post in reply to the parent says it would have been possible to support both in Windows).
3.2) Microsoft refuses to support 1.2, pushing on with its 1.1 branch, apparently in violation of their license (presumably figuring that the worst that could happen was that a court would order that they couldn't carry Java anymore, which would suit them anyway, with maybe a lawsuit for mere millions of dollars when this market is worth billions)
3.3) Judge finds that in fact MS illegally used their monopoly to hurt Sun & Java (even though Java still had some life left in it).
That changes the background for the rest of the steps: 4) Sun sues Microsoft
5) Sun offers settlement...terminate future licenses, puts a deadline on distributing the old java
I don't know if that was a settlement or just automatically triggered by a license violation. 6) Microsoft removes old Java well before deadline
7) Sun complains, puts large advertisements out showing disgruntlement with Microsoft
8) Microsoft decides.NET runtime is ready for primetime in WinXP SR1.....includes.NET runtime and the only version of Java they have licensed, although the license is soon to expire. ... because they violated the terms of their long term license to use the latest version of Java? 9) Sun cries fowl. Demands MS includes Sun's java because they limited MS's license to an old, obsolete version. ... it sounds like MS had the choice to keep their Java license long term, if they had supported the current version of Java, not just the 1997 Java API plus Windows API in 2000 and 2002. 10) Judge grants sun's wish......for now. ... stating that further harm would be done in future if the market wasn't adjusted back towards level immediately. If Java was as dead as some of the other technologies MS has crushed, there would be no point in trying to help.
Heads up: It is not just faxes and spam to your PC. In Japan there was a major problem with spam email to mobile phones (that costs a lot more than spam email to your PC), and the latest problem is millions of spam hang-up calls to mobile phones - enough to severely overload the network. See this Infoworld article today.
The scam: the spammer pays nothing for the cell calls since no-one answered. The target sees a "missed call" with an unfamiliar caller ID number, they call back and get a phone sex line. In doing so they incur at least cell phone charges plus the operators use anything else they can to persuade/intimidate people to pay more to the operator for the "service".
This is really large scale, and unlike the US Japan already had rules preventing phone email spam:
... the volume of calls started rising at around 10 a.m. in the morning and within 15 minutes the carrier had been forced to place a 50 percent curb on the number of calls that could be made, to keep the network operating. The disruption, which lasted for several hours and affected more than 5 million telephone lines, was traced to a one-giri operator that began making more than 4,000 calls every three minutes over roughly 200 telephone lines.
For Japan's cell-phone users, the rise in one-giri calls came just as they were getting relief from another annoyance: unwanted e-mail. A new law prohibiting mass e-mailing to random cell phone users went into effect on July 1.
Re:Bugs in DOS
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The weirdest set of symptoms I ever had to diagnose was due to one or two bugs in the Microsoft DOS Linker (circa 1985, version 3.61 I think). I was linking C code and Quickbasic code into one executable of about 200-300k (that was a lot when 640k was the system max).
The first symptom was that I ran my program from DOS, and the previous program that I had been running under DOS sparked back into life briefly then the system hung or rebooted - different each time I ran my broken executable. What was happening was that the DOS loader was not loading the last 64k of the.exe, which was where the entry pointer was, so it just jumped to whatever happened to be in memory already. The linker was somehow getting the filesize word in the.exe header 64k too low (can't remember how long it took to figure that out). I fixed this with a program run by my makefile that checked and if necessary patched every.exe file as soon as it was linked.
The second symptom was about a year later, in a different version of the linker (still buggy), when I started using MS link.exe compression. I got heap corruption in one part of my code. I added in one debug message, and the problem went away, but came back when I took out the debug. Almost any change anywhere in the program (any source file) changed the symptom. After about 80 hours in the debugger tracking through godawful quickbasic initialisation and memory management, I found there were about 5 bytes of corruption in my static strings. The MS linker.exe compression did simple run-length compression on the executable, and appended some decompression code onto the end of the executable. The problem was that the initial stack pointer used by this decompression routine was supposed to be beyond the end of the file in free memory, but instead it was 64k before the end of the.exe, and whatever happened to be 64k before the end of the.exe got a hole punched in it during the.exe startup code introduced by the linker. I changed my patch program to patch that pointer after every link too.
I spent a long time fuming at the weeks that I had lost just on this bug over the years. I never did figure out what it was about my program that tripped the bug in the linker.
Aside: I maintained and supported that program until the early 90's... the second-last native application I developed for a Microsoft Operating System. I got a job in UNIX systems in 1992, in 1995 my company was looking for a way to go GUI, I did one experimental Windows fat-client/server program in early 1995... the last native executable I did for a Microsoft OS. I recommended my company write our GUI for the web instead, and we got a 2-4 year lead over our competition worldwide.
Intel-based servers may be cheap and all, but I do not look forward to a future where the RISC-based manufacturers, such as Sun, IBM, and SGI, are totally displaced.
Maybe we can have both Intel and high-end engineering (even though it may not look cheap by some standards). For example: SGI are migrating their Origin servers from MIPS RISC CPUs to Intel IA-64 CPUs. In the Origin 3000 series only the CPU "bricks" change, all other hardware components (IO, disk, racks etc) are the same for both CPU types. The MIPS Origin OS is IRIX, the IA-64 Origin OS is Linux, which SGI are migrating high-end features into (XFS, advanced NUMA support etc).
Slashdot Mirror
Atheism was effectively banned for local citizens (not visitors) after a communist coup failed in 1965 (but blasphemy is illegal even for visitors). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Indonesia
A full refetch of the page text (whether or not the screen is redrawn) couldn't let the user carry on with field input while a server fetch is pending. Not keeping the user waiting while network round trips are happening makes a much better "responsive" impression.
Plus, with larger pages and/or slower networks a full refetch would become a lot slower than DOM modifications.
Although I enjoy trips to the US, yes I do think it is worth emigrating to NZ for a variety of reasons. If you are a skilled professional or have the means to grow new business here you should qualify under our immigration rules, Mr/Ms "deaddrunk". ;-)
However, some of us would appreciate it if you could vote in campaign finance reform first, Thanks.
Ironic that money counts for immigration and this thread was about money counting less in politics.
Before technology made that theoretically possible, having elected representatives was probably supposed to get as close to that as practically possible. Of course there would need to be VERY strong community stability controls to prevent the law swinging wildy with fads. Even something as simple as a slashdot discussion has layers of moderation and meta-moderation, and you still get a ton of junk posts just because they can. Something like the Linux kernel depends on a trusted dictator, which is works when you can have many different software implementations and ignore all but the effective ones. We can't afford to allow that with laws, we have to pick ONE right law for everyone before implementation.
Today, I think the biggest barrier to progress towards the community ideal is that in America campaign contribution money can apparently override logic via blitz advertising for votes. That effectively breaks "one man, one vote". I'm not an American nor do I live in America so I can't directly participate in that process, but it still affects me at home because those policies are exported via political pressure on other countries.
DMCA-like policy is only one of a number of unpopular policies that are being pushed on legislatures worldwide by corporate lobbying. In most countries corporations don't have as much influence over politics, so more and more internationally we are seeing government-to-government pressure from American politicians who are apparently legally allowed to owe big contributors big favors.
Maybe American campaign finance reform is the way to break that barrier down, make American individuals votes count more than dollars again, and other individuals in their own countries too.
Where I live, political campaigning by individual politicians is limited to 6 weeks before the election and must stop the day before the election. Individual electorate politicians have a campaign budget limited to merely thousands of dollars, enough for volunteers to put up posters and local some local media advertising but not enough to blitz the mass media. Penalties for exceeding this spending limit go beyond removal of that individual from office. The budgets for political parties are not as limited, but any party that can prove signed up membership of more than a certain number of people can get government contribution towards equal TV advertising time. This means that campaign money is not essential to a party getting a message publicised. No guarantee people will watch, but still a better chance.
Not having to listen to a two-year run-up to every four-yearly election is one of the minor benefits of fairer campaign finance, the major one is that people's votes would count for more in making the law.
What I've read sounds closer to:
... which includes provisions that they carry the latest version
... for Java 1.1 ...
... but are opt-out rather than opt-in and violate JVM spec unless you specifically turn them off (another reply to the parent has explained that already)
1) MS signs Java agreement
2) MS produces better runtime
3) MS adds extensions for Windows only development, which are optional to developers
Most importantly, you left out:
3.1) Sun releases enhanced JVM 1.2 with better enterprise networking features etc and the JNI for interfacing native code with Java. At a low level the JNI doesn't work the same way MS's native windows extentions do (although another post in reply to the parent says it would have been possible to support both in Windows).
3.2) Microsoft refuses to support 1.2, pushing on with its 1.1 branch, apparently in violation of their license (presumably figuring that the worst that could happen was that a court would order that they couldn't carry Java anymore, which would suit them anyway, with maybe a lawsuit for mere millions of dollars when this market is worth billions)
3.3) Judge finds that in fact MS illegally used their monopoly to hurt Sun & Java (even though Java still had some life left in it).
That changes the background for the rest of the steps: .NET runtime is ready for primetime in WinXP SR1.....includes .NET runtime and the only version of Java they have licensed, although the license is soon to expire.
... because they violated the terms of their long term license to use the latest version of Java?
... it sounds like MS had the choice to keep their Java license long term, if they had supported the current version of Java, not just the 1997 Java API plus Windows API in 2000 and 2002.
... stating that further harm would be done in future if the market wasn't adjusted back towards level immediately. If Java was as dead as some of the other technologies MS has crushed, there would be no point in trying to help.
4) Sun sues Microsoft
5) Sun offers settlement...terminate future licenses, puts a deadline on distributing the old java
I don't know if that was a settlement or just automatically triggered by a license violation.
6) Microsoft removes old Java well before deadline
7) Sun complains, puts large advertisements out showing disgruntlement with Microsoft
8) Microsoft decides
9) Sun cries fowl. Demands MS includes Sun's java because they limited MS's license to an old, obsolete version.
10) Judge grants sun's wish......for now.
The scam: the spammer pays nothing for the cell calls since no-one answered. The target sees a "missed call" with an unfamiliar caller ID number, they call back and get a phone sex line. In doing so they incur at least cell phone charges plus the operators use anything else they can to persuade/intimidate people to pay more to the operator for the "service".
This is really large scale, and unlike the US Japan already had rules preventing phone email spam:
The first symptom was that I ran my program from DOS, and the previous program that I had been running under DOS sparked back into life briefly then the system hung or rebooted - different each time I ran my broken executable. What was happening was that the DOS loader was not loading the last 64k of the .exe, which was where the entry pointer was, so it just jumped to whatever happened to be in memory already. The linker was somehow getting the filesize word in the .exe header 64k too low (can't remember how long it took to figure that out). I fixed this with a program run by my makefile that checked and if necessary patched every .exe file as soon as it was linked.
The second symptom was about a year later, in a different version of the linker (still buggy), when I started using MS link .exe compression. I got heap corruption in one part of my code. I added in one debug message, and the problem went away, but came back when I took out the debug. Almost any change anywhere in the program (any source file) changed the symptom. After about 80 hours in the debugger tracking through godawful quickbasic initialisation and memory management, I found there were about 5 bytes of corruption in my static strings. The MS linker .exe compression did simple run-length compression on the executable, and appended some decompression code onto the end of the executable. The problem was that the initial stack pointer used by this decompression routine was supposed to be beyond the end of the file in free memory, but instead it was 64k before the end of the .exe, and whatever happened to be 64k before the end of the .exe got a hole punched in it during the .exe startup code introduced by the linker. I changed my patch program to patch that pointer after every link too.
I spent a long time fuming at the weeks that I had lost just on this bug over the years. I never did figure out what it was about my program that tripped the bug in the linker.
Aside: I maintained and supported that program until the early 90's... the second-last native application I developed for a Microsoft Operating System. I got a job in UNIX systems in 1992, in 1995 my company was looking for a way to go GUI, I did one experimental Windows fat-client/server program in early 1995... the last native executable I did for a Microsoft OS. I recommended my company write our GUI for the web instead, and we got a 2-4 year lead over our competition worldwide.