According to the world health organization ( http://www.who.int/dsa/cat98/fgmbook.htm ), as of 1998 female genital mutilation is still practiced by a specific and relatively small (half a million people) ethno-religious minority in bombay. Look at the link.
Not widespread by any means, but definitely more than a misremembering of an NPR report.
If next time you are going to make a statement as serious as "there is female genital mutilation in india" or "there is no female genital mutilation in india" in a public forum, you would check with Google first, it would be to the betterment for us all. Just a thought.
What you say is very true. However, i don't think that the thing you are saying and the thing Raskin is saying are mutually exclusive.
In an ideal world, there should be only one way to do it, BUT the USER should be able to determine what this one way is.
In my humble opinion, the direction that GUI design needs to and, inevetably-- i have no idea when, but it HAS to go this way eventually-- will go, is in the direction of infinite modularity: the direction of seperating style from content, seperating form from function. Up until this point, interface design has been a constant war between the macintosh "all applications should act roughly consistently with one another" mindset, where you take a single set of guidelines and stick with them, and the Xwindows/UNIX "interface guidelines are fascism" mindset. The UNIX mindset has an extremely good point-- but makes the mistake that it just trades off apple's single point of interface fascism for a billion tiny points of interface fascism, one for the author of each application. The author of each application is still the one in control, and is in control only of the application they created. The user is in control of nothing. And from the user's standpoint, being powerless over the behavior of a bunch of applications that all act the same (as on the mac) is better than being powerless over the behavior bunch of applications that all act differently (as on UNIX).
Ideally, the person who dictates interface behavior would be neither Apple nor the application designer, but the user. Ideally Apple and the application designer would both offer *suggestions* as to how the application would behave, and the user would determine which, if either, of these suggestions the application would follow.
Ideally, eventually we will move to where programmers don't say "i want a text field, two buttons, and a menu with these specific sizes and positions", they will say "i want a text field that you can do these two specific things to and which you have these options for, and the text field and the potential buttons and the potential menu have these specific relationships to each other", and the system will build the interface based on the rules the user prefers.
Hmm. I'm kind of rambling now, and i have to go. But how i was going to end this is by saying that the direction things should take from here, and the direction things ARE taking from here (at least with the things that GNOME and apple are putting forth) is that common things like text fields and scrollbars should be done by a single systemwide service, but *abstractly*-- such that the user can augument the behavior of those text fields or whatever at will; and that we should move toward the model used by CSS, the glade files of the GNOME api, and the nib files of apple's Cocoa API-- where you define functions, and then define an interface, and then link the two together. I, the user, can open up the nib files inside of these mac os x applications i use, and because the relationship between interface and function is abstract rather than hardwired into code, i can rewire that relationship-- i can delete, rearrange, and redesign the function of interface elements of existing programs in InterfaceBuilder despite not having the source code to the program. This is the way things should be.
OK.. i'm done. thanks for listening:)
"I have a firm belief that computers should conform themselves to my behavior, and not the other way around." --Steven Levy, on the original Newton release of the Graffiti pen input system now used in the palmpilot
> The really controversial idea, though, is to abandon applications altogether. There would be only the system, with its commands, and the users' content
This sounds like opendoc. Does Raskin actually mention that opendoc is what he's talking about? Is opendoc what he's talking about?
How does Raskin propose that this state he advocates in his book be reached? If he wants to follow the opendoc model of applications being split up into as many tiny interlocking pieces as possible, with a framework for pieces from disparate apps being allowed to interlock with one another as long as they operate on the same kinds of data, then how does he propose that the parts be coordinated together in such a way that they appear, as he wants them to, modeless and consistent?
Basically what i'm asking is this: The things he proposes (a single modeless system that does EVERYTHING and in which every bit of interface is consistent with every other) are things which are extremely difficult to achieve unless every bit of said system is written by the same company. Does he suggest any way that disparate groups could work on the creation of a system such as he proposes without the different voices involved ruining the purity of the whole thing-- like, the people writing apps start doing their own thing, and eventually the differnet parts of the system become inconsistent again.
I also would be curious to see what Raskin would think of the mac os x "services" model, which attempts to revive the opendoc idea with in a less extreme-marxism manner-- applications can rewrite parts of themselves as "services" that do certain actions on certain types of data. If the user is using a program which uses a type of data that a service the user has installed can work with, the user is allowed to let the service wrest control of the data from the application and operate on it. Is this good because it's a step in the right direction, or bad because unlike opendoc the focus remains on the application and not the document?
What i'm thinking now-- although i've no idea if it would work-- is the idea of this:
Gracenote is going around bullying people, starting lawsuits they clearly don't mean to end in anything other than an out-of-court-settlement, and claiming in press releases that freedb is an illegal copy of their product.
However, freedb is clearly not illegal, and as yerricde has mentioned above the content from Gracenote's product is used under liscense.
Therefore, the FreeDB project can sue Gracenote for slander/libel, as Gracenote is going around and publicly and in the press spreading lies about the freedb product as a way to scare away customers from a competitor.
Is there any reason this isn't the least bit valid? I don't really think there is.
The Rambus thing earlier this week was really a revelation to me, and it should have been to most of the rest of the slashdot population, in that, hey! If a company commits fraud, you can actually sue them for fraud! You aren't limited to just sitting around and bitching on public webboards! Isn't that wierd? Why didn't that occur to any of us earlier?
Well, you can't really know what they're doing in there.
Your suggestion is probably closer than mine to what they're likely to wind up doing, though. Napster's going to put in a system like that eventually; they might as well liscense microsoft's..
Wow, cool. That would be a GREAT way to drive off the three remaining people who are still using napster.
More likely it isn't about *forcing* the user to trade WMAs, but rather just *allowing* them to. Napster still requires all files moved to be mp3s or mp2s, don't they? Well, here's a nice alternative to forcing everybody on the file sharing network to use a format nobody uses yet and killing the file sharing network as a result: just find a way to get a bunch of.wmas floating around on that network, and make it so napster client can play those wmas. The napster user can't tell what format they're using; they just click on the first thing along the lines of "Creed - I Sure Do Like Pearl Jam.tla" in the search window and tell napster to play it for them. So start dumping.wmas on the network and pretty soon they'll get into vaguely wide circulation.. hell, i can't think of a better way to get a format widespread. Get a couple of.wmas on the hard drive of every single idiot napster user out there without said idiot user napsters noticing it. Then later when they go back to listen and discover they have to download WiMP to listen to it outside of the napster application.. well, which do you think they'll choose? Look for and redownload the Creed song as an mp3, download Windows Media Player, or switch to Gnutella? I'm thinking the second; it's the least work.
Pity. I'd like to see napster dead; then something better would come along.
Word of advice to the free software community: you need to learn how to play the game of making support for your formats viral, and you need to learn to play the game of using The Blinking 12:00 Effect to your advantage. Microsoft is the master of both of these games, and you people are HORRIBLE at them. My first suggestion: start talking to apple about putting Ogg Vorbis support into quicktime. Maybe even volunteer to write a nice little LGPLed quicktime plugin that apple could start including. Then you'd have this great big ol' installed base. Installed bases are good. Really! Trust me, they are.
Black Lab Linux says on their page they are based on Yellow Dog Linux. Yellow Dog Linux uses the LinuxPPC kernel, which Jason Haas is directly responsible for. Black Lab Linux seems to have done some kernel tweaking, but it's still the LinuxPPC team that did all the work..
Something that almost NOBODY seems to have straight is the difference between LinuxPPC the kernel and LinuxPPC the distro. I'm still a bit confused m'self. From observing, i get the vague sense that the LinuxPPC distro is just kind of tossed together by kernel developers who are much too busy maintaining the kernel to actually put together a distro, and the LPPC distro is nothing more than redhat recompiled without any testing, a thousand disparate and mostly uncessecary parts thrown together on a CD, most of which are for various reaons broken. Personally, i have used (buying one of them) multiple versions of LinuxPPC and had a simply miserable time with them all. I then went and got me a copy of Debian/PPC, which uses the LinuxPPC kernel -- which was as easy as downloading a disk image and letting dpkg handle the rest-- and my experience with it has been absolutely blissful. (I have had serious problems with the X server, i will admit, but i suspect this could easily be fixed were it not for the fact i am purposefully choosing not to run X on this machine.) I have never used Yellow Dog Linux, but everyone i've talked to who used it was quite happy with it. I personally would rather use Debian/PPC, being as i love apt-get and dselect more than i can express, but YDL may be better for people who are not (as i would consider myself now) relatively experienced linux users. I am still wonderfully grateful to the LinuxPPC project, it just seems to me the quality of their distro is not very high on their list of priorities.
If i am mistaken as to the nature of the LinuxPPC distrbution, or if the LPPC distribution has improved in quality since the times i used it (it has been awhile, relatively speaking) i wish to apologize greatly to anyone i have slandered.
Because the only persons affected by this law are employees of the state.
While i for one would be irritated were my employer to demand i use a certain operating system or set of software to do my job, i do believe an employer has the right to dictate what equipment the employees use at work.
The law probably ought to contain some kind of back door-- like, something where a person at a state university can appeal this law and be given an exception based on usage of free software being unreasonable given a lack of free software alternatives to a closed source program they need to use-- but still there are all kinds of reasons why this is a good idea. I for one would be alarmed by the idea of the government gaining a dependence on a private software company; if you can't get out your welfare checks without this tracking software created by a company in another country, and that other country suddenly becomes diplomatically hostile to you, and you suddenly discover a horrible bug that absolutely has to be fixed that instant for the system to continue functioning, and you can't get the source.. well, that's bad. But if you have the source you (the government) can fix and continue to maintain things yourself.
I wish english had a pronoun for the abstract third person. Yes, i know i could use "one". That doesn't count.
Someone made a statement along these lines (Microkernels are a good idea but Mach is a poor implementation of the idea of a microkernel) earlier, in the slashdot discussion on the kernel of Mac OS X and Linus' long-standing dislike for microkernels. Like you, they failed to back this assertion up with anything at all.
Will someone please attempt to assert or refute, using some kind of solid logic or numbers or something, the statement that microkernels are a good idea but Mach is a bad implementation of that idea? What is done wrong in Mach, and can it be fixed?
If mach is, indeed, a bad implementation of the microkernel, what would be a *good* implementation of the microkernel? Are any well-designed microkernels out there? If there are, then what is it that repeatedly leads projects like xMach/HURD/OS X/mkLinux to embrace Mach as opposed to one of the competing microkernels
Past that: Unless i am quite confused, supposedly, because the interaction between the microkernel and the OS is somewhat abstract, you ought to be able to replace the microkernel with a better one as long as the interface is the same. Is there any reason a better microkernel with the same software-side interface as Mach could not be written, and used to replace mach?
and, btw, this is kind offtopic, but while we're VAGUELY near the subject: someone once told me that Mach has the ability to host multiple kernels on the same machine at the same time. Is this true? How does that work in terms of sharing the hardware? How do you go about doing this?
I am just thinking that at this point, it would be an utterly useless but nifty parlor trick to try to get Mac OS X/Darwin, MkLinux, xMach and HURD running off the same mach microkernel on the same machine at the same time.
Thanx0r. I look forward to reading the xMach web page and finding out what it is as soon as their web provider recovers.
Software that uses X.11, which by custom tends to begin with the letter x ("xEyes")
xMach (uses mach)
Multiple X servers for Mac OS and Mac OS X, one of which is named "MacX" but is not compatible with Mac OS X. Good luck looking for "Mac OS X X Server"s on ANY search engine.
XF86 (X server; despite name, runs on lots of non-x86 hardware)
Someday we will start seeing X servers for XMach
And, most horrifically of all, someday we will see Mac OS 11-- which undoubtedly everyone on IRC will start calling "X 11". Assuming apple doesn't come out and name it "Mac OS X 11".
> The main possible problem would be interfacing between memory management systems. (Still, it can be done with the Obj-C/Java bridge; it may be clumsy though.)
Um, i don't know much about anything but i see no reason why this wouldn't be relatively easy.. i mean just play with release/retain. Assuming the garbage collector in smalltalk works in terms of some kind of reference counting. I mean, just capture the -release and -retain messages before they hit the smalltalk objects and feed them to the GC, and then have the GC send -retain/-release as it determines they are necessary. Maybe keep track of how many of each refs for a given object are from the objc side, and how many are from the smalltalk side and if someone sends a -dealloc then you just remove all the objc refs. Seems to me that would be pretty clean. RIght?
this of course gets into the issue of what happens if someone uses @defs on a smalltalk object, but anyone using @defs in the first place is just asking for trouble -_-
Seriously. I don't know why i should use this language. Convince me.
I recently started developing with Objective C and the Cocoa/Yellow Box/NextStep API in Mac OS X. I think Objective C is fantastic, and have no terrible problem with living without exceptions or garbage collection. How would you argue that Smalltalk is better?
What is significantly better about one language as compared to the other? Has one features or elegance the other does not? Has anyone used both? How does smalltalk provide the things that protocols and categories give you in ObjC and multiple inherhitance gives you in C++? Is there way to do the nifty things that you can do with the ObjC forwardInvocation method?
Also: is there any reason that the smalltalk language could not interface with the Cocoa/Yellow Box/NextStep APIs? Would doing so be clumsy, or in some way degrade the concepts of the language? If you messed with the compiler, could Smalltalk objects and ObjC objects communicate transparently with each other through the objective c messaging system?
P.S. If i could somehow touch off a flamewar here that involved in ANY way the subjects of CLOS and Objective CAML, i would be completely overjoyed.
Please explain this: AOL, whether you know this or not, has two protocols with which to connect to their network. AOL is not banning third party clients from connecting over TOC. It is banning them from using OSCAR. AOL has been saying for years OSCAR is their public protocol, and TOC is their private one. The clients that have been banned are the ones that, for some reason, have chosen to leave their sandbox and use TOC.
Why? Why not just take all the banned clients and switch them over to TOC?
I'm not trying ot say they should; that's just an honest question. I'm curious. Why not use TOC? What is the reasoning here? AOL's request that people stick to the public TOC protocol and let AOL use their OSCAR protocol for official use seems completely reasonable to me; am i missing something? Please explain.
I am a user of Mac OS X. Until the week after AOL banned all the IM clients, there was no official AOLIM client for mac os x and no way to run TCL/Tk scripts, so i-- everyone-- used a nifty little program called Fire. Fire is wonderful. Fire is usable. Fire is open source. Fire was blocked along with all the other TOC/OSCAR clients, and the AOLIM program that AOL finally released was so bad as to be literally unusable. I for one would occationally launch the thing to see if anyone really important was on, then quit it and go back to micq in terminal. Thankfully, a couple weeks ago, Fire switched to TOC, and i have had NO problems since then. Why don't the linux clients do the same? Jabber is staying away from TOC because they're afraid that if they use TOC AOL will ban TOC altogether (see the public statement on their website), thus ruining things for everyone. What is everyone else's excuse?
By the way, Many people in this thread have suggested that we do not have a right to use AOL's service. This may be correct; I don't care. I am going to use AOL's servers. Capitalism is a nice thing, but capitalism does not often work as a system with the communications market, and does not work here at all. There are no market forces. I'll say this; If Southwestern Bell attempts to set unreasonable demands on my usage of their network, that's PERFECTLY FINE with me, because i can walk away at any time. I can, if i want, cancel my Southwestern Bell telephone service, and go to Birch. If both Birch and Southwestern Bell offer terms i am not happy with, that's fine too, because it is theoretically possible for me to go start my own telephone company. See? Capitalism.
But meanwhile if i am NOT a Southwestern Bell customer, and they tell me that i can't dial IN to their network because i use a Primeco cellular phone, well, you can bet your ass that i for one am going to start breaking out the little yellow boxes. I will willingly break into SWBell's network if i have to (i don't) and i will willingly break into AOL's if i have to (i might eventually).And i don't care much if i am using expensive resources belonging to AOL or Ma Bell or whatever, i am not at all comfortable with any non-governmental entity having that kind of power. I'm not really comfortable with the government having it either, but at least as a voting citizen i have some tiny amount of control over what the government does, which means i am more comfortable with the government having split up the telephone network away from Ma Bell and making it open and would be more comfortable were the government to split up AOL and make their system open.
I don't want to use AIM.
I don't want to use their servers. I don't want to use their client.
I am not given a choice. There are people on that network i need to talk to, and that is why i have suffered through dealing their awful bloated software for three years. (Over most of which time, i believe i rebooted more times because AIM had crashed than for all other reasons put together.) If i could get the people i know to switch to Jabber, i would be ecstatic. I can't. If you tell me that if i want to talk to those people i have to pay someone to use the network infrastructure, that's actually fine, sort of. But if i don't have a choice of who gets paid-- if i don't have the ability to walk away and change providers-- i am not ok with that. And if you are comparing communication networks, i don't think you can ever quite have that one single right, the right which the consumer has to have in order for capitalism to be capitalism. "You can go use the Jabber network but not talk to anyone there because AOL is specifically banning the Jabber network from communicating with theirs" Is not an alright situation to me, "you can't send e-mail to an aol user if you're using the linux sendmail server" is not an alright situation to me, and i am not going to pay much attention to what the law says in such a situation unless the police will come after me personally because i am trying to communicate with AOL users on my own terms. I doubt they will, and if they do i suspect the EFF will pay for everything anyway.
Don't discount GNUStep! They still have some serious issues, ESPECIALLY AppKit stability issues, and they are not currently aiming for 100% NextStep compatibility.. but still, the idea of a future GNUStep letting you run OS X Cocoa binaries under LinuxPPC is not at all unrealistic.
Here's the only couple of real things i can think of that are holding GNUStep and OSX apart-- let me know if you can think of any others:
Usage of nib files in Cocoa, vs. usage of . -- although if you are simply *porting* an app from Cocoa to GNUStep, this isn't a real issue, as the two formats can be converted between.
Quartz (Display PDF) in Cocoa vs. oldskool Display Postscript in GNUStep-- this is the biggest issue, and really something of a huge problem.
The tendency, although this tendency may fade away with time, of OS X developers confused or frustrated by the poor documentation for some of the new technologies, to link into Carbon frameworks, especially Quickdraw.
That being said, the idea of apple releasing (as NeXT did) runtimes that would allow you to run recompiled Cocoa apps on windows xp or linux or whatever is not wholly unrealistic, although i don't think Steve wants to do it. Still, i could forsee a future where Redhat or somebody dumps a whole bunch of money into making GNUStep for Windows and Linux 100% cocoa compatible, and then trying to go to all the OS X software companies and convince them to include x86 GNUStep ports in their shrinkwrapped boxes (hey, look, it's just a recompile!).. followed by apple porting the non-free "official" Cocoa, trying to convince everyone, look, you can get this dodgy third-party thing Redhat made for free, or you can pay us $30 and get *our* version, which is more stable or faster or whatever.
At the VERY least, though, I think it is VERY likely that at some point in the near future we will see GNUStep trying to pander to developers of OS X software as a very quick method of porting OS X software to other platforms. And despite any stigma there may still be with linking into a GNU framework, if a development house has become enamored with Cocoa, the idea of developing in that first and then porting to GNUStep for instant Windows and Linux ports would more than likely be *very* appealing.
Alright, i've read your comment and the Linus vs. Tannenbaum debate thing linked above, and i just have one thing i would like somewhat clarified.
I don't really know much about how the hardware interacts with the OS. I am somewhat confused by the comments i have seen talking about how the *hardware* performs context changes, or the *hardware* is poor at memory paging. I mean, i can accept the idea that the hardware's capabilities directly influence whether such seemingly OS-level concepts as threading or paged memory are realistic or not, but i am not quite sure why the idea is true. So if you respond, please try to do so as if you are talking to someone who does not quite understand what you are talking about.
Anyway: you, and really everyone else throughout this/. discussion, seem to be confining your discussion of whether Mach is good as a microkernel to its performance on the x86 hardware-- i.e., the 386 being poor at context swaps vs. the modern Pentium being poor at context swaps. But the pentium really isn't *relevant*, is it? Since what we are discussing now is Mac OS X, and it as of now only runs on one single hardware platform-- the
PPC macintosh. Alright, so to a person interested in Darwin it is relevant whether the Pentium is a good chip to be using with the Mach microkernel, but with Mac OS X in general the Pentium is not an option. (Really funny, isn't it-- Start looking and you'll realize that Mac OS X is, from the ground up, at several levels, the most portable operating system ever created. The thing makes a few minor performance sacrifices in the name of portability. And yet it only runs on one single hardware platform. Wheee.)
So i guess my question is, ok, so the ability of the hardware to context swap bears a major role in the superiority of monolithic vs microkernel architectures. This is an excellent point. Could you explain what this means in relation to the hardware apple is currently using? Is the *PowerPC* good at context swaps? Can we assume that the PPC is intrinsically better at running either type of kernel than an x86 chip would be, or no? And if Darwin is what you're going to be running, are there any non-x86-compatible chips other than the PPC which might be capable of running Darwin/mach even better?
Mac OS X has and will always have completely insane RAM requirements. Classic or no Classic, you need AT LEAST 256 MB or you will be completely miserable.
I for one upgraded to 384 MB before the final version came out, and no doubt the issues i had with the public beta running on a 128 MB machine are softened by now, but let me just explain something to you:
Everything you see in Mac OS X is being rendered through a display layer known as Quartz-- essentially Display PDF. Everything on the screen is a PDF object. This is a bit of a performance hit, but not so much as you'd get under, say, Display Postscript (since Postscript is actually its own little stack-based programming language and requires a somewhat computationally expensive runtime. Quartz gives you the potential for some simply AMAZING things (for the moment the main sign of its existence is the ominpresent drop shadows and semitransparent menus in OS X, but the whole concept is EXTREMELY powerful and i think that five years from now most of the huge selling points of os x will be things made possible by quartz), and in the end the whole system is a probably good bit more sane than, say, X.
However THE PROBLEM WITH THIS IS that Quartz, as (in the words of the developers) a "per-pixel mixer, not a per-pixel switcher", offers FREE BUFFERING to all windows, and almost all apps accept. What this means is that when the display server draws a pixel, it can't just figure out which window owns the pixel and ask the window to draw it; it has to keep track of each window independently by itself, consider which pixels from which windows to take into consideration (and some of these windows may have elements smaller than a pixel..), and indepdendently mix them appropriately at every pixel on the screen.
The performance hit from this really isn't as bad as one would think, but **because Quartz stores the image of pretty much *every window on the screen***, *including* the ones you can't see, in RAM, it does mean you need RAM. Because if you don't supply enough RAM, it means that os x will start dipping into Virtual Memory.
*** and it doesn't MATTER how high end your microprocessor and graphics processor are, if every time you have a signifigant screen redraw the system has to go grab bits from a large number of windows scattered throughout virtual memory, and that virtual memory is fragmented all over your hard disk (Mac OS X does not have a dedicated swap partition. Therefore, if your disk is fragmented, your virtual memory will be fragmented, and there is nothing more pathetic than watching an extremely fast machine try to deal with a fragmented virtual memory file), and that hard disk is the kind of cruddy IDE drive that apple's been relying on so much lately.. well, then, the system is going to be SLOW.
SO: If you are going to run OS X, GET A BUNCH OF RAM, and MAKE SURE that you have a huge block of unfragmented free disk space for os x to use. And if you don't do these things, don't go around blaming the slow system responsiveness on the microkernel or the Objective C messaging architecture or the complex multitiered layout of the OS. And if you don't want to pay for the hardware needed to make all this stuff usable, well.. Be isn't *quite* bankrupt yet:)
I for one am going to sit around and wait for apple to get some Multiprocessor machines out on the market. Whoo!
(Classic only adds to all this pain, and to be honest as of right now (while you don't HAVE to run Classic, and i for one don't) the app support is such that either you are a GNU-head who will wind up living in Terminal most of the time or you will have several very important tasks you will find can *only* be provided by Classic mac apps. Come july that may change, but still..)
There was at one point a case of a public web site which for a time (until their DNS provider threatened to take away service) contained some activex or javascript
code thing which caused-- if you visited the web page on a Windows NT machine-- FOR THE OPERATING SYSTEM KERNEL TO BE OVERWRITTEN WITH AN EMPTY FILE, requiring a reinstall of the entire system. There were multiple cases of sysadmins who just happened to be web browsing on production machines (stupid idea anyway) and subsequently had to go down for hours to reinstall NT and all the service packs.
I seem to remember that this would happen even if the user was not an administrator, however this detail seems EXTREMELY unlikely and i probably imagined it. It was called monkeybagel.com or something. I can't find it anymore. I did find this:
Or rather, three interlocking application platforms, each akin to little OSes: the clumsy javascript/vbscript/html access, the java engine hooked in at the side, and the port going out the back to ActiveX where most of the TROUBLE! (OHH YESSS WE GOT TROUBLLE!!) seems to be coming from.
This thing is a MESS, and while it's easy to understand how someone having to cover THIS much material could make a sloppy job of it, that doesn't make it *OK*. PUT SOME THOUGHT INTO YOUR GODDAMN SOFTWARE.
> and you somehow reached the conclustion that it is MS' fault that all the other browsers aren't as good, right?
You could make that case, very easily. Think: if not for Microsoft, it would still today be realistic to charge money for a web browser. Meaning it would be possible for a web browser to exist on its own terms, with SERIOUS resources devoted to their development, rather than the current situation where the major browsers must squeak by with either hand-outs from a massive corporation who are only developing the browser as a political tool, or beg (unsucessfully) for money and developers from passerby.
I'm don't know if it necessarily follows from this that MS was acting in an immoral fashion by leveraging its huge pool of resources to drive everyone serious out of the browser market, but you can CERTAINLY make a good case that it is "MS' fault that all the other
browsers aren't as good"..
Heh. The last one sounds really funny. Hadn't heard about that one. So that leaves the score at what? Netscape: One arbitrary code execution bug, one hard drive access bug. MSIE: At LEAST two arbitrary code execution bugs (that i can remember), and at least two hard drive access bugs (that i can remember). Umm.. hmm. Maybe we should start putting together some kind of official scorecard or timeline or something of this stuff ^_^ would be interesting to look at..
No, i did not mean to imply that Netscape has a perfect track record. Upon re-reading i realize that that was what i SAID, but i did not mean to; i must blame the hour of the morning and the fact that i am a massive tool for this occurance. The general gist of the garbled thought behind my posting was that Netscape bugs i remembered hearing about from time to time ; ie bugs i remembered hearing about *on a regular basis.* I thank you for bringing some objectivity to all this:)
Moderators: as of this writing, Ayende Rahien's informative post here is at score: 1, and my toss-off post he is replying to is at score: 3. WHAT ARE YOU SMOKING.
Ha! OK, i was *afraid* that story would turn out to be incorrect. That only makes hypercard all the cooler, though, now doesn't it; it WAS visual basic, earlier, and in a more elegant fashion, with a more elegant backing "language" to boot. And i'll assume your agreement covers the fact that had apple continued to update Hypercard, it could now be everything visual basic is now and more..:shrugs;
Please excuse me if my memories on this subject are not too clear, i was two years old at the time and i am working off things i heard later:) There *was* some kind of thing going on involving hypercard and microsoft, i *think*, but i have just violated my right to speak on this subject i suppose ^_^
Please forgive me. I honestly really hate people who post vaguely remembered information on slashdot without checking their facts for correctness first, i am chagrined to find myself one of them =_=.
My apologies for being unclear. That comment was meant to refer to microsoft's *web browser* division, and microsoft's web brower division *only*. Yes, of course server OSes and server apps will have security issues from time to time. I don't expect them not to. The thing that leaves me a bit taken aback, though, is microsoft's tendencies to have security issues in a low-end *consumer-oriented* app like a web browser. WEB BROWSERS ARE NOT THE KIND OF THING WE SHOULD HAVE A SECURITY TRACK RECORD TO KEEP TRACK OF, and that was my only point.
YESS, it really kind of *is* an MS thing. Except for one vague memory or so of an incident involving a java hole, you just plain don't *SEE* security holes popping up with Netscape or Opera or Omniweb or really ANY browser except MSIE! *Netscape* got security right, and their software was AWFUL! But that there should be THIS many instances of hardware-access-level vulnerabilities in something meant to display web pages.. just. blah. it blows my mind.
Slashdot Mirror
Not widespread by any means, but definitely more than a misremembering of an NPR report.
If next time you are going to make a statement as serious as "there is female genital mutilation in india" or "there is no female genital mutilation in india" in a public forum, you would check with Google first, it would be to the betterment for us all. Just a thought.
In an ideal world, there should be only one way to do it, BUT the USER should be able to determine what this one way is.
In my humble opinion, the direction that GUI design needs to and, inevetably-- i have no idea when, but it HAS to go this way eventually-- will go, is in the direction of infinite modularity: the direction of seperating style from content, seperating form from function. Up until this point, interface design has been a constant war between the macintosh "all applications should act roughly consistently with one another" mindset, where you take a single set of guidelines and stick with them, and the Xwindows/UNIX "interface guidelines are fascism" mindset. The UNIX mindset has an extremely good point-- but makes the mistake that it just trades off apple's single point of interface fascism for a billion tiny points of interface fascism, one for the author of each application. The author of each application is still the one in control, and is in control only of the application they created. The user is in control of nothing. And from the user's standpoint, being powerless over the behavior of a bunch of applications that all act the same (as on the mac) is better than being powerless over the behavior bunch of applications that all act differently (as on UNIX).
Ideally, the person who dictates interface behavior would be neither Apple nor the application designer, but the user. Ideally Apple and the application designer would both offer *suggestions* as to how the application would behave, and the user would determine which, if either, of these suggestions the application would follow.
Ideally, eventually we will move to where programmers don't say "i want a text field, two buttons, and a menu with these specific sizes and positions", they will say "i want a text field that you can do these two specific things to and which you have these options for, and the text field and the potential buttons and the potential menu have these specific relationships to each other", and the system will build the interface based on the rules the user prefers.
Hmm. I'm kind of rambling now, and i have to go. But how i was going to end this is by saying that the direction things should take from here, and the direction things ARE taking from here (at least with the things that GNOME and apple are putting forth) is that common things like text fields and scrollbars should be done by a single systemwide service, but *abstractly*-- such that the user can augument the behavior of those text fields or whatever at will; and that we should move toward the model used by CSS, the glade files of the GNOME api, and the nib files of apple's Cocoa API-- where you define functions, and then define an interface, and then link the two together. I, the user, can open up the nib files inside of these mac os x applications i use, and because the relationship between interface and function is abstract rather than hardwired into code, i can rewire that relationship-- i can delete, rearrange, and redesign the function of interface elements of existing programs in InterfaceBuilder despite not having the source code to the program. This is the way things should be.
OK.. i'm done. thanks for listening :)
"I have a firm belief that computers should conform themselves to my behavior, and not the other way around." --Steven Levy, on the original Newton release of the Graffiti pen input system now used in the palmpilot
> The really controversial idea, though, is to abandon applications altogether. There would be only the system, with its commands, and the users' content
This sounds like opendoc. Does Raskin actually mention that opendoc is what he's talking about? Is opendoc what he's talking about?
How does Raskin propose that this state he advocates in his book be reached? If he wants to follow the opendoc model of applications being split up into as many tiny interlocking pieces as possible, with a framework for pieces from disparate apps being allowed to interlock with one another as long as they operate on the same kinds of data, then how does he propose that the parts be coordinated together in such a way that they appear, as he wants them to, modeless and consistent?
Basically what i'm asking is this: The things he proposes (a single modeless system that does EVERYTHING and in which every bit of interface is consistent with every other) are things which are extremely difficult to achieve unless every bit of said system is written by the same company. Does he suggest any way that disparate groups could work on the creation of a system such as he proposes without the different voices involved ruining the purity of the whole thing-- like, the people writing apps start doing their own thing, and eventually the differnet parts of the system become inconsistent again.
I also would be curious to see what Raskin would think of the mac os x "services" model, which attempts to revive the opendoc idea with in a less extreme-marxism manner-- applications can rewrite parts of themselves as "services" that do certain actions on certain types of data. If the user is using a program which uses a type of data that a service the user has installed can work with, the user is allowed to let the service wrest control of the data from the application and operate on it. Is this good because it's a step in the right direction, or bad because unlike opendoc the focus remains on the application and not the document?
Andrej Bauer's Random Art Generator
Scottd's Random Art Generator
[enter subtle prompt here for people to post links to other interesting but not-directly-related to-Aaron-itself projects.]
- Gracenote is going around bullying people, starting lawsuits they clearly don't mean to end in anything other than an out-of-court-settlement, and claiming in press releases that freedb is an illegal copy of their product.
- However, freedb is clearly not illegal, and as yerricde has mentioned above the content from Gracenote's product is used under liscense.
- Therefore, the FreeDB project can sue Gracenote for slander/libel, as Gracenote is going around and publicly and in the press spreading lies about the freedb product as a way to scare away customers from a competitor.
Is there any reason this isn't the least bit valid? I don't really think there is.The Rambus thing earlier this week was really a revelation to me, and it should have been to most of the rest of the slashdot population, in that, hey! If a company commits fraud, you can actually sue them for fraud! You aren't limited to just sitting around and bitching on public webboards! Isn't that wierd? Why didn't that occur to any of us earlier?
Btw.. Freedb is, imho, a really stupid name.
Your suggestion is probably closer than mine to what they're likely to wind up doing, though. Napster's going to put in a system like that eventually; they might as well liscense microsoft's..
More likely it isn't about *forcing* the user to trade WMAs, but rather just *allowing* them to. Napster still requires all files moved to be mp3s or mp2s, don't they? Well, here's a nice alternative to forcing everybody on the file sharing network to use a format nobody uses yet and killing the file sharing network as a result: just find a way to get a bunch of .wmas floating around on that network, and make it so napster client can play those wmas. The napster user can't tell what format they're using; they just click on the first thing along the lines of "Creed - I Sure Do Like Pearl Jam.tla" in the search window and tell napster to play it for them. So start dumping .wmas on the network and pretty soon they'll get into vaguely wide circulation.. hell, i can't think of a better way to get a format widespread. Get a couple of .wmas on the hard drive of every single idiot napster user out there without said idiot user napsters noticing it. Then later when they go back to listen and discover they have to download WiMP to listen to it outside of the napster application.. well, which do you think they'll choose? Look for and redownload the Creed song as an mp3, download Windows Media Player, or switch to Gnutella? I'm thinking the second; it's the least work.
Pity. I'd like to see napster dead; then something better would come along.
Word of advice to the free software community: you need to learn how to play the game of making support for your formats viral, and you need to learn to play the game of using The Blinking 12:00 Effect to your advantage. Microsoft is the master of both of these games, and you people are HORRIBLE at them. My first suggestion: start talking to apple about putting Ogg Vorbis support into quicktime. Maybe even volunteer to write a nice little LGPLed quicktime plugin that apple could start including. Then you'd have this great big ol' installed base. Installed bases are good. Really! Trust me, they are.
Something that almost NOBODY seems to have straight is the difference between LinuxPPC the kernel and LinuxPPC the distro. I'm still a bit confused m'self. From observing, i get the vague sense that the LinuxPPC distro is just kind of tossed together by kernel developers who are much too busy maintaining the kernel to actually put together a distro, and the LPPC distro is nothing more than redhat recompiled without any testing, a thousand disparate and mostly uncessecary parts thrown together on a CD, most of which are for various reaons broken. Personally, i have used (buying one of them) multiple versions of LinuxPPC and had a simply miserable time with them all. I then went and got me a copy of Debian/PPC, which uses the LinuxPPC kernel -- which was as easy as downloading a disk image and letting dpkg handle the rest-- and my experience with it has been absolutely blissful. (I have had serious problems with the X server, i will admit, but i suspect this could easily be fixed were it not for the fact i am purposefully choosing not to run X on this machine.) I have never used Yellow Dog Linux, but everyone i've talked to who used it was quite happy with it. I personally would rather use Debian/PPC, being as i love apt-get and dselect more than i can express, but YDL may be better for people who are not (as i would consider myself now) relatively experienced linux users. I am still wonderfully grateful to the LinuxPPC project, it just seems to me the quality of their distro is not very high on their list of priorities.
If i am mistaken as to the nature of the LinuxPPC distrbution, or if the LPPC distribution has improved in quality since the times i used it (it has been awhile, relatively speaking) i wish to apologize greatly to anyone i have slandered.
While i for one would be irritated were my employer to demand i use a certain operating system or set of software to do my job, i do believe an employer has the right to dictate what equipment the employees use at work.
The law probably ought to contain some kind of back door-- like, something where a person at a state university can appeal this law and be given an exception based on usage of free software being unreasonable given a lack of free software alternatives to a closed source program they need to use-- but still there are all kinds of reasons why this is a good idea. I for one would be alarmed by the idea of the government gaining a dependence on a private software company; if you can't get out your welfare checks without this tracking software created by a company in another country, and that other country suddenly becomes diplomatically hostile to you, and you suddenly discover a horrible bug that absolutely has to be fixed that instant for the system to continue functioning, and you can't get the source.. well, that's bad. But if you have the source you (the government) can fix and continue to maintain things yourself.
I wish english had a pronoun for the abstract third person. Yes, i know i could use "one". That doesn't count.
Oops :)
My apologies
Thanks for the great info.. C4L and all of you who replied..
/me is happy
Someone made a statement along these lines (Microkernels are a good idea but Mach is a poor implementation of the idea of a microkernel) earlier, in the slashdot discussion on the kernel of Mac OS X and Linus' long-standing dislike for microkernels. Like you, they failed to back this assertion up with anything at all.
Will someone please attempt to assert or refute, using some kind of solid logic or numbers or something, the statement that microkernels are a good idea but Mach is a bad implementation of that idea? What is done wrong in Mach, and can it be fixed?
If mach is, indeed, a bad implementation of the microkernel, what would be a *good* implementation of the microkernel? Are any well-designed microkernels out there? If there are, then what is it that repeatedly leads projects like xMach/HURD/OS X/mkLinux to embrace Mach as opposed to one of the competing microkernels
Past that: Unless i am quite confused, supposedly, because the interaction between the microkernel and the OS is somewhat abstract, you ought to be able to replace the microkernel with a better one as long as the interface is the same. Is there any reason a better microkernel with the same software-side interface as Mach could not be written, and used to replace mach?
and, btw, this is kind offtopic, but while we're VAGUELY near the subject: someone once told me that Mach has the ability to host multiple kernels on the same machine at the same time. Is this true? How does that work in terms of sharing the hardware? How do you go about doing this?
I am just thinking that at this point, it would be an utterly useless but nifty parlor trick to try to get Mac OS X/Darwin, MkLinux, xMach and HURD running off the same mach microkernel on the same machine at the same time.
Thanx0r. I look forward to reading the xMach web page and finding out what it is as soon as their web provider recovers.
- X.11
- Mac OS X (uses mach)
- "X Server"s
- x86
- Mac OS X server (uses mach)
- Software that uses X.11, which by custom tends to begin with the letter x ("xEyes")
- xMach (uses mach)
- Multiple X servers for Mac OS and Mac OS X, one of which is named "MacX" but is not compatible with Mac OS X. Good luck looking for "Mac OS X X Server"s on ANY search engine.
- XF86 (X server; despite name, runs on lots of non-x86 hardware)
- Someday we will start seeing X servers for XMach
- And, most horrifically of all, someday we will see Mac OS 11-- which undoubtedly everyone on IRC will start calling "X 11". Assuming apple doesn't come out and name it "Mac OS X 11".
ARGH!Um, i don't know much about anything but i see no reason why this wouldn't be relatively easy.. i mean just play with release/retain. Assuming the garbage collector in smalltalk works in terms of some kind of reference counting. I mean, just capture the -release and -retain messages before they hit the smalltalk objects and feed them to the GC, and then have the GC send -retain/-release as it determines they are necessary. Maybe keep track of how many of each refs for a given object are from the objc side, and how many are from the smalltalk side and if someone sends a -dealloc then you just remove all the objc refs. Seems to me that would be pretty clean. RIght?
this of course gets into the issue of what happens if someone uses @defs on a smalltalk object, but anyone using @defs in the first place is just asking for trouble -_-
Seriously. I don't know why i should use this language. Convince me.
I recently started developing with Objective C and the Cocoa/Yellow Box/NextStep API in Mac OS X. I think Objective C is fantastic, and have no terrible problem with living without exceptions or garbage collection. How would you argue that Smalltalk is better?
What is significantly better about one language as compared to the other? Has one features or elegance the other does not? Has anyone used both? How does smalltalk provide the things that protocols and categories give you in ObjC and multiple inherhitance gives you in C++? Is there way to do the nifty things that you can do with the ObjC forwardInvocation method?
Also: is there any reason that the smalltalk language could not interface with the Cocoa/Yellow Box/NextStep APIs? Would doing so be clumsy, or in some way degrade the concepts of the language? If you messed with the compiler, could Smalltalk objects and ObjC objects communicate transparently with each other through the objective c messaging system?
P.S. If i could somehow touch off a flamewar here that involved in ANY way the subjects of CLOS and Objective CAML, i would be completely overjoyed.
Why? Why not just take all the banned clients and switch them over to TOC?
I'm not trying ot say they should; that's just an honest question. I'm curious. Why not use TOC? What is the reasoning here? AOL's request that people stick to the public TOC protocol and let AOL use their OSCAR protocol for official use seems completely reasonable to me; am i missing something? Please explain.
I am a user of Mac OS X. Until the week after AOL banned all the IM clients, there was no official AOLIM client for mac os x and no way to run TCL/Tk scripts, so i-- everyone-- used a nifty little program called Fire. Fire is wonderful. Fire is usable. Fire is open source. Fire was blocked along with all the other TOC/OSCAR clients, and the AOLIM program that AOL finally released was so bad as to be literally unusable. I for one would occationally launch the thing to see if anyone really important was on, then quit it and go back to micq in terminal. Thankfully, a couple weeks ago, Fire switched to TOC, and i have had NO problems since then. Why don't the linux clients do the same? Jabber is staying away from TOC because they're afraid that if they use TOC AOL will ban TOC altogether (see the public statement on their website), thus ruining things for everyone. What is everyone else's excuse?
By the way, Many people in this thread have suggested that we do not have a right to use AOL's service. This may be correct; I don't care. I am going to use AOL's servers. Capitalism is a nice thing, but capitalism does not often work as a system with the communications market, and does not work here at all. There are no market forces. I'll say this; If Southwestern Bell attempts to set unreasonable demands on my usage of their network, that's PERFECTLY FINE with me, because i can walk away at any time. I can, if i want, cancel my Southwestern Bell telephone service, and go to Birch. If both Birch and Southwestern Bell offer terms i am not happy with, that's fine too, because it is theoretically possible for me to go start my own telephone company. See? Capitalism. But meanwhile if i am NOT a Southwestern Bell customer, and they tell me that i can't dial IN to their network because i use a Primeco cellular phone, well, you can bet your ass that i for one am going to start breaking out the little yellow boxes. I will willingly break into SWBell's network if i have to (i don't) and i will willingly break into AOL's if i have to (i might eventually).And i don't care much if i am using expensive resources belonging to AOL or Ma Bell or whatever, i am not at all comfortable with any non-governmental entity having that kind of power. I'm not really comfortable with the government having it either, but at least as a voting citizen i have some tiny amount of control over what the government does, which means i am more comfortable with the government having split up the telephone network away from Ma Bell and making it open and would be more comfortable were the government to split up AOL and make their system open.
I don't want to use AIM.
I don't want to use their servers. I don't want to use their client. I am not given a choice. There are people on that network i need to talk to, and that is why i have suffered through dealing their awful bloated software for three years. (Over most of which time, i believe i rebooted more times because AIM had crashed than for all other reasons put together.) If i could get the people i know to switch to Jabber, i would be ecstatic. I can't. If you tell me that if i want to talk to those people i have to pay someone to use the network infrastructure, that's actually fine, sort of. But if i don't have a choice of who gets paid-- if i don't have the ability to walk away and change providers-- i am not ok with that. And if you are comparing communication networks, i don't think you can ever quite have that one single right, the right which the consumer has to have in order for capitalism to be capitalism. "You can go use the Jabber network but not talk to anyone there because AOL is specifically banning the Jabber network from communicating with theirs" Is not an alright situation to me, "you can't send e-mail to an aol user if you're using the linux sendmail server" is not an alright situation to me, and i am not going to pay much attention to what the law says in such a situation unless the police will come after me personally because i am trying to communicate with AOL users on my own terms. I doubt they will, and if they do i suspect the EFF will pay for everything anyway.
Here's the only couple of real things i can think of that are holding GNUStep and OSX apart-- let me know if you can think of any others:
That being said, the idea of apple releasing (as NeXT did) runtimes that would allow you to run recompiled Cocoa apps on windows xp or linux or whatever is not wholly unrealistic, although i don't think Steve wants to do it. Still, i could forsee a future where Redhat or somebody dumps a whole bunch of money into making GNUStep for Windows and Linux 100% cocoa compatible, and then trying to go to all the OS X software companies and convince them to include x86 GNUStep ports in their shrinkwrapped boxes (hey, look, it's just a recompile!)
At the VERY least, though, I think it is VERY likely that at some point in the near future we will see GNUStep trying to pander to developers of OS X software as a very quick method of porting OS X software to other platforms. And despite any stigma there may still be with linking into a GNU framework, if a development house has become enamored with Cocoa, the idea of developing in that first and then porting to GNUStep for instant Windows and Linux ports would more than likely be *very* appealing.
I don't really know much about how the hardware interacts with the OS. I am somewhat confused by the comments i have seen talking about how the *hardware* performs context changes, or the *hardware* is poor at memory paging. I mean, i can accept the idea that the hardware's capabilities directly influence whether such seemingly OS-level concepts as threading or paged memory are realistic or not, but i am not quite sure why the idea is true. So if you respond, please try to do so as if you are talking to someone who does not quite understand what you are talking about.
Anyway: you, and really everyone else throughout this /. discussion, seem to be confining your discussion of whether Mach is good as a microkernel to its performance on the x86 hardware-- i.e., the 386 being poor at context swaps vs. the modern Pentium being poor at context swaps. But the pentium really isn't *relevant*, is it? Since what we are discussing now is Mac OS X, and it as of now only runs on one single hardware platform-- the
PPC macintosh. Alright, so to a person interested in Darwin it is relevant whether the Pentium is a good chip to be using with the Mach microkernel, but with Mac OS X in general the Pentium is not an option. (Really funny, isn't it-- Start looking and you'll realize that Mac OS X is, from the ground up, at several levels, the most portable operating system ever created. The thing makes a few minor performance sacrifices in the name of portability. And yet it only runs on one single hardware platform. Wheee.)
So i guess my question is, ok, so the ability of the hardware to context swap bears a major role in the superiority of monolithic vs microkernel architectures. This is an excellent point. Could you explain what this means in relation to the hardware apple is currently using? Is the *PowerPC* good at context swaps? Can we assume that the PPC is intrinsically better at running either type of kernel than an x86 chip would be, or no? And if Darwin is what you're going to be running, are there any non-x86-compatible chips other than the PPC which might be capable of running Darwin/mach even better?
And in all of these questions: why?
I for one upgraded to 384 MB before the final version came out, and no doubt the issues i had with the public beta running on a 128 MB machine are softened by now, but let me just explain something to you: Everything you see in Mac OS X is being rendered through a display layer known as Quartz-- essentially Display PDF. Everything on the screen is a PDF object. This is a bit of a performance hit, but not so much as you'd get under, say, Display Postscript (since Postscript is actually its own little stack-based programming language and requires a somewhat computationally expensive runtime. Quartz gives you the potential for some simply AMAZING things (for the moment the main sign of its existence is the ominpresent drop shadows and semitransparent menus in OS X, but the whole concept is EXTREMELY powerful and i think that five years from now most of the huge selling points of os x will be things made possible by quartz), and in the end the whole system is a probably good bit more sane than, say, X.
However THE PROBLEM WITH THIS IS that Quartz, as (in the words of the developers) a "per-pixel mixer, not a per-pixel switcher", offers FREE BUFFERING to all windows, and almost all apps accept. What this means is that when the display server draws a pixel, it can't just figure out which window owns the pixel and ask the window to draw it; it has to keep track of each window independently by itself, consider which pixels from which windows to take into consideration (and some of these windows may have elements smaller than a pixel..), and indepdendently mix them appropriately at every pixel on the screen.
SO: If you are going to run OS X, GET A BUNCH OF RAM, and MAKE SURE that you have a huge block of unfragmented free disk space for os x to use. And if you don't do these things, don't go around blaming the slow system responsiveness on the microkernel or the Objective C messaging architecture or the complex multitiered layout of the OS. And if you don't want to pay for the hardware needed to make all this stuff usable, well.. Be isn't *quite* bankrupt yetThe performance hit from this really isn't as bad as one would think, but **because Quartz stores the image of pretty much *every window on the screen***, *including* the ones you can't see, in RAM, it does mean you need RAM. Because if you don't supply enough RAM, it means that os x will start dipping into Virtual Memory.
I for one am going to sit around and wait for apple to get some Multiprocessor machines out on the market. Whoo!
(Classic only adds to all this pain, and to be honest as of right now (while you don't HAVE to run Classic, and i for one don't) the app support is such that either you are a GNU-head who will wind up living in Terminal most of the time or you will have several very important tasks you will find can *only* be provided by Classic mac apps. Come july that may change, but still..)
There is already a project which has created a Jabber connection library and Jabber client written in Flash. If you can create an instant messaging client, i'm sure there's no reason you couldn't create a backend to connect to a MySQL server... :shrugs:
I seem to remember that this would happen even if the user was not an administrator, however this detail seems EXTREMELY unlikely and i probably imagined it. It was called monkeybagel.com or something. I can't find it anymore. I did find this:
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/1999/35/ns-9701.html
W3c, thy art dead.
You could make that case, very easily. Think: if not for Microsoft, it would still today be realistic to charge money for a web browser. Meaning it would be possible for a web browser to exist on its own terms, with SERIOUS resources devoted to their development, rather than the current situation where the major browsers must squeak by with either hand-outs from a massive corporation who are only developing the browser as a political tool, or beg (unsucessfully) for money and developers from passerby.
I'm don't know if it necessarily follows from this that MS was acting in an immoral fashion by leveraging its huge pool of resources to drive everyone serious out of the browser market, but you can CERTAINLY make a good case that it is "MS' fault that all the other browsers aren't as good"..
No, i did not mean to imply that Netscape has a perfect track record. Upon re-reading i realize that that was what i SAID, but i did not mean to; i must blame the hour of the morning and the fact that i am a massive tool for this occurance. The general gist of the garbled thought behind my posting was that Netscape bugs i remembered hearing about from time to time ; ie bugs i remembered hearing about *on a regular basis.* I thank you for bringing some objectivity to all this :)
Moderators: as of this writing, Ayende Rahien's informative post here is at score: 1, and my toss-off post he is replying to is at score: 3. WHAT ARE YOU SMOKING.
Please excuse me if my memories on this subject are not too clear, i was two years old at the time and i am working off things i heard later :) There *was* some kind of thing going on involving hypercard and microsoft, i *think*, but i have just violated my right to speak on this subject i suppose ^_^
Please forgive me. I honestly really hate people who post vaguely remembered information on slashdot without checking their facts for correctness first, i am chagrined to find myself one of them =_=.
hypercard@everything2.com
YESS, it really kind of *is* an MS thing. Except for one vague memory or so of an incident involving a java hole, you just plain don't *SEE* security holes popping up with Netscape or Opera or Omniweb or really ANY browser except MSIE! *Netscape* got security right, and their software was AWFUL! But that there should be THIS many instances of hardware-access-level vulnerabilities in something meant to display web pages.. just. blah. it blows my mind.
--mcc
it is late and i am spastic and bitter