Companies go through mortgage agreements because those are binding. You see them before the deal and agree to them. EULAs are restrictions they try to apply after you've already agreed to the real contract. They have no legal weight so it doesn't make sense to pay attention.
You wouldn't listen to a car dealer who, as you were driving off the lot having signed the papers, told you that you had to buy gas from them only. Why listen to this sort of thing from a software company?
It'd never get that far if you had a compotent lawyer. Post-sale restrictions aren't binding. I can't sell you a car and then after the sale is final, tell you that you must buy gas from my station and drive my kids to soccer practice. That's essentially what Dell is trying to do and it's simply not legal.
You could agree to these bizarre restrictions on my car if you knew about them before the purchase. Not just that there are restrictions, but exactly what they are. If I try to enforce restrictions you didn't know about (and thus aren't obligated to follow) it could be seen as extortion. You know, "That's an awful nice car you've got there - be a real shame if you weren't able to drive it..."
That's what Dell is doing... "Awful nice laptop there. Be a shame if you didn't agree to this EULA and it was nothing but a hunk of useless plastic."
The question to ask is "How can the courts find these licenses valid when nobody knew about them before the sale was made final?"
The answer to that is much simpler. They don't.
These licenses are not in any way binding. You couldn't go back to the store and tell them that by selling you the computer they were also selling you a few extra batteries. They can't come to you and tell you that the computer they were selling came with a page of conditions on its use. You need to negotiate this stuff before the contract (even an implied one, like for a purchase in a store) much be known to both parties before agreement. If it's not, the secret clauses aren't binding. (And trying to enforce them can be a criminal act, depending on a few conditions.)
This doesn't mean you aren't bound by a contract if you don't read it. That's your fault. But if you didn't know there was another page to the contract (they faxed over all but one page, for example) you can't be bound by it, regardless of what it says.
They can't enforce these licenses anyways. You bought the product. Copyright law specifically allows all copying required to use a copyrighted work (ie, to the HD, to RAM, etc) so you don't need their permission for anything.
Treat it like a toaster. If you bought a toaster and found a "license" when you opened it that tried to tell you the only brand of bread you could toast was Brand X, would you obey it? That's exactly what these licenses are.
I really don't see what the problem is. EULAs aren't binding. You don't have to agree to anything to use software because by the time you get it any copying has been done, and copyright law specifically says copying to ram for use (if required, yada yada) is not a copyright violation. In other words, if they sold it, they can't stop you from using it.
Even more, post-sale contracts simply are not binding. I can't sell you something and then come along later and give you a bunch of conditions for its use, so why is it more believable when the unenforcable conditions come printed on a paper inside the box?
Ignore these things.
(Or, better yet, maybe there's a way to sue the companies for these in small claims. They are a intentional misrepresentation for profit, I wonder if you can claim damages for the time spent dealing with them in order to be able to use your product... Or maybe, try to get them charged with extortion.)
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Be careful to only include companies where SCO's parent owns more than a percent or two of stock... Make sure they have enough to matter.
Otherwise, all they'd need to do to really fuck with our heads would be purchase 1% of Redhat, or VA Linux. Cheap stocks that are publicly traded so nobody could stop them, as much as we dislike them.
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One good thing about SCO's stock price going up is that it's oportunistic bastards buying it. They've read about SCOs claims, and likely about all the rest of the analysis, and they've decided they're in for some of that easy money.
So the SCO execs unload their stock to a bunch of just as greedy, but much dumber people who don't understand why rats suddenly flee a ship. Think of it as evolution in action. Once the greedy hordes have lost all their money and learned a lesson, we've got a relatively small handful of SCO execs to hound till the ends of the earth, Ralsky style.
Maybe when we're done we can go after the Rambus execs...
It's not a valid argument. Newbies don't upgrade kernels. No need.
Newbs run something like Mandrake Update which is easier than Windows Update in that it doesn't require reboot. (It does require you to choose which packages to install, but you can just select everything.)
The other side of this "Linux is harder" is: "I tried to patch Windows to fix a vulnerability, but the only patch I could find was against the binary because there's no source. So I loaded a hex editor and started editing bytes, but then I mistyped one and.... Why can't it be easy like Linux or BSD where you can just download the source patch, type 'make' and 'make install' and it just works?!"
The reason would be that one project can get stuck at a dead-end. They can make a bad design decision that limits their ability to grow past a certain problem.
Ideally, two projects will have two sets of methods and will get stuck at different points.
What you need though, is sharing between the two. No sense implementing two sets of GUIs for a database where the GUI is an add-on. No sense rewriting something from scratch, as when you method failed, and the other project has code that does exactly what you need. Yet, you both can believe that the best way to implement transactions is completely different and either there are two (or more) good ways, or time will tell which is right.
In other words, friendly competition where people will share when requested, will produce good long-term results in a field that needs research (a field where we don't *know* the best methods yet). In other words, friendly competition is like biodiversity. Each can have its strengths and a little inter-breeding can keep everyone healthy. Plus, competition can be fun if you don't let it rule you. It's like Marines and Army are always competing in every way, except when faced by a real enemy.
Randian, intensely capitalism, short-sighted, shoot-self-in-foot-out-of-spite-rather-than-share- a-single-thing, kind of competition of course produces a thousand overlapping projects which all have to succeed or fail on their own. The state of the art advances very slowly because nobody learns from anyone else's mistakes. (Yet, Randian characters all make full use of the science of their days, which was developed in a cooperative society... Hmmm)
No, you aren't the first. And yeah, any SQL coder knows what you'd have done. Keep all the data that must change together in one table and use a single update statement to change it, relying on the fact that individual statements are atomic.
That way, if you were changing someone's address, and phone number, you'd be sure to have a valid address, and a valid phone number. They might be out of sync, but then you'd have a dirty bit to indicate it.
It's pretty easy to do this, with minimal risk, on inserts. If you get into deletes you can quickly end up with addresses for clients who aren't in the DB anymore and so on.
However, the risk, while minimal, is there. This is an okay idea for goofing around on your website where all you lose is a link to a new picture or something, but is totally unacceptable for a commerce site.
However, you attitude is/was common. I used to see it in the context of people putting inline assembly in their C code. Whenever they knew a clever trick to save a cycle or two they'd use it. The silly thing is that compilers are usually better at the silly tricks. Compilers could use the LEA instruction to perform basic integer multiplication just as well as people (and did, when integer multiplication was slow and cycles mattered). Now, we're not all using the same CPUs as we were back in the 486 days. What's a quick thing on an Athlon might save work on a P4, and might hurt performance on a P3. Too many variables to keep in your head, and too ugly of code, for the incredibly minute gains. Especially since people didn't profile their code before going and optimizing it.
Now, the "proper" thing to do is write the cleanest code you can and let the compiler have a shot. If it runs too slowly, consider throwing more CPU at it. If that fails, profile it and try to fix it with a new algorithm, only after all that, go in and hand-tweak certain sections.
> I structure my data so that atomicity on a statement level is all that I care about.
So, you throw away the R in RDBMS, just for a small potential performance gain. You then hack at basic transaction features. You don't have atomicity, but you have a way of telling if you've screwed up a record.
But then what? What if you do screw up a record? Do you have a query that runs at startup and goes and deletes these now unsafe records? Is it okay that you've mangled a record (ie, dirty bit set, data may or may not have been written)? These can't be important records then. Not customer data or anything.
You'd be better off taking the money that pays for this extra, wasted, coding and simply buying a slightly faster CPU, or more RAM, if you feel speed is an issue. That way you'd get the safety of transactions. You could also use the relational aspects of the database and make your queries run a *lot* faster. (You can't index properly (quickly) between tables unless they're keyed with a a real foreign key, not just the same piece of data in both tables but unlinked.)
I question, if you wish to see it that way, your developer credentials because your claims don't make sense. While you are older than me, it's not by more than a few years, and we both started coding in the Apple 2 era. Not that it matters, John Carmack's our age too and he's a bit better than either of us, I'll bet.
You also don't understand bundling. You aren't given Mozilla, with your OS, and with it set as a default browser that pops up any time you select any local or remote HTML content. You have to seek it out and install it, if you want what it comes with and have a machine that runs it well. MS's handling of IE is completely unrelated.
Further, your definition of browser is flawed. That what *you* want. If you don't want Mozilla, don't use it, but don't whine that they should target a five year old computer. Other people want pretty much exactly what Mozilla comes with. Features are added to it by the same people who are going to use it. I'm very happy with almost every feature it has. Even the ones I rarely use, like the IRC client, aren't really bloat. They're XUL apps, essentially freebies that doesn't get loaded into RAM unless wanted, that you have the capability for once you have a sufficiently expandable interface which is required for the easy customizability of the browser itself.
I'm sorry that you want computers advance slowly to protect you investment but they don't. Your computer is less than an eighth the speed of current machines, with a similarly small ammount of RAM. It's obsolete and you prove it by whining about modern software. If you were running a firewall and mail server on a 486, it wouldn't be obsolete, it'd be fitting its niche perfectly. If you try to use a P2-266 for modern apps, it's obsolete.
It's old if it was made before the software was. Do you understand that? If you want to run Quake 3, a Pentium is old. If you want to run Doom, a Pentium rocks.
You obviously want to run Mozilla, so your P2-266 is old.
I stand by my statement that you aren't a developer if all you think Mozilla does, over Netscape 4.7, is popup stopping and cookie viewing. You seriously must not have looked at the DOM browser, the pluggins you can get, the sidebar, or any of that. Hell, the cookie viewer alone is worth going to Mozilla for, just for trying to debug oddball session-cookie problems.
As to your, "stop growing the codebase", they've done that. Mozilla 1.0 had been exactly the same size since release. Netscape 4.7 hasn't added a single byte since it came out. They've been creating new version, with new features, and those run very well on modern hardware.
You really need to get over your fixation on a specific ammount of ram. Why don't you complain that nothing will run on your Vic-20 in its 4k of ram? A single 512MB DIMM costs less today than the 64MB I bought with my P1, so why should I care that programs want more?
No, anti-spam people want to ban SPAM. Is that hard to understand? SPAM, in its current definition, is unsolicited email, of a commercial or non-commercial nature. I've gotten jesus spam that's just as annoying as penis pills spam.
Themes have no use? Hah. I'm not into glitz at all, so I choose a nice small theme that keeps all the buttons but doesn't take up half the screen. Anything that gives me more usable screen.
You just can't understand that things you don't want aren't always bloat.
Mozilla does things that make it hard to imagine having to browse in IE or an old Netscape.
Sure, much of it could be done with add-on programs, but when I ran junk-buster I'd have to right-click and get the URL of banners, then edit the config file, etc. With Moz I simply right-click and select "Block images from this server".
I *could* install a seperate DOM viewer program to view a web page, but that's the real definition of bloat. It'd have to have its own parsing/rendering engine, and UI. This capability is inherent in displaying a webpage, why reinvent the wheel?
I could open a new browser window, which would get tossed in the OS-sorted (as opposed to application sorted) bar at the bottom of the screen, open a bookmark, and then paste a URL into it to check the HTML compliance. Or, in Moz I could right-click and select 'Check page for compliance at W3C". Let moz handle the new tab, the cut and paste, everything.
I could open up Bugzilla, scroll down, enter a bug #, and click "Find". Or, I could use bookmark keywords so I can type ctrl-t, b Num to open a bug report.
I could run a web proxy and capture the setting of session cookies, or I could simply go into the Cookie viewer and see exactly what the cookies are, including the session cookies that other browsers don't give you any way of seeing.
But yeah, none of that is needed. I should probably be developing web apps in Notepad.
How about, if you aren't a developer and will never use anything more advanced than the "back" button, you can go download IE and do everything manually. I'll pay a couple of extra dollars so that I can use powerful apps that make my work go much faster.
There's NO bloody way that this is a valid patent. If it covers pluggins, which were the obvious solution to a technical problem, then it automatically fails.
Of course, some judges have jello for brains and have obviously never been told what makes a valid patent.
Until the patent system has an exception for independent discovery (I mean, how innovative was the idea if I had the exact same idea as you when we looked at the same problem) it's worse than worthless. It harms the companies who actually do something (and are thus liable for "damages") and only helps companies that are all lawyers and never produce a damn thing of any worth to society.
Exactly. Patents are about protection the "how", not the "what".
They are also supposed to only be applicable when a skilled technician in that field wouldn't come up with the same solutions when presented with the same constraints. Once seen it can seem obvious, but if you ask someone in that field, who hasn't seen the invention, how to do this and they come up with the same design, it shouldn't be patentable.
At least, that's how it used to be, now you can patent any damn thing.
Actually, they weren't, though this is a common misconception.
Patents were introduced to reduce the number of trade secrets, to increase the state of art.
It used to be that you'd keep everything secret. Only family members would know the formula for Coke, or how to build some special machine that make widgets cheaper. This had two problems:
1) You spent a lot of time and money keeping it secret.
2) If nobody else could do this, widgets would be a bit cheaper, but nobody else could use this to make gadgets cheaper, and you don't know how to make gadgets, so cheap gadgets are never produced.
Thus, the government said "Oh to hell with it. You tell everyone how it works, enough detail for them to build one, and we'll keep everyone else from doing it for a while, as your reward. You save money and time now, still profit from your invention, and eventually we'll have cheap gadgets as well as cheap widgets."
Keeping secrets is hard, and "Trade Secrets" only get protection if they leak through espionage means. If you leave the formula for Coke in the copier and someone finds it, it's not protected anymore. If someone reverse engineers it (clean-room not required) it's not protected. If your workers accidently leak critical info at trade shows, it's not protected. It's really hard to keep a secret for a long time and still use it in business. If you want to keep the workings of a machine secret you have to do the repairs in-house, with workers under NDA. Very annoying.
So people gambled on a government-guaranteed, fixed-length, monopoly instead of having to risk being able to keep a secret, which might be more profitable, or might be worth nothing tomorrow.
"Helping the little guy" wasn't actually involved at all. It was more of a, "The rising tide floats all boats".
However, patents now harm the computer industry about as much as they help it. Especially software and business-model patents.
Listen, your machine worked fine when you got it. Consider the hardware and software a unit. Don't upgrade the software until you upgrade the hardware and it'll work fine until the day it dies. Don't try to drag everyone down to your level because you can't understand that adding features slows things down.
Just don't whine about people writing new software that does new things. Mozilla has a ton of functionality like tabbed browsing, real-time cookie viewing, the DOM viewer, a password manager, a white/black list for popups and images, and a ton more. Its interface is also written in XUL and script, which means it can be easily extended. I've got five or ten extra tools in my context menu (depending on work/home) and a ton of references in the sidebar. Stuff that I'd have had to run a whole seperate program for if I couldn't load it as a browser pluggin. CCS are another file to load and parse, and a more complex layout that takes longer to render.
I really can't imagine how I got by with older browsers. While I'm sure Mozilla is bloated, in the sense that everything not done in hand-tuned assembly is, it'll never be as fast as a well-tuned NS4.7 era browser because it does so much more.
But, they should make it do so much more, and run faster, on a slower machine, because you don't want to upgrade.
If you want to stick with old hardware, stick with old programs. I'm stuck using a P2-233 at work with 96mb of ram, much the same as what you've got, and I don't bitch because it runs WinXP and Mandrake9.1 badly because I don't try. I run Redhat 7.3 and Win98SE on it. Both were made when this machine was current and they are reasonably fast.
Mozilla does a hell of a lot more than NS4.7, if you think it's only cookies and popups you're either not a developer, or you've never actually used Mozilla. If you want this extra functionality, you have to have the hardware to run it, if you don't, stick with NS4.7 on your P2-266.
Or, run one of the just-Gecko in a native interface versions of Mozilla, like K-Meleon. I can't remember what the Linux project to do this is, but then I went out and bought an $800 Canadian computer with an XP2500+ and half a gig of ram so that my compiles take 1/20th (honestly) the time they used to. (This is my home machine, the one at work is a dog.) Also, I can play games made in this century.
Either write to them, or anonymously turn yourself in, about an application that looks at a 'type' and launches the appropriate program to deal with this content. Get them to say that their patent covers this and that you owe them royalties.
Then show them MacOS, circa '84, and how it fits exactly what they are trying to make you pay them for.
Of course, proof like this means nothing in court because patents are immune to logic, but it'd be hilarious to have them admit that they patented a key concept in an OS that's been around 19 years.
Everyone I know who uses a blacklist to drop email sends bounce messages explaining this to the sender. No mail is silently lost in this situation, the user is simply informed that they need to communicate the message in another fashion (phone, web-form, etc) or in email from a different ISP preferably.
Compare this to the false-positives hidden or deleted by spam filters, or accidently by users trying to delete spam manually. No warning goes out in this case.
I get very little spam, but a lot of spam is sent to me for automated deletion. That slows down my net access and, if over a certain limit, costs me for every megabyte. It'd be much worse if I connected over a modem.
Then there's the time involved in dealing with spam. You either set up Spam Assasain (or similar) and subscribe to black-hole lists of one sort or another, or download and test a ton of rules trying to describe spam, or you go through and press delete up to a few hundred times a day. Either way it takes time and time isn't unlimited. If you're doing it for work there's even a dollar cost involved.
More importantly though, is the chance that you'll accidently delete a real email, either with an automated script, or by hand. That could cost you a lot.
You know all of this though. You know spam costs a fortune, for network traffic, storage, and time. You also know that most of these costs are paid for by the recipient who doesn't want to read the email, let alone pay for it. Why do you even waste time pretending otherwise?
The only things SPEWS and services like it do, are suggest that you might be someone I want to ignore. I then ignore you. You are not directly affected by SPEWS, it's only an automated way of sysadmins saying "Don't accept mail from foo.com, they harbour spammers."
There's no product involved, so it can hardly be a crappy product. Perhaps SPEWS advice is crappy, but then considering what you pay for it, it's a pretty good deal.
SPEWS does no such thing. They offer a list of ISP that harbour spammers. Other ISPs take that list and use it to ignore mail that's likely spam.
As for shifting, whose fault is the spam, the cost for which you are somehow saying is shifted? It's the fault of the ISPs who don't police their customers. If these ISPs didn't enable spammers, there wouldn't be any costs for anyone. But, no costs are being shifted. These ISPs who refuse to act in a net-friendly manner are simply being ignored. If anything, this will end up costing them less as their bandwidth costs will no doubt go down when their legitimate customers leave for an ISP whose peers actually accept traffic from them.
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Companies go through mortgage agreements because those are binding. You see them before the deal and agree to them. EULAs are restrictions they try to apply after you've already agreed to the real contract. They have no legal weight so it doesn't make sense to pay attention.
You wouldn't listen to a car dealer who, as you were driving off the lot having signed the papers, told you that you had to buy gas from them only. Why listen to this sort of thing from a software company?
It'd never get that far if you had a compotent lawyer. Post-sale restrictions aren't binding. I can't sell you a car and then after the sale is final, tell you that you must buy gas from my station and drive my kids to soccer practice. That's essentially what Dell is trying to do and it's simply not legal.
You could agree to these bizarre restrictions on my car if you knew about them before the purchase. Not just that there are restrictions, but exactly what they are. If I try to enforce restrictions you didn't know about (and thus aren't obligated to follow) it could be seen as extortion. You know, "That's an awful nice car you've got there - be a real shame if you weren't able to drive it..."
That's what Dell is doing... "Awful nice laptop there. Be a shame if you didn't agree to this EULA and it was nothing but a hunk of useless plastic."
The question to ask is "How can the courts find these licenses valid when nobody knew about them before the sale was made final?"
The answer to that is much simpler. They don't.
These licenses are not in any way binding. You couldn't go back to the store and tell them that by selling you the computer they were also selling you a few extra batteries. They can't come to you and tell you that the computer they were selling came with a page of conditions on its use. You need to negotiate this stuff before the contract (even an implied one, like for a purchase in a store) much be known to both parties before agreement. If it's not, the secret clauses aren't binding. (And trying to enforce them can be a criminal act, depending on a few conditions.)
This doesn't mean you aren't bound by a contract if you don't read it. That's your fault. But if you didn't know there was another page to the contract (they faxed over all but one page, for example) you can't be bound by it, regardless of what it says.
They can't enforce these licenses anyways. You bought the product. Copyright law specifically allows all copying required to use a copyrighted work (ie, to the HD, to RAM, etc) so you don't need their permission for anything.
Treat it like a toaster. If you bought a toaster and found a "license" when you opened it that tried to tell you the only brand of bread you could toast was Brand X, would you obey it? That's exactly what these licenses are.
I really don't see what the problem is. EULAs aren't binding. You don't have to agree to anything to use software because by the time you get it any copying has been done, and copyright law specifically says copying to ram for use (if required, yada yada) is not a copyright violation. In other words, if they sold it, they can't stop you from using it.
Even more, post-sale contracts simply are not binding. I can't sell you something and then come along later and give you a bunch of conditions for its use, so why is it more believable when the unenforcable conditions come printed on a paper inside the box?
Ignore these things.
(Or, better yet, maybe there's a way to sue the companies for these in small claims. They are a intentional misrepresentation for profit, I wonder if you can claim damages for the time spent dealing with them in order to be able to use your product... Or maybe, try to get them charged with extortion.)
Be careful to only include companies where SCO's parent owns more than a percent or two of stock... Make sure they have enough to matter.
Otherwise, all they'd need to do to really fuck with our heads would be purchase 1% of Redhat, or VA Linux. Cheap stocks that are publicly traded so nobody could stop them, as much as we dislike them.
One good thing about SCO's stock price going up is that it's oportunistic bastards buying it. They've read about SCOs claims, and likely about all the rest of the analysis, and they've decided they're in for some of that easy money.
So the SCO execs unload their stock to a bunch of just as greedy, but much dumber people who don't understand why rats suddenly flee a ship. Think of it as evolution in action. Once the greedy hordes have lost all their money and learned a lesson, we've got a relatively small handful of SCO execs to hound till the ends of the earth, Ralsky style.
Maybe when we're done we can go after the Rambus execs...
It's not a valid argument. Newbies don't upgrade kernels. No need.
.... Why can't it be easy like Linux or BSD where you can just download the source patch, type 'make' and 'make install' and it just works?!"
Newbs run something like Mandrake Update which is easier than Windows Update in that it doesn't require reboot. (It does require you to choose which packages to install, but you can just select everything.)
The other side of this "Linux is harder" is: "I tried to patch Windows to fix a vulnerability, but the only patch I could find was against the binary because there's no source. So I loaded a hex editor and started editing bytes, but then I mistyped one and
The reason would be that one project can get stuck at a dead-end. They can make a bad design decision that limits their ability to grow past a certain problem.
- a-single-thing, kind of competition of course produces a thousand overlapping projects which all have to succeed or fail on their own. The state of the art advances very slowly because nobody learns from anyone else's mistakes. (Yet, Randian characters all make full use of the science of their days, which was developed in a cooperative society... Hmmm)
Ideally, two projects will have two sets of methods and will get stuck at different points.
What you need though, is sharing between the two. No sense implementing two sets of GUIs for a database where the GUI is an add-on. No sense rewriting something from scratch, as when you method failed, and the other project has code that does exactly what you need. Yet, you both can believe that the best way to implement transactions is completely different and either there are two (or more) good ways, or time will tell which is right.
In other words, friendly competition where people will share when requested, will produce good long-term results in a field that needs research (a field where we don't *know* the best methods yet). In other words, friendly competition is like biodiversity. Each can have its strengths and a little inter-breeding can keep everyone healthy. Plus, competition can be fun if you don't let it rule you. It's like Marines and Army are always competing in every way, except when faced by a real enemy.
Randian, intensely capitalism, short-sighted, shoot-self-in-foot-out-of-spite-rather-than-share
No, you aren't the first. And yeah, any SQL coder knows what you'd have done. Keep all the data that must change together in one table and use a single update statement to change it, relying on the fact that individual statements are atomic.
That way, if you were changing someone's address, and phone number, you'd be sure to have a valid address, and a valid phone number. They might be out of sync, but then you'd have a dirty bit to indicate it.
It's pretty easy to do this, with minimal risk, on inserts. If you get into deletes you can quickly end up with addresses for clients who aren't in the DB anymore and so on.
However, the risk, while minimal, is there. This is an okay idea for goofing around on your website where all you lose is a link to a new picture or something, but is totally unacceptable for a commerce site.
However, you attitude is/was common. I used to see it in the context of people putting inline assembly in their C code. Whenever they knew a clever trick to save a cycle or two they'd use it. The silly thing is that compilers are usually better at the silly tricks. Compilers could use the LEA instruction to perform basic integer multiplication just as well as people (and did, when integer multiplication was slow and cycles mattered). Now, we're not all using the same CPUs as we were back in the 486 days. What's a quick thing on an Athlon might save work on a P4, and might hurt performance on a P3. Too many variables to keep in your head, and too ugly of code, for the incredibly minute gains. Especially since people didn't profile their code before going and optimizing it.
Now, the "proper" thing to do is write the cleanest code you can and let the compiler have a shot. If it runs too slowly, consider throwing more CPU at it. If that fails, profile it and try to fix it with a new algorithm, only after all that, go in and hand-tweak certain sections.
> I structure my data so that atomicity on a statement level is all that I care about.
So, you throw away the R in RDBMS, just for a small potential performance gain. You then hack at basic transaction features. You don't have atomicity, but you have a way of telling if you've screwed up a record.
But then what? What if you do screw up a record? Do you have a query that runs at startup and goes and deletes these now unsafe records? Is it okay that you've mangled a record (ie, dirty bit set, data may or may not have been written)? These can't be important records then. Not customer data or anything.
You'd be better off taking the money that pays for this extra, wasted, coding and simply buying a slightly faster CPU, or more RAM, if you feel speed is an issue. That way you'd get the safety of transactions. You could also use the relational aspects of the database and make your queries run a *lot* faster. (You can't index properly (quickly) between tables unless they're keyed with a a real foreign key, not just the same piece of data in both tables but unlinked.)
I question, if you wish to see it that way, your developer credentials because your claims don't make sense. While you are older than me, it's not by more than a few years, and we both started coding in the Apple 2 era. Not that it matters, John Carmack's our age too and he's a bit better than either of us, I'll bet.
You also don't understand bundling. You aren't given Mozilla, with your OS, and with it set as a default browser that pops up any time you select any local or remote HTML content. You have to seek it out and install it, if you want what it comes with and have a machine that runs it well. MS's handling of IE is completely unrelated.
Further, your definition of browser is flawed. That what *you* want. If you don't want Mozilla, don't use it, but don't whine that they should target a five year old computer. Other people want pretty much exactly what Mozilla comes with. Features are added to it by the same people who are going to use it. I'm very happy with almost every feature it has. Even the ones I rarely use, like the IRC client, aren't really bloat. They're XUL apps, essentially freebies that doesn't get loaded into RAM unless wanted, that you have the capability for once you have a sufficiently expandable interface which is required for the easy customizability of the browser itself.
I'm sorry that you want computers advance slowly to protect you investment but they don't. Your computer is less than an eighth the speed of current machines, with a similarly small ammount of RAM. It's obsolete and you prove it by whining about modern software. If you were running a firewall and mail server on a 486, it wouldn't be obsolete, it'd be fitting its niche perfectly. If you try to use a P2-266 for modern apps, it's obsolete.
It's old if it was made before the software was. Do you understand that? If you want to run Quake 3, a Pentium is old. If you want to run Doom, a Pentium rocks.
You obviously want to run Mozilla, so your P2-266 is old.
I stand by my statement that you aren't a developer if all you think Mozilla does, over Netscape 4.7, is popup stopping and cookie viewing. You seriously must not have looked at the DOM browser, the pluggins you can get, the sidebar, or any of that. Hell, the cookie viewer alone is worth going to Mozilla for, just for trying to debug oddball session-cookie problems.
As to your, "stop growing the codebase", they've done that. Mozilla 1.0 had been exactly the same size since release. Netscape 4.7 hasn't added a single byte since it came out. They've been creating new version, with new features, and those run very well on modern hardware.
You really need to get over your fixation on a specific ammount of ram. Why don't you complain that nothing will run on your Vic-20 in its 4k of ram? A single 512MB DIMM costs less today than the 64MB I bought with my P1, so why should I care that programs want more?
No, anti-spam people want to ban SPAM. Is that hard to understand? SPAM, in its current definition, is unsolicited email, of a commercial or non-commercial nature. I've gotten jesus spam that's just as annoying as penis pills spam.
Themes have no use? Hah. I'm not into glitz at all, so I choose a nice small theme that keeps all the buttons but doesn't take up half the screen. Anything that gives me more usable screen.
You just can't understand that things you don't want aren't always bloat.
Mozilla does things that make it hard to imagine having to browse in IE or an old Netscape.
Sure, much of it could be done with add-on programs, but when I ran junk-buster I'd have to right-click and get the URL of banners, then edit the config file, etc. With Moz I simply right-click and select "Block images from this server".
I *could* install a seperate DOM viewer program to view a web page, but that's the real definition of bloat. It'd have to have its own parsing/rendering engine, and UI. This capability is inherent in displaying a webpage, why reinvent the wheel?
I could open a new browser window, which would get tossed in the OS-sorted (as opposed to application sorted) bar at the bottom of the screen, open a bookmark, and then paste a URL into it to check the HTML compliance. Or, in Moz I could right-click and select 'Check page for compliance at W3C". Let moz handle the new tab, the cut and paste, everything.
I could open up Bugzilla, scroll down, enter a bug #, and click "Find". Or, I could use bookmark keywords so I can type ctrl-t, b Num to open a bug report.
I could run a web proxy and capture the setting of session cookies, or I could simply go into the Cookie viewer and see exactly what the cookies are, including the session cookies that other browsers don't give you any way of seeing.
But yeah, none of that is needed. I should probably be developing web apps in Notepad.
How about, if you aren't a developer and will never use anything more advanced than the "back" button, you can go download IE and do everything manually. I'll pay a couple of extra dollars so that I can use powerful apps that make my work go much faster.
*If* the patent is valid?
There's NO bloody way that this is a valid patent. If it covers pluggins, which were the obvious solution to a technical problem, then it automatically fails.
Of course, some judges have jello for brains and have obviously never been told what makes a valid patent.
Until the patent system has an exception for independent discovery (I mean, how innovative was the idea if I had the exact same idea as you when we looked at the same problem) it's worse than worthless. It harms the companies who actually do something (and are thus liable for "damages") and only helps companies that are all lawyers and never produce a damn thing of any worth to society.
Exactly. Patents are about protection the "how", not the "what".
They are also supposed to only be applicable when a skilled technician in that field wouldn't come up with the same solutions when presented with the same constraints. Once seen it can seem obvious, but if you ask someone in that field, who hasn't seen the invention, how to do this and they come up with the same design, it shouldn't be patentable.
At least, that's how it used to be, now you can patent any damn thing.
Actually, they weren't, though this is a common misconception.
Patents were introduced to reduce the number of trade secrets, to increase the state of art.
It used to be that you'd keep everything secret. Only family members would know the formula for Coke, or how to build some special machine that make widgets cheaper. This had two problems:
1) You spent a lot of time and money keeping it secret.
2) If nobody else could do this, widgets would be a bit cheaper, but nobody else could use this to make gadgets cheaper, and you don't know how to make gadgets, so cheap gadgets are never produced.
Thus, the government said "Oh to hell with it. You tell everyone how it works, enough detail for them to build one, and we'll keep everyone else from doing it for a while, as your reward. You save money and time now, still profit from your invention, and eventually we'll have cheap gadgets as well as cheap widgets."
Keeping secrets is hard, and "Trade Secrets" only get protection if they leak through espionage means. If you leave the formula for Coke in the copier and someone finds it, it's not protected anymore. If someone reverse engineers it (clean-room not required) it's not protected. If your workers accidently leak critical info at trade shows, it's not protected. It's really hard to keep a secret for a long time and still use it in business. If you want to keep the workings of a machine secret you have to do the repairs in-house, with workers under NDA. Very annoying.
So people gambled on a government-guaranteed, fixed-length, monopoly instead of having to risk being able to keep a secret, which might be more profitable, or might be worth nothing tomorrow.
"Helping the little guy" wasn't actually involved at all. It was more of a, "The rising tide floats all boats".
However, patents now harm the computer industry about as much as they help it. Especially software and business-model patents.
Ahhh, that's the problem. Jealousy.
Listen, your machine worked fine when you got it. Consider the hardware and software a unit. Don't upgrade the software until you upgrade the hardware and it'll work fine until the day it dies. Don't try to drag everyone down to your level because you can't understand that adding features slows things down.
Just don't whine about people writing new software that does new things. Mozilla has a ton of functionality like tabbed browsing, real-time cookie viewing, the DOM viewer, a password manager, a white/black list for popups and images, and a ton more. Its interface is also written in XUL and script, which means it can be easily extended. I've got five or ten extra tools in my context menu (depending on work/home) and a ton of references in the sidebar. Stuff that I'd have had to run a whole seperate program for if I couldn't load it as a browser pluggin. CCS are another file to load and parse, and a more complex layout that takes longer to render.
I really can't imagine how I got by with older browsers. While I'm sure Mozilla is bloated, in the sense that everything not done in hand-tuned assembly is, it'll never be as fast as a well-tuned NS4.7 era browser because it does so much more.
But, they should make it do so much more, and run faster, on a slower machine, because you don't want to upgrade.
If you want to stick with old hardware, stick with old programs. I'm stuck using a P2-233 at work with 96mb of ram, much the same as what you've got, and I don't bitch because it runs WinXP and Mandrake9.1 badly because I don't try. I run Redhat 7.3 and Win98SE on it. Both were made when this machine was current and they are reasonably fast.
Mozilla does a hell of a lot more than NS4.7, if you think it's only cookies and popups you're either not a developer, or you've never actually used Mozilla. If you want this extra functionality, you have to have the hardware to run it, if you don't, stick with NS4.7 on your P2-266.
Or, run one of the just-Gecko in a native interface versions of Mozilla, like K-Meleon. I can't remember what the Linux project to do this is, but then I went out and bought an $800 Canadian computer with an XP2500+ and half a gig of ram so that my compiles take 1/20th (honestly) the time they used to. (This is my home machine, the one at work is a dog.) Also, I can play games made in this century.
Either write to them, or anonymously turn yourself in, about an application that looks at a 'type' and launches the appropriate program to deal with this content. Get them to say that their patent covers this and that you owe them royalties.
Then show them MacOS, circa '84, and how it fits exactly what they are trying to make you pay them for.
Of course, proof like this means nothing in court because patents are immune to logic, but it'd be hilarious to have them admit that they patented a key concept in an OS that's been around 19 years.
Everyone I know who uses a blacklist to drop email sends bounce messages explaining this to the sender. No mail is silently lost in this situation, the user is simply informed that they need to communicate the message in another fashion (phone, web-form, etc) or in email from a different ISP preferably.
Compare this to the false-positives hidden or deleted by spam filters, or accidently by users trying to delete spam manually. No warning goes out in this case.
I get very little spam, but a lot of spam is sent to me for automated deletion. That slows down my net access and, if over a certain limit, costs me for every megabyte. It'd be much worse if I connected over a modem.
Then there's the time involved in dealing with spam. You either set up Spam Assasain (or similar) and subscribe to black-hole lists of one sort or another, or download and test a ton of rules trying to describe spam, or you go through and press delete up to a few hundred times a day. Either way it takes time and time isn't unlimited. If you're doing it for work there's even a dollar cost involved.
More importantly though, is the chance that you'll accidently delete a real email, either with an automated script, or by hand. That could cost you a lot.
You know all of this though. You know spam costs a fortune, for network traffic, storage, and time. You also know that most of these costs are paid for by the recipient who doesn't want to read the email, let alone pay for it. Why do you even waste time pretending otherwise?
The only things SPEWS and services like it do, are suggest that you might be someone I want to ignore. I then ignore you. You are not directly affected by SPEWS, it's only an automated way of sysadmins saying "Don't accept mail from foo.com, they harbour spammers."
There's no product involved, so it can hardly be a crappy product. Perhaps SPEWS advice is crappy, but then considering what you pay for it, it's a pretty good deal.
SPEWS does no such thing. They offer a list of ISP that harbour spammers. Other ISPs take that list and use it to ignore mail that's likely spam.
As for shifting, whose fault is the spam, the cost for which you are somehow saying is shifted? It's the fault of the ISPs who don't police their customers. If these ISPs didn't enable spammers, there wouldn't be any costs for anyone. But, no costs are being shifted. These ISPs who refuse to act in a net-friendly manner are simply being ignored. If anything, this will end up costing them less as their bandwidth costs will no doubt go down when their legitimate customers leave for an ISP whose peers actually accept traffic from them.