If Microsoft were making such clandestine deals it would be all over the press...
Microsoft was found in court to have made many clandestine deals and none of them hit the press at the time, that I can recall. I find it entirely believable that Microsoft is still today using the same tactics, as the only punishment they ever got for their wrongdoing was a pat on the wrist. Plus paying out $billions in private suits, but Microsoft just regards that as a business license.
Nothing but the facts there, mod points won't change that.
We're a very large IT company here and we have maybe 3 RHEL servers (because Linux was the best option for the task) and a couple of thousand (including virtual) Windows servers.
Wow, it must suck to work where you work. Could you please tell me the name so that I may have nothing to do with it?
Microsoft scientologists appear to be out in force tonight.
If Microsoft were making such clandestine deals it would be all over the press...
Microsoft was found in court to have made many clandestine deals and none of them hit the press at the time, that I can recall. I find it entirely believable that Microsoft is still today using the same tactics, as the only punishment they ever got for their wrongdoing was a pat on the wrist. Plus paying out $billions in private suits, but Microsoft just regards that as a business license.
We're a very large IT company here and we have maybe 3 RHEL servers (because Linux was the best option for the task) and a couple of thousand (including virtual) Windows servers.
Wow, it must suck to work where you work. Could you please tell me the name so that I may have nothing to do with it?
I'm not saying it's impossible to implement XUL and XPCOM on top of Webkit, but if you're throwing out Gecko you're almost starting over from scratch.
Not even close. You are starting with a working HTML engine and wrapping it to present an already existing API. A standard software engineering project, and the best chance in the world for a major housecleaning without a complete rewrite.
Now, if I may present a counterargument: what if Gecko fades away, do we then get a browser engine monoculture, increasing the effectiveness of malware attacks or possibly having a bad effect on the evolution of standards? And I will answer my own argument: keeping to the current course, Gecko is likely to die anyway, plus Firefox and the Mozilla foundation along with it. The only way for Mozilla foundation to survive is to preside over the code base with the most developers, and my crystal ball says the developer community is already well down the path of walking away from Gecko holding its collective nose. Not plugin developers so far, but core developers. And one day the plugin developers will go too.
I have done so for the last 12 or so years, I am however not under any disillusion that Free Software had much to do with that. Proprietary software would have essentially almost always done a much better job at getting the work done.
So you are merely speculating that the software you used would have been even better if it had been proprietary, whereas it is a fact that the free software we actually have does the job. Bird in the hand, you know. And actually, the fact that I don't have to pay for it, don't have to agree to a license (unless I change and redistribute it), don't have to mess with copy protection schemes, don't have to be bombarded with advertising, know that it doesn't contain malware and don't have to worry about end of life makes free software significantly more useful to me than proprietary, so I doubt the likelihood of your theoretical scenario. On top of that, there are a number of significant cases where the free version is much better functionally than proprietary entries into the same market. GCC for example, has better and earlier standards compliance and generates code for more platforms than Microsoft's product, while generating similar quality code, and currently improving faster than Microsoft's product. Both Firefox and Chrome are better than any Microsoft offering. There are counterexamples to be sure, getting fewer as time goes by.
Having access to the source and a general computing device sounds all nice in theory, but when you want to get work done, it's hardly ever of any use.
Apparently you live on a different planet than I do. On this planet, I have used free software to get all my work done for the last six years or so. That includes spreadsheeting, word processing, presentation graphics, software development, communications... everything I need to be productive. And that includes interfacing with those still struggling along with nonfree tools. So sorry for you on your planet, it must suck there.
Excuse me, but are your seriously trying to call other people obnoxious?
You CAN NOT take open source code private ever
Way wrong. If the license permits it, you just add a bunch of features (including evil features like "now works with this device that has a secret API") and keep the source for the new features secret. Or add malware, same idea. How would a user know?
Taking Apache or BSD licensed software private is easy and done all the time. That is why developers who have the choice tend to prefer licenses that guarantee their work can never be taken private.
Plus, due to its nature, it's easy to overlay and hook into, which is what allows the extensions to be as useful as they are. That's the reason why XUL-based web browsers, after all these years, still outmatch every other web browser in terms of extensibility and customisability.
Agreed, Firefox extensions are its biggest strength. So you say it's impossible to implement XUL and XPCOM on top of Webkit/KHTML? I haven't analyzed that, so I'm relying on you:-)
I'm not sure how much of JavaScriptCore Google actually uses in Chrome now that they've got their own BSD-licensed V8 javascript engine. That leaves WebCore, which basically corresponds to the parts that originally came from KHTML - both Apple and Google have licensed as little as possible under the LGPL.
And the only possible reason is to distribute binaries built from secret source code. In other words, both reserve the right to do evil, whether or not they are actually doing it today.
I would not suggest iPad 2. It suffers from horrible lags when web browsing that are frustrating to the point of unusability. Obviously, it doesn't handle flash sites. It has much less available in the way of quality free apps. The user interface is dumbed down or broken in many little ways that make the experience one long chain of annoyances.
Android tablets are much closer to being true laptop replacements on the road. On my last road trip I brought a netbook and a Xoom. I never used the netbook. I did all the browsing I needed with the Xoom and I edited text files using a bluetooth keyboard. I have QuickOffice on it, but I didn't use it this time. I look forward to the Android version of LibreOffice,I found I didn't really need a mouse, but I will get the Apple trackpad to use with the Xoom, apparently it works fine. Otherwise, I regard Apple's product as mainly for games and spending money. Not the best choice for a serious computer user.
Hmm, Apple cultists seem to have mod points tonight. Scary.
Yet I own several ipads and android tablets and have NEVER experienced what you have.
Lucky you. However the net is full of complaints about slow iPad browsing and I did not imagine it when I experienced it myself, or saw multiple other people experience it. So you are special.
My mother got an iPad 2. I use it from time to time when I visit her. I am not making anything up. The iPad gets used for almost exclusively one thing: playing Bookworm, the free game that came installed. Browsing on the iPad is way too frustrating, she does that on her Windows desktop. She plays Solitaire, reads her email and browses on the Desktop, even though she has to get up and go to another room to do it. In practice, the iPad is a sad waste of several hundred dollars.
Meanwhile the Xoom tablet gets constant use because it actually works well for browsing, unlike the iPad, which is intensely frustrating with its frequent lags of up to tens of seconds. Whereas the Xoom running right beside it has no appreciable lag at all, so it's definitely the iPad.
Sorry, didn't make anything up. As far as you Apple cultists are concerned, you would be better served by sticking to the facts yourself as opposed to the usual ad hominem attacks on people who are actually willing to sign their name to their posts.
Wrong on many counts. Firstly, you can only change a license if you own the copyright. I just checked out a copy of WebKit from their svn repo. Copyrights are all over the place-- some belong to Apple, some belong to Google, and many little pieces here and there belong to private individuals. Getting everyone to reassign their copyrights would be a nightmare. This is why many GNU projects require copyright assignment statements before you contribute patches.
Sorry, it is you who are wrong. It depends on the license. The terms of BSD license are entirely compatible with relicencing under (L)GPL, and you do not need to be the copyright owner to do so. The BSD license gives you that right.
As far as Apple is concerned, they had no choice but to continue to licence webkit under LGPL, because it was already under LGPL. And they did not get KHTML from "Qt" as you put it (perhaps you meant Trolltech) it was created by the KDE community of volunteers. KHTML was licensed under LGPL from the start, not BSD as you claim, but feel free to correct me if you can do it factually.
...It's precisely because it affects different platforms that MS is rolling out the update before others. It is good for their damaged PR. Other than that they don't really care about having a secure platform.
Apart from the foul language, you hit the nail right on the head.
ARM started from the bottom and is struggling to match Intel for performance. Intel started from the top and is struggling to match ARM for efficiency.
This battle is far from over, and I'm putting my money on Intel because in the end, they have manufacturing prowess no one can equal.
In a portable device I am only interested in mips/watt, provided baseline performance is good enough to run apps and GUI without lag, which ARM A8 certainly is and it only gets better from here. As far as I am concerned, the hardware problem is solved: ARM is it. Thanks to Google skinning Linux and marketing it as Android, ARM now has access to all the device drivers it needs to really succeed on portable devices. Now the fight for usability shifts to a new front: working around Google's half baked attempt to lock down Linux behind a shiny but pathetically limited GUI, and Google's self-damaging attempt to turn native apps into second class citizens. I'm pretty sure it will all work out in the end. Google may have an evil streak here and there but they are not so far gone that they cannot be embarrassed into doing the right thing from time to time. I can even imagine Android development opening up into a proper community project instead of the Google lapdog it currently is. Otherwise what happened to Oracle with OpenOffice will inevitably happen to Google. I think the uberlords at Google will eventually grasp the logic of winning some PR points and expanding the developer community for free, versus losing control of the entire project. Sorry, rambled a little there. The point is, it's not about which processor is best for mobile any more, we already know that. Now it's all about getting usable software on that processor.
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If Microsoft were making such clandestine deals it would be all over the press...
Microsoft was found in court to have made many clandestine deals and none of them hit the press at the time, that I can recall. I find it entirely believable that Microsoft is still today using the same tactics, as the only punishment they ever got for their wrongdoing was a pat on the wrist. Plus paying out $billions in private suits, but Microsoft just regards that as a business license.
Nothing but the facts there, mod points won't change that.
We're a very large IT company here and we have maybe 3 RHEL servers (because Linux was the best option for the task) and a couple of thousand (including virtual) Windows servers.
Wow, it must suck to work where you work. Could you please tell me the name so that I may have nothing to do with it?
Microsoft scientologists appear to be out in force tonight.
I mean seriously, how am I going to use it?
Running old programs maybe?
Flash rom upgrades for all kinds of devices. It's the standard.
Ext4's only major flaw is that it does not have snapshots. That can be fixed, actually.
If Microsoft were making such clandestine deals it would be all over the press...
Microsoft was found in court to have made many clandestine deals and none of them hit the press at the time, that I can recall. I find it entirely believable that Microsoft is still today using the same tactics, as the only punishment they ever got for their wrongdoing was a pat on the wrist. Plus paying out $billions in private suits, but Microsoft just regards that as a business license.
We're a very large IT company here and we have maybe 3 RHEL servers (because Linux was the best option for the task) and a couple of thousand (including virtual) Windows servers.
Wow, it must suck to work where you work. Could you please tell me the name so that I may have nothing to do with it?
Why is it reasonable to render the UIs of Web apps using WebKit but unreasonable to render any other kind of UI using WebKit?
Rendering any UI with html is offensive to any engineer with a sense of decency. All the more so for a device that needs to conserve battery power.
The SCADA system isn't flawed...
How do you know that? Is Windows involved?
I'm not saying it's impossible to implement XUL and XPCOM on top of Webkit, but if you're throwing out Gecko you're almost starting over from scratch.
Not even close. You are starting with a working HTML engine and wrapping it to present an already existing API. A standard software engineering project, and the best chance in the world for a major housecleaning without a complete rewrite.
Now, if I may present a counterargument: what if Gecko fades away, do we then get a browser engine monoculture, increasing the effectiveness of malware attacks or possibly having a bad effect on the evolution of standards? And I will answer my own argument: keeping to the current course, Gecko is likely to die anyway, plus Firefox and the Mozilla foundation along with it. The only way for Mozilla foundation to survive is to preside over the code base with the most developers, and my crystal ball says the developer community is already well down the path of walking away from Gecko holding its collective nose. Not plugin developers so far, but core developers. And one day the plugin developers will go too.
I have done so for the last 12 or so years, I am however not under any disillusion that Free Software had much to do with that. Proprietary software would have essentially almost always done a much better job at getting the work done.
So you are merely speculating that the software you used would have been even better if it had been proprietary, whereas it is a fact that the free software we actually have does the job. Bird in the hand, you know. And actually, the fact that I don't have to pay for it, don't have to agree to a license (unless I change and redistribute it), don't have to mess with copy protection schemes, don't have to be bombarded with advertising, know that it doesn't contain malware and don't have to worry about end of life makes free software significantly more useful to me than proprietary, so I doubt the likelihood of your theoretical scenario. On top of that, there are a number of significant cases where the free version is much better functionally than proprietary entries into the same market. GCC for example, has better and earlier standards compliance and generates code for more platforms than Microsoft's product, while generating similar quality code, and currently improving faster than Microsoft's product. Both Firefox and Chrome are better than any Microsoft offering. There are counterexamples to be sure, getting fewer as time goes by.
"Don't tell me what to do!" from a purchaser to a seller is exactly the purchaser being a child.
According to you. According to me, the customer is always right.
PC gaming went from desktops to consoles
It went from sucking because of Microsoft to sucking even more because of Sony. And your point is?
Having access to the source and a general computing device sounds all nice in theory, but when you want to get work done, it's hardly ever of any use.
Apparently you live on a different planet than I do. On this planet, I have used free software to get all my work done for the last six years or so. That includes spreadsheeting, word processing, presentation graphics, software development, communications... everything I need to be productive. And that includes interfacing with those still struggling along with nonfree tools. So sorry for you on your planet, it must suck there.
Most users never wanted freedom, they wanted to get work done or enjoy themselves.
And of course they end up getting neither, what with the buggy, clumsy, malware ridden software you inevitably get once freedom is pushed to the curb.
Excuse me, but are your seriously trying to call other people obnoxious?
You CAN NOT take open source code private ever
Way wrong. If the license permits it, you just add a bunch of features (including evil features like "now works with this device that has a secret API") and keep the source for the new features secret. Or add malware, same idea. How would a user know?
Taking Apache or BSD licensed software private is easy and done all the time. That is why developers who have the choice tend to prefer licenses that guarantee their work can never be taken private.
Plus, due to its nature, it's easy to overlay and hook into, which is what allows the extensions to be as useful as they are. That's the reason why XUL-based web browsers, after all these years, still outmatch every other web browser in terms of extensibility and customisability.
Agreed, Firefox extensions are its biggest strength. So you say it's impossible to implement XUL and XPCOM on top of Webkit/KHTML? I haven't analyzed that, so I'm relying on you :-)
I'm not sure how much of JavaScriptCore Google actually uses in Chrome now that they've got their own BSD-licensed V8 javascript engine. That leaves WebCore, which basically corresponds to the parts that originally came from KHTML - both Apple and Google have licensed as little as possible under the LGPL.
And the only possible reason is to distribute binaries built from secret source code. In other words, both reserve the right to do evil, whether or not they are actually doing it today.
I'm guessing your mom's wifi sucks.
You guess wrong. No such lag occurs with the Xoom or my G2, or several laptops and notebooks, only the iPad.
I would not suggest iPad 2. It suffers from horrible lags when web browsing that are frustrating to the point of unusability. Obviously, it doesn't handle flash sites. It has much less available in the way of quality free apps. The user interface is dumbed down or broken in many little ways that make the experience one long chain of annoyances.
Android tablets are much closer to being true laptop replacements on the road. On my last road trip I brought a netbook and a Xoom. I never used the netbook. I did all the browsing I needed with the Xoom and I edited text files using a bluetooth keyboard. I have QuickOffice on it, but I didn't use it this time. I look forward to the Android version of LibreOffice,I found I didn't really need a mouse, but I will get the Apple trackpad to use with the Xoom, apparently it works fine. Otherwise, I regard Apple's product as mainly for games and spending money. Not the best choice for a serious computer user.
Hmm, Apple cultists seem to have mod points tonight. Scary.
Yet I own several ipads and android tablets and have NEVER experienced what you have.
Lucky you. However the net is full of complaints about slow iPad browsing and I did not imagine it when I experienced it myself, or saw multiple other people experience it. So you are special.
My mother got an iPad 2. I use it from time to time when I visit her. I am not making anything up. The iPad gets used for almost exclusively one thing: playing Bookworm, the free game that came installed. Browsing on the iPad is way too frustrating, she does that on her Windows desktop. She plays Solitaire, reads her email and browses on the Desktop, even though she has to get up and go to another room to do it. In practice, the iPad is a sad waste of several hundred dollars.
Meanwhile the Xoom tablet gets constant use because it actually works well for browsing, unlike the iPad, which is intensely frustrating with its frequent lags of up to tens of seconds. Whereas the Xoom running right beside it has no appreciable lag at all, so it's definitely the iPad.
Sorry, didn't make anything up. As far as you Apple cultists are concerned, you would be better served by sticking to the facts yourself as opposed to the usual ad hominem attacks on people who are actually willing to sign their name to their posts.
Wrong on many counts. Firstly, you can only change a license if you own the copyright. I just checked out a copy of WebKit from their svn repo. Copyrights are all over the place-- some belong to Apple, some belong to Google, and many little pieces here and there belong to private individuals. Getting everyone to reassign their copyrights would be a nightmare. This is why many GNU projects require copyright assignment statements before you contribute patches.
Sorry, it is you who are wrong. It depends on the license. The terms of BSD license are entirely compatible with relicencing under (L)GPL, and you do not need to be the copyright owner to do so. The BSD license gives you that right.
As far as Apple is concerned, they had no choice but to continue to licence webkit under LGPL, because it was already under LGPL. And they did not get KHTML from "Qt" as you put it (perhaps you meant Trolltech) it was created by the KDE community of volunteers. KHTML was licensed under LGPL from the start, not BSD as you claim, but feel free to correct me if you can do it factually.
...It's precisely because it affects different platforms that MS is rolling out the update before others. It is good for their damaged PR. Other than that they don't really care about having a secure platform.
Apart from the foul language, you hit the nail right on the head.
I guess Motorola will follow suit.
ARM started from the bottom and is struggling to match Intel for performance. Intel started from the top and is struggling to match ARM for efficiency.
This battle is far from over, and I'm putting my money on Intel because in the end, they have manufacturing prowess no one can equal.
In a portable device I am only interested in mips/watt, provided baseline performance is good enough to run apps and GUI without lag, which ARM A8 certainly is and it only gets better from here. As far as I am concerned, the hardware problem is solved: ARM is it. Thanks to Google skinning Linux and marketing it as Android, ARM now has access to all the device drivers it needs to really succeed on portable devices. Now the fight for usability shifts to a new front: working around Google's half baked attempt to lock down Linux behind a shiny but pathetically limited GUI, and Google's self-damaging attempt to turn native apps into second class citizens. I'm pretty sure it will all work out in the end. Google may have an evil streak here and there but they are not so far gone that they cannot be embarrassed into doing the right thing from time to time. I can even imagine Android development opening up into a proper community project instead of the Google lapdog it currently is. Otherwise what happened to Oracle with OpenOffice will inevitably happen to Google. I think the uberlords at Google will eventually grasp the logic of winning some PR points and expanding the developer community for free, versus losing control of the entire project. Sorry, rambled a little there. The point is, it's not about which processor is best for mobile any more, we already know that. Now it's all about getting usable software on that processor.