I surf with javascript off routinely; it's no big deal. If you are trying to say that a website with no javascript is just as bad as a website with no HTML, then you have a lot to learn about the web.
Anything above 10 seconds or so is reasonable. That rules out interference with virtually every legitimate script I've seen. For exceptional cases, Mozilla's behaviour, where it suspends the script and asks you if you want to continue is acceptable.
Anything up to a minute is acceptable, too. All you need is a safeguard that lets you interact with the browser in case of a problem. Of course, a javascript engine that didn't block the UI would be even better.
Argument 1: It may be that he has presented solid ground for calling the mish-mash of software used by most distros "GNU/Linux", but why did he bring it up at a KDE event? KDE works on all sorts of different operating systems. Why call it KDE/GNU/Linux when lots of people are using FreeBSD to run it?
Because of his "extremism," KDE is now free software instead of proprietary.
No. KDE was always Free software. There was a licensing problem with the combination of KDE and the QT toolkit a while back, but QT is not KDE. I'm sure he's responsible for freeing a lot of code, but don't include the massive codebase of KDE among it.
Trolltech seems to have released QT under the GPL for the purposes of interoperability, not for ideological reasons - the toolkit was already available under another open-source license. And their whole purpose for doing so is to increase mindshare - which is more in keeping with the theory behind Open-Source. Remember, RMS is always keen to distinguish between that and Free Software.
umm, would you like to expand on "you can protect yourself from that (javascript) quite easily"?
Switch off javascript, or if there are some sites you want to keep it on for, allow it for certain domains. You can do this in Mozilla, Konqueror, and even IE, usually.
Since when does any script on a normal website need to run more than a few seconds without halting? You don't need to solve the Halting Problem to catch problems with javascript.
That Netscape major version is over five years old. I am well aware of the problems with Netscape 4.x and CSS, not to mention a hell of a lot of other problems with that browser. If you use Netscape 4.x as a measuring stick for the statement:
Are we *that* confident in the maturity of our web browsers that causing a browser crash is nowadays considered a serious issue?
...then I think the answer is "I'm not confident that "our web browsers" won't burn down my house and steal my gran's pension. Netscape 4.x is evil. I trust IE more than I trust Netscape 4.x.
Everybody who has spent any time developing web pages has learnt that bad (and sometimes even good) html can crash browsers.
I can't think of a browser released in the past couple of years that *crashes* on bad HTML, except for this particular issue. Misrenders, yes, but crashes, no. Bad javascript is another issue; you can protect yourself from that quite easily, and most of the time the browser catches infinite loops, fork bomb-style attacks, etc anyway.
<tidbit type=outdated>
Netscape 3 had a neat crash code:
<script>delete new Location</script>
The neat part about it is that 2 of those 3 words were undocumented.
Of course any attempt to pass that as a security concern back then would have been laughed at. loudly.
I'm not sure what has fundamentally changed since then.
</tidbit>
IE has become a standard part of the Windows OS. As more and more applications use it, the impact of crashing greatly increases.
In other words, it's pretty simple to turn an AAC into an mp3.
AAC is a different lossy encoding scheme to MP3. Expect horrible quality if you transcode from one to the other, since you'll be getting the worst of both worlds.
Seems strange to me that Apple can actually come up with a workable DRM while Microsoft is still sitting on their hands.
Apple more or less control their hardware platform. Microsoft does not (unless you are talking about the X-Box, which does have DRM built-in). The only effective DRM will come from hardware, and even then you can work around it in many cases.
Hopefully, Apple will continue to strike the correct balance between protecting the artists and making content available.
Up until this move, Apple seemed to be taking the approach "here are the unencumbered files, if you break the law, it's your own responsibility". Unfortunately, they seem to have re-thought that policy.
The problem is that people who are passionate about music (i.e. the people most interested in this service) don't like compromising on quality. Why don't they offer a Ogg FLAC option too?
You as a programmer may benefit from this, but most customers will not.
That depends on the size of the company. For small companies, I agree. For larger ones, hiring a contract programmer for a month or two could be cheaper than the alternative.
Rarely do "customers" know better than the developers.
I agree. However, the customer will have more of an incentive to fix the bug that is causing them grief than the original vendor will.
Furthermore, I would say most web developers would benefit little from IE coming with source code.
I was using my particular situation as an example of how people must rely on proprietary software for *mission-critical* purposes. I wasn't implying anything about web developers in particular.
microsoft would have to agree to incorporate the fix for it to be worth anything...
No. I'm not referring to bugs where a developer has to deal with the lack of, say, attribute selector support in IE. I'm referring to bugs whereby there is a problem with IE that prevents me from relying on it - i.e. it refuses to run on my particular machine. If you'd like a different example, consider before Y2K. An organisation uses a mission-critical application all day long, but when Y2K rolls around, it refuses to work. They can't fix the bug because nobody has the source but the vendor, and the vendor has no reason to fix it, as they are no longer selling the application, made the programmers involved redundant, and so on. They might not even have the source themselves.
A fork for every bug is not going to improve any software.
The aim is not to try and graft on an open-source development model. The aim is not to improve the software; it's merely to have a get-out clause when the original vendor screws you. In the Y2K example, for instance, an independent contractor could fix up the application and sell it on at a marked-up price.
The vendor gets 110% for writing buggy software that others need to fix? Or do you mean anyone who calls themselves a vendor can get the software for free?
Perhaps this was a badly thought out option. The intent was to provide a way of third-party bug fixing, without giving out the source to every customer, maintaining revenue for copies sold, yet discouraging "forks" where somebody could sell a superior version and take over the original vendor's market.
[About being unable to disclaim liability] Unfortunately for most developers/vendors, this will read, "Be unable to distribute software".
That's why the other options exist. I'm not sympathetic to people who claim their business will be hampered by disclosing source code - the expensive part of development is not some radical new way of writing a function, it's the project management - and unless somebody directly violates copyright, disclosing source code will not help competitors.
Where life-critical systems are put in place, there will be an insurance policy. The insurance company should require a guarantee from the software vendor. Therefore, in life-critical systems, the software vendor should always be able to be held accountable. Yes, this will be expensive, but not as expensive as all those lawsuits.
Most software does not fall into this category. Virtually every business is heavily dependant upon software though, so it is mission-critical. The nature of closed-source software is a massive imbalance between vendor and customer though. The vendor is the only one who can fix bugs; it's the ultimate form of vendor lock-in. Those vendors with monopolies (for example Microsoft) should therefore be regulated in some way, as they can literally hold a majority of businesses to ransom.
Suppose a defect that only affected a small number of businesses was found in Windows? Microsoft has little economic incentive to fix the issue. The businesses are heavily dependent on the software, yet nobody can help them - the only thing they can do is work around the issue somehow, which may not be possible, or an expensive migration to another platform (expensive in terms of resources; even if the software is free, the downtime is not).
What can be done to fix this situation? Obviously, if you run a business, you take appropriate notice of this business risk, and plan accordingly. But this doesn't escape the fact that sometimes you have to resort to using software you cannot rely on. I'm a web developer; I have no choice but to test in Internet Explorer. If a bug prevents me from running it, it's a major setback.
I believe a solution to this is to loosen the grip the vendors have on the software. Copyright is an artificial monopoly on creating copies; it shouldn't be an artifical monopoly on fixing bugs. If you are a software vendor, you should have three options:
Provide the software in a form that allows the customer to fix bugs and rebuild. In other words, provide the source and everything needed to compile it.
License the buildable source code to third parties for free. These third parties should pay the original vendor the retail price + 10% for any copies they sell. Any third party should be able to license the code in this way.
Be unable to disclaim liability for the software.
This, I feel, is the balance between protecting businesses from having no control over their software, and protecting the rights of the software vendor. Have I missed anything?
Programming languages are instructions to be interpreted by a compiler of some sort, eventually resulting into machine code which can be executed.
HTML surely isn't a Turing complete programming language, but I would say one does program HTML in a sense.
No. Like you said, programming involves instructions for the computer. HTML is purely descriptive. When you write <p>, you aren't saying "computer: add a line break and some vertical space please", you are saying "this is beginning of a paragraph".
surely HTML is interpreted and indirectly turned into machine code
Not at all. It's data, not code. HTML is not a set of instructions.
Not that the result is a stand-program, but the result is your browser generating the machine code to display the page.
By that reasoning, typing your name into a plain text file would also be programming, as when you open the file, the text editor "generates the machine code" to display the file.
Much like what a Java virtual machine does with an applet...
Well, no. A Java applet is a standalone program, written for a virtual platform. The VM simply interprets the instructions as is appropriate for the platform it is running on.
I guess it's like the term hacker. I don't see cracking as being equal to hacking, but I do recognize the fact that for many people that distinction simply doesn't exist. Why be so absolute?
Because the media doesn't almost exclusively call HTML "programming"? Because two wrongs don't make a right? Because thinking of HTML as a programming language gets you into the wrong frame of mind for developing high-quality websites?
Whether someone is insane, is experiencing delusions or not, this should not mean that the person does not need to be taken off the streets.
What part of the post you are replying to disagrees with this? Did you miss the bit that said:
And ultimately, if you look up statistics on the defense, you'll find that it is hardly ever used, does not work when it should, and that the mean time spent incarcerated in mental hostpitals by NGRI people is higher than the mean time spent in prison for the same crime.
Hey, I'm not responsible! Each time I killed one of those 14 victims, I was insane at the time. I am sane all the rest of the time. I am sane now. I should not be punished for something that I am not responsible for.
You know, there is such a thing as a jury. Having the right to plead insanity is not the same as compelling the jury to find the defendant not guilty each time it is used.
I think that both you and arkanes have misunderstood me. I know how the GPL works. I was specifically referring to the fact that, under the axiom that installing == infringement on copyright, the EULA has the same basic mechanism as the GPL - it grants rights in return for consideration on your part.
I'm not trying to argue that the licenses are the same, just using the GPL as an example that people might be more familiar with.
There's no contract (there has to be consideration in contracts, and there's none in an EULA).
I agree with the rest of your post, but the basis for the legality of EULAs is that you are creating a copy of the work when you install it (or copy it into memory), I think. In other words, you have to agree to the EULA, or you are infringing on their copyright - it's the same way the GPL works if you consider installing software to be copying it (I don't).
So, that is the consideration right there - you are bound to the terms of the EULA (Microsoft's consideration), and in return, you get to make a "copy" of the software for installation purposes (your consideration).
Here's something to consider - there's not 1 single thing that makes it illegal for you to bypass an installer and just avoid an EULA entirely.
In most cases, I believe it is enough to delete the file EULA.txt or similar before running the installation program. If it's an archive executable, there is usually a command-line switch to unpack it that you can run without agreeing to anything.
There are occasional problems when they add the leap seconds (programs that don't expect 61 seconds in a minute, for example), or programs that don't realize that there are X number of seconds (15 or so?) that simply didn't exist since 1970. (sometimes this stuff matters).
There are also problems with programs dealing with daylight savings time etc. The way unix handles this is that all time is stored in UTC, and only when time is presented to the end user is it converted to the local time zone (BST, whatever).
Perhaps the correct solution is to have computers running off TAI, and treat UTC as just another timezone.
People who write code, including game code, are generally introvert and their primary motivation is to sell the code for money.
Apart from the fact that this is a blanket statement with nothing to back it up, there seems to be plenty of people who share code freely without any expectation of getting paid. And you seem to have missed the "or any other kind of application" bit of my post, despite quoting it. Think of webtv-type applications, for example.
Slashdot Mirror
I surf with javascript off routinely; it's no big deal. If you are trying to say that a website with no javascript is just as bad as a website with no HTML, then you have a lot to learn about the web.
Anything above 10 seconds or so is reasonable. That rules out interference with virtually every legitimate script I've seen. For exceptional cases, Mozilla's behaviour, where it suspends the script and asks you if you want to continue is acceptable.
Anything up to a minute is acceptable, too. All you need is a safeguard that lets you interact with the browser in case of a problem. Of course, a javascript engine that didn't block the UI would be even better.
Argument 1: It may be that he has presented solid ground for calling the mish-mash of software used by most distros "GNU/Linux", but why did he bring it up at a KDE event? KDE works on all sorts of different operating systems. Why call it KDE/GNU/Linux when lots of people are using FreeBSD to run it?
No. KDE was always Free software. There was a licensing problem with the combination of KDE and the QT toolkit a while back, but QT is not KDE. I'm sure he's responsible for freeing a lot of code, but don't include the massive codebase of KDE among it.
Trolltech seems to have released QT under the GPL for the purposes of interoperability, not for ideological reasons - the toolkit was already available under another open-source license. And their whole purpose for doing so is to increase mindshare - which is more in keeping with the theory behind Open-Source. Remember, RMS is always keen to distinguish between that and Free Software.
Switch off javascript, or if there are some sites you want to keep it on for, allow it for certain domains. You can do this in Mozilla, Konqueror, and even IE, usually.
Since when does any script on a normal website need to run more than a few seconds without halting? You don't need to solve the Halting Problem to catch problems with javascript.
That Netscape major version is over five years old. I am well aware of the problems with Netscape 4.x and CSS, not to mention a hell of a lot of other problems with that browser. If you use Netscape 4.x as a measuring stick for the statement:
I can't think of a browser released in the past couple of years that *crashes* on bad HTML, except for this particular issue. Misrenders, yes, but crashes, no. Bad javascript is another issue; you can protect yourself from that quite easily, and most of the time the browser catches infinite loops, fork bomb-style attacks, etc anyway.
IE has become a standard part of the Windows OS. As more and more applications use it, the impact of crashing greatly increases.
Ditto to the JohnCompanies recommendation. They are clueful in the extreme. If you can be your own sysadmin, go for it.
What if you run an online store, and have been blocked for years without knowing?
This product could have been responsible for quite a few lost sales - shouldn't this be compensated for?
Okay low blow, but joking aside, what's newsworthy about this? Is there something that sets it apart from run-of-the-mill linters?
AAC is a different lossy encoding scheme to MP3. Expect horrible quality if you transcode from one to the other, since you'll be getting the worst of both worlds.
Apple more or less control their hardware platform. Microsoft does not (unless you are talking about the X-Box, which does have DRM built-in). The only effective DRM will come from hardware, and even then you can work around it in many cases.
Up until this move, Apple seemed to be taking the approach "here are the unencumbered files, if you break the law, it's your own responsibility". Unfortunately, they seem to have re-thought that policy.
The problem is that people who are passionate about music (i.e. the people most interested in this service) don't like compromising on quality. Why don't they offer a Ogg FLAC option too?
That depends on the size of the company. For small companies, I agree. For larger ones, hiring a contract programmer for a month or two could be cheaper than the alternative.
I agree. However, the customer will have more of an incentive to fix the bug that is causing them grief than the original vendor will.
I was using my particular situation as an example of how people must rely on proprietary software for *mission-critical* purposes. I wasn't implying anything about web developers in particular.
No. I'm not referring to bugs where a developer has to deal with the lack of, say, attribute selector support in IE. I'm referring to bugs whereby there is a problem with IE that prevents me from relying on it - i.e. it refuses to run on my particular machine. If you'd like a different example, consider before Y2K. An organisation uses a mission-critical application all day long, but when Y2K rolls around, it refuses to work. They can't fix the bug because nobody has the source but the vendor, and the vendor has no reason to fix it, as they are no longer selling the application, made the programmers involved redundant, and so on. They might not even have the source themselves.
The aim is not to try and graft on an open-source development model. The aim is not to improve the software; it's merely to have a get-out clause when the original vendor screws you. In the Y2K example, for instance, an independent contractor could fix up the application and sell it on at a marked-up price.
Perhaps this was a badly thought out option. The intent was to provide a way of third-party bug fixing, without giving out the source to every customer, maintaining revenue for copies sold, yet discouraging "forks" where somebody could sell a superior version and take over the original vendor's market.
That's why the other options exist. I'm not sympathetic to people who claim their business will be hampered by disclosing source code - the expensive part of development is not some radical new way of writing a function, it's the project management - and unless somebody directly violates copyright, disclosing source code will not help competitors.
Where life-critical systems are put in place, there will be an insurance policy. The insurance company should require a guarantee from the software vendor. Therefore, in life-critical systems, the software vendor should always be able to be held accountable. Yes, this will be expensive, but not as expensive as all those lawsuits.
Most software does not fall into this category. Virtually every business is heavily dependant upon software though, so it is mission-critical. The nature of closed-source software is a massive imbalance between vendor and customer though. The vendor is the only one who can fix bugs; it's the ultimate form of vendor lock-in. Those vendors with monopolies (for example Microsoft) should therefore be regulated in some way, as they can literally hold a majority of businesses to ransom.
Suppose a defect that only affected a small number of businesses was found in Windows? Microsoft has little economic incentive to fix the issue. The businesses are heavily dependent on the software, yet nobody can help them - the only thing they can do is work around the issue somehow, which may not be possible, or an expensive migration to another platform (expensive in terms of resources; even if the software is free, the downtime is not).
What can be done to fix this situation? Obviously, if you run a business, you take appropriate notice of this business risk, and plan accordingly. But this doesn't escape the fact that sometimes you have to resort to using software you cannot rely on. I'm a web developer; I have no choice but to test in Internet Explorer. If a bug prevents me from running it, it's a major setback.
I believe a solution to this is to loosen the grip the vendors have on the software. Copyright is an artificial monopoly on creating copies; it shouldn't be an artifical monopoly on fixing bugs. If you are a software vendor, you should have three options:
This, I feel, is the balance between protecting businesses from having no control over their software, and protecting the rights of the software vendor. Have I missed anything?
No. Like you said, programming involves instructions for the computer. HTML is purely descriptive. When you write <p>, you aren't saying "computer: add a line break and some vertical space please", you are saying "this is beginning of a paragraph".
Not at all. It's data, not code. HTML is not a set of instructions.
By that reasoning, typing your name into a plain text file would also be programming, as when you open the file, the text editor "generates the machine code" to display the file.
Well, no. A Java applet is a standalone program, written for a virtual platform. The VM simply interprets the instructions as is appropriate for the platform it is running on.
Because the media doesn't almost exclusively call HTML "programming"? Because two wrongs don't make a right? Because thinking of HTML as a programming language gets you into the wrong frame of mind for developing high-quality websites?
It may have only just implemented things like floats, but it's had XHTML, SVG, annotations and MathML for years.
It's a testbed project - it's not behind the curve, it just has different priorities.
Linux wasn't based on Minix either; it was written from scratch. Even if Minix was based directly on a product of SCO's, it wouldn't matter.
What part of the post you are replying to disagrees with this? Did you miss the bit that said:
You know, there is such a thing as a jury. Having the right to plead insanity is not the same as compelling the jury to find the defendant not guilty each time it is used.
I think that both you and arkanes have misunderstood me. I know how the GPL works. I was specifically referring to the fact that, under the axiom that installing == infringement on copyright, the EULA has the same basic mechanism as the GPL - it grants rights in return for consideration on your part.
I'm not trying to argue that the licenses are the same, just using the GPL as an example that people might be more familiar with.
I agree with the rest of your post, but the basis for the legality of EULAs is that you are creating a copy of the work when you install it (or copy it into memory), I think. In other words, you have to agree to the EULA, or you are infringing on their copyright - it's the same way the GPL works if you consider installing software to be copying it (I don't).
So, that is the consideration right there - you are bound to the terms of the EULA (Microsoft's consideration), and in return, you get to make a "copy" of the software for installation purposes (your consideration).
In most cases, I believe it is enough to delete the file EULA.txt or similar before running the installation program. If it's an archive executable, there is usually a command-line switch to unpack it that you can run without agreeing to anything.
Take a look at Blinux, it's a Linux distribution especially targetted at the blind.
There are also problems with programs dealing with daylight savings time etc. The way unix handles this is that all time is stored in UTC, and only when time is presented to the end user is it converted to the local time zone (BST, whatever).
Perhaps the correct solution is to have computers running off TAI, and treat UTC as just another timezone.
Funny, that's the one thing I can't stand - it's far too easy to switch weapons accidentally. What's wrong with buttons 4/5 for that?
Apart from the fact that this is a blanket statement with nothing to back it up, there seems to be plenty of people who share code freely without any expectation of getting paid. And you seem to have missed the "or any other kind of application" bit of my post, despite quoting it. Think of webtv-type applications, for example.