If you view a Back button as a bookmark, then you are right. However, I don't view it that way. When I click the Back button, I want to see the last page, exactly the way it was, without any additional server transaction, as if I had opened the page in another window and was switching back and forth. To me, the Back button is window management, not bookmarking, and I suspect to many other users as well.
I used to think that the fact that Netscape worked differently was just some deep down lossage; I didn't even consider the case that anybody would do this sort of thing deliberately. It results in accidental duplicate orders over the web, for example. Netscape printing also used to reload the page--very bad.
In any case, the current behavior, where it sometimes reloads and sometimes doesn't, is just inconsistent.
That somehow doesn't seem right. You don't need to cache the page content to remember your position in it. And as for caching on "Back", that should be up to the user.
This is the way to price high-speed Internet access: by volume. That way, you get fast, instant access to the Internet but bottlenecks are avoided. It's the way you pay for electricity, gas, and long-distance service. The alternative to volume-based pricing is that the access provider sends the IP patrol to your house to make sure you only connect one PC and only use it for looking at MSNBC ads.
I think, however, it would be worth tinkering around with the details a little. For example, volume charges should probably differ between peak and off-peak hours, and metering should be on a per-month basis, not a multi-tier subscription service. Also, if they have volume-based pricing, they should drop any restrictions on usage ("business", "multiple PCs", etc.) from their contracts. So, the specific volume-based plan that they have may or may not be "fair" or reasonable, but overall, it seems like a step in the right direction.
I don't see how this helps. Maybe there are open source implementations of MPEG-4, but MPEG-4 is patented. Even if divx.com wanted to open source a decoder, other patent holders would probably want their cut.
(Whether MPEG-4 audio/video contains any technology that should have been patentable is another question.)
AmigaOS was a great OS and it is impressive that AmigaOS could do what it could do on a $1000 machine. AmigaOS, at the time, beat MacOS, Windows, and TOS, hands down in architecture, performance, and funtionality. If AmigaOS had taken over the world, instead of Windows and MacOS, the computer industry would have progressed much faster.
But the underlying concepts weren't new, even at the time: message passing, multitasking, GUIs, hardware acceleration, etc., were already being used in several other operating systems. OSX's ancestor, Mach, was already being developed, and Linux's ancestors, various versions of UNIX, had been out for nearly a decade. Several GUIs, including early versions of X, were also in use.
Comparing that kind of data to assess security is obviously bogus: the set of packages being considered is different, vulnerabilities are discovered differently (NT doesn't come with sources), and the user communities are different.
Both Linux and NT have plenty of security holes to go around. But Linux is also clearly far preferable from a security point of view: it is much easier to run only the software/servers you actually need on Linux, it comes with full sources, and serious security holes are fixed usually within hours of being reported.
Claims like those on WinFormant mainly demonstrate the incompetence and inexperience of their authors.
Beliefs that something as big and complex as Windows, Office, or Linux can be made secure are misguided. You can do a little better than those systems by using better tools, but that won't save you.
The only solution is to have a wide variety of software, so that any particular fault only affects a small number of users. Yes, you pay for that in interoperability and support costs, but the alternative, an operating system monoculture, will be getting more and more vulnerable and unreliable over time.
Almost all DNA tests use completely standard and widely known technology. Furthermore, the genetic sequence associated with a disease is a simple fact of nature. Patenting genetic tests is therefore not much different from if we were to allow patenting diagnosis of a disease, say, from the visual appearance of a rash that's examined with a magnifying glass or Wood's light. The argument that DNA tests take time and money to develop doesn't hold much either: reliable diagnosis from any kind of symptom requires extensive experience and, ultimately, scientific studies.
I did not claim that you change the license. I'm claiming that you know ahead of time what kind of license compliance you can expect with shareware. Low compliance has both advantages and disadvantages for a software author, and you should know that. If you don't like the tradeoffs, distribute your software differently, don't complain about it afterwards.
I contacted Sharp--they had no plans for an X server as of two months ago. Even if there was one, as long as Qt/Embedded "owns" the screen, lots of nifty X11-based handheld software just won't port (input methods, window management, etc.).
Most servers run with only a text-mode console display, or they run entirely headless. Should we scrap them because its not X?
X11 can fully support text-only applications, as well as Qt-based applications. Qt/Embedded does not support X11-based applications. Get the difference?
This whole post just makes no sense.
Perhaps that's because I have developed handheld software and you haven't?
I don't say that there is no "middle ground", I just say that I consider complaints by shareware authors bogus. If they want higher license compliance, they should do the usual thing for a software product: give out a demo version and charge for the full version. What they are doing instead is grabbing market share with their license model, knowing full well that most of that market share is due to "illegal" copies. What is dishonest is if the same people then come back and complain about low compliance.
Both Windows and Linux make no bones about what license they have and their developers try to enforce them. Shareware is different: it claims to be commercial software, but the enforcement is intrinsically lacking.
As I was saying: one can't stop shareware authors from offering this, but I don't have much sympathy for them. If they want to ensure payment, they know what to do. My recommendation: don't use shareware.
What do they want? Nobody promised them that shareware was a viable business model, and nobody knows whether many people would pay a dollar for their software if they came up with a way of forcing people to pay. There is a reason why real software companies pay lots of money for marketing, packaging, demo versions, and sales. Shrill cries of "piracy" are misplaced.
Personally, I view shareware as pollution of the software marketplace. By being effectively "free", it threatens real free software, and by being supposedly a piece of "commercial software" it undercuts developers that really do pay what it takes. There is no hope that shareware will go away, but I'm not sympathetic to their plight.
I have developed software for the VR3. It's a nice little device. Because it uses standard Linux GUI software, I can now take my software and run it on several other Linux-based PDAs.
The Sharp Zaurus only runs Qt/Embedded. It will not share the screen with any other toolkit, and if I develop for Qt, I may end up having to pay steep licensing fees. Thanks, but no thanks. The point of Linux is that software is compatible among different Linux machines/devices and that I'm not forced to use just the software that some hardware vendor decided to impose on me.
Since there haven't been a lot of terrorist attacks, there is essentially no data available to validate such a system. As a consequence, the "threat assessments" will have to be based on prejudices and guesses by law enforcement about what are "normal" living arrangements and "normal" travel patterns. You can figure out for yourself what these people are going to consider "normal" and "suspicious".
This is really a pretty deep architectural limitation of the Linux kernel: many interesting enhancements and bug fixes do require the source code to be patched. That's was a decent design choice for a small kernel with very focussed functionality, but it just doesn't work very well when there are thousands of developers, thousands of drivers, and dozens of important kernel variants and modifications. It's an approach to building kernels from the 1970's.
What is the solution? There are lots of possibilities, but they all come down to either changing to some other programming language, or emulating what other programming languages have built in "by hand".
Something like an Objective-C runtime, where you can replace classes and methods at runtime and where most important function calls go through the runtime, would allow most of the kernel functionality to be changed and enhanced by separately developed modules without requiring patching all over the place. Such runtimes are very efficient and would probably not make a lot of difference in terms of performance. Another approach is a Mach-like microkernel. If people want to stay with plain C, another solution is to add lots of hooks for everything (kind of like you have in Emacs).
Even if this were to make the kernel run a little slower, what good is it to have a kernel that runs blindingly fast but doesn't do what I want and doesn't have drivers for the devices I want to use?
It means that the people living in your house are, on average, several times more wealthy than those in the richest country in the world. When comparing economies, that is a meaningful description.
Tascam also has a portable MP3 encoder, aimed at live music recording. It's a little larger, but it also records at higher bitrates, has more inputs, and has a CF slot.
The traditional standard for publication is that the experiment must be described in sufficient detail reproducible by others. However, this standard has never been met reliably in the past; even if the issue was just academic competition, researchers might keep a crucial experimental detail secret or delay making available necessary experimental materials in order to keep other research groups from catching up too fast.
Why is reproducibility important? Let's say group A reports some really neat genetics in mice. Group B doesn't have much interest in reproducing it in mice (little potential for scientific rewards) but tries the same thing in primates and it doesn't work. Without being able to reproduce the work of group A, group B doesn't know whether there is a genuine difference in primates, whether there is something wrong with their procedure, or whether group A just published an incorrect or fraudulent result.
Peer reviewers for reputable journals should insist on reproducibility, which should include a binding offer by the authors to make available all necessary materials to other scientists to reproduce the results and build on them. If anything else were to get published, it should at least be marked in big, red letters as "irreproducible" and should not count much towards someone's scientific publication record--after all, it might all be invented.
GNU C and 'high performance computing' don't belong in the same sentence, sorry.
As I was saying, the GNU C optimizer is known not to be the best in the world. What you don't seem to get is that it doesn't matter. A performance difference of, say, 30% corresponds to maybe half a year in hardware evolution. Do you buy a new machine every six months? I don't.
Also, C optimizers are largely irrelevant for high performance computing--ANSI C simply does not permit important optimizations. You either have to do them by hand for your inner loops, you have to write them in FORTRAN, or you have to use some non-standard language constructs or compiler options.
overlaying multiple different modulation methods on the same frequency bands can lead to better aggregate utilization of the total bandwidth.
Only if the individual modulation methods aren't using their allocated bandwidth optimally. Of course, for historical and practical reasons, they don't. But the same technology that makes UWB feasible also allows more efficient utilization of spectrum within our current allocation system.
Trying to use UWB on top of the existing allocations in order to achieve better overall utilization seems like saying "we'll just park this car in your front yard--you aren't using the space for anything important anyway".
If its not about producing the best software how will it succeed?
There is no such thing as "the best software". Microsoft can hack on Visual C++ for the next 100 years, and it still won't be "the best software" for me--that's because Microsoft's user community and I have irreconcilable preferences and needs.
if the goal of OSS is just to provide options that's all most of it will ever be, just another option. there seems to be too much confusing of socio-politcal agendas and what is technically superior.
Providing options isn't a socio-political agenda, it's a technical and engineering issue. The ability to read and modify source code means that a software author doesn't have to anticipate every need any user may have and doesn't have to document every obscure behavior. Whatever oddball functionality I want in a piece of software, I can add myself. That may not matter to you, but it matters to enough people to make open source software popular and successful. And it is something closed source software, by definition, cannot deliver.
The GPL is quite clear about what open source is about:
By contrast, the GNU General Public
License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free
software
Furthermore, the notion that open source software caught on because it was faster or higher quality is ridiculous to anybody who is familiar with its history. GNU C was accepted and widely used long before it became the high quality compiler it is today. Linux caught on long before its networking and stability were competitive. But the ability to get the source code and fix it more than makes up for any deficiencies and limitations to many users, and that's why open source software has been as successful as it has.
As for "redefinition", I don't see why we should let you, the Microsoft PR department, or a bunch of clueless journalists and VCs define what open source is all about. If open source isn't for you, just don't use it and go away.
Sorry, even a 50% performance improvement on some benchmark isn't going to get me to switch to some proprietary compiler. I have used "fast" proprietary compilers from Sun, IBM, and others. Each of them usually has their own idiosyncracies and problems. So does GNU C, but with GNU C, they are the same on all platforms, and they actually get fixed in a finite amount of time. And with all of those compilers, you can usually structure the code that it will run fast (manual unrolling, manual constant folding, etc.).
If you see something in particular in GNU C that you don't like or that seems inefficient, fix it or at least report it. Don't just whine about it.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to think that the fact that Netscape worked differently was just some deep down lossage; I didn't even consider the case that anybody would do this sort of thing deliberately. It results in accidental duplicate orders over the web, for example. Netscape printing also used to reload the page--very bad.
In any case, the current behavior, where it sometimes reloads and sometimes doesn't, is just inconsistent.
That somehow doesn't seem right. You don't need to cache the page content to remember your position in it. And as for caching on "Back", that should be up to the user.
I think, however, it would be worth tinkering around with the details a little. For example, volume charges should probably differ between peak and off-peak hours, and metering should be on a per-month basis, not a multi-tier subscription service. Also, if they have volume-based pricing, they should drop any restrictions on usage ("business", "multiple PCs", etc.) from their contracts. So, the specific volume-based plan that they have may or may not be "fair" or reasonable, but overall, it seems like a step in the right direction.
(Whether MPEG-4 audio/video contains any technology that should have been patentable is another question.)
But the underlying concepts weren't new, even at the time: message passing, multitasking, GUIs, hardware acceleration, etc., were already being used in several other operating systems. OSX's ancestor, Mach, was already being developed, and Linux's ancestors, various versions of UNIX, had been out for nearly a decade. Several GUIs, including early versions of X, were also in use.
Both Linux and NT have plenty of security holes to go around. But Linux is also clearly far preferable from a security point of view: it is much easier to run only the software/servers you actually need on Linux, it comes with full sources, and serious security holes are fixed usually within hours of being reported.
Claims like those on WinFormant mainly demonstrate the incompetence and inexperience of their authors.
The only solution is to have a wide variety of software, so that any particular fault only affects a small number of users. Yes, you pay for that in interoperability and support costs, but the alternative, an operating system monoculture, will be getting more and more vulnerable and unreliable over time.
Almost all DNA tests use completely standard and widely known technology. Furthermore, the genetic sequence associated with a disease is a simple fact of nature. Patenting genetic tests is therefore not much different from if we were to allow patenting diagnosis of a disease, say, from the visual appearance of a rash that's examined with a magnifying glass or Wood's light. The argument that DNA tests take time and money to develop doesn't hold much either: reliable diagnosis from any kind of symptom requires extensive experience and, ultimately, scientific studies.
I did not claim that you change the license. I'm claiming that you know ahead of time what kind of license compliance you can expect with shareware. Low compliance has both advantages and disadvantages for a software author, and you should know that. If you don't like the tradeoffs, distribute your software differently, don't complain about it afterwards.
As for Java, that's besides the point. PersonalJava runs everywhere, under X11, Qt, and WindowsCE. At issue is Linux GUI software, not Java.
And as for your last question, do you ever bother to engage your brain, or do you just pick up whatever device happens to look neat to you?
Most servers run with only a text-mode console display, or they run entirely headless. Should we scrap them because its not X?
X11 can fully support text-only applications, as well as Qt-based applications. Qt/Embedded does not support X11-based applications. Get the difference?
This whole post just makes no sense.
Perhaps that's because I have developed handheld software and you haven't?
I don't say that there is no "middle ground", I just say that I consider complaints by shareware authors bogus. If they want higher license compliance, they should do the usual thing for a software product: give out a demo version and charge for the full version. What they are doing instead is grabbing market share with their license model, knowing full well that most of that market share is due to "illegal" copies. What is dishonest is if the same people then come back and complain about low compliance.
As I was saying: one can't stop shareware authors from offering this, but I don't have much sympathy for them. If they want to ensure payment, they know what to do. My recommendation: don't use shareware.
Personally, I view shareware as pollution of the software marketplace. By being effectively "free", it threatens real free software, and by being supposedly a piece of "commercial software" it undercuts developers that really do pay what it takes. There is no hope that shareware will go away, but I'm not sympathetic to their plight.
The Sharp Zaurus only runs Qt/Embedded. It will not share the screen with any other toolkit, and if I develop for Qt, I may end up having to pay steep licensing fees. Thanks, but no thanks. The point of Linux is that software is compatible among different Linux machines/devices and that I'm not forced to use just the software that some hardware vendor decided to impose on me.
Since there haven't been a lot of terrorist attacks, there is essentially no data available to validate such a system. As a consequence, the "threat assessments" will have to be based on prejudices and guesses by law enforcement about what are "normal" living arrangements and "normal" travel patterns. You can figure out for yourself what these people are going to consider "normal" and "suspicious".
What is the solution? There are lots of possibilities, but they all come down to either changing to some other programming language, or emulating what other programming languages have built in "by hand".
Something like an Objective-C runtime, where you can replace classes and methods at runtime and where most important function calls go through the runtime, would allow most of the kernel functionality to be changed and enhanced by separately developed modules without requiring patching all over the place. Such runtimes are very efficient and would probably not make a lot of difference in terms of performance. Another approach is a Mach-like microkernel. If people want to stay with plain C, another solution is to add lots of hooks for everything (kind of like you have in Emacs).
Even if this were to make the kernel run a little slower, what good is it to have a kernel that runs blindingly fast but doesn't do what I want and doesn't have drivers for the devices I want to use?
It means that the people living in your house are, on average, several times more wealthy than those in the richest country in the world. When comparing economies, that is a meaningful description.
Tascam also has a portable MP3 encoder, aimed at live music recording. It's a little larger, but it also records at higher bitrates, has more inputs, and has a CF slot.
Why is reproducibility important? Let's say group A reports some really neat genetics in mice. Group B doesn't have much interest in reproducing it in mice (little potential for scientific rewards) but tries the same thing in primates and it doesn't work. Without being able to reproduce the work of group A, group B doesn't know whether there is a genuine difference in primates, whether there is something wrong with their procedure, or whether group A just published an incorrect or fraudulent result.
Peer reviewers for reputable journals should insist on reproducibility, which should include a binding offer by the authors to make available all necessary materials to other scientists to reproduce the results and build on them. If anything else were to get published, it should at least be marked in big, red letters as "irreproducible" and should not count much towards someone's scientific publication record--after all, it might all be invented.
As I was saying, the GNU C optimizer is known not to be the best in the world. What you don't seem to get is that it doesn't matter. A performance difference of, say, 30% corresponds to maybe half a year in hardware evolution. Do you buy a new machine every six months? I don't.
Also, C optimizers are largely irrelevant for high performance computing--ANSI C simply does not permit important optimizations. You either have to do them by hand for your inner loops, you have to write them in FORTRAN, or you have to use some non-standard language constructs or compiler options.
Only if the individual modulation methods aren't using their allocated bandwidth optimally. Of course, for historical and practical reasons, they don't. But the same technology that makes UWB feasible also allows more efficient utilization of spectrum within our current allocation system.
Trying to use UWB on top of the existing allocations in order to achieve better overall utilization seems like saying "we'll just park this car in your front yard--you aren't using the space for anything important anyway".
There is no such thing as "the best software". Microsoft can hack on Visual C++ for the next 100 years, and it still won't be "the best software" for me--that's because Microsoft's user community and I have irreconcilable preferences and needs.
if the goal of OSS is just to provide options that's all most of it will ever be, just another option. there seems to be too much confusing of socio-politcal agendas and what is technically superior.
Providing options isn't a socio-political agenda, it's a technical and engineering issue. The ability to read and modify source code means that a software author doesn't have to anticipate every need any user may have and doesn't have to document every obscure behavior. Whatever oddball functionality I want in a piece of software, I can add myself. That may not matter to you, but it matters to enough people to make open source software popular and successful. And it is something closed source software, by definition, cannot deliver.
By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software
Furthermore, the notion that open source software caught on because it was faster or higher quality is ridiculous to anybody who is familiar with its history. GNU C was accepted and widely used long before it became the high quality compiler it is today. Linux caught on long before its networking and stability were competitive. But the ability to get the source code and fix it more than makes up for any deficiencies and limitations to many users, and that's why open source software has been as successful as it has.
As for "redefinition", I don't see why we should let you, the Microsoft PR department, or a bunch of clueless journalists and VCs define what open source is all about. If open source isn't for you, just don't use it and go away.
If you see something in particular in GNU C that you don't like or that seems inefficient, fix it or at least report it. Don't just whine about it.