Good point, but they may have displayed some agreement before letting people download it (as many sites do now a days).
But you're right, you can't agree to the setup licence without first having ran part of the program, by which time, you've already accepted it (ie: you've ran the program).
Imagine: You drag and drop a file, and you get a dialog box: "Are you sure you want to do this? Y/N", you click yes, "Are you allowed to do this? Y/N", you again click yes, "Type in your license number that allows you to do this: [ ]", you click continue, and yet another dialog box comes up "Please logon to the Internet for us to verify your license number.", and then after 10 minutes of wasted time, you get: "Sorry, your license to drag and drop this file has expired, please renew. Would you like to renew now? Y/N", "Enter your credit card number: [ ]", and so on...
Doing away with the penny is basically giving in to the idea of infinite inflation, and that a penny will never again be worth something.
That's my opinion as well. Pennies are the things that can stop a runaway inflation. It takes.6 the worth of a penny to make one, so as long as you have a penny, the devaluation cannot happen as quickly as it would without them.
Sine, gov controls the value of money, they can print as many 100 dollar bills as they want (even to settle their own debts!), but if they're always required to be able to exchange that 100 dollar bill for 10,000 pennies, they won't be as eager to devaluate money as quickly.
Notice that every runaway inflation in history was the result of "cheap" money; money that costs almost nothing to manufacture. Digital money is nearly 100% free, and may eventually feed an uncontrollable inflation (since you wouldn't even need the time and resources to print/distribute bills, and people won't be as bugged carrying crates load of money to buy groceries).
How about their little shell game with caller ID and related tech?
Not to mention providing you with caller ID data costs them NOTHING!, yet they still somehow figure out how to charge for it (their only possible costs are probably processing the bills for the service).
Totally agree. It's very nostalgic... brings back lots of memories. I'm actually kinda upset it doesn't go back farther in time. (my oldest site there is from 1997, kinda sad can't see the 'original' though).
And to the people who complain about copyrights: It's public content. If you don't want your "copyrighted" stuff on the internet, then simply don't put it there in the first place. Nobody is complaining about Google's cache, and this is something similar, except it goes back years.
I think this is a great thing! You can go back to see how the internet used to be. (go see how corny microsoft.com or ibm.com looked in 1996:-) The only bad thing is that it doesn't go back to the very beginning, other than that, it's one of the sites that will be on my favorites from now on.
As far as I remember, IE3 did not come pre-installed on anything. You had to separately download it, so what strong arm tactics? (the same tactics Mozilla uses now? Ie: if you're interested, you download, if you're not, you don't).
IMHO, Netscape realized that they can't compete in a market where their chief competitor is a free download, and so they folded (complaining even to this day that it was all Microsoft's fault). Microsoft did what it does best: kill a competitor, gain a lot of users for their software, and make a ton of money (isn't this what every company strives to do?).
I think a free browser is a key part of a 'computer', and even most Linux distributions now come with some browser (can you imagine it otherwise?), so what's so bad about Microsoft including a free good-quality (by Win98 - IE4, quality got better than Netscape) browser?
you can't patent something as it is found in nature
Always had an issue with that statement.
Well, Gee, Aren't we all found in nature? Are humans natural? Is what nature does natural? Then isn't it reasonable to assume that anything humans do is also natural?
Even if some gene just happened into existence because humans engineered it (cleaned it up, etc.,) then its existence in nature is achieved by natural means, ie: humans.
Most recent intellectual patents are really dumb anyway.
Why is it that everybody objected when IE got pre-installed on Windows, yet nobody objected when Netscape was pre-installed?
I'm sure there would be no complaints from the public if OpenOffice and Mozilla were pre-installed, but if Microsoft all of a sudden decided to pre-install their MS Office for free (just to shut down all competition), everybody would be outraged. Why is that?
Is it evil? Or just a different perspective on things?
And btw, in mid 90's, Netscape was king, and IE was just a lowly crap browser. There was no competition until IE3 came out. Only after version 3.0 did the browsers really got into a fight. So yes, Microsoft was an underdog in its browser market until their IE4 and IE5 effectively buried the competition. And more so because of the better quality rather than marketing. IE was and still is faster and uses up less memory than Netscape (Mozilla).
I have nothing personal against Netscape. I still use Netscape 3.0 from time to time, since NS3 is faster than IE, but that's just once-in-a-blue-moon to test my site for compatibility with old stuff.
If it wasn't for Microsoft and their unfair power to skew the market, we'll all still be paying for Netscape. Or do you forget that Netscape was actually selling the browser before Microsoft got into the game?
You're making Netscape sound like a victim, but at the time, it was Microsoft who was the underdog.
From all the posts, I gather a good public-relations strategy would be to allow suing only Microsoft and nobody else. Open Source is unaffected, and Microsoft is suffering - would sure make everybody here happy:-)
Seriously though, there is no way you can fix "all" bugs, so releasing ANY software will just open you up to various lawsuits.
There is also a matter of who will be allowed to sue. For example, someone discovers a flaw, sues Microsoft, gets paid lots of $$$, Microsoft fixes the bug, posts a patch on their site, and a month later some other nut gets effected by the same bug. Should Microsoft pay that other nut as well just because they didn't upgrade? Many software problems are fixed soon after they're discovered, yet a vast majority of the people never bother to patch. (that's why these internet worms can spread, etc.)
Another issue is that many problems arise from improper use of the software. Most buffer overflow is definitely "improper use"... it is a security hole? Sure! But is it "regular" use? No! Software is designed with some proper use in mind, if you start to improperly use it, then sorry to say, the software wasn't designed for it. (well, granted, buffer overflow shouldn't be allowed, but just making a point).
In general the liability strategy will degrade software reliability, since a company will do a lot of in-house testing, etc., not releasing it into the public in fear of being sued. Now, no matter how many QA testers Microsoft or anybody has, they will NOT find all the problems in their software (60 million lines of code in WinXP???), AND they'll find a LOT less bugs than the general public. I know it's not nice to use your users as beta testers, but that's how software becomes reliable. People find bugs, complain, company fixes bug, and software becomes better and more reliable for everybody.
Then there is this whole thing about it being next to impossible to prove the correctness of a program...
The problem is that most universities should concentrate more on design and theory than on syntax and language. Language details (syntax, etc.) are for beginners. True professionals can generally learn a language in a matter of hours (learn it well enough to write non-trivial code). After you write your own compiler, learning ANY language becomes just as trivial as reading the grammar and a few minutes of practice.
I teach (yey) at two vastly different schools. One school is the traditional' theory based school, and the other is the 'devry' type learn syntax and don't care about understanding type. In one school, I give language independent projects, ask people to come up with algorithms, etc., in another the students are so far behind in actual understanding of computer science that I have no choice but to resort to testing their syntax (since there isn't much you can do when students have problems with for loops - and are 2 months away from graduation!).
Now, if your class is something like "algorithms" they shouldn't really care if you miss a comma or a brace, etc., as long as the idea is correct, but if it's something like "Java 101" and you write something that resembles QBASIC, then there is obviously a problem.
So the original idea of writing code on paper should only be used either in beginner classes or in 'devry' like schools, all else should be a bit above 'code' and more into algorithms and concepts.
How about the up-for-grabs RSA factoring challenge? Come up with factors of a certain 2048 bit number and get $200,000. Considering that the factor is probably 1024 bits, which makes 128 bytes, that's $1562.50 for every byte! (that's money they're willing to pay YOU for a proper answer).
Then there is always that long long integer that holds Bill Gate's fortune...
With encryption in place, man-in-the-middle is avoided...
Are you sure? Man-in-the-middle problem is a LOT harder to "fix" than just introducing encryption. That's the whole issue with online bots, and such: there is no easy way of making sure you're talking to the authentic client or to some proxy (I think John Carmack even said something of the sort in one of his.plan updates). Only decently workable way so far was to keep the communication protocols secret (and encode data to make it hard to figure out from just sniffing the packets), but that hasn't worked well anyway.
The client can always be decompiled (no matter what licensing you put on it) and encryption algorithm extracted, which would enable a custom program to make a totally authentic connection to the server. No way to prevent that.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah, maybe, but that's not as newsworthy.
But you're right, you can't agree to the setup licence without first having ran part of the program, by which time, you've already accepted it (ie: you've ran the program).
Wait till they get the idea of spinning them in a different direction...
Fun future, heh?
That's my opinion as well. Pennies are the things that can stop a runaway inflation. It takes .6 the worth of a penny to make one, so as long as you have a penny, the devaluation cannot happen as quickly as it would without them.
Sine, gov controls the value of money, they can print as many 100 dollar bills as they want (even to settle their own debts!), but if they're always required to be able to exchange that 100 dollar bill for 10,000 pennies, they won't be as eager to devaluate money as quickly.
Notice that every runaway inflation in history was the result of "cheap" money; money that costs almost nothing to manufacture. Digital money is nearly 100% free, and may eventually feed an uncontrollable inflation (since you wouldn't even need the time and resources to print/distribute bills, and people won't be as bugged carrying crates load of money to buy groceries).
Not to mention providing you with caller ID data costs them NOTHING!, yet they still somehow figure out how to charge for it (their only possible costs are probably processing the bills for the service).
Isn't this what carnivore is already doing?
And to the people who complain about copyrights: It's public content. If you don't want your "copyrighted" stuff on the internet, then simply don't put it there in the first place. Nobody is complaining about Google's cache, and this is something similar, except it goes back years.
I think this is a great thing! You can go back to see how the internet used to be. (go see how corny microsoft.com or ibm.com looked in 1996 :-) The only bad thing is that it doesn't go back to the very beginning, other than that, it's one of the sites that will be on my favorites from now on.
Wasn't safeweb one of the services sponsored by the CIA? The guys you'd wanna trust with your censorship subversive browsing... Hmm...
IMHO, Netscape realized that they can't compete in a market where their chief competitor is a free download, and so they folded (complaining even to this day that it was all Microsoft's fault). Microsoft did what it does best: kill a competitor, gain a lot of users for their software, and make a ton of money (isn't this what every company strives to do?).
I think a free browser is a key part of a 'computer', and even most Linux distributions now come with some browser (can you imagine it otherwise?), so what's so bad about Microsoft including a free good-quality (by Win98 - IE4, quality got better than Netscape) browser?
Always had an issue with that statement.
Well, Gee, Aren't we all found in nature? Are humans natural? Is what nature does natural? Then isn't it reasonable to assume that anything humans do is also natural?
Even if some gene just happened into existence because humans engineered it (cleaned it up, etc.,) then its existence in nature is achieved by natural means, ie: humans.
Most recent intellectual patents are really dumb anyway.
I'm sure there would be no complaints from the public if OpenOffice and Mozilla were pre-installed, but if Microsoft all of a sudden decided to pre-install their MS Office for free (just to shut down all competition), everybody would be outraged. Why is that?
Is it evil? Or just a different perspective on things?
And btw, in mid 90's, Netscape was king, and IE was just a lowly crap browser. There was no competition until IE3 came out. Only after version 3.0 did the browsers really got into a fight. So yes, Microsoft was an underdog in its browser market until their IE4 and IE5 effectively buried the competition. And more so because of the better quality rather than marketing. IE was and still is faster and uses up less memory than Netscape (Mozilla).
I have nothing personal against Netscape. I still use Netscape 3.0 from time to time, since NS3 is faster than IE, but that's just once-in-a-blue-moon to test my site for compatibility with old stuff.
You're making Netscape sound like a victim, but at the time, it was Microsoft who was the underdog.
Seriously though, there is no way you can fix "all" bugs, so releasing ANY software will just open you up to various lawsuits.
There is also a matter of who will be allowed to sue. For example, someone discovers a flaw, sues Microsoft, gets paid lots of $$$, Microsoft fixes the bug, posts a patch on their site, and a month later some other nut gets effected by the same bug. Should Microsoft pay that other nut as well just because they didn't upgrade? Many software problems are fixed soon after they're discovered, yet a vast majority of the people never bother to patch. (that's why these internet worms can spread, etc.)
Another issue is that many problems arise from improper use of the software. Most buffer overflow is definitely "improper use"... it is a security hole? Sure! But is it "regular" use? No! Software is designed with some proper use in mind, if you start to improperly use it, then sorry to say, the software wasn't designed for it. (well, granted, buffer overflow shouldn't be allowed, but just making a point).
In general the liability strategy will degrade software reliability, since a company will do a lot of in-house testing, etc., not releasing it into the public in fear of being sued. Now, no matter how many QA testers Microsoft or anybody has, they will NOT find all the problems in their software (60 million lines of code in WinXP???), AND they'll find a LOT less bugs than the general public. I know it's not nice to use your users as beta testers, but that's how software becomes reliable. People find bugs, complain, company fixes bug, and software becomes better and more reliable for everybody.
Then there is this whole thing about it being next to impossible to prove the correctness of a program...
I teach (yey) at two vastly different schools. One school is the traditional' theory based school, and the other is the 'devry' type learn syntax and don't care about understanding type. In one school, I give language independent projects, ask people to come up with algorithms, etc., in another the students are so far behind in actual understanding of computer science that I have no choice but to resort to testing their syntax (since there isn't much you can do when students have problems with for loops - and are 2 months away from graduation!).
Now, if your class is something like "algorithms" they shouldn't really care if you miss a comma or a brace, etc., as long as the idea is correct, but if it's something like "Java 101" and you write something that resembles QBASIC, then there is obviously a problem.
So the original idea of writing code on paper should only be used either in beginner classes or in 'devry' like schools, all else should be a bit above 'code' and more into algorithms and concepts.
It's a really big and slow airplane.
Then there is always that long long integer that holds Bill Gate's fortune...
Ahh... but then you have to purchase Dilbert's depruner :-)
With encryption in place, man-in-the-middle is avoided...
Are you sure? Man-in-the-middle problem is a LOT harder to "fix" than just introducing encryption. That's the whole issue with online bots, and such: there is no easy way of making sure you're talking to the authentic client or to some proxy (I think John Carmack even said something of the sort in one of his .plan updates). Only decently workable way so far was to keep the communication protocols secret (and encode data to make it hard to figure out from just sniffing the packets), but that hasn't worked well anyway.
The client can always be decompiled (no matter what licensing you put on it) and encryption algorithm extracted, which would enable a custom program to make a totally authentic connection to the server. No way to prevent that.