Instant messaging services where starting to go this way a decade ago with Jabber, then Facebook and Google decided all of a sudden that this was somehow a BAD idea?
Because spam. WhatsApp, for example, is built on the same protocol as Jabber but has deliberate incompatibilities to discourage spammers.
I don't see how the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet would cause a problem to speakers of English as a second language. In fact, it might clear up confusion. Case in point: G is called J in French, and J is called G. But the long names are "Golf" and "Juliett", which eliminates the problem.
Zero, four, three, zero, two, nine is much easier to get correct than Esss, Eff, Bee, Pee.
That's why schools need to teach the long names of letters. "Sierra foxtrot bravo papa" should carry just as well as "zero four three zero two niner" over any given voice channel.
I just did an interview over google hangouts, w/o a phone number.
Then how'd you get a Google account with which to use Hangouts? Or, like me, do you get in early enough before Google started requiring new users to provide a mobile phone number to act as an additional means of account recovery and as a means of increasing spammers' cost to sign up?
So the difference between an update and an upgrade is defined by how difficult it is to get to run smoothly on your specific computer?
To me, update means "download the latest list of packages", and upgrade means "download packages newer than the installed packages and install them". But because I was trying to answer outside the context of Debian APT, I'll try to use terms independent of a particular operating system's terminology: "minor upgrade" and "major upgrade".
You propose to define a major upgrade in part through breaking compatibility with a piece of hardware. I'm inclined to agree. To avoid "you are an edge case not worth serving" comebacks, one might replace "your specific computer" with "the supermajority of computers on which the original product was intended to run". Another definition is whether the proprietary software's publisher charges for the upgrade. Microsoft charged for the upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista, from Windows Vista to Windows 7, from Windows 7 to Windows 8, but not for the upgrade from Windows 8 to 8.1, and until the end of July not for the upgrade from Windows 7 to 10 or 8.1 to 10.
But these are special cases of the more general metric of cost of applying an upgrade. An upgrade correcting a security vulnerability in one service costs far less to apply than an upgrade that requires new hardware, requires a payment to renew the proprietary software license, requires follow-on upgrades of proprietary applications installed on a machine, requires the labor of a clean install, etc.
I haven't read the HDCP agreement myself, but I wouldn't be surprised if it forbade modification of the video signal.
Even if this is not forbidden, a DRM scheme operates on the principle that implementations are assumed noncompliant until proven compliant. The fixed costs of an equipment producer joining a DRM scheme include the cost of an audit (possibly probabilistic) of the compliance of the equipment producer's product on behalf of the scheme's maintainer. So even if it were compliant, whether a device is compliant or not does not matter if the prospective manufacturer cannot draw enough investors to make the device exist in the first place.
In this comment, I shall address your "not my problem" angle.
Like if someone said no car exists, and I point out a Toyota Camry "car" going past. Toyota Camry is not an analogy.
The argument in this case would be "no such car exists", with the scope of "such car" defined implicitly by the rest of the paragraph.
they can suck it. I never assumed the role of godfather for the "information publication" industry
Yet as a user of Slashdot, you presumably use the products and services of said industry and would thus be affected by the drastic contraction that you propose. Once you need to buy a year's subscription for Google Search, another for Slashdot, and another for each site linked from Slashdot, where do you plan to hang out on the web? And with the end of ability to find professionally written material through a web search at no additional charge, how will there remain enough demand for home Internet connections to sustain a market for affordable home Internet connections like yours?
A "news site" has no right to exist. Human members of that organization can be said to have the right - and they can join existing butcher shops, or start new ones.
Thank you for clarifying the extent of the changes that you wish would happen to the web. Just to be absolutely sure that I understand, would you agree with the following summary of your central thesis?
Companies operating ad-supported web sites ought to switch to subscriptions. Those that can't turn a profit with a paywall ought to wind up operations and return their assets to their investors, and their former employees ought to retrain for a different industry, such as opening a butcher shop.
Thank you. I was trying to infer what you meant; the best I could come up with at the time was "I speak Lithuanian; why aren't all the apps available in Lithuanian?" Now the best scenario I can come up with is that you might get apps intended for use in a particular locale outside Five Eyes that are available only in the official or majority language of that locale.
And why is using my keyboard layout language somehow a better choice than the display language I've explicitly told it I want?
If an app ignores the display language in favor of the language for which your keyboard layout was intended, then that's either a bug or DRM. Have you reported it to the developer of each affected app? Or does it affect all apps system-wide?
In practice, the fixed costs of a company joining a particular DRM scheme raise "charging enough for the device" to such a level that production of a low-volume video processor intended to measurably degrade objective picture quality would likely be unprofitable.
IE 7, which shipped on Windows Vista and ran on Windows XP, is no longer supported. IE 8, which shipped on Windows 7 and ran on Windows Vista and Windows XP. is supported only on versions of Windows Embedded derived from Windows XP, such as the "POSReady" thing that some Windows XP diehards installed to take advantage of continued security updates to XP-based cash registers. IE 9, which ran on Windows 7 and Windows Vista, is supported on Windows Vista and the version of Server derived therefrom. On Windows 8.1 and 7, only IE 11 is supported. So whether you can ditch IE pre-11 depends on how many users of Windows Vista and Windows Embedded you still have.
I challenge you to even boot Windows XP SP3 without causing massive amounts of memory paging and tearing out your hair in frustration on the same hardware.
Windows XP Service Pack 3 potentially required a RAM upgrade. Windows 8.1 potentially required a CPU upgrade. On laptops, RAM upgrades are generally more practical than CPU upgrades.
I thought laptop CPUs were likely to be soldered down rather than socketed. This article states that some still are this way, especially a MacBook, an Ultrabook, or a netbook. And even on those laptops with a socketed CPU, this forum post states that finding new CPUs compatible with the motherboard or new motherboards compatible with the form factor is difficult. What am I thinking of?
Then complain to the hardware makers that they should include Linux-drivers also on that disk?
RESOLVED WONTFIX
Historically, hardware makers are more open to complaints about missing functionality in Windows than about such in Linux. If it doesn't say Linux on the box, the manufacturer is not obligated to support its use under Linux.
Not like the makers behind Linux can help it if the hardware makers don't make drivers and don't give specs.
This is why increasing the install base of free operating systems is so important: it makes hardware makers less likely to just write off GNU/Linux users as acceptable collateral damage.
[GNU/Linux] supports more [hardware] then Windows out of the box (without driver CD's).
And Windows supports more hardware with driver CDs. With Windows, you use the Windows driver on the driver CD. With GNU/Linux, there is usually no Linux driver on the driver CD.
I personally never use hibernate (takes longer then cold boot)
Does "takes longer" include the time to locate and reopen the documents that were closed when you shut down your computer? And if you had web pages open in tabs in a web browser for later offline reading while you ride the bus, does this include waiting to arrive at your destination so that you can connect to Wi-Fi and reload the pages?
there's a reason most Wifi cards come with a little CD containing drivers.
At least WLAN cards come with working drivers for Windows, even if they are on a disc. A lot of WLAN cards have no easily obtainable drivers for GNU/Linux at all. And a lot of WLAN cards with free PC-side drivers, such as several by Intel and Broadcom, still require a binary firmware for the radio DSP that distributions aren't allowed to include.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm wondering what the "Facebook" form of [...] the pizza place down the street to order some dinner
Probably something like Domino's Tweetzza.
Instant messaging services where starting to go this way a decade ago with Jabber, then Facebook and Google decided all of a sudden that this was somehow a BAD idea?
Because spam. WhatsApp, for example, is built on the same protocol as Jabber but has deliberate incompatibilities to discourage spammers.
You still need some id over the mobile network. Ad of 4G it is an MSISDN.
That threw me for a moment. How can 4G be modern if it uses Microsoft and ISDN?
I don't see how the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet would cause a problem to speakers of English as a second language. In fact, it might clear up confusion. Case in point: G is called J in French, and J is called G. But the long names are "Golf" and "Juliett", which eliminates the problem.
By going to Walmart, buying a few boxes of DiGiorno pizza, and popping one in the oven. Or by going to Dominos.com or wherever.
You can get e-mail, but not phone, at a public library.
Intermodal public transit systems may require the user to transfer from a subway train to a bus.
but who gets to administer the DNS servers/entries?
Perhaps the blockchain can do it.
Today, they are one-time use IDs that we use to contact someone else, then both people's phones remember the number forever.
"Forever" or "until I buy a new phone or have to borrow someone's"?
Zero, four, three, zero, two, nine is much easier to get correct than Esss, Eff, Bee, Pee.
That's why schools need to teach the long names of letters. "Sierra foxtrot bravo papa" should carry just as well as "zero four three zero two niner" over any given voice channel.
telephone service costs like 60 dollars a month minimum
I don't know where you're getting that figure, as I get telephone service from Virgin Mobile USA for $90 per year.
I just did an interview over google hangouts, w/o a phone number.
Then how'd you get a Google account with which to use Hangouts? Or, like me, do you get in early enough before Google started requiring new users to provide a mobile phone number to act as an additional means of account recovery and as a means of increasing spammers' cost to sign up?
So the difference between an update and an upgrade is defined by how difficult it is to get to run smoothly on your specific computer?
To me, update means "download the latest list of packages", and upgrade means "download packages newer than the installed packages and install them". But because I was trying to answer outside the context of Debian APT, I'll try to use terms independent of a particular operating system's terminology: "minor upgrade" and "major upgrade".
You propose to define a major upgrade in part through breaking compatibility with a piece of hardware. I'm inclined to agree. To avoid "you are an edge case not worth serving" comebacks, one might replace "your specific computer" with "the supermajority of computers on which the original product was intended to run". Another definition is whether the proprietary software's publisher charges for the upgrade. Microsoft charged for the upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista, from Windows Vista to Windows 7, from Windows 7 to Windows 8, but not for the upgrade from Windows 8 to 8.1, and until the end of July not for the upgrade from Windows 7 to 10 or 8.1 to 10.
But these are special cases of the more general metric of cost of applying an upgrade. An upgrade correcting a security vulnerability in one service costs far less to apply than an upgrade that requires new hardware, requires a payment to renew the proprietary software license, requires follow-on upgrades of proprietary applications installed on a machine, requires the labor of a clean install, etc.
I haven't read the HDCP agreement myself, but I wouldn't be surprised if it forbade modification of the video signal.
Even if this is not forbidden, a DRM scheme operates on the principle that implementations are assumed noncompliant until proven compliant. The fixed costs of an equipment producer joining a DRM scheme include the cost of an audit (possibly probabilistic) of the compliance of the equipment producer's product on behalf of the scheme's maintainer. So even if it were compliant, whether a device is compliant or not does not matter if the prospective manufacturer cannot draw enough investors to make the device exist in the first place.
In this comment, I shall address your "not my problem" angle.
Like if someone said no car exists, and I point out a Toyota Camry "car" going past. Toyota Camry is not an analogy.
The argument in this case would be "no such car exists", with the scope of "such car" defined implicitly by the rest of the paragraph.
they can suck it. I never assumed the role of godfather for the "information publication" industry
Yet as a user of Slashdot, you presumably use the products and services of said industry and would thus be affected by the drastic contraction that you propose. Once you need to buy a year's subscription for Google Search, another for Slashdot, and another for each site linked from Slashdot, where do you plan to hang out on the web? And with the end of ability to find professionally written material through a web search at no additional charge, how will there remain enough demand for home Internet connections to sustain a market for affordable home Internet connections like yours?
A "news site" has no right to exist. Human members of that organization can be said to have the right - and they can join existing butcher shops, or start new ones.
Thank you for clarifying the extent of the changes that you wish would happen to the web. Just to be absolutely sure that I understand, would you agree with the following summary of your central thesis?
My forced display language is English.
Thank you. I was trying to infer what you meant; the best I could come up with at the time was "I speak Lithuanian; why aren't all the apps available in Lithuanian?" Now the best scenario I can come up with is that you might get apps intended for use in a particular locale outside Five Eyes that are available only in the official or majority language of that locale.
And why is using my keyboard layout language somehow a better choice than the display language I've explicitly told it I want?
If an app ignores the display language in favor of the language for which your keyboard layout was intended, then that's either a bug or DRM. Have you reported it to the developer of each affected app? Or does it affect all apps system-wide?
In practice, the fixed costs of a company joining a particular DRM scheme raise "charging enough for the device" to such a level that production of a low-volume video processor intended to measurably degrade objective picture quality would likely be unprofitable.
IE 7, which shipped on Windows Vista and ran on Windows XP, is no longer supported. IE 8, which shipped on Windows 7 and ran on Windows Vista and Windows XP. is supported only on versions of Windows Embedded derived from Windows XP, such as the "POSReady" thing that some Windows XP diehards installed to take advantage of continued security updates to XP-based cash registers. IE 9, which ran on Windows 7 and Windows Vista, is supported on Windows Vista and the version of Server derived therefrom. On Windows 8.1 and 7, only IE 11 is supported. So whether you can ditch IE pre-11 depends on how many users of Windows Vista and Windows Embedded you still have.
I challenge you to even boot Windows XP SP3 without causing massive amounts of memory paging and tearing out your hair in frustration on the same hardware.
Windows XP Service Pack 3 potentially required a RAM upgrade. Windows 8.1 potentially required a CPU upgrade. On laptops, RAM upgrades are generally more practical than CPU upgrades.
I thought laptop CPUs were likely to be soldered down rather than socketed. This article states that some still are this way, especially a MacBook, an Ultrabook, or a netbook. And even on those laptops with a socketed CPU, this forum post states that finding new CPUs compatible with the motherboard or new motherboards compatible with the form factor is difficult. What am I thinking of?
Then complain to the hardware makers that they should include Linux-drivers also on that disk?
RESOLVED WONTFIX
Historically, hardware makers are more open to complaints about missing functionality in Windows than about such in Linux. If it doesn't say Linux on the box, the manufacturer is not obligated to support its use under Linux.
Not like the makers behind Linux can help it if the hardware makers don't make drivers and don't give specs.
This is why increasing the install base of free operating systems is so important: it makes hardware makers less likely to just write off GNU/Linux users as acceptable collateral damage.
Why should applying security updates require also applying user interface changes?
It'd probably take one of these forms:
[GNU/Linux] supports more [hardware] then Windows out of the box (without driver CD's).
And Windows supports more hardware with driver CDs. With Windows, you use the Windows driver on the driver CD. With GNU/Linux, there is usually no Linux driver on the driver CD.
I personally never use hibernate (takes longer then cold boot)
Does "takes longer" include the time to locate and reopen the documents that were closed when you shut down your computer? And if you had web pages open in tabs in a web browser for later offline reading while you ride the bus, does this include waiting to arrive at your destination so that you can connect to Wi-Fi and reload the pages?
there's a reason most Wifi cards come with a little CD containing drivers.
At least WLAN cards come with working drivers for Windows, even if they are on a disc. A lot of WLAN cards have no easily obtainable drivers for GNU/Linux at all. And a lot of WLAN cards with free PC-side drivers, such as several by Intel and Broadcom, still require a binary firmware for the radio DSP that distributions aren't allowed to include.
the past decade has brought [...] the ability to try [GNU/Linux] in a VM or even LiveCD/USB to try it on your hardware.
Does this include trying it on a laptop before buying the laptop? Not everybody is satisfied with the limited selection of laptops sold by System76.