That's how shareware works. Free software doesn't have nag screens. If a company wants to offer the latter and sell support, why shouldn't they be able to?
It does, but I don't think it does in the way you mean.
It says that the supremes don't believe this to be obviously unconstitutional enough to warrant hearing at this time - perhaps they think there might be more arguments that other courts might hear or present, and they want there to be a few more cases before deciding anything.
A few more people in a few more states need to be arrested over this to even have standing, and the Supreme court is ok with waiting for that.
Checking when the application starts and silently applying the update when it closes leaves the software vulnerable for hours while the user is using the old version.
I'm curious how, "Check at start" became "Check at start and don't do anything with the info for hours." Typically, programs that check at start offer to download and launch the installer via modal dialog as soon as the check is complete.
Which usually requires an annual fee plus a cut of the sales.
Google and Apple are like this. The linux software repositories have different requirements.
There should be a fee, though. The repository service handles notification and downloads for you, and they should be providing some kind of validation service for their users - ranging from, "the checksum matches" to "we reviewed the source code and tested it on a similar machine and didn't see anything harmful" (the extreme at that end should probably be borne by the users. I can see a market for high-end curated repositories.)
What other revenue source would you recommend for an application distributed for no fee?
Adobe Reader is distributed at no fee. But it's distributed so that adobe can sell licenses of Adobe Acrobat to businesses under the promise that the results will be have a wide potential audience, so Adobe already has a revenue model that should work.
Other software products should push out patches for the life of their products, having reserved some of the original revenue to pay for the ongoing support. They should probably announce their expected software lifetime, so that people know what they're getting into when they buy the product. One does not expect support for a product to continue forever without revenue, but one does expect there will be some finite, definable amount of support to accompany the purchase of a software product.
The legal department often demands this when it updates the EULA to cover a newly discovered loophole.
I'm sure that they do. I doubt that any but the original eula are in any way enforceable for purchased software, though. Holding the software itself or security updates hostage seems a lot like duress in my book.
Lawyers love stuff like this because even an unenforceable contract will result in billable hours (for at least two teams of lawyers, even...) for lawyers.
Newly released software often has critical security or functionality defects that are discovered "every other day or so" once the user base expands by orders of magnitude from beta to general availability.
Which is why the OP spelled out security fixes as an exception to the general rule of not pushing updates every day. Not sure where you're going with this.
No you won't. What really happens is that you'll make a mental note not to buy the product, then later, when you want something of the kind, and see several products on the shelf, you'll remember that you made that mental note, but you'll have long since forgotten why. You'll then buy the product you've heard of, which is the one you made a mental note not to buy...
The best you can do is to set up an adblock filter and forget about the ad.
Don't stop before you get to the "moderate" wing douchebags. They'll listen to the arguments of the other douchebags and say, "you guys are douchebags. Let's do half of what each of you want." Because obviously averaging two bad ideas is just like having a good idea, right?
"cuts to pensions" is a far sight better than "no pensions."
The problem is that pensions themselves are allowed to exist - it's too tempting to either under-fund them (counting on "catching up" in the out years) or raid the huge pile of money that's not doing anything (yet...).
The employee's compensation should be paid within a reasonable time from when they do the work and they should be responsible for distributing it between retirement and other purposes, and the tax structure should be such that it does not encourage employees and employers to get into arrangements as fraught with moral hazards as an employer provided pension system.
A former employee should not have to be punished if their company falters 20 years after they did the work....
The slippery slope fallacy argument isn't a real argument either, it's brought up every time someone uses an argument that resembles the slippery slope argument, but fails to recognize that examples of the slippery slope process can be found every field.
People desirous of the slippery slope's outcome call the process progress....
If you consistently beat them by the same amount regardless of the car, then they're doing a good job - you have useful gauge to compare different models, and you have a good estimate for yourself after applying the correction factor.
The question is whether the real-world numbers match the estimates. I'm not sure we could get that without requiring the cars collect the data themselves and mechanics submit the data at the regular service intervals.
If the condensing dryer is a closed loop, then surely the "exhaust" runs over the cooling coils where the moisture is extracted (by condensing...) and the heated again before passing through the basket. There wouldn't be any point in releasing the exhaust, as you'd just have that much further to heat the new incoming air.
Why else would it even be called a condensing drier?
Tracking it with what, though? The drone isn't big enough to have an antenna of sufficient size for the task. The power of the IF is comparable to the received signal level, and isn't directly driving an antenna.
I haven't checked in a while because I usually don't use firefox (nothing against it, though), but the last time I used it, it was a configurable option whether or not the images scaled when you scaled the page.
I've decided to meet you halfway, though. I think you're right about the UI scaling, in fact, I think that the UI scaling is the only appropriate thing for a browser to do in response to an OS-level scaling setting. The pages themselves should be fully under the control of the browser, with the initial setting being one where raster elements are not scaled.
But web page designers should also not get off the hook for designing their pages so that they won't work if you scale the text and not the images, or in slashdot's case, so that they don't work so well if you scale it at all, images or not. A web page isn't a brochure or a magazine page.
It should behave when a user wants to change things about it, whether that be the width of the canvas or the size of the text or images. The user is changing those things because they want to see the damn page better, don't fight them!
There are more design constraints in a laptop than just the screen size. 16:(10ish) and other "wide" formats happen to match up very nicely with some of the other constraints, which include:
1) laptop must include a keyboard which is actually useful for typing on 2) laptop may include a pointing device 3) laptop must minimize bulk and weight
It happens that a keyboard has a very wide aspect ratio, such that even when you add an oversized multitouch trackpad underneath, the whole setup still has a wide aspect.
Wide aspect ratios are a good compromise for maximizing the use of space, they allow the screen to match the footprint of the base. Demanding a 4:3 screen would put constraints on the other parts, and you might get too short a keyboard, or a machine that was unnecessarily deep. For some classes of machines, this isn't a big deal, for a 13" or 15" knapsack notebook, it's not ideal.
And most people probably do use their machines as entertainment devices almost as much as they do actual work on them. Also, most people tend to be annoyed by letterboxing (and on an LCD monitor, letter boxing is kind of annoying - there just isn't enough contrast ratio to make the bars disappear). So the wide form factor is, in fact, a comfortable width.
A problem is that many people who design software don't know how to operate windows. They make their application so that it demands 60% (or fullscreen sometimes...) of the screen to work correctly or just to not have annoying "features" like 2D scrolling.
The slashdot designers are among those people - I would like to have/. in a column on a side of my screen, using no more than 25% of the width, and having newspaper-like narrow columns of text. Instead, If I don't stretch the window to cover way more than I care to (I want to use the rest of the screen for other things, without having to alt-tab to look at each of them), it gets an annoying horizontal scroll bar. Horizontal scrolling is an acceptable feature depending on the application, but only vertical-text languages should allow text to require horizontal scrolling - you have to scroll it at the end of every damn line otherwise.
Worse, the width it requires is too many em's wide - the length of the lines is not appropriate for quickly acquiring the start of the next line after reaching the end of the current one, which slows down reading and comprehension.
Then firefox worked correctly. The default behavior should be to scale and/or reflow the text and possibly other procedurally defined elements, but to lock the raster elements to the actual pixels on the screen.
If there were an option to request a higher resolution image from the server, that would be helpful, but unless the website is sending massively oversized images so that they can be scaled down to the appropriate screen size (as apple has done with desktop icons for a while now, despite not being particularly serious about resolution independence), the browser should not scale the images unless specifically asked to by the user.
Soda is a little like juice - it's water that has some flavor, except it has a long shelf life and an easily identifiable freshness indicator - if the bottle was opened too long ago, it's pretty much guaranteed to be flat. Any still-carbonated cola is likely to be safe to drink from a microbial standpoint.
Plain carbonated water is less bad for you, and provides the same freshness indicator, but many people do not like the taste that carbonation imparts on its own.
Oddly, carbonated juice never really caught on. My guess is because real juice is much more expensive and soda provides the same appearance (the sweet taste) at a fraction of the cost (and benefit....)
One way to change the law is to deliberately disobey it and accept the consequences. This is what they used to call "Civil Disobedience" back when that pond guy spent a night in jail for refusing to pay taxes.
Your second reason is stupid. Just because Windows and OSX still sort of do it that way doesn't mean it actually makes sense that you should have to futz with the resolution just to make widgets use more or less screen real estate for better viewing. Window managers should handle scaling of UI elements and text sanely.
If I want bigger text to be easier to read, I still want crisp text. If I want smaller text to have more stuff on the screen, I don't want the letters to all run together like a censor bar.
No they shouldn't. If the assertion is correct that punishment is the goal, then the fines should go to either the victims or to the state (except in cases where the defendant is the state...). The lawyers' compensation should not be unlimited.
Perhaps the fines should go to a kitty to be use to pay lawyers' fees for those who have been harmed, but who do not have the resources to hire their own lawyers, that way we can remove the argument that the lawyers' wins have to be huge to make up for deserving cases they take on spec that do not win.
How would you feel about it if you had to drive over terrible sections of road just to get to the places you needed to patch, and there weren't enough other road workers of sufficient skill to ever make enough progress to patch the less critical sections that you nevertheless have to drive over every day?
If you have a choice, you might look for other opportunities, non?
Although you make a good point, the fact remains that they will never close all of the security issues in a software product as large as XP. The best we can ever hope for is for them to close as many as possible, and address newly discovered issues in a timely manner. They can only do this if they have a revenue stream of some kind - developers need to eat, you know.
The upgrade treadmill is how they handled this issue historically - putting out new versions and deprecating the old ones and using sales of new products to continue to fund fixes for the old version for a time. Obviously, they can't fund it forever this way unless people actually buy the new products, though.
How would you suggest they solve the funding dilemma?
Slashdot Mirror
That's how shareware works. Free software doesn't have nag screens. If a company wants to offer the latter and sell support, why shouldn't they be able to?
It does, but I don't think it does in the way you mean.
It says that the supremes don't believe this to be obviously unconstitutional enough to warrant hearing at this time - perhaps they think there might be more arguments that other courts might hear or present, and they want there to be a few more cases before deciding anything.
A few more people in a few more states need to be arrested over this to even have standing, and the Supreme court is ok with waiting for that.
Checking when the application starts and silently applying the update when it closes leaves the software vulnerable for hours while the user is using the old version.
I'm curious how, "Check at start" became "Check at start and don't do anything with the info for hours." Typically, programs that check at start offer to download and launch the installer via modal dialog as soon as the check is complete.
Which usually requires an annual fee plus a cut of the sales.
Google and Apple are like this. The linux software repositories have different requirements.
There should be a fee, though. The repository service handles notification and downloads for you, and they should be providing some kind of validation service for their users - ranging from, "the checksum matches" to "we reviewed the source code and tested it on a similar machine and didn't see anything harmful" (the extreme at that end should probably be borne by the users. I can see a market for high-end curated repositories.)
What other revenue source would you recommend for an application distributed for no fee?
Adobe Reader is distributed at no fee. But it's distributed so that adobe can sell licenses of Adobe Acrobat to businesses under the promise that the results will be have a wide potential audience, so Adobe already has a revenue model that should work.
Other software products should push out patches for the life of their products, having reserved some of the original revenue to pay for the ongoing support. They should probably announce their expected software lifetime, so that people know what they're getting into when they buy the product. One does not expect support for a product to continue forever without revenue, but one does expect there will be some finite, definable amount of support to accompany the purchase of a software product.
The legal department often demands this when it updates the EULA to cover a newly discovered loophole.
I'm sure that they do. I doubt that any but the original eula are in any way enforceable for purchased software, though. Holding the software itself or security updates hostage seems a lot like duress in my book.
Lawyers love stuff like this because even an unenforceable contract will result in billable hours (for at least two teams of lawyers, even...) for lawyers.
Newly released software often has critical security or functionality defects that are discovered "every other day or so" once the user base expands by orders of magnitude from beta to general availability.
Which is why the OP spelled out security fixes as an exception to the general rule of not pushing updates every day. Not sure where you're going with this.
No you won't. What really happens is that you'll make a mental note not to buy the product, then later, when you want something of the kind, and see several products on the shelf, you'll remember that you made that mental note, but you'll have long since forgotten why. You'll then buy the product you've heard of, which is the one you made a mental note not to buy...
The best you can do is to set up an adblock filter and forget about the ad.
Don't stop before you get to the "moderate" wing douchebags. They'll listen to the arguments of the other douchebags and say, "you guys are douchebags. Let's do half of what each of you want." Because obviously averaging two bad ideas is just like having a good idea, right?
"cuts to pensions" is a far sight better than "no pensions."
The problem is that pensions themselves are allowed to exist - it's too tempting to either under-fund them (counting on "catching up" in the out years) or raid the huge pile of money that's not doing anything (yet...).
The employee's compensation should be paid within a reasonable time from when they do the work and they should be responsible for distributing it between retirement and other purposes, and the tax structure should be such that it does not encourage employees and employers to get into arrangements as fraught with moral hazards as an employer provided pension system.
A former employee should not have to be punished if their company falters 20 years after they did the work....
The problem is that, in a democracy, the tyrants could be the majority....
The slippery slope fallacy argument isn't a real argument either, it's brought up every time someone uses an argument that resembles the slippery slope argument, but fails to recognize that examples of the slippery slope process can be found every field.
People desirous of the slippery slope's outcome call the process progress....
Where do the swiss grow their cocoa beans?
If you consistently beat them by the same amount regardless of the car, then they're doing a good job - you have useful gauge to compare different models, and you have a good estimate for yourself after applying the correction factor.
The question is whether the real-world numbers match the estimates. I'm not sure we could get that without requiring the cars collect the data themselves and mechanics submit the data at the regular service intervals.
If the condensing dryer is a closed loop, then surely the "exhaust" runs over the cooling coils where the moisture is extracted (by condensing...) and the heated again before passing through the basket. There wouldn't be any point in releasing the exhaust, as you'd just have that much further to heat the new incoming air.
Why else would it even be called a condensing drier?
Tracking it with what, though? The drone isn't big enough to have an antenna of sufficient size for the task. The power of the IF is comparable to the received signal level, and isn't directly driving an antenna.
I haven't checked in a while because I usually don't use firefox (nothing against it, though), but the last time I used it, it was a configurable option whether or not the images scaled when you scaled the page.
I've decided to meet you halfway, though. I think you're right about the UI scaling, in fact, I think that the UI scaling is the only appropriate thing for a browser to do in response to an OS-level scaling setting. The pages themselves should be fully under the control of the browser, with the initial setting being one where raster elements are not scaled.
But web page designers should also not get off the hook for designing their pages so that they won't work if you scale the text and not the images, or in slashdot's case, so that they don't work so well if you scale it at all, images or not. A web page isn't a brochure or a magazine page.
It should behave when a user wants to change things about it, whether that be the width of the canvas or the size of the text or images. The user is changing those things because they want to see the damn page better, don't fight them!
There are more design constraints in a laptop than just the screen size. 16:(10ish) and other "wide" formats happen to match up very nicely with some of the other constraints, which include:
1) laptop must include a keyboard which is actually useful for typing on
2) laptop may include a pointing device
3) laptop must minimize bulk and weight
It happens that a keyboard has a very wide aspect ratio, such that even when you add an oversized multitouch trackpad underneath, the whole setup still has a wide aspect.
Wide aspect ratios are a good compromise for maximizing the use of space, they allow the screen to match the footprint of the base. Demanding a 4:3 screen would put constraints on the other parts, and you might get too short a keyboard, or a machine that was unnecessarily deep. For some classes of machines, this isn't a big deal, for a 13" or 15" knapsack notebook, it's not ideal.
And most people probably do use their machines as entertainment devices almost as much as they do actual work on them. Also, most people tend to be annoyed by letterboxing (and on an LCD monitor, letter boxing is kind of annoying - there just isn't enough contrast ratio to make the bars disappear). So the wide form factor is, in fact, a comfortable width.
A problem is that many people who design software don't know how to operate windows. They make their application so that it demands 60% (or fullscreen sometimes...) of the screen to work correctly or just to not have annoying "features" like 2D scrolling.
The slashdot designers are among those people - I would like to have /. in a column on a side of my screen, using no more than 25% of the width, and having newspaper-like narrow columns of text. Instead, If I don't stretch the window to cover way more than I care to (I want to use the rest of the screen for other things, without having to alt-tab to look at each of them), it gets an annoying horizontal scroll bar. Horizontal scrolling is an acceptable feature depending on the application, but only vertical-text languages should allow text to require horizontal scrolling - you have to scroll it at the end of every damn line otherwise.
Worse, the width it requires is too many em's wide - the length of the lines is not appropriate for quickly acquiring the start of the next line after reaching the end of the current one, which slows down reading and comprehension.
Firefox scaled text but not images
Then firefox worked correctly. The default behavior should be to scale and/or reflow the text and possibly other procedurally defined elements, but to lock the raster elements to the actual pixels on the screen.
If there were an option to request a higher resolution image from the server, that would be helpful, but unless the website is sending massively oversized images so that they can be scaled down to the appropriate screen size (as apple has done with desktop icons for a while now, despite not being particularly serious about resolution independence), the browser should not scale the images unless specifically asked to by the user.
Presumably he wants more pixels and a video card that can drive them.
If that's a yacht, then so is this: http://tron.wikia.com/wiki/Solar_Sailer, they both exist only on a graphics card, after all...
Soda is a little like juice - it's water that has some flavor, except it has a long shelf life and an easily identifiable freshness indicator - if the bottle was opened too long ago, it's pretty much guaranteed to be flat. Any still-carbonated cola is likely to be safe to drink from a microbial standpoint.
Plain carbonated water is less bad for you, and provides the same freshness indicator, but many people do not like the taste that carbonation imparts on its own.
Oddly, carbonated juice never really caught on. My guess is because real juice is much more expensive and soda provides the same appearance (the sweet taste) at a fraction of the cost (and benefit....)
One way to change the law is to deliberately disobey it and accept the consequences. This is what they used to call "Civil Disobedience" back when that pond guy spent a night in jail for refusing to pay taxes.
Your second reason is stupid. Just because Windows and OSX still sort of do it that way doesn't mean it actually makes sense that you should have to futz with the resolution just to make widgets use more or less screen real estate for better viewing. Window managers should handle scaling of UI elements and text sanely.
If I want bigger text to be easier to read, I still want crisp text. If I want smaller text to have more stuff on the screen, I don't want the letters to all run together like a censor bar.
No they shouldn't. If the assertion is correct that punishment is the goal, then the fines should go to either the victims or to the state (except in cases where the defendant is the state...). The lawyers' compensation should not be unlimited.
Perhaps the fines should go to a kitty to be use to pay lawyers' fees for those who have been harmed, but who do not have the resources to hire their own lawyers, that way we can remove the argument that the lawyers' wins have to be huge to make up for deserving cases they take on spec that do not win.
How would you feel about it if you had to drive over terrible sections of road just to get to the places you needed to patch, and there weren't enough other road workers of sufficient skill to ever make enough progress to patch the less critical sections that you nevertheless have to drive over every day?
If you have a choice, you might look for other opportunities, non?
And if the time really doesn't matter, then you use a flashlight drive or solar sail....
Apple pushes its suppliers to provide at lower cost. It's our job to push apple to lower its prices, if we want their products....
Although you make a good point, the fact remains that they will never close all of the security issues in a software product as large as XP. The best we can ever hope for is for them to close as many as possible, and address newly discovered issues in a timely manner. They can only do this if they have a revenue stream of some kind - developers need to eat, you know.
The upgrade treadmill is how they handled this issue historically - putting out new versions and deprecating the old ones and using sales of new products to continue to fund fixes for the old version for a time. Obviously, they can't fund it forever this way unless people actually buy the new products, though.
How would you suggest they solve the funding dilemma?