So what happens if Bram gets run over by a bus? The way he wrote his license, Vim becomes frozen and that's that. No more development because the license says you have to show him your changes if you want to make them public.
The theory behind GPL is that once the software is put under GPL, then ALL authors who contribute to it get equal say in what they do with it. The original author doesn't get any more say than anyone else just because he's the one that started it. It takes on a life of its own and can't be stopped or repealed. Yes, the decision of an author to put something under GPL should definately not be taken lightly. It's a decision that once made, can never be undone.
Now, that's not always what you want, as in the case of Bram's charityware license. And Bram's decision not to use GPL makes perfect sense. (But not for the reason he cites, which is based on a false premise.) But he really should add a "will" clause for what happens if he is no longer alive, or decides he no longer wants to be the maintainer of Vim.
Why do providers make policies where you can receive a lot faster than you can send? Is there some technical reason I might not be aware of why upload data is more resource-consuming than download data and therefore has to be more restricted? What the hell's wrong with just saying, "We cap you at N bytes before your rate drops, regardless of what direction those bytes were going." I was under the impression that a transfer of a packet of, say, 2Kb will take the same amount of bandwith no matter which direction it's going in.
Or is this just a sneaky underhanded way to make people buy the more expensive business plans just to run a teeny little bit of server apps?
It only measures sites with their tool being used.
Users can lie with their user-agent strings and sometimes *have* to to get into a site at all.
Even when the user-agent string is honest, the user might have javascript disabled by default. Those who don't use Javascript don't get counted into this counter. Now, who is more likely to have JS turned off - a Windows user or a Linux user?
Web hits per day cannot measure computer *ownership* percentages, only user *traffic* percentages. Users with innefficient web browsing habits will tend to score much higher in the measure than those with sensible web browsing habits. The next time you see some guy clicking back and forth between pages instead of opening two browser windows, think "HitBox thinks there's 10 times as many of him as there are of me".
What hitbox does isn't necessarily wrong. It is a useful thing to know how much of the web traffic is coming from what users. It's just when this data gets misinterpeted by hack reporters that there's a problem.
- X Windows: Relying on a HUGE layer for your graphical underpinnings is a big mistake. Remove X. Its too complicated to install, too big and too slow. I could give a hoot about all you so called "Linux Hackers" who say that Linux is for the elite. I look at it as I see it -- it shouldn't be this damn hard, and this damn big! Windows 98 installs in 10 mins -- nice goal to shoot for. Xfree86 my ass, move off that clunker and have a nice thin layer at the bottom... sheesh.
At this point I knew I no longer needed to bother reading the rest of what you wrote. You ignore what it is that X is doing - it makes everything network transparent. Use a direct solution and remote usability is thrown out the window. You might not ever use it, or even know it exists, but there's no way I'm ever giving it up. It's one of the reasons I started using Linux several years ago.
And' I don't understand your claim that X is so much bigger than Windows' gui. It's not. (It is a bit slower, I admit. But it's not much bigger.)
If they did something similarly deceptive* and polled only computer science web site users at universities, they just might get a number that high. My reaction would be much the same - point out that it's not as universal as the author claims.
* - Note that it may not be StatMarket's deception here. They may have reported the results fairly with the caveat that it only applies to a few sites. The deception might be on the part of the sloppy writer of the article. It might have been the reporter that expanded the claim out to mean 0.23 % of users in general.
Or perhaps the max score of 5 is inadequete for this puropose. It makes some sense for normal posts, but for question proposals we need more differentiation. As you said, we get so many +5
posts that the decision of which to put forth ends up being the editor's call rather than based on user votes like it was intended to be.
Perhaps the right thing to do is to retain the real score for these posts, but still cap it at 5 for the sake of calculating the poster's Karma.
But the thing is, any completely functional web browser must deal with the "file:" URL type.
Once you have that functionality embedded inside the browser, you are 80% of the way to having a fully functional file manager tool.
And *that* is why they are being merged together. Keeping them seperate duplicates a lot of functionality.
The solution is to invoke different rules when the ftp: and http: protocols are in use from when the file: protocol is in use. Stuff you normally allow via the local file: window (like letting a user doubleclick a program file to run it) should not be allowed from a remote site during http: or ftp: file list displays.)
But there's no need to rewrite the whole browser tool just to make a local file manager. Just flag certain security blocks based on if the files are local or remote.
So, when several problems are mentioned you find ONE of them to be not a big deal, that means the rest all are too?
What about shitty security that lets other people spoof being you and use your account for their purchases?
What about the shitty customer service where when you have a problem you can't get anyone to talk with about it? The fact that mistakes are made from time to time is inevitable with an operation the size of PayPal. The fact that they stick their heads in the sand and pretend there are no problems, and assume all complainers are lying is not acceptable.
(Oops - sorry about that empty post above. I'm used to using Netscape where hitting return in a text field sends you to the next field just like TAB, but I've switched to Konqueror where hitting return submits the form. I hit return after typing the subject thinking that would "TAB" me down to the text body but - oops.)
Anyway - This story you quote, if true, indicates not only that PayPal is guilty of the annoyingly common MS-is-god-above-all attitude, but also the poster is doing somethng a bit strange too. Notice he didn't call it Linux 2.4.x, or something like that. He called it Linux 8.0 - which indicates to me that he's reselling a full DISTRIBUTION, perhaps Mandrake or SuSE - and THAT could include add-ons that are not free, and THAT would still make what he's doing illegal.
Tell that to the people who decided to make moderation dependant on Karma, or who change the initial filter score from 1 to 2 after a certain Karma is reached. *I* wouldn't care about it if the slashcode didn't care.
Two points: I'll get dinged now and then, but it doesn't take long to get back to 50. I really don't worry about it. Who cares if your karma is maxed or not.
The moderation system seems to care. Case and point - as I post this I'm sitting at 47 (because of the very thing I'm talking about here - the system ignores my previous posative hmods that occurred while I was capped and only counts the recent hits where people said this thread is offtopic.) Right now I can't moderate
until someone finds something else of mine worthy
of modding up.
And I don't think the percentage deal would be good. I'll often make quick responses like this one that add to the discussion but I don't really feel deserve any more karma.
Under the system I proposed, number of posts doesn't enter into the equation - number of MODS does. (So one post with 3 posative mods is the same thing as 3 posts with 1 posative mod each) Posts that get no mods don't affect your score up or down. If you posted 50 posts, and ALL of them had 1 mod each, 40 up and 10 down, your percentage would be 80%. If you posted 100 posts, of which only 50 of them had been modded in any way, 40 of them up, and 10 of them down, the resulting karma would be the same.) This gets rid of the karma whoring problem
(since someone who's posted 10 times is just as able to have a 100% karma as is someone who has posted 1000 times.)
I may not have communicated my intent clearly. The examples of comments you gave *are* the sorts of comments I like to see. They summarize at a level much more vague than the code. They explain why you wrote the code, not what it is doing in a detailed fashion. ("I wrote these next few lines in order to make it do foo.")
The karma cap of 50 is so low that users are not
going to be doing what you claim. It takes very
little time to cap it off and then you're done.
(Karma cap rant: The cap is implemented in a rather unfair way. Imagine two people starting at zero karma. Person 1 then gets 97 positive
mods in a row followed by 3 negative ones, giving him a total of 47. Person 2 gets 30 positive mods, then 10 negative ones, then 30 positive ones, then 10 negative, then 20 positive. His Karma is now capped at 50. But out of the 100 modded posts both of them have had, clearly person 1 is the more positively modded poster, with 97% positive mods, while person 2 had only 80%. I think karma should be implemented as a percentage rather than a raw count. The mistake the karma cap tried correcting was that the volume of posting affected the karma, which made abusive excessive posting a path to high karma. But, using a score that indicates the ratio of posative vs negative mods would have fixed it too, but in a more fair way.)
If all the comments are doing is telling you exactly what you already knew from being moderately literate in the language, then they are just ugly chunks of text that get in the way of reading the program.
But that doesn't mean verbose comments are bad. If the verbosity is dedicated to telling you *why* something is being done, rather than giving a play-by-play description of how, then it is very useful. If I see a for-loop that counts backward from ( array_size -1 ) down to zero, don't give me a comment that says "counting backward in a loop". I can TELL that. But what I can't necessarily tell at a glance is *why* the author chose to count backward instead of forward - what was the algorithmic purpose to doing it that way - THAT is what I want to see comments explaining. And with THAT type of comment I am very happy when it comes with a lot of verbosity.
The worst examples of useless verbosity are when you see code written by someone who has *just* learned a new programming language and is unfamiliar with the "culture" of that language. They tend to document things that everyone already knows like the back of their hand. (For example, a novice C programmer tends to go into excessive detail about the use of null chars to terminate strings.)
IE does make money, in precisely the same way that the Windows Eplorer file manager makes money, and COMMAND.EXE makes money, and the CD Player makes money. It's cost is recouped on the sale of the OS into which it is packaged.
The fact that the extremely easy workaround exists in the first place is proof that they don't care about the actual problem itself.
The fact that someone leaves their house deliberately unlocked (not just forgetting about it, but choosing on purpose to leave it that way) is proof that they don't care about their own security.
It is morally wrong to keep it. It is stealing, no matter how clever your arguments are to the contrary.
Whether it is wrong to steal is is irrelevant since that's not what the complaint is about. Apple isn't going after people doing the stealing. They're going after the people *publicizing* how easy it is to steal it. It's like pointing out that someone left their front door unlocked, and getting sued for pointing it out when someone ELSE uses that information to burgle the house.
It is a disturbing trend that businesses are more concerned with the act of POINTING OUT how crappy their security is than they are with the actual act of exploiting that bad security. They don't give a damn about the theft - they just don't like the bad press, and will gag you for trying to point out a truth about them that they find embarassing.
The DMCA - the law that makes it illegal to tell the truth.
Scenario: You just put up a new webpage and want
to be sure it gets top hits on google.
How you do it: After putting the page up, write a
tool to hit google's voting engine over and over and over... giving yourself good ratings.
Question: How would the system prevent this type of abuse from happening - especially the opposite approach - rating competitors' sites poorly to drop them in the list?
Devil's Advocate Question: If you don't allow this abuse to occur, doesn't that then unfairly give extra ranking to sites based on age? A new site won't have accumulated as many votes as an old one yet, and so the ranking would always favor old (and likely to be out of date) sites over new ones.
The advantage pipes have is that they have an ad-hoc CLI component. You can use the components in your own scripts easily. As far as I know, with CORBA you end up having to write a lot of app in order to just get "hello world" types of things going. Not that that's inherently wrong, but it does remove the ability to do quick ad-hoc glueing of modules together in a simple script. Someone who is used to being able to do that would be missing that familiar feature.
CORBA is more powerful, but less able to do ad-hoc things.
I agree that using a tool with minimalist functionality is a good thing, but when it comes to an e-mail client, I consider IMAP support to BE minimally necessary functionality, and kmail doesn't have it.
So kmail doesn't even achieve minimal functionality for me. (It is useless in an environment where I sometimes access mail from home and sometimes from work and sometimes from a friend's house and sometimes on the road.)
Unfortunately it seems like nobody is making a minimalist client that has IMAP support. All the clients that do IMAP are also gigantic bloatware with functionality unrelated to mail. That means I have to put up with the bloat, like it or not.
I agree wholeheartedly with your KDE/Gnome comment. One nice strength of open source is that people don't go out of their way to make things incompatable just because they can. You can run a Gnome app on KDE desktop, and you can run a KDE app on a Gnome desktop - so you don't *have* to choose one to the exclusion of the other. Mix and match to your heart's content. I prefer the Gnome desktop's look, but I like a lot of the KDE project applications (especially Konqueror). So I run Gnome but roughly 50% of the apps up on my screen at any given time are actually from KDE. This doesn't have to be a holy war - the technologies are not mutually exclusive in the way that closed source guis tend to be.
Despite all the problems with Netscape 4.7x as a browser, it's e-mail client does work very well with IMAP. That's one reason I still keep Netscape around. (For actual web surfing I'm using Konqueror now.)
I was looking at kmail - but it's IMAP support is nonexistant. I would welcome a good gui IMAP client for linux so I could finally stop wasting my precious RAM on the whole of netscape 4.7 (browser and composer and mail reader loaded in RAM all at once - oh joy) just to read mail.
Tabs don't do it right. They make it so I can't see *any* of the window at all unless I have it in front. That's no different than running with all windows maximized, and is annoying for all the same reasons.
The ideal window manager would have tiles, tabs, AND overlaps, and stop trying to cover up missing functionality by saying it is "out of date".
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He's not saying we should trust Monsanto. He's saying we shouldn't throw GM foods out the window just because one company is bad.
The theory behind GPL is that once the software is put under GPL, then ALL authors who contribute to it get equal say in what they do with it. The original author doesn't get any more say than anyone else just because he's the one that started it. It takes on a life of its own and can't be stopped or repealed. Yes, the decision of an author to put something under GPL should definately not be taken lightly. It's a decision that once made, can never be undone.
Now, that's not always what you want, as in the case of Bram's charityware license. And Bram's decision not to use GPL makes perfect sense. (But not for the reason he cites, which is based on a false premise.) But he really should add a "will" clause for what happens if he is no longer alive, or decides he no longer wants to be the maintainer of Vim.
Or is this just a sneaky underhanded way to make people buy the more expensive business plans just to run a teeny little bit of server apps?
What hitbox does isn't necessarily wrong. It is a useful thing to know how much of the web traffic is coming from what users. It's just when this data gets misinterpeted by hack reporters that there's a problem.
If they did something similarly deceptive* and polled only computer science web site users at universities, they just might get a number that high. My reaction would be much the same - point out that it's not as universal as the author claims.
* - Note that it may not be StatMarket's deception here. They may have reported the results fairly with the caveat that it only applies to a few sites. The deception might be on the part of the sloppy writer of the article. It might have been the reporter that expanded the claim out to mean 0.23 % of users in general.
Perhaps the right thing to do is to retain the real score for these posts, but still cap it at 5 for the sake of calculating the poster's Karma.
And *that* is why they are being merged together. Keeping them seperate duplicates a lot of functionality.
The solution is to invoke different rules when the ftp: and http: protocols are in use from when the file: protocol is in use. Stuff you normally allow via the local file: window (like letting a user doubleclick a program file to run it) should not be allowed from a remote site during http: or ftp: file list displays.) But there's no need to rewrite the whole browser tool just to make a local file manager. Just flag certain security blocks based on if the files are local or remote.
What about shitty security that lets other people spoof being you and use your account for their purchases?
What about the shitty customer service where when you have a problem you can't get anyone to talk with about it? The fact that mistakes are made from time to time is inevitable with an operation the size of PayPal. The fact that they stick their heads in the sand and pretend there are no problems, and assume all complainers are lying is not acceptable.
Anyway - This story you quote, if true, indicates not only that PayPal is guilty of the annoyingly common MS-is-god-above-all attitude, but also the poster is doing somethng a bit strange too. Notice he didn't call it Linux 2.4.x, or something like that. He called it Linux 8.0 - which indicates to me that he's reselling a full DISTRIBUTION, perhaps Mandrake or SuSE - and THAT could include add-ons that are not free, and THAT would still make what he's doing illegal.
Tell that to the people who decided to make moderation dependant on Karma, or who change the initial filter score from 1 to 2 after a certain Karma is reached. *I* wouldn't care about it if the slashcode didn't care.
Tell that to the people who decided to make moderation dependant on karma score.
I may not have communicated my intent clearly. The examples of comments you gave *are* the sorts of comments I like to see. They summarize at a level much more vague than the code. They explain why you wrote the code, not what it is doing in a detailed fashion. ("I wrote these next few lines in order to make it do foo.")
The karma cap of 50 is so low that users are not
going to be doing what you claim. It takes very
little time to cap it off and then you're done.
(Karma cap rant: The cap is implemented in a rather unfair way. Imagine two people starting at zero karma. Person 1 then gets 97 positive
mods in a row followed by 3 negative ones, giving him a total of 47. Person 2 gets 30 positive mods, then 10 negative ones, then 30 positive ones, then 10 negative, then 20 positive. His Karma is now capped at 50. But out of the 100 modded posts both of them have had, clearly person 1 is the more positively modded poster, with 97% positive mods, while person 2 had only 80%. I think karma should be implemented as a percentage rather than a raw count. The mistake the karma cap tried correcting was that the volume of posting affected the karma, which made abusive excessive posting a path to high karma. But, using a score that indicates the ratio of posative vs negative mods would have fixed it too, but in a more fair way.)
Comments should explain WHY, not HOW.
If all the comments are doing is telling you exactly what you already knew from being moderately literate in the language, then they are just ugly chunks of text that get in the way of reading the program.
But that doesn't mean verbose comments are bad. If the verbosity is dedicated to telling you *why* something is being done, rather than giving a play-by-play description of how, then it is very useful. If I see a for-loop that counts backward from ( array_size -1 ) down to zero, don't give me a comment that says "counting backward in a loop". I can TELL that. But what I can't necessarily tell at a glance is *why* the author chose to count backward instead of forward - what was the algorithmic purpose to doing it that way - THAT is what I want to see comments explaining. And with THAT type of comment I am very happy when it comes with a lot of verbosity.
The worst examples of useless verbosity are when you see code written by someone who has *just* learned a new programming language and is unfamiliar with the "culture" of that language. They tend to document things that everyone already knows like the back of their hand. (For example, a novice C programmer tends to go into excessive detail about the use of null chars to terminate strings.)
IE does make money, in precisely the same way that the Windows Eplorer file manager makes money, and COMMAND.EXE makes money, and the CD Player makes money. It's cost is recouped on the sale of the OS into which it is packaged.
The fact that someone leaves their house deliberately unlocked (not just forgetting about it, but choosing on purpose to leave it that way) is proof that they don't care about their own security.
It is a disturbing trend that businesses are more concerned with the act of POINTING OUT how crappy their security is than they are with the actual act of exploiting that bad security. They don't give a damn about the theft - they just don't like the bad press, and will gag you for trying to point out a truth about them that they find embarassing.
The DMCA - the law that makes it illegal to tell the truth.
How you do it: After putting the page up, write a tool to hit google's voting engine over and over and over... giving yourself good ratings.
Question: How would the system prevent this type of abuse from happening - especially the opposite approach - rating competitors' sites poorly to drop them in the list?
Devil's Advocate Question: If you don't allow this abuse to occur, doesn't that then unfairly give extra ranking to sites based on age? A new site won't have accumulated as many votes as an old one yet, and so the ranking would always favor old (and likely to be out of date) sites over new ones.
CORBA is more powerful, but less able to do ad-hoc things.
So kmail doesn't even achieve minimal functionality for me. (It is useless in an environment where I sometimes access mail from home and sometimes from work and sometimes from a friend's house and sometimes on the road.)
Unfortunately it seems like nobody is making a minimalist client that has IMAP support. All the clients that do IMAP are also gigantic bloatware with functionality unrelated to mail. That means I have to put up with the bloat, like it or not.
I agree wholeheartedly with your KDE/Gnome comment. One nice strength of open source is that people don't go out of their way to make things incompatable just because they can. You can run a Gnome app on KDE desktop, and you can run a KDE app on a Gnome desktop - so you don't *have* to choose one to the exclusion of the other. Mix and match to your heart's content. I prefer the Gnome desktop's look, but I like a lot of the KDE project applications (especially Konqueror). So I run Gnome but roughly 50% of the apps up on my screen at any given time are actually from KDE. This doesn't have to be a holy war - the technologies are not mutually exclusive in the way that closed source guis tend to be.
Despite all the problems with Netscape 4.7x as a browser, it's e-mail client does work very well with IMAP. That's one reason I still keep Netscape around. (For actual web surfing I'm using Konqueror now.)
I was looking at kmail - but it's IMAP support is nonexistant. I would welcome a good gui IMAP client for linux so I could finally stop wasting my precious RAM on the whole of netscape 4.7 (browser and composer and mail reader loaded in RAM all at once - oh joy) just to read mail.
Tabs don't do it right. They make it so I can't see *any* of the window at all unless I have it in front. That's no different than running with all windows maximized, and is annoying for all the same reasons.
The ideal window manager would have tiles, tabs, AND overlaps, and stop trying to cover up missing functionality by saying it is "out of date".